Each Day I'm Listening to One Full Album I've Never Heard from Start to Finish
A Music Writer Exercise for February
Towards the end of January this year, Gary Suarez of the impeccable CABBAGES posted this at Bluesky.
Needing to get my writing chops back up to a place they haven’t been in a looong time, (a lot of it because of too many other distractions and a few other hobbies. PLENTY of it because the laptop I am using is like a billion years old and takes forever to boot up and almost as long to function without throwing fouls or freezing) I am stepping up to this challenge. I am doing mine a little differently though. I am posting which album it is each day on my Bluesky and then doing a weekly post here with some quick thoughts on each album.
There is no theme or reason for the records I picked. Every morning, I thought of an album I’d never heard and listened to it on my commute to and from work and during whatever free time I had during each day.
Here is the first installment.
Saturday, Feb. 1st, 2025:
BOB DYLAN Street Legal • In 1975, after a few middling to absolute stinkers of albums, Bob Dylan proved he still had “it” as an individual force with Blood On The Tracks. In 1978, though, it sounds as if he decided to be more of a follower than a leader, sounding more like artists he influenced rather than being the influencer. Springsteen like saxophones are aplenty, some sorta gypsy jazz rock a la Van Morrison, a white blooze rock clunker and backing vocals that sound like cod versions of southern soul/modern gospel songs that he most likely copped from the spectacles that Elvis had going on in his 70s live shows.
I know a couple of Dylan heads who say this is one of his most underrated albums and have told me I should understand that Bobby Z was going through a lot of roughness because of his divorce at the time but outside of the album’s opening and closing tracks ("Changing of the Guards" and "Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)") and how a few lyrical lines seem to be him rewriting some words Robert Johnson sang, nothing stands out from the murky production and sticks for me.
Sunday, Feb. 2nd, 2025
TEENAGE FANCLUB Grand Prix The first two Teenage Fanclub “proper” releases (the quotations because there was an album called The King which was released between the two and deleted the same day it was released to meet their contract obligations with Matador and for them to move on to Atlantic records) meant a lot to me when they came out. They encapsulate a time and space of my life. And when I hear them today, I still feel that. The shambling Catholic Education and the superpop that was Bandwagonesgue were two sides of a perfect coin to me. I thought their third album, Thirteen, was decent yet seemed to be Bandwagonesque part two to my ears and wasn’t a record I ever found myself returning to for repeated listening. Because of that, along with my tastes shifting towards different sounds (and no, it wasn’t “grunge”, that whole train left the station a while ago by then) I never really got around to checking out their 4th album Grand Prix.
I can’t say I would have dug the album at the time of its release but I am digging it now. All three of the band’s songwriters Norman Blake, Raymond McGinley and Gerard Love are firing on all cylinders and unlike their previous records, it’s not Blake taking up almost all of the spotlight. This is not a slight towards him as Blake wrote some of the best loud guitar pop songs of the early 1990s (and has some total charmers on this record like the slightly Crazy Horse-ish jangle on the aptly titled Neil Yung) but Love shines brightly with showing the band’s often cited adoration for Big Star on “Discolite” and the twisted hoedown lick that drives Sparky’s Dream. Meanwhile, McGinley’s Verisimilitude offers up one of the only things I can think of at this moment that could be described as angry/agitated baroque pop.
Monday, Feb. 3rd, 2025:
OLIVER NELSON Blues And The Abstract Truth • My jazz knowledge is middling at best but I’m always giving it a chance. And unlike some other (aging) hipsters I know, who dabble in it, claim to be “really into jazz,” and then most likely name-drop some stupid project the guy from Primus or some shit did,I can actually rattle off more than the usual three to five obvious albums they always go on about. I do have a scant knowledge of it, though. I can’t break down sub-genres or scenes or any of that. So, if any serious jazzbos are reading this and my take comes off like an uneducated philistine, I apologize in advance.
This is one of those albums that a couple of people who really know their jazz have recommended to me over the years (and they seemed kinda miffed or surprised I’d never heard it).
Saxophonist Nelson leads a group of some of the greatest players on the planet (Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, saxophonists Eric Dolphy and George Barrow, Bill Evans on piano, bassist Paul Chambers and Roy Haynes on drums) through six of his compositions.
The opener, “Stolen Moments”, is one of those things where a part of history began. Composed, structured and some wide open spaces. Every player gets their space and time to introduce themselves. It’s a notice to the listener that they’re there to play hard.
And play hard they do. A lot. And very busy. There’s a lot to take in all at once as side one progresses.
“Yearnin’” starts side two and puts me in a place I like to be with records like this. It's a smokey groove. It’s sophisticated yet it wails and gets a bit wild. It's a track that's heavily sly the whole time.
Tuesday, Feb. 4th, 2025:
FRIJID PINK Defrosted • This Detroit band made a mark on the charts in 1970 with their debut album due to a fuzzed out and heavy psych take of “House Of The Rising Sun” which went top ten on the Billboard charts that year. To strike while the iron was still hot, they released their 2nd album, Defrosted, six months later.
Having heard their first album a lot as a little kid thanks to a much older cousin who would always tell me about the time he saw them play some party in Marysville, Michigan around the time they were hitting it big and always noting “you could smell the weed smoke from a mile away” (though I was a little kid and had absolutely no idea what weed smoke even smelled like let alone what he was going on about.) He also liked to tell me how one time Led Zep opened for them and not the other way around. That must mean they were some heavy stuff, right?
As I look back, this was the mid 70s when he was telling me this. It was well after the band hit their only peak at fame but he was really, really into them. Disturbingly so, now that I think about it. I mean, how many superfans could the band actually have had? And it was just their first album he’d rave about and play. I don’t ever recall hearing any of their other albums at any other time in my life.
I decided to listen to their 2nd because of this (and the exercise at hand calls for that.) It’s definitely a Detroit Rock album of its time (after all, they were contemporaries of other Grande Ballroom denizens/legends like the MC5, the Stooges etc) but they are much more lunkheaded. They didn’t set out to harsh out the normies with some art noise like the Osterberg gang’s original modus operandi, nor were they talking about revolution while trying to turn the audience on to Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra like the 5. They were just out there to crank heavy rock, thrust their crotches while doing something “serious and topical” thinking it would help them score some earth mama ‘tang (“Sing A Song for Freedom”), oversing almost every note on what they probably considered their homage to “real blues” (titled, of course, “Bye Bye Blues”) play a lot of overmodulated and rippin’ guitar solos (every song on the record) and make sure weed smoke could be smelled from over a mile away. Is this some great and forgotten classic proto metal album? Nah. Is it a dumb as fuck fun and unintentionally hilarious hard rock album from 1970s? Yeah, it kinda is.
As far as that older cousin, I have not seen him since sometime in the 80s. My dad told me the last he heard, he was in Alaska but no one has heard from in close to thirty years. Perhaps he’s cranking up the first album for polar bears and still telling his story of seeing the band and the smelling weed smoke from a mile away.
Wednesday, Feb. 5th, 2025:
The DAMNED Strawberries • Like any self-respecting teenager first getting into punk rock in the 1980s (or any time, really), getting a Damned album in my collection was at the top of my list. There were a couple of their albums at the record store I was in when I decided to take the plunge. I walked up to the cash register with Strawberries—their latest release at the time—in my hand.
"Oh, checking out the Damned?" the dude asked me.
"Yep."
"You heard much of them before?"
"Just some stuff I heard on the radio last week."
"I know the guy who does that show," he tells me. "It wasn’t off this album. This is their new album and it sucks. You want to get their first album."
I heeded his advice because he had a cool record store job in the city, and I was just a boy from one of those out-of-the-way rural counties. He obviously knew what was cooler than I did, right? So for decades now, I’ve never actually listened to it, though I’ve read a lot about it. When I told my wife it’d be my musical writer exercise album of the day, she asked how I could have never heard the whole thing before. "It’s a bit of a goth classic," she noted.
I mentioned to her that some dude in a record store in the '80s told me it sucks.
"And you were a record store dude in the '90s. How many kids do you think took your opinion as truth? Probably not many. They probably left the store thinking, 'That guy doesn’t know about anything that’s actually good.'"
Fair point, I guess. Then again, I was telling that to kids buying Korn and Stabbing Westward CDs, thinking they were the punkest things ever. And, no, they did not take my advice for the most part. If they had, some band like Teengenerate or the Cheater Slicks would have been the biggest musical act in the world. My wife is an OG goth, so who am I to doubt her take on the album?
If that record store dude hadn’t steered me away from the record, I’d have been bummed if I’d bought it at the time. I didn’t have a lot of spending money, and though the record store in my hometown was good, I was in the big city. It was a big deal. There’s no “Neat, Neat, Neat” or “New Rose” going on here. Even the band knew it. The record’s title itself is a swipe at fans who didn’t take kindly to its predecessor, The Black Album (another Damned album I’ve never listened to either). The thing is, though, if I’d picked up this record two years later, I probably would’ve been really into it, ’cause that was around the time Nuggets and the Pebbles comps first entered my life.
The aptly titled opener, "Ignite," lights the fuse with rollicking rif-o-rama for close to five minutes, fooling listeners into thinking the record is gonna be that punk rock 'n' roll that got 'em to the band in the first place. It’s a straight-up Damned blaster, but more textured and advanced than the smash it ups that were their early calling card.
Those same listeners who may have cheered, "Yes, the band's back on their game," get totally thrown off when "Generals" (which has more than just a nod to Syd Barrett and possibly some inspiration taken from the Soft Boys as well) comes on. It’s the track where the swirling organ lines—sounding somewhere between a downcast garage band and something you’d hear at a pretty sketchy carnival midway—come to the fore and serve as the main motif for the rest of the album.
This is the Damned listening to the world going around them. They always had the savvy and a trolling sense of humor. Beating up a Beatles song, teaming up with the drummer of Pink Floyd to produce their 2nd album, Music For Pleasure (which happens to be my favorite album by them) and throwing in some lineup changes, the signs were always there that they'd, at the very least, change, if not progress.
There's some mutated Motown à la Dexy's and Madness. Dave gets his menacingly debonair thing going for seven minutes, quoting Anne Rice, on “The Dog.” There’s some proto/post power-pop that wouldn’t sound outta place on the Kinks' Face to Face, and The Captain sings some straight-up pure pop.
Would I pick up a copy of Strawberries now if I saw it in the wild? It's a fun record. I ain't mad at it but probably not. I’ve been slowly paring down my record collection to things I know I return to. This is not a record like that.
Thursday, Feb. 6th, 2025
The DUM DUM BOYS Let There Be Noise • In 1981, the Dum Dum Boys became the first New Zealand punk band to record and release a full-length album in their home country. Though they took their name from a song on Iggy Pop’s 1977 album The Idiot, their sound reaches back a few years earlier, to the Stooges' Raw Power.
It’s like they heard Raw Power for the first time, grabbed a box cutter, and carved out the “ballads” (you know, “Gimme Danger” and “Penetration.”) Then, they soaked some rags in gasoline and meticulously cleaned the grooves of “Shake Appeal”, “Search and Destroy”, “Your Pretty Face…”. Those three they played until the record player’s needle melted into toxic goo. It started a fire. This album is the result of that blaze.
Friday, Feb 7th, 2025
MOBY GRAPE Moby Grape ‘69 • Skip Spence dropped out of the Moby Grape before they recorded their third album ‘69. I am familiar with their first two albums (both of which have songs I like a lot) and figured I’d finally give this one a shot.
If I’d stopped listening to this album after the first two songs, I’d have tossed it straight onto the “meh” pile and called it a day. Opener “Ooh Mama Ooh” leans too hard into Deadhead country-jazz noodling for my taste and “Ain’t That a Shame” is a blooze rocker that thinks it’s way more badass than it actually is.
Luckily, I decided to stay all in and it was, for the most part, worth it. The Grape had dipped their toes into cosmic country nuances on their first two albums but this go ‘round, they dived head first. It’s where the album starts to shine "I Am Not Willing" has a melancholy wake-n-bake feeling that’s made for watching a Pacific ocean sunrise on a dewy summer morning, “Captain Nemo” is very hairy era Byrds and tracks like “If You Can’t Learn From My Mistakes” are as if Papa Nez time traveled to the future to take the Beachwood Sparks back with him to be the First National Band. The band also shows that they still could nail the fuzzy and buzzy west coast psych (ie: flowery adorned but still heavy without being too preposterous) on “Going Nowhere” and “Seeing” too.
Check back next week for part two of me in this Feburary 2025 Music Writer's Exercise.