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.
I don’t like the label “dad rock,” but this is it right here. It’s triggering my Oedipus complex.
This guy would clean up at karaoke
Glittering and literate. I haven’t heard an album of such complete and assured vision since that one by Neutral Milk Hotel. The songs feel like glass worlds which Newsom must keep from shattering on the sharp edges of her voice. The erratic time signatures and undulating emotional registers make for a challenging, thrilling listen.
Creedence is a singles band for me, to the point where Chronicle is one of like three greatest hits albums I’ll unashamedly bump (Cosmo’s Factory might as well be a second greatest hits album). This one’s good for one new bluesy track I really liked, “Graveyard Train”, but otherwise it’s just them doing what they do pretty damn well, white boy blues & swamp rock.
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.
I first heard these guys’ song “Ghost Town” on a WMBR program that picks a different popular song every week and plays the original version, plus two hours’ worth of covers. As much as any single song has done on the first listen since my high school days, it blew me away. Having only known them from the goofy, ska-influenced “A Message To You Rudy” and the cheekily understated “Friday Night, Saturday Morning” I couldn’t believe the same band was capable of producing something so moody and haunting. Maybe there was more to them than meets the eye?
If there is, you wouldn’t really get it from their debut studio album here. It’s perfectly good ska (proto-ska?), a genre whose hate I’ve never really gotten but which I’ve never really cared to explore either. They certainly seem more adept at it, more in tune with the principles that kind of make it work, than the successors that I’ve heard do. It’s a US-only track, disrespectfully placed first on the Apple Music release (it occupied a few different places on the album depending on the CD, but never first), “Gangsters”, that’s the standout track, though I could see “Doesn’t Make It Alright” being a second-rate Morrissey solo track for some reason.
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.
Tried getting into this album many years ago because I really liked their song “Paranoid” thanks to Rock Band. Couldn’t swing it back then, no doubt due to a risible lack of taste. What was I thinking? This was a potent sojourn through unrelenting killer songwriting that seemed to get better as it went along. Those soaring choruses in Milk are otherworldly. I really want to know what why they decided to modulate to an out of key F# chord the first few times through and flip to the more orthodox Em towards the end. I had the deluxe edition on and even after the album proper ended, the B-sides kept the energy going.
I haven’t listened to much Ellington, but from what I’ve heard he’s kind of like The Beach Boys: his stuff can sound a little trite or underdeveloped to my modern ears, but that’s only because legions of artists have been interpolating and building on it for over a century. This was apparently something of a comeback for him, and it’s definitely a fun time, the way the energy grows throughout the concert is contagious. When it comes to big band I tend to be Mingus-or-bust, but this will stay in my library for when I need a change.
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.
If I try to listen to this outside the gym, Professor Oak is going to appear and say "There's a time and a place for everything... but not now."
I’m just now hearing this is the best-selling album of all time in Ireland. OF ALL TIME! Someone should probably check on them.
This album reminds me of when I would be eating breakfast in front of the TV before school, flipping between the channels that just play music, and eventually when you run out of options you end up on like the Adult Contemporary channel and it sounds like this. Or maybe it's more like phone hold music, or idk AI music. Bad.
While he may not have quite the chops or influence of that more famous froggy-throated Louis, Mr. Prima can certainly rock out. It sure helps when he’s aided by his then-wife Keely Smith — check them out doing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” on Ed Sullivan. And how can you not feel romantic, awash in the moonlit Med of “Buona Sera”?
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.
I’ll echo everyone else: why is this on the list? Seems like they’re doing a half-hearted revue of their various influences. Should’ve stuck with at least trying to rock out (“Assessment”, “Out-Side”, maybe “Liquid Bird”).
This feels like one of those bands I should really like, but it’s going to take some time. The first two songs didn’t blow me away, but by the time I got through "Arabian Knights", "Halloween", and especially "Monitor" I was really feeling it. Time will tell where we go with this.
I guess this was big when it came out but it sounds to me like a high school football locker room. However washed up Nas and Prodigy may have been by this point, they put out some of the smoothest, freshest sounding music of the 90s - that Jay-Z not only felt comfortable coming at them with something as gaudy and graceless as this, but was hailed for it, is … maybe it’s best not to speak on it. It’s got that early Kanye production going for it at least, though I feel like Kanye’s breezy, almost sassy style fits his beats better than Jay-Z’s indefatigable smugness.
Really liked this one! It’s firmly rooted in 90s-style stripped down beats, but in the raps you can hear the melodic singing style that would become more prevalent in the 21st century. While Hill’s the star of the show and made an even bigger name for herself outside the group, I still really dig the Caribbean influence on some of the songs, no doubt attributable to the other members’ Haitian heritage.
For such a monumental album, I found this one a bit underwhelming. It’s pleasant, mellow, Gaye’s voice is predictably on point. The production doesn’t do anything for me. “Inner City Blues” is the only track that feels like it's doing something interesting.
For the longest time, I was thoroughly repulsed by music from the 80s. All of it. The wet drums, the cheesy synths, the overly sentimental vocals. Not welcome in my ears. It felt totally at odds with the mix of classic and alternative rock I was raised on. I’ve been trying to remedy this unfortunate situation, and now enjoy stuff like The Smiths and The Cure, new wave bands like Talking Heads, Blondie, and Duran Duran, even Bowie’s 80s output.
But there are still many that just don’t click for me — Genesis & its offshoots, Tears for Fears, U2. Don’t get me started on hair metal. Tracy Chapman falls in this latter category. I recognize the artistry here, and her voice is singular and compelling. Not sure what to say but that it’s not for me. To the arbiters of good music, I’m Sorry.
Those who can speak of nothing, be it adoringly or disparagingly, of the immaculate mixing on Steely Dan’s later albums are being craven and dishonest. The uncomfortable truth is, the perfect production is merely a side effect of what happens when you make a comprehensively perfect album.
In the same way Pynchon was described as a mathematician of prose, who could calculate the ideal distributions of verbal stress and emotional impact across sentences and paragraphs, the Dan, by the time of their sixth album, had arrived at a golden formula and simply applied it against the concept of soft-rock music.
That first abrupt harmony in “Black Cow”. Those drums (that high-hat!) and synth at the end of the title track. The jaunty, buttery guitar solo on “I Got the News” played by, I believe, Walter Becker himself.
But it’s really all about the “Deacon Blues”. Steely Dan loved to invent seedy characters for their songs, from drug slinging doctors to regretful adulteresses to straight up pedophiles. Here, though, those swirling, slimy narratives reach a sort of catharsis in what feels like the band’s mission statement, the Loser’s Redemption Through The Power Of Music.
Everything about this track is perfect. By this point in their career, Steely Dan were getting really good at making “cinematic” music that could conjure up vignettes better than a silver screen ever could — see also “FM”, “Glamour Profession”, and “The Nightfly” — but “Deacon Blues” is their most cohesive statement. You can feel the sleaze and romance fighting each other in the sax, the hopeful guitar licks popping in when the gloom threatens to overwhelm. It’s what I love best about jazz, cozy and maudlin and defiant all at the same time. I want to live in the world of this song and never leave.
This version of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” is real special to me. It’s like zombies went to town on the dopey, wistful Neil Young original and turned it into one of their own, perverted it into an endless churn of three minor-key chords, a spaced-out, affectless vocal, a lone shimmering synth note appearing and fading at will like a specter of the death everyone’s long past caring is coming. This is a prophecy, foretold before I was born, of the world my generation would inherit, the inescapable capitulation to/embrace of commodification and spiritual atrophy. It’s horrifying and beautiful.
The rest of the album feels a little scattered and can be hit or miss. There are some lovely dreamy songs (“Carnt Sleep”, “London Belongs To Me”) and some fun dancey ones (“Girl VII”, “Nothing Can Stop Us”). Overall, it’s not cohesive enough as a whole work, nor are its songs strong enough beyond “Only Love”, to warrant a higher rating, but it’s a good one to return to if you’re in a weird mood.
I rarely drift back to this one, I guess because its more polished sound isn’t usually what I’m looking for in a Dylan album, but looking at things rationally it’s got to be his most well-realized collection of songs. It starts mellow and melancholy, but with “Idiot Wind” we get one of his most scathing lyrics since “Like a Rolling Stone” before modulating back to a folksy tone for the back half, leading into the monumental “Shelter from the Storm”.
I’ve always regarded Dylan for his passion, his anger, and his humor, but hearing him so contemplative, conflicted, and magnanimous on a record he wrote when he was only a bit older than I am now I feel like I’m discovering another side of him, a side I can deeply relate to as I related to his younger self in my own younger days. We’ll see if the trend continues into his Christian phase.
Man, they ought to give a Nobel Prize to whoever can make the first double album that actually warrants being a double album. I’ve yet to hear one. Dylan came close with Blonde on Blonde but I don’t think it’s quite there.
This one started off so promising. Jeff Lynne’s got an ear for harmony like few who’ve come since the Beatles and isn’t afraid to let the disco influence shine. By the middle of the infectious “Sweet Talkin’ Women” I thought he might pull it off. But, coincidentally, around the time when a single album would just about be wrapping up, it starts to drag. And drag.
Even “Mr. Blue Sky”, which you can’t help but nod your head to, can’t save the second half from its repetitive, Supertramp-throwaway 70s indulgence. It’s just a style that doesn’t lend itself well to filler tracks. Good try.
I wonder if, had the timing been different, Bowie would have spared a line or two in his epic [purported] Gary Numan diss track “Teenage Wildlife” (which came out the same year as this album) for Adam & The Ants. I mean, whatever his personal misgivings, if you can do a passable imitation of Bowie’s style at any given time you’re already more listenable than most bands in my book. They don’t add much else outside a couple fun bass lines, such as on “Dog Eat Dog” and “Making History”.
This is unfortunately my introduction to the vaunted Nick Cave. It’s an hour+ of shimmering ambient whole notes and tentative arpeggios and heavyhanded lyrics sung in a voice which must be an acquired taste. Taking forever to get nowhere. You might appreciate the timbres of these whole notes, the subtle changes the arpeggios and counterpoints undergo, the restraint Cave shows. It’s beautiful at times, but I’m having a hard time finding it interesting.
I see these guys compared to U2 but I’m not really getting it. This album feels stripped down, unpretentious, and earnest. “We Will Not Be Lovers” is a fun romp, the “Sweet Thing” cover fits their style well despite its unfortunate and needless interpolation of a different tune, and there’s a decent amount of enjoyable fiddlin’ folk sprinkled throughout. The production feels rich and warm, a nice counterpart to the sparser arrangements.
