Yo La Tengo, Electr-O-Pura: I wonder if it would actually be possible for me to dislike a YLT album--the general subset of styles they do (VU ballads, noisy guitar epics, Sonic Youth/My Bloody Valentine-type stuff, quick folky tunes) is so easy for me to like that I doubt they'd ever come up with anything I'd flat out hate, though I've heard nothing they did before 1993 or after 2006. This critically acclaimed album is the runt of the litter, with me picking the not-that-great "Ballad Of Red Buckets" as the highlight, according to my records, but not caring for the album all that much. I still don't--it's padded out to an hour by mediocre dreamy tunes like "Straight Down To The Bitter End," "My Heart's Reflection" and "The Hour Grows Late," and I have zero clue why so many reviews acclaimed the single "Tom Courtenay" as one of their very best songs, as the melody is pretty banal IMO. There were some rediscoveries here, though!! The dark Sonic Youth-ish guitar epic "Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)" is wonderful, predicting Rather Ripped and "False Alarm" makes great use of a lonely feedback noise. I also think the 9 minute closer "Blue Line Swinger" is a far better background-noise guitar-buildup than whatever closed Painful. So I'll be grateful for those. This is still the weakest prime-era YLT album though!
Billy Joel, Turnstiles: I normally do these relistens because I've forgotten most or all of the songs, but relistening to this I realized I remembered pretty much all of it except "James" and "Summer, Highland Falls." Most of it is pretty good, too--it's just that The Stranger is still better on most fronts, and this album ends up feeling like a warmup for that one. "James" is not bad but "She's Always A Woman" is better. "New York State Of Mind" is not bad but "Just The Way You Are" is better. "I've Loved These Days" is good, but "Vienna" is better...wait, no, "I've Loved These Days" is probably still better there. "Come Dancing" by the Kinks--uh, did Ray Davies rip off Billy's "All You Wanna Do is Dance"? The Stranger is also more diverse. At any rate this has aged pretty well and has no bad songs, and I can't help but a lot of these songs seem to predict 80s adult contemporary or even quasi-playful Muzak--doesn't the main piano line in "Angry Young Man" (actually the best song here) predict the background music I heard in chemistry videos from high school? Or TV theme songs? Elton John's piano lines from the mid 1970s aren't really like these...
Amon Duul II, Tanz Der Lemminge: I didn't get into this one at all the first time around--the three shorter tracks at the end seemed kinda useless, whereas the three straight sidelong epics that START the album always seemed badly patchy. Relistening made me like the good parts of the three epics better, so I like the album a bit better, whereas Yeti I think was pretty strong for 30 minutes before petering out, so I liked that one a little bit less (though I am not frequenting "Soap Shop Rock"!) Yeti also kinda does one long thing most of the album whereas this one is an explosion of All Over The Place. "Syntelman's March" has weird folky parts and weird electric parts that I liked better in 2022, "Restless Skylight-Transistor-Child" contains the album's best parts, some creepy-dreamy-folky sections that are reminiscent of Sung Tongs (I'm not making this up!) and "Marilyn Monroe Memorial Church" casts a decent spacey-funereal spell for about, oh, seven or eight minutes--it just didn't need to be eighteen. As for the three closing shorts, "Stumbling Over Melted Moonlight" will at least stick in my head this time around (the other two still don't--annoying repetitive guitar riffs) because I think Radiohead may have ripped it off for "Myxamatosis." Whether or not I'll do the rest of the ADII catalogue--rumored to have some strong albums!!--remains to be seen. Another thing that didn't help my original listen: most of the reviews I was able to find this time around (even George's--he gave this the 13, y'know) aren't very good at describing what kind of album this is, just going "uhhhhh mind-blowing" a lot.
Syd Barrett, Barrett: All I really remembered about this album from my first listen, which was...uh, 2007, maybe? was that Rick Wright and David Gilmour helped out with this one, and that it came out the same year as Barrett's first solo album, which I liked a lot better. I didn't know all the stories about just how poor and scattershot Syd's condition was, or that Gilmour and Wright really had to coax him and fill things out for him because of it. What I didn't remember were the songs, and I wrote the album off entirely. I shouldn't have--there's a few cool little jaunty kiddie songs here--"Dominoes," "Love Song," "It Is Obvious," "Baby Lemonade" and "Gigolo Aunt" are all pretty nice, and I should have known that the first time since I've considered Piper At The Gates Of Dawn to be Floyd's lone true five-star album since about 2005. I still can't give this more than maybe three stars out of five because the rest of it is frankly just ugly junk ("Rats" is supposed to be scary, but isn't--I found several reviews claiming there's a part where Syd raises his voice that is spine tingling, but it sure didn't work on me," and "Maisie" is so stupid that it makes Smiley Smile look like long-gestating prog-rock, though at least "Wined And Dined" got ripped off for Blur's "Trimm Trabb") but I'm very glad I relistened to it, because I thought it was pure crap the first time around. Also, many "the artist is going mad!!!" albums are exaggerated in terms of the story behind them (Pink Moon comes to mind) but this one really isn't--Syd was by all accounts in bad shape, apparently someone had to take him into the bathroom and point his dick at a toilet so he'd piss!!)