what was the last 'classic album' you got and were knocked out by?

xp Yeah, “Takes Off”... it’s my favorite, next to “Volunteers.”

jefferson airplane are a ridiculously underrated live band as far as i'm concerned.

Jack fucking Casady

I think they got a lot better when they started improvising which seems to be some time in early 67 from what I can remember from the loves You box set notes. & that seems to be the big thing with the sound on Baxters, not really hearing it on Pillow. THough Garcia is music director so would have thought he'd bring it with him

Grace Slick's previous band the Great Society were pretty great with improvising too. I love Darby Slick her Brother-in Law on their material, a deeply undersung, under-recorded raga influenced guitarist who took off for India to study the music further when grace decamped to JA.

& the comparison of early fairport Convention to them is nothing new. I think FA were referred to as the English JA quite a bit. Wish there was more live material around by them from their early years when the 2 female singers were onboard . Would like to hear how far Richard Thompson stretched out live, you get to hear some of it on the Bouton Rouge appearance from French TV when Judy Dyble was in the band, but I remember reading about him improvising a lot more.
They were doing a lot of US singer/songwriter material before Ashley Hutchings discovered the Cecil Sharpe archives and they became the more traditional orientated band they've remained ever since.

Coincidentally I've been listening to Jefferson Airplane quite a bit lately, I had a Best Of for years but only really knew Surrealistic Pillow outside that. Takes Off is really good, yeah. Baxters is pretty good too.

I also like their cover of High Flyin' Bird a lot, I downloaded what I thought was the original by Billy Edd Wheeler but it looks like he actually recorded that after the JA version (he wrote the song but wiki says Judy Henske did the first recording of it in 1963)

Judy Henske was a pretty strident folk singer who went onto recording Farewell Alderbaraan with then husband Jerry Yester in 1969.
I think that's a must hear lp, glad it finally got an official cd version a couple of years ago

Jefferson Airplane is a major blind spot of mine, as I think I've mentioned at length before on ILM.

Amon Duul II tap into some of the same feeling though the sound is a bit more avant and teutonic.
Their first 5 or 6 lps are well worth checking out too.

Yes, I prefer Amon Duul II and Fairport to JA.

a couple things that strike me about JA:

* it wasn't just the core band, they had some really talented people in their periphery - there's this rolling band going out playing JA songs now and I believe both Darby Slick and Peter Kaukonen are involved, and I feel like, man, they're both great and should be recognized for more than just hanging out with the Airplane

* there are basically a ton of bands who copied the Jefferson Airplane male/female vocal/electric folk model, most of whom are now forgotten - you know, bands like HP Lovecraft. definitely a really influential band back in the day

* when it comes to them as a live outfit, they might pale next to people from europe, but, i will be controversial here - i think as a live band they were the best san francisco psychedelia had to offer. except for the dead, that scene is a little bit out of vogue right now because rolling stone pushes it so hard, but i gotta say, in '69 i truly believe that the airplane were a better live band than the dead (see: "sweeping up the spotlight")

Link Wray's S/T 1971, mentioned up thread and covered extensively in Oxford American. Like Exile on Main St, and unlike a lot of other early 70s soul-rock, it brings the riffs, not just the depleted gaze and world-weary hooks.

Kleenex/LILIPUT, First Songs

some shit talk about this album itt but sweetheart of the rodeo by the byrds has been my album for about the last 6 months. play it about once a week.

Whoever shit talks my sweetheart has a mouth that smells like shit
- psalms 82

The Wipers, especially Youth Of America. no idea how I managed to avoid them until now, but I'm head over heels in love.

yesss that's the best one

i think that overall YOA is the best, but once you're ready to explore them so more there are some reaaaaally good songs on their surrounding releases. i just mention it because i also missed out on the wipers for a really long time, and even when i finally got into YOA, i kept missing out on other great stuff.

in particular, the first three tracks from Over the Edge are just UNSTOPPABLE - Over the Edge, Doom Town, So Young. the rest of the album flags a bit imo (which is why YOA is still the consensus best wipers album as a whole)

the title track of Over the Edge has one of the top 5 wordless choruses in guitar music of all time (i just made that list up and don't know what else is on it except for MBV's What You Want). i guess this advice goes for most wipers songs but it sounds particularly good when played at maximum volume

yeah that's some starting run. i never really listened to the wipers until i moved to vancouver, and then in the circles I'm around tire extremely popular and i feel like I've heard the title track to over the edge a hundred times since moving here and it's still awesome

can this be and pushing the extreme are so fucking great

right now the answer to this is Van Morrison's "Poetic Champions Compose" - much more loose and spacey than I expected

Youth of America has always been my fave Wipers album. The quintessential Wipers song is When It's Over which is about the most transcendental piece of music I have ever listened to in my life. I wrote about it in my blog a while ago.

Link Wray's S/T 1971, mentioned up thread and covered extensively in Oxford American. Like Exile on Main St, and unlike a lot of other early 70s soul-rock, it brings the riffs, not just the depleted gaze and world-weary hooks.

I was knocked out by this one too when I first heard it almost 10 years ago. I had no idea Wray had made music that sounded like that.

Coming out of a five year relationship, discovering Hats by the Blue Nile makes a lot of sense.

https://www.discogs.com/Natural-Essence-In-Search-Of-Happiness/master/233493"">guys

fuck.

album's an absolute spewing volcano of pure heat tho

Another for Kleenex/LiLiPUT. Only had "Madness" on a mix tape, and finally just listened to
a bunch of others. Blows me away how good they were for early 80s.

Drexciya and side projects, Der Zyklus II in particular

rajie - espresso

another mid-'80s record along the lines of akina nakamori's "fushigi", who knew there was more than one great cocteau twins-influenced j-pop record from the mid-80s?

sry, this is the album i was trying to link before i opened up a wormhole: https://www.discogs.com/Natural-Essence-In-Search-Of-Happiness/master/233493

it's a david axelrod / cannonball Adderley affiliated jazz / soul album

Kleenex First Songs 2LP on Mississippi/Kill Rock Stars sounds fantastic, for some reason much bigger than the 2CD version represented on Spotify. Definitely a favorite discovery of recent years.

The Residents Fingerprince.
Probably about tiime i was familiar with all that early run though.
NIce weird stuff like I've been looking for for years. I have meet The , & Not Available not sure why I never really got into the band massively. Also used to have Third Reich & Roll and Commercial lp but not sure what I listened to heavily. I think bits of Commercial stuck in my head for years though.

i liked "leapmus" on the fingerprince preserved edition, overall the bonus tracks have been hit and miss but man i've never heard a version of "diskomo" i didn't like

the 180 gs just did a cover of the commercial album, i think overall the commercial album doesn't quite work as a conceit for me, particularly since "ups and downs" is way better as a proper _song_, but i'm still a little curious

Looks like the choice of bonus on a lot of these come from very different periods seeing a lot of 82 and 201-s. Would hope they'd keep things contemporary. Are things being released to the exclusion of things from the time or is there just little secretly stashed.
Like this preserved edition otherwise though so may pick up the rest up to Eskimo. Really don't know after that.

they're releasing what they have, stevolende - a lot of it is later versions of the original songs on the album. you're not going to go wrong with '82 diskomo though, and some of the outtakes "contemporary" to the recordings are stuff that mostly deserves to be on the cutting room floor

was really enjoying what i heard of that 180 gs album, liked it better than the residents' version, i guess that's common for me though, i like the residents better as songwriters than as performers

side a of Tarkus totally blew me away recently. I mean, damn!!!

in a very good way

side a of tarkus is phenomenal (and i really dislike all other elp)

not sure it actually _needed_ to be a side-long epic but "eruption" bangs hard

along the lines of akina nakamori's "fushigi"

thank you for bringing this album to my attention... what a remarkable pop record.

so a thing i like to do is go record shopping and buy classic albums / highly repsected cult classics i've never heard, load them up on my ipod and then hit shuffle and try to guess what i'm hearing.

on my last trip to amoeba, i picked up a couple glenn branca and cluster albums. when 'the acsension' came on i legitimately thought it was a deep cut off this comp. when a cluster track off sowiesoso came up, i was expecting adrian borland to start singing.

went back and listened to sowiesoso and zuckerzeit in full after being so awesomely stumped and, good god damn, those records are outstanding!

Yeah, I only picked up those Cluster albums a couple of years ago and they still sound completely fresh to me, albeit you can tell how influential they were to our favorite post-punkers.

Speaking of which, the last classic album that knocked me out was listening to Neu!'s "1975", driving with the top down at night, coming back from a record run in Portland, ME. Utterly perfect.

roman candle by elliott smith. that ringing acoustic guitar, his voice which sounds like a whole choir. the small guitar distortions. and those harmonies. divine.

I'm going to pick Brian Eno's Ambient 4: On Land, which came out in 1982. I've heard bits of it on ambient mixtapes, but never the whole thing until I bought it recently - it has aged extremely well. It's creepy, nocturnal, and sounds a lot more diverse than his earlier ambient records.

After 1982 he discovered the "shimmer" sound that's plastered all over Apollo, the Dune soundtrack, his work with U2 etc, so it's not like his later records either. It really doesn't sound as I would expect an ambient record from the early 1980s to sound.

Also, Youtube's recommendations keep throwing up excellent albums from the 1970s and 1980s - Japanese jazz music, city pop, German funk, Lebanese psychedelic folk etc - but although individually some of the records are impressive, collectively they've started to wash over me. I'm worried that my brain has been subjected to so much stimulation it's no longer capable of extreme reactions to unexpected inputs.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f4/Braziliana_(Luiz_Bonfá_album).jpg

as a hiphop head in the 90s, i always loved 'saudade vem correndo' but i never knew that bonfa and his wife had released their own album. it's obviously trying to cash in on the success of astrud gilberto, but i don't know, it's a much different kind of album. it alternates between luiz's instrumentals and orchestrated vocal numbers by maria. i love bonfa's guitar playing. he has a very "flat" style (if that makes any sense) in comparison to similar folks like charlie byrd, ac jobim, and laurindo almeida. and maria's breathy tenor range is the perfect match for it. braziliana is haunting and beautiful. it feels like the less schmaltzy counterpart to the albums astrud gilberto was releasing at the time. it's very quiet and subdued. absolutely perfect fall music.

Judas Priest - Sad Wings of Destiny - I don't know if I've ever given this the time of day before, but it's sounding very good now. There are definitely some shades of other '70s boogie-metal acts like Blue Oyster Cult and Alice Cooper here, but the tight high operatic vocals and heaviness of the riffs set this apart.

Gong Flying Teapot in its latest remaster.
Not sure when I last heard the lp anyway but sound is now great.& 8ts otherness shines through beautifully.

Before that would probably be one of the Numero label releases.
Probably the Willie Wright lp which is sublime and probably a bit anachronistic. Sounds like it should be about 72 not disco era.
The Happy Rhodes compo I got is also lovely. Got some great great tracks on it far better than ersatz Kate Bush.

I've heard it lots of times before but I put 'Avalon' by Roxy Music on last night after a long autumn walk and it was the perfect thing for a Sunday evening

black rose: a rock legend by thin lizzy. absurd chord progressions on 'waiting for an alibi'.

I'd never heard Tubular Bells, except for the intro theme, until recently. Good stuff, a lot more varied than I'd expected somehow.