Beautifully produced
Lett me roll it to you is McCartney doing Lennon.
Lyrics are nonsense.
Paul probably needed someone to tell him "no" and John George and Ringo weren't around.
Bluebird is probably the best thing on the album.
Sits somewhere between folk and 70s sci fi soundtrack. Like Cat Stevens had a baby with Barbarella
About as good as albums get. Not a weak song on it and not a moment when her level of performance dips below brilliant.
What a tragedy we lost her.
Absolute gold.
Darlen Love singing Baby Please Come Home is a powerhouse of Yuletide heartbreak.
Silent Night, however, where Spector himself gives us a little cosy chat is a step too far into kitsch.
Has all the 90s grunge cliches with Metal cliches thrown in.
Huge if you like that sort of thing and seemingly designed for disaffected young men.
Wildly pretentious (thankyou Sting).
A film of this being recorded would make Let It Be seem tame. They recorded their tracks in separate rooms "for social reasons".
When it's good it's amazing, but there's also a lot of dross.
And then there's "Mother", Andy Summers "Lets give Ringo a song" moment.
And just to point out, Stewart Copeland goes hard on this.
The body count on this is incredible.
Death bed confessions; a brother promising to marry the dying other brother's girl, who turns out to be unfaithful anyway; a seven year old has his heart broken when his girl - his one true love - leaves town; young lovers commit suicide because the girl's parents won't let them marry; a man murders a girl for no discernible reason and throws her body in the river, then regrets it because she was "the gal I loved".
I mean... what the actual fark?
If you took a New Wave / Post Punk band like, say Talking Heads or Psychedelic Furs, then sanded off all the edges and applied a high gloss polish, you'd end up with something like The Cars. They're the Post Punk Monkees.
Perfectly crafted for FM radio and they're still being played today.
If you want depth then head to "More Songs About Buildings and Food".
If you want a party soundtrack then this is the one.
Just looking at the names of the songwriters on the album cover and you get a sense of what you're in for. None of them are "less is more" kind of people
Ute Lemper has a wonderful voice and The Divine Comedy is an all right band.
But the whole thing seems overwrought and a bit self-indulgent.
When Joni Mitchell did "Both Sides Now" - a similar "Diva sings with a big backing" collection of songs - she knew how to hold back enough to keep it tasteful.
This doesn't hold back at all and the result is overwhelming. And not entirely in a good way.
A lot of testosterone produces thr opposite of complex music.
Simple harmonies in 4/4 time and nothing much melodic, but the hook is that it's played fast and loud. They can play, but they fall back on a regular bunch of tricks- the chugging bass, the guitar triplets and so on.
They talk about "socially aware lyrics", but then put the vocals so far back in the mix and the singer is so unclear that you wouldn't know.
I can see the appeal, but it's not really deep. And it's amusing that this gets labelled "extreme metal" when real extreme music like Throbbing Gristle or John Zorn languishes at the bottom of the rankings.
To most the 60s mean the Beatles, the British Invasion, The Summer of Love, protest songs, Psychedelia, long guitar jams and ever so groovy drum solos.
But this stuff - the male crooner - was huge. Sinatra was still having hits; Andy Williams and Tom Jones had their own TV shows; there were Engelbert Humperdink, Matt Monroe, Rod McKuen, Roger Whittaker and lots of others who all rode high on the charts at one time or another.
It's all desperately unfashionable today, but the people who say this sounds like unused Bond themes are right - but only because the Bond Producers knew what was huge and used it because people liked it.
Scott Walker is a bit different from the others. First, he was a big fan of Jaques Brel, a man who never met a simile he didn't like. Brel wrote songs that make Jimmy Webb and Jim Steinman seem like models of restraint.
Second, he wrote his own songs that were heavily influenced - oh all right, copies - of Brel. Only he was not quite as good at it as Brel and songs like "Plastic Palace People" are so over written as to be unbelievable.
As an artefact of its time and of a forgotten corner of sixties music it's valuable. 4 Stars.
But as a listening pleasure - not really. 2 stars.
Skates close to pastiche, while remaining being something new.
A touch of Dylan, some Aladdin Sane, some country music flourishes, some roots and blues, a genuine R&B cover, maybe some Tom Waits, some big riffs, all played by a cracking band who steam along like a runaway train.
The lyrics contain some fairly lacerating stuff, directed against others (especially women) and particularly against himself. How much off this is due to his recent divorce is anyone's guess, but clearly it's not an album filled with happiness.
If you look up "awesome" in a dictionary there's a picture of this album.
These guys are the band the Sex Pistols wanted to be - literally so, since The Saints had a record deal and the Pistols didn't.
This is purest punk. The sneering snarl of Chris Bailey's vocals; the power of Ed Kuepper's guitar riffing; the solid wall of the drum and bass driving everything on. It's like the fiercest of angry animals coming at you. And they add a horn section.
At the time that horn section caused some angst because "real punks don't use horns". The Saints, who WERE real punks (and Australian punks at that) just told them to stick their heads up a dead bear's bum and did it anyway.
This is real punk and if you've grown up with bands who claim to be punk rockers (looking at you Blink-182) then listen and learn.
Also, their first album - (I'm) Stranded -goes even harder.
On the first track they come on like Neil Young's noisier cousin, all discordant screaming and weird anger.
Then they settle down into the sort of thing punk psychobilly cowboys might line dance to.
The album is peppered with instrumentals, a bit of gospel, some Nashville, some flat out rock.
It's all over the place like a madwoman's undies and exactly how well known they'd be if Kurt Cobain hadn't announced them on the Unplugged album is up for discussion, but they're kind of fascinating in a strange "can't look away" kind of manner
One of the foundational documents of Hip Hop and the first Hip Hop album to enter the mainstream
The rapping is razor sharp and the rhymes are brilliant.
Tricky is the absolute, indispensable masterpiece, but there is a flow of bangers, one after the other.
Okay, Dumb Girl hasn't aged well and Walk This Way, while great fun, is cheesier than Nonna's lasagne, but these two aside, you'd be hard to find a dud track on the album.
Essential
Funk so funky you could eat it with a spoon. A beautiful voice so charged with feeling.
But the lyrics. From the man who wrote "People Get Ready" and "Move on Up" we get things like:
Can't be no fun
To be shot with a hand gun
Or
When cupboards are bare
Our love we can share
Truth is not the whole question
What is the answer you hide?
Or
Every time we kiss
It's such a pleasant taste
Or this pearler
Our love is your confession
That we're in love.
It's just not very good.
4 for the music
1 for the songs
So it comes with a Public Service Announcement at the beginning saying Children Should Not Listen and Don't Try This at Home and proceeds to 90 minutes of songs that are so extreme in their homophobia, misogyny, social dislocation and violence that toy wonder what exactly was the intention of it all.
Is it some sort of Randy Newman satirical character study? Is it meant to be taken seriously? (A lot did) Is it a jet black humour performance in the vein of The Naked Lunch?
Whatever it is, it's hardly the most mature album ever, and some of the songs sound like the demo versions of songs from a better album.
Another reviewer here said that it was like being trapped in a room with a 13 year old obnoxious brat and they're not wrong.
