Day 0890 - The Soft Bulletin

Flaming Lips "The Soft Bulletin" (1999)

The Lips had been mining experimental veins of musical exploration,  which could be seen to culminate with the "Zaireeka" album consisting of 4 discs designed to be played simultaneously on 4 different players.   Where to go from there?  Obviously the answer was to make a transcendent baroque pop album.

The Lips did it in their own way though, so interesting sonic manipulation is evident throughout more traditional instrumentation and lush arrangements.

The highlight for me is the mostly instrumental, wordless track "the Observer".    

 

"Feeling Yourself Disintergrate" starts with a repeated, ping-pong vocal somewhere between beatbox and scat that is then enveloped by treated keyboards, reverby vocals and a general warm blanket of music.  Despite its seemingly bleak title, the track in fact dwells on love, life and the universe in a dreamy, tripped out way.  That approach seems to be the bent of many of singer Wayne Coyne's lyrics: filling with hope instead of the cynicism and nihilism of some of his musical peers.

This trippy pop approach and psychedelic yet uplifting lyrics would go on to be further developed on follow-up "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots".

Day 0640 - Like a Prayer

Madonna "Like a Prayer" (1989)

Madonna moved away from her dancey pop music into a more artistically daring form of pop, one that led critics to label it "as close to art as pop gets"

An album born from turmoil, Madonna was dealing with the Catholic guilt bred into her through her upbringing, coming close to the age her mother had been when she died, and having her tumultuous marriage to Sean Penn come to an end.

Madonna funnelled all of this into her work, with an album steeped in sex and God.  As such, it wasn't exactly welcomed by the church.  The Vatican condemned one of her music videos and Pepsi pulled out of promotional deal with her (apparently controversial religious overtones are not welcome, but shallow Kardashian trivialisation of important social movements is fine). 

She had been working to develop a musical with Prince, that didn't end up eventuating, but the collaboration did result in him dueting with her on the song "Love Song" and contributed some guitar and production elsewhere on the album.

The album cemented Madonna's place as pop royalty and seemed to be her working out some residual catholic guilt, opening her up to more confronting projects such as her album "Erotica" and her book "Sex".

Day 0475 - More Specials

The Specials "More Specials" (1980)

 
The Specials had helped launch the ska craze in the UK. The label 2-tone records, started by Specials keyboardist and songwriter Jerry Dammers would go on to release music from artists such as Madness, the Beat, and Elvis Costello (only one single for EC though).

The band were exhausted from touring and were hoping to make a few changes for their second album in order to keep things interesting.

The first few tracks stick to the ska/reggae formula, but towards the middle of the album you start to get the kitschy sing-along of "Pearl's Cafe" and hard funking of "Sock it to em JB". The album works with passages of exotica and some noodling around with different keyboard textures. The mix of styles would go on to influence the 90s trip-hop explosion through artists like Portishead, Massive Attack and others.