‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ by Brian Wilson

A record which is as confusing, as baffling, and as hard to explain as the man who made it. ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’ was made in the mid 90s as the soundtrack to a documentary about Wilson’s life. As such, there are a number of things about it which are commendable.

Firstly, it would have been easy not to bother. A lazily assembled compilation of existing Beach Boys tracks would have been easier to put together, so it’s good that this wasn’t done. Secondly, it would also have been easy for Wilson to churn out an obvious set of re-recorded ‘classics’. This would have made for a more appealing commercial prospect, but not a better record. Instead, this record skirts around the edges of Wilson’s song-writing catalogue, touching on tracks that are easy to miss – ‘Meant For You’, ‘This Whole World’, ‘Let The Wind Blow’ and ‘Til I Die’ are particularly good choices. Less worthy of inclusion are ‘Love And Mercy’ and ‘Melt Away’, two solo-era tracks credited to Wilson and his doctor/therapist/manager, Eugene Landy, the man who broke Wilson’s drug dependence and began restoring him to a normal life, in return for the minor concession of having complete control over every aspect of his life, and the right to profit from any work he went on to complete – behaviour which resulted in complicated legal action and an eventual revocation of his license to practice. ‘Love And Mercy’ is a pleasant enough track – ‘Melt Away’ is weaker. Perhaps the most interesting track on the album is ‘Still I Dream Of It’, a home demo from the mid-seventies which, I think, had been unreleased until this point.

Alongside the creditable aspects of this work are some fairly major drawbacks. Of course, more work has gone into this album than a simple round-up of the relevant Beach Boys tracks would have been. Unfortunately, that hasn’t resulted in a better album. Wilson’s backing band and singers on this project are a collection of anonymous session players who lack both the family-honed warmth of the Beach Boys or the faithful recreation of Wilson’s later backing band. Worse still, Wilson’s voice is not in good shape here. No-one would expect it to be as good as it was in the sixties, but here it’s in a very fragile condition – a world away from what it would recover to by the time he started touring ‘Pet Sounds’ and recreating ‘Smile’.

So, all in all, this is something of a non-essential record – one for the dedicated fans only. But consider this – this was the first time Wilson had really had the confidence to look back over his life’s work and do something with it. A few years on, and he’d be playing ‘Pet Sounds’ to audiences across the world. A few years later, he finished ‘Smile’. Maybe this was a first step? If so, worth it.

‘Hunky Dory’ by David Bowie

My earliest experience of Bowie – and, I guess, one of my formative musical experiences – was listening to a compilation album called ‘Changesbowie’. This record began with ‘Space Oddity’, and continued with ‘Changes’, the track which opens ‘Hunky Dory’, Bowie’s first great album. I remember loving the track then, and I still love it now. It’s a perfect blend of ingredients. Bowie’s vocals croon through the verses then soar through the chorus, that classic bass-and-guitar riff between chorus and verse hits you every time, and Rick Wakeman’s reverb-y piano is an unalloyed delight. And so it continues. ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ works in a similar vein. ‘Eight Line Poem’ is too brief and simple to be a favourite, but it’s a sweet addition. ‘Life On Mars’ is exceptional – genuinely, I don’t have the words to describe how good it is: the voice, the strings, the piano, the guitar solo – it couldn’t be improved. ‘Kooks’ is the ideal gentle and slightly daft contrast.

‘Quicksand’ is a growing beast of a track. ‘Fill Your Heart’ is arguably filler, but it’s a lot of fun. ‘Andy Warhol’ and ‘Song For Bob Dylan’ are well crafted tributes from an artist who, even at this stage, was willing to acknowledge his influences. ‘Queen Bitch’ is the only real indication of Bowie’s next step – ‘Ziggy Stardust’ would be another massive stylistic departure, and ‘The Bewlay Brothers’ is a complex and wordy way to finish, but no less impressive because of this.

‘Hunky Dory’ is great for a number of reasons. First of all, it was something of a one off. ‘The Man Who Sold The World’, his previous album, had been nothing like this. ‘Ziggy Stardust’, his next, would be nothing like this either. This made ‘Hunky Dory’ unique – special. It didn’t do ever so well at the time, but it’s now rightly seen as an absolute classic. Second of all, Bowie’s choice of fellow artists is pitched perfectly here. This was the first album to be recorded with the complete ‘Spiders From Mars’ line up, and Mick Ronson’s arrangements are a particularly fine feature. Alongside them, Rick Wakeman plays piano throughout. Many would cite Mike Garson as Bowie’s quintessential piano player, and with good reason, but Wakeman’s flourishing style is perfect here, and the album wouldn’t be the same without him.

I’d argue a strong case that this might be Bowie’s best album. I’d argue a similar case for three or four other albums, but there we are. Here endeth the letter ‘H’. The letter ‘I’ will feature less albums, but will feature considerably more solo albums by Brian Wilson, so that’ll be fun.

‘How To Save A Life’ by The Fray

Every now and then, a song comes along that just gets everywhere. It’s all over the radio, it’s on every TV show’s climactic final moments, and it soundtracks every advert. ‘How To Save A Life’ was one of these tracks. Often, this sort of ubiquity is woefully undeserved, but just occasionally, you can live with it. ‘How To Save A Life’ was a good track. Listening back to it, it’s hard to say why.

I’m not trying to be over-critical, but what is it that makes this song work? It’s not the musical structure – the melody in the verse is all over the place, and when it drifts into the chorus (with no noticeable transition) it continues in much the same vein. The lyrics aren’t the key to its success – they’re not saying anything too profound, and at various points you can barely make out what they are as they’re drawled so indistinctly. The arrangement is quite good – the piano bounces along quite nicely, there are some fairly effective (if simple) harmonies towards the end, and the drum outro is a nice touch, but these things do not a great song make. Yet, somehow, the song succeeds in becoming much more than the sum of its parts – it sweeps you in, even though you know it shouldn’t, even now, four years after it was everywhere. Extraordinary.

For the sake of completion, I should point out that this album contains a further twelve songs. I won’t bore you with the details – suffice to say, they’re pleasant enough, but the world wouldn’t miss them if they weren’t there.

‘Hours…’ by David Bowie

Some might be tempted to assume that I own more Bowie albums than albums by people who aren’t Bowie. That obviously isn’t the case, but his records do pop up on the list with gratifying frequency.

‘Hours’ was his final album of the 20^th century, and quite an interesting one in its own way. For the first time in many, many years, it was an album less defined by its style than by its content. This worked in its favour to a degree – it made it harder for the critics to beat it with a stick, and reviews were favourable at the time. On the other hand, it meant that any weaknesses in the album couldn’t be disguised by the underlying concept, something which helped cover the gaps in, say, Outside or Earthling. In place of grand artistic ideals came a set of simple songs, predominantly acoustic, that were to live or die by their own merit. Along with this came a willingness to embrace the past, both on the record itself, and in the live appearances he made around the same time (including a career-rejuvenating Glastonbury headline slot).

Twelve years on, and it’s hard to see ‘Hours’ as much more than a career footnote, especially with the knowledge that ‘Heathen’ was just around the corner. There are some really good moments present: ‘Thursday’s Child’ is a richly textured ballad, ‘What’s Really Happening’ and ‘Something In The Air’ are age-appropriate takes on classic Bowie. ‘The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell’, despite being self-referential to the point of extreme parody, is a great rock track, and ‘Survive’ is up there with his very best tracks – worth owning the album for on its own. Elsewhere, other tracks feel a little underwhelming either in production terms (‘Seven’), or in terms of the material itself. But it’s a perfectly decent album, and a pleasure to hear. If this had been how he bowed out of recording, it would have been a perfectly acceptable swansong – we’re very lucky that he raised his game once again.

‘Hotel Shampoo’ by Gruff Rhys

This is an interesting one. I stuck it on my birthday list earlier this year to pad out a set of options that was a little too short. It ended up being perhaps my favourite present. I’d vaguely lost interest in the Super Furry Animals a few years ago, so this was very much a ‘hope-for-the-best’ which paid off.

The trouble SFA always had was that they combined genuine pop greatness with a propensity for sloppy messing about. Now, I don’t object to musical messing about, but when it gets in the way of – you know – making music that’s actually good, it can be a little frustrating. Happily, Rhys has reigned in the nonsense here, producing thirteen tracks of classic pop goodness. Few of them pass the three minute mark, so even the lesser tracks don’t outstay their welcome, but I’d happily listen to almost all of them for longer.

It’s a very relaxed album with a very home-made feel. It impressively jumps from the upbeat (‘Sensations In The Dark’, ‘Conversation, Conversation’) to the gentle (the sublime ‘Take A Sentence’). It displays Rhys’ skill with wordplay (‘If We Were Words’) and his knack for Brian Wilson-esque harmony (‘Honey All Over’). It is, in short, a real treat, and the album I would recommend above all others this year.

‘Hot Fuss’ by The Killers

This is where I lose the cool points – by giving Keane’s 2004 debut a better review than The Killers’ debut of the same year. Happily, I do so in the knowledge that there’s way worse to come in the fullness of time.

Is ‘Hot Fuss’ a bad album? No, not at all. Bits of it are good, and the good bits are actually superb. ‘Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine’, ‘Mr Brightside’, ‘Somebody Told Me’ and ‘All These Things That I’ve Done’ would have made an exemplary four-track EP. Add in ‘Smile Like You Mean It’, and the average quality would just about hold. Trouble is, that still only covers five tracks, and the first five at that. From there on in, the album takes a massive turn towards the mediocre. The remaining six tracks are just… there. They’re not awful, but they’re distinctly unmemorable. If they were spaced out a bit, maybe that wouldn’t matter, but they’re not, and it does.

It’s rare for an album to begin with such huge promise and end so far away from fulfilling that promise. I’ve not bought, or even bothered to listen to a Killers album since. But those first five tracks… if only they’d kept it up.

‘Hopes And Fears’ by Keane

When Keane erupted onto the scene in 2004, they aimed to prove two things: that a band of privately educated posh boys could make it in the world of indie, and that they could do so without using guitars. The first of these aims wasn’t really that hard – the music world is far less dependent on the working classes than it would like to think it is, but the second was a fair challenge. Evidently, they were pretty successful in achieving that one as well, however, as ‘Hopes And Fears’ went on to become the most successful album of all time (I’d need to fact check that – but it felt like it probably was).

Listening back to it seven years on, it certainly has its charms. The album roughly divides into two groups. The first group is composed of upbeat sing-along anthems – ‘Somewhere Only We Know’, ‘Bend And Break’, ‘Everybody’s Changing’, ‘Your Eyes Open’, ‘Can’t Stop Now’ and ‘This Is The Last Time’. This group works well. The band undeniably have a good ear for a melody, and how to hook people into one. The second group, the slower ballad, is less successful. ‘We Might As Well Be Strangers’, ‘She Has No Time’and ‘On A Day Like Today’ – none of them are bad, exactly, but they drag a bit. ‘Bedshaped’, the final song of this group, is by far the most successful as it integrates the anthemic feel of the first group. Little wonder it became a fan favourite. Skirting in between these two groups are two other songs – ‘Sunshine’, which is a pleasant, slightly trippy track and ‘Untitled1’ which seems to have little idea what it is, as evidenced by the fact that – obviously – it doesn’t even have a title.

So, as a debut, it hits more often than it misses, and it did excellent business. It’s aged pretty well. Good stuff.

‘Hooked EP’ by Catatonia

This one comes up by mistake, really. A little while back, I re-organised EPs and b-sides into more obvious chunks so that they’d be easier to listen to. Had I not missed this, it would be filed away under ‘Way Beyond Blue’ additional tracks – where I would almost certainly never listen to it ever again. But I didn’t, so here we are.

I picked this up in Wales at around the point that Catatonia were becoming famous. This was an early release – their second, I think. Nothing on this EP re-appeared later down the track, though in fairness, it’s not that bad. The first two tracks are pleasant-enough jangling indie, very much in keeping with the rest of their early work – the band went on to become much more ‘anthemic’, and there are precious few signs of that here. The final track, ‘Difrycheulyd (Snail Ambition)’ is sung in Welsh with spoken French interjections – charming in its own way, but precisely the kind of self indulgent nonsense the band were to ditch once they decided that selling some records might be quite a nice idea.

It’s not a great record by any stretch, but it’s a debut EP, so you can’t be too harsh. You know – for what it is, it’s fine.

‘Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire’ by Eels

He’s a funny chap, E from Eels. He spends ages making ‘Blinking Lights and Other Revelations’, an intricate double album full of beauty, then he puts out an album which sounds like it was written and recorded over the course of a weekend before following it up with another two albums inside a year.

When this album was announced, I had low expectations. It was promoted as a sequel to ‘Souljacker’, my least favourite Eels album by a long way, so I imagined this would be a fairly heavy, indeed oppressive album of angry indie. In actual fact, it’s a true gem – light, delicate, and a real pleasure to hear. I said a minute ago that it sounded like an album made very fast – somehow, this adds to its qualities rather than distracting from it.

‘Prizefighter’ begins the album with an infectiously catchy foot-stomping two-chord romp. ‘That Look You Gave That Guy’ continues with a fragile composition overlaid with the most minimal overdubs possible. The next few tracks swing between these two points without putting a foot wrong along the way. Only right in the middle of the album does the content become a little more dense – ‘The Longing’ is one of those incredibly bleak solo performances that E does so well, and ‘Fresh Blood’ is a lurking beast of a song, and the most obvious link to ‘Souljacker’. It works better in isolation than it would have done stretched across the album as a whole. The second half of the album contains a run of songs that would have sat happily on ‘Blinking Lights’ – whether they were left-overs or written for the task, I don’t know, and I couldn’t care less. Either way, they deserve to be heard. Genuinely, the only downside to this album is how quickly it was followed up: ‘End Times’ and ‘Tomorrow Morning’ both came so fast, it would be easy to overlook this album entirely. Easy, but a foolish mistake.

'Holland' by The Beach Boys

The career trajectory of The Beach Boys is a fascinating one. After an upward trend which peaked at ‘Pet Sounds’, the band spent several years flailing about and attempting to hit gold. Album after album was based around the scraps that fell from Brian Wilson’s broken mind, padded out with material of dubious quality written by the rest of the band. As they headed towards the mid seventies, the band were seriously low on options. For reasons that I’ve never been able to fathom, the band decided that heading to the Netherlands would help their creative juices to flow. What they achieved during this album should have set their career on a new path. It really didn’t.

The amazing thing about this album is how good it is. I’m going out on a limb here, but this is my favourite Beach Boys album (apart from ‘Pet Sounds’, obviously – I’m not mental). It’s a fascinating look at what the rest of the band could achieve when they had to – by this stage, Brian had pretty much run dry, and he had virtually no involvement in the record. ‘Sail On Sailor’, the only track Brian managed to put his name to, should have been a huge hit. ‘Steamboat’ had no hitmaking potential, but it’s a fascinating experiment in vocal atmospherics. The ‘California Saga’ is the first real sign of what makes this album special. It’s a sequence of three tracks based around a loose theme. The first, ‘Big Sur’, is that rarest of things – a track written by Mike Love that doesn’t provoke you to a murderous rage. Gentle and folky, if he could have kept this up, I’d have spent time searching out his solo albums. Al Jardine’s ‘Beaks of Eagles’ follows. On the face of things, it’s nonsense – an absurdly self-important spoken word narrative interspersed with slightly trite sung passages – but it has a real charm. Then ‘California’ completes the cycle with lush Beach Boys harmonies and squelching bouncy bass lines. ‘The Trader’ follows – a real Carl Wilson led masterpiece. He rarely sounded better, moving effortlessly from the harder ‘rock’ half to the softer more reflective ending. ‘Leaving This Town’ is a Ricky Fataar / Blondie Chaplin driven track, as is the closing ‘Funky Pretty’ – both demonstrate very clearly how much life the two newer members injected into the band. It’s a huge shame that they bowed out after this album. Dennis’s ‘Only With You’ rounds out the tracklist, another indication of his growing talent.

The album was an unmitigated flop which, in my opinion, was a great shame for the band, and a great shame for music in general. In some parallel universe somewhere, ‘Holland’ was a great success, and a creative re-birth for a band who would enter a new chapter in their career producing a whole run of albums like this. In reality, the band panicked and reverted to a ‘back to basics’ approach which saw them mining the style of their early albums with ever diminishing returns. I maintain that ‘Holland’ was their last demonstration of greatness – never again would they release anything this good.

(I should point out that I don’t consider ‘Mount Vernon and Fairway’ part of this album. The separate EP is on my mp3 player under its own name. My review of that will be, shall we say, quite different.)

‘Holes In The Wall’ by The Electric Soft Parade

I must have bought this about eight years ago after seeing The Electric Soft Parade perform ‘Empty At The End’ on Later with Jools Holland. It was one of those pitch-perfect performances that grabbed me instantly – I won’t say I rushed out to buy the album the next day, but it was added to a mental list, and it didn’t take too long.

It’s a good album. I have no idea where the band are now, but this was a good enough to debut for me to buy the follow up a couple of years down the line. The band (I think, in reality, they were more of an augmented duo) wrote fairly straightforward indie-pop songs with good harmonies and played them well. They weren’t going to change anyone’s life, but the album rattles along nicely and doesn’t outstay its welcome. Even ‘Silent To The Dark’, with its extended coda, is over before you wish it wasn’t. An overlooked gem.

'Holding Nothing Back' by Tim Hughes

A quirk of alphabetical filing takes me from one Tim Hughes album to another, skipping over ‘When Silence Falls’ (which I’m not going to get to for a long time at this rate). By the time of this, his third album, Hughes’ situation had changed significantly. No longer was he the new face on the scene, snapping at the heels of Matt Redman – he’d already become a major figure in Christian music, and not just in Britain.

The development in sound between ‘Here I Am To Worship’ and this are fairly obvious when you listen to them back to back. The arrangements are clearer and more muscular here, and Hughes’ voice – which had always been strong – is in very fine form. There is a sprinkling of new anthems throughout the album – the title track, and ‘Almighty God’ and ‘Happy Day’, for instance, and there other very strong moments – ‘Clinging To The Cross’ is lovely, and ‘God Of Justice’ is delicately arranged. There are other moments, especially towards the end of the album, where Hughes falls into the almost unavoidable trap of the worship songwriter – writing songs which wouldn’t quite work congregationally, but aren’t quite distinctive enough to make it on their own. The material is good enough to get through this problem, but it’s a problem never-the-less.

'Here I Am To Worship' by Tim Hughes

‘Here I Am To Worship’ is surely one of the most significant British worship albums of the last couple of decades. Tim Hughes’ (pretty much) debut was the point at which he emerged as a major voice within the world of Christian music, but it also seemed the point at which Matt Redman’s monopoly of the market was broken. (I should point out – that’s not a criticism of Matt Redman, but for a long time, it seemed like there was no-one else around).

The difficulty of this album was that by the time of its release, a lot of the songs were already quite familiar through Soul Survivor live albums, and so on. Hughes sidesteps this familiarity well by presenting fairly different arrangements of the better known songs – ‘May The Words Of My Mouth’ is a little faster and upbeat than previous versions had been, ‘I’ll Always Love You’ and ‘Jesus You Alone’ are raised a little higher through the pitches. String arrangements are provided, and there is a liberal sprinkling of drum loops (which now sound a little dated, but you can’t always predict these things). The key weapon in the arsenal is his voice – the backing tracks to the album are decent enough, but the voice soars over the top of them. Hughes can go from anthemic to gentle with ease, and his use of multitracked harmonising mark him out from his peers.

It’s the very end of the album which is maybe the most interesting. Covering Matt Redman’s ‘The Eyes Of My Heart’ is a brave move, as comparisons to Redman were inevitable anyway. Still, he chooses one of Redman’s lesser known songs, and it’s a very good version. The final track is his own ‘My Jesus, My Lifeline’, one of the first songs he shared with the world through a Soul Survivor album a few years earlier. Judged against the rest of the album, it’s not the strongest of his songs, but it’s a touching ‘back to basics’ moment that ends the album well.

'Here Be Monsters' by Ed Harcourt

Ed Harcourt’s first album (unless you count the shortened ‘Maplewood’, bought in the days when I listened to xfm and made a real effort to stay up to date. Harcourt came along at the wrong time, really – a few years on from the release of this album, the male singer-songwriter was very much in vogue, but his career never reached the heights of many less deserving artists.

‘Here Be Monsters’ is a very solid debut – relaxed, confident, and highly enjoyable, though not without its flaws. Harcourt is at his best when he’s having fun. ‘Hanging With The Wrong Crowd’, ‘Birds Fly Backwards’ and ‘Shanghai’ are testament to this. The crowning moments of the album are near the beginning. ‘God Protect Your Soul’ is wonderfully atmospheric with its rolling bass piano notes and murky trumpet lines, and it contrasts brilliantly with the more straightforward ‘She Fell Into My Arms’. These two tracks together are possibly the best he’s ever been.

The album suffers a little when Harcourt downplays the fun. ‘Beneath The Heart of Darkness’ suffers from a noisy and extended coda which lends more weight to the song than it deserves to carry, and ‘Wind Through The Trees’ becomes very skippable after the first couple of minutes – they’re the clearest sign of the album’s debut nature. Never-the-less, he can do the heartfelt stuff – the album closes with ‘Like Only Lovers Can’ which is fragile but very lovely. So considered as a whole, the album is a success, and a real springboard for a career that should have reached greater heights than it ever did.

'Helplessness Blues' by Fleet Foxes

An easy and recent purchase. After loving their eponymous debut, this was a release-week buy earlier this year, and I don’t make any were as many of those as I used to. No regrets either – it’s a more than worthy follow up to their first record; similar enough to be readily identifiable, but different enough to be worth having. On balance, it’s more delicately constructed than the first. The acoustic guitar dominates to a larger degree than it did beforehand, and the vocal arrangements are allowed to shine through more clearly – whether as layered harmony or stark solo. The album also feels more like it’s been stitched together like a tapestry of segments – the songs (and pieces of songs) flow from one to the other with gaps you barely notice. As a result, it’s difficult to pick out highlight tracks, but that doesn’t seem to matter.

'Hedonism' by Bellowhead

From one album of folk-type music to another, but it’s very different. Whereas Iona present a highly polished and slick album (even though it’s recorded live), Bellowhead glory in their slightly shambolic approach. Of course – this is very much an act. The band know exactly what they’re doing, and despite the air of chaos, they’re a very tight outfit with years of experience. Listen to the details: the slight timing break at the end of ‘New York Girls’, the intricate arrangements of, well, everything – they know exactly what they’re doing. This isn’t a disappointment – the members of Bellowhead all put the legwork in before they came together, so there was little need for them to improve. They’ve found their niche, they’re comfortable inside it, and with the entire history of English folk to draw on, they’re not about to run out of music. The only real difference between ‘Hedonism’ and its predecessors is the sheer amount of rudeness on display. That’s folk music for you – ‘The Handmaiden and the Weaver’ and ‘Yarmouth Town’ in particular are downright filthy. I don’t mean that in a bad way.

Sat in the middle of the album is ‘Cold Blows The Wind’. In many ways, it doesn’t stand out, but its magic is worth analysing. Jon Boden’s vocals are a treat – not for any technical reasons, but because he tells the story so richly. Underneath them, the folkish backing music sits unobtrusive, building slowly to a cacophony of horns which provide the gaps between verses. It’s completely infectious, and it’s quintessential Bellowhead. Listen to it, love it, love them. Long may they continue.

'Heaven's Bright Sun' by Iona

This is an album that’s been lurking on my shelves for a good long time. I bought it when I was about 14, at a point in my life when I was listening almost exclusively to Christian music (‘OK Computer’ rescued me from this eventually). Iona were a big name in the genre at the time – their Celtic sound made them largely immune from the criticism routinely thrown at other Christian artists, and they have a reasonable amount of crossover appeal and respect, if not genuine mainstream success.

I’ve not listened to ‘Heaven’s Bright Sun’ for a long time. At the time I bought it, I remember having a number of opinions that still ring true. There’s no doubting the talent within the band. The standard of musicianship is extremely high, and the mix works well. There are times when the music drifts for too long into noodling territory, but when the different strands of the band come together, they make a beautiful sound. Iona’s vocalist (I can’t remember her name, and I’m in hospital with no internet connection. Matt, you’re probably the only person who’ll ever read this, and you know how to use Wikipedia) has a glorious voice which grounds the music behind her – this album is at its best when her voice is allowed to genuinely drive the music. During ‘Treasure’, for instance, or ‘Irish Day’.

The thing I most remember about listening to Iona half a lifetime ago is the feeling that I wasn’t really ready for them. They were too mature, too sophisticated for me – I imagined that if I returned to them five years down the line, I’d appreciate them more. Fifteen years on, I feel the same way, which probably says more about me than it does about them.

'Heathen' by David Bowie

When post-Tin-Machine Bowie albums were reviewed, they’d always be referred to as his best since ‘Scary Monsters’, only for their reputations to quickly slide down the scale a bit. Much of his work in the nineties and beyond was seen as interesting rather than good, but Heathen is generally seen as an exception to this, and rightly so. It’s a wonderful album – genuinely wonderful, and anyone who likes Bowie on any level should hear it if they haven’t done so.

I say this as a big fan of his later output. I think ‘1.Outside’ in particular is hugely underrated, and I enjoy ‘Hours’ and ‘Earthling’ a great deal as well, but I recognise that ‘Heathen’ is better on most levels than all of these. It’s an album which reflects Bowie’s age and status without being restrained by it making full use of the vocal register Bowie had at the time. It’s also a massive success for Tony Visconti, the quintessential Bowie producer who had been away from the fold for so long. Songs like ‘Sunday’ and ‘Slip Away’ ooze texture and warmth – ‘Slip Away’ in particular is a beautiful track, displaying a gentleness and melodic strength that runs through much of the album. A number of songs on the album contain more complexity than you pick up on first listen – ‘5.15 Angels Have Gone’ and ‘Everyone Says Hi’ in particular - but nothing on the album is inaccessible. Even the more experimental sounds of ‘I Would Be Your Slave’ and ‘Took A Trip On A Gemini Spacecraft’ are easy to listen to.

There aren’t really any true weak spots on ‘Heathen’. Only his version of ‘I’ve Been Waiting For You’ feels unnecessary (especially since it’s one of three cover tracks), but even this runs along in decent fashion.

Perhaps the best thing about ‘Heathen’ is how complete it sounds. It isn’t an album full of content which feels like it could have come from other Bowie albums. Even at this late stage in his career (he’s only released one album since, and there are precious few signs of any more on their way), Bowie could still create something worthwhile and special. That’s why he’s great.

'Have You Fed The Fish?' by Badly Drawn Boy

It’s funny how sometimes an album changes your view of an artist for reasons that turn out to be somewhat unjustified when they’re properly thought through. ‘Have You Fed The Fish?’ is one of those albums. I followed the career of Badly Drawn Boy not from the very beginning, but certainly from album number one. I enjoyed the debut, in spite of his lack of coherence, and I thought his ‘About A Boy Soundtrack’ was very strong, so I had high hopes for this, his third. In some ways, those hopes were met. In other ways, not nearly so much.

The instrumental beginning is a chirpily confident start, but the title track which follows is emblematic of all the album’s problems. There’s a good idea buried away within it, but it’s overblown, rambling, and full of lyrical strings that appear to have no meaning. The next few tracks are better – ‘Born Again’ has a real punch to it, ‘All Possibilities’ retains its sense of fun despite the best efforts of Comet’s advertising department. ’40 Days 40 Fights’ is an interesting one. It’s a good listen, but it’s also the track which put me off Badly Drawn Boy to an extent I’ve never quite recovered from. Not because of the album version, but because of the horrible leaden version he and his backing band of the time plodded out on Later as part of the album’s promotion. The pairing of ‘I Was Wrong’ and ‘You Were Right’ works well enough, though the latter hovers dangerously close to outstaying its welcome. The problem is compounded by the fact that the lyrics are reused later in ‘Tickets To What You Need’ which (almost) finishes the album in an unfortunate ‘will this do?’ fashion.

Elsewhere, ‘Counterpane’ is a nice instrumental which would have sat happily on ‘About A Boy’. ‘How?’ mixes gentle acoustics with stirring orchestrations quite nicely and ‘The Further I Slide’ and ‘Imaginary Lines’ have a playfulness which Badly Drawn Boy had seemed to excel at so well up to this point. ‘Using Our Feet’ does to, in a sense, though less successfully. ‘What Is It Now?’ is a perfectly competent, though unremarkable closer.

So all in all, ‘Have You Fed The Fish’ is by no means a terrible album, it just manages to be somehow far less than the sum of its parts, and I’m not sure why. The side effect of this is that although I own a copy of the follow up, I’ve barely listened to it over the years. If I ever reach ‘O’, I’ll give it a go.