One of the classics of a genre I hated at the time but have weirdly come to have a soft spot for with 2 decades of hindsight. Whinging vocals, taught guitars, explosive energy - the overwrought emotionally incontinent sound of suburban Mid Atlantic millennial angst. The soundtrack to messy breakups, screaming fights in cars parked in strip malls, of getting dumped, yelling at your mom and getting yelled at by your dad. From 1001 more albums & user list.
Portuguese alt rock with high spec production, mainstream radio style with hooky guitar parts, lots of loud/quiet dynamics, and whining nasal vocals that get grating fast.
A strange mix of bluesy glam, jazzy TV theme tunes, David Bowie & Dave Matthews inspired alt-rock, and Can-Con lyrics (more hockey references than any album I’ve heard before). It’s an eclectic, sometimes incoherent, blend of angsty and bright, dissonant and poppy, straight and psych, country twang and post-punk noise, heartland and urban, proggy arena rock and barroom folk jam. Way too bloated - all the songs had something good to them, but then they’d keep going and going and include a bunch of boring extra stuff like long outros, genre shifts, overly complex arrangements. Same for the album as a whole.
Beth Orton in French with added neo soul bits like flutes and horns to go with the classic strummy acoustic guitars & trip hop beats, but the vocals don't have the hushed charisma.
Big brash synth saturated disco pop - three anthemic mega hits but the rest really holds up well - it sounds colorful. Fun, hedonistic party music, it’s hyper-synthetic with a robo- Daft Punk style to the production. It’s very Eurovision for an American pop album. The raps that pop up every so often are awful though good lord. A bit too long.
Laid back new wave with a strong beat, crunchy guitars, and a mix of super 80s keyboard sounds that seem like the main songwriting base, so it has a bit of an Elton John/Elvis Costello pop rock style to it.
Abrasive post-hardcore with a touch of emo but much more of the brutally direct noise of an Albino joint and the sprawled textural anxiety of sonic youth. At times it's shoegaze/post rock, at times screamo math rock, then they're like a guitar/bass/drum trio doing industrial music. The bass is loud and overdriven and relentless, the drums played with hammers, and the guitar an explosive combination of thick chords, jagged edges, screeching lines and tender melodic noise. A very cool amalgam of other 90s alt/punk sounds in a tightly packed dense as shit dose
Hyperactive theatre kid music. Busy over-arranged, lyric-centered piano rock for a one person musical about a manic episode.
Dude wrote a book called How to Write a Song and has been advertising it by showing how effective his method really is - his 5th solo album in 8 years (in addition to 4 Wilco records this decade) is a triple disc 30-song album. How much do you really have to say? His method is kind of random word association/imagery based - but he is a genius of wringing meaning from this. How many musical ideas do you really need to get out there? He writes to stay sane, creativity is a compulsion, but a bit of curation would help. These are remarkably consistent (if a bit samey) tracks though - broadly starting from his alt country folk rock foundation before building/flowering into more abstract spacey textural atmospheric passages with motorik drumming. Tastefully assembled, expertly arranged, a master at work just doing his thing. It’s actually really very good. Compulsion as creativity.
Combines all the worst aspect of multiple genres - the dull repetition and slow pacing of post-rock, the generic riffs of alt-rock, flat vocals and insipid melodies of radio metal, and the bloated pompousness of prog - with little to see of their redeeming qualities apart from some nice atmospheric stuff, bits of Tool-style bass riffing, and some great lead guitar stuff from Adrian Belew on a couple tracks.
This combines the riffing of grunge with the noisy atmosphere of shoegaze for a dense, heavy & moody album. Thick guitars, muddy production, and flat vocals give it a distant sealed off feeling, but then you get explosive moments of release breaking through. The stepping stone between Nirvana and Deftones in 90s alt rock genealogy.
There was a dangerous surplus of acoustic guitar boys in the early years of the new millennium and this certainly wasn't helping the situation. I've tried a few times with this album over the years, but it's always been a not for me, dog. He has a nice voice and the sound is clean and captures the guitar beautifully, but the songs are dire dirges, at once dull and overwrought.
Mumble core cinematic indie. It’s dark and moody, narrative driven. The arrangements are complex and varied with horns and strings and lots of keyboard sounds to go with the basic rock drum/bass/guitar foundation. The vocals are low like Leonard Cohen but mumbly and deliberately obscured. At times they’re a bit like Calexico, sometimes like a French movie soundtrack, lots of songs are like the VU or Belle & Sebastian story songs.
Lush dreamy electronica that’s all floaty atmosphere and icey cold glistening surfaces. Synthy textures cut with warm organic instruments make a bedding for ethereal reverby hushed vocals that weave in and out, jumping over and below the surface for a neon pink oceanic feeling. The EDM touches loose it for a split seconds, but then it returns to an ambient trance hazy feeling stuff. Pretty cool wow.
Krautrock goes pop lol. Short songs rather than deep grooves, Instrumental synth experimentation, but on something of a leash with bright tones and emphasis on melodies. Drum machine beats, a couple of tracks of bleeps and boops, lots of woozy textures. Proto-Eno ambient stuff and clear line of influence from here to Boards of Canada
The musical equivalent of tea lights and mason jars and Christmas lights: generic upper middle class southern suburban Americana wedding aesthetics. Slow acoustic guitar songs, overwrought vocals, hetero-harmonies, insipid love is great lyrics. Not unpleasant, but dull. Pretty production - clean, bright, and easy, the instrumental parts like soaring lapsteel dressing and the piano/violin outro are nice.
Stretching the meaning of album to include how music is released, circulated, consumed in other genres, this is a DJ Mix in which PO remixes, sews together, reworks and adapts a bunch of other peoples’ music into a cohesive seamless set of hard hitting bass heavy house/trance music. There’s something that always strikes me as douchey about this sound palette - the diva samples, synthetic bleeps, the repetitive big dumb beats - when I encounter it in the wild: it’s giving neon & and strobe lit box full of coked up Brits on holiday. But on headphones it works very well as toe tapping head nodding lock in, zone out music.
Weezer spawn. Pop punk singer songwriter stuff, thinking man’s emo, like a millennial Elvis Costello with random ska outbreaks. Whiney, hooky, overwrought, excitable and on the nose.
I bought this CD as an 11 year old after liking Aeroplane on the radio and knowing rhcp was a band to like, but was annoyed at how much filler there was, even compared to other 90s radio rock CDs I was buying at the time. Time has not aged it well -- the funk bass is solid but so corny, the Janes Addiction style guitars don't fit at all, and his voice is a tough listen. The songs are bad, like, just rip offs of themselves, 90% of the album is shooting for Another Under the Bridge and missing wildly.
Why is he doing that with his voice? Why is the bass so aggressively jaunty? Are they being serious, or is this a joke on some level I don't understand? Is this Canada's version of ska? So many questions...they sound like they couldn't decide to be a novelty act or a real band and this was the compromise. Extremely annoying.
