Reviews by deksametazon

Despite being long, it never quite loses its pacing, and I think it's its biggest trump card. We can talk about their overindulgence, the lazy recording style that made the album feel like an eclectic mess, and the bickering and absences of the core members of the Stones, but the truth of the matter is that Exile on Main St. has a lot of great moments that are well spaced out and stringed together. Rocks Off is an amazing Boogie track, the run from Tumbling Dice to Sweet Black Angel carries the mid, and the penultimate track that's an ode to Brian Jones caps off the album well.

It's also fun to hear their progression from a fairly popular band to one of the biggest bands in the world, and the change in musical style to reflect that. From this point, their albums would be more populated by 3 minute radio rock than a blues fascination they cultivated up to this point. Thankfully Exile on Main St. stands on that zenith between the uphill and the downhill, so we have the best of both worlds.

If you look hard enough, Beggars Banquet can be called another psychedelic album in the same vain as their previous album, except the psychedelia here ain't sunshine and rainbows, but mescaline, booze and the devil standing in the doorway.

Rolling Stones finally found their groove with Beggars Banquet, incorporating American style blues and country rock. It's a total frenzy. Very ugly in every way imaginable, but also full of sadness at the same time. I guess that's the way the devil works around those parts.

Besides the openers on both version, something about this album never managed to snatch me. No aspect of it bothers me, but nothing sticks out. It also doesn't help that Goin Home is 11 and a half minutes long, and turns into an unnecessary jam session. The rest is decent RnB. Maybe the US version, which is more condensed (at least that's what they tell), is better?

My favorite Brian Jones-era Stones album is, coincidentally, the one he worked on the least.

Jokes aside, Let It Bleed is the first album where the fierce blues really shows, other than Midnight Rambler which retains the psychedelic edge (because, it's one of the last songs Jones worked on). It starts and ends with the best songs on the album, with both adding distinct African American sounds to them: the blues in Gimmie Shelter, and gospel in the closer, You Can't Always Get What You Want.

The rest doesn't come close obviously, but are sufficient to create a great album. Side A trumps over side B, with sounds like Love in Vain (a personal favorite) and Let It Bleed occupying the side A end slot.

It's hedonism and drugs at it's finest (not at its most, you'll have to wait for that). It doesn't sacrifice their roots, and continues to add more upon the dirty, dusty Banquet sound, which is why Let It Bleed is personally my favorite Stones album.

More personal than its predecessor. It still has a political edge to it, but you can feel the fear of not making it in his voice and in his writing style. It's more folky and intimate, in comparison to the rockish debut.

The debut had good songs, but Coming From Reality has songs that stay with me longer. If you like the debut, you'll like this as well.

There's something special about Detroit. While LA and the west coast bred psychedelia, sunshine pop and the surfer aesthetic rock, and the east coast was cold, stuffy, full of big skyscrapers and an aesthetic full of busy streets that are, oddly enough, easily traversable once you know the inner workings of the city, but Detroit mixed both the cocaine side of the west, and a heroin side of the east to create this speedball concoction of ruin, present in a lot of Detroit music.

Cold Fact is no stranger to that. It takes pride in coming from the ruins of society, which is a rare vantage point to take. It glorifies drugs, it talks about political unrest in a direct way, and previous love interests with such fiery disgust that makes Dylan seem like a pansy.

You can see why Rodriguez didn't get the fame: his songs are downtrodden and real, and didn't fit the rapid progression of life at the time. If someone like him appeared in today's climate, he would be hailed as the messiah that resurrects the genre to its former glory, I can tell you that.

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2025: #11 An album featuring the theremin (32nd Album)

The arrangements are nice, but my, is that theremin annoying. It sounds like a mosquito humming around. The two works that were decent were Pastorale and the Harpischord Concerto in F Minor, only because the theremin is most tolerable on them.

People listen to this plastic schlock unironically?

To an extent, it's understandable that kids who haven't grown up around the music of the 70s and 80s to flock towards this, alongside people who mindlessly go wherever the wind takes them, but considering how this is the internet: why don't you all use it to find music that's original, tingling and stimulating to the brain, instead of music like this that recycles motifs and ideas from the 80s and the 00s?

Other than being a rip-off, I find this album to be a nuisance to listen to. A baffling experience I had to turn off mid-listen to preserve my hearing.

The Roach keeps on roachin' as he smacks those drums like they own him money. You can feel the intensity of the smacks and crashes, as if he's releasing all that anger onto it. The rest of the band try to follow him in his tempo, but they can't, obviously. They do well in the circumstances, but once they hear the roar and the steps slowly approaching them, they do the most sensible thing and lower their heads while the boss does his thing.

Synth funk a la Denis & Denis, but less Miami Vice. Iliriana has a nice voice, but overall it gets a bit boring. Nothing to do with the album, this is great contemporary synth funk, it's wholly me. Valla Bravo is a spectacular instrumental though.

Look at who plays the sax on this.

Bet you feel icky for liking it, huh?

Really spectacular musicianship. I'm usually not a fan of shoegaze, but what Ride created on Nowhere is nothing short of great. Nice melodic guitars reinforced by some really amazing drumwork, courtesy of Loz Colbert. I'm fairly certain that because of him, I've started to pay more attention to individual instruments when listening to albums.

To me, it's a perfect mix of mainstream pop and the hazy shoegaze. The lyrics are your standard moody teenage angst, but at the end of the day, who's here for the lyrics? Just sit back and let the reverb wash over you, man.

Good background listen that sounds similar to another Australian psychedelic band from the same time period. To me, barely anything sticks, other than the psychy, trippy atmosphere, but even then, there are better bands/albums.

Decent rock album from the veteran rockers. Starts off great with Svirao Je Dejvid Bovi, Kad Padne Noc is an all-timer, and the two songs Ne Spavaj Gola and Da, To Sam ja are great atmospheric ballads. The rest tethers between okay, listenable and barely passable.

Also, Bora's political side continues to be a more prominent driving force in songs. It yielded some very blah moments, especially on this albums B side, but with the 20-20 hindsight, it's worth to be mentioned.

With the help of their third album, Riblja Corba managed to place themselves in the pantheon of the most important groups of Yugoslavia at the time.

There is no excessive deviation from the sound already established with the previous two albums, they just became a lot more integrated and a lot more experienced in creating evergreens that are still listened to today. The dynamic writing duo of Bora and Bajaga, who were once compared to Jagger and Richards, managed to compose tracks that closely described one group of society. Outwardly macho with testosterone oozing from every pore, but inwardly very fragile, contradictory, and eager for affirmations.

The rest of the band is, as already mentioned, quite coordinated, with rhythms that evoke the old school of metal, and blues, and even on one hand borrow the modern building blocks of punk. A very good album, and a very important album. Big recommendations.

There was something about Riblja Corba that we need to talk about. How does one band, whose sound is rooted in blues, and hard rock, become relevant across the 80s, selling out stadiums left and right, becoming the darlings of critics and listeners alike?

It's still a mystery to me, but I guess it had to do with a darker presence of the band itself, and I'm not talking about voodoo or anything. Yugoslavia lacked a harder sounding band that didn't fiddle with glam aesthetics, so Riblja Corba fit right in there as a band for those macho men who never were into more "colorful" hard rock like Smak and Bijelo Dugme, but into blues and drinking the bitter booze.

Bora had that vocal of a 50 something year old drunkard, and the band followed with a crude rendition of some of their early 70s idols. It's great, albeit a bit late to matter in the grander scheme of things, though you could make a gymnastic pirouette and declare it to be punk, and in a way it is: something different from the norm with fair amounts of criticism. So there's your answer to the question in the beginning.

How the hell can something sound this midwestern is beyond me.

Meh. Neither here nor there. Has some interesting parts and fragments, like the trumpet playing in Na Beira do Uaricoera, the 10-minute ambient laced Latin jazz, and the overall trip-hop feel it goes for in the album, but even that doesn't help that most of the album is forgettable and goes over my head.

Or maybe it's the mystery factor doing its job. If that's the case, then it's doing a mighty fine job of keeping the curious listener trying to uncover more, and the average one at bay.

I was harsh back in the day when I gave this album 1.5 stars. Sure it's not my style of music, but to say that it doesn't have beautiful storytelling, amazing vocals, mixed in with tense atmosphere and something that will appease any prog junkie is just plain unfair. Silly me! But the thing I'll have to say is that I much more enjoyed side A than the epic "Song Of Scheherazade", mostly because side B drags on a bit too much, but that's the nature of storytelling I guess. Will probably revisit it somewhere down the line though!

To me, this album is growing up in 90s suburban America. Latchkey kids, some kind of loneliness, boredom and fear in the air, a feeling of nostalgia, and an uncertain future.

A brilliant album that never lets up. Drive is exactly a song that needs to start an album like this, with subtleness and a political bite to it. Try Not To Breath is probably my favorite on here, because of its tender subject of fading away and coming to terms with dying. Hell, a lot of the songs here cover death or dying in one way or another, but they're done in a way that doesn't sound whiny or self-centered. It's dying explained from a position of moving on, not necessarily about death itself, though at some moments, it's point-blank. Ignoreland is a bit of a turn from the intimate atmosphere and into a jangly Neil Young political rocker, but I don't mind. It's the only song that's not amazing, and you could argue it doesn't even fit here, but I like the little turn. It keeps the album from turning into a pure saccharine sap.

I like this version of R.E.M the most. They're far from the local band from Athens they started as, and the music shows. Of course, the mysteriousness and the jangle still lingers, but a "straightforward motor" drives them, alongside with using their fame to pass a message along, instead of riding the glory train. Thankfully for them and us fans, with Automatic For The People, they did both.