Cascade

Resonance cascade
A bad day for Black Mesa labs
They're waiting for you

Planet Rock: The Album by Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force

Let’s start with the good stuff. This is a genre defining album that takes the icy electronic music of Kraftwerk (reproduced in the studio rather than sampled) and melds it with a danceable beat to create something genuinely new and exciting. It’s good to see that the members of Kraftwerk get individual writing credits on this, which earns this album a star.

The bad is that Bambaataa was not only a sexual predator of the very worst kind for many years, but that his crimes were ‘hip-hop’s best kept secret’ and covered up, with whistle blowers and victims being silenced by the rich and powerful. Enough is enough.

Wings, Constellation

Ten bright stars twinkling
Ptolomy saw an eagle
Soaring in heaven

Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake by Small Faces

I’m still not entirely sure how Small Faces went from being a well regarded mod band playing R&B and Soul covers, to producing one of the strangest and most psychedelic concept albums ever recorded, but I’m glad they did. The record was originally released in a circular metal tin but that had to be abandoned because it was expensive and they kept rolling off the shelves in record shops!

The first side opens with the title track, featuring a Hammond organ and string session, moving on to a varied selection of styles including hard rock, soul and a proper blinky-blimey-cockernee singalong that anticipated the Britpop of Blur et al by a good thirty years. Side two is even stranger, with a surreal concept story narrated by comedian Professor Stanley Unwin, famed for inventing his own mangled version of English.

I can imagine a sixties hippie, having rolled up a giant Camberwell carrot on the back of their record tin being transported by this tale of Happiness Stan, a giant fly and a quest for the missing half of the moon.

Genuinely enchanting and Engly Twenty Fido-tastic!

Pampas Grass, Nirvana

Suburban swingers
Subtle signposts softly sway
Seeking Nirvana

Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water by Limp Bizkit

Oh dear. As well as the usual embarrassing spectacle of white people rapping, this album features an overload of puerile swearing, as if Beavis and Butthead decided to copy the Beastie Boys with a side order of Nine Inch Nails. They even tried to get Rick Rubin to produce this, but he lasted a week before sensibly quitting.

The end result is simply tiresome, with mother-effin this and sniggering references to rude bits of anatomy-that. Even Apple Music thought that the name of this album was beyond the pale and asterisked it out. After listening to a couple of tracks, I looked up Fred Durst’s Wikipedia bio and it confirmed that he is, indeed, a massive arsehole who supports Vladimir Putin. Yikes.

I prefer my biscuits crunchy.

Waning Moon, Wild Rose

On the lone prairie
A wild rose grows free beneath
The pale waning moon