Reviews by anoriginalcliche

Like this post if this is the worst Elvis Costello album you’ve ever heard!!!!!!!!!

I couldn’t lock into this — it’s not in US streaming services, so a YouTube ad punctuated every song — though it’s still quite beautiful

I’ve listened to this countless times and it’s still entrancing and transportive every time I put it on.

I like it in moments but this is far more interesting backstory than listening experience.

Sparse, existential and full of vivid campfire storytelling, this psychological western was recorded in a cheaply rented studio and initially deemed unreleasable, before becoming the hit that cemented Willie Nelson among country music’s greats. It may not contain his best individual songs, but Red Headed Stranger remains his greatest achievement as an album, and one I’ve returned to on many hazy late nights.

This is not XTC’s most groundbreaking work, nor one I would have chosen for this challenge, but after having listened to them for decades, this intricately crafted late-career masterpiece is the album that I come back to most, and enjoy more every time.

Quite enjoyed this, even apart from its god tier one hit wonder

I just think it’s neat that the people of the nineteen seventies had a maroon 5 to call their own

Maybe my favorite 70s pop album, one I return to again and again.

This made me feel far better dressed than I am.

ELO feels like my parents caught me listening to too much Beatlesesque symphonic pop and made me smoke an entire carton of it in front of them

I think the reason British dance music had aged so much worse than euro dance is it’s not even ironically funny.

I was ready to dismiss this as another forgotten 2000s curio, but giving it another couple of spins while driving and walking at night really opened it up for me. A really unique blend of so many styles and genres that never sounds like it was recorded in the' garden shed of one of the two members' parents. Recommended.

If you only have room in your collection for one jazz record, make it Kind of Blue. If you can squeeze two, throw this in there too.

There’s moments I love it, moments I hate it. A singular, outlandish document of a time and place. Glad I wasn’t there though. If the sounds are this madcap, I can’t imagine the smells.

I don’t even feel guilty about this score. Check my feet for proof.

First three songs are maybe the peak of modern stadium rock, with producer Brian Eno’s spacious ambient textures elevating the instrumentation to feel almost ethereal at times. That recording room feels like a whole universe.

Unfortunately, the rest of the album is such an endless slog that I can’t even say I like this. 1001 albums to hear to accept a quick death.

He played this on a broken piano. Yes, he’d driven 350 miles, hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept, was in a back brace and in tremendous pain, but I always think the most about this shitty ass piano, a tiny, out-of-tune Bösendorfer baby grand that he initially refused to play because the highs and the lows were thin and busted and the pedals all stuck. He improvised the whole thing as always, but nothing else of his quite hits the same because he made something transcendent with this unique, broken piano, forced to get even more creative about how to pull beauty out of it, focusing his melodies and modal explorations in the middle, putting his entire body into it to make the sound resonate across the whole venue, groaning in pain and passion. The limitation is the whole thing, and because of it nothing else will ever quite sound the same. A one of a kind masterpiece.

This isn't when it became clear that Brian Wilson is a genius -- that was probably a year earlier on his Be My Baby-ode Don't Worry Baby, itself one of the best pop songs of the 60s.

But this is where he started thinking about the album as an artform to itself, with complex and inspired instrumental and vocal arrangements unified by his spin on the wall-of-sound aesthetic, separated into an upbeat first half and a melancholic second.

The lyrics have evolved from the surfer beach stuff they began with, but I appreciate that, to someone coming into this new, it sounds like just a bunch of love songs.

But much like on his masterpiece Pet Sounds a year later, there's a lot of his inner life coming into the writing, such as: “I'm so afraid that she'll unlock the door / And see me the way I really am instead of what I seem to be."

With early to mid-period Beach Boys, much like the pre-Rubber Soul Beatles, you have to dig a bit deeper to see the brilliance in some of the musical choices, but the brilliance is there.

Also, LISTEN TO THIS IN MONO! That's the only original mix, the stereo was created decades later, and it sounds far warmer and punchier in Mono.

Also, i wonder how many people searching for something very different have been surprised to find what the track 'Bull Session with the Big Daddy' actual entails?

There’s a lot of kitsch pre-Beatles throwback genre mashup stuff going on here on the surface, but if you’ve only heard Love Shack and assume they’re lame, focus in on Ricky Wilson’s guitar — completely unique, self-tuned to ear song by song, and intoxicating. He died of AIDS complications in 85, but he was the magic ingredient of their early albums, which are every bit as electric and innovative of the early Talking Heads. It’s strange they’ve now been relegated to the lame pile culturally when this is one of the coolest bands that’s ever been.