Day 0767 - CrazySexyCool

TLC "CrazySexyCool" (1994)

TLC were started by Crystal Jones and her manager when they had the idea to put together a girl-group with a hip-hop image.  They enlisted Lisa ‘left-eye’ Lopes and Tionne Watkins and started shopping around management and producers.  The band’s name was made up from the first letter of each member’s first name.   Before they could be signed, Jones was ousted from the group and Rozonda Thomas was bought on board.  She was given the nickname 'Chilli' to keep the TLC moniker intact.
                                              
After a successful debut “Ooooooohhh... On the TLC Tip” the group set about recording their second album.  They cast aside the energetic, colourful ‘teen’ image from the first album to recast themselves as a more sultry, adult group.  This, mixed with their genre-mixing of RnB, soul and hip hop would create a blueprint for future artists such as Destiny Child, Pussycat Dolls etc.

To my ears "Waterfalls" is the most obvious hit on the album, so not surprising that it was chosen as a single.

Despite the group's success, they filed for bankruptcy the next year, partly due to the reported unfairness of their contracts and partly due to Left-eye having set fire to the mansion of her football player boyfriend... oddly, the two reconciled and went back to dating after that!

Day 0599 - Strangeways, Here We Come

The Smiths "Strangeways, Here We Come" (1987)

Despite my previous statement that all Smiths albums sound the same to me; this one is something else.  There are certainly some familiar 'Smithy' sounds going on, but there's a touch of glam rock, and the moody slow groove of 'Death of a Disco Dancer'.   I don't know, I think that I just prefer the songs on this album to the other two that I listened to via this list.

It could be that old chestnut of 'personal turmoil and creative tension serving the artistry' because between this album being finished and it being released, the band broke up.  As I mentioned earlier, they have managed to this day to resist the urge to reform.

Day 0591 - Sign o' the Times

Prince "Sign o' the Times " (1987)

 
Prince had been working on a double album with the Revolution "Dream Factory", and a solo album that he'd planned to release under the feminine pseudonym 'Camille'.  He ended up disbanding the Revolution and scrapping the Camille album.  Combining the material from these projects with some new songs he planned a triple album "Crystal Ball".   This was vetoed by the record company who baulked at releasing that much material simultaneously, and Prince was left to cherry-pick tracks for a single album.

You'd think that choosing from such a large pool of songs this would be a 'home run' of an album.  Instead, I feel as though the songs being drawn from 3 disparate projects over a number of years led to a bit of a lack of cohesion across the material.

There are plenty of good moments here, and Prince explores every genre that he'd investigated up till that point (and then some), but as a whole it just doesn't quite hit the spot for me the way that '1999' or 'Purple Rain' did.

Day 0450 - Off the Wall

Michael Jackson "Off the Wall" (1979)

The beginning of the end of the... beginning, I guess. MJ hadn't had a solo hit in 7 odd years, and while working on the (not particularly successful) film 'The Wiz' Jackson asked Quincy Jones to recommend him a producer. Quincy suggested himself and they began what has to be one of the more commercially successful partnerships in music.

This album combined funk, disco and soul to basically lay out the blueprints for modern RnB (and the blueprint for nearly every Jamiroquai album).  Michael is let loose over these tracks, forming and honing the array of vocal ticks and exclamations that would become one of his many trademarks and would go on to define his vocal style.

Amongst all the upbeat danceable songs, he even has one of the more straightforward heart-string tugging ballads of his career in "She's out of my life".  He's so sincere that by the end of it he sounds like he's more or less in tears... tears of money.