1st song. Kinda reminds me of REM in the oddest way with the lyrics that feel almost too fast for the tune itself, Definitely starts running. Suprised this is early 90s and not mid 90s
2nd song. Gives Greenday Vibes in the pop punk feel, but specifically the earlier (and better) Greenday albums. Some great guitar work but I'm not hooked on the singing yet.
3rd song. Not my favorite so far, sounds like something off a burnout soundtrack and unfortunately not in a good way. Cool post chorus transitioning into the next verse though!
I like how breezy and fast these songs have been so far but I wonder if that leads them feeling a tiny bit one dimensional and not fully fleshed out to me over longer songs.
4th song. I really like the background singing in this, and the instrumentation is at its best so far, but the lyrics still are so hit and miss for me. It's not that I don't connect with them, but they feel like they hit the mix of vagueness and angst that give pop-punk a bad name as being a more vapid form of punk.
5th song. Wow this is a pretty huge shift from the previous songs, and I really like it! I feel like a younger me would resinate with this more and find the lyrics a little less eye-roll worthy, but I feel that's the way of this kind of music in general. It works best at a specific time in your life, and that's great in its on right.
6th song. The downside of an album with so many songs like this is that I'm a quarter of the way in and yet the songs are starting to merge together for me. This one didn't do much for me.
7th song. Great Intro, mediocre song.
Skipping forward a bit because I don't have much new to say.
The cover songs here are god damn great! Mrs Robinson is played with the kind of deep sarcasm that the song deserves. I don't like it more then the legendary original, but I totally get it. This feels like the kind of cover Alien Ant Farm wished it could be but never could. By changing the genre it reinforces the sardonic nature of the song whilst updating it in a way that feels like a commentary on how little the topic has changed.
Also there's a cover of Knowing me, Knowing you on here??? This song feels like it was made for me. There's something almost MTV unplugged about this uncover, which I do really like. It's lowkey, and appropriately somber. Maybe the covers are the things I like most about this album? On the otherhand, I can never imagine really listening to this over the original which has so much more emotion with Frida's beautiful voice.
I think I liked this album, mostly! I don't think it was incredible by any means, but the highlights were pretty high. I do wish the album was a bit more focused and the best songs were a little more fleshed out, especially because some of the middle tracks meld into one another in a way that didn't make for a great album listening experience. It feels like a 3 for me but not in "mediocre" way and more in a "the positives and negatives balance each other out"
Well I've listened to a fair amount of Radiohead before, but actually have not listened to Amnesiac all the way through so this will be a first.
"Packt Like Sardines In a Crushd Tin Box" is quite interesting to me. The instrumentation is extremely out their and works well, and yet taken as a whole, there's something almost pop-adjacent about it. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I do really like it.
"Pyramid Song" I've seen this song mostly talked about due to the 'music theory' involved in it, but the song is doing a lot more then just trying to be pretentious for the sake of it. I love the feeling like the song is "catching" itself. Almost the musical equivalent of the feeling of falling asleep, only to catch yourself and wake back up at the last moment. Its also very cinematic, I can see the line between something like this and their attempt at a James Bond intro.
"You and Whose Army?" just reminds me of Incendies at this point, great movie, never gonna watch it again.
God damn "I might be Wrong" is good, sometimes radiohead just finds a tune and explores it perfectly and suddenly I "get" the hype. I am very off and on about the entire discography of Radiohead but when they hit it, they do it out of the park.
"Knives out" sounds dramatically different from everything so far, and feels like it belongs on another radiohead album. It's very much a radiohead song that blends into all the other songs.
The second half of this album really feels like it goes to nowhere after the first half. I don't know if that's the intent, but it feels quite unfulfilling and not nearly as fully formed as the first half. Perhaps I'm not in the mood for it, but it did feel like the album stalled out and so did my interest.
Well I can't say I'm usually into aggressively heterosexual albums, which this definitely is. So much of this album is fawning over guys that I instantly knew this was going to be an upward battle for me. I prephise the album with this because the fact that I like this album so much is really a testament to how good it is that it's completely out of my wheelhouse.
My god, the singing on this. The way the songs blend conventions of music with a kind of stream-of-consciousness is incredible and I should have listened to this a long time ago. Especially because I do love so many singers influenced directly by Joni Mitchell (Weyes Blood being an obvious example)! It almost makes you forget Joni Mitchell did blackface and refused to apologize for it up until today because she said she was basically black despite being the most archetypal white Canadian Woman to ever walk the earth.
...But anyway the album itself is good. Funnily I heard River playing just two weeks ago, but I'm not one for christmas songs. Favorite songs are California, Carey and A Case of You.
About half way through listening to this I realized that this was from 1963. 1963! I mean there's ahead of its time and then there's THIS. There's something so theatrical about this, its like a sung through musical with no need for singing. The way the music moves through sections works so well- just as it feels like a piece is becoming too at home, the music switches up completely. I can't say I'm all that knowledgeable on theory of this kind of music so I don't have too much to say but I both extremely enjoyed and felt suprisingly anxious listening to this. The classical guitar and Spanish influence really shakes up the big band sound in a way that was very complementary.
I really love the way themes and leitmotifs are repeated throughout, it gives both a level of stabilization ( going back to something that's already been established) but also suprise (seeing something we've heard before in a new context) that never got old for me
I dunno, feels kind of like a 1960s folk album where every song goes on about twice as long as it needs to. I enjoy the strings quite a bit but they can only do so much to hold up the album. Honestly just don't think its for me considering what other people seem to think of it has such a mismatch to my own listening experience.
A really good album that makes me wish I listened to Prince more before now. Somehow I've managed to dodge basically all the-artist-formerly-known-as-Prince's music but god damn some of this is like peak 80s. And this is very early in the 80s to be at the peak! I do think some of the songs are almost a little bit too goofy sounding and haven't aged great (Delirious, All the critics love U in New York) but damn the title track and Little Red Corvette is great. The unrepetant horniness mixed with the Funk work incredibly when they do work. Almost a 5 for me but its just not quite consistent enough, and I get the feeling there's other Prince albums on this list I'm going to like more.
Yeah, it's good! I actually don't really know what I'm looking for between a good and "bad" jazz album. With most genres I've heard some of the absolute worst and some of the best, so I have good perspective on the line between them. Jazz though? I've mostly only heard the greats so differentiating between "good" and "great" is really hard for me. Well, that's not changing anytime soon because I know this was great!
Just on a purely listening experience, this was a nice calm vibe that felt like it was just the right length for me. The way the album shifts towards increasingly relaxed vibes as it goes on with moments of dramatic shifts and great release, makes the entire album feel very cohesive. I definitely got the fusion vibes, but considering how much I read about how Jazz was apprehensive to the shift, I was expecting it to lean harder into the fusion. That's not a fault though, as I feel it's perfectly balanced for the music that is being presented. Would love to listen to this again in a car on a dark, quiet night.
This list has a whole lot of British New wave so I guess we've got to settle in for that. The band throughout this album is pretty good but, by god, Elvis Costello... I think after this album I hate this guy. He reminds me of other singers I like far more then him. It made me really want to listen to a Clash album or even The Boomtown Rats. I do not like this snide nice-guy core.
You Belong to me and Hand in Hand was about the point I realized this would be a long listen. The band itself being so good makes the fact that I've got to hear Elvis Costello whine over this entire album even worse. Songs like Lip Service have a great sound to it completely destroyed by Costello's "ranting about another woman" hour. I wish this album was an instrumental. THIS GUY IS ON THIS LIST 4 TIMES? God damn it.
My immediate reaction to seeing this album was "Wait didn't these guys sing that one song?". Why yes, yes they did. I saw a Todd in the Shadows video about this band once. The first immediate thing I noticed when listening to this is that the mastering of this album is god awful. It sounds like the music is playing on an MP3 player at the opposite side of a really echo-y hallway. Luckily, this can SORT of be fixed by listening to the 20th anniversary version.
This was fun, mostly. The first few songs kinda suck, but the one hit wonder "I believe in a Thing Called Love" is pretty good. It's goofy and an earworm. I don't really get why this is on this list though? It's a very early 2000s rock album that doesn't really feel very special, except maybe the singers voice. I feel like they should have committed more to the comedic and absurd elements, but it doesn't and so it feels trapped between goofball anthems and semi-sincere love songs. It's like they can't work out if they want to be Electric Six or The-Killers-does-glam-rock.
I'm suprised at myself for this, but it was weird in a way I liked! Kinda reminded me of a The Piper at the Gates of Dawn era Pink Floyd. A chaotic clashing of sounds that every now and again comes together to make me go "wow this is really going off". I'd totally get if someone said they absolutely detested it, but I think I was in the right frame of mind for it. I was a bit skeptical at first but the outro of fuzzy birds had me hooked, and the weirdness of Something 4 the weekend really caught me and from there I was along for the ride. I, too, would've liked to hang out with Howard Marks. It's so hard to choose between a 3 and a 4 because it isn't at all a consistent album, but I think it just eeks out a 4 on this listen. I could see downgrading it a bit if I listened to it on another day.
I still think I prefer Willy and the Poor Boys, but this is pretty great too. It's suprising how little of the hits I know are on this Creedance album and yet I think it still comes together really well! Some great instrumentals on this one, and in comparison to yesterday's album- very consistent. I just think it lacks the clear standouts needed for 5 stars to me, everything kind of melds together towards the end.
Very long songs and riffs the album. Idk I guess it was fine? I do not know what I'm listening for with this genre but there was something about the way this sounded that distinctly sounded off to me, beyond just the songs all being way too long. The bass feels oddly burried in the mix, whilst the whole thing has a muddy, overprocessed sound to me that I just do not really enjoy. I'll be the first to say do not trust my opinion on this entire genre as its just not my thing, but hey, I have to review each album up here so here goes.
Apparantly this book was made by a bunch of different critics and I have to assume all of them were British by what I've heard so far. I like some of this, I'd like it a lot more if it was maaaybe 30 minutes long instead of anywhere between 1 and 2 hours depending on the version. It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect from an "English Drum and Bass album that's very late 90s" but I think my ear is somewhat attuned to that by the fact that I've actually at least heard one of these songs before but didn't realize it at the time (Brown Paper Bag). Still it is very, very repetitive. If I imagine myself listening to one or two of the songs instead of sitting through the whole thing though, I think I'd have a pretty good time. My favorites are probably "Share the Fall", "Down" and "New Forms".
I swear you could play 10 second snippets of half these songs, say they're a different song from the same album and no one would be able to tell the difference.
