Creedence Clearwater Revival - Green River (1969)

One of my favourite albums ever! I love the cover so much that I'm gonna put the back below!

It's so awesome! The weird rural washed-out-ness of those pictures makes Fogerty's reminiscences on the opening track Green River seem all the more personal to him, and also make the listener nostalgic whether or not they know where the catfish bite. The rose-tinted Romantcism- not only rural, but childhood memories leads into Commotion, where the timeless sentimental vacuum full of small but exciting details is replaced by the modern obsession with time, treadmills, and political gibberish. It'd be cheesy but the band earn the right to be Romantic every now and then by being so convincingly chaotic when they need to be. Things only get darker as the album progresses! The nasty side to nostalgia is that it can only exist when the person feeling it believes that the present and future are in decline, and that's what happens in Green River. As soon as the regrets of Commotion are out of the way, Fogerty's paranoid in Tomb Stone Shadow where he's reminded of death whenever he's happy, and practically welcomes the apocalypse in Bad Moon Rising. Part of what sells all this to me is his voice which once annoyed me but started to click as I played Green River for the first time. Wrote A Song For Everyone is moving in a way that his superstitions can't be, the down-and-out Lodi becomes all the more sympathetic, and the closing cover The Night Time Is the Right Time convinces me that he's one of rock's greatest vocalists. 9 tracks, under half an hour, all good, 3 of the best rock songs of all time, and a dark, regretful atmosphere hanging over even the more excited ones

A+

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