The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan | Bob Dylan | 1962 | Columbia | #306 Faaakin ell. This is my first time properly listening to this. I mean I’ve listened to Bob Dylan before. Like, I know all these songs. But I’ve never sat down and properly listened to a Bob Dylan album. I’m 36 years old. That’s fine; I never intended on being any younger than this anyway. When I was younger I assumed life went on forever and there’s all the time in the world to do things like listen to Bob Dylan or watch Citizen Kane or read Shakespeare. These colossi of culture and art that I’ll eventually get round to consuming. Have you seen how old some people are? That’s how much time I have to read Hemingway or take the time to understand whatever the fuck Aristotle was banging on about. There’s an overwhelming amount of shit I really ought to be paying attention to, but there’s so much time to consume it all. ...

Midnite Vultures | Beck | 1999 | DGC | #307 You know how the boomers got their lot in life then pulled the ladder up, so as to onset a process whereby - at their mercy - we chronically have a large, lumpish implement unceasingly thrust into our powerless, destitute anuses (already cramped from the abundance of other such pears of anguish from the various mechanisms of capitalism)? Well, imagine the torture our anuses must feel in this metaphor. ...

It’s a Shame About Ray | The Lemonheads | 1992 | Atlantic | #308 Life doesn’t really add up. How am I supposed to hold down a full-time job whilst having days where from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed I wonder how it is that people actually enjoy life, and yet also fit in days where I’m satisfied enough with my innermost self to not feel like I’m a bit part in whatever world it is where people are comfortably resonating with this album? ...

Metallica | Metallica | 1991 | Elektra | #309 I was planning on listening to this again now - some 15 years after I first did so - with a kind of disparaging, snobbish retrospect that being twice the age of my Metallica-debuting teenage self naturally allows me. As it happens though, it’s just a fucking good album isn’t it? I don’t know why I cynically thought that way, I just expected it to be so. And for some reason doing things like entirely rejecting everything my younger self stood for makes me feel better about getting older. ...

Countdown to Ecstasy | Steely Dan | 1973 | ABC | #310 It sounds like what I’d imagine a mid-morning BBC Radio 2 presenter would play if they were being daring. For example, Donald Fagen finally exclaims “look out!” before the breakdown/solo/outro of “Bodhisattva” begins - a blues guitar solo over a swing rhythm section complete with an organ! To be fair there was hardly any time to react to _New York Dolls _in 1973. Cautionary lyrical warnings preceding innocuous 70s guitar solos only seem naive now because we know about the invention of punk. ...

Guerrilla | Super Furry Animals | 1999 | Creation | #311 There are many parallels between embarking on this challenge and doing a PhD. Namely that I’m apparently very good at doing it every day for a couple of months followed by 6 weeks of total capitulation and questioning why I’d ever started. But part of being an adult, I’ve grudgingly learned, is knowing the relative consequences of failure for both and to whom it is most important to keep happy. Which is why I’m reviewing 25 Feb’s album on 8 April and consequently why I still have a job. ...

Treasure | Cocteau Twins | 1984 | 4AD | #312 I found this quite a difficult album to describe. It plays out like the antidote to a stressful day with its delicate, dreamlike, melodies - not that today was stressful by any stretch. The songs wash about with ambient echoes and indecipherable lyrics with an unobtrusive drum track; it’s dream pop. The problem is that if you’re not looking for music to be medicinal then I found there wasn’t much here to find entertaining; the idea quickly runs bland and it’s just not fun after that. ...

Franks Wild Years | Tom Waits | 1987 | Island | #313 Being a Tom Waits neophyte, I feel like I’m running through a biography or getting a chronological discovery of the development, or invention, of Tom’s character with every album of his I listen to. I watched him on an old Letterman interview recently. He really is quite a character. But there’s something unsettling about realising his off-record persona matches that in his music. Idiosyncratic characters who are that cool exist only in fiction, or so I thought. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s all genuine. Maybe it doesn’t matter. ...

Spiderland | Slint | 1991 | Touch and Go | #314 For me this is so definitively 90s alt-rock. Edgy, spoken-word vocals, grungey guitar riffs, odd time signatures, and sounding like it was recorded in someone’s basement. But it’s also way more than that and it’s impossible to explain why without sounding like a pretentious twat. The lyrics are pensive and cynical - and the music reflects that - but it’s so incredibly mesmerising. It manages to be moody but not sulky; the melodies creep and brood and suddenly flair out with controlled bursts like a breaching whale. (told you) ...

Cheap Thrills | Big Brother and the Holding Company | 1968 | Columbia | #315 Should I have known that Janis Joplin fronted Big Brother as her first major label record release? Well I didn’t. She’s a stand-out here; sounding like someone’s ripping out her vocal cord while she’s belting out blues vocals over a classic rock and roll backing band. You could say its an almost Robert Plant-esque “banshee wail” but of course Janis was doing it first. ...