Giuseppe Zangara

TSM never got me laid.

You Forgot It in People was my #2 for 2003. I still love it; the s/t is good, but I haven't been compelled to listen to it very much. It's a very exhausting album, from the overproduction to the lengths of the songs themselves—"It's All Gonna Break," for instance, should've been seven minutes shorter.

Oh, I loved subliminal_animal; I hope he never comes back.

I was really hoping no one would bring that one up.

As for other people's gimmicks: Banders Kennany.

Bertil Olssen and David Schwimmer.

Due to its reputation, I avoided this for the longest time. No longer. The production is really awful, so flat and muddy. At first I thought maybe it needed a new remaster, but the cd I'm listening to is from '99, when Epic remastered/reissued the Clash's back catalogue. My copy of London Calling I'm so familiar with—also a '99 remaster—sounds light years better than this. An aside: I misspelled the Sandinista! in the thread title.

Not in the rock department? Don't tell me you're thinking rap. Rappers have a notoriously short shelf life when it comes to mainstream popularity.

I looked through an issue of Rolling Stone the other day. First time in at least a year. The layout resembled the work of an ADD-addled child; who can read this shit? I couldn't tell what was an advertisement and what was an article. The first post in this thread illustrates that it's nearly impossible to tell the two apart, anyway.

And dude, shut up with the Interpol/Joy Division shit. It was lazy criticism three years ago and it's simply pathetic now. Any similarity between the two is superficial at best.

Wilco. They've been putting out albums for the last ten years and are bigger now than when they started. They got legs.

Regrettably.

And that's Sandinista!. There's one more track after "Career Opportunities"—another dub excursion, this one called "Sheperds Delight"—but it's only noteworthy for being such an unexceptional way to end a so bewildering, frustrating and not very rewarding recording. Don't bother with this unless you can get it for very cheap or free. At the very least, download "Police on My Back." Dismissing this song just because it's a cover is clueless.

After "Charlie Don't Surf"—which wasn't bad while listening to it, but all's I can recall now are the clunky lyrics—absolutely nothing of interest happens for the next eight songs (and I can't even call half of these "songs"). Which, while incredibly boring to listen to, saved me the effort of having to think of anything to say here. Then comes "Career Opportunities," finding the Clash revisit this classic tune from their debut. They got rid of the nasty punk guitars from the original, replaced them with warm, sprightly keyboards and—predating the Kidz Bop craze by two decades—a chorus of children on vocals. The allmusic review of this song, covering both the original recording from the s/t as well as the redo here, put it best: I honestly liked this song. More so than the original, even, since, frankly, the lyrics are pretty stupid. And, given how so much of Sandinista! is the Clash trying to prove that they're Serious Artists, it's good to see them with a sense of humour (note the British 'u') intact.

That makes me want to kill.

Have you tried Souls at Zero yet? Sometimes I don't even want to listen to it; sometimes it's my favorite album ever. No! I should get on that.

The first third of the second CD provides the album's best stretch of music, "The Equaliser" aside. "The Call Up" is a good midtempo disco tune which only requires you to ignore the Velveeta opening; "Washington Bullets" delves once again into tropicalia, but with an actual song, as opposed to the tentative sketch that was the first disc's "Let's Go Crazy." "Broadway" is an effective, jazzy ballad, one I didn't like the first time I heard it, but went down well just now. Then there's "Lose This Skin." Musically, it's a Celtic rocker I like just fine. Too bad they let a one Terry Doggs—who wrote the song and plays violin here—screech his way through the vocals. I bet the Pogues would've done a lovely cover of this; I'll take Shane Macgowan's drunken snarl over this shit anyday.

Disc two. Yes, "Police on My Back" is massive. And so what it's a cover? They took a relatively obscure reggae song and turned it into this first class rave up, which showed that, given just how much of Sandinista! was sloppy and incoherent, they could still turn in an outstanding rocker. I love this song, those siren-like guitars. One of Mick Jones' finest vocal performances, if not his best. It's the only track on the album where the shoddy production doesn't hinder it in the slightest. Fucking rock. The song that follows it, "Midnight Log" is nice, too; unfortunately, any goodwill built up by having two good songs in a row (a rarity here, to be sure) is flushed away by "The Equaliser," yet another interminable dub experiment.

Would his psychotic ravings be entertaining to someone, like myself, who does not follow football? If so, could you post links?

I can't emphasize enough just how startled I am at how poor the album as a whole sounds. I understand it was written and recorded fairly quickly, but, given just how much sonic detail the Clash were going for here, attempting something so complex meant they should've given at least the very same consideration that went into the writing and recording of London Calling. Sure, their s/t debut was also muddy, but that was punk rock; Sandinista! was not. I'm not saying better production would've saved this album—that would require some generous track deletion (and less white powder for Strummer, dude was heavily dreaming Colombian around this time)—but it would've helped quite a bit in making this album more listenable.

A lot of you are getting away from industrial, but, not being well-versed in the genre myself, I've little room to argue. Since Thumbtack mentioned it, I wanted to say—I think I've said this before—that the title track to Through Silver in Blood is one of the rare moments where music managed to scare the shit out of me. Keep in my I was playing it rather loudly and late at night, laying in bed with the (foolish) idea of going to sleep afterwards.

By the by, I expect little-to-no response to this thread. This is mostly for my own amusement. Also, I've gone back and edited some of the posts—cleaning up a few sentences, adding a couple more. And I'll probably do the second disc tonight.

The first cd/first side of the second LP ends with "The Sound of Sinners" and oboy oboy! it's a gospel song. Regular readers of mine know just how much I love choirs and I'll be damned if this song doesn't have one. Sarcasm aside, this track isn't terribly offensive even if it sounded like it was recorded in a very large bathroom. But then that's par for the course. As for late-in-the-first-disc songs like "Corner Soul" and "If Music Could Talk," I have no recollection of what they were like, in spite of being less than 20 minutes removed from hearing them. I think "Corner Soul" was decent, but, again, production. "Let's Go Crazy"—no relation to the Prince song that would surface four years later—was quaint (so very, very quaint) tropicalia. Right now, I'm in no mood to sit through the 70+ minutes it would require to listen to disc two, though it does contain one of the Clash's very best songs.

Songs from earlier in the disc I feel I should mention: "The Magnificient Seven" is the most anthologized song on this album, a cursory glance of their discography shows. I don't know why. Maybe due to it being the very first song and so few people can be arsed to sit through Sandinista!'s nearly 2.5 hour running time. It's a totally dated appropriation of hip hop, which, at the time of this album's release (1980), was still very much in its infancy. Later on in this disc (or, the song that opened the second LP of the original three LP set), "Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)" also takes a stab at hip hop, with equally underwhelming results. The Clash actually whip up a nice groove on these songs, but Joe Strummer's rapping is hilariously misguided, mostly due to his speech impediment. No one would spray the mic with so much spittle until 23 years later, when Kanye went "Through the Wire." Mick Jones' "Somebody Got Murdered" and "Up in Heaven (Not Only Here)" are both good songs, hampered only by the weak production and the fact that both are basically rewrites of "Lost in the Supermarket."