I don’t feel experienced enough with jazz music to say where this falls on the scale of good-to-masterpiece. But I like it. Energetic, clean, background enough while still being engaging.
Not awful, but I’m glad it ended when it did. Made me think of magic the gathering conventions, and that’s both a good and bad thing.
It barely even sounds like a live album? It’s like a worse version of not good songs to begin with.
I can’t think of a song better deserving of being called an “anthem” more than time to pretend. What an opener. Despite loving the singles, I never have really listened to the album. And weirdly, it didn’t do much for me. It’s almost like the three singles latched onto me when they were released and I’ve enjoyed them for the last 15ish years, but my tastes aren’t the same anymore so anything new kind of bounces off me. Weird!
Some beautiful songs although the album felt disjointed at times. Black Is The Color is an all time favorite.
The album name and title are so intriguing, mysterious, then the opener is this weird, peppy, background vanilla jazz. I should have been primed to love this, but couldn’t wait for it to end. My least favorite style of big band-ish layered saxophones and whiney trombones. It almost made me wonder if Spotify had the wrong album linked.
Repetitive, stupid lyrics. Thin instrumentation. I guess it’s good at evoking a certain period of time. If you’ve heard one beach boys song you’ve heard them all. At least the harmonies are nice. Help me Rhonda was the best of the bunch. Can’t see myself listening to this again unless I’m cosplaying the golden girls.
Easy listening, enjoyable guitar licks and solos, definitive southern blues-rock vocals. Like it!!
As familiar as I am with REM, I don’t think I’ve ever listened to an album. They’ve always been down the fairway for me — a band people said they liked in high school because it was cool to say so. REM does fine for me with more straightforward rock songs with slower vocals (Finest Worksong). But as soon as we get into attempts to be clever, uptempo, major chord voicing stuff (McCarthy) I find it extremely grating. And End of the World has always been a hated song to me. Sometimes fine, sometimes annoying, sometimes different. Seems like a pretty solid 3 to me.
Sounds like someone wanted to imitate flight of the concords, but took themselves too seriously. Unlistenable in parts, unless i imagined Brett doing that whisper singing to be funny.
Fun life hack. If you include this with the instructions of “ 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die ” you can extend your life a decent about thanks to the egregious length of some of these songs. I was fine having some of this on in the background as pleasant enough standard blues-ish jamming. And then some solos got way too obnoxious to be background music. Listening to live albums is like listening to your friend tell you what they dreamed about last night.
The less I can hear the vocalist the better. Pablo Picasso is a big miss. Roadrunner is a lot of fun. I don’t mind the pre-punk driving guitar, bass, drums.
Kind of liked having it on in the background.
Pretty incredible how many timeless songs are on the same album.
When the songs hit, they REALLY hit. The open spaces are as tight as the horn hits are. Beats and grooves are great. But then some songs are total misses and feel stuck in time (Reasons). Surprise hit was Africano, loved it.
Listening to this made me actively irritable and angry.