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.
I'd never heard this one by Ben. His 1969 album is incredible, and then his work becomes more mainstream as the 70s continue. Lots of good songs here, though!
You gotta be in the mood for some sax, that's for sure.
Not my favorite Van ("Did you ever hear about Wordsworth and Coleridge? They were smokin' up in Kendal" is more my jam), but for me it's always been one of those albums you can put on for just about anyone and they'll enjoy it. And you will, too.
Isn't it odd, though, that he hated the commerciality of "Brown Eyed Girl" so deeply he turned around and recorded an avant jazz/rock masterpiece (Astral Weeks), and then turned BACK around and made Moondance, which is basically the dictionary definition of radio friendly? I guess it might have redefined radio friendly for the 70s, too.
Van's repugnant 21st century personality and ideology shouldn't enter into consideration, but ought to be mentioned.
I got into Joshua Tree first, as a 9 or 10yo. This one quickly followed, and the tape stayed in my boom box for months. It's a straightforward rock album out to save the world, and it STILL feels good to listen to 40 years later. The guitar hooks are juicy (the pre-chorus riff on New Years Day--christ almighty what a wonderful sound), the drums righteous, the singer sing-y.
I went on to be (and still am) obsessed with The Velvets, Can, Faust, Neu!, and Eno. U2 helped me get there.
Sounds like a full-scale, no-expenses-spared, shameless ripoff of Radiohead in the 90s.
I didn't listen to the whole thing--the Thom Yorke singalike vocals are really distracting. I don't like the harmonies on Soldier's Poem, and I like any and all harmonies, usually.
I just can't get around this one takeaway: Thom Yorke sings with a great deal of emotion in his voice, and that contributes to his unique style, especially on the first 3 Radiohead albums. This sounds like someone aping Yorke's singing style, with similar emotional embellishments...except the emotion is totally absent and no one gives a shit what this Muse guy is singing about.
I always imagine that I love this band, but in practice I can't quite get there. I bought the nice CD set of their 90s-00s albums 10 years ago and found it hard to get through all of it once.
This album has a chill, lo-fi approach, with most of the songs setting out a repetitive groove that never really goes anywhere. And that's how I feel about it overall: a few nice songs that sound good in the background, but nothing really moved me or made me shut up and listen.
It's great to hear his voice live, obviously Cooke is a genius and an absolute legend. But live many live albums, this one makes me feel like I missed a really fun evening. This recording is the faintest echo of what that experience must have been like.
Reggae was never one of my loves, but there's nothing not to love here: great songs, powerful messages, 100% groove.
One of the best examples of the pop album as art. Nilsson was a genius. A previous reviewer here was irked when they found that the album's songs are all different and don't seem to belong together. To me, that's a great marker of what has changed in popular music: Nilsson could (and did) sing anything, and the record companies were happy to spare no expense. Want the best drummer in the business? You got him. Want cocaine and liquor, along with the trombones and the strings? Let the good times roll. And when you use real (sometimes real drunk, high) musicians and instruments to make every sound, you hear the diversity of human musicmaking, and that sounds very different than the digital creations that dominate the airwaves now.
I think the album contains multitudes, and if someone asked "what did it sound like and feel like after the sixties went kaput and the Beatles broke up?" Nilsson Schmilsson is a pretty good answer.
This music is really fun to listen to, everything else aside. For me it's probably a 4, but the Tolkien imagery lifts it up to a 5.
Love the singles, but as a whole album it's not really that interesting. Great cover, great band--looks like the came on strong with this as a first album. The Boss cover is kinda fun, but the others don't really make sense to me. Great 80s sound, plenty of bombast...but it left me feeling empty.
I didn't appreciate Mitchell until close to midlife, and then it was like opening a door I'd never noticed was there. Her work is incredible; the high soprano sometimes grates, but this is the last album where she uses that range frequently. If you're into guitar, her work with open tunings here is beyond compare. If you're into songcraft and poetry, there is no one like her.
