I love early The Who. I like all the tremolo (only good modulation effect), but y'all are right about the VERY heavy "influence" from black musicians, especially track 1. FWIW, I like the James Brown cover and to hear a "rock" band do a rendition, but man, Roger, man. You gotta find your voice please. He's oscillating between James Brown voice and Bob Dylan voice (The Good's Gone). I love The Good's Gone, though.
I really like this album!!!! I don't know!!!! I feel like early The Who is just doing everything pre-HardDaysNight Beatles were doing better and much more raucous, which isn't saying much, especially considering that by 1965, they had moved the fuck on.
AND OH!!! THE VOCAL HARMONIES!!!!!! I was on my Doo-Wop moment for a while last month, and what I find so endearing about these early rock albums is how they combine those vocal harmonies with increasingly heavy styles. I love The Kinks because they were always a little tongue-in-cheek, but this doesn't feel tongue-in-cheek at all. It's often very fun and cute!!!!!!!!!!! THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT!!!!!!!!! I would return to this more!!!
The Ox is basically a classic for me. Always LOVED THAT TRACK!!!! AND I WILL SING TITLE TRACK AT KARAOKE ONE OF THESE DAYS!!!!
I AM THE HAPPY SMILER WHEN I LISTEN TO THIS ALBUM!!!!!!!!! YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah there are so many songs on this that I just like,, dude. I'm A Man. Bo Diddley awesome. But jesus christ.
Maybe my favorite of Elliot Smith's catalog, although I'm also not the most well-versed. I don't know. His acoustic stuff really isn't compelling to me. Some of it is. I think that a lot of the critiques people leverage against Phoebe Bridgers can equally be leveraged against Elliot Smith. But People Would Kill Me For That. I DONT KNOW!!!! This is beautiful!! These arrangements are beautiful. "Everything Reminds Me of Her" is a pretty terrible refrain though, but wow his guitar playing on it is still really great.
Okay so I thought this was my favorite and then songs I didn't like kept coming. "L.A." does very little for me. "In the Lost of Found?" Dude. STICK TO GUITAR!!!!!! PLEASE!!!! The Roost ending is cool, but dude. Come on. "Easy Way Out?" Really?? Elliot Smith only became a more and more obvious songwriter as his career went on, for better and for worse, and when the arrangements that back them are forgettable, like on "Happiness/The Gondola Man," it makes his obvious a little blinding. Again, the glittering outro is pretty but damn dude WORK THAT INTO YOUR ARRANGEMENT!!!!! This album had a Beatles cover on the deluxe version, you got it bro.
STUPIDITY TRIES IS PROBABLY MY FAVORITE SONG BY ELLIOT SMITH THOUGH
This is like a 2.8
Oh my GOD!!! These instrumental are so STRANGE and NOISY!!!! Oh my GOD!!!!
666 CUT W.I.C. LIKE NEWT GINGRICH SUCKS DICK
bass guitar should just sound like that I think. What I love about PJ's vocals is how baroque she sounds. Like her delivery is so operatic. Nice compliment to the 90s guitar thing. the 90s areso awsom. :)
but honestly there are times where i was like this would be so more awseom if more raucous. I guess that is what Rid Of Me is for. SLIDE GUITAR SO FUN!!!!!! so many lyrics about the body...
i feel so silly!!!!!!!!!!! like i loved bikini kill & sleater-kinney in high school, was like yess this riot grrl stuff is cool but i feel ignorant not knowing that PJ was kind of the frontrunner of the style??? but actually maybe this is not riot grrl??? not everything with Feminism Lyrics is riot grrl, barrett!!!! this is true. not as raucous as riot grrl. so maybe this is why i'd rather just put on The Woods or Dig Me Out. Let's circle back when we inevitably pull one of those albums on this journey we have taken ourselves on.
drums on Hair, specifically in the verse, are causing the doubts with regards to this "is this riot grrl?" mental turmoil anguish i'm currently experiencing. Because they are so jazzy!!!! The band is so good here. hashtag let women talk about how much it sucks to be a woman without GRAHGRAHGRAH vocals. more "Subtle." Oh how I love subtlety. That thing that was so awesome about the 90s. Subtlety. I love how I write shit like this and then the next song is "Joe." Which is awesome.
ACOUSTIC GUITAR WOW!!!!!! I LOVE WHEN THE 90S ALBUM IS ALL GRAHGRAHGRAH AND THEN THEY DO THE ACOUSTIC GUITAR!!!!!! BALLAD TIME!!!!! WOW!!!! BUT THE INSTRUMENTATIONS YES????? THEY ARE GETTING MORE AND MORE!!!!! AND WOW THAT IS A LOT MORE!!!!! I SHOULD EXPECT THESE THINGS!!!!! TIS THE NINETIES AFTER ALL!!!!!!
This is awesome, but by the end of the end of the album, I feel the disconnect between vocals and instrumentation are apparent. Both are awesome, but it's just like, yes these things are awesome but it feels like both are panned hard left and hard right. They don't mesh together for me. This is a hard one to say THIS SUCKS!!!!! BUT WHEN IT IS ON MY EARS I'M LIKE I LIKE THIS!!!!!!! it's an easy one to say I DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH I WANT TO RETURN TO THIS!!!!
Hush little baby don't you cry. Albini's gonna come and place a mic.
OKAYYYYYY I GUESS IF WE'RE ALL GOING TO SUCK NEIL YOUNG'S COCK AD INFINITUM BECAUSE INDIE ROCK IS AN AWESOME FUCKING GENRE AND MAYBE THE ONLY FUKCING one MAYBE LETS SEE WHAT THESE OTHER BUFFY SPRINGY CROSBY NASH STILLS TWERPS WERE UP TO!?
Track 1 has that Movin' On Up by Screamadelica everybody sing so much vibe that I love in pretty much any context!!!!!
THE CREDITS ARE FUCKING STACKED HOLY FUCK?!?? HE GOT JIMI HENDRIX FOR THIS???!!!!!! BOOKER T TOOO?????? CASS ELLIOT!??! RINGO??!??!!! WOW!!!!!
BUT IT SHOULD BE A SIN TO HAVE JIMI FUCKING HENDRIX MIXED THAT LOW!!!!! I DONT KNOW!!!! IT STILL KINDA ROCKS THAT ITS HIM~~~~ STILL!!!!!! COOL, WHAT A. RREESSTTRRAAIINNEEDDDDDDDD SOLO!!!!!! I SUPPOSE THAT IT BECAUSE HE IS INTERPLAYING WITH THE ORGAN GOONER 5000 ON TRACK 4 MISTER STEPHEN STILLS HIMSELF. DUDE, YOU'VE GOT JIMI HENDRIX RIGHT THERE!!!! I WANT TO HEAR HIM!!!!!!!!
eRIC cLAPTON going 55mph as per usual. AND LITERALLY INTERPOLATING VOODOO CHILD (SLIGHT RETURN) ON LITERALLY THE NEXT TRACK LMFAOOOOOOOOOOO YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP.
I am getting caught up in the instrumentals these songs are rather good. Aw I'm being a dick. E.C. is "serving the song." Which I suppose I could give him some credit for. I made the stank face a couple of times.
Oh. It was Stills doing rhythm. Redact previous paragraph. See orginal statement.
Okay, let's hear about this "Black Queen" Mister Stephen Stills. I don't like this shit at all.
Man I really don't give a fuck about this record at all. Stephen Stills' songwriting is really uncompelling to me. Some of the arrangements, like on the last track are really pretty, quaint, even, but god.
He's kinda like the loser of the CSNY group, and not even a loser in an interesting way. It's hard for me to care because I really don't get a sense of what Mister Stephen Stills himself cares about. You wrote For What It's Worth, for fucks sake. GIVE US SOMETHING!!!! I feel duped by all those gospel vocals. He works the best when his voice SHARES equal weight to others, but when he's given the spotlight and all the backing that goes with it, he falls flat. This album is like a million jazz hands poking out stage left stage right and it's just some guy.
My favorite moment was when Jimi Hendrix pulled up.
I suppose it sever occurred to me that these fools only had five studio albums (6 if you consider The Graduate Soundtrack)
Wow! These guys sure know how to write POP songs!!!
Every time I listen to S&G now, I'm always so surprised how much of a proclivity they have for goofiness. I guess the modern "FOLK" music "MOVEMENT" makes a lot more sense with that in mind. I guess whimsicality is dead in 2026. There's no space for songs like "Feelin' Groovy" anymore. Everything is corny now. Nothing can be cute. I'm not saying I'm exempt. I find a lot of shit corny. A nice reminder that 28 minute album was to remind me to be a little silly.
That Dylan impersonation was rough, though.
yayyyyyy first pull that Eno was involved in :) never really given this one a serious listen!! Am excited!!
It's so cool how everything Eno touched was kind of at the Ethos of Ice-Nineing Muzak and he produced something as quaint as this. I'm not complaining. The arrangements are really gorgeous, dare I say, quirky. It has a straightforwardness that I always about other releases on E.G.
Was not expecting vocals either!!!
This does feel like a less-electronic, more ornate version of Another Green World. I love the subtle tape effects, drum machines, the vocoder-lite.
Standouts: From the Colonies, MILK, Pigtail, THE SOUND OF SOMEONE YOU LOVE WHO'S GOING AWAY AND IT DOESN'T MATTER (I mean WOW!!!! What a centerpiece).
Hugebaby counts as another devastating blow to my "Tremolo the only modulation effect that sounds good with guitar" take. Chartered Flight is an awesome closer. I love tone poems that deal with planes, or movement in transportation.
A poptimist and a punk walk into a bar. on karaoke night. The second that the punk, sitting alone, hears that timeless drum beat, he finishes his heavy-handed gulp of Yeungling and lets out the type of groan that pains you and everyone around you, as he willed it into existence. This catches the attention of the poptimist, who wonders how someone could be so aggrevated at such a timeless song.
"Oh gee I don’t know. Maybe because it’s because these fucking dopes thought. Oh you know what would be funny? What if we opened our pseudo-punk masterpiece with the corniest CR-78 pattern ever??? It’s an emblem of the rain of shit that would cloud the 80s. Punks thinking they’re too good. So they put on a suit. Tale as old as time and call it “pop.” And Blondie, they were the first.
The Poptimist does not know what a Roland CR-78 drum machine is, or that it was set to the "samba" preset.
"These fucking-" says the punk, about to invole the Unholy Word, revealing more veins than Chapter 7 in an BIO 201 textbook, "SELLOUTS"
"WOAH WOAH WOAH"
"ITS TRUE!! They tried so hard to write a hit, and every time time they failed, they album suffered. If you’re a punk, you can get away with writing a shit song because at least you’ll be still be saying SOMETHING"
The Poptimist, sipping his Negroni served out of a coupe glass, replies "Did I just hear a punk complaining about a band not being Album-oriented-"
"Don’t twist my words. Over half of Parallel Lines FAILED! One of the five good songs is a COVER!!!! Of a REAL-"
Both men are shouting at each other so loudly that not a single person in the bar can hear that I haven’t hit a single note. It is barely the third verse.
"This album is supposed to be a $3 steal in the discount bins at the local record store, but because they used to play at CBGB, they’re rock fucking royalty."
"OH SO WHAT ABOUT THE RAMONES THEN?!! THEY MIGHT AS WELL HAVE THE LETTERS OMFUG TATTOOED ON THEIR COCKS!! DID THEY HAVE MUCH OF SUBSTANCE TO SAY?!"
"THE RAMONES HAD THE RAUCOUS PUNK ATTITUDE TO BACK UP THEIR POP-"
"AND THEY STILL SUCK"
“ROBERT FRIPP PLAYED ON THE ALBUM FOR CHRIST SAKE!! THAT SHOULD BE PROOF ENOUGH-“
Both of these men have been going to the same bar for 40 years. It never occurs to them that they are both incredibly gay and desperately want to have sex with each other.
When they set out to make this album, did they have any idea how it was gonna sound? I hear Rockabilly in this on Narcissist, like this track feels less like a punk revival and more of a Kinks tribute. I hear so many disparate influences, and it feels like none of them have had any time to settle in, like a Meat Sauce that needs another 2 hours to simmer. First track has some genuinely pretty guitar work but the lyrics are not sticky enough for it to work, and why the fuck is there a harmonica solo??? You don’t fucking need it!!!
The Ha Ha Wall has some genuinely good ideas that could’ve worked better if given the option to explore them more. I think they could’ve made a lot of these songs cooler if they weren’t comitted to this album being so explicitly commercial.
As for a lot of the rest of the album, these guys don’t know when a phrase is good enough to be "the only phrase." Last Phrase on the Bungle riff is genuinely annoying. So is the acoustic fake out at the very end of the album. I was so ready for it to be over and then it’s so whatever acoustic jam.
The vocalist is also just ripping off much better ones from this period, specifically Hamilton Liethauset of the Walkmen and Alex Turner (i suppose The Libertines predate Arctic Monkeys, but still AM improves on this p much every way) Also,,, MORRISSEY????? LIKE VERY OBVIOUSLY!! All of these English vocalists he’s taking heavy inspiration for, and it sounds so flat. And these girl group shoop shoop da da da’s, sang with such little affect, maybe the most egregious motifs on this album.
The lyrics, too. God, so Nothing. Arbeit Macht Frei, how terrible. It’s not even saying anything interesting to say about it. This horrific concentration camp solo in a ooh rah singy song. Maybe they were going for a Victoria by the Kinks say, but it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work at all.
I will say, the drummer has chops, I think, but if I could summate this album in one word, it would be "undistilled"
CHANGE MY PITCH UP
SMACK MY BITCH UP
CHANGE MY PITCH UP
SMACK MY BITCH UP
CHANGE MY PITCH UP
SMACK MY BITCH UP
CHANGE MY PITCH UP
SMACK MY BITCH UP
CHANGE MY PITCH UP
SMACK MY BITCH UP
CHANGE MY PITCH UP
SMACK MY BITCH UP
OKAY FINE ILL ELABORATE ON MY BLONDIE SHITPOST WITH THE GO-GO’s PROXY!!!!
I think it is genuinely awesome that Blondie came from roots at CBGB and transformed themselves into pop icons. The great songs on that album are some of the greatest of that era, and ever, but the songs that miss just feel like songs of their era have nothing going for them.
The Go-Go’s admitedly debuted after Blondie and owe a lot of their success to them, but their Cali-forn-I-A background makes SO much more sense to me in the context of a punk rock pivot. They’re one of the first bands to reinterpret surf music after the punk boom.
The Go-go’s surfrock-newwave synthesis, call it "Surfwave," compliment each other MUCH better than Blondie’s straight pop pivot for many reasons because they have those girl group harmonies, not just the Men in Blacking Band.
We Got the Beat, Our Lips Are Sealed, Fading Fast, but the other tracks have a
Automatic is genuinely haunting. It reminds me of like, Drugs by Talking Heads.
I don’t know. Belinda Carslile u are so awesome.
Why studio ghibli food look so good🤤🤤🤤🤤
AIMEE IM
SOOOOO DRUNK IM SOOOOOO DRUNK
They’re calling it the most Okay rock album of all time. What if we took everything great about my bloody valentine and stepped on it? Literally stepped on it? These songs are so fucking flat. Why do so many of them 5+ minutes?? They overstay their welcome!! Cherub Rock is great. Mayonaisse is great I can’t lie.
I want to shoot whoever is shaking that tambourine on Walk On like 11 times.
I guess when I think about Kraftwerk, I think about how antithetical their entire artistic ethos is to American sensibility. The Singularly Voiced Songwriter, The Virtuoso, The Rock God. I love how they are able to extract so much groove out of their instruments while keeping the music feeling cold and robotic. In the electronic music that they helped pioneer, Kraftwerk saw a way out of these rigid ways of thinking, instead seeking the rigidity of a machine, of a train track, the freedom of going where the tracks take you, and letting go in the time between departure and destination.
When I think about Kraftwerk, I don't really think about the bone that the chimp threw, or that big space ship in the sky, and or the horrific destructive powers of HAL. I don't think about the marked off watering hole, the primitive thirst, and the circumstantial greed that led the clever little chimp to pick it up in the first place. I just think about where it is I'm going to. I think about how time drags me along.
When I think about Kraftwerk, I think about how egoless the music is. The facade never cracks. Nobody takes a solo, there are no lyrics that stand out and shake you to your core. Everything is placed exactly where you want it to be, songs arranged like a doll house from 2152. Yet it is in their deficiency of individuality that they create something profoundly human. Kraftwerk imagines a humanity that is not driven by pride or emotion or even driven at all. All I do is think about all the people I've forged connections with because of technology, and all the beauties, man-made or natural, that I've seen because of the freedom technology has offered us.
Though try as I may, when I think about Kraftwerk, I think about myself. I think about the repetitive ways in which I move my muscles, the way I pose. I think about how lifeless I become when I submit myself to the eye of the beholder. This album is really their first to touch on themes of celebrity and the vapidness of living fashionably, themes they'd later expand upon it with The Model on their next album, but I think the tracks Showroom Dummies and The Hall of Mirrors stand out to me on TEE for being particularly self-aware. Look at these dudes from Dusseldorf, putting on makeup and wearing matching outfits. They have very little sex appeal, yet it entrances the audience all the same.
Kraftwerk could've been the world's most gimmicky electronic band of the 70s, and it is a gimmick that more and more artists fell into year after year following Kraftwerk's inception. But they never were a gimmick because they didn't see their instruments as gimmicks; they saw them as tools. They discovered new uses for them, modified them to fit their needs, pushed them to their absolute limit, all in the name of creating a world that is as equally orderly and harmonious as it is beautiful. When I think about Kraftwerk, I feel an unshakeable optimism about technology and how we are constantly evolving alongside it, as it evolves from our endless approach. That relationship, to me, is what it means to be human.
Life is timeless. Life is timeless.
