This prog/baroque rock intro reminds me of Switched on Bach and Moog music generally - the novelty of electrified instruments playing formerly acoustic music was clearly in the zeitgeist.
Father to Son is a beautiful love letter to the their contemporaries. I can hear the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd. This song is dusty, though - there's hair on every track, nothing like the shimmering clarity and crunch of those other bands' hits.
White Queen is such a beautiful prog fantasy. The melodrama drips from every word and reverberates with every drum hit. I can hear Led Zeppelin IV so clearly in it.
Some Day One Day is an interesting psych folk piece. They're trying out some fascinating vocal effects and comps, with lots of phasing and stereo panning. It's gorgeous - I still hear a ton of Led Zeppelin electrified folk in this, but the phasing vocals remind me more of John Lennon trying to sound like a Himalayan Guru than Robert Plant croons.
The Loser In The End sounds like David Bowie meets a Beck - some incredibly forward thinking use of delay on drums and gritty yelling from Freddie Mercury has it sounding like ground breaking 2000s dirt rock more than baroque prog. Fuck, those drum fills during the outro jam are DIRTY.
Ogre Battle has one of the best song-played-in-reverse executions I've ever heard - the beginning is epic, disorienting, overwhelming. Then it turns into a frankly corny song - though the studio tricks throughout still delight.
The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke is the first most obviously original, iconically "Queen" song on the album. Melodramatic, beautiful, rock-operatic. It and the next song, Nevermore, are really a single song with two movements that take the listener on a beautiful journey, guided by Freddie Mercury's golden siren song.
The March Of The Black Queen continues the rock opera of what I assume is the second side of the album. It's gorgeous and complex, a fully developed crystal of a style and mood. I will have to revisit this again to fully appreciate it - my notes can't keep up with my thoughts keeping up with my ears. These chaps know what they're doing.
The transition into Funny How Love Is is straight out of Abbey Road, but the song itself sounds like the Beach Boys meets Neil Young. Not my favorite of the album - feels more like an interlude than a full song.
And the album comes to a close with Seven Seas Of Rhye - a total barn burner, although the cheeky sea shanty transition at the end kills its momentum. I bet it was a treat to hear live! And on the album, it leaves the listener raring for more.
I wanted to hate this album - its dusty, jammy beginning and (to my modern ears) generic blue-eyed-soul was a huge disappointment to me after Queen's bombastic melodrama. But fuck me if Clapton, Allman, and the rest don't know how to write some catchy, impactful tunes, and of course the eponymous Layla is a classic rock anthem that will stand the test of time. Still, I don't feel compelled to give the same play-by-play as I did for Queen II, and ultimately the album registers as pretty mid to me. Maybe the next time I'm on a long road trip through the south/west, I'll revisit it.
Now that's how you kick off an album! Confusion, chaotic synths, clean jams, and sultry sax. If the brand-new 80s were calling out for a theme song, Duran Duran answered with Rio.
And it continues - My Own Way is rarefied synth-pop. Everything reverberates and chatters with the driving beat - it feels expansive but focused, full but clear, every musical thought crystallized and then washed away by the next.
Lonely In Your Nightmare stumbles a bit for me personally - it's still great, but the dreamy instrumentation and melodies would be more impactful without the speedy drums underlying the whole track, which just clash and make the more contemplative instrumentals/vocals feel like they're dragging.
Hungry Like The Wolf rides the line a little bit better. Altogether this track has good energy (and a neat audio collage breakdown in the middle), but it feels a little generic to me. Curse of generational hindsight, I suppose, and it appears many disagree with me - this song has about 5 times as many plays as Rio, which blows my mind.
Hold Back The Rain captures my attention a little more than Hungry Like The Wolf, but otherwise doesn't stand out as altogether different. Both are making me nervous about punk album syndrome - where there are one or two stand-out tracks, but the rest are just variations on a theme. At least this one has the play count I'd expect - almost 20 times fewer than Rio.
New Religion - I'm a believer lol. This is the energy, atmosphere, and attention to the details of sonic experience I expected coming into this album. It's funky and ominous, and it tells a story with its soundscapes and dynamics. I hear Pet Shop Boys, Bee Gees, Pink Floyd, and some rare Queen - all in a catchy, vibey package. Sad to see it overlooked by the masses, but glad it's on the album.
Last Chance On The Stairway feels like Rio (Reprise). The bass scrambles up and down its little ladders in the same way, and the other melodic elements soar (vocals) and gently bounce (synth, guitar). The whole affair is a bit more melancholy, but in that distinctively 80s way where we're still bopping the whole time.
Save A Prayer is amazing - the chiptune-esque arpeggiated synths and lilting proto-grunge vocals are gorgeous and darkly hypnotizing. The glitzy drums sound like they're shimmering at the end of a tight and moonlit hallway. Everything is moody and calm - the synth lead sounds like a sacred futuristic flute played for an unknown city's meditation.
The entire album is essentially a long come down from Rio, the chaotic energy of a night out slowly dissipating into the ether of dawn over the city. The Chauffeur feels like an epilogue, a determined ode to the next night. I can hear the bravado and determination of Hip Hop in it, and the pizzicato synths and driven beat could come straight out of the late nineties club scene. Not the vocals, though, or the medieval recorder chorus - those feel perfectly at home in the 80s and in synth pop in general.
This album is a winner, a new favorite of mine, and sure to become influential in my own music. Still, the filler is not killer and it's not a 5/5 for me.
Well, no need to listen before commenting on this one - Dark Side Of The Moon has been a 5/5, 10/10, top-tier, all-time-favorite, desert island record for me since high school.
You know, I thought I knew this album, but in retrospect, I haven't really listened to it all the way through since it first came out, aside from my brief interest in the then-ubiquitous "0110" playlists that attempted to weave OK Computer and In Rainbows into some 10-year mega-project.
All in all, it's a quieter, more focused experience than I had built up in my head. It's also so much more compelling than I remembered (or expected, after I realized I didn't recognize it as much as I thought), and I suspect it has a lot to do with my last 16 years of growth as a musician and producer.
The engineering and production of this album is insane. It's unbelievably precise while demonstrating mastery of a wide range of production/performance techniques. I want to call the album cozy, but it's not comfortable - it's eerie and beautiful. It's intimate, but only in the same sense that a fireside conversation with the last, dying scion of a noble bloodline in their otherwise cold, dark castle is intimate. This is vampire music.
The drums are so clear and punchy, despite sounding tiny - a lot of the individual instruments sound tiny to me as if they're all miniature musicians in a cupboard somewhere, but that doesn't detract from the overall impact of the music. If anything, the perceived smallness draws me in further, only to be submerged by the wash of experience that each song inevitably crashes over my head.
It's hard to explain why, but I feel like this album works especially well because it isn't one super hit after another - there are some obvious "singles" in the mix (Bodysnatchers, Weird Fishes / Arpeggi, Reckoner, maybe Jigsaw Falling Into Place), but the beauty is in the sum of the whole, and the whole album delights, distresses, destroys me. Hugely inspirational and aspirational. A surprising 5/5 for me.
It's hard to be objective about this album when I'm listening to it for the first time in 2023, especially since I'm not a lyrics-first person or by extension a hip-hop or pop fan by default. I've heard enough modern music influenced by this and other 2010s albums that MBDTF's production doesn't feel as fresh as I'm sure it did on release, and it's hard to get over the urge to dismiss all of Kanye's lyrics out of had given his long-accelerating descent into public insanity and the recent revelation of his anti-semitism.
That all being said, I understand why this album is celebrated - there are brilliant songs on this album, and its sprawling, indulgent production is impressive and enveloping, even more so to those who know its references and context intimately, I'm sure.
I am especially impressed by the number and variety of features on the album - it's not easy to weave so many top pop artists into a cohesive whole or to surf their different skills and moods as effortlessly as Kanye does. It probably helps that he has an ego big enough to subsume all of them, but hey whatever gets the job done.
Highlights: POWER, All Of The Lights, Nicki Minaj's verse on Monster, the production on So Appalled, Devil In A New Dress, Hell Of A Life.
Lowlights: ego, song length, and misogyny, the pinnacle of all three being Chris Rock's absurd, cringy, and disgusting skit on Blame Game, which honestly knocked an entire star off the rating of this album for me. If I have to listen to something that unpleasant every time I listen to the album in full I am not giving that full album a 3 or higher.
God, this is a devastating album. Beautiful, gritty, tragic, and psychedelic. Also pretty funny at times - Camp David stays appealing in 2023 for me.
It's hard to overstate how much I love the production and instrumentals on this album. Despite its age (51 years!), it feels fresh, funky, crisp, and cool. Bowie's unique vocals aren't for everyone, but I personally have a soft spot in my heart for his wavery inflection.
I personally find the album flags a bit around the halfway mark - It Ain't Easy, Lady Stardust, Star, and Hang On To Yourself just aren't my cup of tea, maybe because stray into a trite kind of Rock & Roll, away from the high strangeness and cosmic awareness of the earlier songs on the album. They're far from bad songs, though, and it's so clear in retrospect how many artists have been inspired by their sounds, riffs, and vibes in the decades since. It Ain't Easy is probably my favorite of this batch.
Ziggy Stardust, Suffragette City, and Rock 'N' Roll Suicide pull the album out of its nosedive, make it do a flip, and then take off into the clouds, respectively.
Highlights: Five Years, Soul Love (I will forever aspire to that sax tone), Moonage Daydream (let those children boogie), Starman, Suffragette City (wham, bam, thank you, ma'am), Rock 'N' Roll Suicide
Lowlights: Lady Stardust, Star, and Hang On To Yourself. Not terrible, but easily the most disappointing songs on the album to me.
Beautiful production, with dreamy vocals, sizzling brass, and booming percussion. Deeply influential sad boy intellectualism. Not exactly to my taste - it's a little too kitschy to affect me as deeply as the lyrics suggest. Still, top-notch song writing and performances from this classic duo.
