Penance Soirée

I was way more up on this at the start of the album, but over time it started to drag a lot more and began to feel more repetitive and samey. It’s nowhere near as noisy and discordant as people are saying. I thought I was in for an ear-splitting time, but it’s just quite competent grungey / garage rock. It’s ok. There’s enough here that works.

You take the Rolling Stones during their heroin period and you put them through a distortion pedal. If that sounds like your thing, well, have I got the album for you!

I’m at a 1.5 that I’m going to round down to a 1. That is the first, and hopefully last time I will ever have to write a sentence like that.

This album fluctuated for a while in terms of where I was at with it; I thought the first track, “Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers” was fine – not super captivating, but just ultimately fine. I thought the second track, “Spit on It” was obnoxiously mixed and I quickly thought this would be a completely disastrous trainwreck. On the Lash had the worst intro ever, and started to reaffirm my fears, until it ended up actually being pretty good. Caviar was fine, but just sort of a directionless slog. Spike Island was decent – not that good, but it was enjoyable enough that I liked it. Kiss Like Lizards is the highest point of the album – I genuinely think it’s a great track with a lot of fun energy. By that point, I was probably at around a 2.5 that I could bump up to a 3. It was poorly mixed, sure, but it wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t appreciate what the album was going for, it just wasn’t gonna be fully my thing.

Getting Bright at Night is one of the longest, loudest, and least substantial tracks I think we’ve gotten on any album so far. It is a never-ending 9-minute mess with a never-ending guitar that never once lets the song breathe on its own merits, and it immediately fucking dragged down the mood. The sad part is that the album gets in one last good gasp of air with Big Sleep, which I thought was pretty enjoyable. After that point, from Track 9 (White Devil) and onward, the album just… ugh. Tracks 9 and 10 are fine, but completely boring – they exist for the sake of padding. Track 11, Virgin Velcro, is decent enough but it’s not doing anything new or special. By now, every song just blended together and felt the same to me, even the better ones. At this point, I had simply grown tired of the album.

Seasick is decent enough until the final 2 minutes. The final 2 minutes of Seasick broke me. It’s just noise. It’s genuinely just noise. It’s not even noise with vocals to give the appearance of music. It’s truly just noise, and it’s not even noise that’s good and relaxing in the white noise Brian Eno-esque sort of way – it’s some of the most grating and painfully awful noise ever put to tape to be commercially sold. There’s not a single positive behind it. It grows louder and louder, and then it just… transitions into “Party the Baby Off,” as I’m just supposed to accept that I had my ear to the door of a T-1000 getting tortured in a lab for the last 2 minutes like it didn’t fucking exist.

Party the Baby Off has some of the worst lyrics I’ve ever heard in any album closer ever. “But motherfuckers do what they have to, beat your face black and blue” before repeating “take off all your clothes” as the album faded out was genuinely the final straw for me. It genuinely went from an album where 3 of the first 6 tracks were fine to being an utter trainwreck of an album that I simply had no respect for.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think that On the Lash, Spike Island, Kiss Like Lizards, and Big Sleep are all good tracks, and I might throw those in my playlists. However, this album just soured on me to such a deeply harsh fucking degree that I simply don’t think I can even give it a 2, as much as I thought about doing so. If this had had even a decent closing track, I could’ve probably been nice and gone up to a 2, just barely, if only to reward the good tracks for actually being good. It’s just not there for me.

When I gave Maxinquaye a 1, it was because I simply found the album to be deeply boring – there was no energy and it did absolutely nothing for me. I’m at a 1.5 with this one, and because of the lyrics in that last track, I simply refuse to bump it up to a 2. I do think this album has a better energy and is probably still better than Maxinquaye, but it’s the third time I’m giving an album a 1 (fuck you Kid Rock), and it’s only because it had such an extreme decline that just made me feel disappointed that I even listened to it by the end. This did not need to be on the list.

The whole time this felt like I was listening to a knock off early White Stripes album that took direction from Lou Reed.

AIka hyvä garagelevy! 4/5

It’s rock. I guess it’s metal. Wouldn’t say it’s very heavy. The lead singer’s voice often drones. If there was a genre called sleepy metal, several of the songs would fit that description. Didn’t hear anything special in this one.

2.5

The band is so loud, yet they make no real noise. The singer is doing so much, yet saying so little. There are so many notes, yet no actual melodies. So much effort for such little payoff. Complete anonymity. Example #36 of “why *must* I hear this before I die?”

2/5

Hell yeah, this is sick! It sucks so bad about the label issues because I never heard of this (presumably due to that) and I love it. I would've 100% been a huge fan of this album when it dropped. Regardless, I'm glad to have found it now at least. Noisy garage rock is my jam.

I don't get the hate for this. It's a decent rocker, fairly heavy but not overbearingly so, good instrumentation. The bass especially stands out to me. I can definitely see the influence from Iggy Pop/The Stooges. Some of it is kind of dated, sure, but most of the albums from this time are. It kind of falls into a "post grunge we don't know what to do anymore but we all like 70s punk and the White Stripes" category which isn't a bad thing. It does get a little repetitive, that's true. But they certainly deserve more than the whopping 1,440 listeners they have on Spotify...

Lo que he podido escuchar me ha gustado, aunque no está en abierto por ningún lado. En Spotify o YouTube Music no está y de Tidal no tengo ya acceso. Veré si puedo oírlo por otro lado.

Probably would have liked this at the time; now it's just a bit numbing and not hardcore enough.

Noisy rock, but fun to listen to. I had not heard this one before, but I will make sure it gets on my rotation.

Surprised Iv never come across this band or album before. This is right up my street. Straight into my rotation.

Today's album was a headache inducer. I've never heard of The Icarus Line before today, and from what I read, they are a post hardcore/aggro punk group. From that description I deduce that this album is going to be loud and angry.

That is exactly what it is. It is mostly distortion and noise. At some points, even the vocalist is singing through a distortion filter for some ungodly reason, as if what this music needed was more feedback. It reminds me quite a bit of Nine Inch Nails, which is ironic because one of the guitarists from this band (Aaron North) left and joined NIN. Is a full minute of feedback distortion necessary at the end of Sea Sick? I think not. This is not music, and has influenced nothing. This is just noise with the sole purpose of being loud and annoying. To be on a list like this, you need to either be able to play instruments, have been highly influential, or have a huge, dedicated fan base. These tools have none of this from what I can tell. Spotify says average monthly listeners is only around 1,000 and their most "popular" song only has 50,000 listens (most of which were probably poor bastards trying to do this generator).

Overall, this album is complete garbage. I've already forgot most of it, and have recovered most of my hearing. I will never subject myself to this trash ever again and I wonder what the fuck the list creator was smoking when he thought that shit like this was deserving of this list.

Favourite songs: Virgin Velcro, Spike Island, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker

Least favourite songs: Spit On It, On the Lash, Meatmaker, Sea Sick

2/5

The worst parts of The White Stripes (which are rare) combined with the whiney-ness and "not knowing when to stop a song"-isms of Marilyn Manson to create an album that started out already at a two star and just got worse and worse. I had decided one star by the time we got to the nine minute song that was just a combination of the song before and after it for a twenty minute "epic" that just was repetitive and boring. Perhaps this should be a two because none of this was awful, per se, but as my partner taught me: if you find yourself turning the music DOWN as it goes on, it probably isn't your thing.

Genuinely surprised I hadn't heard this before. Not sure it deserves to be on this list but it's alright. Kinda like it when they get noisier and more experimental. Wish they'd lean into that more.

Very noisy, but solid tunes in there somewhere too. Clear influence on royal blood and the white stripes, hints of the strokes, queens of the stone age, and plenty of grunge. Not one of the best 1001 albums, but an interesting one I would never otherwise have heard

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