Reviews by bow_doubt

The hits are fun in familiar ways. The rest is tedious.

During the 80s, I thought Simply Red was a one-hit wonder, and the one hit pretty lame at that. Eventually I came to realize that in the UK the band is taken more seriously, and Mick Hucknall is a star. It made me curious about Simply Red, especially as there is this whole UK pop-soul thing (Style Council, Swing Out Sister, Everything But the Girl) that we don't really have. None of it is great, but it's kind of interesting. Like a much less compelling Two Tone.
So, thank you to the site and the Remorseless Eating Machine for arranging for me to finally listen to a Simply Red album.
It's pretty good. None of it is great, but it all works if you listen long enough and let the songs develop. Solid and consistent. Good job, Red people. Probably not gonna listen to them ever again. Though ... apparently, their album Star from a few years later was even more successful ... ?

Classic album ... [list of great songs you know well] ...
So, then the question is: what does listening to the full album yield that we would not get from the career-spanning compilation?
Very little. Plus, quite odd. (Feature / bug -- ? )
Excellent example of a noteworthy album that .... you really don't need to listen to.

This is not for me.

ZZ Top's best singles are really fun, and I've always had a certain fondness for them since hearing an interview in like 1982 in which Billy Gibbons attributed their success to "never learning that third chord."
That said, I have never listened to an album of theirs. This album was pretty much what I expected -- a bunch of ok songs, plus the one great single.
Songwriting is really important. Having a fun sound can only take you so far.

Since the 1980s, so for 40 years, I have periodically interacted with this classic hard rock album, with its iconic cover art and compelling lead single, Good Times Bad Times. The result has always been the same: underwhelmed(edness). There are really good moments, Jimmy Page is obviously very good at playing guitar, but ... eh. Only one song is fully successful (Good Times, on which all four membets of the band shine).
Several months ago I went through the Zep catalog for purposes of capturing the songs of theirs I like in my Apple Music library. I offended a friend of mine, who loves this band, by complaining to a text chain that their catalog is thin. But lots of it is plodding and underdeveloped. Sorry, Ross!
I found the provenance of Black Mountain Side to be highly interesting ... Al Stewart taught it to Page based on Bert Jansch's arrangement, but got the tuning wrong ... the record company wanted to sue, but couldn't quite get there...
Down by Blackwaterside - Wikipedia https://share.google/9qTkwYSegQjQPCZFI

To quote Homer Simpson: BORrrrrrRINNNG! It's ok, but just ... boring. Not that hard to sit through, but ... just -- why? A few of the songs are better, a few are decidedly not good. I thought the best song was Elevation, and it has some truly banal / cliched lyrics. How does this album make it onto this list?

No thank you.
It's actually well produced and seems good bybthe standards of its genre, but there's no freakin way. Uh uh. Yuck.

First time listening to a Madonna album from start to finish. Every song was fine; didn't skip any. The production is immaculate (arguably to the point of sterility). But the choices, in arranging and mixing, are questionable throughout. The songs consistently lack urgency or excitement. Often elements that might draw the listener in are too low in the mix, while banal elements are featured very prominently. It must be said that the songs featuring acoustic guitar sound very 90s-pop in a way I would never have guessed Madonna songs could sound. The overall result is an album that is best suited to playing as background music, perhaps while having drinks with friends, or while doing household chores. This is a fate we could never have imagined for Madonna: to be ordinary.

This album comes billed as an all time great masterpiece. To me, it’s more like a good example of a certain kind of album. Hill has a great voice, the production is good, the skits are a lame waste of time, some of the songs are better than others ...
It’s good. I’m not sure it’s the singular achievement I was told it is.

I won't ever listen to this again, and it is most certainly not for me. But I don't hate it.

Never really listened to much Janis Joplin. Not a huge fan. I’m inconsistent on great singers with bad voices: Neil Young, Shane MacGowan: on board. Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin: less so.
This album was something of an eye opener. Good album. I forgot how good Move Over is. Mercedes Benz always makes me smile. Still not gonna listen to a lot of Janis, but ... I have adjusted my ideas.

Pleasant music, well played, by excellent musicians. Not really my thing. It seems like a fairly random selection, even if we limited the field to the long and distinguished careers of the two principals, Piazzolla and Gary Burton. I consulted my copy of The Book for greater insight, and the writeup amounted to, This album is Great because it was so amazing that they did this, which is Great. Gonna have to take your word on it. I'm not enthusiastic, but I've given 3 stars to so many albums I affirmatively did not like, just to reward them for not being out and out terrible, that I have to go 4 here.

I came to this skeptical ... Public Enemy is huge, influential, etc., but ... how well would this hold up, didn’t they peak with Fear of a Black Planet? and so on. The opening track, Lost At Birth, is brilliant. No notes. From there, a dense unfolding flow of sound -- dynamic, vibrant, powerful. A very long album, not my first choice of genre, but this is the real deal. And so refreshing after some of the lame, dull successors we have been saddled with during this project. I was going to give it a 4, because ... I don’t love it. But the music is so well constructed that, thinking about some of the stuff I’ve given 4 stars to, I had to go to 5. Experts in their craft are at work here.

I consider this to be a great album. It has what is probably Shane MacGowan's best song in a crowded field, the title track. Broad Majestic Shannon is a standout, and a staple of concert set lists and compilation albums, of which the Pogues have issued many. But Bottle of Smoke and Sit Down By the Fire are also excellent. When I finally bought this album 20 years ago, it was interesting to hear thr original of Lullaby of London, after listening to and loving the version by June Tabor and the Oyster Band for several years.
The move here was to make the Pogues more commercially successful, and that worked -- the sound is clearer (though ... some of the dynamism is lost ...), and the songs more varied. But for me, listening to Fiesta, Turkish Song of the Damned, and Metropolis multiple times leads to diminishing returns. Steve Lillywhite's achievements as producer are therefore somewhat equivocal.
But there are just so many good moments on this album. Great achievement.
Gotta make a plug for Shane's solo work -- in addition to the Snake, which did rather well, Crock of Gold is an underrated masterpiece, and the live album Across the Broad Atlantic is excellent.

They were huge when this came out, and this album was everywhere. Or something. About two thirds of these songs are familiar to me. One after another -- oh, yeah, this one. Good song. Not a very fun listen, though. I attribute that to the ascension from scrappy rock band to Artists that was completed with this album.
The only song here I really enjoy is Mon On the Moon, a graceful and elegant elegant tribute to a departed friend, Andy Kaufman, a disturbed, disturbing, and ultimately for me unsympathetic figure. The overall effect is odd.

I love the song La Femme d'Argent. It's great The challenge with bands working in this mode is coming up with enough ideas to sustain a full album (or even half an album). The tendency is to devolve into bland repetition, soundscapes that don't do much.
Some pretty good songs follow Femme, the signature single form this album. By track 5, we're into Soundtrack to Imagined Film territory. The devolution is underway. By track 8, it's like -- was this the soundtrack to the Mary Tyler Moore show? No. Not lively enough. The Courtship of Eddie's Father?
A lot of this is solid, but not enough is affirmatively interesting. 3.5 stars.

I've never been a big Boss fan. I grew up hearing him on the radio, but not listening to the albums. I'm well disposed, but -- I like his big songs, don't really enjoy his albums. Many of his songs are longer than they need to be. I also just don't fundamentally understand his songs. He says a bunch of stuff, and the band does a bunch of things, and it's held together by recurring, catchy lines -- which generally provide the song its title (he stretches this to the breaking point in Badlands, a good song that goes on long enough that when toward the end he works his way around to landing on "Badlands," with heavy emphasis, it sounds a bit like self-parody). For me, Van Morrison is similar -- when it works, it doesn't matter, but on the less successful songs, I'm baffled -- what is he even doing? How does this work as a song?
This album has a solid handful of the successful Boss songs, so -- pretty good. But I am not enthusiastic. 3.5 stars

I can see the strengths of this album that have led so many to be so enthusiastic about it. But it has never clicked with me. I don't do great with soul music -- it's flow is somehow off for me. Apple Music chose this as one of the best or whatever 100 Albums of all blah blah. In an obviously highly on-board description, the critic never introduces the names Billie Holiday or Ronnie Spector. Which seems odd to me -- I heard them all over this record, to the point that it becomes fair to introduce that dreaded word, Derivative, into the conversation. [fight breaks out] ... The song that stood out for me on this listen was Love Is a Losing Game, which I am not aware of as one of the big songs on this album. Good album, but not something I am drawn to.

Decidedly not to my taste, but good of its kind. It’s easy to see how Janis became a star on the basis of these performances.