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.
80s style boom bap beats but with rock and hardcore riff samples instead of soul breaks. DJ scratching all over the place, some cool jazzy basslines and organs/flutes that give it a Native Tongues feel. Pretty much all delivered in their signature flow with 3 guys yelling the rhyming word at the end of the line. They've moved on from the novelty hits like girls and fight for your right, and getting a bit more experimental pushing the production further on this album. They have a great combined best of, but their albums are really laden with filler.
High spec but generic bluegrass with clean production where every instrument pops cleanly, coming forward as it takes the lead. Traditional arrangements, harmonies, and melodies. The distinctive part is, of course, the lead vocals which has a unique hoarse timbre, exquisite twang, and forceful charisma that really stands out in the mix.
Raucous and relentless. Pop punk hooks for days and a barrage of riffs delivered with a contagious edge of your seat energy and lo-fi diy sound. The sound of kickflips and scuffed knees.
Slow building ambient electronica with some trippy digital delay bluesy guitars jamming and trippy chanting indie rock vocals over trancey, glitchy beats. Patient, calming, relaxed starts reach mesmerizing psych-house peaks. Very nice.
Dark and somber, a depressed trudge of an album, with densely layered arrangements and percussion that keeps the momentum going. Prettily cinematic. The best bits are like pretty good Interpol cast offs with fuzzy guitars rumbling into some searching cathartic riffs. But it gets a bit ponderous and at times turgid the more the piano takes over.
rippy psychedelic indie with electronica influences and a cool highly manipulated vocal delivering chanty verses over with the dancey beats and kaleidoscopic eclectic arrangements sourced from the world music aisle.
Hard to imagine an album combining more of the elements I dislike.
Aggressive, explosive, exhausting and exhilarating. A grinding noisy blur of thick heavy riffing, throat shredding screaming, and demented percussion. The best bits are the slowed down, ominous, doomy passages where they're gathering force and threatening the chaos to come - the chaos itself is harder to enjoy, at least on headphones, though you can image a crowd going absolutely bat shit for it. Great version of a genre I can appreciate without it really being my thing.
Swishy indie lounge with a lo-fi DIY sound, budget electronica palette, and a woozy warbly modulated feel. Warm but shy, homemade, introspective and very personal/intimate. His voice is deliberately not great, a bit flat and monotone, reaching earnestly in a charming way.
Sleepy and lush, dreamy and emotive, acoustic cutting against electronic for a pretty ambience, somber feeling but overwrought. Too much of an ok thing.
Pop punk songs with chaotic energy, random ska instruments, and some extremely earnest vocals that leave it all out there, making up for what he lacks in staying in tune with dangerous levels of millennial cringe.
Techno inspired swedish folk with spacey chanting, droning, Celtic sounding instruments and melodies, and heavy deep synth stuff. Cool idea,very 90s.
As always, cool guitar solos paired with zany compositions that vary from fun to irritating, and silly juvenile lyrics delivered with a smirk.
Guitar rock from the transition from Britpop to indie. Best bits are garagey and energetic with a kind of whiney emo vocal but a lot of it pretty generic - it rocks and rolls in all the expected places.
Brutally heavy, technical and sharp riffs, growling screaming vocals, harmonized melodic guitar leads and shredding - it’s got it all! A bit of thrash, a bit of death metal, a touch of prog - it rips and chugs relentlessly.
Surprisingly convincing Swedish Americana that anticipates a ton of the twangy alt-country inflection of contemporary indie. It’s ultimately still highly produced Swedish pop output though so it’s super polished genre farire that's full of hooks, close harmonies, and the uncanny feeling of really good simulacra.
Singing that's alternatingly breathy and nasal, forceful and whiney, smokey and warm - very controlled and earnest. Piano based songs with a bit of jazzyness and and a lot of open mic singer songwriter. Best with the fuller arrangements that create a nice warm ambience ala Fiona Apple, worst when it really hinges on the vocals purely. Slow, contemplative, autumnal.
Post-punk revival - goth atmospheric guitars, grindy tone propulsive bass, operatic vocals. High tempo, driving, reverby. It’s a more accessible version of Siouxsie, high energy Interpol, or a slightly more pop iteration of dark wave. A touch formulaic, but good fun.
Massive RnB pop with lots of dance tracks and hip hop production to go with a few big ballads. It's as commercial as it gets and expertly made. The rappers’ guest verses are pretty tame pro forma space fillers and some of the beats are very generic (almost covers?) for the glossy party rap era, a low ebb in hip hop. But her vocals are impressive and unrestrained but it's empty virtuosity, not my thing at all.
Ornate, orchestral, densely layered. It sometimes peters out into strings vamping and electro flickering bleeps, but the higher energy tracks where the guitars take over and lead the brass and chamber orchestra through some proper rock work really well. The vocals are wispy and hushed, modulated and buried/blended into the mix. The drums alternate between jazzy tinkling and propulsive motorik and when the gritty dirty bass drops it kicks the whole thing into gear. A bit more pop and energy, but lots of hazy shoegaze style to it.
There’s an interesting story behind this guy that they made a movie about and so people confuse that with the music being good, when really it’s just fine but nothing remarkable Dylan knock-off folksy singer songwriter stuff with an guy and a guitar at the forefront fleshed out with some 60s psych guitar, latin percussion, schmaltzy strings and light rock bass. A perfectly generic blend of East Village and San Francisco scene sounds.
Nice enough indie rock with some alt country twang, some power pop jangle, and some hazy psych atmosphere.
One all conquering single that’s a definitive piece of the pop punk/emo canon and a handful of other tracks that approximate that and a few really dire slow songs (Hear You Me is shockingly bad). Some decent hooks and ok riffs, but it’s mostly a bit of a slog.
On the artsier side of millennial indie - heavy roles for off-kilter pianos, big warbly operatic vocals, sharp left turns in the compositions, and a vaudeville circus tent aesthetic. Despite the ironic pastiche and kitsch hyperstylized form, the vocals are intensely earnest, delivering a full throated and full bodied wrenching performance.
Wallow core. Super slow, very deliberately put together, but also deliberately paced. There’s a mix of piano, dirty electric guitars, thumping electronica bass/drum machines, and chamber orchestration in the arrangements for a lush, deep sound and very moody ambience. The best songs have a bit more energy and verve to them, but a lot of it is so glacial it’s hard to appreciate as more than depressive background music. It’s like the prestige tv of pop - very high spec and ambitious, but it really drags on for longer than necessary and enjoys spending time in its own aesthetic world more than anything else and gets kind of boring. A couple of really patience-testing aimless tracks in the middle really drag on and on and on. I liked Lana Del Ray’s first albums a lot, but she’s had a pernicious influence - I don’t dislike any of them individually, but am getting really tired of this anaemic sleepy vibes rock that’s been coming out since the pandemic.
Tepid indie with a 90s alt rock sound, slow paced songs but with rapid drumming, and bloated orchestral arrangements that prevent it from ever taking off. The best parts are a bit like the loose ambience of Broken Social Scene - but there's way too much aimless strumming and repetitive monotonous padding. What actually even is ‘art rock’ ? Seems to mean overthought middle brow tedium.
Indie Americana with the singer from Walkmen doing a pretty good Dylan impression over warm alt country arrangements (the organ especially gives it a great vintage The Band feel while also being the most direct sonic reference to the Walkmen). It’s shaggy and loose, lived in, earnest and personal feeling albeit pretty par for the course for folksy stomp-clap adjacent rock.
Modest Mouse takes the Pixies formula and emo it up - loud/quiet dynamics, fuzzy scuzzy guitars paired with extremely catchy melodies, high energy drum and bass parts and single-note guitar riffs. The thing they’re best at is the plaintive aching guitar leads (simple major key lines played to sound sad, with a perfect reverby breaking up tone, spacey slow atmosphere) and the tender hurt vocals on the slow songs - that build and sprawl and release. They’re hit and miss when they speed up, sometimes achieving a tight high intensity punk fervor, but other times crossing into a too dissonant noise they struggle to contain. Not even their best album, and overlong, but so many great songs, a masterpiece of 90s indie.
Pretty talented musicians bored of playing rock music but can’t shake their Gen X alt/prog rock frat boy sensibility turn to comedy, write ironic genre pastiche, and think they’re much funnier than they are. The trap is that they’re then trapped singing dick & poo songs the rest of their lives. I had a good time at a Ween show once, but it’s novelty music and once the novelty wears off the joke is incredibly thin.
Thick slabs of bass and slashing guitars echoing and skittering across the speakers, brass stabs looping to infinity. Classic roots reggae remixed, made instrumental, turned into the platform for melodeon noodling and experiments in effects and DJing - of dub that's basically the birth of electronica and still stands up 50 years later as a timeless hypnotic mood.
Sparse and spacious art school post-punk/post rock played slow until any residual funk in the bass is so stretched out you can’t feel it. Guitars are chimey high up the neck, played for rhythm like a maraca or a cymbal but occupying the ‘lead’ space in the mix. The drums have a robotic krautrock feel. Vocals are chants for an absurdist feel. It has a very performance art feel, like the musical equivalent of (or multimedia component of a postmodern collage sculpture - confrontational and aggressively non-commercial - music as a medium not an end, a means to disrupt a mental state, to trigger, to experiment.
Dark synthy and moody. Implied neon reflecting in back alley puddle. Pure darkwave aesthetics. Slow, calm, moody. The best parts are like the slow vampy bits on Wish You Were Here and Animals - spacey, patient, textural, emotive. A few distracting bits of dialogue and exegetic music bits interrupt the flow.
Genre defining & apocalypse conjuring. Slow, patient, and ominous - a frenzy gathers force and explodes, collapsing the boundary between inner turmoil and a world on fire.
Insane gap between the can and the should on this one
Most of the worst tendencies of what you'd hear on 90s mainstream rock radio all rolled into one. Bricked all mid guitars playing mid tempo heavy butt rock riffs, emo whinging, anthemic late britpop aspirations, nu metal rapping and dj squiggling. Tepid, grey vague angst. Sounds like if Papa Roach did Verve covers.
Delightfully corny new wave synth pop, a full on day-glo bath of cheesy keyboard patches, rubbery funk bass, upbeat grooves and sultry plastic moods. Abandoning the strictures of guitar rock gave this generation freedom to go fully neon, embrace disco’s ephemerality and aesthetic superficiality, and pair light hearted fun with a latent minor key darkness. Some of the singing really sucks though, yikes.
Alternates between infectiously joyous poppy rocksteady/ska & darker heavier roots reggae. Warm organic arrangements, gorgeous vocals harmonies with a gentle churchy sound and a motown soul feel, classic hooks, and magnetic charisma. Somewhere between a Jimmy Cliff album and a compilation - the variety keeps it exciting as the only knock is that it gets a bit saccharine at times, but there's usually a minor twist from Dekker, Scotty, the Melodians, or the Maytalls around the corner to bring it back to earth. Banger after banger.
Greta Van Fleet for Rush. Derivative but less annoying than the original because of a more light hearted arena glam and glitter sound and embrace of wild synths - big laser light night a the planetarium energy.
Fun mix of uptempo beats and styles from old school boom bap hip hop with dj scratching to dub/reggae/dancehall thump with toasted verses, to hard hitting break beats and rock adjacent electronica ala chemical brothers or prodigy. Overlong but an good hang - party music for driving, movie montages, or getting chores done.
One day there'll be a scientific explanation of why France - a country synonymous with refined taste and avant garde work in visual art, literature, fashion, cuisine, aesthetic theory, philosophy… - has never really figured out music. Until then were left to ponder the wompy rubbery bass, corny keyboards, whispered vocals, angsty moods and tacky saccharine sentiments of this synth pop offering. The slow songs are dire. But the harder hitting upbeat Blondie/Tom Tom Club sounding ‘je t’aime melancholie’ is a good disco-y new wave track with hilarious quasi rap verses and the lush dreamy pop of ‘pas de doute’ is a good ethereal vibe. Solid at times, but always closer to funny than fun.
Tense, anxious, ambient. Strings pulsate nervously, with lines that emerge from the frozen foggy sound gradually and crystallize as melodies - the pulse quickens and a wider range of instruments come in filling it out, but remaining looping, iterative, ominous.
Woozy mellow neo-soul beats with loads of warbly modulation for a trippy stoned hazy dazy feel to it - warm, lo-fi, peaceful. Guitar parts played with a hand on the whammy bar, shifting and sliding around the key. Jazzy RnB horns and keys, nostalgic synths, gospel harmonies, with tight electro drumming. The verses are wordy, playful, reflexive, thoughtful; they come in a kind of mumbly introverted delivery, like it's being recorded in a bedroom and they don't want to bother anyone next door. They slide between rapping, speaking and singing in a breathy unhurried playful stream of conversation. Mellow and lush but a bit samey and dull even at just 33 minutes. Gentle background music for a bougie cafe.
Washed out 5th gen indie like the National but with a bigger more overwrought cathartic approach, Bon Iver style vocals (reverb = emotion) and the sole ambition to play over a HEARTBREAKING GUT-WRENCHING scene in some melodrama like This Is Us.
Slow, sparse, spacious singer songwriter stuff with a hushed whispery voice in the lead, backed up mostly by an acoustic guitar and/or a piano, with the odd track/part with a more fleshed out band or orchestral arrangement. It’s pretty, introspective, well put together, but one of a million cafe-core albums.
The genius of this band was taking the slow burning cathartic post-rock formula, shedding most of the apocalyptic feel and miserableness (clue: the title explicitly rejecting doomerism) to create something affirming, inspirational, almost poppy. Could be one of the best guitar albums of the decade. There's a strong emphasis on the bright clean lead guitar lines - nothing pyrotechnic, but a beautiful crystalline tone and simple articulate phrasing - 2 interlocking voices articulating melodies/countermelodies that echo through the mix, picking up the ambience and carrying the songs to their peaks as the rest of band reaches a crescendo. It's a hackneyed, corny, and cheap formula - start slow to build the mood, step on the gas, let it off, step on it some more, martial snares to build up the pressure, ease it off, then bring it home - but it really does get close to being a shortcut to transcendence. You can't blame them for the thousands of God-awful church bands that have been abusing their reverb pedals and ripping this off in the name of Jesus ever since Friday Night Lights.
Upbeat tempo and bright timber give this a very poppy power-pop feeling. The main sounds are a jangly guitar with a tightly compressed overdriven tone combined with active basslines and synth accents. The vocal is very dominant, quick delivery, nasal sound and really pretty grating sometimes. Some psychedelic Syd-era pink Floyd elements.
Another Beach Boys album that impresses but doesn't connect - lush harmonies, clever arrangements, sophisticated production, pure pop brightness with a lingering melancholy subtending it. Big Beatles influence and lots that has kernels of stuff that would be realized in other genres, a pleasant listen but nothing that stands out to demand attention or make me care at all.
Springsteen meets pop punk - it's fast paced and dirty heartland rock with organs and keys, very tight compressed mid-pushed guitars, and a hoarse vocal singing in the exact Bruce cadence. A band that missed the 90s alt rock radio party by a decade.
Cool combination of lo-fi bedroom power pop, shaggy fuzzy slacker psych, jokey hip hop, lush loungey jazz, and stickily horny neo-soul jams. Sometimes in sequence, sometimes all at once. Tons of ideas, not all of them stick - an album of brainstorming.
Extremely try-hard theatre kid melodramatic music that swells and reaches for epicness from the first note and flails around trying to get there for 40 minutes. Dual vocals, strummy guitars, rich string arrangements, operatic ambitions, a through-narrative. Then a few tracks without the strings and just a more sparse singer songwriter folksy thing, but with the same cringey lyrics (“I’m going to show my cat some memes”) and musical theatre melodic phrasing. A for effort, but D for not including anything I want to listen to.
Dark brooding electronica that’s full of gritty grimey textures, slow burning beats, heavy bass, and ominous atmospheres. Spooky!
Crazy Train is pretty much the pinnacle of this genre of arena metal - polished production that sounds amazing, heavy but poppy riffs, accessible hooks, dynamic vocals, wild squealing solos, shredding in just the right quantities, uncut cocaine energy. Big dumb fun and the ballads don't suck too much. But it fades and drags on the bside.
