Jeroen's Micro Blog

2020-12-01 00:00:00

• The two hundred and fifty-fifth album: #255 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - Will The Circle Be Unbroken It's a bit of a change to hear a bluegrass album, the bluesy country feeling at odds with the rock experiments we've been hearing and the country rock the genre seemed to be gravitating towards. That is, according to the documentary I only heard about, the reason behind the album - the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band got artists from the past from the genre to record with them so the original sounds could be preserved. It's not my sound and while I enjoyed the songs while doing something else, I wouldn't have sought them out. These are standard country songs performed incredibly well by the big people in the genre and they work, but I think only a few really gave me that connection. Well performed, capable, and the behind the scenes notes work, but it isn't quite my thing.

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• The one hundred and fifty-fourth TV show: #903 Marchlands Thanks to some last minute changes in Christmas plans, we ended up watching a modern ghost story for Christmas. Marchlands in the story of three families living in a house called Marchlands, each twenty years apart, and the story of a ghost that connects them. The story slowly builds as we find out what happens and more characters gain prominence, Setting the story in the same location helps a lot with that, as you keep going back to the same places, but always looking different - from a dark 60s house to the pastels from 1987 and the brighter, cleaner 2010 version. It adds to the continuity of events that draws the three families together even as the parallels between them shrink. One of the three eras doesn't even get too involved in the resolution of the story, instead providing the context for its hauntings and scares. It's more about how the death of a girl can linger on a house while giving it a more supernatural view of it. It almost doesn't need to be said, but the performances are the best, as you can expect from British prestige drama. Jodie Whitaker as the bereft mother puts in a wonderfully layered performance in both her initial sadness and coping with it afterwards, and Anne Reid's follow up performance manages to carry that through perfectly. The other parents that are most involved - Dean Andrews in the 1980s and Shelley Conn as the new mother in the 2010s do a lot of this as well, trying to understand and be in tune with what is going on around them. A lot of them never interact, but here it means they get to shine on their own. In the end, there are no big mysteries or conspiracies here and the story stays a lot more personal, just with a supernatural element that pushes things forward. It makes for a better show, in tune with one where the spirit is trying to help and warn rather than to scare, and all in all it's about that sadness, rather than any sort of horror angle.

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• The ninety-second comic: #640 Hellboy As I suspect many have done, I've seen the Hellboy movie before reading this series. It's not a bad idea, it sets up the premise quite nicely and while I don't quite remember whether the plots match, it's close enough to the same universe that it works anyway. But while there is a bigger plot, Hellboy reads more as a number of cases that touch the supernatural, often with the nazi enemies that come in the backstory (something that's becoming disturbingly common in American superhero or supernatural stories). In that sense, it feels like it follows Mushi-shi - we go to a place, fix the problems, and move to the next. Here Hellboy and his companions are sent by a bureau instead. The gritty art style fits with the violence that runs through, but as with something like Sandman, it's the world the comic creates that matters, as well as the weird creatures and situations that we find - especially when we get to deal with underwater monsters or various witches. It's those supernatural creatures and events that I enjoy the most, and luckily it feels like that's what the series embraces more as time goes on.

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• The two hundred and fifty-fourth album: #254 Todd Rundgren - Something/Anything As I said, we're in the age of the double albums, but I don't think I've heard anyone embrace the advantages of having four sides to work with this much. Each of them has a distinct identity and if you start with the first you'd be deceived into thinking it's just pop, a polished sound that draws from both rock and r&b traditions to create a set of easy to listen to songs. The introduction to the second side - slightly tongue in cheek describing studio recording sounds - becomes more avant garde, with some more intellectual songs and different takes on the music. It's quite a twist and it primes you for these changes moving from a Phil Spector sound to something that would fit with Paul Simon or Bob Dylan's work with a hint of psychedelia. The third side then takes it into a harder rock with heavier lyrics, something not best suited to Todd Rundgren's voice but sounded quite distinct on its own. It's the fourth that's the odd standout, a pop operetta that's the only side with tracks not written by Rundgren and with performances from other musicians. It starts off with a loose overture that leads into a tighter performance of Dust in the Wind. On the whole, though, this shared performance feels looser, with some of the live performance left in. It's a nice set of songs, not as clearly connected but creating a nice love story through line. It's probably the closest to a set of r&b and pop tracks on the album, which works well enough here, while giving the feeling that recording sessions were a lot of fun as well. In the end, there are four sides to this album, and I feel they all work for different reasons. The second side probably connected best with me, but it's worth going on the full adventure.

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• The one hundredth classical performance: #738 Constant Lambert - The Rio Grande There is, of course, not a clear delineation between classical and 'modern' music and even where there is some distinction, the two influence each other. While it has a full orchestra and chorus, this sounds and feels distinctly different from the other pieces. It's more like a movie soundtrack in its energy and it has a big jazz influence in its sound and how it plays. To be fair, that's probably just as much part of the way we randomly jump around the list. Seeing how this feels this could also be a backing soundtrack for Merry Melodies or another cartoon series, the amount of energy it has is amazing while it feels it takes you through a story at the same time.

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• The two hundred and fifty-third album: #253 Milton Nascimento & Lo Borges - Clube da Esquina As I've seen before on this list, the Brazilian music scene has a tendency to take the prevalent music of the day and make it their own, mixing elements in a way that doesn't always get done in other countries. For Clube da Esquina, that's a case of taking their existing jazz and bossa nova route and mixing in contemporary rock, mixing in some rock ballads and psychedelic rock and bringing that experimentation into their own context. What you get is a fusion of styles that's hard to place in what we know, but gives a nice, relaxed vibe that's pleasant to listen to. In the era of double albums an hour-long album is already feeling less excessive, but regardless of that it doesn't drag as other albums of this length tend to, offering a nice variety even as it's an album that works as well in the background as something to listen to while working.

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• The two hundred and fifty-second album: #252 Hugh Masekela - Home Is Where The Music Is Here we go again. I've talked about disliking jazz albums before - they really don't work for me as these lengthy pieces that you're listening to more or less on your own with an album like this and the rise of rock seemed to have put a stop to them. The afrobeat inspiration doesn't really come through in the album either, or if it does it doesn't give it enough of a kick to stand out in my mind - only one track really feels like it, and it feels like a looser improvised section at the end rather than a part of the same album. Some bits are quite well performed, but the jazz sound never fills me with that good a feeling, especially with its 76 minute runtime.

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• The ninety-ninth classical recording: #305 Robert Schumann - Piano Quintet It sounds like this work got popular after it was composed as a known and loved piece of chamber music. Although I can't entirely judge this, I can see why it could be under these circumstances. While it goes through different emotions - the second movement is the most dour, based on a funeral march - there is quite an upbeat feel to most of it, an energy and excitement that lifts your spirits. The ascending and descending scales of the third movement grab your attention with the intensity of the piece really coming through.

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• The two hundred and fifty-first album: #251 Lou Reed - Transformer I don't think I really knew how David Bowie's influence towered over music in the early seventies. This album is clearly Lou Reed's, a follow up to his work with Velvet Underground, but it also feels aggressively glam in places with tracks where the pop genre is really coming through. Perfect Day features as the third track and it's such a good pop song that it continues to stand well here. Following up with the very rocky Hangin' Round, almost a throwback, shows the range this album is aiming for. The tracks still focus on the lyrics, which feel just as strong - Perfect Day and Walk on the Wild Side both show this as there is a lot of meaning in them, and throughout the album addresses issues that were controversial at the time. Following Candy on an earlier Velvet Underground album, there are several tracks that address LGBT icons, with the ones that (at least for the time) positively focus on trans characters. I can't say whether they still work in the current context, but it feels like it speaks of it quite tenderly. David Bowie's image, at least at the time, feels like it influences this part too - perhaps not through the lyrics, but by encouraging its content. However it worked later, this album on its own works like a lovely piece of music. The ninety-first comic: #431 Life In Hell Life In Hell is Matt Groening's comic, started over a decade before he created the Simpsons. Other than showing a few character designs that (vaguely) match the design of those characters, there isn't really much of an overlap there, with Life In Hell aiming for a less family friendly vibe even if it stays within newspaper boundaries. Rather, it is a collection of conversations or shorter stories between some set characters, or one panel gags that comment on a situation. I believe it's also one of the first to feature a gay couple without that ever being remarked on (they might be brothers, but there's clearly a relationship here). The reason was so Matt Groening couldn't be accused of bias or taking sides, but it does feel like a small step. The comics are fun, at times dated as it reports on current events, and often enough a bit bizarre. Not something I'd chase down further, but as they a number of them currently online at http://lifeinhellarchives.tumblr.com/ it's easy enough to check out.

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• The ninetieth comic: #786 Berlin: City of Stones Berlin: City of Stones, and its follow up works (which I've read part of as well) is mostly set in 1929, around the time of the great recession and the events leading up to the nazis taking control of Germany. Through it, we read the story of several people as they live their lives in Berlin through these events. The main thread is the love story of Kurt, a disaffected journalist, and Marthe, an art student. They live their life while trying to stay unaffected directly - with enough resources to not have to worry too much about what's going on. We meet a lot of different groups that are more so. One family split by the ideological differences, which leads to the mother being killed in the Blutmai massacre and the girl living on the streets. A later work introduces several black jazz musicians who have to live in this racist environment while having more privileges thanks to their work in a somewhat more known night club. It's a dark and daunting view of a world that makes you reflect more than anything on how to survive in a world where all this is going on, how you'd ignore or deal with certain things while trying to get through it. There's occasional decadence that seems unjustified, violence that would have happened but pushed away and other challenges. The simple style (skin colour is implied more than shown) adds to the bleak feel of the world and the really sets the tone for a look at a world that seemed far less alien than I thought.

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• The two hundred and fiftieth album: #250 Yes - Close to the Edge As I think we've come to expect from Yes and other prog rock bands, this 43 minute album contains three tracks. It opens, in fact, with the eighteen minute behemoth Close to the Edge, which starts with the sounds of birds and nature before coming together into a set of songs that stays remarkably coherent throughout - the throughline is there, unlike a lot of other lengthy songs like it, while moving through different movements with their different moods. It's a far more impressive feat than most, feeling in how it's built like a classical piece while staying a rock number. The album pulls off this amazing feat of keeping the three tracks focused like this - with an identity they don't lose - and never wears out their welcome. This might be the first album with these long tracks that really succeeded at this for me and I'm glad to hear that it can be done.

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• The ninety-eighth classical recording: #108 Domenico Scarlatti - Keyboard Sonatas Looking at the works that surround this one on the list, we're at a point where classical music has really left the choral and is moving on, but isn't at the bombastic stages we later get. Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas are delicate, not using fancy tricks to impress but instead playing beautiful, light pieces that impact with a relative simplicity. The list only gives a selection of the over 500 keyboard sonatas written by Scarlatti, but they already give the impression of someone working on something delicate and sweet, with a clear view of what he's doing with his works, but creating beauty out of all of that.

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2020-11-01 00:00:00

• The two hundred and fourty-ninth album: #249 Deep Purple - Made in Japan I listened to Deep Purple a few weeks ago with their album Machinehead and this album duplicates quite a bit of that. Recorded live at a few Japanese concerts, it seems the draw isn't necessarily the songs (a lot of those we've heard before) but the live performance in a double length album. As you'd expect, this leads to more extravagant solos, but also a lot of energy that comes from the feeling of having the live crowd there. It doesn't resolve the issue I had with the album a few weeks ago though - at songs of this length, you need something that holds them together, and here it even more feels like they drift too much - the live interaction making that worse. In the end, it feels like there's some good rock in here, but it lacks a real identity to hang it from.

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• The two hundred and fourty-eighth album: #248 Slade - Slayed? Slayed? is a hard rock album. Some of it has some glam rock influences and a song like 'Feel So Fine' draws on earlier rock influences, but so much of it follows the hard rock standards that it's hard to say more than that. I didn't really get drawn to any specific songs, the album oddly mostly being a presence in the background while it never gave me that feeling of reaching special heights. It's the only album of Slade's that's on the list, and it works as a good example of where else the rock genre stands, but I didn't feel this soared to greater heights.

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• The ninety-seventh classical recording: #48 Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber - Mystery Sonatas These sonatas are the earliest piece we've covered in a while and they feel from a different time. While later works start to pick up a certain sound, using string instruments (I believe it's from the continuo group if I read it correctly) that we heard in the very early works but disappears later to be replaced by heavier pianos. Here it adds an upbeat flavour that connects the music to earlier, less religious music, and while the pieces continue to have that meaning, they are also a big change from the harmonies that are present in more religious music. This feels more like a mix between the religious and secular. There is a lot of variation in these two hours of music, dominated by violin performances. As a collection, it makes good use of different instruments to lend a different feeling to each of the works as it goes through these emotions with an ear for change while keeping a lot of the work consistent. It's a nice collection of sonatas with some variety in there, and I can see how this would have been leading in its day.

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• The eighty-ninth comic: #467 Torpedo 1936 I sometimes love stories about antihero, people who aren't a traditional hero but that you end up following through their story, if not rooting for. The line between one and someone who becomes repulsive can be thin, though, and Torpedo 1936 goes too far off the wrong end. The most egregious examples are several instances of rape as a payment for a hitjob he's done, which feel unnecessary and over the top, and are the biggest crime in the series completely failing to build any empathy for the character. He's a dick, he seems to delight in killing as many as possible and it's all probably pretty realistic, but doesn't make for anything approaching a good comic. It'd be good if that changed, but as it is this feels like a comic to avoid.

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• The two hundred and fourty-seventh album: #247 Curtis Mayfield - Superfly While I haven't watched the blaxploitation film Super Fly, I've seen the similar Shaft and listened to its soundtrack. The soul of Superfly isn't quite as good - although that might be because I don't have the movie to compare it to which may make it shine by comparison. A lot of it, even with the vocals there, comes down to a sound that goes to the background, with this sounding like supporting music rather than music that stays in the foreground. It has some decent riffs, but the strength is in the vocals that aren't used for the movie, telling a rather uglier, more depressing story that doesn't approve of the protagonist as much. In that sense, the story it's telling is a lot more welcome and mostly works really well in its context. It works with those goals in mind, but is hardly exceptional in what it does. It's a fine album to listen to, but little more than that something that here is certainly a matter of taste

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• The eighty-eighth comic: #901 Sardine in Outer Space I have to say that in this case, dealing with a comic that's clearly not aimed at me is quite frustrating. I'm sure that it's fine in its category, but it's hard to see how this comic aimed at young kids is that important. The jokes are obviously kid friendly, following an anarchic set up of naughty jokes, kids being naughty and all of that enabled by the fun parent. What really gets to me is that the entire story line is immediate, throwing in sudden changes and expectations and just feeling unfulfilling. It is as if it's written by a five year olds - including their sudden "but they win because of this new thing" twists - which ultimately feels unsatisfying. I'm sure it works for the target audience, but as a comic on a list of recommendations, it doesn't hold up.

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• The eighty-seventh comic: #572 Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga On some level, Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga has shades of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, in that it tries to break down the comic in a meta fashion. However, where the latter focuses on breaking down the medium, analyzing it and trying to say something about the art form, Even A Monkey Can Draw Manga has a more down to earth, almost exploitative bend in the way it talks about drawing manga. The focus is more on creating a comic that's popular and will sell, without going deeper. While that works for the comedy (as over the top puerile as it is sometimes) it means getting lost in technical details that get a bit bewildering for a Western audience. Ultimately, it means the comic is fun - really good from the start - but loses steam as it gets to some in depth genre 'analysis' (how do I reach the biggest audience, usually with some sexual undertones) that just doesn't appeal quite as much. Still a worthwhile read, but it's a concept that stretches itself just a bit too thin.

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• The two hundred and fourty-sixth album: #246 Neil Young - Harvest The potential in folk and country rock is one where musically, it keeps itself a bit more contained - there can be more going on, but it avoids screeching guitars as well as the musically 'full' wall of sound. Not necessarily a man and his guitar, but while there's an orchestra on some of these tracks, it doesn't dominate. The connection you get with the work is more personal, from the vocals and what is there getting its hooks into you. While Neil Young's technique follows these elements, I haven't actually felt a connection with the music in this album. For a large part, he appeals towards a sense of Americana in the lyrics that I don't connect with, the country roots of the music shining through in a way that's not aimed at me. The songs are good, proficient in what they do and they're an easy enough listen (probably helped by them not seeming that political compared to others in the genre), but ultimately the lack of real consequences makes them feel hollow, while not having anything else that grasps me. It's a fine album, but doesn't seem to reach the heights I'd expect.

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• The one hundred and fifty-third TV show: #366 Neighbours Here's another soap - I'm trying to get through them a bit - but rather than the British ones I've mostly seen so far, this is an Australian series. It's a show that skews young - a lot of it seems to revolve around showing off a bunch of hot young people and the problems they get into, while mostly living the sort of middle class lifestyle that leads to and almost requires more complex storylines - amnesia from boiler explosions, charity sales to cover debts while pretending it's for underprivileged kids... I'll be honest, I found it hard to connect, even more than the other soaps I've covered here. Beyond that, it's a case of different people, same problems, made up to the standards you expect from a soap, but I personally I don't really get it.

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• The ninety-sixth classical recording: #627 Sergei Rachmaninov - The Bells While originally based on a poem, setting it to music, more interesting is how this work explores the four different moods that resonate with the different bells reference - the cosy, communal feeling of sleigh bells, the formal and almost menacing sound of wedding bells that fades towards the angelic, the loud and imposing alarm bells clearly causing panic and ending with the mournful bells at the end. It's a simple story structure but works well as an arc of emotions These four movements are supported by different vocalists, a different sound of the music, and some use of the glockenspiel, bells and other percussion instruments that give the sound of these bells. They are mostly used as emphasis, rather than dominating the work, but feel like a nice and welcome relief - I always feel they're a bit underused. Even so, the emotions and feelings created by these bells resonate through the work.

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• The eighty-sixth comic: #449 Akira I knew of Akira through the movie adaptation before the manga, probably like most, and coming at a comic from that angle is interesting. Having seen its post apocalyptic world animated prepared me for a number of the beats - mostly at the start and end of the work, which follow similar beats. They set up a destroyed Tokyo after a big explosion, the military research program that goes in with them, and at the end it tracks some parts. It looks like that end was written after the movie was made - an ending that feels relatively abrupt following the longer exploration of the shows, and it's hard not to feel Katsuhiro Otomo was done with the series at that point What lies in between those two sections are arguably as interesting, if not more so. While we start in a dystopian Neo Tokyo run as a police state, with gangs roaming the street, we see the government driven out in favour of a regime led by Tetsuo as a supernatural force, with the titular Akira as a figurehead. He doesn't necessarily have as active a role in the story, but there's that doubt in the background on how much control he exerts indirectly when we find out he could communicate telepathically. It takes its time, working out the many battles and the ebb and flow of power in the former capital, while at the same time Americans (or an international force) come in to take back the capital as well. Several factions are at play, and while we never get a scene of them coming together, there's a lot to keep track of there that switches who gets to do what. In the end, though, that fades away for the ultimate battle, but the lead up to it is tense and interesting enough. It's a great mix of places, shifting from a gritty gang dominated world to a Mad Max style world, resolving itself in a body horror disaster movie with art that seems to move in my mind as I see it, drawn that fluidly. Slightly rushed ending aside - it feels like it drops a couple of threads in favour of an ending that reinforces the dystopian nature - it's an interesting journey to go on with several characters, seeing them grow and build in this world, without a great attempt to improve or fix it - it's to exist and make a good place for yourself while helping others. There's an independence in it that's fascinating, and a slight bleakness that it can't quite overcome.

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• The two hundred and fourty-fifth album: #245 Steely Dan - Can't Buy A Thrill Sometimes you don't really realise what you're missing in the albums until you hear them, and Steely Dan is just hitting that spot - a pleasant soft rock album, nothing extravagant but just cruising along to a gentle sound. That doesn't mean there's no energy to the performance - it's there, and something like Reelin' In The Years really adds some pep to your step, but it's not as extravagant. The poppy sound, with some country influences, is incredibly pleasant to listen to and I'd happily have kept it on for longer. It sounds like this is a sound that might get more elaborate, and I've got three more albums to see how it goes, but at this point the lack of big production, a focus on simpler lyrics and sounds, is welcome.

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• The two hundred and fourty-fourth album: #244 Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath Vol. 4 Did I mention yet that we've reached the era of heavy metal? Sure, this album features a ballad in Changes, more sensitive songs scored with piano and mellotron, and a weird experiment in the form of FX (I can only assume drugs were involved in that one). The majority are what you expect - loud guitars, heavy drums, and Ozzy Ozbourne's almost shouted, strained vocals that almost seem to struggle to get on top. Heavy metal is a music style I need to be in the mood for, and I certainly prefer lighter rock than this, but it feels like this album walks the line quite well. It gets a bit much for me sometimes, but there's enough of a flow to it that the sound doesn't grow tiresome. I know it's a genre that's still early, and I'm more looking forward to how it evolves, but it needs the more deliberate choices and darkness of Under the Sun more than the comparatively generic St. Vitus Dance.

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• The ninety-fifth classical recording: #275 Vincenzo Bellini - I Puritani My day today is dominated, as far as listening is concerned, by a three hour opera, in Italian of course, about the English Civil War. Of course, with my focus on the music rather than the visuals, a lot of this does tend to escape me, but often musically a lot comes through. While other operas can be fairly jubilant in places, with a tendency to 'go big', it feels like here there's more of a focus on the solos and the smaller, personal sounds, often dropping music to let the vocalists stand, with a violin punctuating it instead. The lack of the chorus in those places really makes them feel more personal, even more when the soloists get the focus over the more complex interplay, and it feels more of a case of the music supporting the text than you would see in other operas. It's a great piece from that perspective - feeling unique without really losing your interest during the three hours.

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• The two hundred and fourty-third album: Big Star - #1 Record With the rock world at this point dominated by glam rock and the start of metal, with big instruments and hard guitars, the simpler rock of Big Star stands out, foreshadowing later bands doing the same. These are the gentler ballads like Thirteen, which have a slight folk influence but mostly come out as a lovelier explanation. Then there's Don't Lie To Me, which feels like a throwback at this point but sticks through a simpler garage rock style. While I've never heard of the band before, it feels like this is setting up a lot of what will follow - not exactly back to basics, but something that goes back to a focus on the music and lyrics. I'm obviously only seeing that from a snapshot - others would have done the same, but it feels like a good album for it nevertheless.

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• The two hundred and fourty-second album: #242 Deep Purple - Machine Head We saw the previous Deep Purple album as a starting point of heavy metal and there's no doubt that this album really puts us there. There are prog rock elements in here, with what feels like a showy performance, but it also has the driving riffs, the loud bass and aggressive guitar. The lyrics are what you'd expect from that - some time has gone into them, but none of them feel like they'll change the world either, with few deep meanings to discover. They are, in that sense, more accessible. Between the extended solos and other jams, the album long tracks tend to lose their identity sometimes. When you get the core riffs and moments, they're at their strongest, but unfortunately they do meander sometimes to the point where they get lost when they do so. I can see that being fine for a casual listen, but it doesn't work as much for me when I want to focus on an album.

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• The ninety-fourth classical recording: #453 Reynaldo Hahn - Melodies As a sign that we're listening to a prodigy, the collection of melodies we listened to contained some written when he was fourteen. These songs set existing poems to music, an exercise that means only a piano accompanies work with the flourishes being in the vocals. One of the things that happens is that we get almost a modern album, with a baritone singing several songs that otherwise feel like classical works. It's a varied set of pieces, as you can expect from a number of works put together, but what shines through is how they build on a simple melody, letting the words shine through and emphasizing their emotion. It's simple, but very effective.

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• The two hundred and fourty-first album: #241 Randy Newman - Sail Away It's hard to ignore how much of a throwback this album feels to be in places, with Lonely at the Top feeling like a track that could have been in Sinatra's repertoire and others throwing back to older gospel music influences. The short length of most sense feels like they contribute as well, so there are more jumps between stylings - there's an electric guitar in Last Night I Had A Dream, which is followed by Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear, which plays purely on the piano and which I can imagine a performer singing sat at the piano in a 1920s music hall performance. Even so, these were all composed and written by Randy Newman himself, here recording new material and songs he'd written for others in the past. When he's able to get out there with his own material, a sarcastic hint in some of the best (to me) like Political Science, that really works in making a point while really inhabiting a character. While the music can feel older, the lyrics are more often of a contemporary nature. They're worth listening to and paying attention to, as that's what really enhances and makes the album.

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2020-10-01 00:00:00

• The two hundred and fourtieth album: #240 David Bowie - Hunky Dory And with David Bowie entering the room, we see another piece of the seventies music fall into place. We're due to see a lot of different sides of his work, but the first on the list (his fourth studio album) both has a fairly singular identity - they feel like they sound as a single album - but show a variety of emotions, with the upbeat 'Kooks' followed by a slower, more depressing Quicksand. There's still a lot of production in it and it ends with the upswing that feels typical of the album's sound to help with that. Add to that the references to folk rock, with Song for Bob Dylan being the closest, towards artier rock, playing with glam influences, and it's it's a mix that not only sounds good, but has a lot of content in the lyrics as well to make these a lot more meaningful. It's a delightful album, with something new hiding in each album in a burst of creativity that I feel we see in few artists - similar to the period of the Beatles working together and trying what they can do in their albums without having to worry about what others will say. Add to that the silliness showing through a bit in the start of a track like Andy Warhol - both a dedication to perfection and a moment of levity (at least to the listener) that punctures the mythical legend a bit to show the humanity underneath it.

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• The ninety-third classical recording: #397 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Piano Concerto no. 1 While the name of this piece may not be as descriptive, the opening few bars are familiar with a horn theme and various motifs that seem to have been used in a lot of other places. Oddly enough, it also feels like it stands apart from the more delicate rest of the work, the proper first movement relying more on just piano and strings and making for a gentler journey. The piano work in this piece is obviously the focus and the performance of that is as amazing. There's a great focus on it in the first movement, but it's a constant presence that sounds complicated in a lot of places and clearly requires skill to pull off as well. This is strongest in the march of the third movement, which drives relentlessly forward. On the whole, this is a classic piece, but with more layers than you'd hear if you only listened to that famous introduction.

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• The eighty-fifth comic: #184 Uncle Scrooge: The Second-Richest Duck Thanks to my grandparents' giant collection of Donald Duck magazines when I was growing up, I've read a lot of Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck stories. Coming back to it today then makes for a nice and comfortable restart on the comics list. While I'm not sure I've read this story before, there are certainly a lot of familiar elements that these stories end up having, with this one being the first appearance of Scrooge's rival Flintheart Glomgold. The amount of ground it manages to cover in twenty pages is quite amazing - not just the two rivals meeting, but also their lengthy competition to determine who wins on the last bit of the test, the fowl with the longest piece of string (as their wealth is equal everywhere else). It's fun, following cartoon conventions, wiht a bit of tension built in even if you know who'll win it at the end by comic logic. For me, it really is a return to a familiar world and familiar art and this is a good entry in that series.

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• The two hundred and thirty-ninth album: #239 T. Rex - Electric Warrior I see this album cited as kicking off the glam rock movement, the band's appearance on Top of the Pops setting up that idea more than anything. While I'm sure this played on trends that had started, there's something different about the rock played here. It's subdued, without the big flourishes from before, but still more produced than those early rock albums were. It differs somewhat between tracks, of course, but the well known Get It On is a good example of this - a fairly simple rhythm, relying on some harmonies but creating a sound that's clearly intentionally produced to create crescendos. Plenty of the other tracks beyond that don't necessarily stick with you, but they're fine to listen to, a decent album but I know glam rock will go further than this.

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• The one hundred and fifty-second TV show: #94 Top of the Pops While originally a British show, Top of the Pops transcended borders and for some time some decades ago I watched the Dutch edition. It gave away the trick of the show quite quickly, as the show has an identical studio in each country it records in so they can share performances. For a Dutch boy, Wyclef Jean singing about '999' when the version played on Dutch radio used the American '911' was a dead giveaway. This doesn't appear to have been as widespread as I thought, based on the lack of international editions in general, but it always stuck in my head as a bit of TV magic - the same sets everywhere with some editing magic did a lot of the heavy lifting there. As to the show itself, while we are going to cover more of its genre in the future, this does feel like the ur-example of a show like it: several performers record a performance, a presenter links them and you get access to see these artists perform without having to get to a concert. It makes complete sense, especially in the time before music videos as a way to see these performances. At the same time, with the way technology has changed we don't need them when you can go on Youtube and see all of these performance, recorded legally or not. We saw some random editions for this, thanks to BBC 4 repeats, but looking at that is just as much commenting on the music of the day as it is the show. The stages, after all, are what you'd expect from the day, abstract so it doesn't distract too much, while the show gives you the music I've discussed on plenty of other posts. The lack of adornment does it a big favour in that sense - not having to deal with other distractions means you just get a show that's as good as the music that contains it. The episodes we watched did still have the dance troupe performances, with Legs & Co in the episodes we saw. They make sense in the context of the show early on, since when a band can't or won't perform you still need to show something on TV, but these days the hastily created routines seem cheesy and unnecessary. As a show, though, this sets a template and I wonder how other shows like Soul Train will do following it.

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• The one hundred and fifty-first TV show: #855 The Big C It's hard to come back from it when the first episodes of a show leave a bad taste in your mouth. Having dealt with cancer in my family, the way Cathy deals with her diagnosis - becoming selfish and steamrolling people without telling people about her diagnosis and getting their support - infuriated me. If her plan was to hide it, it feels like a way to deny everyone else a chance to stay goodbye and come to terms with it. I get that it's how people would react. It's something she tries to make up for later in the series - sort of - but the selfishness of it was off putting, even more in the ways I feel she was harming herself with it. It was too much to be able to bear and I forwarded to later episodes to get past that moment. It still didn't feel quite right and it didn't feel like something good. It's a decent, well acted show, but I just struggled to connect with people in a way that doesn't work for me.

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• The one hundred and fiftieth TV show: #800 Man v. Food The concept of Man v. Food can be described as the Travel Channel doing a food show - host Adam Richman travels around the US and in each city visits a couple of restaurants and, at the end of the episode, takes part in a food challenge. Usually it's eating a lot of food (17 hot dogs in an hour, a truly pizza and so on), but in others it comes down to eating the spiciest meals. It's a good concept, not to be watched when you're hungry because this will make it worse. This is especially the case in the main part of the episode, when you get a bunch of cuisines on show and see how these are made. The challenge at the end of the episode can be interesting for a bit, but feels like it stretches out a bit too far and at times just gets gross. The food still looks good, but you ask yourself what the point is - why eat this much food when it just makes you sick. Still, weird intermissions aside, it's a nice, simple food show mostly focused on common food - sort of American, in that it needs to have made it over there. It's a perfect show to have on during dinner, as long as they don't go too far on the gross side, which is the risk.

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• The five hundred twenty-seventh song: The Winner Takes It All - Abba It feels like there's little to say about Abba songs that hasn't been said already. The Winner Takes It All has multiple layers, something that shows Abba at their best as there's the victory, making it something you can dance too, but with that melancholic angle that's in there, with Agnetha's almost spoken word bridge having most of this element. It's an interesting song with a real life element that's there, even if it doesn't quite reflect reality. It's a sad celebration that feels like it's one of their best in showing what they can do. The five hundred twenty-eighth song: Rapture - Blondie Part of the reason this song is its historic significance, the first song featuring rap to reach the number one position in the US charts. It's a weird experience, in part because these days, Debbie Harry's rap would sound more like a parody of the idea while here it's them using a musical style that seems to have been in their world and using a new tool in the arsenal. Even so, it grows the genre in a way by using its own music rather than sampling others, even as rap was, or became, a black culture phenomenon. The five hundred twenty-ninth song: While You See a Chance - Steve Winwood It feels like with the eighties coming in and Abba and the like setting a direction for music, that others follow. While You See a Chance moves a rock star to perform something closer to electronic pop and here it feels like part of that shift. The song itself is some nice synth rock, moving towards that more pop sound. The song's quite good for that, but it's also not the most out there or impressive song, instead it's more of an indication of a moment in how music developed. The five hundred thirtieth song: Heartattack and Vine - Tom Waits It's clear that blues rock from the 1980s is a different beast from what we've seen earlier in the list, and while Tom Waits' vocals match that of the performers of the sixties, there's something sleazier and darker in there that's everywhere, from presentation to sound, with lyrics about the dark side of life and those who are poor, rather than hardship and more classic stories that feature in other blues songs. The constant threat is there, and it paints a world that'll be a shock to the middle class, feeling exaggerated but still also grounded in reality. The five hundred thirty-first song: Kings of the Wild Frontier - Adam & The Ants There is a lot to say about what followed punk as you can say about punk itself. Adam & The Ants come from that world, but clearly build on their own things. They feel extravagant, creating a performance rather than just playing the music, and while the critical and political lyrics are still there, the driving beat that they made their signature goes beyond the punk aggression to feel the base of something that sound more threatening, contrasting more jubilant and louder vocals that build to aggression in a way that moves beyond that of punk - using the punk vocal style to mix with a more intense hard rock style that creates a threat and a performance more than anything else. The five hundred thirty-second song: Redemption Song - Bob Marley & The Wailers While this is one of the last Bob Marley songs released during his lifetime, there's also something about this in here that's specifically his. Recorded with just an acoustic guitar, the constant sound of reggae is gone in favour of a sad ballad that uses a style of singing that follows what you get in reggae rather than in country or such. It's a show of artistry, a call for continuing to fight for freedom that comes across far stronger because it's just Marley playing a guitar. It's unexpected, but for me this does feel like it's his best. The five hundred thirty-third song: Dead Souls - Joy Division Dead Souls is an interesting pick for the list, a heavy metal B-side with lyrics evoking an emotional darkness that's the band's trademark but eerily prefigure Ian Curtis' passing a few months later. It's dark and haunting for those reasons and difficult to listen to in retrospect. It references regression and past lives, but also through that the spectres of his past that keep calling him back. It's a difficult song to listen to with that retrospect and an unfortunate story that this leads into, but it shows how well music can send these emotions at the same time.

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• The one hundred and fourty-ninth TV show: #328 The Young Ones I've had the DVDs of this show around for a long time, waiting to unleash them for this blog. With it having been a decade since I watched the series, it was interesting to revisit and see how it holds up. Looking at it, it's not the highest of humour, and the first two episodes is mostly the characters being mean and violent to each other, without much more going on. It gets better later, as that tones down in favour of more absurdist plots, surrounded with loads of slapstick violence and at times terrible jokes. It's the weird cutaways and out of nowhere jokes that work best, with the slapstick violence working best when focused and smaller - in particular when it starts making fun of its own tendency to do so in the later episodes. The second season seems to have had a budget increase, used for longer and bigger cutaways, including hiring an elephant or two, and a bunch more fourth wall breaking gags (including one where Neil's parents comment on him starring in this terrible show). There's still a lot of commitment to the characters, four losers and stereotypes of the groups of students that seem to have been prevalent in the eighties, but the show moves beyond them more often. It's not the most amazingly clever comedy, but as the 1980s equivalent of slapstick comedy, with its aggressive attitude and criticism of the attitudes at the time, is still pretty good. You just need to get past those first few bad episodes.

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• The ninety-second classical recording: #258 Frederic Chopin - Nocturnes Starting off my prep for this piece, I saw nocturnes described as a piece inspired by night, played later in the evening and, hence, sounding smaller than other pieces. There's a lot of sensitivity in these pieces as the piano gently plays - they are neat little pieces, performed well here - something that seemed challenging enough. It's good accompaniment, not necessarily something you fully focus on, but work as good background music. They're lovely, simple pieces that work really well.

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• The two hundred and thirty-eighth album: #238 Harry Nilsson - Nilsson Schmilsson Reading up on him, it seems a bit odd I've never heard of Harry Nilsson. While I don't think there are any songs on here that I really know, the push towards a rock-influenced pop is clear here, with a pop sound that eschews the psychedelic or the soul, but uses a rock influence and takes the old rock classic sound, tones down the guitars and such, and moves into a pleasant sound rather than the more serious, morose tone of folk rock. There's thought put into the lyrics, but there's a happy tone to several of the songs which really make you feel better. One of the best places to compare different sounds is a cover on the album, and Without You has been covered more famously by others. Here, it feels like a bit more of a production number than others on the album, with vocal double tracking, violins and a generally more bombastic feeling, but also one that feels well composed. Similarly, Coconut was written by Nilsson but was covered since and I don't think I ever heard the original. The song is pretty minimal, which works really well for it, even if the imitated accents seem a bit odd now.

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• The ninety-first classical recording: #324 Robert Schumann - Symphony no. 3 "Rhenish" There's a beauty in this piece that I can't quite put into words. There aren't these stand out phrases or specific movements that have something extra, instead there's a lovely, gentle flow between them with each having their own identity, but the symphony also sounding more uniform than I feel I've heard with other pieces. It's a lovely set up,

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• The two hundred and thirty-seventh album: #237 John Prine - John Prine Country folk isn't entirely my thing and it's hard to ignore those instincts when listening to this album, which goes all in on that and makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable as a result. It's all a bit too maudlin and a bit too twangy to work for me, a bit too morose to make me want to connect with it. Even the song I know most, Sam Stone, doesn't work for me in this rendition. It's one of the situations where I don't see the appeal of this music at all.

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• The ninetieth classical recording: #192 Ludwig von Beethoven - Piano Sonata in F minor, op. 57, "Appassionata" While we've been listening mostly to more recent classical works, it feels like the older ones have been neglected. Going back to the Appassionata really made an impact. Gone are the big orchestra scores and instead it's a masterful piano performance. There's an intensity in the performance, starting off quite forceful and dark in the first movement but becoming more delicate and peaceful in the second. It calmly repeats itself through several variations. It gets more frantic in the repetitions and stays forceful, but it feels like some of that anger has dissipated, leaving (as per the title) a work with passion even as it has some darkness.

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• The two hundred and thirty-sixth album: #236 Gene Clark - White Light From the moment this album opened with a harmonica blues guitar playing, I know that what I was in for was a simple country rock album, rather than anything more avant garde, following the return to basics that acts related to the Byrds seem to follow. While that's fine - this is a good country rock album, the folk route works for Gene Clark - it's also not a sound that I can say excites me. It's a lovely album, well made, but in the end it'll never jump out at me as something I have to listen to again.

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• The one hundred and fourty-eighth TV show: #15 The Quatermass Experiment Can you fairly judge a six part serial on only the first two episodes? I've certainly made snap judgements on other shows, but it feels difficult here, in part because I did enjoy it. Due to its age, only the first two episodes of remain - not because the recordings of the other four episodes were lost, but because recording it turned out to be so difficult that they decided not to bother for the others. It's hard to imagine now, but they would have had actors come in to the play again - live, as happened here. The issue that arises here is one that I've also noticed in old Doctor Who serials, and others with that set up: while the first episode is interesting in the way it sets up a story, the middle episodes can feel like they're spinning their wheels until the final episode or two resolve what's going on. The skill is on dividing it well enough that it keeps being interesting, with stuff moving in and out, at which point the episodes in the middle feel like they are important in keeping things moving. With the conclusion missing, the second episode looks a bit worse as it's a lot of exposition and waiting around, a bit of a let down after the dynamic parts of the first episode. There's still some sitting around in labs, but there's some quite exciting crowd scenes that feel like they're more impressive live. The fact that these were live - per the way the BBC worked at the time - adds to how impressive and interesting it is. There are some sound issues, where the performers aren't that clear, but on the whole it works out. Sure, they have theatre experience, but having to deal with more sets and cameras makes this even more interesting since, unlike later serials in the Quatermass series, it sounds like nothing was prerecorded and there's no room for mistakes. I would have loved to have seen the entire serial, as the way this abruptly ends makes it a bit more awkward. Even more important, it sounds like this was incredibly influential in one of my favourite genres, I do plan on watching the other serials so I can experience those and hopefully see how the full arc works out and I hope that will keep paying off.

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• The one hundred and fourty-seventh TV show: #254 Abigail's Party Some of the best comedies are the ones that are rooted in reality, that take people you know in real life, have them do their thing and have it all fall in place in a real way. Abigail's Party is about a party in the seventies that don't feel entirely different from what I would expect my parents to have (although, of course, there are no kids here), but with most dysfunctional relationships. Beverly, played by the brilliant Alison Steadman, has invited a new couple in the neighbourhood to a party at her place, together with Sue, the mother of the titular Abigail, so she can be out of the way during Abigail's party. It's an awkward affair, with the subtly bossy Beverly ordering everyone around, her husband Lawrence trying to show how elevated he is in a way that seems snobby, while the mismatched couple of Angela and Tony seem to suffer in front of us. It makes for a comedy of awkwardness, one where nobody quite gets along but everyone stays polite enough not to cause a scene. There's a constant underlying tension that comes out further as everyone drinks more, with a dark and explosive end that both resolves and removes some of the tension, but seems to leave things worse. As a play, it's an amazing tour de force with characters that interact believably with each other creating the small stakes that the party brings, but it's also intense enough that it's difficult to watch at times. It's a known masterpiece, and it shows clearly here why that's the case.

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• The two hundred and thirty-fifth album: #235 Flamin' Groovies - Teenage Head Teenage Head goes back to an earlier era of rock, taking the Stones' blues-inspired sound, using a simpler sound that avoids the more eclectic sounds contemporary rock took on. Sure, it bypasses the innocence of earlier rock, but with this listed as garage rock, the album takes on that simpler rock sound that we'll later see flow into punk and its companions. It makes for a compact half hour, with some good different riffs between tracks - Teenage Head sounds more threatening and darker than what came before, but also brings in more blues stylings than previous tracks, while Evil-Hearted Ada could easily be an Elvis Presley song. It's in a weird way more timeless for it - a throwback to the early 60s that also fits in with the early 70s and at least resonates further down. I'm not sure I'd consider it a masterpiece as such - it doesn't line up with my tastes quite well enough for that, and there's something lacking here, but it is just a really good rock album.

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• The one hundred and fourty-sixth TV show: #314 The Chinese Detective In theory, the concept of this show should have appealed to us. A Chinese detective in the Metropolitan police - a distinct minority, especially in the eighties - faces prejudice as he does his job. He's also a maverick and pursues the case of his father being thrown off the force unfairly and the corruption that underlies it. In practice, the case of the week structure doesn't blend well with the ongoing plot and while the two can inform each other, it feels like usually, the weekly case gets removed and stays unresolved in exchange for a favour or two. It's missing some connective tissue and I think the show was made a t a time where this structure hadn't necessarily developed far enough yet. It feels like it's best when it avoids that plot and deals with a maverick detective who also fights against prejudice - creating enough of a tension to work. However, just as much of it seems to come down to Ho's father abusing him, the chief going a bit further just to be mean and it all feeling unnecessary. I guess I may have missed part of the timing, but all in all it was too much of a mixed bag to keep diving into. The show was the first British show to feature a British Chinese lead and, I believe, might still be the only one to do so, and it's certainly notable for that. When it addresses that, the show is as interesting, as the way John Ho deals with it in the context of its day works well, but it doesn't do enough to elevate the story - an ongoing plot that built further on that might have suited better.

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• The two hundred and thirty-fourth album: #234 Faces - A Nod is As Good As a Wink... to a Blind Horse It's not hard to draw a parallel between this album and the blues rock of the Rolling Stones. There's the same drawl, the same instruments, the same country-ish guitars. The album follows tha pattern, without any major surprises - not going into the really hard numbers the Stones tended to put one or two of in an album - but it flows along with some experimentation. It's still pretty straight up country and blues rock, a formula that works here. The eighty-ninth classical recording: #718 Alexander Zemlinsky - String Quartet no. 3 I'm still not sure I've fully got the vocabulary down to talk about these recordings, which means that for these string quartets it gets harder to say much here. They can be fairly abstract - creating nice music without feeling like they have any story to them. For me, there's always some longing in a melody using only string instruments, with this piece having a lot of those moments. There are the bursts of energy, but it really lives in the quieter parts. The main change to this is in the final part, described as 'burlesque' in one of the lists I have for this, with a far more upbeat sound. It feels a bit of an odd choice to put that at the end - usually the energetic piece comes earlier - but to be honest, it was the pick me up here that I did need today.

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• The two hundred and thirty-third album: #233 Fela Kuti & The Afrika 70 With Ginger Baker - Live! How should I address an afrobeat album? As a fusion of west African music, soul, rock and jazz, there is a lot to unpack in these, with some complex arrangements that take some time to really make sense of. It's an interesting style of music, removing the droning repetition of soul while maintaining its call and response in places. It has the rock energy and mood, jazz's at times looser style and drum solos that last for ages. At the same time, this is its own sound, an album with a different style of percussion and a different way in which it makes music. Does it get tedious to listen to? Yeah, sometimes, but there's a craftsmanship in here that's incredible to listen to, and at times feels more like a classical symphony arranged using modern instruments than anything else, and that's good enough for me.

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• The two hundred and thirty-second album: #232 Janis Joplin - Pearl I am certain that the initial reaction to this album was coloured by Janis Joplin's death a few months prior. Further removed from her and her work, my first thoughts went to my time in a supermarket where, for various reasons, the ambient music track that played wasn't swapped out for almost a year. As the tape played two or three times a day, you got to know the songs intimately, and even now, nearly twenty years later, I associate the pop of Burt Bacharach and the gentler soul songs on this album with those days. Janis Joplin has a great blues voice in these songs and the lament in her voice is real - not raw and unpolished, but she carries a lot of emotion in her songs. While these are on well produced tracks, they genuinely feel hollow without her and instead feel a lot more shallow. There's a lot of emotion in her voice that carries through and knowing the circumstances of the album's production, it becomes that much more harrowing. The eighty-eighth classical recording: #898 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis It's interesting how in the 20th century, especially after the second world war, classical music became more experimental. Metastatis has a lot of theory behind it, based on mathematical constructs, and uses 61 musicians playing different parts to create an uncertain, chaotic work. There's no single melody, it's unsettling, but there's a method to how the music combines - not by repetition, but by overlapping at the right time to create these moments. It's probably not a piece to just listen to, but it's an interesting experience and I can see how live, this would be even more amazing.

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• The one hundred and fourty-fifth TV show: #489 Riget Riget is a true split show for us. We watched the first season as part of the 1001 movies list about five or six years ago, while we left the second season until more recently - something I'd still count as part of the list. Having watched this second season, I feel it was important to see as a sequel, even if it didn't quite live up to the first. Riget is probably best described as Twin Peaks via Lars von Trier, with a hospital drama replacing the cop show of Twin Peaks. Lars von Trier explicitly cited that show as inspiration, so it feels natural to compare. It has that show's weird vibe and at times odd storylines, mixing the mundane with the supernatural. It also doesn't live up to it. Twin Peaks presents a living town with a lot of sympathetic characters, while Riget - in part due to its shorter runtime - doesn't take the time to set up the characters that well. It takes its time with some seeming non-sequiturs, but it feels like it doesn't let the characters live. Each has their own arc, odd and bizarre, intersecting as they do. This works best in the first season, as the weirdness slowly amps up - the first episode is mostly hospital drama, but from the end of that episode it slowly starts changing. The second season, where it's constantly there, doesn't work because it's leaning on that too much, with people getting too accepting in places. It's the weaker half, at times serving to ramp up the weakness without being committed to resolving as much that's going on. Again, to use the obvious comparison, Twin Peaks had open endings, but wasn't as afraid to end stories as others start. That's not to say that this is a bad show. I enjoyed Riget immensely, even if some arcs suited me better than others. It's the first season that's truly the masterpiece though, with the second season at times buckling under the need to replicate it or missing the tone a bit.

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• The two hundred and thirty-first album: #231 Funkadelic - Maggot Brain While funk is far from my favourite genre, funk rock and its variations that are covered by Maggot Brain works better. Some of the rhythmic repetition works better when pushed into a rock song, more as a chorus than the whole theme of the song. With that said, Maggot Brain pushes for different reasons. It starts with a ten minute guitar solo by Eddie Hazel. While it's a good performance, it is also quite different from the rest of the album, with its larger focus on vocals including the call and response parts from funk. The sound of the album is far enough off the beaten track that I need to get used to it - no doubt in part because this is the first time the book seems to pay attention to it - but once I did it was good, something to cheer you up and keep you happy throughout. It is, for the purposes of this exploration, a new innovation in music that i know will be influencing R&B and probably feed back into mainstream rock in a way that I believe I'm really going to enjoy.

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• The two hundred and thirtieth album: #230 Joni MItchell - Blue It might be the specific ordering of the book, but we're getting more folk songs in the list lately. Blue is the first of four of Joni Mitchell's albums on the list and provides some more welcome folk songs, a mix of the more maudlin works and upbeat songs occasionally verging towards rock. Musically it's lovely, the mix of instruments, underscores the songs nicely, sometimes just supporting Joni's songs while in others, such as Carey, feeling like its own story. Then the lyrics work well. There are no calls to change the world here, instead these feel like personal stories, lamenting the end of a relationship as well as celebrating better times, and I think there's something to find in most of these songs - something that connects. It's a lovely album - nothing big, but it works well at this size. The eighty-seventh classical recording: #616 Arnold Schoenberg - Gurrelieder Two music performances in a day? Yeah, it was time to dust off this list following everything else that's been going on in the world. Not just that, we're starting with a two hour performance of various poems, with a full orchestra, solo vocalists and a choir. While partially telling a love story, there's no other performance - it's purely the music and the songs, and although it feels it could be an opera at times, the staging doesn't work that way. The music is big and majestic, creating and invoking the fantasy landscape this seems to take place as a medieval romance. It's a grandiose work, requiring a large orchestra and a large chorus, which means the entire work feels big. It feels like an intentional choice, in part because the story could be smaller, but intentionally isn't made to be that way. It certainly has its tender moments - the speaker's part feels that way - but it's that much bigger at other times, which is what makes this special.

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2020-08-01 00:00:00

• The two hundred and twenty-ninth album: Leonard Cohen - Songs of Love and Hate I've covered enough folk from this era before, between Bob Dylan and other contemporary artists. From that, I know that it's a hit and miss genre for me, sometimes dependent on my mood at the time as so much of it relies on hitting that emotional core. Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate hits an odd spot for me in that, as it has some lyrics that connect with me, but then adds some flourishes that don't feel quite right to me, with Diamonds in the Mine feeling really off for me there. Perhaps it's the vocals: Leonard Cohen's gravel suits some songs, but not all, and right now it feels like it goes between pulling me in on the smaller one and pushing me away when it's bigger. Folk, more than anything, thrives on that emotional connection, and today it felt like it fluctuated so much that I couldn't decide where the album fell.

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• The one hundred forty-fourth TV show: #367 Eastenders Is it bad to say that all soaps feel the same? Other than different faces and a different setting, so much of it feels the same that I genuinely get quite bored with the episodes and don't see the point of them as much. I get that the appeal is in part in getting to know the different people, but I saw so many faces in these few episodes that I couldn't catch up with all of them and there were a bunch of storylines I couldn't really follow - and this is while watching several omnibus editions that meant they shoudl have gone through. I mean, oddly, the acting feels better here than I've seen in other soaps and it seems like some more are was put into it, but the stories are just fine and most of them feel repetitive one way or another. Again, this is a genre I'll never quite understand, with its sheer size making me even less likely to get there.

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• The two hundred and twenty-eighth album: #228 Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Pictures at an Exhibition We covered another Emerson, Lake & Palmer album two weeks ago, a lengthy jazz fusion album that just didn't sit right with me. Pictures at an Exhibition, a prog rock interpretation of the classical piece that I will be covering for that list some day. It works far better for me, the progression of the classical piece supporting the different decisions for this live performance well - going between genres, moving from using just the organ to having a prog rock arrangement of the same linking pieces. It's a piece that feels coherent, flows well and feels like a really good interpretation of the work. I think I've got to schedule the full work soon when we get back to listening to classical pieces.

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• The two hundred and twenty-seventh album: Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story It's weird how an opening can affect your opinion of the rest of the album. The titular track that opens the album is explicitly racist and quite sexist, a combination that felt apparent just listening to it and just put me off of what was a decent rock song initially. It made me look at the entire thing with some suspicion, an uphill battle the album didn't seem up to. I have to admit that Rod Stewart's vocals add to my discomfort. While they're fine for the harder rock numbers, the strained, hoarse vocals don't suit the ballads and more sensitive numbers he seems fond off and while it'd make sense to include one or two in there, this album uses them too much. Because of that, there are flashes of good songs, but I'm not sure the entire album works as well.

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• The two hundred and twenty-sixth album: #226 Serge Gainsbourg - Histoire de Melody Nelson We've only covered Gainsbourg for the songs list so far, where it focused on his individual songs. For the albums list, the compilers selected this concept album with a throughline of the singer's romance with Melody. While the chanson style is one that is a familiar one as I heard it often enough growing up, it feels like the list doesn't show it (or really that many non-English language acts) that often. It feels like a nie break, a gentler album that plays on the feeling of atmosphere and feeling that these French songs bring, one where you get enough of the lyrics to set a tone, but don't quite need it to be brought into this world. What helps the album in particular is that while the vocals may be more traditional, it's actually quite pop-like in its setup, using electric guitar and organs and a lot of other flourishes that feel like they'd suit Phil Spector - but with a depth of lyrics and focus on vocals rather than those being drowned out as you would get in those numbers. It's cleverly and nicely done and there's something gloriously immersive about it.

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• The two hundred and twenty-fifth album: #225 Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV With this being the fourth of five Led Zeppelin albums on the list, I started off wondering whether the repetition had started to become a bit much and there wouldn't be enough for the album to offer something new in. Mostly, what sets it apart is that later in the album, the album calms down, with Stairway to Heaven the big centerpiece, a fairly mellow number which doesn't have as much of an impact for me, but where I can see how it works far more effectively as a way to reach someone. Even when it does step up, it feels fairly sedate, an increase in energy without overdoing it. IN the end though, it feels like nothing in the album really sticks with me. I know I listened to it, but I doubt I'd recognise the songs if I heard them again.

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• The two hundred and twenty-fourth album: #224 Emerson, Lake & Palmer - Tarkus Oh boy - another prog rock album with one side being a single twenty minute epic that feels jazz-infused improv a few bars in. There's some more structure to Tarkus than that implies, but it still feels like it lacks the focus of the really grand epics. There's some storytelling in here, but the lyrics don't fulfill that and the music feels more like an accompaniment to the liner images. The rest of the album, like some many prog rock albums, feels like a playground, trying to seem smarter than it might well be. There are some interesting experiments with instruments, but it feels like it's been done better, with more earned confidence - I can see how this could be your thing if you're into prog rock, but it's hard to do so when you feel the genre has shot past what makes it good.

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• The one hundred fourty-third TV show: #690 The X Factor I'm not a fan of these singing competition reality shows, but The X-Factor feels like it's more off-putting than others in the type. It feels like it's all about stroking the judges' egos, having them belittle and play tricks as they compete, rather than actually being about the performers themselves. This may change in later seasons, but it's so strong in the first season that I watched that I was genuinely put off even after the first episodes, auditions that seemed set up to take too much advantage of people. It seems to be made to feed these egomaniacs, whether they play it up or not, and I wouldn't want to watch any more of it. The two hundred and twenty-third album: #223 Don McLean - American Pie Listening to the title track of the album, it really made much more sense to me. As a statement, it says a lot about Don McLean's point of view, a statement about his work as much as it's commemorative. It's still joyful and excited, not just sad about the day the music died, and it's that sort of celebration that carries through. The sensitive Vincent - the other notable song here - isn't jubilant, but it's so caring and sweet that it makes its own impact. Everybody Loves Me, Baby is the oddball on the album, a jubilant, noisy number that's partially just people making noise. Through that contrast, Don McLean makes his point - that of the self serving, unaware annoying person - so much better. He is being over the top, but considering that if others would have recorded it this way, it might have been slightly more of a jubilant love songs rather than a complete send up like it feels here. While not all instant classics, it feels like American Pie has a few tentpoles, and a number of thoughtful songs surrounding it, with plenty of different emotions portrayed in the album. It was a really enjoyable listen, a folk album that, like the best of them - really shows you what's happening and impressing those emotions on you without thinking.

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2020-07-01 00:00:00

• The two hundred and twenty-second album: #220 Dolly Parton - Coat of Many Colors I don't think that it's unfair to say that Dolly Parton has a sound, focused on a simple guitar backing to support her songs. Other instruments and harmonies come in, but it's those two that feature most heavily on most of her songs and changing it out for a bass guitar already feels like an interesting step to switch things up. In this case, that's not bad, as it works as a sound, but I have to admit it made Early Morning Breeze a favourite for me. Instead, it gives a focus to her lyrics that carries through the album. The aforementioned Early Morning Breeze creates that image of a walk through nature in the early morning, or stepping out into the garden and enjoying nature. Others are clear love songs, sweet and effective, reflections on her childhood (including the titular track) and other slices of life. It's sweet and persuasive, with some amazing lyrics . It's an amazing album for that, and especially when it mixes things up more on the second half, the album is really enjoyable.

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• The two hundred and twenty-first album: #221 Elton John - Madman Across The Water Listening to Madman Across The Water, I've somehow felt a bit underwhelmed. There are some big flourishes on the songs, but most of it feels like quite standard, synthy pop of the day. The lyrics are well written and thought out, but aren't as impactful on all of the songs - Indian Sunset's story probably feels like it gets told the best. It's not that the album is bad - it just felt like none of it did anything for me. I see the quality, sure, but it doesn't feel like this has anything to reach me in it.

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• The two hundred and twentieth album: Can - Tago Mago When you have an album of seven tracks that's seven minutes in length, you know you're going to get something experimental. This krautrock album goes to some weird places, piling on other psychedelic influences to create stream of consciousness music. Parts go from one area to the other, using candid performances, backwards recordings and candidly captured sounds of rehearsals and jam sessions. It's unsettling at times, a weird insight into the mind of what seems a weird group, and something I think I still struggle to define. It's an interesting album, but the repetition over some of these long tracks gets quite tiresome, at which point it feels like the track gets thrown at you more than that you're actively listening to it - it just doesn't always have those hooks to keep grabbing your attention. It's a state of mind, an album that isn't necessarily great, but it's creative and different. I listened, I think I got part of it, but I see no reason to go back to it.

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• The two hundred and nineteenth album: #219 The Doors - L.A. Woman L.A. Woman is another blues rock album from The Doors, but where that felt staid on the previously listed albm, there's something here that makes it more contemporary. Some songs are more uptempo and angry, but right now there's something soothing about a track like Cars Hiss By My Window, a blues track that comes along nicely and relaxes you. The titular L.A. Woman, aside from the its length, steps it up more, but even then it feels like an extended jam session rather than the more produced styles of rock that seem to be its contemporaries. It ends with Riders on the Storm, more produced, deliberate and even more a part of this relaxed mood music, with the backdrop of rain and calmer sounds. The album has that vein throughout, some more laid back blues mixed with some psychedelic rock elements, but on the whole it's the perfect sound for a slow, warm corona Monday morning.

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• The two hundred and eighteenth album: #218 Yes - Fragile There's a lot in Fragile that feels like it produces a real example of the prog rock genre. Heavy rock riff lightened with the electric organ, long, conceptual songs with a story it tells as it goes on mixed with short concepts - a rearranged version of Brahms is on the second track, for example. It shows intelligence and thought put into an album that you don't necessarily see in other genres. Even the short songs here are part of the setup for the longer epics, and with the changes in the longer songs it seems more for the form sometimes than something that was fully intended, but I guess it makes sense for release aims - Long-Distance Runaround would have worked well as its own single, a distillation of the album in a track, while also matching with the tracks around it. All of this gives you an album where you get lost in the tracks, and the phases in them are as important as the changes in the track listing that you see. It's a good listen - energetic in places, but also contemplative, not going all out but experimenting a lot to create a distinct sound that does well in telling a story.

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• The two hundred and seventeenth album: #217 The Beach Boys - Surf's Up There's something odd about this album. The first seven tracks fall into the band's surf rock feel, nice poppy songs that build on their heritage but add more meaningful lyrics. It's decent, a nice move to get something more out of it, but I could see why it wouldn't have had as much of an impact. Then, for the last three songs, Brian Wilson's personal tracks come in. The three songs are sombre and more contemplative, the harmonies working really well to create a pessimistic feeling, darker than what came before and this completely different direction to what came before. They're what make you think in this album, perhaps not their strength, but it's a far more interesting direction for this music to go.

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• The two hundred sixteenth album: #216 John Lennon - Imagine Slowly, the influence of the Beatles comes to an end, with only an album by Paul McCartney with the Wings coming up on the list. John Lennon's Imagine, which opens the album, feels so overused for me now - a lovely ballad about world peace without real solutions but just a "what if" that gets overused now in all sorts of "Let's just get along" contexts where that seems easier than taking action. I wouldn't expect a song to do that, but it feels like its current use puts a shadow on a song that works that well. It's followed by a far jauntier Crippled Inside, a country rock ballad that is quite nice, but not as impactful. The album then goes between protest songs, ballads and prog rock songs. As much as the album has its sweet moments and moments of peace, there are as many where the anger comes through in it - indirect if not outspoken, with How Do You Sleep being the obvious reference - and it creates a more complex feeling album - not undercutting the message, but enhancing this being a personal album from a real person, rather than some more fabricated point. I was worried going into this album based on the title track, but there's a lot more nuance to it than I expected, and there's a lot here still of what I liked from the Beatles.

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• The two hundred and fifteenth album: #215 The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers Any controversy aside, the Rolling Stones' drift between hard rock and blues rock has served it well. The blues part is always there, even when there's shouting and loud guitars, but for an album, being able to flow from loud Brown Sugar to sensitive country Wild Horses is a real boon as it manages to avoid a tone whiplash. It's a good mix between a few bangers, some amazing ballads and some good songs in between.

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• The two hundred and fourteenth album: The Allman Brothers Band - At Fillmore East Another live album, and it looks like jazz isn't going away. Over an hour of rock jams with a jazz and blues influence. It's listenable, the music isn't bad, but at times it's self indulgent - as one guitar solo in You Don't Love Me shows, with how it drags without providing much value. It doesn't offer much for its length and, again, doesn't work as something you actively listen to. I'm content having it sit in the background, but I don't think it pulls off much that grabs my attention.

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2020-06-01 00:00:00

• The two hundred and thirteenth album: Isaac Hayes - Shaft I've watched Shaft (the movie this is the soundtrack to)! I didn't enjoy it - blaxploitation isn't my thing - but I also remember the movie almost existing for the soundtrack, it was a stand out. Of course, without the visuals, that falls apart, and while the vocal funk songs work decently, a lot of the 70 minute album is background music, something the album is suited for but which doesn't work as something I more actively listen to. So the Theme From Shaft and Soulsville are decent songs, Bumpy's Lament gives a good atmosphere, but everything else fades into the background. I've heard the soundtrack of Shaft referenced often in other works and it feels like it might have become the default sound of this type of movie or show for some time, and it does its job really well to bring across the right atmosphere, but as a standalone album this feels a bit weak.

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• The two hundred and twelfth album: #212 Carole King - Tapestry It's nice to get some gentle soft rock in today - it's been a tense few days and Tapestry really helps a lot with clearing that up. It's hard to pick out individual songs - not because they're all the same, but because today they just put me in a feel good cocoon. Beautiful is the right sort of upbeat song, a nice basic rock tune that really feels uplifting and positive. It's a feeling that runs through the album and it really works at the moment. You've Got A Friend, which opens the second side, is a song that's been covered enough and always had a resonance with me (I think because it was one of the songs that we covered during singing/vocal lessons, and made a connection with because of it). Again, it just works as a show of support. The whole album is a fulfilling listen like that, lifting my spirits and making me feel good.

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• The one hundred fourty-second TV show: #14 Academy Awards By their nature, there's something quite indulgent about awards shows, and the one honouring the movie industry is that most of all, allowing big production values, plenty of stars and spectacle. How much this hits depends in part on the host and their writers (as I haven't had a chance to watch a hostless edition here), but while there are some bits that feel fine on their own, it feels just as often like a distraction from the actually important parts, actually giving out the awards, and it's hard not to feel like it misses the point sometimes. This applies even more when you consider there's little set up to be done: you don't have any sets to move and are already really restricting the time for speeches. Some of that makes it less boring, I suppose, but the stand up isn't necessarily worth it. For that reason, this feels like over indulgent - a good show at times, but a bit too much. It's something worth watching if you're really interested in the outcome, but it doesn't hold up for repeat, or after the day viewing.

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• The two hundred eleventh album: #211 The Who - Who's Next When you get to a band like this that has been around for a while, with their previous album Tommy looming large, it feels like there are two directions to take - either shake it up or go deeper on what you've been doing. And while Tommy looms as one of the biggest rock opera albums, it feels like Who's Next builds on that sound, but not (due to various reasons) the concept. It's quite telling that Who's Next, the one song by John Entwistle rather than Pete Townshend, stands out so much both in the use of horns and the generally quite jovial tone. Others are serious, angry or sentimental - The Song Is Over following after going very deep on the latter, starting with an introduction that has vocals over a piano, building up but not going in as hard. The real meat of the album is at the end though, with Behind Blue Eyes grabbing me in particular as a powerful ballad, the harmonies that bookend the song feeling incredibly powerful and something I've felt connected to. The end, the longer and more known Won't Get Fooled Again, hits as a powerful statement piece. The venom is in the tail, but it's worth it.

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• The two hundred and tenth album: #210 The Bee Gees - Trafalgar Oddly enough, the Bee Gees' turn into disco isn't covered by this list, leaving us with two rock albums as their contributions to the list. Instead, it continues to use the same harmonies and soft, accessible rock that we know, violins and all. It sounds really good, the vocals are good, the music lovely, and it gets quite emotional at times. Somehow, though, they never quite connected with me. I can admire the craftsmanship in here, but I got a bit bored with what it was trying to offer - it just didn't add that extra bit of life or connection that I felt it needed.

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• The one hundred forty-first TV show: #403 Star Trek: The Next Generation I mean, I could have written about this from the start, with how much I've seen of this series as well as its sequels. The first season of the series is a bit shaky in places, in production values if nothing else, but the core of the characters is there, as well as some of the writing. While the show has its issues - the no conflict rule being an issue - it works incredibly well once it gets going and creates some great science fiction and other drama stories. The tight ensemble works well there, with a group that got along well which shines through in the performances. It's hard to describe why this is as good as I enjoy the franchise so much, and this is one of its best entries even as some of the flaws come through now a few decades have passed. It's still well worth watching.

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• The two hundred and ninth album: #209 Yes - The Yes Album The Yes Album opens with a 10 minute prog rock track, similar to other albums of the time, that make their way through several different sections, playing with the technology and feeling like it serves as a show case for everything the band can do. The message - an antiwar one based on the Vietnam war - obviously gets pushed to the sections with vocals. The album has Clap as an instrumental interlude, setting the format used for both sides - two long tracks with a three minute 'interlude' that feels less significant and more intends to set the table. Starship Trooper is the second major song of the first half and it feels even more constructed - three sections to build to and on each other to create an outstanding adventure. Similarly, the second side is opened by I've Seen All Good People, which starts like a relatively calmer, more romantic song leading into an early 1960s rock inspired riff. It's a simple take off from existing elements, and the (relative) constraint in not building too much pays off incredibly well here. The album finished with Perpetual Change, again at time slightly smaller, but also at times a glorious finish to an album that feels like it does prog rock incredibly well.

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• The one hundred fortieth TV show: #832 The Vampire Diaries For a long time, I was looking at this show as a quite standard teen vampire drama. Stefan, the lead vampire character, is the guy who struggles with his heritage but remains human, while Damon gives into his impulses more, in a controlled but darker way. It's a bit edgy and very teen angsty and seems to have that Twilight inspiration. I was about to say that while it pulls it off well enough, the frequent shirtless guys and good looking teens looking sad are such teen drama staples that it's just that element added to make it stand out. It's fine, but not something I'd have continued. Then around episode 16, as I'm about to give up, the show turns and Stefan turns from protagonist to (semi-) antagonist. I don't know yet whether it lasts, but having this changed around will mean that this can always float around as a more realistic element. It means we can focus more on Damon too, who is the more interesting character, and on the whole the show benefits from these changes. I'll need to see how much longer this will last, but at the moment it certainly has my attention.

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• The two hundred and eighth album: #208 Marvin Gaye - What's Going On Listening to it, there's something appropriate about this album, the violence and problems described in it as much of a problem now as it has been. All of this is wrapped in a gorgeous soul album, one that lets the message dominate but mixes a bunch of elements incredibly well. It's its own tour de force, an impressive string of songs, that feels like it delivers on all things that matter - but with that, also feels relevant nearly forty years later, describing a struggle that still affects us. Marvin Gaye proves to have been an amazing song writer and creator of something timeless here.

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• The two hundred seventh album: #207 Sly & The Family Stone - There's a Riot Goin' On I've not always loved the funk songs we've covered for the songs list, not in the least because you get these long, repetitive sections with not much going on. While this isn't quite fully funk yet, it's hard not to feel like this album drags on just as much, not justifying its 47 minute runtime. There are moments where it feels there could be something there, but I don't think the album pulls off what it tries to achieve and it gets worse, rather than better, as a result of that.

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• The two hundred and sixth album: #206 David Crosby - If I Could Only Remember My Name It's odd how this feels like this is another album of the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young supergroup and that this is David Crosby's debut solo album - reviewed as one of the best in its own right, but it's the link to the bigger group that stands out more clearly in my mind. I do think there's more personality that comes through as you listen to the album. While there's a fair amount of folk rock in here, it's often infused with psychedelia in a way that the bigger group doesn't always have. It's not overdone, in the way that gets bothersome in other places, but it's more integrated into the folk sound, adding to the music rather than overtaking it. It creates a nice, listenable album, nothing that leaves as big of an impact on its own, but it feels you can put the album on at any point and listen to something pleasant, without any excess baggage. It's that friendly, folk rock explortation of the music while never getting bored in how it presents itself.

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• The two hundred and fifth album: #205 Jethro Tull - Aqualung Time to try and settle back into a new rhythm, with life staying the way it is for another few months at this rate. We kick off things with Jethro Tull's Aqualung, a hard and folk rock album that felt more important as I listened to it. The riff of the opening track Aqualung alone is familiar and a great song that justifies its length on the album. It moves to some more sensitive sounds - the flute in Cross-Eyed Mary alone changing the feel of the album as it moves into something softer. It's a gentler end that prefaces the second side, titled "My God". As it deals with religion, parts bring back the hard rock style while others sound choral, clearly imitatin religious songs - sounding quite impressive having been more immersed in classical music. Again, after the heavier start the music gets softer again, Locomotive Breath bringing the energy back up and creating a different curve to the side with a second spike of hard rock the first side doesn't have. It's an interesting album, comtemplative in places but at the same time containing a lot of good, strong rock music.

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2020-05-01 00:00:00

• The one hundred thirty-ninth TV show: #676 Project Runway After we started watching it, we ended up addicted to RuPaul's Drag Race. As a follow up show (a few years later) we picked Project Runway, one of the big inspirations for Drag Race (as that show's third season shows) and something where we see a different side to fashion. Although it seems to take a season or two to truly find its feet, but unlike the other show, Project Runway has a pretty decent standard structure - get an assignment, design and build a garment and show it off on the runway. There are some twists - aside from changes to what you make, some have group challenges or other smaller changes, but often the target group or type of fashion is what matters. It's lower on drama, it's simpler, but that makes the show much more watchable and your appreciation of their skills builds immensely. It's a neat set up and the show is just as addictive. Unlike other reality shows, this relies on skill and I feel that's what really matters here.

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• The one hundred thirty-eighth TV show: #594 Malcolm in the Middle There's something realistically wholesome about Malcolm in the Middle. It has the heart of a family that loves each other, but also the rough way a household of four boys would interact. The parents aren't great - Hal has partially detached, while Lois is the type-A loud mother who seems out of her depth a lot of the time. There's shades of what the Middle later did, but with younger kids, and the cast is a powerhouse- we know what Bryan Cranston can do, and here he goes into everything with wild abandon, Jane Kaczamarek is amazing in the show and the kids are amazingly well cast. The whole series becomes a delight that delivers. The main struggle, at least in these early seasons, is that Francis, the oldest son, is stuck in the military academy - while he gets his own story lines, it feels like an unnecessary separation that makes everything more complicated and doesn't always add much. It's a great show, still, and I'm glad we still have several stations left.

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• The five hundred eighteenth song: Outdoor Miner - Wire I'm not sure whether it's the time I'm listening at or something else, but Outdoor Miner's subdued, straightforward slow song doesn't quite fit the post punk feel you'd expect from that moniker. It's a pleasant poppy song, something that could fit into a soundtrack somewhere around track eight. It works well enough, without a bigger impact. The five hundred nineteenth song: Rapper’s Delight - The Sugarhill Gang While this isn't where rap started, it's what broke the genre to the world. It's been parodied, sampled and referenced so often that this feels like a parody, but the evolution of funk or disco works here - the music sound is there, but the rap changes it into something more interesting, removing the repetition or longer dance breaks and pushes it further. With the benefit of hindsight this feels a bit simple and commercial, but I do see how this becomes impressive. The five hundred twentieth song: California Uber Alles - Dead Kennedys On the other side, California Uber Alles is a highly political song, written with some quite high brow allusions to Shakespeare and Orwell that comment on the governor of California and his actions. It's dark and aggressive, militaristic in places, and it feels like a challenge that stays that aggressive. The five hundred twenty-first song: Typical Girls - The Slits Typical Girls is a female led rock song, which feels like it was even rarer at the time - I know we have BLondie ocmic up, but the rock and punk scene has it as the exception, often restricted to the vocalist. Here, the entire band is, with a sound that feels as unique. The guitars and bass as mostly toned down, the drums a bit different, but the slurred punk vocals are there and it feels loose, an anthem that challenges standards and sets its point of view. I can't say this is the best performance out there, but it has its own unique side. The five hundred twenty-second song: Atomic - Blondie I'm not sure what this song is trying to say, Debbie Harry's improvised vocals more an instrument than creating that much meaning for the song. That feels a bit futuristic for the time, relying on synths and electric guitars to creating an ongoing beat that just occasionally gets interrupted by some musical flourishes, vocals and the rest that comes in. That, at the same time, fills the room, creating an environment more than anything. The five hundred twenty-third song: Gangsters - The Specials The story behind this song - the Specials were blamed for the damage another English band did to a hotel room - feels slightly undercut by the message. Rather than a statement, the early ska vocals feel a tad whiny and the punk vocals seem a bit off compared to the ska sound. It's an odd mix that doesn't always work well and doesn't come into its own until the second half of the song, when it all meshes better. It's a decent experiment and something different from what we've been used to. The five hundred twenty-fourth song: Cars - Gary Numan It feels like we had a Gary Numan song in the last batch, and we're in his big stage, with new wave coming in as it is. The first minute and a half have the actual vocals, a commentary on the security while you're in a car and that feeling of immortality - something I've noticed mostly as a regular pedestrian. The music itself continues for another two and a half minutes, a good electric sound that follows those new wave roots further and (aside from synths being a bit out of date) feels like it would now, or at any time. It's good, but it's the first section that works best, while the instrumental part threatens to become a tad too self indulgent in its length. The five hundred twenty-fifth song: Babylon’s Burning - The Ruts More reggae punk here, but while The Specials had the reggae vocals, The Ruts' Malcolm Owen sings with a hard rock voice, loud and shoulty in a way that even punk doesn't always have. It lends an aggression to the song that suits the message far better and continues to dominate the track. It feels like a more impressive feat and everything else follows suit - loud guitars, the constant drums and an anger that is felt throughout. The five hundred twenty-sixth song: Message in a Bottle - The Police Listening to these songs in context really bring out some of the influences you didn't really think of before hand, and the reggae intro of Message in a Bottle stands out a lot more here. The sound is dropped in the chorus, thankfully, as while it makes the verses sound different, I also wonder whether it adds that much to the song. The driving and desperate chorus feels like the more interesting part of the song, the music underscoring the longing despair that well. It works so well, becoming memorable and interesting as a track still worth listening to.

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• The one hundred thirty-seventh TV show: #29 Eurovision Song Contest With the proper Eurovision Song Contest cancelled this year - appointment viewing for us - we've been following along with the recent live rewatches that have been happening on Saturday evenings. Most of these have been reposted on Youtube as well, and so since it's not on tomorrow, we used today to watch an old one that won't be shared as much - just to get that full coverage. And because we were curious about Abba's competition, we thought 1974 would work as a nice option. It feels like, at times, you are either into the contest or don't care for it at all. We have been faithful viewers for years now and so most of the repeats were familiar. These days, it does feel like a spectacle, with a variation of styles and attempts, with the smaller songs sometimes working better to win than the ones that go huge. And despite the controversies and arguments, for the most part these are friendly arguments, in a friendly competition. Most countries try, and while there are some bloc voting accusations, rewatching these show that, at the very least, it's normally a top three song that wins, as well as the stand out at times. It's best to get into the spirit, embrace the campiness - that wasn't quite there in the seventies, and has been reduced a bit lately, but is also what makes the whole thing just a lot of fun.

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• The one hundred thirty-sixth TV show: #598 Curb Your Enthusiasm It's taken us quite a while to come back to Curb, having watched it some time ago. We were watching it for a while, but two episdes into the fourth season we gave up. Now, watching more, it actually became clear why. This is written around cringe comedy, with Larry's attitude and people surrounding them creating a situation where it all falls apart. I don't think Larry is likeable, he gets into these situations too often, and the characters around him are the same - I can't sympathize with them. At the same time, the moments of cringe are too much, too painful and not entertaining. I can see why it's acclaimed - there are many moments of brilliance and genius - but especially in these times I don't think I can connect with them.

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• The ninetieth book: #74 Frankenstein - Mary Shelley Thanks to a summarized retelling of the book by the podcast Fictional, I knew that this book wasn't quite like what the movies and pop culture portrayed. The monster's creation is a small part of the story, with no observers or an Igor really present. Instead, the story focuses on Frankenstein dealing with what he created, throughout trying to escape responsibility - abandoning the monster until it gets his attention by murdering his loved ones. Even when asked to make a companion for the monster, he starts but destroys the creature in disgust. As much as he frets about his relationship - mostly a courtship of his adopted cousin - it reads as a standard romance novel and really is just a set up for the horrendous things happening around him. The monster's story about how he survives afterwards is the more interesting description of his life, and his descriptions of his struggles to find any meaning are harrowing. Even after Frankenstein's death, the monster can't find peace, and the tragedy is his, as much as his creator wants otherwise. It's a powerful story that resonates now, even if popular culture didn't follow up.

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• The one hundred thirty-fifth TV show: #442 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit While I don't think I've felt the true religious pressure on the LGBT, I've seen enough of the periphery of it to make me uncomfortable. I've once decided not to pursue a job opportunity because of it. As such, while I don't have as direct an experience with these issues, I can sympathize and understand how hard it is. This story of Jess, an adopted girl from the north west of England. Starting off as a semi-comedy, it morphs into a darker story as she discovers her feelings for another woman, then gets kicked out by her religious parents and gets shunned by most of her community. As funny as the showcases of their missionary existence are - feeling as often like an excuse to hang out - the tone slowly shows how difficult it is, how much the church has brainwashed them and uses techniques like another cult to keep people in and behaving the way that's desired. It's a story of growing up and finding your independence and letting go off what is damaging you. It's a lovely series, one that makes you think and hits you where it hurts, even as it stays light.

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• The one hundred thirty-fourth TV show: #118 The Time Tunnel The concept of a couple of people travelling through time, unable to control where they're going, is an interesting one, explored before on Doctor Who and, dimension or life hopping rather than time hopping, on shows like Sliders and Quantum Leap. To a lesser extent, most sci-fi shows seem to do time travel at some point, both as a different way to tell a story and, to be honest, because those are sets built for other production and so are cheaper to use. The latter is the driving force of Time Tunnel, using both the sets and crowd scenes of existing productions, with a small guest cast for the actual stories. The success is, at best, mixed, a trilogy of alien stories and the end of the series working because of how bizarre it gets, but stories involving the fall of Jericho and a trip to the Moon doing quite less so. On the whole the show feels ambitious, a trend setter for American television, but flawed now, with too much action where some more dilemmas would have been better. There are places where that comes up, and that's when the episodes are more interesting than when we deal with the fall of Troy following the known beats. We didn't finish it, but it stayed a decent curiosity.

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• The eighty-sixth classical recording: #93 George Frideric Handel - Coronation Anthems The four anthems in this set are known for, and paired here because of, their use in the British coronation rather than for their thematic link. The four are wonderful choral pieces, with Zodak the Priest feeling more singularly focused while others have more parts and feel more complex. As situational music, they feel more focused on their purpose and the length is more set for proceedings rather than what the piece needs. Still, that focus doesn't distract and they flow well on their own, the complexity of The King Shall Rejoice, for example, sounding wonderful. I suspect that, hearing this live, would be impressive.

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• The one hundred thirty-third TV show: #233 I, Claudius While a lot of people might seek out something fun and distracting during the pandemic, we've ended up going for a historic drama set in Rome, a fictionalized account of Claudius' fictional memoirs and family history, set up at times as a dark comedy and just as often played as a soap opera. What it is, even more than that, is a show where a lot of great British actor give amazing performances, a stage play filmed and better designed. The centre of that cast is, of course, Claudius, played brilliantly by Derek Jacobi. It's hard to see how Charlton Heston would have played him, as the vulnerability, frailty and low status are such a part of his character while also standing up against the other big performances, just forceful enough to stay in focus and not fade. It's an amazing balancing act that is easy to overlook, but he walks the tightrope incredibly well. The three other emperors show this most clearly. Augustus, played by Brian Blessed, is of course larger than life, well meaning but foolish, and the moment he shows respect for Claudius rather than ignoring him is one of the sweetest moments in there. George Baker's Tiberius always has anger lurking underneath the surface, a sense of insecurity that he feels he has to hide which puts him on that knife's edge all the time. But some of the most amazing scenes are between Claudius and John Hurt's Caligula, who seems otherworldly. His insanity goes between comedic and intimidating, always making you wonder what's happening, and somehow Derek Jacobi keeps being able to stand up to it where it feels like other actors are lessened in between. Livia, Augustus' wife and main driving force in the first half of the series, is an amazing tour de force, a camp villain that remains believable and sets the standard for schemers in the rest of the series (although I don't think any quite live up to it). Other stand outs are, of course, Patrick Stewart and Patricia Quinn, but there are many others. Sometimes they are overshadowed by some of the earlier performances, but (aside from some child actors) most do well, and it shows the talent in the West End at the time. Add to that how they're working with a great script, hitting the right notes and balancing the serious and humorous sides, and some great directing that makes the best of the limited BBC budgets. Yeah, the sets are often reused, with a lot of happening being told about rather than shown, and the make up has its flaws, but it's not necessary with the performances on display. It's not hard to see why this is still remembered well - all of it still amazing and something that's unlikely we'll see again.

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• The two hundred and fourth album: #204 Syd Barrett - The Madcap Laughs I feel the history of this album might be as interesting as the music itself, the product of mental health issues that come through in different ways. The first track, Terrapin, is a relaxing, blues number, calming you down and leading you through a slow increase in manic energy, first culminating in a darker, distorted No Man's Land that feels unsettling. Still though, it feels like there's no real rhyme or reason to the songs included on the album - probably partially due to the disjointed nature of its recording. Two tracks later, we get Here I Go, a simple rock song that reminds me of those of the early sixties, even when Barrett's vocals don't quite meet the standards of the day. That's what makes it disconcerting, but other than that it's a sweet song about a break up, naive in how it presents its point of view. Added to that is that the Dave Gilmour produced tracks feel looser than the Malcolm Jones ones, and you get a progression that is a bit unsettling, with the latter (mostly earlier in the album) standing out as the better songs. Whie probably down to the producers' stances (and possibly annoyance with how the production was going), the contracts beteen If It's You and Here I Go is startling, both coming from the same type of music, but with fastly different production and sound. It feels like it does Syd Barrett a disservice, but at the same time you can understand how it all would have happened. It's the work of someone who's a tortured genius, I'm sure, but where his trouble led to an album that just couldn't hold up.

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• The one hundred thirty-second TV show: #870 Black Mirror It's hard to talk about an anthology series here. It's even harder considering it took us the better part of a year to get through, as some of the episodes, especially early on, were quite heavy. And while not all episodes have a twist, it's a show that's easy enough to spoil while they episodes are best when it's not. The show addresses the consequences of technology, the problems that come from its adoption and use and how it could or would influence society. Most of it is set in a near(ish) future, a further development of technology we already have (as much as we need to make for a good story). The series retraces some steps sometimes, not always successfully, but on the whole has enough different perspectives to stay interesting. Bandersnatch's commentary on choice, for example, feels like not many others could have done it, while the different takes on virtual reality have some interesting ideas. Even the weaker episode has something interesting and worthwhile in there, and often something is worth watching.

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• The one hundred thirty-first TV show: #144 Monty Python's Flying Circus After finally getting through some other shows, I thought I'd go back to Monty Python - it had been a while since I'd seen it and would make for a nice diversion in a difficult time. Having watched the first twenty episodes - probably about half of the best era of the show - it's been welcoming as we watched at least two episodes most nights. Now, some of it is quite dated - there's more blackface than there should be, for example - but the show holds up. It's not as innovative as it might have been at the time, with things like odd transitions being more common in comedy, especially the alt comedy scene. What's more delightful, however, is how incredibly silly the show gets. It gets weird, it gets side tracked and feels like it keeps doing its own things, sometimes with non sequiturs or diversions that lead nowhere, or as often with a normal, well developed sketch that's just written and performed well. It goes broad sometimes, but just as often is as smart as you'd think. It's a writer's show, with the writers performing their work as well, but focusing on performing that the best rather than adding their own thing to the show. It's stayed watchable, and especially when you find the relative gems - not the few scenes that are repeated by everyone, but the weird bits that just sit there without as much acknowledgement from the world as a whole.

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• The eighty-ninth book: #1014 Ormond - Maria Edgeworth I struggle with how to feel about Edgeworth's works. On one hand, I started off enjoying Ormond, its characters and the description of the title character's early life. The same applies to its descriptions of French life - you're not meant to feel opposed to their excesses, but it's enjoyably described and explored. On the other hand, the hardships of Irish life are described and the feudal system somewhat glorified, in a way that her novels have ended up doing. At a time where I feel Jane Austen started to move this genre ahead, this one just doesn't feel as satisfying.

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• The five hundred tenth song: Gloria - Umberto Tozzi While there's room for Italian disco on this list, I feel like this is missing something. It's fine as a love song, there's an okay riff underneath, but is it that it doesn't connect? For disco, it's missing some volume, for pop it lacks a bit of a connection, and on the whole listening to this it's a song that wants to be lifted up a notch. It's a godo base for a song, and while it made a splash, I would wonder if a well produced cover would be more my thing. The five hundred eleventh song: Black Eyed Dog - Nick Drake There's a simple sadness to this song, one of the last Nick Drake recorded before his death. The guitar riff is simple, the whole song a blues where you hear the depression through the song, through the guitar, through the tiredness in his voice. There isn't more, it seems, that he can push out. It hits you completely and it feels a sadness there that warns of what will come. The five hundred twelfth song: Are “Friends” Electric? - Gary Numan & Tubeway Army Taking synth rock away from Kraftwerk (in the best way possible) the electronic sound that's in this song underlies the lonely message and the isolation. He's trying to get on top of the music in his vocals, a melodic drone that varies a fair amount - a repetition that doesn't jar but stays interesting. It's taken on a lot of influences from elsewhere, but it creates its own sound, gentler than Kraftwerk but more electronic than prog rock and the like. There's a new stream here, the lack of a personal touch being intentional, and in a way that I hope we can to see explored further. It's influential, but I'm not quite sure how. The five hundred thirteenth song: Boys Don’t Cry - The Cure Boys Don't Cry feels like a fairly straight forward poppy rock song, with a bit of post punk, but while it's a break up song, it has a little bit of depth to it. Is it amazing? No, but it feels like a good entry for a band where I might enjoy the deeper cuts. The five hundred fourteenth song: Good Times - Chic An eight minute disco song? I'm not sure how much they want to push me to hate disco, when you know you'll have the long dance break, a repeating riff that they spend too much on early on and something that works as a sample that's extended. Not to mention that singing about how you want to dance to this song feels a bit overdone and after several songs with depth, there's not much here that I want. (It does hide the lyrics, which are about how it's not the best idea to go out and party when they were going through a major depression - and perhaps it should be a part of the current Covid-19 soundtrack. It just doesn't come through here) The five hundred fifteenth song: Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough - Michael Jackson Considering the love affair this list has with some artists, it feels odd that Michael Jackson only gets two entries - ignoring his private life, musically it feels like he's been incredibly influential and a genius. It draws on all the disco we've heard before, but somehow it avoids the tropes - it doesn't repeat itself to the point where it gets old and the dance break feels more engaging and varied, with enough going on to keep you engaged as a listener. The five hundred sixteenth song: Lost in Music - Sister Sledge Another disco classic, produced by Chic, this feels like it works better - aside from being a bit shorter, again it includes more variation and stays more engaging for it. Lyrically it's still no better - there's not that much going on - but it feels less like it's the same parts repeated over and over. It still doesn't beat Jackson's number, but for the first half of the song, it works. The five hundred seventeenth song: Brass in Pocket - Pretenders Brass in Pocket is a decent poppy rock song (or new wave, as it's described here) - a decent, simple melody with some powerful focus, Chrissie Hynde is in charge throughout as she prepares for whatever she's doing and how she's ready. It's a catchy chorus, a good hook, and making lists always works in this sort of set up. It's enjoyable end, and a good upbeat disco antidote.

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• The two hundred and third album: #203 Santana - Abraxas Latin rock hasn't featured on this list - at least not recently - and Santana's second album sets a tone from the first number, a jazzy fusion that brings in some different sounds on its own and flows into Black Magic Woman, the first song with lyrics. Not that those matter much - Oye Como Va mostly just repeats the words and for the most part the refrains are an additional instrument in the songs. Beyond that, while this doesn't have the loose, improv feel of most jazz albums, a lot of the songs are inspired y the sound, especially the instrumentals that feel like they lounge along more - although the Latin elements are strong as well, adding a bit of a kick to the proceedings. It takes until Mother's Daughter for the album to really bring in rock as I think of it, with the heavier guitars and the vocal stylings that reminded me of the Rolling Stones. It's a good sound that integrates a few elements well, but it also feels like a shift to a rockier sound that feels quite distinct from the first half. They're good, but not necessarily to provide a consistent whole on the album. It's one where there are good individual tracks (even if jazz isn't my thing), but where it felt like it wanted to create a consistent experience at the start, that fell by the wayside later on.

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• The two hundred second album: #202 Paul McCartney - McCartney Where do you go with your music after leaving the Beatles? For Paul McCartney, the answer seems to have been to tone down the production and go for something simpler instead. Paul McCartney is created with just about anything you hear on the album (other than some harmony vocals) and it seems to have created a more minimal, stripped down pop rock without dropping down into folk, keeping up some production beyond that. The downside of all of that is that the album has no stand out songs, instead being serviceable and highly listenable throughout.

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• The two hundred first album: #201 James Taylor - Sweet Baby James The country track that leads off the album seems to set up what follows - country folk with some rock influences, but sticking to that sound. It veers - sometimes poppier, sometimes more of a blues, but there's a country sound underneath it all. It probably works best for me when it's not aiming for pure country, but brings out a good folk ballad - the more traditional country sound doesn't work for me that well, but there are some good variations on the theme that especially appeal to me. For song writing, it feels like Sunny Skies' message is where it really starts off, a gentle, poppy sound that doesn't go too light with darker lyrics. It's not entirely contradictory, but there's enough of a contrast to set a tone and mood. The shift from Oh, Susannah to Suzanne in Fire and Rain's first verse is also oddly effective, linking the two in a way that might not have been intended, but makes the punch of her loss more effective, leading into a sadder song. On a similar, thought not quite as impactful note, the Suite for 20G that finishes the album transitions through this variety well and it works, a mixture of rock and ballads where all of them sound quite good but there's also a clear flow between them. It's a good album - when it gets the right songs in.

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• The eighty-fifth classical recording: #369 Guiseppe Verdi - Don Carlos As always, it's hard to write up an opera as it has so much variation - and so it's looking for stand out moments and themes. Don Carlos feels fairly sombre from the start, even when ignoring the scenes set around tombs with lamenting monks. The parties sound more threatening than uplifting and the whole opera has an undertone of darkness, without much room for anything lighter - something the plot obviously supports. The lack of triumph feels like it robs the music from its most impactful moments though and while it's beautiful in places, it feels like it can't quite soar. Good for a performance, but it doesn't work as well listening purely to a recording and I started hoping for something extra that never materializes.

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• The two hundredth album: #200 The Stooges - Fun House While the songs list pushed me past punk yesterday, even if arguably it was still in the air, my list of albums is driving towards it. Fun House is arguably too rocky and - dare I say - musically creative in places, without the politically charged lyrics that are more common in punk and with more of a focus on the music and its variety that punk has up to a point, but not as in depth as we get here. It's clearly improvised at times too, and rough and raw to go with that. As far as jazz improv goes, these generally feel a bit more listenable to me - perhaps showing that the style of music matters as much to me - but even so the non-jazz songs earlier in the album work better for me. The improv tends towards a cacophony of noise near the ends, which really doesn't work as well and seems to have been more something fun for the musicians to do rather than creating something listenable. In the end, the proper rock here is fine - especially when the hints of punk are there - but it loses a lot of that in the second half.

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• The one hundred thirtieth TV show: #736 Big Love This show's story of a polygamous Mormon marriage is an interesting and often uncomfortable one. The polygamy on its own not as much - between consenting adults I feel that's their own choice - but often enough it feels the gender imbalance in the relationship means that the decisions aren't always consensual. It's one of those themes that goes through the show, one where choice, obligation and expectations from upbringing clash and make you ask what wins out. That expands to the rest, which follows the family of Bill Henrickson, his three wives and their kids as he tries to build his business, stay within the greater Mormon church while also handling the Juniper Creek compound he comes from that more actively promotes polygamy. It's an odd world that I'd never be in, but the actors do the work to make you care for them. In particular, the three wives carry the show in their own way. Jeanne Triplehorn as the first wife, with a long history who seems to struggle with it sometimes but also is the mother to the whole clan. Ginnifer Goodwin is great as the young Marge, the latest wife who's excited about this new direction and being part of a community, even if she appears to avoid the stakes. Best, though, is Chloe Sevigny. Her character Nicki comes from the compound and is deep in that lore. She's strong willed and defiant, in part to keep up their ideals, but she's also the one doing the DIY around the house and gets things done. She's often the spark that brings up the conflict, which makes her performance even more amazing. Somehow, Chloe Sevigny keeps up the balance between repulsion of a world that doesn't suit me and care for the character because it's her views and she's trying to do the right thing, even if they don't match mine. It's the tightrope the show constantly walks, and mostly you end up rooting for the family, even as different character attract you or push you away, with few people sticking to one side or the other. I've struggled going back to it from time to time, but it keeps paying off and the story keeps pushing relentlessly forward and I feel I need to see the end now.

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• The five hundred first song: Hammond Song - The Roches Starting off 1979 is this folk song by the all-female Roches, three sisters who sing a lovely folk song with an interesting contralto sound that comes in quite unexpectedly. The lyrics are relatively simple, focused on something more mundane, but even more effective for it. It grows on yo, the guitar underlying the songs, even more when the electric guitar comes in. It's not a very complicated song, but one with a better message for it. The five hundred second song: Heaven - Talking Heads Heaven feels like one of those songs where I feel I can see why people enjoy it, see why it makes an impact and sounds special. There's a nihilism in the lyrics that appeals to me, but I'm not sure the music quite lends itself to that - a bit too synthy and poppy to work for it and perhaps that's where I feel like I'm missing something. It's well produced, but the craft that other may have don't feel like it's in the song for me. The five hundred third song: The Eton Rifles - The Jam In an already post punk era, The Jam brings another song from that type, an attack on the upper class and how they take on the lower class for a joke, the latter still being forced down - right on the back of worker rights being squashed. The politics are there in the song, but the catchy chorus over aggressive guitars drive the point home more. It's a war song of sorts, a call for a revolution that comes across in many of these songs. The five hundred fourth song: London Calling - The Clash Speaking of classic punk, London Calling is one of the big anthems, an effective comment on where the world was going and, in some sense, the same worries and fears that play these days. There's a gloom in the music, on top of the punky angry sound, with some of the ape-like calling sounds adding to the primal fear that's in there. It's not too long, but effective. The five hundred fifth song: Transmission - Joy Division The first of Joy Division's three songs on the list is dark and moody, its lyrics sung in such a low bass voice that it becomes unsettling, its commands drowned out by barely harmonious guitars and an almost angelic background sound at times. It keeps going, powerful and strong, without giving a break at any point. It's dark, the "dance to the radio" chorus being menacing throughout rather than something you'd enjoy. It's truly excellent that way. The five hundred sixth song: Voulez-Vous - Abba Time to wipe away the darkness for now for an upbeat disco number, showing the other side of life that was happening around the time - probably experienced by more people than the darkness of Joy Division. Voulez-Vous really feels full-on disco, with tightly-honed vocals on top of a relatively simple score, with the chorus getting in the real flourishes. The repetition of it is what really drives it home as a dance song, nothing too intense or complicated, but more having a good time - even if the disco dance break against lasts too long. The five hundred seventh song: Beat the Clock - Sparks The Sparks' previous song was, to say the least, bizarre, with sound effects and just general weirdness. Beat The Clock dials back on that, instead bringing in an 80s synth rhythm and driving chorus, backing a more melodic verse that expounds on the need to beat the clock, "no time for relationships", which, too, feels like an 80s philosophy. We're there a bit early, but it's a good start of a musical style and I'm looking forward to reviewing their albums some day. The five hundred eighth song: Oliver’s Army - Elvis Costello & The Attractions I guess this is another side of new wave - taking in a heavy disco influence as the backing of the song really sounds like an Abba song in several places, the organ and piano both enforcing that. At the same time, the lyrics go in a completely different direction, primarily referencing the Northern Irish conflicts, as well as other conflicts around the world and how scary they were. It's an anti-war and anti-aggression song, but rather than taking a folksy song, it's a happier, peppier disco mood that is an interesting counter to the feeling the song is trying to bring across. The five hundred ninth song: Tusk - Fleetwood Mac Tusk feels a bit experimental still, a prog rock oddity with cheering crowds in the background, a non-rock rhythm and a move to a more pop sound in places. At times it feels like a party or a carneval, with lyrics that don't feel too meaningful but otherwise a sound that feels like an experiment - see what works, what sticks, and what does it for the band. Here, it apparently did - not that it got me wildly enthusiastic, but I guess it works.

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• The eighty-fourth classical recording: #852 Richard Strauss - Metamorphosen Metamorphosen starts delicate, a few strings playing the theme, and in a Germany at the end of World War II, that feels fitting as something sombre. It builds to that though, and while it continues to have the same sombre undertone, the strings playing against each other creates something more sinister, perhaps panicking a bit at times. The variations of the piece aren't really metamorphoses, but it seems like you can ignore the title there - it's the sounds that make it fairly morose but engaging, not quite comforting, but fitting the time it was written in.

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• The eighty-fourth comic: #496 XIII: The Day of the Black Sun An amnesiac man washes up on the shore of an American village. As he's being nursed to health, assassins attack. From there on, the story of XIII - named after the Roman numeral tattooed on his collar bone - begins. He gets immersed in a president's assassination as he tries to unravel the plot while also understanding his past. It's a fairly easy to understand plot and the comic does well with it. While the book officially only covers the first issue, or (I suppose) the first arc, it doesn't provide you with all the answers. Rather, it gives you a decent idea of what's happening and more layers get revealed as time goes on. It never comes as quite unexpected or a way to keep the story going, but grows naturally from step to step (although some reveals are more telegraphed than others). It gets through it at a nice pace and while I haven't finished the whole run yet, it feels clear that it would have ended when the truth fully comes out. There's quite a bit of repetition in the basic get captured => get cornered => get rescued set up, but XIII is competent enough that there are enough variations on it. The art looks quite good, in the realistic Belgo-French style that I know quite well. It's a great way to position the characters and adds to the gritty action feel. I'm going to keep going with this series - at this point I might as well see it through to the end.

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• The one hundred ninety-ninth album: #199 Traffic - John Barleycorn Must Die Unlike what I was really expecting, John Barleycorn Must Die starts with a seven minutes jazz song - not feeling quite as improvised as jazz normally gets, but still feeling quite loose. After that, the jazz influences remain a bit in the prog rock that follows, not a very complex sounding album but there are some decent vocal performances in the big, layered songs that work very well together. The titular, foksy track of John Barleycorn Must Die, is incredibly subdued in comparison, but because of that might well be the most memorable track of the six. It can clearly tell its story without gettig too deep into the prog rock sound and instruments - the flute really adding to the atmosphere. Ending with Every Moth's Son, the album ends especially strong, with what feel like its two best, most accessible tracks at the end, which make it worth the journey more than anything else.

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• The one hundred ninety-eighth album: Cat Stevens - Tea For The Tillerman Some folk rock works better than others for me and Cat Stevens' Tea For The Tillerman fails to hit the right notes for me. It's not one man and a guitar, which can hit the right notes for me, but while there's some big production, there's not always the energy that needs. It sounds musically good, but the sentiments and emotions it's meant to reach don't hit for me. What doesn't help is that the covers of his songs that I'm aware of - Father and Son and Wild World stand out - have that punch and hit the emotional beats more than I feel here. I guess I don't manage to connect with Cat Stevens in the way the music requires, and that hurts the quality of the album for me.

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• The one hundred ninety-seventh album: #197 Simon & Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water Sometimes, you listen to a song, it feels like a perfect number, but then it doesn't stick the landing. Bridge Over Troubled Water is an amazing piece, performed well, delicate and sweet with a lovely message. The big, more bombastic finish overrules that though, and that's unfortunate. The album doesn't quite continue on that tone - El Condor Pasa sounds quite different, though still focusing on the lyrics, and it already has a different feel, while Cecilia is so different that the R&B-like rhythm is surprising, but it stays a joyous party song. The album, at this point, really feels like it's veered further into pop for a few songs, the folk disappearing a bit for something more danceable and joyous, even if the lyrics of Keep the Customer Satisfied don't quite fit the mood (but the juxtaposition makes the point far better). So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright, changes that of course, going back into the sweeter, more sentimental sounds that with just that bit of knowledge really sounds like the duo's farewell. The Boxer, which feels like the other big song, starts the second side in a similar vein, a song that hits deep, beyond what you would get from just lyrics or music. It's an amazing performance, simple but so effective. The album alternates between the upbeat rhythms and slower, more folksy numbers. The latter are more effective most of the time, with the best of the former at the start of the album, and at times they're more filler as the main contents of this album, and why it should be praised, are these gentle, sensitive songs that speak to (especially) Paul Simon's frame of mind at the time.

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• The one hundred ninety-sixth album: #196 George Harrison - All Things Must Pass Listening to this album, it's clear that by the end, the Beatles were far more of a constraint to George Harrison's creativity than they were a help. Whie he may not have started out as one, the 23 tracks on this album come out with a decent variety in song writing with a very clear definition that suit his performance. It harkens back more often to earlier Beatles tracks, including their harmonies, while the topics are at times personal and at times spiritual. A lot of these were written during Harrison's time in the Beatles, then produced and put together by big names, and it shows in how good the tracks sound. At the same time, there's something good about the relative purity of the song writing - not always too complex, but clearly carrying out its message. No other albums of his are on the list, but in part that feels like because the sophomore slump feels unavoidable after this, and 100 minutes of material is a lot to put out at once. The last disc, the Apple Jam, obviously strays from that into a number of instrumental jams and (as I could have predicted) these are less of a hit with me. They don't sound bad, but on the whole the jazzier approach never does as much for me as a thought out, more deliberate song. The album isn't anything heavy or swinging, Dylan's influence and writing is obvious, but there's somethig about the way it comes together with Spector's big (but not over the top) production and the performances that makes it bigger than that, switching tones without straying too far. It's a nice and coherent work without being the same, a nice balance to create an enjoyable album.

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• The eighty-third comic: #611 Sailor Moon I'll be honest, I'm not sure Sailor Moon ever quite grabbed me. While partially a superhero story featuring the Sailor Scouts, the titular Sailor Moon is clearly the focus of the entire story, with the love story elements of the likes of Nodame Cantabile and Rose of Versailles. The former is there early on, and gets a bit less later, but these are clearly part of the draw, while the action sequences are almost an afterthought - they are rare and don't work well in the entire thing. While that's fine, since they can be more boring, they feel so short that they're very much perfunctory and (I'd argue) almost useless as there are no dilemmas in the fighting. It probably works better in anime form, with some good animation, but without it they're not interesting. That means that both sides of the coin, the relationship angle and the action angle, don't work for me,and the gaps in between, the hangout stuff, doesn't give me much. I still don't know much about the other characters, with Amy being the only one I felt I saw a bit more of, but developing that more, rather than characters from the future and making googly eyes at each other. There's a good core here, and I am curious to try the anime, but this never got there.

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• The eighty-third classical recording: #978 Milton Babbitt - Transfigured Notes It looks like, after receiving the score, it took three years for someone to even take on performing the piece. Scored for strings along, Transfigured Notes is discordant, off putting and odd sounding, a mess of notes that never settles in, but still creates some musicality out of the different sounds and sudden switches of tempo that are present in this piece. The piece merges it into something a bit more concordant as time goes on, but this isn't a piece that really lets you settle.

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• The one hundred ninety-fifth album: #195 Rod Stewart - Gasoline Alley It's weird to listen to Gasoline Alley as a 1970 rock album - on all levels,it feels more like something from the early 1960s, with a blues feel, simpler subjects and a sound that goes back to old rock and roll. Sure, it's gentler and the country feel has some appeal, but we've seen how this can be showier and bigger, even without losing that aspect, and this album loses out for that reason - it's not worth it enough for me.

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• The one hundred ninety-fourth album: #194 Soft Machine - Third Listening to Facelift, the first track on Third, feels like it features two indulgences that I like least - the loose, too long jazz improv style layered on top of a prog rock feel that is unfocused, losing its power in the process. There are moments that make you perk up and think something interesting is going to follow, but really the twenty minutes just keep dragging. oon in June feels like a good step up (even if it's backwards for their oeuvre) as the lyrics provide a lot more structure to the num. It it still long, the lyrics aren't great, but it feels like it has a bit more substance while that part lasts. On the whole though, it's an album with four tracks that run too long, but don't have the pay off needed to make them worth the time spent listening to them.

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• The eighty-second classical recording: #898 Alan Hovhaness - Symphony no. 2, "Mysterious Mountain" Mysterious Mountain, as a symphony, is a delicate piece, taking you on a journey through something beautiful, avoiding a more bombastic piece in favour of something subtle and small. For the most part, it feels like it doesn't do much or need much, but its tour is enticing and creates a lovely sound - I'm sure you could set a nice story to it. I didn't quite get a leitmotif that caught me, but its journey caught me and pulled me along.

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• The eighty-eighth book: #73 Rob Roy - Walter Scott Can I complain about a work's false advertising based on its title? While Scottish outlaw Rob Roy appears in the story, he's far from the focus. The introduction in the edition I had tells a lot about his exploits, but it feels like almost nothing of that comes through in the novel. The focus is on Frank Osbaldistone, a nobleman who gets stripped of his inheritance and flees the law but, in the end, is proven right and gets it all back. Rasleigh makes for a good villain - a definite upside - but I wish the story could focus on Rob Roy more - he's a more interesting character and while we hear some of him, it's his exploits that I thought would be the focus. As it is, this is a story with a lot of setup, but a lacklustre pay-off.

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• The one hundred ninety-third album: #193 The Who - Live at Leeds As an intentional counter point to Tommy, Live at Leeds is an unthemed collection of songs from a live performance. The sound is, for the most part, still the same - hard rock songs - with the psychedelia obviously dialled back in favour of a sound that can be done - and would work better - on stage. It culminates in a 15 minute jam around My Generation,including parts of Tommy and songs on other albums. It's a glorious hard rock celebration, dropping the messages and stories in favour of just playing music. As a counter point to the rock opera albums, this hits a different spot, and it's impressive that both sides work - a testament to how good The Who was (and is?).

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• The one hundred ninety-second album: #192 Ananda Shankar - Ananda Shankar The Beatles started to include Indian influences in their musi as they drifted towards psychedelia, with the sitar being an important instrument used in that. It feels natural then that this is a stream that developed further. Ananda Shankar had moved to the US a few years earlier and gotten involved with the rock groups of the era. His first, self-titled album brings that in, but instead features his sitar playing first, with a rock influence in the background. Some of that comes through in the (mostly) instrumental covers of rock songs, which keep that rock sound as well, while Mamata has the feel of a jazz improv number instead, the sitar supported by quieter instruments. Metamorphosis really feels like the point the psychedelia ramps up, not just in the stranger soundscape, but also the repetition that heightens the emotions. The later tracks go back to something that sounds more traditional, but there is that undertone of modernity that creates an interesting fusion, even if it's not compelling for me in the long run.

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• The eighty-first classical recording: #481 Johannes Brahms - Clarinet Quintet I think this might have been the first piece we've done that focuses on the clarinet. It's nice as a change of pace, the strings aren't as heavy and without a full orchesa the piece feels a lot more delicate. The piece itself feels a bit downbeat and sad, with the third movement having some exceptions, but the tone gets set for that early on. The bts where the clarinet really gets to shine with some rapid movements and pieces, change that a bit as well, but it is mostly kept low key. It works, a nice listenable piece that do't assault you, but keeps you in a slightly sombre (apparently autumnal mood).

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• The one hundred ninety-first album: #191 Nick Drake - Bryter Layter Nick Drake's folk music may need the feeling of a grey, wet Thursday more than a sunny July like I had for the previous album. The melancholic vocals get a good counter point in the music, with the different instruments often adding some optimism to the thoughtful songs. The instrumental help set the mood, creating a natural atmosphere that helps create that setting. It's a lovely, magical album, with Northern Sky being the peak of that atmosphere.

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• The eighty-first second comic: #654 Tekkon Kinkreet: Black & White It's hard to say sometimes to what extent lofty ambitions should count versus the execution. Tekkon Kinkreet: Black & White creates an interesting world in which two orphans, called Black and White in the translation I had, live a violent existence in their attempts to survive a brutal world. It's clear normal life goes on around them, but they sleep in a car, surrounded by junk they gathered, and deal with the seedy parts of the city. This gets heightened as the yakuza moves in to get its own control on the city. They have to change as their environment changes. It looks good, with a harsh and artificial art style, but the writing isn't quite there. I don't quite care enough about the characters, but that feels undercut anyway by the rapid cuts between characters and locations, which means you never get quite enough time to get to know them. It's unclear quite what they want, especially for anyone other than the main two. Sure, it comes together in the third act, but the build up fails and the pay off isn't quite satisfying enough for that reason. It's a good set up, but it feels like it's missing a step somewhere.

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• The one hundred ninetieth album: #190 The Grateful Dead - American Beauty Restarting the sequence, I come back to some friendly folk rock with the acoustic sound of the Grateful Dead - avoiding the lengthy jams from before, instead focusing on shorter, to the point songs that have meaningful lyrics reflected in the music. There's something melancholic about a lot of them and even Truckin', the closest to a jam, still feels a bit sedate. It's good, but it does feel like a quiet morning, not necessarily sad but not something loud if that's what you want.

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• The eighty-first comic: #318 Mickey Mouse Meets the Air Pirate Funnies Some comics are on this list not because they are the pinnacle, because they are the first or because they achieved something special - some are on here for their notoriety and influence outside their immediate reach. We've had several crude comics before, but they never used existing characters in the name of satire. The Air Pirate Funnies though went after Mickey Mouse and other Disney properties and stood out all the more because of it. It tried but, tied up in legal proceedings, got two issues out. The thing is, they're not that funny. The jokes are drawn out and crass humour doesn't really connect with me. It's a decent attempt at satire, but for that to work there needs to be more of a point to it - drawing Mickey and Minnie Mouse having sex doesn't really make one. It's notable, but not that worthwhile.

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• The eightieth classical recording: #767 Dmitri Shostakovich - Piano Concerto no. 1 While other concertos often have a soloist that gets followed by an orchestra, in this concerto they are not quite synced and it feels like the piano is almost overlaid on top of the rest of the orchestra. They flow well together, but there's something off about the way it sounds. The trumpet, too, plays into the idea of two independent instruments supported by an orchestra, though not following entirely along with it, and the independence of it feels like a commentary - it makes for a lighter piece, even in the more sombre movements, which feels enlightening on its own.

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• The one hundred twenty-ninth TV show: #692 Hustle I've been looking forward to my partial rewatch of Hustle. The premise is interesting already - you're following a group of con men in London, taking money from rich scum. Obviously, you need to feel on their side - not just because they're targetting bad people (innocents do get caught in their wake), but because they're charismatic enough so you stay on their side - flawed and funny, with enough smarts to pull everything off in the end. The show explores a lot of con options and styles, focusing on long cons but using shorter ones as well. There are plans and backup plans that interact, with enough improv as needed to avoid the perfection - one episode partially hinging on them being too perfect, which is also an interesting direction. Even when rewatching it, it's a delight as even knowing what happens the plan still works out nicely. It stays light enough, which makes for a good, watchable sequence - whether you get invested in every step or sit back and enjoy the ride.

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• The seventy-ninth classical recording: #563 Jean Sibelius - Pelleas et Melisande Suite The movements of this suite are mostly slow, not bombastic but big and impressive. They hit that mix of moods, as parts of the bigger work these belonged to, and while the thematic through line may be missing a bit in comparison, it's a good, inspiring piece of music that gets you through the day in a way.

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• The one hundred eighty-ninth album: #189 Van Morrison - Moondance The folksy and jazzy rock of Van Morrison again hits a different part of my brain, as the titular track of Moondance manages to hit the right points to work for me. Following the jazz with a ballad works well, both imbuing the previous song with more energy while Crazy Love becomes a sweeter love song for it. Moving on the edges between blues, folk rock and jazz, a bunch of these songs turn up a lot of depth while still working as a casual listen. You need to dig to really get everything out of it, but it's a surprisingly upbeat set of songs without it.

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• The seventy-eighth classical recording: #929 Henri Dutilleux - Metaboles When I was reading up on this piece before listening to it, I got intrigued straight away - this is a piece that plays with transforming elements of the usic, taking in the basic parts and playing with it. It sounded like an interesting idea and the work delivers on it, with a busy piece that runs through a lot of variations of - well - everything, it seems. As a piece it's on the shorter side, but aside from interesting in its setup, it's also nice to listen to, an energetic, more modern work that creates something well.

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• The one hundred twenty-eighth TV show: #303 Cosmos Cosmos, initially, presents itself as a show about space. Talking about how we explored it, learned about the Earth, the solar system and galaxies, while teaching about what's there and how it interacts. It's simple if you've read up on it, and at times a bit outdated, but it explains it well, giving you some things to think about, with things we discussed afterwards and in between. It reflects on the Earth too, the dilemmas we face with things like climate change, an issue even in the seventies, and war, which was an even bigger threat at the time. As the show continues though, that later part starts to overtake. While there might be life on other planets, they're unlikely to reach us unless we reach out, and only if we survive for long enough. It ends up preachy, but at the same time uses science and reason to promote a better, more conscientious earth. It paints the spreading of science as political and makes points that still ring true today - even if it feels we progressed a bit. I miss the space talk - it's the best bit - but Carl Sagan stays engaging throughout.

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• The one hundred eighty-eighth album: #188 Deep Purple - In Rock Deep Purple's In Rock is another early driving force for the heavy metal movement, using long tracks with prog rock influences to break up the metal sound that mostly underlies the vocals. It goes for epic, mixing in these different elements, especially in the long runs like that of Child In Time, which feels like a mini album on its own considering the many things it does. With that said, this is the point where we've really embraced metal, and it's great to have another album on the road to it.

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• The eighty-seventh book: #72 Emma - Jane Austen After Mansfield Park, Emma, the protagonist this book is obviously named after, suits me a lot better. She's active and strong willed, she drives the action and she's flawed - for the purposes of this book and in comparison to the era, very flawed. She enjoys playing matchmaker, but it shown several times to be bad at it, leading to some unsatisfactory unions and others avoiding her attention or work to get their own way. She fails, she's flawed, and while it gets tricky to keep up with the characters flying around sometimes, on the whole it's nice to see it all play out with our protagonist in the middle. Jane Austen set out to write a character, she said, that no one but herself would really like and while I think that description goes a bit far, the fact that she isn't as easy to love makes her a more interesting character that really stands inside the world, rather than above it. Through it you get other characters around her, not straight villains and heroes, but other complex characters that the novel can explore more freely. It's an empowering story in that sense, and feels like a highlight of these romance novels so far.

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• The one hundred eighty-seventh album: #187 Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin III Led Zeppelin provides us with another album of rock.It varies a bit on where it goes - Immigrant Song is rockier, Since I've Been Loving You closer to blues rock, but on the whole the rock stays, the aggression is there and the energy is there. It's good to wake me up on a sleepy Tuesday and is the right music to get you through on a day like that.

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• The seventy-seventh classical recording: #360 George Bizet - The Pearl Fishers Taken as a musical piece, The Pearl Fishers is imposing, with some big songs and vocal parts to match. There aren't necessarily as many calm parts, it feels like the piece stays big and powerful a fair amount. I miss the balance a bit, as it feels quite full on throughout. It matches the tone of the work - both the storms and the anger that's in there. The work feels big - something that must come across quite well in the theatre performances as well.

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• The one hundred eighty-sixth album: #186 Neil Young - After The Gold Rush While Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's folk rock went for the more energetic, faster folk rock, Neil Young's album goes to the gentler country rock, not quite producing ballads but creating something simpler, perhaps at times sadder ("Only Love Can Break Your Heart" shows that) as well. There are comparative rockers, like "Southern Man", but even then those would be gentler songs for other bands. Lyrically, the songs are richer, with the aforementioned Southern Man commenting on racism, while After the Gold Rush tells a fairly vivid story. It's nothing fancy, but the album just works so well.

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• The one hundred eighty-fifth album: #185 Black Sabbath - Paranoid I'm covering another Black Sabbath album pretty shortly after the first, with the band, it seems, already moving more into heavy metal. There are some absolute masterpieces in here that cover that, with Paranoid feeling like an immediate classic that gets followed by a quieter, simpler Planet Caravan that feels as trippy, just not as loud. I'm not sure the lyrics always extend that well - Iron Man isn't a literary masterpiece - but the music does enough to evoke a feeling that the lyrics feel easy to overlook in those place. This is probably where heavy metal comes out better - not as a single song, where its isolation makes it stand out, but in an album where it has time to build and relax. There's a good flow to the album, with some great moments in the song that sound better in context.

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• The eighty-fifth book: #129 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll The eighty-sixth book: #142 Alice Through the Looking-Glass - Lewis Carroll After a few more books in order, I got a Lewis Carroll in to break up my Austens. I'm grouping the two Alice stories together as they are both fairly short and feel linked enough. They're technically the story of Alice as she explores these weird places, but its main focus is that it shows us these bizarre vignettes, situations with outlandish fantasy characters (most of which you know by now) that Alice travels between. Some carry from one to the other, but there's very little throughline to Adventures in Wonderland. Through the Looking-Glass has Alice travel to the other side of a chess board, but aside from the Queens' occasional appearances, each square is its own story and place. That's not a criticism, it's a view into one man's imagination, clearly inspired by the people and toys around him as he was telling these stories. I don't know the exact inspirations behind them, but it feels like he put in jokes into short stories that he collected and built a single story out of, with some crossover characters and references at the end. It's a bit more structured in Through the Looking-Glass, but seeing these different situations is the most appealing. It occasionally makes you think, but at the same time, there's not much point to trying to find too much meaning in it - and here, that's just fine.

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• The seventy-sixth classical recording: #715 Marcel Dupre - Symphonie-Passion A purely organ-based piece is always going to sound a bit more ominous, and the way this piece leads off, with almost discordant, dark notes played almost at random, adds to this unsettling feeling. Part of this remains, but at the same time it provides a contrast to the second movement, the nativity, which has a lighter melody through it as well. Knowing the basic subject, the four movements become easier to pick out and place, with a natural progression that stays ominous while conveying their meaning - it's there to impress for the most part, although the resurrection itself starts telling even more of a story, with its slow, gentler start, staying sombre but not necessarily as imposing. It's a piece that goes from unsettling to affecting in half an hour, one that needs to grow on you but was effective for me once it does.

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• The one hundred eighty-fourth album: #184 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Deja Vu After I enjoyed Stephen Stills' self titled album, his next collaboration is one I'm looking forward to listening to here. The album gives more of that, some powerful rock songs that are more personal and impactful - louder, but not a screaming match. It's impactful, helped by the great performances of the band, the harmonies sounding beautiful and the whole album feeling perfected in all places. Whether it's the simple Our House or agonizing Almost Cut My Hair, there's craft that's gone into each of them and I can see how they might have reached the 800 hours in the studio needed to really make this work.

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• The eighty-fourth book: Mansfield Park - Jane Austen I'll be honest, Mansfield Park was my least favourite of the Austen novels so far. Her first two books were great reads, with strong female protagonists (for their time) who worked to make their own destiny. I wouldn't say it was filled with action, but they drive it. On the other hand, Fanny Price is more passive, put into a position in life and accepting the virtuous, good path. It feels like a callback to earlier epistolary novels and their female characters who have everything happen to them. It reads a bit as a morality, with Fanny Price inside it but mostly acting as an observer and mouthpiece as the protagonist with the right morals, but I didn't find much in there that actually endeared me to her and everything going on around her fell flat because she was so passive - I was waiting for that to switch, but it simply never happened.

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• The one hundred twenty-seventh TV show: #882 Winners & Losers I'm struggling to figure out how I feel about this show, and it's the different sides that feel so frustrating. There's a premise here that sounds good - four losers in school come back for their reunion and decide to share a lottery ticket. That ticket wins eight million dollars that they split (with some drama here, as always) as it transforms their life. They're now winners, at least supposedly, but are they really? It's a decent premise, but while not quite abandoned, the changes I'd expect in their lives - how do other people treat them, for example, or what happens if they spend too much and still need to watch their finances - don't really materialize. Yeah, they can buy their own place and don't have to go for a promotion at work, but mostly it plays out like a soap where none of the characters end up worrying about money. If they just didn't mention it, it would be like any other soap story. With that, some of the characters don't stay as compelling. Francis is an amazing character, played perfectly, and Sophie's arc in the first few episodes makes her a lot more likeable. On the other hand, Jenny is well played and likeable, but the story feels quite cliche. It just never really connected in a way that became interesting. The whole thing never quite delivers on its premise and sadly it goes in a direction that doesn't work for me. There are bits that I'd love to see more of - Francis especially - but on the whole it doesn't feel worth going on with how little actually changes.

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• The four hundred and ninety-third song: Ambition - Subway Sect Ambition makes for a decent punk song, with the British punk sound, the hard guitars and synthesizers and driving melody. It feels like quite a standard punk song, fun but not something that really jumps out specifically. The four hundred and ninety-fourth song: Hong Kong Garden - Siouxsie & The Banshees Another (post) punk that materialized from fans around the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie and the Banshees create a song that feels a bit weird now as it uses a lot of Chinese influences in a now insensitive way. On the other hand, the spirit is there and the song feels a bit more crafted than other punk songs, with more of a build up and follow up. The four hundred and ninety-fifth song: Being Boiled - The Human League Electronic music is still incredibly experimental at this stage and the beeps and bloops with lyrics over them feel like a video game sound track, creating an odd experience that make it unsurprising that early audiences didn't take to it. It's thin and odd, not bad, but such a mental shift that it's hard to immediately take it in. The four hundred and ninety-sixth song: Rock Lobster - The B52’s With new wave come more bizarre songs and Rock Lobster, describing a party of sea animals. It's bizarre and eclectic, the sounds accompanying the story telling adding to the bizarre feeling while the melody helps make you smile. It's bizarre but entertaining and just keeps putting me in a good mood. It's a lovely surprise to get here. The four hundred and ninety-seventh song: Roxanne - The Police Roxanne moves to quite a different place and the reggae-influenced vocal stylings add a lot of emotion to the song's dour music and setting. There's a lot of desperation in the song in the naivety of the singer as it goes on. This is a classic, with a theme that seems to have endured, and it remains that way here, with a weird way of showing emotion that I might not otherwise have seen. The four hundred and ninety-eighth song: Another Girl, Another Planet - The Only Ones While I'm not sure I agree with the idea that this is the greatest rock song ever recorded, there is something good about this track that works well. It's got a good chorus, the lyrics aren't complex but work really well and the improvised, longer interludes works quite nicely here to set the tone. The four hundred and ninety-ninth song: Germ Free Adolescents - X-Ray Spex In a section of the list filled with new wave and punk rock, this feels slow, though not quiet. There's a fairly mellow beat underlying the similarly relaxed lyrics. Her voice is great, but feels a bit odd and out of place. There's something in the song that drags you along, but it doesn't necessarily give you any other feelings. It's odd, lovely to listen to, but frankly a bit bizarre. The five hundredth song: Runnin’ with the Devil - Van Halen The other side of this is that we get pushed towards hard rock, with Van Halen giving it a good showing. They sound good here, with an energetic performance that comes with the required screams and loudness, but playing and modulating it so it doesn't always come at you and the different elements get their break throughout. It's a good, powerful song that really works to give a big finish to 1978.

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• The one hundred eighty-third album: John Lennon - Plastic Ono Band John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band is the first post-Beatles album by a former member on the list, although both George Harrison and Paul McCartney released in the same year and probably before this - a victim of the book's ordering. It is an interesting point of view - John Lennon always felt like the more introspective writer of the McCartney-Lennon duo and it shows through here, with songs that all feel personal on some level, from his childhood, reflections on Beatles fame and reflecting on the changes in society. While the album still drifts into avant garde rock, tracks like Working Class Hero hit the spot far more and these folk tracks and influences help make this album feel like one that's more personal. That doesn't mean that's all, and Well Well Well is a longer, hard rock track that gets more aggressive, but on the whole the album is calmer, contemplative, not as experimental, but more of a journey through John Lennon's feeling. It's an album of growth, that might not hit you as personally as much as others might, but works as a good statement.

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• The one hundred eighty-second album: #182 Stephen Stills - Stephen Stills I think the albums of the various variations of super groups Stephen Stills have been in have generally been fairly good, the type of folk rock that tends to connect. Stephen Stills' self-titled album starts Love The One You're With hits the right spot straight away, an up tempo folk rock song that connects immediately and works to set up a good album. It's a positive enough message that suits the music. The happier feel of the music continues - avoiding the maudlin sound folk tends to get, without the anger from hard rock, the other genre this is based on, and it's an encouraging, exciting album that really works for me. It's thoughtful, but not miserable, and that's what makes this a lovely album.

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• The one hundred twenty-sixth TV show: #921 Elementary I've discussed Sherlock before, and Elementary is the other side of the coin. Another adaptation of the character, Elementary mostly avoids adapting the original work (in part because it is difficult in a weekly show with 22 episodes per season), instead transplanting the Sherlock Holmes character to New York, helping the police there. It evaluates his character in a modern setting - as a recovering alcoholic, he isn't as good a person, and it's Jonny Lee Miller's charismatic but slightly off approach that really seals the deal, keeping him likeable but off putting enough. What helps is Lucy Liu playing Joan Watson, the gender swapped doctor who really is our window into the world. Over the series we see her grow into someone as competent as Sherlock, but more human. Even then there's a balance on how much she starts to copy Sherlock. In other words, rather than just focusing on the crimes, there's a lot more focus on our protagonist, as well as the supporting cast in the NYPD. It's a good watch and for the most part entertaining, a lot of this kept light while exploring certain situations quite deeply. It's an adaptation that works amazingly well, with legs that outpace the original.

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• The one hundred eighty-first album: #181 The Carpenters - Close To You While I feel like I keep talking about rock and roll diversifying, with blues and jazz albums coming in between those, I've forgotten how good it feels to get a simple, straight forward pop album. The Carpenters know how to create this, with some lovely harmonies, soe good melodies, and solid covers. Burt Bacharach's Close To You, which lends its title to the album, is the famous example, but Help gets its own twist that sounds a bit folksier and, to be honest, quite seventies here. It shows how, while the album isn't experimental, it's clearly their own sound that works well. Sure, it's fairly inoffensive in what it does, but it's the right amount of relaxed to stay listenable.

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• The seventy-fifth classical recording: #527 Gustav Mahler - Symphony no. 4 For a four movement symphony that is small by Mahler's standards, there is still plenty of big things on display here. The symphony never gets frantic, even if it's rarely solemn, instead displaying a confidence in its sound that is happy and pleasant. It's mostly peaceful and gentle, but explores that space as well, and the energy is always still there. Once the soprano comes in, as a listener I had settled into a comfortable, peaceful place that felt engaging, and even some of the tempo increases there didn't phase me as much as I thought they could have. There's something to the nergy that pulls you along, while avoiding becoming that dreamlike - it just works out that much better on its own.

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• The eightieth comic: #634 Understanding Comics I'm not sure what the best point would be to to read this, but I feel like 80 comics in, I got a decent base to understand the specific comics and styles Scott McCloud was referencing throughout - knowing French comics, for example, is incredibly helpful. This work starts off by defining what a comic is, then after that analysing and explaining the medium in several ways - levels of abstraction, words versus pictures, as well as exploring the gap between panels. It's an engaging thesis - mostly right, and leaving plenty open to resolve - that gives me a lot more to think about when trying to understand comics in the future. The differences between different styles - especially Japanese and Western - is well explained here and it feels like subsequent works really made use of these ideas to create a way to produce comics. This means that this is not only a fascinating read - and it really is worth reading for any fans, or anyone trying to understand comics and why they qualify as art - but also give you a better grounding for other styles.

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• The one hundred eightieth album: #180 The Doors - Morrison Hotel With the original Doors album on the list being nearly ninety albums ago, it's odd to see the throwbacks of sorts we get in this album - although in reality, less than four years has passed between he albums. The blues rock feeling here feels a bit outdated, with harder variants having taken over, as the psychedelia has been toned down - the organ is there, but it blends in and the good, strong riffs take precendence. A song like Blue Sunday veers there more, but it's a song like Peace Frog or Land Ho! that stands out more. The lyrics aren't alway sthe most out there, but they work well in the road movie sense - decently meaningful wtihout being too complex, they work well enough together.

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• The seventy-ninth comic: #540 Zenith It's a bit hard to talk about this comic, in part because I'm not always convinced they entirely knew what it was meant to be. Zenith is a slightly vacuous 80s popstar who's also a pop star - I'm not sure how often that's used during his performances, but it explains his way of travelling without much concern about the world of his powers. He's the son of two other superheroes, who disappearing in the 60s, together with all the others that exist. The first volume explores this odd world, bringing back some past superheroes to stop the ancient evil and exploring some of the things that would have changed and the generational conflict involved. Later issues bring in an anti-Thatcher and (for a special) anti-Blair element, with a former/current superhero with mind control as part of the Tory government, which it hints at but doesn't address enough to really work. There's a story of fighting evil in there which works well in the original issues, and a "are we right to destroy some things after they're overrun by evil" section that sadly gets undercut later. The fourth issue breaks down and the story doesn't stick as well. It's a decent read, but the story fails to engage near the end - which stays unfortunate.

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• The one hundred seventy-ninth album: #179 Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath The other side of rock in the seventies feels like it really emerges here, as heavy metal comes to the foreground. The drawn out, bassy blues tones of the opening number set the scene for a gothic, intense album that indulges in the theatrical, including its dark lyrics, but also has some good, rocking tunes that sound good on their own - the choice is yours on whether you dig deeper, but it works on both lev

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• The seventy-eighth comic: #325 Ayako Ayako really plays with your emotions through its run. Set, initially, in a small Japanese village, we follow a Japanese soldier who was a prisoner of war as well as a spy while he was there. He stays involved in shady dealings throughout, but slowly the focus shifts to his youngest sister, Ayako. Because of his involvement, her life turns rough and she is held underground for a long time. We explore her psyche partially, as well as the developments during and after her capture. She's part of a rotten family, staying an innocent but not always acting that way, and in a way, after a long time, resolves the crimes that were committed. The ending is incredibly fitting, and it was engaging throughout, a lovely work that really manages to get you in places. The seventy-fourth classical recording: #799 Bohuslav Martinu - Double Concerto Reading up a little about the tensions at the time it was created, with Europe on the brink of the second World War, the music makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of tension in it, a lot of anger as well as slow, tense bits that really get to you. It's quite impactful, making me feel the anxiety but also bringing in some moments of hope, which is just as welcome. It feels like it reflects my disordered mind at the moment - the perfect sound for me today, really.

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