The first album given to me by this little website, and it's one of my all-time favorites. I first heard it on an BMG music club CD freshman year of college. It confounded and fascinated me then, and (even after reading some of the community reviews on here--yowza) it still does.
Who sings like this, ever, in rock? Bowie is singing like a man being chased by howling wolves while trying to audition to join the pack. Yes, it's an art rock album: the lyrics are fashionable, fashioned experiments. Joe the Lion makes absolutely no sense, unless, idk, you google it and read about the performance artist Chris Burden. Made of iron, he must have been. But despite the artsy backgrounds and the side of instrumentals, it's a blatantly emotional album with beautifully unhinged, passionate vocals and hepcat honking sax played (by Bowie, I believe) over those fragile synth landscapes.
This came out at a time in my life when I was music-obsessed, but it never made much of an impression. This is the first time I've intentionally sat down and listened to it from start to finish...and I'm still not all that moved. I love "Ce Matin-la." The rest of this I can take or leave. It sounds precocious to me, and yet it just sort of happily vamps on its influences (Bacharach, Pet Sounds, exotica) without really doing anything bold. It's background music, but it wants the listener to hear some grand toy symphony.
I guess I came of age to this one; I still have the CD. I found most of it to be easier to listen to than I expected, but... It's all so "on the nose" as they say. My favorites, as always, are the prettier ones. I'd give 4 stars to three or four of these songs, but as a 65 minute album (blame it on the times--they put too much music on CDs) it just doesn't hold up very well for me.
I was happy to turn this one off. I like their earlier stuff, but this is just too many notes, too many solos. Nothing moved me.
Part of a string of brilliant albums by Stevie Wonder. You could buy these on vinyl for under $5 back in the 90s, and I've never stopped listening to my copy. Every song is beautiful, catchy, and technically flawless. I give this one 4 stars as his other albums from the era are even better.
Granted I'm only one song in but my god this is the worst. To me, this is noisy. Too much melodrama and overblown singing. I am surprised how much it reminds me of Springsteen's later stuff, but that might be a similar Broadway influence, and just the typical soundscapes of the day. I will try to listen to it all...
This was very much the music that was happening when I was coming into adulthood. I always preferred the approach to this kind of music exemplified by the Chemical Brothers and Boards of Canada (and going back, the Bowie/Eno/Krautrock stuff is what always moved me the most). The Prodigy always sounded like the harder-edged, all-we-do-is-get-drunk-and-jump-up-and-down version of electronica. Not my thing. And looking back, it just sounds like the first flowering of the tweaked, compressed, fully digital, fully Pro Tools music we hear today. And I'm not sure that's a good thing.
ONETWOEXYOU!!
Not my favorite Wire: their second and third albums are the ones that really move me, where they back off the punk attack quite a bit. But you can get a sense of their painterly approach here, not to mention a subtle tone to the music that might best be described as "sinister." My favorite song is "Strange," which I first heard covered by R.E.M.. "Mannequin" is great too, and you can really hear their influence on 80s and 90s groups on that one.
Wire are also a rare example of a group still producing relevant and intriguing music almost 50 years after they formed. Can't recommend their stuff from the last 10 years enough--it is fantastic.
Hard for me to review this one objectively, as it feels like my 20s are bound up in this album's sounds. I didn't get Wilco until I moved to the Midwest, which happened a month before this album came out. I still love it, still love this band. I think I've come to appreciate some of their later albums even more than this one, but YHF is where it all starts for me.
