Reviews by applaud01

Probably Punk's finest hour and an obvious 5 stars.

Flat out Rock, jazz, reggae, blues, rockabily and punk come together with politics and social commentary in an angry burst of energy.

About as good as it gets

Cooler than I will ever be

Exactly how much of this is properly live is anyone's guess, but it's certainly a slick sounding album.

The performances are perfectly fine and the twin guitar sound is sensational.

The problem is that once they've played the hits they've still got plenty of time to fill on a double album. So they bring out the B Grade (and, eventually, the C Grade) material.

Sure, hearing Boys are Back in Town is great, but there's plenty of filler. No-one is putting this on just to hear Baby Drives Me Crazy. Well played filler, certainly, but filler none the less.

Like they saw The Tubes play " White Punks on Dope" and thought, "Like that, but dumber."

Pretty much inadequate on every level.

Perfectly serviceable R&B sung by woman with a decent set of pipes.

Whether this late 60 year old male got the most out of it is doubtful, but if I was a 16 or 17 year old girl looking for some opinions I think it would hit a lot deeper.

In which a couple of American lads hear traditional Brazilian music, think "Well, we could do that" and introduce America to something like what they heard.

Hey Kids, can we all say "cultural appropriation?"

Getz and Byrd and their band play beautifully and make some lovely music. But if you go back and listen to the originals - Antonio Carlos Jobim, for example, who wrote Desafinado and One Note Samba - you realise that they lack the liquid quality of rhythm that the Brazilian musicians have in their DNA.

Getz and Byrd have the notes on paper and play them as written rather than as felt. It's a tidied up version of Bossa Nova and hence, probably perfect for middle America.

There seems to be no good reason for all these songs to be six or seven minutes long. They could be a concise three, be stronger and we'd all get to go home sooner.

The first moments on the album had me thinking there'd been some mistake and I had a Will Smith album.

The rhymes, which include such things as

I get stupid, I shoot an arrow like Cupid
l use a word that don't mean nothin, like looptid

- are either goofy or incompetent - let's go with goofy, just to be charitable.

And all the sex kink stuff. Well, we've got Prince to do that properly.

Kind of an artefact of what the 90s thought would last.

The songs are old style Nashville sadness, but when their voices come together and launch into To Know Him is to Love Him or Linda Thompson's Telling Me Lies, it's spine tingling.

Five stars for the performances, but the songs are probably not everyone's cup of tea.

The thing is, if you've heard Ace of Spades than you've pretty much heard the album because they had - I think the polite term is - "consistency of style".

You certainly know what you're getting with Motörhead. The template is: thunderous bass; flailing about on the drums; some medium skill level guitar shredding; some screamy, shouty vocals in a voice that sounds like it could give out at any moment. For variety they play the template slow, or fast, or really fast. That's about it. They're not about to bust out a 20 minute suite of modal funk jazz fusion.

Simple but effective.

Born out of the same American punk scene as Talking Heads and Devo, B-52s are the punk Annette, Frankie and Moondoggy. Punk Blanket Bingo.

They don't want to be the AntiChrist, they just want you to dance.

Beloved by the kids who didn't fit in; who looked at the pencil moustaches, beehive hair, matador pants and cha-cha shoes and found their people.

Proof, if proof was needed, that there's great art to be found in being very silly.

There's some good stuff here, but just because a CD can hold more than an hour of music doesn't mean it has to.

Might have been stronger if someone had taken Frank aside and insisted they cut 20 minutes.

Beautifully produced, but at 75 minutes there's some flab that could be cut.

Delicate, simple and very, very English.

Dripping in sadness, but beautiful and probably timeless.

Sold almost no copies in his lifetime, but he's obviously one of the great songwriters.

Has there ever been a band with a bigger disconnect between the legend and the reality? If you believe the legend then The Doors are poets and prophets who peeled back the illusion of the American dream and exposed the heart of darkness underneath.

And actually listening to the albums, you realise that they're a basic blues band with a sense of their own importance and a lack of skills to back it up.

A singer with an average voice who writes some of the most pretentious lyrics imaginable. They seems to be at the level of "There was a young man of Nantucket," but without the laughs.

A keyboard player whose idea of a solo is a couple of bars of "Carol of the Bells" or an irrelevant Chopin piece.

A guitar player who is, at best, fair to middling.

When they decide to "let out their inner James Brown" you realise that you can only let it out if it's there in the first place. It isn't.

Love her madly tenderly describes a disfunctional relationship as though it's Romeo and Juliet and rhymes "madly," "badly," and "daddy" with all the confidence of William McGonagall and then, for good measure and no reason, assures us that "Seven horses seem to be on the mark"

Their white boy version of Crawling King Snake achieves nothing but help you realise how good John Lee Hooker is.

The WASP is like every teenage poetry slam you ever avoided.

Riders on the Storm is probably the best thing here, but it's a low bar. Again the lyrics are all deep and meaningful in a shallow way, but at least the musical backing shows a restraint that the rest of the album lacks. Although the gimmick of storm sound effects wears pretty thin.

It's all the sort of thing that people who need to get out more might find brilliant.

I remember in Australia in 1981, the most popular media commentator announced on national TV that "Punk is dead because of this album. And all over the UK kids are holding Ant Balls!"

Which, of course, earned the response, "Must be bloody big ants!"

As big, dumb, glam-pop, proto New Wave albums go this is pretty good. Sure, some songs are better than others. There are some that are a lot worse than others.

It's all about as substantial as The Macarena, but when they fire up the twin drum Burundi beat and start emoting about warriors and ants and looking like dandies and pirates and going completely over the top it's all very early 80s and a pretty entertaining - albeit slighty weird - good time.

A prime example of what cocaine can achieve with just a little bit of co-operation.

Bowie, it seems, had no memory of actually making this.

Musically it's magnificent, with the band playing as though their Ives depended on it.

I defy anyone to say what any of the songs are actually about, with a patchwork of Kabbalah, Crowley, Sci-Fi, TVs that eat people and who knows what else all wrapped up in the sort of lyrics that probably seemed like they made sense at the time.

Station to Station is nearly ten minutes of disco-prog, proclaiming "the return of the Thin White Duke" and "The European Canon". Okay.

Golden Years seems like a continuation of the Young Americans album's "plastic soul" and, indeed, Bowie performed it on Soul Train, all coked out and looking like a pale white insect.

Word on a Wing seems to be some sort of prayer. "Lord I kneel and offer you my Word on a Wing" It's probably the most portentous song on the album and, to be honest, drags a bit.

TVC-15 is the closest thing to a "fun track" on the album and even then it's a kind of Videodrome nightmare. It chugs along and in later, live performances (at Live Aid, for example) Bowie would perform it at double the tempo and it would really come to life.

Stay might be the best thing on the album. Earl Slick's guitar heads into metal territory and the song is the closest thing to a stadium banger the album has.

Then, to finish, we have Wild is the Wind, probably the weakest thing on the album. The problem is that Nina Simone's version is so definitive that Bowie's version seems like a pale copy. It's a beautiful song and Bowie performs it beautifully, but it's all surface, where Simone mines into the depths of the song. Mind, you, George Michael did a version, so Bowie is ahead there.

When this album is good it's sensational and up there with the best things Bowie ever did. But Word on a Wing and Wild is the Wind let it down.

Two absolute, stone cold classics in Sympathy for the Devil and Street Fighting Man.

The rest, with one notable exception are pleasant enough, if not that memorable.

The exception is Stray Cat Blues - about a man lusting for sex with an under-age girl. "I BET YOUR MOTHER DONT KNOW YOU SCREAM LIKE THAT!" It ends with him inviting her friends around for under age group sex.

2 stars each for the classic songs PLUS a star for the rest. That's five stars.

MINUS (Oh, lets say) ALL the stars for the paedophilia.

I saw another review on here that described this as "iconically bland" and that seems about right.

Hugely talented ex-members of Free, Mott The Hoople, and King Crimson join together to play the sort of basic, pub rock stuff that sits firmly in the middle of the road.

It's like it was designed 50 years ago for Nostalgic middle aged men.

On that level it's fun and if you put it on at a backyard party full of 60 year olds keen to recapture their youth and celebrate Dave's retirement, it'd go off like a frog in a sock.

Back in the day, when I was in Primarry School, we had a teacher (you know the type. Leather jacket, "Call me by my first name," "I'm not so much a teacher as a fellow learner") who would give us the lyrics from this album for poetry lessons. "Because this is where it's at kids!"

Well, maybe. But another way of looking at it is that on a number off these songs Simon effortlessly crosses the fine line between being meaningful and being pretentious.

There's no doubt that this is a beautiful sounding album. Art and Paul just blend together into a gorgeous whole. The arrangements are superb.

But the songs are at their best when Simon keeps it simple. Homeward Bound and For Emily Whenever I May Find Here are probably the best things here, because he holds back a bit and doesn't feel he has to prove how clever he is.

Scarborough Fair is a lovely thing, but buried inside it there's a whole "war is really bad" message that probably gets missed a lot. Feeling Groovy is fun, if you can get past the 60s style "Life I love you" lyrics.

Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine is dopey fun and gets its message across simply and directly and is all the better for it.

But the songs where Simon feels he needs to make a big statement and goes in hard with the "sophisticated" lyrics are a bit much.

Patterns, Cloudy, Flowers Never Bend in the Rain, A Poem on the Underground, The Dangling Conversation all strive for "poetic significance" and end up sounding unconvincing. The fact that Simon could think that describing something as "Ragamuffin" or mention "You read Emily Dickinson and I read Robert Frost" was "groovy" is hilarious. It's overwriting at its finest.

A Simple Desultory Phillipic announces itself with possibly the most pretentious title on any major artist's album and then proceeds to produce a parody of Dylan that proves nothing except that Paul Simon is no Bob Dylan.

And the less said about the dull thud that Silent Night lands with the better.

Beautiful sounding album, with a number of magnificent songs. But Paul, just rein it in and stop trying to impress everyone with how much more clever you are than them.

Recorded before he was the "prophetic voice of a generation" the album contains some.genuine monster songs.

Blowing in the Wind, Masters of War, Hard Rain, Don't Think Twice, It's Alright are probably as good as any songs ever written. But then, The Talking Blues are a bit meh, and Oxford Town is so much of its time that it doesn't wear well.

For a purely brilliant performance Corrina Corrina is just lovely.

So, all up, there are brilliant things here, but there's some dross as well.