Christgau's Consumer Guide Grade List: A+

Latin Playboys: Latin Playboys [1994, Slash/Warner Bros.]

This is the one that jumped out at me, atmospheric, slightly experimental latin roots rock.

His choices are certainly idiosyncratic - "Heart Of A Dog" is an A+ Laurie Anderson album?? And I dig Wussy but "Attica" isn't even their best. *shrug*

I love that Procol Harum album!

imagine listening to so much music and still being so completely obsessed with posturing

that is a dig at christgau to be clear.

that Latin Playboys album is so good

I always look at lists like these to see what I can learn from them. I don't understand looking for overrated warhorses as an excuse to dismiss the entire list. Like, just now I started wondering, "maybe there's something I might appreciate in Lefty Frizzell...?"

chuckling at gogol bordello

I see now that Wild Honey was part of that same RS 1967 roundup...He didn't quite list it on his Top 50 list recently (his wife did), but it was on his work list.

yeah gogol bordello might be the only truly embarrassing selection

I don’t think the problem is a lack of overrated warhorses; for me, it’s a lack of many interesting/provocative choices around albums I do know (which would be signposts that there’s something to be learned from digging deeper). It just reads like some guy’s personal taste.

I don't know, I think those things are in there. Like, why this Tribe Called Quest album and not either of the first two? Why Sign o the Times and not Purple Rain? Flipside of that, why Born in the USA and not Born to Run? Many of these albums are warhorses or classics or canon or whatever because so much time has passed, but given so many of the artists listed are themselves warhorses or classic or canon themselves, sometimes the choices he makes can still be interesting. Again, like why that Ornette album, which iirc was even out of print for eons? Or why the first Paul Simon, but not Graceland (which got a rave of an A, which I suspect he downgraded from an A+ for political reasons)? Or how the African stuff might ostensibly be obvious (now), but honestly wasn't (and isn't) to the vast majority of Americans?

Or, for example, why those Dylan albums, out of all of them, including collections, get the A+s.

that Tribe album is literally the only intersection with my own canon of 10/10s lol, difference being that I am not the soi-disant Dean of American Rock Critics

xp Well the Dylan choices are a good example—if those are someone’s three favorite Dylan releases since 1970 (including, exactly, the first few Bootleg Series collections), it’s hard to think our taste will be very simpatico. Somehow his choices are unexpected yet boring.

idgi, love and theft and the basement tapes are excellent picks

I think (per my Graceland example) his reasoning sometimes becomes more clear when you read the review(s). Other times, opaque and arbitrary, but it ain't a science.

xpost But as canon building goes, would you tell someone to start with those? That's how I read his reviews when I was a lot younger. "Wow, an A+, I should start with such and such." Which I think is not necessarily the right way to do it.

basement tapes is maybe a little unwieldy and steeped in its own myth, but fuck yeah i'd use love and theft to introduce someone to dylan and they'd probably really like it

One of his A plusses doesn't need to become an A plus for me (if I rated records) to be worth hearing.
And true, these are not necessarily starter picks (though the compilations may well be).

I think just about every record up there is worth hearing. If they lead someone back to a better A- or B+ record, that works for me!

(xpost) I remember Graceland was an A+ on release, yes; Who's Next, too.

Haha, I had no idea he like Procol Harum that much!

that Tribe album is literally the only intersection with my own canon of 10/10s lol, difference being that I am not the soi-disant Dean of American Rock Critics

― imago, Tuesday, June 8, 2021 8:48 AM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lj i feel there is stuff on this list u need to check out

*likes

A Thousand Leaves, excepting two standout tracks, is second worst SY album after NYC Ghosts. I was talking about this with a friend the other day— I don't go to SY for hippie noodling or for rocking indie-pop, I go to them for aggressive, noisy art-rock. A Thousand Leaves is a dull record and no critic will ever convince me otherwise.

they're good at hippie noodling though cf. murray street. a thousand leaves i would argue proves there's no binary between hippie noodling and noisy art-rock

it opens with "contre le sexisme" ffs

That's another good example—I'm not an SY head but I've listened to all the albums, and that one's like "huh?"

i'm not a christgau defender but i think he saw certain artists very clearly, chief among them al green and sonic youth imo

(I actually like NYC Ghosts, but I wouldn't give it an A+ either... I don't think they were going for a perfect grade, anyway, with that one)

thousand leaves is such a fucking awesome record and i encourage everyone to smoke a bowl and hang with it

With the exception of "Hits of Sunshine," I hear no hippy noodling on A Thousand Leaves.

might be referring to "wildflower soul" as well idk

"Hoarfrost" is Ranaldo's best song, "Sunday" is the aggressive noisy art rock that table's looking for, and "Karen Koltrane" is spooky as fuck.

It's not an A+ but it's my favorite SY of the nineties: they stretched and it mostly worked.

When CDs were still a thing, I burned or bought copies of Love and Theft to introduce skeptics to Dylan and it almost always worked. The reaction tended to be, "Whoa! This cranky old dude is fun!" Many skeptics come to him mythos-first, which would make me a skeptic too.

upset that, AFAIK, "Karen Koltrane" has never been deployed in a horror film

Karen trips on a cloud
Sets down stars in her eyes
She's alone in a room
She's deep inside of her mind

I wish I'd hung onto the LP.

This reminds me, there was once a thread entitled something like "Would you trade all your records for those that Christgau rated A or higher?", which is a demented concept unless you are 10 years old or hate your music collection for some reason.

"Hoarfrost" is Ranaldo's best song

This is the most absolutely wrong thing you've ever written on these boards, fwiw.

And also further proof that I shouldn't listen to y'all about SY. A Thousand Leaves sucks.

I contain wrongitudes!

The mere existence of "Mote" disproves your opinion about which is Lee's best track, and also "Goo" came out in 1990, so it wins for best SY of that decade afaic.

I gave up on Sonic Youth after hating the single from Dirty. I came back for Murray Street because the Borbetomagus horns were guests on one track, but it turned out they were barely audible, so I gave up again. I keep telling myself I should deep-dive their 90s/00s catalog, but something more enticing always comes up.

Ranaldo's my least favorite of the songwriting trio precisely because he makes the most effort to make his okay lyrics legible, but I love at least a dozen of his songs.

I mean, it's not like the Grateful Dead never got noisy. There's a similar sort of loose, jammy, psychedelic quality to ATL, although it's SY doing their take on it with their vocabulary, so I get what someone means if they call it "hippie noodling". (I also get why Dead- and Television-loving Christgau likes it.) I like it but I like all their albums.

"hoarfrost" is totally my favorite ranaldo song this side of "mote"

The mere existence of "Mote" disproves your opinion about which is Lee's best track, and also "Goo" came out in 1990, so it wins for best SY of that decade afaic.

― heyy nineteen, that's john belushi (the table is the table), Tuesday, June 8, 2021

"Mote" is great.

and "Hey Joni"!

But, like, I once recommended ATL to a guy who loved DMB and he thought it was unlistenably pretentious avant-garde noise.

Yeah, I do too. Bought it because of xgau's review, and liked it, but seemed more low-key than what I was hoping for, not paradise of guitarrr celebration.

from January 19 Christgau substack email:

You haven’t reviewed an Elvis Costello album since 1991 and haven’t A-listed one since 1986. Is there any hope that he will ever release an album up to your standards again? — Adam S. Fenton, Menifee, California

By “review” you seem to mean a full paragraph as opposed to an Honorable Mention sentence/clause. But Honorable Mentions are reviews by me. They represent at least three to five listens, often more while less is very unusual. Sometimes the writing is dashed off—if something succinct comes to me I thank the prose gods and go with it. Usually, however, I put real time into the first draft and go over it many times. In addition, at the bottom of my Costello page you’ll find a full-length review of his Roots show and collab written for MSN in 2013. Have played the new one once. Thought it began strong. Will return at my own pace.

In terms of the Universal era, he skipped When I Was Cruel altogether but besides the positive Roots show review he gave *** (the "highest" honorable mention) to Painted from Memory, The Delivery Man and The River in Reverse. Sounds about right though I'd probably do 'choice cuts' for the latter - some of the originals are gems, but as fine as the covers may be, I'd rather play the better known vintage recordings by Lee Dorsey et al.

(Also IIRC honorable mentions are all B+'s, or would have been pre-honorable mention, which is kind of weird but that's what he said in a recent podcast interview.)

Straying from the thread topic here, but I can't let a mention of Painted from Memory pass without repping for its sibling, The Sweetest Punch, with Bill Frisell arranging the former's songs for and fronting a truly fantastic band. A beloved album in my home.

He's got two good songs, one brushed by chamber-y strings, the other by a bridge that leads me back though his album with Bacharach, briefly, though overall the setting of this one comes off kinda Motown---they both also end up fitting pretty well into Johnny Cash--Forever Words (Expanded Edition), the 2021 re-re-issue, which finally got to 34 tracks, sailing along. It's an army of artists responding to JC's previously unset lyrics, poems, even a sample of his comments on some of that, with the words coming through clearly enough on Costello's (and all other) ventures, seeming like some directions he might have gone in or come back to if he'd lived longer. Costello does 'em his way, but okay by (non-stan) me.

some directions that Cash might have etc.

Two good new songs

Christgau top albums of 2021 list is up

how'd Wussy do?

https://robertchristgau.substack.com/p/deans-list-2021?r=khofd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

lol Neil Young

So although preliminary listening and research persuades me that Rolling Stone had reason to put Puerto Rican pop phenom Rauw Alejandro’s Vice Versa high on its list, there’s no way he’ll ever be Olivia Rodrigo or even Harry Styles for me unless he starts singing in English (as he probably will, to exactly what effect is another matter). And while there’s no denying that Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman showcases actual songs on Pitchfork’s seventh-ranked Weather Station album Ignorance, their smug gentility reminds me all too vividly of Joan Baez putting me off lo these many decades ago. Which isn’t even to mention the impressionistic musical poesy of Pitchfork’s second-place L’Rain, or the huzzahs that greeted my old fave Jazmine Sullivan when she compensated for her songwriting drought by inviting women to contribute spoken-word accounts of their sexual travails and got album-of-the-year plaudits from Pitchfork for the dodge

Correct about Sullivan, RONG about the Weather Station.

Figures: he's always had a blind spot about Baez's better albums, and, closer to Lindeman's sound, early Joni as well. Haven't gotten into L'Rain's album, though will listen more; she's effective on the xpost Bowie trib, Modern Love.

I remember noticing a couple years back that Firesign Theatre was the first act to whom he'd awarded two A+ grades, and a friend rightly said, "how like Christgau of you to notice"

sexual travails: manages to be a lofty shit even "just" en passant; that's some A Movable Feast-level shit, class out the ass!

Something Scott Woods created, a tribute to some of Christgau's A+ albums. I'm one of the readers, fumbling my way through his Attica review--also Kevin Bozelka and a couple of others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIIfvvDzI2w