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You Love More Than Most
Albums you rated higher than global average
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wonderful Rainbow | 5 | 2.28 | +2.72 |
| Suicide | 5 | 2.46 | +2.54 |
| Take Me Apart | 5 | 2.75 | +2.25 |
| Whatever | 5 | 2.82 | +2.18 |
| Kollaps | 4 | 1.9 | +2.1 |
| Music Has The Right To Children | 5 | 2.91 | +2.09 |
| The Dreaming | 5 | 2.96 | +2.04 |
| Rings Around The World | 5 | 2.97 | +2.03 |
| Killing Joke | 5 | 2.99 | +2.01 |
| Car Wheels On A Gravel Road | 5 | 2.99 | +2.01 |
You Love Less Than Most
Albums you rated lower than global average
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs | 1 | 3.39 | -2.39 |
| Physical Graffiti | 2 | 3.92 | -1.92 |
| Metallica | 2 | 3.79 | -1.79 |
| Exile On Main Street | 2 | 3.61 | -1.61 |
| Blood Sugar Sex Magik | 2 | 3.51 | -1.51 |
| The Marshall Mathers LP | 2 | 3.49 | -1.49 |
| Tommy | 2 | 3.35 | -1.35 |
| Achtung Baby | 2 | 3.31 | -1.31 |
| The Slim Shady LP | 2 | 3.29 | -1.29 |
| Live At The Star Club, Hamburg | 2 | 3.28 | -1.28 |
Artist Analysis
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Artists with 2+ albums
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Fela Kuti | 2 | 5 |
5-Star Albums (63)
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Popular Reviews
Metallica
3/5
it's trite. it's been said. it's been a punchline and a dead horse and a nickel in the jar.
but man -- not having bass (i will not be saying that word again in the review) on your thrash metal album REALLY makes you come to terms with how fucking bad Lars Ulrich is as a drummer. so many complex songs and all he can do is pound the same three patterns. he's like the guy in "Deacon Blues" who learns to play the saxophone as part of a midlife crisis, and you get the feeling this is his skill ceiling. instead of being OK with his cover band and job as a forklift operator, he's part of the biggest metal band in the world and earns millions from fucking up drum parts in front of thousands of adoring fans for over 40 years at this point.
it's equally frustrating because for all the shit around Ulrich, Hetfield and Hammett are going insane on the guitar -- their most ambitious song structures and solos and scooped tones yet. and Lars, he's just not up to snuff. the whole band has to make room for him as he plods through each track. i also don't think that this album should be as long as it is, but i also really couldn't tell you what to cut. there's so much of it; i feel fatigued.
"One" kicks ass though -- makes the whole thing worth it at least a little. the key to being a metal superstar is probably "writing songs based off of a book you read" if it and Iron Maiden's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" are anything to go on.
4 likes
Led Zeppelin
2/5
it's not that it's too long, although that's part of it. it's not the terrible funky Clavinets on "Custard Pie" and "Trampled Under Foot", although that didn't help. it isn't that they make "In My Time of Dying" 11 minutes long and really sexual about Jesus in the last third, it isn't the stupid wedding music in the middle of "In the Light", and that boring final stretch that REALLY makes you tired of hearing Jimmy Page say "mama".
it's that Physical Graffiti exists as a gluttonous object. we get to see the band's typical "more misses than hits" style now applied to the double album, and we see that nothing has changed. there is enough good music here for an OK album, but for some reason or another, they put out a tiring, exhaustive double album. it's like if you didn't cook enough food for a potluck, so you rummage through your fridge and bring a wagon full of leftovers. then the guests praise this "dish" as your best yet. i mean it's 84 minutes long... and it's got "Kashmir" and "The Rover"! what stick in the mud hates "Kashmir" and "The Rover"?
this is a filedump -- and in 1975, a filedump cost $35 dollars in today's money. have you ever seen a classic inaugurated into the canon by sunk cost fallacy?
2 likes
Grant Lee Buffalo
5/5
are Grant Lee Buffalo glam rock?
like, maybe i'm overthinking it, but this album borrows all of Bowie's or Bolan's anthemic, post-psych traits (dramatic lyrics, theatrical performances, blazing guitar solos, acoustic guitar on a lot of the songs) and puts it in the context of a Uncle Tupelo era Americana scene, leading people to tag it as the latter without connecting to the dots to the former. i dunno if songs like "Moonage Daydream" and "Jupiter and Teardrop" or "Life's A Gas" and "You Just Have to Be Crazy" share DNA, but dammit, they sound related. Phillips is literally making the same face Bowie is making on "Aladdin Sane".
still, maybe it's less a matter of genre and more talent. maybe i hear so many of these influences because the band is just so talented at writing driving, engaging songs. i've known the title track all my life, but somehow, i feel like the rest of the songs -- which i've just heard -- have been there the whole time too. the music has the quality of good, fresh leather, or warm rain on a sunny day. Fuzzy is the album every pick 'n stomp band wants to make; Grant Lee Buffalo are the only band that made it.
2 likes
Butthole Surfers
4/5
yknow in like, cartoons or teenybopper sitcoms when the characters knock over a vase, and they gotta glue and duct tape it back together and comedically hope that the owner of said vase don't notice that it's been shattered into a million pieces?
the Butthole Surfers knocked over rock music on purpose, tried to tape it back together on Locust Abortion Technician, and it is now your duty to see how long you can humor them and pretend it's still rock and not a pile of shattered debris on a pedestal.
1 likes
Stereolab
5/5
the absolute middle between noisy krautpop Stereolab and future alien pinko lounge Stereolab, and by all accounts the best starting point. i don't think it could ever live up to the pure sonic joy of something like Dots and Loops or Cobra and Phases Group, but in terms of something rough, something analog and retro and yet as futuristic as you could muster, there's not many selections better than Emperor Tomato Ketchup.
...don't look up where the name comes from, though.
1 likes
1-Star Albums (1)
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A Tribe Called Quest
4/5
a teenager's guide to jazz rap -- and that isn't a bad thing! i feel like a lot of people stack this thing up against its follow-up, and to me, that just isn't fair. why should we devalue this album's accomplishments just because it's stacked up against The Low End Theory? pit most albums against TLET and you don't really have to guess which one comes out on top.
anyhow, i think what makes People's Instinctive Travels stick out to me is its willingness to delve into being relatively lighthearted. sure, there's a few moments where it gets a little too silly for comfort (and Ham N Eggs is NOT one of them), but for the most part, i feel as if what PIT lacks in maturity it makes up in creativity. q-tip's an incredible MC -- as the main rapper on the album, he better be -- but what mostly carries the album is his and mohammed's production. i can count the number of times i smiled and said "oh my god are they really doing this one" on both hands whenever a sample came up, and yet every single track makes it work. maybe the tribe had yet to mature, but now and then i think we all need to savor when we were a hungry, horny little bastard. you don't stop having fun until the record ends, and then you gotta move on.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
4/5
i don't really have much experience with reggae (especially roots reggae) but i'm still somewhat familiar with bob marley through cultural osmosis/cheesy references in 2000's comedy films. for some reason he'd always struck me as an overly positive figure with the post-mortem brand reverence of an act like the beatles -- i honestly should have guessed there's actual substance behind the hype when you actually sit down and give him a listen.
yeah, it's positive, but its not ignorantly positive. there's obvious trouble in the world, and especially for the african diaspora of which marley was a part of. it's a good attitude in a world that will not stop causing you and your community pain. some of the more spiritual tracks like So Jah Seh don't engage me as much (i am broadly unfamiliar with most Rastafarian practices) but i don't ever feel like i was being annoyed or preached to. i even kind of like the traditional pop cover on side B! the production is really well done as well, all the instruments feel at the right place in the mix -- that creamy 70's studio goodness. the performances are great and much more unique than i would have thought from the general idea i was given of reggae being a slow, languid genre. sure, maybe there's a couple slow moments, especially on side b, but the only reason this is an 8 instead of a 9 is because i feel like i don't have the context that a more astute reggae/ska/dub fan would have on a record like this. if i revisit this after having heard more jamaican music, i might increase it. who knows?
i feel like i've learned something. i might check out more of marley's records later. maybe i don't buy the hype fully, but i at least know that he's immensely talented and MUCH more introspective than i was led to believe.
Dire Straits
3/5
went into this expecting to hate it and... i surprisingly don't? don't get me wrong, i still think a good amount of this album is a bit generic, but i don't really think i could muster up any vitriol for it. it's definitely one of those albums that're carried by the first track on either side, but it's very well crafted and played rock music. i never found myself zoning out or rolling my eyes at an "ooh baby do i love ya" lyric. it's nothing to write home about, but i mean that as positively as possible. it's like finding a quarter on the street and putting it in your pocket -- all you can really say is "neat" and move on. i'd come back for the singles and most of the B-side for sure.
and man, can Knopfler play.
Nina Simone
5/5
one of those intrinsically perfect things. maybe you could make the argument that there's too many slow solo piano songs in a row or the soul songs are a weird contrast to the jazzier and more serious songs, but it'd be a bad argument and a wrong one too -- i'm disgusted that i even had to make up an argument against Wild is the Wind. "too many slow piano songs" you mean "Lilac Wine"? or "Four Women"? get out. it's an indisputable classic. nina simone was a god among her fellow man and i don't trust anyone who doesn't like her. sorry.
actually, no i'm not sorry. if you don't like nina simone, take some time out of your personal life and try to figure out why. pin down a reason or get a doctor's note or something.
Elvis Presley
4/5
an odd middle period in Elvis's career -- between the heartthrob movie star sell-out and the gun-toting Vegas gospel singer with Coke cups on his piano, there was a period that felt... oddly classy? Young Elvis, Movie Elvis, Classy Elvis, Fat Elvis? sure.
im somewhat surprised how enjoyable this LP is given Elvis's reputation as a jukebox king rather than a beast of the album era, but barring a throwback or two, it feels coherent and progressive. i dunno, maybe it's a dirty trick to use the back-up singers on so many songs but it's a damn good trick. there's a couple duds, like "After Loving You" or "It Keeps Right On A-Hurtin'", but i can really only call them duds insofar as they remind me more of Movie Elvis than the tracks surrounding them do.
who knows what would have happened if Elvis kept making album albums instead of "compilation of studio recordings" albums? did the King have a Sgt. Pepper's in him? we'll probably never know, but if it was true in another world i doubt i'd be surprised.
Herbie Hancock
5/5
the template for everything that came after. it's not perfect, but it really doesn't need to be. i mean, you don't have to like drinking water to know it's important to everything alive on the planet. i'll put it this way: 100% of all funk owes its existence to James Brown, that is indisputable. in that same vein, 80% of all jazz-funk owes its existence to Head Hunters (with a remaining 20% of consideration for Miles Davis's works in the 70's). what more can i say? Chameleon is everything.
Frank Black
4/5
the soundtrack to a 30-something homeless guy rider mowing his way across america for quarters and soda-pop.
not conceptually of course -- the record lacks concept (and a lot of cohesion) but it does have the feeling of trying to recapture a forever lost youth. the songs kinda melt together into a big hunk of pop, like leaving a box of Mike n Ikes in your car overnight. yeah, i like Mike n Ikes, and i don't think i'd feel sick or whatever, but eating the whole block kinda gives you (heh) a headache. maybe it hits harder on a long drive, but i honestly think this is one of the few cases of "too much good music brings the whole experience down". (this is why im not much of a fan of "the best of" albums. it can't ALL be pop chart darlings all the time.) i like it, but i don't like THAT much of it. despite this glut of hook and fuzz, i still don't think i hated a single song on the record.
except "fiddle riddle". what the fuck was that, frank
The Clash
4/5
i've always viewed The Clash as the aging punk's Led Zeppelin: a collection of white guys taking cues from traditionally black music being revered as the only band that really matters -- the last bastion of Reel Rawk before it was pussified, removed of its bite, London Calling being a shining example of said Rawk. which is strange, because London Calling isn't a particularly rock-y album! it's mostly a pop album! if The Clash lacked the hype they had, if it was ANY other band, this would be seen as a bit of a betrayal. if you were so inclined, you could make a case for this being an overlong sell-out album. why isn't that the case?
well, there's a lot of good songs on it, stupid.
maybe the first few songs of the project is a bit off-putting: following the title track with a kind of generic rock song doesn't set high expectations, and i cannot get down with "Jimmy Jazz", but "Hateful" and "Rudie Can't Lose" make up for it. London Calling wins you over, and i think that's why it's been so well loved over the years. it's got hooks for days and great production, and for a double album, it's definitely got a good pace and a lot of variation to make the time feel a lot shorter than it actually is. "revolutionary pub rock" isn't a genre, but if it was, it'd be this album and a bunch of cheap imitators. hell, i think most of the ska songs are essential. i don't think there's a single non-ska artist with multiple ska songs you can say that about other than the Clash.
London Calling is good. controversial, i know.
Garbage
5/5
a sound coming together so strongly it honestly makes me a little mad. so many bands spend albums finding out who they really are. Garbage were sure -- and right -- on their first album. bubblegrunge guitars and Hacienda beats go together like cheddar and grapes; maybe it's not your first inclination, but when you do it for the first time you just can't stop. i guess you could call it a "grebo" album, but the reason people prefer "Stupid Girl" over "Unbelievable" by EMF or "Right Here, Right Now" by Jesus Jones (now there was a band) is because "Stupid Girl" has butch vig and those other songs have some asshole from Britain in a pre-war town, blissfully deceiving themselves that the Teen Spirit Bomb will never drop and destroy their little lives.
Garbage are post-apocalyptic warriors, dressed in the clothes of the burnt past and the chains of the new world, ready to take on the ruins.
Miles Davis
4/5
i've already heard Kind of Blue before taking the wacky 1001 albums challenge and upon relistening my take is unfortunately somewhat similar: i like jazz, and i like cool jazz, but Kind of Blue is so subtle in its progression of the genre that i can't really take as much from it as someone with actual musical education would. i feel like a moron saying this, but avant garde jazz is a bit easier for me to listen to because i know there's something wrong -- there's a loud horn, discordant notes, hour long pieces. when an album is so perfectly normal, it makes it harder to pick out parts of it that i like without treating its artistic expression as simple background noise, and it frustrates me.
two years after my first listen, i can appreciate how it sounds a bit more (i still have a woeful lack of jazz education but am familiar with a larger breadth of your straight ahead bop and modal) so i'd say its closer to a 9 than an 8 nowadays. it sounds nice! i just wish i could speak its language!
Christina Aguilera
3/5
first complaint: i dunno if it was just the spotify version or if it's just how the album is produced, but this whole thing has such high, piercing treble that it's hard to enjoy this thing on headphones. that's probably my biggest complaint.
second complaint: i don't really like her weird attempts at merging flamenco with r&b. put the guitar down.
third complaint: i am not a fan of Christina's inspirational ballads. i think "Beautiful" is the chintziest song of all time and other songs like "Soar" don't do a much better job of winning me over.
still, when the album jams, it jams. Aguilera's voice is impressive and she can really do great things to a melody. im kind of a sucker for dated 2000's neo-soul/r&b beats, and the first half of the album does have a lot of them. maybe in a world where this thing wasn't 77 minutes long, it'd be a really great album, but the CD urge to give people their money's worth kind of makes the whole thing feel a bit more tedious than it should be. 7 not 6, but a very shaky 7. my ears might need a little time to recover.
Billy Joel
5/5
i like Billy Joel. i have no defense for this, nothing to restore the hipster cred lost from this statement. i like his newsboy pop, i like his stupid kids movie voice, i like his weird Peter Lorre stare, i like when his songs come on the radio, i even like the ACK ACK ACK ACK -- have since i was a kid. hell, i even kinda like "Piano Man", and nobody with taste has liked "Piano Man" since 1983. i think The Stranger is a great record and barring "Only The Good Die Young" (even i have limits), i don't think there's a bad song on it. in our confusion, we've forsaken Billy Joel for the world's stupidest crime: making nice music that your mom and dad like.
it's not kitsch, it's art.
Simon & Garfunkel
4/5
i think bookends suffers from not having enough ideas to go around -- and there are good ideas. the first half of the album clearly is meant to be about going from youth to adulthood to middle to old age, but unfortunately, the b-side, which feels a bit more like a space saving afterthought, has more musical ideas, and that really shouldn't be the case. still, i like the brief moments of experimentation, and it is nice to have such a short album for the day.
why does rym hate old people so much? who knows.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
5/5
Everyone Knows This is Nowhere's brand of sloppy, loud country rock still blows as many socks off as it did in 1969. people (falsely) claim it invented grunge, but i think it did something even better: it invented neil young. there's something meat-and-potatoes simple about the songs, the most beloved ("Cinnamon Girl", "Down By The River") having been written in a 103 F fever. maybe it shows. but it doesnt matter. you can tell what EKTiN is about from the cover art alone: a grainy picture of a man, but just enough detail so there's no mistaking who it is. plus there's a cute puppy.
The Band
4/5
surprisingly, "chest fever" is the only non-starter for me on the whole album. i dunno how it's possible for an album to feel like a warm hug, especially with such simple instrumentation, but somehow the Band do it. it makes you wanna take to the guitar and write a few things. plus, don't lie to yourself -- it's fun to sing like Robbie Robertson on "The Weight". we've all done it once or twice.
Beastie Boys
5/5
i was pleasantly surprised to learn that the short tracks people tend to ignore and rate lower over the vocal ones have a chance of being one of two things:
1. an incredibly accurate 70's funk pastiche that doesn't feel porn groovy in the slightest, or;
2. a sorta funny punk song that is over in like a minute. maybe i won't be coming back to heart attack man, but i don't think it was a track meant to be returned to. a stumble, but in no way a fall or penalty.
of course, hip hop is the main focus of the album, and songs like "Sure Shot" and "Get It Together" are proof positive it was the right choice. production's incredible, the tradeoffs and lyrics are great (maybe they're not the most serious, but they're very fun turns of phrase), and of course "Sabotage" exists and its presence on the record guarantees i can't hate it. this whole thing feels like the group flexing what they can do, in regards to both their talent and eclecticism. maybe that doesn't work for everyone, but it sure works for me -- they got weird with it and survived! and had a charting rock song from it! boundless respect.
Butthole Surfers
4/5
yknow in like, cartoons or teenybopper sitcoms when the characters knock over a vase, and they gotta glue and duct tape it back together and comedically hope that the owner of said vase don't notice that it's been shattered into a million pieces?
the Butthole Surfers knocked over rock music on purpose, tried to tape it back together on Locust Abortion Technician, and it is now your duty to see how long you can humor them and pretend it's still rock and not a pile of shattered debris on a pedestal.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
4/5
first song: ...we want the funk. give up the funk. we want the funk, gotta have the funk...
i haven't exactly been fair to heartland rock. in all fairness, the indie rock/public radio scene has been inundated with insufferable imitators. the war on drugs, my morning jacket, the gaslight anthem -- these people have made their trade off of hazy, ignorable music infused with "authenticity", like smoke flavor in a cocktail served in a gentrified "gastropub". there's exposed brick. the wings cost way too much for how middle-of-the-road they are. you've been there (if you live in colorado these places clutter the cities like cholesterol). it's low energy dross that isn't worth the tape it's recorded on.
if there's anything you can fault Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for, it's definitely not lack of energy. there's a driving force behind each song that you never feel lulled into a trance. maybe it's his voice, maybe it's the tempo of the songs, but barring the droll-bordering-dull country balladry of "Mystery Man" and the brief cliche of "Hometown Blues", the record is a packed gunpowder cap that won't stop exploding. there's some odd things i didn't expect from Petty -- "Strangered In The Night" features lyrics about blowing someone's head off and is apparently autobiographical -- but you can see the origins of what was to come from the later hits in the deeper cuts. it's not perfect, but in half an hour of fluorescent midnight, Petty and co. prove themselves.
and of course "American Girl". the anthem, the legend, the song of the hour. its the song all these throwback motherfuckers try and fail to write. if some madman made it so "American Girl" played in full was the US anthem, i might actually start standing up at hockey games. patriotism! from me! that's the power of "American Girl", baby.
Fela Kuti
5/5
i will pay you $100 dollars on Paypal if you can find me one bad Fela Kuti song. i'm not kidding. not a weak one, not a "oh it's alright" one, one that is actually bad in a way that is clearly identifiable. Fela and Afrika 70 are the most consistent artists to ever live and the fact that Ginger Baker could slot in with them so perfectly on side b is a miracle. seriously, how do you go from drumming on this to ending up on Band on the Run? you must feel as if you got a peek at the Grail before being struck blind.
the Grail, in this case, is Tony Allen.
Rod Stewart
3/5
a classic album -- in the sense that it's structured like a 1950's collection of session cover songs with two or three songs that Rod wrote that you actually wanna hear. "Maggie May" and "Mandolin Wind" are fine, even good, but there is no reason on earth for a cover of "That's All Right" to last that long, even discounting the vocal cover of "Amazing Grace" tacked onto the end. call it anti-rockist poisoning but as nice as the guitars and drums can sound, there just isn't enough to bring me back.
is this the first album i've been recommended that i don't really like? i think so
Stereolab
5/5
the absolute middle between noisy krautpop Stereolab and future alien pinko lounge Stereolab, and by all accounts the best starting point. i don't think it could ever live up to the pure sonic joy of something like Dots and Loops or Cobra and Phases Group, but in terms of something rough, something analog and retro and yet as futuristic as you could muster, there's not many selections better than Emperor Tomato Ketchup.
...don't look up where the name comes from, though.
Slipknot
4/5
i do wish it was shorter (we're having Teenager of the Year problems in short) but you almost have to respect the audacity, the sheer BALLS to sell America and her youth what could be best described as "music to kill your grandma" and then make shit tons of money by doing that. $8's a very impressive vocalist and guitar performances, though somewhat similar, still leave a lasting impression on you when the album ends. my only complaint other than length/slurry is that the songs don't really have anything to do with the characters constructed by the band. what's the point of dressing up in silly proggy costumes if you're not even gonna go all out and make up a stupid musician's plot for them that you explore through music?
Frank Sinatra
3/5
the prospect of buying a Frank Sinatra album must be like deciding to buy a loaf of bread or a hammer and nails from king soopers. you always know what you're going to get: a collection of Frank Sinatra standards that more or less are sung the same, backed the same, and presented the same.
i have the sneaking suspicion that 1001 Albums doesn't have Watertown or Trilogy on the list, so I don't think I'll be proven wrong. enjoy your bread, enjoy your hammer 'n nails, and enjoy your Frankie.
R.E.M.
4/5
something about the tracks that aren't the stuff of legend strangely hook me a little bit more than "classic R.E.M." deep cuts. i love that period of R.E.M., they're like that cousin who's cooler and more down to earth than you, but that cousin now has a good job and a house and he's somehow cooler? and that's saying nothing of the two beasts right in the middle of the record. there's no cutting them out. "a serve", as the kids say.
is it sacrilege to say i like seminal jangle pop band R.E.M. more after they "sold out"? am i stupid? am i gonna die?
Hole
5/5
probably the most emotionally direct record of the 90's grunge scene -- Nirvana at least attempted a couple hard to parse metaphors for all their fury. i know exactly what Courtney Love is thinking upon hearing the song's main conceit. this isn't in any way a put down, of course. there's something almost Hemingway-like about the lyrics on "Doll Parts" or "Asking For It" -- you don't have to do a lot of work to get what she's talking about, but it just makes it all the more impactful. in this way, i think the Young Marble Giants cover is fitting. both they and Hole are bands that embrace simplicity, like the pure elegant design of a chunk of metal that we call a crowbar.
also my pet conspiracy theory is that Kurt doesn't even sing on the two tracks he's credited on, like how he didn't even really produce anything on Houdini. listen to those songs and tell me if you can pick him out in the mix, cause i sure fuckin' can't.
Radiohead
5/5
gushing fanfic of Warp giants from a person who doesn't know what a "mode" or "envelope filter" is ends up accidentally transforming into a mind-blowing post-rock trip, a Polaroid of an abstract never-was present. there exists a world where Kid A never comes out because the band breaks up right before it releases and the tracks get eaten by a hard drive or something. maybe in that world, Radiohead are still widely respected and their big rock statement of OK Computer is still wavering at #2. that world doesn't make me happy. i like the world i'm in where a band with an okay discography suddenly discovers Autechre and in an attempt to emulate them ends up striking gold.
it isn't stillbirth on IMAX. it isn't a Pink Floyd ripoff. it's some other third thing. i think that should be its main genre. "Some Other Third Thing". it fits.
Nas
5/5
it is really odd how a debut album by a 19 year old feels like the full summation of someone's entire "deal". in a lot of ways, that's gotta be both a blessing and a curse; people have both the highest regard for your short body of work and equally high expectations for whatever art you put out after it. in a way i wish i'd listened to a Nas album that wasn't Illmatic before hearing this so i wasn't just stacking the gems of his discography up against... well, Illmatic.
overall, it's just a tight record that feels like a document of whatever situation Nas was in when he was writing and performing it, like the best art of young men. you can find little bits of lyricism that pioneer what you hear on hip-hop tracks both later in the decade and to this day. maybe that makes a lot of what it does "old hat", but there's value in studying the blueprint of what makes everything that came after tick. plus, if you don't care for Nas, there's always the all-star beats behind him that make the thing worthwhile.
i hope Nas has a lifetime supply of Moet from how much he reps it on this record.
Donald Fagen
3/5
Steely Dan without the irony isn't half bad, but it's still not the same. i think The Nightfly is alright, it works as a jazzy exercise of nostalgia and lost dreams for Fagen himself. there's a lot of good things about it ("I.G.Y." and the title track rival the best Steely Dan songs) but i think what keeps it from being on the level of a Gaucho or even a Katy Lied is that cautious optimism. instead of a man selling me moonshine wrapped in studio candy, i'm just getting a nice bowl of candy. i like candy, and some of it tastes like the moonshine, but i can't help but feel a bit let down that i'm JUST getting this.
also, "The Goodbye Look" has got to be the snazziest song about a Mafia casino runner getting executed by Castro this side of the trade embargo. if you're in Cuba and using RYM:
1. how
2. why
3. do they have better songs about similar topics on your end? message me if so.
The Last Shadow Puppets
4/5
call me a cornball, i don't care: spaghetti western kicks ass. i think a twangy guitar makes all the difference in western movie and i am glad i am not alone in realizing this. going into this, i felt a bit apprehensive. the hype around the Arctic Monkeys and Alex Turner's body of work has been the most omnipresent and bafflingly large of its kind; AM fans are the Swifties of indie rock. consider me pleasantly surprised when i find that Turner's voice broadly suits the tracks here and assists an incredibly unique Morricone-meets-Bacharach atmosphere for the project. i'm a bit sad he didn't stick with this band more, but i can understand this being a "when we have time on our schedules" project -- we all love spaghetti western, but we don't love it THAT much. or at least, most of us don't. don't speak for me, i won't speak for you.
Iron Maiden
4/5
i... really like this? i dunno, maybe its because i have recently been getting over my "rock the fuck out" aversion, but i really enjoy it when a band that is good at rocking the fuck out does precisely that for 37 minutes. the solos are fun and colorful and holy shit is Steve Harris good at playing the bass. for years i wondered why the hell this silly band with a weird zombie guy for a mascot has this "bigger than the beatles" status and it literally only took me one album for me to understand.
if Di'Anno's the second best singer in Iron Maiden, what the hell is Bruce Dickinson gonna sound like?
Big Star
5/5
i have a pet theory that #1 Record invented the 70's. not the decade itself, but the sound, the feel of the thing. i thought i would be able to look back at this and go "oh well there's some Stones here and some Beatles there" but to the extent that those bands are there, they're obscured, dressed up in colorful clothing and leather jackets. chalk it up to 50's nostalgia but by combining that with the psychedelic tendencies of the 60's, Big Star made something wholly unlike what came before it.
in the past i think i judged this album a bit harshly due to its tendencies towards folk over the power pop we typically associate Big Star with. "where's my album of El Goodos? my Feels?" now that it's been a few years, you grow to appreciate the trick 1# Record plays. you're invited in by loud, raucous rock before the guitars settle down on the other side. the album grows up; eventually, so do you. watch the sunrise.
Simon & Garfunkel
3/5
"Scarborough Fair/Canticle" is too pretty. i get the intent of pairing a fairy tale song with an anti-war countermelody, but the former is just too delicate and flowery (no pun intended) for me to even really notice the latter. it feels embarrassing to listen to, and not in an "i like this and i'm flustered" way, in a "this is kinda for babies" way. sorry to "Scarborough Fair" fans, but despite my enjoyment of over-medieval bullshit ("Ys", "Peasant", "Pull The Right Rope") it's just a bit too twee for me. i'm a "Girl of the North Country" feller.
that aside, i feel like a sub-30 minute would necessitate a good ratio of songs to strongly impress themselves on you, something that i don't think this LP has the juice to do. there's nice deep cuts on the B-Side, with "Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall" being one of the duo's best songs, but generally i'd say a lot of the leaps taken here don't land as well as they do on the next two albums. ending your album by doing a cover of "Silent Night" over news reports of violence and government oppression might have been searing and thoughtfully ironic in the 60's, but nowadays it's no more daring than the man writing "FUCK" on the subway wall in the previous song.
and why is "Feelin' Groovy" so big, anyhow? it's clearly an interlude. maybe i've just heard too much Muzak.
Soundgarden
4/5
[Artist42165], a band led by [Artist4953]'s guitarist in the 90's, are allegedly named after the tendency of heavy metal musicians who don't scream or growl to go "whuaaaough" really high like Robert Plant. i call it "whoa momma imma love you" voice, but the following fact doesn't change: i gave up on [Album3800] because of Chris Cornell's tendency to do this.
why is it so well used here, then? you could probably attribute it to real life psychopath and occasional producer Michael Bienhorn's slick, anal retentive production essentially swallowing Chris. on any given track, he's more often fighting than singing. it makes the wails excusable -- of course he's gotta hoot n' holler, have you [i]heard[/i] the guitars? poor guy's drowning.
special mention goes to how the songs are constructed as complex as you could get them by complete mistake. how do you accidentally write a song in 15/8? you've gotta be either naturally talented or just extremely lucky to do that. something tells me Soundgarden are both.
one concession: Tom Scharpling is right. "Spoonman" is really dumb. good, but dumb. i think a lot of grunge could be understood by this criteria.
Thelonious Monk
4/5
a charming, elegant album. strangely enough, i was much more charmed by Henry and Rollins' saxwork than i was with Thelonious Monk on his own album. one of these people would die the same year this came out, the other would go on to continue a long and illustrious career in jazz and is still alive. it makes you wonder how different things could have been. two people going down wildly different paths in life working together to do beautiful things and then one of you dies. does that person become a part of you, or is that just a section of your mind closed off, meant to be callused over?
an aside: its always sweet when i hear Monk humming under the keys as he plays it. you can feel the love in his art.
Peter Gabriel
4/5
announcing your pop turn by writing an odd burble of a song about St. Vitus' Dance is a choice i think only Peter Gabriel would make -- as is following that with your biggest pop hit that is inexplicably in 7/4. the Car album probably isn't his best solo effort, but it sets up the general rule that you shouldn't really expect one thing or another from Peter Gabriel; he does what he wants when he wants. folk pop? somewhat tedious blues? tender ballads? stupid Little Orphan Annie bullshit as conducted by bass virtuoso Tony Levin? there is no one direction that Car is headed, and this spreads the project thin, but nevertheless takes it to some beautiful places.
The Beach Boys
5/5
never heard of these guys before. really promising album though, im sure they've got a masterpiece on their hands after this!
what, what do you want me to say? "erm, i have something new to say about the Beach Boys' 'Pet Sounds'!" i do not. nobody does. it's like trying to say something new and exciting about Citizen Kane or Moby-Dick. it invented the Great American Pop Album. what more could be said about it that couldn't be said about the Big Bang?
thanks, i guess.
Jimi Hendrix
4/5
the Jimi Hendrix Experience are probably one of the most endlessly charismatic rock groups to come out of the 60's, or probably anywhere. i'd say about 50% of it is Jimi -- generally he's what you think of when you hear the term "rockstar" -- but Mitch and Noel split the remaining half. they're good at both keeping up with him and providing a lot of memorable additions to songs that the guitar just can't muster. most heavy psych/hard rock of the 70's basically copies its homework from how they play, and i think they deserve their due credit.
still -- it's the JIMI HENDRIX Experience. you're here for him. sorry "She's So Fine".
i could gush over the complexity and energy of the guitar playing, but everyone does that. for good reason, but guitar is guitar. i'm instead gonna make a very risky assumption. i think the reason people come back to Jimi's songs and his records is because of his personality. he's good at writing and playing music, sure, but there's such a draw to his presence; there is a world of tumult and chaos in the guitar and there is a man holding it down and controlling it as true showman would. the Jimi Hendrix Experience is a snake in the hands and a charmer or three to tame it.
Al Green
4/5
incredibly consistent in sound and feel, but a lot of the time on the A-side, i feel as if the deeper cuts have a hard time distinguishing themselves from the other. by virtue of having "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" on side B, Let's Stay Together sort of prevents this trend from continuing throughout, but it can still be hard to pick each track apart. it's a bit suiting that an album that's generally associated with having sex with someone feels like it was recorded in a hot, kind of sticky room.
The Jam
5/5
it's actually kinda sad. every song tries so very hard to be the best song ever and in isolation, it succeeds. Paul Weller is a pop genius who probably creates his choruses directly by taking part of his life energy and spinning it into something musical. hell, even the "everyone writes on this one :)" song is actually pretty good! it would be stiff competition were it not for one inalienable fact:
"That's Entertainment" is the best song ever. not my favorite song of all time, just the best song ever. you can't fight facts.
Yes
5/5
i was mostly expecting "Roundabout" to be the most fun track on here, but as it turns out, almost every track on the album is fun or bright in a way that i wasn't really expecting from how people regard the band Yes. you expect a big, stodgy, self-important piece of rock (and of course there are important, abstract themes of nature and emotion tackled on here) but on each track there's always a joyful little vocal harmony or a funky little bass part hidden in every corner of this ecosystem. i think there's really only one misstep and it's the weird moogy cover of Symphony in E that took 15 hours to record somehow? outside of that, it's kind of no surprise that Yes turned into 80's Trevor Horn pop the next decade. Yes could do whatever they wanted, but they do melody the best.
Suzanne Vega
4/5
i was familiar with Suzanne Vega's work through my mom and her CD of "99 Degrees F", so her poetry and folkisms aren't terra incognito. what WAS a bit of a surprise is how much Windham Hill style production is on her first album -- charming, free flowing, often dated but always clear. even if the actual WH regulars are only on a few tracks, you can't shake the sense that this is a session musician's record; everyone one here is incredibly talented at what they do but would probably never become a superstar beyond the minds of the nerds in the recording booth.
i think this also applies to Vega. she's a session singer-songwriter. your favorite bard's favorite bard. a relative unknown despite her care. that is, until a freak accident puts her in the last place you think she'd ever be -- the dance floor.
The Stone Roses
4/5
ive been listening to The Stone Roses' self-titled for years, and every single time i listen to it, the exact same thing happens: its got me hooked for the first couple tracks, then gradually fades me out until i snap back in for the last two songs. pleasant, but not a core part of my personality. i get that it's influential, and despite sounding nothing like its contemporaries basically put "baggy" as a genre on the map, but really it's more useful as a touchstone of british music of the era than it is an undeniable classic that cracks 4.00 on RateYourMusic dot com. there are two types of museums -- art and history. the stone roses sought to build the former, but 35 years on, they've ended up with the latter. there's nothing wrong with history, but i know what i'll pick if ever given the choice between the two.
Bob Dylan
3/5
the first "real" Bob Dylan album, and let me tell you, it's just fine. yeah, it's impressive that someone could write something like "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice" so early in his career, but for any of those greatly poetic tracks you get another that's slavishly devoted to all the folk that came before him -- weedy Guthrie worship and blues picking that just isn't filled with as interesting sentiments as the "Hits". i have some affection for a few of the deep cuts ("Bob Dylan's Dream" and "I Shall Be Free", which makes its point in 2/3rds the time that "Talking World War III Blues" does) but i couldn't see myself coming back to it for more than those few glimmers of what is to come.
and i'm gonna say it. "Blowin' in the Wind" does nothing for me. i actually think it's too sappy for me to enjoy. to each their own.
Nick Drake
4/5
i would say that this record is a bit anachronistic, something that seems like it should have been released in the 2000's than the 1970's, but given the corporate use of it in the VW Golf ad boosting US sales from 6,000 to 74,000, it might as well have come out in that time. maybe from that event, selling cars with the songs of a dead man, it primes one to be cynical about Pink Moon; i cannot muster it. it's one of those things where the simplicity and tenderness of the thing makes it feel impactful. Pink Moon is a well crafted quilt with very few flourishes sown upon it, but it's warm and reliable nonetheless. no matter the purpose, it's a good thing someone dug it out of the attic.
Klaxons
5/5
a collage of every garish, beautiful melody someone could think of, glued together and put on the road. for my money, the closest possible thing a new rave record has come to the deranged eclecticism of Fantasy Black Channel. when i first heard it, i thought i wouldn't be thinking about the songs past first exposure. upon revisiting, it becomes apparent that every single song was just waiting to be rediscovered, each bassline or siren a loud, brash sound dispelling the ideas of it being any sort of relic. barring "isle of her" (which, like. cmon) i don't even think i could tell you what track is my favorite.
it's gonna become (or has become, if you consider Brat Summer to have been an extension of bloghouse chic) cool to like this type of music again very soon. im more prepared than all of you.
Pere Ubu
4/5
i haven't heard a single second of Pere Ubu before now, so i was surprised to find out they were an electric cockroach jugband playing blues from your bathroom floor. they're celebrating -- the radio is on, the shower is running, and you are dead. sometimes i dread running into foundational post-punk classics, but sometimes you find something really fun and crazy. Pere Ubu, despite recording from miserable conditions (Cleveland), bring as much fun as they do crazy.
The Smashing Pumpkins
4/5
the ultimate high school masterpiece: an album meant to be grown out of but still treasured. i never heard the entirety of Siamese Dream as a teenager, but the songs i did hear appealed to me immensely. they were loud, angsty, romantic, and everything you really wanted to hear when you yourself were loud, angsty, and painfully infatuated with everyone who was ever nice to you. Billy Corgan gets you for all five and three-quarter minutes of "Mayonaise" -- and his and James Iha's guitars get you more.
i can understand why someone would hate the Smashing Pumpkins, of course. they were hyped up to no end, they were this big Americanized arena rock take on a distinctly indie British scene/fad, and let's face it -- Billy Corgan is a C-tier lyricist at best. you can deny Siamese Dream its "masterpiece" status through these criteria, sure. but try denying the wave of guitars that slams into you on "Today". you can't, cause it killed you. cause it went so hard. silly.
New York Dolls
3/5
i don't get it. you're one of the founders of "punk". you're dressed as women and absolutely serving on the cover. todd rundgren produced your first album. you're foundational to independent music and have that coveted "favorite artist's favorite artist's" reputation.
how are the New York Dolls this boring?
it's not all bad. "lookin for a kiss", "trash", and "jet boy" are pretty good for what they are (garage band Rolling Stones worship). but what could i get from the whole album that The Stones or Alice Cooper don't already have? i'll take Raw Power over this any day. yes, even the Bowie mix.
My Bloody Valentine
5/5
yknow, for all the words you could spill about "Loveless", all the anecdotes, all the hypotheticals, all the lovesick poetry written around its faerie forests of noise and pink washed sex-syrup-opium-vomit-oil wheel projector feel, i truly don't believe there has been a better description of the record than "it sounds like a mermaid falling into a black hole". like, yeah. that's pretty much dead on. no notes, Mr. John Doran.
your mileage may vary. then again, if you're listening to mbv regularly, you probably don't have a car. or a driver's license. so i guess it might really vary.
Aimee Mann
5/5
i've yet to hear a bad Aimee Mann song. whether that's through luck or simply her sheer consistency, in every track from her that i've heard, she's generating this peculiar warmth in each song thick as a rainforest. Jon Brion's no slouch either -- if this is a test run for Aimee Mann's skills as a singer-songwriter, it's his test run for his 70's studio nerd production style. i get that '93 was a stacked year, but what the hell was wrong with people that they weren't buying this? were they stupid? deaf? both? is this also why Spilt Milk didn't sell well?
when i die, don't bury me. wrap me in an Aimee Mann song then throw me in the ocean. i'll stay warm forever.
The White Stripes
3/5
the difference between "disastrous change to the formula that carried the band through four albums" and "needed shakeup to the sound that shows a band evolving" is usually a pretty fine line, but for some reason, on Get Behind Me Satan, that line is blurred. i think part of that is simply because there isn't really a HUGE shakeup -- the songs are still the same bluesy, dramatic guitar work + steady rhythms, but with a few extra elements added in in the production studio. a piano hit here, a folk number there, but it's still the same old group with just a few constraints let up. it doesn't feel like a radical left turn; rather, i feel like it's the first album of a somewhat promising band that will become great if they simply turn up their amp and ditch the piano songs. that band would probably be on the level of the White Stripes' first few albums if they did that.
one aside: Little Ghost is a cute song and arguably the best on the album. contact me directly to duel me for saying so.
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
4/5
probably not for everyone, but i live in Colorado where there is just... so much bluegrass stuff. like, an inordinately large amount of people who love bluegrass, to the point where the only music festival in the state is a bluegrass festival. i'm used to hillbilly bullshit; hell, i welcome it.
i think, personally, Will The Circle Be Unbroken is most useful as two things:
1. background music for cleaning the house/cooking Thanksgiving dinner, and
2. a historical document of a bunch of hippies fanboying out over legends in Appalachian folk music.
did i feel an emotional journey by listening to 110 minutes of bluegrass classics? not really. instead, i felt this weird, sort of patchwork comfort from the affair. it reminds me of reading about the Great Depression for fun as a kid, or imagining myself as a cowboy wandering the plains with his gun and his horse, living off a diet of stogies and beans. maybe this feeling is anachronistic and built on ignored histories, but for a brief moment, this storybook fantasy would be nice to put myself in.
hearing Randy Scruggs play Both Sides Now at the end does make me cry a bit, though. he's passing the torch.
Violent Femmes
4/5
"the violent femmes are the band people pretend weezer is but in real life. so of course they were very important to me as a teenager" - unpublished joke review i wrote in January
i should note three things that are true about the Violent Femmes (more considerably their heathenistic debut):
1. it is incredibly impressive Gordon Gano wrote all these songs when he was still in High School,
2. he could not have written them any other time,
3. the album is better for it.
really, any complaints i have with the lyrics of this thing pertain exclusively to the incredibly cringy lyrics of the bonus tracks stapled to the end of every US CD. everything else is pretty tame, including "Add It Up". maybe you could make the link between Gano's sexual frustration and misogyny, but really, it doesn't seem like he's angry at anyone except himself. he knows that it could he could be much worse off than simply unloved.
of course, it also goes without saying that even if the lyrics were "better" (an impossible concept to me), they'd still pale in comparison to the sound of the tracks. everyone who's ever walked into a Guitar Center and seen one of those big ass acoustic basses have sat down and played
G———4———5—4———4———5—4———4———5—4———| 2x
D—5———5—————5———5—————5———5—————5—|
A—————————————————————————————————|
E—————————————————————————————————|
at least once. Violent Femmes strikes the right balance of something to play in your room alone while moping and for your family while driving on a nice summer's day. yes, even the tracks where he says fuck.
the bonus tracks, however, are not car friendly. they're barely ear friendly. in my endless crusade against bonus tracks, "Ugly" and "Gimme The Car" (which is five FUCKING minutes, Gordon, cripes) are Evidence No. 1. just take the CD out of the player after "Good Feeling" -- it's better as a closer anyway.
Radiohead
4/5
despite not being as good as Kid A, despite basically being a B-sides compilation for an album with no singles, and despite the clear dip in quality in the back half, i am still glad i live in a world where these songs were released than one where they weren't.
my mom gave birth to me to this album. it creeped out a lot of the nurses. i dunno if that nets me cred here or not.
Lupe Fiasco
3/5
as a result of being a starstudded event, with appearances from Jay-Z, the Neptunes, Kanye West, and Linkin Park when they were hot, the album unfortunately forgets about someone pretty important: Lupe fucking Fiasco. on a lot of the beats, he sounds very at home ("American Terrorist", "Hurt Me Soul", the inimitable "Kick, Push"), but on others he's trying his hand at a hook, which isn't really his forte, or making way for a singer to do it, which makes him feel like a guest on his own song (see "Daydreamin'"). the poppy beats are good, and his verses are good, but what's the point if they don't go together? this pop jumble also messes with the supposed thematic concept -- wasn't this supposed to be a treatise on good and evil? these just sound like songs about the same few things again and again. where are your characters? God forgive me, WHERE ARE YOUR SKITS?!?
i don't hate "Lupe Fiasco's Food and Liquor". but it's fitting that the outro track where he thanks everyone who worked on/inspired the record is 12 goddamn minutes long. there are superhero movies with shorter credits.
Grant Lee Buffalo
5/5
are Grant Lee Buffalo glam rock?
like, maybe i'm overthinking it, but this album borrows all of Bowie's or Bolan's anthemic, post-psych traits (dramatic lyrics, theatrical performances, blazing guitar solos, acoustic guitar on a lot of the songs) and puts it in the context of a Uncle Tupelo era Americana scene, leading people to tag it as the latter without connecting to the dots to the former. i dunno if songs like "Moonage Daydream" and "Jupiter and Teardrop" or "Life's A Gas" and "You Just Have to Be Crazy" share DNA, but dammit, they sound related. Phillips is literally making the same face Bowie is making on "Aladdin Sane".
still, maybe it's less a matter of genre and more talent. maybe i hear so many of these influences because the band is just so talented at writing driving, engaging songs. i've known the title track all my life, but somehow, i feel like the rest of the songs -- which i've just heard -- have been there the whole time too. the music has the quality of good, fresh leather, or warm rain on a sunny day. Fuzzy is the album every pick 'n stomp band wants to make; Grant Lee Buffalo are the only band that made it.
The Fall
3/5
in my opinion, Mark E. Smith and Frank Zappa aren't alike in any meaningful way at all, except for a few key ways that matter to me:
1. they both have a constantly cycling roster of musical prisoner monkeys who play what he tells them to play when he wants them to play and for however many gigs they are useful for. this might seem a bit tyrannical, and it is, but offers the benefit of having a constantly evolving sound and incredibly tight instrumentals across your discography. if you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, these artists are professional velociraptors.
2. they have fanbases (really, more like weird monks bitching over canon) who are always fighting over what the best album to get into Zappa or the Fall is, and the answer is never the same, but the correct answer is also definitely "the one that doesn't feel like the biggest time sink". this was probably a good place to start, seeing as Hex Enduction Hour is 60 minutes long and i didn't really know what to expect.
3. god they're both so fucking obnoxious. i cannot stand Frank Zappa's lyrics about how women's rights are gay or whatever, and i can't stand Mark E. Smith repeating the same few vaguely politically evocative words again and again. it gets old fast. i don't care if it's taking direct inspiration from krautrock -- most krautrock at least knows when to shut the fuck up and let the instruments speak instead.
it's not my thing. it was fun for like the first couple of songs, but i think there's only two songs on here i'd actually consider returning to. this album's rating would probably be much lower if i was listening to the extended hour long version. there's three the Fall albums on the "1001 Albums You Need to Hear Before You Die" list and let me tell you right now: i don't need to. i get it. i get why you dweebs like this. but i don't want any more of it.
Jorge Ben Jor
5/5
don't tell him this cause he's Christian and might find it offensive, but every day i wake up and thank God for Jorge Ben. his song are on point, his guitar is on point, the energy and overall vibes are on point. whenever he sings a vocal line and the backup singers respond in turn, my brain does flips like a trained dog. high effort, high energy, high point. no skips. essential.
Arrested Development
2/5
"they represented unity, they represented peace, they represented this. *mildly clenches fist and raises it* whatever this is, they represented 100% of that." - Usher
this is your stepdad's favorite rap album. he says it's because it tackles real issues and doesn't delve into glorifying the life of a "thug" and that Speech wants real change. you listen to it and you understand the real reason this is your stepdad's favorite album: it is 56 minutes of the record agreeing with him. i can nearly picture him stroking his goatee and nodding whenever a particularly "conscious" bar comes up. "yes... yes... that's so true..."
every time i have to hear Speech rap about how the best thing a Black revolution can be kickstarted by is getting a woman pregnant and loving God and not being a gangsta stereotype over those corny fucking Casio beats, it's like biting into a Spicy McChicken and getting a particularly wilted piece lettuce or a sickening amount of mayo in your mouth. it also feels like you're eating it right outside of a Music City Hot Chicken. like, i had other options -- better options. why would i choose this?
Oasis
4/5
Rian Johnson's Columbo homage Poker Face has a murder happen to an ambitious, rowdy drummer in what Rian Johnson thinks is a glam metal band, killed over a single that would rocket him to stardom and not the rest of the band. while hanging with the murder victim, Charlie Cale (played by Natasha Lyonne in all the scrappy charm she can muster) notices that he basically writes his songs by stitching together whatever he sees, leading to a hilarious scene where she picks through his trash and finds out the lyrics to his song are lifted wholesale from whatever bullshit he had crumpled in his pocket. it's not a bad song, he just wrote it by stealing bits and pieces of whatever he sees. he's a magpie.
i would say Oasis function as a group of Magpies. they take a little bit of Ride, a few bits and baubles from the Beatles, an intro from "Bang a Gong (Get It On), and an entire verse from a Coke commercial to make their nest, and it's a perfectly fine nest. maybe a few of the bits woven into it prick you when you sit down, but it's quite roomy and thick and there's plenty of room for you to lean back and watch Liam and Noel peck each other's eyes out. overall, i am entertained. this is probably a masterpiece if you're a little wasted and know the words.
however, there's something real hard to stomach about Definitely Maybe it is something i like to call "oops, it's shoegaze", and i don't really mean this as a compliment. aside from the subtle Ride influence, any DNA this shares with the aforementioned genre appears to be completely accidental. the guitar seems to be that loud because the band thought it was a good volume to put it at, and i respect their decision, but it does make sitting through this record a bit of an endurance test. these are probably pretty good songs they duct taped together, but the sheer sound of them makes me want to drop a few so my ears aren't being burnt alive for as long.
spoiler for the Poker Face episode btw: the band gets busted not because they murdered their magpie, but because his hit had its melody wholly lifted from the theme to Benson, thus scoring them a class-action lawsuit instead of a record deal. unfortunately, they lack the half a million Oasis paid Coca-Cola with over "Shakermaker". whoops!
Led Zeppelin
3/5
feel crazy. despite my relatively anti-rockist tastes and inexorable state of zoomerism, i love Led Zeppelin's hits. "Immigrant Song" is iconic. "Out on the Tiles" rocks. "Tangerine" is surprisingly effective. "Bron-Y-Aur Stomp" is ok enough to put on a playlist.
then every single one of their deep cuts sounds the exact same. it's either a kinda meh flowerchild folk song, an even more meh blues jam, or weird genre attempts like "The Crunge" or "D'yer Maker"* on later albums. people hold enough stock in these deep cuts to rate them relatively high on RYM and put it near 3.96 (as of 10/21/24) on the evil known as 1001 Albums, but i just don't get it. "Immigrant Song" is incredible, but surely it's not enough to turn this album into a classic?
i am glad that nobody is excusing "Hats Off to (Roy) Harper", though. awful, awful song.
Coldplay
4/5
i remember my best friend showed me The Blue Room E.P. and it felt like peering into another universe. in this world, Coldplay is considered a second rate Radiohead ripoff and never crossed over, never shed their influences, and never quite sounded distinct. maybe "Bigger Stronger" ends up played during a radio segment displaying OK Computer's influence on the British music scene. they have a few bangers, but they at most have 1,000 ratings on their first album. they become a curiosity at best -- a Panchiko with a label deal that puts them in debt for the next decade.
however, instead of doing that, Coldplay became Coldplay. this has made a lot of people angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
i, for one, am Coldplay neutral. i know that it's easy to turn them into a punchline, to say their brand of rock is bland or non-descript, and to compare their work as a sinister lead-in to the Chainsmokers-collaborating pop monster they would become in the 2010s. however, personally, there's some significant charm for me in the post-Britpop sound in general, and Coldplay are a prime slice of that sound. it harkens back to the 70's studio rock record -- not to say that it's exactly like a Fleetwood Mac or a Carole King record, but that its elements are recorded in such a way that the songs feel as if they've always existed (i'm inexplicably reminded of Jon Brion on a few of the instrumental touches - a glockenspiel on "Sparks", or how the lead guitar bends around on "Trouble"). maybe the lyrics are too vaguely psychedelic to sink one's teeth into, but a lot of the time, it's not about the words you write, it's how you sing them.
Coldplay always had the sense about them that they got remarkably lucky and seized upon it. you could call them sell-outs or softies; i doubt you could call them derivative in good faith. we all know what Coldplay is supposed to sound like -- they sound like "Yellow", or "Trouble". they sure as hell don't sound like "Bigger Stronger".
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
3/5
why is it that the first thing we tried to do with the Moog synthesizer was make it play classical music? instead of creating a space age future, for a good 10 years we were just doing nothing but redoing classical works. no disrespect to ELP (or Wendy Carlos, or Tomita, or all the people who did this), who are definitely talented and respect the classical works to a fault, but every time i hear one of these pieces, i think of some concert pianist doubled over in his study, head in his hands as the techno-farts play what he's spent his whole life training to do. it's the most beautiful and forward-thinking thing he, a man living in 1972, has ever heard
listen, i'm a dork -- a cornball. i plan to learn to code at some point so i can make a video game. i have considered buying a red DEVO cone at one point in my life. i semi-regularly used Cohost before it got shut down for being designed specifically to not make any money. when they find the lost pilot episode for the shortlived 80's Japanese virtual band Pink Crows, i'll be right there on the Lost Media Wiki to gawk at it. i've attended multiple furry conventions.
when i say that covering Modest Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" with your keyboard-based prog band is too dorky for me to enjoy, understand what your modern median human person's reaction to this would be if you played it for them.
i am shocked that many people cheered after Nutrocker.
The Mothers Of Invention
3/5
my main complaint towards We're Only in It for the Money is one you've probably heard before: Zappa's critique of the flower power hippie is rendered toothless by his inherent arrogance towards the movement. maybe he was right about a lot of the hippies just being in it for Ass 'n' Grass and planning to ditch this and run a car dealership in San Bernardino, but goddammit, it's 1967. better things are supposed to at least look possible. in his mind, Frank Zappa is above this stupid flower power bullshit -- he's a composer, an artiste, he knows who fucking Stockhausen is, for God's sake.
the tragedy is, Frank, that you are still selling to these flower power douchebags. they are buying your records, saying it's "far out" just like the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead fuckheads do. you'll figure out that your fans are also assholes in 1971 when they set a casino on fire/push you into an orchestra pit.
outside of the lyrical content (i dunno if you could call the songs with words actual songs rather than little pasted together collages of pop), i think the musique concrete experiments hold up, but if i never hear that engineer whispering in the booth again i'd die happy.
shout out Jimmy Carl Black, the Indian of the group.
The Verve
4/5
the party ended in 1997. first there's Oasis's Be Here Now, which was an Emperor's Clothes moment for a lot of critics of the movement. all the songs are gaudy, overloud, overblown, and so indebted to a quickly faltering liberal British optimism that it became shorthand for the failings of the genre through its ugly borrowings and inescapable peace n' loveyness. the Beatles are all well and good until someone else tries to convince you they're the Beatles by playing a 9 minute vamp about spreading the word about how everything's gonna be alright, maaaaan. functionally, Oasis would break up and turn into a sibling boxing match before the turn of the millennium.
in a way, Urban Hymns sits on the opposite end of the Britfatigue scale: it's an album where the band evolved their sound to fit with the times, pushed the sound of the genre to fit their tastes, and gained international success through an insanely catchy crossover hit indebted to 60's British pop...
and it also completely destroyed the band.
see, you probably already know that the Verve got sued for sampling by federal tax criminal and former superstar agent to the Rolling Stones Allen Klein, forcing Richard Ashcroft and co. to give up 100% of the rights to the song due to them sampling an orchestral version of "The Last Time" without his permission. as of writing, it took until about 5 years ago for all parties involved to realize this is fucking bullshit and that millions of dollars were stolen from Ashcroft for no reason but greed. however, i have a theory:
this lawsuit made these clinger-on bands realize that the greats were still alive, and if you took enough inspiration from them, they could probably sue you. it made the prospect of paying tribute to the 60's and 70's a bit of a gambit if you didn't have a superstar legal team and millions of dollars to pay them. if you're planning to play this type of music, you're basically realizing you're late to the party anyhow. so people moved onto a newer, fresher sound that was representative of a colder, more modern society -- Radiohead, Coldplay, Doves, all those post-Brit guys. the world didn't have time for free love and mellotrons in the age of digital love and terror bombing.
still, even if you chopped "Bitter Sweet Symphony" off the album (a crime against music), you'd have some very decent tunes here. it goes without saying that "The Drugs Don't Work" and "Lucky Man" are timeless, but "Weeping Willow", "Sonnet", and "Come On" are all respectable deep cuts as well. maybe we could have done without seven minutes of "The Rolling People" or six minutes of "Catching the Butterfly", but for its length (about as long as Be Here Now when you take out the obligatory hidden CD track silence), it never really feels bloated. in time, i could see myself loving Urban Hymns. there's fresh ideas, tons of creativity, and new directions navigated in a sound that many considered a bit less than fresh at the time.
still, money talks. the kicker is that it can never sing.
The Chemical Brothers
5/5
The Amazing Chemical Brothers!
watch as they strap on their rocket skates and do battle with the wicked California Surf Nazis invading the ravefields of New Manchester in 11 thrilling episodes! witness as they do battle with evil normcore monsters created to destroy the K-Citizens wandering the fields, vanquishing each foe with their samurai swords and titanium-reinforced Stratocasters! be astounded by the death defying sonic stunts in each episode -- flying bass kicks in "It Doesn't Matter", flaming song structures in "Elektrobank", and their world renowned... "Block Rockin' Beats"! you might even get to see their elusive and astounding "Private Psychedelic Reel"!
don't wait! don't miss out! tune in each Thursday for another, jaw-dropping episode! only on Big Beat Network: "We've Got The Beat."
Joe Ely
4/5
solid, meat and potatoes 70's country -- the best vintage for the genre, if you ask me. can the tropes get a bit grating if you're not a fan of the whole country thing? sure, but if you are it's just a very nice, well performed slice of, well, honky tonk. music for the night after a shit day at work.
also, they use the moog pretty good on this thing. makes me wonder if more country is out there using wires and knobs.
Led Zeppelin
2/5
it's not that it's too long, although that's part of it. it's not the terrible funky Clavinets on "Custard Pie" and "Trampled Under Foot", although that didn't help. it isn't that they make "In My Time of Dying" 11 minutes long and really sexual about Jesus in the last third, it isn't the stupid wedding music in the middle of "In the Light", and that boring final stretch that REALLY makes you tired of hearing Jimmy Page say "mama".
it's that Physical Graffiti exists as a gluttonous object. we get to see the band's typical "more misses than hits" style now applied to the double album, and we see that nothing has changed. there is enough good music here for an OK album, but for some reason or another, they put out a tiring, exhaustive double album. it's like if you didn't cook enough food for a potluck, so you rummage through your fridge and bring a wagon full of leftovers. then the guests praise this "dish" as your best yet. i mean it's 84 minutes long... and it's got "Kashmir" and "The Rover"! what stick in the mud hates "Kashmir" and "The Rover"?
this is a filedump -- and in 1975, a filedump cost $35 dollars in today's money. have you ever seen a classic inaugurated into the canon by sunk cost fallacy?
The Human League
4/5
The Human League dropped their album with their big fuckoff hit on it at the perfect time: the tech was nerdy enough to experiment and sport rough edges to its synth sound and yet cool and cutting edge enough to avoid total obscurity. the idea that you could make a No. 1 hit with nothing but electric instruments that wasn't pure novelty probably inspired more young artists than Yaz or M or Hot Butter did. that's the benefit of going pop, everyone can see you being weird and call you a trendsetter.
still, it can be a bit silly to hear some of these synths, especially with the confusing 1-2 whiff of "Get Carter" and "I Am The Law". despite how cool songs like "Seconds" and "Do or Die" can sound, there are still bits on here that remind you you're listening to a band named after a faction in StarForce who were notorious for covering the Doctor Who theme live.
Hookworms
4/5
Microshift is a baffling crossbreed between that public radio late 2010's indie pop sound (wonder why) and heavy Stereolab influence in both choice of warm, analog synths and an eternal debt to krautrock and weird library music instrumentation. as both a product of their time and still firmly driven by bands like The American Analog Set and Broadcast, Hookworms intrigue me to no end. i had no idea this combination would even work -- like cheddar cheese and apple pie. aside from the somewhat grating "Boxing Day", i don't think there's a single skip on this thing. a delight, and one that i argue deserves to be on the 1001 Albums list more so than three solo Moz records.
still, nothing good can stay. ever. nothing good ever happens and if it does, ohohoho buddy, hold onto your shittin pants, cause you're about to learn a valuable life lesson.
Steve Earle
3/5
lots of great characteristics, but other than the first songs on each side, i think it lacks a certain "oomph" that the best country always has. i'm not against 80's country, but this has its fair share of both charm and relentless, relentless studio cheese. this being the ONLY Steve Earle album on the list when it's not even the sound he's known for (i was shocked he even had an album out in the 80's) shocks me -- you're telling me this was more important to add than El Corazón? really?
plus, i can forgive touring the world with a "Jap guitar" [sic], but if you ever want to feel like you're sitting next to your ex-trucker grandpa complaining about how soft the world's gotten since they impeached Nixon, listen to "Good Ol' Boy (Gettin Tough)", preferably while chewing smelly nicotine gum.
Frank Ocean
4/5
i'm gonna make some people mad:
the biggest roadblock preventing me from fanboying over Frank Ocean's music (aside from his inability to get his worthless ass out of the piazza and back to the typewriter) is a problem he shares with another indie darling: Sufjan Stevens. despite their earnestness, despite their embrace of the "concept album", i still find myself drawn more to the singles outlining points in the plan rather than the project overall.
obviously i enjoy "Pyramids", or "Thinkin' Bout You", or "Sweet Life" (i'm not some obstinate, no fun asshole), but i think that the scattershot concept of loves lost doesn't really hold up under inspection. in the uneasy balance of character acting and personal expression, i find myself disengaged from what narrative could be gleaned. is this album about a rich character who makes his girlfriend run coke deals, or is it about Frank Ocean, the man, dealing with issues of having his heart broken (again and again and again)? if it's a conflict between his desire and his reality, then sonically, i don't think it's a great display OF that conflict. the production is good, the lyrics are good, and the track-by-track flow is good; sitll, it's never quite great, never a true masterpiece, of which i don't think either Frank Ocean or Sufjan Stevens have had.
i like Frank Ocean, but i can't bring myself to love him. what's so bad about that?
Metallica
3/5
it's trite. it's been said. it's been a punchline and a dead horse and a nickel in the jar.
but man -- not having bass (i will not be saying that word again in the review) on your thrash metal album REALLY makes you come to terms with how fucking bad Lars Ulrich is as a drummer. so many complex songs and all he can do is pound the same three patterns. he's like the guy in "Deacon Blues" who learns to play the saxophone as part of a midlife crisis, and you get the feeling this is his skill ceiling. instead of being OK with his cover band and job as a forklift operator, he's part of the biggest metal band in the world and earns millions from fucking up drum parts in front of thousands of adoring fans for over 40 years at this point.
it's equally frustrating because for all the shit around Ulrich, Hetfield and Hammett are going insane on the guitar -- their most ambitious song structures and solos and scooped tones yet. and Lars, he's just not up to snuff. the whole band has to make room for him as he plods through each track. i also don't think that this album should be as long as it is, but i also really couldn't tell you what to cut. there's so much of it; i feel fatigued.
"One" kicks ass though -- makes the whole thing worth it at least a little. the key to being a metal superstar is probably "writing songs based off of a book you read" if it and Iron Maiden's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" are anything to go on.
Blood, Sweat & Tears
3/5
i can't fault something for being cornball Muppet Show pop five years before it even aired, but i can say that, if handed a nondescript studio psychedelic record from the late 60's/early 70's, i would expect it to sound like this and have something like "Spinning Wheel" on it. i completely forgot that song existed -- i thought it was something like a childhood nursery rhyme or something.
still, there are parts of this record that feel very tender rather than simply corny. it's definitely a November or February feel; you can hear the leaves or slush piling on the ground on each song. it's got the same avuncular quality to it as The Guess Who or Three Dog Night -- soul to be sung from under the blondest, curliest mustache your barber will allow. there's at least a LITTLE charm to that.
maybe it shouldn't have won the Grammy, but it's a nice look back at the era of dying psychedelia and a gateway to the coming era of Bubblegum and Violence.
Simon & Garfunkel
5/5
the sequencing is fine. get over yourselves.
Bridge over Troubled Water is a record that i think is flawed, but still undeniably Simon and Garfunkel's best. it follows that trend of "Goodbye, the 60's" records like Abbey Road or The Velvet Underground; it's an eclectic medley of styles while still displaying what the band is best at. hearing this as my first full S&G album made me think that this scattered style is what holds it back, but after giving Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme and Bookends a listen, i've come to understand Bridge as their tightest album. every song is doing something different, but even the goofy tracks or covers don't feel time-wastey. it's just as well that this is their last album, because i don't think they could really improve on what they had here. it's not perfect, but it's the best they'll ever do it. i think you're probably some sort of sentient meat slab if "The Boxer" doesn't stir something in you.
someone foolish said "Cecilia" is a proto-freak folk song. if an Animal Collective ripoff covered this whole album, how would they handle "Keep The Customer Satisfied"? accordion drone? creaky voice white girl doing the horn parts a cappella?
The Black Crowes
3/5
it's fine. like, there is a lot to hate about a release like this -- and i don't think i'll be coming back to it any time soon -- but what exactly could it do to make it better? it's a southern rock record that pulls a lot from the Rolling Stones and was produced in 1990 -- as a result, it sounds like it does and could not sound any different. there are no epics, no pop cuts, just pure, unabashed 70's RAWK cuts. judging The Black Crowes by their ability to create interesting, modern rock that breaks the mold is like judging a foot race between a human and a bird. the bird, quite simply, is not built to run, so likewise, i shouldn't expect the Black Crowes to do anything but what they are made to do, which is play blues rock and sell records to your dad.
the Black Crowes are a bagful of salted peanuts. you get what you pay for -- something dry, something consistent, and something you probably pair with copious amounts of alcohol or whatever they have on the menu at Texas Roadhouse.
White Denim
4/5
you'd expect something really boring or run-of-the-mill from a garage rock band with the name "White Denim", but there's a lot more melodic complexity and engagement here than i was expecting to get. the noodly guitar lines reminded me of Surface to Air Missive at points, taking the songs weird but catchy places. other than the indulgent jam "River to Consider", this thing blows by fast, each song a dandelion seed pushed by a breath.
Queen
4/5
A Night at the Opera's title (without prior knowledge of the Marx Brothers) and the reputation of "Bohemian Rhapsody" would have you believe that it's parent record would be a sweeping, theatrical epic -- an opera. it is not. really, the album takes the form of a revue, with a bunch of sketches, dances, and characters parading around the stage for your entertainment. maybe there's a few bits where they get maudlin like with "Love of My Life", but overall the tone of the show is light, frivolous, ephemeral. it makes you wonder where they would have taken things if they ever deigned to write in an actual narrative.
Queen are not the best band in the world, but in bursts, you get the sense that they could have been. i guess just being Queen was good enough for them (and the rest of the human race).
Queen
4/5
"but mags," you say after reading my review of A Night at the Opera, "queen DID have a narrative in an album! they did do stuff akin to prog rock!"
...did they?
like, yeah this is Queen with a prog rock style to them, but is what they're doing here actually a narrative, or is it just them writing stuff about fantasy themes? you could PROBABLY construct a loose narrative from the songs here and there's definitely a choice made with each side's naming, but i feel like that's just them trying to put some intentionality into how it's constructed rather than an attempt at a coherent story. and that's just fine. and also, is it really the same band?
something really weird happens when you start this record called Queen II -- it plays music from a band that seems like it's not entirely quite unlike Queen, but still feels like you could mistake it for an entirely different group if you weren't paying attention and interrogating what you're hearing. then you flip the record and oh my god it's Queen! hi!!! it's Freddie Mercury's theater vocals and Brian May's cool guitar that goes "wowbiddawowwow!!!" and Deacon and Taylor doin cool drums and bass work! wow!
Queen II made me feel like a greyhound with separation anxiety. or i feel like that on a regular basis and Queen II made me interrogate that part of myself. take your pick.
Peter Gabriel
5/5
the runner up for most 1986 album to ever 1986 (Graceland remains undefeated), So feels like a big motorcycle your uncle buys after his divorce. in my eyes, this isn't a negative quality: motorcycles are undoubtedly cool. however, that motorcycle isn't staying in your uncle's garage. i find this CD in the Goodwill reliably every time i peruse its section of your grandma's classical music CDs and your mom's copies of k.d. lang's Ingénue. So enters someone's life and, a few plays later, leaves it for worn-out pastures.
i'm here to tell you, as a connoisseur of sparkly Sharper Image pop, that So is worth keeping around. so what if it sounds artificial at points? you're telling me you hate the sound of the Fairlight? of the Chapman stick stylings of Tony Levin? of "In Your Eyes" and "Sledgehammer"? i don't think there's a human being alive who hates "Sledgehammer" who isn't some dour metalhead with a drinking problem. there's a sort of enchantment to the record that makes me teary eyed. even though there are fun and life affirming moments, So feels filled with melancholy a lot of the time. it's in "That Voice Again", in "Red Rain", and in "Mercy Street" in spades. i couldn't call it bipolar, but i can definitely call it panicked, frantic. one second he dances in the clouds, the next he dips his head in the gutter.
next time you go to buy some used pants or a set of discarded aluminum pans, give the lost CDs a chance. look at Peter Gabriel's pleading orphan eyes and give him a home. do this enough times and you'll be able to construct an Everything is Terrible!-style Jerry Maguire pyramid in the desert. you'll thank me later.
The Libertines
3/5
bands like The Libertines are one of those inscrutable British Music Press Things that you hear about by virtue of being a relic signifying when the music press was a thing people cared about in any real capacity, same as Razorlight or Kaiser Chiefs. as an American, whose hipster music press bets paid off for the most part (yknow, up until it stopped mattering), it's easy to feel smug about their selections aging kinda badly. maybe it's unearned smugness, but it just feels good knowing Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene definitely did put out some enduring, post-hype classics whereas The Libertines did not.
i enjoy sloppy records, but there are some parts where i'm wondering: did they not have enough studio time? surely you could have gotten ONE more take from the vocalists. they could have played the rhythm guitar just one more time. they could have turned down the levels in the studio down by like 3 dB. they could have thrown out a few songs that go nowhere and waste time. as a result, it turns out as an incoherent mess of tropes i've seen better done elsewhere. i don't hate it, but it definitely doesn't pass the sniff test if you're not some Tony Blair-era NME writer looking for the next Clash.
i can't see a world where the Libertines matter past 2005, and i guess they couldn't either. also, please don't release an album that's self-titled and not your debut. who do you think you're kidding?
Charles Mingus
5/5
much affection as i afford it, the big band jazz orchestra always felt wasted playing swing and 78 rpm single standards. therefore, using the thick sound of big band to make something that never feels simply pleasant, but challenging and complex, works like a cheat code on me.
still, my only complaint is that, although the sound and direction of the thing is beautiful, as a ballet, it feels a bit lacking by having no choreography to go along with it. i know people make their own to go along and perform it, but i think the only thing keeping this from being an all timer is not seeing one of those performances live. who knows. maybe someone in Colorado will dare to and i'll revisit this with the proper idea of how one would move to it. God knows i'd embarrass myself if i tried.
Stereo MC's
4/5
a bit of a nice coincidence i got my Japanese CD of Mind the Gap before getting assigned this to listen to. what you get from this is pretty much what you would expect of a release with these tags and released at this time -- something groovy and clubby, if a bit dated. it does slow down in the middle a bit with "Fade Away" and "Pressure", but the majority of Connected never leaves its (and my) comfort zone of transporting you to the Hacienda in 1992 while fucked up on E and swinging your arms around like a moron.
it was supposed to be baggy summer at some point this decade. and then it wasn't. a shame.
Fugees
4/5
it is funny how Spotify has "The Beast" coupled with "- includes Chinese restaurant skit" in its title. big "Dead Dove: Do Not Eat" vibes from that.
i can understand why some see this as an enduring classic, but i wish i could do the same. it's not bad or even middling by any extent of the imagination -- "Ready or Not" is a pefect song -- but it is easy to see a better record if some changes were made. let Lauryn rap more and get Pras to rap less. let John Forte join the group and make him contribute a bit more than Pras. tone down the tutting judgement in the first half of the record. cut the "No Woman, No Cry" because it's straight ass and you have a cover on the album already. don't let Ruff House put three bonus tracks on on the CD.
however, The Score is what it is and it's no point dictating things you could do to improve it. the milk was spilt, dried, and forgotten. i don't think there are any really weak instrumentals on the record, everything's very well put together (barring the bonus tracks stapled to the end). it's more to do with the simple fact of who the Fugees are -- a very talented woman who knows this, a guy who thinks he's much more talented than she is, and his cousin. why did the Fugees break up? why do crows mob owls? why do papier-mâché volcanoes explode? because there is no other outcome for the combination of the parties involved. it's just the way it was always gonna be.
Roxy Music
4/5
Roxy Music's debut confounds me because it seems glam almost by accident -- there's almost none of the bluesy 50's worship or psychedelic strums of their contemporaries. rather, it feels someone accidentally beamed it in from a dimension where glam rock was a natural extension of prog rock, and Pink Floyd ditched the acid for cocaine and sequins. the woman on the cover is near incongruous to the music -- she could be an elf or a terrible Hipgnosis collage instead and i doubt it would fit the music any less.
however, as interesting as the self-titled is, it does spin its wheels a bit more than go anywhere. songs like "2 H.B." and "Chance Meeting" are underdeveloped, not lacking in sound but rather lacking in stand-out ideas. there are moments of glammy greatness and weirdness on this album, but they don't often mix. i'm mostly wondering if Eno wishes he'd been in an actual prog band like Phil Manzanera was.
also, i hate saying it, but the American version with the bonus track is essential; "Virginia Plain" is what i thought this band was gonna sound like before i hit the second track. i feel like not hearing on here is a big mistake, like leaving "Peace Love and Understanding" off of Armed Forces. a rare opinion from me, i assure you.
Dolly Parton
4/5
my only flight out of state this year (it's been a busy time at school) was to visit my partners in Tennessee. we decided to visit Dollywood's adjacent waterpark Splash Country cause it was relatively close. it was... kinda nice? you expect an offshoot of a celebrity tie in theme park to be, like, Mickey Rooney potato restaurant levels of jank, right? it's odd. Dolly Parton grew up in the 70's equivalent of an Abraham Lincoln log cabin, started playing music at age eight, got into the industry, got really huge, and built a theme park ten miles from where she was born. it's odd to see someone do what they knew they were born for so well that they can build a theme park out of all the money they made from it.
...is there a God? i've doubted it in the past, but i really think God put Dolly Parton on Earth to do what she's been doing for the past half a century. it's a matter of predestination, fate -- the universe always meant to her to get this big. this is a roundabout way to say that the album is strong, sweet, and deserving of its place on the list. considering batting average, 70's country is better than 70's prog. fight me.
The xx
3/5
i can sum up The xx in one sentence: they are a band of incredibly creative people who are truly, without a shadow of a doubt, the sum of their parts and nothing more. this is not a band -- this is a supergroup of three people who set a limit for themselves, hit it, and clock out immediately. basically, imagine a group of Boris Diaws who are bored and simply do not want to do this because it's beneath them -- they're probably right.
it's not bad, of course. there are flashes of something beautiful, with the samples on tracks 2 and 8 betraying a bit more of Jamie xx's influence and Romy's guitar contributing very well to the more "dreamy" tracks. i think that this is a perfectly serviceable thing, but i also don't think it could have really been anything but serviceable. i'd like to believe that The xx have a Rumours tucked somewhere in their collective mind, a work of screaming passion and anger and beauty, pushing boundaries, blowing minds, changing lives. i'd also like to believe in the Tooth Fairy and reversible climate damage. it doesn't mean these things are coming true any time soon.
i hear Jamie's new album is good. i think people will be saying the previous sentence more than they would about a new album by The xx.
Lightning Bolt
5/5
Robotomy was a show that aired for about 2-ish months on Cartoon Network in 2010-2011. it's best known for being the show Christy Karacas produced (not created) before the network picked up Superjail! -- from this angle, you would expect a cartoon that looks like this and has this pedigree and history to be wild, too wild for television, and unfortunately it's mostly just kinda mild? there's flashes of unhinged energy, but instead of being this crazy cartoon about two robots who live in a junkyard and try to kill each other with hammers while wearing bloody Halloween costumes, it's basically just Superbad for 13 year olds. and that's fiiiine. but like, i kinda wish it was the former? no plot, no talking, just beautiful murder?
this is a roundabout way of saying that if the former cartoon existed and was able to be watched, i would like for the soundtrack to sound like this. never has music sounded so primitive and brutal while also probably being really technically difficult to play. i want to play air bass to this, only because i know i'd break my hands on any object near me if i played air drums to it instead. Lightning Bolt are simple enough for you to understand that it's just two guys, but virtuosic enough for you to still be highly impressed that a sound like this can come from people in general. although, who knows. maybe they are robots wearing Halloween costumes? has anyone checked?
Nick Drake
4/5
i like this a little bit more than Pink Moon. yeah i know, it's a stupid contrarian opinion. i know that a Nick Drake album with sax solos shouldn't be anyone's favorite (even if i do think they kick ass).
i couldn't even really tell you what wins me over about Bryter Layter. maybe i like Nick Drake with a few more overdubs; it makes him sound a bit less like a hermit, and gives him a complex character in my head rather than this omnipresent idea of the recluse. british folk rock instrumentals also win me over, and that sure is Fairport Convention on this thing. maybe i just like hearing him a bit happier, soul chorus or not.
i can't see this album as summer or fall, not in the slightest. it feels like false spring; it's a week of wearing shorts outside and a chilly wind blowing while the sun beams upon you. before the snow falls, everything cautiously shines, and the birds visit their trees as guests.
Patti Smith
4/5
the name of the game is attitude. by no musical standpoint would i really consider Horses to be an actual punk record -- the guitars are pretty conventional for their time, the vocals aren't harsh, and the closest thing i'd say it has to a contemporary is Television, who had one song out at the time, and neither Television nor Smith sound like they're inventing what we know to be punk.
really, what i think people find punk about Patti Smith is her combining of surrealist, rebellious poetry with an evolution of frat rock -- you can't imagine Them breaking into rants about girls humping parking meters or anyone who covers "Land of a Thousand Dances" slipping into imagery of slitting your own throat, and its this juxtaposition that makes the record such a pioneer in its genre. what is punk if not making the rock of the past utterly hideous? i don't think i'd play any track from "Horses" in the car with my family. good. it's not for the car. it's not for anyone, except maybe animated helium ravens.
The Cardigans
5/5
The Cardigans stand out as one of the few "twee" bands to make it (and not just indie circlejerk "make it" like Bull & Shitbastian -- actually make it). it's honestly hard to tell how they even DID make it. "Lovefool" was in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet for like 10 seconds in a scene nobody really remembers, but the soundtrack sold well. i guess people were just drawn to the strength of the song. for a hot second, The Cardigans had a time in the spotlight, paced around a bit, and then walked back home. for a genre of snarky doofuses named after a type of sweater, this counts as winning the lottery.
you could say they sold out with First Band on the Moon -- i'd argue their aesthetic choices are no more smooth than they were on Life. i'd also argue that there are multiple songs on the record that are as good, if not better than "Lovefool", like "Been It" and (as retroactively recognized by the internet) "Step on Me". basically, the past few years of my life have seen me falling in love with FBotM's space age continuation of the last album's globetrot. in each song, there's a delightful little hook and a mean little turn of phrase, said with a bitter smile on the lips. The Cardigans remain one of the few legitimate practitioners of the black arts of the 1990's best known as "irony".
and the Sabbath covers DO make sense. what's more Swedish than heavy metal?
The Associates
3/5
somehow, The Associates made an album that is wreaks sensory hell upon me and still sounds very much spongy to all the sounds around it. it's music i can only imagine was recorded in studio by the do on the cover hopping around like 90's grossout cartoon characters, bouncing off the walls and getting glitter all over the place. it takes until the second half for this weird saute of genre to come together in a "satisfying" way, and it does have its moments, but the moment is always the same flavor of squirrely flamboyance.
Beatles
3/5
it's impossible to even offer up an opinion that isn't just "oh neat" to any Beatles album before Rubber Soul (or Help!, to be nice). like, i obviously can't/don't hate it, but i really couldn't imagine it as anything but a "oh boy the Beatles!" delivery system. it delivers the Beatles circa 1964. i like it. it's fine.
My Bloody Valentine
4/5
Valve releasing the lastest Half-Life game for a slowly dying gaming trend (one that also doesn't play nice with glasses) feels like a cruel twist of fate, a monkey's finger wickedly curling up. Half-Life: Alyx, by all accounts, is a good game, and shows that Valve still has it. this infuriates me; HL:A is a great game that the company has the capacity to make, but refuses to do so on anything one could consider a reasonable basis. why would they? if you owned the biggest computer games market in the world and could print money with live service multiplayer games, why would you bother with things like narrative experiences? just shuffle the desks and collect the dough. it's fine.
nothing can convince me that any part of m b v was recorded in the 90's, much less the 2000's. i think maybe Shields wrote some of the songs in that period of time, but the earliest i could see the record starting production is 2009. by then, Loveless had essentially gone from the record that started that weird trend of loud guitars in British music to being the blueprint for any band that wanted to make "shoegaze". so what we get isn't anything new or exciting, but rather just... more Loveless. and more Loveless is fine, but i'm seeing this assertion that this is in any way less innovative than the records that came after it. it feels like everyone who loved My Bloody Valentine waited 22 years for the Amnesiac to the last album's Kid A. that's fine.
the vocals are pretty similar, as are the odd, charming ambient experiments, and even if they're lowered in the mix, the guitars still have that classic glidey sound to them. what the album's sound lacks, really, is an actual progression of what was approached before. "If I Am" has baggy beats underneath Bilinda's (or Kevin's) vocals like "Soon" does. "Only Tomorrow" is close enough to "Sometimes" that i feel like they could transition into each other comfortably. "Wonder 2" betrays a new direction in sound for the band, but good luck seeing them ever get there; other than that, My Bloody Valentine sounds largely the same. it's an adjusted frame, not another picture. and that's fine.
Kevin Shields does not make music. he makes money off of music. and that's fine. if you wanna do that, that's ok. you can go recluse! you can write your one book and go "nah, i fuckin nailed it" whenever the music press bugs you for an interview. it's ok to hang it up -- Mark Hollis did. Harper Lee did. Boards of Canada did (stop lying to yourselves). it's also ok to just put out a good album every four years or so -- nothing to top your magnum opus, but nothing really could, so why bother? you're still making something you believe in. what i can't abide is not doing anything for a near quarter century, putting out something that sounds like it could have been made four years after and is solid, and then going back to doing nothing for the next quarter of a century. you can't do both. in short, it's fine.
the album is fine, good even. i hate it.
The xx
3/5
i would pay RateYourMusic a million dollars if they would let me post my I See You review again unchanged except for the standout tracks having been adjusted. my opinion hasn't changed. the exact sum of the band member's parts, just with one more person who they decided to kick out of the band afterwards because they were bored. xx sounds like a day that threatens to rain but never does, preferring to thunder in the distance and never shower you with any real vibrancy in the music. i am never excited to hear a The xx track; i am simply subjected to it.
do you think the band finds it demoralizing that people consider a wordless, two minute intro their best song? or does all the money the group gets from car commercials help to assuage their cognitive dissonance?
Amy Winehouse
4/5
it jars me to hear Amy Winehouse's vocals coated in the production caramel of the early 2000's neo-soul hallmarks rather than what you normally expect from her -- throwback 60's soul worship -- but i still welcome it as a fan of that sound. there are moments that feel a bit undercooked, namely the bossa nova and reggae elements that seem to be trying for some connection to the past, music that she liked but didn't yet have the chops or backing to pull off. this makes the whole affair sag a bit in the middle, before picking right back up by "In My Bed". i don't think Frank is some bypassed masterpiece, but i do think it's worth looking into to get an idea of who Amy was before Back to Black. i think it'd serve you better than watching that utterly ghoulish movie that came out this year.
also it's an utter crime Help Yourself isn't available in the US, considering it's the best look into what music she'd make later in her career. you're telling me the copyright is that strong on some single from 1946? get real.
Kate Bush
5/5
Kate Bush utilizes emotion like she would a Fairlight; this time, she used mania. every song is filled with a histrionic turn, a swing of one's fists in the dark as they feel the walls closing in on them. it's cabaret, it's theater, it's drama, it's a dance in the misty grass. nothing like The Dreaming existed before it was released, and nothing like it will exist after. no notes. perfect, in every sense.
Manu Chao
4/5
i don't think this very often -- if there's anything the English speaking world doesn't need it's being catered to -- but i do wish the CD to this had some form of translation in the liner notes, not just for my dumb monolingual ass wholly unable to understand what the significance of "Mentira" is, but for the Spanish speakers who don't know what "Bongo Bong" is about and the French speakers who don't understand what is being said on all but two of the songs. i think this need to note check is maybe a little less important on other releases in other languages where the feeling of the song comes through, but in instances like this (or other genres like Chanson, Nueva cancion, and a significant amount of MPB), it feels like the message is more important than the sound of the music itself. for this, i feel like i can't really derive as much enjoyment as others could without consulting middling to bad translations -- but then again, maybe those translations hurt those who can't understand the English sections as well.
other than that, i think Manu Chao does a good job establishing himself as everyone's troubadour. how the guy performs imparts a lot of energy on you even if you aren't wholly down with the whole "reggae on acoustic guitar" sound. as of 2024, the ratings show the album losing steam per track, but if you asked me, i couldn't really tell you when the album left its groove or spun its wheels. whether Chao, a Basque-French polyglot that struck up a friendship with the Zapatistas, is the best person to discuss the the plight of the migrant or the homeless or the heartbroken fuckup is up to you, but i think regardless of your stance, he sells his understanding well.
Wire
4/5
there isn't a lot i can add onto any analysis of Wire's "Pink Flag". i don't think it's the greatest record of all time, but i fully understand why someone would hold it in such regard. each of the hits float along as song islands in the little wave pool of sub-2:00 oddities that push you around and fill your nose with water. if you enjoy that feeling, then i'm sure you'll love "Pink Flag" lot for a lot more than The Songs Every Hipster Knows. maybe one day i will too.
i would just like to say something about British punk c. 1977. whenever a band takes heavy influence from "Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols" or the Clash's first effort, you can probably tell. if a band takes influence from "Pink Flag", they would probably need to tell you -- but the latter band is always better than the former. no exception.
Pretenders
4/5
initially, the Pretenders serve high energy, meat 'n' potatoes new wave -- without fashion, without synth and pop appeal, without any further influence than its bare building blocks, their debut feels like the scientific control of its genre. as a result, Side A fuses together into this slab of sound, each song sounding pretty close to the last but still the same amount of fun. meanwhile, Side B has these singles that serve as high points in their discography interspersed with long, jammy tracks like "Private Life" and "Lovers of Today". it's like the whole thing is trying to keep it together, playing it safe in the first half like a glued Lego set. then it brings out this fragile original Lego creation that kicks the prebuilt set's ass but also has little greebles and bits falling off of it with each jostle of the table. i admire this hustle; i can't help but award it an 8.
also, you're kidding me. nobody in the band was from New York City? Ohio and the UK? alright. i'll believe you... cautiously.
Method Man
4/5
apparently only one of the tracks here was recorded by RZA before his studio flooded and destroyed dozens of tracks, so he had to remake a lot of these really quick and maybe you could explain why so many of the songs here sound... well, not wrong, but also not right. it's dark, it's gritty, it's boom bap that feels like the boom is in someone's dark, flooded basement and the bap is a chair slammed over your head.
Method's flow and wordplay is always great, but i'd consider it to add a bit of a strange contrast to the sounds here -- a lot of the time, he brags, but he brags from what sounds like New York in Taxi Driver mixed with a depressing, spider-like dystopia. of course, on tracks like "Mr. Sandman" or "Bring the Pain", he knows exactly what he owns, and what it's worth in a world of horrors. most of the beats here creep me the fuck out, and it's odd to go from a fun battle rap beat like "Meth vs. Chef" to "Sub Crazy" with the weird dying tape voice playing over bitcrushed drums while Meth continues to do his thing. it's horrifying, demented; i love it to bits.
this would be an awful record to smoke weed to. or a great one, if you like feeling as if the pizza man is going to stab you in the dick and laugh instead of give you your fucking pizza.
The Icarus Line
3/5
some bands have to go through an iteration or two before turning into something great. Uncle Tupelo explodes and turns into Wilco and Son Volt. Alice 'n Chains coughs out a loogie and that thing mutates into Alice in Chains. Slapstick breaks into two pieces and morphs into The Lawrence Arms and Alkaline Trio.
the Icarus Line were a band in bad need of a breakup.
this is not because i dislike them, but because something is holding them back from actually releasing something great. i feel like everything is half cooked, having trouble finding its own identity. the first track's good, "Spike Island" is good, and i can tolerate a lot of "Getting Bright at Night", but a lot of this bores me. the songs drag on. the album fails to develop an actual image out of the frying negative of guitar noise and yowling that wears its 70's Stoogepunk pedigree on its sleeve. i think this is a just fine album to start your career with on a little who-cares label run by your friends and his CD writer. unfortunately, this is a CD that people paid a lot of money to Richard Branson for, which means that this is your band now. this is it.
the Icarus Line broke up after Alvin DeGuzman died of cancer in 2017. even if i'm not the biggest fan of the band, to hell with what i think -- i hope he was at least somewhat satisfied with what he made. i hope that for him, this was a pinnacle, even if i wish it hadn't been. by all accounts, they had much more potential than they let on.
Steely Dan
5/5
[note: this review was written in 2021. i have no plans to replace it on RateYourMusic and will simply post the old review here. my opinion remains unchanged.]
aja is the culmination of about 5+ years of musical prowess and performance, and is pretty much considered THE dan album that cannot be denied as an ass-kicker. there's a reason audiophiles who care about how FLACs sound and immediately turn a song off if it clips use it as a test for their speakers -- it's one of the most well produced albums of all time. you could pick out each part of a song with a pair of mental chopsticks if you wanted to, with how much space and weight is in the production. however, because i don't know any music theory and very little about how they made it sound like it does, but i know that i love it
lyrically, this is the tightest fagen and becker have ever been. the people depicted are pitiable wrecks, as always, but the sentimentality of the music doesnt impress the idea that theyre beyond help. "deacon blues" is the most iconic song here because its a song about how cool it would be to do a sick ass sax solo and drink in lounges, despite the narrator very clearly just being that guy who says hes gonna learn guitar and buys a martin but has never really played it and just uses it as a conversation piece. "black cow", "peg", and "josie" can be categorized as "songs about women", but the songs are less "why aren't you fucking me any more" and more "what the hell is wrong with you, why are you like this". "home at last" and "i got the news" are considered the worst tracks, but theyre still crazy good, and shout out to the part of the chorus michael mcdonald sings.
finally, the title track is this beautiful suite that pretty much serves as a tribute to charlie parker and the jazz that inspired SD throughout the years, and honestly? its kind of heartwarming, and despite illustrating a scene of where parker was institutionalized, it sort of feels like an uncharacteristic love song -- not of romance, but of admiration for the art of music and the struggles artists go through to "get it right". i think they did their job here, and did it well
Moby Grape
2/5
listen, i'm not gonna pretend to understand why acidhead hippies love San Francisco country rock so much. to me, Moby Grape and the Grateful Dead maintain the veneer of countercultural and revolutionary aesthetic due to being at the right place in the right time. in practice, it serves as perfectly passable background music for doodling Mr. Natural or Freak Brothers fanart to. nice yet inoffensive. i do like "Omaha", "Naked, If I Want To", "Lazy Me", and "Sitting by the Window" (the closest the record gets to wowing me), but nothing really hooks me here. i don't get it. if there was a Moby Grape cover band playing at the park (where else would they be), i'd probably leave. go buy some soap at the adjacent farmer's market and wash myself with that until i get hives after a week.
if i was selling Moby Grape i'd airbrush out the flag and the middle finger too, this time as an aesthetic choice. this is not a "fuck you" record. this is a handshake record -- it's friendly, brief, and i'm probably gonna forget i engaged with it in a week's time. such is the way of the wing.
The Lemonheads
4/5
Dando probably wouldn't admit it, but a lot of "It's A Shame About Ray" feels as if it holds some debt to Tom Petty. i don't think their voices sound too similar, but they both maintain this spunk and small town jitteriness to their lyrics that can feel infectious at times. you could argue the album loses that energy over time, but i think it's mostly consistent, with a few highlights like "Confetti" and "Rudderless." overall, it's a solid, fun record. maybe it's a bit of a tragedy that the bonus cover tacked on at the end gets all the attention, but not cause it's bad -- just cause it made people think that was all there was to the Lemonheads.
Justin Timberlake
3/5
i have come up with a theory: people do not like Justin Timblerlake, but they like how his music sounds. yeah, he can sing, and dance, and arguably beatbox, but would people like his early music if it didn't have quality production from star makers like The Neptunes and Timbaland at his peak? it feels like he was one kind of mediocre producer/writer away from flopping musically like the rest of the *NSYNCers -- on track 9 and 11, we get a glimpse into a world where this happened. it sounds like middle-of-the-road 2000's R&B and therapist office adult contemporary, respectively. if i heard Justin Timberlake in this shadow world, i would be perfectly neutral on his career's existence, and if someone told me that a former *NSYNC member made it the schmoopy ass song playing on the radio, i would probably guess it was Justin after a few tries. then i would forget about it for the next three years until i was in the mall and it played in one of the stores, almost by accident.
i see Justified as a sort of charcuterie board. you can put cheese on a cracker, or meat on it, or like, olives or something. at times, the cracker is dry, thick, and at times the topping is too mild to overpower its inexplicably greasy flavor. nobody goes to a charcuterie board for a cracker.
N.W.A.
3/5
Straight Outta Compton probably blew minds in 1988, and deservedly so -- from what i can tell, it was basically the first West Coast rap record to actually matter. still, i think that even though it's got some highly influential tracks that i would be crazy to deny (basically the whole A side) it still often has that mid-gear mid-school cheese to it. are the lyrics them being badass gangsters who fuck bitches and kill people? yeah. does the production accurately display the level of hardness in the lyrics? ...sometimes? like, i dunno, sometimes beats like "Parental Discretion Iz Advised" and "I Aint tha 1" are too obvious and cornball to actually give me that impression. i still hear Dr. Dre's red jacket calling to him from the closet like the Green Goblin suit with every 808 "clunk clunk". i appreciate Compton a bit more as a piece of history and as a pioneering record than something you can really give repeated listens.
also, making the back half of your album mostly remixes of the last one is always a bad idea.
Incredible Bongo Band
4/5
hearing Bongo Rock impresses upon me that almost all the crate diggy modern funk (The Budos Band and most artists releasing singles on Colemine Records) owe their existence to The Incredible Bongo Band and projects like it -- studio soundtrack work that just so happens to have a good beat you can lift from it for hip hop. it makes me wonder; do these groups, who often have the same formula of letting the drums hang and filling the space with horn fills and the infrequent Spaghettified library music guitar riff, take inspiration from this brand of funk, or do they take inspiration from its use as sampled material? do the Budos Band, talented and fun as they are, make jazz-funk or do they reverse engineer hip hop? is it loving tribute or simulacrum?
anyway, great record. sample something from this if you're stumped.
Kings of Leon
3/5
it's odd hearing people point to the vocals as a weak point for Aha Shake Heartbreak, as if it isn't what basically prevents this LP from turning into IPA brewery background music to wax your mustache to. musically, the rave ups on each track do nothing spectacular or super memorable that wasn't boringly done by The Black Crowes or better done by The Strokes, but Caleb Followill's yelpy little voice makes him stand out a little. you may consider it annoying, but i consider it, at the very least, engaging. and hey, that's more than i can say about a lot of groups in the practice of playing "REAL GARAGE ROCK" that cuts out the bullshit and makes music from the heart, maaan. sometimes, Cow from Cow and Chicken distracts me from that hokey goal.
shame about the rest of their career though. some bands just sorta morph into Cold War Kids no matter how hard they try. Coldwarcinization, they call it. dire shit.
Pixies
4/5
i can understand why someone would consider this inferior to Doolittle (it is), but i don't really think it's that much of a step down. in fact, i think you could slot a few of the cuts on here into Doolittle and most people wouldn't even notice -- what's even changed? they do surf riffs sometimes? the snare is a bit gated? it's still the same band that made "Hey" and "Gouge Away". what's the crime, not being "Doolittle"? They already made that album! i think there's maybe a few slow bits, like "Ana" and "Blown Away", but i don't think anything's gone wrong other than some songs being a bit less memorable than the constant hookfest of the last album.
Pixies docked their surfboard-ship on the station they built with the hull duct taped together and the engine sputtering, but it still runs, dammit.
The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy
4/5
it's odd because i really do like it. it's a conscious hip hop album with great production, devoid of crank NoI shit and generally doing a good job at covering (at the time) meaningful issues. the production is what's gonna make this thing stick out, with the soundscapes standing out as an always thumping, sometimes downright gothic constant. you really do feel like you're observing the worst the early 90's had to offer its pariahs from the grimiest of gutters.
but god, Michael Franti's flow is garbage. like, i don't have any issues with his voice, but the way he delivers things makes it seem less like he's rapping and more like he's reading some poetry while gesturing with each lyric. as a result, you end up wishing the whole thing was like four songs shorter -- it's a bit fatiguing when he delivers everything nearly the exact same "sorta hard, sorta poetic" way, from the hooks to the (admittedly uncreative) rhymes. its a shame cause if he had another person on the mic, it would be a lot more bearable.
maybe they should have asked William S. Burroughs to join? think of how many one liners he could get off about accidentally shooting his wife...
The Auteurs
4/5
New Wave sounds like it skipped a whole British music scene, sailing straight from the snarkiness of C86 to the glam and tribute of Britpop without even deigning to stop at the club on the way there. i will admit, sometimes the songs blend into each other if you're not paying attention, especially in the middle of what would be the CD and the end of the vinyl's A side, but i don't think it's really a record meant to be thrown on in the background. rather, you're supposed to hone in on each little line with a double entendre or bitter meaning, something to hear with headphones at home -- T. Rex for the introverts. don't wave your lighter, you'll burn the place down.
i dunno why, but i feel like this album's fursona is a hooded crow.
CHIC
4/5
Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers did some sort of strange, chemical process to disco, like a penny in vinegar. it comes out so shiny, so smooth, so hard to detect any sort of blemishes. like, have you ever seen that picture of $761 lab standard reference peanut butter? C'est Chic feels like that.
i do think there are a few dull tracks -- "Happy Man" and "At Last I Am Free" are broadly forgettable, but i still think they're admirable as being the smoothest you can get dance music before the advent of the drum machine and synthesizer. even if you can't love it, i think you should at least give it respect.
Fela Kuti
5/5
get their ass Fela!!!
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
4/5
i won't call it grunge cause it's not, but there's a certain emotional sincerity to Rust Never Sleeps that one could easily mistake it for being "proto-grunge". maybe it's contained in the acoustic A-side, with frequently bitter and sobering tunes about burning out and leaving behind people who were weighing you down. maybe on the B-side, you can find a bit of comfort in loud, raucous tunes like "Sedan Delivery" or in watching some hapless civilian get vaporized by a gun boat like a rat meeting an exposed electrical wire on "Powderfinger". or maybe it's just the raspy distortion of "Hey Hey, My My"'s reprise, acting like a reminder that you haven't changed from your depression or your anger -- it's all the same person.
i can be cruel to myself, filled with sorrow and regret. i can be angry at the world too, lashing out at whatever hand feeds me or tries to pry the trap from my leg. Rust Never Sleeps feels like the perfect depiction of this dichotomy, shifting back and forth as one being. one day i'll change, but in this moment i am tossed between hands, like a ragdoll sailing through the air.
The Birthday Party
4/5
the album cover really does let you know what you're in for: a hot rod drive-by done by psychotic mutant hillbillies wearing Ed Roth t-shirts. there's something really uncanny about how the great spirit of the All-American Fuckup was captured by a bunch of Aussies in the process of dismantling their band. maybe that explosive nature was key -- in order to sound like every caricature in focus on the songs is falling apart and panicking, the group had to self-destruct as well. i do think that on a few songs, the whole rattle 'n' yelp sound of the Birthday Party get a bit grating, but in brief rushes, like "6" Gold Blade" and "Hamlet (Pow Pow Pow)", you can actually get a bit scared.
and the cover art is fine. you guys just need to get used to Ed Roth.
George Harrison
3/5
All Things Must Pass most closely resembles sitting in a massage chair for an hour and forty minutes. at first i enjoy it, and it's a nice, consistent feeling, but after about 30 minutes, i start getting tingly. 60 minutes later my entire ass has gone numb, and at the end getting off after it switches to a sudden stop feels like a relief. i'm reminded of the similar experience i had with Songs in the Key of Life -- an album a lot of people love and with good reason. i think you have a right to love ATMP as well. i love a lot of it too. "My Sweet Lord", "Isn't It A Pity", and the title track deserve to be considered classics. sadly, i otherwise feel crushed, not by the length of the project, but by the sound of it. All Things Must Pass does not bore me; it wears me out.
for me, 100 minutes of music either has to be dynamic enough to keep me engaged or atmospheric enough to lure me into a trance. instead, Phil Spector makes sure all the tracks are going at 100% except in the rare case where there simply aren't enough instruments to go utterly batshit with. everyones playing guitar licks and the drums and going crazy and there's harmonies and the songs morph into this fog that overwhelms me. it's exhausting enough that i'm actually a little more appreciative when the Apple Jam kicks in -- not enough for me to change my opinion, but definitely not enough to drop my opinion of the record as a whole.
All Things Must Pass might enlighten you, but it doesn't do the same for me. it's not a sermon or a live show -- it's a baseball game. i can get loving baseball, but going to a game regularly or watching it on TV simply isn't my bag. more power to ya.
4/5
it's odd that for all their influences, for all that they allegedly draw from Depeche Mode, Lightning Bolt, and (yeah, sure) Sly & the Family Stone, they just can't help but sound like nerdier Queen. like, that's all i can hear -- these theater kid vocals swaying through ever present guitar flourishes and the ever so slight difference of the bass being super loud. there's great songs here, but i think any ambitions for a big coherent prog rock project are sorely misaimed. in no way do i dislike Black Holes and Revelations with its earnest operatics and drama, but i still find myself remembering how dull Queen could have been if it were led by anyone but Freddie Mercury. Bellamy comes close, but Earth's close to Mars, and Mars is still really fucking far away.
and god, i hate Hipgnosis. such ugly covers of greasy men standing in glossy deserts. thank god "Knights of Cydonia" is on here or this thing would be a half point lower for the crime of looking at the cover.
Dwight Yoakam
3/5
it's a nice sound, but Buenas noches From a Lonely Room often comes off as too homogenous and gives you a lot to compare parts of itself with. "I Sang Dixie" is a great song with a slow swaying tempo, and "Send Me the Pillow" hits the same beats but less effectively. the same goes for the rockin' numbers, "I Got You" and "Streets of Bakersfield" are great, while "What I Don't Know" does the same thing but worse. it also does the whole "you cheated, now die" thing worse than the title track. i'm not against neo-trad country, but it seems to have a problem in shaking things up throughout a full LP.
Joan Armatrading
4/5
a melancholy permeates the whole album, making its love songs feel less like pleas to another and more "if i ever get to love again, this is what i'm sure it will feel like." even the folk funk experiments have this feeling of anxiety about them, how often her lover can be fiery and sweet, but you're reading between the lines that they aren't right now (and probably haven't been for some time). kind of had tears in my eyes for the whole thing, and i don't know if that's me or just what the music does. i think a few of the tracks are duds ("Water With the Wine" should probably not sound that cheery given its subject matter) but the rest of the album makes up for it.
an album that makes you want a good cry and a cigarette, and i don't even smoke.
Prince
5/5
one of the increasingly rare double albums that actually feels like it both values your time and expects you to sit through the full thing. going in, i thought an 80 minute album was at the very least gonna be a bit tiring, but it feels shorter than some 50+ minute albums i've heard. i hold the theory that this is due to no two songs sounding alike -- Sign "☮︎" the Times always has another trick up its sleeve, and switches you from soul to dirty funk, and Christian rock to a goddamn Wizard of Oz chant live jam. i'm not saying that he's doing any wild genre experiments on S☮︎tT, but Prince always keeps things moving from one new idea to another, like a brisk studio tour that is also nearly an hour and a half. the record just bristles with this wild, colorful energy, a kaleidoscope of song that shifts the world around it. by no means is it perfect, but if someone said this was Prince's best album, I don't think anyone would fault them for it.
the idea of being Prince turns my stomach. can you imagine having a new, exciting musical idea every day of your life and live with the fact that you'll never be able to play them all?
Public Image Ltd.
2/5
Side A:
"Theme" drops you screaming into a world of vomit and dusty trash on asphalt, swirling around it in a hazy journey through a world of not wanting to be alive any more but not seeing yourself as worth wasting a suicide attempt on. it's a hangover and a headache and it makes you say "wow, this album's gonna have such a developed sound and breadth of topic! Lydon's really goin for it!"
the next three songs are about how the church blows, and they're reaaaaally boring.
Side B:
the title track feels like both a return to form and a huge shake-up at the same time -- the Sex Pistols were not capable of something so melodic, so fun, so much like soaring above the sky and flipping everyone below you off. but Public Image Ltd. are. and they're gonna make the most of their new sound.
the next two songs are about how Malcolm McLaren is a sellout moron, and they're reaaaaally boring. "Fodderstompf" is funny though; i just never want to hear it ever again.
Lauryn Hill
4/5
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill could either be the best or worst album to listen to after a break up, and is preferably consumed alongside a pint of ice cream and a cool pillow to lie down on. "Ex-Factor" and "I Used to Love Him" have the right bitter quality to them about separation, while songs like "To Zion" and "Forgive Them Father" uplift the listener by reminding them that there are more important things to focus on in your life than licking your wounds; for Lauryn it's her son, her (at the time) romantic partner, and God. it's a reminder that the power to rise above hurt lies in you.
unfortunately there's the semi-regular reminder that Lauryn Hill is a real human being and that her life is, generously, a bit of a mess. she's had tax issues, relationship issues, performance issues, and hasn't released a full studio project since 1998. sometimes, you can see through the cracks in the project, whether it's the judginess of "Doo Wop (That Thing)" or sort of cornball throwback of "Every Ghetto, Every City" that feels a bit too desperate to return to the "good old days". on record, Lauryn Hill is probably doing fine, but i wouldn't blame you if you thought otherwise. and if she's working hard to cover her hurt instead of remove it, how are you ever gonna get rid of yours?
what i'm saying here is that your mileage may vary. i, personally, think that regardless of the external circumstances of Ms. Hill's life, it's still a really enjoyable, often comforting piece of soul. maybe we're like the children in the skits -- we're stumbling around, still unsure of what love is, but always discovering what it could mean through trial and error.
The Smashing Pumpkins
4/5
it is a little wild how the songs i (and most other people who were born after the time of the Pumpkins) got to know this band from were from a two hour long album. i hesitate to call it "epic" because i don't really think it has that quality to it, but Mellon Collie doesn't really seem like a file dump. really, it feels most like -- and this is an odd analogy, i know -- those Made-for-TV cartoon movies (Phineas and Ferb: Across the Second Dimension or Kim Possible: So the Drama) that feel like long episodes of the show they're based off of.
of course, this doesn't mean nothing has changed; paradoxically, their big ambitious feature album is also a huge pop swing with crossover appeal. oddly enough, the strongest moments of the album are when it sounds completely divorced from the Yankee shoegaze of Siamese Dream. the softness of songs like "Tonight, Tonight", "1979", and "Thirty-Three" feel like an actual progression of the band's art, something alluded to by "Disarm" on the last LP. they're at their weakest at Big Layered Guitars with Whining like on "An Ode to No One" or "Tales of a Scorched Earth". those songs aren't necessarily bad, but they feel like songs by a band that wanted to make a sequel to Siamese Dream instead of something ambitious and daring. as a result, it can end up blurring together by the end of the first disc.
there's also the issue of all the weird tracks being sort of crammed in the back quarter of the album, as when you've been worn down, you're blindsided by softer, goofier tracks that would have been better sequenced in between the seas of creamy fuzz that can fade into the background. i'm not even sure how the track play into the structure of one disc being the day and the other being the night -- "Lily (My One and Only)" and "Stumbeline" sure seem sunny compared to "Bullet with Butterfly Wings".
i can see why people slowly start to get fatigued by this record and hone in on the excellence of the singles. i can't hate Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, in fact, i love a lot of it. it's just harder to love as a whole. i couldn't see it being anything but expansive, and i also couldn't see myself coming back now that i've heard the whole thing.
Depeche Mode
5/5
i consider Violator to be the logical conclusion of "gothic rock", moreso than Disintegration. Disintegration is a journey, sure, but it doesn't push the sound as far as it can go like how Violator does. the production imbues the songs, even the raucous "Personal Jesus", with an otherworldly, faded futurism. the songs pulse, but the "strings" still feel coated in silicone dust and shake across tracks like "Clean" like phantoms. the beat of "Enjoy the Silence" gives you choirs over a pulsing beat, but the choir sounds more plastic than any dancy drum synths. it's paradoxically artificial and organic, reminding me a lot of (forgive me) 平沢進 [Susumu Hirasawa], who absolutely took influence from it.
these soundscapes impress a dark, brooding world of rusting Art Nouveau towers and a desert surrounding them. there hasn't been electricity in this city for years, but there is still light coming from the buildings, and vampire moth people clamoring around it, warming their antennae. so find a pretty young mothman. hug him tight. dance with him under the moon and spread your wings in its clammy light. savor the connection; no words, just your face reflected in his compound eye. love one another in your few nights of life.
The Byrds
4/5
a downright lovely psychedelic record, something for a rainy day indoors. i dunno, there's this part of me that feels as if i would really like this thing if i heard it as a kid, playing the CD on my boombox under my trundle bed. "Why" makes me wanna take the cushions off the couch and angle them on the frame before crawling in through the hole and hiding (i was a weird kid. i called this "playing tomb"). not everything's super uptempo, like "Everybody's Been Burned", but even that song appeals to the melancholic part of my childhood, days spent worried by trauma that i've taken care of just fine, thank you. Younger Than Yesterday is a definite recommend to anyone who likes 60's pop, which includes me.
David Crosby was crazy when he put "Mind Gardens" on here, and i'm crazier for actually liking it a lot.
Stevie Wonder
4/5
i really do wish i could love Stevie Wonder -- i really do like a lot of the songs he makes, but for some reason the songs that aren't huge hits that i grew up with just don't have the same hold on me as much as they do everyone else on Earth. i don't think this is through any fault of Stevie, this is a me problem. other people hear his music and hear some of the best stuff ever put to tape. i hear stuff like "You and I" and "Blame It on the Sun", and i think "wow that's a very nice sounding song" and just can't get any more from it.
i had this same problem with Songs in the Key of Life too, but this album is at least a little shorter and as such it wears me down much less. it's good, but it's just good to me, not an inch above that waterline. i feel... a bit more enthusiastic about "Superstition" and "I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)", but that just means to your average human being, listening to these songs is like entering some sort of nirvana-like state during their runtime. genuinely, who do i convene with in order to fix myself? God? the Devil? Stevie himself?
Keith Jarrett
5/5
there aren't many words to describe The Köln Concert or Keith Jarrett's creativity and passion on the piano. i just think you, the reader, should know three things:
1. this concert was recorded on a broken piano while Keith Jarrett was wearing a back brace, tired, hungry, and had spent hours driving with Manfred Eicher in his beater Renault cross country in bad weather. everything in the universe transpired to prevent this recording from happening and it still happened.
2. yeah, sometimes the moans are funny, but don't you wish you could do something as well and with as much of yourself as Jarrett does while playing piano? don't you want to be lost in the feeling?
3. the dual strokes that Jarrett suffered in the 2020's, thus paralyzing him and preventing him from ever playing piano again, is one of the greatest artistic tragedies in jazz and American art in general. we won't realize it until he's gone.
that's all.
X-Ray Spex
4/5
i'm not weird for immediately loving Poly Styrene's vocals, right? everyone treats it like this acquired taste, but i personally find her stylings to hit that sweet spot between grating but also pretty melodic and memorable? its a damn shame she didn't put out one more album in the prime of the UK Punk scene before everything started splintering, because she's got a lot of personality when doing vocals -- no wonder she sticks with a lot of people getting into punk.
of course, she isn't the only reason the record's great. i think putting saxophone on your punk rock record at a time when that was the cheeseball or dad rock instrument makes it stand out from every other 70's band with loud simple chords and shouty vocals. it makes each song go from a typical uptempo punk number to a barnburner, searing a melody across the guitars, almost like a second vocalist. it's great. i might need to come back to this one some time soon.
Slipknot
3/5
i dunno, i don't wanna be a stubborn fan but i really don't think Metallica-inspired groove metal is the right direction to "change your sound up" in; firstly because there's not really a shortage of those types of bands, and secondly because super fast, blasty drumming is really hard to listen to with mainstream loudness war production. it feels like Joey Jordinson is in my skull and just going wild on the snare, and not in a cool "im in your mind muahahaha" way, in a "i have a mosquito stuck in my ear please get some tweezers" way.
i mean of course I like "Psychosocial" and "Snuff", but even the latter song feels a bit ill-fitting. am i supposed to feel emotional about this song when it's being sung by a guy who looks like a sown-together homunculus with Target bull terrier eyes? im definitely not one of those people who doesn't connect with things with non-human faces, but i did also spend the previous 10 songs hearing this thing bellow like a wounded beast about the Iraq War and the record industry. it's a tad ridiculous.
Jeff Buckley
5/5
maybe its reputation is a bit inflated, but i can't deny that Grace has an incredible sense of melody and atmosphere, especially in regard to his falsettos. you could probably trace a whole taxonomy of alt-rockers who heard the chorus of "So Real" and built a whole sound off of it. it's impossible to say "i hate Jeff Buckley's voice" because no, you don't. Buckley's voice is one of the most agreeable things i've heard in my life and i'm sure most people who aren't even fans of Grace can agree the guy can sing. odds are you're just really sick of hearing "Hallelujah" everywhere.
i feel like the only thing holding me back from considering this an all timer is that every so often, you get a little hint of his cock rocky, KISS or Led Zeppelin roots here. being influenced by cock rock isn't necessarily bad -- i mean, Kurt Cobain thought Aerosmith's Rocks was on the same level as Swans or the Raincoats -- but on "Eternal Life", you can really taste that Jimmy Page drank out of this can. you can taste a bit of backwash on a few songs on the follow-up record if you don't believe me. still, a very minor complaint of a record that i think is an easy 9/10.
Jeff Buckley should not be dead. he should be selling out stadium shows and happily married with four kids, but the world proves too cruel to let a kindness go unpunished. Jeff Buckley should not be dead.
Frank Zappa
4/5
there's an article that the Hard Times did where they made up a story about Ten and how it was recorded, making outlandish claims and just sort of taking details from hit movies because the actual recording of Ten is so unremarkable and bog standard that actually telling people about it would put them to sleep. basically, Pearl Jam started after the death of Andrew Wood broke up Mother Love Bone. Eddie Vedder got his hands on a copy of the instrumental demo that Stone Gosser and Jeff Ament recorded, wrote some lyrics for the record after going surfing on the idyllic San Diego coast, and went to go to Seattle to start a band. They then recorded the album and released it. that's it.
ideally, a wholly fictional biopic about the recording of Hot Rats would go like this: Frank Zappa, exhausted by the high vocal strain and experimental material of Uncle Meat decided to strip back his recording process. However, recording was fraught with issues, as several members of the band disagreed with Zappa on his much tamer and less humorous tendencies, with particular contention on the lack of his iconic vocals on any part of the song. as a result, only two of the Mothers of Invention are on the record, necessitating its billing as a solo album. a revolving door of studio musicians butted heads with Zappa and his perfectionist attitudes, with Captain Beefheart and Zappa coming to blows several times. eventually, the album was released, with months upon months of hard work creating a modern classic. it proves that true art comes from strife and passion, both working against each other and intertwining.
how it was actually recorded: Frank Zappa wrote a bunch of songs, wanted to release them solo after the first incarnation of the Mothers of Invention broke up, and brought in a bunch of studio musicians to help, and when he was done recording after a month in the studio, he released the album. that's it. all the songs on the record are good and even people who aren't charmed by Zappa's obnoxious lure think it's great.
can you imagine that? going into a studio, thinking "i'm gonna make my best album ever with zero hitches or interesting facts or sordid tales behind it, then release it"? nothing happened, it all worked out, and everyone loves it.
honestly, i kind of hate him for it. i feel like i just watched the meanest girl at school push a kid in a wheelchair out of the path of a runaway bus. you always assume theyre capable of it, but also it just feels like an event God made manifest to piss you off in particular. fuck you Frank, fuck you and your really good album.
The Yardbirds
3/5
it's just blues rock. i honestly can't fault it for being that, even though i assumed from the cover that it would delve into weirder, more abstract territory. the closest we really get to that is "Turn Into Earth", really putting in this equal parts charismatic and kinda creepy energy. unfortunately, the rest of the album is just kinda ok blues rock with weak mixing (and yeah i mean the mono version. if that's still the wrong version then they had multiple chances to put the right mix that everyone likes on streaming). if that's your thing, i've got nothing against you, but i'm getting way too much beat and not nearly enough freak, if you get my drift.
Eminem
2/5
it might be a bit of a shock to tell you that, as a Colorado native, i've never seen a single episode of South Park. i hesitate it to call it my "culture", but it and the general cultural output of Matt Stone and Trey Parker have been forever linked to my state. hell, they had a South Park t-shirt ban at my elementary school. all this hullabaloo has been going on around me and now all of a sudden these guys have Tony Awards and they own Casa Bonita (and apparently the food's a lot better -- what a letdown).
honestly? i've never really felt the need to engage with it. partially because South Park is always going to be viewed through the lens of its edginess and how well that holds up as comedy (although arguably we're entering a golden age of saying slurs to be subversive) so there will always be stuff like Manbearpig that dates it to this continuous era of raised-eyebrow skepticism, and partially because it just seems exhausting. they had like, a COVID special a few years back, and the idea of Matt and Trey letting me know what they think about COVID using the weird PC principal character i hear tell is about as appetizing as biting my own finger off and swallowing it. i can do weird voices about things i don't like by myself, thank you. it seems exhausting to continue to subject yourself to that.
all that said, i am a bit surprised there's only two South Park references on The Marshall Mathers LP, a surprisingly serviceable Cartman impression and a pretty bad one of Mr. Garrison. most of the record's comedy stems from Eminem's reaction to becoming a breakout success and immediately deciding to take a shit on stage in front of everybody while flashing two middle fingers behind your back. in a sense, your investment in the LP is dependent on your investment of Eminem/Slim Shady/Marshall Mathers as a character, and his position as a provocateur in rap.
i, unfortunately, don't find this character compelling. i kind of feel like i'm just sort of listening to a guy try to stoke more media attention by saying loud, obnoxious things. its a put on, and i know its a put on, and it makes the whole thing come off as flat. i don't exactly hate it, but i'm a bit worn down by it. i feel like we only really get actual emotional development on two tracks: "Stan" and "Kim".
i don't really have much to say about "Stan". rickthelai says its one of the few times on the record where the persona drops and he actually considers the effect his music has on others. i do think it's still hiding under the persona of the performer, but i do understand that it's at least a little vulnerable. it's a classic for a reason, and it sounds great.
"Kim" is another story. yeah, i do think he's still "in character", but the character here betrays a deeper insecurity and anger behind the mask. he doesn't rap on this track so much as scream at himself and enact a melodramatic fantasy of enacting messy, manic revenge on his ex-wife. musically it's quite bad, with the chorus feeling really lazy, like someone trying to make a theme song for Dracula off the top of their head, but god the fucking verses. and it feels actually gross, not a fake horror movie gross about fucking a girl's slit throat or whatever. there's a sort of vent-like quality to it -- Marshall Mathers the real ass man would not have actually done this to his wife, but a part of him at least thought about it. that alone is a dark, personal thing that you'd have to be either crazy or stupid to show your friends, much less an entire record going public. that takes actual balls.
the next song is him rapping "you can suck my dick if you don't like my shit" over what sounds like Scheming Weasel by Kevin MacLeod. such is the tragedy of Eminem -- there is a real person behind those middle fingers, but if he could replace his head with a fist permanently flipping the bird, he would.
also, i don't care how much of an edgy asshole you are, putting a skit of Shaggy 2 Dope and Silent J double slurping your gay character's penis in stereo should be grounds for legal action. that's not cool, don't ever do that shit again.
Little Richard
4/5
it's odd how much difference a decade can make. in 1945, we won WWII, started building Levittowns, and were listening to Vera Lynn and Billie Holiday. that's not to say wild, swinging music hadn't existed beforehand, but it's not the sound you hear when you see a sailor making out with some random woman in the middle of Times Square. then, in ten years, before your kids are even old enough to understand what sex is, something Happens. call it the rise of popular music that wasn't exclusively white, call it the first true inkling of mass counterculture, call it whatever -- a thing happened to make Little Richard exist and put out "Tutti Frutti" in 1955.
you can picture the troubled vet whose first exposure to music in the months after Normandy was probably a V-disc of slow torch song big band jazz that was thrown in the ocean after the war ended walking into the wrong club, where Little Richard happens to be playing. i can. but there is nothing i can do to understand how the man felt hearing this man, in a violent, sweaty rage against his piano, scream a song that is ostensibly about anal sex. was it disgust? shock? elation? arousal? some yet-unidentified fifth thing?
another thing that happened in ten years -- the birth of the 33 and 1/3rd RPM record and our current concept of the album as it stands. i think we're a bit far from what we consider a "modern" album, but honestly this thing feels pretty tight and well structured for what amounts to a simple collection of songs. there's your high energy rocking numbers like "Ready Teddy" right before slower NOLA RnB numbers like "Baby", so it's not all high octane piano and sax solos for 27 minutes straight. as crazy as it seems, even Little Richard needs a breath in between blazes of energy.
Super Furry Animals
5/5
"Rings Around the World" sounds like a sort of sibling album to Quebec, and no, it's not just because both albums feature cumming in someone's mouth (although it's pretty similar lurid ground).
really, i think it's because both albums feel like reactions to the end of the Big Decade of the Future, the time when anything felt possible, before slowly realizing that there are limits to boundless optimism and cynicism. "Quebec" does this musically, keeping the goofiness in spots while also evolving into something more musically mature than you would normally get from Ween; you could argue they toned it down. i've only sort of heard another album from Super Furry Animals, Radiator, and it's got its moments of being silly, but never crude and rude like Ween are. really, i think they may have gotten weirder over time, with offbeat trip-hop and techno interludes in between glam and and straightforward 60's pop appreciation. its uplifting, manic starchild music and i loved almost every second of it.
where i am it's January 14th, 2025. in six days, Donald Trump serves a non-consecutive term as President in an increasingly cruel and reactionary United States following a piss poor emergency campaign led by the faltering Democratic Party. just today, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was arrested for an attempted coup that he performed because he was "lonely". two and a half decades ago, George Bush stole an election from Al Gore because the state his votes were contested in had the former's brother as governor.
that last political event is the environment that "Rings Around the World" found itself released in, an age hit by the internet revolution and a brave new future for television, movies, and even video games. now the internet is run by fascist ghoul billionaires, and our the main media of planet Earth is provocateurs on Kick showering the Wal-Mart produce in wasp spray, and Mr. Beast. the albums of the 2000's like this and "Quebec" were the last hug out the door before we faced the cruelty of the coming future, much as people had been hugged in 2024 by Imaginal Disk or Diamond Jubilee or The New Sound -- the weird eventually gives way to sobering reality. it always has.
it is easy to believe that we are slipping into dark times, or that we're living the new dark age now, but the truth is found in the album sitting between your bong and your record player, as per an old, wise doorman outside Abbey Road Studios:
"Matter of fact, it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun."
Tracy Chapman
4/5
in the age of G'n'R and the fall of Communism, Tracy Chapman made a folksy alt-rock album about the failings of the American Dream and materialism, and it sold millions of copies. maybe that success is due to the breakout success of "Fast Car", but that song is pretty outwardly political too -- it's a female-focused portrait of being let down by every man in your life as they drink their lives away, something that no fast car to the city can take you away from if you let it follow you. in my opinion, it's the last great American folk song, and everything after is pure revivalism.
nobody has enough money in Chapman's songs, they're all starving or ignored or hurt, and it feels a little refreshing that it became popular in the decade of Me, even if by accident. there's a bit of a reggae misfire on "She's Got Her Ticket", but the rest of the album is worth a thrift shop salvage for deep cuts like ""For My Lover" and "Across the Lines". it's a perfect album for a day where you feel kinda bad but not miserable, you know? everything is overcast and the world's getting to you through the phone screen -- it's not gonna erase those things, but you'll at least feel a bit better equipped to deal with it.
Ryan Adams
3/5
they used to play Ryan Adams on my favorite radio station, 105.5 The Colorado Sound. they stopped one day, i found out why, and now you spend every lovelorn fingerpick session with Mr. Adams thinking "serves you right, you piece of shit". so pre-emptively -- fuck you, Ryan. fuck your boring cover albums and your current Spotify-only career. i hope you punched a hole in your wall after you saw boygenius get huge in the last couple years while you released yet another album without a blue link on Wikipedia.
now, i'm not gonna be talking about what he did or did not do, or anything like that, but learning that really does make it gratingly apparent how much of his music takes the form of the torch song, holding out hope for lost loves. of course, he's already setting himself up for failure by casting himself as the floppy-haired wretch who is always high and always getting left behind. it regrettably comes off as one note by the time the back third of the album rolls around, really only providing depth to this persona in moments of cruelty and spite like "Come Pick Me Up". that song actually feels cathartic, feels ugly. this is the sound of someone with the maturity to have their ex come back to them and to tell them "no, fuck off". by the time the album's moribund, i'm just kind of tired of it all and wondering if you could count this as a full listen if you stopped after that song.
unfortunately, the hallmark of a mature artist is often pretty apparent by their frequency of releases. Ryan Adams has about 32 albums and counting in 25 years. it feels a bit like the high effort version of Viper releasing five albums a month to game the algorithm. like, cmon, Ryan. how many of these are just demos you polished up of you doing the same thing you're doing here? where's the quality control? i may give Gold or Love Is Hell a chance at some point, but i wouldn't be caught dead listening to Blood on the Tracks (Ryan's Version).
Willie Nelson
5/5
i cannot tell you how much i respect Willie Nelson for producing an incredibly stripped back concept album about actually regretting murdering your cheating wife in the same year as CW McCall's Convoy / Long Lonesome Road. i'd heard "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" a bit back, and i thought it was alright. then i found out "oh no it's twice as heartbreaking in context" and now i don't know if i can even listen to it in isolation anymore -- i went from being slightly entertained to realizing that listening to it without hearing the previous song is almost sacrilege.
god, what a great album. what a sad album. what a human thing in the age of the overdub and Muppet guest star singalong backup vocals. there are probably grizzled boomers out there who are holding back tears by the end of this record, and i don't blame them. if you've got a friend who doesn't like country, show them this album and then, i dunno, a Dolly Parton album too. and "Convoy" if you feel like an asshole.
Sheryl Crow
3/5
Sheryl Crow's debut is weird, but not in an obvious way. i feel like it has a quality to it of "trying everything", doing as many agreeable sounds as possible to try and get A Thing to stick. i start the album and "Run, Baby, Run" gobsmacks me, hitting me with this stale whiff of CMT and the radio at the local GreatClips. it's one thing opening your album with a ballad, it's another making it five minutes long. then it gets followed up by the much better "Leaving Las Vegas". there's roots rock, there's five minute harmonized folk ballads like Alison Krauss, and there's an inexplicable melding of country, rap, and the "We Didn't Start the Fire" method of protest song where you're just sort of listing stuff. all of it feels like it's in the wrong place, next to the wrong songs, and you could probably spend hours finding an order in which it makes sense but you'll still probably have a few pieces that won't fit. maybe you could call this aspect of the record eclectic, but i just think it's messy. charming, but still messy.
with it hitting that cornball middle point between 70's country rock and disco, "All I Wanna Do" becoming a smash hit simultaneously feels like it was always meant to be and like a complete accident. they released four singles from this beforehand and that was what made No. 2 on the Billboard 100. a disco country song about talking with a drunk guy at a bar provided actual competition to "I'll Make Love to You". wild.
Ella Fitzgerald
4/5
it's odd getting this album as your daily, partially because of its length, partially because of its content, but mostly because this just isn't an album you're supposed to spend your full attention on. it's archival stuff, not something for careful listening. as a result, i listened to most of it while writing stuff and getting groceries at Wal-Mart. somehow, i feel like i didn't lose anything in the process -- i still was able to enjoy how beautiful Ella sounded and also grew an appreciation for how the Gershwins constructed their pop music, how the lyrics add a sort of cultural context to what would otherwise be timeless pop. is it essential? i don't really think so, but i think there's value in three hours of old Tin Pan Alley tunes sung beautifully and performed like classical music. you could put this thing on shuffle every time you take a walk and it'd always be a very nice walk, no matter how cold and dreary.
B.B. King
4/5
i spent my whole life being told that BB King was a revolutionary guitar player, so color me surprised when i finally get around to listening to his music, he spends much more time singing than soloing. this is moreso an album for saxophone freaks than it is for blues guitar freaks, and the sax work is (for the most part) good and not annoying. i just feel a little disappointed. i knew the name of BB King's guitar at age eight and you're telling me he isn't playing it the whole time? dang.
however, what makes me think the album's more than just average is the genius idea to record the effect that King had on the audience, setting us in the crowd in the front row instead of recording from the stage. people are going insane whenever he sings and/or plays, and at times it feels like i'm actually there that November night in Chicago. the energy is, if you excuse my pun, electric. i feel like my lack of experience in the blues means i don't get as much from these songs as someone better versed in the genre does, but i still greatly appreciate the presence this has in the canon.
although what the fuck are you talking about on "Worry, Worry", BB? what do you mean "she won't let you catch her next time"?
Kelela
5/5
there's nothing i love more than a pop record drawing on the burgeoning electronic sound of the era. Ray of Light takes influence from german trance and trip hop, Speak for Yourself saw Imogen Heap managing to get Jeff Beck from the 70's to absolutely shred on a glitch pop track, and all i have to say is the word Vespertine for you to get the meaning. hell, even in the world of R&B, you see stuff like Transient and One Touch popping up, bringing a taste of the dancefloor to the world dominated by the Neptunes and Timbaland's less-EDM inspired (but no less forward thinking and off-the-wall) production styles. the dance music of today, however, sounds a lot different. and can seem scarier. the bass has no limit, and neither does the percussion.
Take Me Apart feels like one of those aforementioned records, but for music too weird to really be considered something you can dance to. UK bass is a hard genre to pin down, and you could argue it's not even really a genre, serving more as a production style indebted to dubstep, future garage, and the ever invaluable wonky. hell, things like PC Music and the epic collage of Elysia Crampton probably at least take some inspiration from the netweirdos of the scene, a new digital sound pulsing like a feeling through your headphones rather than a set of samples and/or MIDI-controlled pianos. it sounds like the FUTURE, goddammit. to UK bass, the future is dark, sleek, and growling.
Kelela wields these sounds with the utmost confidence, melding her voice into it in an almost ghostly manner, always hitting beautiful hooks or soaring highs with her voice, and sometimes dying down to a whisper, almost centimeters away from the microphone and the inside of your brain. for some reason, the sound of the future isn't sinister to me here as it would be on, say, Faith in Strangers or even In Colour. it's dark and sleek, sure, but it's like velvet or a rabbit's fur instead of a cold, unfeeling car or the motion smoothing on your uncle's new TV. i get the feeling that there is no theatrical routine of life maintained beneath the surface -- seemingly, there is life.
but i'm not 100% sure.
in a way, the title serves as instructions. "Take Me Apart". i will let you find out for yourself.
Kraftwerk
4/5
its odd to have Kraftwerk's legacy exist in the popular consciousness as dorky, intellectual music because they honestly don't really require much thought or tolerance for weirdness to enjoy. their melodies are simple, digestible, not too chaotic or similar to the classical music that so much electronica of the time sought to emulate. they called themselves industrial folk music, and honestly, if there's anything that feels like someone doing a fun guitar jam circle, it's probably "Autobahn" -- just replace the guitar with a cool modular synthesizer. i do feel like the back half can get a bit annoying, but at times it serves as the perfect comedown for a record that spends over half its runtime barreling down the highway as fast as it can go. plus, "Morgenspaizergang" is a really pretty way to end the whole thing.
Megadeth
5/5
i must admit: i have grown to love Dave Mustaine's ridiculous voice. first off, i've listened to people who have unconventional voices sing before and liked it as much as Dave's vocals if not more, so why should he get docked points for sounding like a cartoon rat? he can't help it!
that quality aside, i don't think there's a single bad or boring riff on the record -- everything feels right, with each song taking Mustaine and Friedman's solos in a new bold direction. i do wish that the lyrics were a bit less simple, but most people don't really come to thrash metal for nuanced discussions of authoritarianism in the current decade, do they?
i don't really have much else to say. Rust in Peace probably deserves the hype.
Amy Winehouse
5/5
i dunno. it's hard to look at something so incredible and great marred by the tragedy of reality. i can't be objective. you can't separate what the songs are about from what ended up hurting her the most; it's what they're about. like, i don't really care whatsoever about British Music Press Squabble, but Amy Winehouse was bigger than NME and The Sun; people cared about her here. even my mom, who relished in celebrity gossip in the days of TMZ on DVR, who saw celebrities as morons with too much money and hypocritical drug habits, was noticeably upset when she died. she wasn't surprised. nobody really was. i guess we all were just hoping she'd pull through.
i don't think i hate a single song on Back to Black. it has weak songs, yeah, but they're weak in comparison to the title track, or "You Know I'm No Good" or "Tears Dry on Their Own". it's unfair competition. that's like putting a regular guy who could lift you up above his head and throw you across the gym against, like, a Greek god. you're putting a mortal against an immortal in this instance, but the mortal could probably wipe the floor with any of his fellow Homo sapiens and not even break a sweat. you can't fault a human being for having bones and blood and physical limitations. i don't think there is a single thing wrong with the album. it all works, and everything that doesn't work probably comes down to preference. i LIKE that her voice clips in the production: it makes it sound dirtier, more raw and off-the-cuff. it clashes against the strings and the world's tightest horn section, like flashes of lightning in a swirling, cloudy sky. and even if i didn't like that sound, the songs are there. i think you gotta try to hate Back to Black. like, put the hours in.
that's not to say you couldn't have a good reason to hate the thing. you could be a cynic. you could say that it set us up for the brutal musical junta of Meghan Trainor, and that the bawdiness of a British outsider singing swears over one of the most timeless slices of soul in American history borders on sacrilege. however, i don't think she saw it that way. i think she (and Mark Ronson) saw it as a combination of what soul was at the time and what it was when it began. would The Supremes have sung about a lost lover with the words "kept his dick wet / with the same old safe bet" had the culture been more permissive? who knows. i'd like to think that if airplay were no object, we'd have a lot of Motown singles where the gist and/or lyrics of the song are "Berry Gordy, go fuck yourself".
Back to Black is a heartbreaker, a love letter, a dirty joke told between drunk friends, and an occasional diary, a message from one person hurting to the millions after. you can't live in the past. but maybe it can keep you warm for a little while.
Flamin' Groovies
4/5
this sounds like a wild metaphor, but this record feels like the platonic ideal of a summer camp. it's fun, super active, a bit embarrassingly folksy, and overall feels like you're just having a good time in the woods with a bunch of dudes playing their instruments. i'm not really a fan of 70's blues rock revival, and parts of side B indicate some influence from the more noxious Stones tunes of the era, but i'd argue side A is flawless if you like loud, freewheelin' garage rock. i've only known the Groovies from "Shake Some Action", and i don't think this record displays any range from that first impression, but this casts them as true acolytes of the rock 'n' roll cult, not just fanboys. can you really call it revivalism if the sounds you're playing were just barely developed less than a decade ago? that's not nostalgia, that's stubbornness, which i respect just a bit more.
also what a cool guitar. my dream is to find a Dan Armstrong Ampeg just hanging out in someone's garage for $200. my entire life would change if that happened.
Jane's Addiction
3/5
Grunge was coming, like Captain Trips, and to the nascent funk rock and metal bands gaining attention, the best course of action was to lay down on the lawn and cough yourself to death. sure, there were a few holdouts -- Primus carried on like genetic freaks, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers basically survived by jumping right before the elevator hit the ground -- but most people who specialized in That Sound were better off spending their last few days with their loved ones before going to their rooms and shuffling off.
i hesitate to call Jane's Addiction a victim; rather, i consider them more a paranoid prepper, a modern day Joseph Smith Jr., frantically writing down their manifesto of dogma and prophecies before detonating their suicide vest during a no-knock raid. somehow, that manifesto made its way out of that gore-soaked basement, and you can find traces of its influence in other bands that were skeptical of the coming tide of mopey guys in flannel. hell, it might have even been a hit with a few of those guys -- i think Vedder might have brought a bit of that energy with him from the California coast. however, i think the work is most popular among the more presentable bands, like Spin Doctors or Blind Melon.
maybe you can roll your eyes at the first half of the album, say that it's just your regular hard rock evangelizing that doesn't really go anywhere and sounds way too 1990 for its own good. the four tracks after feel like accidentally hitting a communion with God, probably even making you ask "wait, they're a... good band?"
i would say yes. Jane's Addiction can be a good band when they wanna be. and you're not a poser for liking them. ok, well, maybe you're a little bit of a poser. get over yourself.
Leonard Cohen
5/5
could there be American Chanson? a genre that i've always wanted to get into but with a clear barrier for entry -- knowing how to speak French -- i find myself unable to get what other people (read: the French) do from the style. chanson is more than just a personality singing alone, it's someone singing truths from themselves, affecting the audience not just in sound but in meaning. i want to be affected, i want to feel that tear in my soul. it's just hidden behind a language that i never bothered to learn the rules of.
so i need to settle for American chanson. the closest you can get to that, as far as i know, is Leonard Cohen. i've heard his slicker, almost parodically synthetic work on I'm Your Man and liked it. here, we find ourselves at the tonal opposite, with "tenderness" being the word in mind here. the sparseness of the arrangements do away with the dramatic and end up leaving me feeling something at the end of each song. raw emotion delivered slowly and beautifully. i have a beat up copy of this, rescued from the ARC Thrift Store in Fort Collins, and i'm glad its with me, even if it's been chewed by a dog and forgotten. feels appropriate.
i don't care if he was yours to begin with, Canada. you can't take him from us. he made these songs in New York. he's our boy.
SZA
4/5
Ctrl starts off rough (Travis Scott can make anything boring, i swear), but eventually improves into something a bit more mature and less one-note over time. i still don't feel like i'm "in love" with the record -- any themes of control as relayed to SZA via her mom feel scattershot and almost incidental -- but i can understand why people gave so much love and attention to her career at the time. it's hard picking out the best track cause of how united the album is in its sound, but let's be real, the answer's probably Drew Barrymore.
wasn't aware pussy had so many dimensions before "Doves in the Wind". i kind of miss the time before i learned, about an hour ago.
Iron Maiden
4/5
i'm not totally blown away by Bruce Dickinson's vocals -- they're about as good as Paul Di'Anno's but nowhere near the "greatest of all time" -- but god, this record really goes. i know people give "Gangland" and "Invaders" shit, but honestly i think it's a great idea to have big, stupid balls-to-the-walls biker themes right before your dramatic last track or starting the whole thing off. that's what your in for the whole time: full speed, no brains, all gas, no brakes. solid shit. you're never not moving, never not going from one song to the next at full speed with an angel from hell shrieking at your backside. everything's either super silly, super dramatic, or based off of a movie that someone in the band saw -- it's not rocket surgery. putting an interpolation of "When The Saints Go Marching In" about your satanic dream is some Solid C+ Student shit and i love it. never change, Maiden.
i do, however, kind of hate "22, Acacia Avenue". like, you're gonna try to make yourself seem cool by visiting a prostitute at her house and then spend the end of the song telling her she's thrown her life away? motherfucker, you paid to be here. make up your mind.
Killing Joke
5/5
i'm thinking of a band named Killing Joke and their self-titled album featuring a bunch of children crawling over ruins on the cover. i am picturing a dour, humorless release with a vocalist who sounds like Mark E. Smith from the fall. there is an annoying sound collage on it and despite being only 30 minutes or so, it feels ten minutes too long. it is entirely popular with John Peel fans who had the worst day of their lives when Steve Albini died.
i am listening Killing Joke's self titled album. it is the most fun i have ever had listening to a dismal record about how everything's fucked and man is evil. "Requiem" rips. "The Wait" rips. "Complications" and "Bloodsport" rip -- everything rips. i love it. i am now probably gonna check out the rest of their music because this was unbelievably good. don't judge a book by it's cover. listen to an album with an increasingly worrying genre tag; you might just be surprised.
Supertramp
4/5
it made sense to me that Supertramp were biggest in Canada; there's something so hearty and melodic about their brand of prog that feels right for the area. i'm sure these songs aren't easy to play, but it honestly does make me want to sing along or play bass to it -- even if they aren't as cheery as the tracks i've heard off of Breakfast in America. honestly, a lot of the album sounds bitter and melancholic, like the feeling of a shrug and lean forward. you could call this a spiritual debut, but if you told me this was the band's last album, i'd believe you. it has that "I'm Not Marching Anymore Energy"; somehow, the band just got sunnier with each release.
Jerry Lee Lewis
2/5
y'know, i was really promised that he was wild. insane. a madman who set fire to his piano. and for the time, i'm sure he was, but it just isn't... CRAZY enough for me. the sound is cool, yeah, but i was sold on this being a crime scene of a record. i wanted something like Love Me / Whisper Your Love, and i was naive enough to expect something like that. instead i got... rock standards played kinda loud to a bunch of horny Germans. i'm glad they're having fun.
not to beat a dead horse, but you know that video Pad Chennington did of the "MOST BRUTAL ALBUM OF ALL TIME" and the thumbnail was WLFGRL? if YouTube was around in the 60's, the thumbnail to that video would include this album instead.
Queen
4/5
nothing beats "Brighton Rock". i'm sorry -- i love "Killer Queen", it's an incredible song, but it's an absolutely horrible way to explain what the fuck Queen is to your friend from under a really heavy rock or outer space. their best songs are theatric, but they also rock the fuck out, and you could argue they don't get bigger on either than on "Brighton Rock". like, the rest of the album's fine. "Stone Cold Crazy" is great and whatever and they've got a few good proggy bits on the LP, and hell, the Roger track is pretty good, but you're not gonna get any better than "Brighton Rock"; it's impossible. for five minutes, everything was perfect, the balance was right in the universe.
Van Halen
3/5
a bit back i saw a tweet calling Black Sabbath impressive given the fact that its frontman is and always has been barely sapient. personally, i find it incredibly funny to consider Ozzy Osbourne a type of kobold who would be happiest sorting moss in a cave if he and a guy missing part of his finger hadn't invented heavy metal. in this sense, i consider Eddie Van Halen to be the opposite: someone too smart and talented for their own good inventing the 1980's with insane, Mozart-like talent despite not being able to read music. he didn't invent tapping, but he did it well enough to name it "tapping" in the first place, and i think that's basically enough to drive someone who's just a cut under him crazy. the rest of the band is making good time catching up to Eddie, but they're still not gonna win the race. he's basically a lap ahead of them at all times, cylinders blazing.
of course, that doesn't mean that Van Halen is entirely my cup of tea. they did pretty much invent what glam metal was gonna sound like until its death, and i feel like that sort of colors the whole thing an unfortunate shade of stupid. still, i can't blame Van Halen for that -- i blame the wannabes for running the sound into the ground. you can pick out any of the Def Leppards or Guns N Roses and find the DNA, but none of them are smart enough to put the world's then-most technical and insane solo right before a cover of the prototypical "song so easy to come up with you could write it by accident if you've never played a guitar before" track.
Miriam Makeba
4/5
i had zero idea what marabi was before being given this to listen to, so i am not entirely sure how regionally accurate the bullshit 50's Christmas Choir on "Suliram" are, but mostly the first half of the album is pretty good -- Xhosa is such an interesting language to me, and to sing it well is a real talent. to think, there are probably people who bought this not even knowing Xhosa or Zulu were languages. Hell, they might not have even known South Africa was a country; they might have just assumed it was the south of Africa. This is probably one of the few times where the wall of text plastered to the back of a record actually served a purpose other than explaining to you what exactly a "folk music" or "album" was.
i dunno what Charles Coleman finds so funny about the song he's on, but i somewhat understand why he's not on that many albums. keep it together, man. it's not that funny.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5/5
Nick Cave invents goth country and considers it an abject failure. that's the type of guy you're dealing with -- in a relentless struggle with Neil Young's producer of some 20+ years, he invents a genre that seems like a no-brainer when you consider it (melding the godliness of country with the creepiness of post-punk, either by lyric or sound) and then when asked a few decades later says "oh yeah that record kinda disappoints me".
something haunts "Henry's Dream", not some supernatural spirit or ideology, but rather this inescapable misery of the open road. the bass hums like a red neon sign, flickering light in the shampe of a smiling cowboy on the empty horizon. Nick wails every lyric like he's screaming for his supper of whiskey in the last bar that'll serve him, offering tales to anyone willing to spare a couple of quarters. we tour America like jittering flies on a supine coyote, too old to keep going down the road.
why do childhood cancer funds always name themselves [so and so]'s Dream? do you think your son would have wanted to be the poster boy of dying children? what would it be like for a miracle from God to happen and there still being a cancer foundation named after you? how would it feel to be dead to every stranger but yourself?
FKA twigs
4/5
i don't think i've ever met anyone who expressed their sexual and emotional needs through harrowing dubstep sound palettes before, but it's not like i'm gonna complain. there are worse ways to do it -- power electronics, Steven Segal patois, no third example -- and as much as i like R'n'B, i think this barely counts as something connected to that genre. FKA twigs has much more in common with Björk in their contortion of dance music and unconventional electronic sounds to work for them as pop rather than making a pop song into something you can dance to. i feel like her fursona would be a pillbug, something shiny on the outside but spindly and organic on the inside.
Leonard Cohen
3/5
i will admit that the first track is pretty damn good; it sounds like he's facing off against God, not in battle or fitful rage, but in a staring contest. he knows he's gonna blink, but he's going down staring him into his soul. the whole thing has a great build up to it and it's definitely one of my favorite Leonard Cohen tracks. unfortunately, i just don't think the rest of the album's up to snuff. often, i feel like the poetry treads old ground, just with the added specter of death rustling through the tracks. i really wish i liked this a little more, but it's just both dwarfed by what kicks the album off and is underwhelming at so many spots after. it's just kind of a shame -- it started off so well.
Solange
5/5
i feel wholly unqualified to talk about the themes and meanings of this album, but i can evaluate three things about it:
1) this thing sounds immaculate. perfect sound to the whole thing, from the drums and the vocal layers to all the little touches on piano and synth and bass.
2) it feels like the right length -- short enough to feel concise but just long enough to feel like it's elaborating on a theme, with the interludes actually making a point about race and advantage in between the songs to give them more context.
3) the whole thing feels human. it's hard to explain how achingly sad it is to hear "Cranes in the Sky" in any context -- if you're gonna listen to one song from this thing after 2016, it would probably be this.
it's impactful, it's important, and someone smarter than me would do a better job explaining and adding context to the themes than my white hipster ass. no words.
CHIC
4/5
recently i've been thinking about expensive music -- stuff that sounds expensive, like it was high grade, buffalo mozzarella and gold leaf in the metro area. Invincible cost 30 million of Epic's own money to make, but i couldn't tell you if any of those songs sounded like they cost a couple million to make. Risque has the opposite problem -- i don't know how much "Will You Cry (When You Hear This Song)" cost to make, but i can definitely tell it was a lot more than i make in a year. there's something so lush about it, like there's a party going on but you should really put down a coaster cause that's mahogany it's sitting on.
forgive me, but it kinda feels a bit Weimar to me. decadence, the cabaret and celebration during the rise of reactionary conservativism in the US and UK (and yes, the death of disco). it's all so bittersweet -- you could fault it for being romantic or frivolous, but at least some point good times were had. it's literally the name of the first track, after all.
The Who
2/5
i don't get "Tommy". not for lack of trying, really; i understand the spiritual connection the music has and the connection it shares with Pete Townshend's experiences, but the unfortunate fact is that none of this actually helps me understand the "opera" part of the world's first self-billed "Rock Opera".
like, maybe the narrative of The Wall falls apart by the end with "The Trial", but things happen for reasons in that album, there is a legitimate cause for the actions and progression of the album's story. Pink is a rock star whose father died in the war, his mother smothered him as a child, and worst of all, he attended British school in the mid 20th century. as a result, he does copious amounts of drugs in order to return to any sort of comfort and lashes out at the world by becoming a rock star. this leads to him overinflating his own ego by imagining himself as the person who took his father's life and led him down this path -- his very own Adolf Hitler. there are reasons as to why Pink does these things.
i actually don't know why Tommy does anything in this album. he becomes deaf blind and dumb because he witnesses his dad murder his mom's lover (which isn't really made clear in the lyrics, it's probably clearer in the liner notes); then his parents just kind of turn into Timmy's mom and dad in "the Fairly Odd Parents" and leave him to get tortured by his cousin and molested by his uncle. then he gets into pinball because uh, he got it for Christmas? he then starts a new religious movement when looking in a mirror cures his symptoms. it suffers from being both way too unclear in many parts but also way too on the nose in many other parts. said evil uncle and cousin, his first doctor's acid casualty wife, and the doctor who actually cures him get introductory songs, but Tommy's rise to fame is almost incidental compared to his time as a 12 year old new religious leader. it's confusing.
i could overlook this if i was enchanted by the Who's musical capabilities, but unfortunately i find the performances here weak. i can hardly reconcile this being the same band behind "I Can See for Miles" or "Baba O'Riley", because everything here feels way too light for what should be a freaky, challenging record. the guitars should roar; instead, they buzz under the radar compared to the lyrics, which both center stage and struggle to be understood. it's so easy to trace all of the rock opera genre's sins to "Tommy", taking the musical and the concept album and merging the worst parts of both instead of focusing on the possibilities that both offer. it's not awful, but god, i'd rather just watch the episode of Clone High that riffs on this and The Wall.
Bauhaus
3/5
stupid confession: i like this album more when it's trying to be Talking Heads than it is trying to be Joy Division. that's not to say i don't love Bauhaus being goth, but for me, the vocals are mixed way too flat for me to get the same exhiliration i feel listening to "Bela Lugosi's Dead" or "Dark Entries". why this is the only Bauhaus album on the list is beyond me -- it's like saying the only Bob Dylan album you need to listen to is Nashville Skyline. it's not a wrong choice per se, just an odd one.
Big Star
4/5
some records are best defined by their coherence, how well everything fits together into an understandable package. this couldn't be further from the truth for "3rd" by Big Star. arguably, it's not even finished, only released initially as a last ditch attempt to keep the band together as it was in the process of dissolving, it was mastered and put out as a white label in 1975; at that point neither Alex Chilton nor Jody Stephens were interested in doing a proper release because absolutely no heads or tails could be made of all the tracks made for the project. three years later, PVC Records, a TVT-type sketchy ass label bought the songs and put out a record titled "3rd". the actual thing didn't even have a proper name; "Sisters Lovers" (as seen on the Rykodisc re-release) was probably a joke that they used as a placeholder name when they were actually gonna release it. numerous guttersnipe reissue labels managed to get ahold of the rights and put it together in a some other order than the original, with a million different covers and a million different flows. as a result, "3rd" is not so much a record by Big Star than it is a vinyl playlist of a forgotten dream. this is not an album, it's a concept. it's a bit like Smile.
i say a bit like SMiLE because its ephemerality is its sole shared quality. SMiLE may have "Fire" and "Surf's Up", but there's still rollicking good time tracks like "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains". there is nothing fun or free wheeling on "3rd" -- emotions range from melancholy to downright suicidal. it makes sense; contextually, the album is a document of a artistic partnership slowly collapsing. the song about little baby Jesus feels less joyful and more manic, like a sobbing breakdown during Christmas. "O, Dana" could be the album's "rocker", but it ends with the sound of the orchestra deflating, like the singer just sort of gave up on Dana and went home. "Holocaust" feels like if someone tried to make a version of Gloomy Sunday (The Famous Hungarian Suicide Song) / I'm in a Low Down Groove that actually made you want to kill yourself -- it's a song with the power to ruin your day. even the ending song, what could be be seen as a bittersweet farewell lyrically, has some snark underneath the first three words. "thank youuu, frrrriends." nothing was made possible, just made able to be moved on from. dry your eyes, blow your nose, and walk out.
it's not my favorite Big Star "album" -- both because i prefer Radio City and because i can hardly call it an album -- but there are moments where i can see why it would be someone's favorite Big Star thing. it's the sound of a beautiful mansion on the coast burning down, as it was always meant to. it can't be helped.
Einstürzende Neubauten
4/5
i entirely thought the appeal of early industrial was that it was evil music that also sounded like it was coming directly from a Casiotone that Satan had been using as a personal fleshlight for the past ten hours. as a result, i enjoyed it in the same way i enjoy smooth jazz -- a product of its limitations, trying to scare you, but ending up more spooky than actually scary. i'm sorry, but i think it took a bit of technological progress to make the synthetic sufficiently frightening.
as a result, "Kollaps" feels out of place. this thing fucking scares me. people who ding it because it's hard to listen to and abrasive: have you considered that maybe that's the point?
Beastie Boys
4/5
i really do hate the whole "you can't make Blazing Saddles today" thing people do, because it's both true (you don't really need to make fun of cowboy movies anymore) but for the wrong reasons (Evil Woke Liberals). however, i say this will all of my heart: you cannot go to Capitol Records, tell them "hey, I want to make a record with these new producers just starting out using 100 samples" and expect them to just let you do it. nowadays they'd ask questions like "do you know how much money it would cost to clear all of that" and "i don't trust these guys, why don't we go with Rick Rubin" and "who the hell do you think you are?"
everything just feels so fun and creative here, from the production to the flows (a lot of the bars goof around, but don't fully lean into novelty), and the cover even reflects that. it's messy, colorful, a little grimy, but not scary. just a fun time.
Pink Floyd
3/5
there's nothing i hate worse than the word "pretentious". "i think this thing means less than you do" is a nothing criticism; if you stick your head in the sand and pretend that what is being said doesn't matter, then anything can be pretentious. i think "The Wall", as a work of art, has a lot to say about fame, about how evil begets evil, and about the problems that Waters was going through at the time. i understand this as an honest attempt to self-critique. key word: attempt.
however, i will admit: i think it falls short. the album betrays a bit of limited self-awareness from Waters. he gets the gist of a lot of his issues with women and his past trauma and all the causes for his issues, but it's that sort of thing that a lot of people who are fucking up in their lives do where they can directly say exactly what's wrong with them, but lack the ability, means, or drive to actually fix these issues. the women in his life are smothering mothers or thoughtless floozies who cheat on him, the fans push him to become racist and cruel in his personal world, his agent pumps him full of drugs and television, and it's never his fault. its because he's being punished for being an artiste, having feelings, being human. he's not a prick, it's the world that made him a prick and a misogynist and a Nazi. everyone's so mean to me. as an avatar of Roger Waters, Pink's excuse is that he's just a pushcart of a human being, acting out in response instead of making choices.
in a shocking parallel, "The Wall" has a lot in common with... Nostalgia Critic's The Wall. Both works betray a lack of emotional maturity that keeps either creator from actually understanding the subject of the work. Roger Waters doesn't understand himself, The Nostalgia Critic doesn't understand "The Wall". For Roger, it's that self-pity isn't the same as self-awareness, and "The Trial" still sees him portraying himself as a consequence of a society that spit him out, rather than a person with some modicum of control over his actions -- he cuts the camera and brings us back to the beginning before we ever understand what "tearing down the wall" means for Pink/Roger. is he just gonna make the same mistakes all over again? was all the self-pity and punishment for nothing? (knowing Roger Waters' following output, probably?) because of how shallow Roger's self-critique is, the ending's lack of closure doesn't raise questions, it just disappoints.
for Doug, it's that "The Wall" isn't actually fucking pretentious, you just didn't engage with it on its own terms. dumbass.
still, apart from this, i think The Wall is much better than i gave it credit for. it's got some seriously great moments -- "Mother", "Another Brick in the Wall 2", "Hey You", "Vera", "Comfortably Numb", "Run Like Hell" -- and the production is stellar. honestly, as someone who is being fairly critical of the album, don't trust anyone who outwardly hates "The Wall". strip away the thematic failings, and it's still a pretty good rock album. it tried to do something deep and (reasonably) introspective, and although in many respects it fell short, a rock musician in the late 70's stopping and asking themselves "why am i like this" is always appreciated. and the cool solos. the solos are much appreciated.
Lucinda Williams
5/5
earlier i said you should use Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger to introduce your friend to country. i think that if that doesn't work, you should invariably use "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road". Lucinda isn't the most energetic or impressive singer in country, you might even hate her voice, but she's got the passion. in my opinion, passion's what matters in the genre. you can say whatever you want, sure, tell what ever story you have in your head, but do you mean it with your heart? i get the feeling Lucinda Williams does. this whole album makes me wanna sob at a bar.
Radiohead
3/5
CHVRCHES
4/5
a lot of things could make your average music dork overlook CHVRCHES. it could be the dated LCK F VWLS ND LL CPS band name. it could be the dated 80's synthpop revival sound that cluttered the 2010's, conjuring up Outrun skies and gaudy, blocky DeLorians speeding down a lightcycle grid on the wall of a Target. it could be simply because Lauren Mayberry isn't singing on every song. however, despite all three of these things being true, two things save this album from being a potentially frustrating listen.
one. the record has the songs to back up the sound. if you have a song that would sound good in any genre, there's no reason why it wouldn't sound good in one that's dated. even if i think "Night Sky" is the only weak link, your average listener would probably still love it if they heard it on the radio.
two: there is zero cynical retro ideation. we're not going back to the mall or shouting out other bands or trying to conjure up New Order or The Cure; this record sounds 80's almost on accident. it's like CHVRCHES and Vangelis just both independently agreed that this setting on the DX7 sounded good. of course, this probably isn't TRUE (i think everyone and their mom knows what Vangelis sounds like) but it feels like their sound, not another person's sound that they thought would add that vintage feel to it.
i saw Drab Majesty opening up for Slowdive last year and they were horrible. just another band too loud and too obsessed with sounding like another band that they forgot to write songs that did something other than signify. CHVRCHES does not signify; it feels like the signal.
Pet Shop Boys
5/5
the Pet Shop Boys put together a grey record for "Behavior" (or "Behaviour" if you feel imperially inclined), and it makes sense. the record was post-everything -- post-AIDS, post-Communism, post-Reagan, post-Thatcherite economic boom. as a result, the record sounds less filled with zeal and more weariness, like waking up at noon on accident. it isn't pessimistic or optimistic; rather, the songs feel like they come from the source of bitter acceptance. even the throb of "So Hard"'s Hi-NRG bass and orchestra hits are tinged with drifting pads and lyrics concerning giving up you and your partner's respective affairs. it's fessing up, growing up, moving on. sometimes that isn't triumphant, it just happens. leaves fall sooner or later.
grey can be beautiful.
Bob Dylan
4/5
god, this must be an incredible album to drive to. i don't think Dylan meant for the album to be heard on the car stereo (although it was possible in 1965 with the 8 track release) but the whole thing starts out feeling like you're undertaking this great journey in a big junky car, and you drive through the plains the whole time watching the telephone poles whoosh by and keeping note of every roadside stand and abandoned barn on the side of the building. you start asking yourself questions about what those barns were like, what people lived in them, what the memorials mean, and on and on until you come to a crash of thought and reason during the final stretch. i'm not a huge fan of tracks 3 and 4, but everything else feels killer, just loose and freewheeling. if i could pack as much venom as Dylan does in the chorus of "Like a Rolling Stone", i'd have killed millions. i really wanna invest in a CD of this and learn how to drive. it should also be summer. it just feels right.
Alice In Chains
5/5
Alice in Chains sneak up on you, man. you go in expecting to bear witness to all the sins of grunge, and at first it seems like that with the metal riffs and the lyrics, but then you realize how much Layne Staley's voice sticks out from other vocalists in the genre. he's got this great sense of melody, knowing just when to turn on the juice, when to go low, and when to bring in Jerry for the harmonies. it's insane. then, around that, you find that you like the other parts of the songs, from the riffs to the lyrics being some of the better in the genre, and then at some point you start asking yourself, almost fearful:
"is Alice in Chains better than Nirvana?"
i feel like the answer's still no, but i don't think there was ever a need for either band to be better than one another. truly, it's apples and oranges. Nirvana was punk filtered through the sludgy trends of the late 80's before being reconstructed for radio and deconstructed for the unfortunate finale. Alice in Chains seem much more straight-ahead in their approach than their contemporaries. they take the hard rock of the 70's, crank the knobs, and add some real vulnerability into the mix. i'm sorry but if you don't feel anything in the last moments of "Would?" you might actually be a psychopath.
apparently the Cameron Crowe movie "Singles" (never seen it) has Alice in Chains as one of the bands the main characters goes to see. one of said protagonists says that they're gonna go "out dancing". i get the feeling this line was written before Crowe actually had heard Alice in Chains, because who dances to Alice in Chains? is it possible? has anyone swayed with their partner to the swingin' sounds of "Rooster"?
System Of A Down
4/5
i have zero idea how System of a Down made it in this town.
like, the band is quality, but what was the soul of the country like when everyone heard them and thought "yes, let's make these guys one of the biggest metal acts in the world. they should open for Slayer and Metallica." it's not even the weirdness of Serj's vocals or the subjects being covered -- i mean Rage Against the Machine is huge and that's basically as political as rock music gets -- it's how the guitar often goes out of its way to sound atonal and dissonant, like the siren sounding tapping on "Mind" or the little squirts of strangled guitar notes as the main lick on "Sugar". the organ waltz on "Peephole" doesn't scream platinum album seller, it screams weirdo album with a cult following of underground dweebs. and yet, it's huge. it's probably the first metal band you're gonna get into.
then again, it's hard to deny how fun the album is. fun! it's not always fun, as you've got "Spiders" and "P.L.U.C.K." bringing the lights down low, but so many tracks ("Darts", "Soil", "CUBErt", and the aforementioned "Sugar") feature Serj just doing the goofiest possible voice and Daron Malakian doing insane death metal growls to back him up. it's hyperactive, bouncy metal that has a lot to say, but it says it so quickly and loudly that you can miss it if you aren't paying attention. it's infectious energy bringing people in, making them want to mosh. SoaD are like if the Pied Piper lured teenagers into going monkeyshit with electric guitar.
anyway, fuck the Turkish government, stop denying the Armenian genocide, and free Artsakh. that is all.
Bob Dylan
3/5
i think it's fine, i just don't think it's a mindblowing comeback. this is through no fault of Dylan -- his lyrics are as great and thoughtprovoking as ever -- but really due to the production of Daniel Lanois, whose work i normally admire. however, instead of making great ideas sparkle, they just feel smoothed over, like a plank dipped in matte paint. the blues here never feel wild or exciting, and more like they serve to back up Bob's vocals. there's a few interesting instrumental ideas here, sure, but they're not plentiful enough throughout the 72 minutes to do anything but placate. like i said, i don't hate it, but i miss the nuclear siren of his harmonica in the 60's ever so slightly. good poems, okay sounds.
Derek & The Dominos
1/5
i am not enough of a zoomer fuckhead to deny that "Layla" is very good. arguably, it's Clapton's finest moment as a songwriter/guitar player, and the contrast between the two sections of the song serve as a mild stroke of genius. i could play the stickler and claim Jim Gordon deserves the credit, but no, he doesn't. this is Clapton's song, it's his win, he can take it. i am being genuine and honest when i say "Layla" does not suck.
the hour plus of album before it? fuck off.
never have i been more lulled into not paying attention to an album that demands careful listening than "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs". if it's not a very weaksauce cover of a blues standard, it's an equally forgettable original track with poor mixing and nothing to differentiate itself from the surrounding efforts. people say Duane Allman kicks Clapton's ass on his own album, but if pressed i couldn't tell you who was playing what; halfway through i felt like i was being lowered into a boiling pot of guitar licks and 12 bar struts.
i could make a case for the "Little Wing" cover, but if given the choice between listening to this version and Hendrix's version, i'm obviously going to pick the latter. maybe i could make a case for "Bell Bottom Blues", which has a very nice chorus. it's a shame the pre-chorus uses this god awful tabla to bring us into it, just sort of going "bwoong" over an otherwise strong part of the song. if just one, ONE other song didn't have something that sabotaged itself, i would consider giving the record a D.
no dice. it really is just "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs". at the very least, they could have put it in that order.
The Pogues
5/5
i deny it no longer: i am a white person who gets down with some Irish folk music. am i Irish? kinda? probably? (Northern Irish Protestants count, right?) either way, i just know that the bouzouki and the tin whistle go well together instrumentally, and that Shane MacGowan goes well with that duo as well. he's got such a way of describing a scene that it feels like you're really there, going through it next to him. special commendation obviously goes to "Fairytale of New York", of course. when i'm not either of the characters in the song, i feel like i'm watching them argue and fall apart at the seams while still loving each other as much as two shipwrecks can. i want to build my dreams around another.
The Byrds
5/5
people always talk about how The Byrds invented jangle pop with their "Mr. Tambourine Man" cover, but for the record, they also perfected it on "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better". as a whole, the album captures this youthful energy that makes it feel like the direct connection between the folk of the Greenwich Village and the teenybopper bubblegum bullshit of the late 60's and early 70's. what separates the Byrds from your Buddah Records schlock is the genuine heart they put into all of these melodies. even the "We'll Meet Again" cover, however cheesy it may seem, is trying to do something a bit more interesting with the melody than Vera Lynn. honestly, i think this is the perfect sound for a band to achieve on their first try. what a swing.
Björk
5/5
how does she do it? i am still trying to wrap my head around how Bjork decides which sound she's going to pursue one each project. if an artist says "this is my album where i make sandwiches" or "this is my mushroom album" you're likely to say "pff, these artists say the craziest things to sell records". when Bjork says it, she means it, and you trust her. she makes an album full of plucky strings and found sounds and skittery, ear-flipping beats, and it makes sense. there is no mainstream, there is no underground, there is simply Bjork.
i would also like to say that i appreciate not only how sexual the album is, but how the sex is equal parts sacred and casual. honestly, isn't that how it is in the real world? like religion, sex pervades our lives, whether its in comfort, in violence, in ritual, in affirmation. there are those who use sex as a tool to control others, and those who use sex as a form of celebration. like the little clicks and whistles in your ear, it is still a part of you and your experience as an elevated being, whether in presence, absence, or disinterest. we pray to our gods, gathering orgone, but also feel impulses of inspiration, whether it's bouts of arousal or desire for your other part(s). even when not in devotion to it in this way, most of us still feel love in erotic or platonic ways, and dissolve into it with sheer joy.
that is what this album is about. one enters love like a swimming pool, the nip of the cool water against your skin almost frightening as you wade in; then, breaking fragile hesitation, you plunge underneath and let it surround you.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
4/5
something i appreciate about Creedence Clearwater Revival: short album lengths. their longest record is 42 minutes long and it doesn't waste a second of it. in the case of "Green River", when you've got the title track and "Bad Moon Rising" on your album, you really don't need much else. 28 minutes is fine -- people get it.
still, i do feel like the album's missing a certain something. i like "Wrote a Song for Everyone" almost as much as the big hits and "Lodi" isn't half bad either. still, the more standard, bluesier cuts miss the sparkle that makes something like "Bad Moon Rising" shine like veneers. i wouldn't have minded a 7 minute jam all that much to round out the record instead of "The Night Time Is the Right Time". at least it can be pressed at 45 RPM on modern reissues and keep higher fidelity, right?
...33 RPM, huh? cripes, why do we waste vinyl like this?
Giant Sand
4/5
Smog by way of Thrill Jockey Records was not something i knew existed, or that i needed it so much. "Chore of Enchantment" keeps in low gear with its eclecticism, always surprising you when something like a trip hop beat or a sample of an old movie pops in or a mellotron comes in on one of the tracks. my only real complaint is the horrible mouth smacking intro on "Temptation of Egg". alongside this, "Raw" feels less raw and more underbaked, a good idea that could have been a great song but never develops with ornamentation like the other tracks do. otherwise, all the little experimental flourishes feel at home here, introducing itself as a warm friend before walking right out the door. what a delightful variety of reunions.
The Rolling Stones
2/5
if i was a Black Panther in the 70's, i would have thrown a molotov at the Rolling Stones' tour bus for "Sweet Black Angel". imagine going to jail as a political prisoner and the biggest white rock group in the world writes a song calling you a pin up girl and using the words "free de sweet black slave". i'd be pissed.
otherwise, "Exile on Main St."'s biggest crime is how boilerplate it is for the Stones' sound. it's treated as this revelation to their sound, but i just feel like it's the same bluesy stuff that fades into the background of a sports bar instead of something really special. even the good songs with memorable parts like "Let it Loose" or "Tumbling Dice" basically get by on how homey and folksy they sound instead of any real interesting or unique sound. if i squint my ears, i can trick myself into thinking in listening to The Band. you can hate Sticky Fingers all you want, but at least it's got "Wild Horses" and "Moonlight Mile". "Exile on Main St." doesn't have tracks like that. the closest it ever gets to it is "Shine a Light", which is diminished by how much it sounds like the worse tracks around it. it's a The Beatles [White Album] with all the interesting experiments replaced with more messy blues, an artistic statement that says "this is what we are" by staying the course instead of exploding into a million different directions. it's probably a lot better to listen to if you're drunk, and that's not a compliment.
i can't hate the Rolling Stones. Scorsese's one of my favorite directors, he likes the Stones, so i can tolerate them for Marty. but i can't really make any excuses for "Exile". it's just a boring, bluesy sludge dumped on the ground. consistency isn't everything if the substance offers no real taste.
The Flaming Lips
4/5
the title track (or the first part of it) was my first exposure to "electronica", or any real electronic music. sitting in the back of my parents' Ford station wagon at night, I was about six years old listening to a mix CD, filled with grainy iTunes downloads. I wondered what could make drums sound like that, or what that weird squishy sounding noise was making a melody. nothing else really sounded like it. later on, as a full grown adult, i thought i wouldn't be charmed by The Flaming Lips' quirky brand of psychedelics. these were the gummy skull guys, the 24 hour skull song guys, the Heady Fwends "blood filled vinyl that has to be delivered by hand by the band itself" guys. i thought it would be empty twee gimmick with some enjoyable highs.
and of course, i was wrong.
like, there are a few parts that still feel a bit cutesy. i do think the high pitched vocals can be a bit Fraggle Rock-y at points, especially on "Do You Realize??" -- but man, what a sense of melody the group has. Wayne Coyne's voice isn't impressive, but it's very consistent, and the shakiness of him hitting higher notes feels less like he's straining and more like he's stretching it out, relaxed and not tense. an early summer record if i've ever heard one, just warm and sunshiny in every single one of its song palettes. i wanna lie on a hill on a clear blue and windy day and feel blown away.
Jethro Tull
4/5
see, the impression i got from Jethro Tull before i started listening to them was that they were bad and that the flute was annoying. every time i heard someone say "hey, Aqualung" it always felt like it was sort of mocking. The Chicago Sun-Times compared The Crane Wife to the band as a joke, saying it was the best JT album since Heavy Horses. this is because at some point, the music going public decided they were just too good for pastoral flute and rollicking guitar. therefore, i was deprived of listening to some really solid prog rock.
i do think it's a bit funny how people assumed this was a concept album because a character is mentioned more than once. Aqualung isn't a character in a narrative, he's a stock character in the commedia dell'arte present in each of the songs. the record's a comedy, focusing on the foibles of each character and their various fuck ups. maybe that's the real concept: you're watching a bunch of people take custard pies to the face in between flute solos. welcome to the theater, buddy.
The Rolling Stones
3/5
i'm not a big fan of the original, intended cover. what's the Beggar's Banquet? is it human shit? is it doo doo feces? gross.
anyway, "Beggars Banquet" is a perfectly fine record. it's got some real iconic tracks, it's got some nice deep cuts, and i even like some of the folkier cuts near the end like "Factory Girl". my main issue with the record is that it has such great songs like "Sympathy For the Devil" or "Jig-Saw Puzzle", these great, daring compositions with great performances and lyrics that betray a smarter band than you'd initially think. then you get dull songs like "Dear Doctor" or "Prodigal Son" to follow them up. i can't really hate them, but i can't really muster up any love for them either. they're not sons or daughters, they're bastard, boring cousins, and they drag the record down.
also, hot take time: i think "Street Fighting Man" kinda sucks! the song doesn't ever kick into high gear like how it wants to; it feels like a long intro to a better track taken out of context. you guys are not gonna like what i have to say about "Beast of Burden" either, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
The La's
3/5
if there's anything that The Thief and the Cobbler taught me, it's that perfectionism is a fool's errand and a producer's nightmare. reading about the recording of The La's self-titled debut (and i guess final album) kind of irritates me, because Lee Mavers's discontent with the record makes sense. it just doesn't sound like the best it could be, but i don't really think the issue is with the production. rather, it's the inclusion of all the dumb skiffle songs. were "Liberty Ship" or "Freedom Song" vital to the sound of the group, or were Mavers and Power simply being stubborn about these half-baked tracks?
otherwise, the album's sound is eerily prescient of the sound that would hit British indie in the coming decade, taking the contemporary sounds of jangle pop and filling it with 60's nostalgia and sunshine. there are some really incredible tracks on here, but as a whole i think the album is just missing that je ne sais quoi that would make it an all-timer. at the very least, The La's have bragging rights for striking gold, even though it'd take a couple years for the gold rush to begin.
Run-D.M.C.
4/5
i get it's corny, but i really do like how much they hype each other up on all the tracks, especially towards Jam Master Jay. he's basically the reason that Run and D's trade-offs work -- he sets up a steady beat, some nice samples (or two members of Aerosmith) for them to work over, and lets them do their thing. as cool of a beat it probably is, "Perfection" shows that they're really nothing unless they work as a power trio. i get the whole mid-school thing is associated with cheesy record scratches and dated beats, but they really make it work. it's not timeless, it's dry aged. i love Run-D.M.C. and i am not ashamed, nor should i be. i mean they made "My Sharona" listenable, desirable even.
man, the first No. 1 rap hit really should have been It's Tricky / Proud to Be Black. it shouldn't have been fucking Ice Ice Baby.
Primal Scream
3/5
the 1990's were a huge time for electronica. first off, the "rave" became an actual thing people went to instead of something you simply did accompanied with the words "rant and" beforehand. it was a time in which people started gathering together, dancing to trippy, psychedelic music, and doing copious amounts of drugs. it was the beginning of a revolution, and a lot of people wanted in, including the rockers. of course, this was before grunge and Britpop swept away the dancers to their own separate corner, from 1988 to the end of the Cold War, it seemed like the two could collaborate.
Primal Scream are a band best known for making the first C86 song you're likely to hear with "Velocity Girl". Bobby Gillespie, the group's leader, never really jived with just one sound, and would basically switch up what Primal Scream "was" for each album. For 1991's Halloween party, they went as E ravers, swinging their arms and sweating up a storm. you could consider this a form of cultural appropriation, sure, but i do get the feeling that the group knew what they were doing.
in between "Movin' On Up" and "Loaded" like a bunch of different attempts at electronic squibbles, tribal house, tinky Casio pianos, and proto-trip hop that are there not because it's what Gillespie thought those genres sounded like, but because he was probably spending some time at the Hacienda and wanted to make a record that sounded like going to that club, both in emotion and feeling. unfortunately, the last third of the feeling -- the comedown if you will -- often fades into the background and sends me into apathy, but i truly do love "Higher Than the Sun (A Dub Symphony in Two Parts)" because of how committed it is to creating this sort of "walking home at 3 AM" atmosphere.
"Screamadelica" is dated, sure. "Screamadelica" isn't even really what Primal Scream would sound like in a few years, choosing to pursue the rootsy sound of "Damaged" for some reason or another. i mean this as honestly and positively as i can: "Screamadelica" feels like fanfiction. someone was a fan of a thing they heard while high off their tits in a club, and wanted to make more of that thing, not even necessarily in their own style; just more. i respect it.
Buddy Holly & The Crickets
3/5
i dunno man, i do like it. my main issue with Buddy Holly and/or The Crickets is how normal and laid back he seems compared to what Elvis was doing in the late 50's. was that part of his lasting appeal? his approachability? his dork glasses? his songs containing much the same as his contemporaries but with a friendlier voice and homelier harmonies behind him? it's perfectly fine for what it is, but for rockabilly, it doesn't make me feel like i wanna rock.
sometimes i wonder if the love people hold for Holly, Valens, and the Big Bopper is reinforced through their death on that plane. not to say that none of these men have no memorability, but if in some morbid way, "The Day the Music Died" was the day that rock and roll got actual lore. blood is what builds the mythos. Robert Johnson sold his soul at the Crossroads, then was poisoned by an angry husband. Sam Cooke was shot in the chest by Bertha Franklin under dubious circumstances. and one cold February night in Iowa, four men went down in a Beechcraft Bonanza in snow and died instantly. that's how tragedy starts art, as ghoulish as it is. you rally around graves.
Michael Jackson
4/5
"Bad"? more like... "Good"! i'll be here all week, people.
in all seriousness, coming into "Bad", i thought i'd be let down by the spaces between "The Way You Make Me Feel", "Man in the Mirror", and "Smooth Criminal", but all the tracks have this wonderful 80's sheen to it that only Quincy Jones could bring. Mikey does it for me here too, always putting out an insane new noise or hook for you to get your brain fixated on for a few hours after the track ends. "Bad"'s biggest crime is those tracks just not meeting the standards of the mega-hits, which basically exist as perfect songs next to good ones. some songs are "Smooth Criminal", and some songs are "Just Good Friends" ft. Stevie Wonder. not much you can do about it.
George Michael
4/5
never really liked Wham! -- for me, the combination of the deeply cornball synths with George Michael's voice put me off. it was music that felt too plastic, too soft, and mostly just innocuous and sterile. i hate "Last Christmas", and "Careless Whisper" is fun for like two minutes before i'm over the steamy sax and histrionics. my favorite song of theirs is "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go", and it really shouldn't be.
George Michael's solo career though? dude's an artist. "Listen Without Prejudice" is the rare (but still important) event of an artist known as a sexy heartthrob who fucks and fucks often saying "hey i'm actually more than a sex symbol". it's not slick, it's smooth, and the plastic is less rough PVC and more silicone, soft and malleable. i feel actual comfort here, even if it isn't all friendly.
also, i never really got the connection to baggy's whole Thing and The Rolling Stones until he started singing "You Can't Always Get What You Want" at the end of "Waiting for That Day". kind of mind-blowing.
G. Love & Special Sauce
2/5
the poor man's Beck. or Soul Coughing. or Morphine. honestly, i can't even judge this on the basis of class or anything. G. Love is superficial, unnecessary in the company of his peers. his Special Sauce backing band is fine, but his rapping is god awful, and omnipresent across all the tracks. just nothing but posturing and an assumed "coolness" that feels wholly unearned, because the guy's name is G. Love and his backing band is fucking called Special Sauce. at three tracks it's a little grating, six tracks in it's acrid, and by track 12 i am desperately watching the clock, waiting for a reprieve or maybe my internet to go out. "This Ain't Living" is a passable oasis in the middle of an otherwise dull and infuriating desert of slacker raps about food, living the easy life in Philly, and being a sexy boy, rowr. i feel like i pissed my pants and i have to walk all the way home for an hour to get a fresh pair. i feel uncomfortable and embarrassed.
i'm tired. i don't even know why this is on the list. did the British music press go utterly gaga over G. Love and Special Sauce exclusively? everyone else who was involved in the H.O.R.D.E. festival -- i presume this is why it's in the "1001 Albums" book -- i could definitely recognize, but these guys didn't enter my radar until this same list recommended it to my friend Azzy. maybe they were good live? who knows? i need a drink. and new pants.
Stan Getz
4/5
it's quite nice! Byrd's playing is pretty fun and well suited for the bossa nova style, and all the tracks are nice, calm, and well suited for just being around. it's sunlight pushing through a dusty window on a lazy day where there's just not much you can or wanna do. i do feel as if this sort of diminishes my enjoyment of the music, as "this sounds like being bored!" isn't exactly high praise, but sometimes, all music has to be is pleasant, and this is the definition of the word.
do wish there were some vocals though. this version of "One-Note Samba" has me pining for the Muppet Show rendition.
Marvin Gaye
5/5
Gaye took Come to My Garden's hippie sensibilities out of the garden and introduced it to the men sleeping under newspapers on park benches. all of a sudden, the flower power shifts from being carefree to being pointed, giving serious thought about the condition of the world as it strolls from topic to topic. it doesn't have any concrete solutions. Marvin is wearing a coat on the cover to shield himself from the rain, but his face is still soaked. he isn't blind to trouble outside, he just wants to survive it.
i always wondered why i'd never heard a single from this thing, despite hearing so much of Marvin Gaye's music casually. turns out it's because it's only complete as a whole piece. this is probably transcendent on vinyl.
Ice Cube
4/5
i kind of get the feeling that Ice Cube was being held back by NWA, because he really demonstrates a lot more of his personality now that he's the main focus. of course, he does sometimes get a little too crude for his own good -- "I'm Only Out for One Thang" and the following track really are the pinnacle of that whole "hip-hop is misogynist" thing (and aren't as good as the tracks surrounding it), more so than "You Can't Fade Me" and its pregnancy story. Ice has a knack for storytelling and getting you invested in whatever he's stuck doing, and the interludes/skit type things are mostly pretty funny. it really is no wonder he got into acting.
this, alongside both Sir Jinx and the Bomb Squad basically doing production magic over as many choppy, crushed little samples as possible makes the whole record jitter with such energy, like a fly under a bottlecap. i wasn't in the mood for something that felt "old school" today, but as it turns out, it's as forward thinking as you could possibly get with the technology. some bars here never age, and neither does the production.
Talking Heads
3/5
it's not like they were normal before Eno -- clearly "Psycho Killer" betrays a lot of the eccentricities you'd hear on later records -- but otherwise a lot of the songs here have more in common with Chrissie Hynde than Adrian Belew. nothing's wrong with that, but its a bit like seeing pictures of surrealist authors in yearbook photos.
maybe its because the guitar work is so straight laced or because David's a little more anxious and less willing to go buckwild on record. over time, they loosen up, like on "No Compassion" and "The Book I Read". of course, "Psycho Killer" is in its own league. nothing will ever beat that bassline. that's how you know this band is gonna work out; not the initial bass part, but the one that comes in with the chorus. these guys are going places.
P.S.: i really do love the title "Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town". it makes me picture a giant heart terrorizing some suburb in Ohio to the beat.
5/5
on one hand, i think anyone can make a PJ Harvey record. this isn't a bad thing; her songs are brutal, visceral, straightforward as a punch to a chin. if you care enough about your art and how you can push it without ever breaking it into unidentifiable bits, like some car speeding down the highway with bits falling off of its chassis, i think you could make something similar to a PJ Harvery record, even something almost as good as "Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea". like a vegan hot dog.
on the other hand, nobody can make a PJ Harvey record except PJ Harvey. you can try to sing like her, you can thrash on your guitar, you can write your nice little hooks and it'll still be like trying to beat a cheetah in a footrace. you could even do the nice little touch of having the last two tracks of the album be relatively quiet comapred to everything that came before. but it just won't be as good. i'm sorry. every time i familiarize myself with her art further, the more and more sure i am that the whole "she was going to try out to do vocals on the third Slint album!" thing is complete bullshit. Nick Cave, as often as Harvey is compared to him, is still someone i could see being in a band. not so for PJ.
so, it's a nine. honestly, if i spend more time with this, it might be a ten. i don't think i have a single track i even dislike here. need to get to know it a bit better, i guess.
Ms. Dynamite
3/5
JAY Z
4/5
i was so used to Jay-Z being mid and kinda dull from pop parlance that i never considered the alternative prior to his later music: that he is a huge egotist with a bit of a grating personality. there are so many songs here that rely on you buying into Jay-Z as a personality, and i guess that works if you grew up with his harder stuff/this album in particular, but i didn't even know he went by "Hove" before this. what is Jay-Z supposed to be to a new audience now that he's just "Beyonce's Husband"?
a lot of my enjoyment of the record is diminished by how self-obsessed Jay-Z is with his own mythology. he grew up poor, dealing drugs and killing motherfuckers before hitting it big and getting rich, but he's still the same person. he is this person on almost every single song. it's not bad; the production is great and he flows really well on a lot of these tracks, but its still that annoying hard ass personality that comes off as a little flat over the hour. literally the most emotional he gets over a break up, and the chorus is literally "well i'm too tough to get emotional, so i guess i'm gonna make the song cry". Jay-Z, i know it's a tall order, but can you stop being a baller for five minutes and emote? get a bit political or introspective? talk about the Five Percenters at least?
it's a dull record in a perfect record's clothes. it's fine, and i don't blame you if you think it's a classic. i like it. hell, i went into the record wanting to love it. but i'd need to like Jay-Z a little more to do that. happy 200th review of the series, everyone.
Neneh Cherry
3/5
coming right at the zeitgeist of the whole Madchester craze, it's somehow emblematic of every part of that era without ever really being directly connected to it or any of those sounds. rather, i'd say it brought over the sound from the club of its own volition without watching others do it or knowing there was a trend of Brits taking influence from hip hop and the dance floor. it's like showing up in a costume you made yourself for Halloween and then finding out that everyone else is dressed in the same costume as you that they bought from Spirit Halloween. you know you're better than them, but who's gonna notice?
still, even if it feels accidentally of its time, its still bursting with as much energy as your baggy and grebo bands, hitting you with high energy track after track. i do think "Kisses on the Wind" and its Latin influence kinda falls flat, and the orchestra hits on "Outré risqué locomotive" get a bit obnoxious, but most of the tracks are alright. "Buffalo Stance" is the clear standout, though, and i'd say it's worth the price of admission. the whole album's a fun little mash of sunny post-Madonnasplosion pop and socially conscious rap. is the rapping great? not exactly, but for 1989 it could be worse. you take what you can get.
R.E.M.
4/5
with the exception of Automatic for the People, late 80s/mid 90s R.E.M. albums (you know, when they hit it big finally) have the unfortunate distinction of setting the band up for a killer Greatest Hits comp. Out of Time has "Losing My Religion" (and "Shiny Happy People" if you're a contrarian), Monster has "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?". Green, their first big label joint, has "Orange Crush". (and "Stand". cue Ben Wyatt's 3 second long claymation animation.) of course, "Orange Crush" is good.
in fact, the whole album's pretty good? the track ratings (and initial evaluation by Toefucker Christgau) betray a fall-off that i don't think exists? all the folkier tracks still have that same warm quality to it that foreshadowed "Losing My Religion", and it gives the whole record a weird, freaky nature boy quality. that is not just my shit, it's the next house over's shit, too, whether they like it or not. otherwise, all the tracks are solid, better than most of their 80's output that i've heard, even. the weakest song is "Stand", and hey -- it sounds like "La Bamba". who hates "La Bamba?"
maybe i'm biased. i found an original pressing of this with the 4s spot varnished over the Rs in my grandma's basement years back. it's a nice, warm record. good for the coming summer.
The Notorious B.I.G.
4/5
Diddy was the main reason i was hesitant to listen to this record today. not because of his crimes -- numerous and horrid as they are -- but simply because i didn't think he was going to be a good producer. everything i'd heard from him beforehand as a solo artist was inoffensive, horrible interpolate'n'b that you hear in a shopping mall. so color me surprised that despite his legacy as a solo artists being that, he's a fairly competent boom bapper.
of course, the production plays second fiddle to Biggie here. he's the biggest personality, and damn near the only personality in the loose narrative of the album. of course it doesn't do any good gushing over "Juicy", "Big Poppa", and "Suicidal Thoughts". rather, i'd like to highlight how strong the first stretch of the album is and how great of a job it does building Biggie's character so you have greater context for the more emotionally open and positive hits later on and the inevitable, tragic ending. at first it seems like he's about nothing but crime and death, but reveals himself as a more sensitive and honest character over time. i mean, he robs a train in the opening skit. who robs a train if they aren't a bit of an old timey goofball at heart? (recording your wife giving you head on the album is gross, still.)
"Suicidal Thoughts", man. Scarface is ostensibly a movie about a man's rise and fall, but his fall is a glorious blaze of glory, with yayo, grenade launchers, and grand foyers. imagine if Scarface ended with Al Pacino morosely muttering to a friend on the phone before blowing his brains out over the iconic mountain of coke. shit's dire.
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
not to be anymore of a cringe ass nerd, but Hideo Kojima laid out the themes for the first three Metal Gear Solid games as "gene", "meme", and "scene" respectively. Bruce Springsteen loves one of those themes, and it's scene, scene, scene. he survives off of imagery, a painting shot straight at your head like a bullet spiraling from a rifle. it's direct, romantic, and colorful. fire roads, badlands, Cain and Abel. it's not Dylan, but it IS Shakespeare, if you get me.
of course, since it is Shakespeare, the person performing it needs to respect the material. you can't just be some yahoo covering "The Promised Land" with your terrible jam band Sunday night at the Drunken Monkey. even then, you've gotta deal with the fact that nobody's gonna be as good at performing it as Bruce is. there's a reason he's such a successful performer - he's 75 and still performing like a madman for thousands a day. he's earnest, he's powerful, and he makes a scene. it's all about scene.
Suicide
5/5
Lt. William Calley died last year -- a complete failure in school who joined the military after being unable to keep a job in anything, who then rose to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant and got to be in control of a platoon in Vietnam in 1969. he then entered the village of My Lai with his men, guns blazing, and told his boys to kill everyone. 347 people were killed, countless more were raped, wounded, and left for dead. a neighboring village was also attacked, and about 150 more died there according to the Vietnamese government. he went on trial, and was the only person ever charged with a crime in the killings. Nixon commuted his sentence to three years under house arrest. subsequent appeals chalked his punishment up to time served. he had no remorse. he was just following orders.
Suicide released this record in what i can best describe as the first ever post-atrocity era. there were unfathomable atrocities sure, but burgeoning mass media and countercultural backlash made atrocities more popular than ever before. the band's use of rockabilly rhythms and comic book references -- even taking their name from an issue of Ghost Rider -- shows literacy in American pulp, the stereotypical degraded to nigh unrecognizability. Alan Vega shrieks and moans, Martin Rev attacks an organ, and the audience to this day is divided. it is Americana burning at the bottom of a shallow grave, smelling of sulfur. it is seven anthems of the homeless people on the New York street, living in misery and squalor in full view before the city could muster up the budget to brush them under the couch.
so is the record good? i feel like that's asking the wrong question. Suicide's self-titled isn't meant to be "good"; it isn't enjoyable to listen to, it's mixed rather odd, it's corny at times when it doesn't mean to be, and "Frankie Teardrop" is unable to be sat through without literally bracing yourself. they were chased off the stage in Brussels and started a riot for just... being what they were. Suicide are not, by the flawed lens of objective critique, good. but they are effective, and i love them. they're something scarier than a fun house mirror -- they're a clean, straight, and silvery reflection in broad daylight, a diseased freak laid bare. we're all Frankies; we're all capable of evil.
"There was considerable public support for Lt. Calley. In a Gallup poll taken the following month, 69 percent of the respondents said he was a scapegoat. Many of his defenders went farther, arguing that he was, in fact, a hero. Country music stations played 'Set Lt. Calley Free' and 'Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley,' the latter of which eventually sold some two million records.
President Nixon declined to publicly celebrate the disgraced Army officer, but he told Henry Kissinger that 'most people don’t give a shit' whether he had actually killed the Vietnamese civilians." - James E. Wright, writing for Defense One.
The Undertones
3/5
there's a certain charm to power poppy new wave bands before the synthpop explosion: it's punk-not-punk, despite the Undertones inarguably having been punk-is-punk at some point. there's glimpses of that old band that could play like Johnny Rotten, but the Undertones aren't beloved for those qualities; they're beloved for their deviation.
the only Undertones song you've heard, "Teenage Kicks", is good not because it's a thrash of a song, but because it's a lovely little hard candy of a song. i'd say a lot of the best parts of the album function on that logic, deviating from what you'd expect from a punk band and just writing songs about, well, "Chocolate and Girls". i don't think it's a very CONSISTENT listen, but i appreciate it as a feel-good album; probably good to put on after a rough day at work. even if the lyrics sometimes go against the tone, the tone is impenetrable, bright, and visible at nighttime. songs about sex killers and your shitty new wave cousin have never been so chipper.
god, i want some Red Lobster.
Pantera
2/5
Vulgar Display of Power Is The Greatest Album Ever. I Listen To It With My Buddies Before We Do Airsoft And It Feels Bad A$$! My Wife Doesn't Like Me Playing It All The Time From The Den But My Bro's Don't Care How Loud You Crank The Knob!!! - wraparoundsunglasses11281
the ultimate music for people who intentionally try to hit animals with their cars - thecouncilhasdecidedyourfate
i have no idea why the album sounds like this. didn't Terry Date produce White Pony? like, the riffs are fine, but every drum hit sounds way too high pitched, especially that damn snare. if they wanted to make the heaviest album ever, they probably should have stuck with someone who didn't specialize in producing 80s metal. i'm writing this review in a white tank top and sport shorts. i didn't put them on, they just popped onto my body when i hit play. - m_crowley
Listened to this album so much on tour in Afghanistan that the CD wore out in my Discman. I didn't even know CDs could do that! Even today, I still come back to "Walk" and feel cool as all get out. I gotta show my kids this! - McLovinFury
i'm a 50 year old Black person from Chicago and i listen to Pantera every day! ROCK ON! - wonnywadke47
my dad used to listen to this with me in the car. we were never that close, but he's the reason i got into metal in the first place, and this album is where it all started. even now i still come back to it from time to time. miss you, dad. hope you're alright up there. - puddingthievesforhire
All these youngsters playing punk today should bow down if Phil Anselmo ever walks past them -- he's the reason they're even able to do breakdowns int he first place! - EffingHostileTrucker
Electric Light Orchestra
5/5
i haven't been able to find a good source for John Lennon saying that Electric Light Orchestra were the "sons of the Beatles", but if they were in any way Beatlesque, they clearly didn't come from any member's loins but Paul's. of course, this discounts their admiration for the Beach Boys, the Kinks, a little glam rock, and a jumble of soul references put through a symphonic filter and let loose with all the colors of the rainbow. basically, they took all the influences they could carry, glued it together, and put it on the wall. however, unlike a lot of collages, it doesn't feel piecemeal or abstract; rather, it feels like Jeff Lynne made something wholly new from chopped up reference. it's only when you get closer when you start to notice all the little bits the songs are made of -- and Lynne knows it. in "Across the Border", he's clearly biting from Heroes and Villains, but then puts a little twist in it with the second half, denying the audience the ability to call it a rip wholesale and lets us in on the joke. "Mr. Blue Sky" offers a very McCartney-like radio announcer to bring us into the song before hitting us with the piano break from A Day in the Life to start us off. and on "Sweet Talkin' Woman" and "Starlight", you can just make out half the Motown roster through the violins and vocoders.
still, there's something brazenly original to how ELO does things. the melodies hold so much more sentimentality to me, maybe a bit corny, but also sweet and lush. maybe the back up singers are just that powerful of an instrument, a cue for your heart to put value into the interplay of the chorus and the leading man. there's a few failed experiments like "Jungle" and "Birmingham Blues", but there's more experiments that went completely right like, well, the entirety of "Concerto for a Rainy Day". that C-side feels less like any sort of musical thing and more like a substance, golden and ambrosia-like in consistency.
there's something about this damn band, man. phenomenal stuff. ELO rocks.
Bill Evans Trio
5/5
Bill Evans is just one of those people that feels like he should have some sort of "sold his soul to the devil" type mythos about him. it'd add some fun irreverence to what is a generally sad and bleak story to hear about. his friend said that his death in 1980 was the "longest suicide in history" -- i am praying to God my life doesn't bring me down such a dark path that my friends refer to my death as such.
my god, what an album though. i'm a tad basic, so cool jazz already somewhat appeals to me as something i can approach and appreciate (especially as i listen to more jazz to compare it to) and something about Evans and the band he has assembled here makes the whole experience feel like magic. i swear, there's a "Daisy" quote here, a song that i find to be corny and dripping with gay 90s foppishness, and it somehow works. of course, i don't think anything tops the last track here, the solemnity of it contrasting all the bright and sweet feelings of the five tracks fire. if you're a musician, you can make magic anywhere, and a lot of magic was made at the Village Vanguard that night.
Prefab Sprout
3/5
i think this is one of those records that is still incredibly consistent, but the structure of the thing is what holds it back. the B-Side is still good, of course. i've come around on "Horsin' Around", and "Desire As" is as good as any song on the flipside, but by virtue of having that flipside present with all its gold undistributed across the record, it makes the latter half look like a slog, a comedown after 5-6 consecutive highs. "Goodbye Lucille #1" is basically a perfect closer and they just... don't go for it.
what an A-Side, though -- delicate but flashy synth flourishes, the right twinkle of guitars, and those wonderful sardonic lyrics that Paddy's such a master at writing. sometimes, if i lose the mood quickly enough, i'll put on a record and then not flip it over and choose to do something else. if i ever lose the mood for Steve McQueen, i'll still feel something.
Crowded House
4/5
yeah, i always knew them as the guys behind "Don't Dream It's Over". no, i didn't expect them to be a big cultural institution in Australia with a fanbase and everything. i mean, i probably should have -- any foreign band with just one song you hear on American radio has a 50/50 shot of being exactly that. it's especially odd how none of their later songs caught on in the US once they went a bit more indie, cause some of these sound like they should be college radio regulars. i still get the feeling that they're a bit deeper than your Deep Blue Something or your School of Fish. i can imagine this being a comfort listen in the future, or something to put on in the car. a surprisingly pleasant find compared to what i was dreading i'd find (really boring soft rock). good job, Oz.
Adam & The Ants
3/5
it's cultural appropriation, sure, but i cannot pin point any one culture that Adam and his Ants draw from out of the grabbag of supposed cultural sounds. (American Indians? Mexicans? the people of Burundi? pirates?) what matters is that he takes this glut of pop/other people's cultures and makes it into a fairly compelling if messy painting. i do feel a bit bored by the tracks that aren't filled with loud thundering drums, but it would get a bit frustrating if that's ALL the drumming that was on the album. it's perfectly fine, even if i don't buy into Adam's whole thing -- whatever that thing is.
U2
2/5
how.
how do you put together a group of four pretty talented musicians, get production from Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, and Flood, and make something so...
meh.
like, i think this is it, right? this is what proves that good art is more than the sum of its parts, that and supergroups. prestige-era U2 sound like a supergroup of people who you don't know and are just expected to know already. and you know what else they sound like? CHRISTIAN ROCK. i'm familiar with the South Park gag of writing love songs and just replacing any mention of a woman with Jesus and God -- U2 are doing it backwards. look:
"[He's] slippy
You're sliding down
[He'll] be there when you hit the ground
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright
[He] moves in mysterious ways
It's alright, it's alright, it's alright
[He] moves in mysterious ways, oh"
- "Mysterious Ways"
"Gonna run to you, run to you, run to you
[Jesus] be still
I'm gonna run to you, run to you, run to you
[Jesus] I will"
- "Tryin' To Throw Your Arms Around the World"
"No, nothing makes sense
Nothing seems to fit
I know you'd hit out
If you only knew who to hit
And I'd join the movement
If there was one I could believe in
Yeah I'd break bread and wine
If there was a church I could receive in
'Cause I need it now"
- "Acrobat"
i didn't even need to change that last one.
to cap things off, another reference:
you know that episode of Regular Show with the Every Meat Burrito? it's got like 90 different exotic meats on it, and Mordecai, Rigby, and co. gotta go rent a police beater that still has a criminal hiding in the shag carpeting. it's a great episode. anyway, they finally get the burrito that they've been hyped for the entire episode, and the first thing Rigby says when he bites in is:
"huh. tastes like chicken."
this album tastes like chicken. make of that what you will.
Kanye West
4/5
an incredible album.*
*well, first, you have to understand it as a work of fiction. the Kanye on MBDTF is a Kanye who looked at himself and saw someone who needs to change. really though, we know for a fact Kanye looked at himself and saw someone who was Fine, Actually, and who eventually managed to suppress any actual sense of awareness but with all the ugliness of still seizing the headlines and doubling down on his worst tendencies, both creatively and personality wise. the introspection was an act, something for the cameras that breaks like a character.
the bowie comparison always seems spooky to me, partially cause of the K. West sign, but because it's so easy to put the image of a "different character" on every era of West. one of my favorite pieces of Kanye-related art shows him in his various "eras" represented by the bear, modified with a discoball mask for Donda or playing a piano and Jheri curled for 808s. for MBDTF, he's sitting on a throne, bored and languishing. as we know now, looking inward, the self-awareness and post-VMAs "change" was as much of an era as, like, doing autotune R'n'B.
so yeah, it's a great album. it's a bit slow near the end, but the concept's strong and the tracks are radio slam dunks that i still get chunks of stuck in my head ever since i learned of "POWER" or "All of the Lights". but it's as much of a performance as Ziggy Stardust. after all these years, i feel like we're finally beginning to meet the real Kanye, one too far gone to care about performing past provocateur antics and stupidity, and guys? it's been miserable.
fuckin' ridiculous, even.
Bob Dylan
5/5
listen, it's gonna take someone a lot smarter than me to discuss all the lyrical themes of Blonde on Blonde. i do think that the album as a whole is much less focused on politics than it is love. not just love between one person and another, but love between an artist and their audience, love turning sour, and love that is so far away that you have zero hope of ever obtaining it. you could see songs like "Just Like a Woman" as condescending to whoever the target would be, but they're at the very least not venomous. it seems, so far, to be the Dylan most concerned with himself rather than the world around him and its going-ons. "Memphis Blues Again" feels like a brief glimpse into an outer world that makes less and less sense over time, all capped off with wishing you were a part of it while stuck in your own humble squalor. "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" is the only time a man has written a song for a specific woman who is all but named in the title and got away with it. he deserved to.
basically, it's "Highway 61 Revisted" turned inwards and a bit calmer. and longer. what could be better?
Red Hot Chili Peppers
2/5
i feel like i gotta confess something: i don't hate the Red Hot Chili Peppers. i know, i know, they're basically Zoomer Styx and if you profess a little affinity for them your qualifications as a critic and tastemaker are essentially null, ant beneath boot, your opinions worthy of transformation into palimpsest. they're fucking stupid; however, hear me out -- that's the point. stupid wacky bullshit lyrics with occasional shallow social commentary and emotional navel gazing does have its place. i don't think they deserve to be tossed aside as a band just for lacking in emotional maturity and the general staleness of their white funk deep cuts. you can allot yourself some affection for boomer ass "REEL RAWK" guitar and/or bass solos. it's okay. you're estranged from your shitty dad; he won't know you like the same music as him. get him out of your head.
but it didn't have to be 74 minutes. you could have ended the album after "Under the Bridge". finish on a high note. could have been a solid B- album if they'd just cut it off after that song. instead, the band and Rick Rubin decide to just let the record's finish line downhill after its arduous journey upwards. i am exhausted, please let me go, guys. please. eight minute jam? creamy beaver, hotter than a fever? fuck you. let me go. i wanna watch the new Louis Theroux special on West Bank settlers before it gets deleted from YouTube. please.
(sidenote: every time i hear the intro to "Under the Bridge", i expect it to give way to Santeria. does anyone else?)
Pink Floyd
3/5
last month someone offered me PCP (i think) at a rave. it was dogshit music from breakbeat artists who went dubstep and never looked back, and this dude was begging me for a light and offering to share something that looked like but did not smell of marijuana. the next day i saw someone on the street, taking "donations" for "free" distributions of psilocybin. every day i walk past the back cover of Westword and see a smorgasbord of deals for weed, kratom, and spores. in Denver, i bet i am about three friends away from getting my hands on a sheet of lysergic stamps. arguably, it's never been easier to be an acid casualty than it is in the modern day. why don't we see as many in the creative world?
for one, we have martyrs. Brian Wilson, Skip Spence, Roky Erikson, Peter Green, Syd Barrett, and the milieu of lost hippy folk balladeers populating Numero and Light in the Attic reissue comps serve as Icarus-like "flying too close to the psionic sun" cautionary tales. you hear romantic notions of losing yourself in the embrace of God(s) to warn you away from the trippy stuff. stick to the "wrong kind of drugs" a la Lemmy -- booze, heroin, and coke.
also, it's bullshit. almost all the people mentioned probably had prior mental health issues (even minor ones like anxiety and stress), and as it turns out, taking psychoactive drugs while everything's not quite right upstairs isn't exactly a recipe for a well-functioning psyche. it isn't the drug that destroys the user with psychedelics, it's the user's mind being unable to handle lysergic fuckery in between their synapses.
so, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn -- is it a trip into a fracturing psyche? not really. for every creepy psychedelic detour in brute force stereo, there's a poppy, playful little rock bit that shows Syd Barrett wanted to be a musician first, not a cautionary tale. "Interstellar Overdrive" is mostly a experimental jam, but also part hard driving rock song with the heaviest riff you could write in 1967. it's also then followed by a lil toytown song about a gnome. there's a tinge of darkness, but it's still quite fun and childish at times. it's a cloudy and warm day.
i think, really, the acid casualty is equal parts myth and over classification. maybe we should see these people as artists before we see them as myths to tell each other in fearful tones.
Britney Spears
3/5
there's a certain insipidity to how music marketed for teens sounded in the 1990s and 2000s. it always centers around borrowed sounds from adult contemporary balladeers and contemporary r'n'b cliches that never go further than a wink and a nod to the burgeoning hormones tormenting its audience's minds. in this sense, "...Baby One More Time" is no exception. "Soda Pop", "E-Mail My Heart" and "I Will Still Love You" feel less like pop music and more like simulacrums of pop music for an audience that producers, marketers, and executives had no idea how to relate to.
and yet.
listen, i'm not gonna say this is getting a B rating just because of the title track. there's actually a lot to like here other than it; for example, i really enjoy the other two tracks that Max Martin wrote here, i enjoy the (forgive me) Persona 4-esque groove of "Deep In My Heart", and "The Beat Goes On" is a respectable little downtempo jam. of course, nothing more needs to be said about how well Britney pulls off the singing here, pretty much pioneering pop star vocal fry like 15 years before it became the norm. but c'mon, man. the first track is perfection. it's like two bullets colliding in the air at the Somme, something so miraculous that any attempt to repeat it feels like charlatanism. the chorus feels ritualistic, cult-like in a way, building everything up and possessing you to scream "AND I" and "STILL BELIEVE" at the wrong times because you're already swept up in the fever. it's terrifying. how did they pull it off?
also, i'd like to say how appreciative i am of Britney's albums always being so short. in the age of CD fillers, she gave you just the right amount. her longest record is 49 minutes. it's admirable.
Red Snapper
4/5
Psyence Fiction kind of killed the whole trip hop thing. the record was super hyped up, had all these cooks in the kitchen, and yet that didn't stop it from receiving an (unjust) thrashing in the music press for failing to meet exospheric expectations. even Pitchfork, who gave it an incredible 9.8 at the time quietly scrubbed the review from its site when pretty soon after, downtempo, trip hop, and acid jazz started spiraling into obscurity, overshadowed by the revolution of buzzy electro house and chopped up disco house hits. regardless of the quality of the music, trip hop became another byword for undesirable lounge music, something to drink or ignore or fuck to. when the most beloved examples of your genre in the coming decade are soundtracks to PS2 games, you know Bristol has fallen into the sea.
poor red snapper. making fucking incredible work in their genre, set on the wayside by simply by existing at the time it did. the grooves are chill, but just spooky enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck. "Don't Go Nowhere" feels equal parts inviting and yet also slightly off-putting with its looping vocal sample. some parts of it are abrasive, like the lyrics to "The Rough and the Quick", and some of the tracks don't particularly develop from one musical idea to the next, but i feel like this might be intentional? this isn't a cocktail record, this is a record that feels like the underside of a highway, cars roaring above as the graffiti stares you down. there's nothing more minimal than decaying brutalized slabs of concrete in the sky.
the record's inclusion in 1001 Albums is a mystery to me, not because of its lack of quality or the relative obscurity of the artist, but simply because of the unconventional period of time it existed within. trip hop's demise can be foul play, but acid jazz is another thing; nothing killed it, it just kind of keeled over and died like some cancerous hamster. it's at the precipice of the apocalypse, about to slide, feet first, into the sinkhole in the center of the city.
Hugh Masekela
4/5
my mom mostly has two reactions to jazz:
1. "what is this Charlie Brown bullshit you've got me listening to?" (said in response to a Vince Guaraldi deep cut playing on the radio)
2. "this is torture. i'm gonna find us a seat, please bring my fries to me when they come out." (said in response to a local free jazz band playing really loudly when we were at the Lyric buying tickets for Sinners)
however, i do believe that if i played this jazz for her, she would like it a lot. it's both fairly conventional in approach, doesn't really have any rough edges past a few daring solos here and there, and can easily fade into the background if you wanna have a conversation about something. however, when you engage with it, it's really rewarding, and it takes a lot from soul music without fully subjecting itself to the strict form of the pop song.
what i'm saying is that i'm a lot more tolerant of duller or crazier jazz than my mom. i like me some Charlie Brown bullshit. i also like me some crazy screechy shit that makes you wanna crawl out of your skin. but if we had common ground on jazz, it'd probably be this. this is pretty damn good. and yeah, my mom lets me swear. she's cool like that, and i'm an adult.
Leftfield
3/5
when people attach the operative word "progressive" to anything, they usually mean something forward thinking, daringly structured, and artful. progressive rock, progressive soul, progressive pop. leave it to prog house to have the prog refer to how tracks "progress" over multiple sections. it's like how the "post-" in post-grunge doesn't mean Nickleback is using timbres. therefore, whenever i see a track labeled "progressive house" im basically understanding it as "house that anyone can potentially hear in a big club". i think most of the people who are heavily into EDM first heard of it from a prog house track. how appropriate for the inventors of The People's 120 BPM to be named "Leftism."
i do think that this fulfills its mission statement of sounding cool as fuck but also being relatively approachable. i could enjoy it sober, i could enjoy it while ricocheting through a pocket dimension of DMT receptors. all the tracks here sound like they were custom made to be the best part of an hour long mix, causing people to go "awww yeah" the second the drums kick in. i appreciate the hyper-artificial soundscapes of this genre too, and thank it every day for basically being one of the most influential sounds in EDM. it's the soundtrack to PLUR.
but that's also partially why i don't fully love it? i feel like the reason all the sad nerds gravitated towards braindance is because it lacked the toxic positivity of being so in love with the world, man. the experimental touches of Autechre and Aphex or the spooky hauntology of BoC are a different aesthetic experience to the Matrix Bullet Time of "Space Shanty". that song's incredible, but i bet you there are a million other prog house dudes biting from it. they're allll making nigh identical music to fill the rest of the hour long DJ mix. maybe it's the unfortunate orientalism of vaguely "tribal" sounds like sitars and African drumming and dub toasting, but this record feels a bit TOO earnest, to the point of naivety. if i wasn't in a good mood, it would be oppressive, especially on headphones. hell, it might be more oppressive if i was in the club -- what if i was having a horrible time and the only thing i could hear was cool breakbeats and trancey leads in major key?
plus, to paraphrase one of the few decent memes from the dying internet: "You Bitches Be Like 💖✨🎶🧳🌈PLUR💖✨🎶🧳🌈 But Are Actually Horrible Human Beings". i had a friend get spiked a bit back and let me tell you -- not everyone on Earth is your brother. some of them are gross cousins who steal money from their mom's purse and they do not need to be part of the Global Tribe of Love. fuck 'em.
Jurassic 5
4/5
it was 2002, and there was no real room for overly conscious hip-hop after the South took over the genre like Napoleon to France. sure, it wasn't extinct, but boom bap and jazzy cyphers were going underground for the decade, replaced by ringtones, high-pitched soul, or abstraction. someone forgot to give Jurassic 5 the memo or they threw it directly in the trash, and i am glad they did. Power In Numbers feels so earnestly out of step with the trends of the time, almost defiant.
part of it is definitely Cut Chemist and DJ Nu-Mark's production and beats, but the best part of his cuts are how his compositions make space for the crew to work over, trading off and calling back and forth for hooks. i'd definitely like to shout out 2na's vocals; he's got such a unique voice, something you could rap the phonebook with. of course, almost everyone else has their own personality, tight and honed. i'm not sure if Quality Control is worse than this (i haven't heard it yet), but i don't see it being better. there are cuts like the phony-call out track "One of Them" that keep this from being a perfect listen -- the homophobic slight honestly feels less offensive than the cornball gangsta shaming. otherwise, this feels like Jurassic 5 working at peak performance, like a day in the sun.
Metallica
2/5
metal.
metal that feels like a solid color (here it's black, even if grey is more appropriate). metal everyone knows. metal that is perfectly adequate at what it does -- whatever that is -- and never strives for anything further. metal that took blood sweat and tears to produce. metal that proves you can bleed, sweat, and cry as much as you want and it won't automatically create a gesamtkunstwerk. metal your mom doesn't switch off when the radio plays it. metal the radio plays. metal that you could feasibly cover with your local indie folk band that uses mandocello. metal that fills stadiums. metal that could be considered a "safe aux choice". metal with a bit of thrash and a bit of groove and a bit of alt but really none of those things all at once. metal, stainless steel used for a butter knife made in Hoboken -- durable, polished, dull.
metal you would presume is made by a band named "metallic-a".
Eminem
2/5
another? ugh.
i do think it's better than The Marshall Mathers LP, if only by a nose. "Rock Bottom", "Role Model", and of course "My Name Is" are exceptional tracks, and it's no wonder he shot to stardom off of that last one. also, "Bad Meets Evil" is actually pretty good, with Royce da 5-9 having a lot of good chemistry with Em (or Slim). even if "Still Don't Give A Fuck" is that classic "birds to the world" edgeball lyricism, the beat and Eminem's flow saves it from being simple horrorcore schlock.
but god, when the Slim Shady comedy rap gets grating, it gets REALLY grating. when a prank call featuring the words "give you a piece of my ass" is funnier than your hilarious verses about a girl you wanted to fuck overdosing on... mushrooms? and ending up in a "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" style ugly-woman-chasing-a-man situation, you should maybe rework a few of the songs. "Guilty Conscience", one of the better regarded tracks here, is kneecapped by putting skits in the middle of the fucking song instead of just letting the verses flow like normal. like come on! i don't need a radio announcer for each character you want to be the impulsive side of!
finally, the predecessor of "Kim" -- "'97 Bonnie & Clyde" -- is basically if that song was made a bit more palatable by taking all the raw anger and emotion and putting it through the lens of gimmicky innuendos between Marshall Mathers and his daughter. this makes the song worse in basically every way, from the framing of the situation to the corniness of Hailey helping Eminem dispose of her dead mom. as a result, the Slim Shady LP is a better record, but almost offensively shallow. maybe offensive in a few other ways, but none that actually got a reaction out of me. i really hope The Eminem Show is not on this list. i don't know how much more i can take of this guy.
Dion
2/5
i think Phil Spector should have died or at the very least retired after the early 60s. not only because he was a violent psychopath who held people at gunpoint, not only because he abused anyone unlucky enough to know him, and not only because he shot Lana Clarkson in the head with a .38 snub-nosed revolver and killed her, but because he just kind of started sucking?
like, even late Spector productions that are well received, like All Things Must Pass or John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band come off as bombastic and overcrowded to me. you can have a good song like "Instant Karma" or "My Sweet Lord" and then here comes Spector producing it with the same grandma's fireplace kitsch as "Happy Xmas (War is Over)". maybe you like "Happy Xmas", but you can't deny that the song is a little bit much. even the rawer Lennon cuts like "Mother" still have that "performing in a concert hall" reverb to it that every single Spector song has. a man can't perform a song alone on a piano, it has to be a piano at MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, WHOAHHHHH. it feels like the songwriter has to work around him and his abundance to get anywhere, and Phil very much didn't like that.
what i'm saying is that late Spector is only as good as the artist he's got locked in his basement putting down endless takes. they've got to have the sauce to be heard above the Chinese Hell of Cloying Orchestras.
the guy who sang Runaround Sue does not have the sauce.
Mylo
4/5
i feel a sort of kinship with Mylo. all he had growing up in the Isle of Skye (basically Hyperborea) was a soft rock station that played AOR and Fleetwood Mac, stuff that feels tame as milk; children's music essentially. then, you find out that there are people out there, powerful people, who believe this stuff is enacting mind control over the godless youth and making them kill for the devil. it doesn't seem fair, right? it seems right out of a kid's movie to hate music for that reason.
i had more than one station growing up, but those stations tended to play the same five songs over and over again, and they were all so tame. you realize that the only way music can be evil is if it's boring, no matter how good the tunes are. so Mylo, with full respect, took these songs that played incessantly in all their bubbly glory and turned them into fun dance tunes. "In My Arms" in particular feels so joyous in its energy, nigh infectious. maybe it's not the most hard hitting electro house of the era, but harsh bangers are a dime a dozen in the genre; sometimes it pays to chill.
Talking Heads
5/5
the album's pretty good. it's like the band finally found their quirk after finding a producer who encouraged them to be weird and hyper. i feel like most people are aware of this and as such they consider it their proper debut, sort of including myself. i don't even think there are any non-starters on this thing. it's all quite fun, from the first song to the last.
however, i'm going to use this review to focus on a single song -- "The Big Country". i grew up in a flyover part of my state, best known for cattle silage and bus accidents. for a vacation, my family would north to South Dakota. there, you'd see towns with downtowns that weren't really meant for the people who lived there; rather, they were for tourists with cameras and hotel reservations like us. everyone in those towns worked and lived for people who did not live there. the words "i wouldn't live there if you paid me to" always brought to mind the tourist's paradox; by the simple act of visiting and not living, you're essentially perpetually out of place. "the flyover states." it's got to be demeaning to be thought of as that. i don't know if David Byrne was being ironic with this song; i have always assumed it was. the slide guitar always seems like it's poking fun not of the country music of that area, but of the idea people get of it. the people of small town America enjoy their lives and here he is in a little metal box with wings, separated from the real world, seeing all the fun they have and life they live, thinking he wouldn't live there if they paid him. the arrogance and stupidity, even though so many of us living there don't wanna be there either. can you really hate a small town if you never lived there? does anyone who lives in a small town really hate it, or are they just bored? do rocks hate the lakes they've been cast into or do they simply adjust to the water?
anyway, good album.
Deee-Lite
3/5
it is wild how Deee-Lite got onto the whole diva house thing like a year after the trend started popping off. of course, nobody's really here for cuts like "Good Beat" or "Who Was That?", but we'll get to that soon. when i was first getting into late 80s and early 90s house, i was sort of offput by how synthetic and often cornball the components sounded, too synthetic for its own good. now, of course, i find a lot of charm in those odd squelchy basslines and UK soul inspired cuts. even if i'm probably not going to remember most of them, they're a lovely little time capsule. the record tries a little bit of everything, and whether you think it was successful or not depends on whether you think it stands up to the deep cuts they were inspired by. i dunno if i'd trade "Deep Ending" for anything off of Strictly Rhythm, even thought i like it.
of course, then there's "Groove Is in the Heart". this song sounds, looks, and feels eight years ahead of when it came out. its livelier than the rest of the cuts on the record, and i actually don't know how they pulled it off. everyone was capable of it, no doubt, but you gotta assume they were really surprised in the studio when they got everything but the guest spots done. like, "wait what the fuck? how did we do that?" it's like being the first person to BLJ in Super Mario 64 in the 90s. something beautiful and terrifying has been enacted by your hands, and you're not sure you can do it again. but pretty soon, everyone's gonna be doing it, and they'll look to you as some mad pioneer.
Boards of Canada
5/5
generation z's obsession with analog horror is a strange one. not only did most people born before 2010 not have many formative experiences with things like VHS players or analog television before it was supplanted by superior and higher-fidelity, they also seem not to entirely understand the inherent nostalgic draw of these formats. often, the analog element simply serves as a shallow aesthetic choice, failing to make the two routes of "shitty equipment" and "spooky horror" converge in a meaningful manner.
with all that said, why do i, a member of that generation, still care about it so much?
well, i think it might be partially because i hold so much in common with the creators. things like analog horror, lost media, and nostalgia hold (please forgive me) an autistic quality to them that is enabled in the internet era of archives and infinite data. the thrown away, the forgotten, the easily ignored by the layman, the "who cares" -- it serves as a sort of hauntological comfort, an image of a world where things are not the stability that we know. maybe we identify with the long forgotten TAT logo, rotting away on your grandmother's tape collection of The Jeffersons. in disintegrating hiss and cherished fading memory, we both find comfort and challenge ourselves. it's creepy, but it's also wet, if you get me.
i am not going to say Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin are autistic; it's not my place to diagnose them. but their focus on the past, the mining of a world they never quite knew for warm, often uncanny memories, feels a lot in line with those who make analog horror. maybe it blends the two a bit better -- downtempo already took a lot from the synthetic and sampled to create a new style of music -- than this teenage passion, but you could just as easily strip away the Moogs and the Sesame Street samples and have a pretty decent beat tape. nevertheless, they are there. because Mike and Marcus care, and so do you.
Guns N' Roses
3/5
every decade has its great unsubstantiated moral panic and for the 1980s it was nothin but Satan, baby. you probably know all about it -- the Devil was molesting children in the basements of preschools, and this snowballed into claims that he was also making America's youth shoot drugs and kill themselves through backmasked glam metal music and Dungeons and Dragons. of course, we all know this to be classic Protestant horseshit on VHS, of which i take no stock in.
except for Guns N' Roses.
there's probably better words to describe them; perhaps you could call them industry plants, but there was no real industry for them to be planted by. apparently they were just really popular in the Sunset Strip scene.
well, actually, no -- their PREVIOUS bands, L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose, were popular on the Strip. Guns N' Roses is essentially a supergroup. the band proper was formed a year before they got signed to Geffen, released an EP on an "independent" label, and then shot to superstardom. this further befuddles me. how does an utter trainwreck-at-conception last minute lineup shoot to being the snownosed face of rock and/or roll?
like, okay, the singles are good. "Welcome to the Jungle" rocks, and i can stomach decent amounts of "Paradise City" and "Sweet Child o' Mine". but they otherwise sound pretty similar to most of the other bands that were playing that sound at that time. Bound for Hell: On the Sunset Strip is chock-filled with music that sounds just like (and at several points) better than the material here. barring "Think About You", so many of the "deep cuts" on this thing basically feel like 80s sleaze rock white noise, neither good nor bad, and yet it's treated by so many people as this towering authentic force in rock. was it because they swore and talked drugs? was it because they did it more bluntly?
you could say the album's carried by the singles. sure, maybe. that doesn't explain how they came back after G n' R Lies became the poster child for sophomore slumps. you could say they lucked out. THAT i will not accept. the only explanation for this perfectly fine but of so very of its time band becoming rock and roll royalty overnight is some sort of Faustian bargain. i harbor no hate for Guns N' Roses because i have not been exposed to more than one (1) of their bad songs (Knockin' on Heaven's Door). i do not despise them, or Slash's really squeaky guitar tone, or Axl's freebasing Elmo voice. in fact, these aspects of an otherwise quite dull band are what make them charming to me in a way. i am just confused as to what all the hullaballoo is about. what makes you so special, Axl?
Nirvana
5/5
et's be real: MTV Unplugged is a gimmick -- not a bad gimmick per se, but one with limited mileage. yeah, it's an interesting experiment to take a song dependent on studio magic and electric necromancy and take it in a more casual context, especially for people who are just starting out on guitar, but i've seen enough episodes of the Tiny Desk Concerts to realize that for every band that works great in an intimate live setting, there's a band that just doesn't translate well without all the stuff that makes them them. i don't wanna litigate Korn's MTVU anymore (partially cause i think it sounds kinda fun) but something like, oh, The Scorpions' MTVU feels like it forgets a lot of the reasons people enjoy these bands. "Rock You Like A Hurricane" is great because it's an over the top rock song, and outside of that context, it just becomes too cornball for its own good.
Nirvana, on the other hand, got their money's worth from the Unplugged treatment, taking the gimmick and turning it into real ass art. not only does their style of grunge dovetail pretty well into being stripped back, but the intimacy of the performance feels at home with the dark, brooding lyrics of both the original non-hit songs and the handful of covers Kurt lugs along with him. it could be a studio in Hell's Kitchen, but it could also be a living room with a bunch of friends lined up on your couch. something feels magical about this miserable psychedelia, all festooned with dead flowers and candles. i think it's something to treasure, especially if you're not in the mood for aggression -- just bitter pain.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
3/5
"Welcome to the Pleasuredome" is kind of a rock opera, and unfortunately, like countless rock operas, its lack of focus is what holds it back from greatness. yeah, there's a lot of good cuts like the title track, "Relax", and "Two Tribes", but a good chunk of this beautiful dumb drama club hunk is spent momentarily shifting into a jukebox musical instead of developing the ideas spent on the first disc, then dropping that and struggling to regain momentum until "The Power of Love" comes in as the big show stopper. if they'd just spent a bit more time on the second disc, they'd have something really special on their hands.
what i'm saying is that there should be a Welcome to the Pleasuredome musical on Broadway -- but they gotta fix that desert in the second half. otherwise i'm just gonna catch Les Miz.
Blondie
5/5
APOLOGY FORM FOR THE BAND BLONDIE
EXCUSE LIST:
[x] The media convinced me they were boomer trailer music
[x] I only listened to the radio singles
[x] I was jealous of Blondie inventing new wave before punk
[x] I didn't listen to the actual albums
[x] I don't know new wave
[x] Mercury was in Gatorade
[x] I will hereby respect Blondie and I will NOT talk down on the current and 19 years running Rock and Roll Hall of Famers.
Anything else to say?:
listen, i feel like a total dork when i enjoy new wave. the cookie crumbled so that the accessible and popular cousin of punk rock ended up making you look like a total mondo dweebazoid with no friends and no game if you had extensive knowledge about it. you may as well start buying Rogaine at 16. plus, as The Knack have proven, not all new wave is good -- it actually has a great capability to suck ass and survive in culture as throwback trailer music for bitter Gen X'ers. (what's millenial The Knack? Jet?) i know Blondie; who doesn't? i just kind of heard the singles, which are really good, and saw how little buzz their albums got and just assumed "yeah i guess they're a singles band" like a moron. this is some premium grade new wave, and probably the best pop rock that side of the 70s.
i was wrong. i shouldn't have put off listening to Parallel Lines. neither should you. can i leave music dork detention now?
Curtis Mayfield
3/5
a fairly resigned, at times tired sounding, record, perfect for the 70s malaise and bitter loss. even the song about Jesus feels like it's trying to reassure itself rather than evangelize, like looking to Christ during the worst time of your life. even "Hard Times", a dramatic and hard hitting soul number, turns into languid and exhausted funk, sapped of its energy and left to sit and stew. this isn't a bad thing (although i do think a lot of this record feels a bit TOO inactive), it's just a far cry from the Curtis i came to know on "Move On Up" and "Freddie's Dead". what happened, man? are you alright? do you need to sit down?
Deep Purple
3/5
why do we make live albums?
of course i have the ability to be an annoying prick and say that i don't like hearing music live, but that's a total lie. i love going to concerts, i love watching people play songs i love, and i love the chance to feel like i'm a part of musical history, a little piece of memory to prove to yourself "i was there". live performance offers lots of things to people that the record itself cannot. however, from my perspective, live albums offer neither the polish or production of a studio engineer nor the feeling that i'm actually there. so, i've tried to narrow down all the reasons as to why someone would purchase a live album over a studio album.
1. it captures one particularly great show, such as 98.12.28 男達の別れ [98.12.28 Otokotachi no wakare], The Köln Concert, or At Folsom Prison. this is what makes the most sense to me -- if a performance was legendary, of course you'd wanna hear it. of course, sometimes this can go too far; if anyone who isn't wholly suckered into the cult of the Deadhead can tell me what makes Here Comes Sunshine better on Dick's Picks Volume One: Tampa, Florida, 12/19/73 than on Dick's Picks Volume Fourteen: Boston Music Hall, 11/30/73 & 12/2/73 or vice versa, i'd really like to know. there's got to be at least some reason as to why you'd want to archive one performance over another, otherwise it just feels like manufacturing false importance.
2. it's a bunch of recordings from a single tour meant to be representative of a really good TOUR instead of a really good concert. it's a snapshot of the band at the time. this album is an example of such a thing, as is 'Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!': The Rolling Stones in Concert. i'm a little less compelled by this reason, because at that point, it's more of a compilation of really good moments of the band and thus is more susceptible to cherry picking. a mediocre live act could delude an audience into paying money for a concert because their compilation album made them come off as real rooftearin' sonsabitches over the course of a month. thankfully, from what i've heard, Deep Purple are a great live act, and you can hear it on the record during some of the jammier sections.
3. this is the only record we have of the band existing. you've got '77 Live, or Nervous Conditions, or 801 Live. at this point, you are listening to a sanctioned demo. this is the equivalent of getting a really tasty sample at the grocery store and looking in vain only to find that it was discontinued, so you're stuck licking the little paper cup it came in.
4. for some ungodly reason, you are basically listening to a fake live album. this includes Alive! and Alive II, Beach Boys' Party!, or Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles! Live!. you weren't there. nobody was there. in fact, there's a good chance they weren't there. other live albums with extensive overdubs such as The Song Remains the Same also get filed under this category for all the overdubs. this is the pinnacle of parasociality, and i find it kind of sad. maybe they're good performances, but at that point, you should just buy the album with these songs on them. if you want the "LIVE!" experience, just find some damn stock audience sounds and crossfade them between songs.
anyway, this album is fine. sometimes it's a tad too jammy for my tastes, but it's still fun. i just wish i was there, so i could have as much fun as the people here were having. that's probably the biggest reason why i'm not a live albums guy -- how dare you have fun in the past without me?
The Jesus And Mary Chain
2/5
i do wanna know why the Jesus and Mary Chain seemed so deadset on making the wrong aesthetic choices at all times. with fuzz and reverb, they'd created one of the most iconic and influential sounds of 80s indie rock, melding 60s pop and 80s post punk in a TV static bath. one of the things that kept me from fully loving Psychocandy was how so many of the songs sounded so much alike. surely, on the next album, they'd fix that little bit of disappointment, but keep the strong suit of their revolutionary wash of noise.
well, to make a long story short, the Reid brothers are either fucking stupid or just really wanted a hit. maybe they're both. this record sounds like everything else that was coming out at the time, but with the dull songwriting from last time around wholly untouched. for the brief moments where the band actually comes up with a new idea, like "Happy When It Rains" or "April Skies" -- a song with great bones and a genuinely great track respectively -- it feels stunted by having the same sonic palette as The Cult. every jagged edge that made the band exciting and dangerous is now ground down to nubs of indie teen prom rock.
listen, i'm not one of those people who gets irrationally mad when a band changes sound. it can be fun to shake things up, and it can be a necessary evolution. but when you take away the noise, you realize just how shallow an act JAMC are. whoever called them a one trick pony for their noise and not their slavish dedication to this sleepy musical formula, you're a monster and i am unsure how you can sleep at night.
The Smiths
4/5
the pedant's favorite Smiths album, which of course means it's my second favorite. much as i enjoy the miserabilist sound and feeling on The Queen Is Dead (which Morrissey will never ruin for me despite every stupid, reactionary thing his PETA-addled brain vomits out these days), i really enjoy how bright and layered some of these songs sound -- even though a good chunk of them are about the dead or dying. honestly, i'm shocked it's gotten such a bad rap, considering how two or three of their best regarded songs are on it. my mom doesn't even like the Smiths and she knows "Girlfriend in a Coma".
"Strangeways" is peak Moz melodramatics too, although it might have been at the cost of him being unable to shut it off later in life. if "Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me" wasn't a dirge for a dying band with each member playing their hearts out into the inky black of the coffin, then i'm not sure what else would be.
Ride
5/5
the continued disrespect this record receives from the shoegaze crowd comes from a place of ignorance. not all shoegaze sounded like My Bloody Valentine in the genre's heyday; in fact, Loveless was so highly praised because nothing else sounded like it. the reason Loveless was accused of having killed the genre was because it set such an impossibly high sonic standard that no other group content with their sound could catch up to, and everyone who didn't meet them (read: 98% of all shoegaze bands signed to labels who wanted to make back their money) caught flak from the British Music Press. this is what led to almost every single shoegaze or baggy band switching to Britpop by '95. so in a sense, your average RYMer is simply falling for the same booby trap the NME fell for: the next best thing arrives, and your old toys are left to collect dust in the attic. i am not exempt from such stupidity.
anyway, Nowhere! it's one of those records where you can hardly believe it came out so soon after a contemporary, and this is definitely true in this case. maybe you could trace bits of it to the baggy of The Stone Roses, but the fact that it was just a year after proves how far Ride pushed the needle at the time. Screamadelica came out a year after this! so did fuckin' Nevermind! the best part is that even though i think the sequencing of the tracks could be better, i don't think there's a single bad song on the record. the effects and dreaminess is all grounded by this regular indie rhythm section, so you're always suspended six feet above ground. if you meet it on its own terms, Nowhere holds up remarkably well.
Wild Beasts
4/5
if you weren't obsessed with the dance floor in 2009, you were obsessed with polyrhythms. some groups fresh from the freak folk scene, like Dirty Projectors and Tune-Yards, mined "tribal" sounds, sort of taken of context and turned into something appreciated by thine white hipster US blogwriters. i like those acts too, but if i liked them at the time and still liked them now instead of turning my back on them, there'd probably be some Maoist ass struggle sessions taking place. going across the pond, however, you see a lot more "math pop" -- something coined for whatever was going on in San Francisco in the late 90s -- with TTNG and Foals going for a more original (and less approximated) sound. Wild Beasts are a part of the latter group.
however, what people remember about this band isn't their incredibly intricate guitarwork and musicianship, but the vocals of Mr. Hayden Thorpe, who has one of the most distinct falsettos in all of indie rock. (his biggest solo release appears to be a cover of "Goodbye, Horses", which makes sense for him to perform.) accompanying the voice is oddball poetry for lyrics like "This is a booty call; my boot up your arse hole / This is a Freudian slip; my slipper in your bits" or "O, unpluckable flower of the moon! / O, untetherable bird of the blue!" -- and you know how much i love crude poetics. altogether, it makes for a delicate package of crystal and china all covered in dust.
in my opinion, Two Dancers is quite special. unlike most stuff that was pushed by the British Music Press before hitting the ground like a dropped frog, it deserves to be remembered.
Miles Davis
5/5
the last dregs of The Cool quietly petering out over the night horizon, bound to make way for the chaos of the day. every time i listen to him, i am astounded how much Davis packed into each composition and how he got the right performers for the job almost every single time. i mean, this is THE "first" jazz fusion record, or the first one everyone knew. the idea of someone codifying a genre that would come to be the main sound of jazz some cold February night stuns me. i do wish they'd done a bit more with "It's About That Time", but otherwise, this is nigh perfect music.
John Coltrane
5/5
John Coltrane's passion for all spirituality was one that most churchgoers and meditators strive to reach. devotion to a higher power is tricky for me, same as devotion to anyone, but the passion and pure love Coltrane puts in his performance here can be felt no matter how much of a heathen i am. even that variation on those four simple notes from the beginning feels so careful and attentive in each go around on the third part.
i used to hear that knights spent a night in a chapel praying non-stop to God to show piety and be worthy of serving the Lord. i feel like this is the musical version of that act.
Brian Eno
4/5
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts touches on musical territory that was generally only broached by the pranksters and noise terrorists of the musical world, like The Residents and Negativland. your mileage may vary on whether it's meshing this with already developed ideas by David Byrne or wholesale lifted from Jon Hassell's conception of "Fourth World Music". your mileage may especially vary on whether the use of such sounds reeks of orientalism or is simply a recontextualization of these sounds to a more electronic soundscape -- i lean towards the latter.
there is a much appreciated neurosis to this sample discofunk. as a result, i feel like it sits right next to other classics in the stressed-out weirdo pantheon, like Remain in Light and Discipline, and all done without a single yelp or Fripp'd up guitar solo.
Tito Puente
4/5
those horn blasts on "Hong Kong Mambo" scare the shit out of me! other than that, there's not a lot to say about Dance Mania other than it probably being a very good stepping stone into understanding what "mambo" is. those trumpet performances are enough to make me want to maybe pick the instrument back up for the first time since freshman year in High School. Cuba proves itself as the second most influential island in the Caribbean in terms of music, just behind the eternal tower of influence that is Jamaica. yeah i know Tito Puente's not Cuban, but i'm sure Nuyoricans are welcome to master the timbalero as well.
Portishead
5/5
your demon stalks you in the night. it stares at you from every angle of this city, across from every derelict bus stop, in hallucinations formed between the specks in your eyes and the popcorn ceiling above your bed. in between moments of brief sexual release by yourself, you feel its hands, perverted and unkind, perched upon your shoulder. its drool is cold upon your neck. something haunts you, and it will not leave you alone, nor will it kill you. it will simply exist, taking up space wherever it sees fit, like some dispassionate feline.
for some reason, there has been an understanding of Dummy as potentially sexy or swanky; i could not imagine fucking to this. this isn't lifeless music, for sure, but something is haunted and off-putting about it. the band made this record through taking their soon-to-be-abandoned vinyl samples and sliding down the banister on them, using them as skateboards. as a result, we have a scuffed future, something far from Massive Attack's sobering march into the future or Tricky's vampiric hip hop. it's soul music, emptied of its lust for life and filled with a bitter acceptance of a future that is equal parts uncertain and unfair. even the occasional acid jazz flourishes feel like flashes of light from a malfunctioning neon sign, accidentally switched on by a nightguard watching old rotting properties.
the term i saw used in RJ Wheaton's book on Trip Hop for the 33 1/3 Genre series was "black-hearted soul". i disagree -- a "black heart" implies cruelty, evil. Portishead are not evil, they are drained. this is soul-sucked soul.
Joan Baez
3/5
a quiet, unadorned work of folk of which your opinion of is based on your attachment to early 60s folk preservation. i enjoy Joan Baez a lot, and she sells the bejeezus out of otherwise overdone tunes like "House of the Rising Sun" and "John Riley", but i'm just not enough of a folk dork to care about every rendition of "Little Moses". the crown jewel, however, is clearly her fingerpicked version of "Silver Dagger" that opens up the whole thing in moody glory, and always feels as if it would accompany a shower of rain and muffled sunlight.