Really good, can't believe I'd never listened to this one before. My knowledge of rap in general, and this period of rap specifically, is very spotty; this album seems to me to represent an important point in the transition from the Sugarhill Gang and Run-DMC era of hip-hop towards the time of Biggie and Tupac. The older style of flow is largely still there, but the lyrical content is becoming more aggressive, explicit, and straightforwardly political. The beats are excellent; the MCs can all hang with each other lyrically (apparently Ice Cube wrote "almost half" of the lyrics on this album?); the tracks cover a wide variety of subject matter. The back half is certainly weaker than the front but most tracks still hold up.
Very good if you like approachable pop punk. Some very memorable tracks, including a few I had forgotten about, and Green Day's sound is distinctive enough for them to be easily differentiated from other pop punk bands.
Restrained, elegant, loping, somewhat spare soul music with low-key but irrepressibly funky beats. Very crisp production, but not featuring the most memorable of Mayfield's melodies. Comparable in some ways to the contemporaneous work of Isaac Hayes, but Mayfield has a very different voice, no string section, and generally less bombast. Christgau gave this a D+! What the hell!
A punchy 34 minutes of blues; King has the audience in the palm of his hand, which lends the performance a frenetic energy. King is introduced as "the world's greatest blues singer," which sounds odd only because I think of him in his later years first and foremost as a guitar player. The first and last tracks are rhythmically unusual and make the whole thing feel a little off-kilter. I may need to relisten to this one a few times before I come around to the idea of enshrining it as one of the greatest blues albums of all time.
By coincidence I just listened to this all the way through for the first time like a week ago. Pretty enjoyable, bursting with that characteristic RHCP scraggly funkiness, with some tracks that suffer from being overplayed. Back half certainly weaker than the front. Not bad!
I was expecting this to be a couple of unassailable classics and ten tracks or so of garbage. The highs (Dancing Queen) are high, the lows (Dum Dum Diddle) are certainly low, and... I must begrudgingly admit that there are a few more pretty good pop songs on here than I expected. I still think ABBA is a singles band and not an album band, but this exceeded my expectations.
A musician with an incredibly distinctive voice, style, and mood whose works I haven't dug into nearly as much as I should have by this point. The majority of tracks on here have a particular kind of slow, roiling, uneasy quality that seems like her preferred mode; I think it's the kind of thing where I have to be in the right mood to fully meet her where she's at. Autumnal music.
Quite a good band with whom I had little familiarity. They have a nice kind of sharp, jangly lo-fi pop sensibility that lies sort of halfway between the sound of The Kinks (a cover of whose "Waterloo Sunset" is on the deluxe edition of this album, alongside a cover of "And Your Bird Can Sing") and that of, I don't know, Public Image Ltd. or something. Curious to dig into some more by them.
Three musicians at the top of their game giving a balanced, masterful performance that manages to sound consummately relaxed. LaFaro and Motian provide distinctive but restrained support for Evans' shimmering, tasteful piano work. I'm honestly never not in the mood to listen to this one.
Further outside (complimentary) than I would have expected given my previous exposure to Masekela, which is mostly from listening to the soundtrack to Amandla: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony. Tremendous sense of rhythm here, even on the slower tracks; elegant music produced by an extremely tight band.
Fascinating, hypnotic electronic music, totally unbothered by any notion of pop song structure. Not something I'd reach for all the time, but an important precursor to later developments and just the thing if you're in the right mood.
Maybe the weakest of the three studio albums Hendrix released during his lifetime, maybe a slightly lower rate of memorable hits than the other two, but still a masterpiece. The songwriting is endlessly creative and surprising, and the album is brimming with untouchable performances from all three musicians. I'd listen to this anytime.
Not fully convinced by this particular form of pastiche, and not sure I'll spin it all that often. I don't really listen to film scores, much less scores for nonexistent films, and most of the more ambient tracks on here failed to grab me. Some of the tracks with more of a beat are quite good, but I don't know that I'd ever rather listen to this than something by The Avalanches or Boards of Canada, or, for that matter, Henry Mancini.
Awesome album, been meaning to listen to this for a while and shouldn't have put it off so long. Blissed-out, spaced-out paisley pop with a tremendous command of melody, harmony, instrumentation, and arrangement. Somewhere in the tumbling, colorful zone between The Mamas & The Papas and Todd Rundgren.
Good stuff. On this album the Byrds are starting to leaven their brand of light folk rock and close harmony with sitar-influenced guitar work and more complex song structures, making them sound a bit more distinctive and pushing towards what will become psychedelic rock. Some really good tracks on here and some that are a bit rougher around the edges.
Instrumental hip-hop is not something I listen to all that much, so I don't have a lot to say about this one other than that it was full of good beats and I liked it. By comparison with other albums that other people tend to refer to as "well-produced," I think this one has a claim to the same descriptor, but I don't fully understand what that means. I didn't recognize any of the samples except for the Twin Peaks one at the very end. I would probably benefit from a back-to-back comparison between this and, I don't know, Donuts and Luv(sic) Hexalogy.
By this point, the velvet seats of the 1956 Buick Special of Elvis's career had begun to acquire a somewhat roughened texture. Haven't heard much from this era aside from "Suspicious Minds" - today I learned that the same guy who wrote that also wrote "Hooked on a Feeling"! This album is honestly pretty good but I sometimes can't shake the feeling that I could be listening to a better version of the same song (e.g. Hank Snow's original version of "I'm Movin' On") or the song from which Elvis seems to cribbing (e.g. Aretha Franklin's "I Never Loved a Man" in lieu of "Power of Your Love").
There are at a minimum 5 or so stone cold, unimpeachable, all-time classic tracks on this album, and even on the slightly weaker tracks you're still getting to hear one of the 20th century's greatest singers at the height of her powers. Easy 5 stars.
Never heard of this band but Alex Turner's voice is immediately recognizable. Their sound is certainly comparable to Artic Monkeys, but with less punch and more... swoop, deriving from their 60s mod flair and lush instrumentation. Pretty good!
This probably went crazy if you were 12 in 1973. "No More Mr. Nice Guy" is a classic, and a couple tracks are surprisingly pleasant, like "Unfinished Sweet"; I was also surprised to hear "Elected," a clear ancestor of "I Wanna Be Sedated." Other than that there's not much to recommend here. Even setting aside the necrophiliac lyrics and Cooper making sex sounds for the whole second half of the song, "I Love the Dead" is a particular low point in the history of music.
Very solid, with some tracks that are undeniable classics – but classics to which I don't have the same level of attachment that some other people do, since I didn't really grow up with them. Still a hell of a good time.
I might have just been in the wrong mood for this one but I found it to be mostly pretty dull. There are a few radio-ready tracks like "Catch the Sun," but they feel like the exception that proves the rule: the majority of the time this album seems more concerned with spindly agglomerations of woozy major 7th guitar chords, wafting snatches of illegible vocals, and a drummer who seems have forgotten one of his sticks. Boring!
Just learned that these reviews are public, if not individually identifiable, so I might take a bit more care with them lol.
Never actually listened to this one all the way through before, nor have I seen the movie yet. The musicianship and arrangements are immaculate, notably the seamless transitions between tracks; the songwriting is very good; I have some trouble with the extremely 80s production, which I realize is a skill issue on my part. Everything kind of sounds like it was tracked on a cheap synth or recorded inside a tin can, or both, as was the fashion at the time, and I can't quite get over that. It all just sounds a little thin somehow, despite its tremendous punch and tightness. I wonder if some kind of different listening setup (vinyl? FLACs?) would help. 4 stars for now.
I've listened to Doolittle and Surfer Rosa a number of times, but I've only heard a couple of tracks off of this one before. Not to be too glib but my review of this one is along the lines of: Yep, more Pixies, and that's a good thing. It doesn't quite have the same intensity of... emotional chiaroscuro?... as, say, Doolittle, and I think the songwriting is not quite as strong, but it's still Pixies and it's still very good.
If I were someone who made tiktoks where I recommended albums with an "immaculate dark academia vibe" or whatever to young people, this album would probably come up at some point. It's a whole vibe! Most of the songs are a bit samey from beginning to end, and many are a bit samey in comparison with one another, but the vibes cannot be denied.
