Reviews by bow_doubt

An all time great album.
I find Keith Moon's drumming on this album fascinating. Without giving up his role as the timekeeper / anchor of the songs, he manages to be the most significant voice instrumentally in the music, which is tight and strong throughout. Probably their best performance as a band in their catalog.
I've always thought Behind Blue Eyes was, y'know, ridiculous. But people seem to really like it.
So many years after buying a bargain priced reissue LP of this album in the mid 80s, I still enjoy listening to it. Goin Mobile ... My Wife ... Bargain ... so many good album tracks. And the sound is tremendous -- their first truly well-recorded album.

Kind of cool. Kind of interesting. Find myself losing interest steadily as we progress through the album.
Dance rock background music?
That could be either a bold, wild, quixotic, paradoxical enterprise ... or a bad idea.
This distinctly leans toward the second.

I really didn't want to listen to this album -- too much metal! Don't want to listen to any of it! But I had forgotten that Paranoid is a very good song. Not sure that I ever knew what it's title was. So, that's something. Still -- no thank you.

Cool album. Not really my thing. I find it pleasant, but not something I would seek out.

Coldplay is terrible. Frequently, in the 2010s, I would be listening to a perfectly good Pandora station, enjoying it, algorithm doing its job, and then -- something horrible would come out of the speaker. I would rush to the smartphone, look at the Pandora display, and -- Agghh! Coldplay! Again!!
They are bad. I don't know why The Computers think I should like them, but they do, and I don't.
This album has moments. God Put a Smile, Clocks, and Daylight all give indications of how a good song was potentially there, for example. But none of them get there.
Cycling among pastiches of U2, Dave Matthews, and Sting -- and maybe Radiohead? (never got into them, but people I respect like them ... they seem relevant here) -- the derivative but real songcraft is continually dragged down by the bombastic, bloated-synthy production.
If Coldplay and Imagine Dragons went into an arena and had a Cheese Off .... I don't know what would happen, but all concerned would be in grave danger.

An all time great album. Love this album. Took me a while to get into some of the songs on sides 3 and 4. But more and more, I find that every song is a winner. Always a pleasure to revisit this album.
I'm fascinated by Revolution Rock, which I have seen people complain about online as a blemish marring the record, but which is one of my favorites.
There are many paths to feeling old. One of the more fun ones is owning an LP copy of this album that does not list Train In Vain, making it seem like a mysterious secret track (the song was included at a late stage, and the packaging was not altered, not clear why. This was fixed in later pressings.). I was confused for a period of time in the late 1980s. About a lot of things, but that was one of them.

Ah, Jesus.
In the Garden of Eden is a gloriously ridiculous monsterpiece. The rest is a hopeless, sludgy mess.
[Chapter 95, In the Garden of Eden .... In which The Book takes its credibility, crumples it into a ball, and expectorates heavily onto it before tossing it into a waste receptacle.]

Even if you like Yes, this is not a great album. The Yes Album is their best album, but for some reason -- I think because this has Rick Wakeman on keyboards, which made them a bit more of a supergroup, and because it includes Roundabout, which is perhaps their best song -- people tend to focus on this album as their peak.
But aside from Roundabout, Long Distance Runaround is it for songs that hang together. I like Chris Squires' bass playing, so for me The Fish works well as an extension of Long Distance. And Steve Howe was a talented guitarist, so I enjoy Mood For a Day.
But ... Heart of the Sunrise? More like Heart of a Trainwreck. The musicianship shines within hook-driven songs, but can't carry sprawling, formless material. Not a satisfying listen, even if you like Yes. And they are obviously not for everyone.

I am familiar with Ali Farka Toure's name as a greatly respected musician, but never listened to his albums.
This is a cool album. I've been listening to it in a backgroundy way. Very enjoyable. Gomni is a standout. Really, really good track.

An undoubted classic I was not interested in when it came out and have never been interested in it.
To my mind, Billie Jean and Wanna Be Startin Something are the only songs that truly hold up. (The latter of which, tellingly, was actually written during production of Off the Wall, which I think has to be considered Jackson's peak, musically.)
Never listened to this album except as singles on the radio. The Lady In My Life is a shockingly terrible song.

There are Bob Dylan songs I like, but I do not like Bob Dylan. My attitude toward Dylan has vacillated between skepticism and hostility for 40 years.
This album's fame and daunting reputation to me are an intractable mystery.
Just as hit or miss as other electric Dylan albums of the Sixties.
It's not a famous song, and I've never listened to this album in full before, so I was not familiar with Obviously Five Believers, but for my money, that is the most successful song on this album.
It is difficult to capture in words how much I dislike Rainy Day Women. #blahblahirritatingpretension. I thought it was dumb and annoying when I first heard it on WBCN Boston in the early 80s, and it hasn't improved any since.

Great album. I like the way this sits at the intersection of genres. Beautiful playing. A pleasure.

For those who have been waiting for decades for Nick Lowe to turn his charming but limited vocal powers to the project of reviving Neil Diamond's ghost -- Good News! That album exists and has been located. (Neil is actually alive. Thanks, Wikipedia.)
The cover photo is a shambolic trainwreck. Get a haircut. And comb your hair. In either order; makes no difference. And then get new glasses. And the all black outfit is ... I mean, come on.
Get it together, Hawley!
This album has its moments, but overall it is a beguiling blend of the boring and the tedious. With a dash of the tiresome to pull it all together.
At least Paul Anka's Nirvana cover on Rock Swings is funny.
Closing with something that sounds like it came from a Brian Eno ambient album qualifies as a true surprise.

Famous album. Never listened to it before. Great performances -- beautiful vocals, tight band, fantastic 70s funk sound (amazing sound at times). But the songwriting. Not memorable. Sprawling, loose compositions ... some people seem to like that sort of thing. I need some tighter structures. I get bored, can't find anything to grab hold of.
In the end, this becomes an exercise in creating killer background music.
Which I guess is a way of saying, the key word here is Soundtrack.

Never listened to a Dire Straits album before. They always seemed like a singles act to me. And indeed ... the songs I already know are good, and the rest seems dull. Unless you're planning to live for a couple of millennia, just listen to a concise greatest hits album, and save the rest for A Near Infinite Parade of Albums To Listen to After You're Dead.

Beautiful voice, excellent production, varied and inventive arrangements, big scope and ambition ... this album has it all. It just doesn't click for me. There are parts I like (the bass on Neon Street, the bubbly marimba synth on Wondaland), but ... it's just not doing it for me.
It often sounds like something between tribute and pastiche lies at the heart or seed of many songs (Make the Bus ... Prince meets Queen ... ? Before giving way to ... something else, not sure what ... ?)
The energy level picks up notably on Come Alive, though that sounds like it might have a working title of Grunge Song, and the grungy guitars are a little much. I can admire this, but not very interested in listening to it.

As uncomfortable as it is to say in some circles, the truth is that I am indifferent to REM. I like a bunch of the singles, I generally am not interested in the album tracks. I don't want to listen to their albums all the way through. This one, which every fellow college student around me seemed to own and love, obviously has several standout tracks. Good album.

Good album. Some songs are just ok, some stand out. I appreciate the wider palette, and varied instrumentation. Speech does not have a great voice, which limits the impact of the music. And puts more pressure on the composition side of things. A more commanding voice might make a track like Mama's Always On Stage work better. It's ok; it needs a voice that can really sell it.
The bass at times needs to boom more.
I remember this album coming out, and hearing it at a friend's apartment, and thinking, it's ok. A little ... background-y. A more careful listen changes that judgement a bit, but not fundamentally.
Mr. Wendel is a really good song.

Not sure I've ever listeened to this from beginning to end. A huge album by hugely talented artists ... and yet, a truly gripping track doesn't arise until Fu-Gee-La. the sixth track (though, on an album like this, that's maybe the third actual song). Speaking of which, to get to a good track, the listener has to endure some tedious hip hop skit bullshit. (My best friend from elementary school years told me recently he harbors an ambition to create a long playlist exclusively comprised of dumb 90s hip hop skits, which is a sort of brilliantly absurd conceptual art project, but a terrifying prospect to sit through.)
Absolutely beautiful bass line on the Sly and Robbie mix of Fu-Gee-La.
I remember this as the cornerstone or a high point or whatever of the Phat Beat era, and yet ... I'm less blown away by the beats than I thought I would be. I think I never listened to this all the way through because I became discouraged by the boring parts and stopped. Which seems about right.
Beautiful beat on the Score. I don't remember that one. Very compelling music. Surprisingly generic vocals given the opportunity provided by the music.
Overall, this is surprisingly hit or miss for such a successful album.

Dug out the cd for this one. Not today, Satan's Streaming Services!
There are many things I really, really like about this album, that I think is the most successful of the Beasties' albums -- (Not sure, but I think so.) --
The Sabotage video is so hilarious; there are a bunch of really good songs; the sampling is smart and deft; the funk playing is legit; the wild, big-tent creativity ... songs are at times unfinished, or assemblages of fragments, lots of stuff is jumbled up together in a joyous mess that works surprisingly well.
When they are funny, and self-consciously so ("I feel international when I eat French toast") -- love that side of them. (Intergalactic video, when they enact a Power Rangers esgue fight in a city scape that is obviously made of cardboard boxes. Cracks me up.)
(Apparently not in this book is Hello Nasty, another masterpiece, which includes Intergalactic .... Probably my favorite BB moment is at the end of Intergalactic , when there is a little bonus snippet -- I have been quoting Biz Markie for years to my family when they stare at me like, That's your idea? And I want to say, come on, you know ... and I quote Biz Markie to them: You know ?? .... With the echo .... ?? I'm telling you -- !!
I love that moment. The Biz is -- was -- hilarious.)
The didgeridoo based Shambala! So good. Big Youth sampled on Futterman's Rule ... Flute Loop .... Tremendous.
There are of course things I don't like as well. The thrashy hardcore type stuff isn't for me. But they incorporate so much stuff that one simply accepts that this will happen. Few will dig everything they do on their best albums.
At times, the dumbass masculinist juvenile side is ... a lot. Don't care for that. And that side of them always sets a limit on how much affection I can have for this band.
But this is a pretty great album.