'Drill EP' by Radiohead

Pre-dating their debut album by a year, the 'Drill EP' was the first opportunity to listen to Radiohead ever presented to the world at large. The world at large wasn't especially bothered, and looking back with eighteen year's hind-sight, it's easy to see why. It's not a bad record, but it contains little indication of just how brilliant Radiohead were eventually going to be.

There are four tracks here in all, none of which are of much interest to anyone except die-hard fans of the band. 'Prove Yourself' and 'You' would go on to be re-recorded and tightened up for 'Pablo Honey'. 'Thinking About You' would be re-worked more radically. It would eventually become a gentle moment on the debut album - an acoustic interlude amongst the indie-rock. Here, it's a pretty straightforward race to a finish. The final track (not that it comes at the end) is 'Stupid Cars'. It should be the most interesting track on the record, being the only one to never re-appear in any form, but it's actually pretty forgettable. The band would revisit this subject with the far superior 'Killer Cars', but even this wouldn't be good enough to make it as an album track.

So it's okay. As part of the Radiohead back catalogue, it's worth a listen, but if they hadn't gone on to create so many better records, this would be an unremembered footnote to musical history.

'Drawn From Memory' by Embrace

‘Drawn From Memory’ was the second album from Embrace, and it marks the point where the wheels began to fall off the band. After the hype and bluster of ‘The Good Will Out’, the band needed an excellent second album to justify themselves. This wasn’t it.

That’s not to say it’s a bad album. Bits of it are great – ‘The Love It Takes’, ‘You’re Not Alone’ and ‘Save Me’ are all very effective. Sadly, they’re all done in the first three tracks. All three are examples of Embrace’s strong point – the mid-tempo indie sub-anthem. They genuinely do this very well. The trouble is, the rest of the album swerves too far from this template in either direction. When they slow down to a ballad (‘Drawn From Memory’ and ‘Liar’s Tears’), they never achieve anything more than boring. When they turn things up and attempt genuine rock, the results are mildly embarrassing. ‘Yeah You’ is the nadir – a shouty belligerent slice of pointlessness. ‘New Adam New Eve’ is better, but only by default. The only real point of bravery on the album is ‘Hooligan’ which is both intriguing and irritating in equal measure – a brave choice for a first single, but rather too dependent on the listener loving the kazoo. Embrace managed one more album after this before being dropped. They had a resurgence due to a Coldplay act of charity, but where are they now? No-one really seems to care.

'Draw' by Matthew Jay

I tend to carry around a lot of trivia in my head about artists and bands that I like. When I came to listened to this, however, I remembered very little about Matthew Jay. It took wikipedia to remind me that he’s dead now. The album itself, however, is a real treat.

Over its twelve tracks, Jay treats the listener to a collection of delicately constructed acoustic based songs, but with a real pop sheen that fits them perfectly. Though the opener, ‘Four Minute Rebellion’ hints at a record of angst, this is an album full of joy, even in its more melancholic moments. It portrays Jay as a kind of British Elliot Smith. Though it was largely ignored on its release, it still sounds great. Particular highlights are ‘Let Your Shoulder Fall’, ‘Only Meant To Say’ and ‘Meteorology’, but every track is a bit of a treat.

'Drastic Fantastic' by KT Tunstall

The second studio album from KT Tunstall, ‘Drastic Fantastic’ is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a follow up to ‘Eye To The Telescope’ – another set of well written pop songs with a dash of folk thrown in but struggling to be heard over the slightly too glossy production.

Starting an album with a recording of an old b-side demonstrates either a great confidence in your work, or a real desperation. Happily, ‘Little Favours’ is a decent, breezy opening, though ‘If Only’, which follows, is more interesting. ‘White Bird’ is a tricky one – write an acoustic based track and name it after a bird, and you will be compared to Paul McCartney, and you will come off worse – but it’s a nice enough song on its own merit. Actually, ‘nice enough’ sums up the album pretty well. It’s all pretty good, but it’s pretty safe, and there’s little in the way of progression from album number one. This is a shame, as the ‘Acoustic Extravaganza’ album released in the interim had been really good, but it’s perhaps inevitable – the record company would presumably have wanted another big seller, and most of the songs on this album were written before or around the time of her debut.

Things are most interesting when Tunstall experiments. ‘Hold On’ is a riotous clatter of elements that only just holds together, but it’s all the better for it, and ‘Beauty of Uncertainty’ uses a dream-like backing track and echoey vocal line to good effect. It’s just a shame that the record doesn’t have more of such things.

‘Dog On Wheels’ by Belle & Sebastian

Only a few days ago, I listened again to ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’, the most polished, and perhaps the most successful of Belle and Sebastian records. From there, I go to here, Belle and Sebastian’s first EP. In reality, this barely counts as a real record. Released after the first two albums had made a bit of stir, this EP contains four demo tracks recorded before Belle and Sebastian were even a band. It is, shall we say, considerably less polished than their later work.

It’s better than you might expect, though. ‘Dog On Wheels’, the first track, has some convincing energy, and a nice trumpet line. ‘The State I Am In’, familiar through it’s ‘Tigermilk’ version is also pretty well formed here. The slower pace gives Stuart Murdoch’s lyrics space to breathe – it’s pretty clear that at this early stage, they are the bands main selling point. ‘String Bean Jean’ ups the tempo and adds some wild-west style guitar work and a harmony which, although slightly ropey, shows the promise of things to come. The final track, ‘Belle And Sebastian’ has some lovely arrangements, but the budgetary restraints are hard to escape. It also suffers from a vocal performance that only a mother could love. In later years, Murdoch would become a fine delicate vocalist – at this point, it would charitable to say he was still finding his feet.

I heard nothing of this when it was released, but I remember it being around. I was an avid reader of the music pages on teletext, and I remember this record being named their single of the year. In a sense, this is an inexplicable choice, but there is something about it that appeals, even if it’s just the knowledge of what was to come.

‘Document’ by REM

‘Document was the fifth album by REM, but on some level, it feels like a debut, probably only because it’s the earliest one I own, and I don’t think I know any songs that predate it. In addition to this, it sounds like a debut should – a bit rough and ready, a couple of really good songs, and a lot of potential. It’s hard to imagine a band getting to a fifth album these days without having passed this stage.

‘Finest Worksong’ begins the album with a decent amount of bluster before ‘Welcome To The Occupation’ serves up a more typical slice of folk-inspired vaguely political meandering, made great by it’s two part harmony, a feature that REM used a lot at the time. ‘Exhuming McCarthy’ is a jauntier track – like a prototype ‘Stand’ with allegedly weightier lyrics.

Variations on these three track types fill the rest of the album, to a generally high level of success. There are further standouts – ‘It’s The End Of The World As We Know It’ is successful as a result of its speed, and its determination to cram in as many lyrics as possible, ‘The One I Love’ succeeds through having a very strong (if simple) melody. The rest of the album just sort of chugs along happily until the end comes. A perfectly decent listen, but nothing to get wildly excited about.

‘Diamond Dogs’ by David Bowie

‘Diamond Dogs’ is one of the pivotal albums in Bowie’s career, though given the twists and turns on display through his recorded output, you could make that claim about virtually any of them. However, ‘Diamond Dogs’ was the last of Bowie’s run of glam-rock-type albums that established him as a major star in the early seventies. Having abandoned his Ziggy Stardust persona after ‘Aladdin Sane’, ‘Diamond Dogs’ allowed him to work the remnants of Ziggy out of his system. As a result, bits of the album are an obvious continuation of earlier work, particularly the title track, and ‘Rebel Rebel’. ‘Rebel Rebel’, incidentally, is a song which contains such a condensed essence of glam, it more or less rendered glam obsolete. It was time for Bowie to move on.

This was the first Bowie album since ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ to feature no other members of the Spiders outfit. However, by retaining pianist Mike Garson, and re-recruiting Herbie Flowers as bassist and Tony Visconti as producer, Bowie demonstrated a willingness to mix and match elements of his own past which he would continue to do throughout his career. Mike Garson underpins much of the record. He has no standout pieces as he did on Aladdin Sane, but his piano flourishes through ‘Sweet Thing’ and ‘Candidate’ in particular are essential to the feel of the record. Because Bowie played most of the lead guitar on the album himself, there’s no other figure to dominate the album in quite such a way.

Away from the glam aspects of the album, Bowie develops a more soulful side. ‘Sweet Thing’ is an obvious example of this, but ‘When You Rock And Roll With Me’ is fairly different from all his previous output as well. It’s the conceptual stuff, however, that sticks from this album. It opens with ‘Future Legend’ a horribly disturbing (or ridiculous, if you like) monologue about ‘Hunger City’, the location for much of the albums descriptions. Bowie’s original plans to base a concept album around ‘1984’ were opposed by Orwell’s estate, but the influence is hardly hidden – naming your last two tracks ‘1984’ and ‘Big Brother’ is less than subtle, though both tracks are excellent. ‘1984’ is the clearest signal of the ‘Young Americans’ which was to come, and ‘Big Brother’ is a suitable filling climax, descending as it does into the disorientating ‘Ever-Circling Chant of the Skeletal People’.

It would be easy to sneer at ‘Diamond Dogs’ as the sort of ridiculous concept album which made the seventies something of a joke, but to do so would be unfair for two reasons. Firstly, in making this his last album of type, making him well ahead of the pack. ‘Diamond Dogs’ came out in 1974. Within two years, he would have made ‘Young Americans’ and ‘Station To Station’, and be holed up in Berlin making ‘Low’. By contrast, it would take Queen until 1977 to attempt to abandon glam rock, and that was with the slightly uncomfortable ‘News of the World’. Secondly, and more importantly, it’s just really good.

‘Deserter’s Songs’ by Mercury Rev

‘Deserter’s Songs’ was the first album by Mercury Rev that I came across, and that’s true for most of the world. It was released to widespread critical acclaim, though mass commercial success wouldn’t be a side-effect of this. However, it did well enough for the band to change their mind about giving up, which was no bad thing in itself.

Apparently, suspecting it to be their last album, the band made a deliberate choice to make an album entirely for their own benefit, with no allowances made for others. It shows. From the beginning, the album throws you into a surreal dream-like world, a world where choruses don’t exist, strange theremin-like noises rule, and spelling is irrelevant. ‘Holes’, ‘Tonite It Shows’ and ‘Endlessly’, the albums first three tracks, are a mass of wobbly orchestrations, nonsensical lyrics, and Jonathan Donahue’s voice – beautiful, in its own way, but not for everyone.

Signs of relative normality appear as the album goes on. ‘Opus 40’ and ‘Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp’ all managed to nudge into the charts without sounding ridiculously out of place, but even ‘Goddess On A Highway’, the albums lead single and most identifiable track, doesn’t have ‘major hit single’ written all over it. Sitting in the middle of the album is ‘The Hudson Line’, perhaps the most conventional song on the record. Ironically, perhaps deliberately, it sounds somewhat out of place.

Like the Mercury Rev catalogue at larger, ‘Deserter’s Songs’ is not an album which would be to everyone’s tastes, and I imagine a number of those who sang its praises from the rooftops at the time would be somewhat less enthusiastic now. Nevertheless, it contains real beauty, and it’s unusualness as an album is something to be cherished.

'Dear Catastrophe Waitress' by Belle and Sebastian

Though they'd been around for a while, this was the first Belle and Sebastian album I heard all the way through, and then the first that I bought. Thanks to Matt for lending it to me first. I'd heard the name many times, and I'd read a lot about them. Through their early years, Belle and Sebastian were loved by a small number of dedicated fans, and spurned by a good number for being somewhat twee.

In fairness, having gone back through their discography, there's some validity to these claims. 'Dear Catastrophe Waitress', however, marked a turning point for the band. Perhaps in an attempt to prove their critics wrong, the band recruited producer Trevor Horn to make the album, and the result is their most solid album by far. It has a far more muscular and well-built style than all their previous albums, and happily, the quality of the songs themselves match this new-found confidence. The title track, 'I'm a Cuckoo', 'Roy Walker', 'If She Wants Me' - all are perfectly formed pieces of pop music.

The delicate nature of Belle and Sebastian still shines through, both in full tracks - 'Piazza, New York Catcher', 'Lord Anthony' - and in the flashes of other tracks: this may be a harder album than their others, but it still begins with a flute riff for 'Step Into My Office, Baby'.

The album as a whole is a joy - a pleasure to listen to, but complex and layered enough to stand up to repeated listening. It also manages the unusual feat of ending on a real high. 'Stay Loose', the albums closing track, is like nothing in the Belle and Sebastian catalogue up to that point (though something of an indicator towards the next album). It's a real treat.

'David Live' by David Bowie

When Bowie toured Ziggy, he was accompanied by four people – a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, and a pianist. By the time he was taking the Diamond Dogs tour across America, he was heading a band of eleven. As a result, the live album of the tour is, in parts, busier, fuller, more bloated, and messier than earlier live recordings.

The bulk of the album is material taken from ‘Diamond Dogs’ and ‘Aladdin Sane’, Bowie’s most recent two albums (sensibly discounting ‘Pin-Ups’). This is the material that works best. ‘1984’ makes for an excellent start, and ‘Sweet Thing’ and ‘Big Brother’ sound fantastic. The title track from ‘Aladdin Sane’ is successfully reworked for the stage, and ‘Time’ and ‘Watch That Man’ both benefit from the additional musicians.

Older songs are more of a mixed bag. ‘Suffragette City’ works well as a riot of noise, and ‘Space Oddity’ makes the transition well, but ‘The Width Of The Circle’ sounds more bloated than usual (and it’s bloated enough in the first place), and ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ is drained of its power by too much woodwind making it something of an anti-climax.

Most interesting are the two cover tracks. ‘Knock On Wood’ is reasonably disposable, but it carries a good sense of fun. ‘Here Today, Gone Tomorrow’ is something a departure – a more soul-influenced song which is the only real indication up to this point of the ‘Young Americans’ sound that was to come. As the tour progressed, these influences would apparently play a much more significant role, and it’s a shame, retrospectively, that the album wasn’t recorded during this later period.

As a result, this album can’t claim to be essential, or even mildly important, but it’s a decent enough listen with some good moments.

''David Bowie' by David Bowie

There are good reasons for quietly disowning a debut album later in your career. Perhaps it’s clearly inferior to the rest of your work, or perhaps it’s just too stylistically different from later albums to make sense of. Neither of these reasons really explains the status of ‘David Bowie’, however. For many years, Bowie’s quasi-official discography has had ‘Space Oddity’ at the beginning, and ‘David Bowie’, the album that came first, has been largely overlooked.

In terms of quality and style, it’s a mixed bag. Some if it is genuinely very good, other bits, less so. ‘Uncle Arthur’ and ‘Little Bombadier’ are the sort of character study that Blur would go on to forge a career with, and its lots of fun, but a bit twee.

‘Sell Me A Coat’ has a lovely arrangement and melody, especially in its verses. ‘Love You Til Tuesday’ is a fantastic sixties-style gem (though close to being ruined by the last few seconds). ‘When I Live My Dream’ is a bit schmaltzy, but it works.

‘Rubber Band’ mixes unconventional arrangements with bizarre lyrics, but generally remain interesting, and fairly good. ‘We Are Hungry Men’ is a slightly deranged pointer in the direction of ‘Hunky Dory’ and, in a sense, ‘Diamond Dogs’. ‘Please Mr Gravedigger’ is possibly the oddest album closer in the Bowie catalogue – unsettling, off-key, barely even a song, it’s a difficult lesson, and a key indication of Bowie’s determination to follow his own path.

At times, the affectations of the album veer towards irritating, and it may not have dated amazingly well, but there’s plenty to enjoy here. It’s certainly more interesting than ‘Space Oddity’, even if it has nothing to match the quality of that album’s title track, and although there was a jump of styles between those two albums, the jump between ‘Space Oddity’ and ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ was bigger still. On the plus side, because of its relegation to ‘largely forgotten status’, this album can be picked up cheaply and easily.

'Dark Side Of The Moon' by Pink Floyd

What took me so long to hear this? Despite this album being nestled among mum and dad's vinyl collection throughout my life, I only actually listened to it for the first time two or three years ago. For the life of me, I can't remember what made me investigate it further.

It's brilliant, of course. Rarely does any album work so well as one consistent piece of work - every part of every track fits into sequence perfectly. Rarely also do a band work together so closely to produce such a unified sound. It's hard to understand how a band that could make this album could become so acrimonious.

Highlights are hard to pick out due to the nature of the album, but there are some - the harmonies in 'Time', the piano intro to 'The Great Gig In The Sky', all of 'Us And Them'. To be honest though, the highlights are joined together by other highlights - this album doesn't put a foot wrong. Essential.