Music: Here It My Way

Artists: Various

Hear it my way
By Nadeem F. Paracha



It’s been a little more than a decade since I first started to write on music. All these years three of the most frequently asked questions that continue to come my way are also the ones I have refused to answer: (1) How many breakdowns have I suffered? (2) What is the “highest high” I have experienced? And (3) What are my ten favorite albums ever?
Even though the frequency of these questions remains consistent, I have decided to answer one of them. The third one. (*Applause*).


·Best Of …: Simon & Garfunkel (1967-71)
I have never heard a more melodic act than S&G. The duo took the edgy wit of Bob Dylan’s folk-rock and deliciously smoothened it with all the finest and most tuneful pop sensibilities.

·Spirits Having Flown: Bee Gees (1978)
I always loved the mid/late-70s’ Bee Gees phase when they took their bleeding-heart bubblegum pop harmonies and added to them chunks of vintage ‘70s disco beats and beeps. The result was highly addictive dance-pop, crisply mixed, delivered and produced.


·Master Of Reality: Black Sabbath (1971)
I’ve listened to a lot of heavy-rock in my life and I have no qualms in suggesting that this is perhaps the heaviest album ever made. It comes at you like a rumbling, 100-ton charge of a stoned rhino! Lovely.


·Rise & Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars: David Bowie (1972)
Ziggy Stardust remains to be my favorite Bowie album. On it he delivers his trademark eccentric lyrics with the help of basic, riff-friendly rock chops, all pouring through colorful theatrics and imagery of quirky art-rock.


·Tusk: Fleetwood Mac (1979)
Tusk remains to be FM-Rock’s most edgy and ambitious release, packing 20 lavishly produced and constructed ditties subtly (but surly) cut with wonderfully understated experimentation, and thus making itself sound a lot more sexier and edgy than most other good FM-Rock .


·Man Machine: Kraftwerk (1978)
Kraftwerk can be credited for single-handedly influencing the eventual creation of early-‘80s synth-based New-Wave and ‘90s genres like Techno and Industrial. They took the minimilist Philip Glass route and wired it with distant, cold sounds of a post-industrial society. Couple this with their equally enigmatic album covers that (as on Man Machine) mixed Warholsque pop-art with the that of 1920’s Bolshevik propaganda art, one is left listening to the album over and over again to find out what lies under layers of all those hypnotic, mechanical beats.

·London Calling: The Clash (1979)
A vintage 360º Punk gem, it sees The Clash peaking on their raging left-wing stands and DIY ethics. But it does so without shying away from melodic accessibility by adding liberal doses of ska and reggea into the mix.

·Animals: Pink Floyd (1977)
The mighty Floyd takes their astute observations of the human condition and uses them in everyday social and cultural contexts, creating a modern Animal Farm in which dogs are soulless, white-collar opportunists (future yuppies); the pigs are myopic moralists and capitalist thugs and the sheep are numb, gullible masses that may revolt but end up replacing one set of dogs and pigs with another.
The intensity and insightfulness of the lyrics are quite breathtaking. And they are perfectly complimented by rampaging, epic compositions dominated byraging guitar histrionics, angry and raving, but at same time remaining well within the confines of archetypical Floydian aural engagement.

·Moving Pictures: Rush (1981)
Dynamic in the true sense of the word. Dizzing compositions punctuated with odd chords, tremendous powerhouse drumming and brilliant, brilliant
Production. Vintage prog-metal at its finest and most sophisticated.

*VS:2: Vital Signs (1991)
To me this remains to be local-pop`s best 45 minutes. Even though the album begins with VS:1-like Filmi-Pop ('Sanwal Salonii'), and then moves along into scoring great, melodic FM-Pop ('Mera Dil Nahin Available';
'Teray Liye Hai Mera Dil'), its overall sound and mood throughout remains rather sombre, with subtle, moody shades of melancholia and even pessimism.