Third - Sister Lovers

Much like Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, another 1970s album of great dissipation, Big Star’s third album is the sound of a man experiencing a mental breakdown. Big Star singer Alex Chilton first experienced fame as the teenaged singer of the Box Tops’ “The Letter” and then watched his music career trickle away in a series of ineptly executed business moves. Lack of promotion from both label and band, along with a shifting musical climate, guaranteed the Memphis group would never reach the mass audience their music deserved. By the time of this third album, Big Star was barely even a band and Chilton used the recording sessions to express his frustrations. “Jesus Christ” and “You Can’t Have Me” keep energy levels up — and Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” sounds like the party could have held its own — but Chilton is determined to slow things to a desperate crawl, adding an eerie ache to the Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale” and applying a death grip to “Holocaust,” “Big Black Car,” and “Nighttime,” where he sounds lonely, drunk and disoriented. Chilling as both music and a psychological observation.