Great album. One of my coworkers said that not only does it work with The Wizard of Oz, but also Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2.
Now I finally know what Rolling Stones tune Neil Young took for “Borrowed Tune,” so that’s cool. Neil did it better, of course.
This one really isn’t it.
Can you imagine if Moe Tucker had ever hit a cymbal hard? The world might be a totally different place.
A little piece of H. Land trivia: Black Hole Sun is my least favorite song, beating out Cotton Eyes Joe because it’s a full two minutes longer. When I saw the run time of this album, I slumped. But I made it through, and even turned it up real loud.
There were about 2 minutes of this that I really liked, on My Wave and I think Head Down.
Ranking this album is hard, because I’m just not into the sonic palette of grunge. Ultimately, it gets a two, because it’s definitely not worse than Aftermath, but I wouldn’t listen to either again.
I enjoyed this album throughout. Great rhythm section and guitar work.
I was able to listen to this one a few times today, mostly while shoveling out the driveway and hitting Walmart.
The music’s just so evocative of feelings, moods, places, weather, seasons. It works well as background music and also rewards close listening. It’s a music of movement and movements.
On the first listen, the front half of the album sticks out. The first track’s cinematic, 19th-century bombast trading bars with some strutting saxophone leads to a somber, snowy piano solo into another warm saxophone bop in “Strange Meadow Lark.” “Take Five” sounds like the stream of thought in a flow state.
The last four songs kind of blended together to me on the first couple listens (it took forever to shovel this driveway), but while I was putzing around Walmart I put on the second half and was surprised at how much is going on. It’s far more subtle, but there’s as many shifts in tone and tempo and the continued movement keeps it interesting.
Was initially gonna rate it a four, but this one won me over.
Is “Sob Story” in on the joke?
The Wu-Tang Clan Extended Universe is so fun. RZA’s production work creates the perfect mood and backdrop for GZA’s storytelling, pontificating, and shit-talking, while the features get on board too.
I usually don’t like the skits that populated rap albums pre-Graduation, but the ones on here don’t take too long, and it wouldn’t be a WTC album without the kung fu sound bites.
A maximalist masterpiece. One of this album’s core strengths lies in the Lips’ heady mixture of lightness and weight. It can be pure, candy fluff and the next second turn thick molasses. The Soft Bulletin gets heavy without ever being dark, gets lost in the clouds but always tethered firmly to the earth, and gets morbid without being morose.
It almost forces you to turn to Greek mythology to describe it. It is Proteus, constantly changing; it is Aeolus, windy and breathy and capricious. It is Apollonian and Dionysian in the Nietzschean sense of the words. Waitin’ for an Ubermensch.
“Buggin’” is a fixture of any summer playlist, a perfect song for driving through the heat with the windows down.
“Waitin’ for a Superman” wakes me up in the morning, and I still don’t have an aversion to it.
“The Spiderbite Song” is so sweetly empathetic. I used it for a project in grad school, and that led to the professor telling me she used to pal around with David Berman and Bob Nastanovich.
There’s an old Pitchfork Classic documentary on this album, and if you can still find it, it’s really great. Good interviews from the band members on how they put this one together.
I definitely had this, or Mitchell did, in the cd case back in the day. I listened to Americana, the one with the cockroach on the cover and Pretty Fly (For a White Guy), way more. There were a couple tracks here that triggered some recognition, but not many.
It took me a couple tries to get through this album, but the back half is a lot more fun. A little bit of humor and a self-deprecating narrator go a long way for me.
Also, Chelsea and I watched another 90s artifact a couple months ago, Idle Hands, which features The Offspring performing at the high school Halloween dance. That movie holds UP.
Also also, the singer’s got a pretty interesting Wikipedia page (for a pop-punk singer).
Man, hate to disrespect, but I never want to hear this again.
Looks like this was her final album before she died, and she sounds a lot older than 44. The circumstances of her death are wild and sad.
Ray Ellis and his orchestra at times sound like they’re making the most boring Bond movie ever. But, there are some moments that sound pleasant enough.
I have no idea how to rate this kind of music. Like, unless it blows my socks off, it’s hard to give it a bad rating because I’m sitting here listening to it in the car on the commute at seven in the morning or playing Zelda in a recliner.
Given the right kind of drugs I’m sure I’d enjoy this album a hell of a lot.
It’s such well put together music. So many earworms that are designed to get stuck in your head for days. It’s no Aja, but still fantastic.
Definitely a step up production-wise from “It Takes a Nation of Millions…” and Flavor Flav is more sidelined on this album. I like the bombast of it all, though it is a bit long.
Ice Cube being on that track about Hollywood and how it flattens black characters is pretty funny in retrospect.
I’ll save my thesis on Conscious Rap seeming to be a psy-op inhibiting class consciousness for another day.
“But the salient feature of the absurd age I was at – an age which for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich – is that reason is not its guide, and the most insignificant attributes of other people always appear to be consubstantial with their personality. One lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind. There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity that urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything.“ -Marcel Proust
I got this album when I was a freshman in high school, and every few months I return to it. The lyrics and arrangements perfectly express young, dumb, naive, adolescent love and yearning.
One of the biggest knocks this album has to its name is that Brian Wilson didn’t know how to end a song, so they’re all fade-outs. Man, these songs are eternal. Are you telling me there’s a satisfying way to end “God Only Knows” or “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”?
“Sloop John B” is a fucking banger and one of the most illustrative examples of the fact that The Beach Boys like, aren’t world-class singers? Sure they’ve got range, but it’s the way B. Wilson arranges those voices into this wall of sound that is stunning.
That bass harmonica coming in like a moose in “I Know There’s an Answer” is one of my favorite moments in all music.
The few down-tempo tracks are suited for the content: Of course you have to slow down for a song called “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).”
An all-timer, up there in the GOAT conversation, one of the easiest 5s I’ll have.
It’s hard to separate how much I generally liked the musicianship and how grating I found her voice a lot of the time. Sometimes I dug it, kinda sounded like FKA twigs at times, but often it was shrill. After the first couple of songs I thought I would like this more than I ultimately did.
2.5 but rounding down for the three minute a capella song near the end.
Record Exec circa 1993: “This Beck loser is really climbing up the charts. It’s nonsense to me and the wife, but our kids love it. We need an answer to this, maybe something a little friendlier for the whole family. Find it!”
*one week later*
Talent scout: “I found the perfect band, and they even sing a song about basketball for the urban audience.”
Record exec: “Sign them yesterday.”
Seriously though, as much fun as it will be to shit on this album by just quoting it or its Wikipedia page directly (the album “nearly went gold”), I enjoyed it despite myself.
Solid album held up by some world-conquering singles. Will I listen to this again? Probably not. Will I throw it at Penelope when she goes through a bad breakup? Absolutely.
Everything about this album seems like it was designed in a lab to be a punchline in ‘Arrested Development.’
It’s kind of mind blowing that a song like “Holding Back the Years” was the number 1 song in America for a time. The Reagan years were even bleaker than I thought.
Overall, fine, but no stand out songs for me, maybe the first one. Otherwise kinda meh.
First of all, an extra star is awarded for the total non sequitur sample of “All I wanted was a Pepsi” at the end of “How I Could Just Kill a Man.”
Second of all, I really like whatever this style of production is called, heavy on the samples, a mix of genres, heavy bass lines, idk. Ultimately I like De La Soul’s version of it a bit more.
But, the lyrical content was pretty repetitive, and the flows were all kinda the same. I ended up listening to this a time and an half and liked it a lot more on the second run through.
