Reviews by cmhess98

Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney absorbed the Mississippi hill country blues tradition — Robert Johnson, Junior Kimbrough, the whole lineage — and made it completely their own without losing what made the tradition worth inheriting. Brothers is where that absorption became something irreplaceable, the duo format pushed to its logical peak with a warmth and vintage sonic care that the rawer approach of their earlier records was still working toward.
The production is the other half of the achievement — Auerbach layering organ and keyboard textures that give the blues-rock foundation a depth that pure guitar-bass-drums wouldn't have reached. Everything sounds like it was made with genuine love for the sonic detail, the vintage warmth sitting over the grooves in ways that connect directly to the records that built the tradition in the first place. That care is audible in every track.
"Tighten Up" is the single that broke them to a mainstream audience, and it earns that status completely. "Howlin' For You," "She's Long Gone," and "Ten Cent Pistol" are where the record's real depth lives — blues-rock operating at a level that the ZZ Top and CCR listens in this project recognized as the tradition done right.
Auerbach's solo record Waiting on a Song pulls in a different direction — warmer, more melodically generous, Nashville soul where this is Akron blues. The fact that both can earn a five is the point: different expressions of the same gift, each irreplaceable on its own terms.
A five that the blues DNA and the vintage warmth earn completely.

The cultural conversation around this record has always been dominated by "Nothing Compares 2 U" — Prince's song, Sinéad's performance, the shaved head and the single tear doing as much work as the vocal itself. That performance is genuinely one of the most emotionally direct moments in pop music history, and it earns every bit of the attention it gets. The honest surprise is how much the rest of the record delivers in ways the single's shadow obscures.
The diversity is real and unexpected — cool beats and grooves sitting alongside a cappella pieces, acoustic folk, and orchestral pop in a sequence that holds together as a unified emotional journey rather than a collection of styles. The opening a cappella "Feel So Different" establishes a tone of vulnerability and spiritual searching that the record sustains throughout, and the rhythmic moments that surface along the way give the whole thing a range that pure folk-vocal records don't attempt.
O'Connor's voice is the instrument that makes all of it work — raw, precise, capable of going from whisper to full power within the same phrase without losing control. The emotional directness is total throughout, which is either overwhelming or exactly what you needed depending on the day.
A four that the whole record earns rather than just the single — which is the more meaningful achievement given how completely "Nothing Compares 2 U" dominates the memory of everything around it. She left too soon.

The record that contains "Le Freak" — written in a burst of frustration after Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards were turned away from Studio 54 on New Year's Eve, the anger completely invisible in the finished product. That gap between origin and result is the whole Chic story: whatever was happening in the room, what came out was always the groove, precise and joyful and completely in service of the moment.
"Le Freak" is the rhythm guitar chop that became Rodgers' signature move in its most concentrated form — the interlocking pattern so precisely right that it sold over four million copies as a single and still sounds like the only possible version of itself. "I Want Your Love" is the warmer counterweight, melodically generous in ways the title track doesn't need to be, arguably the better song for exactly that reason.
The Chic formula is fully realized throughout — rhythm guitar and bass locked together, strings adding warmth without weight, vocals serving the groove rather than competing with it. The same observation that landed Risqué at four applies here: borderline five territory without quite the depth to clear the bar, the peaks excellent and the surrounding material excellent without either reaching irreplaceable.
Two Chic records, two fours, two records where "Good Times" and "Le Freak" respectively make the strongest case and the albums around them deliver consistently without transcending. A four that the groove earns completely.

The acoustic EBTG that Walking Wounded's programmed drums couldn't access — Tracey Thorn's voice warm and precise over chamber arrangements that step back and let the songs breathe. The production obstacle that kept that record at three is absent here, which turns out to reveal a different kind of distance rather than none at all.

The yacht rock smoothness creates its own ceiling — pleasant, well-crafted, and generating the specific frustration of a record that should connect more than it does. Thorn's voice deserves better material or a different listener, and both things can be true simultaneously. A three, the other records waiting justified.

Will Oldham's most celebrated record has a devoted cult following for whom the off-pitch vocals and the sparse darkness are features rather than limitations — evidence of authenticity, emotional rawness, music made without commercial concern. That argument is real and worth acknowledging.

It doesn't help when the out-of-tune vocals and the timing issues in the background harmonies are genuinely bothersome rather than charmingly rough — and that's a musically informed response, not a failure of listening. The deliberate imprecision that makes this record feel lived-in for its fans is the same quality that keeps it at arm's length for everyone else. A two honestly delivered, the record left unfinished for good reason.

The record that turned Led Zeppelin from a promising blues-rock band into the biggest band in the world, recorded on the road between tours with a ferocity that shows in every second. The blues DNA is deep and direct throughout — Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, and Robert Johnson all audible underneath the volume and the electricity, the tradition absorbed so completely that the derivative question becomes irrelevant. This is the tradition transformed rather than borrowed.

"Whole Lotta Love" opens the record and the argument simultaneously — the riff, the theremin breakdown, Plant's vocal, and Bonham's drums arriving together as a complete statement of what this band could do that nobody else could. That opening is one of the great album moments in rock history and everything that follows earns it rather than coasting on it.

John Bonham is the central fact. The drumming throughout is a masterclass in power and feel operating simultaneously — groove-oriented in a way that pure metal drumming never quite manages, the blues foundation giving every fill a purpose beyond mere display. "Moby Dick" exists to make the case for him specifically and makes it completely. "Heartbreaker" and "Ramble On" show the range beyond the opening assault, the band finding different registers within the same sonic world without losing what made the first side hit so hard.

Quite well done and totally not my thing — which is the cleanest possible three verdict and the most honest one available. Ian MacKaye building something meaningfully more sophisticated than Minor Threat, the funk and dub elements giving the rhythm section a groove that hardcore rarely attempted, Joe Lally's bass doing real work underneath the aggression. The craft is genuine and the ethics that surrounded the whole enterprise were as serious as the music.

None of which generates any pull toward return visits. A respectful three, delivered without ambiguity.

The record most people consider the greatest thrash metal album ever made earns that reputation on the strength of what it does with dynamics — the acoustic drops arriving as genuine surprise in the middle of a thrash assault, the mid-section of the title track showing a band thinking about more than pure speed and aggression. That instinct toward light and shade is the thing that separates Master of Puppets from most of what surrounds it in the genre.
"Battery" opens with one of the most celebrated album openers in metal history. The title track earns its eight and a half minutes completely. "Orion" closes the record as a melodic, patient instrumental that shows the range at its most unexpected — genuinely beautiful in ways the thrash context doesn't prepare you for.
Cliff Burton's bass is the other distinction — a genuine musical voice rather than rhythmic support, his presence giving the record a warmth and depth that ...And Justice for All conspicuously lacked without him. That record landed at three in this project largely for his absence. This one earns four largely for his presence.
The Black Album refined the dynamic range instinct into something more emotionally direct and more polished — the purists prefer this rawer version, and the craft argument for Master of Puppets is real. But hearing the seeds of what would become that more accessible approach is part of what makes this listen interesting beyond the thrash credentials alone.
A four that the dynamics and Burton earn honestly.

The debut that invented neo-soul as a genre and announced a talent that the world got to enjoy for thirty years before losing him too soon. D'Angelo arriving at 21 with a record that drew from Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Prince while sounding completely contemporary and completely his own — an amalgamation of so many good things synthesized into something that felt genuinely new in 1995 and hasn't aged a day since.

The title track is the signature and the template — slow, hypnotic, intimate in a way that R&B of the era wasn't allowing itself to be. "Lady" and his cover of "Cruisin'" show the range, the Smokey Robinson original made completely his own through the sheer warmth of the voice and the production. Bob Power's deliberately analog feel was a direct reaction against the overproduced R&B around it, giving everything breath and space that digital production couldn't replicate.

The church upbringing and the Prince influence and the classic soul DNA all flowing together without any of it feeling like calculation — that's the achievement, and it's the reason this record sits at the founding moment of a genre rather than just as a good record from 1995.

The opening four tracks make the case immediately. "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" into "Candle in the Wind" into "Bennie and the Jets" into the title track is as strong an opening sequence as any record in the project — four songs, four completely different emotional registers, all working completely. That kind of sustained quality at the top of a double album is not an accident; it's a songwriter and a pianist operating at the absolute peak of their collaboration.

"Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" gives the record its rock credibility. "The Ballad of Danny Bailey" shows the range. Five genuine landmarks on one record is the kind of achievement that makes critical consensus feel earned rather than constructed — this one deserves everything it got.

Elton's piano throughout is technically accomplished and completely in service of the songs, which is the distinction that separates great playing from great music. Madman Across the Water earned a four earlier in this project. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road clears that bar with room to spare.

A five that the opening four tracks earn and the rest of the record confirms.

The first solo record after Steely Dan went on hiatus makes the case immediately and completely — "I.G.Y." opening with one of the most perfectly constructed pop songs of the decade, the optimistic 1957 vision of the future delivered with just enough irony to make it bittersweet rather than naive. The International Geophysical Year as a prism for lost American innocence is exactly the kind of concept that Fagen's sensibility makes feel inevitable rather than precious.

The production is immaculate — one of the first major releases mixed digitally, the clarity still remarkable four decades later. Chuck Rainey's bass and Steve Jordan's drums anchor everything with the same precision that made the Steely Dan sessions definitive, the cast of elite session musicians giving Fagen exactly the sonic world he heard in his head. The jazz harmonics and studio perfectionism that defined Aja and Can't Buy a Thrill are fully present without Becker as co-pilot, which answers the question of where the primary creative force resided.

"New Frontier" carries the nostalgic sci-fi optimism forward with a backbeat that earns it completely. The title track closes the record as a meditation on late night jazz radio and the specific American cultural moment that formed Fagen's musical imagination — which is the whole record's subject made explicit in its final minutes.

Both Aja and Can't Buy a Thrill earned fives in this project. The Nightfly joins them without deliberation — Fagen alone doing what Fagen and Becker did together, which is the highest possible solo statement.

Ziggy Stardust on tour in America — Bowie absorbing the chaos and excess of the US touring experience and feeding it back through the persona, the result rawer and more fragmented than the more carefully constructed record it followed. The American road trip quality gives everything a nervous energy that suits the material without always cohering into something as unified as what came before.

Mike Garson's piano is the defining element and the record's most lasting achievement. His title track solo arrives like a dispatch from another dimension — genuinely avant-garde, completely unexpected, sitting in the middle of a glam rock album with a jazz and classical vocabulary that nobody else in Bowie's orbit was deploying. It's the moment the record is remembered for and it earns that status completely.

"The Jean Genie" delivers the straight-ahead rock stomp that became one of Bowie's biggest hits. "Drive-In Saturday" is the underrated gem — a nostalgic future-shock ballad that shows the songwriting range at its most inventive, the 50s nostalgia filtered through a science fiction sensibility that is purely Bowie's own. "Panic in Detroit" has a Rolling Stones swagger that suits the American context perfectly.

Thirty minutes, acoustic guitar, one brief piano overdub on the title track, and nothing else. Drake recorded this alone in two nights, left the tape with a receptionist at Island Records without speaking to anyone, and walked out. He died two years later at 26. The backstory is inseparable from the listen and the music carries the weight of it without needing it — which is the definition of something that exists completely on its own terms.
The fingerpicking throughout is technically extraordinary — open tunings creating harmonic colors that conventional guitar playing can't produce, every note placed with a precision that the intimacy of the recording makes feel accidental and isn't. "Place to Be" and "From the Morning" are the moments where the quietness becomes something more than just quietness, the emotional directness arriving without announcement.
The honest ceiling is that the narrow emotional register doesn't shift enough to generate the peaks that earn a five — same-same across the board is the accurate verdict for a record that made a deliberate choice to stay in one place and stay there completely. The sparseness is the point rather than a limitation, which is a meaningful distinction, and the craft and emotional directness earn a four despite the consistency of temperature throughout.
Unlike Joanna Newsom's similar intimacy that landed at two for never quite connecting, Drake's sparseness has genuine emotional presence underneath it. The ceiling is real and the four is honest.

Genuinely visionary and genuinely held at arm's length — the two things coexisting honestly rather than contradicting each other. Eno and Byrne essentially invented world music, sampling, and ambient hip-hop simultaneously before any of those genres had names, layering field recordings, radio evangelists, exorcism ceremonies, and Lebanese mountain singers over funk and electronic rhythms in a way that had no precedent in 1981 and plenty of descendants since.

The innovation is real and the historical importance is undeniable. The feeling of something cooked up in a laboratory is equally real — a record that fascinates intellectually without quite generating the emotional pull that earns return visits. The found vocals that replace Byrne's singing remove the distance his voice has created elsewhere in this project without fully replacing it with warmth.

A three for a record that pushed doors open without quite inviting you through them.

The record that invented G-funk as a sonic universe — Dre leaving NWA and building something completely new, the P-Funk samples and live instrumentation giving West Coast hip-hop a warmth and groove that the genre hadn't quite found before. The Parliament DNA is most audible on "Let Me Ride," which samples Mothership Connection directly and earns every second of that lineage — hearing it after giving that record a five makes the connection feel inevitable rather than derivative.
"Nuthin' But a G Thang" is the other landmark and one of the great hip-hop singles ever recorded — the slow, hypnotic groove and Snoop's fully formed debut presence creating something that still sounds unhurried and confident thirty years later. Two tracks at that level is a meaningful achievement.
The honest accounting of everything around them is that the rest of the record is solid without sustaining the same height — good hip-hop that serves the world Dre was building without generating the same pull as the peaks. The blueprint for Doggystyle rather than the finished structure, which is its own kind of essential without quite being irreplaceable.
A four that the Parliament connection and two landmark singles earn completely.

The farewell record and their biggest — five Grammys, the title track one of the most recognizable songs in popular music, and a partnership already fraying at the edges during the recording. The tension between what Simon was becoming as a solo artist and what the duo format could contain is audible if you know to listen for it, which gives the record a bittersweet quality that the music itself doesn't always acknowledge.
"Bridge Over Troubled Water" has been so thoroughly absorbed into the culture that hearing it freshly requires a deliberate act — the gospel piano, Garfunkel's vocal, the orchestral build all so familiar they risk sounding like wallpaper. That they don't, that the song still lands with genuine emotional weight despite everything you already know about it, is the mark of something built to last rather than merely to sell. "The Boxer" rewards the same close attention — production detail and harmonic sophistication underneath the familiarity that reveal themselves slowly. "Cecilia" gives the record a lightness and energy that the more serious material needs as a counterweight.
The duo format ceiling that has held at four for both Parsley Sage and Bookends holds here too — Simon as the engine, Garfunkel as the instrument, the partnership both enabling and constraining what either could become alone. A strong four that the title track and The Boxer earn and Cecilia confirms, delivered at the end of something that was already ending.

Green Gartside made the most perfectly artificial pop record he could as a philosophical statement about pop artifice, which is either a fascinating conceptual achievement or its own explanation for why the record keeps you at arm's length. The crystalline production and David Gamson's immaculate arrangements deliver exactly what they promise — frictionless, pleasurable, and ultimately a little too smooth to generate genuine pull.

"Perfect Way" is the guilty pleasure peak and the honest ceiling simultaneously — smooth enough that Miles Davis covered it, which is the highest possible endorsement, and still not quite enough to make the rest of the record feel essential. The 80s pop surface is the experience rather than the entry point to something deeper underneath.

The Sade comparison is exact — same consistent temperature, same pleasant surface, same three. A record that does what it does very well without generating any desire to return to it.

A strange paradox at the center of this record — the songs come on the radio and land immediately, and then the artist credit registers as a mild surprise every time. Boston built a sound so perfectly calibrated for album-oriented rock radio that it became the radio rather than something on it, which is either the ultimate compliment or the explanation for why the band never quite lodges in memory the way the songs do.
Tom Scholz recording most of this in his basement on homemade equipment while working as a product designer at Polaroid is the origin story that makes everything else make sense — an engineer's approach to rock and roll, every guitar layer placed with precision, Brad Delp's soaring tenor sitting over arrangements that are immaculate without ever feeling cold. The guitar tone Scholz developed became one of the most imitated sounds in classic rock, which is its own kind of anonymous immortality.
"More Than a Feeling" is the argument — one of the great singles of the era, melodically generous, the kind of song that Kurt Cobain essentially admitted borrowing for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" because the chord progression was too good to leave alone. The rest of the record delivers the same formula with diminishing but still genuine returns.
A four that the nostalgia and the craft earn together — a band whose songs are more memorable than the band itself, which is a strange kind of success and an honest one.

Owen Bradley produced Patsy Cline's definitive recordings in the late 50s and early 60s, and the decision to pair him with k.d. lang in 1988 was either an act of considerable confidence or considerable audacity depending on how you look at it. The result justifies both — a classic country record that sounds nothing like 1988, no synthesizers or pop crossover concessions, just lang's extraordinary voice over lush orchestral arrangements that could have been made in 1961 and would have been just as good.
Lang's mezzo-soprano is the central fact throughout — a range and emotional expressiveness that Nashville wasn't quite sure what to do with, for reasons that had everything and nothing to do with the music simultaneously. What's undeniable is that she could sing anything and make it sound written specifically for her, which is the definition of a voice operating at the highest level.
The honest ceiling is that extraordinary and transcendent are different things, and the record stays in the first category throughout without quite reaching the second. Patsy Cline herself had that additional quality that makes you reach for the record by necessity rather than choice — lang's tribute is impeccable without being irreplaceable on its own terms. A strong four for a voice that deserves every bit of the attention and a production that serves it completely.

The record where Ray Davies started becoming the distinctly English chronicler of ordinary life that made him one of the great songwriters of the era — the social observation and character studies that would fully flower on Village Green Preservation Society audible here in earlier, less realized form. "Sunny Afternoon" is the landmark, sardonic and perfectly constructed, doing something nobody else in British rock was quite attempting in 1966.

The honest limitation is that 1966 was Revolver's year and most of what surrounded it suffered by comparison — Face to Face included. Beatles-lite is a fair verdict for a record that's working in the same sonic space without quite the same songwriting genius or studio ambition. Good without being great, interesting as a document of Davies finding his voice before he fully found it.

Village Green earned a four in this project for delivering on the promise this record makes. A three for the promise itself.