[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.
