Reviews by cmhess98

Femi Kuti inherited one of the most formidable traditions in modern music — his father Fela invented Afrobeat, built it into something completely singular, and left his son with an inheritance that would be either a launchpad or a weight depending on what he did with it. This debut record answers the question convincingly: Femi found his own lane within the tradition without abandoning what made the tradition worth inheriting.
The songs are long and the grooves meander, which in lesser hands would be the criticism. Here it's the point. The extended runtimes aren't indulgence — they're the groove finding itself, the ensemble exploring rather than executing, the kind of collective musical thinking that rewards being in the room with it. The Masekela listen had this same quality, and the same verdict applies: meandering in a good way is a meaningful distinction from meandering as a symptom of a band losing the thread.
The ska and reggae affinities that surface throughout aren't coincidence or borrowing — they're family resemblance. Afrobeat, ska, and reggae share common African rhythmic ancestry, and hearing those connections in Femi's playing is hearing the same polyrhythmic Yoruba foundation that Fela built the genre on, just traveled through different routes to different destinations.
What the record does most consistently is make you want to move, which sounds simple and is actually the hardest thing to achieve. Entrancing is the right word — the groove pulls without demanding, which is the mark of a band operating at a genuinely high level.
A strong four. The son made something worth hearing entirely on its own terms.

Three songs. That's the case for this record and it's a strong enough case to win the argument. "Shout," "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," and "Head Over Heels" are three of the defining singles of 1985 — enormous, melodically generous, built on layered keyboards and processed drums that fill every available sonic space without quite tipping into the schmaltz that sinks lesser records of the era. Forty years later they still hit with an immediacy that separates genuine pop achievement from mere period artifact.
The honest accounting of everything else is brief: forgettable. The back half of Songs from the Big Chair does the work of existing between the peaks without generating any pull of its own, which is a significant gap between the record's best moments and its filler. Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith built something genuinely ambitious here — the conceptual foundation in primal scream therapy, the maximalist production, the sheer sonic scale of the whole enterprise — and the singles justify every bit of that ambition. The album tracks around them do not.
What tips it to four rather than three is simply the quality of the peaks. Three exceptional singles constitutes a real achievement regardless of what surrounds them, and "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" alone has earned its place in the permanent rotation of songs that sound like a specific moment in time without being diminished by it.
A four carried entirely by its highs, which is sometimes exactly enough.

Columbia Records thought this was commercial suicide. Willie Nelson covering ten American standards with lush orchestral production by Booker T. Jones had no obvious market in 1978 and made no strategic sense for a country artist riding the outlaw wave. It spent two years on the country charts anyway, because the people who heard it recognized immediately that something had gone completely right.
The origin story matches the record's spirit perfectly — Booker T. was living on a Malibu beach, Willie jogged past his house, they started talking, and somewhere in that accidental collision the idea took shape. Two musicians who had no business being in the same place at the same time finding each other and making something neither could have made alone. The record has that same quality of inevitability that the best collaborations always do — not planned so much as discovered.
The song list is the foundation: "Stardust," "Georgia on My Mind," "Blue Skies," "All of Me," "Unchained Melody" — some of the most enduring American popular songs ever written, handed to a voice that turns out to be their perfect vessel. Willie's phrasing is unhurried and completely his own, treating these standards not as museum pieces to be preserved but as living songs that still have things to say. Booker T.'s production gives him exactly the space he needs — warm strings, piano, arrangements that serve the voice rather than competing with it.
This brings together everything that matters most in this project: voice as primary instrument, ensemble serving the whole, standards reimagined rather than merely executed, and the specific pleasure of musicians operating precisely at the intersection of their greatest strengths. It makes you want to make a record like it someday, which is the highest thing music can do.
Some records are self-evidently wonderful. The people who don't hear it are simply wrong.

Something/Anything? is a remarkable technical achievement before it's anything else — a double album recorded almost entirely by one person, Rundgren playing every instrument, writing every song, producing and engineering the whole thing at a time when that kind of solo studio ambition was essentially unheard of. The craft is real and audible throughout, and the peaks justify the considerable time the record asks for.
Those peaks are genuinely something. "I Saw the Light" is blue-eyed soul done with enough conviction to transcend the genre's usual limitations, and "Hello It's Me" — originally recorded with his earlier band Nazz and reimagined here — is the kind of melodically generous pop song that sounds inevitable in retrospect. The first side in particular moves with an ease and warmth that makes the whole enterprise feel effortless, which is the highest compliment you can pay to something this technically demanding.
The honest limitation is the length. A double album runtime asks for commitment that the lows don't earn — the forgettable stretches between the peaks are a tax that a tighter single record wouldn't impose, and there are enough of them to keep this from the conversation that a more focused collection might have earned. The bloat is the price of the ambition.
Worth noting that Rundgren produced Bat Out of Hell — the same meticulous pop craft sensibility is audible in both records, just without Steinman's operatic maximalism pushing everything to eleven. The fingerprints are consistent even when the contexts couldn't be more different.
A four that the peaks earn honestly, delivered at greater length than strictly necessary.

Scott Walker has one of the great baritones in pop music history, and Scott 4 is the record where his original songwriting fully takes over from covers — lush orchestral arrangements, strings and bass doing genuinely interesting things underneath, a European cabaret darkness borrowed from Jacques Brel that gives the whole thing a dramatic intensity conventional pop of the era wasn't attempting. "The Seventh Seal," a song adapted from an Ingmar Bergman film, tells you everything about where his head was and nothing about why this would be anyone's idea of a good time.
The honest verdict is don't hate, don't like, would never reach for — which is a three delivered without ambiguity or apology. The voice is real, the arrangements are considered, the songs are interesting in the way that things can be interesting without generating any pull toward return visits. It sits at arm's length and stays there for the full runtime.
Whether it belongs on a list of 1001 essential albums is a fair question. The answer is probably yes, but for reasons that have more to do with the through-line to Bowie and a generation of British art-pop than with anything this particular listener needs from a record. Influence and listenability are different categories, and Scott 4 earns its place firmly in the first one.

Reggatta de Blanc translates literally as "white reggae," which is either an act of disarming self-awareness or considerable audacity depending on your generosity toward three very talented British musicians appropriating a Jamaican genre and making it their own. The honest answer is probably both, and the record is good enough that the argument becomes academic fairly quickly.
The singles are the reason this earns its four. "Message in a Bottle" and "Walking on the Moon" are two of the strongest things the Police ever made — propulsive, melodically generous, built on Copeland's genuinely inventive drumming in a way that gives both tracks more rhythmic interest than their radio ubiquity might suggest. "Beds Too Big Without You" is the hidden gem, warmer and more vulnerable than the band's usual cool precision, the kind of track that elevates a record by showing a different register entirely.
The honest limitation is that the material between those peaks is middling in a way that a stronger record wouldn't tolerate. The filler is competent without being compelling, and there's enough of it to keep this from the conversation that Synchronicity earned on the strength of its more consistent songwriting.
What tips it to four rather than three is a specific quality that's hard to quantify and easy to feel — a kitsch charm particular to the Police's reggae-punk hybrid that operates somewhere between nostalgia and genuine affection. The record is fun in a way that the respect-don't-love threes simply aren't, and fun earns its place in the rating when it's this consistent at its peaks.

Forty minutes. Ten tracks. One of the most unanimous critical verdicts in hip-hop history, and listening to it now it's easy to understand why — Nas was twenty years old rapping about Queensbridge with a specificity and lyrical density that made everything around it sound approximate. The authenticity is total and audible from the first bar of "New York State of Mind," which remains one of the great album openers in the genre and sets a standard the rest of the record spends forty minutes living up to.
The production is the other half of the argument. DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Q-Tip, and Large Professor each contribute beats, which gives the record an instrumental variety that shouldn't work at this length and cohesion level but does completely. The jazz samples and piano loops sit in adjacent territory to the Low End Theory listen — same DNA, rawer energy, street-level rather than late-night. The drums hit with genuine weight throughout.
The honest ceiling is the same one that kept good kid m.A.A.d city at four — very good and not my music are compatible verdicts, and this is both simultaneously. The lyrical density and the Queensbridge geography are doing something specific and irreplaceable for the listener this record was made for. For everyone else it's a document of craft at the highest level that stops just short of the personal pull that earns a five.
Illmatic wasn't a radio record on release — it grew into its canonical status over years rather than arriving as a phenomenon, which explains the absence of a crossover moment without diminishing what it actually is. A strong four, honestly delivered.

At under thirty minutes this barely qualifies as a full album by conventional standards, which makes it all the more remarkable that it still manages to feel uneven. The opening one-two of “Blister in the Sun” and the promise it establishes set expectations the back half can’t consistently meet — a familiar problem, but more pronounced here than most because the gap between the peaks and the valleys is genuinely wide.

The peaks are real. “Blister in the Sun” is transcendent in the specific way that opening tracks can be — the kind of song that resets what you think a guitar and a voice can do together in under three minutes. “Add It Up” is the other anchor, the song that works at maximum volume late at night when everyone is sufficiently committed to the moment, which is its own category of achievement. These are songs that have appeared in movies, TV shows, and club sets for forty years for good reason.

Gordon Gano’s voice is the variable that determines everything else. When the material is strong enough to carry it the adenoidal intensity is part of what makes the record feel like nothing else. When the material isn’t — and “Please Do Not Go” is the clearest example — it tips from distinctive into wearing, which is the honest ceiling on what the record can do front to back.

A three with two genuinely great songs inside it. Worth catching their festival set at Bourbon and Beyond for exactly those two songs. A standalone show in Roanoke is a different commitment, and this listen settles that question cleanly.

There is an argument about whether Oasis borrowed too heavily from the Beatles, and that argument has been running for thirty years and can continue without this project’s participation. What matters is what the songs do, and what the songs do is hit with an immediacy and a size that very few records in any era match. “Wonderwall,” “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” “Champagne Supernova” — three songs that were inescapable in 1995 and have never really left, which is the definition of music that found something universal rather than something fashionable.

“Champagne Supernova” is the personal anchor here — a song that Suede Basement has been playing for years, which means it’s been heard from the inside out, learned at the level where you stop listening and start inhabiting. That kind of relationship with a song is the highest form of the record player test. You don’t put it on to hear it. You put it on because it’s already part of how you understand what music can do.

Liam Gallagher’s voice is one of the great rock vocal instruments of the era — sneering, nasal, utterly without self-doubt, the perfect delivery mechanism for Noel’s melodies. The wall of guitars is enormous and unapologetic. The Beatles debt is worn openly and paid back with interest by songs strong enough to stand on their own terms.

A five that the singles earn and the personal history confirms.

Bat Out of Hell is the most maximalist record in the project and it earns that designation completely — every song enormous, every arrangement operatic, every emotional stake raised to the point where subtlety isn’t just absent but actively unwelcome. Jim Steinman’s name is right there on the cover alongside Meat Loaf’s, which tells you everything about where the vision came from. The songs are his; the voice that makes them land rather than collapse under their own weight is somebody else’s entirely.

That voice is the genuine article. Meat Loaf commits to the drama without a single wink, which is the only way this material works — ironic distance would kill it instantly. Roy Bittan’s piano gives the whole thing a Springsteen-adjacent muscularity that grounds the bombast just enough, and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” remains one of the great absurd achievements in rock history: eight minutes, a baseball play-by-play in the middle, and somehow it earns every second.

The honest verdict is guilty pleasure rather than essential listening — fun in a way that’s completely specific to what this record is doing, without generating the pull that earns regular rotation. That’s a different kind of three than the same-samey records that have landed here recently. This one connects; it just connects to something that doesn’t quite demand return visits on its own merits.

The algorithm’s autoplay into Eye of the Tiger after this felt less like a non sequitur and more like a logical conclusion. The record apparently has a type, and the type knows exactly what it is.

Diamond Life arrived the same year as Private Dancer and represents the opposite solution to the same problem — where Tina Turner buried herself in big production and processed drums, Sade stripped everything back to candlelight and negative space. The restraint is real and it's a genuine artistic choice. The late-night, smoke-and-jazz atmosphere is completely controlled and completely intentional, and "Smooth Operator" remains one of the most recognizable songs the decade produced.
The honest limitation is the same one that kept The Stone Roses at three earlier in this project — same samey. The emotional temperature that makes the record distinctive at the start is the same temperature it holds all the way through, which means the qualities that initially seduce gradually become the qualities that numb. A record that opens cool and stays cool has made a choice, but that choice comes at the cost of the peaks that earn replayability.
Sade's voice is the genuine article — warm, precise, completely unshowy in a way that suits the material perfectly. The jazz harmonic language the band borrows gives the whole thing a sophistication that separates it from standard 80s pop. But borrowing jazz's vocabulary without its capacity for surprise or emotional shift turns out to be a ceiling as much as a foundation.
A solid three. The atmosphere is real, the voice is real, and a record that does one thing this consistently and this well deserves its place. It just doesn't generate the pull that earns more than that.

Nobody is more authentic than Tom Waits. That’s not hyperbole — it’s an observation about a career that has never once sounded like performance, never chased a trend, never produced a moment where the seams between the artist and the persona were visible. The voice, the characters, the world he inhabits across every record — it all comes from the same place and it never wavers. You either find that world compelling or you don’t, and Heartattack and Vine makes the case for it as forcefully as anything in his catalog.

This is the last record before the full avant-garde transformation of Swordfishtrombones, and it sits at the hinge point — the blues and R&B roots more raw and exposed than anywhere else in his work, the strangeness that would come to define everything after already audible underneath. The title track is a genuine blues stomper, distorted and aggressive, nothing like the piano-bar melancholy of Closing Time. “Jersey Girl” sits at the center of the record as the sentimental counterweight — tender enough that Springsteen heard it and knew immediately it belonged to him too.

The discovery that anchors the record is Ronnie Barron, the New Orleans R&B organist who collaborated with Dr. John and brought that same rain-soaked, morally ambiguous mythology to his playing. “Till the Money Runs Out” is where that pairing pays off most completely — a rolling, slightly sinister groove that makes Waits’ world feel inhabited rather than constructed. Two musicians who traffic in the same swampy American darkness finding each other was not an accident.

The record closes with “Ruby’s Arms” — a devastating, spare ballad that strips everything back after the blues grit that preceded it, Waits at his most quietly heartbroken. The contrast is the point: a record that opens with distorted aggression and closes with something that sounds like a man standing in a doorway at dawn not quite ready to leave. That range is the argument for the five.

Not quite Closing Time, which remains the desert island Waits record and one of the great American debut statements. But five is five, and this earns it on its own terms — authenticity, blues grit, Barron’s organ, and songs that refuse to leave even when you think you’re done with them.

The opening of the first track arrives with an almost “All Blues” quality — the same modal spaciousness, the same unhurried tempo, the suggestion that something patient and beautiful is about to unfold. The problem is that Miles Davis made those elements feel inevitable, like the only music those particular notes could possibly make. Here the pieces never quite commit to the same conversation.

Buckley’s voice is doing one thing. Lee Underwood’s guitar is doing another. David Friedman’s vibraphone floats somewhere in between. The talent is real and audible throughout — this isn’t a record made by people who don’t know what they’re doing. But knowing what you’re doing and making the parts cohere are different achievements, and Happy Sad falls short of the second one in ways that become more apparent the longer it runs.

The timing doesn’t help. Coming immediately after The Atomic Mr. Basie — a record that is essentially a masterclass in ensemble unity, where every element exists in complete service of the whole — the contrast is stark. Basie’s orchestra made cohesion sound effortless. This record makes effort sound like cohesion, which is the opposite problem.

A third Tim Buckley record in the project and the third time the considerable vocal talent hasn’t been enough to overcome the surrounding friction. A 2 that respects the ambition without being able to recommend the result.

The formula on the cover says it plainly: E = MC² = Count Basie Orchestra + Neal Hefti Arrangements. What it doesn't say is that the result is something self-evidently beautiful that somehow still gets dismissed as elevator music by people who aren't listening closely enough, and that this is genuinely sad.
Neal Hefti wrote and arranged every track, and his charts are models of what big band writing can be at its highest — tight, swinging, built from riffs that develop rather than solos that show off. The orchestra is the instrument. Individual virtuosity is beside the point. What matters is the whole, and the whole is immaculate.
Basie himself is the lesson in restraint that every musician should hear. His piano comps and punctuates and gets out of the way, saying ten words where another pianist would say a hundred. The space he leaves is as musical as anything he plays — a reminder that knowing what not to do is the hardest and most valuable skill in any ensemble context. It is both of its time and completely beyond it, which is the definition of a record that earns its place in any era.
What this music does, more than almost anything else in the project, is make you want to find people to make a similar sound with. That instinct — ensemble-first, groove-forward, every player serving something larger than themselves — is the through line connecting everything worth reaching for musically. Basie's orchestra isn't just a great band. It's an argument for why playing together matters.
Some people hear elevator music. They are wrong, and it is a shame.
A five without hesitation.

Younger Than Yesterday is a record that rewards the listener it was made for — someone with Americana and folk-rock at the center of their musical world, for whom the 12-string Rickenbacker jangle and the emerging country lean feel like a native language rather than a visited one. That listener would find a lot to love here: Chris Hillman's songwriting arriving as a genuine second voice alongside Roger McGuinn, David Crosby's psychedelic instincts adding texture before his imminent departure, and a Dylan cover in "My Back Pages" that ranks among the band's best.
The honest limitation is that the center of gravity has shifted. The same appreciation-without-pull that defined the Sweetheart of the Rodeo listen applies here — enough Americana DNA in the background to hear exactly what the record is doing and respect it fully, but not enough active pull to generate replayability. The jangle and the country lean are working at a lower emotional temperature than where the listening energy currently lives, which is a fair description of the gap between a record being good and a record being yours.
A respectful three. The younger, more Americana-focused version of this listener would likely have rated it higher, and that version wasn't wrong. Tastes move, and this one moved on.

Tres Hombres is what ZZ Top sounded like before the beards became a costume and the synthesizers arrived to sand down the edges — raw, blues-rooted Texas boogie with no production sheen and no apologies. This is the record that turned a regional curiosity into a real band, and hearing it now it's easy to understand why.
Billy Gibbons is the central fact. His guitar playing sits deep in the Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf lineage — dirty, economical, groove-oriented in a way that prioritizes feel over flash at every turn. "La Grange" is the landmark, built on a John Lee Hooker boogie riff that Gibbons makes completely his own over the course of five minutes that don't waste a second. But the record earns its rating before La Grange even arrives — "Waitin' for the Bus" and "Jesus Just Left Chicago" run together as an opening sequence that establishes the band's coordinates immediately and delivers on every promise they make.
The blues DNA here triggered a specific memory: a former band that used to play "Crash on the Levee" from the Basement Tapes, reimagined through exactly the kind of ZZ Top filter this record makes inevitable. The origin story involves guitarist Loren "Hot Sauce" Huggins falling asleep on an ant hill after considerable whiskey, a resulting fever dream of ZZ Top covering Dylan, and a version of the song that transformed something ramshackle and mellow into something considerably less so. That's the kind of band folklore that lives forever, and Tres Hombres is exactly the record that could conjure it.
The rhythm section locks in and stays there. The songs are short and unpretentious and don't overstay their welcome. The whole record has the quality of a band that knows exactly what it is and has no interest in being anything else, which in 1973 Texas meant blues-soaked rock played with total conviction.
A strong four that earns the blues DNA comparison honestly. Not quite the irreplaceable peak expression of the tradition that would push it to five — that conversation belongs to Hard Again — but an excellent record by a band operating at the top of their pre-fame powers.

The Stone Roses arrived in 1989 at the center of a moment — Madchester, the convergence of indie guitar rock and dance culture that briefly made a specific corner of England feel like the only place music was happening. The record carries that energy convincingly. The jangly 60s-inflected guitars, Reni’s drumming (genuinely the secret weapon, funk-informed in a way the rest of the band doesn’t always match), Ian Brown’s loose detached vocal sitting more on feel than precision — it all coheres into something that sounds like a scene rather than just a band.

The problem is that it sounds like that scene for the entire record without quite varying the formula enough to keep the back half as alive as the front. Same samey is the honest verdict — not in the sense that the songs are indistinguishable, but in the sense that the emotional register doesn’t shift enough to generate the kind of peaks that earn replayability. Nothing moves the needle sufficiently to demand return visits, which is the test that separates a record worth respecting from a record worth reaching for.

The talent is real and the vibe is genuine. “She Bangs the Drums” and “I Am the Resurrection” make the case for what the band could do when the groove locked in. But a record that impresses without moving sits at three regardless of its historical reputation, and the UK press canonization of this particular era deserves the same healthy skepticism it always does in this project.

A solid three. The moment was real. The record is a good document of it.

The surprise here is genuine — a record this good, sitting this quietly in the catalog, not quite a household name outside of jazz circles. Home Is Where The Music Is is a live double album recorded at Ronnie Scott's in London, and it has all the occupational hazards of that format: extended passages that meander, moments where the band is finding rather than delivering, connective tissue between the peaks. None of that is disqualifying. The peaks are excellent enough to carry it.
Those peaks are specific. Big Apple and Inner Circle are where the Afrobeat and Soul Jazz tags on the record become most literal — the ensemble stops exploring and commits to a pocket, and when Masekela's flugelhorn settles into that groove the whole thing locks in with a satisfying completeness. Nomali is a different kind of pleasure, warmer and more lyrical. Maesha earns its runtime by actually going somewhere over the course of the track — evolving rather than repeating, which is the distinction between live jazz that takes you somewhere and live jazz that simply continues. Ingot Pow-Pow closes things out as the outlier, interesting without fully connecting, which is an honest ending for a record that never pretended to be perfect front to back.
Masekela's horn playing throughout sits in the lyrical, accessible tradition — melodic presence rather than virtuosic display, ensemble-first in the way that the best jazz always is. The band is the instrument; the trumpet is the voice.
A strong four that earns its place in the high-probability Latin and African zone this project has been quietly building. The only surprise is not having found it sooner.

Marquee Moon is a record that reveals itself slowly and honestly, which is either a virtue or a limitation depending on what you're after. By the end it has grown into something real — the guitar interplay between Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd opens up gradually, the Stones-inflected looseness becomes more audible, the ten-minute title track earns its length in a way that In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida's drum solo decidedly does not. And yet grown-on-me doesn't quite get it to four, which is its own useful piece of information.
The Wilco connection is the clearest entry point. The extended instrumental passages — exploratory rather than showy, built from interlocking melodic lines rather than riffs — draw a fairly direct line to what Tweedy and Nels Cline would do decades later on records like A Ghost Is Born. Hearing Television is hearing an ancestor, which gives the listen genuine context beyond pure historical importance. The guitar interplay here isn't musicianship for its own sake; it's a conversation, and the conversation is interesting.
What keeps it at three is Verlaine's voice, which operates in the same art-school angular territory as David Byrne — the singer slightly outside the song, observing rather than inhabiting. That approach has created consistent distance throughout this project, and it does the same work here. The instrumental world pulls you in; the vocal world holds you at arm's length.
A respectful three with real texture underneath it — more genuine connection than most records that land here, but a ceiling it can't quite break through.

The production couldn't be more 1984 if it tried. Gated reverb, processed drums, synths doing things that felt futuristic and now feel like a time capsule — Private Dancer is so aggressively of its moment that resisting it is almost beside the point. You either ride the flashback or you don't, and it turns out the answer here is yes, buckle in.
What makes this a four rather than a three is Tina Turner's voice, which operates at a level the production doesn't always deserve. There's a consistent gap between what she's bringing and what the songs are asking of her, and instead of that mismatch being a problem it becomes the record's defining tension. She's so clearly operating above the material that the schmaltz gets burned off somewhere in the upper register. "What's Love Got to Do with It" is a five-star single in any era, any production context — the melody holds up completely independent of the 80s clothes it's wearing, which is the real test. "Better Be Good to Me" has the same quality. Strip the reverb out and put a Hammond and a horn section underneath that vocal and you'd have something Jimmy Smith would have recognized.
The covers are a particular pleasure. Tina doesn't execute other people's songs — she inhabits them, which is a meaningful distinction in a decade that produced a lot of well-produced karaoke.
A 4 that earns it through voice and nostalgia in roughly equal measure, with the record player test delivering the verdict cleanly: this is a record you cue up and tell people to buckle in for. That's not respect. That's enthusiasm.