MY GENERATION

My Generation is the debut album from legendary sixties rock band The Who. The Who isn´t a band I´ve ever listened to besides seing the Tommy movie somtime in my teenage years, so I thought I´d give it a go to see if they could excite me.

My Generation is a pretty typical sixties pop/ rock album which is clearly inspired by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones which means that The Who has both the nice pop melodies and beautiful arranged harmony vocals and the more dirty bluesy touch. My Generation isn´t a very dirty album though and it´s not that progressive either. Most of the songs fail to give me much more than a good simple pop melody. There are not many exciting instrumental arrangements on the album. I´ll mention a few exceptions: The Good's Gone is a pretty good song in my ears and it even has some psychadelic hints ( only hints). My Generation was the hit from the album and also one of the most memorable songs on the album. What is special about that song is the noisy ending that probably upset a few people back then. But it´s with The Ox that The Who touches progressive territory. The great instrumental track has lots of distorted guitar and feedback which I´m pretty sure wasn´t normal at the time. The opening guitar riff from Pete Townshend is really great and I´m sure this riff inspired many other bands to try something a little different.

The musicianship is good and even though much of the playing on the album is very basic pop / rock three chord stuff it´s played with conviction. The bass and the drums are actually pretty dominant which is a great feature in The Who´s music. Roger Daltry is an excellent rock singer. He´s got a great voice and of course Pete Townshend needs to be mentioned as well as he does have a special touch when he plays that guitar.

The production is very well done for a sixties production. Very enjoyable.

The cover is pretty typical sixties looking with the band depicted on the cover looking a bit cocky.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised by My Generation even though this is not music I´ll be listening to again for quite some time. I´ll rate My Generation 2 stars but don´t get my wrong here because I do think this album is good, but it´s not very progressive by today´s standards and I normally enjoy music a bit more challenging than this.