wow he really does just sing like that all the time huh?
not really the kind of music i usually listen to but i fuck w/ graveyard train incredibly. sometimes u just gotta yell. the harmonica solos on keep on chooglin(?) are fun too. other than that its like, fine? maybe a little samey but the way the album is laid out stops the tracks running together and its over before outstaying its welcome.
i'd probably enjoy it a lot less if the weather wasn't as sunny as it is today,
took me a while to get thru this one for some reason. the first half of it is solid enough, nothing i'd pick out as a favourite but i enjoy the crunchy guitars, the vocals are great and there's enough variation to avoid entirely fading into the background.
...and then i heard "as heaven is wide".
"stupid girl" aside, the entire back third of this album feels like the soundtrack to a cancelled shadow the hedgehog sequel which was somehow released a decade before the original. and yeah, it fucks. the tracks take on a harder, darker and more industrial vibe and i love it a lot, especially "as heaven is wide" and "queer". if the whole album was this it might honestly be a 5. unfortunately its not. but does 4 tracks of "shadow the hedgehog music" on a 12 track album that was otherwise destined for a (strong) 3-star rating justify bumping it up to a 4? of course it does. are you fucking kidding me??
shadow the hedgehog is so fucking cool dude.
if u told me theres exactly 1 offspring album on this list and i had to bet it all on which one it is i'm choosing americana every time. its not my favourite, but it's a solid album and it's the one everyone knows. and i guess i'd lose that bet cos for some reason whoever put this list together chose smash instead??? ive been trying to avoid criticising the list in my reviews so far but im baffled by this one.
its ok tho cos smash is hands down my favourite offspring album. raw skate punk. punchy & pure. i love this shit. the loose doubletracking on dexter holland's vocals always hits perfect and compared to their later albums the guitars and drums are driving at their most forceful here imo. there's a lot to like in this album, with "bad habit", "something to believe in", "self esteem", "it'll be a long time", "not the one" and "smash" being my favourites (although at that point i've listed half the damn album), and fans of offspring's later sound will find themselves right at home with "come out and play", which feels almost like an early preview of "pretty fly for a white guy". but the stand-out track for me is "genocide". im not gonna fuck around with fancy words this track just goes crazy hard, to the point that the main riff breached containment and reappeared on their next album during "change the world". hell, the first half of it even popped up again on americana where it forms most of the vocal hook on "end of the line". what a banger. damn. i fuckin love music!
hmmm. i especially enjoyed that one. let's see what's next....
i think i heard basically the whole first half of this as individual tracks back in the 00s when i first started actually "listening" to music so its weird finally hearing them in context. whats weirder is finding that i actually like the back half a lot more? but maybe thats just cos ive heard paranoid, iron man and (to a lesser extent) war pigs so much that the unfamiliar tracks hit harder. guess that kind of overexposure will happen when theyre probably the biggest band to ever have come outta ur hometown lmao
hand of doom is my favourite track as a whole but im really into the prog-adjacent sections of electric funeral and the slow, droning guitars and sirens in the intro to war pigs. i'd somehow never heard the intro before and it kinda reminds me of the type of stuff gybe would start putting out over 3 decades later. good sounds....
its a great album. nothin else to say really. rip ozzy ;_;7
im vibing with it. again its not a genre i listen to usually but in this case thats my bad. ive been missing out.
chain of fools and groovin stand out the most to me but almost the entire album had me bobbing my head. even the couple of more gospel-leaning tracks, which are so far outside what i would usually listen to, are good enough that i can still fuck w/ it. only real complaint is how short the tracks are and how often they just fade out, but i get the impression that was just how folks were making music back then so i cant really hold that against this album in particular.
i should listen to more rnb....
hell of a range on this one. the opening few tracks are great, international feel is a crazy strong opening and it keeps up til at least da da dali imo, but the energy wears down around the end of the first half and the second kinda loses that experimental edge and makes me feel like maybe this album didnt need to be an hour long.
kinda hard to rate this on a scale of 1-5, it starts off as a 4 but falls off to a 3 before the halfway point. guess that's a 3. but its a high 3 for whatever thats worth.
rock and roll pussaaaayyyyyyyyyyy.....
48 minutes of perfectly mid music. extremely inoffensive. i've probably heard this playing in the background at stores before but it just washes thru and leaves no trace in my memory. i guess i like the vocal style and vocal processing but again, other artists did it the same on much more interesting tracks. rebellion comes closest to standing out but... not really.
mostly this album just makes me wish i was listening to the killers instead.
idk where to even begin talkin about how good this album is. any time stevie nicks is singing i am being sent somewhere (good) and the rest of the tracks are an even split of bangers between mcvie and buckingham. i do feel like the album is overall stronger when buckingham isn't singing but his attempts to make an album totally different than rumours resulted in some really great music. i wish "that's enough for me" went on longer tho. it wasn't enough for me.....
its hard to even name my favourite tracks cos the quality is so high throughout but "what makes you think you're the one", "storms", "never make me cry" and (of course) "tusk" all spring to mind. its wild that this album is over an hour long and when it ends it still has me like. damn i could listen to another hour of this. i guess thats the strength of having 3 singer/songwriters in ur band.
overall: holy fuck dude. what a great album. i literally love music.
i like the instrumentals on a couple tracks in the first half, especially the fucked up drums in parts of "the louvre" and the weird metallic squeals on "hard feelings", but other than that this one just didnt register. i spent most the second half of the album checking the track list like "damn.... theres still this many tracks left?"
i've already forgotten everything i didn't mention already. im not sure if it's not for me or if its just not very good,
despite hearing about cocteau twins before, i'd somehow never actually heard their music? but when i saw the wiki article for this album note that they approached brian eno to produce it and he turned them down saying they didnt need him, i knew i was in for a great listen.
i wasn't really sure what to expect in terms of genre going into this but it turns out it's exactly my type of sounds. hazy and sludgy, with a gothic flavour but never fully submerging itself in it. kinda makes me think of how siouxsie and the banshees might've sounded if shoegaze had been invented a decade or so earlier than it was. i've always been a big fan of the use of vocal as instrument, so i love how it's shoved down into the mix here at times, sometimes even layered over itself. its unfortunate that the unintelligible lyrics make it kind of impossible to sing along to, but i respect it fully.
the sound is so ethereal that it's kinda difficult to pick out which track is which (the largely non-descriptive track titles don't help), which leads to a lot of "oh shit, its *this* track!" moments while listening back. i wanna say my favourites are "persephone", "aloysius", "lorelei", and "donimo", which i particularly enjoy the drone-adjacent first two minutes of. i'd have trouble recalling their names if you asked me again in a couple hours though,
i really liked this one. its a real good summer sound to me. i could veg out to this on a hot day no problem.
i feel like its rare that i listen to an album and find nothing of note other than the singles i already know ("sex on fire" and "use somebody" in this case). the shoegazey guitar solos of "cold desert" came through at the last moment to save this one from that fate, but only just. it's otherwise a fairly one-note experience, nothing that's especially bad musically but if you've heard the aforementioned singles you've heard the whole thing.
mostly this just made me want to listen to foo fighters. or maybe even lostprophets, which i guess would be appropriate given what "17" is about. dont tell us about that shit dude.
its fucked up that i'd never heard of the isley brothers before. this album is great. "that lady" is a really strong opening track with great guitars and although the album loses some energy through the tracks immediately following, it picks up steam again with "listen to the music" and keeps going strong til the end.
u could pick any track from the back half of this and ask me if its my favourite and i would say yes, but since thats not how this works i'm gonna say my favourite favourites are "that woman", "listen to the music" and "sunshine (go away today)". i especially like the bass on the latter. its soooo fucking wettttt...
i think im gonna be investigating this album for some time. i know ive heard some of these tracks sampled before, and i gotta know what synths chris jasper was using. i won't mind listening to it a bunch more to figure it out tho :)
i mostly know rush as a band for canadian dads. guess im finally listening to em.
the first half (first track?) is solid enough. i enjoy the musical goofiness of "overture", and "oracle the dream" and "soliloquy" are pretty good (if structurally identical) metal tracks, but it's not until "grand finale" that it finally gets into the time signature changes and experimental soundscapes i associate with prog rock. a fun listen but one that gives me the impression that other prog rock acts might have set my expectations a little higher than they maybe should've been.
the back half.... hmmmmm. as soon as i heard the stereotype asian riff on "a passage to bangkok" i yelled "grow the fuck up" out loud. come the fuck on dude. and "the twilight zone" seems to be literally just describing scenarios from the show. i enjoyed some of the instrumentals but it takes on a lyrical silliness that makes me think more of acts like electric six, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, except that they seem to lack the self-awareness to pull it off. its hard for me to get into.
i think if they'd just released the first half as an ep i'd have ranked this higher? but they didn't. unfortunate.....
this is an odd one. i don't really get why it's on the list? it doesn't seem to have charted at all anywhere and, having listened to it, its nothing musically incredible either imo. maybe it's intended as an example of early post-hardcore? but for a genre that started appearing in the late 80s, it's not even that early....
its not that there's nothing on offer here, "rockets are red", "satin down" and "bughouse" are all great, i especially enjoyed the growling guitars and vocals of those first two, but other than that the tracks all kind of mush together into a single ongoing texture. it's a good texture, and i liked listening to it, but it's not something i can fully lock in for. hell, ive already forgotten most of it and i only listened like half an hour ago.
i guess overall its kind of just, fine? mostly just puzzling really. i could definitely mosh to it but afterwards i'd probably remember the smells of the pit better than the music itself. what a weird album.
ngl when these guys were all over the radio in the mid 00s i was sick to bastard death of em. but i was a fuckin idiot cos this whips. i'd never realised their sound back then was like, dance punk? the lyrics often tend towards whining about small grievances like getting kicked out a bar and cops harassing kids in the park but honestly it paints a good picture of what life was like at the time in the north and midlands. lookin back now.... i kinda was those kids in the park lmao
this album caught me off guard right from the start. "the view from the afternoon" goes in swinging with its aggressive drums and punchy guitars for an instant favourite and the energy keeps up throughout the whole first half, only calming down for a breather during the third quarter. "perhaps vampires is a bit strong but..." is my favourite, with its much darker feel, distorted vocals and duelling guitars, but the fun mishmash of punk subgenres in "still take you home" brings it real close and "from the ritz to the rubble" deserves a shoutout just for rhyming "scary un" with "totalitarian". the energy in the back half never quite gets back up to where it started but there's not a single bad track here. even "when the sun goes down" and "i bet you look good on the dancefloor", which i'd heard so much when this came out that i was tired of em for years, are, as it turns out, fuckin great actually. its bangers cover to cover. from the second it ended i was already up to jump back in for a second listen.
i really enjoyed this one. music to crack a few tins with the lads in the back yard to before giving ur mate a peck on the lips and hitting him over the back with a folding chair. good stuff.
ohhhhh this is a good one
when i saw the track listing had the length of the first track, "djed", as "half the damn album", i had no idea what to expect but wow. its amazing. 21 minutes of rich texture, evolving minute to minute. it starts in an almost-danceable drone and moves through a variety of different sounds, never staying in one spot for too long. i was gonna write a whole blow-by-blow description of the entire track but it'd take thousands of words, u really gotta just listen to it. the best i can do in brief is to say it feels equal parts fuck buttons, mike oldfield and boards of canada, with the balance between them shifting movement to movement. but that doesn't do it justice at all and honestly is total bullshit cos really this isn't like anything i've heard before. its incredible.
after somethin of that calibre i was worried it'd fall off in the back half but nah, it totally sticks the landing and brings even more diversity to the table. "a survey" feels like its trying to lead me somewhere in a dark forest, "the taut and tame" appeals to me deeply with its fast paced rhythm and bitcrushed cheap casio ass synth, and "dear grandma and grandpa" is honestly bordering on ambient techno. its really fuckin good.
i should note that i've based my review on the standard edition but imo with or without the jp edition bonus tracks it's still a solid 5 out of 5. without is for sure a more cohesive experience, u can really feel the break after the main album and the bonus tracks feel almost like an encore....? but it's a really strong encore. especially "gamera". damn..
another album that got the "i love music" reaction from me. i will be giving this one many more listens i think.
yeah idk. no strong feeling on this one. "after supper", "midnight blue" and "splanky" are all a little bit sexual with it but other than that i really don't have much to say about this album. i'm sure there's a good reason it's on here, i could see these guys being big at the time and the wiki article does mention that it picked up two different awards at the first ever grammys so i guess this popped the fuck off in 1958. but its 2026 these days.... guess it's just not for me.
i feel mean giving it a 2, but to be blunt there's no way i'd pick this out for another listen when my only thought on it is "yep, that's big band", so what choice do i have. for what its worth i dont think its necessarily a bad album, just one that i couldn't get into myself. sorry mr basie.
yknow, as i close this out i'm realising i actually do have one strong feeling on this album after all: the feeling that i'm missing something. so maybe some day i'll come back to this one and i'll finally Get It, and then i'll feel ashamed for my words and deeds. even if i don't, i'm sure the cover art will still go hard.
i feel like i don't have the right vocabulary to discuss this album or its sound and idk if its cos i've just not listened to much psychedelic rock or cos it's so *out there* but either way i fuck w/ it deeply so im gonna try. the first minute or so of "american metaphysical circus" sounds like booting up rollercoaster tycoon, cranking the speakers and scrolling around so all the ride music plays at once, "i won't leave my wooden wife for you, sugar" and "the american way of living" are both equal parts incredible and incredibly goofy, and i really enjoy "coming down", especially the electric organ parts. its close but i wanna say "cloud song" is my favourite track, i love the haunting, ethereal texture it has. i could listen to a whole album of that sound alone. but then it probably wouldn't be a psych rock album. oops.....
i guess my only complaint would be that "stranded in time" has a real strong beatles stink on it. not sure if it's genuine inspiration or if they're taking the piss but either way i think this album is at its strongest when its doing its own thing, so the track just feels kind of unfortunate.
other than that tho this album is great. it feels very ahead of its time. might be hard to get other people to listen to given how it starts lmao
i feel bad for saying this especially given what the track is about and all but listening in 2026 the instrumental of "mannish boy" sounds like a musical shitpost. i've heard the "bad to the bone riff" played so many times over so many pictures of skulls and things shaped like skulls that discovering the original source of the riff is a song where it's playing literally every single bar for five straight minutes feels like an intensely elaborate joke that's been over 50 years in the making. has muddy waters trolled me? maybe. did i deserve it? almost certainly. does the song still fuck? no fuckin doubt.
anyway this album is great. every track is an incredible performance, it feels like muddy waters never holds back even a little. "i want to be loved", "i can't be satisfied", "deep down in florida" and "crosseyed cat" all stand out as potential favourites, as does the aforementioned "mannish boy" despite the psychic damage i took when i first heard the riff, but its all so good it's impossible to pick just one.
i never really listened to much blues before but if it's all like this then i gotta change that asap. wow.
this album is pissing me off dude. there's a solid trip hop ep in here that with a little work could maybe shine on its own, but instead it's been shackled to an incredibly mediocre 90s pop/rock album for some reason. "butter the soul", "what is happening?", "state troopers", "it's indian tobacco my friend" and "candyman" are all good, with the latter two being my favourites, but the rest of it? at best it's not offering much of interest beyond the "world sound" element and at worst we get "funky days are back again", which sounds like blur if damon albarn just completely stopped giving a shit. and then it ends with a beatles cover. fuck this.
at least "brimful of asha" got a good remix, i guess. but that's not on this album. whatever.
the title track is a really strong opening, i love the synth, i love the energy once the drums kick in. never thought i'd hear abba telling me to crank it up. but unfortunately it turns out their call was unwarranted, as the next track immediately reverts to standard abba fare and the album stays this way pretty much throughout. as expected, it's all very "musical number", which isnt necessarily bad, but it is also pretty toothless. really can't think of a better way to describe it than "white people music".
ultimately all the tracks i particularly enjoyed were the ones that moved away from how i'm used to abba sounding. other than "the visitors", "two for the price of one" feels like the only track that really comes close to managing it, and the jaunty style and dueling vocals have it tied for my favourite. honorable mentions go to "soldiers", which seems to be an anti-military song, a bold move for a band that's usually kinda lyrically fisher price, and "like an angel passing through my room", with vocals which made me think of "science fiction/double feature" from the rocky horror picture show. but otherwise.... it's just kind of fine to me. inoffensive pop with no subgenre. not really something i'd bother picking back up.
at least "head over heels" made me consider what it'd be like if a swedish man was italian, i guess.
its fuckin stevie wonder dude. like, of course its great. what can i even say that hasn't already been said?
theres not a single bad song to be found here. i love the soaking wet moog bass on "maybe your baby", and obviously "superstitious" fucks, but "i believe (when i fall in love it will be forever)" might be my favourite. it hits deep down inside so hard the hook had me tryin to sing along on my first listen even tho i didn't know the words yet. can u believe he plays every single part on this track himself? incredible.....
as a whole album, one thing that stands out to me about it is how clean the production sounds. along with the constant use of electric pianos and synths, it makes the album feel both ahead of its time, but also timeless. like this album could've dropped any time in the last 45 years, but somehow it's even older than that. do u understand?
a solid as fuck album, as expected. damn. i love music....
this album comes out fuckin swinging. "split myself in two" sounds like if a song could have a panic attack with its frantic guitars and vocals repeatedly descending into a swirling mass of feedback. i love it, and so its a shame the energy kinda drops off after that, but there's still a lot to enjoy here. between the extremely short song lengths and wide variety of sounds, even the weaker parts are done with and left behind before i'd bother skipping.
to be honest, despite my disappointment that more of the album doesn't sound like the opener, some of the slowest tracks are the ones i like the most, especially the ajj-esque "lost", and "aurora borealis", which is just a dope instumental that i find myself bobbing my head to every time. it definitely helps that im really into the whining vocal style of the kirkwoods, which kinda makes me wanna bully them, but like, in a good way. yknow?
anyway its a good album, even if i do wish it held onto the chaotic energy of the first track just a little bit longer. already listened to this like 6 times now and definitely will listen again. which is easy given its only half an hour long lmao
this album was a fucking challenge. it felt like the nitty gritty dirt band knew that one day i'd make repeated claims that i love music and decided to test the limits of my resolve. and honestly.... i'm not sure i passed their test.
1 hour, 49 minutes and 2 seconds of bluegrass might just be too much for me to handle in a single sitting. or at least as close as i could get to a single sitting, since it was so long i had to take a bathroom break in the middle. i managed to lock in for the first hour or so and was mostly enjoying it, especially the performances of merle travis' "dark as a dungeon" and "nine-pound hammer", but by the time the run of instrumentals in the second half had ended and the album moved back into more vocal tracks the fatigue had kicked in and it became a real struggle to continue. i wanna say i liked the title track and "both sides now", but it's impossible to judge how much of that was just down to their position at the end of the album and the knowledge that once i'd listened to them, i could finally take off my headphones and move on with my life.
as much as i appreciate the band's goal of bringing the gap between generations of country musicians, by the end i was very much ready to clock out. unless you're a true country music head it's probably best to listen to this in the background while doing something else rather than attempting to fully engage with it... or maybe just skip straight to the bonus tracks for the blazing performance of "foggy mountain breakdown". imo they really fumbled the bag by not including it in the original release, but i guess even the dirt band must've hit their limit by that point. whatever the case, i think it's gonna be quite some time before i'm ready to listen to bluegrass again. good lord.....
i don't understand why this is on the list. "i had too much to dream (last night)" is decent but then the band apparently hit the beatles pack too hard for the rest of the front half, only sobering up for "sold to the highest bidder", which i guess i'd call my favourite track even if the dogshit stereo mix puts the lead guitar entirely in my left ear and makes it physically uncomfortable to listen to. "get me to the world on time" gets the back half off to a start that at best i would describe as "just barely enjoyable", although i'm probably going too easy on it out of respect for the unhinged levels of delay and reverb they put on it, then to round out the experience we get 4 tracks of absolutely nothing followed by the worst song i've heard in any album on this list so far.
"the toonerville trolley" just absolutely fucking sucks. i'm not even sure what the songwriters were intending here. it seems like a half-assed attempt at some kind of ragtime musical number, which they then gave to a psych/garage rock band for some reason? and the band clearly did not want to play it, for reasons that feel like they should be obvious but apparently weren't to the folks responsible. the result is what i imagine it'd sound like if rogers and hammerstein had just absolutely stopped giving a fuck. a truly miserable listening experience. just absolute shite.
honestly i feel bad for the electric prunes. it sounds like the label picked them up more or less on a whim and then took away their creative control for almost the entire album, so it's hard to blame the band for how much it sucks. you can even hear it in their performances, the vocals on the last track in particular are absolutely (and justifiably) brimming with malice. i'm hoping that's why it's on the list in the first place cos the alternative is that the critic responsible genuinely thought this was a good album, and if that's the case idk what to say other than like, i hope they got better. fucking hell.
even if this album is bad for an amazing reason, it's still bad. you really don't gotta listen to this one before you die. no one who's heard it will judge you for giving it a miss.
no one ever asked what the exact midpoint between muse and coldplay would sound like but arcade fire are back to answer a second time, whether i like it or not.
to be fair to the band, i found the instrumentals here a lot more interesting than on funeral. "black mirror" is a dense heap of sounds piled onto a driving rhythm that i can get into, and i enjoyed the organ sitting right up front on "intervention" and "my body is a cage". "(antichrist television blues)" and "no cars go" are both straight up great, with the latter being hands down my favourite. there are a few places where it feels like they're almost trying too hard to sound dramatic (the unearned string swell at the end of "ocean of noise" springs to mind), but overall the sound is solid. as an instrumental album this could've potentially been a 4.
however, the vocals are much worse this time. régine chassagne's singing is fine on the exactly three tracks they let her sing on, but without the processing they'd used in funeral i'm realising win butler's style is entirely uninteresting to me. and the lyrics kinda suck. maybe they sucked on funeral too and he was just singing in french often enough that i couldn't tell? who can say. in any case this time it feels like he's trying a bunch of different styles but never fully committing to any of them, which at best makes him sound like a half-asleep chris martin and at worst almost sounds like he's whisper-shouting. i'm not a fan.
overall i guess i'd still say this is better than funeral, arcade fire have succeeded in making music that doesn't put me to sleep this time. i still spent most of the album wishing butler would shut the fuck up though. unfortunate.
i got a lot of respect for pete townshend and the who as a whole for going thru with creating a 75 minute long concept album, it's a full dick and balls on the table move and they pulled it off. even if the little interludes they included to explicitly move the story along kinda took me out of it a bit i can't say it's not well constructed. but the story the album tells is fuckin wack dude. like, the album covers a lot of really heavy topics, which isn't necessarily a problem but it does kinda put me off listening to it again if i'm not in the right mood for it. and did they really need to give the nonce character a second song? yeesh,
regardless, the performances are great throughout, and i enjoyed the variety. i'm having trouble picking out favourites this time but "eyesight to the blind (the hawker)", "underture", "i'm free" and "welcome" stood out in particular. to my surprise, "pinball wizard" didn't really strike me as being substantially better than the rest of the album, but maybe i'm just overexposed...? and i guess "cousin kevin" and "the acid queen" both deserve honourable mentions too but i find it hard to get my head around the lyrics of either, especially the latter. you can't be saying that, dude....
i think overall i enjoyed it, more or less. but being about what it's about, it's been a struggle even to flick back through it for this review, so i don't think i'll be listening again any time soon. it's not bad, and i respect what they were going for, but it's the kind of thing that really requires me to be in the right moodset, and with things being as they are it's one that's rare for me these days.
somehow i never listened to any throbbing gristle before so when i saw the genre listed as "industrial" i expected something more like 80s industrial? really this feels closer to noise, but it's still very listenable.
its definitely another "you just gotta listen to it" album so i'm not gonna get too into attempts to describe the sounds but the sounds are fucking good. "dead on arrival" comes in with synths squealing like power tools, i love the haunting, desolate ambience of "weeping" that continues into "hamburger lady", and "ab/7a" just straight up fucks. my only real complaint would be that the tracks don't really cohere at all, being more a scattered collection of ideas, but on the other hand that means you're getting a lot of variety so it's not even entirely a bad thing.
i'll concede that this kind of sound isn't for everyone so if you don't get this album it's understandable, but if you don't even attempt to engage and just outright hate it as "not music" or whatever that's honestly a skill issue. this shit rules. i gotta listen to more tg.
yeah idk we had the other abba album like a week ago so i don't feel like i have much new to say here. it's freaking abba babyy! and they really don't look like they enjoy being in that helicopter. im glad they let them out for the french edition.
as before, i think i like abba most when they're doing something a little less "abba". so i like "knowing me, knowing you" cos it's moving slightly more into a soft rock vibe over their usual pure pop flavour. and the title track ("arrival"...) is my favourite with that 70s synth approximation of bagpipes. i put that track on repeat for like half an hour after my first listen. do you understand?
other than that... it's abba! "dum dum diddle" is cute i guess? "dancing queen" is "dancing queen". "money, money, money" is "money, money, money". its fine. i'm just overexposed. sorry........
the simon with no garfunkel.
this one is weird. simultaneously i have a lot of thoughts on it but am struggling for things to say about it. the songs are like, fine? there's a lot of good sounds in em but they're honestly a little samey and as there's not really much of a structure to the album as a whole i have trouble telling the songs apart. this makes "homeless" my favourite almost by default since it's the only track different enough to catch my attention. which feels a little unfair cos it is genuinely a good song. but its shining brighter against its blurred surroundings, yknow?
having said this, it's not that other songs didn't catch my attention, but in most other cases what i was noticing was that the lyrics are kind of fucking bad. paul simon's vocal style is fine but i'm not a fan of the "i said, he said, i said, she said" loop he repeatedly falls into throughout this album. it got so severe in "i know what i know" that it legitimately pissed me off and i had to go take a shower. i don't need a blow by blow account of a conversation you had one time dude. gimme a break..
ultimately my feelings on this one are complicated. i think i like it, but the bad lyrics keep taking me out of it, but i don't think it would be better as an instrumental album cos i enjoy the quality of the vocals as an instrument. i feel like vampire weekend did a much better job with the same musical ideas, but i don't think this album is worse for it even if contra is kind of just the same album but better. and i'm not even gonna get into the political context this was made in. probably not the wisest move? idk.
....i'm tired of thinking about this album.
never heard of these guys but i like their sound. i guess this is like, proto-grunge? early shoegaze? i'm into it. although, i'm currently on my third listen to try and get it to register fully cos it's all very samey. which i'm kind of ok with in this case cos i'm totally down to just let that good grunge texture wash over me, but its making it so hard to pick out individual tracks to say anything about...
after really concentrating hard on it i think "nine million rainy days" is my favourite? but idk if i could really even explain why in concrete terms. despite the composition being a bit slower and softer than average for the album, it feels more forceful somehow.....? could be the rock ballad ass beat? the reverb feels bigger too and it's known that i'm a sucker for that shit. idk. "on the wall" stood out a bit more too but there's no mystery there, it's just repetitive to the point of being kinda catchy.
when it comes down to it, i'm a simple woman. i hear guitars playing through a fat stack of effects and vocals pushed down into the mix and i space the fuck out bobbing my head slowly and swaying side to side with my eyes closed. easiest 3 so far even if it does keep fading into the background.
i don't think i've listened to this since it came out but i think i was probably crying thru most of it. i didn't realise bowie was explicitly inspired by kendrick and death grips on this one?? i hear it tho.
it's so interesting that for his last album bowie decided to steer away from his usual rock sound and what he came up with is fuckin great. i love the variety, and as a known earthling liker i'm especially glad he gave drum n bass one last shot with "sue (or in a season of crime)". "'tis a pity she was a whore" and "girl loves me" both go crazy god damn hard too, and the title track and "i can't give everything away" form a perfect frame for the album, beautiful and haunting. honestly fuck it, every single track is a banger. it's one hell of a final performance.
i can't do this album justice with words. it's an easy 5 even if it does bring me close to tears on every listen. rip bowie ;_;7
oh sick i actually have this one on cd. the sleeve is completely yellow now tho... i remember ripping it so i could load it onto my phone in the late 00s and listening the fuck outta it thru the most dogshit headphones imaginable. the quality was abysmal by that point but i didnt even care. its that fuckin good.
honestly this is another easy 5. my only gripe is that it only has the 2 minute version of "organ donor" instead of the almost 5 minute extended cut that's on the second disc of the deluxe edition. i guess it's not too surprising given the album is already over an hour long as is, although there's so much variety even within each track that it never felt it. still, it was my favourite track on my first listen and it's my favourite now, 2 decades later. which is saying something for an album as packed with bangers as this is.
thinking about it this album probably is what got me into hip hop/trip hop in the first place, as well as (along with a few coldcut tracks and like, early ytpmvs) being my introduction to plunderphonics as a concept. there's a good chance i wouldn't be making the kind of sounds i make now without this album. and i picked it up entirely on a whim. crazy....
