Pretty interesting start for a challenge.
Immediate impression is that the album is quite well-named, even if it might be for the title track. Its vibe, despite it being rather downer and melancholic for most of the runtime, is quite beachy, and I think the dissonance works really well. The album cover illustrates this dissonance pretty well, depicting the weather on the beach Neil is standing on as rather gray and overcast.
The instrumentation is masterfully crafted, and speaks a lot of the talent and coordination of all the musicians involved. The lyricism, however, is something rather jarring to me as someone who's not very familiar with this era of music. It's simplistic but a bit opaque at times, and it takes some extra commitment to understand the meaning of some of the short passages that permeate through the album. I typically think of great lyrics as something with many layers that has a lot to digest, but manages accessibility without compromising the core, so this rather sparse writing caught me by surprise. When I heard that Young is an acclaimed lyricist, I did not expect to hear the songs I could easily summarize with a single sentence.
Not to say that I hate it, though. The lack of understanding of certain moments that got me to google more it's kind of a "me" problem, as events he touches on, such as Watergate and the presence of Charles Manson in popular culture, are not something that's ever been contemporary to me. Moreover, when I accepted the songs for what they are, their intricacies did show up on me, especially on the more emotionally charged moments like Walk On, where he brazenly states that he cannot appease the shit talkers, and the final three-track song run, where Neil laments on his self-perception of waning relevancy and the world being in such a continuous movement it feels like it is leaving him behind. What prevails in the lyricism isn't so much the substance itself as it is the tone it's delivered in. The emotion leaves a more lasting experience than the lyrics themselves.
I had a great time with this album overall, and it did raise my appetite both for the folk and country music, as well as other albums in Neil Young's discography.
Actual rating for me is 9/10, or 4.5/5.
Hotel California the song is a classic, but the rest of this album is rather unspectacular, moderately enjoyable radio-tier soft rock. I'm not feeling very eager to explore this album further than once, aside from maybe touching some more on a single someday, which is very interesting as a sentimental piece about California and perhaps the American dream, something I feel they are definitely qualified to talk about as people not originally from California. It has a rather fascinating personal tinge to it.
Disraeli Gears is my first encounter with Eric Clapton and Cream, and it's quite an impressive introduction.
This album is all about its intricate psychedelic sound. The instrumentation on it is masterful, and it blew me away on the first listen. It leaves no doubts in the album's status in the music canon, and I imagine at the time it was quite huge in the mainstream.
That said, my impression was slightly ruined when I started more thoroughly listening to the lyrics, as they ended up quite plain, uneventful, monotone, and were all just singing about some woman, in a somewhat crass male way most of the time. It lowered my enjoyment of the songs I really loved off of this.
The final song is a completely unnecessary departure that feels like a shitpost, and its presence on the album is utterly baffling. What were they even thinking with that one?
My first encounter with Neil Young left me feeling a bit conflicted with his lyrical style, as I still hadn't come to terms with the fact that there's more to good lyricism than verbosity. His writing was more sparse than what I was used to, and that felt a bit jarring to me upon listening to On The Beach. I didn't know what to make of it or how to judge it, considering that my perspective hardly accounts for the records that are lyrically as slim as his. But I did sense something special in it that still felt worthy of paying attention to.
My experience with Disraeli Gears, an album that shined with intricate instrumentation while faltering lyrics, put all the things into place. Now I understand that far from many artists, even the great ones, possess even the quarter of lyrical prowess that Young brings to his music.
Young's poeticism is immaculate. The emotion delivered is genuine and endearing, and his character is naturally relatable to those who don't feel like they've found their place in this world. I think the song that highlights that the most on Harvest in particular is A Man Needs a Maid. It's a rather dated song upfront, and nowadays, it can be credibly criticized as misogynistic. But I think there's still a timeless quality to it. The loneliness and the trauma of lost love portrayed in the song are deeply relatable, underscored by Young's highly passionate vocal delivery, and the song's message is all the more potent coming from someone with writing prowess as strong as Young's.
This album is considered Young's most mainstream, and its wide appeal is particularly evident by the success of his biggest song, Heart of Gold. But I'd be hard-pressed to say that its mass appeal has a negative impact on the album's vision. While it's not as consistent as On The Beach was, and some tracks on this feel like completely irrelevant filler, songs like Out on the Weekend, Old Man, Alabama, and The Needle and Damage Done maintain strong focus on their subject and feel worthy of the classic status they maintain.
Actual rating for me is 9/10, or 4.5/5.
My appreciation for the more poetic side of lyricism is growing further the more I get into this challenge. Most entries so far have been great at this [to be fair, it's thanks to Neil Young that I'm even bringing this up now], and Queen II is a very strong note to follow up with in my journey of musical appreciation.
This record is lush, and it is quite notable for being wrapped in the medieval fantasy themes that are likely Freddy's core input into this record. It paints a grandiose picture filled with so many references to royalties, magic, epic battles and adventures that you'd be forgiven to think you accidentally stepped into a DnD campaign. Sometimes it embraces this illustrious side so much that it ends up being absorbed in it, delivering style over substance.
But don't get me wrong, the record's substance is still great. It is delivered without hesitation, right from the opening track, Father to Son, a beautiful existential piece about the cycle of life and passing down a legacy to your child. The March of the Black Queen, the most critically acclaimed song on the record, is a beautiful ballad about chasing the love of someone who clearly doesn't act in your best interest. Comprising the stellar second half of the record, it feels like a direct precursor to Queen's most celebrated song, Bohemian Rhapsody, both in sound and the vocal delivery of Freddy Mercury, who is yet to become the primary voice of the band.
Yeah, surprisingly, Freddie Mercury is not yet the main face of the band, with most songs instead being sung either by Brian May or Roger Taylor. It makes The Loser in the End all the more surprising, as it kind of reads like Freddy airing out the grievances he has regarding his family, and yet he isn't even the person singing it. Regardless, it's also a major highlight, providing a strong statement on the responsibility of parenting and how mothers should not take their children's love for granted.
This album is a solid preview for what's to come within Queen's discography going forward, as it's easy to sense the sound that will eventually blossom into their classic songs. And that is hardly metaphorical, either, as the final song, Seven Seas of Rhye, is credited as the final push the band needed to finally get to the point of producing the masterpieces for years to come.
I like the dreamy industrial feel of this. Very cloudy, yet mechanical and sonically bold.
This album is quite front-loaded ngl. The second half of the record is moodier and doesn't have as strong a footing, with the low moment for me being the song I Believe, but I enjoyed Head Over Heels as well as the closing track, which has some nice ambient vibes to it.
It's an album that doesn't say that much, yet it has its heart in the right place when it comes to its topics. It's not an outwardly political album, in the sense that it's pretty safe and doesn't even talk broadly about its issues, but it's pretty clearly informed by the Thatcher years and the rising tensions of the Cold War, with themes being anti-elite, anti-war, anti-nuclear, and, to an extent, even anti-capitalist, one might say? It works thematically, for sure.
P. S. My first impression from listening to this record was, "Wow, this sounds like Depeche Mode!" I did not even know Shout is not a Depeche Mode song, but now I not only know that it isn't, but also that the vocalist from Tears for Fears literally admitted to being not just inspired, but also jealous of Depeche Mode, to the point of saying he thinks Shout would be better as a Depeche Mode song. Crazy and surprisingly humble.
Actual rating for me is 9/10, or 4.5/5.
The notability of this inclusion is understandable, as this album literally saved the band's career and defined their sound they'd be refining further on their universally acclaimed albums such as Close to the Edge and the follow-up to this record, Fragile.
As for the music itself, cool prog :)
This album was tough for me to get into at first, mainly because I found the songs to be too short and end too soon. Now I realize that my poor initial comprehension of song lyrics made me misjudge this album a lot, as the lyricism here is precisely what makes it work.
I'm coming to grips with the fact that there is music out there that doesn't have that strong of a focus on the shape of its voice. Here, the lyrics themselves carry most of the weight, and missing out on them severely degrades the listening experience. I don't hate this, but said observation makes me appreciate how far the music has come over the years and how much the presentation has improved in the meantime. We take a lot for granted these days, and it can make us forget that this all was made on the shoulders of our predecessors.
Besides, for Bowie, and perhaps for music at large, it was uncharted territory at the time. He was there right at the dawn of electronic music, and the experimentation present here proved hugely influential, pushing rock music way farther than anyone could imagine at the time and influencing the sound for decades to come.
The A-side feels like a chaotic internal monologue, a voice of depression with desperate pleas for attention and love. Now that I'm more familiar with it, I can accept its beauty, its complexity and unevenness. What I initially perceived as unfinished, I now understand as brevity, and it's quite impressive how it manages to paint a complete picture with what are essentially small fragments.
The more expansive B-side, though, is what got me to truly appreciate this album. Made with heavy input from the ambient legend Brian Eno, it paints a gloomy landscape of the Cold War era. Thematically, it focuses on the city of Berlin through the lens of the Cold War, attempting to capture the tragedy of the city at the time, when it was still divided by the Berlin Wall.
It wasn't Berlin that caught my eye, though. It was another city that got a presence here, Warsaw. The titular track, Warszawa, is a very haunting tune that reminds me a lot of the Blade Runner soundtrack. Much like the movie, it's gloomy, slow-paced, and synth-rich. The only thing missing here is the futurism, as the dystopia portrayed here is specifically of its time and still rather distant from Blade Runner's 80s-style futuristic dystopia.
I used to be quite mesmerized by Moby's music. Nowadays, it rings hollow with me. This is a very Gen X-coded record with a rather dated sound. Sometimes it does exhibit this endearing quality, but it generally screams the 90s in a rather mediocre fashion.
Songs vary by quality and don't really feel like they have any kind of connective tissue that brings any kind of coherency or flow. Most of them are just loose experimentation, throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.
The atmosphere of the better songs works, but with me having more experience with the music of Moby's contemporaries in the trip hop/downtempo genre, such as Portishead and Massive Attack, it fails to impress. I surely don't gravitate to it as much as I do to the more obviously dated pieces such as Bodyrock and Machete.
The music video for Porcelain is great, though. Quite a striking existential piece.
Actual rating is 7/10, or 3.5/5.
This is my revisiting of the record for the group after I already had this rolled as my first album.
I understand this record much better after experiencing Harvest and seeing Neil Young's character in more detail. A picture could not be any clearer: a loner, a rebel with a cause, brought down by depression and looming existential fears. The fact that he wrote music like this in his twenties makes both Harvest and On the Beach much more relatable to me. Even though I'm definitely not as famous as he was, I know what existential dread is like. His progressive politics also resonate with me quite a lot.
Young's style of lyricism is also much clearer to me now. His writing is best perceived as short poetry, something that doesn't take up much space, yet entertains the thoughts and subtly yields the emotions out of the listener. It helps that Young's singing is very passionate and sells the emotional moments very well.
Repost of the original review in case it gets overwritten:
Immediate impression is that the album is quite well-named, even if it might be for the title track. Its vibe, despite it being rather downer and melancholic for most of the runtime, is quite beachy, and I think the dissonance works really well. The album cover illustrates this dissonance pretty well, depicting the weather on the beach Neil is standing on as rather gray and overcast.
The instrumentation is masterfully crafted, and speaks a lot of the talent and coordination of all the musicians involved. The lyricism, however, is something rather jarring to me as someone who's not very familiar with this era of music. It's simplistic but a bit opaque at times, and it takes some extra commitment to understand the meaning of some of the short passages that permeate through the album. I typically think of great lyrics as something with many layers that has a lot to digest, but manages accessibility without compromising the core, so this rather sparse writing caught me by surprise. When I heard that Young is an acclaimed lyricist, I did not expect to hear the songs I could easily summarize with a single sentence.
Not to say that I hate it, though. The lack of understanding of certain moments that got me to google more it's kind of a "me" problem, as events he touches on, such as Watergate and the presence of Charles Manson in popular culture, are not something that's ever been contemporary to me. Moreover, when I accepted the songs for what they are, their intricacies did show up on me, especially on the more emotionally charged moments like Walk On, where he brazenly states that he cannot appease the shit talkers, and the final three-track song run, where Neil laments on his self-perception of waning relevancy and the world being in such a continuous movement it feels like it is leaving him behind. What prevails in the lyricism isn't so much the substance itself as it is the tone it's delivered in. The emotion leaves a more lasting experience than the lyrics themselves.
I had a great time with this album overall, and it did raise my appetite both for the folk and country music, as well as other albums in Neil Young's discography.
Actual rating is 9/10, or 4.5/5.
had a good time with this. this album is quite rough, but i can cut it some slack given its very short production time (5 days, with allegedly 45 minutes being spent on each track) and the fact that dave grohl did most of it entirely by himself. it's rough, a bit samey and formulaic, but it's no less electric for that, and it means a lot that at the time it was considered so good that it got picked up by labelheads despite it not even being intended as a commercial release, sold like hot pancakes and ended up influencing much of the genre that it represented.
if you aren't familiar with the cultural phenomenon known as adult swim, this record's humor may be a bit lost on you, as much of it is quite implicitly coded in the trademark style adult swim shows are well-known for. like those shows, it embraces the brand of humor that is a bit crass, generally unserious, but hugely appealing due to its down-to-earth, pedestrian nature. thundercat's character is weird, not always likeable, and sometimes kind of repugnant. but he's clearly just a down-to-earth dude most of us wouldn't mind chilling with. the stories he tells and the tangents he shares paint familiar life situations most people have probably dealt with.
despite the record's humorous nature, it doesn't compromise artistry for the sake of a joke. its instrumentation is incredibly creative, offering a bright palette of adventurous soul arrangements. it is a wild musical journey with thrilling highs and emotional lows. the record doesn't really let go of its energy, until it decides that enough is enough, and it's time to go to bed. it may be underwhelming to some, but to me it further adds to the authenticity of its humanity.
an epitome of the "throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks" approach to writing music. quite a hit-and-miss fusion of folk/world music and garage rock with a hint of neo-psychedelia, full of musical experiments that sound fun on paper but end up feeling like mere iterations on established conventions. it has its moments, some songs like Goodbye and I Remember When slap, but I don't think i'll be thinking about this much.
Actual rating is 7/10, or 3.5/5.
a very influential indie pop record that i find hard to dislike. now an established sound of the whole era of indie pop, the minimalistic instrumentation, paired with graceful vocal performances, makes this record feel like a soft touch, a warm hug, a tender moment in a dimly lit room during nighttime.
this is surprisingly transgressive and rebellious muzak, must say. pure youthful passionate resentment of the status quo
an undisputed nu-metal classic full of angst, tasteful albeit, at times, still conventional production, as well as highly passionate lyricism and vocal work. while some of the deep cuts falter a bit by sticking to the formula, they're still solid songs, plus they're easy to forgive due to how many all-timers this record has spawned.
barring the insane political context of this album, this is a magnificent piece. very intricate, complex, demanding of attention on a solemn listen, yet catchy, energetic, danceable, and charged with righteous anger. this feels like a cultural monument, and it fills me with endless fascination that i couldn't realistically do justice by talking about it in a condensed one-day format of this challenge.
