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.
I had never really dug into Lou Reed's work in the past. I knew the inevitable "Walk on the Wild Side", of course, and I was aware of the Velvet Underground as a seminal force in early alternative rock, but hadn't actually listened to much of it. Listening to this album has convinced me that Lou Reed is much like Bob Dylan. This is partly because he's an extremely influential musician whose echoes are still being heard in music decades later, but mostly because he's a gifted songwriter and fantastic lyricist who is hampered by a profound inability to sing. Unlike Dylan, Reed has a very mellifluous voice, but he can't hit a pitch to save his life. Songs like "Walk on the Wild Side" and "New York Telephone Conversation" cover this up by being more conversational, but then we come to songs like "Satellite of Love" and "I'm So Free" where he's singing alongside some really excellent harmony vocals, and his lead lines are just kind of...stuck in there wherever. The production (by David Bowie, no less!) is stellar, and the music is sublime - even the quirky choices (like replacing bass with a tuba) work. I just wish Reed wasn't tone-deaf...although, given that this was the highly experimental New York of 1972, that may have been the point.
Boy, Morrissey sure sounds like Morrissey, doesn't he? All of his songs seem to fall into one (or more) of five categories:
* I Hate Myself and Everyone Else
* I Hate England and Everywhere Else
* I Hate Religion and Politics and Celebrities
* You Can't Possibly Understand How Difficult My Life Is
* Why Doesn't Anyone Like Me?
"The World Is Full of Crashing Bores" sounds like P.G. Wodehouse wrote a pop song. And who else would have the ego to write a song called "I Have Forgiven Jesus"?
Morrissey writes good lyrics and performs them well, with a solid band and excellent production behind him, and "America Is Not the World" is still depressingly relevant 20 years after its recording. But he's a massively self-indulgent tortured poet of a man, and apparently rather a racist too, so I don't feel bad for missing out on this for as long as I have.
I don't claim to be any kind of rap connoisseur, but this is good stuff. Queen Latifah has amazing flow over very strong backing tracks, and her special guests also bring the fire. I love the way she brings a wide variety of world rhythms to her music ("She rhyme American, she rap Jamaican" feels very true). My favorites are "Princess of the Posse" and "Ladies First", but there's not a single dead spot on the album. Winner!
This is great English folk of the quiet and reflective variety. The chords are lovely and melancholy; the lyrics are sweet and intelligent, but occasionally slip by unnoticed due to Drake's understated delivery. The album features fantastic string arrangements ("Day is Done", "Fruit Tree") that enrich the whole sound without overcoming the voice and guitar that are at the heart of the music. A fantastic album for certain moods, and a crucial record of another talent gone too soon. Favorite tracks: "Three Hours", "'Cello Song"
The band sounds like they might be decent if you could hear them through the huge swathes of muffling reverb. The vocals are annoyingly atonal. All in all, it's an indistinguishable mass of noise to me. I actively dislike this and have no desire to listen to it again.
Classic early '80s metal, with the thunderous bonus of Steve Harris putting a shot of adrenaline into heavy metal bass. There are some weird moments where the tempo goes wonky, but the band is 100% together, so it's not really a problem. Favorites: "The Prisoner", "Run to the Hills"
It's...fine, I guess? Nice production, good arrangements, solid performances, but it all kinda sounds the same to me, and doesn't particularly grab me. Favorite track: "Rebellion (Lies)"
Jerry Lee Lewis was a grade-A asshole. Marrying his 13-year-old cousin would get him that label all by itself, but add in some bigamy, spousal abuse, the suspicious deaths of two of his wives, accidentally shooting his own bass player, and generally being a mean, abusive, racist, egotistical, drunken bastard. His style (and this performance) may have been groundbreaking at the time (at least for white audiences), but today it's pretty old-fashioned and all kind of sounds the same. Leave it in the dustbin of history.
Smooth grooves, nice harmonies, tight production. This sounds almost like it could be a lost Squeeze album (meant as a compliment). The second half (what would be side 2 back when albums had sides) is slower and more melancholy - still good, but less interesting to me. Still, overall a very pleasant surprise from a band I only knew from "Don't Dream It's Over". Will definitely be digging deeper into their discography. Favorite Tracks: "Chocolate Cake", "Whispers and Moans"
The pipes on this man! The groove of the backing band! The arrangements! This album more or less defined the slow, sexy soul ballads that are a centerpiece of R&B to this day. The songs do eventually sound a little bit alike, but given that this was the album that you'd start playing just before you and your partner got busy, it didn't need a lot of variety. All of the vocals (except the backups on "Just to Keep You Satisfied" and presumably the...excited young lady at the start of "You Sure Love to Ball") are Gaye, multitracked to provide an amazing one-man chorus. A titan of its era, even if the title track is the only one you know.
How mind-blowing it must have been to hear Hendrix when all of his material was new - every album doing things the electric guitar never had before, setting the stage for decades of rock music to come. He was an intuitive and organic musician, but also worked exceptionally hard to make his albums the best they could be. This is a double album full of brilliance, from the extended blues masterpiece that is "Voodoo Chile" (featuring Jack Casady and a young Steve Winwood) to the rock-pop precision of "Crosstown Traffic". There are a few weak spots - "Little Miss Strange" sounds like a Monkees tune with a Hendrix solo bolted on top (not to throw shade at the Monkees) - but all in all it's full of brilliance from Hendrix and his co-conspirators.
It's smooth jazz. Very influential, very well-performed, very groovy smooth jazz with absolutely no flaws...but in the end, it's not anything more or less than an exemplary specimen of the style. Also, most of the lyrics are in Portuguese, which may be a positive or a negative based on how much Portuguese you speak and how important lyrics are to you. Favorite tracks: Só Danço Samba, Vivo Sonhando, and yes, the iconic "The Girl From Ipanema."
I don't know what I'd call this, but I think I like it. A wide variety of styles here, from the experimental ambient instrumentals of "Brother Woodrow/Closing Prayer" to the slow sinister blues of "I Keep Coming Back" to the almost folky "Fountain and Fairfax". It's interesting and engaging, and though some of the tracks go on long enough to outstay their welcome, it's overall a very pleasant surprise. Favorites: "Gentlemen", "Debonair"
I never realized that "Sister Sledge" were four different singers - yes, all sisters - who sang lead vocals on separate tracks, but (at least on this album) never sang together. Regardless, this is a classic disco album, released only a few months before disco fever in the US finally collapsed. It's a fine example of the genre - great beats, surging romantic string sections, and endlessly repetitive choruses (the title track is over 8 minutes long). And surprising absolutely no one, Bernard Edwards KILLS the bass playing throughout (he and Chic partner Nile Rodgers wrote and produced the album). "You're a Friend To Me" has a slight reggae vibe, which isn't what one would expect from a disco album, but it works. It's a great snapshot of the popular music of its day, polished to a mirror sheen - but I'm glad we've moved on.
Man...if I was still in junior high school, this would have sounded edgy as FUCK. Incredibly fast drum and guitar work topped off by somebody tonelessly screaming word salad about blood and death and torture and murder (and, y'know, literal Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele). The production is good, at least, and the musicians are very technically skilled; there are noticeably several places where the drums are going too fast for the guitars or vice versa, but no one seems to have time to notice, and there's no meaningful way to tell one song from another anyway. I guess this might have been impressive or groundbreaking at the time of its release, when this was new and shocking; music to scare your mom/pastor/congresscritter with. Now it just sounds like a hyperactive parody of itself. Best part: you can get through the whole thing in half an hour.
Well, I liked it better than Definitely Maybe, but it still kinda reminds me of my least favorite Beatles tunes. Still not a fan of Liam Gallagher's voice, still think the guitars are too shrill and brittle, still feel like the entire mix was put through a high pass filter to kill the bass, still feel like most of the songs are several choruses too long. Favorite tracks are probably "Morning Glory" and "Champagne Supernova", because they at least do something a little interesting and different from the rest of the album.
This sounds like a reasonably competent bar band of middle-aged guys who are going through the motions to support the guy who writes all their songs, who is a pretty good guitar player and decent lyricist even though he can't sing for shit. The harmonies are solid - better than the lead vocals for sure - but the whole thing has a very "recorded in one take without any effort to mix anything" vibe. "Ragged" is right. I never understood the passion some people have for Neil Young, and this album did nothing to convince me.
If you have one album that contains "Norwegian Wood", "Michelle", and "In My Life", that's a 5-star album even if the rest of the tracks are blank. But we also get to enjoy classics like "Drive My Car" and "Nowhere Man". Not all of the remaining songs are gems - "You Won't See Me" and "Run For Your Life" don't do a lot for me. But in addition to the R&B and even country influences, this is where the Beatles started experimenting with sitars and other non-traditionally Western instruments, and started treating the studio as an instrument, which would come to full fruition in later albums. Just great songwriting on full display.
Lots of good funk, with LOTS of different flavors mixed in - ska, reggae, late-'80s guitar rock, classic soul, punk, and I even feel like I hear some Frank Zappa influence here and there. There's something for everyone here, and I dig it. I don't know if this broke any new ground, but these guys sound like they'd be a helluva lot of fun at a party.
The first part of the album is theoretically several different songs, but they all sound the same to me - masses of liquified keyboard angst with moaning emo vocals on top. Later on, the band remembers that they also have a guitar player, and start doing some songs that are a bit more different/interesting - "Fascination Street" is a heck of a groove, even at its funereal pace. It's extremely well performed and produced, and doesn't sound like anything other than itself. It's a great example of what it's trying to do, but what it's trying to do doesn't particularly interest me.
Classic slow lovemakin' funk, with wah-wahs and clavinets...but Mayfield's high falsetto vocals just don't quite click for me. He's clearly passionate about his vocals, but the high range doesn't work for me. I can hear how it influenced Prince, though I never liked his falsetto work much either. Killer band, great grooves, but the vocals bring it down a notch for me.
Great vintage keys and sounds married to songs that don't do a lot for me. There are some winners here - I really dug the stretch from "In the Cold, Cold Night" to "Ball and Biscuit" - but a lot of the other songs just seem to sort of meander around for a while and then wander off. They're clearly a very talented group that has studied and absorbed a lot of older rock and integrated it into their own material...I just don't always enjoy what they do with it.
A couple of talented young brothers - solid songwriters, amazing harmonizers - produced into a clean-cut, extremely marketable package, trying to hang on to the perfect '50s through the turn into the tumultuous '60s. The only recognizable tunes from this album for me were "Cathy's Clown" and the original version of "Love Hurts", which I knew much better from Nazareth's cover in the '70s. The rest of it seems like a perfect time capsule of its day - well-performed, but not something I feel a particular desire to listen to.
These don't really feel like songs; they are free verse set to music, often without a recognizable verse/chorus structure or even a defined melody. (The exception is "Centerpiece", a beautifully rendered blues/jazz standard that feels like a curious digression in the middle of everything else.) The music, jazzy and flowing, is fantastic, featuring a number of LA session superstars, Steely Dan alumni, and superstar musicians in their own right. The lyrics are poetic and meandering, but intelligently written and beautifully sung. This isn't the sort of album that you can sing along with, but it's a beautifully crafted listening experience.
Sharp, flowing lyrics with more than your recommended daily allowance of F-bombs, flavored with as many samples from old kung-fu movies as there are from classic R&B. I'm no hip-hop expert, but this feels special, even though it's not the kind of thing I'd seek out to listen to. Favorite tracks: "Protect Ya Neck" and "Da Mystery of Chessboxin'"
I always thought that Bob Dylan was a great songwriter hampered by the fact that he was a lousy singer (and an even lousier harmonica player). After listening to this album, I'm not convinced he was even that good a songwriter. Repetitive, simple chord progressions limp along under lyrics full of bizarre metaphors that almost rhyme, if you squint a lot. Okay, the King of the Philistines refers to LBJ, but is Dylan actually SAYING anything about it? I'm not sure the Emperor has any clothes at all.
