Issue #021

Featuring The Who, Royal Blood, Royel Otis, Tropicália & Jimmy Smith

1. CLASSICS: Tommy by The Who (1969)

A music album so good, it was performed by The Who in its entirety at Woodstock, then at the Metropolitan Opera House and later turned into a film featuring Elton John as the “Pinball Wizard”. Do you even need to know more? Born in Pete Townshend's head, Tommy is a story about a deaf, dumb and blind boy who becomes a spiritual guru. The rest of the band just let him get on with it. They recorded the whole thing at IBC Studios in London between September 1968 and March 1969, produced by their manager Kit Lambert, and released it on Track Records in May 1969.

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2. ROCK: Royal Blood by Royal Blood (2014)

Royal Blood are just Mike Kerr and Ben Thatcher. One plays bass, the other plays drums. Mike runs his bass through a chain of pedals that makes it sound like a guitar and a bass at the same time and Ben has a pretty heavy hand, which means the two of them fill a room (or a stadium) the way a full band would. The opening track, “Out of the Black,” is a pretty badass way to open a debut album. It was recorded primarily at Rockfield Studios in Wales, produced with Tom Dalgety, with most of it done in single takes with no overdubs, no samples, just the two of them playing live in a room. It became the fastest-selling British rock debut in three years and Jimmy Page presented them with the Brit Award for Best British Group the following year. If you like Queens of the Stone Age or early Led Zeppelin, this one's for you.

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3. UNCHARTED: Hickey by Royel Otis (2025)

Royel Maddell and Otis Pavlovic met while both working in bars and cafés in Australia, got together with their guitars in 2019 and have been making music together ever since. This is their second full album, released through Capitol Records and it was shaped largely by the year they spent touring nonstop after their debut. They recorded parts of it in Palm Springs and Calabasas with producers Blake Slatkin and Omer Fedi. It's the kind of album that works best with the window down and a coastline somewhere nearby (or if you want to replicate that feeling somewhere else).

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4. MADE IN BRAZIL: Tropicália Ou Panis Et Circencis by Various Artists (1968)

By 1968 young Brazilian artists were frustrated with the military dictatorship and with the conservative side of brazilian music, that refused anything that wasn't Bossa Nova or traditional MPB. Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, Gal Costa, Os Mutantes, and the poet Torquato Neto decided to do something about it. The idea behind the Tropicália movement was simple, but radical for that time: stop looking at the US and Europe for cultural validation and produce music and art that celebrates Brazilian culture and identity. With maestro Rogério Duprat, they recorded the album in São Paulo. It threw everything into the same pot: bossa nova, african rhythms, psychedelic rock, poetry, samba and the kind of experimental arrangements that Duprat was known for. Shortly after the launch, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were arrested, imprisoned and eventually sent into exile. Decades later, artists like David Byrne and Beck cited Tropicália as a major influence, and the album found a second life among international listeners.

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5. JAZZ: Back at the Chicken Shack by Jimmy Smith (1963)

In 1954 after hearing organist Wild Bill Davis play, pianist Jimmy Smith switched to a Hammond B3 organ, rented a Philadelphia warehouse to practice in and came out a different person. Blue Note boss Alfred Lion heard him, named him “The Incredible Jimmy Smith” and on April 25, 1960, brought him into Rudy Van Gelder's studio in New Jersey with saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, guitarist Kenny Burrell and drummer Donald Bailey to record two albums in the same session. This was one of them. Maybe I'll write about the other one, which was released earlier in 1961, in a future issue.

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💬 Join the conversation in the comments!

What's your take on these albums? Which albums have you been listening to lately? Feel free to comment below.

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