[mid 2020s cultural critic voice] the repetitive anxiety-inducing refrain in the fourth track of the baritone sax panned hard left with the broad overarching rumbling overture panned hard right is sonically the most accurate depiction of a panic attack ever put to record
now i don't have much historical context for jazz or for this album itself but it's fascinating to me. on repeat listens the frantic and manic mood engendered by the album softened by familiarity into a warm sense of clarity that let me appreciate different performers, different instruments, different moments, etc. it was overwhelming at first in a way that felt cacophonic but there's an internal structure that is quite enigmatic. really enjoyed this. a great first album.
WOULD ESTROGEN HAVE SAVED NICK DRAKE!?
as a professional in the field of transgendering, i'm inclined to say yes. a flamboyant depressed man with an album like this? yeah buddy. seen it a thousand times. drake has a nice soft voice and there's some decent instrumentation between the mellow guitar and the flute which offers decent lift to an otherwise depressing album that makes this at least listenable, but it's largely forgettable mumbling that bounced right off me. something i've said before with art is that i feel like a lot of dead artists (especially young ones) have their work boosted posthumously because people ascribe inherent meaning to the fact that they are dead which i find frustrating.
my biggest problem with this album is that i'm not on coke at a club while listening to it because i think that's quite clearly the intended context. it's not that it's bad but it's just not something i can fully appreciate sitting quietly in my room as the highly repetitive weighed heavily on me. there's pockets of it that are good, such as the title track notably, lady cab driver, and DMSR (probably my fave), but there's so little progression in most tracks that i was itching to skip next after a little while. the blending of funk and synth is quite lovely conceptually though. it's groovy as fuck no doubt where it holds up, but the early synth usage feels primitive in a way that doesn't always endear me because some of the tracks are downright unserious. amazingly i've actually listened to literally zero prince in my life so this was intriguingly new, however my partner said "oh that's not even one of his good albums can i just play that for you instead?" lmfao.
this one is a head scratcher to me. i've know heard some of davis' work here and there, but nothing i can directly place. this album is kinda making me feel insane because i can't tell if i love it or hate it. it's no doubt deeply influential in the way that it is on the forefront of synthesizing modern electric instruments into the body of jazz from a legendary artist, but how do i feel about it as a listening experience? not a clue! to my ear the keyboard and the guitar feel so deeply at odds with the acoustic instruments and i do not know how to synthesize (hah) them. the arrangement of the players (side one in particular) made it feel like i had multiple tabs playing audio at once. it was wildly disorienting, even on a second listen. is it good, is it bad, do i just feel okay with it.... i don't know. normally i have words to describe my feelings on art from experience in doing so even when i lack useful context to make more articulate observations, but trying to parse this feels like asking for my opinion on a sentence said in chinese. i don't know man i don't speak chinese.
misogynistic british new wave slop by a man with an incredibly whiny voice. properly exhausting to listen to, start to finish. that costello maintains to this day that his songs are not misogynistic and that it's the listeners who are the problem? buddy. oh Buddy. his lyrics are so uninspiring and unfunny so it baffles me that he's an artist that people talk about as having good wordplay. it's nothing but whining. even the band itself sounds corny as can be with little in here that sounds better than a half hour of white noise. i'd choose the bear.
it's fine i guess. the singer is noteworthy for having a nice voice but broadly speaking it's forgettable muddy 00s glam rock before they invented parametric eq and mixing. it's really rough. i can't tell if it's the mixing or if the vocalist is just british but i could scarce make out more than a line here or there. the whole aesthetic and vibe of this album is "protagonist band in a high school movie who save the school from a nebulous outside bureaucratic force through the power of song". does that make sense? it kinda makes sense to me. tracks like "friday night" are toe-tappers that i'd hear at 20% volume on the store radio while standing in line at a coffee shop that charged me $7 for a basic latte. your dad probably swears this band is underrated for some reason.
extremely inconsistent. tracks like "if you don't want me to destroy you" and "long gone" are to me probably the most engaging sonically because it feels like they tried to do something interesting with dynamism and the violins that cut through the muddy wall of oversaturated guitars that plague most of the album. this feels like bog-standard forgettable britpop to me so it is bewildering that this is included on a Must Listen list, and given the wikipedia's article retroactive quote about how the vocalist was more interested in fame via a studio than actually making a good record, it seems like he agrees! i think i got baited by pulling mingus as the first album in this list.
pretty solid! i haven't listened to much from CCR but it's hard not to like their sound. i really love how distorted john fogerty's guitar is (well, the whole band, but him as lead) because it's just got such an energy to it and fogerty's got a very interesting voice too. swamp rock is good shit because i was bobbing my head along to pretty much all of it. i don't know if anything particularly stood out though? this was all just Good. "run through the jungle" is probably the most interesting to me. they're doing some crazy ass shit on that track.
metal is a genre that i consistently say that i like but don't listen to enough. thrash in particular is fun, so for an album that's nothing but riffs it's enjoyable. every song is too long though. like, way too long, especially with how much they don't grow or adapt or shift. the title track i genuinely thought i accidentally restarted it before seeing that i was 8 minutes in to the 10 minute track. the album gets monotonous as it goes on because of this lack of growth. the drums on this lowkey suck shit too because they're VERY samey across the album. they're so far forward in the mixes too which draws attention to how they aren't doing anything at all meanwhile the bass is nearly imperceptible. this whole album is an oddball to me in that they show clear capable chops ("one", "dyer's eye") yet it all feels phoned in, mixing aside.
fascinating that this is the album that people cite as what made the public take drum and bass seriously as a genre when to me this album feels like a parody of itself. perhaps it's partially a measure of distance and development in the edm space, but i can't imagine ever wanting to listen to this when breakcore exists ngl. even tracks like "hi-potent" that have Something going on drastically overstay their welcome without expansion. unserious vocals across the album as well.
the sampling of YMO's "lotus love" in "digital" for instance just made me want to go listen to that instead, but it's a great cut. i can't place the horns in "destination" but it's the same thing where there are glimpses of other (and better) records interwoven into The Same Generic Bassline for over 2 hours. "trust me" as an example feels like unchanging purgatory. i could've watched an a movie in the time spent listening to this instead of getting pranked by garbage. complete joke of an album. DNF in full.
really a scathing indictment of the list in this book that an album with such an impact was removed in a later edition. it's not my favourite album from kendrick but it's hard to say that this isn't one of the best and most cohesive hip hop albums from the 2010s. kendrick is such a good storyteller that even an album that is imo not his best is still an all-time GOAT contender. i love that it's billed as "a short film" because to me the emotion across the album feels like a perfectly paced narrative experience. it's reflective and introspective and dense. the kind of album you can always find new angles to appreciate because the songwriting is as sharp as it is layered. exceptional across all fronts.
god the singing here is miserable. nails on chalkboard tier, and the instrumentation does NOT help. the album experience of a bunch of drunk lads poorly shouting incomprehensible songs together inside a pub while you walk by on the sidewalk completely sober. it sure SEEMS like there's music going on, and you assume they're having fun, but you probably plug your ears and walk a bit faster. the garish cover art does this no favors either. feels like a prank album mocking celtic music rather than a revitalization of the genre such as is claimed but what the hell do i know when i don't even know when my dad's side of the family emigrated from scotland.
easy five. saw the genre was "psychedelic soul" and had the instant "oh hell yeah" reaction because this was fantastic start to finish. the hendrix-inspired stratocaster sound here is sublime. there's such an emotive body to it that gives a really strong base for kiwanuka's complimentary vocals. the string arrangements across this whole album are fantastic. like, listening to the violins take the front in "light" while kiwanuka's guitar slowly reverbs across in tandem with the background vocalists? that's what i'm talking about right there. genuinely pretty surprising that this album didn't blow up more. great stuff.
incel rock anthem. half-decent grunge instrumentation, but with the most whiny and angsty vocals i've heard in a minute that are absolutely dripping with misogyny. every single track is expressing entitlement towards woman as sexual objects, plain and simple. "you think i'm scared of girls, well maybe, but i'm not afraid of you" is a real line. cartoonishly bad songwriting. this album is described as being "about a toxic relationship" yeah it's about a guy who is transparently an abusive slimey gross piece of shit who should get a job and stay away from her. the most surprising part about this is when i googled "greg dulli politics" and found an article from 2022 where he (the lead vocalist and songwriter) described himself as a socialist. growth, i guess.
a classic of the bossa nova genre which is yet another genre i'm always saying i should listen to more. this is like a warm blanket to me. joão gilberto's soft vocals and stan getz' soothing saxophone are so comforting. what i find most interesting about the development of the genre is how it was in response to the development of microphones, yet only the lower quality ones available in brazil, so it was intentionally cut back, simplified, and arranged differently. the innovation through the magic of buying two of them giving equality clarity to the vocals and the guitar is a novelty as well. nothing really new to say about an album like this but it's one that deserves all the praise it gets.
it's convenient to not have to engage with the "well it might be a pedophile but at least he makes good music" mental gymnastics because i thought this album sucked. caetano veloso was a chief artist involved in the tropicália movement which was notable both for its contributions to brazilian pop music and also as cultural backlash against the US-backed dictatorship of the time, so objectively speaking this *is* a notable album, but to me the "artistic cannibalism" mentality of tropicália (which on its own is questionable imho) is on terrible display. the usage of the sitar for instance in "eles" which was topical in the west at the time because of the beetles sounds *so* bad here. points for historical notability but that's it.
i..... like this? i'm bewildered. on my first listen i had no clue how to feel about ANY of this because this singing style is baffling but i noticed i was tapping my foot to "talent is an asset" and "in my family" towards the end of the album. there is a LOT that is happening. once i got attuned to the energy, the second listen really grew on me a lot. it's fucking *weird*. incredibly forward looking for this to be a 1974 album in its whole construction. it's like the album itself has a learning curve. not every track hits and i think that's what holds me back from loving this more but this is perplexingly good.
an awkward album to review given the personal subject matter of the tracks and the unfortunate fate of multiple band members. to me though it's just okay. this album leans more on its heavy metal influences which i kinda like but it all feels very samey to me. could jump to any point in the album and not really be able to tell you what song it is. the thing about grunge is that even despite how absolutely fucked everything is rn i'm an perma-optimist *anyway* because the alternative sucks and is antithetical to my mode of being, so the apathetic angst and self-loathing always bounces off me.
a landmark album that if one were to rate solely on consideration of sociopolitical impacts particularly in the american context could very easily make the case for being one of the most important albums in the last 100 years, but you already know that. it's ray charles for crying out loud. that said, as always i rate media based on my personal enjoyment which is the subjective experience of Myself in My particular modern context, and this album is very Of The Times. charles has an incredible voice and it's no surprise why people lost their shit at hearing a bunch of classics covered in such a strong way, but it doesn't quite land for me with the same impact.
it's astounding that this album had as much of an impact on metal as it did when it's pretty much garbage. it all sounds like shit. one of the muddiest albums i've heard in my life so i can't even appreciate the energy of the riffs. the whole album sounds like i'm hearing it through the wall to my neighbor's apartment. it's unclear to me if this is a creative choice or a skill issue but it's nigh unlistenable. the lyrics are hilariously cringe so of course the biggest nazi dullards on the planet in norway took it and ran with it.
impossible to talk about this album without talking about phil spector who is A Right Bastard. just like, WOW, is he awful. i loosely knew of him prior to listening but i didn't appreciate the intensity of *how* evil the guy was, so of course he's widely influential on the development of pop because he figured out how to sell records. "what if we made the record sound like dogshit because we're targeting car radios" is maddening that it was effective because frequently people think louder = better, and boy is this loud!!! it's exhausting. it's quite literally wrong to listen to this on headphones, but either way it's an acoustic brick being thrown at mach 10 at your head. the frustrating thing to me about a cruel tyrant like spector is that i do not believe for a second that his sociopathic torturing of musicians was meritful to the creative or financial success of records he produced. it's all smoke and mirrors in purpose of mythmaking about his supposed 'genius' and the false necessity of suffering to produce great art. merry christmas.
the bewildering britishness of robert dimery's 1001 albums you must hear before you die fascinates me endlessly to include an entry such as this, for this album is wholly unremarkable. it's dusty springfield's middling debut cover album of her favourite tracks, primarily black soul/pop singers, delivered to a british audience. it is not a strong showcase of her capabilities as a singer and it did not even sell exceptionally well either. the producer johnny franz was particularly inspired by phil spector's wall of sound style as suffered previously which to me seems like a blight across albums of this era.
i cannot describe how visceral the feeling of jarring disconnection was in my bones when when the vocalist started. just as i was enjoying the guitar and getting into the feel of the rhythm of the drums, here comes this rabid barking dog ruining the whole thing. no exaggeration i reflexively recoiled in disgust. i might as well have just cracked my window open and waited for my neighbor's dog to start howling once it hears a siren. the vocals on every track are *rough*. i don't know if it's partially based on how edgy the content is or if i just really hate this particular guy's voice, but wow. it was agonizing. metal songs always love to be like 20% too long too so that didn't help either.
an interesting fusion album. i'm a fan of plucked string instruments and a fan of the moog synthesizer, so i was immediately intrigued. if anything i think it could've leaned harder on the moog, but also harder on the sitar for what it is. many of these tracks sound like tracks written in a typical western guitar style, yet played with the sitar instead. the second half of "the ocean" is a highlight for me as once it starts going it starts GOING which kinda gave me a feeling of like, damn you could've been given me that the whole time!? so it's a mixed bag. not quite consistent enough for me to say that i enjoyed all of it, but it's cool for what it is.
i can't think of the last time i listened to the album in full as usually it's just "fast car" that gets airtime, but "baby can i hold you" is slept on i think. tracy chapman's voice is fantastic. even on the tracks that don't work for me as much as the others, her singing is exceptional. she covers a lot of ground here with tracks like "behind the wall" that are quite distressing. chapman carries strong emotion across the whole album, but with the instrumentation stripped back entirely it hits even harder. an album full of love and hope despite every reason to not have either. really great stuff.
this feels like a self-parody album. i mean i bet this probably went really hard if you had never heard music before and were high on novel drugs, but broadly speaking this sounds pretty horrible. the tracks are actively grating for most of the album and it doesn't seem like quality of any aspect was a consideration at any point. there's mediocre whiny singing with lyrics that are either generic 60s countercultural lines or actively low effort nonsense. run some guitars through distortion, poorly play an organ, and call it a day. exhausting.
this is a prank album. i think i am genuinely being pranked. the first song in this album, "people hold on", is a groover. house is a genre that tends to bounce off me, but this opens with a deliciously late 80s energetic track that would be fantastic to dance to in a club. after expectations like that, the rest of the album is "when do they stop tuning their instruments" tier garbage. worse yet, it's "your buddy's first attempt with a DAW" tier. i just want to know what goes into the mind of a person who thinks that this completely unremarkable forgotten english house album that does not exist anywhere except for a single 200 subscriber youtube channel with a big yoshi profile is not only Great, but *essential listening* for one to appreciate the entire body of modern music. madness.
forgettable background music in a low-budget spy thriller. the hacker is IN. i was forgetting this in real time. i'm half convinced that this album included repeats because i earnestly could not tell you a single notable thing about any of these tracks. i don't even know what to make of the weirdly orientalist vibe from the cover or how it shifted from vaguely techno scifi to an indiana jones temp score pillaging an ancient temple. if there's one thing you'd hope from ambient music, it's a good vibe, but the vibe here is simply terrible.
what is that guitar melody in "more than a feeling"? i'm not sure if it's the originator or if it is itself pulling from something else, but i just can't place it. tip of my tongue. given that this is all certifiable Dad Rock on every Top Classic Rock list, i figure i probably have just heard this more than i realize, but i found this monotonous and boring. it's sound that was playing for a little under 40 minutes. mentally while listening to this album i was standing in line at a theme park waiting to get on a roller coaster thinking about what i would have for lunch. it's cool how extremely clean and technically complex this is for something entirely self-produced, but to me it says something about an album when it's more entertaining to read about the sound engineering techniques employed rather than actually listen to it.
not my jam on this one. it's quintessential mid 2000s hip hop which tends to bounce right off me. i don't care for ghostface's rapping style. it feels one note here and largely kinda exhausting, so for a album this bloated in length, i was itching for it to end. could not appreciate the emotion in this at all. it's not Bad i just really would like to listen to anything else than this.
well even if one were to ignore that rod stewart is a racist tory bastard, which one should not, he also has a voice that sounds like RFK Jr with how strained it is. it is physically upsetting to hear his voice. truly a sensory nightmare. some people have a voice fit for miming and they just should not make music. even if i were to strain myself to put attention towards the rest of the production, it's simply not good. anyways again about the racism part which you shouldn't ignore, the title track includes some gross anti-asian racism. yuck. there is nothing redeemable about any of this.
"The majority of the tracks were composed on the spot in the studio, the lyrics not being written until Bowie stood in front of the microphone." BOY does it show!!!! this songwriting is so vapid and empty. the main highlight of this album to me is robert fripp's guitar and brian eno's synthesizers across the whole album, though even then the ambient tracks in the second half are quite uninspiring to me. it's frustrating that tracks like "secret life of arabia" or "sons of the silent age" have such lovely instruments that feel somewhat spoiled by the banality of the writing even if bowie's distant singing is expressive. the title track is the only thing even slightly memorable here.
