Great album. Shame Billy Corgan is who he is.
Beautiful sounding if monotonous. I enjoyed it from start to finish, but kind of wished I was listening to a Tom Waits album. Wanting to listen to someone else is never a great sign for me.
Lots of fun!
Copyright laws should allow everyone to sample everything. Nothing means nothing.
At the age of 9 I tried to sell penguin facts to fellow students for 50c, so I speak with expertise here.
I don’t think these people have ever met a penguin.
This album is weird, and interesting, and feels at times like a group of people trying to see how many different sounds they can make. Which, all things considered, isn’t a terrible artistic endeavour.
I am glad I listened to this album. I probably won’t listen to it again.
I listened to this album when walking home from the pub. I was going to give it 2/5 because it didn’t interest me. Then, ‘the Sound of Someone…’ started playing. The slow, beautiful interplay of instruments nearly made me bump it up to 3/5. Until they started introducing beeps and boops into it. No need! Allow your melody to exist unencumbered by sound effects.
Maybe it’s still a 3. Who am I to give this a failing grade.
Thank God Dylan went electric. The three album run that begins with Bringing It All Back Home and ends with Blonde on Blonde are possibly the greatest 3 album run of all time, and this is undoubtedly their peak.
The more I listen, the more I feel that the success and driving force of the album is than tinny piano that flows through. It blends into the background when it needs to, or take the reins when required. Desolation Row, while epic, sorely missed it.
Lyrically, the man could do no wrong at this point. Even if some of the images add up to nothing, they still contribute to a wholistic and meaningful story told by a man the forefront of his movement.
Nice work, Bobby.
This was good.
There are some great great songs here (What’s Golden) and lots of other really fun, well produced songs throughout.
There’s not really a dud in the bunch but it also hasn’t grabbed me as something I want to listen to over and over again. Like it’s solid.
An impressive outing.
The lyrics are impressively bad. They seem to be the political ramblings of an angsty teen which in and of itself isn’t necessarily a terrible concept but they manifest in the clunkiest angsty metaphors. This, coupled with Mustaine’s voice make every time he’s singing an infuriating endeavour.
Musically, it is impressive, and I find myself enjoying the groove of it all when there’s no singing. During those times I can see why people enjoy this genre.
It’s hard to say if I like this more or less than the Metallica one. Musically, it feels better produced and less tinny but I’d still rather listen to the like 7 good Metallica songs than this again.
Interesting and fun musically and lyrically with enough range of style that I was entertained from start to finish.
I enjoy albums where people just tell little stories about different people and Dury has enough humour to go around and keep it interested. The problem is that many of these stories are not at all understandable or relatable to me given that I don’t tick the boxes of being a drunk, horny working class cockney in the 70s.
But, hey, that doesn’t mean it’s not good stuff. More songs should start by actively declaring that people are ‘arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks’
There’s a reason the Isley Brothers have been so successfully and consistently sampled in musical history and it’s because their consistent groove and soulful songs are timelessly good.
Nothing here feels aged or out of place. It’s just a really really nice, well produced album.
This is the era of music that feels it has aged the poorest. Overproduced drum beats become grating after a while, and a whole album of them is a bit much. It makes it difficult to differentiate songs and find value in them as individual tracks.
That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it, but I could have enjoyed it more.
The Parsons contributions to this album are its most important factor, and that’s not limited to the three songs he lends his voice to on the standard release. Both ‘You’re Still on My Mind’ and ‘Hickory Wind’ are particular highlights and form, along with ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’ the peaks of the album.
This both is and isn’t a Gram Parsons album. By all accounts, he helped lead the push towards this musical approach for the Byrds, but I think he’s well tempered by having a band of capable and successful musicians behind him. Whilst no harmoniser here can hold a candle to Emmylou, they do an admirable job and the album as a whole avoids the mawkish sentimentality that his solo work sometimes falls into.
His vision for country rock inspired leagues of pale imitators, but still to this day none can match his voice or vision. the Byrds weren’t overly comfortable with this, and re-recorded many of his tracks. Who’s to say if they were right.
This album owes a lot to 70s soul and funk, and is certainly fun to listen to, but I don’t think it offers me anything new.
This album’s brilliance lies on three levels.
First is the utterly silky smooth production of Booker T, who arranges these songs beautifully and with incredible attention to detail.
The second is Willie Nelson’s voice, which while not the strongest all the time, just has enough sickly sweet qualities to make these songs his own.
The third is highlighting just how impressive the songs of the Great American Song Book are. Together, Nelson and Booker T do a phenomenal job emphasising how incredible this songwriting is.
Brilliant!
I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.
I don’t dislike grunge or 90s alt rock, but this album is neither nostalgic to me nor interesting to listen to with modern ears.
Jack Antonoff feels like the Russo Brothers of music in that he will make silky smooth crowd pleasers that don’t actually scratch any itch.
Listening to this album, I’m never offended or put off or anything but I’m also never listening to something that mean anything to me.
This is fantastic. You can hear the alt rock explosion of the 90s ten years before it happened, and with a fun country twist.
I think it should be highlighted that Meat Puppets actually do have quite a nice sense of melody, and some of their calmer, country influenced songs are really quite sweet. Conversely, they’re not scared of straight up punk wailing.
‘nothing at the top but a bucket and a mop and an illustrated book about birds’ is one of the all time great lyrics.
Arcade Fire suffer because they inspired a truly insufferable wave of bands that followed them and were worth less than nothing. This style of indie late 00s, early 10s folkish rock once sounded great and groundbreaking but has been left woefully behind and sounding, frankly, naff.
Arcade Fire were the best of these types of bands and this was their last worthwhile output but half the songs sound like they’d go well beyond a mobile phone ad and the other half sound whiny.
Sprawl II is great though. Great enough to bump up the album to a 3/5.
This is really impressive musically in a way that frankly I just can’t appreciate as well as I think the musicians deserve. Feels hard to give it an honest review when I haven’t got enough musical theory knowledge to know if what they’re doing is truly great or not.
I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. The singles and hits are obviously catchy and boppy but the rest of it felt slightly empty. You could see why Duran Duran were as big as they were, and hear how they influenced a certain rock-pop sound in this era. Or were they influenced by it? I don’t know enough about them to distinguish.
Rio’s fun. Probably won’t listen to it again.
Psychedelic rock is great and these guys are great at it. A beautiful blend of country, blues and proto-hard rock that never stays in one place long enough for you to get bored. Sometimes this is a bad thing, and you want music to explore concepts more deeply but these guys know what they’re doing, so every song is just enough.
What strikes me most about this album is how much I enjoyed the smoothness of its production. It has instruments coming in at all times, but nothing ever overwhelms the core, the focus, the funk.
White boys play the blues adequately with more than one blatant John Lee Hooker knock off.
Great driving music, in that the riffs are loud, basic and frenetic. The singing doesn’t really match the subject style for me though.
