Third/Sister Lovers

By the time Big Star started the sessions for their third album in 1974, what began as a quartet was down to just singer/guitarist Alex Chilton and drummer/singer Jody Stephens. Their first two albums – today recognized as rock classics -- had gone nowhere, and Big Star was in freefall, with Chilton describing the view on the way down. The emotional dislocation that bleeds out from harrowing songs like “Holocaust” and “Big Black Car” is mirrored in both the fractured, haunting music and Chilton’s wrecked, peering-into-the-abyss vocals. Ironically, there are just as many songs that burst forth with blissful sentiments and big, expansive arrangements, like the jubilant “Jesus Christ” and the openhearted “Thank You Friends.” Perhaps most effective of all, though, are the tracks whose mood hangs somewhere between those two extremes – a chill-inducing cover of the Velvet Underground ballad “Femme Fatale” and Chilton’s own evanescent, bittersweet “Nighttime” are dreamlike, transcendent moments that stand among the band’s finest. But their label was imploding just as quickly as the band, and although versions of the album were released as early as 1978, an official band-sanctioned Third/Sister Lovers didn't appear until 1992.