Oasis 7: Heathen Chemistry

With rhythm guitarist Gem Archer and bassist Andy Bell still on board since the live album, the Gallagher brothers felt confident enough to get back to the rock with Heathen Chemistry. Noel seemed to have cut back on the nose candy, and even let the other members contribute to the songwriting. Even Liam wrote three songs of his own.

You’d be forgiven for fearing some kind of insensitive musical decoration on a song called “The Hindu Times”, but to their credit none of the other lyrics would have been better titles, and we’re off and running. “Force Of Nature” starts out like Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing”, but gets more of its own character when Noel starts singing. “Hung In A Bad Place” is very reminiscent of their first and third albums, but since one of the new guys wrote it that’s just fine. The piano on “Stop Crying Your Heart Out” brings to mind early Bee Gees in a good way, though we wish Noel had let off the “Wonderwall”-style echoed voices during the verses. The song still works as an anthem, especially as it sets up Liam’s utterly charming “Songbird” strum, sadly over before we know it. Noel seems to slow things down again on “Little By Little”, and we’re not used to hearing him sound so humanistic, but as ever, he knows how to nail a chorus.

“A Quick Peep” is indeed that, a rockin’ sketch by the bass player, then “(Probably) All In The Mind” recycles those Revolver tropes that put them and others on the map. The feedback doesn’t dominate, and a kinder, gentler Noel rises out of the fade with the attempt at sincerity of “She Is Love”, but even the Mellotron flutes can’t hide that this song has been written several times already, to the point where we can’t place the original source for the theft. (We suspect somewhere in Laurel Canyon, and tips or leads are welcome.) “Born On A Different Cloud” proves that Liam hasn’t learned how to vary a melody yet, but the “Karma Police” piano and dirge rhythm are more White Album than 1967, even if it does drag at six minutes, and enough with the Mellotron flutes already. He does better with “Better Man”—not the Pearl Jam song, nor an update of “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)”—which favors guitars over its trip-hop backing. The half-hour of silence at the of the song serves only to fill up the disc to capacity, but since “The Cage” apparently never got lyrics, it provides a mildly moody finale. And they just couldn’t lay off the Mellotron.

Derivative as it is—and despite how many times we used the word “but” throughout this summation—Heathen Chemistry succeeds from not being overly indulgent or self-important. They still had their swagger, of course, though they weren’t trying to push people away. Too much, anyway. The parts are mostly better than the whole.

Oasis Heathen Chemistry (2002)—3

Prince 26: One Nite Alone

Having not learned his lesson with the Crystal Ball debacle, Prince tried again to make his music available directly to his fans, this time via online subscription. It was a nice idea, but those who parted with a hundred bucks complained first about the frequency of releases, as well as repetition of stuff they’d already received.

At any rate, the first such issue was One Night Alone…, billed as “solo piano and voice”, which is pretty much what we get for just over half an hour. The title track is a slow seduction, starting off nice and pretty over two chords, alternating between falsetto and spoken, escalating into a Keith Jarrett exploration, then out. Apparently she didn’t buy it, given the heartbreak in “U’re Gonna C Me”. “Here On Earth” is even slower, a rumination on a dream with some overdubs, including drums by John Blackwell. He pulls out some guitar and bass for “A Case Of U”, a cover of his favorite Joni Mitchell song, though he only uses the second verse.

“Have A ” is loaded with nonstandard chord changes and unexpected harmonies, and its mildly vague content makes an odd direct segue into the salacious metaphors of “Objects In The Mirror”. It’s right into “Avalanche”, another lovely performance, but the lyrics air eyebrow-raising claims about the history of slavery in America. After that, “Pearls B4 The Swine” is a quirky little post-breakup number, the closest thing to a catchy single. “Young And Beautiful” could be one too, with a message of empowerment for the object of the song, leaving us with “Arboretum”, a lovely instrumental closing theme of sorts, after which he gets up and walks away. (His pet doves are credited with “ambient singing”.)

The album was something of a taster for the One Night Alone… tour, where he was accompanied his smallest combo in years—albeit with Maceo Parker, Candy Dulfer, and Najee on horns—and would spawn his first official live album. He was ostensibly promoting The Rainbow Children, and the music certainly thrives onstage; the deep narration is still there, but mostly he just plays, mostly on guitar. The only real rarity is “Xenophobia”, which serves to introduce the band and to admonish those in the audience who came for the oldies. He does touch on his entire catalog, but more on deep cuts than obvious choices. “Extraordinary” and “The Other Side Of The Pillow” are surprises, while the adjusted title “When U Were Mine” and “Take Me With U” retain the vibe of the records. After 90 minutes he says good night, but comes back for a set alone at the piano cocktail lounge-style, touching on romantic favorites and encouraging the crowd. They go nuts when “Nothing Compares 2 U” kicks in, and the band comes back and stays for the duration. “Free” goes into “Starfish & Coffee”, then “Sometimes It Snows In April” and “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore”, and “Anna Stesia” stretches for ten minutes so he can harangue about God before a moody coda and farewell.

But that wasn’t all either. A third disc, The Aftershow: It Aint Over!, provides a glimpse into his tradition of hitting a club a few hours after finishing a concert to keep the party going. Larry Graham sits in on a torrid “Joy In Repetition”, George Clinton croaks “We Do This”, and Questlove and Musiq Soulchild are on the medley of the latter’s “Just Friends” and Sly Stone’s “If You Want Me To Stay”. “2 Nigs United For West Compton” fits well with “Alphabet St.” He threatens to keep “Peach” going for twenty minutes, but we only hear eleven. “Dorothy Parker” is more subdued but jazzy, “Girls & Boys” is mostly suggested by one chorus, and the closing vamp on “Everlasting Now” brings it full circle to the main show. All in all, a satisfying experience. (In 2020, the Up All Nite With Prince: The One Nite Alone Collection box included all of the above, plus the Live At The Aladdin Las Vegas DVD. Not included was 2004’s C-Note, a download-only EP consisting of four soundcheck jams—two funky and two moody—plus the first-ever release of “Empty Room”, a song about heartbreak dating from 1985.)

Prince One Night Alone… (2002)—3
Prince & The New Power Generation One Night Alone… Live! (2002)—3½

Nico 1: Chelsea Girl

Even before she was appended to the Velvet Underground, Nico had been trying to make it in showbiz. Her blonde beauty and cheekbones had already emblazoned album covers and got her into movies, but the girl just wanted to sing. Her husky timber would be an acquired taste, but she exuded enough cool to open a few doors.

Once the band’s first album had been released, producer Tom Wilson took to the task of establishing her as a chanteuse. She’d already been doing solo shows at the same East Village venue that Andy Warhol had already turned into a nightclub, and where she was accompanied by a rotating cast of guitarists, including the guys from the Velvets, Tim Buckley, Tim Hardin, and a kid we’ll reveal shortly. She built a repertoire, which Wilson recorded in the folk style, then promptly slathered in chamber-pop arrangements nothing like the album she’d just finished, and which she insisted she hated. (Interestingly—to us, anyway—the arranger would work on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks a year later.)

The aforementioned kid was named Jackson Browne, and while his own career would take another five years to really start, he plays on most of Chelsea Girl, and two of the three songs he’d written for the album open it. “The Fairest Of The Seasons” is lovely little reverie, and the strings don’t get too much in the way, but the future classic “These Days” would be bettered by others. “Little Sister” is credited to Lou Reed and John Cale, but the see-sawing organ and airy lyrics suggest mostly the work of the latter. Only his name is on the tense, Gothic “Winter Song”, which comes off as a faster minor-key variation with more polysyllabic words. Folks who were with her so far might not have appreciated “It Was A Pleasure Then”, wherein she sings a haunting, almost Gregorian melody over Reed and Cale’s tapped guitars and burst of feedback for eight minutes. Only the absence of drums keeps it from being a full-on Velvets track.

Another contender, and almost as long, is “Chelsea Girls”, written after the fact for Warhol’s experimental 3½-hour split-screen film experience. Eight nursery rhyme-style verses document the sad lives of the denizens, each culminating in a mournful chorus of sorts. She wasn’t the first person to record Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine”, but like Judy Collins she insisted he’d written it explicitly for her, and sources say he did. “Somewhere There’s A Feather” is another very sweet Jackson Browne song to which he never returned, while “Wrap Your Troubles In Dreams” was one of Lou’s earliest songs. At five minutes it tends to drag, and the constantly fluttering flute has the effect of a buzzing fly, causing the listener to swat the air with the album sleeve. “Eulogy To Lenny Bruce” is Tim Hardin’s tribute to the comedian who’d died the previous summer, and a little too specific about their shared addiction to be universal.

Chelsea Girl is one of those “iconic” albums that people seem to revere, but we always suspected it was more due to the fascination with her image and mythology. The arrangements are a little precious, and many of the songs have a sameness to them that take a lot of listens to distinguish. And you’ll either really, really like her voice, or find the accent and pitch problems to be too much to handle. Still, it’s since become part of the Velvet Underground story as a whole, having been included with its stepsiblings in various box sets and expanded reissues.

Nico Chelsea Girl (1967)—2½

Brian Eno 32: Lateral, Luminal, Liminal

Clearly not slowing down when he could simply enjoy the pensioner’s life, Brian Eno’s next collaborator was one Beatie Wolfe, a conceptual artist who’d done a lot of work fusing music and technology, and specifically exploring its therapeutic capabilities. Something sparked between the two, to the extent that they managed to release three albums in less than six months’ time.

Lateral consists of a single ambient track, “Big Empty Country”, split into “Day” and “Night” halves on the abridged vinyl and eight eight-minute segments in the digital files. Described by the pair as “space music”, not a lot happens over the course of it, making it not that different from Thursday Afternoon or Neroli. The same hum and triad are established for the first twenty minutes, then a few gentle guitar notes appear in the same rhythm, and other harmonics begin to emerge. Towards the last ten minutes or so, the atmosphere seems to spread wider, and eventually fades. So basically, it’s pretty and easy to get lost in as well as ignore, so it works.

Released the same day, Luminal presented “dream music”, which in this case means actual songs. Wolfe has a pleasant alto voice that melds well with her guitar and the background, as on “Milky Sleep”. “Hopelessly At Ease” is unique in the Eno catalog for being an actual love song; “Suddenly” could almost count as one, but it’s more suited to somebody in recovery. (Both of these recall Daniel Lanois’ work on the Sling Blade soundtrack thirty years earlier.) “My Lovely Days” picks up the tempo and a little jangle, but “Play On” is a little too robotic, and definitely too long. “Shhh” is an improvement, as his voice isn’t manipulated on it. “A Ceiling And A Lifeboat” ups the eeriness, and while “And Live Again” hints at more hope, “Breath March” and “Never Was It Now” are full of foreboding. At least the ticking rhythm of “What We Are” suggests that the bad dream has subsided.

Four months later, Liminal appeared, this time presenting “dark matter music”, which to them means a mix of songs and shorter, not necessarily ambient pieces. After the very slow “Part Of Us”, “Ringing Ocean” sets a slowly spiraling, tense mood, continued in the two-word phrases of “The Last To Know” before resolving on a major chord. “Procession” could well be a descriptive placeholder for this particular idea, while “Little Boy” is a lullaby over textures right out of Apollo. “Flower Women” isn’t much more than a looped two-chord phrase, the few words mixed so low as to be inaudible until the midway break. “Shallow Form” uses his favorite chord changes, as heard in “Spinning Away” and “The Big Ship”, then “Before Life” sends us off into the solar system again. “Laundry Room” is an existential crisis wrapped in a monologue a la Laurie Anderson, and “Corona” gives us more spacey music before culminating in the eerie carnival of “Shudder Like Crows”.

All of these are fine on their own, and are therefore recommended for individual use. But given the simple, uniform designs of each, one wonders if they couldn’t have simply created one really good album instead of three.

Brian Eno & Beatie Wolfe Lateral (2025)—3
Beatie Wolfe & Brian Eno Luminal (2025)—2½
Brian Eno & Beatie Wolfe Liminal (2025)—2½

Talking Heads 13: Tentative Decisions

A good half-century after they were formed, Talking Heads continued to be appreciated, and not just by people who liked them in the first place. David Byrne had continued to find interesting ways to apply performance art to his catalog, and interactions with his former bandmates had become much less strained, even cordial.

The band’s catalog had also become subject to deluxe editions on top of earlier expansions, as well as live recordings issued for various Record Store Days. Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live was one such release, but what was first a single LP plus a bonus 45 was expanded by a degree of three.

The first disc, which replicates the vinyl release, consists mostly of demos recorded by their sound guy, and offers early versions of songs that would go on to populate their first two albums. The tracks on the second disc were recorded as an audition for Columbia Records, who didn’t sign them, and features a lot of the same songs again. They were only a trio at this point, but already Tina Weymouth has learned how to maneuver through Byrne’s angular, non-standard riffing and chording. His voice is almost there, but sounds more, well, tentative than the eventual brand. There’s even two songs by the Artistics, the first version of the band before Chris Frantz got his girlfriend to learn the bass.

The third disc is all live, split between a show at Max’s Kansas City recorded from the audience, and another in much better fidelity a few months later and hours away in Syracuse. By this time they’d gotten their record deal, and have beaten the tunes into shape. Jerry Harrison still hadn’t joined, but “Take Me To The River” is already in their set, along with Jonathan Richman’s “Pablo Picasso” and “1, 2, 3 Red Light” by the 1910 Fruitgum Company.

Tentative Decisions comes in a handsome book-bound package, with hype incorporated into the artwork, and should fit comfortably on the shelf alongside its siblings. Historically it’s very interesting, showing both how formed the band was at this stage, and demonstrating just how much Jerry would bring to the dynamic.

Talking Heads Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live (2026)—3

Frank Zappa 57: The Lost Episodes

Another project Frank was working on his final years was a further attempt to present the pre-history and evolution of his music and obsessions. The You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore series only scratched the surface of what he’d been sitting on, and outside of a few stray tracks, didn’t even begin to encompass studio work. The Lost Episodes was the first of several “audio documentaries” that would emerge over the coming decades, distilled from some of the multidisc retrospectives he’d threatened since the late ‘60s. (Sequels were promised and forgotten at the turn of the century, but the vault-digging continues to this day.)

Being mostly chronological, it’s designed to tell a story, starting from the oldest recordings in his vault. After a brief intro about one of his early bands, it begins at the beginning with “Lost In A Whirlpool”, sung by the future Captain Beefheart. Kenny and Ronnie of “Let’s Make The Water Turn Black” fame provide context for that song, and then we seesaw between his early attempts at classical and film scoring, and his earliest recording studio projects. Highlights include takes of Mothers music later heard on Freak Out and Ruben & The Jets, the Captain singing lines from a comic book over a blues riff for “Tiger Roach”, and the one-man doo-wop parody “Charva”. Engineer Dick Kunc sets up a series of recordings of the Mothers in New York City, including arrangements of the sea chanties “Wedding Dress Song” and “Handsome Cabin Boy”, excerpts from a visit by the police that almost made it to Uncle Meat, and the soundtrack for a cough drop commercial. Beefheart returns for a couple of humorous monologues and another original collaboration in “Alley Cat”, then it’s right into the ‘70s for some familiar songs. Ricky Lancelotti shrieks his way through “Wonderful Wino”, and we hear the first versions of “RDNZL” and “Inca Roads”, the latter without lyrics yet. We go back to the Hot Rats sessions for “Lil’ Clanton Shuffle” with Sugarcane Harris, leap ahead for the 1980 single version of “I Don’t Wanna Get Drafted”, and end with a glorious 12-minute alternate take of “Sharleena” that surpasses the original, with Sugarcane and Frank trading solos and Ian Underwood being amazing.

The Lost Episodes is a very listenable disc overall, particularly as it provides context for that elusive conceptual continuity before the internet made it easy to explain all the references. While the earlier field recordings are of historical interest only, the music stands out, and the humor even lands most of the time.

Frank Zappa The Lost Episodes (1996)—3½

Roger Daltrey 11: Going Back Home

What was left of the Who had been touring somewhat steadily with the idea that they’d keep showing up as long as tickets were sold, but they weren’t playing hundreds of dates a year. While Pete Townshend would occasionally mention some long-gestating project he was working on, Roger Daltrey had learned long before that he couldn’t just sit and wait for Pete to give him something to sing.

Still, once he got to his 70s and was all too aware that his voice might not last forever, Roger embraced the “if not now, when?” mentality common to rockers his age and got to work. A chance meeting with pub-rocker guitarist Wilko Johnson, who started out in Dr. Feelgood and had a brief stint with Ian Dury’s Blockheads, led to Going Back Home, Roger’s first solo album in twenty years, and first full-length non-Who collaboration ever.

With the exception of a surprising cover of Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window”, the album consists mostly of rerecorded Johnson originals, taken from all eras of his career. (The photos throughout the packaging come from all eras too.) This is straight guitar-based rock ‘n roll, with no effects or pedals. The songs are all pretty tough, chock full of defiant lyrics over standard changes, though the regretful “Turned 21” is sung almost sweetly. The band includes two former Blockheads as well as Mick Talbot, once of the Style Council, on piano and organ. Sadly, it’s not Roger blowing harmonica at all, but he struts and growls his way through the tunes like he must’ve back in 1964. Meanwhile, Wilko plays guitar like he’s hitting the strings with a brick, and never misses a note.

At just under 35 minutes, Going Back Home gets the job done. Besides giving Roger some songs worthy of his voice, the album also raised Wilko’s profile at a time when he needed a boost, having been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. As it turned out, he would outlive the original terminal diagnosis by almost ten years. (About six months after its initial release, a Deluxe Edition offered an extra disc filled up with one session outtake that should have made the album, one radio edit, three songs from the album sung by Wilko and not Roger, six live tracks without Roger, and six tracks with.)

Wilko Johnson/Roger Daltrey Going Back Home (2014)—3