Reviews by alien

I remember, a week before my 11th birthday, laying in bed at night in my maternal grandparents' house when my (then 76) nanna came into the spare room to tell my (then 41) mum that Amy Winehouse died. This meant nothing to me then, like when somebody on my primary school playground told me Michael Jackson died when I was 8, nearly 9.

My earliest musical memories are of mid-2000s rock like Mr Brightside by the Killers, American Idiot by Green Day and Ruby by the Kaiser Chiefs.

While my grandad's music taste was quite eclectic before he lost his hearing and the ability to get out of his chair unassisted, I think my nanna was mainly interested in Amy Winehouse's death because she read the Daily Mail every day and Winehouse was a tabloid phenomenon.

I have too many both positive and negative associations with this music before ever voluntarily listening to an Amy Winehouse album to rate it objectively.

I'm going to give it 5 stars. I think I always did like it, and loved listening to it today.

As I said in my review of Beggars Banquet just a few days ago, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. are the greatest Stones albums. I think this one is my favourite of them all.

Townes Van Zandt is great, but I also prefer the original Dead Flowers.

« La musique est bonne. »

I love Thomas Pynchon, although I did give up about 150 pages into Gravity's Rainbow a couple years ago and haven't gone back to it yet. I read The Crying of Lot 49 in 2022, then earlier in 2025 I read Inherent Vice and Mason & Dixon. I also watched Hangmen Also Die! (1943) in 2020

I am mainly familiar with Klaxons from this passage in a 2022 interview with Bob Dylan:

Later in the interview, Dylan discussed some of the artists he had seen perform live. “Some I’ve seen live,” he said. “The Oasis Brothers, I like them both, Julian Casablanca, the Klaxons, Grace Potter. I’ve seen Metallica twice. I’ve made special efforts to see Jack White and Alex Turner. Zac Deputy, I’ve discovered him lately. He’s a one-man show like Ed Sheeran, but he sits down when he plays.”

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/bob-dylan-favourite-modern-musicians/

Which is funny because of how incongruous Bob Dylan and "landfill" indie are. Since I was 7 and much too young for Club 18-30 in 2007, I haven't consciously listened to Klaxons, but I wasn't too surprised by the sound -- "Franz Ferdinand" is one of the tags, which checks out.

I haven't read Burroughs or Gibson, but I love Sister by Sonic Youth which I believe takes some of the technobabble from Neuromancer.

The music is decent, and charmingly 2007. I'm now wondering if I have heard Gravity's Rainbow "Come with me, come with me, we'll travel to infinity" before, or just something similar. I like it in any case.

I am a partisan of the next 3 Stones albums, but this is obviously very good. You should watch Jean-Luc Godard's Sympathy for the Devil to see the genesis of that song (along with some other Godard shit).

Jigsaw Puzzle is very underrated, I think. Stray Cat Blues goes hard, but those lyrics, yeesh. I guess it's honest at least, all those classic rock guys were having sex with underage "groupies".

RIP Brian Wilson.

As soon as I heard the news, I put on Pet Sounds, then Surf's Up, then Sunflower, then Love You, then my 100ish song "Best of the Beach Boys" playlist:

Do You Wanna Dance, When I Grow Up (To Be a Man), Help Me Rhonda, Please Let Me Wonder and In the Back of My Mind from this album are on it.

A lot of people discount pre-Pet Sounds Beach Boys music as juvenile and underdeveloped, but there are already so many great songs with both the incredible arrangements and harmonies, and the lyrics which elevate being a teenager in mid 20th century America into universal truths about love, life and death which everyone loves about Pet Sounds.

I got the Phil Spector Christmas album on Christmas and a Beach Boys album the day after Brian Wilson died, I wonder if the site owner manipulates the generator or if those are both coincidences.

Anyway, I already got Pet Sounds a while ago, I obviously gave it 5 stars, with a one word review: "Masterpiece". The BB albums I mentioned above deserve 5 stars (despite Student Demonstration Time), this album isn't one I listen to front to back that often, mostly just the songs I mentioned.

I am quite generous with my ratings, and I like this album a lot more than some of the albums I've given 4 stars. Fuck it, I'll give it a 5, the Beach Boys made so much great music that this isn't even my favourite pre-Pet Sounds album (that's All Summer Long), but it's still a 5 star album.

Not at all notable or essential, not terrible either, it's not really anything at all.

Oh yeah, that's the stuff.

I appreciate it, but I don't quite "get" it.

It's funny, I had the harmonica part of Heart of Gold stuck in my head yesterday. Mostly great album, though A Man Needs a Maid does drag it down slightly.

I love the Damo Suzuki Can albums, but I've struggled to get into other Can albums than those and Monster Movie/Soon Over Babluma. I feel like the stars all aligned for them to make incredible, kosmische music for a few years.

I wasn't aware of this album, and although I enjoyed it well enough, I don't think I'll be returning to it.

A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young

I love the cheesy early digital sound and the lyrics, it's like an East Coast Pet Sounds in how it looks back at teenage delusions.

I gave Pretzel Logic a 4 a while ago, I'd give it a 5 now as I've become more Danpilled since then.

They're Zionist dogs so fuck them, but this album is still a masterpiece.

Maybe I'm a prude, but I don't care for all the moaning etc. The shock value of singing about fucking is gone in 2025, though I imagine it was more transgressive to be a horny little freak in the 80s. Now it's just irritating.

Musically it has its moments, but they're few and far between. Every time I saw the next track was 7, 8, 9 minutes long, I thought "oh for fuck's sake".

Hejira lite, pretty good but I'm not bowled over by it on my first 2 listens.

My dad was my age (24) when this came out and was a big fan, and despite the natural inclination to rebel against your parents' taste, this album is undeniable.

I've heard Oasis songs a billion times growing up in England, but I don't think I've put on an Oasis album on myself and listened to it front to back before. It's background radiation here, though being from the South and not Manchester it's not so much part of my identity, and I've never felt the need to "get into" them.

It's humbling and slightly mortifying to slowly turn into your father (Old man look at my life, I'm a lot like you were...), apparently he listened to the Smiths a lot as a mopey teenager in the 80s as I did in the 2010s.

His parents were older when they had him, being born in the early 1930s they were too old for the Baby Boomer youth culture of the 60s (don't trust anyone over 30), all I can remember my Grandpa listening to is classical music, potentially some crooners, potentially jazz, but nothing too out there, fusion or avant-garde.

My music taste is in some ways broader than my dad's, thanks to growing up with streaming, though very americanised. I listen mostly to 60s/70s singer-songwriters and 80s/90s/2000s Alternative/College/Indie rock, probably very little that he hasn't heard or at least heard of (read about in music magazines at the time). I'll often walk by him listening to Oasis, but also many much smaller, more obscure English bands of the 80s/90s that didn't make it as big, probably didn't make it to America at all and I would be unlikely to find out about, finding music largely through the internet.

I haven't talked about the music at all because it's hard to say much about it. "It's just Rock 'n' Roll" (complimentary).

Meat Loaf is an American thing that I've only ever heard as a punchline and not listened to.

This rocked. The baseball commentary sex joke cinched the 5 stars for me.

Wow, a new-to-me first listen five star. The balance between the angry lyrics and disaffected delivery is perfect.

I'm a Lynyrd Skynyrd hater, I think Neil Young shouldn't have backed doon, but doubled doon, on Southern Man, and I love Play It All Night Long by Warren Zevon. I've been hating from a place of ignorance mostly, I know Sweet Home Alabama and Free Bird, but I don't think I've ever listened to a full album.

This album hasn't changed my mind, though the music is orthogonal to why I dislike this band. The music's pretty good, but not great, at no point did I want to turn it off, but I doubt I'll go back and listen to it in full again.

This album doesn't have Sweet Home Alabama, so I can't knock points for that. It's pretty generic Southern USian rock, which holds no particular cultural resonance for me as an English person. It's fine.

Some good points, like Something Wicked This Way Comes and Miles, but this list does not need two "soundtracks for films that don't exist" by Barry Adamson.

"Vermillion Kisses" is one of the most irritating interludes I've ever heard, even worse than skits in rap/hip hop albums that are just sex noises.

Speaking of sex noises, Jarvis Cocker's moaning sets a tone which is immediately abandoned, as each song takes a left turn from the previous one. You could say the album is varied, but really it's all over the place.