Reviews by benc

Yeah whatever whatever starbucks 2000s coffeehouse jazz. Honestly, I thought this was pretty good for what it is -- they don't make adult contemporary like they used to. I saw Norah Jones when I was a teenager and she opened for the Dave Matthews Band. I don't remember much except she made a joke about her fly being down.

I get it, I respect it, and I also dislike basically every song.

Elite level synth pop production with one of the greatest singers ever. What's not to love?

Stevie the GOAT taking swings at Nixon. Dude never misses. How was he able to make a zillion albums and they're all great???

If you bracket out the two orchestral songs, this is a perfect album. (Neil literally never made another song with that kind of orchestral arrangement, so I argue it's perfectly valid to do so.)

More barn!

Pulp have style, they're fun, they make me nostalgic, Jarvis is a good front man with good taste. But what about the songs?

-a strange batch of cupcakes: some are too sweet, some are overbaked, and some are absolutely perfect

-ABBA are weird because, although they are usually described as pure pop in its ideal form, they only lightly dabble in American pop forms. You can definitely hear r&b elements throughout this album, but they more often draw from an "art song" tradition that pre-dates the record industry. For better or worse, ABBA are like a supercharged version of lieder or chanson.

-respect to ABBA for their ability to find (and harness) some of the strangest keyboard tones

Absolutely love J5 and have since high school. So yeah, they take me back to the day of yes-yall'n, but also they give me some extra fond memories of LA. I was way too late to witness the Project Blowed / Good Life Cafe scene, but you could feel their resonance in Leimert Park at the Bananas cyphers, and even at Low End Theory. I'm not trying to be a cringe "real hip hop" backpackers, but J5 absolutely cannot be beaten -- bars for miles.

Great stuff, classic country, twangs from front to back. Yee, and if you would indulge me, haw.

I love heavy acid rock and I like this record, but I can also acknowledge it's fairly second rate and unmemorable (other than the title track of course). I've had this LP since high school and I couldn't have named another track on it. But I liked listening to it and it's more "good enough if you're into 60s rock" than essential listening.

Some of the best electric guitar playing ever recorded, without a doubt. Some of the best rock drumming ever recorded. An unrelenting explosion of psychedelic noise-rock. I can't even begin to explain how much I love this music.

I listened to this in college, judged it as "English major music," and never really thought about it again. It absolutely is English major music, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed revisiting it. I've grown a different appreciation for songcraft as I get older, and it is an impressive achievement in itself to write so many songs that sound different from one another, are not in some kind of generic form or style, and generally hang together successfully. Historically, I think of this as a the direct link between Beat Happening and Sufjan Stevens, and I definitely prefer the songs that tilt closer to the former than the latter.

Like the other SFA album on this list, I found this album irritating. It's competently written and performed, but also quite cloying and empty. It feels like it was written through a game of telephone -- the "Beatles" songs actually sound like ELO, the "Beach Boys" songs sound like warmed over c86, and don't get me started on the "Bowie" songs. Pass.

A really great late 80s record from Kate Bush. I like that she transforms her earlier style into something a little dreamier and more impressionistic here. Yeah there are a couple clunky late 80s rock cliches too, but overall this is a gem.

This album is as gritty and raw as anything ever made. It's basically an hour straight of Biggie spitting absolutely cracked slice-of-life poems with unrelenting intensity over drum beats. By the time Juicy rolls around, that song sounds like a love ballad.

Basically every word of every bar is captivating. Everything Big says flows perfectly and his unmatched ability to twist rhymes and play with your expectations gives the record a sublime level of emotional intensity.

When I was in graduate school I embarked on an archival project that required me to read every major British music magazine published in 1976. My research was about the Sex Pistols and the rise of punk rock in the UK, but I was shocked to see nearly every mag list this album as the Album of the Year. I had never even heard of Joan Armatrading, but here was a stack of primary sources showing me how important she once was. Maybe the lesson is that today's critical darling is tomorrow's forgotten pop star. Listening to this album, though, I can understand how/why listeners were hungry for something that felt "authentic," musically sophisticated, but not corny or cliche. Armatrading hits all these marks, but I do think the songwriting is relatively uneven -- there are a few songs here that go nowhere or are totally unmemorable. Nevertheless, I'm really happy to learn about Armatrading and her music.

Painfully dull. Sounds like a dentist's office.

Kurt Cobain deserves all the praise that's ever been heaped upon him, and maybe more. He was a brilliant artist, and one of the ultimate composers/performers of the rock era. I used to hear Nirvana were "Black Sabbath meets the Beatles," which is not accurate -- Kurt had much more esoteric taste, and, if there were a formula, it would probably be closer to Yoko Ono meets the Monkees. Nirvana were right on the verge of being a *noise* band and you can here some outrageously dissonant influences (Scratch Acid, Saccharine Trust, Butthole Surfers, etc) all over their discography. And at the same time, Nevermind proved that you could harness that intense dissonance into something as poppy and sugary as any Carpenters album. Kurt Cobain often spoke dismissively about Nevermind, as if it was a nakedly contrived attempt to write a pop album, but that was also his brilliance, the ability to imagine music that sounds like this could even *be* pop.

I have a strong fondness for the Specials and this is an album I absolutely loved when I was 17 years old. When I was working my first job in high school, at the local library, my boss handed me 3 old records from her collection because she found out I started collecting vinyl -- London Calling, the first Madness LP, and this. (What a generous gift!) My bestie named his first car Rudy after this record (and "Rudy Can't Fail").

Of course, as a suburban kid in the 90s/00s, my knowledge of ska was mostly related to the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack and the Warped Tour (as others have said, third wave ska is "the sound a kid hears in their head when they get handed a plate of mozzarella sticks"). I still have a certain fondness for that era of ska-punk, but it felt incredible to find out about the immediate "roots" from the late 70s (it would take a few more years before I figured out this was only the second wave and not really the origin of ska, but that's another story). It lent a strange credibility to some music I'd been listening to since age 10.

The record itself is fab and I didn't totally understand its impact until I took my first trips to London. You could find 2 Tone singles at nearly every charity shop, which felt like an incredible score. I then came to understand how this movement was (almost) on par with the Motown craze in the US. The proliferation of ska into pop music, as modeled by the Specials, has a wide, deep, substantial effect if you listen closely.

ZZ Top really are top tier weirdos. They found a lane and sped down it (pun intended). They may have influenced a ton of bands, but no one was capable of doing what they did. Eliminator is, at once, 1) true blue authentic country fried blues rock n roll and, 2) shiny chrome 80s pop music. It took me a long time to "get" what they were doing, but now that I do I love it.