Reviews by applaud01

Manages the neat trick of being on fire at the same time as it's smooth as Velvet.

Forget the ecconomy, LET'S DANCE!

Listening to this is like listening to Wagner's Ring cycle. I can see how it's good and I can get that a lot of people will love it, but I just don't get it.

It's like I feel there's something there behind a door that I can't quite unlock.

So yeah. I don't doubt that it's food. But......

It's important to remember that when this was recorded, Mandela was still in prison and Apartheid was still operating in South Africa. This is the sound of an oppressed people.

The act of recording this, of perpetuating Black Culture was a political act. If it isn't the politics of rebellion, it certainly is the politics of Cultural Survival.

Of course, it's intensely beautiful, with the voices perfectly blended in gorgeous harmony. Whether you want to listen to it as a complete album or as something to dip into now and then is up to personal preference.

It's hopeful, it's defiant and it's strong.

It's enjoyable, energetic, loud and a lot of fun.

But it's Punk in the way that MacDonald's is food.

I enjoyed it as a rock album. But put it up against the great punk albums and it's flaws start to show.

It lacks the rawness of X-Ray Spex, The Anger of The Clash, The Fury of the Pistols, The Purity of The Ramones,The Intelligence of a Patti Smith or Gang of Four.

Cos-play Punk

A band that had put out an album that went nowhere, changed labels and recorded this second one, but broke up before it was released and also went nowhere.

It is pretty much unlike anything you've heard before. All off kilter guitars and strange rhythms; sudden changes in volume and tempo; whispered vocals that turn into screaming. (Actual singing is not the default setting) The band members were barely out of their teens when they recorded it and it's full of youthful angst and uncertainty.

It's strange, it's unsettling and, i suspect is vastly influential. If you've never heard anything like it before, you've heard a lot like it in the years since.

Not sure I liked it, or enjoyed it, but I respected it.

Almost certainly some kind of masterpiece.

It's not a pleasant record to listen to with its themes of loss, mourning and death.

And it's pretty honest about drugs. When the man who wrote After the Goldrush sings that he stole this tune from the Rolling Stones because he's too wasted to write his own, then there's no glamourising of addiction here.

Of course it's sloppy and barely in tune and threaten to fall apart at any moment.

But it's a powerful record for all that. As though these wasted, drunken old Hippies have stood up (unsteadily) to come together and say "fuck it, we're still alive"

It's tough, but it's powerful.

Of course there were a lot of guitar heroes at Woodstock in 69.

Alvin Lee, Jerry Garcia, Pete Townsend, John Fogerty, Robbie Robertson, and the man himself, Jimi Hendrix.

But Carlos Santana was the one who came as a shock. When his band strutted through a fiery "Soul Sacrifice" it was the last moment he would be unknown.

His first album was the calling card, saying, "Here I am. This is what I do."

But this second album was the one where things really caught fire.

Originals, covers of Fleetwood Mac and Tito Puente, all dished up in Latin Fusion and Santana's stinging guitar tone.

There is a kind of magic on this album. Santana loved B. B. King, and there is something of Lucille about his playing. But it's the blues from Mexico.

And you can dance to it.

At the start we find ourselves in territory somewhere between Revolver, Bitches Brew and Umma Gumma, with the whole thing put through a lens of Germanic Cold War dread.

Then, in the second half, Karlheinz Stockhausen shows up and things get very spicy indeed.

Lots of droning electronics and groaning, shouting screaming voices, free jazz freakouts, all put through more distortion and reverb than seems sensible.

It all takes a bit of patience, and while there are moments that make Public Image Limited sound like Andy Williams, there are also passages that are glorious in their experimental nerve.

Another vocal gymnast who can certainly sing, but uses every trick in the book to sing ALL the notes.

At times (You're Beautiful, Can't Hold Us Down, The Voice Within) her songs seem torn from the gritty pages of a new age self help book.

And at nearly 80 minutes it really does go on too long and seems unfocussed.

I do like some decent pop music, but I'd prefer Millie Small singing My Boy Lollipop to this bloated, self-important artistic statement.

Probably the album that comes closest to justifying the hype, although there are still moments that are skippable.

Orange Crush and Stand are the obvious highpoints and there are several songs not far behind. But at times they veer close to self parody.

3½ stars? 4 if I'm in a good mood?

These lads do take themselves seriously don't they?

A few days back I had another album with a black cover assigned to me and AC/DC are a lot more fun, in a sort of seaside postcard manner.

Still, you can't deny the talent on display here. In the "crunching bass / thumping drums / frantic guitar shredding" sort of thing they're probably peerless.

There is a lot of testosterone seeping out of the speakers while you play this and I can't help thinking that teenaged boys faced with the howling abyss of existential dread would lap it up and come back for more.

I'm not sure it needed to be an hour long. And the big ballads are a bit dull. The trouble with them slowing down and actually singing, is that you get to hear the lyrics. It's not edifying.

But it's pretty impressive when it's firing on all cylinders

I was surprised to learn that I had the other XX album very early on in this project, but, to be completely honest, I could not remember a thing about it.

This is slightly more memorable than that.

These guys are coming up against the fact that in the last few weeks this list has handed me Minor Threat, Circle Jerks, and The Clash's debut album.

After those albums, this sounds like Punk reimagined by Corporate Committee. The charges of plagiarism from Wire and The Stranglers don't help either.

Sure, there are some good tracks here, but let's not be fooled. This has the same relationship to what it wants to be as Oasis has to the Beatles

Soul so smooth you could skate on it.

All right, so his cover of Phoenix perhaps didn't need the sermon about the power of love, but once the song proper starts it's properly fabulous. For once the single edit is an improvement.

The other tracks stretch out luxuriously and are seduction on a stick.

Gorgeous.

One monster riff after another.

It's not subtle or complex and it's certainly not well mannered.

But it's certainly entertaining.

As though someone heard a Dead Kennedys album and said, "Yes, like that, only less easy listening."

Fast, furious and just a bit ridiculous. Kind of like the Sex Pistols, but without their intellectual rigour and maturity.

If your idea of Electronic Music is Aphex Twin or Autechre, or some Japanese Industrial Noise, then AIR will seem very easy listening.

They are, of course, stylish and polished and chic. They have morer than a touch of Jean-Michel Jarre and Daft Punk about them. Their melodies - yes they have melodies, Merzbow fans - are directly appealing.

The whole thing could easily sound like elevator music, but it is rather better than that. Sexy Boy and Kelly Watch the Stars are the obvious standouts, but every track is honed to a fine edge of enjoyment.

Personally I think it's all a bit safe, but clearly a lot of people love it. Wweorrrth a listen at least once.

When I look at some of the albums I've had during this project and realise that there is one one Nina Simone album included I can't help but feel my blood pressure rise.

To be honest, if I had to pick one Nina Simone album to be on this list it would be her first, Little Girl Blue.

Or even better, I'd leave out a Morrissey album or two and have more by Nina.

This one is rather uneven. Two of the tracks on it are just awe inspiring. Several are not far behind those. And one or two are, well, not up to that level.

First of all, Four Women. It must have been like a slap in the face to a white audience in 1966 and still packs a punch. The song, and her performance of it, are astonishing.

Wild is the Wind is the other jaw dropping number. Her singing is so bleak and the arrangement so spare that it's like no love song you've ever heard.

Other songs, like Either Way I Lose, Black is the Colour of my True Love's Hair, or If I lose You are just about as good.

Lilac Wine is a song I don't like much, but it's a lovely performance.

What more can I say and Why Keep on Breaking my Heart have big band arrangements that sound dated, and don't show the vocals to their best advantage.

And I Love Your Loving Ways and Break Down and Let it All Out stray almost into Aretha Franklin R&B territory, which I'm not sure really suits Nina Simone.

But consistently, the rich treacle of her voice is everywhere. She does things with her voice that others just don't, or can't.

It's an album of highs and lows - or perhaps Highs and slightly lower Highs. But the Highs are such Everests that you can't help but give it 5 stars.

And wish there was another Nina Simone album on this list

Back in the late 1970s (when I was in my early 20s) you could not set foot at a birthday or a dinner party without someone having this on the turntable. (Also Monty Python's, "Live at Drury Lane", but that's another issue)

People genuinely touted it as "The Greatest Album Ever Made"

Of course, it isn't. It's a campy, silly, tasteless extravaganza that's like someone heard "Macarthur Park" and said, "like that, but rock and roll. And bigger". Even the quiet ballads are loud and over the top.

Like a less talented Nick Cave, Steinman has clearly never heard of the word "restraint" and throws every thing he can think of into his epics and looks around for anything left over that he can stuff in as well. A key change? A tempo change? A second middle eight? Some sexual innuendo? Word play? Religious imagery? A pre-recorded voice over? Spoken word intros? Why not all of them?

Todd Rundgren's production takes these overstuffed, silly songs full teen angst and gothic excess and inflates them further with strings, and choirs, and speed guitar, and thundering piano and drums, and raises the trite to the level of kitsch ecstasy.

Over the top (in more ways the one) you have Meatloaf himself, emoting in a full throated, utterly sincere, Broadway vocal that just keeps going. Just when you thought he couldn't get any bigger, he switches up a gear and goes harder.

Obviously the whole thing is vastly overblown and totally ridiculous. Which is why, I guess, it sold like hotcakes and is still selling today.

Oh my. Another one with a preference for 13 year olds that we need to apply the "review the music, not the artist rule" to.

Which would be a lot easier if the music didn't sound like Portugal's 12th placed entry in the 1965 Eurovision Song Contest.

Hard to like this one.