Reviews by benc

This is kinda cool, but...really? The 5th Primal Scream album? Not quite essential unless you're an enormous Primal Scream fan. I absolutely love psychedelic music and I'm not sure this album would crack my top 100.

This is a great record, and I don't care that Bernard Sumner can't really sing. Quite gothic. It makes me yearn for the day when regular lads with good taste (and some songwriting skills) could become mega pop stars.

I'm going out on a limb by saying this is a perfect album. I know almost nothing about Senegalese music, so my frame of reference lacks a lot of context. But I first heard Baaba Maal about 5 years ago and his playing completely blew me away. This music totally changed how I understand the guitar as an instrument and how it can be used to create ambient textures. Also, I think Baaba Maal does a good job of conveying how the blues is a transatlantic phenomenon.

Bad album. Every moment felt like a chore. Goofy but not funny, misshapen but frictionless, melodramatic but emotionless. Bad singing, bad lyrics, bad songwriting, bad recording. Bad album.

I used to like this album when I was 18, but I probably hadn't listened to the full thing in more than 20 years. As I relistened, I kept waiting for a dud song and it never really happened. Yes, it's a bit derivative, and maybe it slows down a little for the last couple tracks, but overall this is a wall to wall banger. It sounds like a bunch of teenage punks hopped up on caffeine (or something stronger). This might just be the best Britpop album of all time.

What a great, crazy, virtuosic, creative piece of work. The Louvin Brothers were probably no fun to have dinner with, but they were inarguably some of the most influential musicians ever. You can draw a (nearly) direct line between this record and loads of contemporary pop, rock, country, etc. Plus, great harmonies!

There was a big deluxe reissue of this album when I was in high school and I fell in love with it then. This really is the hinge point of their career -- the guitars all still kinda sound like Daydream Nation, but the songs have a bit more of a "pop" structure. Lotsa love for Goo!

I really like XTC, but I'll admit I've never listened to anything after the 80s. The first 3 songs are really fucking great but it does level off a bit after that. Andy Partridge has had basically zero cultural influence in America but he really is a top-tier weirdo pop songwriter.

It's time to end the Killers revisionism. This album came out right around my 16th birthday, which I feel lends me a degree of credibility (seeing as how all pop music is made for 16-year-olds). Obviously they had a bunch of hits and this album sold really well, so of course the Killers were "popular" in a basic way. But they had basically zero clout or cred or coolness among young people. I remember seeing their music videos a lot, and I knew a couple people at school who had this CD, but they were not really part of the music crowd (it seemed like a CD you'd get for christmas and listen to a half a dozen times).

By 2004 nu metal felt like the distant past, the mainstreaming of pop punk led to an unsustainably brief emo trend, and the "the bands" garage rock revival just didn't have the mainstream juice. You could feel the record industry groping for the "next big thing" of rock music as they stumbled toward a kind of dance-punk / post-punk revival a la Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, the Bravery, etc. The Killers are among the most corporate-ready version of this sound, as proven by the seemingly infinite persistence of Mr. Brightside. Mr. Brightside is not a good song, but it has a soporific palliative effect on human consciousness, so it's become the millennial Don't Stop Believing. (I prefer Somebody Told Me, which is at least a little funky.) But I'm sorry not sorry to say this music still sounds horrible and horribly uncool to me. They successfully copy/paste some superficial features from new wave bands, but they fully miss every cultural, social, aesthetic, or conceptual feature that made new wave and early synth pop so fresh and interesting at the turn of the 80s. You can hear the Killers at a football stadium or a church youth group or a karaoke bar or a corporate training program, not because it's so perfectly crafted for everyone to love but because it's so dull it could never possibly provoke an ounce of friction.

The last Hendrix studio album, an absolutely crazed masterpiece. He never stopped experimenting, never shied away from truly out there musical ideas. He constantly improved as a guitarist, and yes he is probably the best electric guitarist ever. Also, really grew as a singer, and his falsetto sounds gorgeous here. The Jimi Hendrix Experience: a perfect power trio with a perfect trio of albums.

Was pretty obsessed with this album in college and I still love it. Jonathan Richman is a truly weird guy and this album is the best thing he's ever done. Skronky proto-punk pop magic.

Does everything a rock n roll record should, but not too much. A perfect album.

All pastiche with little substance. If I wanted to hear this kind of synth pop, I would so much rather hear the bands Hot Chip are aping from -- there is practically nothing on this record that wasn't already done 25+ years earlier. And it's produced with an easy listening sheen that makes it ready for ad placement (I swear I heard one of these songs in an insurance commercial). I don't know, I feel like I'm being hard on them -- it wasn't a noxiously terrible listen. But there is zero chance I will ever want to revisit this.

-this is really well made, candy-coated, Max Martin produced pop music that somehow pulls off the trick of convincing the listener that Taylor is maturing, and that this is a post-hipster early-Instagram work of poptimist art.
But that is ridiculous. This album is basically children’s music; it is so sugary and easy to consume. Every song has a title like “Bad Blood” and then it ends up being about having bad blood with someone and there’s a big screamy sing-along chorus you could imagine a child repeating all day after they saw it placed in a movie on the Disney Channel.

-my favorite track is probably the first, “Welcome to New York,” which has a kind of millennial rumspringa single ladies doin it for themselves in the big city Girls (HBO) vibe to it. I tend to enjoy this kind of story, so it sits well with me. It's exactly the kind of thing people are preoccupied with when they’re 17-27. But it also has a bit of an “urban playground” feel to the lyrics, where the protagonist is so thrilled to see (shock!) gay people, because the big city is a place of whimsy and has no history and is not a space where people live.

-I also like Wildest Dreams; the way it builds contrast and transitions between verse and chorus is just insanely satisfying. This is Britney/NSYNC levels of maximalist pop perfection.

-ok, Style is probably a cutesy wink to Harry Styles, but it's also a pretty weird, unsettling, and unsuccessful bit of gender norm revanchism.

-I’m not even sure if I like this or not anymore; at one point of my life I would have described this as my “favorite Taylor Swift album.” But now TS has ascended to a level of fame, wealth, and power so overwhelming it feels impossible to have a real human connection with this music.

It's like a combo of Billy Joel, Nick Cave, and Rodgers & Hammerstein. To me, that doesn't sound too appetizing. But I can respect the craft and the earnestness.

I might be biased by nostalgia here, but I like this record a lot. I had forgotten how much I used to listen to this when I was a teenager, but the songs came back to me quickly. It rocks surprisingly hard, the guitars sound great, PJ's voice sounds great. But it also has a kind of arty urban chic to it, which is probably what first attracted me in high school. Overall, good shit.

An interesting listen, a British band that mostly sounds like an American rock band in the 90s. I'd never heard of them, and I'm glad to learn about them, but it's not something I fell in love with.

I can't give my full Arcade Fire history here -- I need to save that for Funeral. But I found this record to be really unenjoyable. It's a basic culmination of the "baroque twee" style of indie rock that dominated the late 00s -- a style I can't stand. Plus, this kind of muted, aimless meditation on suburban ennui feels like a really boring, played out theme for an album in 2010. But hey, this won album of the year at a time most people didn't know who they are -- I'm old enough to remember all the tweets that said, "who the f is rk fire?"

OK, Beck returns to his poly-stylistic pastiche approach, but he doesn't deliver anything as cheeky or fun as the radio singles from Odelay.

It's got a slightly broader emotional range, but nothing really touches my heart.

It's cerebral, but nothing makes me think.

It's a bit funky, but nothing makes me want to dance (could you imagine any DJ playing any of these songs at any function where anyone is dancing?).

At least in the mid-90s, Beck the Appropriator had an experimental tinge to him; by 2005, this gimmick was pretty corny. Half the tracks sound like he wrote them for an icebreakers gum commercial, the other half sound like proto-stomp-clap ("Go It Alone" might be the worst Beck song ever). There's a couple fun grooves buried here, but this is otherwise inessential; you absolutely do not need to listen to this album before you die.

This is a charming and wholesome album and it makes me feel like I'm listening to college radio. Is it as good as the Minutemen? Not even close. But I'm happy to listen to it anyway. Long live Watt.