Manzarek is like a spiritual medium whose keys channel, in controlled doses, Morrison or whatever demon is possessing him. Ethics aside, it’s clear some arcane entity involved in this thing has got The Vision.
Never been big into electronic music but I do love some Ladytron and can see the ancestry here. The songs feel simple musically, and aren’t atmospheric enough to really lose yourself in them. It seems more like they’re reveling in the technological marvel of it all. I did find “Neon Lights” beautiful though.
Neil is a top-5 artist for me, and he pretty much does no wrong here, although it’s lacking the unhinged edge that, while probably not healthy, takes some earlier albums to the next level. The medium matters with this one: man was not meant to go from “Sail Away” to “Powderfinger” without flipping a record over.
The closing track is Ditch-era Neil taken in a blisteringly resolute direction, a proclamation of rock’s immortality splattered on an instrumental that sounds like a train about to go over a cliff. Is that panic in his voice?
My personal favorite might be “Pocahontas”, which features some of his crunchiest percussive strumming plus an off-kilter lyric which might only be bested in Neil’s oeuvre by the later “Crime in the City”. Plus, I’ll take those gorgeous harmonies over CSN kumbayah crap any day.
This album has some stellar songs (“Let Me Roll It”, “Nineteen Hundred Eighty-Five”, I’ll even include “No Words” in that). The rest is good, not great, almost uncanny valley Beatles. Hard to put it on when Ram is right there. The American release CD, one of the first I personally owned, includes the rocker “Helen Wheels”, bumping it up half a star at least, but streaming services don’t want you to know that.
This is peak commercial hip hop. I want to hate but I can’t, the songs are irresistibly fun. It’s the kind of thing I’d be self-conscious playing around others but might make appearances in the gym rotation. First listen highlight was “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)”.
One of the few albums on regular rotation freshman year of college (yes, college) that wasn’t swimming in angst. Crazy how fresh this sounds while their 2000s output feel like a relic of a simpler time. I’m still finding new John Frusciante flourishes to love, I should really get into his solo stuff.
An American has about as much license to review the Kinks as a suburban white boy has to review Chief Keef. But when I see Ray Davies hailed as a better songwriter than Lennon/McCartney online I must don my cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat and go to bat for people that write actual songs and not trite political snark over sparsely arranged/imagined tunes.
I’m really being too hard on ol’ Ray, this is a good album. It's just that I used to listen to it a lot and nowadays I often wonder why. The production always annoyed me. Maybe it says more about me than about the album that my favorite songs are the slickest and most Beatle-like, “Mr. Churchill Says” and “She’s Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina”.
I agree with everything Sebastian said and have nothing really to add.
One minor note is I basically zero ear for production/mixing, but this one is kind of weird. On the one hand, that clean, crispy sound was a revelation to little me. It sounded like something from the future, and I just can’t shake that association. Nowadays, though, I’ll compare it to, like, Dookie, and it just sounds kind of bad.
Personal favorite Bowie. Not cohesive at all, six wildly different tracks, unified by their irrepressible desperation and passion. There’ve been times I believed Bowie may have actually done some mingling in the spirit realm and this feels like a hopeless yet worthwhile attempt to communicate in some five-dimensional language he learned there. Or maybe it’s the side effects of the cocaine!
“Wild Is The Wind” is a haunting, almost sickeningly slick reupholstering of a Nina Simone classic which would be my favorite Bowie song if not for the preceding track “Stay”, which I read somewhere was one of Bowie’s favorites as well. It features a locked-in rhythm section and hysterical dueling guitars that largely sideline Bowie’s vocals and lyric, the latter of which is about as close as he ever comes to vulnerability.
