Dummy - Portishead

Everyone our age has this album in their collection. And if they don't, they either didn't have any taste or made it through the nineties without trying to impress a girl.

Rolling Stone call it a bizarre love triangle between a girl, a guy and a sampler. Spot on, but doesn't quite explain the haunting sexiness of Beth Gittons' voice or the slow funky beats of Geoff Barrow. Portishead's debut album from 1994 is simply beautiful. It's hard to write about this album without resorting to cliches. Like their Bristol counterparts Massive Attack, Portishead revolutionalised British music mostly for the better, but you must also admit, oftentimes for the worse. Who knows what came first? Cafes or cafe music.

The album is a slow grind of hip hop beats, combined with smooth jazz and soaring vocals. It's funky and contagious and it gets at you in a quiet, but compelling way.

There are definitely highlight tracks, such as Wandering Star and Numb, but this album is far more than the sum of its parts. I'm not sure anyone has ever listened to the tracks individually. It was always the album that you put on at the end of the night when most people had left the party and those who hadn't were draining any remaining bottles lying around the house. Or when you got home and frantically searched through the CD stack for an album that would aid your seduction efforts. This was always a safe bet because girls love it.

Although the risk is that when you get to a song like Roads, which is a tortured song of regret with exquisite vocals from Beth, you both end up feeling sad and raking over memories and disappointments.

The final track, Glory Box is the pinnacle of woe is woman, why don't boys appreciate me for who I am, only my girlfriends understand me etc etc... And many a time it has been ruined by young girls screeching in their bedroom, straining, yet failing, to reach Gitton's voice. Lemon stollies, you have a lot to answer for.

This album sounds as delicate, dark and edgy as it did back when you listened to it every weekend. Pour a glass of heavy red, dim the lights and let it wash over you.

Dinah Sings Bessie Smith - Dinah Washington

You probably don't own this 1958 album. Which is a shame because it's brilliant. And it's really hard to find. We had to have it imported from the Netherlands. Through Basement Discs in Melbourne. Aren't we cool. Yes, given we don't actually dig to find albums very often and because we love it so much there is a particular smugness in our relationship with it.

It's late March in Canberra so it is one of the last nights we'll comfortably sit outside. So we're smoking cigars and we'll probably have a bourbon after our martini. This is a night for nostalgia. For an era you don't really know anything about but wish to be a part of all the same.

Like so many blues greats, these songs are infused by tragedy. Bessie Smith grew up in the deep, deep south, developing her talent in a 'travelling minstrel show' and confined to performing to black audiences. Her popularity with white audiences really only grew after her death. Her decline was brought about by alcoholism but her death was the result of racism. After a car accident, she was denied treatment at a 'white's only' hospital and bled to death on the way to find another.

We think of Dinah mostly for her sentimental, slow, love songs. There's a couple on here, but her tribute to Bessie, recorded twenty years after Bessie's death, is blues and dixie jazz. Her voice is powerful, raspy and seductive. Most often it's Nina Simone we turn to for oomph, but Dinah more than brings it.

Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair is wonderful because, in a time when many blues numbers were about killing your cheatin', disrespeccin' lady, it's about a woman proudly owning up to "slitting her good man's throat" and asking to be slain rather than rotting in jail.

You've Been a Good Old Wagon is a serenade to a broken wagon. It's a testament to Dinah's singing that lamenting a broken cart sounds so sorrowful and wrenching. We're going to write a tune about L's late 1984 Sigma. It will break your heart.

The tremendous thing about these tunes is that there's four or five instruments playing lead at the same time. The vocals, keys, clarinet, trombone and trumpet all battle the others for the spotlight, each playing their own intricate melody but still fitting together to create ornate songs. And as much as we love the clarinet, Dinah's voice wins out every time.

We discovered this album after hearing Back Water Blues on a plane. Even through the crappy Qantas headphones, her voice blew you away. It's an astonishing song, breathtaking every time. It's about the flood in New Orleans in 1911, when the black community was left to fend for itself. Almost one hundred years later America, while so much had changed, there is still a ways to go.

This is a beautiful album with style and grace and guts. Go and find it for your next Saturday night at home with your gin.

Harvest - Neil Young

Harvest. Possibly the most classic of all classic albums.

This album turned Neil Young into an icon for hippies, civil rights activists and progressives everywhere. Young wrote protest songs without Dylan's irony. He is earnest, angry and downhome country.

The album sidles into the lounge room with two lackadaisical country stomps. It sounds as if Young and the Stray Gators sat around in a barn, sparked something up and let the tunes flow. And the reason it sounds like that is because that's exactly what they did.

Overwrought orchestral arrangements give A Man Needs a Maid a sophistication and melodrama that now sound eccentric. The song is brilliant for its unusual conclusion - after a break up, Young decides that he should give up on love and hire a maid to fulfil the domestic share of the relationship.

Heart of Gold kicks you in the guts with every listen. It remains one of the most powerful songs ever written. At its essence is a sincere and heartfelt hope for communalism, justice and equality. This is also the essence of the album.

Old Man was the other hit single from the album. It's a beautifully naive lament about growing up and getting old, breaking out into an anthemic chorus.

The album sometimes feels disjointed - but, somehow, not in a bad way. The difference in sound between the songs recorded in the studio and those recorded in Young's barn is stark.  Young dragged musician friends (like Linda Ronstandt and James Taylor) into the studio late at night to record tracks like Heart of Gold and Alabama, overlaying lead guitar later.

The loose group singing backing vocals on Alabama are perfect for its indictment of southern prejudice. The indignant young musicians gathered around a microphone and sang their disdain and hope for change.

Check out Rolling Stones' savaging of the album at the time, describing the lyrics as banal and the tunes insipid. It's worth reading not only as an historical curiosity but for its dreadful writing, so convoluted and pretentious it makes our writing seem understated.

The review is wrong in thinking Young's earnestness and hope is naive and glib.  The album just turned 40; its enduring popularity is testament to its sincerity and power.

Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen

Early in our relationship, one Valentine's Day, B told me "you ain't a beauty, but hey you're alright." And my heart melted. In a moment, I knew that he got it. He got my obsession with Bruce.

(B would like to add, btw, that he said it not because he believed it, but because he knew she loved the line).


Simply put dear reader, this is the greatest album of all time. L is not sure she can write about it and do it any justice. Thunder Road. Tenth Avenue Freeze Out. Jungleland. Born to Run. Born to Run is on most mix tapes, cd or playlist we've ever made and is always the first song played in the car on every road trip to Melbourne. Of course, only once we get past Hall and can put the foot on the gas.


L once heard Bruce talk about Born to Run album cover. As you open the sleeve, you see Bruce leaning on E Street Band saxophonist, Clarence Clemons. He describes the cover as an invitation to join the band. Thunder Road, the opening track, was Bruce's invitation to the album.

The song starts slowly with a lonely harmonica wail. It picks up speed as Bruce describes a vision: "the screen door slams, Wendy's dress sways". It's a simple but evocative image, which takes you somewhere else - straight into small town America. No songwriter has mastered imagery like Bruce. Indeed, he's more a storyteller than a songwriter. And there's many a novelist who could do well to learn from Bruce's pithiness. It doesn't take him 60,000 words to tell a tale.

Born to Run is extraordinary. Every listen makes us want to pack up our lives and get in a car and just go. What stops us is that we'd make it to Yass and realise it's not as easy as it sounds. That's the tragedy of the characters in Born to Run. We know that for all their enthusiasm and pent-up energy, they're not going to find escape and release.  The song apparently took six months to record, with overdub after overdub. Listen to the song closely and repeatedly and you can hear how it is painstakingly constructed. It's worth it. Every bar is a masterpiece; it's never been bested.

Bruce has made great solo albums but the E Street Band take his songs to a whole nother level. Each member of the band is a great talent and there's an unusual egalitarianism to the songs' production. No part dominates the other. Each instrument equally vies for your attention, which makes the album anything but subtle. The complementarity shows a band of geniuses working in perfect harmony.

Of course, Bruce is the pinnacle. His vocals are raw, rock and roll. But he has range and he can do it soft or loud. And when he's loud he's electrifying. The best there ever was.

Jungleland warrants mentioning because it's the world in a song. It doesn't have a single narrative arc, it has multiple. From highs to lows to deeper lows and the most breathtaking pinnacle. Our favourite line is "down here the poets don't write nothing at all, they just sit back and let it all be". Clarence's sax solo is magnificent. In a world where "sax solo" has rightfully become a dirty phrase, this stands alone.

It's a town full of losers. I'm pulling out of here to win.

Heartbreaker - Ryan Adams

And we're back. Christmas holidays, milestone birthdays, Hottest 100 and finally we've returned to the routine of a martini, an overly ambitious meal and a classic album. How I have missed martinis.

What an exquisite album to bring us into 2012. Ryan Adam's debut solo album from 2000 is his masterpiece. It opens with a rockabilly foot stomp, To Be Young, which incites some backyard dancing at Martini Saturdays headquarters. It's followed up with My Winding Wheel, which is a beautifully optimistic love song. In fact they are all beautiful love songs, either about wanting someone, finding someone or losing someone. There is no shortage of women who have fallen in love listening to this album.

Ryan is usually categorised as 'alt-country'; we've always doubted the utility of this term because it seems to only ever be used to describe Ryan Adams and Wilco. In which case, it is probably the greatest music genre of recent times.

My Sweet Carolina is a lonesome travelling ballad about loss, hope, thwarted ambition and missing your home. That is, it's like nearly all country ballads. It says something about the universality of these emotions that such a popular and enduring genre barely covers anything else. Also, like so many country ballads, Emmylou Harris and her ageless voice provide sweet backing vocals.

Ryan's band, Whiskeytown, whom he left just before recording Heartbreaker, were a fun country band. But they didn't have the raw, subtle, brilliant melodies of Heartbreaker and (some of) Ryan's subsequent albums. Tracks 8-10 are the perfected and quintessential core of this album. Damn Sam is a simple tune with confused metaphors, but it's one of the first of his songs that I fell in love with. Come Pick Me Up is his classic, the song most often cited as his best. And even after a thousand listens, the first notes of the harmonica still have enough power to kick you in the guts.

To Be the One is Ryan musing on the night before, with a guitar in hand. I can never decide whether is about a relationship break up or a one night stand. This track has some great lyrics - "I don't know which is worse: to wake up and see the sun, or to be the one that's gone". And the best line on the album - "the empty bottle it misses you and I'm the one it's talking to".

There is a quiet intimacy to this album that no other Ryan Adams' album quite reaches. It's best enjoyed when you're drinking by yourself, late at night with headphones on, yearning for someone to share it with you (but knowing they'd ruin the wonderful loneliness).

For those of you familiar with Ryan, we can't write this blog post without acknowledging that he's a complete wang. I love him and (almost) everything he releases. However, the one time I've seen him live he was terrible. A prima donna who couldn't be bothered to perform. We're seeing him at the Forum in Melbourne next month on the back of his best release in five years (Ashes & Fire). He better bring it this time.