So I've made a decision. I don't want to put albums which I only sort of like in here. This means that there will be a couple years in which I don't have complete top tens, including 1965, which will simply be a top six.
6. The Sonics: Here Are the Sonics
I think there's an extent to which this album, the debut from these Washington garage-rock legends, is more notable for what it influenced and how it's talked about (note "legends") than its actual music - in short, the Sonics suffer from Velvet Underground Syndrome. Now, there's surely some law which says that, having mentioned the VU, I can't post this review unless I dust off the line about how only a thousand people listened to
The Velvet Underground & Nico, but all of them started bands, yadda yadda yadda. But that's okay, because it's actually very connected to this subject. If Reed, Cale, & co.'s debut inspired art students to launch great but pretentious bands that challenged even our most basic assumptions about music and made a point of pushing all the boundaries they could think of,
Here Are the Sonics told the public, fifteen years before Half Japanese's first album (and closer to thirty before that godawful Radiohead song), that anyone could play guitar. It’s an interesting case because it’s both one of the great populist albums of all time and one that’s (rightly) considered a classic by “intelligent” music snobs. This makes sense - after all, without it, it’s plausible that we wouldn’t have the New York Dolls, we wouldn’t have the Clash, and we might not even have Wire.
But here I am, a decent-sized paragraph in, and I’m falling victim to the same problem I began by addressing - there’s so much to talk about on face with this album, and yet reviewers, including me, spend our time bloviating about its historical importance or whatever. And don’t get me wrong: it
is a landmark in the history of punk rock, or even in the history of music. But even more important is that it’s a bunch of really great songs. It’s impossible for me, in 2014, to hear how fresh this must have sounded to a lot of people, and I won’t try to imagine - it’s even more impressive that a few years after the garage rock revival and after the Hives in particular (who won’t be showing up on any of these lists, but who are criminally underrated when they get lumped in with contemporaries like the Vines) made their name by basically playing “Have Love Will Travel”, these songs still hold up.
So let’s talk about the songs then. “The Witch” starts things off with a bang, introducing the album’s basic formula - blues-derived ranting over aggressive music including skronking sax. The song also includes a quick surf guitar solo. “Do You Love Me” is the first of two Motown covers (the other is Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want)”, and it’s quickly followed by the classic “Roll Over Beethoven” - not one of the stronger cuts in this version, but it’s hard to match the original, and the band’s handclap-accentuated enthusiasm is undeniable. Elsewhere on the album, we get “Have Love Will Travel”, possibly the greatest garage-rock song of all time, “Strychnine”, possibly the second-greatest, and a cover of “Good Golly Miss Molly”. And it’s all over in 29 minutes.