Great example of a cleanly engineered album. Sparse arrangements that don't have the impact a 21st century listener may be accustomed to. Paul Simon is a poet and sometimes that's to his detriment. There's a single hit here for a reason.
It's loose, energetic, and rootsy. A good reminder that punk is an attitude and not an aesthetic or sonic palette. For the space that it occupies, it's good, though meanders in the back half. I wouldn't mind more music like this getting made, but I don't feel gripped by this record in any vital way.
Considering the differences in recording quality, it's not surprising that the hits are the hits and the rest are not. Some of the mixes are just bad and hard to listen to. How they managed to nail it in some places and whiff it elsewhere is beyond me.
Lyrically, however, the hits are no greater than the others. Run-DMC is all about the boast, and that's what Hip Hop was about in the 80s. It does eventually lose potency. It's an important album for the sake of music history but not one that holds up as a classic to keep in rotation.
Maybe I’m more forgiving of Rock. There’s a lot of good tonal ear candy in here. Some of the songs are surprisingly emotional and reflective, some are meta-critical of entertainment, and others are all sound no meaning. But nothing felt strange or too underbaked to me. Good overall.
Does it take its time? Yes.
Is it loosely a concept record? Kinda.
Does it extend Led Zeppelin's penchant for colonizing blues? Sure, but less so than how it started, which is now well documented in its theft of material.
What's inarguable is the quality of the arrangements and performances across the album. The Bonham drums are ferocious. The Jones bass is rock solid. The Plant vocal is soaring. The Page riffs are ringing. Also, one of the absolute best track sequences. Side A starts hot with odd rhythms, rides an arc, and finishes smooth. Side B starts hot with odd rhythms again, rides an arc, and finishes strong. Listening to just a couple tracks on their own misses the point.
Duran Duran might be written off as an example of the time in which the music was produced and not exactly timeless. But the musicality is undeniable, the songs are essential pop, and the deep tracks are actually as good or better than the hits, artistically speaking. I wonder how these songs would hold up if they were arranged differently.
Dark, thick, spacious, narrative -- though sometimes the story is too thin or vague to evoke what it may mean to. The meme that Eddie Vedder is impossible to understand, though I find it's more true on the songs that are overall not as strong, while the tunes that have become part of classic rock canon are pretty clear as far as 90s alt goes. On the whole, this is a key milestone on the long walk of rock history, and like many such entries it has a few lazy indulgences by the artist that make clear why the hits stood out.
The recording is so good. Everything is so articulate and clear, it makes me want to buy better speakers. The musicianship is excellent, and this is an example of "they just don't make records like they used to." But there were some pretty muddy records made at the time, too. Sadly, I'm not really a fan of Mark Knopfler's singing, and I'm indifferent about the writing. It's not bad, but it's not necessarily artful in my opinion. The best parts are when the band is just vamping and Knopfler plucks along.
Stevie Wonder is one of the greatest voices and musicians in pop music. He's also a legendary songwriter, though that's not consistently apparent on this album. I get why this album won a Grammy for engineering. I wish there weren't so many forced rhymes, but they're gracefully masked by that voice.
I dunno man, Neil Young is cool, this is good, loose west coast rock. It’s worth listening to and understanding this artist and this period. It just doesn’t really do anything vital for me.
The beats are great, but repetitive. It’s early hip hop, and it has that classic hip hop scratch and loop style that you can just bop to for an hour. But the raps are just so monotonous and the rhymes are sometimes forced. Feels like it was not yet established what it meant to have artful flow.
