Katy Perry’s Prism hasn’t exactly lived up to the performance of its predecessor, Teenage Dream, but that isn’t really a fair comparison given the historic chart results of the latter.
‘Roar’ and ‘Dark Horse’ have certainly been juggernauts, but does anybody think ‘Birthday’ is destined for greatness?
And ‘Walking On Air,’ another single and today’s random SOTD, fell pretty flat.
It’s hard to pick a favorite among Simon & Garfunkel’s five albums — each has is own unique charm. But I could make a strong case for 1968’s Bookends, the duo’s fourth record.
Bookends is half a concept record, with Side One tracing a life from birth to death. Side Two is made up of odds and ends left over from the Graduate soundtrack, including ‘Mrs. Robinson’ and ‘Hazy Shade of Winter.’
I’m envisioning a future project — a list of bands that produced one excellent album but nothing else that crossed my radar.
This is different from a one-hit wonder because the whole album, not just a single song, has to be great. And it can’t be a group that has a few pretty good albums and one amazing one. This one album has to be the only work of theirs you own.
If there’s one album in my music collection of which I could never tire, its R.E.M.’s 1985 classic Fables of the Reconstruction. I think that’s in part because I have no idea what most of its songs are about — or even what Michael Stipe is singing in half of them.
Reading over the lyrics of ‘Kohoutek,’ I realized that despite hearing and loving it hundreds of times I had never really paid any attention to its words. Because they don’t matter… not really. What matters is the sound and the feel.
It’s been ten years since David Byrne put out what I would consider a real David Byrne album. That was 2004’s Grown Backwards, which went off on a few tangents but was mostly the sort of tight, quirky, literate world pop album he’d released four other times since 1989.
Those five albums — the kind of David Byrne records I adore — are (chronologically) Rei Momo, Uh-Oh, David Byrne, Feeling and the aforementioned Grown Backwards.
Meet Me In Montauk 