Spice (1996) - Spice Girls

I've had this review on the back-burner for several years, but have been putting it off and off and off. Given that one of my main objectives with the curation of this blog was to systematically find my favourite album of all time, I always felt it would be a bit of an anticlimax to write up what almost definitely takes that accolade after only reviewing 20 or so records prior. Because, as will soon become apparent, the Spice Girls' debut album Spice comes very close to ticking all the boxes for me, and will almost definitely be my highest scoring album of all time.

So why now? Well, we're on the cusp of unearthing a small bounty of previously unreleased demos, with the release of their 30th anniversary singles collection in November. The first of four, Do You Think About Me, is already streaming (legitimately, rather than the identical bootleg I've already heard countless times) and I feel the need, as an enthusiast, to get this review published before any more thoughts can take root. It's a habit of mine to hypothesise about the various what-ifs that an album's b-sides and demos pose to me, and I need to get my current mind-map out in the open before the potential of any more interference coming along. That said, I'm personally hoping for official releases of demos I already know about - fingers crossed for W.O.M.A.N, Don't Break My Heart and the earlier pop version of Right Back At Ya - having these to stream would literally make my year!

And, y'know... it's my blog, for me, and I'll do what I want. Who cares if I peak too soon?

If you're looking for a full socio-political breakdown of how the Spice Girls played a pivotal role in the Cool Britannia movement and all that bollocks, you can look elsewhere (don't worry,  you'll find it very easily). While there are certainly contextual elements that made the group so iconic, a word that I'm not using in a remotely hyperbolic way, these largely do not concern me. My concern is the music, and if anything influences that (it does) then I'll dig a little deeper. But it's important to note that the Spice Girls, as a novelty, as a brand, as a figurehead, never really appealed to me personally. The whole shebang, it's all ancillary to the music. It played a huge part in what helped form the music, but ultimately I never cared about their outspokenness or Geri's Union Jack dress - I cared about their craft, which is often the least considered facet of the Spice Girls' legacy.

Spice is a very important album to me, and it's one that has surprisingly stood the test of time. Year after year I've come back to it, and I've never ceased to enjoy it. In fact, I've only grown to love it more as I've gotten older. Initially, as an actual child who was there to witness the Spice phenomenon, only the lively, upbeat hits caught my attention. Then, giving the albums a whirl, the similar sounding non-singles were all that warranted my time. Even disparaging certain tracks as novelties, throughout the years where I'd fixated on more decorous artists or more underground offerings, I still appreciated the textures and the mechanics of their vocal arrangements and the down-to-earth, instant get-ability of everything. Now, I've grown to love the ballads, the quirkier moments, and the rawness of everything the girls brought to their writing and recording. And that? That's the full package. That is me basically saying I enjoy every part of this album.

Now for the fun part:

1. Love Thing
2. Say You'll Be There
3. Who Do You Think You Are?
4. Mama
5. Wannabe
6. Somethin' Kinda Funny
7. If U Can't Dance
8. 2 Become 1
9. Last Time Lover
10. Naked

Total Points 37/50
Average Score: 7.4

There are no bad songs on this album. The weakest point would be Naked, which suffers from being a little too vague in its lyrics, with an ambience that lacks the sophisticated, sultry refinement of recently surfaced gem Feed Your Love. This understated ode to blowjobs (yes, blowjobs), which featured for the first time in 2021 on Spice 25, the album's quarter-century celebratory expanded release, was surely positioned as the penultimate track - where Naked ended up - before an inevitable last-minute switch being made after the Spice Girls found such extreme commercial success with, in particular, a preteen female audience. But Naked is not bad. It just lacks the vivaciousness and straightforwardness that the girls are known for, and the street-smart confidence that saturates the rest of the album.

Take Last Time Lover, for example: vulnerability disguised in the girls' trademark directness and honesty, and simultaneously savvy and hyperaware.  It's definitely one of the clunkier moments of the album, the melodic refrain of the song's title as basic as they come, and the soundscape crossing the line from bombastic to ham-fisted. But the song, like most of the album's contents, oozes with that je-ne-sais-quoi that we've come to instantly connect with their trademark 'Girl Power'. This unmistakable but barely definable quality takes an unremarkable song with throwaway lyrics and gives it a time and a place, and basically saves it.

But what does it do for songs that don't need saving, due to already being lyrically tight, dextrously produced and more catchy than a cold? Say You'll Be There and Love Thing comprise half of the four songs written with Eliot Kennedy, in the week immediately following the girls chosen departure from the management company that had first scouted and formed them*. This confluence of time, circumstance and people, all the layers of context involved, was destined to bear the juiciest of fruits, and these two tracks are undeniably the best on the record. Slick, effervescent verses full of personality and declarations of independence, thumping basslines alongside raspy, challenging instrumentation choices and uncompromising beats, and some of the best and most memorable ad-libbing from the vocal powerhouse that is Mel C - these songs are confident, confrontational, uninhibited and cool. Everything that defines a Spice Girl.

*The other two would later surface as Pepsi tie-in single Step To Me and the much-bootlegged Strong Enough, all four tracks, incidentally, of a similar style and caliber that would make for an excellent EP release

I went through a brief phase of dismissing Wannabe as cheesy. Which it absolutely is, but I've come to realise that cheese and refinement are not mutually exclusive qualities. Wannabe is so pure in set-up, so uncomplicated by trying to be anything aside from what it is (ironically, given the track's title) that there is an understated elegance beneath the veneer of its brash, fun charisma and bubblegum chorus. Those low piano steps underneath the shouted question and answer segments, the sweetest of line deliveries from Emma on the chorus (really living up to her nickname) and the sheer effortless with which the whole thing is performed - it is masterful. It is a living lesson in how to write pop music, whilst at the same time being completely inimitable.

Quieter moments like 2 Become 1 and Mama are structurally the most stable parts of the record, acting as pillars that ground and support the rest of the songs' frenetic vigour. The various ways the girls 'divide and conquer' the vocal work really come to life in these songs, often teaming up in pairs to alternate lines of harmonies creates such unique layers,  the likes of which just didn't happen (and still seldom do) in mainstream music. The quirkiness of 2 Become 1's chord pattern is its hidden superpower, and the longer Mama continues, the more vocals layer up like a round and you're swimming in a rich sound bath of pure, unaffected voice. The more tender subject matter of these tracks is perhaps the corniest the girls get, but their candidness carries through and they ultimately just come off as very real.

Perhaps the weirdest track on the album is If U Can't Dance, which is a story of hate turned to love for me. Sampling the droning bass motif from Digital Underground's The Humpty Dance, it first struck me as a massive WTF moment at the end of the album, a baffling note to finish on. But the essence of the girls is peppered throughout, Mel B's chilled, conversational rap over a slow background police siren, the ethnic-sounding overblown flute in the chorus, the message of assertion through a simple proclamation of standards on a night out - it's all so them. The only thing missing is Victoria's slightly flat but very catchy chant throughout the chorus, present in the demo version but inexplicable vetoed from the final article, This, as well as the slightly shifted repetition of the track's title, give the song a little bit more melodic neatness and maybe would have helped acclimatise it to the 9 tracks before it if they'd stayed.

B-sides and demos of the era are a little dicey, and ultimately I think that one of the main reasons I gave the album such a high score is because the right tracks made it on. Wannabe and Say You'll Be There's respective b-sides Bumper To Bumper and Take Me Home verge a little too much into r&b, sonically incongruous with the firm pop vibe of Spice, the latter also uncharacteristically weedy and underdeveloped. One Of These Girls isn't bad as such, but panders by referencing their press-given personalities in an awfully on-the-nose way, and would stick out like a sore thumb if it had made the cut for the album. As for demos, the aforementioned Strong Enough would easily have been the best addition, funky and exuberant, and in-keeping with Spice's strong message of empowerment. Do You Think About Me, Don't Break My Heart and Walking On Air (look them up, they're worth a listen) are all great tracks but sound a little too primitive in their construction and lyrics, and even with polished up vocals would probably, unfortunately, sound quite juvenile next to the likes of Say You'll Be There.

So it's a score of 7.4, and I can't see that being superceded. I actually feel I've been hypercritical in awarding only two tracks blue status, and leaving If U Can't Dance and 2 Become 1 as yellows. But even with this debatable underscoring, it'll probably beat every other album I listen to. Their follow-up album has decent moments (and better b-sides) but the name of that game with the Spiceworld was always going to be continuing the momentum built up by Spice. It wasn't set up for failure (and it certainly wasn't a failure, commercially or critically) but it lacked the specific terroir that amalgamated to make Spice such a knockout.

While some debuts are fumbled, tentative accounts of artists trying to find their sound or carve out a niche in the music industry, Spice was only ever going to be a steam train hurtling down the track, already full of momentum, vivacity funnelling right out of it. By the time Wannabe was released, the girls had been through the mill in there early years under the name Touch (imagine that world for a moment!), broke away from their restraints and used one another as catalysts for their own success. Their rise was inevitable and, by extension, so was the greatness of Spice.

Generation Terrorists (1992) - Manic Street Preachers

I usually try to write my reviews in a way that 'comes full circle' or reinforces my main observations/talking points, so that they feel as complete as I can make them. During the course of writing this one though, I realised that each of those points were merely a station on a rather linear route - all needed, all wanted, but without an all-encompassing message I'm trying to convey. And the culmination is ultimately an ode to perhaps the greatest song of the 1990s, rather than a reflection of the whole album. So - spoiler alert - this one is going to end with a weird science-project-esque points summary as a kind of round-up, but no actual general conclusion. No problem there, but maybe not what you'd usually expect from me in terms of structure. In terms of polarising opinions and florid language, however, I shouldn't expect to disappoint.

Whereas in the past, I've praised double albums/records with a high volume of content for managing to not to feel bloated, I cannot offer the same assessment for Generation Terrorists, the debut effort of the Manic Street Preachers. This album stinks of an overwrought need to cram songs into what was essentially a musical and political manifesto for the band, in a record where a song omission is effectively a censorship of stance. With a high media profile and long wait in the run-up to its much anticipated release, the band was set up for disappointment from the start. Thematically, the album is generally favoured, and the totality with which the Manics saturate its sound and lyrics with their message is undeniable. But the general consensus is that, despite the commendation, there's just too bloody much of it. And I'm inclined to agree.

1. Motorcycle Emptiness
2. Little Baby Nothing
3. Slash 'n' Burn
4. Nat West-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds
5. You Love Us
6. Condemned To Rock 'n' Roll
   
7. Tennessee
8. Another Invented Disease
9. Crucifix Kiss
10. So Dead
11. Methadone Pretty
12. Spectators Of Suicide
13. Love's Sweet Exile
14. Stay Beautiful
15. Born To End
16. Damn Dog
17. Repeat (UK)
18. Repeat (Stars & Stripes)

Total Points: 49/90
Average Score: 5.44

A gargantuan eighteen individual songs, almost filling the entire 80 minute capacity of a compact disc, is an ambitious feat for your album debut, and something that hindsight would probably correct if it could. With retrospect comes a refined vision and a more discerning approach, and this was acknowledged by then rhythm guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards, claiming it would be 'a lot better without the crap'. Daunting to tackle as a listener, the album largely matches expectation upon seeing the tracklist, as a dense and distended ordeal to trudge through. The fact that there are two versions of the same song (incidentally my least favourite song on the record) featured as part of official (non-bonus) album infrastructure indicates just how unnecessarily overpopulated the record is. That said, quality hardly comes into it - in fact, I found many of the tracks nearly impossible to distinguish in this respect (note the vast sea of middling yellow in my rankings). The real problem with Generation Terrorists is that, in sound at least, it's largely the same, more of the same, and then just a little bit more of the same. 

And then, there's Motorcycle Emptiness.

I've written previously about a standout single leaving the rest of the record in the dust, in reference to Cake by Trashcan Sinatras. To say this here would be a slight discredit to the overall quality achieved across Generation Terrorists, and the moderate strength of other reasonably memorable tracks like Slash'n'Burn and Condemned To Rock 'n' Roll. However, I cannot stress enough how fucking good this song is. In a sea of squiggly glam rock refrains and semi-screamed hair metal vocals set over cowbells and run-of-the-mill punk palm-muting, this is an absolute outlier. It doesn't compare - never mind the ballpark, it's a whole other game. It sounds nothing like anything else on the record, to the point where I'm thinking "is this even the same band?". Motorcycle Emptiness is a song that only should have surfaced with 2 or 3 albums under their belt, with the maturity and perspective that usually only comes with time and experimentation. Not on a debut, and not on a debut full to the brim with another very consistent flavour of music.

The instant the twisting, soaring notes of the guitar melody kick in, you're in a different world. The sparser drums and syncopated guitar strumming are so much more relaxed and effortless that it feels almost like autopilot; let the song do the work and the performance will take care of itself. No-one is trying too hard or in a hurry here - with the change of pace, you're given permission to close your eyes and absorb and enjoy as the 6 minutes of perfection drift into your ears. It feels like a dream - time transcends, and you're almost floating as the wondrous momentum propels itself, feeling at once wistful and voracious. Lyrically is the only way it ties into the rest of Generation Terrorists, with aptly critical themes of nihilism within capitalism; musically, however, it is untouchable. There's nothing wrong with the rest, style-wise. It's fine. It feels very within a mould, which is ironic for what is essentially a punk record. This is just a different kettle of fish, and it's for sure the kettle I want my fish from.

I can't really justify making time for most of the album. Little Baby Nothing deserves its flowers, and their cover of the M*A*S*H theme that features later as a bonus track is harrowingly heartfelt if repetitive, but Damn Dog, for example, can get in the bin. I'm not going to waste my time re-listening to or discussing the lowest tracks - why would I, when I could be listening to Motorcycle Emptiness instead? Sorry for being so dismissive, but that's just the power that Motorcycle Emptiness has over me. It is, and I don't use this word lightly, epic.

So, in summary:

• Generation Terrorists is too long and bloated, but not necessarily bad.
• The material is competently played but largely indistinctive.
• Motorcycle Emptiness exists on a higher plain.

Come their next album (which I won't detail here, it may deserve its own dedicated post in the future), many of the 'issues' are fixed - the vision is much more focused and the execution far more easily digestible. But there'll never be another Motorcycle Emptiness which, quite frankly, marks the zenith of my interest in the Manics. Early demos reveal how it's an odd, ramshackle collage of other, far more punky cuts, and I find it utterly fascinating that such a young band were able to mould it into a masterpiece that sits so far apart from the rest of their repertoire. My overall score is not particularly favourable, but let it be known that it's far more a product of quantity over quality, and that the most quality article of all exists there within.

Awakening (1982) - Hiroshi Sato featuring Wendy Matthews

Hiroshi Sato was part of the City Pop scene since its inception, but I never see him attributed with the same prestige or influence as the likes of Tatsuro Yamashita or Toshiki Kadomatsu. That said, his landmark album, 1982's Awakening, is about as classic a City Pop record as one could imagine, but in a far quirkier, organic and individual way than what could be expected from most other artists. Vastly ahead of its time, this work is an unlikely product of Sato's yearning for something he felt Japan could no longer afford him and a magnetism that continually drew him back to his musical roots. To Sato, it really was an awakening, because it represented a renewal of possibility, and the resulting work is one of the finest examples of genre fusion to come out of Japan that decade.

Long-time readers of this blog (who?) will know the value I place on an album with a succinct flavour, whose songs exist as part of a self-contained ecosystem. Awakening is very much one of these albums, but in such an imaginative and unusual way that fuses ideologies and tech to create something quite unique. At one end of the spectrum, there exist within the record slow, after-midnight, smoky jazz-club ballads, full of soul and emotion, centred around the acoustic piano. At the other end, we have the hyper-futurism of the Roland Jupiter 8 and the Linn LM-1 drum machine (I know, I know) which feel to be at the very frontier of music production, sounding almost otherworldly, let alone innovative. Such a fusion shouldn't work, but it's to Sato's credit that he had such inspiration and vision with this record, that he seemed to just make them work. The blend is inexplicably effortless. Even that drum machine, when incorporated with flush production value, choice timbre and carefully monitored accompaniment, can be part of a truly stylish, palatable yet avant-garde soundscape.*

*I maintain that Prince had no place using it in Sign 'O' The Times, feeling more of a convenience in his case, whereas for Hiroshi Sato it feels integral to his overall concept.

1. Say Goodbye
2. Blue And Moody Music (Wendy's Version)
3. Only A Love Affair
4. Blue And Moody Music
5. Awakening
6. It Isn't Easy
7. I Can't Wait
8. Love And Peace
9. You're My Baby
10. From Me To You
    (Exempt from total score: Awakening (覚醒) )

Total Points: 30/50
Average Score: 6.0

Say Goodbye is about as close to a City Pop anthem as you can get, yet its sound actually encroaches more on the contemporary 'future-funk' offshoot from the last decade. Though the staple of funky guitar fills are prevalent, as well as Awakening's signature semi-automated arpeggiated motif, it's the introduction of Sato's robotic vocoder-processed voice and the wobbly low synths that project this song so far into the future. This combination makes for a distorted, submerged-under-water feel that evokes the kind of overproduction that has only really come about since City Pop was rediscovered in the internet age, messing with its bare bones and 'retrofuturising' the music within a new context. Here, the heavy affectation to the tones create a bubble around the relatively simple song, making it the most immersive moment on the record.

Collaborating with Australian singer Wendy Matthews for multiple vocal tracks was a key factor in the album's blanket mood of genre-mashed sophistication. Her clear, high voice performs a careful balancing act with Sato's deep, rich tone, and the whole album feels like the most grown-up of duets. Their two separate versions of Blue And Moody Music act as opposing ends of the electronic-acoustic spectrum - and though both are magnificent, the rendition with Wendy's vocals trumps it for me; the brighter, perkier sound bypasses the literal content of the lyrics and cuts straight to the feeling they're trying to convey. Her voice is an exquisite fit for another highlight, Only A Love Affair, in which she passionately but sagaciously confesses her irrepressible love for someone, as the coolest of electric pianos tinkles around her vocals. The song is restrained, chic and perhaps the most refined on the album, whilst still feeling very much part of the same world as the thick, competing layers of Say Goodbye.

Though it's true that I applaud how effectively Sato was able to marry acoustic jazz with pioneering electronica, I will say that every track errs one way more than the other, and it is unfortunately those jazzier influenced ballads that I feel are weaker. They are undoubtedly beautiful in their moodiness, but that moodiness is a double-edged sword; at worst, they're sluggish, dense and drowsy. It Isn't Easy, when isolated, manages to ride the soul to a greater degree of success than the rest, but is mildly hampered by its positioning directly after the equally-slowly-paced I Can't Wait. Furthermore, its aloofly virtuoso piano solo is offset by the overarching prevalence of a particularly lumpy pentatonic scale motif, feeling a little too remedial of a focus when in such a high class of music production.

While City Pop contemporary Tatsuro Yamashita (who, incidentally, plays guitar throughout Awakening) is obsessed with the Beach Boys, Hiroshi Sato always had something of a hyper-fixation with another western entity - The Beatles. Barely an album surfaced without a slightly awkward cover of one of their more overlooked songs, their original 60's sound rejected in favour of synthesisers and clunky 16-beat rhythms, attempting to update them for the 1980's. Sato always had great melodic and harmonic instincts, a vivid imagination and an excellent grasp of the English language; by this logic, these covers shouldn't be ill-advised disasters. Unfortunately though, these strengths are hard-countered by a frequent lack of restraint, a desire to constantly push the envelope, and a preoccupation with unnecessarily reworking old material (others' and his own alike). The results were often shambolic arrangements full of mad, goofy-sounding synth sounds, that stink of trying to fix something that isn't broken. From Me To You is no exception, sounding rather like a demo playing out of a Casio midi keyboard. Its slowed-down pace renders the music patchy and insubstantial, and the poor choice of song turns the sophisticated and modern vibe from the rest of the album utterly on its head, this track absolutely lacking synergy with the rest of the material.

The aforementioned envelope pushing is perhaps the reason why I don't harbour as much love for Sato's subsequent works, which are far more synth-heavy and clumsy, despite his ever-prevalent skilfulness as a programmer and producer. Awakening marks an interesting juncture in his career, freshly back from America (a point of significance for many City Pop artists), increasingly interested in where technology could take him and the boundaries it would broaden, but still wanting to scratch an itch that existed from a time where his music was more atmospheric and acoustic. It is this in-between-ness that perhaps makes this album such a standout, not just to myself but in the general view of City Pop connoisseurs. Marriage of cultures and genres has always been elemental to City Pop, but never has it been quite so exploratory and to such serendipitous effect. There is, quite simply, nothing else like it.

Short Stories (Remastered for 2022) - Yeah Jazz

In previous reviews, I've gone into a fair amount of detail about where my various tastes stem from. Nostalgia is a huge factor when it comes to informing my musical profile, but it's also a driver that makes me want to continue writing about music. I've explored numerous different eye-opening (or, rather, ear-opening) points throughout my life in the form of musical anecdotes, but I think it's time to go back to where it truly all began. Which is, technically, in 1991, the year of my birth.

In 1991, Yeah Jazz (a relatively obscure band from Uttoxeter, Staffordshire) released Short Stories on cassette. After a few singles and an album in the 80s, this was their first release with new drummer Fred Hopwood, and the addition of a keyboardist, Dave Blant. To those in the know (not a single person reading this), everything is falling into place as to why I'm so intrinsically connected to this album in particular. But for those who don't know, maybe when I tell you that I am the nephew of Fred Hopwood and that Dave Blant taught me music from years 5-8 at Oldfields Middle School in Uttoxeter, where I grew up, you'll understand why these rudimentary facts about a little known indie band are actually relevant to me.

Some of my earliest memories of music are the songs from this album, playing on tape through the car stereo as we drive to a holiday rental in Wales, or blasting out of my dad's sound system on New Years Eve, or even a few nights before, heard live but not really consciously knowing it, as my uncle played with Yeah Jazz and his other various musical outfits at a local village club in celebration of his late December birthday. As my tastes evolved, I started to brush them off as 'just a local band', shunning their lack of clout and embarrassed by my ties to them, but over time I've reconnected. At uni, where I studied photography, they were a big influence for my final project (in which I created work about the tension I feel regarding my hometown), and I was able to draw upon the lyrics with a newfound insight and appreciation. Now, at the age of 34, I can see eye-to-eye with their vision and I feel like this music is in my blood.

A scan of the sleeve for the original 1991 cassette release of Short Stories

So if my intent is to review my first exposure to music, why am I working with the 2022 rerelease and not the original? Well, multiple reasons - strap in! (Or, alternatively, skip to the rankings if you don't give a shit.)

As well as these two 'editions' of Short Stories, there have also been 3 further releases (Songs from Biscuit Town, Distant Trains and a further Short Stories, the latter released by a German label under the alias 'Big Red Kite'), with almost every song appearing at least twice between the 5 total records, but in some cases 4 separate times. Perhaps the purest way to do this would be to review separately the Big Red Kite version and Songs from Biscuit Town, which feature only a single song in common (which, ironically, shows up nowhere else!) - but it was important to me to include all the songs that I have the most nostalgia for in one go. Separate reviews would mean segregating two absolute standouts on Biscuit Town from the rest of the pack on Big Red Kite. This would feel very wrong because I know them together from the original tape (see above). Now, speaking of tapes...

Distant Trains is an interesting one because it never had a release other than on cassette, and it's almost like a revised/abridged version of the 1991 Short Stories tape. The liners, much like the original Short Stories, were printed on assorted coloured cardboard in black toner (the roads in the above scan have been inked in with coloured marker afterward - music doesn't get more artisanal than that!). Eight of the ten tracks on Distant Trains are taken directly from the original 1991 Short Stories, but with two notable additions; Don't Let Me Leave and the title track. These are songs I'm reluctant to bar from my review; because of how much shared content there exists between the two tapes, I think of them as virtually the same album. Ultimately though, I struggle to want to review either of the two original cassettes, because they are the least accessible. Nostalgia or not, I can't currently listen to them in this format.

So this brings me to the 2022 Short Stories remaster. The highest quality audio, most accessible (it's on their band camp, along with Songs From Biscuit Town) and the most comprehensive tracklist. Almost every song is represented from the original two cassettes I knew as a child. Two exceptions are Speak To Me and Times Change (now only on the new edition of Songs From Biscuit Town) - these I can admittedly sacrifice as I'd basically forgotten about them, thanks to relying on CD rips and the original CD tracklist for Songs From Biscuit Town not featuring either (sidenote: this is so convoluted, it's probably not worth the three paragraphs' worth explanation). The final omission is Lorraine and Duane, which is a bit of a blow due to its uniqueness and exceptionally balanced structure, but not worth losing out on Distant Trains and Don't Let Me Leave for. Lorraine and Duane also features (consistently!) on Songs From Biscuit Town. The final consideration I had to make is that the rerelease inexplicably uses shorter edits of two songs (April and Hey Tray) - but I'm happy to take these as their original length counterparts.

My choice of edition effectively makes this something of a compilation review - but at this point, the lines are so blurred that a) it doesn't matter and b) I'm past caring.

1. Billy Comes Of Age
2. Orchids Bloom
3. Thinking About You (aka Don't Stop)
4. Hey Tray
5. Distant Trains
6. Don't Let Me Leave
7. April (We've Changed)
8. Rainbows
9. Speak Softly To Me
10. Brown Eyes
11. The Great Escape
12. Red Hot Polka (aka Lost At Sea)
13. Angel
14. Michael Forgive Me
15. Cathy Smiles (aka A Summer's Day)

Total Points: 51/75
Average Score: 6.8

I'm not normally that responsive to lyrics, but I believe that Kevin Hand is unparalleled when it comes to storytelling - there's a reason it's called Short Stories. He has an ability with his ballads to go beyond simple narration; though the action and detail are definitely there, he's able to conjure such tangible atmosphere and utterly transport you to his headspace and his location, that his songwriting becomes straight-up poetry. And all with such unbelievable brevity. How does such a complete scene exist in my head when so few words are uttered? While it's true that I identify with much of his writing through living my own version of many of his experiences, there's also a lot I don't directly relate to. But through his colloquial yet carefully crafted lines, I really feel like I'm peering through his eyes and understanding his thoughts. Take the second verse of Hey Tray for example:

"Saturday, stuck in the launderette

Not noticing the notices she smoked another cigarette

And that photograph of you by the purple garage door

That coat you found - you'd strut around - do you wear it anymore?

And you know what? It's a funny thing 

The older I get, the less I feel I'm living"

This is actually pretty jam-packed for a Yeah Jazz verse, but it's extremely immersive. Hand frequently manages something I always aspired to do within my photography, which is to make a moment out of nothing. And it's scattered all over this collection of songs. Everything from describing "eyes as blue as blue skies" in Distant Trains, the "smoke from the chimney reaching for the sun" in Billy Comes Of Age, to the goosebumps I get listening to Thinking About You, where "we hit the road at 90 and the sun rose all around me". These lines, alone, have an understated beauty to them; I'm there, I can see it. But drop them into the full context of the music and you hit gold. You truly feel it.

Now, I don't think Yeah Jazz are especially talented instrumentalists, and this is evident in their solos. With the exception of my uncle's drumming, which is exemplary (I'm not being nepotistic I swear!), any facade of virtuosity is undermined by clumsy and unambitious ad libs. Blant's accordion solos are often clearly fumbled, lacking the dexterity and confidence needed to make a competent polka riff, and the constant prattling around the root note of the chord in guitar and keys solos alike feels amateurish and uninspired. But as an ensemble band, to create a mood and absolutely support each lyric with the ideal accompanying sound? It's this synergy that tells you they are a live band before they are recording artists. This is where they excel and actually surpass their individual skill levels.

So with this in mind, let's go back to that lyric from Thinking About You. "We hit the road at 90" is sung to what I would describe as a runaway drum rhythm, the brightest, slightly sharply-tuned piano chiming in the background, and a guttural, Johnny Cash-esque guitar playing the exact three notes to make the whole sky appear to swirl around you as you hurtle down the motorway and the sun hits from what feels like every direction at once. The song is tinted with the warmest of orange hues, and you're almost physically shielding your eyes as golden rays seep in through every window. This is the very definition of atmospheric.

My absolute favourite song is Billy Comes Of Age. This is a damn-near perfect song. Again, extremely simple in overall structure, but the story is told in so many more ways than just the already poignant, empathetic and naively articulate lyrics. The song builds from a lone, low piano, pausing for breath at intermittent junctures, tom tom rolls that remind me of Joy Division's Atmosphere, and a doubling of pace that feels perfectly timed to propel the story and step into Billy's shoes. The music builds with the story, and eventually reaches an apex of absolute liberation. There's a two-second pause, and then it kicks back in, ever so slightly (1bpm perhaps) faster, and you can feel the excitement and freedom filling your body. It is sublime.

My single critique of Billy Comes Of Age (which, in all other regards, is a quintessential coming-of-age song on par with Trashcan Sinatras' Obscurity Knocks, which is of similar vintage) is Kevin Hand's vocal style. Initially, when Yeah Jazz started up in the early 80s, they had a very blanket, undefined sound that blended them in with a million other white male British indie setups doing essentially the same thing. As he established more of an identity in his writing, he did the same with his voice. On the plus, he was able to curate a very distinctive style that exaggerates his midlands intonation and brings an undeniable degree of authenticity to his performance. On the downside, however, he bleats. He literally bleats like a sheep. He ruins the most beautiful lines by trailing off his notes in a stammered, downward glissando, which sounds so affected and performative that it can take you right out of the ambience they've worked so hard to establish. In a song as strong as Billy Comes Of Age, this vocal idiosyncrasy does the least damage - but as soon as you notice it once, you hear it crop up all over the album, and it's like pulling the one thread that could threaten to unravel the entire outfit.

But even with these shortcomings, the songs, generally speaking, work. Order has never really mattered to me - perhaps this is more due to how many configurations I've known them in over the years, or perhaps this is more due to their nature, each one very much being a 'short story' that the album title implies. Orchids Bloom is the most solid individual track, very well balanced and performed, with a brilliant chorus that works as much as a pop record as it does a mainstay in their unique soundscape. April encroaches on this as well, but with a bit more of a swerve into the polka/bluegrass lean much of the music has. The Great Escape and Brown Eyes epitomise this facet of their music, and while this influence can be polarising, I don't think it sounds weird among their less genre-specific work. Don't Let Me Leave contains an ample dose of this influence, and is one of the songs I most identify with as someone who once left that same hometown in search of freedom and a life beyond its confines.

I have the least amount of nostalgia for the newer additions, Michael Forgive Me and Angel, neither of which existed on the cassettes I knew as a child. The former, in particular, I don't especially enjoy thanks to the rolling and slightly limp repetitive guitar strumming and rhyming pattern that verges on twee. The one track I've thrown off the cliff though is Cathy Smiles, which was a favourite of mine as a kid. I used to love its lively, catchy accordion refrain, but now I view it as corny with positivity, and definitely the weakest of bunch lyrically. My dad always liked to pick apart the line "the grass grew around she smiled as she sat down on it" but for me, nothing is more of a cringe than life being "just a bus ride away".

I knew I had a lot of feelings about this album but I didn't know until this review just how much I had to verbalise. I've been extra-critical in parts, but I think these assessments have ultimately been outweighed by the undeniable appreciation for the many, multiple aspects I love. Rather than summarising at this point to the extent I usually would, I'm going to do the unheard of and just straight up plug the band. They found a degree of commercial success in the 80s but this album and everything since have clearly been made to satisfy the creative buzz and for the love of performing, and if there is a reader viewing this who actually goes out of their way to give them a listen and find out for themselves what I'm on about, that will be worth a hundred times more than any review I could give.

So here's their bandcamp, go listen and purchase some music. And don't worry, it's not and has never been actual jazz.

West End Girl (2025) - Lily Allen

Less than a month after my spontaneous Sheezus review, Lily Allen comes off musical hiatus and drops (I hate that term but it really did just 'drop') fresh new album West End Girl. And it's not just any album, but a break-up album (the juiciest kind) - and you just know, with it being Lily Allen, she's not going to hold back. To paraphrase a friend of mine, this girl wrote a song called Fuck You; she was not about to pull any punches. But what proceeded when I pressed play was a much more delicate exploration into her divorce from David Harbour than I had expected, one full of speculations, dwellings on small moments, and frank but understated revelations. It still has it's cutting moments, and definitely draws from a familiar well of honesty and openness, but what really comes across is how thrown off Allen is by the whole experience, and the uncertainty and fragility that ensues.

When I think of great break-up albums, the one that stands out to me is Björk's Vulnicura - a highly meditative and organic excavation into the breakdown of her own marriage, spanning the full breadth of the emotional spectrum from tenderness to despair. While West End Girl certainly exudes similar range, and is arguably every bit as dextrous in expressing specific, subtly divergent micro-feelings (although with less inner confidence it seems), it is actually Björk's fourth album, Vespertine, that I can draw the most comparison with*. This is due to the shared utilisation of small-scale electronic beats and intricate mixing to create a quietly complex yet unostentatious sound, and an overarching lyrical theme of family and everyday home-life that Björk has previously labelled 'domestic'. In West End Girl, Allen is constantly referencing her kids and struggling to work out how to filter her marital situation for them, and which of her family unit is currently at or away from home - it doesn't get any more domestic than this. The household setting becomes the headspace for the dilemmas and musings at the root of her anguish, serving to further amplify her pain because of how trapped within these boundaries the lyrics are. Even in tracks like Dallas Major, where she's clearly trying to move past them, she's ultimately subdued by those oppressive walls and incapable of escaping.

*I still plan to review both Vulnicura and Vespertine at a later date. Indeed, one of my objectives in starting this blog was to finally settle my preference between Vespertine and Homogenic. Spoiler: initial rankings of Vespertine don't exactly make this conclusive.

1. Sleepwalking
2. Madeline
3. Pussy Palace
4. Dallas Major
5. 4chan Stan
6. Fruityloop
7. Just Enough
8. Ruminating
9. Tennis
10. Relapse
11. Nonmonogamummy
12. Let You W/In
    
13. West End Girl
14. Beg For Me

Total Points: 45/70
Average Score: 6.43

Even though I've messed around with the exact placements of these songs incessantly, I always end up with a similar balance of colour distribution and a score with only one point or so difference. This tells me that the strength of this record is in the way the tracks come together to paint the overall pastiche, and not necessarily within the individual tracks. The lack of blue corroborates this - there is no standout, and I think this is largely owing to the small-scale, domiciliary approach that Allen has taken in portraying her divorce. There is very little in the way of sensationalism within the lyrics, and the sound suits this decision. Separately, the songs only say a fragment at a time, but those individual components come together to make, to reference Björk one more time, an army of Lily, that presents a unified front and wins you over in numbers.

The album's overall sound is so chilled out that if you took the vocals away, it would sound like a lo-fi playlist presented in high fidelity. When you listen with headphones, the soundscape is cocooning and comforting, with ambient beats, swelling, woozy-sounding synthesiser fills and the softest of pizzicato strings building up a safe environment for Allen's vulnerable storytelling. Pussy Palace and Relapse epitomise this vibe, the latter reminding me of some of the softer moments I gave a somewhat harsher critique to in Sheezus but, here, succeeding due to the immersive nature of the record. Occasionally, a more acoustic approach is taken; Just Enough is especially delicate thanks to this, while the chord sequence and fingertipped guitar in Let You W/In evoke the theme from Brokeback Mountain, the connection inherently carrying with it a similar degree of emotional weight and an air of reluctant resolve.

Sentimentality aside, the album has its venomous moments too. The bluntest lyric on the record, 'lie to me babe and I'll end you', punctuated with the cocking and subsequent firing of a shotgun, also happens to be my personal favourite. This is taken from Madeline, the song where we see the Lily Allen from MySpace, at her gutsiest and coldest, adopting an active role rather than a reactive, passive one. So many of her lyrics are about working out her feelings and recounting conversations, the kind of introspection that is inevitable in the throes of a break-up, but here she's pursuing, acting on her intuition and sparking a streak of revolt in a sea of contemplation. By the time we get to the final track, Fruityloop, Allen has come to terms with her disillusionment, and a full circle moment occurs when she finally has the revelation that 'it's not me, it's you', to quote the title of her second studio album.

After much debate, I settled on placing the title track and Beg For Me at the bottom. Though the song West End Girl contains the crucial, tangibly awkward and damning 'phone call' where the realisation sets in for both Allen and the listener, the song until that point is admittedly a bit plain and one-dimensional. Beg For Me is one of the severer sounding tracks, the pizzicato coming across much more hostile alongside the frosty sampling of Lumidee's Never Leave You - this track would certainly be a missing puzzle piece if it were absent, but its less exploratory and anecdotal format gives it more of a cookie-cutter materialisation compared to the rest of the album. The most difficult song to score was Ruminating, which could be placed first just as easily as last, depending on what aspect of the song most compels me at the time. As it goes, I've averaged it out at dead centre, weighing its whirlwind stream-of-consciousness highs against its generic, bludgeoned-over-the-head-with-autotune lows. It is an aural assault, but in the best way possible, considering that it possesses pretty much every trait I despise in modern pop music.

I've written all that and I've still hardly touched on several of the most memorable and profound instances, of which there are several many across the record. Lily Allen has done a superb job at hitting everything an artist can hit with a work about a break-up. Condense the story of an entire multiple-year-long experience down into a collection of 14 songs? Check. Remain cerebral enough to catch every emotions in the moment even while in the midst of turbulence and numbness? Check. Harness those emotions to create a concise but poignant body of directly conveyed and digestible content? Check.

All that, and to top it off, the music is banging. It's addictive to listen to. I don't really care too much about her personal life, but I'm somewhat invested in Lily Allen as a musician, and West End Girl feels like the apex of her artistic potential. I feel like I'm riding a zeitgeist, but not the one that's trying to sensationalise the scandal of her divorce (they can try, but the closest they'll get is quoting Tennis when she asks 'and who the fuck is Madeline?', and that doesn't really cut it). No, I'm riding my own personal Lily Allen zeitgeist right now, the one that is gushing over her growth, her ability to process and make art, and her authenticity throughout. And it's assembly is 10% my coincidental foray into a previous work of hers, and 90% this album's showcasing of her talent. I can't see there being another album this year that I end up liking more.

BEST ~Second Session~ (2006) - Koda Kumi

Compilation albums are usually out of contention for my review format. What's the point of fussing over what is already considered the 'best of' an artist's work, in an environment where the contents were never planned as part of the same project, and myriad themes, moods and genres co-exist in aggregate despite never being conceived together? Normally, there wouldn't be a point, because I'd have nothing to observe and write about, and any rating would feel hollow and superfluous. But what if there existed an album that was technically a compilation, but one by design and almost necessity, implemented as the final manifestation of a unique and deliberate project? Well, let me introduce you to BEST ~Second Session~ by Koda Kumi, a 'best of' that turns the 'best of' format on its head.

In late 2005, relatively freshly established J-pop artist Koda Kumi embarked upon her 12 Singles Collection project, where a new single was released each week from December 7th to February 22nd. This plan had 'publicity stunt' and 'cash grab' written all over it, or at least it would have if her primary audience was found in the western world. But for the 'Japanese Christina Aguilera' (I do not remember where I read this comparison, but I definitely saw it somewhere), who was more sophisticated and voice-driven than your typical idol, this was the perfect way to capitalise on a culture who loves their pop icons and amassing a personal collection, but also to show off as a singer and creative talent. With each single's artwork featuring Koda boldly styled in a colourful, avant-garde take on a costume from a different country's culture, the visuals were every bit as beguiling as the idea itself. It could be dismissed as a gimmick, were it not for the fact that the music is genuinely rather good.

1. Someday
2. D.D.D. (feat. Soulhead)
3. Kamen (feat. Tatsuya Ishii)
4. Love Goes Like
5. Lies
6. Birthday Eve
7. Wind
8. Candy (feat. Mr Blistah)
9. Ima Sugu Hoshii
10. Shake It Up
11. You
12. No Regret
13. Feel
    (Exempt from total score: Introduction To The Second Session)

Total Points: 45/65
Average Score: 6.93

Something I love about popular music from the naughties - especially that with an r&b influence - is how instantly identifiable it is; so often, there is such a distinct and incriminatingly dating sound. This certainly shows up throughout, unavoidably so in Candy and Love Goes Like, but because of how all the music is so sweeping and radically unrelated in style, whilst still somehow maintaining its shape as a uniform project, the datedness doesn't set in. Or rather, it is cushioned, by the through thread of Koda's immaculate voice, the ultra-modern (modern but decidedly not futuristic) sound of each track's instrumentation and, to the credit of Koda's management, the image projected through the videos and artwork. Eclectic, vibrant, exciting, but always Koda through and through - that is what this album is, to the eyes and ears alike.

Though D.D.D. borrows its verse melody from the already frequently reimagined western mainstay Lady Marmalade, these are perhaps the least impressive moments of the song. With each other section, it transforms into a whirlwind of a pop track, breathing fantastical life into tried-and-tested chord progressions with earworm melodies and full-throttle, undying energy that make this the absolute pinnacle of all upbeat get-up-and-dance tracks. Even with the occasional r&b moment, pure pop is the predominant sound. But this exists as a spectrum within itself, and D.D.D. sits somewhere in the middle - right between the sugary, squeaky-clean bubblegum of Wind and Birthday Eve and the quirkier, heavily mixed and scratched Lies. All of these songs sound correct in each other's company, becoming a cross section of Koda's tastes and talents, and a real showcase of her dynamism.

My lower rated tracks are among the best known from this era - You, the lead single of the project, remains the best-selling of the individual releases and something of a signature ballad for Koda, while No Regret, which also performed well, found an extra lease of life as an anime opening theme. Though no less competent than the rest of the album, the former is a little on the bland side (especially compared to the heady and indulgent duet Kamen, a far more satisfying ballad) and the latter being rather hard and fast, very constant with its orchestra hits and techno-esque timbres, but without much resolution. Feel seems to combine both of the other bottom songs' flaws, being anomalously bland in an album full of sugar, spice and full-bodied flavour.

Finale track to both the album and the project itself (the orders of original release and compilation tracklist are different), Someday, makes for a dramatic and memorable ending. Rich string flourishes, teeter-tottering piano chord phrases and silky wah guitar bring together elements from disco, house and funk respectively, lending themselves to the most elegant j-pop imaginable. This makes for a timeless and grand sound, that stays with you long after you finish listening. Furthermore, each of these instrumentations feature elsewhere on the album, making Someday the most apt and gratifying way to end the proceedings and consolidate the whole project. It's everything a closer should be, and the perfect way to encapsulate the overall energy of the compilation without repeating anything or being too literal.

The cover photos for each of the 12 separate single releases

This capsule collection of music is an inimitable relic of its time in terms of concept, while the fruits of it are anything but, their overall coalescence managing to straddle multiple sub-genres and transcend time. Such a bold idea surely won't be attempted again, certainly not in the age of digital music and streaming. Because it stands out to me as such a singular entity, I've struggled to get into much more of Koda Kumi's music. Stepping outside the Second Sessions bubble I've somehow found myself within would almost feel a betrayal of my love for it. This probably has a lot to do with how unavailable her music was to me at the time it was made. My CD copy of this was imported from Japan, purchased over eBay for an amount I would not usually feel happy paying for an album I'm buying blindly, and it was almost entirely gambled on the promotional artwork (above) I'd seen online, and the fact I knew of Koda from when she sung the Final Fantasy X-2 theme. This gamble, of course, paid off for me - but, for so long, it was the only access I could really afford myself to her music. Now, of course, I have Spotify, Youtube, full 2025 internet access. I could even follow her on instagram probably. But it's scary to venture out of this project's bubble when I look around from within and see something verging on perfection. Sure, I've been critical, but it really does sparkle to me. When I ranked it and saw the score, I was initially surprised, but when writing about it and breaking down the music, it makes so much sense to me that I rate it all so highly. One day I'll branch out and absorb a wider discography of Koda Kumi, but for now I'm more than happy to stay here and relish in the glory of this incredible and unlikely 'best of' album, that defies the very archetype it constitutes.

Weezer (Blue Album) (1994) - Weezer

When it comes to Weezer, a band whose work I've consistently kept up with throughout the years, and whose work I have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of, I think the best place to start is the beginning.

I didn't exactly grow up with Weezer - I was only 3 when their debut self-titled album (I'll refer to it as the Blue Album, or just Blue, as is permissible given that they are currently up to 6 eponymous works) was released, and I didn't really start listening to them until college, at which point I torrented their discography up to that date and really got into them. Since then, I've stayed pretty tuned in to what they're up to, and each new release plots a new co-ordinate on an ever-elongating graph documenting how good Weezer currently are. But in the eyes of so many, 'how good Weezer are' seems to correlate directly to their first record, and the real measurement actually becomes 'how closely a Weezer release resembles the sound of the Blue Album'.

When a band sets such a golden standard with their debut, it is very difficult not to compare everything with this solid initial idea of who they are. Anything too different feels like a deviation rather than an evolution, and it's to the credit of Rivers Cuomo that he rarely lets this stigmatic public viewpoint dictate direction of the band's output. I think I've trained myself over the years to not look at their new music in such an expectant, comparative way. That said, there have certainly been times when I'm midway through something simultaneously wacky and drab on an album like Pacific Daydream and I find myself longing for the good old Weezer of 1994. But what is it that gives Blue this iconic status that has endured for over 30 years and still remains the primary accolade of an act who have never stopped writing new material?

This era of Weezer was a simpler, less pretentious time, and the songs from The Blue Album (and, incidentally, follow-up Pinkerton) are the creations of a younger band, with different ideologies and priorities. Where with age, time and experience, a musician might strive for technical perfection, a younger musician whose ambition is no less potent will value different qualities. With a song like Say It Ain't So, rawness of emotion is the point, the take that makes the album probably used because the vocals sound authentically emotive and the verse contrasts especially well against the chorus. The Weezer of today don't make this kind of track - asides from the fact they don't need to, because it already exists in Say It Ain't So, raw emotion is just not high up on their agenda any more. I actually regard it a good thing that the band doesn't sound like they did in 1994 - that would be disastrously stagnant, and I would be concerned for Rivers Cuomo if he was as volatile and emotional at 55 as he was at 24.

So, in my opinion, it is the voice of a younger band who are taking the first possible chance to say the things they want to say that separates Weezer's early works apart from the rest. I think many find this easier to connect with, many can identify with their oddness and the honesty they are intent on conveying, and I think the delivery, unkempt but not messy, provides an accessible vessel in which to house these attributes.

1. Buddy Holly
2. Say It Ain't So
3. Undone - The Sweater Song
4. Only In Dreams
5. My Name Is Jonas
6. Surf Wax America
7. Holiday
8. The World Has Turned And Left Me Here
9. No One Else
10. In The Garage

Total Points: 32/50
Average Score: 6.4

Rawness and finesse are not mutually exclusive qualities; as demonstrated with nimble finger picking and gradually built layers throughout, the Blue Album is every bit as meticulous as Weezer's more polished later albums, but in its own, homemade-sounding way. My Name Is Jonas, for example, sounds completely underproduced, more like a live performance than a studio recording, but the expertise of structure and dynamics resonates so much that they outweigh the roughness and make for an incredibly strong start.

Drifting, ambling layers and timid, unadorned verses help to give Undone - The Sweater Song and Only In Dreams such compelling progressions, both resolving in pure heavy guitar fire and a true unleashing of tension. The spoken word excerpts in the former (especially the apathetic and barely audible first person responses) feel despairingly mundane but in a way that informs the content of the song so aptly. Meanwhile, Buddy Holly works because of how solid and concrete it is; nothing bends, everything is rigidly with the beat and played at a constant volume of loud. That said, the bridges manage to add an unexpected softness with their chord resolutions and comforting, tender turn for the lyrics, and the song climaxes perfectly when everything cuts out for a single bar of the guitar solo before the final chorus.

No One Else's misogynist lyrics make Rivers look like an asshole, and while this isn't exactly compelling content for me, it's actually the dip in articulation and complexity that most impacts my rating. Positioned directly after My Name Is Jonas, it sounds underbaked and a bit slapdash. The indisputable worst track, however, is In The Garage - though it definitely portrays a valid slice of Cuomo's teenage reality, the standard nerd content of the verses plus the flimsily sing-song chorus (not to mention the lazy and juvenile way he pronounces 'garage' as a single syllable) sound genuinely pathetic together. In The Garage also has the added detractor of a harmonica intro that sounds like a rusty gate swinging off its hinges, which nobody wants to hear.

I didn't mean this to be a defence piece for current Weezer, but I can't help but feel a bit inclined to jump in whenever they release new material and the first thing out of anyone's mouth is "it's not like the Blue Album". But hopefully I've still conveyed why this happens, why people (myself included, check the score) love the Blue Album and why it has such an unattainable je ne sais quoi in the eyes of so many Weezer fans. Part of me is scared about writing about future ventures of theirs that I enjoy and figuring out how to do it justice - but part of me is also looking forward to it!

Sheezus (2014) - Lily Allen

Sometimes I get so bogged down with nostalgia and trying to weave together some kind of grandiose review to end all reviews that it all starts to feel a bit stale. The albums I want to discuss are usually steeped in meaning for me, or have had verdicts on them marinating and maturing for several years (or even decades). I'm also aware that I'll generally have more to say about something I like, and that there's little point in reviewing an album I don't much like, given the whole point of this blog is to compare my favourite albums. This is a deadly combination that leads to insane writers block and, if dwelled upon too much, a sour taste for the music itself. So I thought I'd keep things fresh and review an album I've never listened to until two days ago.

I was a MySpace teenager (like you can't tell from the customised transparent banner I made for this blog) so I'd first heard of Lily Allen when she was on the brink of her breakthrough. Initially defined by a bold personal style (cocktail dress and trainers) and a quirky, vintage, ska-infused sound, Lily Allen was one of the biggest success stories of the indie music zeitgeist of the 00s. It soon became clear though that she wasn't the sort to sit primly in the niche she'd carved out for herself with her debut Alright, Still, and by the time Sheezus came around, Lily Allen had thoroughly made sure that her signature was her attitude, not her aesthetic.

Sheezus is essentially an electropop album - emphasis on the pop, with the electro seeping through in a largely subliminal way. You don't really notice how deeply you've been swimming in the electronic beats until URL Badman's dubstep chorus kicks in and tells you it's time for air. Typically the only electro not to manifest with overbearingly incessant energy is the kind of ambient, über-chill trip-hop of Massive Attack and the like. Sheezus, however, uses beats in a subtle, supportive way that maintains a calmness that isn't intrinsically atmospheric, instead finessing the music round the edges and helping to add flair to otherwise simple melodies. Together with Allen's clean, blasé style of vocalisation and quippy, unexpected rhymes, the result is a surprisingly sophisticated modern feminist manifesto of a nearly 30-year-old Lily Allen speaking her mind once more.

1. Hard Out Here
2. Insincerly Yours
3. Air Balloon
4. Close Your Eyes
5. As Long As I Got You
6. Somewhere Only We Know
7. Our Time
8. URL Badman
9. Sheezus
10. Silver Spoon
11. L8 CMMR
12. Take My Place
13. Life For Me
    (Exempt from total score: Interlude)

Total Points: 38/65
Average Score: 5.85

Lily Allen is never short of statements to make, but the real headliners are the ones that pack the most punch outside of just their lyrical content. This makes Hard Out Here the clear standout, a bold pop banger with social commentary that still feels current and relevant, Allen's sweet, crooning vocals licensing her to be extra cutting in her critique. Insincerely Yours is similarly audacious, but laid back and funky, less of an outright anthem but just as memorable. This is where the electronic timbres work best, elevating a pretty standard tune to match the excellent lyrics by beautifully balancing layers of intricate effects and precision beats. Close Your Eyes functions as an updated take on the 90s r'n'b slow jam, like TLC's Red Light Special, but white, British and post-childbirth - a little more self-deprecating and dysfunctional, but every bit as transparent and lustful, and polished with the same pristine sleekness that exemplifies the best of the album's tracks.

There are two main ways that the album wanes for me; one is in the clumpier overproduction suffered in songs like L8 CMMR and Sheezus - these songs rely a little too heavily on discombobulating effects and an almost satirical use of autotune and synth sounds that come across like intentionally sarcastic musical tropes. If they were positioned later in the tracklist, they'd take me right out of the listening experience. Speaking of which, the anomalously jolly and acoustic As Long As I Got You absolutely does this, smack bang in the middle of the album. The song itself is innocuous but its presence detracts from the album's otherwise synergistic mood.

The other way the album wanes is through an inherent sleepiness that dusts the slower, less vibrant songs, an issue that I also observed in 2009's It's Not Me, It's You. Allen's voice does not fluctuate in tone track to track, always set to a deadpan, lightly sassy medium-low. So when a lower energy song comes along, she's not working overtime to sell it, instead depending on the construction and content to do the work. Take My Place and Life For Me, though palpably heartfelt and personal to Allen, lack the necessary interest to keep them from being unfortunately boring, electronic embellishments unable to help out when the material is so languid to begin with. You can't aim for beauty in simplicity when Hard Out Here is right there on the same record.

Though not everything on the album is to my taste, I appreciate when an artist can really let me into their world and see things from their eyes, and that is what Lily Allen does best. She does it so directly it almost feels cheap - in fact, it does feel cheap in the songs with a less bombastic sound. But in the rest, master directional decisions and clarity of vision elevate Allen's opinions and observations into a true art, something that is as catchy and poppy as it is succinct and important. I don't think diving into music I've never heard before will always work for me - I think there was an element of luck this time round. I'm not always going to be able to just pick up an album and expect to have things to say about it. But I feel refreshed for having done it this time, so I'd say the experiment was a success.

Sign 'O' The Times (1987) - Prince

Strap in folks, this one is a long one. I have a lot to say.

I generally think of Sign 'O' The Times as one of my favourite albums. Pre-rating system, I would have pinned this as top 10, probably even top 5 material. But casting a critical eye over it and comparing it to a multitude of other records shines a light on the flaws that I've previously chosen to ignore. For better or for worse, I can't honestly say I enjoy this album as much as I thought I did. But that's not to say it's a bad album - it is undoubtedly Prince's magnum opus and will probably remain my highest rated of his works. But first, a little backstory on why I consider Prince one of my favourite artists of all time. I promise it is relevant - in fact, it is very much intertwined with my review of this album.

My introduction to Prince was through Sign 'O' The Times. Not the album I'm reviewing though - the concert film of the same name, featuring many of the album's songs performed, for want of a better word, live. Weaving a poorly-conceived and even-worse-acted narrative into the setlist, performed on a smoky, late-night city slum set, Prince somehow accomplished the impossible, using these corny and extremely dating elements to only amplify the quality of the music, to a point where the amateurish skit segues barely register as a drop in the ocean. And what music it was! It was my first exposure to music that defied the boundaries of genre, simultaneously moody and funky, distortion guitar and slap bass intertwined, that managed to fuse such contrasting elements as nihilistic philosophy and sleazy erotica. Why was there a scantily clad hyperactive drummer performing a 2 minute percussion solo like some sexy female Animal from the Muppets? Why was the saxophonist wearing a hooded cloak and clutching his tenor sax like he was the grim reaper brandishing a scythe? Why was there a giant heart-shaped platform that tilted gradually backwards from a vertical until it formed a horizontal trashy love-hotel bed? Turns out, ecstasy. But also, it was a vision, one that left me immersed and invested and in awe of what music could be. It was an awakening.

The fact of the matter is, if I was reviewing the songs as I heard them 'live', there would be a sea of blue ahead in my rankings, and you'd be looking at, indisputably, my favourite album of all time. But the 1987 double album Sign 'O' The Times is a different beast entirely, effectively an amalgamation of several years' worth of songs, all originally intended for a plethora of unrelated shelved projects, and thrown into an odd kind of compilation. One that has a theme, but lacks the clarity of a smaller concept album, or the full scope of of a grander and more extensive compendium.

The real disappointment, the thing that makes this album come across like seeing the real Wizard of Oz after the curtain of the concert film is pulled back, is the quality, or lack-thereof, of the songs themselves. They sound like demos. There's no better way to put it. They sound tinny, feeble, stark, bland and incomplete. It brings to mind a vision of Prince spending hours isolated in a tiny studio, like a self-imposed asylum, frantically trying to play every instrument in turn over the robotic monotony of the Linn drum machine (my true nemesis for this record), scrambling so hard to contain every idea that he ends up missing the vision he started with. Timbre, richness and balance remain largely unconsidered, to the point where it sounds like Prince forgot he could re-record something instead of force it into a box in which it doesn't belong. These tracks are mere shells of what they would later become, when granted the treatment of a live band, the input of other performers and the consideration to become something more than a slapdash effort at turning a creative mess into an actual release.

It is crazy to me that Prince could look over the eventual double album and think 'yes, this is ready for release'. It may have been the drugs, but I have a theory that he heard his production efforts entirely differently in the 80s, his ears filtering them before the information reached his brain, and making him think he'd produced something akin in sound to what his live concerts yielded, but on his own in a studio. Imagine an artist painting a landscape, and getting so close to the canvas and caught up in details that he forgets to stand back and neglects to see none of the colours match and there's no sky painted in. SOTT is that painting, but in music. And again, just a theory, but I reckon he was so untouchable to those around him, touted as such a genius, that no-one dared tell him that his music production was anything less than immaculate.

Whatever the reason, ranking these songs is hard. Harder than usual, when you're torn between judging what might have been, based on what they would become in a different setting, and what they are in situ. Do I purely evaluate the core skeleton of the song, the lyrics and tune and chords that remain unchanged? Or do I zoom in on the anaemic sound quality and overarching limpness that let the record down? Doing this would undoubtedly allow some fundamentally weaker tracks to rise up the ranks, just because they have a marginally more soulful delivery, compared to real gems that are coated in the grime of poor manifestation. Ultimately, I have had to take it all in, and go with my viscera - not my head or my heart, but what my gut tells me is right.

1. U Got The Look
2. If I Was Your Girlfriend
3. I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man
4. Strange Relationship
5. The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker
6. Sign O The Times
7. Housequake
8. Forever In My Life
9. Slow Love
10. It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night
11. Play In The Sunshine
12. Starfish And Coffee
13. The Cross
14. Hot Thing
15. Adore
16. It

Total Points: 50/80
Average Score: 6.25

Straight off the bat, its clear that what my gut tells me is that I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man, the absolute standout from the concert film, though vastly diminished by basically being no better in quality that its original 1979 demo, ultimately maintains its prestige in my eyes, just by being a really good song. However, almost everything else remains a weak, pale husk of the sumptuous, decadent events they become in the film. Slow Love in particular is so transformed with Prince's hyper-sexualised performance and dizzying arrangement - especially Eric Leeds' dazzling sax cascades (saxcades?) - that it's only when you listen to the comparably banal studio recording that you realise how vanilla it is - structurally, lyrically and sonically, it is a rather empty affair.

Only two tracks are unmarred by a superior 'live' performance (yes, I'm aware I'm skirting around the legitimacy of the concert recordings, but I have far more pressing points to make first) - one of which breaks form and is actually the studio recording, with it's actual promotional music video slotted into the middle of the film. U Got The Look is the only track that retains the amplitude present in Purple Rain era of production (the last full Prince album of truly decent sound quality until the 90s) and its bombastic, plosive beats are much more evocative of what Sheila E did on tour than what the Linn drum machine usually recited. This vivacity sticks out like a sore thumb, thriving in a sea of songs that are, by comparison, on production life support. The other high-scorer, If I Was Ur Girlfriend, has the privilege of being distinct from its concert counterpart but not necessarily worse - what comes across as sterile production on other album tracks here serves as a beneficial degree of restraint. There's even a moment, at the climax at the song, where the drum machine is all that's playing, like it's been left on and Prince has just caught himself in the midst of delivering his 'psychosexual monologue' - and a truly apt feeling of unsettling introspection and isolation prevails.

Regrettably, most other tracks are simply tainted by the knowledge that they are so far from their full potential. Housequake, for example, is about as funky a jam as Prince can crank out. The studio version is serviceable (thanks to being one of the few tracks to feature collaborative musicians!) but it doesn't make me want to get up and dance and be alive. It leaves me feeling just fine sat here. Same for the title track - it's all the right notes in the right order, but does it have the soul to make me want to bang along with the 'drum' tattoo at the end? Absolutely not.

A couple of higher scorers are songs that don't have the same core issue the rest do, from not being featured in the setlist for the film. Strange Relationship has a thumping, driven beat and croaky, deep bassline that encroaches on the kind of oomph U Got The Look achieves, combining with a tidy, balanced verse melody for a real sense of resolution. And The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker, while still feeling quite bare, invokes a fittingly understated ambience and is, at least, a decently interesting story to listen to.

At the other end of the spectrum, Adore is utterly boring. Saccharine in all the wrong places, lazy in the lines that need the most attention, obtuse organ cheesing up the place, muted trumpet stabs turning it into a pompous jazz parody, and loose, howling vocals having little-to-no regard for the actual song being performed. The only thing that saves this slog of a closer from dead last place and even, miraculously, from a red rating, is the abomination that is the song It. Orchestra hits are an acquired taste at the best of times, but never have they been used so offensively - dare I say even recklessly, over the most repetitive and bitch-basic synth pattern that a preschooler could master and, you've guessed it, our old friend Linn. Prince sometimes prefers to screech out his vocals as opposed to sing them, and he picked the absolute worst track to use this technique to create discordant 'harmonies' over. This song is unlistenable. It's even a low point in the film, the lyrics inexplicably attached to the end of a lovely acoustic rendition of Forever In My Life and tripling the length of the song with no real pay-off - but at least they're sung and not screamed.

I have been so critical of this album that I doubt I've adequately conveyed my adoration and respect for it and what the songs represent to me. I certainly haven't accomplished this for my admiration of Prince himself. He just had the misfortune of unveiling himself to me for the first time in the most unfairly unattainable instance of perfection that anything else would be a downgrade by comparison. The bar was set way to high with the SOTT film and my brain made it a precedent that just couldn't be bettered. I do love this album, I promise. But it's so hard not to listen to each track and picture a better version, standing and waving to me just a short, out-of-earshot distance away. It is a travesty that the film never had an official audio release - imagine a remaster of that? I would eat that up. The closest things we have are the live recordings from Utrecht featured on the Super Deluxe SOTT remaster - bootlegs inform me that the band was pretty much on form for every live show, and this is no exception - but there are always, of course, minor differences. Thus is the nature of live music.

Which brings me to the elephant in the room (and a bit of an ironic full circle moment): it is glaringly suspicious that the 'live' recordings in the film are all magically played without Prince ever plugging in his guitar. To his merit, the perfectionist in him spoke out and told him to rerecord the video, knowing he could give more and do better. This allowed him to unplug and go for drama and showmanship, ham everything up and make the visuals match the fantasticality of the incredible music. So it's basically all lipsynced to the original audio. Again, thanks to bootlegs and the Utrecht recordings, I know he's playing the guitar in the original recordings - I do not question his bonafide virtuosity. But what I do question is why he had the compulsion to pursue a greater spectacle here, but not for the root studio album. Was it pressure from his label, with whom he had an infamously rocky relationship? Was it the ego of a renowned prodigy incapable of seeing the forest for the trees? Or was it simply the ecstasy?