Random A-List

Here are 12 A- (or better) graded albums, selected at random. Use your Reload button to get more.

The Andrews Sisters: Greatest Hits: 60th Anniversary Collection [1998, MCA]
From all-American Minneapolis, half Norwegian and half Greek, the biggest-selling girl group of all time. Although Patti's soggy "I Wanna Be Loved" states explicitly that "loved" doesn't stop with "kissed" and my wife swears "Want Some Sea Food Mama" can't just mean butterfish, their considerable sex appeal is all in their wholesome eagerness to let their hair down. By concentrating on close-harmony uptempo smashes, this 16-song best-of-the-best minimizes mawk as well as travelogues like "Rum and Coca-Cola" and "Bongo, bongo, bongo/I don't want to leave the Congo." Only one "polka," for instance. Averred their music director: "I hated 'Beer Barrel Polka' and arranged it as badly as I could, but it turned out to be their biggest hit. So I gave up trying to do anything musically worthwhile." Now do you believe they were on the side of the angels? A-

Arcade Fire: The Suburbs [2010, Merge]
With beats this straight and stolid, you'd better keep the anthems coming, and they do, almost. Acclimate yourself and maybe you'll check in with track three (at 1:20, the "chosen few" stuff) or even track two (just 29 seconds until "Businessmen they drink my wine"). Certainly track four, the sub-four-minutes reproach "Rococo" ("ro-co-co-ro-co-co-ro-co-co-ro-co-co," although that rendering shortchanges the rhythmic nuances). Then you'll put the record aside for a week or two, and when you return you'll be back to backgrounding it till track five, six seconds of violin pre-climax to the speedy intro to the sub-three-minutes Régine Chassagne feature "Empty Room," followed hard on by the determined "City With No Children." After that it'll be as back-and-forth as Win Butler's thematics till Ms. Chassagne climaxes the opus with the wholehearted "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)." Then you'll remember just why you wanted to put it on, and soon you'll be coming in at "Rococo" yet again. A-

Blue Lu Barker: 1946-1949 [2000, Classics]
This 24-track selection complements and then some the Remastered Collection download I reviewed on a different "label" in 2018. Near as I can tell, owning both will make you a Blue Lu Barker completist. These 24 post-WWII tracks are more polished than the 21 on Remastered Collection (a/k/a 1938-1939)--check the relaxed New Orleans polyphony that frolics through "There Was a L'il Mouse." By sexist blues mama standards, the thirtysomething Barker sounds girlish and slight--no shout, no grit, no phlegm. But her sass and eroticism are baked in. Whether "Layin' in Jail" because she shot the cheater she'd just bought a $100 suit or insisting you "Loan Me Your Husband" because he "looks so kind," she sticks up for herself. And almost never does she stick herself with a generic song. A-

Be Your Own Pet: Be Your Own Pet [2006, Ecstatic Peace!]
Although their buzz came too early, this is one young band that did get better, not something being 16 guarantees--as paths go, both pretension and technique are pretty fucking forking. But at 18 or so, all four still identify as teens, and write for them. Mouthy, destructive, confused, sexed-up but no sex object, Jemina Pearl is the pearl. Guitar man Jonas Stein, who'll turn 19 this fall, takes the hyperactive rhythm section wilding. Yeah yeah yeahs all around. A-

Bootsy Collins: Back in the Day: The Best of Bootsy [1994, Sire/Warner Archives]
"I've got a cartoon mind," he brags, and in the Toony Tune world of P-Funk spinoffs, rivals, and flat-out fakes, this was a virtue to make the most of. It helped that he worked for George, a doowop veteran whose instinct for the hook is everywhere in this music. Because for all Bootsy's deep bass and uncut funk--a legend perpetuated here by a raw live "Psychoticbumpschool"--what makes the Rubber Band so much more consistent than the Gap Band, whose new best-of stops dead every time it trots out a ballad, is the funny, kooky, kind slow ones. A

D.O.A.: War on 45 [1982, Alternative Tentacles]
Hearty, no-bullshit songs for Canadian hardcore to march by, and that they hail from verdant Vancouver sure doesn't hurt the charity of their politics, or of their tempos either. Best originals: "Liar for Hire" and "Let's Fuck" (multilingual so it gets on Francophone radio, right?). Best covers: "War in the East," "Class War," and "War." A-

Loretta Lynn: Loretta Lynn's Greatest Hits Vol. II [1974, MCA]
Each (short) side closes off with the obligatory domestic bromide. But the other nine songs--including six by the singer and two by Shel Silverstein--embody Lynn's notion of female liberation. This notion isn't very sisterly--the only other woman who appears here is headed for Fist City--but does break through the male-identified dead ends of a Tammy Wynette. If Loretta doesn't get her love rights, then she's gonna declare her independence, and even scarier for her man, she sounds like she's itching for an excuse. You know about funky? Well, then, call this spunky. A-

The Pixies: Bossanova [1990, 4AD/Elektra]
Though the words are less willful, they're still mostly indecipherable without the crib sheet and still mostly incomprehensible with it--leisure-class kiddies grasping at straws (or women: Black Francis has gone through three girlfriends by cut five) as the solar system bangs and whimpers to a halt. But these collegians are obscurantists no longer. Announcing their newfound religious faith with a surf-metal instrumental ("Cecilia Ann," who's not a girlfriend though Francis loves her best of all), they march out tunes so simple and confident and power riffs so grandly declamatory that you learn to understand the choruses by singing them. The beats are lively. The three-minute songs don't bash you over the head with their punk/pop brevity. Neither do the two-minute songs. If they weren't still a little gothic-surrealist they might even be too easy--but they ain't. A

The Rough Guide to the Music of the Balkan Gypsies [2005, World Music Network]
The Rom, as these notes call them, set out from India a millennium ago and have long played music the way African freedmen did in Cuba--because it's low-class, low-paying work, but also because they're thought to have a knack. By 1700 or sooner they had seized local styles in dozens of European locales. There is no "real" Gypsy music, but the daredevil fiddles, skirling horns, and extreme vocals of the Balkan strains whose ins and outs they deploy come close enough. I'd never heard of most of these Romanian, Bulgarian, and other bands, but those I've encountered before, including Taraf de Haïdouks on a standout cut absent from their two Nonesuch albums, have never sounded better than in this can-you-top-this party. Not a new groove because it's not smooth enough. But more than one new beat, usually with a history. A-

Homeboy Sandman: First of a Living Breed [2012, Stones Throw]
Between speed of delivery and brevity of line, Sandman's nonstop tunefulness here tends jingly no matter how gritty his flow. So listen up, Goya Foods--he's a Dominican vegan with an old rhyme called "Canned Goods," and if you're real nice maybe he'll let you attach it to a garbanzo commercial. As a sucker for babies, let me praise the sample that runs through the "Wear Clean Draws" variant "For the Kids"; as an elder, let me remind those who've forgotten (as I had) that the treated verbalese of "Cedar & Sedgwick" namechecks the birthplace of hip-hop. Sandman's rhymes are so unfailing I wish he'd tell stories as well as pile on rhetoric, because rhetoric is harder to sustain at the level of interest he deserves. I also wish his best album didn't recycle one standout each from his two 2012 EPs. But there aren't many rappers who can top a strong collection with a progress report on their careers which credibly reports that the nicest thing about earning money is having more to give away and transforms a diffidently childish "not really" into a dynamite hook. I mean, what a boast: "Not really." A-

Spoon: Transference [2010, Merge]
So hermetic, so dynamically contained, Britt Daniel's music discourages identification however impressive its skill set. Ratcheting his reticence up half a turn, he opens with his bleakest new song, and only if you follow his chronically noncommittal lyrics will you notice his emotions opening up along with his tunes, his attitudes along with his structures. First it's "All I know is all I know," then it's "I'm part of this world." Smart enough to have figured out that he's "got nothing to lose but bitterness and patterns," he combats his own unease, and there's a payoff--not the nicer girl than he deserves so much as the grace to write her an adult lullaby: "Your worries are meant to stop for now/You know they're not for keeping." A-

Bunny Wailer: Bunny Wailer Sings the Wailers [1980, Mango]
You'd think these remade rude-boy hits would hook in quick, since for most of us they're not haunted by the ghosts of the originals. Only they don't--the Third Wailer's somewhat ethereal vocal presence, as well as the intractably relaxed groove that rockers studio flash is heir to, assure that. But after too many plays hook in they do, especially on side one, where "Burial," "I Stand Predominate," and "Walk the Proud Land" form a gently triumphant triptych. A-