Week 32

I discovered a new music website that is doing exactly what I set out to do with my blog except they have a much more robust site wnew.com. They have a section called 'Forgotten Favorites' which highlights many of the same albums I am covering here in this blog. In fact, the site has a review, which I linked in below. I also added a link at the top - so hit them up.

Had a nice long conversation with my uncle and we discussed how music today just sucks. Few hit artists have real talent and the ones that do have talent get no air play or breaks. Like I said to him, if I could travel back in time to listen to music I would land right around 1972. Hold on and learn the roots of music and one day real musicianship will make a comeback. For now, we have to dig through the wasteland of hacks to find all the gems. On to this week's gems (8/9-8/15):

Nickelback - The Long Road
Bonnie Raitt - Luck of the Draw
Bruce Springsteen - Lucky Town
Queens Of The Stone Age - Lullabies To Paralyze
Joe Cocker - Mad Dogs & Englishmen
Matchbox Twenty - Mad Season
Nick Drake - Made To Love Magic
Bruce Springsteen - Magic
Beachwood Sparks - Make The Cowboy Robots Cry
Lenny Kravitz - Mama Said
Spencer Dickinson - The Man Who Lives For Love
David Bowie - The Man Who Sold The World
Stephen Stills - Manassas (CD & Vinyl)

Weeks ago I slammed Nickelback for making what I thought to be a boring album in Dark Horse. Reason being, all they did was take all the swagger of The Long Road and re-engineer it by polishing up the vocals, removing some of the riffs, made it a little more poppy and slapped a new cover on it. The Long Road is my favorite album hands down by Nickelback and to see it torn apart for commercial success annoyed me. So if you want to hear the real Nickelback, pop in The Long Road and you'll see what this band is really all about.

Lullabies to Paralyze - what a cool title for an album!? QOTSA is a band that I have grown to appreciate more and more over the past year. The reason I got into them had nothing to do with the producer and collaborater - Chris Goss - that gave them the band its name, but it's still cool to see someone with notoriety that shares my last name. The album also has a song Burn The Witch that features Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top as well as Jack Black.

I am far from being a David Bowie fan, but The Man Who Sold The World is as good an album as any to own. My favorite track from the album is Black Country Rock, which is the one song that sounds least like the rest of the album. This album is often regarded as the birth of "glam-rock". In case the term is foreign to you here are a list of bands to check out - T. Rex, Gary Glitter, New York Dolls, and Lou Reed. While this isn't my favorite genre I find a lot of appeal in how much show these artists brought into the rock n' roll show. Bands that owe their persona creations to the genre are acts like KISS, Quiet Riot, Motley Crue, and every other Hair Metal band.

There are influential albums and then there is Manassas. This album from Stephen Stills is just plain out of the solar system. It's a four part album each of the four sections contains a theme. I actually found an in depth review on WNEW of the album that was right on the nose with how I felt and will defer to it for my full review. Stills assembled the modern day equivalent of a super-group and even brought in Bill Wyman of the Stones for a track. Wyman reportedly was willing to quit the Stones to join Manassas if that tells you anything about their significance. This album has rock, blues, country, and a little bit of everything else you can mix in while remaining on the path of a cohesive album. My favorite tunes from this album were Song of Love, Anyway, Colorado, Bound to Fall, and What To Do. Inside the liner notes at the end of the Side 4 (for those of you that have never listened to an album on vinyl you have to literally flip it over to keep listening) track listing it states the album is a tribute to Jimi Hendrix - Al Wilson - Duane Allman. And on that note let me just say that liner notes and sides for albums is the one thing that the digital age has killed in music. You lose the history when nobody cares about what went into making an album, it's roots, it's influences, musicians, credits. The digital books that come with download music never get viewed. Anyway enough of the soapbox - go out and listen to this masterpiece.