Showcases his talents as a songwriter, but isn’t his best work.
Track by track:
Brilliant Corners: 10/10
Bu-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are: 9/10
Pannonica: 8/10
I Surrender Dear: 8/10
Bemsha Swing: 9/10
88/100 total—5 stars
I’ve only really listened to the jazz “essentials”—like, Kind of Blue, A Love Supreme, etc—and the only one of those I really *got* without much effort or research was The Shape of Jazz to Come. Jazz is the genre I know the least about. I can say that this has really cool drums, though, and the solos do a great job with filling space in a creative way. It’s not as good as the jazz albums I have to compare it to but it sounds pretty good so what the hell.
Love this album! Fantastic storytelling on the title song and amazing riffs and energy throughout. Easy five stars.
This is a fantastic live album. Diminuendo in Blue is one of the best jazz pieces I’ve ever heard. The fact that the crowd heard that song then just went absolutely crazy is amazing. The rest of the album is also awesome, and the history behind it is insane.
I just wish parts hadn’t been recreated in studio. It was kinda disappointing to learn that nearly the entire first disc was recreated. I much rather would’ve heard the badly-rehearsed songs in their raw form than the attempt to recreate them. It would be a five if it weren’t for that.
This is an album. It has notes. There are songs. The songs follow a tempo. The tempo varies sometimes and sometimes the notes also change.
I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never listened to this one—only Pet Sounds. I’ve heard this is their second best album, though.
The cover is absolutely hilarious. It’s like this guy in anguish with SURF’S UP 😎 written over his head. The Beach Boys have always been interesting to me in that way—they’re this band famous for writing about surfing and girls, but then they also had a member who horrifically drowned, they were managed by their incredibly abusive father, and Brian Wilson was in and out of mental hospitals. He also was absolutely obsessed with being better than The Beatles—and the two bands actually mutually inspired each other. The complexity of their songs is also insane. Good Vibrations, for example, is so basic on surface-level, but it actually has an insane amount of layers to it.
This album wasn’t as good as Pet Sounds, but it is certainly fantastic. The songs are deeply thoughtful and introspective. The opening seconds immediately hook you in and refuse to let go. I’m just wondering wtf Student Demonstration Time is. At first it sounded like a hollow attempt at a protest song, and then like it was making fun of the four students who died at Kent…and I honestly can’t tell, it was written by Mike Love though, and he’s reportedly a jerk. The sirens were kinda cool but they were so out of place.
Anyway, yeah. Bad sticks out more than good. So even if my main comments are about that song, the rest of the album is genuinely great.
Classic David Byrne weirdness mixed with classic Brian Eno weirdness. Fantastic album.
Fantastic album. Wonderful uses of highlighting and isolating instruments, as well as building up songs with volume and layering. His voice is fantastic. I am definitely biased, as I remember my grandma and mom playing me some of these songs as a kid, but I feel as if I’d still really like this even if it weren’t for that. This is the definition of good ol’ country. The piano and guitar were especially good. My one critique is that the production can feel dated at times.
My excitement when I opened this album and saw it was 46 minutes with only 4 songs cannot be described. I love long songs and I love albums where the tracklist is short and doesn’t total over 50 minutes—with some exceptions, of course, especially when it comes to punk music or concept albums.
The effect and build up at the very beginning is awesome. All of Walk On By is phenomenal. I feel like I’ve heard it a lot before, but I know they wouldn’t play an eleven minute song on the radio so I honestly don’t know. Maybe something samples it?
Ok apparently Me Against the World by 2Pac does, and I have that on my playlist, so that makes sense. Also 6 Inch by Beyoncé, which I’ve only listened to two or three times, but it was a fairly memorable song.
Hyperbolic… has quite the title, with lyricism to match and lots of cool production.
One Woman is great as well. I honestly don’t remember much because I had to listen to it in segments due to some stuff that came up, but I remember liking it—great vocals and such.
By The Time I Get to Phoenix is a beautiful spoken word telling a love story. It’s a great closer for the album and really perfectly sums up what the album’s about.
Amazing album. RIP Isaac Hayes.
