Reviews by anoriginalcliche

Far more vibrant and compelling than her peers

Waiting room music at a sexual torture dungeon (complimentary)

The DIY classic that influenced so many others, most notably Prince. Todd Rundgren had grown bored of basic 60s and 70s pop, and bored of himself, and before he abandoned both completely with his next album, he pushed the form to its limits here, playing every instrument himself (teaching himself any he didn’t already know) and producing too in the days when creating something this meticulous and complex in its arrangements took insane skill. And then by side D, he got bored of that too, and assembled a band in New York to record songs in the studio as messily as possible. This is pop music teetering on the edge, reshaped in an image of a guy with no interest in what its success may bring him, who abandoned the audience this brought in within a year of amassing it. The whole here is greater than the sum of its parts — a jukebox possessed with a fit of mania.

This isn’t bad music per se, and I was hoping I could hear it with fresh ears, but unfortunately it’s not good enough to overcome the baggage of its immense success and outsized presence in my life against my will when it came out.

It sounds like the walls closing in on you, but the walls have never sounded better.

If your view of this band is burdened by the baggage of over-familiar singles from their peak, this is your way in to discovering their true magic — a debut with its front man Michael Stipe still finding his voice, pushed back in the mix with the drums brought up front for an unmistakable, inscrutable sound that draws you in and never lets go.

No album better captures the psyche of the English man at that time, and perhaps no album should.

I can picture a scenario, in a new york cub in the 50s, in which I really enjoy this. But I’m not here to rate hypotheticals.

A high 3 because I like her music, have sought her out live, and think she’s singular. Definitely a landmark album that still gets me dancing. But since I picked this up 20 years ago, I never feel like jumping into the full album.

A truism of music so true it’s banal itself is this: the more influential something is, the more hackneyed it seems when you go back to it. And Chic has many layers of that — you know the hits best from a playlist you first heard at a discount shop, you’ve heard the melodies interpolated into hip-hop and r&b, you resent this sound because it was done worse by the big musicians that recruited Nile Rodgers to do it for them to diminishing returns. Or maybe you just think disco sucks, a hand-me-down opinion that had some partly racialized and homophobic roots.
It’s the simplicity of their sound, however, that proved most influential — whittling down funk to its most basic ingredients and innovating techniques to capture its effects with less. That allowed so much space in the mix, which fueled pop music the world over, for better and for worse.
But, strip all of that away, and this is still joyous, inspired stuff. Musically, the follow up Risqué is better with grooves that build and expand, but this is still a party of its own — opulent, elegant, both aspiring and aspirational.

*PSA: The Spotify link is to the wrong album. They made another self titled album in 2003. You may be able to find it on the first ten tracks of 1998’s In the Doghouse, but If can’t find it on streaming, find it on YouTube. It’s worth it*

What a revelation this album is. I’m more than 100 in, and this is my favorite discovery of the challenge so far.

Both melodic and discordant, with songs that careen off the rails into new directions at any moments and then find their way back again. Lyrics that feel like someone’s confessing something to you in plain language but you can’t quite grasp what they’re telling you. Better each time I spin it.

I can’t think of a greater chasm between singer and band than this. There’s some really interesting, groundbreaking work here, but hearing it is like trying to focus on a piano recital with a car alarm going off.

You may be tempted to say, 'if you just cut this down to the best songs, you'd have a perfect record.' And I'm with you – no one wants to listen to this all the way through each time they go back to it. But if you cut it down, even to just non-stop bangers, you’d make a worse album.

With Melancholy the messiness is a feature, built in from before they even started writing. They were inspired by the Beatles’ White Album, firing the producer who had just made a masterpiece with them to force themselves into new creative territory. And they pushed and pushed, exploring the backrooms of their sound – there were around 60 songs that came from those sessions, nearly all worth hearing, with 28 making the final cut.

The sprawl is the journey. The highs are high, and they’re usually all I go back to, but I was struck upon revisiting this how good the stuff I usually skip over is, and how little the contrast clashes. Even when it’s shit it’s brilliant.

A pleasant enough place to pass through even if you’re checking your watch after 20 minutes but there’s no reason to come back

Lever street is almost a vibe

The most interesting thing about Neon Bible for me has always been its namesake, a novel written by a 16-year-old about a boy trying to escape the suffocating repression and hollow religiosity of his small town with only one kind person in his life as respite, a book which was rejected by publishers at the time. A similar fate befell his follow-up, A Confederacy of Dunces, as well, the frustration of which led him to end his own life. His mother pushed for it to be published after his death, and it became a cult classic, with Neon Bible seeing publication in 1989 against her wishes due to a legal dispute from their money-hungry extended family.

But with this album, I’ve always felt that Arcade Fire bit off more than they could chew. The ingredients are so compelling – written and recorded in an abandoned church that the band had bought and fixed up, tackling those same themes of social alienation and fighting to escape an oppressive small town life only to find a world equally if not more disappointing, corrupt, empty, co-opted than what you had just run from – ending on a note that what you’re imprisoned in now is your own flesh.

But as much as you can intellectualize it, I just don’t think it does that ambition justice. Musically, it only hits the highs it promises on a few tracks – first of which is Ocean of Noise, still gorgeous though I prefer the Calexico cover they released as a b-side, Intervention, and Windowsill. The rest, though memorable, still falls flat for me, never reaching the sublime highs they found on that first record. 2000s indie might have hit the mainstream here, but it was never going to stick around if this is the best we could do.

Jamie is still carrying the other two, but in trying to reach his level they've actually regressed. While I appreciate the craft, I wanted this to be over for most of it.

This album took decades and multiple generations to even be appreciated, let alone taken for granted as American pop’s pinnacle. But even now, it remains singular, the rare work of pure ambition and crazed inspiration that actually achieved its vision. But it wasn’t attempting to unite the world or fill stadiums. Listen to the lyrics – these are intimate, personal, tortured and conversational. The music reflects the multitudes, the overwhelming spirit, contained in those everyday yearnings. It’s a man searching for his own limits by seeing how far he can push music itself, and forging his own pathway to get there that no one else could dare follow. Anyways it’s pretty good, check it out. If only for a love song that starts with the lyrics: I may not always love you.

If you want a kid to discover the joys of music, play them some AC/DC. Eminently accessible, surface level rock. Maybe skip the song where they describe an assault though.

I can appreciate it in moments with the right mindset, surely. But do I ever want to listen to this again?