

Released outside of Jamaica by Island Records with guitar overdubs and ornamentation, the original Jamaican version is a stripped-down masterpiece. He packed the album with beautiful melodic numbers, such as “High Tide and Low Tide”, and rhythmic dance tracks like “Kinky Reggae”.

Marley sang of life “where the living is hardest” in “Concrete Jungle” and looked back to Jamaica’s ignoble slaving past – “No chains around my feet but I’m not free”. The album that carried reggae music to the four corners of the world and made Bob Marley an international superstar also set the political tone for many artists to follow. HBĬatch a Fire (Jamaican version) (1973), Bob Marley and the Wailers Propulsive polyrhythms drive against the lyrical pleas for us to stop and take stock.

“Facts are simple and facts are straight / Facts are lazy and facts are late…” sang David Byrne, submerging personal and planetary anxieties about fake news and conspicuous consumption in dense, layers and loops of Afrobeat-indebted funk. Although that was really the only mediaeval imagery they conjured up – they ripped Dungeons & Dragons clichés out of the lyrics and replaced them with the apocalypse, with bassist Cliff Burton, drummer Lars Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and singer/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield serving as the four horsemen. This album is about storytelling – the mediaeval-influenced guitar picks on opener “Battery” should be enough to tell you that. In 1986, they released one of the best metal records of all time, which dealt with the potency and very nature of control, meshing beauty and raw human ugliness together on tracks like “Damage Inc” and “Orion”. HBĭespite not featuring any singles, Metallica’s third album was the UK rock radio breakthrough they’d been looking for. You can hear her listening to the band, biding her time before firing up her voice to demand “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”, 50 years before the #MeToo movement. The Queen of Soul gave herself the same space. When Jerry Wexler signed the daughter of a violent, philandering preacher to Atlantic records, he “took her to church, sat her down at the piano, and let her be herself”. I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), Aretha Franklin
