Excellent, big vibe for me in the 2010s.
Fine; not anything I would put on again, but it wasn't a problem to get through. Jet was the only song I actively enjoyed.
Solidly good album overall. Enjoyed how Don't Go Near Water was an almost satirical take on their early work. Great harmonies throughout the whole record.
Eh. Two and half stars is my actual rating but I'll give it 3. At best it's generic 90s-2000s radio pop. At worst it's Call Me Maybe level bad songwriting. Didn't have to skip any songs but I know I won't be listening to Robbie Williams again, unless it's over the shitty speakers at the grocery store.
Sounds like an alternate universe Cocteau Twins where the lyrics make sense if you just concentrate hard enough.
Could not get into this, his voice is just not for me.
Fun & funky, great vibes. Added to my library.
3.5 stars, really. Unoffensive, some good harmonies, but not something I go out of my way to listen to.
3.5 stars. Not my favorite Joni Mitchell personally.
Better than Rush, not as good as Yes. Enjoyed the very metal interlude in the opening track.
Disco isn't really my thing but does still have an innate power to sometimes make your booty move without input from your brain.
Confirmed my belief that the only reason to listen to the Dan is to test your new expensive sound system for 5 minutes before putting on literally anything else. The worst middle of the road nonsense I've heard in a long time.
Definitely not my first time hearing it, and not my favorite of one of my favorites genres Sad White Men With Weird Voices Who Sound Like They Need A Friend, but overall a solid 90s alt album. The softer songs are much weaker compared to the heavier ones.
Great album, of course have listened to it dozens or hundreds or times.
I've always enjoyed the 1960s renaissance revival.
Ah, the feeling of the Obama years.
Kind of reminds of Morphine.
Too disco for me personally.
Honestly not an album I super love. It's a bit too all-over-the-place for me. I like Simon & Garfunkel but I only ever like maybe 60%-70% of each album. I do think 7 O'Clock News/Silent Night is interesting as piece of art (both for the obvious juxtaposition of the peaceful imagery of Silent Night with the horrors of war and also the fact that neither of them sing the melody, inviting the listener to do so), but it's not an album I will listen to whole.
Obviously a classic album and one of his most beloved, but I personally think of it as more of a proof of concept than a great album. I love Neil Young, but he's at his best live, when he's not trying to gussy up simple music with complex orchestration. His simple melodies, straightforward guitar playing, and idiosyncratic voice are what unique and effective; covering those up with strings and harps doesn't elevate it, it just clashes. It's like putting on a pair of old overalls and then adding a tiara and thinking you're dressed up. It's somewhat incoherent. The clear top song of the album, for me at least, is The Needle and the Damage Done, the simplicity of which allows the emotion of the song to come through sincerely and without artifice. A Man Needs A Maid suffers the most from the unnecessary and overwrought strings; it's almost as if he heard Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left and tried (unsuccessfully) to replicate it. Any time I listen to Harvest, I end up wishing I had just listened to a live album instead (just not the one where he's Too High and can't make it though a single verse of Sugar Mountain without interrupting himself to spout some nonsense. I want to say it's Young Shakespeare).
I was forced to listen to a fair amount of James Taylor as a child, and never enjoyed it, and this album did not change my mind. The best parts of the album merely reach forgettable and inoffensive, and on the whole it sounds like a cross between Raffi and Neil Young (who, to be clear, I do like). Sunny Skies and Blossom are straight up Raffi, and the only way I can try and process Steamroller is as satire. I can’t imagine anyone being able to unironically enjoy hearing James Taylor, who sounds like if Mr. Rogers decided to quit TV and embark on a folk music career, sing that he’s going to “inject your soul with some sweet rock n’ roll and shoot you full of rhythm and blues” and call himself “churning urn of burning funk”, “a hefty hunk of steaming junk”, and a “napalm bomb just guaranteed to blow your mind”. Like, sorry bro, you are maybe the whitest person alive, you are not cut out for singing the blues. He’s just entirely toothless and so incredibly middle of the road. He’s like if cottage cheese was a singer.
I know people love Sting but man is he a terrible songwriter. The melodies are boring, the lyrics are insipid, the rhyme schemes are all just AAAA or ABAB. The track about dinosaurs sounds like it was written for a 5th grade science project.
There's obvious Bowie inspiration, and a lot of elements that are very reminiscent of Rufus Wainwright, but overall I think it's a little incoherent and honestly just not my fave.
Too Grateful Dead-esque to be enjoyable to me.
Not really into the down-home country boy 1970s rock aesthetic tbh.
What can I say about Getz/Gilberto that hasn't already been said? It's a masterpiece. Stan Getz is my undisputed sax king, and João Gilberto is the bossa nova master. What could be bad? Listened to this absolute classic as it was meant to be played, on vinyl pressed in 1964.
Melodies are boring and the lyrics are like a high school boy's diary.
More like 3 and half really. Not bad, but not super my thing.
Kind of a weird random mix of knock-off Beach Boys, Rolling Stones, and The Beatles.
I like to think I'm pretty accepting of unique voices (given that I love Radiohead, The Mountain Goats, Neil Young, Elliott Smith, etc), but I couldn't get used to the goth Tiny Tim vibes here. Too much falsetto, too much vibrato. I liked the non-vocal components, so we're averaging it to a 3.
One of my absolute favorite albums, and the one that got me into Radiohead in the first place. It's sadly just as relevant now as it was when it was released in the darkness of the Bush era. The day after the 2024 election, I just put it on and rage cleaned. There's so much raw emotion in the melodies and the lyrics; it was incredibly cathartic.
Wow. Just wow. What an incredibly stunning, moving, heartbreaking, hopeful, emotional album. It ended and I put it right back on again.
While the tracklist itself doesn't contain really any of his greatest hits (barring maybe See the Sky About To Rain), this comes higher for me in his discography than something like Harvest, which has several of his most loved songs, but with a frankly awful orchestration. On The Beach sounds like what Neil Young should sound like to me — simple, straightforward music from a man with a guitar. There are no extraneous backing instruments getting in the way of the actual songs and songwriting.
Not my favorite Nick Cave tbh.
I know he's very divisive, and I get it, but I do enjoy Tom Waits. I'm generally a fan of an idiosyncratic voice, and a somewhat depressing tune, so he fits the bill. I don't love when he does his carnival of the damned vibe, but hankfully not too much of it on this record, other than the opener. Time remains my favorite track of the album.
Really enjoyed this album; reminded me a bit of Keep It Together era Guster. I didn't realize until the end that I had a compilation with one of their songs in the early 2000s that I loved.
Personally not a fan of Frank Sinatra. His voice is too polished and the accompaniment is always so overproduced and artificial feeling to me; it ends up reading as soulless elevator music a lot of the time. This doesn't hold a candle to Getz/Gilberto.
Pretty good. Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head and Crimes of Paris reminds me of Michael Penn; since this album predates his work, I wonder if it was a direct inspiration or just a coincidence. I Want You remains one of my favorite Elvis Costello songs; the (inadvisable) yearning is palpable.
I know that In Rainbows was a commercially successful album, and that it brought Radiohead onto a lot of people’s radar, but compared to the rest of their catalog, it’s generic, shallow, and uninspired. The melodies and arrangements are straightforward, the lyrics are boring, and overall it sounds like Radiohead’s attempt at a commercial radio hit, and I suppose it was successful in that regard. It tries to make for the lack of musical complexity with reverb.
The thing that makes Radiohead special is that whether or not you like them, their albums sound like no one else could have made them, and that just doesn’t ring true for In Rainbows. If you replace Thom Yorke’s vocals with someone less identifiable, I’m not sure it would really even still read as a Radiohead album.
Nude finally makes an album appearance and is honestly the worse for it. For a song that was played live so much and floated around as an unreleased b-side, the boring and generic album version is a let down that feels emotionally neutered. The ending is formulaic and hackneyed.
Faust Arp is one of the more interesting and complex tracks on the album, though it wouldn’t be the strongest track on an album comprised of songs from their prior (or later) eras.
Reckoner has some harmonies reminiscent of the last half of Hail to the Thief, but the falsetto melody is a little much (even as someone who genuinely loves Thom Yorke’s idiosyncratic voice, it just reads as whiny when carried through the whole song). Jigsaw Falling Into Place also carries through the Hail to the Thief vibes, and I think is the strongest offering on the album.
Though I suppose not technically part of the purview of this project, In Rainbows Disk 2 is actually better overall in my opinion. Go Slowly is better than most of the songs on the main album, Bangers + Mash is a (pardon the pun) banger, 4 Minute Warning is relatable and pleasant, and while I still think their album recordings of fan favorite unreleased tracks generally don’t live up to the versions that had been played for years, this version of Last Flowers suffers the least, remaining true to what we’ve heard and not mucked up by an attempt at reinvention.
Just an all time classic, perfect album. One of our go-tos when have a long drive and aren't sure what to put on. Yes is always a safe bet. It's that perfect midpoint of musically complex and yet approachable. Banger after banger.
Just a fun, unpretentious record.
Much more boring than you would expect given the band name and album name.
What could I possibly say about this album that hasn't already been said? It's just fantastic from start to finish.
