An album I knew well from my early listening history. The big hits (Go Your Own Way, You Make Loving Fun, Don't Stop, The Chain) are embedded in my permanent memory, but while I remembered songs like Oh Daddy and Gold Dust Woman, I had forgotten just how GOOD they were. Other than Second Hand News (which is cromulent but suffers from being surrounded by gold), this album is just one brilliantly-crafted song after another, and it well deserves its spot on the Mount Rushmore of classic rock albums.
Does it remind me of the Beatles? Yes! Unfortunately, the Beatles that it reminds me of is my least favorite kind of Beatles - John Lennon's nasal, repetitive drone songs, though those are still more interesting than most of this album. There are a few highlights - I rather liked "Columbia" and "Married With Children" - but for the most part this one left me cold. And Liam Gallagher's bizarre over-enunciation (especially on tracks like "Cigarettes & Alcohol") REALLY annoys me. <oldmanyellsatcloud.gif>
Not an album I'd actively seek out to listen to, but a great example of music that evokes a time and place (even one that, as a white norteamericano, I have no significant exposure to). Great background/chilling music for the right vibe. El Cuarto de Tula, El Carretero, and Candela are my favorite tracks.
This feels like an album that I need to give repeated listens - the key to everything is the lyrics, and there are some that I just can't catch on the first pass. Love the classic jazz samples that provide the backbone, especially when the rappers call them out ("Ron Carter on the bass"). Lots of great historical music references packed into "What?" as well. And was that Busta Rhymes dropping a D&D reference ("Rawr! Rawr! Like a dungeon dragon")? This is one of those cases where as a first-time listener I think "This sounds like every other hip-hop album," but I'm told it was so groundbreaking that every other hip-hop album - or at least a lot of them - sounds like this. Fantastic wordplay and performances, just not the kind of thing I listen to often.
I was familiar with some of these tracks ("Girls", "Fight For Your Right", "No Sleep Till Brooklyn", "Brass Monkey") via general cultural osmosis, and based on those wasn't looking forward to the rest of the album. There were definitely moments here I enjoyed - "Rhymin' and Stealin'" was fun, partly because you can't go wrong with John Bonham's thunderous drums. But for the most part the album was what I expected - the soundtrack of the beer-soaked frat boys that I hated in college. Simple rhymes about beer and hos and how awesome they were, nothing too complicated that you couldn't slur along to after a few brewskis. None for me, thanks.
First of all, the backing tracks are AMAZING - fantastic sound selection and production. Little Simz has great flow and clearly has Things To Say as a Black woman in the 21st century. I'll admit that I'm not used to a London accent in rap - there's nothing wrong with it, of course, I just need to tune my ears to it. As I've said on a few other rap album reviews, it really deserves more attention to the lyrics on another listen(s) - the rhymes are intricate and dense, and I'm not sure where she breathes in some of these tracks. Favorites for me are "Offence", "Pressure", and especially the aptly-named "Venom".
I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this...and that's a good thing. The title track, "The Age of the Understatement", reminded me a lot of early Yes - not as proggy, but laden with baroque lyrics and orchestral arrangements. The next track felt like the B-side of a '60s James Bond theme; in fact, the whole thing feels very classically cinematic. I could hear any one of these songs showing up in a Tarantino film. The songs are short, punchy, and have a ton of character - which I don't hear as often as I'd like these days. Great symphonic parts drench the whole album in atmosphere. I think this might be the first of the 1001 albums (those I don't already own at least) that I actually buy.
It's hard for listeners today to realize just how much this album sounded like nothing that had been heard on the radio before. This album planted the seeds of hair metal in a field full of disco and punk, and also caused tens of thousands of budding guitar players to spontaneously combust. Eddie Van Halen's technique, precision, and sheer speed blew minds across the country, and defined how rock was going to sound for much of the next decade. This was a band that had honed their craft in countless bar gigs, and by God, they were TIGHT - the timing, the harmonies, everything polished to a mirror finish. None of the songs are anything special by themselves (though I have a soft spot for the lesser-known "I'm the One"), but the performances were everything, and they set rock music on fire.
Wow. This feels like a compilation of rejected Doors songs with a tone-deaf Frank Zappa impersonator filling in on vocals for a passed-out Jim Morrison. The music is simple and repetitive, the vocals are somehow both atonal and off-key, the tempo is wildly inconsistent within any given song, and the whole thing has a very "we're too cool to care if this sounds like shit" vibe. There are clear echoes of the Velvet Underground (which makes sense because John Cale produced most of these tracks), and you can definitely also hear early traces of the Cars and the Talking Heads (both of which bands members of the Modern Lovers went on to found/join later). Modern Lovers doesn't have anywhere near the polish of those bands, but I sense that they didn't really want that, so...well done? It's apparently a very important and influential proto-punk album. It's not for me, though.
I'd never heard of this album (or this band), though it turns out that I was previously familiar with "Alright" without knowing who had created it. This is three-chord, slightly punky alt-pop, well-conceived and well-executed. The songs are punchy, short, and fun (though I could do without the Chipmunks-style sped-up vocals on "We're Not Supposed To". Favorite track is probably "She's So Loose" with it's interesting chord choices. Overall, it's nothing that rocked my world, but there's nothing here to object to, and I'd have no problem listening to it again -the very definition of a three-star album.
This sounds exactly what you would expect a Phil Spector Christmas album to sound like. All the Christmas classics (and a few less popular tracks like "The Bells of St. Mary" and "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers") with a super-tight rhythm section, beautifully arranged backing vocals, and the standard "wall of sound" production. There are five different artists on this album, but frankly they all sounded more or less the same...which is what Phil Spector was after. Shame about the whole psychological breakdown and murder thing, but boy could he make records in his prime.
I've known of Amy Winehouse's reputation as a great talent gone too soon, but hadn't listened to any of her material before. God DAMN, what a voice, what impeccable jazz chops and phrasing filtered through an R&B filter and a bad attitude. The very jazzy backing tracks are produced to sound like samples even though most of them were performed live. Favorite tracks are probably "Pumps" and "Help Yourself". It's not an album I'd deliberately put on to listen to very often, but it definitely proves Winehouse's extraordinary talent. I wish we'd been able to hear more of what she would have been capable of.
Okay, but seriously...what the ACTUAL fuck? This is a late-90s album of orchestral pop that sounds for all the world like something Neil Diamond or Englebert Humperdinck would have released in the early 70s. The arrangements are lush and well-done, and the singer takes it ABSOLUTELY seriously, but the lyrics...well, they vary from absolutely sincere pablum ("Someone") to tortuously overextended metaphors that go to really dark and twisted places ("If..."). Not to mention a recurrent theme of wishing his lover was an animal of some kind (dog, sheep, and especially horse). The best track is probably "Timewatching", which plays with the lyrics to a much better song ("When I Fall in Love"). Overall, the lyrics have intermittent moments, but whoever the target audience for this was, it's not me.
This sounds like an album of potentially good songs that's had all of the energy drained from it, like an indie-rock-flavored LaCroix. Even the songs with more energetic rhythm sections ("Little Faith", "Bloodbuzz Ohio") have them buried in the back of the mix, as if the engineer was afraid that someone might start nodding their head in time with the drums. The composition and production are all well executed, and the lyrics are interesting (if incomprehensible), but most of the songs have no dynamics at all. They start and end at the same level of energy - which I'd call "more or less awake" - and don't seem to go anywhere interesting along the way. "Bloodbuzz Ohio" and "England" are the closest to being interesting to me, but they don't quite get there. Still, if anyone ever wants to make a Disco Elysium musical and Sea Power isn't available, this might be the band for the job.
This, for me, is Led Zeppelin at the height of their powers, opening with a fairly traditional blues tune ("Custard Pie") and evolving into some of their most exotic and experimental work ("Kashmir", "In the Light", "Ten Years Gone"). Some of it is classic '70s excess, to be sure; "In My Time of Dying" is a fascinating journey from slide blues to an electrifying series of rhythm section variations, but it definitely didn't need to be 11 minutes long. And, as with almost any double album, there's some filler material; the tracks on side four are fine, but don't stand out among the great music that precedes them. But for the most part, this album shows that Zeppelin were worthy of their previous success and were continuing to evolve. My personal favorite part is "Ten Years Gone", particularly the opening moments when John Paul Jones' bass drops in to provide a fantastic deep counterpoint to Jimmy Page's shimmering chords.
