Reviews by bob

The Good: We must be on a roll!!!
The Bad: What if we really want to stop?
The Ugly: The state we are in, after slamming into another car, cause we really wanted to stop…

There are things to be said that one person’s favorite album can be another person's least or another person’t so-so selection… at the end of the day, music is subjective as hell.
However, when it comes to live albums, there is little subjectiveness involved… it is fact; you either hate it or love it.

In the case of this trainwreck of an album… I have to just bow my head and say thanks that I won’t have to listen to it again…

I am certain that there are Van M fans out there who view this album as the best of the best… in my case, it’s too late to stop now…. 2* thanks to Into The Mystic

The Good: We get to enjoy Joe Pesci!!!
The Bad: That’s another Stan Getz…
The Ugly: They still fuck you at the drive-thru!!!

How many of you young-uns are going to understand the above?

So, when I was a little younger, more frequently then not, around my birthday, every 3 years or so, we would move to a new country.
My father was not one of them important civil servants working at your local embassy or consul, no no, he worked in the finance sector, and was tasked with the things he was tasked with.
It was ’82 and I found my surroundings to be the beach all of a sudden…

My birthday is in the middle of summer, which is the reason that we would always move around my birthday, because this way we would not be transferred to a new school in the middle of the year.

Anyway, Rio de Janeiro had become our new destination… and before people start jammer about how could that must have been… Rio, in the ‘80s, was dirt poor, and we, for all intents and purposes, were considered rich… If you’ve never had a machete pulled on your because someone wants your watch and sneakers, you don’t know what I’m talking about.

So what the fuck does this have to do with our “o disco da vez”?
Well, wherever we would go, my father would embrace local music and play it constantly. So I got to listen to a ton of Gilberto Gil, and I was actually hoping to find some bossanova on this list…

Great album, greater memories—even if the machete pulling is no fun, it is still an integral part of my youth…

I dedicate this 4* rating to the beach volleyball club Caspahinho who were nice enough to “adopt” my younger brother and me as part of the clan!

The Good: We get something we’ve never heard about before!
The Bad: Some sounds are just not meant to be sung…
The Ugly: Album = Artist Name…

Miriam, it seems, was a key figure in fighting apartheid, good for her! She played/recorded with some titans like Dizzy Gillespie, Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon… and yet, most people will never have heard of her.

Every now and again, Mr Dimery actually presents us with something that we do need to hear before we die!

Having said that… The album is listed as World Music, which I never have understood… is that a classification when there just isn’t enough specific material to justify a new name? There is influence of Jazz, BossaNova et al…

I don’t know if I will want to listen to the album any time soon again, so I am conflicted as to the score I should give this album… also, it seems that Miriam has 2 albums on this list, and that is not making me a happy camper, due to the lack of some massive albums/artist already being snubbed that I have bitched and complained about ad nauseam…

So, down the middle we go… 3*

The Good: We’ve got an anagram!
The Bad: Finding out that it stands for “Mike’s Cat Vet”…
The Ugly: Encountering a grizzly cat… in the wild…

Fuck me, the intrawebs sure does make certain people [me] go into a rabbit hole of absurdities…
I blame the album… and it’s fucking tittle… which, so I’ve been told, is of Wampanoag origins.. but nobody seems to know what it means… maybe, just maybe, it means Indie Rock?

Critics loved this album… me… well, I didn’t hate it… just got a little tired of it after a while. I have to add that I started listening to this around 6:15am while working on a presentation… so the music was low, and my attention was on work…

Shall I just shoot this one down the middle?…

As it has been a massive challenge finding listenable music post 2000, I believe I should be nice and give it a 4* and listen to it again at some point… then, if I don’t like it, I will come back and drop it to 3*

The Good: We get to learn a new word!
The Bad: Changing the O for an A means dirty…
The Ugly: Being a guero guarro…

So I forgot an r… shit happens.
Beck forgot an excellence, when creating this album.
The real good news, however, is that this marks the last Beck album I need to listen to on this list.

Odelay was enjoyable, this album, and the other one on the list, not so much.
For me, it is starting to feel like Beck is more than a one-trick pony, he’s a shaman who’s been able to fool millions in believing him!
Good for him.

2* to keep his hope alive...

The Good: We get a massive bed to play in!
The Bad: We find out that our empress isn’t who we’d hoped she'd be…
The Ugly: Finding out that “& The Attractions” has nothing to do with looks…

What an utter disappointment.

Here are a couple of words which describe best this album:
* Beige
* Fluff
* SHIT

I could go on, but I’ve already wasted too much energy rating an album which has NOTHING admirable meriting it’s presence on a 1001 Album’s You Must Hear Before You Die…

*1

The Good: We are in el oh ve ee!!!
The Bad: Not that kind of butterfly..
The Ugly: Knowing how it all ends…

Mariah Carey is on the list… understandably, because, in the ‘90s, though we had some great rock based music, it was also the decade that R&B started spitting out one too many artists… Mariah being one of them.

You can’t argue that she has a bad voice. She can do things with her vocal chords that view singers can repeat—five octaves… I don’t even know what an octave is!
She’s sold 200 million records… geezus
Every Christmas millions, tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of people will hear her “All I Want For Christmas” and get all cheery as, well, duh, Christmas is near!

Yet, with all those acolytes, this poor woman is only able of garnering a 2.45 rating…
Either we are all wrong about the grandness of this album, or, more likely, Mr Dimery, again, managed to throw us a curve ball…

At least he could have included the All You Want For Xmas song…

2* because she did what she did

The Good: Finding a pot of gold!
The Bad: Misreading the album name… there’s no end to this one…
The Ugly: Have you ever seen a radiohead?

The snob in me really wants to like this album. Snob. Really.

First listen… can’t be bothered.
Second listen… what’s this pulling me in?
Third listen… fuckers!
Fourth listen… can’t wait till the fifth listen…

It’s not a 5* album, but it is better than some of the albums I’ve rated 5*

Really really really enjoyed this outing!
Does this make me a snob?

4*

The Good: Mr Dimery was nice enough to only include 1 of their albums to the list!
The Bad: That it wasn’t zero…
The Ugly: Finding out that “the community” has added 3 more fucking DaftPunk albums… fuck them.

Anyone can stand 1 2-minute songs of this kind… but to have to sit and listen to this repetitive nonsense for well over an hour is enough to make one want to start punching holes into the wall…

DNF, like many other people

1*

The Good: We are sure to get action!
The Bad: I am uncertain who won the battle…
The Ugly: Flaming lips??? Moist, yes…

Let’s go back to the glorious ‘90s, Aug 13th 1993, to be exact. It was a couple days before my Bday, and a friend of mine gave me, as a pre-bday gift, the honors of being the bartender at the post-show-party of the triple bill Butthole Surfers || Flaming Lips || Stone Temple Pilots…

The show? A total blur. I recall have a blast, backstage passes, getting shot down by almost every groupy that I tried to hit on… duh. Then came the post-show-party, or whatever the fuck you call it, and there I was, wielding the only bottle opener around. All of a sudden I became the best friend of many and all.
I can remember when mr Wieland showed up, in a dress, he was all diva-esque… I did not care for divas. Then, at my side, a person presented himself who was tall, not as tall as I, but not short… and we bonded.

I know that he was the lead singer of one of the other bands, both of which I knew very little/nothing about, but we had a blast just fucking around with other people.
The friendship lasted as long as it did… 45 minutes, and off they all went as the tour didn’t end there.

The rest of the evening I hung-out with the roadies, and holy fuck, what a great time that was! Probably one of my finest evenings in the ‘90s, and I spend many a fine evening in the ‘90s

But I digress… we are here to rate this album… never heard of it. For ages I thought that my buddy was the singer of The Flaming Lips, yet I never went so far as to check them out further…
Then, as this album showed itself today, I checked to see the height of the singer, Mr Coyne, to find that it was not he, but Mr Haynes, who I had such a joyful time with…

This album… I think that I’ve listened to it 5 times in the course of 24 hours. For one, because it is a gentle length, and the songs just all kind of blend well.
Oh, and here’s a thought, there is a little stealing going on during the song “In The Morning Of The Magicians” which sounds a lot like Tears For Fears gloomy “Listen” from their 5* album Songs From The Big Chair.

Anyway, I was reading a review from a person who adores The Flaming Lips, and he/she made the comment that, though great the album is, it is not as great as the three albums which preceded this one…

So, to tip my hat to that fellow reviewer, I too shall bestow upon The Lips in Flames the 4*, which is great as this means the album will become part of my frequent rotation!!!! Love’d it!

The Good: It is an album about herbs!!!
The Bad: Not the kind of herb we’d been craving for…
The Ugly: The skunk face you’ll get smoking the afore mentioned 4…

First song, sounds familiar… there’s that song on the Joe Cocker album Mad Dogs & Englishmen where he sings a “duet” with Leon Russell… go check that one out, as it is one of the finest live songs ever.
Anyway, Paul and Art aren’t going to cover a Dylan song, so let’s keep listening, shall we?

We’ve got ‘60s folksy music, with a little psychedelic mixed in (hence the herbs), which is the kind of music I really am starting to dislike… thanks in no small part to this little journey we are on.
But I digress… song 3 comes along… BAM, I’ve heard that one… and it is GOOD. Wait a second, are you telling me that Paul & Art wrote that many hits???

I don’t recall how many times I listened to the album yesterday, but what I do know is that it was lovely on the background, it is nicely short, and more importantly, there are 12 songs so you are sure to find something you will like.

I can’t, in good conscious, give this album 5*, as it is ‘60s folksy, but I will give it 4* with a huge thumbs up!!!

The Good: (spoiler alert) THE LAST LC album I have to listen to on this list!!!
The Bad: The fact that I had to listen to THREE of his albums…
The Ugly: Mr Dimery’s face all smashed in by my fist—this is my imagination, I don’t condone violence… though at times this journey just pulls the worse out of you…

If you own a dusty coffee shop, where 2-3 regulars show up only on rainy Wednesday afternoons, well then this is your album!

We all know that LC is a poet… yet, as many have said before me, and I will gladly repeat, he has NO BUSINESS performing his own songs.

The only positive thing about this album is that it is now done and I will never have to listen to LC again, unless it is accidentally thrust onto me in a movie or some empty dusty coffee shop on a rainy Wednesday afternoon...

1*

The Good: This album is Justified!
The Bad: Don’t believe everything you’re told…
The Ugly: The only good thing about this album is the silence after the last song…

I hit skip… and skip…. though, I did try and listen to the first song… but I couldn’t.
Somehow, I actually started getting aggressive towards anything pop related.

Also, though the album hails from 2002, this is such a ‘90s shit-storm, it isn’t even funny…. or, my brain is just playing tricks on me.

Poor Justin, he’s not getting a lot of love I guess.

Off to listen to one of the other many albums I still left to rate—2 week business trips really don’t help trying to catch up…

1*

The Good: NOTHING
The Bad: Everything
The Ugly: …

There are times that I really don’t understand the criteria for having bands represented on this list, and then there are times that I am really trying to understand why these bands have more then 1 entry…

I will not repeat all those bands who are NOT represented on this list, or which bands should have more than 1 album…
Orbital, together with several of the other useless electronic shit that is cast upon us via this list, is NOT something one needs to hear before one dies… well, that is not true, we should all be exposed to 1 album of electronic shit, so that we can all agree that it mostly is shit.

Caveat, 1 album full of electronica is shit, 1 song might not be that bad… but this plink plonk garbage made me break my own rule of listening to an album all the way through—to consider that when I started this journey almost 2 years ago I was making myself listen to all albums twice, just to be certain my opinion wouldn’t change…

1*

The Good: The great news that not only astronauts get to be on the moon!
The Bad: Knowing that the band is wearing cardigans…
The Ugly: You know… cardigans…

Setting aside the dresscode… what a nice little trip down ‘90s memory lane this has been.

The production is top notch, the songs are just right… nothing to complain about here… except that, well… it is a little bland… like a cardigan.

So, I will give these venturing Swedes a 3* and off to rate one of the other 25 albums I have been skipping lately…

The Good: We are warned about the cargo being strange…
The Bad: We aren’t sure if the III means there are three cargos, or if this is the third cargo, or if III is code for something…
The Ugly: Realizing that III stands for It Is Idiotic!

EDM… why why why are we getting one too many obscure British EDM, or electronica, or whatnot, thrown at us? And if they aren’t British, then we find out they are French…

So, thanks William for putting a frown on my face this morning, as I had hoped this was something avant-garde… but then, the frown just turned into sobbing and tears and anguish and such…

The Good: Magic!
The Bad: Expecting something more interesting then a rabbit out of a hat kind of magic…
The Ugly: … Yes…

I really really really have no idea what I am supposed to think about this album. I know why. I just don’t know if there is going to come a time when this album just all of a sudden clicks with me.

The production is solid. The musicianship is great. Just don’t know what to think… call me stumped.

And here is the weirdest thing of all… I am going to rate this album 4*
Why? Because I know that one day I am going to need this album… as a concept album, this thing is not bad at all.
It’s just that I had Neill Young the other day, and previously I had some other kind of odd ball thing… so I was kind of looking forward to an awesome album that just instantly blows you away…
Something like Paradise Theater by Styx, that is NOT on the list… by the by…

4* as I want to hear this again… several times...

The Good: We finally made it to nowhere!
The Bad: We wanted to be anywhere but nowhere…
The Ugly: Well, Neil Young’s voice doesn’t get any better now that we are nowhere…

When the album showed itself, I wanted to not like it, thus continuing my dislike for most Neil Young albums…
Yet, the fucker, even when being nowhere, is still much better than many of the shit albums I’ve had the displeasure of having to listen to for the past couple of years…

Cinnamon Girl… classic, and great album opener.
The rest, well, it made me forget that I am nowhere!

Now, I shall apply numerology to score this album:
This is album 656 that has been presented to me…
Simple math: 6+5+6 is 17… 1+7 is 8… divided by 2 is 4

4*

The Good: Finally, a SciFi related album!
The Bad: The planet ABBA is a little monotonous…
The Ugly: Realizing that ABBA stands for Anus Boob Boob Anus, and now I can’t get that out of my head…

I’ve given the album a second chance after I was reading the reviews of several fellow pilgrims on this 1001 journey… they all swear that this is, probably, the best ABBA album, like everrrrr…

My opinion, for what it's worth, is that you come to realize that certain harmony vocals should only be listened to once, and then the album can be shelved… I find that this album, aside from making one wonder if the drum machines were being used on this album, proves that the ladies had reached the end of their trick… It’s like an opera singer trying to do grunge music.

I don’t believe that I will want to listen to this album ever again, so, after giving their other outing on this list a 4* for the massive hits it included, I will sadly have to give this album a 2* as it is better than listening to rap music… but only by a margin…

My apologies to all those ABBA fans out there!

The Good: This won’t be loud! It’ll be a…
The Bad: Realizing that murmur isn’t what I thought it would be…
The Ugly: getting murmured without consent!

So, here we are… listening to R.E.M.’s maiden voyage… it’s nice… it’s not too intrusive… it’s like a murmur, but not…

I was never aware of REM, until they just blew up with Loosing My Religion… but I’ve mentioned that already in my previous murmuring for that other REM album that is on this list which does not include Loosing My Religion…

Do I feel better having listened to this? Not really…
Do I feel worse having listened to this? Not really either…

So, let’s call it a 3, click the vote button and hope for something illuminating… not something that’s a murmur…

3*