| #1 Record | 1972 |
| Radio City | 1974 |
| Third/Sister Lovers | 1975 |
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
Big Star are one of those bands that managed to gain a posthumous cult reputation out of nothing but a short musical career, a lack of commercial success, and the efforts of bunch of Me-generation children of the '70s who were irked at the fact that Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd are seen as the definitive bands of their youth. A shiny jangle-pop band that didn't have a hit - it's almost unfair in a way, and as a result Alex Chilton and his band of merry men have been all but deified by a legion of devoted cult followers. It's almost snidely predictable in a way that I don't think they're quite worth all of the fuss, but I'll be damned if I'm going to call them a mediocre band. They're not the epochal band a lot of alternative indie hipsters claim them to be, but their music demonstrates a fine balance between strong songwriting and a knack for sharp, original hooks and they're definitely well worth listening to. A lot of people rank their debut album at the bottom of their bottomless, extensive three-album library, claiming that it doesn't have the depth of the following two albums, but I'm going to have to disagree since it's easily my favorite. For the most part, the music is just as deep and yearning as anything that the band released later, but it's just a lot less depressing, setting the lyrics to more upbeat, chimey material that for the most part isn't too much of a challenge to listen to. But isn't that the point with pop music??
As with most jangle-pop, the songs on the album are split between jangly rockers and jangly ballads, all propped up by a jangly, clean, shiny guitar sound that jangles along through Jangleville with its jangly friends into Mr. Jankly's jangle store to buy some jangly treats. Chilton handles most of the more melancholy material in the second category like "The Ballad Of El Goodo"(or "Ain't No One Gonna Turn Me Round" if you're a modern-day record company exec) and "Thirteen," which sounds like the musical encapsulation of a sigh, while guitarist Chris Bell with his squeaky, high-pitched voice handles the rockers like the plodding but soul-crushing, horn-augmented opener "Feel" and the punchy future That 70's Show theme song "In The Street." By the album's end, the rockers have pretty much left the building for greener pastures on a Raspberries album or something but it's alright since it leaves the road clear for such songwriting masterpieces as Bell's soaring "My Life Is Right" and Chilton's "Watch The Sunrise," my own personal choice for the best Big Star song of them all, with a note-perfect guitar intro that I really really want to learn how to play but it sounds really really hard so for now my amateur ass will stick with "Smoke On The Water" and "Highway To Hell" where it's nice and safe.
There's some weaker material, but it's only weak when stacked up against the really strong stuff that lies elsewhere on the album - the rocker "Don't Lie To Me" is pretty moronic, even though it's funny how the chorus of multiple singers get almost completely out of sync with one another by the song's end, and the ballad "Try Again" has a nice weeping guitar line but doesn't hit the mark as solidly as all of the other ones on the album (in particular the very similar "Give Me Another Chance" which immediately precedes it). As a whole, though, the album is incredibly strong pop music, even if it's not quite as good as everyone's been telling you. But hell, it's still so worth getting that it literally hurts not to own it, and just full of great musical moments that make the whole 37-minute trip worth it.
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
This album is where I part ways with the Big Star legend, though I pretty much already did that by giving a 9 to their debut album so I'd might as well continue to go against the grain like the little annoying cartoon bug that I am. This is the point where the band completely metamorphosed into Alex Chilton's insane traveling rock show (complete with bear in tiny car), and the concise catchiness of the songs on #1 Record is pretty much completely cast away in favor of a bunch of rambling, riff-filled chunky rockers. It's actually a lot more fun to listen to than the debut for this reason, but unfortunately it's at the expense of the memorability of the songs. The songwriting is diverse and colorful, but a lot less direct, which some people see as a huge benefit and the true, superior nature of Chilton's writing style but I find to be a bit of a letdown compared to the direct and upfront tunes like "Watch The Sunrise" that made #1 Record so delightful. This results in songs like the clunky "Life Is White" and "She's A Mover" that bury some pretty decent hooks underneath layers of riffage and band dynamics, and though I kinda sit up and go "woo!" while listening to them there isn't much to make me ever go back and listen again. They're decent songs, mind you, but I'm just not totally convinced of their greatness.
Luckily, a lot of the songs are still friggin' awesome and make up for the music's more angular and unappealing qualities. "O My Soul" is a great opener, living up to every single one of the flaws I just described in the last paragraph but making something truly special out of them, with a fun, bouncy melody and crazy almost game-show-ish keyboard backing that make it not matter at all that the whole thing is pretty much a nearly-six-minute jam session made into a song. "Mod Lang" has a somewhat obnoxious vocal delivery but a fantastic riff that justifies the song's whole existence (and there's an overpriced indie record store here in Berkeley named after it, which is really cool even if I never shop there), and "You Get What You Deserve" is a bleak but catchy dark guitar landscape. The prettier songs from the debut are still represented on here, albiet in a beefed-up form, with the ballad "Daisy Glaze" managing an effective shift from pretty serenity to upbeat joyful frenzy and the band's signature song "September Gurls" being one of the best examples of chiming and charming guitar-pop that I've ever heard, with a ringing guitar break that's incredibly simple but works just so amazingly well. "Back Of A Car" rules too, but if I describe it it'll make the second paragraph longer than the first, unless Nick screws with the structure (and thus my artistic vision) like he always does. Tyranny, I tell you!!!
Anyway, this is nearly as good of a set as the debut but just.......I dunno, a bit lacking on too many levels to be as good of an album. This is where I'd usually say that it's slightly less recommendable than #1 Record but they're both sold together on a nifty twofer so you can't buy one without buying the other. Hooray for thrifty consumerism!
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(reviewed by Rich Bunnell)
The idea of a guitar-pop band like Big Star releasing a "dark album" is on paper the absolute coolest idea in the world -- remember "You Get What You Deserve" off of Radio City? Moody, infectious, memorable, all of that stuff all wrapped into a neat little package ready for the ears. If that's an example of "dark Big Star," then an entire album of the stuff must kick ass, right? Right? Unfortunately, this isn't quite the case. During the sessions for the band's third album, Chilton was pretty much bottomed out from depression over his lack of commercial success and probably a number of other factors that I don't know the specifics of, and by this point he really didn't give a damn about things that most other pop songwriters put high on their priority list like "production" and "accessibility." The outcome of these sessions, actually released only in 1978 after being locked in the record company vaults for three years and guarded by an evil troll, is several jumps away from the shiny pop of the band's first two albums, being dominated by an underproduced, largely acoustic sound instead of catchy riffs and jangly lead guitar.
This of course means that the band's fans over the course of the last few decades have lapped it up as their unheralded dark masterpiece and a window into Chilton's frail mental state at the time of the recording, but I don't quite buy it. Emotionally resonant or not, the album's pattern of dark acoustic ballad after dark acoustic ballad etc. etc. grows wearying after a while, especially as the album nears its close and the songs start to seem almost completely identical regardless of whatever individual virtues they might have. The underproduced sound is actually pretty neat at times, but too often I just end up wishing that Chilton's frequently-strong songwriting were backed up by some actual meat as was the case in the past.
A good number of the songs manage to transcend the album's overbearing sound, though, brimming over with hookcraft not necessarily of the type seen three years ago on #1 Record but with an intriguing and even somewhat-catchy style of their own. The big standout track for me is "Thank You Friends," the only somewhat optimistic song on the entire album with upbeat "doo-doo" backing vocals, an earnest vocal performance and tasteful-but-not-overbearing string embellishments. "Kizza Me" is an almost hilariously catchy and raucous way to kick off the album, managing to make a hell of a hook out of an almost nonexistent melody, and the minimalistic ballad "Holocaust" manages to cast off the flaws of the other ballads on the album with its direct and upfront vocal performance and some of Chilton's most haunting lyrics.
"You Can't Have Me" has a somewhat generic melody but fantastic drum backing that completely justifies the song's existence, and "Jesus Christ" is a strangely-engaging anthem with a bizarre, almost game-show-like mock opener. Also, Chilton finally all-out acknowledges the band's Velvet Underground influence with a cover of "Femme Fetale," which is roughly as good as the original since although it replaces Nico's husky vocals with Chilton's more gentle tone, it also replaces the original's "she's a femme fetale" backing vocals with a girlish murmur that doesn't even sound like it's singing the lyrics in question. Replacing the bad with the good and the good with the bad. Can't anyone do a freakin' solid version of that song? It has such a great melody but everyone who covers it somehow manages to screw it up. And no, Duran Duran's cover doesn't qualify.
Anyway, this is a decent album, but it simply isn't as strong as the two more well-known and legendary ones, and it ended up being the odd-man-out in the CD Reissue Sweepstakes and the one that almost nobody owns, released all by itself on a single CD with a few bonus tracks. It's worth buying for the "emotional voyeur" factor and the simple fact that it's sadistically-fun seeing a band so sure of itself just two albums earlier disintegrating into oblivion, but it doesn't really reach the level of greatness so often bestowed upon it by fans.
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