60–56/100 — Let’s Get Weird! Let’s Get Weird!

Apparently I bunched a whole group of stranger albums all together when making this list. These ones are tough to listen to back to back as they can be challenging one on one, but here goes!
60/100 — The Beatles — Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

I mean, what more can be said about Sgt. Pepper’s? Rolling Stone Magazine has it in the Number 1 spot on their 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. It’s definitely a creative highlight of the Beatles discography. With SPLHCB the Liverpool boys pushed the comfort levels of both fans and studio technicians and created something which broke many people’s conceptions of what recorded music could do or be.
I’m assuming you know this one, so I’ll be brief. George Harrison’s guitar tone on the the opening track is delicious, as is the line “You’re such a lovely audience, we’d love to take you home with us, we’d love to take you home.” The first few tracks especially do a great job of blending George’s guitar chops with Paul’s orchestrator ambitions jumping between guitar and french horn, or guitar and reverbed out harpsichord (“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”). There are an abundance of cadence or rhythmic shifts through out the tracks. I especially love the switch into 3/4 on “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” when they sing, “And of course Henry The Horse dances the waltz!”
There are also some awesome contrasts within the tracklisting. Going from the raga/sitar drone of “Within You Without You” with it’s universal message of a unified life force, directly into the extremely British/vaudeville ditty of “When I’m Sixty-Four” with it’s woodwinds and bells is quite jarring, but delightful.
Then there’s the album closer “A Day in the Life” with it’s bouncing opening and mournful vocal performance from John which touches on themes of suicide and banality. But then there’s a massive dissonant swell which switches into a upbeat tune about the mundane details of life courtesy of Paul which then flits off into a psychedelic dream before returning to the original melody again. Then one final and extreme crescendo and a final piano thump, a brutally high sin wave blast, and a weird tape loop that sounds like the record is skipping. It’s quite a journey and it still blows my mind every time I hear it. It’s possibly the greatest example of the Beatles studio mastery.
Despite its critical acclaim, I didn’t get a chance to hear this Sgt. Pepper’s until the entire Beatles catalogue was reissued on CD in the mid 2000’s. My parents didn’t own it, nor did any of my friends parents, to the point when I played “A Day in the Life” my friend’s dad didn’t even recognize it as the Beatles even though he considered himself a fan. It may not be as odd as Magical Mystery Tour, but it still remains one of the weirder pop albums ever released, and it has plenty of little musical and thematic surprises to discover with close listens. One of the fab four’s best!
Favourite Tracks: “A Day in the Life”, “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds”, “A Little Help From My Friends”
Least Favourite Track: “She’s Leaving Home”
59/100 — The Residents — Not Available (1974/1978)

This may be the second most challenging album on my list. Man is this weird. The Resident’s are an experimental/avant-garde band who really pushed what modern music could be. They seemed to embrace Richard Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, in which all aspects of art — visual, musical, poetic, emotional — all intertwined seamlessly. They began as a fully anonymous collective, wearing masks (especially the iconic eyeball mask seen at the top of this page), and elaborate costumes for live performances and press events. Not Available may be their most ambitious and bizarre work.
Recorded after their debut album Meet The Residents, Not Available was never supposed to be released. It was written and recorded using the Theory of Obscurity as a philosophical starting point. This theory states “that an artist can only produce pure art when the expectations and influences of the outside world are not taken into consideration.” So to that end the band recorded the album by themselves without any inhibitions or outside influence. Upon completion the album was put in a vault never to be heard again… until massive delays and record contract obligations made their label go over their heads and demand to release it because they were tired of waiting for Eskimo to be finished. The band figured that since they didn’t choose to release it and never had intended to when they created it, it didn’t break the philosophical core of the album.
So what does The Resident’s expression of “pure art” sound like? Total batshit insanity. The album opens with a cymbal crash, fairly tuneless horns, and gibberish chanting. Then there’s the first appearance of a strange, lilting motif over which a sort of droning narration occurs. This and other musical themes will return throughout the album to change the scene and musical direction. There’s all sorts of strange musical moments to enjoy. Just a couple of quick examples: there’s the lovely piano melody buried in “Part Two — The Making of a Soul” which devolves into a demented dance Tom Waits would be proud of; and the clanging steam machine of “Ship’s A Going Down.”
The story (as far as I can tell) is that a young woman named Edweena goes to college with her porcupine named Knowledge but abandons her pet when it’s questions become too challenging. She then has some sort of crazy mental and existential crisis, while her Uncle Remus lends confusing and unhelpful advice, confronts an “Enigmatic Foe,” reconnects with her porcupine and feeds it mushrooms, realizes that existence is made real in the questioning of purpose, and gives birth to a son.
Ya. Read the lyrics and tell me if you can figure it out any better. Here’s a taste:
Some questions receive a guarantee to shake you up
How much marriage urges a windmill to pinch infinity?
Is a magic hid-a-bed the final home of Spanish fire?
Is firm corn merrier under gifts of less important love?
I love this album for it’s ambition, it’s bizarrely opaque narrative, and for it’s abstraction. It almost feels like it has an alien knowledge which is incomprehensible but wise. It’s probably all dadaistic nonsense, and yet it has absolutely captured my imagination with it’s many facets.
Favourite Tracks: n/a — it’s a complete piece and must be listened to as such.
58/100 — Can — Tago Mago (1971)

Tago Mago is one funky krautrock record. It’s Can’s first record to feature vocalist Damo Suzuki and his dynamic repetitive improvisation. Every track here is full of cool experimental ideas, phenomenal grooves, and impressive solos. It’s a blend of world music, jazz improvisation, rock grooves. Can deconstructs many musical ideas and styles and reassembles them into a wonderfully spacious and exploratory record.
Two minutes into “Paperhouse,” the melancholic meditation turns into a tribal jam with some of the most delicious guitar noodling you could ask for. The pounding drums propel the track while Suzuki’s voice slowly grows from a whisper into a shouting fit before everything slows into a very reverberant jazz groove. Just listen to the drums in the last third of the track. SO great.
Every track is pushing boundaries. “Mushroom” adds complexity to it’s groove by using a fairly intense tape delay effect on the drums while the guitars (in contrast to the previous track) mostly hold long single notes creating a disorienting atmosphere. Later on, the 17-minute “Aumgn” is a lesson in tape manipulation in a studio environment as voices surge and swirl, and percussion explodes and ceases creating a cosmically chaotic experience that feels like you’re in a zero-gravity clock makers shop. Over all of this noise a voice drones out the a demonic twisting of the “Om” of meditation, after which the track is named. It’s almost like the inverted corruption of new age music.
However, it’s “Halleluhwah” which originally made me fall in love with this album. This 18.5-minute groove fest maintains one rhythmic idea in the bass and drums for the majority of the track while guitars and keyboards and vocals weave in and around each other, exploring so many facets of musical expression that it’s overwhelming. And just when you think it will never end it speeds up and crescendos into a massive explosion of sound before returning to the original simple riff once more right at the end. In fact, it doesn’t even properly end. It merely fades out, as if they would have kept going infinitely if it were not for the constraints of how much music you can fit on one side of a record. In some ways it is a complementary track to the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin” as it also melds religious themes with those of drug use.
The rest of this 73-minute monster continues to explore more and more musical territory right to the end. Album closer “Bring Me Coffee or Tea” has some absolutely mind blowing interplay in its last moments. The drumming on Tago Mago is some of my favourite on any record, and the guitar work rivals some of Frank Zappa’s best. It’s a monumental album which continues to baffle me in its creative density while revealing new treats on each exhaustingly exciting listen.
Favourite Tracks: “Halleluhwah”, “Paperhouse”, “Bring Me Coffee or Tea”
Least Favourite Track: “Peking O”
57/100 — Soft Machine — Third (1970)

Soft Machine was a highly important band in the Canterbury Scene of late 60’s and early 70’s. While contemporary progressive rock bands explored complex song structures often with a narrative focus, Canterbury used similar complex musical ideas in a less structured way with more spontaneous, long form improvisations. Think Bitches Brew rather than Closer to the Edge. Third is made up of four side-length (18/19 minutes) suites of such musical creations. It places a very high focus on keyboard/synthesizer sounds, but also incorporates a large number of woodwinds, brass, and strings which greatly add to its sound palette.
Side one — “Facelift” — is a monster jam very reminiscent of parts of the aforementioned Bitches Brew but also has some krautrock elements, and even though it does build into a really nice groove, it is less focused and has more electronic manipulation. When the flute and horns are really going and the drums take off at about the half way mark it’s quite exhilarating. “Slightly All The Time” opens with a lovely jazz lilt and maintains more cohesion throughout its runtime than any other track. This has the double edged affect of becoming fairly zen, but also of bordering on boredom at times.
“Moon in June” stands out easily as it is the only track to include vocals. Contributed by drummer Robert Wyatt (spoilers, you’ll hear about him again on this list) the lyrics and fairly rambling melodies help divide this song into four tracks which seem to trace the arc of a relationship from intense and unending desire/intimacy, to a time spent long distance, to alienation, to a cold passivity of the inevitable break. There’s a great little swing section, a raging 6/8 solo which thunders along at high speed, and a bit of a mental breakdown filled with strings that would fit well in a horror film. What a ride!
Closing track “Out-Bloody-Rageous” opens and closes with the most spacey/prog-like swirls but is mostly dominated by a large groove maintained by the horns and drums over which some of the best solos on the album occur. It’s very reminiscent of Frank Zappa’s more orchestrated work and it’s just as exciting (if not quite as silly).
Like Tago Mago, Third continues to reveal new nuances and depths of creativity on each listen. Somehow it still feels like it’s the music of the future in spite of some of the dated synth tones — although most are still really solid, included some majorly crunchy ones. By throwing off inhibitions and embracing spontaneity Soft Machine managed to make something which continues to last beyond the magical moment of creation.
Favourite Tracks: “Moon in June”, “Facelift”
Least Favourite Track: “Slightly All The Time”
56/100 — Mercury Rev — Yrself Is Steam (1991)

With Yrself is Steam, Mercury Rev brings krautrock’s experimentation and deconstruction into the post-modern age. The instrumentation and vocal style is very much that of the 90’s indie scene — jangly guitars, thin but prominent drums, a little less concerned about perfect tuning than most eras of music — and yet these compositions seek to break the traditional song structure and arrangements with shoegaze-style walls of noise, post-rock crescendos, and the addition of instruments like flute and trumpet.
“Chasing A Bee” is a wonderful taster of all these elements but also sports a fairly catchy hook for a chorus, which would not have been out of place on a Pavement record. “Syringe Mouth” is in essence much more of a straight ahead rock banger, but the distorted and wailing doubled vocals in the background, as well as multiple layers of fuzzed out guitar improvisation mixed behind the main pounding drum rhythm pushes it beyond what could have been a throw away track on another album. “Coney Island Cyclone” is fairly melodic and definitely fits into the more traditional 90’s indie sound, but then “Blue and Black” sounds like it’s a combination of Not Available’s chants and Neu’s soothing grooves — it’s really lovely. It somehow manages to be fully krautrock and fully 90’s at the same time which is astounding.
In “Sweet Oddysee of a Cancer Cell t’ th’ Center of Yer Heart” you can really hear a prototype for the emerging post-rock sound as it builds slowly until it becomes a storm of electricity bursting through your speakers. Meanwhile “Frittering” could be an early Death Cab for Cutie song. It’s simple strummed guitars and very distant vocals are very sweet but it is slowly drowned in reverb and chaos as more and more guitar noise is added every verse until finally there’s a tremolo picked guitar solo (aka full on post-rock) into which continues to expand before being suddenly cut short. “Very Sleepy Rivers” expands on these experiments even further
Finally “Car Wash Hair” closes the album with another sing-along worthy moment. Note well how suddenly lead guitar bursts in around 1:50 like Neil Young is having a seizure. This begins a four minute crescendo which builds over the repetitive chorus with trumpets resounding and strings swelling and crazy feedback all adding to the grandeur of the music. And yet the lyrics are fairly mundane. It’s a song of simple yearning of adolescent insecurity which is elevated by the music into a hymn for youthful abandon.
By embracing the strangeness of their musical predecessors, Mercury Rev manage to transcend that 90’s attitude which can often come off as carefree-DGAF-silliness, and made something really exciting and challenging while still retaining the earnest simplicity that their contemporary indie scene chased. I love that Yrself is Steam can be both high and low minded simultaneously. It manages to feel both DIY/off the cuff and highly arranged and it touches on and develops quite a wide variety of musical styles and ideas. It’s a really fun listen and I hope that people can get past it’s quirkiness to the lovely core.
Favourite Tracks: “Car Wash Hair”, “Chasing a Bee”, “Blue and Black”
Least Favourite Track: “Continuous Trucks And Thunder Under A Mother’s Smile”
