"get off the bandwagon and put down the handbook"
Feels very very 2006, like working through a checklist of what was hot then. Or what was hot just before then, really. Like a Green Day cover band pretending to be Oasis doing cheeky Strokes covers. Somehow this formula makes for The Walkmen, but annoying. The Walkmen at least bring showtune vibes, these guys are a little more Rohypnol® than theater kid. I mean, at least they want you to think that they might date rape you. Pretty sure a lot of 17 year old British kids got laid to this. The children born in the aftermath of that nation-building rut would be 18 today. Listenable, but boring. Production is flat. Dance songs should have bass that sounds richer than farting through a straw.
I'm not a fan of overproduced pop, but this is a very well produced burner, worth listening to once, volume to the max. Some nice layers in the back channels. Only the occasional hint of 2015-era-skrillex-brostep, buried deep in the mix, like a dumb treat. Not a lot of risks here, but then again, not everything you consume needs to be risky to be good. You want an experimental sandwich for lunch every day?
The age thing is a little irksome. When we were young? You're 25, unless you're getting nostalgic for tricycles I'm not buying it. Then again, Neil Young was talking about getting old almost 50 years ago, and no one gives him shit for it, so I'm giving Adele a pass. You kinda have to be insipid and self absorbed and melancholic when you're 25. Honestly, she had a 3-year-old kid at the time, a lot happens in those first 3 years.
I'm glad I listened to this, and also glad I never have to listen to it again.
Any one of these songs would be great for the credits of a prestige HBO TV show in the early aughts. I don't know, I want to like this more. I understand the reverence folks have for Cohen, and I can hear his influence in lots of musicians I love and appreciate. The other songs I've heard from him over the years work for me. And these songs are the words of a dying man... Can't dismiss that. It's just the music itself is really flat and basic, just muted blues with occasional cantors jumping in. I wish the music was either a little more rich or interesting to support Cohen's voice and lyrics. Sparse is ok, but this is less sparse and more perfunctory. The back half is better, but it often feels like adult contemporary for aging hipsters, bland with a hint of irreverence. Serviceable not memorable, like a dry wheat cracker you can put whatever you want on. Cohen put a little brooding rumination on this cracker, but you still have to chew the dry, mealy, store-brand cracker. I do, in fact, want it darker!
Disjointed with a lot of filler. Just like a real opera! There are moments here and there that are fun or interesting, but it mostly feels like children's music (about child sexual assault). Underture is the highlight, with themes and passages building and twisting on each other. Most of the rest is forgettable.
Fantastic album all the way through. Nothing but bangers. Fame is a nearly perfect song, not just funk rock not more like funk kraut-rock. A real argument in favor of cocaine. Make sure to check out all of the outtakes, there's a whole other album there.
So good, and this isn't Run-DMC at their best. Their first 2 albums are even better. Just an incredible 3 album run.
Superlatives aside, I'm really into the production. The vocals sometimes sound like they're recorded on cheap microphones, but that just adds to the power of the voices, letting them overdrive the volume and distort on occasion. Real hot and immediate, like being yelled at in your ear. The samples have a similar richness to them. They're not magically isolated or interpolated, you can hear the murk of the rest of the sample buried in the mix. I'm not saying any rappers today need to emulate that sound, but it's been decades now of everything having the Lex Luger sound, I wish mainstream rap could just like, do something different production-wise.
These Lost Boys looking, high school goth dorks are the original edge lords. Real Beta city energy. Everything is so serious, how can you dance or have sex to this without just laughing hysterically? Either relax and have a little fun, or go a little further and try and actually be edgy. There's no tension in the middle ground they occupy. The first song is really good tho, and the production is solid throughout. Might be worth listening to with headphones, by candlelight.
Oh man, I love the Beatles! Ha ha just kidding, anyways, this is good but there are better Ravi Shankar albums out there. It's interesting to think about how this was the record that ask the cool kids in the 60s listened to though. I also like the explanations, and kind of want to hear that on like a rap compilation. Kendrick Lamar explaining what bars are or 2chainz explaining ad-libs. Altogether a fun introduction, the historical interest balances out the outdated production. I mean, I would listen to one of his other albums again first before listening to this again if it weren't for the historical significance. 4 stars.
Fun synth-pop/dancefloor time capsule. Lots of late-90s tricks and tropes. If you really like Daft Punk or Air, then you might kinda like this. But it isn't as smart as Daft Punk or as introspective as Air. Thoroughly infected with that instantly insatiable British goofiness. Not really with listening to unless it's loud and you're on the dancefloor.
Assorted is the important word here. Assorted, like a box of chocolates, and like every other chocolate is dry and flavorless. This album is bloated, too many listless, pointless songs. Listening to this is like listening to a little kid share their rock collection, one rock at a time, and most of the rocks are just bits of asphalt or concrete, and the kid is a racist. The best song on here is little wing, and that's a cover. And there are other covers of little wing out there that are just about as good. To be honest, I'm a fan of this type of music... Southern fried loose jam rock? Love it. Dueling lead guitars? Hell yeah. One song with an extended coda? Yes please. But so much of this is boring and unimaginative... Derek is Eric is generic ha ha got 'em.
Overall this is fine if not good pop. A little more introspective and as bit smarter than some with production that alternates between interesting moments and safe trends. But, and I wasn't paying attention at the time, is this the original source of the sultry tween singing voice of that decade? I heard it everywhere for so long back then... Usually a ukulele-picking post-emo psuedo-americana thirteen year old girl, but this is that voice. Such a weird cultural zeitgeist. Whatever, it works fine here. No ukuleles here! Extra star just for that.
The first half it's musically incredible. The second half less so, and starts to get bogged down with starryeyed inflections of the blues, equally mythologized and washed-out. How about a little harmonica here, Eno? But the music is still good. I just cannot stand Bono though. His singing is so overblown and contrived, like a high school musical tryhard. There's a little rawness on Streets, but overall his voice just -sounds- sanctimonious. And the lyrics... Ooooff. Real teenager journaling shit. Bullet the Blue Sky is hilarious. One hundred! Two hundred! Too funny.
So good. Little more rock than their first ones. Very loose but still on point.
Great band at their peak. Really synthesizes all of the big rock genres of the time. Lynott was incredible. And I am a total sucker for dual lead guitars. Fun but never fluffy.
For some reason the link in this app took me to a 20 minute version of the album... Weird! But the actual album is just way too long. Maybe cut 4 songs and it'd be perfect.
This is like jazz where in a movie the main character's friend says they're in a jazz group and the main character goes to see the friend play at the jazz club and like happily nods along to the jazz and afterwards tells the friend the jazz was great and we're meant to think it's good jazz when in reality it's just "jazz" and not really jazz. Honestly there are some good moments on here when they try and fuse country/Americana with the jazz but even then it's like going through the motions and not an that interesting.
Gotta love a million compressed guitars blowing up on every chorus. Add that to any song ever and you have a better song. The birthday song, the 1-800-kars-4-kids jingle, the soundtrack to Avatar... all would be immensely improved with dense exploding layers of guitars. Unfortunately, that's the only thing good on this album, and it only happens on a few songs. The "ballads" are bad, Corgan's voice has no real range, and the drums are recorded weird. A handful of songs are worth listening to every so often but they are repetitive and boring. Oh well, worth a listen every decade or so.
More like 2002 albums, amirite? Because of all of the double albums. This one is ok as a double, there enough variety to almost sustain it but there's still a lot of filler that drags things down. The good stuff is really good stuff tho. Just weird enough to be interesting, just pop enough to be catchy.
I was into three first few songs... Like the Beatles with banjo or slide guitar. A simple tweak and I liked it! Nothing really imaginative or innovative beyond that though. I'm not a big enough fan of the Beatles to like the More Beatles. Maybe there's enough country-inflected songs on their first few albums to make a decent playlist???
I thought Björk was like smart and innovative, so I found this album a little surprising in how safe it was. Everyone I've ever dated had been a Björk fan, so I've heard a lot of her stuff but without context. Ok, so I asked my wife for her thoughts on the album: "A good bridge between the Sugarcubes and her later stuff, mostly cute but nothing compared to her awe inspiring later work." Can't disagree! I think there's a few good songs on here but overall pretty much just ok.
The first half, especially the covers, are kitschy but fun. By the end though something has shifted a bit, so I relistened to side 2. The Ocean starts a bit goofy but slowly turns into something more interesting, and the next 2 songs are solid if not a little too polished jazz fusion. I'm pretty sure there's some banjo on the last track, though it's not in the track listing at all, so maybe just the sitar sounding like a banjo? It's a good idea either way, but maybe it's my idea! Anyways, just feels like things were heading in the right direction but altogether too tied up with crowd pleasing to really launch.
Very pretty and relatively complex. Some surprising moments, and some dull ones, and some goofy ones. Not as guitar driven as literally anything else in the post-rock genre. Honestly not a fan of the voice though. I like to pretend he's just reading the Ikea catalog.
Quoting his Spotify bio: "Asian Underground, one of the most exciting movements in the history of British music." This is the most British sentence I could imagine hearing, truly encapsulating the totality of British-ness. PAs for the album, there's some truly great moments in there, interrupted constantly by some of the most truly goofy moments. Really feels like he was trying to cram too many ideas into the album. Better to let one excellent idea ride and permutate than try shoehorn in a bunch of other mediocre ideas into the first one. But that's the British way... Chicken vindaloo, the Elgin marbles, and cheesy techno.
So many of these songs are so ever-present that it's hard to hear them now and experience them as anything more complex than wallpaper. It's also kind of a weird album... It's super clean sounding, missing a lot of the rough edges from Bleach, but it isn't fully fleshed out and rich like In Utero. The songs themselves are stuck in an in-between space too, sometimes raw and sometimes pop but never really both or either somehow. All of that being said, it's a good listen, and worth repeated listens. But after it's massive impact on everyone and everything ever since I kind of wish I hadn't been force fed so many repeat listens and could hear it just one more time without all of the baggage of every public space I've heard these songs in over the years.
These guys are fun and cool without really trying... The exact opposite of most British musicians. This is a great album. All of the songs are great, and whether you like it or not everyone else you do like likes this so you still like it. And, if you do like this but haven't followed these guys since, check out Pocket Symphony, it's also really good.
Other than the first song, all of these songs are all like "why am I so sad" and "why does love hurt" and "why am I so lonely" and "why don't women like me". Ok, so go back to that first song and it's basically a dad explaining to his son that women are objects of affection and nothing more. PUT IT TOGETHER BRO. Oh sorry, BROS.
A lot of great songs, but not a great album. Of course there's too many skits. Every rap album of the era has too many skits. Back when we made mixtapes on actual tape that wasn't an issue. Too bad the digital versions didn't separate out the tracks, but oh well. The real problem is puffy being all over the place. I have always, always hated that guy. A talentless hack that glued himself to biggies ass and held on. I'm actually happy everyone else hates him too now. Give me a remaster with all of his vocals removed and I'll give the album 5 stars. Give puffy jail for a thousand years.
When I close my eyes and imagine the average British person I see an aging man dressed like a woman Monty Python style (big muumuu) with a monocle sitting on a toadstool with a mouthful of fish and chips and vindaloo muttering something about keeping calm while listening to bad techno. Which is to say I don't have a good idea of Britishness, which is to say again that a lot of this album went over my head. There's some solid stuff on here, but then there's some McCartney level cartoon character studies with wacky carnival music. You can complain about skits on rap albums, but this album has entire songs that are basically skits. I mean, Tracy Jacks is the second song. There is goofy, and then there is goofy Britannia.
I wish the whole thing was just the bubbling frenetic rush of the tile track. The rest of the songs are good, but that first song is fantastic. The rest of the album should be condensed into like, two or three songs. That would be fun! McCartney is at his best when he is pushing the pop envelope, and at his
worst when gives too much time to his weird Charlie Chester or Anthony Newley character studies.
Incredible album, not a single skit.
This is the moment I knew for sure that the author of the 1001 albums list is English.
High school drama club over here.
This is a really great album. Bummer that he gets lumped in with lo-fi sad-bois (nothing wrong with lo-fi sad-bois), since he had this really angry edge buried under the melodies. These could very easily be remixed with distortion into solid pop punk, not luckily Smith wanted to do this thing instead. Not a single filler track here.
Starts off pretty strong and then Paul shows up with his cast of cartoon characters. The medley is fun though. She's So Heavy is my personal fave. Sometimes when bands are falling apart they make their most interesting music, but not this time.
This is not a good album. Dancing Queen is an absolute banger, a real masterpiece of disco pop, but the rest is just studio filler. I'm not a disco hater... But if you're looking to dance it's really just that one song. Tiger and Fernando are both good, not not great.
Also, looking at the other reviews, everyone gets weirded out by I kissed the teacher but just rolls with the dancing queen being only 17? Hmm ok y'all.
This is a fun but kind of exhausting album. It really feels like 2003 to me. Super-pop-mash-ups of like a dozen song ideas in each song. Other bands were doing that too, like the Blueberry Lightnings or whatever... wait, I'm going to look that one up hold on... Ok it's the Fiery Furnaces and their big album was Blueberry Boat. Close! Anyways, post-rock was the same idea but slower, more drawn-out, and cinematic. But it's not 2003, it's now 2025 and my thoughts on this album in the current moment: Hard to grasp any specific song, it just becomes an overwhelming gestalt mass. Lots of interesting moments jammed together with less interesting moments. Like listening to a playlist of every song on Spotify and skipping ahead every 30 seconds. Worth relistening to, but too much to listen to it again for another decade or so. I liked it, but I liked At the Drive-in better. There, I said it!
