This was too funky for me. I suspect it is objectively too funky. I almost didn’t have a good time.
The first two singles from this album have to be two of the greatest of the 1980s. It makes it all the stranger how poor the rest of the album is. The two covers are well chosen but far too long - she manages to add more than a minute to each of them. The second half of the album is dreadful. I will say this for Cyndi Lauper - she has an absolutely brilliant voice; sweet as a bell and at the same time full of character and drama. It’s only this that makes trash like She-bop, I’ll Kiss You and Yeah Yeah listenable.
I was up and down on this album. Early on I was thinking it sounded dated in production and that Alanis over-eggs the pudding on every syllable she sings. But then about three quarters of the way through I was thinking this is just one good tune after another - hard to criticise this level of consistency. But then it outstayed its welcome with a weaker track (Wake Up) then the pointless remix of You Oughta Know and then the hidden track. Still, more cracking pop songs than a lot of folks have in a whole career.
One of the best opening tracks there has ever been in my opinion. Magic from the first second to the last. Then New Kid in Town - a beautiful, brilliant, subtle song. And then the album starts to go downhill. Life in the Fast Lane is decent - good riff, good hook, but not a top Eagles song like the two tracks before it. The rest of the album I find practically soporific. Pleasant enough sometimes (Try to Love Again) and absolutely dire at others (the embarrassingly tacky orchestral reprise to Wasted Time). I know not everyone will agree but for me the real failure of the album is The Last Resort. A huge chunk of running time is dedicated to this self-regarding dirge and it just isn’t good enough to justify its place. It beats you over the head with that same stupid snippet of melody for an absolute age and the lyrics are rotten. Those two opening tracks though….
It’s fair to say Rap is not my genre. But even by the limited parameters of my encounters with it I feel confident in saying that this was pure shit. There is virtually no musical interest here at all - half the tracks are 1 bar on a loop ( how many mics, zealots, the beast, cowboys). Even when all three of them talk over the top at the same time - they can’t summon the dramatic or intellectual interest to compensate for the utter banality of the backing tracks. There was also the classy karaoke (Killing Me Softly…), the absolutely excruciating karaoke (No Woman, No Cry) and the annoying, barely comprehensible skits. Just rubbish.
Live and Dangerous - Thin Lizzy. 3/5 The band sound great and play with tons of energy. A live album is always an odd one to review though. Do you give them credit for the quality of songs - even though that credit properly belongs to the studio recording? And regardless of how well they play (and Thin Lizzy really do play well) - you are listening to more than an hour of exactly the same mix of the same instruments. That calls for some endurance regardless of how much you love the band. I will say that I wasn’t bored though, 76 mins went in just fine.
This was too funky for me. I suspect it is objectively too funky. I almost didn’t have a good time.
My dislike of Green Day is longstanding but to be honest - this was the first time I sat down and listened to Dookie from start to finish. And I did try to go in positive and open-minded - I just found it a gruelling experience. Every track seemed procedural to me and deeply dull. There wasn’t a song I could say was better or worse than another - Basket Case I have never cared for in the slightest. I found myself regularly looking at the track timer at 1:30 saying to myself ‘I can’t believe there is another 30 seconds of this’. I can’t think of a less interesting album of guitar playing in musical terms either - it is just a dull stew of palm-muted power chords and sawed power chords. And I cannot stand Billie Joe Armstrong’s voice.
Great songwriting, great playing. Only The Heathen fell flat. And the string of classics on that second side is silly.
A pleasant enough novelty for half a dozen tracks but a little goes a long way with this procedural old-timey country stuff. Historically significant I’m sure but basically two-dimensional. A chore.
Much more to my taste or mood now than it was 25 years ago, when I first listened to it. Not as dense as I recall, but I'm probably remembering Ladies & Gentlemen. A lot more twee and sparse than that, flimsy almost, with obvious Galaxie 500 and Jesus and Mary Chain similarities. However, it is the moments where the droning singularity explodes into something bigger or more intense that I really enjoy - like Heroin by the Velvet Underground. This is frustratingly withheld for a minute in the middle of If I Were Her Now. Another clear nod to the Velvet Underground on Run.
None of this should stand up, none of it should have ever stood up: crass sloganeering; awful guitar sounds; tense-armed drumming; mismatched sections; melodic fragments; overcrowded lyrics. No element of it works, which is why the whole is so staggeringly impressive. In the face of nihlism and wilful grotesquerie, there is hope and beauty - somehow - there is some achievement worth the time and effort. Eternity clutched from the mouth of oblivion. Take all my stars. The lyrics of The Holy Bible are a shapeless, rambling, almost-stream of consciousness clash of some kind of political nihilism and body horror. They should be unsingable or at least fatal to any attempt to create music worth listening to. Yet James Dean Bradfield took them and forged melodies of such elegance and potency that he must be regarded here as a genius at the moment of his purest inspiration. These are great, grotesque songs and I still shake my head, on the hundredth listen, at their relentless pile-on. Half of them would make a terrific album. As it is, I think of this album in which everything seems to pull forcefully in one direction; the angular, ugly guitar and bass riffs, the coarse production, the striking choice of artwork, those still shocking lyrics, the name of the band itself (invoked here on Archives of Pain), even the clothes they were wearing and I am reminded of no album more than Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. More than pop music; Gesamtkunstwerk. And, which may be more, the best album of 1994. 5/5
Even after hundreds of listens, I am still unseated by the guitar solo in the second verse of Be My Wife, the early fade on Breaking Glass, the out-of-time synth stutters in What In The World. Although I am intimately familiar with every moment of this record, they never feel familiar. It is always juddering, shuddering and coming apart. Travelling at the speed of life, crashing over and over again, and disintegrating in the second half, where words no longer have meaning, are no longer solid in the mouth or on the ear. By Subterraneans, there is no pulse, no presence. Everything disintegrates. You will disintegrate. These five stars that I'm giving Low will collapse, then shoot out in all directions until the atoms of which they were once comprised are millions of light years apart from each other. David Bowie’s finest moment and Brian Eno’s finest moment, both of which is saying an awful lot. Unique and very, very beautiful. The list could be Low 1001 times and it would be a life well spent. 5/5
The term world music denotes a homogenuous, universalist style that freely incorporates elements of different traditions and results in an output that can't be equated with any one or two styles, any particular region, any musical heritage. It is just music of the world, nowhere more specific than that, to be listened to by people, that's as precise as it gets. Americana is much the same and, on Come Away with Me, the jazz is barely distinguishable from the folk and the country is much the same as the blues. In terms of perspective and delivery, there is no difference between a Hoagy Carmichael song from the 30s, a country song from the 60s, or Jones's turn-of-the-millennium pop. It is all buffed into the same smooth recognisable shape, with only the brief Joplinesque growl at the top of Turn Me On giving a sense of what was worked away. I don't know if Americana is meant only to be listened to by Americans or people who experience the world as if it was America, but even the accordions on Painter Song sound Cajun when they should evoke the Left Bank. 2 McVities sells the digestive biscuit in a packet of about 15. But Mr McVitie, like all civilised people, expects that you will consume them 2 or 3 at a time with a cup of tea. So were you to eat the entire packet in one sitting and then complain that it was only a poor meal you would be unjust. Norah Jones’ debut album has 14 tracks. But it is plain to me that when the third track ‘Cold, Cold Heart’ ends with a fade out that evokes the image of the band tip-toeing out of the room so as not to disturb the slumber into which you have just fallen, a civilised portion of Norah Jones has been duly dispensed. No one involved expects you to give these 14 tracks your full attention in one sitting. Indeed, Norah and the band satirise the whole idea of a listener making it all the way to the end of the album by signing off with a track called ‘The Long Day is Over’ and then, chuckling to themselves, playing one more song. In the course of 27 million copies sold there has been a trust between this album’s creators and its consumers - Norah Jones gets the prosperity and career security a very gifted musician may well be entitled to, and the listener nods off or at least stops attending after 3 tracks, content that they can now tell their friends that they ‘listen to Jazz’. This trust has been violated by the inclusion of ‘Come Away With Me’ in the ‘1001 albums…’ project. So the fault here is not Norah’s - it is the fault of the compilers of the list. This is why, after awarding this album the one star of which its music is naturally deserving, I am adding another star in protest; According to the packet: 55% flour, 16% wholemeal wheat flour, ‘raising agents’, and the rest is sugar and ‘partially inverted sugar syrup’. …shame on those who would serve up an entire plateful of this stuff and call it a meal. 2/5
My friend, John, drummed in a scratch band that backed Damo Suzuki once. I wasn't there, unfortunately, but what an incredible experience it must have been making that music or even to be there as it came into being from nothingness. I can never fully get into a Can record, precisely because of the distance from that spontaniety. The record is the lingering light of a star, long dead. But even a dead star gives off radio waves, a pulsar or pulse - a groove? - we can tune into and tune out of. Every moment of Halleluhwah I tune into, I love. Every moment of Aumgn I tune into, I don't love. I am never tuned into the whole thing, however, and I have no more sense of what Aumgn is than Halleluhwah. If I'd just been in the room, though, not even in the band, I would have known everything there is to know - not just of Tago Mago, but of all cosmic shit and stuff. What a groovy experience this album faintly documents. 3 I came to this album today under difficult circumstances. Yesterday the list gave me Norah Jones’ debut album and I scorned it, rightly I think, and yet while I was listening to Tago Mago today I couldn’t help but feel the weight of its proximity as an almost moral burden. There I’d be trying to enjoy listening to some member of Can fellate a microphone (‘blubelubbelubelblubelblub’) and I’d sense Norah’s album at my back saying ‘I get two stars and a pissy review for trying to make nice recordings of carefully rehearsed songs and what’s this nonsense going to get? You’re going to give it 4 or something aren’t you, you prick?’ Well, Norah’s album has a point of sorts but I can only hope that my preference for Can’s album is more than my own superficial sense that while ‘Come Away With Me’ sounds not only like music that my squarest Aunt would buy but also music that she might make if she had any skill, ‘Tago Mago’ sounds not even like music made by a cool Uncle - it sounds like music made by someone who is not a member of my extended family at all. Some of Tago Mago sounds really good - but it’s not as good as it sounds. Drums are a difficult instrument to make sound so distinctive and they are continually fascinating here. There are a lot of interesting choices made in the mix - particularly with the vocals. There is a great sense of colour in this record (which almost by itself counterweighs the beigeness of Norah Jones’ accusing ghost). After my first listen I made the mistake (I think) of reading a bit about Tago Mago and the weight of critical praise for it really is astonishing for its plain injudiciousness. The oddest critical motif seemed to be the insistence on the indispensability of every moment on Tago Mago - the concision of it. Yer hole. It’s all well and good to change the face of popular music but must you take 73 minutes to do it? It’s a bloated, indulgent album by the standard of any genre. I read one account that insisted the first side of the double album was ‘in Sonata-Allegro form’ (bollocks) and the album was actually a symphony. Well 73 minutes is long for a symphony. You had best be Beethoven 9 or Mahler 5 and Tago Mago ain’t by a long shot. In conclusion, Mushroom is brilliant, the drums sound awesome, the guitar solos are lame - especially by the standards of 1971. 3/5
Tasteful playing, considered songwriting, thoughtful arrangements - although they mostly seem to peter out. It is the vocal harmonies that dominate however: high, ornate, and, while tracked, double-tracked, and triple-tracked, still strangely thin. Somewhere between sacred harp singing and Simon & Garfunkel, without the emotional welly of either. Unlike Simon & Garfunkel, Fleet Foxes are not all gone to look for America, but have rather retreated into a Waldenesque fantasy of America, with fake folk songs, fake snow, and fake women in the woods. Perhaps 'In the Airplane Over The Sea' is responsible for all the multi-instrumental Salvation Army indie bands that came in the decade that followed, but, in Jeff Mangum, they had a genuine fantasist, an electric eccentric. The Fleet Foxes' romance is more artisanal than artistic, running off a small generator in a national park campsite, while pretending to be pioneers. If I must have drums worn with a strap, interweaving vocal lines, and musicians in old style coats, living ahistorical fantasies, then I want it to be fun - the real Kings of the Wild Frontier are Adam and the Ants. 3 I find this album very easy to admire and impossible to love. The songwriting is excellent - or at least the music is; the lyrics will certainly do very well, although being American West Coast rural fantasy nostalgia of the mid-Noughties they draw inescapable comparison with Joanna Newsom’s Ys from a year or two before and feel very slight by comparison with the vivid, arresting poetry of that album. But the production… here is a cautionary tale of an album. I can only fantasise about how I might love this set of songs if they had been given any sort of edge by a producer with a vision. As it is… Youse love yer reverb anyway don’t yous yis c#*ts yis? 3/5
On record, Marianne Faithfull is only ever a foil for other people: Jagger and Richards weaponising her innocence; 90s hitmakers revelling in her back story and her pedigree - PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Beck, Billy Corgan, Jarvis Cocker, Metallica. Even her interpretations of Weill, Mercer, and Kern or settings of Byron and Shakespeare rest on how her deep, rasping croak feels like a debauchment. Having her vocalise at all seems like decadence. Broken English is the most significant of a handful of records that prioritises Faithfull's contribution as artist rather than interpreter. However, she was not an artist in that sense and she was not a lyricist or a melodicist. Backed by an egoless new wave band, rather than more successful musicians as on most of her other records, she falters a little as the main focus, so the band never really takes off. Songs like Broken English and Guilty simply aren't as rich or sophisticated as others that she would perform in her life and they never seem to go anywhere. The covers, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan and Working Class Hero, stand out, although the latter sounds odd in the mouth of a patrician such as Faithfull, regardless of how low life laid her. Probably 2.5. The cover art for Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English looks like satire on an imagined collaboration between Joni Mitchell’s Blue and David Bowie’s “Heroes” I will also confess to laughing out loud a couple of times while listening. Ultimately though, I appreciated that I wasn’t supposed to be laughing. This is terribly dull, witless music. Four-square phrases played by a band of no musical distinction. Marianne Faithfull certainly has a characterful voice but no melodies worthy of it. The lyrics are rotten stuff - pedestrian couplets (sometimes laughably contrived) and mangled common metre. By the time ‘Why‘d ya do it‘ tries to grab the listener by the scruff with its cocks and cobwebbed fannies it is too late - that track feels merely like a grotesque and slightly desperate addendum. Covering The Ballad of Lucy Jordan was, no doubt, a bright idea although its dramatic potency emerges predictably from the obvious and crass conceit that Marianne Faithfull at this time ‘fit’ the character. Covering Working-Class Hero was a terrible idea. 1/5
As a man in his forties, it is a challenge to listen to Bob Dylan at the height of his success - heights not many individuals match - carping at the downfalls and shortcomings of others. Even if 'Like A Rolling Stone' isn't about Edie Sedgewick's degradation in New York... Even if 'Queen Jane Approximately' isn't about the uncool Joan Baez and unhip Pete Seeger, now outgrown by Dylan... Even if, as some Dylanologists suggest, these diatribes are hard self-reflection on the effects of fame on the singer, they are bitter, sneering, and callous. They are the postcards sold at the hanging - takedowns exploited for coin. These are brilliant songs, of course. As are 'Ballad of a Thin Man' and 'Desolation Row,' although both fuelled by contempt for the listener: are you smart enough to know that there is no there there? This may be a clever response to the constant questioning about meaning he received in 1965, but sixty years later is hardly an edifying experience in itself. In comparison, John Lennon responded to similar inquery with 'I am the Walrus,' which is funny, charming, and welcoming. It is telling that this abuse and debasement is absent or tangential in tracks 2-4, three joyless slogs of no musical interest. Without the fire of self-righteousness, nothing sparks. I may have been the same when I was that age. Or I might have been if I had the cultural capital that Dylan could afford to torch. But, looking down the near end of middle age, I have enough acid reflux of my own without dealing with Dylan's. If I want to listen to a twenty-something who thinks he's smarter than me and everyone else, I'll take a call from my son. It would be the same length and there'd be no bloody harmonica. 3.5 It has been a few years since I sat down and listened to Highway 61. I have long had a mental picture of it as essentially two giant songs sandwiching a mixed bag of very good, somewhat goofy songs and dull, goofy blues procedurals. This time it changed for me. The curtailed phrasing and premature wail of delight that makes special It Takes a Lot to Laugh… and the marvellous, loose interplay between Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper in From a Buick 6 have become unexpected highlights for me. Tombstone Blues and Just Like Tom Thumbs still fall rather flat despite their energy but on the whole - this is a terrific album. 4/5
I criticised Bob Dylan for his spite and bitterness on Highway 61 Revisited yesterday. It would be hypocritical of me to enjoy it when someone else does it. I will own up to it when it happens, but this is not it. However, the goofy juvenile misogyny isn't really the problem; it's his relentless verbiage. A Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that's all patter. At least Biz Markie sang the chorus of Just A Friend. And, for all Eminem's dexterity, the only parts that cut through for me are the clunkers. 97 Bonnie & Clyde is unpleasant for many reasons, but it is the exposition that appalls me. Who is he trying to convince that this is a toy knife? The baby? The clumsy extension of "quit tryna climb out," where the desperation for the rhyme makes for a contrived and clumsy mode of expression. And the questions put into the child's mouth - "where's mama?" "that smell?" - it's the cheap device of every amateur monologuist trying to justify sharing their every thought in situations where real people are silent. I don't know if Eminem gets better - he probably does - but this is all talent over discipline. And it's boring. 1.5 There is undoubted pleasure to be had in being beat around the head for 4 or 5 minutes at a time with a single bar of music; the evidence is everywhere. That pleasure, however, still eludes my personal experience. Perhaps some happy day I will encounter a lyrical and dramatic performance in the Rap genre that lays bare the musical value of having almost no musical value. But it wasn’t to be today - not this particular set of witless, adolescent sniggerings over fantasies of the humiliation, rape and murder of other people. Oh well, my loss again. 1/5
Honestly, I enjoyed this more than I enjoyed yesterday's Slim Shady LP. Not enough to give it a higher score, but I felt the difference: the beats are less goofy and more groovy and it comes closer to the sci-fi promise of sampling culture. The piano on D. Original is fun for a bit and I liked You Can't Stop the Prophet, but I wonder why, when Straight Outta Compton surely comes upon us, I will accept "life ain't nothing but bitches and money" from Eazy-E when I find Da Bichez from Jeru so embarrassing. He says he's not a misogynist. He says he can't be sexist or racist. I guess it's just as embarrassing when Lupe Fiasco points out that 'bitch' is bad and 'woman' is good ('lady' is better, by the way). Maybe it has something to do with conviction. I really don't know. 1.5 It was illuminating to hear this next to The Slim Shady LP. Here I appreciated both the more interesting samples, the more absorbing beats, and the clean, uncluttered delivery of the lyrics. It was 20 minutes shorter. I laughed out loud at least once (possibly not on cue). The hideous cover art was less hideous than the Eminem album’s. So many advantages and yet only half a star more? It seems unjust but sadly there are other albums available for comparison and Jeru the Damajah, like Eminem, made a profoundly dull record. Every track is one bar going round and round and round and the lyrics, regardless of their moral character relative even to Eminem, are, like Eminem’s, just rubbish. 1.5/5
After two consecutive hip-hop records, it is worth noting sample fatigue: it is not just that you are hearing the same music looped, but the same recording. The exact repetition is exhausting on the ear. So, while Spacemen 3 may hang on a single note for minutes on end, there is the change in timbre and attack and phase, the human differences that mutate each bar. That only takes you so far and, for much of Playing with Fire, it is the moments rather than expanses that pay off. Not any specific moments. But, every once and a while, you tune into and think "That's pretty nice." I think the Pierce songs are probably a bit better, which explains why Spiritualised do the same thing, but probably a bit better. 2 Most people who have ever found themselves listening to a Spacemen 3 album arrived (as did I) as Spiritualized fans. So it is difficult to hear Spacemen 3 on their own terms. Sonic Boom’s compositions dominate here and Revolution was the single and is the centre-piece of the album. But I still can’t escape the temptation to hear it all as proto-Spiritualized. This is fatal not just to my ability to sympathise with Sonic Boom’s less naive, less earnest delivery but also to my ability to hear the two jewels of the album - Jason’s ‘So Hot (Wash Away All of my Tears)’ and ‘Lord Can You Hear Me?’ as anything but mere demos for the later, much grander Spiritualized recordings of those songs that I love. So it’s an album I find easy to listen to with affection, but difficult to get a sense of as a work of art. If any kind of sober judgement were possible - I’d bet that it’s probably a bit of a mess. And the artwork is certainly poop. 2.5/5
Too groovy to be a grind, it is a genuine surprise that 1999 is a double-album of only eleven songs, not one under four minutes. That's not how I remembered it. The title track is full of so many ideas that it doesn't show its six minutes at all. That's not always the case here. But starting the album with exemplars of two forms Prince mastered - the religious good time funk of 1999 and the aching sex ballad of Little Red Corvette - leaves it nowhere to go but down. Not far down. Not as far down as other people's best efforts, but it never reaches those peaks again. Let's Pretend We're Married justifies its full running time and everything after makes a game effort, but the title track is more diverse and dynamic than the last seven tracks together. You could make a reasonable argument for any one of these tracks on the album, but you would need Prince's ego to make an argument for all of them. It's a truism that there is a great single album in any decent double album and I don't care to make claims on what that single album could be here, but it should end on Free, obviously - that's the thematic conclusion to whatever eschatological ecstasy 1999 throws up at the beginning. 3.5 Decadence. ‘Let’s Pretend We’re Married’ - 7 minutes. ‘D.M.S.R’ - 8 minutes. ‘Automatic’ - 9 1/2 minutes. ‘Lady Cab Driver’ - 8 minutes. Even the title track - known and beloved as a 3 1/2 minute pop masterpiece, is an extra 3 minutes long on the album. However long the track stretches it’s always ‘good’ in a sense; every musical elaboration is slick and imaginative - infectious call and response, brilliant solos, silk smooth backing vocals, comically intricate syncopations, and momentary interjections of virtuosity on every instrument - almost all of them designed and played by bloody Prince. Even the sleazy monologues are dramatically effective and amusing. Here is an artist and musician endowed with seemingly limitless talents and he displays them here with all the humility and restraint of Adonis streaking at a football match. On streaking - the well-judged streak will last 10-15 seconds at most and at that the endeavour will generally have the goodwill of the crowd behind it. There will be chuckles and applause, especially if the game has been dull. Once the streaker has had this time, it is just and appropriate to submit to a steward and a blanket. But were a streaker to keep it going thirty seconds or more, dodging every lunge from an official and perhaps embarrassing a professional athlete or two by accelerating quickly away from their irritated grasp, some in the stands will begin to feel that they are being deprived of something. Boos and ‘for fuck sake’s will break out. Streakers! Remember your audience. 3.5/5
I haven't yet developed the skills to adaquately evaluate a hip-hop album. Do I admire the magpie eye and silver ear that samples Peg and Standing on the Dock of the Bay in the same song? Even if those moments don't go anywhere? That's unfair - Eye Know is great, but is it as great as Peg? Do I admire Eminem's dexterous music hall flow over the more pedestrian De La Soul vocalists? Even when they are warmer, more fun, and welcoming? I don't know. I like the Bonzo Dog Band, so I'm not opposed to skits in principle, but do they have to make the records so long? Are mixtapes that long? Are they actual C-90s? I don't know. I suppose a classic rap record should be something like the experience of a soundsystem at a street party. Three Feet and Rising is definitely the closest to this that we've heard: it feels like they're mixing in real-time, rapping in the same room. A positive addition to my 2345 train to Larne. Almost forgot that De La Orgee is awful. 3 The energetic sample-splicing is fun. And it almost felt sometimes like it put this album more in touch with Prince’s 1999 (yesterday’s album) than with the two rap albums at the start of the week (Eminem and Jeru the Damaja). Some of the raps were amusing - I enjoyed Tread Water especially - even if they felt a little flat in delivery. I think De La Soul genuinely uncovered a little musical gold as well - Eye Know. But… the skits are tiresome and after an hour I can’t have a sense of their ‘album’ as anything but an utter shambles; a 15 year old’s messy bedroom. Nice kid though. 2.5/5
Familiar with three of these recordings to begin with - Wild is the Wind, Lilac Wine, and Black is the Colour - all of which are remarkable performances by Dr. Simone, both as a vocalist and pianist. She meets that standard again several times on the album - Four Women, Break Down and Let It Out - although is less well-served by the standard RnB shuffle of I Love Your Lovin' Way and the less focused If I Should Lose You. Either Way I Lose suffers from an easy listen arrangement that doesn't showcase either of the good doctor's strength. That is the risk of compiling out-takes and off-cuts. Simone is about the performance in moment, however, and an album is about something other than performance - we might work out what that is across the years of this project. Just over a week ago, I think I credited Marianne Faithfull's cracked vocal for communicating her experiences of degradation as an individual. Dr. Simone's is much more than that: the pain more painful, the experience more than just her own. 3.5 Despite powerful, committed vocal performances all the way there is no unity to this album. The heart of the album, its best tracks, is Four Women, Lilac Wine, Wild is the Wind and Black is the Colour… It is almost absurd to encounter these brooding, intimate songs side by side with polite, preening lounge ballads like What More Can I Say? or Why Keep on Breaking My Heart? Simone’s voice commands your attention even on fluff like the opening and closing track but when an artist is at the peak of her powers like this - not just as a performer but as a writer - why are those throwaway songs present at all? 3/5