I've heard this one many times, it is quite good in some ways, although it's definitely not my favorite Peter Gabriel album, as I kind of like the earlier ones that are a little less over-produced. I don't know which of Gabriel's albums I like best (maybe "Melt"?) but this one feels like a bit of Daniel Lanois doing a dress rehearsal with this sonic palette for U2 albums, which have greatly soured for me in my old age (but that's another story). Basically, this album feels a bit artificial to me, and that's a lot to do with the production, of turning live instruments into that very '80s sound, of mixing them into sounding like synthesizers. That bass, especially, sounds really synthy. I miss Robert Fripp from some of Gabriel's earlier stuff. I think they worked really well together.
It's no coincidence that this album is the one that really launched Peter Gabriel into the stratosphere, as it's WAY more pop that his previous albums. And even though this has an appearance from Kate Bush, quite frankly it's a bit of a cheesy ballad. Not their best, either of them - of the three "duets" on this album, I think the one with Laurie Anderson. And even though Gabriel did it better than people like Sting (ugh) after him, and maybe even Paul Simon before him, I still have quite a lot of feelings about this whole "worldbeat" subgenre that was rippling through rock and roll at the time, largely through white men having midlife crises, using African people as props in their own music. It's a little gross, isn't it? "In Your Eyes" is a really great, although Youssou N'Dour is just kind of an ornament hung on it. The douchebag from Rusted Root said this album "gave everyone [white people] the go-ahead" to swipe the music of colonized people and turn into pure cheese-pop. Ugh. What's the opposite of an endorsement? That's what that quote is for this album.
I guess that kind of points at my issue here - Gabriel is doing a lot of the same things his peers were doing at the time, like the worldbeat thing, and the Fauxtown ("faux" + "Motown" = the sound of middle-aged white guys like Gabriel, Billy Joel and Phil Collins trying to emulate R&B like Motown and Stax-Volt... yes, I made that word up, so what), which we see in "Sledgehammer" and "Big Time." And the U2 sound is hard to avoid for me, even though this is before those albums. Gabriel is doing all of these things BETTER because he has more ideas and better songs, but those are things I'm really not into, so that kind of stains this album for me. It's probably my least favorite Gabriel album because I have to kind of suppress my gag reflex throughout.
5/10
I'll admit, it took me a while to get into Roxy Music, but this album and "For Your Pleasure" have definitely grown on me. They're both really weird, and while this one isn't quite as weird (and therefore, in my estimation, is the inferior of the two), it's still really solid. Or rather, FLUID - and that's what makes it so good.
As his career has gone one, it really seems like Bryan Ferry wanted to make rather straightforward music, but also be a weirdo doing it, as opposed to wanting to be a weird guy making weird music (he's pretty conservative in his politics, you'll find!). The 'proof' I offer for this hypothesis is what results we get when Ferry is completely in charge, like on the last three Roxy Music albums, after they reunited in the late '70s, as well as Ferry's first three solo albums, which to my ears sound like Bizarro versions of Rod Stewart's "Great American Songbook" albums, or at least trying to do the same thing (decades earlier, but you know what I mean).
The problem is, Ferry in the early '70s put together a band of weirdos who were actual weirdos. Brian Eno is a weirdo. His entire job in the band was to make them sound weirder. He went on to make weird solo music and contributed significantly to the weirdest music Bowie ever made. Phil Manzanera is a weirdo. There are some moments here where his playing is predicting what Robert Quine would do with Richard Hell and Lou Reed. It's weird! And Andy Mackay is a weirdo. He looked weird, he dressed weird, like if the 1950s were also somehow the 2150s. And he played OBOE in a rock band. His second solo album is a concept album about the Chinese Revolution. That's weird!
And it's those weird parts that really make these songs come alive, I think. Don't get me wrong, they're good songs, but I can see an alternate universe where Ferry has a different band and different arrangements and the songs simply aren't as good. So yeah, it might be Ferry's name all over the songwriting credits, but it's the presence of all the other guys that makes this really noteworthy. All these weirdos were assembled and moving various directions that worked because, for the time, there was no in charge. Inmates running the asylum and all that stuff. It works here, really well.
Having said that, it works much better on Side One than it does on Side Two, which does drag a little bit. "Sea Breezes" is a little overly long, and by "Bitters End," they've kind of shown of all the tricks they currently have in their bag. They'd have a few more by the time they started working on "For Your Pleasure."
7/10
Billy Joel sucks and there's likely not a single song of his that you can't say "Oh, it turns out this is just a second-rate version of ____." This album is his bid for respectability - look at that idiot cover, for fuck's sake, wow so deep - but it is also his bid for mainstream success in a commercial landscape where singer-songwriter stuff, like on his previous albums, was slowly metamorphosing into pure cheese which would culminate with yacht rock a couple years from now.
So this kinda sums up Billy Joel to me - someone who wants to be deeply respected as a songwriter, but someone who also wants to make a fuck-ton of money. Those are conflicting desires, and they give us a mixed-bag of shit here, like the "working-class anthem" of "Anthony's Song" (ack-ack-ack-ack-ack) which is less entertaining than Springsteen farting into a microphone, or the retro bullshit of "Only the Good Die Young," or the attempt at observational songwriting in "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant." Stuff like "She's Always a Woman" and "Just the Way You Are" are showing that Joel is plenty good at aping cheese and processing it even further. Terrible stuff.
His next two albums are even worse mainstream garbage than this - Huey Lewis both mimicked this stuff and topped it, so that should tell you something - and then Joel remembered he wanted to be a respected songwriter, so he made "The Nylon Curtain," which is one of the most embarrassing albums of all time in its overly-serious shlockiness. Joel's ambition really exceeding his reach there, and then he went right back to aping the style of others with his album of "homages," "An Innocent Man." Good God, that album sucks, but it hit right at a peak boomer midlife crisis moment and kept Joel around.
He wanted to say something serious with "The Nylon Curtain" but his idiot boomer audience just wanted their bellies rubbed, so that's what he did with "An Innocent Man," and then he just leaned into midlife-crisis music with his next three albums and retired ("A Matter of Trust," "We Didn't Start the Fire," "River of Dreams" - in these three songs you will find everything you need to know about toxic boomer pathology, but that's an entirely different review!), because he could coast for the rest of his life. He has written TWO songs since 1993, as far as we can tell. He has now been a NON-songwriter for as long as he was a songwriter. He doesn't need to write songs, he can just sell out stadiums playing old crap.
So this album is him trying to work out whether or not to sell out. Mostly, he decided to sell out, and frankly, his songwriting chops were only ever good enough to do that. He never would've made it as a serious songwriter with important, interesting things to say. Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen he is not. Huey Lewis he is.
Five stars for "Down to Zero," everything else is a little bland
"That's All You Need" and a couple others are bangers, but as a whole, pretty dull.
As usual, the early Byrds are good at Dylan covers and not much else.
"Do You Wanna Dance" gets a point here; everything else is pretty crap. Hard to believe only a year after this they release "Pet Sounds." What a world of difference.
Dude, if you had made it like fifteen love songs, like "Book of Love" and the other good ones, sure, but...
Just don't understand the hype. I just don't get it. Not terrible but not great, and not an album I would ever put on again.
Cocaine makes you think every idea you have is a great idea. It's not.
One of those bands that seems universally beloved by people who have similar musical tastes as me, but I just CANNOT get into them. I cannot understand their appeal whatsoever. The only decent song here is "Watch Me Jumpstart" because it's the only one that is given space to develop. The rest is, to put it nicely, undercooked to the point of being raw and inedible. For my tastes, at least. I just don't get it.
Some interesting beats but... not my kind of music. Got pretty boring, boring lyrics, etc.
It's got three good songs, and you probably know which ones they are. The rest is pretty terrible.
You already know which three songs are the listenable ones, and the rest is not very good, and one of those three songs is way better in the radio edit version because who can listen to fifteen minutes of cheesy talk box stuff.
It's OK. Not one of my favorite of his (I prefer the stuff from about 1968-1975) but it's pretty good.
Somewhere in the middle as far as Zeppelin albums goes. Not as bad as their last two, not as good as IV, HotH, and the good stuff on PG.
Boring as shit. Not BAD, so not one star, according to my scoring. But boring as shit. I would never listen to this again. It is wallpaper.
The only good songs on here are the ones that end up on the Greatest Hits albums. As for the album as a whole, remember what Rufus said in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - they get better.
Tom Waits is tricky because he's one of those guys who needs someone looking over his shoulder and saying "THIS song's great, THAT one should stay on the cutting room floor," but having that kind of person around would probably kill his muse. There are several songs here of the former kind, and they're great, but many of the latter - songs where he seems to just be chasing some scrap of an idea and presenting an underbaked version of the results.
He's too interested in thug shit here. Earlier stuff, where he cared more about the world, is much more interesting to me.
Crap. Madonna had her moment in the 1980s. But you can only coast so far on spectacle over substance, without being good at the things that are actually your job - singing, dancing, writing pop songs. Madonna's post-'80s career is a textbook study in diminishing returns.
I feel as thought I 'appreciate' Ray Charles more thank I 'like' him. He's an important musical figure, but this is not really my kind of music. And since my ratings as based on 'do I like this,' it gets a low rating.
Good as far as Radiohead albums go - which get pretty shitty after this and immediately before.
Fine for what it is, but just not my thing.
Love this album, love the Minutemen. They're one of the preeminent embodiments of the punk spirit, as far as I'm concerned.
Sting is one of those guys who is desperate to prove how smart and deep and spiritual he is, and he sees art as a vehicle for ego rather than expression. I've always really fucking hated Sting because he's someone with a real knack for melody, but he's also someone whose talent just does not match his ambition at all, and he's hampered by the aforementioned desperation to prove himself. I imagine being in a band with two people whose musical talents completely eclipsed his made that a hell of a lot worse - "Sting, man, you're not even the best musician IN YOUR OWN BAND."
Sting is the kind of guy who reads books and feels the need to prove it to you.
Sting is one of the worst lyricists in rock history because he writes lines like these
"I have only come here seeking knowledge, things they would not teach me of in college"
"Hey there, Mr. Dinosaur, you really couldn't ask for more"
"We have to shout over the din of our Rice Krispies"
and think, "Yeah, looks good."
Every Police album seems like a watered-down version of whatever was cool and cutting-edge six months earlier, and this one is no exception. Feels like Peter Gabriel and Genesis and all that kind of stuff, right down to using the same behind-the-scenes guy (Hugh Padgham).
BUT - this is the best set of songs Sting ever produced. "Every Breath You Take" shows what he can do when he stops trying to prove how fucking cool he is and just decides to write a really fucking good song. "King of Pain" and "Wrapped Around Your Finger" mostly take that approach, too. Same with "Synchronicity I" and "Synchronicity II," which are less successful but still OK.
But the other songs? Holy fucking shit, the rest of the album is SO FUCKING BAD. "Mother," "Miss Gradenko," "Tea in the Sahara," "Walking in Your Footsteps," "O My God," they are all SO BAD they drag down everything else. And even the good songs have really shit lyrics. There is only one song on this album that doesn't make me cringe at least a little, and that's "Every Breath You Take." One flawless song does not make a classic album.
Here's how the songs break down individually -
5 - "Every Breath You Take" No notes, basically flawless song.
4 - "Wrapped Around Your Finger" Some real cringe lyrics in there, but otherwise solid. "King of Pain" Great melody and arrangement, cheeseball lyrics. "That's my soul up there" over and over gets really grating.
3 - "Synchronicity I" "Synchronicity II" Same problem with both songs. Sting is really trying to show you how deep and smart he is, and it hampers what are otherwise pretty solid songs.
1 - "Mother" "Miss Gradenko" "Tea in the Sahara" "Walking in Your Footsteps" "O My God" All unlistenable trash. This is HALF THE ALBUM. And it drags it down sooooooo much.
Average that out and you get 2.4, which gets rounded down to a 2. Not even musicianship like that of Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers can make up for the immense flaws of this set of songs. Great musicianship means very little to me if they're playing bad material.
David Crosby was the guy everyone kept around because they could count on him to score drugs. This album is him cashing in those favors.
Just not my thing, sorry.
Some beautiful moments on here, but they're just absolutely buried by twee, faux-intellectual, self-indulgement, cringey garbage. Her voice gets really grating after a while. I have tried for years to like this stuff and have come to the conclusion that I just don't.
Good first half, then it takes a bit of a nosedive. I'm not inclined toward this type of music to begin with, so that colored my entire experience with the album.
Mostly good songs, though there is definitely some filler. The problem is twofold - the best songs have better versions by the people who originally recorded them, and King's voice is lackluster, not up to performing this material very well.
Boring as shit. All these '90s post-rock bands are boring as shit with the exception of Mogwai.
Good stuff. Everything from the Who up until 1973 is fucking gold.
Pleasantly surprised, not usually my thing.
