One can say this album is well-produced, full of fluent performances and excellent craftsmanship. But the sonic edges on Parachutes are so well sanded out that what emerges for all of this optimization is a soporific unit of music, cooked down until one could expect to take it in pill form. The guitar lines, lacking the edge one might like from the instrument, crash like distant waves into one another with none of the soothing quality. I have no particular animosity towards Coldplay and I appreciate the unique quality of Chris Martin's voice, but in this album he never strays from the safe confines of any capable pop singer. This album is emblematic for the empty sonic field of 2000s alt-rock radio music whose individual agents have collapsed in a pudding-like substrate of uninteresting sonic fare. It all meanders through one ear and falls right out the other, leaving no particular impression. Maybe you heard one of the singles at a baseball game, or maybe it was "Rockstar" by Nickleback, or was it the Creed song, who can say? I might be a bit ungenerous with the two stars, since this is album is mostly inoffensive and not genuinely unpleasant, but I did find myself frustrated enough with how bored I was to make the call.
The pleasure of listening to Elliot Smith eluded me for a long time. This album was thrilling, though. There are theoretically only so many things you can do with one guy and an acoustic guitar, but I was on the edge of my seat with each new track. Smith's voice sounds as if he is screaming through a whisper, every utterance feels urgent and important. The low-fidelity recording charms and imparts a sense of familiarity and warmth, as if you had taken a mixtape from a stranger off a bus and found a masterwork. I think it is missing some gravitas to elevate it to a true masterpiece—in spite of how impressive this album is there is just something missing—but nonetheless this is a delightful listen and an important part of American music.
I feel like Cisco Kid is also a friend of mine, too. Really fun, competent funk album with a lot of groove. Extremely solid all around.
If one were to hear this album without any context, they could easily believe that this was an album of Nirvana B-sides. This album is one of the many that emerged at the apogee of the grunge wave and has all of the building blocks. It is a fine album, absolutely nothing wrong with it, but it is not enough to break away from the shadow of Kurt Cobain.
I hate to report that I was thrilled with Meat is Murder, and I am absolutely furious to concede that, while I was ready to dismiss him as a self-important bum being carried by virtuostic performances of his bandmates, that Morrissey is a critical piece of the Smiths' sound. The vocals float atop the swiftly moving instrumentation in the mix in a way that delights in a new way every time one encounters it. Speaking of instrumentation, this album redefined what one could do with a bass guitar. I wish I could bathe in the bassline to "Barbarism Begins at Home."
That's not to say this is a perfect, no-notes, easy five-star album. Morrissey's preachy, on-the-nose lyricism is leady enough to drag it down from that level. How could you award five stars to an album with such a dreadful title track?
When this album stuck to safer waters, it was inoffensive, pleasant even. Gilberto has a lovely velvet voice that fits so well to relaxed bossa nova style instrumentation. In that way you can consider part of this album definitive of the genre, but still nothing feels earth shattering or even archetypal. At most, the highs are competent and fine to listen to. Unfortunately this came packaged with a few tracks that were frankly awful. I really wanted to skip "Parade (A Banda)" and "You Didn't Have to Be So Nice," and there was nothing so positive to ease the displeasure in this case.
There's a lot of good music here, with the characteristic two-chord beats of reggae supported by some excellent backing music. Burning Spear's vocals are typical for reggae but well above replacement level. You could be fooled by the softly swaying beats into thinking that this is just for easy listening, but the intensely political overtones will disabuse you of that notion quickly. This album opened my eyes to reggae as a medium for political expression and I found its environmental overtures to be fascinating as well. I enjoyed the challenge this album presents.
I had to do a double take when I saw this album came out in 1987. Had I not known better, I would have placed this album in the latter years of glam rock. It really sounds a bit like something one would have heard after Detroit Rock City on the radio, tapped their foot to, and then promptly forgotten after the radio host moved to commercials. Electric, unfortunately, takes a detour through post punk to arrive at the sound of late 70s glam rock in a most unsatisfying way. I have seen some comparisons to Led Zeppelin and their ilk but it strikes me as well downstream of any of those influences. With that said, I did notice my head bobbing to "King Contrary Man" and "Outlaw" but did not feel anything for the big single tracks.
The Beastie Boys are another band with which I have had next to no experience so this was a pleasant surprise. The production felt surprisingly progressive for its time at parts, no doubt because the Beastie Boys coined the direction hip hop would take after them. When you hear the drumming and some of the guitar lines, you can start to understand why people thought Nu Metal would be a good idea. The lyricism is also irreverent, funny, and holds up better than I thought it might have, and on that note, it is so impressive how in-sync all the Boys are, as if they are in spirit all just one Boy. There are a just a few moments where the music shows its age (The Sound of Science), but sometimes you just gotta settle for a finger roll rather than a slam dunk. Really nice album from some of the best guys the East Coast has to offer.
How could one ever claim to not like the Beatles? Is it possible? You have to like the Beatles. To argue otherwise, I think, suggests a sort of poverty of taste or at least a certain naïveté on the part of the listener. The seeds of every popular music you have ever enjoyed in your life reside in this very album. But there are those who bathe daily in the font that the four saints opened, who will not venture far from the wellspring of Beatlemania, and there are those who take full advantage of having been born in the afterworld and climb to the peaks that hem the Beatles' fertile valley and see other things, beyond the cradle these fellows from Liverpool built. I identify thoroughly in the latter camp and will tell you freely that I will not listen to anything off Abbey Road of my own volition. Can you hate the tree that so lovingly bears the fruits you will savor? Surely not, but I hope you will concede that, with few exceptions, you might still not like to feast on the tree's bark. I am grateful for those who saw the greatness in these songs, because by the time I heard them, they were the colorless substrate that have flowed from the speakers of any mix radio station for three or so generations ad infinitum. Maybe it is because they are so well loved over the previous decades that elsewhere, in the shade, malcontent foments, but I think there is something more. The tinny introductory notes of "Here Comes the Sun" elicit a visceral reaction in my reptilian cortex; I want to claw my eardrums out and defenestrate myself. I wish I could unhear "Oh! Darling" and I feel bad for Paul for him having had done that. There are so many more lowlights, and aside from the things I can't stand, there is simply so much filler that is not worth choking down. But then there are the transcendent moments like Something, possibly Harrison's finest hour, which I first heard downstream in Clapton's inferior tribute. They remind you, for a fleeting moment, that you witness something that has moved so many better people to create great things. Then the moment passes, and you hear the bit about the fellow with the silver hammer.
This is the most important album in popular music by a group of men who measurably shifted the course of history with their songs and I cannot rate it even a smidge higher than this.
I find myself wondering if this is one of the top one thousand and however many albums since the dawn of the recording era and I am not sure it is, but I understand why it is on this list. This feels like something one might hear in a prestige television upper crust club scene or an interlude for a long drive. There is something about the music that feels like it was in the groundwater in this era, maybe from the tonal qualities of the synth samples and the piano lines. Maybe this is the wellspring that fed the late 90s/early aughts but it feels like this stuff had already been well trafficked either way. In any event, even if the music is not particularly exciting, it is not even a bit unpleasant, and even if the songs do not feel unique, they are certainly representative of the genre.
This album was intriguing. The best way I can describe it is as an album that rests upon the confluence point between two decades, wherein the musical currents in rock and metal music of the 80s and before meet the emergent grunge and punk sounds of the 90s and grind against one another in what is ultimately a productive conflict that plays out both within as well as between the individual songs. While listening to one track, one can hardly predict where the next song will lead. While that description might give the impression that Bossanova is aesthetically homeless, the album at least, for the most part, is able to make a case for itself, even if the diverse sonic threads do not quite meet here or there.
The Stranger is a magical album. At its best moments, it whisks one away to New York City at its prime, and you can feel the city's heartbeat through the keys. "Only the Good Die Young," for example, feels like a sip of white wine over a lively street festival. "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" is an odyssey and even though it feels longer than it is, I don't ever want it to end. I really like the dark turn of the title track as well. There are a few B-sides and lowlights that I'm not in love with, like "Vienna," but they're hardly unforgivable.
When I listened to this album, I was thinking mostly: was there any other era-defining rock or alt music that came out around this time? Maybe not. We are speaking of a Grammy-nominated album, after all. But this is an impoverished era for this sort of music and It's Blitz, I think, reflects that. What is really impressive is that this album sounds very expensive in the sense that the production elements of the recording are top notch. Whatever you want to say about the album, this music is exquisitely mixed and the performances have been captured with a meticulous attention to detail. For an era in which there was simply not a lot of money to go around in the music industry, that is an impressive feat. I cannot muster the same amount of praise for the songs themselves, though. Heads Will Roll is a really groovy track with a nice bass line where the electronic sounds mesh well with the sonic landscape, but that was the only true highlight in my book. I think we're at the threshold where the electronic elements sound cheap (maybe they'll begin to sound nostalgic eventually!) and the songwriting does not do enough to step out of the shadow of the late-aughts formula. I also must admit that the vocals struck me as generic and a bit phoned-in throughout. This is a genre that heavily favors live performances, though, so I concede that I might be a bit harsh on Karen O. All in all, I think this album is a perfectly good representation of its movement and its era, but it's a movement and era I do not enjoy revisiting.
I spent so long trying to find something to say about this album but I knew in my heart that all there was to say was: certified fiver.
I went back and forth with this one. When I gave them both a genuine, critical listen, the two big tracks (which I had heard and admired so many times) did not hold the same power over me as I thought they might have. "Take it Easy" ended up a bit more ambivalent; when I heard the first couple notes, I was blown away by the depth those scarce guitar sounds opened, so much so that the rest of the song felt flat in comparison. "Witchy Woman," once one of my favorite Eagles tracks, felt a little flat this time around, the guitar didn't sell it and the bass was groovy, but too far down in the mix to save the day. Then down the track list, a few of the ballads hit me like a freight train. I had never heard "Most of Us Are Sad" or "Train Leaves Here This Morning" before, but both of them were the perfect tempo to savor and both featured excellent vocal setups. By the time I hit "Peaceful Easy Feeling," these guys captured my ear again.
I was ready to like this album after the first real track "Break & Enter." It was provocative and very creative, using the sound of breaking glass for a unifying beat over an energizing and sinister synth bass line. I was willing to believe the rest of the album might have potential, and "Their Law," with the dirty guitar riffs and harsh synth sounds, whetted my appetite. But about halfway through "Full Throttle" I could see I would not get what I was hoping for, and I ultimately didn't. The fearlessness in the sample choices unmasked itself as the well of gutless, wrongheaded contrarianism that poisoned the well of 90s music. It was just some unpleasant, needlessly jarring noise. A shame, because there are a handful of bright spots in the earlier numbers, but this one has far more skips than tracks worth sitting through.
Gun to my head, if I had to recommend someone a Muse album, this one might as well be it. "Starlight" and "Knights of Cydonia" are the cuts everybody knows, and for many people, this was enough to love them through their very long blunder years. Every performance is near virtuosic and every track is flawlessly produced. Beyond that, I struggle to think of another place where one might find the same breadth of muscial styles and influences that are all tied into one nice little bundle than on Black Holes and Reveleations. Beyond that, that there is something evocative about the aughties baked into the marrow of this album, though it would be hard to isolate.
With all that having been said, genius is fickle, and as incredible and well-crafted these performances are, maybe genial individually, I would not say this work as an album has what it takes to clear the wall.
While I listened to this album, I could not help but wonder whether B.B. King had ever captured the pure magnetism of his music on a "real" studio recording. There are plenty of acts that never could. I think we gain so much from this being a live album: it feels almost like a living room session, as the MC invites us to listen along to another number and B.B. plucks out a few of his magic notes. The songs, which the form of the album generally keeps at some remove, each flow into one another effortlessly, in the kind of organic movement that can only arise from a live performance. But at the same time, this makes us all to cognizant of what we're not getting. There is a sense of absence, an emptiness of not being in the same room at the same time as this music. The lack of presence usually is smoothed out by studio conditions, but here what we have is raw music, for better and for worse. If you spent a couple years of your life wondering why B.B. King is so high on everybody's Best Guitarists lists, though, this is all it should take to convince you. I struggle to find a better word to describe it other than "magnetic," his playing is absolutely timeless.
No notes.
This had me going back and forth. I was prepared to write this off as some pretentious, overly erudite singer-songwriter music. Usually I bounce right off of the gothic Americana-style acoustic stuff. There were certainly some tracks that confirmed my prejudice (I found A Minor Place to be a bit grating, for example, which sounds a bit too much like the granddaddy of the righteously maligned Stomp Clap Hey music). The first half of the album also was a lot stronger than the latter half, which is a bummer. But there were also some genuinely devastating numbers on this project. Who am I kidding? The title track moved me to tears. There is so much going on in these thirty-seven minutes, many big swings and big misses but also some incredible, raw, emotionally honest music.
For those of us who are still on the war profiteering platform, Bonnie Prince Billy is one of the brave souls that does not distribute his music there; the other streamers do have this one though. It can also
I struggled to find kind things to say about this album, I'm afraid. If nothing else, everyone seemed to be having fun making Scream, Dracula, Scream!, and it got a lot of radio play. The contemporary critics loved it. That's worth something.
Musically, the most pleasant bit was the stolen riff of "Pretty Woman" that the gentlemen bit for the intro to "Used." There were some unique choices determining the elements of this soundscape, but their union is incoherent, perhaps even schizophrenic. The lyrics are charmlessly dimwitted, so forgettable that I cannot even think of any to quote. The songwriting is aimless and insipid and does not coalesce into any meaningful whole or constitute any musical identity. And the vocal performances are, frankly, bad.
All right, pal. Just take your five stars and get lost.
I think this album firmly establishes itself on a list of the most worthwhile one-thousand-or-so albums. Is it earth shattering? Will I wake up at night thinking about the tracks on this record? I don't think so. But this is swing jazz at its apogee, with the finest arrangements and virtuosic work from every side of the orchestra. It is so damn impressive in so many ways and I am glad it exists. It is stuff I would have loved to have heard live with these fine musicians in their prime.
This is a historic piece of music that everyone in the world probably knows and loves very much. It was also a production with no small amount of drama surrounding it. With artefacts like this one, I am always apprehensive: the history surrounding it is so great, you can lose the music behind the fog of the numberless of readings that have emerged in the years since the work's emergence. The genius of Cobain's songwriting has always eluded me and it did here again. Perhaps to his credit, the offerings are diverse covers with a few original Nirvana numbers mixed in. This is not really what I'd call "unplugged," since it sounds like clean electric guitars with electric bass and minimalist percussion. (Then again, this is 90's era acoustic pickups we're talking about, so I would be prepared to be wrong in my judgment.) But the boys sound pretty darn good under these circumstances and for once, I felt the gravitas that Nirvana possessed firsthand. I confess the aughties grunge era is a dark era in rock music in my view, and I tend to put Nirvana at the center of that black hole, but this was a pleasant surprise. Kurt and friends push the boundary of what one can achieve with a cover song, giving the songs new life, remaining additive rather than derivative. The original numbers, too, never sounded better.
Siouxie and the Banshees have been on my list for ages and, for one reason or another, I never got around to giving any of their stuff a fair listen. I heard "The Passenger" and liked it, but not much else. Siouxie is a riveting performer and the band behind her is no worse than she. I was surprised at the progressive moves this album took in its soundscape (the mimetic percussion line after Siouxie sings "throw them down the stairs" made me chortle, as an example). This is a group that does not fear pushing boundaries, and sometimes you'll get a miss here and there, but the biggest sin in my view was keeping "Voodoo Dolly" as a seven-minute cut, where the gang made their point after about three minutes. To give that runtime to the extended tracks on the deluxe edition would have been time better allocated. There is enough brilliance here to clear four stars.
I want to start out by affirming that this album definitely belongs to the cohort of albums you must hear before you die. You can trace the historical continuity from here to the present. You hear this heritage unmistakably in all of the hip-hop that came out of the East Coast. De La Soul is one of the foundational bricks in that musical tradition, end of story. It is also easy to appreciate the lyricism, even though most of us have gotten used to more sophisticated rhymes of our post-2010 era. Let's not forget the presence of "Me Myself and I," which has ascended to the pantheon of the greatest tracks in hip-hop music. They even got Q-Tip to produce a track, a sensational one even.
With that said, how much of the runtime of 3 Feet High is devoted to skits? They feel inescapable. I think we have been a bit to harsh on the skit as a form in the intervening decades; there are many cases where a skit elevates the music around it. There are great examples such as the eerie Midnight Marauder guide from the now-classic album of the same name that gave the project its backbone, or the pinnacle of the form in the chaotic acts on the margins in the 36 Chambers. Here the skits, with the exception of Take It Off (which is somewhere between track and skit) are like tying a leaden brick to the rest of the album. They are suffocating. The sex skit in particular is enough to blunt even the sharpest offering (though nowhere near as grating as the blowjob skit in Ready to Die).
There are times I wish I had a button like Christgau or Fantano to wave an album through; a sort of non-committal rating that could get an album off one's desk. Something to the tune of: This is fine. I do not wish to expend the effort to develop a genuine opinion on this one. Or, whatever you want. Two stars feels a bit mean, since I usually reserve under-three ratings for albums with serious flaws or songs I'd like to have skipped, and there are some very nice arrangements and performances, whereas the less stellar ones are just that and no worse. At the same time, three feels overly generous, because I cannot stand Jack White's voice, and I wouldn't mind exiling this genus of rock music from my own musical imaginary. I appreciate the references, the various little tuggings on the cultural tapestry, like the Citizen Kane references in "The Union Forever," but I remain unmoved. I have chosen to be kind.
Three of the most influential, well received, ironclad songs in popular music in a row, followed up by "I'm in Touch with Your World." That is the song that keeps this from a fiver; the influence, the staying power, the rewriting of the genre, you will find all the other building blocks here. Truly, not every one can be a slam dunk; sometimes, you slam the ball on the rim and it flies out of your hands, those are the breaks. But we are talking about doing that when your team is already winning by sixteen and your own personal double-double is secured. Recently I encountered these songs primarily as individuals on advertisements (get those dollar bills gentlemen) and listening to them in their original context on an album with decent headphones is a completely different experience. You will gain a lot of appreciation for the delicate arrangements that made this one a top selling record. It is bonkers how well The Cars held up.
What does it mean when the best song on an album is another musical setting of the Lost Cause? As a mayonnaise-white Yank, I always sniffed the stink of old Johnny Reb on it, it was always seemed a bit to friendly to the legacy of the Confederacy; but I never felt like I could voice it the right way because of how much folks love the song. I am grateful for Ta-Nehisi Coates for articulating so beautifully what had long remained as a vague something in the back of my head, that he could not appreciate The Band "any more than a Sioux could marvel at the cinematography of They Died with their Boots On." It speaks to the omnipresence of the dark, seductive pull of the Confederacy on this continent that a white Canadian fell to its magic and sang its myths more than a century after the Civil War. I fear the same vile hex underlies my thoughts that maybe, this is a human-interest story of a devastated perpetrator, whose brain was so thoroughly broken by vainglory and vestiges of nobility that he did not recognize his own responsibility for his lot. Then I catch myself: why am I running defense for an imaginary slaver that lives in the mind of some Canadian man? Greater minds than the one of this mayonnaise-colored boy from Ohio can sort this bit out, but I find myself struggling to muster any appreciation for this song, their masterpiece.
What a shame that the stars and bars blot out the light of this album. It presents to us Americana in a true sense: here is an Americana that ignores a line in the sand up north and recognizes the kinship between peoples on this big old landmass. It is musically compelling, with great performances all around, and its fruitfulness is evident in the music that followed.
One thousand albums is simultaneously a lot of albums, and not very many. It is a vanishingly small amount of the recorded music over our history, and simultaneously a tremendous feat for a limited group of people to come up with. There are times where Robert Dimery rises to the occasion and gives us something that, without a doubt, is among the greatest things ever recorded. Other times, it is just a middling release that got some airtime in the UK, and Dimery or someone else personally thought something of it. If we extend the size of the list by an order of magnitude, or two, this might be somewhere at the bottom; it is not an affront to music itself. But I cannot see how Let's Get Killed satisfies any of the metrics to be among the top thousand most important recorded works of music. I wish there was something bad about this album I could dig into because it is supremely unsatisfying to talk about negatives, but Let's Get Killed is characterized by an all-encompassing lack. There is no heritage, no future, no ingenuity, no sonic gravity. It just is, like a fallen leaf beneath one's foot on a sidewalk. A crunch and it is forgotten.
Kate Bush sets the experimental tenor early on The Dreaming; immediately in "Sat on Your Lap," she is pushing the boundaries of what her voice can do. She growls, she shouts, she sweetly whispers, and builds up what amounts to a delectable sonic tension. Her vocal exploration is almost entirely fruitful, and creates quite a musical spectacle. The instrument choices are wild, but intentional, and prove evocative throughout the album, though I would call the bagpipes on "Night of the Swallow" a personal highlight. "Intentional" is a word that sets this album apart from a lot of experimental music: the compositions are all carefully arranged, and nothing feels like an afterthought, and it nonetheless remains provocative music even today. Of course, not all ventues into new territory will bear fruit. I found some of Kate's vocal experiments on "Houdini" and "Get Out of My House" a bit too far-fetched. On top of that, some of the synth lines did not age as well as some of the albums contemporaries (e.g. Kraftwerk, Duran Duran). But the misses are incredible, and the hits are incredible, and I am still floored with the broad musical territory Kate Bush opened up on this effort.
Giving this an honest listen gave me a much better idea why folks like the Sex Pistols. There's plenty to like here, and the pervasive ordered chaos has its charm for sure. A lot of the lyrics read as pretty provocative even today: "Bodies" is a really graphic, messy retelling of an abortion, and "God Save the Queen" would upset a lot of people in our new neo-nationalistic political reality.
