21st Century Schizoid Man is a classic, if not in its own right then as the basis for Power. I remember it as being impossible in Guitar Hero, might need to go back to it now. Could chop off a minute or three as it doesn't really develop in a particularly interesting way. The flute solo on I Talk to the Wind took it from just pleasant to pretty good. Epitaph kinda surprised me with how much I enjoyed it. I think that one's going into (semi)regular rotation. The back half (two-thirds? hour?) of Moonchild is absolutely asinine and a real time-waster, which sucks because the actual song part of the song is really nice. At least when the last track kicks in it reminds you that music exists, even if it's underwhelming.
Really well played stuff. Probably went crazy live
Another band I've meant to dive into and haven't yet, outside some hits (none from here). Great bass, fun vocals, good grooves. After the intro, everything felt like its own high point, with maybe Memories Can't Wait and Air (which at times vocally kinda reminds me of Sensor Ghost, a favorite local band) and Drugs being the highlights of the highlights
Right up my alley with this brand of power pop. In the Crowd and the last run of five tracks all stood out as great among the really good rest. I'll be checking out the rest of their stuff soon.
Maybe I'm just a philistine but I don't quite *get* this one. It sounds good and the players are incredibly talented but it doesn't move me. More toward a 3.5 than a 3 but still
Pleasant and competent boomer rock. Never felt more #american
I've heard this one plenty but decided to give it a full revisit. Title track gets play from me plenty and is as funky as ever. Grovallegiance is just so good, the perfect balance of fun and smooth and well-written and well-played. WSAFBCPR (not typing all that) is a perfect mission statement and I can hear so much of the funk-influenced rock over the next decades I love spawning out of it. The tones, the groove, the self-referentiality of it all. It's really funny how beautiful Promentalshit is musically considering the everything else. I might be a bit inured to it growing up on lots of hip-hop which is obsessed with shit bars, or maybe the music and the background singing is just too pretty, but either way I can overlook it. It's another one I come back to. Into You is one of the main reasons I wanted to come back to the album as a whole, I just couldn't really remember it. The relisten reminds me why; it's just not that great. Technically fine and it works structurally in the album but I just don't really feel anything toward it. Cholly is a nice closer and really could have worked as an intro too, maybe even better. Just a great album and I'm glad I gave it the full listen again.
This is the kind of 4.something that you round up to a 5 because it's damn good. You can hear the hunger, you can hear the reality, even when the sound is big you can tell it's not a group effort, it's two people killing it. Love love love it
Perfectly fine faux-Southern rock. You can tell they're posers because it all lacks a certain scumbaggery (which I do like in the right doses) in the vocal and the instrumental. That's probably how they managed to get so big. Wrote a Song for Everyone feels especially egregiously affected.
Excellent pop punk from a band that made a lot of not-excellent stuff after. Green Day isn't in my top few bands of the genre, but with their popularity, Dookie is easy to point to as one of the best examples of the genre. When I Come Around, Basket Case, Longview, Welcome to Paradise, you never go too long in this album without a reminder of how these three were just tapping into something.
Another one where "pleasant" feels like the best descriptor. Especially considering when it was released, it's good all the way through and especially interesting to me as someone already into east-west fusion through groups like Kula Shaker. Never quite rises to great, although the covers are nice and Sagar is a highlight that flies by despite the runtime.
folklore and evermore hit me in an unexpected way when they came out. I liked a couple Taylor Swift songs before them but I never really gave any album a full listen, but considering the 2020 of it all it felt like I may as well, and they ended up being pretty good. This one is highlighted by willow and no body, no crime, but a lot of the tracks didn't really stand the test of time and became pretty forgettable.
Beautiful horns, beautiful stuff. I'm not too well-versed in jazz but I love what it's done for what I am versed in. This is one of the rare times that the song titles really informed how I listened to an album which is really cool. I could feel the stories and motions in a way I surely wouldn't have picked up on listening blindly. The second track in particular felt so much like the "physical embraces" its subtitle describes (maybe I would have picked up on that one, I dunno). A very pleasant listen
I don't know if I've heard You Don't Know before or not but as soon as it started it sounded very familiar. Really fun listen that was probably just as fun to make, they were going wild in the studio especially for 1966
I listened to this when it came out but that was so damn long ago that I barely remember anything that wasn't a hit. Half of it was hits, though, which helps. The bass is the protagonist throughout. Mr. Brightside is still great, Somebody Told Me is still better. Jenny is great. ATTTID is kinda lame. A couple songs are pretty much nothing. The production and the synthpoppiness of it all evoke their native Vegas beautifully; whether that's because you know they're from there or because it's innate is hard to detangle. The writing and especially the delivery come off British even through that. Still think it's funny and valid that they threw out the original album because the Strokes' debut was just that much better. They couldn't reach those heights regardless, but this came as close as they could.
Mike Mills might be the GOAT. Orange Crush is a classic and still hits the same. The first three songs are great, Turn You Inside-Out is great, I Remember California is so great.
Pretty much everything Costello does is up my alley, and the beginning of it all is no exception. No misses on this one, and plenty of great stuff. Alison is so beautiful top to bottom, no wonder that's where they pulled the title from. The instrumentals on Red Shoes and I'm Not Angry are pretty peak too. Love the random jump back to the 50s on Mystery Dance, plus the fun and not-so-thinly veiled metaphor. Hell of a closer too. Insanely impressive as a debut.
So good. Such a brilliant run toward the start. Heads Will Roll is a perfect song, and Soft Shock and Skeletons are close to it. Runaway and Dragon Queen hit a back half high that brings it right back up. Karen is a top tier singer and lyricist, especially for the genre, and the other guys whose names I should know by now create such great synthpop worlds for her to inhabit.
