10 'Best' Albums From 1973

Yup, I know it's been a while. I've been busy. But I have not forgotten. I've done 1970-1972, but it's time to pick it up once again and get to grips with 1973. I hope you will agree - 1973 is an amazing year. There were many many classic albums that year. Here are my top ten.

I have changed the way that I have done things. If you are interested how click here, but if not let's get on with the malarky.




These are in reverse order:


Leroy Hutson - Love Oh Love

Leroy Hutson is probably not very well known. This is a shame, he should be. For starters, he was a peer of the great Donny Hathaway, collaborating on the classic, The Ghetto. Secondly, he was Curtis Mayfield's choice of replacement when Mayfield left The Impressions. When Hutson then went solo himself, two and a half years later, he released an incredible run of albums over the 1970s and early 1980s.

Love Oh Love was Hutson's debut solo album and is a luscious example of 70s smooth soul. It has the slight disco groove that will become unavoidable later in the decade, but it is far too well constructed to reduce to being 'just' another disco record. It also bears the unmistakable stamp of Curtis Mayfield in the string arrangements and the lyrical structure at time, but Hutson is too much his own to be a mere copyist. In all, it's just lovely.

Bob Marley & The Wailers - Burnin'

I'll admit that for a long time I fell into a weird brand of musical snobbery with Bob Marley. I think his ubiquity, especially with a certain kind of dope-smoking student, along with his willingness to embrace the Eurocentric mainstream (he wasn't Prince Far I or Burning Spear or one of the 'cooler' lesser-known reggae superstars), blinded me to the fact that he was really, really good. I still find the cult of Marley a little silly (he is kind of cool, though), but I am glad that I shook that nonsense off and started to explore his discography. Every record brings something awesome to the mix.

Marley had been recording for best part of a decade before he signed to Island Records in 1973. And what a start! First Catch a Fire, which is a monster, and then this - which is, for my money, even better! It is rougher and less polished than it's predecessor, and thematically, it is darker and more militant. I also has two of the greatest tunes Marley ever wrote:  Get Up Stand Up and  I Shot the Sheriff. What a record!!


Kool & the Gang - Wild and Peaceful

For starters, any album that has Funky Stuff and Jungle Boogie and Hollywood Swinging on it is going to be hard to beat. James Brown once referred to these guys as the 'second baddest', so you know they had some credibility. If you only know them from later so-so efforts like Celebration, I really encourage you to revisit. Anyway, in their earlier days, they sat in a strange nexus between jazz and party music (much like early Earth, Wind and Fire), and their records are an irresistible combination between serious musical chops and getting down. Even when they smooth things out and cool down a little, they chill out so far it's impossible not to want to kick back with them. As they themselves say they're 'scientists of sound, mathematically puttin' it down'.


Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon

I imagine that one or two readers might get a little huffy at this - Surely Dark Side of the Moon is the best album of the year, philistine!  To which I respectfully say, Suck it! Write your own stupid list!

Seriously, I like it but I can't say that I love it. In fact, quite often I find the idea of the album boring. I certainly play it less often than I ought because of this. However, when I actually do play it I remember that it's actually awesome, despite pretty much defining Dad-rock for me.

Part of the reason that I don't love this album is because it has extended periods of ponderousness, and while I appreciate this, I don't often enjoy it. It doesn't excite me very much. It's too cerebral and not physical enough. I know that higher in the list there are other 'serious' records, but at least they have the decency to be fun, or pretty, or least make so that I can tap my feet or drum my fingers on my desk. So yes, this is a great record, and undeniably an album of the year. But it's never going to be top.


Judee Sill - Heart Food

I wrote about Judee Sill recently, praising her lyrics. I'm happy to extend this praise to her music in general. But before I do, let me again take a second to note her career - or rather the lack of it and the tragedy that that involved. She was a teenage runaway, getting involved with heroin and bank robberies. But she had two things that worked in her favour; a musical gift that channelled both Bach and Brian Wilson, and a mystical sense of religious passion. These two features are writ large on her two albums.

The beauty and complexity of the songs here are simply breathtaking. Listen to The Kiss - (don't worry about the lyrics no matter what I said last time) - listen to how she uses the harmonies, the simplicity of the piano line, the use of horns, how she can utilise strings so delicately. It genuinely lifts me. It is a song that is honestly breath-taking. You'd think it un-toppable, until you hit The Donor. It is eight minutes of slow building worship. The vocals ebb and flow and rise and catch you as they repeat and become a round of sorts. The bells and timpani draw you on. Seriously, if mystical revelation had a sound-track this would be it.

If you've never heard it, please do so as soon as you can. If you have heard it, pop it on again.

Sadly, after this, she slipped back into heroin addiction and died penniless in 1979.


Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On

Too cerebral is never a charge you could make of Marvin Gaye's follow up to What's Goin' On? This is a record with one true objective and a person's brain is not a relevant factor. Marvin Gaye's conflicted sexual attitudes are well documented but there's no doubt which side is winning out one here.

It is possible that this is even better than What's Goin' On? There's no lengthy interludes where he points to God or Jesus; there are no bits that slow down to make you think. It's just over half an hour of the sweetest expressions of sexual love and desire. The album is single-minded in making you groove and the groove is so good - I can't but nod my head, tap my fingers, sashay through the kitchen to make a cup of tea and imagine myself the Lothario that I am not even sure that Gaye was.

Marvin Gaye was a genius. I love him.


Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure

In honesty, I struggle a bit with Roxy Music's self-titled debut. I feel like the ideas are there and despite a couple of strong tracks, the album never quite makes it. However, I think they found their feet pretty darn quick because their second and third albums, both released in 1973, are amazing! I have a hard time deciding which I preferred. The third album, Stranded, was Brian Eno's favourite (which I always thought really big of him, since Bryan Ferry kicked him out after the second.) It also has Mother of Pearl on it - a monster of a tune if ever there was one!

But For Your Pleasure wins it.

You can see where the tensions between Brian and Bryan were brewing. The art in art-rock is writ pretty large here. While it is plain that Ferry wants to edge towards more straightforward interpretations, the out-there sound textures provided by Eno are pulling in the opposite direction. Listen to The Bogus Man with its metronomic rhythm and discordant saxophone blurts, Ferry's croon is stretched right out to try to accommodate it. On the title track, the piano is phased as far as it can take while almost everything is stripped away into nothing - it feels like it is decaying before your eyes. And then the dystopian moments of In Every Dream Home a Heartache, which is so dark... But, Do The Strand and Editions of You (especially the latter), in possibly the best double A side ever, both kick ass when it comes to sophisticated pop music.


John Cale - Paris 1919

I could well understand if someone had not heard John Cale or even had spent much time with him, and then listened to this album why they might be a little bemused in its inclusion here. After all, at first listen, it might appear a pretty unremarkable album.

A little context might help. John Cale is, for my money, one of the most interesting and under-recognised artists in contemporary music. If people have heard of him at all, they may know him as the dude that wasn't Lou Reed in the Velvet Underground. This makes me a little sad in that the Velvet Underground, at least in its original (classic) iteration, is at least as much an expression of Cale as it is Reed, if not more so. (As much as I love or respect Lou Reed's further career, he very rarely did anything as interesting as Cale.) For instance, even before the Velvet Underground, Cale was a classically trained musician, learning under renowned avant-garde musicians such as John Cage and Terry Riley. Following the Velvet Underground, aside from his solo album, he produced some albums that have come to be regarded as classics in their own right (Nico, The Stooges, Patti Smith, Happy Mondays and others). And there are his solo albums, which are various in texture and sound.

Paris 1919 might be regarded as Cale's 'breakthrough' album. It wasn't his first, but I read it as the one that people regard as his first fully realised contemporary album. It is a minor key affair, best described as 'chamber pop' - relatively quiet and peaceful - musically very beautiful. It is so delicate, it would be easy doubt that it was the same John Cale of Sister Ray (or even of his own later Rose Garden Funeral of Sores). Cale's own relatively weak voice adds to this sense of fragility. The melodies, however, are subtle and lodge themselves in the mind so firmly, the extend permanently in the mind and produce a sepia toned reality that is warm. As you'd expect from anyone so talented, musically it is gorgeous.

Paul McCartney & Wings - Band on the Run

I genuinely don't care what you think about this being the second best album of a year as good as 1973. I don't care that Paul McCartney can be a bit irritating. I don't care that he did the Frog Chorus or Mull of Kintyre or any of that. I don't care that Paul McCartney will never be as cool as John Lennon (he won't, but that doesn't matter). What I care about is that Paul McCartney has one of the best ears for popular music known to humankind. When he is on form, he will write better than pretty much anyone you care to mention. There's a reason The Beatles are so great - one of them was Paul McCartney.

And Band on the Run is nine tracks of Paul in peak condition. Some commentators have suggested that prior to this, Paul's reputation was already looking shaky. Legendary NME writer Charles Shaar Murray suggested that Paul was the Beatles least likely to re-establish his credibility (after Ringo!). I don't know, I'm certainly no psychologist or anything, but I think that part of the Beatles' incredible fertility of ideas was a product of intense sense of competition between Paul and John. I wonder if this album is so good because that rivalry reared its head a little. I might be wrong, I don't know.

But it is an absolute barnstormer. There are no duff songs at all and there are hooks galore. Besides Kool and the Gang and maybe Stevie Wonder, nothing in 1973 was as much fun to listen to. Listen to Jet: with the reggae guitar line it could easily have slipped into cod-reggae (a tendency that scuppered at least two other huge albums in 1973*) but it doesn't - it keeps the rhythm interesting, just as it should. When the main riff kicks in - a synth-horn blast - it's impossible not to get swept away. Or perhaps the album close: Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Nine. It's jaunty piano line, the supporting swish of synths (there's probably a better word), the endless vamping at the end - what an upbeat close!

It's worth closing by returning to Charles Shaar Murray. Having doubted Paul's credibility he concludes that 'Band on the Run is a great album. If anyone ever puts down McCartney in your presence, bust him in the snoot and play him this. He will thank you afterwards.' Can't argue too much with that...


* Elton's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy both attempt and fail to include reggae. The latter also attempts funk - the execrable Crunge, which is easily the worst thing in the world ever.

Stevie Wonder - Innervisions

In 1950 Alan Turing suggested the Turing Test as a way of determining whether something was a person. He could have saved himself some time and simply said we should pop on Innervisions, by Stevie Wonder, and if it has a reaction it's a person. (I am aware that I am also suggesting that if someone does not have a reaction that they might not be a person. I'm OK with this...)

I guess that that is a little unfair on Turing - he was a genius but not a time-traveller.

Anyway, the early 70s were a spectacular purple patch for Stevie. 1972 was incredible - he released two incredible albums, Music of My Mind and Talking Book which has the eternally danceable Superstition on it. Both of them are great. He also produced the first album by Syreeta, his then wife, which is also awesome. I suppose 1973 was a quiet year - he only released one record. But what a record!

Innervisions is flat out incredible. While it doesn't have anything as unspeakably kinetic as Superstition, it is nine tracks of the smartest, funkiest, coolest, deepest, wokest (yes, I did just use that word) music that anyone could hear in 1973. Stevie was always one of the hardest working and most disciplined in the Motown-universe and on this album, much like his magnum opus, Songs in the Key of Life (1976), he brings everything to bear. It is a celebration of all things Stevie. I love it so much!


And also...

A few albums would have made this list, but they've been talked about elsewhere too recently. Roxy Music's Stranded, Al Green's Call Me, David Bowie's Aladdin Sane, Bill Wither's Live at Carnegie Hall, Dr. John's In the Right Place and Lou Reed's Berlin all might have gotten a mention had it not for this rule.

For the same reason, but in reverse, Steely Dan (Countdown to Ecstasy) and Millie Jackson (It Hurts So Good) are being held off until next year.

Other albums that came close but didn't quite make it included: Gary Higgins' Red Hash, Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters, The Isley Brothers' 3+3, ZZ Top's Tres Hombres and Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

If you really want to see the whole list in order, click here.