The 33 1/3 thread.... (the book series)

Lee Newman said:
This album is a little all over the place, isn’t it? I mean I would have picked The Queen is Dead over this.
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Yeah the last two are the strong ones. Queen is Dead is the most consistent and Strangeways hints at where they could have gone if they didn’t run poor old Johnny Marr into the ground and cause it to all implode. Their debut is ok but the non album singles of the time were better and Meat Is Murder is a bit uneven. That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore is probably my favourite Smiths song and the title track probably my least so
 
yukbon said:
The CD version(s) are even more uneven, they tried tacking on a few extra tracks from singles and b-sides. So you have this lopsided album....and then what is one of their "rock"iest and inarguably most famous song, "How Soon Is Now?" tacked on at the end. The lowing moos on the title track always make me laugh, they're so over the top.
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On the end? It must be a weird transition from the big full stop of the title track to then music playing again 😂 Any of the mid 90s Warner CDs that I had with it tacked on always had it in the middle. It was either just before or just after That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore. Similar with This Charming Man on their debut. I’m happy now to have the vinyl issues with neither on, brilliant tracks but didn’t fit the flow.
 
The live version of Meat is murder from oxford 1985 smokes the studio version , the guitar work is superb...available on That joke isn’t funny b side
 
Joe Mac said:
On the end? It must be a weird transition from the big full stop of the title track to then music playing again 😂 Any of the mid 90s Warner CDs that I had with it tacked on always had it in the middle. It was either just before or just after That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore. Similar with This Charming Man on their debut. I’m happy now to have the vinyl issues with neither on, brilliant tracks but didn’t fit the flow.
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no, you're right, i was misremembering, it's in the middle of the record, between the two sides. what a weird place to drop a non-album song.
 
yukbon said:
no, you're right, i was misremembering, it's in the middle of the record, between the two sides. what a weird place to drop a non-album song.
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I think they were trying to market that as “the” version of the album going forward, using the single as an extra hook. With the debut I actually think it was mirroring the American release by sequencing in This Charming Man, which was absent from the original U.K. I think in both instances they were wrong to add the track but probably right to put it where they put it given both have definitive ending songs, so afterwards have been weird. That said it’s all academic now, Johnny Marr put them back to the original UK release track list when he remastered in 2011.
 
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BjorgenFjorgen said:
I only know Cave vaguely and have never heard his album but using this quote as a foreword is very intriguing!
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It's a album that all his others hint at. Usually there are love songs mixed in though. It can also be brutally descriptive, which can be part of its charm. I don't know if it's a good way to start with Nick Cave or not. The album that really got me on board was The Boatman's Call, which is almost the opposite of this. I then dug in and found I loved it all. He's become one of my favorite artists. And I think he fits with that Dylan, Cohen, Waits quality of songwriter.
 
Interesting that this thread popped up on the first page just now, as I ordered my first two books in this series just the other day. I read the Highway 61 Revisited book on a plane a couple of years ago (somebody had left it at the airport, so I picked it up), and really enjoyed it, and figured I might as well dive in and get some more in the series back then. It took more than two years to finally get around to it, but now In the aeroplane... and Psycho Candy is on their merry way home to me!
 
Matt M said:
It's a album that all his others hint at. Usually there are love songs mixed in though. It can also be brutally descriptive, which can be part of its charm. I don't know if it's a good way to start with Nick Cave or not. The album that really got me on board was The Boatman's Call, which is almost the opposite of this. I then dug in and found I loved it all. He's become one of my favorite artists. And I think he fits with that Dylan, Cohen, Waits quality of songwriter.
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I would agree that Nick Cave is definitely in the company of Dylan/Cohen/Waits. He's got a heavy biblical bent and his songs are lurid and vividly descriptive. I picked up his 1990s-era "best of" and that's how I got into his stuff -- "Tupelo" and the songs that sound lovey-dovey, "Into My Arms" etc. I still think that best-of is a better introduction than the more expansive 3 disc "lovely creatures" they just put out (although that does have stuff from the latter albums, which obvs 'best of' would be missing since it predates those albums). Albums qua albums, I think Murder Ballads might be an intense place to start, but not necessarily bad. I think the albums right after the death of his son might be too much to take in if you were to start there (although both Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen are beautiful and wonderful, they're also harrowing and a bit hard to take -- Skeleton Tree in particular feels a bit like Bowie's Blackstar: a man staring unflinchingly right into death and grief).
 
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Whiteout75 said:
Interesting that this thread popped up on the first page just now, as I ordered my first two books in this series just the other day. I read the Highway 61 Revisited book on a plane a couple of years ago (somebody had left it at the airport, so I picked it up), and really enjoyed it, and figured I might as well dive in and get some more in the series back then. It took more than two years to finally get around to it, but now In the aeroplane... and Psycho Candy is on their merry way home to me!
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Highway 61 is great, I really enjoyed that one (a lot more than Dylan's own book, which was sort of all over the place...) and Aeroplane is one of the more enjoyable books in the series IMO -- the only minor quibble -- and it really is minor given how good the rest of the book is -- is that Jeff Mangum refused to participate in the book (... which at the time was like, mysterious and perfect and fed into the mystique of 'well he made this one perfect jewel of an album and disappeared forever'....but then a few years after that he got everyone back together and toured and stuff, so....)
 
BjorgenFjorgen said:
I only know Cave vaguely and have never heard his album but using this quote as a foreword is very intriguing!
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Prepare for a new rabbit hole to fall down.

I agree with others that Boatmans Call is a good place to start. I would then go to Let Love In (album before Murder Ballads) or No More Shall We Part. His work can be very heavy but he also has a great sense of humour which does not come out as much in the studio albums. I would also recommend his Live At KCRW which give a nice overview in an intimate setting.

Stay away from Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen until you have given the others a good listen. Both of these are really intense. Cave is one of those musicians you want to get into the pool in the shallow end then take your time moving into the deeper waters.
 
About halfway through the Smiths book (I ate fiction up as a kid, not so much anymore)... anyhow, I like it. I think it takes an interesting approach into telling us how the writer feels about the album, sort of using the story to set the stage for all the teenagey angst that makes a band like The Smiths compelling. I also like the pretty spot on way that music can bind friends together as presented in the book.
 
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