It's like being at a high-energy 80s party where everyone is sweaty and on uppers and the sexual tension is off the charts. This peaks at You Really Got Me and Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love. The sound becomes more playful than intense later in the tracklist; see Jamie's Cryin', Feel Your Love Tonight, and the rock n roll treat that is Ice Cream Man. Does this album make me want to headbang or groove? Yes.
This kind of heavy metal reminds me of drone music. Repetition of riffs, busy drum patterns, and distortions that are both hypnotic and slightly discomfiting. The vocals are sort of like chanting. All of it melds together in this lo-fi way. The production may actually be very sophisticated but it *sounds* unfinished, almost laconic, deliberately*not* maximalist despite being very full of sound. I liked The Wizard most, probably because of the harmonica. And the unearthly bridge halfway through Wicked World.
"Life is like a sewer
And I'm trying to wade thru her"
Lead-off track (I've Been Waitin' for Tomorrow) is an uncomplicated banger. Second track (This Is the Day) is soulful and melancholic and still fun (accordion! claps!). I had never heard of Matt Johnson until today but I already feel like he's a *good* songwriter. Look no further than the plinking poppy guitar accentuating The Sinking Feeling around lines like:
"The path of least resistance
Leads to the garbage heap of despair"
The super interesting and jazzy melodic solos in Uncertain Smile are, I think, representative of the whole mood of this album: dancing the night away with cool people while the world falls to pieces outside. It's energetic, it's erotic, it's disorienting, it's a great time, it's menacing and almost sinister (Soul Mining). Like Johnson sings over the irresistible escalating percussion in Giant:
"I'm a stranger to myself
And nobody knows I'm here
When I looked into my face
It wasn't myself I'd seen
But who I've tried to be"
The chants go on for so long you really do lose yourself. This is maybe what the 80s felt like.
Twilight Hour is self-indulgent and weirdly overwrought and keeps this short of 5 stars for me. Other than this misstep, a very enjoyable album.
There's more variation across tracks here than you might expect from our beloved indie sadboy. Multi-instrument orchestration and punchy drums alternating with mellow fingerpicking and piano doodles. Even lyrically: in one song Elliott is urging you to "Sell it while you can," and confessing in the next that "Everything reminds me of her." Our guy is using confessional lyrics to play with different personas. You feel like you know 'Elliott' but this is a sophisticated bit of theatre -- it's clever and I dig it.
There's experimental variation *within* some standout songs as well: see the Beatlesish bars that open Son of Sam before the song becomes something much more contemporary, something very 90s. I also liked Everything Means Nothing To Me (beautifully distressing combo of piano, strings, drums, vocals); Stupidity Tries (bluesy, tragicomically triumphant, an end credits kind of song); Happiness/The Gondola Man (perfect short story with perfectly matched arrangement); Can't Make A Sound (just for the sonic crescendo from the midpoint that I was not expecting at all and that makes it, I think, a better ending track than Bye).
The problem with rating an Elliott Smith album is it's very hard to stay objectively critical, at least for me. Most if not all of the songs are very appealing in a simple and direct way. All the guy really needs is his voice and lyrics and a guitar to sound like the last thing you want to hear tonight and every night. My brain knows this album could have been tighter and some of the tracks didn't need to be here, or should have been put in a different order. I found myself feeling a little lost sometimes, specially on the B side, but lost in a comfortable way. This isn't a flawless album but I could listen to it from beginning to end just randomly and feel something when it's done -- even though I've heard it before and know it's a little messy, a little flawed. I want to give this a 5 but am holding back.
There's something very off-putting about the lead vocals, and maybe the production too. Why is it... raspy? Or like there's too much static in the mic? The problem with this album, for me, is that the melodic structure of many of the songs is quite basic so the songs really have to depend on expressive elements, like instrumental flairs and vocal style. And expressively this just doesn't do it for me.
Wailing screeching guitar can be a very good thing and it is here. The guitar has so much personality in every song on this album that I can't help liking it a lot. I think you have to listen to Fillmore East (and really most good live blues/jazz albums) in a special state of mind -- immersed in the moment rather than comparing song to song, with each track like a phase that's part of the whole. Atmosphere (being there) can induce this state of mind or take away from it. I don't know how often I'd listen to this album (B side is just too long my god) but I'm glad I listened to it now. Statesboro Blues and Hot 'Lanta are standouts for me.
Iconic first track in its full 8 and a half minute glory. I'd never heard the full song before so I didn't know acoustic guitar could combine so nicely with funky bass and electro keys. The rest of the album is weird, or eclectic if you will, with the short tracks on the A side sounding like interludes between big numbers in a rock opera. But it's not grand or gripping enough to be rock opera. There are some cool and intricate moments (I'll probably play Mood for a Day again) but the rest of the album really doesn't live up to Roundabout.
I didn't like the title track despite finding it sort of curious. But the energy picks up so much after that. All the parts work very well together in Can You Get To That and Hit It and Quit It and they're melodically catchy as well. This kind of music always sounds like the artists are having fun, which is nice. I also liked how the sonic identity stayed consistent through the album but the mood shifted across songs: for instance, the chill "yeah yeah yeah"s of You and Your Folks leading into the much more aggressive guitar of Super Stupid, which was followed by the Motown vibes of Back in Our Minds. This is not totally my kind of music but it was interesting.
Truth is I've never enjoyed Kurt Cobain's vocals and am not particularly impressed with his lyrics most of the time. Considering that, I liked the moments of grace in some of the tracks here, like Jesus Don't Want Me For A Sunbeam where he sounds like a folksinger.
In a way Nirvana is a victim of their own iconic status. I think I'd forgotten how interesting some of their compositions are (About A Girl, Pennyroyal Tea), and a live album is a good way to remember that. And hearing a famous band do covers of other people's famous songs is always kind of cool.
Cringe. Had to skip songs because my aversion was so overpowering.
Look it's Dolly, who has a good, occasionally poignant voice and an expressive sense of humor. And it's country music, my #1 all-time hate. I couldn't help thinking for much of the album that she'd sound so good singing in a different genre. But then she wouldn't be Dolly.
Of all days to make me listen to this album again.
Leonard Cohen's early songs are inextricably tied up for me with a place and a time. I'm 19, maybe 20, and sitting with others like me on a rusting bridge over a canal whose green scummy surface is dotted with lilies. Someone strikes a match for another to light a cigarette. Lunch break between classes stretched out indefinitely. Mosquitoes buzzing in the late afternoon light, dogs snoozing in the shade. We're telling jokes and stories that people like us have told at that same spot many years before. We feel like we know everything. We think we'll stay this young forever.
The romance of that space and time is like the romance of these songs. I revisit it as I age and see how fragile is its beauty. It's all a fantasy really. Leonard's lyrics refer to nothing extrinsic but unravel endlessly, a hypnotic, shimmering meditation on the moment that will pass, on the impossible mysteries of being human. They're so metrically and melodically perfect, so precise in their expression of yearning and loss and wonder, so complete in themselves that you cannot describe to someone after the fact what they felt like, what they were even about.
You can't go home again. Every time I listen to this album I'm different, more bent and bumped around. The world is faded because it's larger than you knew. But the gift of memory is precious. Like a mnemonic device, this album takes me back to a time and place that I cannot really revisit, that maybe was never real. You return like a stranger and watch yourself. It's real enough to break your heart, though everything has changed.
Songs of homecoming, songs of farewell. It's time that we began to laugh, and cry, and cry, and laugh about it all again.
Songs for easy listening on a road trip while you're driving down a highway with the windows down. (Outside, it's America.) It has that old-school masculine energy that's compelling sometimes but a little melodramatic and tiring unless the atmosphere is right. Bruce Springsteen does it better. So does Simon & Garfunkel. I don't find the component parts of these songs (vocals, melodic line, percussion etc) too interesting but a few of the songs (With or Without You, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For) are memorable on their own outside the context of the album.
I don't even care, I love this album. Eminem is hilarious and bitter and performatively goofy and disconcertingly honest all at the same time. I wish the first hip hop album this list showed me wasn't by a white dude but that takes nothing away from the Marshall Mathers experience. Tip: listen to Stan and The Way I Am as companion pieces.
Corny af and I tuned out for most of it. I'm getting a little tired of rock bands making familiar sounding and totally nondescript music.
Fresh production, excellent lyrics, musically interesting samples. What's not to love. Favorites: Move, Believe, ManWomanBoogie.
This one of the most fun albums suggested so far. A real pleasure to listen to.
I haven't listened to this album in a very long time. Now, with headphones on, I noticed (or remembered) little things that make the songs really interesting - the aggressive drum fills in the title track, the power chords accenting delicate vocals in Jesus of Suburbia, the vocal harmonies that are effectively integrated into lots of tracks (see here specially the lyrics of Extraordinary Girl). There's also a lot of atmospheric variation across songs but each feels like part of a cohesive imaginary landscape. The transitions between St. Jimmy, Give Me Novocaine, and She's a Rebel are fantastic and reminiscent of a rock opera. I wasn't intending to rate this one so highly but it stands the test of time.
No. It's not good. With this album, Swift lost all the goodwill she'd earned from me after folklore. I did not listen to it again because life is too short.
Until halfway through the album I wasn't sure if I loved this or hated it. It's so incredibly, unashamedly '80s that I'm kind of in awe. But the lyrics are irredeemably cheesy and made me feel like I'm hallucinating. So no. Pass.
The unruliness, the vigor, the wit, the sentiment, the absolute joy of the Irish soul is in The Pogues, as it is in Brendan Behan and Seamus Heaney and James Joyce. Here that soul has been brought into the twentieth century (the rapidfire drums and howling vocals on The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn) but it's still essentially nostalgic -- about green lands, slower time, a community based on old custom (A Pair of Brown Eyes). Maybe traditional music played like this isn't for everyone, but I think it's so original, so unmistakably the music of a place. A Dirty Old Town so deeply beloved.
I was more excited when I misread and thought this was Jeff Buckley.
Couple of songs here that I did like (Old Man River, Greensleeves) but I've heard them done better by others or in different styles. First half of Beck's Bolero was compositionally interesting but I didn't love the performance of it in the second half.
Title track tells you what this album is: a memory project, a sonic collage of a time and place. I think that time is both relative (it's the childhood of The Kinks' band members) and also definite (England after the Second World War). The past often feels like an innocent time of untouched pleasures but we know it's an illusion. Things are hidden from children that they can only see with adult eyes. After the War, the Empire was crumbling and a century of unrest was nowhere near over.
Of course when you're experiencing childhood and innocence, you're not conscious of it. You turn it into story and song later, in memory, with the benefit of adult hindsight. The tone of a project like that is what The Kinks get right. The songs are not exactly cheerful but have jingly mostly-major-key melodies that often introduce a note of uncertainty or irresolution. The ascending scale in Picture Book over the chorus is a good example of this. Ditto the very end of Sitting by the Riverside where the keys suddenly become uncanny for just a bit and upset the romantic fantasy before the last refrain comes in. The songs are fairly simple pop ballads, almost reminiscent of nursery songs, if you read them straight. But I think most, given the combination of lyrics and melody, are knowingly ironic. This can be a jaded and bitter irony: "You're taken in by the lights, think you'll never look back..." Or more reflective: "People take pictures of each other, and the moment can last them forever, of the time when they mattered to someone..." Sometimes it becomes comically self-consoling out of necessity: "I went to that old cafe where I had been in much happier days, and all of my friends were there..." You need to really listen to hear those hidden notes.
I think the comparison to The Beatles is fair and some of the songs can be a little tedious. But it's just a bit more claustrophobic and sad because it isn't committed to being a transcendent experience like Sgt. Pepper. These songs are committed to making you uncomfortable rather than giving you a good time. It makes me want to listen to them again and again to detect their deceptive nuances.
The fact is Richard Hawley is not Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett or Bobby Darin or Tom Jones or Johnny Cash. If you sound just vaguely like the greats but are not one of them, you'll be judged harshly. This album sounds like cover songs and not interesting ones either.
What a gorgeous album, what a beautiful man. This is folk pop but the instrumentals are syncopated and idiosyncratic, jazzy really. Together with Tim's extraordinary expressive powers, both lyrical and vocal, the effect is poignant, magical. "Happy Sad" is exactly right -- like the album cover, the tones are warm and the songs express earnest wistfulness in the best folk tradition. Buzzin' Fly made my heart feel tighter and lighter at the same time. The mood and sound remind me of Nick Drake (with the exception of Gypsy Woman which is interesting and well executed but seems misplaced here). Clearly something special was happening in pop music in the years 1968-69.
I am not listening to a 20-minute prog rock track on the best of days. And after that, Jeremy Bender just left a terrible taste in the mouth. There's no coming back from that. Bitches Crystal is apparently the most liked track on this album and it did nothing for me. Fuck you, prog rock. Stop making the '70s look bad.
