London Calling - The Clash
Best Song: London Calling vs. Lost in the Supermarket
Is this album really all that good?
The short answer is, “Yes, but you have to work hard for it.”
The Clash is one of the hardest bands to assimilate. If you can honestly say you know your feelings about The Clash after listening to one of their albums once you are lying to yourself. There sound is much too dense and diverse and clever to be enjoyed that quickly but seldom does a song of theirs bore you too sleep upon first listen.
London Calling has made tons of lists of “Greatest Punk Albums” but it will never make mine. And that is because this album is not punk, at least not musically (lyrically I guess it is) . This is not bare-boned Rock ‘N Roll taken to the basics like on The Ramones. This is some world class ska music. Now it is worth noting that ska influenced punk and then punk influenced third wave ska so it is a really hard cycle to keep up with. But this falls outside of “influenced by” and directly into “is”.
Which is not a bad thing! Punk is a great genre but it is also limiting musically to pretty trivial (but kickass) instrumentation and the music on London Calling is anything but trivial. Like most ska and reggae a lot of these songs are groove based instead of melody based. But if you allow yourself the time to let these songs grow on you not a single one is bad.
The two songs I most recommend are the title track, which is the most biting track both lyrically and musically, and Lost in the Supermarket. Lost in the Supermarket is this kind of dreamy rock that would, nine-years later, be used by Sonic Youth years later on Daydream Nation, though Lost in the Supermarket is better then anything on that album.
Final Verdict On Reputation: Deserved
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