Didn’t hate it. Slick sound verging on sterile. Tracks blend into one another with little variation. Fagen’s voice is pretty weak and irritatingly nasal. Anodyne background music that never really engages on a deeper level. Music that arrives dressed in shoulder pads and a pair of aviator shades.
I don’t feel in any way qualified to pass comment on a hip-hop album but, based on sheer enjoyment, this is a definite yes from me. Plebty of genre hopping and variety to keep things interesting. Would I revisit it? Probably not, mainly due to feeling slightly uncomfortable as a middle-aged white guy with quite so many ‘n-words’, as well as a whiff of misogyny in some of the lyrics.
I don’t usually count live albums and proper albums but I’ll let this one slide. Sonically a little one dimensional due to sparse instrumentation but Cash’s charisma and storytelling carry it.
As mentioned previously, I don’t really ‘get’ live albums and this does nothing to change my mind. A thirty-seconds-long drum solo is more than enough but eight minutes? Nope! The kind of music that seems a lot more fun for the people on stage than for anyone forced to endure it who isn’t stoned out of their tree. Spinal Tap, except they’re not taking the piss.
It’s almost better to approach this one by disregarding the title track due to its sheer overbearing ubiquity and judge it on the remaining nine. There are at least two other bona fide Lennon classics (Jealous Guy & Gimme Some Truth) and one of the more obvious ‘diss tracks’ aimed at Paul (How Do You Sleep). The rest is pleasant enough, if a little lightweight and lyrically saccharine at times.
Putting the iffy 80s production to one side, this was really quite enjoyable. Its subtlety invites and rewards repeated listening. You can also hear where subsequent female artists maybe took some of their inspiration from.
I’m a day behind and really tried to catch up with this one, but am ashamed to admit that I threw in the towel by the fifteenth track. It’s brimming with ideas, and there are some truly lovely moments, but, just as a single fondant fancy is delicious, I don’t want to eat 22 of them.
Again, I don’t feel at all qualified to offer any meaningful critique. My feeling toward this album is the definition of ambivalence. It exists. I neither like it nor dislike it.
A favourite festival memory is of seeing Jon Spencer at Reading ‘99 with zero prior knowledge of his work. In a live setting, those chaotic, primal elements work fine. On record, however, the chewing gum loses its flavour after a few tracks as it just doesn’t really have enough there to really connect with beyond the noise.
Again, I am hopelessly under qualified to give an informed critique. I’m going on pure enjoyment and the album’s wider cultural significance beyond its intended audience. It’s possibly the fist album I have listened to so far on this list that has made me want to press play again immediately upon finishing.
It’s hard to argue with some of the hooks, and there’s some nice bass work on display, but the lyrics are almost uniformly awful and I’m just not sure there’s enough substance there to sustain even a fairly short album. There’s probably a reason ABBA’s biggest seller is their greatest hits.
It’s difficile to try and be objective with this one but, as debut albums go, it’s pretty much a perfect distillation of what SFA are/were. It doesn’t get a five, as I feel they actually surpassed this on later albums.
This is something I would ordinarily have regarded as ‘music for people much cooler/cleverer than me’ and moved swiftly on, but this was genuinely fantastic. Surprising, affecting, funky and moody in equal measure.
A couple of listens through have brought me to the conclusion that TWS essentially have thee or four songs, and the bulk of their catalogue seems to be made up of variations of these. Thankfully these three or four songs are pretty good, and Jack White’s prowess as a songwriter, musician and performer is undeniable.