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 :)
