Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's Ease Down the Road vs. Neil Young's Everybody Knows this is Nowhere:
This is really a wonderful pair of album covers. A field of grass with a lawn mower cut "road" and a pointilist Neil Young with dog in front of mountains. I own these as CDs, but I'd like to see both covers in vinyl size.
I've been listening to both of these a lot. Probably 8 or 10 times each, which has been great. I was already somewhat familiar with both albums, so it was nice to listen more closely for a while.
They both have a rootsy feel, but in different ways. Everybody Knows This is Nowhere has a distinctly 60s feel in the harmonies but sounds surprisingly close to some alternative country of the 90s (or vice-versa, really). Which is maybe to say that this album was ahead of its time. I've never been that crazy about Round and Round, but repeated listens have made me like it more. There really aren't any duds on this album, though I don't care as much for The Losing End and Running Dry, but they probably share the most with Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's Ease Down the Road.
Ease Down the Road is a great album title because it makes you say things like, "Ease on Dow—no wait, Ease Down the Road?" While listening to the Neil Young album resulted in nodding my head and saying, "yeah!" listening to Ease Down the Road made me turn up the volume and say, "huh? what did he just say?" It kind of sticks in my mind as a string of notable lines like, "with my finger in his a@%," "You F#$% and what's to do? (background: you f@#$)," and "hand on shaft and licked his balls" (didn't catch this nugget until just now). But those notable lines make my ears perk up and then I listen to the usually bizarre, often moving impressions and stories in these songs and really appreciate them. I'd like to propose that this album is part of Will Oldham's middle period, characterized by less bleak-sounding music than his earlier work, but still dealing with overtly bleak ideas. Not that his more recent music is super sunny, but it feels more complex and has a more soothing sound. There's really a lot of sex in this album, much of it on the cheating, guilt-laden end of things: "Why's it seem we're doing right, when we're doing something filthy, in a rented room tonight." I find it refreshingly frank.
But then Neil rocks out with Cinnamon Girl and Down by the River and Cowgirl in the Sand and it's just really great rock'n'roll.
Everybody Knows This is Nowhere is a classic and one of those enduring albums that makes it onto "best 500 albums ever" lists made by institutions like Rolling Stone, but I think right now I'd rather listen to Ease Down the Road.
Winner: Bonnie Prince Billy - Ease Down the Road. Also, it comes earlier in the alphabet.
Substance is one of my favorite albums of the 80's. Side note: You know what I think is my favorite album of the 80's? Violent Femmes - Violent Femmes. I can't believe that didn't make it on anyone's list. Just listened to it the other day, and it stands up and then some. This could have taken both of these down.
Gee, that's a small cover of Bringing It All Back Home. Question: Why isn’t Blonde on Blonde in the tourney?
So here's the thing about jazz. Sometimes I really like jazz records once I'm a little way in, but they're, for me, in the same category as Harpers articles and documentaries: I have to be cajoled into beginning to listen or read or watch. Which is probably a symptom of intellectual laziness. And I do not like what I deem "crazy jazz." Apparently, some people call this brand of jazz "free jazz," but that seems overly generous to me. Take Pharoah Sanders: I cannot unravel the music from the noise in most of his "songs." Which is probably a symptom of tone-deafness. But there you have it. 
At least that's how it is with Abbey Road for me: "Here Comes the Sun" is sunny and tender, warm with earned nostalgia, but then there's the somewhat shoddy replica of that song's lyrics at the beginning of "The Sun King." "Carry That Weight," with its orchestral bits--from the sudden horns to an electric guitar that echoes their fanfare--also wins me over, as does "Come Together." And there's a bunch of songs here too that I think are playful without being vapid, one of which is "Mean Mr. Mustard." Then again, there's a couple of clunkers, by my lights, one of which is "An Octopus's Garden." I think it's stupidly psychedelic. It, like Revolver's "Yellow Submarine," is catchy and noisome. Perhaps I just don't like songs about being underwater. Nor do I tend to like songs written by someone horny improvising with a mod garage band, which, if I had to guess, I would say might describe the composition process for "I Want You (She's So Heavy)."
