Reviews by bow_doubt

A landmark album in its genre. The material is surprisingly weak, with only a few tracks that really work well. The production is solid, but more "promise of what is to come" than a full fledged demonstration of what Dr Dre is capable of. (Looking over the wikipedia page, it appears it was recorded quite quickly, and so that seems relevant here.)
Parental Discretion is interesting ... one of the more successful tracks, it features all four of the rappers who worked on this album, and provides an opportunity to compare their styles --
Ren is a workhorse who can be counted on to take a solid turn, but is not a frontman.
Ice Cube has a remarkable and unmistakable voice, though he seems to have one move: an aggressive, percussive attack. It seems like he over relies on his obvious strength; his voice is so good, he can make anything sound convincing, and so he doesn't have to be as inventive as others might.
The D.O.C. is interesting. I acquired a copy of his album No One Can Do It Better in 1991 by chance and listened to it many, many times that summer. He is genuinely clever, and does a lot of little things with timing, pacing, emphasis, etc. to make the material land. He is a real craftsman, and his performance on this track illustrates that.
Everything about Eazy-E -- his voice, lyrics, and persona -- I find obnoxious. Never understood how he got to be the lead / star of this group. Though ... Ice Cube had a much better career ultimately, so ... the universe is perhaps keyed to logic and reason after all.
Overall, this album is a tough listen. So much mediocre material, violence, misogyny, cheap / exploitative sex talk, and of course -- the swearing. Follow the cuss words to see who is really good at this. Rap lyrics are like crab cakes -- and cuss words are the bready filler.
It hasn't aged very well. It's long. It's just not a great listen. But I will round up to 3 stars because of History.
(To quote the English jesuit schoolmaster speaking to Stephen Daedalus in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: It seems history is to blame.)

Oh, ferf@#%ssake. We already got a Coldplay album. And now we're doing this again?!? This band is not good.
Actually, they are good. They are good at creating a product imbued with that special alchemy that it takes to be a huge commercial success in the music industry.
Just like Hollywood production teams are good at making exploitative, cheap emotional scenes that are so effective, at the level of craft, that you simultaneously are wiping away a tear and so angry at being manipulated that you're looking around to see if the director happens to be nearby so you can punch that puppet-string-pulling asshat in the face.
I once read a music review in the NYU student newspaper that offered the striking pronouncement that, Music is an emotion. (spoiler alert: that is not what music is)
Well, for me, to be asked to listen to the music of Coldplay is an emotion: Anger.
In fairness, I hated this far less than I expected to.
That, kids, is an example of what we mean when we use the phrase "damning with faint praise." Tomorrow, we'll take on zeugma, or perhaps "shit talk."

I mainly think of Donovan as a purveyor of catchy, memorable, ironically-enjoyable psychedelic pop singles that are fun but impossible to take seriously.
At points, I have encountered songs from his "upstart rival to Bob Dylan" phase that revealed a different, interesting, and at times very accomplished side to Donovan.
This album comes as a surprise -- good songs throughout. Very solid album. Ferris Wheel, for example, is a song I've never heard of but is really quite good.
It's still psychedelia, and it's still not something I'm going to listen to regularly. But -- good album. I learned something today.
Looking at his wikipedia page ... it's amazing how young he was. During his folky, Dylan-Guthrie-Martin Carthy -- that's right! Martin Carthy! Look it up! -- phase, he was like 18, 19 years old. When he had his Big Stylistic Shift to psychedelia, he was ... 20, if I'm not mistaken. So, the period he has spent since the early 70s (during which it turns out he released many albums -- including getting a turn on the Rick Rubin Reinvention Machine in 1996 -- who knew?) being a Relic of the Past Times of Sixties Hippiedom -- more than 50 years -- began when he was in his mid to late 20s. What a strange life.

This very famous album, that sold many, many copies, is on many lists of best this and that out of all time whathaveyou. (Starting with a #37 ranking by Rolling Stone in 2003 and 2012.)
It's not a great album. It's actually not even a good album.
It's a mediocre, boring album with three memorable singles. For my money, there's not a single song on here I would call good after those first three big tracks.
The title track is like a Brian De Palma adaptation of a Stephen King story converted into a lengthy rock song with great guitar solos. It's an all time classic of Rock ... sort of like Stairway to Heaven -- this huge, instantly recognizable song that gets a reaction when it comes on the radio, but -- how often are you really going to listen to this thing?
New Kid In Town is a good example of an Eagles song that you remember, as a good song like, oh, sure, that one ... but when you listen to it, you get stuck between wanting to sing along and wanting to throw the stereo out the window. They have a few of those. (The Long One -- am I right?)
And then there's Life In the Fast Lane. Great song, there's a reason it's a staple of classic / dinosaur rock radio. But, again -- aside from specialty use as a song to rock out to while driving ... how often does one need to listen to this thing?
So -- three pinnacle achievements of rock in its most commercial form. And a lot of songs that frankly suck.
After Fast lane, it's: Three rounds of "eh, kinda boring," then one that's, "hey, not bad; this is all right," and then it closes on "this is terrible; whatth-@#$% are we even doing here ?!?"
That's not a good album. That's a huge commercial success and three nice additions to the playlist of your stadium tours. But it is not a good album.
So ... greatest blahblahblah? Give me a blahblah break!

TThe Cure is another of these tricky bands that has a scattered set of great songs, but not much in terms of albums that are really satisfying all the way through for those who are not fully committed fans. (Like me -- I'm speaking from personal experience here! I take it that there are some who love whatever Robert Smith turns out, or did in the 80s, but ... that is a shaky, intellectual exercise for me. Don't feel it.)
I strongly believe that there are some singles compilations that should be on this list -- Squeeze, Singles 45s and Under; the first Blondie greatest hits, which sold like crazy and was one of those "belongs in every record collection" albums; love him or hate him, that blue and orange Steve Miller greatest hits was much the same; Hot Rocks -- another Great Album in its own right. Etc.
The Cure's one great album (One reviewer's opinion) was Standing On a Beach, which, like Hot Rocks, is not comprehensive -- there were more outstanding singles to come -- but is just a great listen. In fact, there are expanded versions of that album that add a couple of songs, which only serve to dilute the experience, demonstrating the point, I think.
Important band? Yes. Producer of must-listen albums? Don't know about that.
On this album, Lovesong is really good. Same for Fascination Street. Lullaby is another good one, that I had forgotten about. The rest is mostly fine, a little boring. Eh. It's an album. The Cure made many of them.
[Prayers For Rain, 5 minutes in: "oh my god, how long are we doing this?"]
Once again, as so often -- make a playlist! Life's too short. The universe gave us the tremendous gift of digital versions, the capacity to easily select the best songs and not bother with the rest.
After Prometheus gave Steve Jobs the gift of iTunes, Zeus cut his rations and doubled the vultures as punishment for his effrontery ... honor Prometheus's sufferings on our behalf, and make a goldurn playlist already!

Great voice, great performances. Chain of Fools and Sweet, Sweet Baby Since You've Been Gone. are standouts. At times, a little overproduced, but -- strong set. First time listening to an Aretha album, and I enjoyed it.

I've only listened to Patti Smith a bit -- I own an lp copy of Wave, which I liked ok, but never really connected with. The first three songs on that album are really good. After that ... eh. I think I was too young when I listened to it.
But now, listening to Patti as a more mature listener ... not sure how different it is, truly
Apple Music named this to their top 100 ever list, and in the headnote raised the question of what does punk mean, exactly. I think that is an interesting question, especially when you think about the New York scene alongside the London one.
Gloria is really interesting ... it seems to forge a direct connection between garage and punk. Redondo Beach and Free Money both sound like early Blondie, which comes as a surprise, but also makes a lot of sense.
Birdland is a reminder of why I'm a Patti Smith skeptic ... it sounds like the more experimental side of Velvety Underground, if they swapped out Nico for a Beat poet. Not a big fan. (Musically, it sounds a lot like VU's Heroin, actually.) But on the second go round I liked it better, so maybe if I listened to this album several times, everything would be different. Who can say?
Land is interesting. It combines all of it ... including the draw from Sixties pop that is a critical component of Blondie's vocabulary. It builds into a masterpiece of ... whatever you would call this. You could connect it to the better / jamming side of Them or the Yardbirds, or early Stooges, or ... not sure. It cooks, but doesn't constrain her verbal riffing, the reaching for what's just beyond the horizon side of her approach.
Good album.
In my earliest encounters with the PS Situation, I felt like a big part of her mystique was always that she was a Poet. That set her apart. Not just some civilian songwriter, but -- an actual, official Poet. But ... the first thing of hers I ever encountered was, of all places, on the back of a used copy of the lp Edgar Winter's White Trash which I picked up at Cheapo Records in Cambridge on a whim. The album was supposed to be good, according to the Rolling Stone Record Guide. I found it boring. On the back was a poem by Patti Smith, which seemed to me (I was 15, so -- who knows) like self-consciously Arty gobbledygook.
And on this album (Horses), at one point, there's this thing in Kimberly about bats -- and the "violet, violent sky" ... that seems obvious and gimmicky to me. And a little bit representative of her writing. That's the Beat side of things for me. Not a compliment. Anyway ... I just find that the thing that's supposed to be her superpower is much dodgier than her reputation leads one to expect. That's what I'm trying to convey. It doesn't matter, really. But if you're not buying the poetry, then the whole enterprise shifts. Basically, I'm saying that Patti Smith tracks with Velvet Underground -- for me, I like certain songs, but I'm just not an enthusiast. My appreciation is more intellectual than felt. I can see why they're important to rock history and why people love them, but I'm just not really ever going to make that kind of connection.

Solid album with two great songs and a bunch of fine ones. I always thought Damn the Torpedoes was considered Petty's best album, and yet (!) -- this is his only album in The Book.
I went down the rabbit hole and listened to Torpedoes ... and even Hard Promises, which Apple Music has also declared to be an Essential Album, along with this, Torpedoes, and a couple others.
When all this thoroughgoing inquiry making was done, I found waiting for me at the end of that shadowy, jangly, hummable, and at times banal road ... my longheld belief that Tom Petty albums have isolated great songs and lots of dispensable but solid filler.
Damn the Torpedoes has four outstanding songs, so it's ... twice as good as this album ... ? None of these albums are amazing! The answer is to make a playlist! That has always been the answer!
Damn the Torpedoes producer Jimmy Iovine had a clear understanding of how to make a successful Tom Petty album: in an interview with Apple Music, guitarist Mike Campbell said that Iovine heard Refugee and Here Comes My Girl and said, "I don't need to hear any more songs, we've got the two we need, the rest doesn't matter."

A classic album. I think its reputation as a singular achievement distorts somewhat its place in the TH discography. Each of their first four albums are really good. Their fifth is easily their strongest set of songs, though the self-produced sound of it is curiously underwhelming. The sound is a bit thin. In any case, it's a matter of preference as to which of those five albums to esteem most highly. They are each their own thing, and will strike different listeners differently.
This album is really two albums -- side one and side two, and my sense is that when people talk about what a great album this is, they are thinking about side one. Which is a tremendous suite of hypnotic, wonderful music.
Side two is more weird music, offkilter poetic speaker, "Mr. Bean fronts a VU-inspired funk rock band" type stuff. Very downtown, avant rock, part of the journey from Velvet Underground and krautrock to .... whatever. Stereolab, Yo La Tengo ... however the individual would finish that sentence. Also very good, but very different. And not, to my mind, the stuff of being named one of the 100 greatest albums of all time, which this was, by Apple Music, a couple years back, on a dodgy list that ... anyway.
The making of this album has been described in a number of places over the years, with details varying, emphases varying, relying on various perspectives ... it was a chancy process, but ultimately very successful. The production is fascinating, the playing is very, very good. Listening to this album on a digital stream that has presumably been remastered at some point is very different from the cheap Italian import LP pressing I listened to in high school. You hear a lot more, and there's a lot more separation.
Debates about the Afrobeat inspirations that went into this record are interesting, but when I listened to it this time I was struck once again by how much tight, I want to call it brittle, funk guitar is on this record. The music truly does achieve a fusion of many components. And Adrian Belew's guitar work at that time was not about genre -- it was about his inventive use of effects (all those wild sounds he was producing ... elsewhere, often making his guitar sound like various animals; idiosyncratic and brilliant).
It is really interesting to see how TH took the very dense sound of these studio recordings and opened them up and made them so dynamic in live performance. There are two great documents of the Remain In Light tour: the performances on The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, and the film of them playing in Rome (it's on YouTube, and it's a treat). Very rewarding to hear that band playing live -- it's the same format as in Stop Making Sense, but the band is even better.
The other place to look for recordings with a similar style would be My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, where the music is constructed in a similar manner. But for another album recorded around the same time with a similarly great batch of songs and a similarly dense, hypnotic, polyrhythmic sound, I associate together this album and Black Uhuru's Sensemilla. They both have music so dense and so propulsive it's delightfully overwhelming.
Anyway -- side one of this album is among my favorite things of all time. Side two has the big single, Once In a Lifetime, and Houses In Motion, which is tremendous, and some weird stuff that is very good, but not nearly as fun as, say, The Great Curve, which is just ... so, so good.

Once upon whathaveyou, I thought I really liked Rockafeller Skank based on hearing it on the radio. But when I bought the single, I found that the song is actually so underdeveloped that it is kind of tedious to listen to all the way through. This is the pattern throughout this album. (Oddly, this version of Rockafeller Skank is different from the single version. Not sure what's going on there.)
By the time you have endured the entirety of In Heaven, all vestiges of charm have worn off. That thing stinks.
Praise You is actually pretty good. Successfully completed, that is.
And it's fun to be able to identify a sample (Gangster Trippin pulls from the Brand New Heavies album Heavy Rhyme, Jump N'Move).
But ... these are like rough drafts or beds on which successful songs could be constructed. This album is like a portfolio you bring to the meeting to try to convince a singer to collaborate with you, because you're pitching that you can give their next album a certain sound.
So repetitive, so static, at times annoying, at times obnoxious. Brilliant sound collages. But. After a while, you're just begging for it to end, as the Fisherman's Blues reviewer put it.

I take it on faith that Monk is a jazz visionary. As so often, my ears are not sophisticated enough to really get the vision. Monk's genius is of such an offkilter, idiosyncratic nature that I just have to go along for the ride and trust that this make sense to Monk and to the critics who hailed it as a top jazz release of the year when it came out and as a core, must-have album in any collection decades later. Consummate hard bop performance. Etc.
I'm not the only one, by the way. From wikipedia: On October 15, Monk attempted to record the title track with the same band during a four-hour session. The complexity of the composition became a challenge for the band, who attempted twenty-five takes, and Henry and Pettiford became upset with Monk. Monk tried to make the recording easier for Henry by not playing during his solo. During one of the takes, producer Orrin Keepnews and others in the control room could not hear Pettiford's playing; they checked the microphone on his bass to see if it was broken, but ultimately realized that he was pantomiming.
I don't know the saxophonist Eric Henry, but Oscar Pettiford is a great bassist. Regardless -- if professional jazz musicians recruited for the session had trouble getting it and got frustrated ... I guess I don't have to feel bad.
Bemsha Swing speaks to me the most here. Maybe that just means it's the funnest, easiest piece on the album. Anyway -- great musicians give excellent performances of music I only partly understand.

This brings me back to 7th and 8th grade at the Immaculate Conception School in North Cambridge. So many classmates who so loved Van Halen, AC/DC, Def Leppard ... etc. All of which is appropriate for boys aged 12 or so. But .... is that what we're here for? I wasn't terribly into this then, and I like to think I've grown since then.
I'm not convinced this is a great album even on its terms, but ... this is just so dumb and plodding. I didn't finish any of the songs, except Rock of Ages. That's a high-quality bombastic hard rock song.

This seems generally to be less than the sum of its constituent parts -- good bass, good production, chill vibe ... but it's pretty lackluster in the end.
Finally when we get to Cruisin' and When We Get By there are songs that truly work. But ... overall, just not that interesting or engaging an album.

Not for me. Decidedly.

Must we?
Today we revisit a classic lagging indicator album -- the sales and media coverage remain extremely high, even after inspiration and creative genius have unmistakably exited the building. For a star of this magnitude, the general public takes a little time to catch up. Rhythm of the Saints also sold a lot of copies.
Bad is the signature single here, and I just skipped to the next song about two thirds of the way through, because it became so tedious.
The Way You Make Me Feel -- good song, deeply undermined by dated, lame late 80s production approach.
Speed Demon -- very lame, boring song I made it only halfway through
Liberian Girl -- a double helix of terrible ideas, between the awful, insipid approach in instrumentation and production and the cringy, exoticizing "African" flourishes. But does this analysis really cover how lame the lyrics are? Triple helix of terrible?
Etc.
Man In the Mirror seemed to me a mystery when it came out -- why are people buying this obviously lame effort? Why are we not noticing that this is terrible? It has a somewhat sturdy structure musically, so it kind sticks in the memory. But the sound! Terrible!
Never mind that he failed to heed his own advice and start with the man in the mirror and make important changes. But for some reason, that never sticks to Michael J.
Impeccably crafted slop. Bleh.
Against all expectations, Leave Me Alone turns into an exercise in what Michael J does so well. Where was this for the preceding 44 minutes?

For what it is -- dated teenybopper twaddle -- this album is surprisingly strong, and even more surprisingly, consistent.
But -- I mean, come on.

Never listened to this band, just a name to me.
The sound of these songs can be compared or related to a number of the more interesting bands of the period, none of which I listened to very much, and this, too, is not really my thing.
But the songs are all pretty strong, and there is an impressive variety to the approach, song to song.
Good album.

Yet another group I know about, but haven't listened to.
Good Times is great, super classic. Will You Cry is amazingly terrible. Everything else is in between, mainly good, fun songs.
Good album. Not great, but pretty dang good.

Famous album. I like Faces pretty well, and have been Small Faces curious as a result. Occasional dips into their catalog haven't gone very far or been very productive.
This album ... why is it famous? Because it did this kind of wobbly crap before some other bands did?
Side One is ok. None of the songs are especially good or bad.
Side Two is an endurance test.
Likable band with not enough material makes goofy album that sounds at times like English pop eccentric mode (Roy Wood, Kevin Ayers) and at times like irritating local lads in the manner of Slade. Then makes a trailblazing story-song sequence that shows the way for lots of other bands to fill up their albums with twaddle and nonsense ... this is a classic album in a hell designed by Sartre, or Ted Danson's Michael in the Good Place. .

I thought I knew a very little bit about Cocteau Twins. I think I'm finding out I had heard their name and completely conflated them with Spandau Ballet.
Good album. Not too much that really stands out, wouldn't listen to it a lot, not really my thing, all that ... but this is good. Nice album.