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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 204. Ananda Shankar – Ananda Shankar (1970)

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  Just because an Indian musician has the same surname, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re related to Ravi Shankar. However, in this case, Ananda is Ravi’s nephew, so it was a safe assumption to make. Ananda’s uncle introduced classical Indian raga to Western audiences, and then Western bands (notably The Byrds, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin) took elements of raga and put them in their songs, either a full-on sitar ‘n’ tabla affair or just using the modes of raga to inform guitar solos and jams. Here we come full circle, with Ananda Shankar playing Western music with Indian instruments, including versions of Light My Fire and Jumping Jack Flash. The effect is mixed, hovering somewhere between cheese and genius. Jumping Jack Flash is great fun, the more bossa-nova inspired Mamata/Affection sounds to me like bad Indian restaurant muzak, but then most bossa nova sounds pretty disposable to me. Shankar then moves into a kind of fusion, following more traditional Indian music ...
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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 203. John Lennon -John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970)

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  After the first track on this album, my pattern-seeking brain came up with a thought, which seems to have been borne out by the rest of the album. Of the three post-Beatles solo albums given in the list (Ringo is overlooked), the style of each reflects where each former Beatle ended up. McCartney, on a farm in an isolated part of Scotland and on the brink of depression, turns out a very lo-fi acoustic album of songs that barely sound finished. Harrison, meanwhile, in a mansion with its own recording studio and surrounded by music industry friends, produces a highly-polished triple album full of radio-friendly rock and soul. Lennon, meanwhile, lives in New York with an avant-garde artist, and so his offering is a much more art-house kind of deal. It feels like a lot of therapy is going on here, as well. The first track, Mother, descends into primal scream about the death of his mother (killed in a car accident when Lennon was 17) and abandonment by his father – the lyrics “ Mama d...
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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 202. Spirit – Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus (1970)

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  Here’s a band I’d not heard of before, and it also doesn’t look like it contains anyone who went on to form another more famous band or solo career, so I can only guess at its prominence in this list. Apart from it being a pretty damn solid album. Wikipedia classes it as psychedelia and prog, which I guess to an extent it is. The track Love Has Found A Way, for example, has some classic Psychedelia back-tracking, while throughout there are the prog-rock characteristics of tracks divided into different “movements” (see for example the opening track Nothin’ To Hide, or the instrumental Space Child) and complex instrumentation. What these tracks don’t do is drift off into jam sessions or the weird free-form jazz middle bits that exist in a lot of prog, all the tracks on here are much more direct and focused (not counting a bit of Moog wanderings in Space Child). In that sense, it’s an album with one foot in the Sixties and the other in the Seventies, and to me it also prefigures...
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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 201. George Harrison – All Things Must Pass (1970)

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  Although this is Harrison’s third solo album, it’s his first post-Beatles, recorded at his house (mansion) in Henley-on-Thames with Eric Clapton and others who would become the band members of Derek and the Dominos – evidently this and Layla must have been produced in roughly the same time period. While Paul McCartney could barely scrape together enough songs for an album, leaving many feeling unfinished, Harrison had enough material for a triple album, and some really solid songs at that, easily better than any of his contributions to the Beatles. We all know My Sweet Lord, featuring two defining elements of this album – Harrison’s slide guitar (which he uses deftly and sparingly so it is noticeable but never overdone), and the spiritual/religious overtones of the lyrics. It’s a simple hymn of praise at heart, with the backing vocals switching between the Biblical “hallelujah” and the Hare Krishna mantra. Many other tracks explore some elements of spirituality – Beware Of Da...
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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 200. Cat Stevens – Tea For The Tillerman (1970)

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  I’m going to take a bit of a hiatus after this one, having reached the milestone of 200 albums, one fifth of the way through. I considered cutting it off after album 204 since that’s the last of the 1970 albums, but here is as good as any to get some energy back. This may or may not show itself in the publication of these since I’ve got a substantial buffer for the moment, but if there isn’t an entry tomorrow, you’ll know why. Not sure how long I’ll take. Until I get some things sorted out in real life and can do this without distracting from more useful stuff for a bit.  [Spoiler alert from future me editing this - normal service is continued tomorrow.] I had a bit of trepidation approaching a Cat Stevens album, since there’s something about his music that tends to leave me cold, even though I also sort of like it at the same time. Perhaps it’s his voice that sounds frail even when it’s not, or the habit some of his songs have of being very stop-start while the music melo...
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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 199. Stephen Stills – Stephen Stills (1970)

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  Given his prior output, the direction that music in general has been heading, and the fact that the album cover features Still playing an acoustic guitar in the snow (next to a pink plastic giraffe for no obvious reason), I was expecting yet more country/folk rock. But instead, surprisingly and pleasantly, Stills leans hard into R&B, with elements of soul, funk, and a lot of gospel throughout. This is most notable on the suitably titled track Church, but also present in the main single Love The One You’re With. And this is the One That You’ve Heard Before from this album, even if perhaps you’re more familiar with, say, the Luther Vandross cover. And the gospel chorus really comes into play for the final track, We Are Not Helpless featuring, among others, Rita Coolidge and Cass Elliott. It’s a call to arms to halt division, about how people are trapped in their echo chambers and keep themselves segregated from each other. Thankfully we know better than to do that fifty-five ...
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1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 198. Derek and the Dominos – Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs (1970)

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Having worked with John Mayall, then Cream, and then Blind Faith, Eric Clapton finds yet another iteration in his career, escaping to relative anonymity for a short while. There’s more of the inevitable adult-oriented rock on display here, sometimes a little bit country (such as I Looked Away), sometimes a little bit R&B (as on Tell The Truth), and quite often just straight up blues rock (such as Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out or Have You Ever Loved A Woman). Most tracks, however, although they may include little motifs from distinct musical genres, actually come across as something that is unmistakably rock, but hard to pin down. That Clapton’s voice sometimes sounds like Steve Winwood, with a bit of blues grit in it, means that tracks often sound a lot like the offerings from Traffic. And since Winwood and Clapton were band-mates in Blind Faith, that ought not to be a surprise. Of course, the showstopper track has to be Layla, which, like Bat Out Of Hell, needs to be...
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