Highway 61 Revisited - Alex Bell's Choice

(Pic courtesy of allmusic.com)
My musical mate Alex Bell (I think that pseudonym is right?) is hot off some recording but he had time to file this report on his favourite album, Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited:

Highway 61 Revisited came at a time when Dylan was very comfortable with himself as a songwriter. With a career’s worth of brilliant songs already behind him, he still had the same insatiable urge to create and was beginning to write with a beautiful reckless abandon. The album came just a few months after Bringing it all Back Home, his previous album.

He just breathed the songs out. And they feel like they were written in a very natural, free-form kind of way. My favourite song on the album, the 10-verse Desolation Row, is a gripping marathon of raw imagery. And the chart almost-topping Like a Rolling Stone is a 6-minute tirade that exhibits the same lyrical freedom.

As the mid-60s rolled on it seemed Dylan felt the urge to try and fit more and more onto the page; “I need a dump truck baby to/ unload my head” (From a Buick 6). I’ve always loved the sound of the album as well. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues has such a beautiful Sunday afternoon, careless feeling to it. And there is great variation in the sound of the songs, with Ballad of a Thin Man plain scary at times and It Takes a Lot to Laugh having a beautiful longing quality to it.

Here is AB's full list:
Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited
The Beatles - White Album (Alex's note: definitely don't refer to it as "The Beatles" - please!)
The Cure - Disintegration
Augie March - Sunset Studies
Dylan - Another Side of Bob Dylan
Elliott Smith - XO
Beck - Mutations
Blur - Think Tank
Bright Eyes - Lifted
Sole - Selling Live Water

Portishead by The Velvet Librarian

The Velvet Librarian is the inaugural voter for the Best Albums of All Time, with this list:
1. Portishead / Portishead
2. Spleen and Ideal / Dead Can Dance
3. OK Computer / Radiohead
4. Twice Upon a Time : The Singles / Siouxsie and the Banshees
5. Cranes / Forever
6. Mezzanine / Massive Attack
7. Treasure / Cocteau Twins
8. Dresden Dolls / Dresden Dolls
9. Dummy / Portishead
10. It'll end in tears / This Mortal Coil

The Velvet Librarian has this to say about Portishead by Portishead (pic from allmusic.com):










Beth Gibbon's voice, emerging from the sound of scratchy vinyl is the sound of smoke and despair. She snarls her tortured lyrics, like a desperate 1950's niteclub chantuse. There's a meticulousness about the sound of the album that's hard to define, but completely perfect, like someone tapped your brain, and distilled everything you loved about old movie soundtracks, femme fatales, spy movies and moulded it into a bunch of hazy torch songs, so perfect you can't diassociate it from those times when you thought everything bad. The antidote to such depression was listening to Portishead, because in their world everything is at the brink of disaster, its reassuring to find that indeed things can be worse, but also for every disaster, there is a glimmer of dirty beauty.

Thanks, TVL, there's more to come from him in the future.

Introduction

Hi,
This blog has been set up in order to find the best and worst music as voted by people I know. Hopefully, people will leave comments or (if they know it) email my personal address with suggestions/nominations and perhaps reasons why. The comments section will be monitored and the nominations taken into the tally, plus comments to be added.

More to come soon.
Thanks,
Lord Beavish