November 5th
album anniversaries

Detroit studios hosted most of the work on Computer Games, split between The Disc in East Detroit and United Sound Systems. George Clinton had formally wound up Parliament and Funkadelic in 1981, yet most of the players around him came from those bands, including Bernie Worrell, Bootsy Collins, Garry Shider and Eddie Hazel.

“Loopzilla” reached the R&B top 20, and “Atomic Dog” went to number one on the R&B chart. Alongside them sit “Get Dressed” and the title track. The album climbed to number three on the R&B albums list and briefly restored Clinton’s standing after a period of financial and personal difficulty.

Jimmie Vaughan assembled The Sky Is Crying from recordings his brother Stevie Ray Vaughan had made with Double Trouble between 1984 and 1989. The sessions behind it took place in New York, Dallas, Memphis and Los Angeles, and none of the ten tracks had been released before.

The album arrived 14 months after Stevie Ray’s death in 1990. “Boot Hill” opens the sequence and “Life by the Drop” closes it, while the extended instrumental reading of “Little Wing” won a Grammy. It reached number 10 on the Billboard 200, the highest placing of any of his albums.

A painting by Ronald “Riskie” Brent fronts The Don Killuminati, the only album released under Tupac Shakur’s Makaveli name. Most of it was cut at Can-Am Studios in Tarzana in July and August 1996, with the work finished in seven days early that August.

QDIII, Hurt-M-Badd and Darryl “Big D” Harper are among the producers, and the Outlawz supply most of the guest verses. “Toss It Up”, “To Live & Die in LA” and “Hail Mary” were issued as singles. Arriving almost two months after Shakur’s death, the album entered the Billboard 200 at number one, selling 664,000 copies in its first week.

Failing eyesight and hospital stays interrupted the 2002 sessions for American IV: The Man Comes Around, produced by Rick Rubin with John Carter Cash. Johnny Cash still opened the record with a new composition of his own, the title track, before turning to Trent Reznor’s “Hurt”.

Covers make up most of the sequence. John Frusciante reworked Martin Gore’s “Personal Jesus” into a bluesy acoustic arrangement, Fiona Apple joins on “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and Nick Cave shares “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”. The album later won Album of the Year at the 2003 CMA Awards.

Sound Forge, an audio editing program, was the main tool behind Untrue. Burial made the album in 2007, often working quickly and at night after scrapping earlier, more technical material, and he edited a cappella vocal samples into new phrases.

“Archangel” and “Ghost Hardware” were drawn from it as singles, while short beatless pieces such as “Endorphin” and “In McDonalds” sit between the longer tracks. Released by Hyperdub, the album was nominated for the 2008 Mercury Prize and afterwards rose from its debut at 121 to a UK chart peak of 58.

Writing for Day/Night began in a forest on Australia’s east coast at the start of 2020, as bushfires gave way weeks later to floods. Parcels cut more than 150 demos down to 19 songs, recorded them at La Frette Studios in Paris and produced the album themselves, with James Ford mixing and Owen Pallett arranging the strings.

The record is built as two self-contained halves: nine songs on Day, opening with “Light”, and ten on Night, which starts with “Shadow” and ends on “Inside”. Day is the lighter side and Night the darker. “Free”, “Comingback” and “Somethinggreater” went out as singles before Because Music released the double album.