Pitching a Fit (Vol. 1, No. 6)
Welcome back to Pitching a Fit, a series of posts for which I’m going through Pitchfork’s 100 Best Albums lists decade by decade. For this installment, we’ve reached numbers 75 - 71 on the Best of the ‘70s list…
After a few days of distance, we come back around to Led Zeppelin with Houses of the Holy, which opens with some pretty quintessential guitar work and heavy drumming on “The Song Remains the Same”. My complaints about Robert Plant’s serpentine and shrieky vocal work remain the same as well, but to complain too much seems beside the point. Plant’s throat is part and parcel with the Zeppelin package, and (in contrast to the double-album sprawl of Physical Graffiti) Houses of the Holy shows it off at a reasonable length. Second track “The Rain Song” immediately shifts things into a somber and soulful direction for nearly eight minutes, meaning this album can hardly be called tight, and the third track, “Over the Hills and Far Away” takes its time ramping back up to a rock beat. But that tone sustains through the reggae vibes of “D’yer Mak’er”, an oddball track that’s most likely my favorite on the collection. It’s hard to account for why Zeppelin continues to kind of bounce off me, with very few of their songs making any claim to my “favorites” list, but maybe it all comes back to Plant’s vocals—an easy scapegoat but a viable one nonetheless.
I had listened to Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Love and Hate a time or two before this, always when I’m in the mood for something ominous to the point of oppressiveness. That’s what Cohen, the baritone poet, delivers in spades from the opening bars of “Avalanche.” This album was apparently written as part of a depressive spiral Cohen was caught in; as he said years later, “everything was beginning to fall apart around me: my spirit, my intentions, my will,” and the songs reflect that despair. It’s an immersive emotional experience, and not one for everyday listening, but on the days when despair is the vibe, Songs of Love and Hate is there for you with a collection of long, expansive tracks. Only one song clocks in at less than five minutes, and that’s the unusually peppy “Diamonds in the Mine”, a song with a buoyancy that’s only offset by Cohen’s growling, howling vocal. Cohen himself seems not to have been much of a fan of the album “You could call it gimmicky,” he said two years after its release, seeming determined to get out ahead of criticism that wasn’t forthcoming. If this is what a gimmicky record sounds like, I’d hesitate to hear a sincere one—I’m not sure I’d survive it.
We have our first full-bore metal album up next with 1978’s Van Halen, a record that opens with the instantly recognizable “Runnin’ with the Devil.” It’s a heavy, hard-driving track with high harmonies offsetting the chorus before the first of many flurries of guitar work by Eddie Van Halen. Eddie gets a showcase with the second track, “Eruption”, a pure solo that lasts about a minute and a half, grinding things to a half just as they begin but simultaneously announcing the band’s priorities: more or less to melt your face off. Their ensuing cover of “You Really Got Me” makes this mission as clear as possible, as do the heavy guitar opening on a track like “I’m the One”, a song that makes the vocals seem like the secondary lead to the guitar work. Only the penultimate track, the halfway-acoustic blues jam “Ice Cream Man”, breaks the flow of heavy metal, and even then the full band kicks in around the midpoint. You can listen to this album and hear the ‘80s unfurling before you, with the impact of this shockwave destined to be felt in garages for years to come.
Next, we have the return of a group represented on this list a few days ago: King Crimson, now reappearing with Red. The opening, titular track plunges you into a world of noise, a dark-tinted jam session that takes its title from the zone the recording equipment’s needle would frequently jump into. The tracks by and large emerged from King Crimson’s improvisations, notable to the point that the conventional vocal work on “Fallen Angel”, which pushes this back into the realm of pure prog, feels surprising and even off-putting. It’s not hard to hear the band straining at the leash, holding something back until they can let loose between the verses. “One More Red Nightmare” splits the difference between prog and noise, landing more firmly in the latter camp, with heavy noodling that pushes the runtime of each track past five minutes; one track—closing number “Starless”—lasts more than ten. Things teeter on the brink of falling apart by the time of the penultimate track, “Providence”, an experimental piece without much spine to speak of, and “Starless” keeps things slack, yielding a song in search of a purpose. Arriving as early as 1974, this album must have been influential on any number of heavy works to come. Unfortunately, it’s not built for me.
We pivot from the heavy to the funky with James Brown’s The Payback. Released in 1973, and somehow the 37th album Brown released since kicking off his career in the late ‘50s, this record is similarly loose and improvisatory to Red, with tracks just as long, and a runtime correspondingly double what most of the albums on this list have offered. But the package is so much lighter on its feet that getting lost in the groove is substantially more fun. This is the kind of album you can just ride like a lazy river, Brown’s loops and riffs—and frequent screams—variating just enough to keep things lively. If the songs don’t seem destined to be sung along with, there’s a pleasantly meditative quality to their elongated jams.
Up next time: Pink Floyd, Faust, Herbie Hancock, more Pink Floyd, and Big Star