11/28/2023 0 Comments Best easy listening albums![]() It’s a half-hour of free-form radio all performed by the same band, and a starting point for one of the most enduring bizarro legacies in all of rock ‘n’ roll. In the course of 10 songs, the band lines up rock ‘n’ roll anthems (“Non-alignment Pact”), punk freakouts (“Life Stinks”), scratchy grooves (“Street Waves”) and avant garde musique concrete terror (“Sentimental Journey”). Their debut album The Modern Dance is their most accessible full-length release, as well as their most cohesive, but that’s not necessarily intended to suggest it’s normal. Formed in the contrails of cult proto-punk band Rocket from the Tombs-which also spawned punk legends Dead Boys-Pere Ubu dubbed themselves an “avant garage” band, both embracing and rejecting the tenets of rock ‘n’ roll tradition in equal measure. – John-Paul ShiverĪnd people thought Devo were the strangest band to come from Ohio. On Pizzazz we get an initial taste of that transformative greatness coming on strong. So by the time we hit the mid-section of her animated call for seeking a perfect companion, a Craigslist post by contemporary standards, we are flummoxed and too exhausted for the grooving “cooler than you” jazz-fusion keyboard run she lays out. “Haven’t You Heard,” the 1979 different-sounding disco hit by Rushen from that album, incorporated heightened Earth Wind & Fire type horn and string charts, flexing them full throttle in a Stravinsky “get in a hurry” frenzy. Pizzazz was released in October of 1979, just months before disco got rebranded and deconstructed into a liquid R&B form termed in this generation as “Boogie,” where Rushen made her greatest impact as a solo artist by pushing jazz forward to the edges and in turn perfecting commercial R&B radio singles. and skilled in classical and charting soundtrack scores, fulfilled a six-year run that ushered along sophisticated dance music, with broad pop appeal and intricate compositional structure. A young Black woman, with expert command of pop and jazz rivaling the likes of Donald Byrd and Grover Washington Jr. Los Angeles musician Patrice Rushen, who showed prodigious talent as a master producer, arranger, and musician with the Prestige label during the early part of the decade, signed to the Elektra/Asylum label in 1978. Update: We’ve supplemented this list with 10 more of the Best Albums of the ’70s. Listen carefully-our list of the Top 150 Albums of the ’70s might remind you of something you’re listening to today. This is a more diverse list, one that represents where we are now, even though it’s music that was made a long time ago. Some from Brazil, Ethiopia, Germany, France, Nigeria, Ireland, Jamaica, Boston and outer space. Well over half of this new list comprises artists we never even mentioned the first time around. But with a few more years to take stock, we’ve simply realized how much more there is to cover. To look back at our first roundup of the best albums of the decade, it’s not that we see albums that no longer matter to us or that aren’t still great. ![]() The ’70s gave us a lot.īut there’s another reason: We’ve changed. Everything we listen to now, arguably, can be traced back in some small way to an innovation that happened in the ’70s, whether it was Giorgio Moroder’s arpeggiated space disco sounds or Factory Records’ minimalist post-punk or the intensifying protest sounds coming from various corners of the world. Why revisit the music of the ’70s? For starters, it’s without question one of the most significant decades in terms of how much music changed and exploded into new and experimental forms. Many writers have come and gone since then, several redesigns, a big change in how we listen and cover music and an overall change in what a canon really means in a society with endless avenues for discovering music. But a lot has changed about Treble since then. Back in the fledgling days of this website, with little editorial direction and a handful of writers just out of college (and many of our current batch still yet to attend), we took it upon ourselves to assemble a list of the best albums of the ’70s, ten from each year, as a sampling of all of our favorites, with little agenda beyond simply waxing enthusiastic about records we liked.
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