One of my favorite things a pop album can do is absolutely fucking rip when it needs to. Obviously all the hooks and harmonies on this are excellent, but the bits and pieces of flashy guitar work take this from "great" to "all-timer" for me.
Another relisten. Liked this a lot better the second time around. I think Lorde's songwriting is a bit too melodramatic (hehe) in the more stripped down cuts on this, but the second she uses it for something anthemic it goes unbelievably hard. They're gonna play Green Light at my funeral.
Another re-listen. I will admit to finding Jeff's voice a little too much to handle in high doses, but when it hits? Dude. DUDE.
I'm generally Talking Heads agnostic, and for the first half-ish of this album I was afraid I would remain that way. But somewhere around Found a Job I feel like this REALLY picked up. The more it focuses on the instrumentals and grooves the better, in my opinion (sorry David Byrne I think I like your voice better in your later work)
The first half of the album is pretty much wall to wall groovy tunes. They can be a little formulaic but they're pretty good at worst. Then the second half hits and it feels like I'm listening to bad, incomplete videogame OSTs. Now I understand where the haters are coming from.
Very enjoyable and consistent, but it's really striking to me just how larger than life Gimme Shelter and YCAGWYW are. It's a bunch of pretty down to earth (but also catchy and energetic) blues rock cuts sandwiched between these absolute titans of the genre. And they hit a lot different when you choose to hear them rather than hearing them on the radio for the billionth time!
I LOVE really loud music (Wonderful Rainbow, on this website's bottom 20 albums, is one of my personal favorites), so it comes as a disappointment when I say that I didn't enjoy this particularly much at all. I feel ridiculous criticizing classic punk rock for lacking dynamics, or having simplistic instrumentation, or having obnoxious vocals, but when every track sounds indistinguishable from one another, then all those traits become impossible to ignore.
Maybe it'll hold up better on a re-listen, because from what I've gleamed through research, this is a classic of the LA punk scene. But listen number one was not promising.
Another relisten for me. I'm mixed on this album; the second half of this record is legitimately great. Very intense, almost oppressive jazz. But I find the first half of be kind of emotionally cold; it's hard to find any element of it to grasp onto (aside from the drum solo towards the end of part 2 which is stunning). I lean more towards positive than negative, but I almost feel unequipped to evaluate this. It's one of jazz's holy grails and it left scratching my head for parts of it.
Sometimes boring, sometimes a little twee, but overall enjoyable! I feel like every time it threatened to get too dry, it'd throw in a new instrument or vocal to shake things up. Don't think I loved it, but found it consistently engaging.
A very pleasant set of tracks, all of which are just a little too traditional and a little too similar. Sarah's voice is incredible, and I found the more upbeat tracks on this to be a joy (the closer made me laugh out loud). But taken as a whole without being present for the actual performance, it feels a little dry on the whole. Something I see myself returning to when I'm in the mood for something very mellow.
Not bad but also feels like it'd appeal to 80 year olds.
Truly baffling record. Has a couple of good cuts, but outside of those, this is incredibly cloying and overwrought. This kind of psychedelic maximalism would be much more appealing to me if every instrument weren't seemingly tuned to the key of "whimsy." The vocals aren't doing it any favors either.
I enjoyed this a little more than my rating implies, as I don't have the same allergy many other music geeks have for car commercial rock. That being said, you won't see me step up to defend it. This is no exception to the rule; this album is pleasant and listenable in the moment, but the individual elements that make it up rarely go beyond being pretty decent. It doesn't really possess any riffs, hooks, or lyrics I'll remember for longer than 10 minutes after a listen.
While the big singles overshadow a lot of the record's deep cuts (Kids is basically unbeatable), but I enjoyed this album a lot on the whole. I particularly liked the more indie rock-esque cuts in the back half; they've got a surprising amount of bite.
Hard-hitting, groovy, menacing, and a little too long and repetitive. The good tracks hit like a truck, but I feel like this is better suited for a dancefloor or a club than a solo listen.
Michael is obviously incredible on this, but the instrumentation really shines as well. The drums are so tight, the bass lines are so good, the strings are so lush. It's so pleasing to the ear that it makes you wonder why more pop doesn't sound like this.
It sure is a phil spektor Christmas album.
Unexpectedly boring. A lot of these songs feel like they loop ad nauseum without enough dynamics or switch-ups to sustain themselves.
I was going to give this collection of tepid, boring, over-long soft rock snoozers 2 stars for, at the very least, not being unlistenable. But hearing the uncensored, slur-filled version of Money For Nothing, a song I already disliked, has earned this a spiteful 1 star.
Hits super well on a couple tracks, but I dunno. It just made me yearn for some of the 90s' better noise pop records, because this just didn't stand out too much on the whole.
Kinda fun as a collection of dumb metal tracks, but a little weaker as an album. Everything on here is very formulaic structurally, but the formula is strong enough to keep it afloat.
I have deliberately laxed my standards on what a 5 star album is. I used to reserve that kind of score for transcendent, life-changing experiences...but that's limiting, isn't it? Why can't something just be a kickass collection of songs? If there are no bad songs, it might as well be 5 stars, right?
This album is one of those. The experimental edge of their previous work is gone, but they still come in hot with an almost perfect set of tunes. The stretch from Candy Says through Beginning to See The Light alone is so flawless that it earns the album a high rating.
Why. Is. It. 70. Minutes. Long.
This band would be better if Win Butler didn't exist, which seems to be the case for society in general.
Every day in America, it feels like it gets harder and harder to accept that I have to live in the same country as people with truly monstrous beliefs, such as those who gave this a lower score than Born in the U.S.A.
I'm giving this 3 stars instead of 2 because I have a friend who really likes incubus whose spirit would be crushed if I gave this a negative score.
