Reviews by anoriginalcliche

One of the albums that justifies the whole concept of a live album.

Failed to make an impression on me.

I remember this being better. Not much better, but better. This time it just struck me as throwaway with some pretty good moments, such as Jimi Hendrix on track 4.

Some bangers tho tbf

Sure, you can let the delirious production wash over you, but the more you focus, the more clever it gets. It’s the kind of attention no one was willing to afford the dudes who had made Brass Monkey at the time, but as the years passed, this flop became a foundational masterpiece for good reason.

Used to love this as a heartsick teenager but going back to it it dragged a lot in the second half

This album has been sampled 1009 times, according to whosampled. And though it’s clearly one of the building blocks of modern music, it’s a very good time in its own right.

“Your butt is mine” ayo?

RIP Joe C.

In 1966 the Velvet Underground and their friend Nico invented sounding like shit on purpose, and from that moment, white people finally had a way to be cool, seven years after Miles Davis had invented it

[screeching metallic noises]

There’s no better final statement in music than this — a summation of their talents, a realization of their ambitions (particularly on side 2) and also a snapshot of their interests at the time. Paul clearly knew in his heart he was losing his first real love, and was coping by looking back to their roots in a simple yet heartfelt Oh Darling, one of best John’s formal experiments in diving deeper and deeper into a repetitive single idea before it crescendos then instantly evaporates (an oft stolen moment since) in I Want You, George fully coming into his own as a songwriter with his two best songs with the Beatles, and Ringo’s got a song about an octopus. (It’s fucking great though, also always-excellent drumming and I won’t hear otherwise).

What an album. I have stronger personal relationships with other Beatles albums so end up ranking if lower but I probably shouldn’t.

You can argue when punk started, but the real American punk community was built in part from here — taking its loud, fast, tongue in cheek fuck you spirit from this spitball launched from the back of the class.

I like this a lot, but I rarely ever go back to it. Robyn Hitchcock has had a long and diverse career worth diving into beyond this album though, so by all means keep going from here.

Good stuff, surprisingly diverse. Favorite track: till your well runs dry

Diverse, inventive, inspired, and at times downright goofy — he was called the American Beatle for a reason, and while many of their other acolytes (and collaborators) understood just how to imitate their melodies or sound, no other artist quite captured their ethos quite like Nilsson. And he’s once again shown here his brilliant mind for interpretation, redefining a mediocre Badfinger track into a cathartic anthem. A record that reveals itself the more time you spend with it — the messy glory of the white album in a tight 35 minute statement.

Deeply influential in the way that Italian fascism was influential, but it cannot be held accountable for the crap it inspired. No, this is a special kind of awful all its own, highlighted by perhaps the worst collection of vocal affectations I’ve ever heard.

There might be no group from this era whose immense influence has been so well absorbed as to strip the original music of its novelty. But the term folk rock was invented to describe them, their sound helped push the Beatles forward on Rubber Soul, and even though they’d fallen out of favour by the time The Notorious Byrd Brothers came out, they were still innovating – experimenting with form, sounds, genres and instrumentation even as the group was falling apart, producing their most cohesive statement.

It’s genuinely astounding how they took a genre so utterly of its moment and transformed it into something this timeless.

Flirted with giving this a 5. Has aged very well for me, probably because their influences are far different, diverse and substantive compared to where a lot of other brit pop it’s lumped in with was coming from.