‘Imagination’ by Brian Wilson

A word of advice. If you’re one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and you’ve been responsible for some of the best albums ever made, be careful with your album titles. Calling your record ‘Imagination’ prompts a certain expectation. This record struggles to live up to that.

It isn’t a bad album, as such. Wilson’s voice is in reasonable shape, and his ear for harmony arrangements is as strong as ever. The songs themselves are okay. There’s nothing on this album that’ll change your life, but greater depths have been plumbed throughout Beach Boys history. The albums greatest failing is its overall sound – it’s very, very polished, when a few rough edges might have helped.

The two most familiar tracks are old Beach Boys tracks. ‘Keep An Eye On Summer’ and ‘Let Him Run Wild’ are both decent reworkings – the latter, in particular, works quite well several keytones down and delivered from a mature perspective. The greatest strength of this album is what it did to Wilson personally. After its creation, he gained enough confidence to tour again, which in turn lead to ‘Pet Sounds’ live, which in turn lead to ‘Smile’. A small step which makes this album more important than it is good.

‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ by Belle and Sebastian

Second album by Belle and Sebastian, and released only five months after their debut, ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ is a great album in many ways, though not without its issues. The songs on the record are superb – whereas ‘Tigermilk’ is a little patchy, ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ is pretty much free of weak spots, which is remarkable given the short length of time between the two records. Having said that, the arrangements and production throughout the record struggle to match the quality of the material. Too many of the backing tracks sound a little feeble – like the band aren’t quite sure of what they should be doing. No-one seems quite comfortable with the material, as though they know it’s good, but they’re not sure how to represent this. So, a good album to hear, but given the choice, I’d always opt for the next on the list. Here goes…

‘Fuzzy Logic’ by Super Furry Animals

Released in 1996 at the height of the Britpop era, the triumph of ‘Fuzzy Logic’ is that it still sounds fresh now. As a debut album, it contains the odd misfire, but on the whole, this album holds up really well fourteen years on.

‘God! Show Me Magic’ is a blisteringly energetic beginning, the beginning of a vein which runs through tracks like ‘Frisbee’ and ‘Bad Behaviour’. Better still, though, are the mid-tempo tracks – ‘Fuzzy Birds’, ‘Hometown Unicorn’, ‘If You Don’t Want Me To Destroy You’, ‘Mario Man’ – which allow the bands harmonies to shine through, as though band are creating a Californian corner of Wales. Other notable points include the circular and evocative ‘Gathering Moss’, the gentle ambient ‘Long Gone’, and extraordinarily confident ‘For Now And Ever’, a track which shows the band had no reservations about creating anthems, even at such an early stage in their career. A very fine listen indeed.

‘Expecting To Fly’ by The Bluetones

A few days ago, I was listening to ‘Everything Must Go’, the Manic Street Preachers album which played a significant role in the development of music in the nineties. At a similar time, The Bluetones were at the height of their career. They would never have anything like the impact that the Manics had, and as such, they’re largely forgotten now, but because expectations of this record are so much lower a decade and a half on, it comes out pretty well.

At their best, The Bluetones wrote great pop songs. ‘Bluetonic’, ‘Cut Some Rug’, ‘The Fountainhead’ and especially ‘Slight Return’ are a joy to listen to. Mark Morriss isn’t a brilliant singer, but he’s equal to the task, and Adam Devlin’s guitar work is light and fluid enough to keep you engaged throughout.

The album becomes less of a pleasure when the band stray further from the pop-song mould. Tracks like ‘Things Change’, ‘Putting Out Fires’ and closing track ‘Time & Again’ are all reasonably good attempts to produce more substantial songs, but the band don’t seem quite up to carrying their weight.

It holds up fine. At the time, you’d have been hard pushed to find anyone who would identify The Bluetones as their favourite band, and time won’t have enhanced their standing, but anyone who enjoyed their music at the time almost certainly still would.

‘Everything Must Go’ by the Manic Street Preachers

Here’s an album that lurks away in the collection, largely ignored, possibly misunderstood. In all honesty, it’s there because of peer pressure. Not heavy-handed actual peer pressure – no-one forced me to buy it, but the kind of ‘everyone says it’s good, so it must be’ kind of peer pressure that makes you buy records as a teenager. Thankfully, I’d passed out of that stage by the time the Stereophonics came along, or I’d have to suffer them to.

I say, suffer, but that’s not really what I mean at all. ‘Everything Must Go’ is fine. It has some really good bits: ‘A Design For Life’ is as good as it ever was, the perfect combination of the written song and the great arrangement, that bit where the strings and the guitar play out the instrumental break together is spine-tingling. And there are other good bits to. ‘Elvis Impersonator’ is a good mix of sparse opening and heavy conclusion, ‘Kevin Carter’ and ‘Removables’ bounce along nicely, and ‘Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky’ is the sort of delicate song the Manics don’t do nearly as often as they should. Elsewhere, however, the album feels slightly oppressive. I think it’s mostly down to James Dean Bradfield’s voice, which is great in the songs I’ve just said I liked, but hard to listen to during the louder tracks. He has a real habit of writing melodies that sound like they’re just too high for his voice to reach, giving the songs a sense of strain that doesn’t do them any favours.

A decade and a half on, the Manics are still going, though to a much-dwindled group of people who are interesting. They’re generally considered a band who’s best days are behind them, and most would consider this to have been the high point of those days. True enough, it stands up fine, and has plenty going for it, but it doesn’t feel like the classic it was portrayed as at the time.

‘Dangerous People’ by Noel Richards

I hadn’t listened to a Noel Richards album for many years – probably a decade – until I listened to ‘Calling All Nations’ a couple of weeks ago. I knew then that this was coming up, and it bothered me. It bothered me because I’d found ‘Calling All Nations’ such hard work, but I didn’t want that to be true for ‘Dangerous People’, as I was pretty fond of Noel Richards’ music back when this was released.

Happily, this remains a much better album than the one that followed it. It’s a little dated now, perhaps inevitably, and it’s welded so strongly to it’s stadium worship context that it’s difficult to comprehend it in any other setting, but it still has proper tunes, and an energy that ‘Calling All Nations’ was entirely lacking.

Interestingly, the album works best at either end of a scale. The most obviously ‘built-for-stadium’ tracks work well (‘Love Songs From Heaven’, ‘Keep On Praying’, ‘There Is No-one Like Our God’), though the lyrics don’t stand up to a great deal of scrutiny, presumably as they were designed to be sung in large groups and therefore accessible to all. At the other end of the scale is ‘You Are My Passion’, a mostly acoustic track which serves as a reminder of how effective a songwriter Richards can be when stripped of all the bluster – the Richards who wrote ‘By Your Side’ and ‘You Laid Aside Your Majesty’. The weak points of the album are where it falls between the two ends of the scale – ‘I Do Believe’, and ‘Have You Heard The Good News?’ (a song written by Stuart Garrard of Delirious who served a stint in the Noel Richards band) aren’t bad, but are reasonably unremarkable. Still, these are minor quibbles for an album which holds its own pretty well.

'Casanova' by The Divine Comedy

‘Casanova’ was Neil Hannon’s breakthrough album. For a few short years, the Divine Comedy became a vaguely famous band, and though ‘Fin de Siecle’ and ‘A Secret History’ maintained the momentum, ‘Casanova’ is responsible.

It’s also a remarkably confident album. Despite having two very low selling albums behind him at that point, Hannon sings like a star from the word go. ‘Something For The Weekend’, the song that would be his first hit single, is bold, overstated, slightly daft, and still rather wonderful a decade and a half later. Starting the album with this track, and then ‘Becoming More Like Alfie’ contrasts with his earlier albums which tended to build up a little more slowly. ‘Middle Class Heroes’ slows things down a little, but builds up the layers of orchestration wonderfully. ‘In and Out of Paris and London’ and ‘Charge’ are both wildly overblown chucks of innuendo, but tremendous fun, with ‘Charge’ in particular showing Hannon’s remarkable vocal range stretched to its limit. ‘Songs of Love’ is a perfectly placed moment of calm before the well formed stories of ‘The Frog Princess’ and ‘Woman of the World’.

‘Through A Long And Sleepless Night’ is both the climax of the album and it’s dark heart. It’s an intense rambling epic of a track, and another opportunity for Hannon to show what he can do with a bigger budget. ‘Theme From Casanova’ is slightly throwaway, but it provides a useful buffer between the previous track and ‘The Dogs and the Horses’ which plays out like the final song of a musical that hasn’t been written.

You could hate this album, easily. If you did, you’d criticise it for being excessive, overblown, pretentious, even absurd, and to be honest, it is all of those things. It’s also wonderful, and a fine example of why Neil Hannon is a talent to be treasured.

‘Brink’ by Eden Burning

After a number of years slogging across the country playing small gigs and releasing well received but low selling albums, ‘Brink’ was Eden Burning’s last throw of the dice. I wasn’t following them at the time, and there’s very little stuff online to fill in the gaps, but it’s hard not to listen to it and see it as one final attempt to crack a mainstream market. ‘Brink’ is less of an acoustic-folk album than their previous albums, and has more of an indie-rock sound instead. Electric guitar features more heavily, mandolins less so.

That said, there’s enough of the band’s style running through it for it to not feel like an anomaly. ‘Deep Blue Sea’ opens the album in a squall of harmonica and vocal harmony. It may be a relatively simple track, musically and lyrically, but it’s a punchy and catchy start. Through ‘Movers and Shakers’, ‘Stories’ and ‘Almost Spent’, the band revert slightly to type – more delicate, acoustic songs, though this is no bad thing. Paul Northup is, as ever, a fine singer, and a superb lyricist. Throughout this album, as with other Eden Burning albums, he weaves his faith deftly through his lyrics without sounding preachy or obvious.

There are some weaker moments later on. ‘Another Country’, ‘With A Kiss’ and ‘Western Eyes’ are all stabs at a rock sound that never quite convinces. The final track, however, is a glorious way to finish a recording career. ‘Let Me Lose’ is simply structured, but beautifully recorded and performed – a true song of worship which could be enjoyed by more or less anyone.

'Beautiful Freak' by Eels

In my head, the Eels career trajectory went from mainstream indie band to deliberate industry outsider. My memories of 'Beautiful Freak' were of a good, but relatively straightforward commerical success. Commercial success it was, of course - it went top 5, and spawned two top 10 singles - it even won a brit award. All of these would be unthinkable achievements from an Eels album now.

What's interesting listening back to the album now is how Eels-like it is. It may have achieved mainstream success, but it's a pretty uncompromising album both lyrically and musically. Mark Everett writes lyrics as miserable as anyone else in music, and this album has as many examples as any other album, particularly during 'Mental' and 'Your Lucky Day In Hell'. The music, whilst more electric-guitar-heavy than many of his other records, is still littered with glockenspiel, top-end piano and synth pads.

'Beautiful Freak' isn't an album to listen to if you need cheering up, but it's a great record. What it lacks in experimentation, it makes up for in focus, and general quality. It'll never be remembered as the quintessential Eels album - that would surely be 'Daisies of the Galaxy' of 'Blinking Lights' - but it's very, very good.

'A Pretty Fine Mess By This One Band' by Grandaddy

The first proper release from Grandaddy, this 7-track EP isn't something I really own, but the tracks were all included on a later compilation, 'The Broken Down Comforter Collection', so on my mp3 player, it's stitched back together.

It's an incredibly unfocused piece of work, but a very interesting one. 'Away Birdies With Special Sounds' is a rambling idea, rather than a song, 'Egg Hit And Jack Too' finishes the record with a big blast of noise, 'Peeano' is a fragment of muffled piano, and nothing else. The other tracks are little more conventional, but only 'Taster' really shows any sign that they would go on to create actual songs later on in their career. A good start, I guess, but not a piece of work that stands up to much repeated listening.

'1977' by Ash

Another day, another hit. It's been ages since I listened to this. Ash passed me by in 1996 when this was first release, so this was an album I bought retrospectively (and cheaply) several years afterwards. It's great.

The noteworthy thing about this album is its energy. It leaks youth out of the speakers with a simplistic charm that completely makes up for the fact that most of the songs sound pretty similar, and that Tim Wheeler's had yet to wrestle full control of his voice. The singles - 'Girl From Mars', 'Oh Yeah' and 'Goldfinger' are obvious highlights, but the rest of it matches up nicely.