So buckin' futch.
“Atlantic City” is a perfect song, and other than that this has a good mix of hainted midwesty guitar strumming and Springsteen hooHOOs
I was all excited to get "Kind of Blue" on 1001 Albums – it's in contention for my favourite album ever – and I went on YouTube to listen and got this different version that (for whatever reason) wasn't marked as such, and after the initial "Huh? Wha?," I settled in to listen to that one (faster rhythm section, slower – in the sense of less jam-packed, hence less adventurous, but as a result actually more percussive and better suiting the faster rhythm) and now it's one of my favourite albums too. I'm sure we could repeat that process indefinitely. That's the amazing thing about jazz in general and modal jazz (=less closely bound to chord progression) in particular, but I feel in some way I can't explain like musicologically about this album in particular: That sense of a structure built to support infinite possibilities.
Iconic bassline starts. Q-Tip seems to have hyperrhythm somehow when he raps, like more rhythm than rhythm. And I like their little stories and nonsensical observations, and surprise references to things like chemical compounds and Ralph Kramden. And Busta is here! Overall, this is fun :)
This is really smooth and I was having a kind of blah morning due to dispute with landlord, deadlines etc., and Solomon Burke helped, and I wonder how much guys like Solomon Burke got up in the morning and had their coffee and looked out at the East River or whatever and thought "I'm helping people all over the world right now."
"Rolling in the Deep" is a sweet fucking song intrinsically, but what makes it an all-time classic and gives this whole album its oomph is Adele's vocal art – those little voice tricks, the absolutely limber oscillation between buttery straight notes and vibrato and melisma, the split-second lip of falsetto at the start of phrases. Also the backup singers, also the percussion. Just very immaculate.
Smooth but effervescent, peach and tobacco notes, looks like a model 'cept she's got a little more ass.
It's a good self-development exercise to take the allegedly artificial, hollowed-out genres like marimba-heavy Latin jazz and try to hear them like they were when they were fresh. Tito Puente's orquesta is inventive and committed and makes the task easy, while simultaneously making you move your meat suit.
I know Beck's a weirdo, but there's still this part of me that thinks this is the coolest music can be and I'll be (white, this is very white music) (free, or at least free to wallow in history's last organic musical landscape before Napster etc.) and (21, or 19 anyway – I feel like 1999 is around when this kind of 90s rock+beats eclecticism got definitively superseded, barring a few latecomers like the Avalanches) forever.
It's nice, the sound envelope is really smooth and perfect, and the familiarity of the style is appealing and engaging, like, you can imagine people with misophonia using this as therapy because the sounds are exactly what you expect them to be. Though I presume many people with misophonia would completely disagree with me here! This is raising the unrelated question, what is people with misophonia's relationship with music in general, generally speaking? Anyway, this is nice. I gave it a three for me, partly because I don't want to give a million fives in this exercise, but I think it probably deserves a four objectively, whatever that means.
At its best this reminds me of that thing where boomer blues rockers in wraparound shades move their face forward and back on their neck in time with the music instead of nodding or shaking their head. At its worst it makes me think of a kid I knew who used to drop his pants and strum his junk like a guitar and go "deener-neener-neet neet neet neet neet."
This is nice, but if I'm honest there are at least three Tribe albums I prefer to it, and I see Q-Tip also has an extensive subsequent career that I haven't perused, so I'm not even sure if it's his best solo joint.
Any Fela/Afrika 70 you can just sink into, but this one is just so chock full of horns and polyrhythms and politics (people would go "Zombie!" when they saw soldiers in the street) and the man, the persona, the hater of zombies and lover of life. I love it.
Cool hot fun weirdo aesthete magpie buffalo music.
Love that loose, ragged old punk sound. Lots of minor chords here to make it sinister. The Damned always get talked about in the same breath as the other punk originators but I kinda kept missing out on them – this feels like music that could grow on me, like I'd love it more the more familiar it gets. Like an alternate canon, like Marvel’s “The Sentry.” Only he’s fascist and these guys are antifa!
I’d forgotten about the collagey aspects of this album, the surprising sounds that emerge and submerge. It’s very beautiful.
