[1972] Aphrodite's Child, "666 (The Apocalypse of John, 13/18)"

What?: The third and final album from Aphrodite's Child, a three piece 60's prog band with Vangelis on keyboards.

Why?: A few years back Classic Rock magazine came with a prog suppliment which listed 50 or so must-have prog albums. I went to YouTube (this was before Spotify) and listened to most of them, and ended up buying this, as well as The Pretty Things, KANSAS and Yes albums (but more on those much later).

Tell me more!:
Remembering back to my first listen of this, I had decided that "Four Horsemen" (the "hit" of the album) really was the only worthwhile track in the two-disc set.

During my recent re-listens I've grown to love this album... or at least, the first disc. It brings together so much of what I love: varied musical styles, instrumental proficiency, that beautiful early 70s "isn't stereo multitrack recording just amazing?!" production and a continuous doom-worthy satanic-end-of-the-world theme.

Much of the album could be described as pretentious, and certainly the spoken word songs ("Loud, Loud, Loud", "The Seventh Seal", "Seven Bowls") are a bit much by themselves, but they're short, and work very well making a coherent whole out of what is a set of very different songs.

The music is... difficult to describe. It's easy to just describe it as prog, but only in that it is so varied. Many of the songs, by themselves, aren't that strange, although others surprise with their oddness. "The Beast" could be a Goodies song, and it's followed by "Ofis", surely something left off a "Monty Python" disc? "Tribulation" wouldn't sound too strange at the end of a Zorn jam, "The Battle Of The Locusts" and "Do It" are pure 70s four piece Hendrix jams, "The Lamb" is exactly the sort of music you'd expect to come out of hippies visiting India in the late 60s, "Aegian Sea" sounds like a "War Of The Worlds" outtake, "Seven Bowls" is waiting to be used in a satanic horror movie.

The two big vocal tracks, "Babylon" and "The Four Horsemen", with Demis Roussos singing, are heaps of fun, and lure the listening into a false sense of security... with much of the rest of the album being the slow descending into hell and the beast rises... Although even the monotonous repetitiveness of "The Four Horsemen" hints at what is to come.

The best contemporary I could compare the album to would be Eyvind Kang, if he'd been born in the 50s.

It's easy to blame this album on drugs, although when many people talk about "trippy" albums I don't imagine this. I imagine terrible repetitive doof. However, of any album I've heard of that drug-music era, this one I believe. Particularly taking the second disc into account.

I love the first disc. It flows perfectly well, it's tells a great story of the coming apocalypse, the rising of the beast.

The second disc however wanders too much. The jams, while excellent, go on too long, the ideas repeat too much. What makes the first disc so great is the shorter jams, connected with the spoken word pieces. It's clear though that the attention span of the stoned listener is expected to be starting to get obsessive by the second disc. If they'd managed to stumble over to the record player to even put the second disc on, I expect they'd have stared at their speakers, open mouthed, while they watched the music swim around them...

To be completely fair it's mostly the almost 20 minute long "All the Seats were Occupied" that I hate (which goes as far as sampling large pieces from the first disc), and I'm really not much of a fan of "Infinity", the much spoken of orgasmic vocal performance of Irene Papas that saw the album almost banned.

I think I might make a version of this album removing those two songs and have another listen, to give the second disc a better go.

I highly recommend this, for hundreds of reasons. It's mental, it's fantastic, it's pretentiousness done right, with a humorous twinkle in its eye., and a dash of chemicals in its veins.

7/10

[1984] Van Halen, "1984"

What?: Van Halen's sixth album, the last with David Lee Roth on vocals.

Why?: I believe I saw this album is a list of "must haves", probably in Classic Rock magazine. I saw it for cheap on Amazon and decided to take a punt. I liked "Jump" and knew Eddie Van Halen was a great guitarist.

Tell me more!:
I listened to this once when I bought it and hated it.

On this relisten I was all ready to yell about how much I still hated it. And after the first listen I did still hate it.

Numerous listens later I've at least begun to appreciate Eddie Van Halen's bizarrely interesting riffing. The guitar is all-over-the-place on "Top Jimmy", and I love that, but the song style, like most of the guitar driven tracks on the album, is mostly that 80's metal-fast-strummy-country that was so popular at the time. I friggin' hate it.

The album is at its best when they let the keyboards shine, on the singles "Jump" and "I'll Wait", but then you don't get to hear as much Eddie.

I missed out on this big-hair-MTV era of music, gaining my love for music from the good GnR songs and Nirvana, and my love of metal grew from Metallica and Pantera. By the time I was buying music magazines they'd dropped the double-page dude-with-his-shirt-off spread. Listening to "1984" I don't think I really missed anything.

2/10

[1999] Blur, "13"

What?: The sixth, and second to last, Blur album.

Why?: Honestly, I'm not the Blur fan in the family, my wife is. Not that I'm shifting any blame, just that I probably wouldn't have bought it.

Tell me more!:
I knew "Coffee and TV" because of that cute video with the carton of milk. Otherwise...

"Tender" is nice and all, but about five minutes too long. It flowed nicely though from listening to an album of Ween country songs though. I'm sure it is heaps of fun live though, lots of opportunity for crowd singing.

I love "Bugman", all over saturated heavy distortion and wig-out jam. Followed by the before-mentioned "Coffee & TV" which is about as "the Blur in my head" as this album gets.

The rest of the album, and I tread carefully when I say this, sounds like prettied up demos. Much evidence can be found in the song titles, which may as well be "Song 3" plus.

I love experimentation. I have many albums that I'd consider "favourites" that are little more than a few "songs" and random in-studio jams. I actually like it when a band doesn't write verse chorus songs.

So I'm not necessarily saying 13 is bad for being experimental. I am saying though that it is mostly an album of jams, from a band that isn't the most amazing instrumentally, and certainly not vocally...

I actually enjoy this album most when it gets really noisy, like the end of "1992", or the excellent electronic "Battle" (which could be an UNKLE song), or the crazy riff at the end of "Trailerpark".

I think they lost an opportunity not ending the album after "No Distance To Run". After so much riffage, vocal snippets and almost-songs, "No Distance To Run" is a beautiful calm, a come-down. Unfortunately they plugged "Opitgan 1" on the end. What even is that?

I sound quite negative, but I actually enjoy listening to this album. It's a pile of fun. I can hear Gorillaz coming (although not as much as I do from their last album "Think Tank"), I love the fight between punk and electronic. I don't really enjoy Damon's attempts at harmonising, but it does work in the context of this crazy piece of music.

I kept being reminded of David Bowie's "Heroes"... and I suppose both albums are similarly structured, although there are a long more "songs" on "Heroes".

5/10

(I fear in my scoring, in my attempts to avoid the usual music-review average of 6 to 8 out of 10, all I've done is move to 5 to 6 out of 10. That is as it is. Over the years, I may change my rating. I may drop them. I may, I may not.)

[1996] Ween, "12 Golden Country Greats"

What?: Ween's 5th album, sitting between two of my favourites (94's Chocolate and Cheese and 97's The Mollusk)

Why?: Because Ween. Because I fell in love with this crazy crazy band and bought all the things.

Tell me more!:
This album cops a lot of flack from the hard-core fans. It's Ween sticking to one style, when half the fun of Ween is their varied styles. It's Ween playing with a real band instead of drum machines and tape-manipulation, when arguably half the fun is Ween pulling music out of the awful.

Personally, I love Ween with a band, and with good production... but I'm not a huge fan of country music. This album has Ween playing with various Nashville musicians I'm not going to pretend to have heard of, who have worked with the likes of Elvis, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, and who have appeared on pretty much everything country ever. They sound fantastic.

Regardless, it's still one of my least favourite of the less-brown-sounding Ween albums. I like "Power Blue" (even though my copy is cruelly cut), "I'm Holding You", "Japanese Cowboy" (aka. Chariots Of Fire) and I'm rather ashamed of loving "Mister Richard Smoker" (is it hugely homophobic?), but the rest doesn't blow me away. But even the worst of Ween is great.

"Piss Up A Rope" and "Help Me Scrape the Mucus off My Brain" seem to be big live favourites, and they're fun, but they're just too... serious... It's not that I demand Ween be amusing and crazy, but... bah.

On relistening to this I had expected "I'm Waving My Dick In The Wind" to be on it, but it's on the album after, "The Mollusk". It probably isn't really fair to watch a single Ween album. A single Ween album is simply another pile of awesome added to their back catalogue...

Meanwhile, I highly recommend you read this excellent interview with the album's producer, Ben Vaughn from 2011, celebrating the 15th anniversary of the album's release where he describes the music as "blue" and the difficulties getting classic country artists to work on the album due to Ween's reputation. Or Hank Shteamer's 33 1/3 on "Chocolate And Cheese" which is full of brilliant, and the best of the 33 1/3 series I've read.

5/10