And, thank God, finally for Foreigner we have fifth album, Agent Provocateur (1984). The big hit from this album was 'I Want To Know What Love Is', and we all know that rock monstrosity inside and out. The album kicks off with another proto-hair-metal workout in the "you can't stop me" vein, 'Tooth and Nail'. It's awful. And of course the rock album template is unassailable and therefore 'Tooth and Nail' has to be followed by a soppy slowie ('That Was Yesterday'), which is also awful. The Def Leppardism of the whole thing, overproduced into oblivion and sounding like you're drowning in an oil slick, is so unutterably ghastly that it's hard to shake the feeling that you're like Noriega, under house arrest and having this stuff blasted at you to drive you out of your mind. Oh God, do you know what, I can't be bothered to even think about this any more. Let's move on and pretend this whole sorry episode was nothing more than a terrible, terrible nightmare.
What's next could scarcely be further away from what we've just gone through. Josephine Foster's freak-folk epic, Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You (2005) is a difficult record to talk about because it's hard to know what to compare it to. Musically it's not too dissimilar from other freak-folk stuff that has been knocking around since the early-2000's - hushed and stately, slightly spooky, sparse, strangely set-apart from any other genre (dig that absolutely awful alliteration! Sorry about that), but Foster's singular thing is her voice. It's a high, quivering thing that swoops and ducks around all over the place and much of the time seems to have come from either another time or another place we don't know about yet, it's very odd, sometimes strangely affecting, sometimes just unnerving. For the most part the songs are presented by just Foster's voice and either an acoustic guitar or harp, each played as unsteadily as her voice, and the whole thing feels like either an exercise in experimentation within the folk form or else a heartfelt demonstration of a unique approach but it's hard to tell which it really is. The album isn't an easy listen but it is weirdly rewarding, creating a universe of its own in the course of its running time. Interestingly some of her vocal phrasing has been used, much less demonstrably challengingly, by Laura Marling and I can't help but wonder if she's familiar with Foster's records.
Aretha Franklin put out some astonishingly high quality stuff during the second half of the 1960's and her two best albums were released in that period. I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967) is a fantastic piece of work, stuffed with blisteringly committed vocal performances, peerless musical setting from the untouchable Muscle Shoals crew and songs to die for. In some ways 'Respect' is not the best way for the album to start, because the familiarity of the song disguises the fact that it's not the barn-stormingly perfect construction that people often want to make out and there's much, much stronger material on the album. The title track, 'Baby Baby Baby', 'Save Me', 'Don't Let Me Lose This Dream' are all tunes that are passed over in favour of the more famous numbers, 'Respect', 'A Change is Gonna Come', 'Do Right Woman, Do Right Man', but the bigger ones are the less interesting. In any event to discuss quality difference here is quibbling, it's all R&B and soul of the absolutely highest calibre and Aretha is in just fantastic voice.
Personally I prefer Lady Soul (1968) though. It's more diverse, any roughness ('Do Right Woman, Do Right Man' is actually rather irritating) has been smoothed out and everything is so fluid, so perfectly judged, it's simply a delight to listen to every time. The smooth soul numbers ('Groovin', which is wonderful, the heartbreaking 'Ain't No Way', and '(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You've Been Gone') are so finely judged that, unlike a lot of soul at the time, there's not a trace of mawkishness or excess of sentimentality about them, they're just gold, and the bigger R&B tracks are thunderous bits of absolutely first-rate songwriting (considering that most of the material on Lady Soul is sourced from the likes of Don Covay, Curtis Mayfield, and Carole King, well it's going to pretty good). Lady Soul really is the sound of someone completely in command not only of their material, but of the way they want to represent themselves and it's a truly superb piece of work by everyone involved.
Next would have been the three song 7" 'The Hand' by Tarnation's Paula Frazer but once again I can't find any of the songs on the internet. Never fear, they'll all turn up when we get to Tarnation (sometime around 2015 I expect).
My brother's friend Julian is responsible for us all owning the final album of the day - it's dream-pop outfit the Frazier Chorus' debut entitled Sue (1989). Easily dismissed as the work of electro-pop also-rans, Sue is actually an acidic sideswipe at both suburban and urban Britishness, couched in swathes of keyboards, pastoral classical instrumentation and sweeping synthesised strings. It does sound dated, but in some ways that's part of the charm of the whole thing, it was very much a product of its time. It sounds something like a cross between Colourbox, the Dream Academy and early Beloved and Tim Freeman's lyrics and let-me-tell-you-a-story sing-speak recall Jarvis Cocker's adoption of the same styles (in fact there's a clear lift of a snatch of the vocal melody of 'Sloppy Heart' on the opening lines of the verses of 'Common People'). For the most part the tunes are sunny, quaintly delicate bits of pop music, disguising the viciousness of the lyrics, but it does occasionally become fairly sinister ('Ha-Ha-Happiness' is particularly bitter). Although tied to its time, Sue is still a decent listen, not least because it anticipated other more successful acts.
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