Friday, October 23, 2020

The 1981 Listening Post - Alex Chilton - Bach's Bottom

 Alex Chilton - Bach's Bottom


#39

1981 Housekeeping

Alex Chilton

Bach’s Bottom

Genre: Rock

1.5 out of 5



Requisite 80s cover: a drunken and horrible demo of “I’m So Tired”. Why is this here? And the actual version is awful as well.

Jagger/Richards’ “Singer Not the Song”. A lazy version of a B-Side that Chilton could have had fun with but, instead…it’s a pale imitation. 

“Summertime Blues”. Why, Alex, why???


If you’ve been reading just my reviews and ignored all the bigger albums that I had already rated and are being handled by guest reviewers then you would know that January 1981 has been quite a slog. 

It’s almost as though 1980 got so drunk on great rock and power pop and even post-rock and punk that the hangover of the next year was so vicious as to be nearly unlistenable. 

So, you can imagine my glee in seeing that there was an Alex Chilton record in housekeeping that I could listen to to round out my reviews of the first month of 1981.

Big Star’s importance to the movement is undeniable but that’s a bunch of years in the past and we have to deal with what came next.

And…

It’s not great. 

From what I’ve read, this is a bunch of leftovers from a half decade before and that’s a shame. I expected more. I’m not sure what the benefit is to putting out second rate Big Star songs under your own name. This record is little more than a curio. In fact, it belongs in the same storage unit as Rivers Cuomo’s Alone. But that was at least interesting. 

This. 

Is. 

Not. 



https://music.apple.com/us/album/bachs-bottom/1469579320

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