Full Albums Archives - Page 2 of 26

Full Albums: The Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

Posted by Tom McDonald at 12:30 pm 1 Response »

Oct 142022

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

After watching all eight hours of Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, and another three hours of interviews with Jackson about the making of Get Back I had to put on A Hard Day’s Night to restore balance. I had to get back to a time when John Lennon was firing on all creative cylinders and Paul McCartney was slacking.

In early-to-mid 1964, Lennon was engaged, prolific, and self-confident enough that the Beatles finally released a full album with all original material: AHDN. No covers! All 13 tracks are Lennon–McCartney compositions, officially, but 10 of them are really Lennon’s. And they are all good to really good Lennon songs, too, except for the ones that are great, like “If I Fell” and the title track.

If McCartney’s contributions were few in number, two of them loom large in the catalog: “Can’t Buy Me Love” became the album’s first #1 single, while his ballad “And I Love Her” stands with McCartney’s best songs of any period. Mostly, though, Paul was not quite finding his stride in ‘64, much like John in the Get Back period.
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Full Albums: Janis Joplin’s ‘Pearl’

Posted by Patrick Robbins at 1:00 pm No Responses »

Sep 022022

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

The album Pearl saw Janis Joplin working with a strong set of songs, a tight band in Full Tilt Boogie, and a simpatico producer in Paul Rothchild. She may not have known she was making a masterpiece, but there was no disguising how well the sessions were going. They came to the most abrupt end possible, however, on October 4th, 1970, when Joplin died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27. A few months later, Pearl was released, and while her death couldn’t help but overshadow it, over the years that shadow has receded. More than just a final statement, it sealed Joplin’s place as the best female singer of blues and rock ‘n’ roll of her era, and in “Me and Bobby McGee” it contained her signature song, one that still feels good to hear on the radio.
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Full Albums: Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds Of Love’

Posted by Hope Silverman at 10:30 am No Responses »

Aug 192022

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

In June of 2022, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” was used to soundtrack a climactic scene in the premiere episode of season four of the Netflix series Stranger Things. What happened next is already the stuff of pop music legend and a tale that will be remembered and recounted for years to come. As the 37-year-old pop song by the reclusive legend played, millions of kids and teens who had never known of Kate Bush’s existence completely lost their minds. Then came the real mayhem.

The next week saw “RUTH” (let’s just call it) ascend to the top of pop charts all over the world, going to number #1 in eight countries (England! New Zealand! Switzerland! Lithuania! More!). Okay, it only got to #4 in the U.S., but still, that’s Top 5 (upon the song’s original release in 1985 it only got as high as #30)! The song garnered millions of plays across all the streaming services (Apple! Spotify! YouTube!), inspired masses of TikTok videos, and most importantly introduced a whole new generation to the incomparable genius of Catherine “Kate” Bush.

But while the pop-chart-exploding Stranger Things-inspired introduction was a singular event unto itself, the experience of just plain hearing Kate Bush for the first time has never really changed. As existing Kate fans can confirm, the excitable reaction of the new listeners was perfectly normal. When Kate Bush enters your pop listening life for the first time, the natural human tendency has always been to go a little “oh my God” crazy.

But perhaps the most mind-blowing thing about all of this is that “RUTH” is not even the best song on the album it actually hails from. That’s how great Hounds Of Love is.

A foundational fixture on every “Best Albums of All-Time” list from now until forever, Hounds Of Love is Kate Bush’s finest hour. Despite its unending sonic drama, Hounds was recorded in the comically peaceful and idyllic environs of a converted barn at Kate’s childhood home. Yes, this madly ambitious album, consisting of four gorgeously unhinged anthems of love, an eerie demon ballad, and a 26-minute oceanic fever dream, actually came to be in storybook surroundings full of greenery, birdsong, and sweet dogs (that’d be Kate’s front cover co-stars and forever icons, Bonnie and Clyde). Epic and anthemic enough to scream along to in the car, but brimming with enough empathy and intimacy for intensive solo headphone engagement, Hounds Of Love is just plain magic.

Full Albums: The Velvet Underground’s ‘White Light/White Heat’

Posted by Adam Mason at 3:00 pm 2 Responses »

May 202022

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

The 2021 album I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to the Velvet Underground & Nico is, without doubt, packed with glorious covers of tracks from the seminal New York band’s revolutionary “banana LP.” Yet it sounds, at times, ever so slightly predictable, when the assembled artists from the upper echelons of US alt-rock are found guilty of smoothing out the transgressive edges of the 1967 original. Matt Berninger of The National, for instance, takes a stab at “I’m Waiting for the Man,” and he sings it magnificently in that brooding style of his. It’s well played, and it has stylish motorik beats, and the production is slick, and it has squalling guitars and backing vocals in all the right places, and…it’s pretty straightforward, really.

The brave souls who choose to tackle any of the six more improvised, less celebrated, and decidedly less melodic tracks on the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat, on the other hand, can rarely be accused of being predictable. Whether for a tribute album or otherwise. Yes, Julian Casablancas may have remade the title track in 2016 in exactly the way you’d expect, as a singer who always made clear his musical debt to Lou Reed and co. But for the most part, the artists are outsider acts adopting songs that express their outsider status, recognizing that the Velvets’ notorious sophomore LP fits as well now as it did in 1968, when it scraped into the Billboard Top 200 as a monumentally uncommercial, poorly produced, avant-garde, anti-hippie, anti-everything work of anarchy. No one, in any case, could hope to tame tracks so strange, confrontational, and anticipatory of punk, glam-rock, and industrial music, especially not the frenzied “I Heard Her Call My Name,” or the epically deranged “Sister Ray.”

In short, the artists to most successfully cover a White Light/White Heat song are those who manage to tap into “the quintessence of articulated punk,” as Reed himself brilliantly described the album in 2013. They also appreciate the Velvets in the way Lester Bangs appreciated them when he lauded the foursome, in his 1971 assessment of the LP, as “one of the most dynamically experimental groups in or out of rock.” But the very best White Light covers over the whole 54 years of the album’s incendiary existence? Across the realms of alt-rock, lo-fi, proto-punk, and, erm, bluegrass? Well, they would have to be these…
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Full Albums: The Grateful Dead’s ‘Europe ’72’

Posted by Curtis Zimmermann at 3:00 pm No Responses »

Mar 302022

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

On April 7, 1972, the Grateful Dead hit the stage at Wembley Empire Pool in London, kicking off a multi-city European tour. The 22-date outing would eventually be immortalized in the three-LP live album it spawned: Europe ‘72.

The tour has been chronicled heavily in band members’ memoirs, remembered for both its great musical output as well as its levels of unbridled debauchery, excessive even by the standards of the Dead. For the band at the time, the tour felt like a monumental undertaking that included both scores of people and mountains of gear. In A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, Dennis McNally cataloged everything that came along for the journey, which included: “seven musicians, ten crew, five staff, seventeen assorted friends, wives, girlfriends and children … They brought themselves and fifteen tons of instruments, a sound system, and a sixteen-track recording system which they would install in a truck as a mobile studio. There was also lighting gear and their first traveling lighting designer.”

That spring, the band’s lineup was in a state of evolution. It was their last tour to include founding member Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, who would pass away in 1973. The husband and wife duo, pianist Keith Godchaux and vocalist Donna, were firmly entrenched in the band. Mickey Hart was on hiatus after his father had stolen money from the band, leaving Bill Kreutzmann as the band’s lone drummer. Given both this blend of musicians and the high quality of the recording equipment, the shows have a unique sound that differs from other eras of the band’s music.

While many bands use live albums as an easy way of fulfilling their contract or rehashing their greatest hits, Europe ‘72 is very much a complete work in its own right. The 17-track, three record set contained practically a full album’s worth of new material mixed in with older tracks. There are six new songs that were never even included on any studio records, three previously unreleased covers and two instrumental jams. Given the album and tour’s popularity among Deadheads, in 2011 the band released a more exhaustive collection, Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, a 73-CD box set.

As Deadhead nation marks the album and tour’s 50th anniversary, we decided to put together our own form of celebration. Here’s a breakdown of live covers of every single track on the album.
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Full Albums: Steely Dan’s ‘Countdown to Ecstasy’

Posted by Tom McDonald at 1:30 pm 5 Responses »

Feb 042022

Full Albums features covers of every track off a classic album. Got an idea for a future pick? Leave a note in the comments!

Any artist who scores a major success with their debut–as Steely Dan accomplished with Can’t Buy a Thrill–just might lose some sleep while working on their follow-up. Will it be any good compared to the first?

But Steely Dan co-founders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen seemingly had no such worries about their sophomore release, Countdown to Ecstasy. In fact, they were cavalier about it to the point of self-sabotage. One example: they selected “Show Biz Kids” as the album’s first single. This is a song in which Fagen drops what we now call an f-bomb (unheard of in 1973); it’s a song that mocks the band’s own (very modest) fanbase.

The prematurely-jaded transplants from New York City adopted a fuck-all stance about show bidness [sic]and the LA lifestyle in general. In their darker moments they took aim at Western civilization itself. Even the album title is cynical, a jab at our collective eagerness to traffic in quick fixes–spiritual, political, and musical ones included.

At least the band toured steadily to promote their music. But even there they did nothing to dress it up–no light shows or stage antics. They simply played the music. In fact, for Countdown, they fired the only band member with any interest in being on stage (singer David Palmer). They shunned press interviews, never smiled for the camera. Looking back at this period decades later, Becker and Fagen blamed the punishing tour schedule for the shortcomings of their studio work.

Countdown did in fact fall short of their first album, if the metric is hit singles and Billboard chart positions. Countdown had no hits to match “Do It Again” or “Reelin’ in the Years” from the album before, and it had no staying power in the charts. What the album did have was a fresh fusion of jazz and rock, remixed within a Brill Building songwriting context. Its tracks featured horn arrangements, Hendrix-inspired guitar pyrotechnics, and flashes of Zappa-level musical mayhem. Lyrically, you have Dylan, Philip K. Dick, and Chuck Berry influences. There’s plenty of polish and precision, but the album makes room for the ramshackle too (the best instance coming from guest guitarist Rick Derringer). Romantic ballads sit beside funkathons. You have “Show Biz Kids”–basically a one-chord song–followed by “My Old School,” with its ornate horn charts, backing vocals galore, and at least a dozen chords. Plus some cowbell to keep it real.
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