Otis Redding Sings Soul - Otis Redding

Prepare for some gushing. We love Otis Redding and have ceded our (yet to exist) first child's name to his honour. Every song on this album is pants-wettingly brilliant.

Singling out an Otis album is difficult. His whole catalogue is outstanding and fits together seamlessly. Our preferred method of listening is to stick his albums on back to back to back etc and enjoy it all. From the funky dance numbers to the aching blues pieces. Soul is an odd genre - it encompasses a range of styles from rhythm and blues to funk to gospel. Who cares what we call it. Otis spans the full spectrum on this album and listening to it is a pure, joyful, celebration.

The riff to Ole Man Trouble is a offbeat welcome to the album. Otis' raspy holler pleads for some respite from the troubles in his life and even though we have none, we too plead for ole man trouble to get off our backs.

Otis' Respect and A Change is Gonna Come are not the definitive versions of these songs but they're probably our favourites. The lyrics to Respect are the same, but the music is completely different to Aretha's version. It's almost a big band number, with some sweet brass riffs. Respect is Otis asking his girl, to whom he's about to give all his money, to show him just a little respect. Ain't too much to ask is it?

A Change is Gonna Come is not as plaintive or polished as Sam Cooke's. Otis injects jazz arrangements to the song, giving it a rhythm and energy that the original lacked.

While Otis' voice is unequalled, the rhythm section on the album is extraordinary, producing some of the tightest, subtlest rhythm and blues you'll ever have the privilege to hear. We didn't realise till tonight that it was Booker T and the MGs, so now it makes a lot more sense. They pull back and let Otis wail, and then they take over and ignite the song. While we're not experts on production, the quality of the sound and the mixing on this album is excellent, beyond what you would expect to hear on a 1965 recording. The talent behind the album is exceptional - Isaac Hayes and Steve Cropper produced.

My favourite moment is Satisfaction. The Stones broke in the UK on the strength of covering rhythm and blues and soul numbers written by artists like Otis. Here Otis reciprocates, covering one of the first original songs the Stones finally got around to writing. Again, it's a completely different arrangement, with less of the dirty aggression of the original and more seduction.

No matter that it's a cliche, My Girl is a great and beautiful song. And then you hear Wonderful World  and it's funkier and more beautiful - pure ecstasy.

When god invented music, he had Otis in mind.

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back - Public Enemy

We didn't own this album until today. I know, I know we should be ashamed and we are. This is the greatest hip hop album of all time. Public Enemy's second album of 1988, It Takes a Nation of Millions... is an unrelenting masterpiece. We really don't have a right to blog about this after two listens, let alone the fact that we are white, middle class, public servants in Australia, however that's never stopped wangs on the internet before. And we're drinking prosecco with campari - ha!

This album is intense, cutting and political. Chuck D's lyrics are aggressive and challenging and still uncomfortable - "They could not understand that I'm a black man And I could never be a veteran". And he doesn't let up for 16 tracks. Flavor adds a randomness to it that doesn't leave you completely alienated from the album. We can only imagine how these sorts of lyrics revolutionised hip hop. Gangsta rappers claimed to be inspired by PE - you can't help but think that Chuck D would have been embarrassed by the violent, cowardly misogyny of the worst of west coast rap.

And the music is simply brilliant. Sonically it more than matches Chuck D's lyrical prowess. The tense, in-your-face beats don't relent for the entire album - each song fits seamlessly into the next without being repetitive. You want to dance but also thrash your head. Somehow Terminator X, Eric 'Vietnam' Sadler and Hank Shocklee bring together a crap load of samples to form a entirely new and never beaten sound.

Don't Believe The Hype is the quintessential track.  Chuck D's flow is rythmic, fluid and resonant, while Flavor chimes in with the rousing chant. The beats are undeniable and exhausting, like you're in the middle or a riot with sirens blaring and drums thumping. Like all the tracks, the music is tense, wired and antagonistic.

Chuck D spits on love songs on Caught, Can I Get a Witness: "You singers are spineless. As you sing your senseless song to the mindless. Your general subject love is minimal. It's sex for profit."
So I wonder how he feels about Flavor Flav's ridiculous Flavor of Love...or appearance on Celebrity Wife Swap? Though he's always been a wack-job. I guess sex for profit always wins in the end.

This album remains hugely influential. Its a call to arms that hasn't really been beaten and it marks an era of rappers long gone. It's never too late to get on the bandwagon.

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.