strange to listen to an abba album that is mostly tracks i haven't heard before. my parents always had them playing a lot in my house when i was a kid, and obviously the films elevate a lot of their music into the public eye too. we all know the classics. so i will say that there's a reason a lot of these songs don't get heard very often when compared to the more popular ones. they just aren't as good imo - if they were good i would probably already be familiar with them.
maybe that's a bit circular though. i guess im implying that the dividing line between good abba tracks and bad abba tracks is is whether they have achieved sufficient cultural penetration to be familiar to me, someone who has never felt the need to seek out abba himself. after all, why should i seek out abba when abba will inevitably make its own way to me anyway? that's not really fair though. the majority of these tracks haven't penetrated, but that shouldn't mean they're bad.
the album was an enjoyable listen anyway i guess. it's fine. favourite track i had never heard before was Tiger, because i have no idea what it is about but it was a lot of fun lmao. love to be a tiger.
coming into this relatively blind, as i have very little in the way of knowledge about these guys. the name is familiar to me, and from wikipedia this appears to be their first album? definitely before my time. the closest i have to experience in this field would be the blues brothers soundtrack which for sure reason i listened to a lot as a child (i enjoyed the film i guess), and maybe the one time my parents played a ray charles album. that's like the extent of my genre knowledge here
from listening, this music is very cool and very enjoyable. super easy listening. some chill-ass noodling around on guitars and keyboards. i'm incredibly sorry for that awfully inadequate description lmao. i just don't have an ear attuned to this kind of music, and i just can't isolate the intricacies of the rhythm - don't have the language to talk in any further detail. i hope that i was able to at least point in the right direction of a vibe.
i would listen to this again if i wanted some background music while i was working. doing programming or computers or whatever the fuck i do. this makes for an excellent non-intrusive music bed. favourite track is green onion, as it is the only one that suck in my head as a stand-alone tune after i finished my album listen. probably because i recognise it already, from adverts or movie trailers or wherever it pops up. never would have known who it was by our what it was called though so fun to discover its origin!
yo this album is long. and i have a confession. i know fuck all about the beatles. one time my co-worker was talking about the beatles and he said 'surely everybody knows which beatles are alive and which are dead', and i said 'i don't think i could even name all four of the beatles, let alone tell you if they're dead or not'. i think that annoyed him quite a lot, turns out he was a big beatles fan. this is a real anecdote, and not one of those bullshit 'check out this awesome thing i said in real life' flexes that people make. how can you tell it's real? because the anecdote makes me look fucking stupid, so i would never choose that to flex about. i would only ever share it if i wanted to make myself look worse... which i do for some reason??? please forget you ever read this.
anyway i realised that loads of songs i have heard before but didn't know were by the beatles are actually by the beatles. so this was a kinda enjoyable listen! turns out the beatles are not bad. bit weird i guess, and some of the tracks were kinda annoying, but not awful. wow. what a shock. mind = blown. i still wouldn't really say that they are my 'thing' though, so i don't think i'll bother listening to this album again in the future. halfway through disc 2 i was starting to wish it would hurry up and be finished lmao, but i stuck it out all the way to the end for the sake of the review. a 2/5 rating for me. but here in the space between xmas and new year when i have to spend half the day working remotely out of my father-in-law's home office and trying to find ways to be productive, it was a lot of fun having revelations about the beatles. and by 'revelations' i guess i mean just affirming what i already assumed to be true and had just never bothered to formalise, because i didn't care enough to do so.
favourite song: man, i dunno. the one that goes oh-bla-dee-oh-bla-da i guess.
so this is the first album ive had to review that's been a complete new experience. hadn't heard of this guy, or this album, or any of these tracks. nothing, nowt. blank slate. was quite exciting! my immediate observation? WOW this dude has an absolutely beautiful voice.
i really love this kind of music. really instrumental and emotive music. so evocative. this is exactly my vibe. i've listened to it once so far but i know for a fact i will be returning to this album, and also checking out this dude's other shit too. both his solo and also the czars.
my holiday plans got half ruined this year. we were supposed to visit my parents for the second half of the holiday. but they got covid - pretty badly too - and we had to bin that off. so that was the backdrop for this listen - sitting on a train that should have been taking me to my family but instead was taking me home. looking out the window and seeing shit fly by. ngl it was cathartic to listen to something so melancholy. made me feel a bit better. 4/5, would absolutely come back to listen again
fave track: marz. already gone back and listened to it a bunch of times by itself.
favourite lyrics: "i feel just like winona ryder in that movie about vampires. she just couldn't get that accent right and neither could the other guy" lmao, rip keanu reeves
sorry, not a fan of this. a dull album. i guess its fine, but its not my thing. i kinda expected there to be a few bangers since i know that a few other kinks tracks have stood the test of time, but wherever those tracks are they ain't here. 2/5, because even though i was able to happily listen to the whole thing i know that i wont do so again, and that it won't leave any impression. i already don't think i can remember any of the songs lol.
this might make me sound incredibly stupid, but fuck it i have to ask - is it an intentional stylistic decision to make the vocals sound as if they're recorded down a telephone line? or is it just cause they're over 50 years now, and audio recording was just shit back then? ive heard way older music that had way better vocal quality than this so I'm inclined to believe it's the former lmao
fave track - two sisters. what is that, the harpsichord? love that fucking thing, if indeed thats even what it is. the two sisters from this song should hook up with the two princes from spin doctors.
im not really into metal. load of my friends were when we were teenagers of course, but even as a kid i could sort of tell how cringe it was. that kinda edgelord bullshit. thrashing on guitars and training about how cool lucifer is and how evil women are. i was always adjacent to it but it just was never for me. i do NOT mean to imply that as a teenager i was some sort of culture guru or snob. lmao, NO. i was too preoccupied listening to like, the soundtrack of final fantasy vii advent children, and whatever random unnamed shit i could get from searching 'good rock' on limewire. so yeah, who was really in the right there?
having said that, i did enjoy this! really took me back to a specific era. sitting with my friend aubrey in his conservatory, listening to shitty music while he plays world of warcraft and i play pokémon crystal which i managed to somehow emulate on whatever mobile phone i had at the time (i THINK it was a nokia 3310. the sideways one). anyway for that reason it's a 3/5 listen.
favourite track: n.i.b. i guess? tbh none of them really leapt out at me as being any better or worse than eachother.
i do love american country music. some of it at least. it can be very beautiful and moving. very sad, and very soothing. very analog. but i gotta say, there's a barrier that stops me from ever liking it TOO much - it's cos i'm not american, so i feel like its impossible for me to actually connect with this stuff.
im not really making a comment about the target audience of american country music. im sure lots of non-americans are into that! good for them. hope they enjoy it. but for me, i feel like too much of it just goes over my head. like, this dude from blue rock montana rode into town on a black stallion, did he? ok. i dont know where that is. is it a good place? a bad place? is that even a real place at all, or is it it like a metaphor? and are people cool with black stallions, or is that a grim omen of dark things to come? whats the group vibe on this dude and his horse? i dunno, i live in the south of england. we have like, seagulls here. big ones like dinosaurs. and lots of rain.
i listened to this whole doing the dishes with my daughter, which was fun! but distracting enough that i couldn't really hone in on a favourite track. 3/5 i think.
this might be shorter than some of my other reviews. its new years day and im pretty hungover, and instead of dripping creative juices i'm just dripping dust. but actually that's perfect, because this album is actually a pretty good vibe for my current state. some quite basic and not too intense dance music to ring in the new year. happy 2023 everyone. hope this year treats you kindly.
good album. 3/5 for sure, i had fun with the whole thing. no tracks were duds, and one of them even made it onto a personal playlist of mine so that's a win IMO. best track - 'try me on, i'm very you'.
what an interesting album. i didn't really have much time to listen to it as it was a busy day, but i managed to squeeze it in at the end of the day while doing my physiotherapy for my fucked up knee. that doesn't really have anything to do with the album though does it.
this girl has a fantastic voice. beautiful, especially with the poetic nature of the lyrics as well. i really enjoy this vibe. gotta say though, not ALL of these songs did it for me. it was a it hit or miss - good enough that i think it averages out to a 3/5, which is fine. a bit hard to follow some of these tracks since they don't always get broken up in the way you would expect a song to, they just sort of go on and on and on. i don't hate that! i actually really like the ones that get a bit structurally weird. like the one called "Land: Horses / Land of a Thousand Dances / La Mer(de)", which just seems to involve her rattling of lines of a poem for almost 10 minutes while someone pumps a bass underneath it. no fucking clue what it's actually about, i'm sure it's something cool lmao.
according to wikipedia this album has 8 tracks, plus one bonus track from a cd reissue, plus an entire additional bonus disk with the same 9 songs but performed live this time. i didn't really have time to listen to the bonus tracks unfortunately, so i guess i'm basing this just off of the original 8 tracks. hope that's not a faux pas of some sort. oh well. fave track here is Break It Up.
never have i been more acutely aware of my own lack of knowledge regarding bayous. for example: what are they? nobody knows. this is truly the creedence clearwater experience.
fave: bootleg
god damn. i just read the story about this album before listening to it. dave grohl seriously did these tracks all by himself? i mean obviously the versions on this cd are done by a full band, but during the original creation of these tracks he'd do every single instrument himself? running from room to room in the recording studio, hopping from drums to guitars to whatever else? making up random vocals 20 minutes before recording began and then just rolling with them? what an intense recording environment. makes sense though, since it was supposed to be just about dave's personal catharsis after losing kurt cobain and wasn't actually intended to be a mainstream musical project in any way.
what an intimidating prelude. i am of course familiar with the foo fighters - have listened to them a bunch, although not as much as i could have. they were always my friend dave's thing more than they were my thing. and 'my friend dave' is not referring to dave grohl lmao. my actual irl friend, who is also coincidentally called dave. except thats not much of a coincidence at all because dave is like the most common men's name in the west. can't take a piss in the street without splashing some dude named dave.
i've never listened to this particular album before. i mostly listened to the colour and the shape, and nothing left to lose. knowing the context of its recording, i can see why this is a little more rough around the edges than some of the later stuff, but you know what? i had a fantastic time with it. what i have surmised is that i really need to listen to the foo fighters more often.
favourite track: big me
