ILM's Now For Something Completely Different... 70s Album Poll Results! Top 100 Countdown! (Part 2)

TOO HIGH! jk. I like that album but haven't listened to it or thought about it for almost 20 years.

yo hellhouse should I post our cover of "106 beats that" to demonstrate for imago that pink flag's shadow still looms tall + long in civilized regions of the world

jesus was that all the touring they did for it? not sure it ever stood a chance but no wonder it flopped if so

I liked that cover at the time, EIII! I am 15 minutes into Pink Flag right now and it's really good yeah, more than the sum of its parts though which is probably why I didn't get it before - it needs to be judged as an album

yo hellhouse should I post our cover of "106 beats that" to demonstrate for imago that pink flag's shadow still looms tall + long in civilized regions of the world

yeah, but w/ the disclaimer that it was assembled in Audacity w/ lobster-claw finesse by disgusting savages.

kinda a shame he packed it in as a new journalist, his piece in tom wolfe's new journalism anthology was pretty great iirc

Wouldn't be surprised. There's an old MC5 piece up on his site that's really good feature writing.

n/m I forgot who imago was (again)

xp

32. MILES DAVIS A Tribute To Jack Johnson (3421 Points, 25 Votes, 1 #1)
RYM: #15 for 1971 , #227 overall | Acclaimed: #1148 | Trouser Press: #58
http://www.waxpoetics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/milesjack.jpeg
http://open.spotify.com/album/0xr31or2qYglJpiX6pODjY
spotify:album:0xr31or2qYglJpiX6pODjY

In which all the flash of Bitches Brew coalesces into one brilliant illumination. On "Right Off" (i.e., side one) John McLaughlin begins by varying a rock riff I'll bet Miles wrote for him over Michael Henderson's blues bass line and Billy Cobham's impressively rockish pulse and then goes on to cut the leader, who's not exactly laying back himself. "Yesternow" (side two) is mellower, mood music for a vacation on the moon. A great one. A+ -- R. Christgau

One night recently I caught Miles' sextet at Shelley's in Hollywood; the music was just outstanding, far superior to what the same sextet does in the grandstand music halls. IF you haven't heard Miles perform live within the last couple of years, you'd certainly get a far better idea of what he's capable of doing from this Jack Johnson album than from the inferior Live At The Fillmore. Which is not to say that Jack Johnson presents the sextet at its best (in fact, for some reason Columbia doesn't even give credit to their personnel...). The album released as the soundtrack for a documentary film of the same title, seems to me to be almost 50 percent filler material. But oh, Jack Johnson has its moments all right.

The first two thirds of the first side is just a bitch. The number opens with raw, biting rock guitar licks (courtesy of John McLaughlin, "guest artist"), thumping bass, poly-dimensional drumming. after this short but very visceral intro, Miles prowls in like a tiger, his musical muscles rippling, taunting, teasing. Miles fragments his phrasing, blowing in short stuttery bursts, then squawking, then stretching a line. McLaughlin's wah-wahing imitates-alternates with the trumpet while the rhythm section steams restlessly at high intensity. A brief section of MIles' "space sound," with low bass drone and slight trumpet echo, gives way to a lovely, restrained soprano solo, which in turn precedes a short section featuring Jarrett. Then Miles sounds again, and everything would have been just right if the track closed at the end of his solo. But instead, an out of play Sly and the Family imitation comes next, and is quite uninspired compared to what came before it. Then, just before the end of the side, McLaughlin plays his guitar the way he's known for it, elasticizing and layering the notes; he barely gets a start by the fade out.

...Jack Johnson is a promise of things that might come. Gary Barts might turn out to be as great a saxophonist as he sounds like he's going to be. And Miles Davis faithfuls just might get the chance to hear another album from him which is, like some from a few years ago, packed with dynamite from the first groove to the last. -- David Lubin, RS

review
[-] by Thom Jurek

None of Miles Davis' recordings has been more shrouded in mystery than Jack Johnson, yet none has better fulfilled Miles Davis' promise that he could form the "greatest rock band you ever heard." Containing only two tracks, the album was assembled out of no less than four recording sessions between February 18, 1970, and June 4, 1970, and was patched together by producer Teo Macero. Most of the outtake material ended up on Directions, Big Fun, and elsewhere. The first misconception is the lineup: the credits on the recording are incomplete. For the opener, "Right Off," the band is Miles, John McLaughlin, Billy Cobham, Herbie Hancock, Michael Henderson, and Steve Grossman (no piano player!), which reflects the liner notes. This was from the musicians' point of view, in a single take, recorded as McLaughlin began riffing in the studio while waiting for Miles; it was picked up on by Henderson and Cobham, Hancock was ushered in to jump on a Hammond organ (he was passing through the building), and Miles rushed in at 2:19 and proceeded to play one of the longest, funkiest, knottiest, and most complex solos of his career. Seldom has he cut loose like that and played in the high register with such a full sound. In the meantime, the interplay between Cobham, McLaughlin, and Henderson is out of the box, McLaughlin playing long, angular chords centering around E. This was funky, dirty rock & roll jazz. There is this groove that gets nastier and nastier as the track carries on, and never quits, though there are insertions by Macero of two Miles takes on Sly Stone tunes and an ambient textured section before the band comes back with the groove, fires it up again, and carries it out. On "Yesternow," the case is far more complex. There are two lineups, the one mentioned above, and one that begins at about 12:55. The second lineup was Miles, McLaughlin, Jack DeJohnette, Chick Corea, Bennie Maupin, Dave Holland, and Sonny Sharrock. The first 12 minutes of the tune revolve around a single bass riff lifted from James Brown's "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud." The material that eases the first half of the tune into the second is taken from "Shhh/Peaceful," from In a Silent Way, overdubbed with the same trumpet solo that is in the ambient section of "Right Off." It gets more complex as the original lineup is dubbed back in with a section from Miles' tune "Willie Nelson," another part of the ambient section of "Right Off," and an orchestral bit of "The Man Nobody Saw" at 23:52, before the voice of Jack Johnson (by actor Brock Peters) takes the piece out. The highly textured, nearly pastoral ambience at the end of the album is a fitting coda to the chilling, overall high-energy rockist stance of the album. Jack Johnson is the purest electric jazz record ever made because of the feeling of spontaneity and freedom it evokes in the listener, for the stellar and inspiring solos by McLaughlin and Davis that blur all edges between the two musics, and for the tireless perfection of the studio assemblage by Miles and producer Macero. [The album was completely remastered and reissued in January of 2005, following the 2003 release of the Complete Jack Johnson Sessions box set by Legacy.]

Regarding touring, I think in the 70s it was a challenge for many bands that had decent followings in major cities but couldn't even fill tiny bars elsewhere. SST's workhorses Black Flag and others seemed to do a lot of groundwork in establishing touring networks for lesser known bands. I actually saw the Dolls a few years ago and they were great!

Trouser Press: #58 = Pitchfork: #58. My bad.

yeah that makes sense. never quite grasped how much the 80s black flag and r.e.m. model of play fucking everywhere was an anomaly, at least for rock bands that hadn't broken thru yet.

yessss to Jack Johnson. That little sequence that they repeat over and over in the second half of Yesternow is the coolest thing ever.

last one for tonight coming up. Will try start a bit earlier tomorrow (about 1)

31. THE POP GROUP Y (3543 Points, 25 Votes)
RYM: #47 for 1979 , #2332 overall | Acclaimed: #678 | Pitchfork: #35
http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_500/MI0001/765/MI0001765253.jpg?partner=allrovi.com
http://open.spotify.com/album/2qVYkN2vno5YSgUTaokg58
spotify:album:2qVYkN2vno5YSgUTaokg58

These abrasive, militant British punks rage against racism, oppression, hunger and anything else that's a world problem; as usual, there's no solution, only anger. The seminal Bristol band synthesizes Beefheartian structures and tribal dance beats to create a didactic soundtrack that barely lets you breathe. Their two primary albums are alternately brilliant and intolerable, with exhortatory songs like "Feed the Hungry," "Rob a Bank" and "Communicate. -- Trouser Press

Hardly a meeting of minds, even in the brief postpunk anything's-possible moment that allowed it, Y married The Pop Group's free rockjazz with the popdub productions of Dennis Bovell: from the opening studio-tech belch, it's a maelstrom of dub and distortion effects, a tempest of extremes. Recording levels change suddenly, inexplicably, in mid-note; musical unity, and the ordinary sense of place that recording strives to maintain, are both constantly, relentlessly, creatively blown to pieces. Nothing is allowed to settle; the listener least of all. Rage, terror, anguish, all hurtle past and round you: time and space feel violently mutable. Digital technology may have made all the cut-and-paste herein easy, but it's never produced so deliriously, maddeningly protean a piece of music. -- Woebot

For better or worse, we here at Stylus, in all of our autocratic consumer-crit greed, are slaves to timeliness. A record over six months old is often discarded, deemed too old for publication, a relic in the internet age. That's why each week at Stylus, one writer takes a look at an album with the benefit of time. Whether it has been unjustly ignored, unfairly lauded, or misunderstood in some fundamental way, we aim with On Second Thought to provide a fresh look at albums that need it. 

Even if the currently reigning postpunk revival gets so big that we witness This Heat namechecked on Will & Grace, The Birthday Party in Miller Light commercials, and guitar manufacturers coming out with an Andy-Gill-endorsed pedal (“Now, more trebly!”), I seriously doubt it’ll do much for The Pop Group’s music. Not only inaccessible but murky and truly weird, they’re a dark and complicated band, one that is truly radical in every sense of the word: they boasted a warbling 6’7” frontman who disappeared from the gigging circuit for a while because he was off aiding Cambodian refugees, a cut-and-paste sonic ethos that bordered on the absurdly promiscuous (they didn’t just namecheck dub, free jazz, and Beefheart, they emulated them all, usually within the space of a single song), and a take-no-prisoners agit-prop lyrical style (this album’s opening track, after all, sings the praises of a heroine to whom “Western values mean nothing”). Since TPG are usually so up-front about their influences, then, I won’t feel quite as bad for copping a move from Pitchfork (who were, I think, talking about The Fucking Champs) when I call them the Serpentor of short-lived oddball postpunk groups. 

You might be skeptical, but that’s only because you haven’t heard “She Is Beyond Good And Evil,” a junkyard-disco romp that, as the band’s debut single, is the closest they came to an entirely unironic use of their name. Still, the slathered-in-reverb production values here—a series of echoed guitar stabs are the only thing that remain distinct through the dubbed-out, echoes-of-echoes fogginess—make for some pretty uneasy listening; frontman Mark Stewart howls out lines on the order of “I’ll hold you like a gun!” as a chunky, minimal bass ascends, and then it’s all over, drowned in its own wake before we knew quite what to make of it. “Thief Of Fire” is funkier and slower, the sort of thing that seems a clear inspiration to early Meat Beat Manifesto, deranged vocal delivery and all. Again, though, there’s a lurking threat in this slow-burning groove, first in a burbling saxophone shoved to the background of the mix, then in a full-on outburst of scummy guitar and a one-drum nervous fit; though there’s a coruscating bass framework that one can follow through the track, everything keeps tearing itself in several different directions. 

But just as you think you’ve got the band figured out (if the album ended here, I’d pen something about them being a Birthday Party/Go4 hybrid that manages to hold onto the more irritating tendencies of each), another curveball arrives in the form of “Snowgirl,” which suddenly metamorphoses into some ornately depravedAladdin Sane piano work and an absurdly hectic drum breakdown that the rest of the band joins, all of which sounds like the Get Hustle practicing in a room where that last Autechre full-length nobody was too fond of was playing from a portable cassette player. A double-tracked Stewart first croons, then wails, as things go, well, even more epileptic, then a sulking bass cuts everything off. 

“Blood Money” is a truly bizarre mixture of tribal drumming (sometimes mixed at half-speed) and what sounds like Jajoukan pipe music, with some truly bloodcurdling effects-treated chaos from Stewart. Is this what Crass would’ve sounded like if they’d let Nurse With Wound take a crack at remixing them? Well, quite possibly. Like certain Boredoms tracks, its intensity-gone-absurd moments bring to mind an alien civilization weaned on a diet of crystal meth, Rudimentary Peni and Tago Mago. Yet things go again in the direction you’d least expect, with the upbeat “We Are Time,” a dub-and-surf-guitar (this provides the interesting opportunity for two sonic idioms known for reverb to create friction with each other) free-for-all that—despite the bizarre presence of sped-up tapes, what could very well be a melodica, and several drop-outs—doesn’t quite succumb to its own internal inconsistencies until six minutes in, with a rampage-at-the-mixing-desk cataclysm that is as scary as anything on The Faust Tapes. 

Another melancholy piano ballad that features some downright lovely playing, against which Stewart’s sinister whispering is used to great effect, “The Savage Sea” is all too brief; “Words Disobey Me” returns with a strong funk element, which is probably the band’s most effective use of the idiom. The rock-solid drumming certainly helps here; even the mess of guitar sprawl is reined in a bit, until the song briefly demolishes itself and a campy shift takes place that approaches film-noir jazz, a Sharks-and-Jets confrontation with prepared piano flourishes. A rudimentary saxophone that perhaps arrived late to the party kicks off “Don’t Call Me Pain,” which features some of the jerkiest, most insistent rhythms this side of Cabaret Voltaire’s 2 x 45. Stewart recites “This is the age of chance” several times in a row, then embarks on an relatively lucid anti-military treatise. Backed as he is by the band’s funk-gone-haywire rhythms and a woodwind instrument that sounds at home in a Moroccan bazaar, this is probably the band’s most effective use of sonic disorientation to underscore an anti-imperialist message. One can almost imagine this as the uprising of mysterious forces, the soundtrack to an incoherent-as-usual Burroughsian revenge fantasy where the souls rise from desecrated graves, with vengeance on their minds. Unfortunately, the following track, “The Boys From Brazil,” uses most of the same tricks to lesser effect. 

This truly baffling album concludes, appropriately enough, with its most abstract track, “Don’t Sell Your Dreams.” Some oddly tuned jazz guitar and more user-unfriendly cops from non-Western music create a subdued backdrop, which slowly percolates until Stewart’s truly disturbing and violent howls upset this relatively idyllic setting. Drums and bass try to rouse up something, but it never happens. And so a humdrum inertness (ours? That of some distant Other? Is it/us able to move? If so, would motion be deemed necessary?) becomes a final apocalyptic statement. We end deeply unsettled, the band continuing to conjure up a bombed out city block with no idea how far the destruction has spread. Maybe, as we could easily be sitting on the brink of war, this could all be far more relevant than we think.  -- Chris Smith, Stylus

review
by John Dougan

Abrasive, but interesting, the Pop Group's debut is perhaps the most succinct summation of their angry and defiant approach to rock & roll. Although at times resembling the discordant funk of fellow post-punk radicals Gang of Four, the Pop Group leave rhythm behind almost as quickly as they find it, and the result is a clattering din of sound resembling an aural collage. The longish, guitar-driven track "We Are Time" is the strongest cut, establishing a solid groove that won't let go.

That was kind of a holy grail album for me. I had a vinyl copy of For How Much Longer..., but could not find Y to save my life, until it was finally reissued on CD in '96. I don't think I've been able to turn a single friend onto The Pop Group -- too sharp and brittle maybe? Cool to see it here.

So the final 30 tomorrow unless the majority would prefer 20 tomorrow and the final 10 on friday

Direct Link to poll recap & full results

Posts on todays albums or previously placed albums are welcome as well as prediction or hopes for the final 30.

Hoping lots of people have discovered new to them albums.

As I said earlier I will try start about 1pm UK time so we can spread the results out a bit but not finish at midnight.

So ZZ Top is gonna play Cleveland on August 24 at...Tiger Stadium.

― less Shin, more Stubbs (weatheringdaleson), Wednesday, March 27, 2013 12:17 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Tiger Stadium...in Massilon, OH. Thank you, NY Dolls!

haha awesome

Wuuuut? Massillon?! That place barely exists. It's no Akron.

forgot how freakin' awesome the suspiria soundtrack is

Roxy Music at 54 isn't too bad, obviously I would have liked it a lot higher as it was my number one but I'm happy with that.

Really surprised how well Mandrill have done in this list, Mandrill Is is by far their best album and really deserves it's place.

I didn't realise Viva was that much popular than La Dusseldorf, it probably is the better album but there really isn't much in it.

After playing it today my biggest hope is that Devo can somehow sneak into the top ten. Another album I wish I'd put higher on my list.

It's looking like Can and Neu are going to do very well now. Not sure which albums will end up the highest, Future Days is my favourite but it'll probably be Ege Bamyasi or maybe Neu 75.

Wow, style sheet update from 1995 to 2000! Change is jarring.

Three #1 votes for Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star. I've had that and a few others for close to a decade, and none of his stuff grabs me. I like it okay when it's on, but nothing I'm compelled to go back to until someone else raves about him and I check again to see what I'm missing. I had problems with the busy, trebly production on Wizard in the past. Today it sounded better to me, maybe because I've gotten used to all the shitty sounding basement psych recordings of Ice Dragon! So what made this album worthy of high placement while the more widely regarded Something/Anything wasn't nominated?

wizard more record geek choice, which is the heavy vibe of the poll i guess. love wizard but something/anything is the only moment where he puts it together completely for me. his getup here is something else, kinda turning into the skid w/ his not conventionally handsome looks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67PygSlObAU

I like both albums but Something/Anything is a pretty soft pop-rock album, neither hard & heavy nor weird nor funky. If we were to include that, we might as well also include Tapestry. A Wizard, a True Star (which I do like more - really love it in fact) is damn weird and also gets into serious heavy rock territory at times.

I mean, the two albums are pretty drastically different from each other imo.

http://youtu.be/lLeCB7Kn-VE

vs

http://youtu.be/FDcngFIy5nA

or

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoMdEF_t-Co

xxp There are many things you could call Zeppelin, "simple" is not one of them.

OTM + I don't think Zep ever posited the Sex Pistols or punk rock as their 'sworn enemies' (although the Sex Pistols did obviously like to frame things that way.)

search Wearing and Tearing

Or even "Communication Breakdown"!

Ha, I suppose that song is pretty simple (as are some other early tracks). It still seems like an odd thing to say about Led Zeppelin on the whole though. I don't really know why a prog fan wouldn't find something to like in the peak period of IV-Houses of the Holy-Physical Graffiti, honestly, unless you just hate Plant's voice.

Like, I dont even like La Grange at all, but Tres Hombres is so stacked with deep cuts like Master of Sparks and Hot Blue & Righteous that it p much instantly transcends that overrated beer commercial nonsense (it helps that LG is shuffled away in the middle of Side 2) xp

― Drugs A. Money, Wednesday, March 27, 2013 4:23 PM (Yesterday)

Sometimes I forget that La Grange is even on Tres Hombres, that's how front-to-back badass this album is to me. I think the two other cuts you named are actually my favorites from the record.

57. ZZ TOP Tres Hombres (2807 Points, 20 Votes)
54. ROXY MUSIC Roxy Music (2836 Points, 20 Votes, 1 #1)
47. BLACK SABBATH Master of Reality (2993 Points, 19 Votes, 1 #1)
46. WIRE Chairs Missing (3009 Points, 21 Votes)

These get a Too Low! from me.

Have never heard Viva, that's something I should listen to (I love their first album).

it's a brilliant album, you won't be disappointed...

Fuck it, I'm giving up hope for Cyborgs Revisited by Simply Saucer. Always have a hard time gauging how well-known stuff is, but thinking that one got 25+ votes is just dreaming. More people should definitely hear it - reminds me of the ramped-up Velvetsisms of the Modern Lovers first album but riddled through with the insectoid psych of Piper-era Floyd or Chrome at their peak plus a liberal dash of flat-out Stoogely guitar raunch. The rhythm section bangs like a fucking fireball through the sky and half the time it sounds like the guitar is just madly scrabbling to keep a hold of the trail being scorched into the blackness.

Best song is Illegal Bodies which no-one bothered voting for in the tracks poll either. Right up there with Rocket From The Tombs imo.

Other really great records I've given up on seeing:

Twink - Think Pink
Älgarnas Trädgård - Framtiden är ett svävande skepp förankrat i forntiden
Harvester - Hemat

^ he's right you know.

That sounds completely enticing, but a few months late in making a difference by campaigning on the voting thread! However I'm sure there's a pretty large audience lurking who appreciates the recommendation. Not that there can't be any surprises today.

An Amazon search of that album also brought this book up, Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond 1977-1981 by Liz Worth. Any good?

30. DEVO Q: Are We Not Men ? A: We Are Devo (3561 Points, 25 Votes, 1 #1)
RYM: #17 for 1978, #722 overall | Acclaimed: #373 | RS: #447 | Pitchfork: #89
http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_500/MI0001/983/MI0001983604.jpg?partner=allrovi.com
http://open.spotify.com/album/1KkMseKFaUHN3TXrXF3jHT
spotify:album:1KkMseKFaUHN3TXrXF3jHT

http://www.superseventies.com/oaaa/oaaa_devo.jpg

If this isn't Kiss for college kids, then it's Meat Loaf for college kids who are too sophisticated to like Meat Loaf. Aside from music per se, the Kiss connection is in their cartoonishness--Devo's robot moves create distance, a margin of safety, the way Kiss's makeup does. But the Meat Loaf connection is deeper, because this is real midnight-movie stuff--the antihumanist sci-fi silliness, the reveling in decay, the thrill of being in a cult that could attract millions and still seem like a cult, since 200 million others will never even get curious. (It's no surprise to be told that a lot of their ideas come from Eraserhead, but who wants to go see Eraserhead to make sure?) What makes this group worthy of attention at all--and now we're back with Kiss, though at a more complex level--is the catchy, comical, herky-jerky rock and roll they've devised out of the same old basic materials. In small doses it's as good as novelty music ever gets, and there isn't a really bad cut on this album. But it leads nowhere. B+ -- R. Christgau

Produced with energetic precision by Brian Eno, Devo's first album is the most concentrated presentation of the band's nebulous theories. "Jocko Homo," "Mongoloid" and "Shrivel Up" employ a cold, assembly-line jerkiness to drive home their defeatist attitudes and post-modern morality. The same nervous energy fuels more emotional messages like "Uncontrollable Urge," "Gut Feeling," "Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin')," the science-fiction paranoia of "Space Junk" and a hilariously high-strung (and de-sexed) version of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," with a mechanical-sounding drum beat that would frizz Charlie Watts' hair. -- Trouser Press

What's most impressive about Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! is its authority: Devo presents their dissociated, chillingly cerebral music as a definitive restatement of rock & roll's aims and boundaries in the Seventies. The band's cover version of "Satisfaction," for instance, with its melody line almost completely erased and the lyrics delivered in a yelping, droogy chant to mechanical rhythms, at first comes across as an intentional travesty, a typical New Wave rejection of the old-fart generation. But what Devo is really doing is reshaping the old message into their own terminology -- claiming one of the greatest anthems of the Sixties, with all its wealth of emotional associations, for their own time. It's a startling gesture, yet a surprisingly convincing one.

The same could be said for the whole album. The primitive guitar work and pulsing beat suggest a gamut of early Sixties borrowings, but the group is also reminiscent (the vocals especially) of some of the artier New Wave bands such as Wire or the B-52s. Yet all of these influences are flattened into an arid, deliberately fragmented science-fiction landscape. There's not an ounce of feeling anywhere, and the only commitment is to the distancing aesthetic of the put-on.

I suspect, though, that in adopting this style, Devo would argue that they're simply being good journalists -- that the futuristic deadpan comedy of their stance reflects the current pop-culture reality. "Too Much Paranoias," for example, starts out as a mocking, jarring little ode to dread that's genuinely frightening, then turns into an overt joke in which the chief villain is apparently a McDonald's hamburger ("Hold the pickles hold the lettuce," in a spasmodic shriek), but the joke is equally scary. And the group's attitude remains poker-faced throughout. In the lobotomized anthems that end side one, "Mongoloid" (a sort of bastard cousin to the Ramones' "Pinhead," with a great, stuttering guitar line) and "Jocko Homo," it's impossible to tell whether these guys are satirizing robotlike regimentation or glorifying it. The answer seems to be that there isn't any difference.

Brian Eno's production is the perfect complement to Devo's music. Eno thickens the band's stop-and-go rhythms with crisp, sharp layers of percussive sound, full of jagged edges and eerie effects that whip in and out of phase at dizzying speeds. On every cut, Devo seems to know exactly what they want and how to achieve it almost effortlessly. Such apparently random strategies as "What Goes On"-style organ in "Mongoloid" or the near-Byrds-like guitar intro to "Gut Feeling" coalesce into a barbed, dislocated texture that draws you in even while it sets your nerves on edge.

Though the group's abstract-expressionistic patterns of sound are closely related to Eno's own brand of experimentation (not to mention the recent work of David Bowie, who one once slated to produce this LP) and to a host of other art rockers, Devo lacks most of Eno's warmth and much of Bowie's flair for mechanized melodrama. For all its idiosyncrasies, the music here is utterly impersonal. This Ohio band either treats humanity as just another junky, mass-cult artifact to be summarily disposed of, or else ignores it completely. Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! is a brittle, small masterpiece of Seventies pop irony, but its shriveling, ice-cold absurdism might not define the Seventies as much as jump the gun on the Eighties. -- Tom Carson, RS

In 1970s pop music, synthesizers were heard largely on disco records and in the elaborate studio productions of progressive rock acts like Yes. Certainly, they were not a staple of punk performances, although Kraftwerk made expert use of the instruments as they explored punkish themes of alienation in their proto-techno music.

Alienation was the stock in trade of Devo, the Ohio quintet whose explosive, Brian Eno-produced 1978 debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, embellished punk's big guitar sound with harsh, metallic synthesizers. To be certain, they made relatively sparing use of them on Q: Are We Not Men?, especially compared to the oceans of synths that typified subsequent efforts like 1980's Freedom Of Choice.

But Devo's four studio releases between 1978 and 1981 were linked thematically. The group, former art students and deft satirists, cultivated a despairing if vague philosophy -- thanks to dubious modern innovations like space exploration and fast food, civilization was not evolving but rather "de-volving" (hence the name). Happily, Devo never let sociological theory get in the way of great music, and little of this ideology is spelled out explicitly in Q: Are We Not Men?, a marvelous, rocking set of funny, quirky songs about topics such as mongoloids and paranoia.

Interestingly, the album's most distinctive and famous song is a cover of "Satisfaction." But while the Stones' version is swaggering and sexy, when Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh sings, the song becomes an anxious, frenetic cri de coeur about feeling overwhelmed in the face of an oppressive consumer culture. -- Kenneth Burns, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die

review
[-] by Steve Huey

Produced by Brian Eno, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! was a seminal touchstone in the development of American new wave. It was one of the first pop albums to use synthesizers as an important textural element, and although they mostly play a supporting role in this guitar-driven set, the innovation began to lay the groundwork for the synth-pop explosion that would follow very shortly. Q: Are We Not Men also revived the absurdist social satire of the Mothers of Invention, claiming punk rock's outsider alienation as a home for freaks and geeks. While Devo's appeal was certainly broader, their sound was tailored well enough to that sensibility that it still resonates with a rabid cult following. It isn't just the dadaist pseudo-intellectual theories, or the critique of the American mindset as unthinkingly, submissively conformist. It was the way their music reflected that view, crafted to be as mechanical and robotic as their targets. Yet Devo hardly sounded like a machine that ran smoothly. There was an almost unbearable tension in the speed of their jerky, jumpy rhythms, outstripping Talking Heads, XTC, and other similarly nervy new wavers. And thanks to all the dissonant, angular melodies, odd-numbered time signatures, and yelping, sing-song vocals, the tension never finds release, which is key to the album's impact. It also doesn't hurt that this is arguably Devo's strongest set of material, though several brilliant peaks can overshadow the remainder. Of those peaks, the most definitive are the de-evolution manifesto "Jocko Homo" (one of the extremely few rock anthems written in 7/8 time) and a wicked deconstruction of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," which reworks the original's alienation into a spastic freak-out that's nearly unrecognizable. But Q: Are We Not Men? also had a conceptual unity that bolstered the consistent songwriting, making it an essential document of one of new wave's most influential bands.

I remember getting one of those educational scholastic mags for kids in third grade, and it had a feature on Devo! Hilarious, considering some of their twisted lyrics.

Thought that would get more comments.

someone go search Kitchen Person is ok ;)

Have never heard Viva, that's something I should listen to (I love their first album).

1st album's better

No it isn't

29. FUNKADELIC Free Your Mind...And Your Ass Will Follow (3596 Points, 26 Votes, 1 #1)
RYM: #99 for 1970, #3024 overall
http://acerecords.co.uk/images/FunkadelicFreeYourMi_1.jpg
http://open.spotify.com/album/1DqPqmHdLL1XcdJToOKMqT
spotify:album:1DqPqmHdLL1XcdJToOKMqT

This is as confusing and promising and ultimately ambiguous as the catchy (and rhythmic) title slogan. Is that ass as in "shake your ass" or ass as in "save your ass"? And does one escape/transcend the dollar by renouncing the material world or by accepting one's lot? Similarly, are the scratchy organ timbres and disorienting separations fuckups or deliberate alienation effects? Is this music to stand to or music to get wasted by? In short, is this band (this black band, I should add, since it's black people who are most victimized by antimaterialist rhetoric) promulgating escapist idealism or psychic liberation? Or do all these antinomies merely precede some aesthetic synthesis? One thing is certain--the only place that synthesis might occur here is on "Funky Dollar Bill." B- -- R. Christgau

By 1970′s Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow, Funkadelic sounded as if they had absorbed some of MC5′s aggression and The Stooges’ decadent nihilism. They continued their critiques of capitalism and booty-liberation theology, but instead of the blues,Free Your Mind’s title track showcased lysergic- drenched noise, with Bernie Worrell’s slavering, distorted three- note organ riff similar to Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray.” Funkadelic were decidedly into drugs, and the unhinged, sprawling length of “Free Your Mind” was a dead giveaway. Clinton was bemused that “They think that’s the best…I’m so embarrassed. We did that entire record in one day, mixed it and walked outta here.” Despite, or maybe because of that, it worked. -- Fastnbulbous

Funkadelic’s second album “Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow” overwhelms the senses from beginning to end even though its total running time barely exceeds 30 minutes. But within that relatively small time in space, Funkadelic ran totally funk-amok in the studio creating something larger and far denser than just a half an hour’s worth of music. It was a jarring, messy and greasy aural freefall, exacerbated by leader George Clinton’s remixing of the album into a dizzying aural pendulum which roared out in the severest of stereo separation. On top of this, he heaped generous amounts of echo, reverb, tape speed manipulations and haphazard stereo panning that caused everything to rocket back and forth from speaker to speaker like a weathervane turning only to the freakiest of angles in high winds. And it always erupts out of nowhere: sometimes on just the guitar, the organ or even an entire channel’s signal and usually to engage itself in infinity symbol/figure eight patterning from speaker to speaker, shaking up your equilibrium like one of those souvenir wintertime Alpine village snowballs constantly handled during boring family visits. Only within the context of “Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow” does that snowball becomes your mind, the snow all the countless fragments of music that swirl around the confines of your head and that Alpine village reveals itself as a depressed, ugly ghetto scene where no snow ever falls, where joys or hopes are rarely sighted and often blighted...Except through that little portal of transformation known as music.

Interstellar oscillations and electronic fissures crack open the album exactly like they did on The Mothers of Invention’s “We’re Only In It For The Money” freeing up the vista for the slow-forming freeform sprawl of a title track, “Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow.” Guitarist Eddie Hazel slowly and distortedly burns throughout with a fuse crackling with energy until it reaches the riff of the main theme and springboards into confounding, free form improvisation. By the time the stoned groove which is the song actually ‘starts,’ you don’t really notice AND it takes over 10 minutes to finish but could go on forever perfectly. Several vocalists continually call and respond the title while their little cosmic kid brother chimes innocently back: “The kingdom of heaven is within.” LSD soul screaming commences, with a hair-raising “WooooOOOOOOOOwww!” cutting through everything as though releasing every pent up, fucked up feeling, ever. Hazel and Tawl Ross exchange scratchy and/or wah-wahed counterpoints as the track begins to rise and rise and rise. Balancing on minor chord darkness and major chord triumphs somewhere between “Sister Ray” and 1969-era Michael Ratledge, Bernie Worrell’s distorted and overdriven keyboard melody line swells as the band approach the ripped open jugular of funk honey currently oozing and koozing outward. The track opens door after door of discovery while the vocalists struggle to free themselves from their mental constraints, each confusing hurdle becoming a near-life or death struggle. The music picks up in pace and is soon shooting between left and right speakers. Keenly aware of its surroundings, Hazel once more bursts through with a furiously wah-wahed solo only to see the track fade out prematurely. But an immediate slight return re-nudges its way back out of silence, and Hazel is STILL in furious mid-flight. It fades away for a final time, almost in warning that this freakstorm is but the beginning...

“Friday Night, August 14th” is a title full of mystery (and not a little dread) although EXACTLY what happened that night in 1970 is never revealed. And whether it was a particularly strong acid trip or whatever the referred-to income tax return proceedings caused or were spent on is besides the point because they’re loose as hell and shaking off all their layers of bummers at once. The beginning sees a “Voodoo Child” (not “Chile”) vamp which soon spins into a lurching trip of Funkadelic’s own creation as the two guitars of Tawl Ross and Eddie Hazel entwine into a swirling mass of shifting slabs of electrified, pulsating SOUL dancing around all the crazy-assed, hammering echo placed upon the drumming, and plenty of swaying gospel vocals accenting. “Friday Night” is a shit-storming track deluxe and the guitar is soon wah-wah-ing itself to death into an echo-embossed mini-drum solo, reverbed uncontrollably and rebounding all over the place. Hazel cuts back with another razing solo until the track fades and somehow, somewhere...ends.

Beginning side two, “Funky Dollar Bill” continues off the same mode as the previous track: so much so it could’ve been subtitled “Saturday Morning, August 15th” if the lyrics weren’t so intent on decrying that particular root of all evil. In contrast to Ross’s fractious rhythm guitar racket, Worrell neatly inserts an bouncy, cascading lounge piano solo which throws itself up to a plateau that hovers above Hazel’s gnarled wah-wah and that nasty, motherfucking rhythm guitar. “I Wanna Know If It’s Good To You Baby” is an undulating and dripping koozedelic bump and grind, split down the middle between the vocal segment and it’s thunderous instrumental fallout. It was released cut in half just between these two segments as a single and the album version reflects the same fractured edit as though the record’s just skipped ahead 10 seconds into a freewheeling, hard and slammed jam of cascading and pummeling guitar from Hazel, distorted organ and forcefully whacked drums. By the end, Worrell’s near Manzarek-improvisations-during-the-quiet-bits-of-“When The Music’s Over” hang from the top of the track’s echo chamber like so many cavernous stalactites as Tiki Fulwood’s loud and sparse drum pattern glances forward to the sort of masterful, hypnotic bashing on Can’s 1971’s epic “Halleluwah.” Gently the track lands back down to earth as cowbells and percussion slowly diminish into silence. “Some More” is the most orthodox moment on the album when a bluesy, Jimmy Smith-type Hammond organ enters. But as soon as that low and big as a foghorn voice gets strained through the grills of a Leslie speaker with extra phlange, it sounds more like some all-pervasive, blue fog seeping out into studio as it proclaims a “new kind of pain” with a “headache in my heart/got a heartache in my head.” Then the proto-dub drum treatments return, abusively echoing them into 10 feet high towers of staggering aural trails. Curlicues of Worrell’s Hammond organ soloing walks the song home to its final snare hit at the end of the verse halts everything but the echo, which finally decays into silence some time after.

Clinton’s spoken word pronouncements of “Eulogy And Light” end the album with a bizarre and twisted pledge of allegiance from a ghetto pimp to “the great god, Big Buck” as “The Lord’s Prayer,” Psalm 23 and “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee” are referenced all at once in a twisted incantation. Completing the inversion, in the background runs a backward masking of the 1969 Funkadelic B-side, “Open Our Eyes.” Originally a reverent plea for strength and goodness in the truest sense of gospel fashion, played backwards it takes on a far more disquieting and sinister quality. One thing that doesn’t mutate is Hazel’s guitar solo: here it is now streaking backwardly crying tears of blood in the sky and sounding even more poignant than it did the right-way-‘round. Gradually things speed up and out of control during the ending segment as the voice of the once mighty narrating bad ass gets his comeuppance right between the eyes and is reduced to a high-pitched/high-speed squeaking freak out...ending an album at once angry, seductive, funny and frightening at the same time, with a vibe to burn forever.  -- The Seth Man, Head Heritage

review
[-] by Ned Raggett

It's one of the best titles in modern musical history, for song and for album, and as a call to arms mentally and physically the promise of funk was never so perfectly stated. If it were just a title then there'd be little more to say, but happily, Free Your Mind lives up to it throughout as another example of Funkadelic getting busy and taking everyone with it. The title track itself kicks things off with rumbling industrial noises and space alien sound effects, before a call-and-response chant between deep and chirpy voices brings the concept to full life. As the response voices say, "The kingdom of heaven is within!" The low and dirty groove rumbles along for ten minutes of dark fun, with Bernie Worrell turning in a great keyboard solo toward the end -- listening to it, one gets the feeling that if Can were this naturally funky, they'd end up sounding like this. From there the band makes its way through a total of six songs, ranging from the good to astoundingly great. "Funky Dollar Bill" is the other standout track from the proceedings, with a great, throw-it-down chorus and rhythm and a sharp, cutting lyric that's as good to think about as it is to sing out loud. The closing "Eulogy and Light," meanwhile, predates Prince with its backward masking and somewhat altered version of the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23. At other points, even if the song is a little more straightforward, there's something worthwhile about it, like the random stereo panning and Eddie Hazel's insane guitar soloing on "I Wanna Know If It's Good for You," with more zoned and stoned keyboard work from Worrell to top things off. The amount of drugs going down for these sessions in particular must have been notable, but the end results make it worthy.

Track Listing:

Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow
{G Clinton, Eddie Hazel, Ray Davis} 10:00 lyrics
Friday Night, August 14th
{G Clinton, Billy Nelson, E Hazel} 5:20 lyrics
Funky Dollar Bill
{G Clinton, E Hazel, R Davis} 3:14 lyrics
I Wanna Know If It's Good to You
{G Clinton, B Nelson, E Hazel, Clarence Haskins} 5:54 lyrics
Some More
{G Clinton, Ernie Harris} 2:55 lyrics
Eulogy and Light
{E Harris} 3:29 lyrics

Personnel:

Lead Guitar: Eddie Hazel
Rhythm Guitar: Tawl Ross
Keyboards: Bernie Worrell
Drums: Tiki Fulwood
Bass: Billy Nelson
Vocals: Parliament (George Clinton, Ray Davis, Fuzzy Haskins, Grady Thomas,
Calvin Simon)

Song-Specific Personnel:

"Free Your Mind"
Lead Vocals: George Clinton, Ray Davis

"Friday Night"
Lead Vocals: Billy Nelson?

"Funky Dollar Bill"
Lead Vocals: Tawl Ross
Piano: Bernie Worrell

"I Wanna Know..."
Vocals: Billy Nelson, Eddie Hazel
Guitar: Eddie Hazel
Organ: Bernie Worrell

"Some More"
Vocals: Eddie Hazel?

"Eulogy & Light"
Vocals: George Clinton

Rating: GZ *** RC **** MM ***1/2 MV: *****

Comment:

RC: I like this album the more I hear it, but it's so short. A third of it is taken up by the annoyingly non-musical title track. The feedback gets to me here, despite some great stuff from Eddie. The rest of the album is very good, with "I Wanna Know..." and "Funky Dollar Bill" being classics. "Eulogy And Light", a rap with all the music backmasked, is one of Funkadelic's most interesting experiments. It's an urban remake of the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm. The whole album was recorded in a single day, with George saying the idea behind it was 'let's see if we can cut a whole album while we're all tripping on acid.' This album is one of the most popular amongst the new generation of Funkadelic fans, especially those who are coming into it from a hard rock/alternative bent.

"Free Your Mind..." actually has a lot of interesting things going on in it under the feedback, but I'm glad that Funkadelic's feedback experiments more-or-less ended here. "Friday Night..." is another strange track featuring more singing and some interesting echo effects. "Funky Dollar Bill" is one of the true standouts, featuring superb work from Hazel and Billy Bass. Great lyrics, too, about what we do for money. Features some remarkable freakout organ from Bernie. "I Wanna Know..." is one of Funkadelic's all-time greatest songs, featuring a mix of some of their oldest lyrics and some wicked new ones, 'your love tastes sweeter than the honey that replaced the rain since I met you.' Also has one of the greatest guitar riffs in the history of mankind. "Some More" actually features some lyrics from an old Clinton production called "Headache In My Heart", and would almost be Motown-ish if not for the production values. "Eulogy & Light" is the strange ending to the experience, with a rap over a 1969 Funkadelic tune, "Open Our Eyes", played backwards (special props to MW for that info). The result is a frightening song, especially matched with the menacing vocal. Heady acid music indeed. The words are sometimes used in concert as an intro to "Maggot Brain."

MM: Free Your Mind is entertaining. The sound quality is really bothersome, however. Also, they should have rocked on the title track, starting around 2:00. Instead, it fades into a bunch of noise (which may be the point).

MV: Free Your Mind merits more than the given three stars. In fact, it merits five stars. An excellent, organic amalgam of funk rock, LSD, feedback and primitive studio manipulation, every cut is strong and the LP certainly hangs together conceptually. A masterpiece which is in fact the group's coherent early LP, conceptually and musically.

Wow, wasn't expecting that - it's a good album but I had no idea people liked it more than, say, Cosmic Slop or the s/t first album.

Title track is a colossus tho

Title track is a colossus tho

True, 'I Wanna Know If It's Good to You' is a classic as well.

This is a lot of Funkadelic fans favourite album actually.

That's the first Funkadelic album I bought, and probably the one I've listened to most