The one hundred fifty-eighth album: #158 MC5 - Kick Out The Jams
It feels like it's been a while since we've had some decent garage rock on the list, with both folksier and more eclectic sounds taking center stage. There's been plenty of hard rock, but the looseness has been missing in an era that seems very studio based. Kick Out The Jams atarts with Ramblin Rose, which is mostly a bunch of noise while the lyrics were shouted over it, the introduction creating the political message. These are part of the album's set up as a live album - a brief introduction, some crowd reactions and songs that it seems the room can barely handle, but work better in this section.
The album is politically charged, radically left and trying to make a point. The songs show this best in Motor City Is Burning, a bluesier number that's directly about the oppression and focuses its lyrics more than before. It's effective, more than the rest of the album is. The songs on the album are better constructed than it sounds above - Starship, for example, plays with quite a few structural elements and has specific points it meets, but it's less precise and heavily produced, instead having an energy and life to it that garage rock, and to some extent the punk that will follow, has as well. It's music made to be enjoyed and I'm hoping I can get more of it.