Enjoyable, brief, feel like I'm transported into the 70s leopard-skin y-fronts of a west-coast oud-smelling lady killer. Heard the big tracks before and they are undeniably the best stuff, but they sit nicely among a general lava lamp shag pile weed cloud waterbed aesthetic. Would definitely put on in the background of an opium den.
Can Leonard Cohen sing? Definitely not. Can he write a bleak 60s folk song or ten about young lads dying in 'nam? Hell yeah. Doesn't make for the best listening, though. Still I liked some of the delicate instrumentation. Lots of weird didgeridoo that really rustled my jimmies aussie-style.
Proof that being Artless isn't the worst thing in the world. Big small Paul delivering some jaunty early American afrobeat nonsense with some other gentle but tightly composed folk ditties. Very, very enjoyable stuff, but not as good as the later more coherent Graceland, which would (will?) be a slapping 5 from me if or whenever it appears in this godforsaken list. But I remember enjoying this album greatly in my undergrad days, and boy howdy will I listen again.
Radio Free Europe is a bop, and I liked lots of the bass work, but I just don't think I'm a Michael Stipe man. I can see why some people might be Michael Stipe men, but the frequent vibratoless wailing delivery thing is just annoying to my ears. And the punk-inflected shout-singing nonsense on 'Catapult' is just more vocal silliness, as if there wasn't enough on this album: it sounds like he's yelling 'cat poo', which actually made me laugh. Hit the Ts, Michael, hells bells! Honestly the whole thing is too much of its era: it's constantly wrestling with the massive influence of punk on all guitar rock while still trying to be a bit different, a bit experimental, a bit late cold war and cool, but ultimately producing nothing but constant restless shuffling and wailing, like 9-9.
Obviously superb, but pretty unrelentingly sparse and bleak. I always remember the Mark Greif essay about Radiohead in N+1, which articulates my thoughts about their output up to 2005 much better than I ever could in my own language, so I won't waste my flipping time here:
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-3/essays/radiohead-or-philosophy-pop/
A deeply weird, uneven, and difficult album. There's something deeply kitsch about it: he's deploying these quite tired or mawkish or embarrassing musical forms fairly sincerely and with an odd devotion, but he always undercuts their apparent sincerity with some daft lyric, some gear shift that doesn't quite sit right, or something that feels hauntingly out of time period or emotional register. The result is honestly quite disorienting. Sometimes I do find it very beautiful, and we get this Kundera-esque doubled experience of appreciating the beauty of these old aesthetics and feeling them somehow redeemed by his beautiful baritone voice, while also being reminded of their excess, their ridiculousness, and perhaps of the ridiculousness of our own emotions at the same time.
So my first response to much of the first half of the album is to laugh, but not because it's purely funny. It's funny and sad whip-lashingly simultaneously and excessively, which is painful, and perhaps funny by a second order precisely because it's an emotion I recognise quite distinctly from my own experience but have never been able fully to articulate or make someone else feel.
But it's far too long and repetitive in parts, even if that length is part of the album's deliberate excess, and some of the tracks are simply poor. Supernatural Defibrillator is annoying and lyrically weak in what feels like a knowing way, but without any of the emotional payoff of, say, Sigourney Weaver. The speaker of SW seems to be wrestling to articulate an experience of lonely grief and anger which can only find expression, perhaps owing to a kind of childish frustration, in a delightfully camp simile. In SD, by contrast, the clichéd expressions of love and wild distorted guitars suggest little more than a nudging and winking 'isn't glam rock fun?' energy, a kind of boring pastiche for which I have little time.
Janelle Monae is an obvious music enjoyer, but I can't say I enjoyed this music. Reminds me of one of those auteur films set in and around Hollywood or LA, where there's pleasure to be had in watching an artist who really loves this stuff mess around with the history and the forms, but which ultimately leaves one a bit cold precisely because of its insularity. It feels virtuosic while having little to say beyond that virtuosity (or perhaps having little to say because of it, being lost somewhat in the sauce of its own creation). Strong Jacob Collier vibes, but slightly better lyrics.
I'm sure this was probably technically impressive in 1989, but this now simply sounds like something a local maniac with essentially no musical training might produce in a DAW then hit up some online forums with, hoping for some feedback on their pre-programmed instrumental loops and drum samples. It's compositionally nonsensical, and basically unlistenable due to tuning issues, baffling and constant squelching, annoyingly mixed lead synths, and completely unsympathetic, largely random-sounding drum loops. The only song I could stand for more than about a minute or two was Pacific 202, which had quite a nice bird samples that conjured up a far away land. Otherwise complete rubbish.
Funky as all hell. Triumphant instrumental chops in grooves so tight they'll cut off the blood supply to your major arteries. The only reason this isn't a storming 5 star is that the final few tracks simply can't live up to the brilliance of the first three.
A fine album, but inescapably cringe. The LOTR nonsense, the grim obviousness of the lyrics' leering, sweating sexuality, the ostensibly 'revolutionary' treatment of a predominantly Black musical genre...it all teeters on the brink of gross, not helped by the profound weirdness of most of Led Zeppelin's contemporary fanbase (not the album's fault, I'll admit). At its best, it is really good: Stairway to Heaven and Going to California are brilliantly composed, interesting pieces of music. But at its worst, it sounds a strange 70s-inflected brand of hopelessly juvenile: a weird fug of bland lyrics, mindless heavy guitars doing, you know, something, and a weird inescapable atmosphere of stale cigarettes, mystical bad folk silliness that has a tinge, just a tinge, of nationalism, and a sound I cannot disassociate from brown carpet tiles, green enamel, and asbestos. Not bad, but hardly, to me at least, worth the endless hype.
Wry, silly, enjoyable, kitsch, keenly self-aware. Britpop at its best.
A fine set of piano ballads, but, like many, found the vocal performance too annoying to endure for very long. Had to listen piecemeal, which undermined both the effectiveness of the album and pretty much any memory I have of it as a cohesive work. And frankly I have no desire to revisit.
Hypnotic and alluring, but you really do have to be quite high or have a need to fall into some sort of experimental techno trance to enjoy this properly. Maybe you could slap it on while you're doing some mundane task, like scrubbing the patio or cleaning out the loft. Still compelling and very listenable.
A real masterclass in clean lead guitar such that it's an entire second voice through the entire album. Popping funk and bluesy howls and chunky thrumming and isn't it just the versatility that sets this sucker alight? Then the voice, growling and a bit wry, as an almost exact counterpoint, a one two punch of timbre and wicked instrumental wit, one always locked in step with, or else seeming to fight against, the other. This struck me as an impressionistic album of mood and tone, and I suppose I listened to it that way, straining my ear for interplays of sound and texture rather than content, which is great fun as far as I'm concerned, but which also perhaps makes any lyrical content and skillful broader songwriting fall a little by the wayside: I guess you might call it a one trick pony. But what a stonking great pony it is.
A lovely gem that I'd not heard before and will listen to a good few times again before I'm sated.
Staggeringly misogynistic and violent, and if I'm honest, I'll never understand albums with skits in them. I've never once laughed. Great samples and rhythmic chops rescue some tunes from the utter mindless drudgery of the violence (The Champ, Kilo). Slangin crack and killing foes/hoes really isn't that interesting, which is a shame, cos the lyrical skill and musicality could have this be so much more.
I continue to fail to understand why people think Nick Cave is good. He sings like an entirely untrained sixth former, and he writes with the kind of philosophical grandiosity you'd expect of a 17 year old who has just discovered that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are important. He even dresses like an edgy sixth former. Maybe the gothic excess and atonal howling are part of the point, but intention cant excuse irritation for me. I found large swathes of this album unlistenable musically, which renders the lyrics, even when interesting, entirely pointless. Does not, and I fear never will, appeal.
An album that never rises much beyond silly. The surf rock influences were pleasing, but some of the postpunk shouting delivery (e.g about cheese) is so, by turns, silly, funny, and then annoying that I feel like taking this too seriously is a waste of time. Still, it doesn't outstay its welcome too sorely.
Deeply and fundamentally silly but definitely funny, and some bits strike me as whip smart even if its the kind of juvenile whip smart that can also come across as annoying and a bit full of itself. Musically and lyrically unbelievably catchy pretty much throughout, and conceptually so wildly stupid and funny that I fear songs like Oh Shit and I'm The Type... will never leave my head. Skits are still a waste of my life, though. These are marginally improved by at least being vaguely musical.
Enjoyable enough. Some beautiful stuff ('Only a Hobo'; 'Lady Day') and an inoffensive folk-blues sound throughout. He does sound like he needs a cough sweet, though. Keep thinking he'll take a break to hack up some phlegm then come back a choirboy.
