Senere britpop lavet af teenagere. Dyrker virkelig cool Britannia mentaliteten. Det lyder også meget punket ift at det er fra 90’erne og under britpop eraen. Lavet af meget unge (19 årige nogle af dem) så teksterne er bare at have det grineren og det kan man også høre på teksterne. Det er bare ungdom frihed og have det grineren. De bruger også orgel så det lyder også lidt som noget fra start 70’erne og slut 60’erne (classic Rock). Synes der er mange gode sange og det er sjovt at lytte til, så det får en høj karakter. Det er sådan noget jeg gerne ville lytte til på en sommerdag med kolde øl og massere af fest. Der er også mange gode langsommere sange på til noget chill rock som giver mig lyst til at få lavet sådan en playliste.
This was a huge record for Billy Joel and, by extension, for rock & roll history. At least 5 of the 9 songs here (see below) are Billy Joel classics you're guaranteed to hear on any greatest hits album ever made (or on easy listening radio on any given day). I totally appreciate the craftsmanship here but it's not my thing. I passively hear these songs so often, and might even sing along sometimes, but that makes it hard to CHOOSE to listen to this record, ya know? We don't have to be strangers, but I don't think we're gonna be friends.
Hit List:
"Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)"
"Just The Way You Are"
"Vienna"
"Only The Good Die Young"
"She's Always A Woman"
I haven't reviewed any of the 7 Beatles albums, 6 Rolling Stones albums, 5 Led Zeppelin albums, or 4 Pink Floyd albums on this list, but this is my 2nd Aerosmith album in less than a month. As someone who lived through Aerosmith's resurgence in the wake of the movie Armageddon, I've had enough Aerosmith. And I swear to god if I get a Bon Jovi album next...
Even casual Aerosmith fans will already know 1/2 of this album and the other half sounds essentially the same and will go down just as smooth. Aerosmith is basically the original version of Buckcherry - remember Buckcherry? It's just kinda raunchy hard rock party music and I really can't think of anything else to say about it.
Aerosmith hits heard here:
"Love In An Elevator"
"Janie's Got A Gun"
"What It Takes"
The band name, album cover, and release year lead me to guess that I'd hear some corny synth-pop new wave (prejudging albums by their covers is my favorite morning game). I was pleasantly surprised to get something a little different when I pressed play.
Side one is a pretty straightforward jazz record. Not experimental jazz, it's the kind of basic smooth jazz you learn when your teacher doesn't trust you to play outside of 4/4 yet; the kind of jazz I learned to play when I was 14 years old. Jazz is complicated - you show off too much and you sound pretentious, you don't show off enough and it also sounds pretentious, but in a way that makes you look like a poseur (pretend-tious? let's coin that). On second listen, I could be convinced that "Dropping Bombs On The Whitehouse" shows off enough to prove their jazz chops; I don't care enough to dig deeper on it though.
Side two is a little more dynamic and maybe could have been a separate album. "A Gospel" (Track 8) is a rap song that I never need to hear again, but after that we get some jazz new wave fusion! I was unaware of the concept of jazz new wave, but it seems inevitable that someone would try it. Whether intentional or not, this record does capture that plastic soul quality of the early Bowie new wave recordings. I do feel like these guys were genuinely trying and didn't mean to leave it so soulless.
This was a side project from Paul Weller (of The Jam) and Mick Talbot. I previously reviewed one The Jam album and was thoroughly unconvinced that it was doing anything new/different/exciting; I guess I can't say the same about this record. I still just can't get over all the pretense here. Even dropping the "The" and calling the band "Style Council" might have done loads to lighten things up, but I get the feeling that's not what they were going for. Wherever I land on my rating, know that it got a full star removed for "A Gospel". If I owned a physical copy, I might intentionally scratch it in a way to make that track forever unplayable.
I really cranked up the volume and tried to immerse myself completely to try and separate my personal bias.. This is just terrible, he uses the worst of every genre, embarrassing use of vocal modulator, weak rhymes and turbulent, almost non-existent flow.
It’s horribly bloated. But it’s also pretty good which is annoying. Eric Clapton does have a load of talent. It’s a shame he’s so fucking annoying and stupid
I'll be a rock 'n' rollin' bitch for you if you give this five stars. This isn't my favorite Bowie album but it's probably his best overall. Straight up classic.
Something did happen on the day he died. I screamed liked a baby.
If it needs justification at all, I’d played a handful of Bowie songs on guitar at my mother’s deathbed the day before. She wasn’t yet gone – she had another ten days - but she was living the end of her life as pleasurably as she could amid the excruciating pain and her strength and consciousness slipping away.
She had given me my first Bowie record when I was fourteen, though we’d listened to him in the car for years, especially on those long drives to the hospice when my grandfather was dying two decades earlier. Bowie has always been tied, for me, to grief and dying - and, by extension, to love and living.
The surprise release of Blackstar allowed me to briefly share the idea of Bowie’s new work with my mother. But when he died so soon after, we agreed she didn’t need to hear it. If we could only fit a thousand and one albums into her last ten days, she didn’t need something new - certainly not one of her favourite artists confronting the thing she herself was approaching. She was content with the music that had brought her happiness during the five short decades she had on earth.
People call Blackstar a grand final statement, but that misreads Bowie’s nature. Sue and ’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore were older pieces tied to another project. The return of Major Tom didn’t feel like a revelation; he had always been part of Bowie’s orbit, a ghost in the system. Bowie had already begun handling the legacy on his previous record, and the Nadsat of Girl Loves Me was simply another of his recurring fascinations. Even Dollar Days, written in the studio, struck me as playful rather than portentous. Bowie rarely said anything definitive, and he wasn’t about to start.
Lazarus interests me far more. It was the title song from the musical he wrote with Enda Walsh, which closed its first run at almost the same moment my mother died - within a few hours. Of the four new songs he wrote for the show, it was the only one he carried across to Blackstar. I don’t know why. But it feels like the more searching piece, Bowie revisiting his own mythology through the figure of Thomas Newton and finding something unsettling there. Unlike Blackstar, the show received mixed reviews.
Bowie had always been a flawed architect of concept albums anyway. His planned musical of 1984 was never produced. 1.Outside remains gloriously confusing. Even Ziggy Stardust abandons its narrative almost as quickly as Sgt. Pepper. And thank goodness: It Ain’t Easy does more for the record than any plot device could. These failures aren’t incidental: they’re intrinsic. Bowie’s form of invention was incompatible with totalities. His art emerged from excess, leakage, overspill - from the impossibility of containing all his personae within any stable frame.
He was part of that generation of art-school musicians who treated popular music as the quickest route to a public imagination. He loved music, but also recognised it as the last mass-cultural space where experimental aesthetics could intervene in everyday life. It was a place to share ideas that could never have found a home in more formal disciplines. He wasn’t a novelist. His paintings were respectable. He was more a star than an actor. But in the interplay of albums, sleeves, performances and videos, he found a gallery for ideas that ranged from the profound to the ludicrous, sometimes in the space of a single track.
It’s telling to compare his first and final on-screen appearances. His screen debut, in the 1967 student horror film The Image, shows an artist tormented by a painting come to life - played, of course, by Bowie. In the video for Lazarus, Bowie, dressed in the Kabbalistic imagery of his mid-70s persona, writes frantically. When he runs out of parchment, he writes on the table, then down the table leg, and on. There is never enough space to capture everything. The beginning and the end share the same insight: creation was both his torment and his great animating force.
To imagine Blackstar as a final statement is to succumb to a fantasy of closure that Bowie’s entire career repudiates. He didn’t make final statements. Nothing he did was final. He revised himself constantly. He contradicted his own mythologies. He had a decade of silence before The Next Day, and it suited him, but even that felt provisional. Dying forced him into new shapes he might never have adopted otherwise. It was a meeting of compulsion and inevitability, and the work emerged from that tension.
It was death, not intention, that made Blackstar the last word. Had he lived, Bowie might have dismissed it or replaced it, and the critics would have obliged. But he didn’t live, and the album became a vessel for our need to find meaning in endings. I struggle to hear it outside that context. And I cannot view it without personal history interjecting: for me, it contains moments of brilliance, moments of silliness, and a great deal of confusion. But I am no better equipped to face death from Blackstar’s insights than I am from the Labyrinth soundtrack - except that Blackstar is, on the whole, the better record.
It is not Mozart’s Requiem. But it is the record by - possibly - my favourite artist that was released just as he and my mother died. And that means something. Perhaps too much.
My mother’s choices to face down death - Starman, Sorrow, The Prettiest Star - brought her comfort simply by existing, not by offering instruction. Let all the children boogie: words to live by, surely.
I’m unsure whether artists are answering a calling or nursing an affliction, but what they produce lets us feel things we might never access otherwise. So when I cried at Bowie’s death, I was crying for my mother. It hardly needs explanation.
She died relatively young; he was respectably old. When I think about my own ending, I wonder which model I’ll follow: Bowie’s anxious compulsion or my mother’s remarkable ease. Bowie achieved more; my mother was content with less. I believe she would have liked Blackstar, though I doubt she would have replayed it. Blackstar is only seven tracks, and none of them are built to carry the weight we place on them. Yet Bowie’s achievement with this final album was to remind us that it is the spirit of creation, rather than any specific creation, that is the meaning of an artist’s life. 3.5
It is nearly impossible to listen to Blackstar and not think about death the whole time. And yet we know that for a couple of days after this album was released this feat was entirely possible. Like most people, I missed that window and by the time I sat down with the album every bar and syllable of it was slathered in one unifying ‘meaning’ imposed from up there, in Heaven. Blackstar had drama that couldn’t be stolen.
Still, I have my suspicions that in those first two days I would have found less of a gulf in quality between Blackstar and, let’s say, Reality. Reality has both the (apparently ‘defiant’) energy of Blackstar and as much (possibly more) lyrical material that can support morbid close-readings. Yet Reality is more or less forgotten, while Blackstar is venerated - particularly by young people I have noticed in recent years.
Listening again this weekend, I can’t help thinking that between the absorbingly odd title track and the lovely closer ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, Blackstar mostly gets by on supplying ‘vibes’ while the listener is unable to draw their critical attention from the limitlessly dramatic notion of Bowie’s confrontation with untimely death. There is neither much structure, nor lyrical heft to stuff like ‘Tis Pity or Sue or Girl Loves Me. Drums go round and round. Portentous riffs go round and round. Saxophones tootle. Surely this is not Bowie’s best work by a long shot. In any case, all was transmogrified by the near-simultaneous release of Bowie’s spirit along with his final music. The album begins and ends memorably (and with sublime poignancy in the musical recall of A New Career..). It has an identity. If it should happen to falter in the middle, well…how did I rate Young Americans?
3/5
Headhunters, hell yeah! One of my measures of whether an album is a classic for me is "could I listen to it every day?" Yes. Yes, I could listen to this every day.
My friend Kate introduced me to this album when we were in high school, and it has been a favourite ever since. I have limited love for most jazz fusion, but this I love. It's funky as hell and a lot of fun; it lives in the damn pocket and the band is playing the hell out of everything. Favourite moment; about 7 minutes into 'Chameleon', the lead synthesizer oscillator goes wildly out of tune, and Herbie wrangles it back into key, landing the plane with both engines on fire.
Herbie Hancock has done many great things over his career, and one of greatest achievements (in my opinion) is to make music that is accessible without dumbing down. This is likeable and catchy without being stupid or pandering. And you can dance to it!
Five stars, no notes.
Super smooth. Sarah Vaughan is up there in my favourite jazz vocalists, and I think this is the album of hers that I have most enjoyed. Stripped of her usual highly orchestrated, string-heavy arrangements to a bare trio backing, intimately recorded, you get to hear her beautiful tone and phrasing without distraction. There is a touch more breathiness and slight husk in the quieter moments that sounds close and real. Her ability to deliver a real emotional content is wonderful.
Probably my favourite Sarah Vaughan record, and I will probably pick a copy up when I see one around. Love the versions of Just a Gigolo and How High the Moon that close out this album.
Update: Just last month I found a copy of this in the $2 bin at The Vintage Record in Annandale. I'll take that, thank you. Cover is beaten up, but it's a bargain at twice the price!
It's funny that the time I have given his first 8 or 10 albums can be measured in thousands of hours and yet somehow I never once listened to this one all the way through.
This album is on the other side of the mountain. The side where the trail leads back down to earth. Maybe he got his personal life in order or his drinking more under control, but it sort of feels like he doesn't have as much emotionally gripping music to make.
I Want You and Blue Chair are much the best here and worthy additions to the cannon. Home is Where You Hang Your Head is pretty good, too. The rest of this is kinda ponderous to me.
A lot of songwriters feel compelled to put out new material on a regular schedule whether the material merits it or not. It has the effect of diluting their overall impact and damages their place in the firmament. I think about this a lot because if I get into the regular habit of writing then I will definitely write more than if I don't have a habit, but if I put myself into a situation where I have to produce on any kind of a deadline then while I will have more finished songs, few or even none of them will stand the test of time. Or worse yet, you accidentally re-write other people's material, as appears to have happened here with Tokyo Storm Warning basically being a poorly disguised Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown.
Anyway, I love Elvis but this album should not be on this list and makes me question the person who put it on there. Get Happy!, Trust, This Year's Model are only the first three examples of EC albums I would have put on here before this one.
I can’t believe the top review for this record (as of Dec 2023) is from someone trying to use their PhD in Mathematics as justification for not liking hip-hop.
Weak.
Oh fuck yeah, now we're talking. Wait no, I swear I'm not being pretentious.
This is the lowest rated album on this site because I guess mostly people aren't very fond of German people smashing metal plates together - who would have guessed.
But halle-fucking-lujah, this is something this list needs more of. Albums that make you go "well, that was an experience and now I'm a changed man". Nobody is lying on their deathbed wishing they heard more crappy 80s post-punk or late 60s psychedelic rock. THIS is what we all deserve to be listening to as we embrace eternal oblivion.
I'm giving this a high rating not only because I genuinely really love it, but also to help Kid Rock move to his rightful place as the actual worst album on this list.
Together we can make a difference. Save the turtles.
Brings back vivid memories of when me and my mate Ray went on a trip to Dresden. We met this rotund goth in a bar, head to toe with tattoos and piercings, real filth and after a while took her into the disabled bogs for a spit roast. We were both pumping away in her with Napalm Death on in the background and her wailing "MEIN GOTT" at the top of her lungs. I remember spaffing all over her back just as Siege of Power kicked in. As i shoot over her, she takes Ray's cock out of her gob and says "do you want fries with that?" in a faux American accent. Anyway, we go outside and there's this gammy little geezer in a wheelchair sitting there furious, giving me daggers, because he's had to wait so long, so I lean into him and I go "I hope you have as much fun in there as we just did you little cunt".
Shit like this on the list is both refreshing and infuriating.
Refreshing because it is good, fun, interesting, and also not something I would regularly be exposed to! It's why I started this project and keeps me coming back.
It's infuriating because the fact that it is included here means that Robert Dimery, the original author of the 1001 albums list is aware that music like this exists. He's clearly aware that there is an entire world of music out there. SO WHY HAVE I LISTENED TO 200 80s BRITISH NEW WAVE ALBUMS AND 200 SCOTTISH ROCK ALBUMS FROM THE 90S??!!?
Back when I was in college, there was this dude who would come into the bar I worked at on a Friday night and play fucking 10 Neil Young songs in a row. He would also hit on girls by doing magic tricks. I remember how angry I got every time he made me listen to an hour of Neil Young because I was just trying to have a good time, and he fucking made me listen to this sad, soppy fuck who writes nothing but songs that sound indistinguishable from each other and never seemed to enjoy a happy moment in his entire like. Fuck that guy, and fuck Neil Young.
2/5
Back when I was in college I used to go to a bar and listen to Neil tunes and do magic tricks for women. There was a bartender there, he was the best. I loved that guy. Some of the best years of my life.
Most 60's groups had three choices: copy the beatles, copy the beach boys, or sexually abuse minors. These guys changed the game and did all three- Four stars!
I am definitely not the target demographic for this album, but I still thought it was very good. There's a lot of skill and artistry put into these tracks, so much so that it is almost invisible. 4 stars for me, plus an extra star just to spite the mathematics PHD guy.
