The Headphone Masterpiece

This is just awful. Self indulgent doesn't even begin to cover how much it smells its own farts. There is ZERO excuse for the length of this. 30 minutes would have been too long. And I am legit shocked this has the scores it does.

The Headphone Masterpiece is the debut album by neo soul artist Cody Chesnutt. It is 1001 songs long, takes four days to listen too and not all songs are of the same quality. And talking about quality: it is recorded on four track by Cody and Cody alone in a hotel room. Still it is not bad that this album is sometimes more a miss than a hit. It is so full of ideas and goes in every direction with a lot of originality. While the recording is not the best ever, the production value is still amazing for the given situation and it adds an extra layer of sincerity to the songs as they sound more direct and personal. All in all this is a brave album by a starting artist that goes all in and does not fail. The Seed 2.0 in the original version is ok, but not a fraction of the fantastic song it becomes in collaboration with The Roots.

Ok, this one surprised me. When I seen the genre, I thought immediately I'd listen for a minute of each song, then give it a quick 2 or 3 rating and move on. But, this one blew me away. I found it really fun and interesting. Even with a couple of songs with trigger words (Bitch, Nigga) that I usually dismiss immediately ... I thought, in this case, those words did not distract from the artist or the songs as negatively as is the case with some other artists. I was even singing Bitch, I'm broke to my wife as she was looking at things at the store.... haha. Fun album, great sound.... it may be a bit too long, but what would you cut? I'm not ready to give this a 5/5 because I don't give those rating to just anything... but, I feel that someday (for me this is 'new') it will be a 5/5, but for now I'll give it a very strong 4/5.

I went into this album with dread, lo-fi neo-soul/R&B with 36 tracks that's AN HOUR AND FORTY MINUTES LONG? Please no. Combine this with me recently generating Voodoo by D'Angelo, which is the gold standard of neo-soul music (sorry Lauryn), an album by this nobody surely can't compare, right? Seriously I was really not looking forward to this, I even put off listening to it all day. To call this a "neo-soul" and "R&B" album to is to completely miss the point, not because it isn't a part of those genres, it very much is, but rather because there's far more going on than just that. I guess the signs that this wasn't what I was expecting was evident from the second track, With Me In Mind, which really felt more like an experimental song than anything else, very low key and droning while some woman talks over it. It lasts for a while too. When it does finally get into the neo-soul that I expected, it's still a bit different, it has more of a bedroom pop sound that you would expect from the late 2010s and 2020s. Hell, some of these songs even have a hypnagogic pop sound to them, bear in mind that the architect of that genre - Ariel "Pink" Rosenberg - had only been making music for a few years, I think that was still when he was releasing demo tapes too. What I'm saying is, Mr Chestnutt, this "nobody", was actually quite ahead of the time with this music. The Headphone Masterpiece feels like a compilation of everything that Cody likes, it's very self-indulgent and that gives it a very charming earnestness that you don't typically hear in music. Cody Chestnutt wears his influences on his sleeve, there's lots of rock, funk, singer/songwriter folk, and psychedelia in the album, and even a little bit of hip-hop, Mr. Chestnutt is clearly a guy that just loves music and it definitely bleeds through to the listener. One of the songs is titled Eric Burdon, the frontman for The Animals and early War, another case of Cody putting what he loves into his music. About halfway through the album I had to look up who this guy was and why I had never heard of him before. As it turns out, he did feature in the 1001, on the album Phrenology by The Roots! On this album he has a song called The Seed, and that album has The Seed 2.0 which heavily samples that song. As for the man himself, he apparently recorded this whole album in his bedroom on a four track recorder, so that explains the lo-fi sound. That said what he lacks in production values he more than makes up for in songwriting talent and his love for music. Based on everything I've said about this album so far probably gives the impression that it's a sprawling and chaotic mess, and in a way it is, but in the same way that the White Album or 69 Love Songs is. Cody Chestnutt pulls off all the different styles and genres he attempts surprisingly well, to a point where I don't think there was a single song on the album I disliked! Even greats like White Album and 69 Love Songs have their stinkers, so that is an extremely impressive feat. Granted the album doesn't have anything quite as good as Helter Skelter or Papa Was a Rodeo, but the consistent quality more than makes up for it. This is an extremely ambitious project for a debut, he throws a lot of shit at the wall but all of it manages to stick, and it results in a very rewarding experience. I'm giving this a tentative 5. This is my first five from the user list that is from an album I didn't already like and I hadn't listened to prior (I didn't even know who this guy was until yesterday!) but an album with this much heart and soul in it absolutely deserves it. Thank you to the submitter, this is exactly why I'm doing the user list, and though you may have taken up a significant portion of my time both yesterday and today, this album was well worth it. I'm glad to see other reviewers fall in love with this album like I have. Should it be on the list: Yes Top 3 songs: The Seed, The World is Coming to My Party, The Make Up

This album did not deserve to be over 90 minutes long. It got pretty boring after a while.

Lo-Fi can actually be a refreshing change IF the music is good. This is good. I was hooked right from the start. The album is quite long. Much longer than your typical debut album. But, the Headphone Masterpiece might actually be a masterpiece. 4/5 for now. But I think it might just be a 5/5 for me sometime in the future.

Thought I was going to hate it. Me being prejudice to R&B, Soul... I usually don't care for it if it isn't from the 1960s-1980s.... But, I'll admit when I was wrong. This was fantastic. There is a wide variety of styles and sounds - which makes the long album not seem so long. 4/5

This is a lot of material, and at times it kind of wandered around a lot and seemed a bit random. That might change if I had more familiarity with the material. Overall, though, I liked it and the lo-fi worked.

Never heard of this and I appreciated the lofi nature of it. Reading wiki I see that record labels said they thought it was demos and it should be re-recorded. I kinda agree with them. At the very least, this was way too long and lacked cohesion with 36 songs and almost 100 minute run time. Musicians, I beg of you, please get good editors! My personal rating: 4/5 My rating relative to the list: 4/5 Should this have been included on the original list? No.

Cool combination of lo-fi bedroom power pop, shaggy fuzzy slacker psych, jokey hip hop, lush loungey jazz, and stickily horny neo-soul jams. Sometimes in sequence, sometimes all at once. Tons of ideas, not all of them stick - an album of brainstorming.

Sucesión de canciones de estilo cantautor, sin mucha instrumentación, de corta duración cada una de estas, básicamente con guitarreo y poco más. Voz masculina un tanto sensual. Le faltan algunos matices para llegar a ser algo más.