Hola amigos! Yes, I'm a bit late this week as I am just back from a 5 day trip to the Riviera Maya, and it was just what the doctor ordered. Plenty of sun (left PA with temps in the low teens), pleny of fun, and lots of beer and tequila. It's still good to be home, even with the snow falling and a prediction of more than 5 inches of the stuff, and what should be our first real snow of the year after a few dustings.

Anyway, this week's selection was a no-brainer for a British newspaper, although I certainly like this one too. The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses (1989)

Until the late Eighties, Manchester was thought to be a forbidding, dour place where the ghost of Ian Curtis still clanked about. The Stone Roses' concatenation of sweet West Coast psychedelia and the lairy, loved-up rave culture was as unforeseeable as it was seismic. Ecstasy pulled the sniffy rock kids away from their Smiths records and into clubland; the result was an album whose woozy words and funky drumming sounded as guileless as it did hedonistic. Without this...well, a bit of the Roses remains in the DNA of every British guitar band since.

Like I said, I really like this record but I don't see it as terribly influential or seminal, but I'm sure others will chime in with their opinions...or at least I hope so.

Swish