Townshend!

If you have albums, tapes, CD's, mp3's, or whatever you listen to music on nowadays (8 track, anyone?), there are albums that you can return to over and over again, without getting tired of them at all. I recently revisited one of my favorite albums, Pete Townshend's "All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes," issued in 1983, and recently remastered with 3 bonus tracks.

I will admit first off, that I am a sucker for remastered versions of albums, and especially bonus tracks. So when I heard that Townshend's entire solo catalogue was going to be re-released, it was quite a delight. And this is the album I was looking forward to the most. Fortunately, I wasn't disappointed in the result.

With "Chinese Eyes," as it's often shortened to in conversation or in writing, it's not that every song on the album is a hit, or just destroys me when I listen to it, but it is truly the total package of how the album builds, never hitting a wrong beat, always keeping the mood right where it should be.

The first four songs on the album, "Stop Hurting People," "The Sea Refuses No River," "Prelude," and "Face Dances Part Two," really do well in introducing and setting the tone for the rest of the album. It's almost like these four songs make a mini-ep all of their own, putting the listener in the right place for what follows.

I've always thought of the next 5 songs as part of a piece that fit together for the body of the album. "Exquisitely Bored," "Communication," "Stardom in Acton," "Uniforms (Corp d'esprit)," and "North Country Girl" all fit together to create a reflective, wistful mood. Even the "up" songs like "Communication" have a thread of melancholy running through them that make the music match the content of the lyrics well.

The final two songs, "Somebody Saved Me" and "Slit Skirts" round out the album with the perfect conclusion, perhaps the best ending of an album that I've heard. "Somebody Saved Me" reflects on friendship and loss, while "Slit Skirts" focuses on the ennui of love faded to the point of not feeling even the shadow of love. Not the most happy of songs, but it works. And music doesn't have to be happy to be uplifting. I finish listening to this album always feeling reflective, and like I've heard a true masterpiece of art. As an album, a complete whole, I don't have many albums that beat this one.

NP: Ten Seconds - Nightwebs