Reviews by deksametazon

Honestly, the biggest surprise was finding out this was her first album. No teen pop forays following her "Friday" blow-up. Also, finding out she's only 25. It feels like she's been around here for an eternity.

Anyways, her debut feels like the rest of the pop fodder that exists in this day's music scene. As someone pointed out, very algorithmic and boring. But not horrible and ear bleed-inducing. Sorta like a watered-down Nelly Furtado. God, I miss her.

I totally forgot how lo-fi, bedroom production doesn't automatically mean bootleg level production. It has come a long way from the times of old.

It has its "Le epic grand" moments, but it's let down by the front positioning of the fuzzy and layered instrumentation. We want to hear your voice, damn it!

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2025: #50 An album with no text or artist name on the cover (15th Album)

Electro-schlock that combines monotonous artistic pop with sounds of a current going through shoddy wires out through some speakers.

Can't commit sin and say anything bad about her vocal abilities, but her use of it is streamlined into this one monotonous and predicatable pattern that it's honestly hard to enjoy this one. Overall, another disappointment. I just can't seem to get through to the jist of Bjork, sadly.

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2024: #7 An album with more than 10,000 ratings on RYM (8th album)

Very 90s sounding electro album. The entire album has the mysterious aura of an underground dance club filled with a palette of different crowds. Just listen to Human Behaviour and Venus as a Boy, and their tribal rhythms behind the avant vocals, and then the clear crowd pleasers, Big Time Sensuality and Violently Happy, followed by pop songs Like Someone in Love, Aeroplane. Pretty much something for everyone.

A lot of people say that this is a one-off thing in her discography: pure house/club music. While I haven't listened to anything past this, yet, it does feel like it lacks the experimentation and boundary-pushing. Still an alright album with a clear purpose.

Long have I championed this album to be the best album Bjesovi have ever released.

And I'm not wrong... if you like this type of music (or better yet, if you dislike the darker turn they took from their next album onwards). With the vocals of Zoran and Goran, some strong, anthemic songs are produced that, had a dark cloud not covered the entire area, I'm sure would have been well received past Serbia at the time. That's why I'm glad the internet is here to unearth some real bangers from this period.

Beautiful album. Coming from their 1990 project "U osvit zadnjeg dana", which boasted a relatively mainstream hard alternative sound, the band was expected to push into that sound even further and get into their groove for their second album.

Then shit happened in the western Balkans, and we got one of the finest achievements of the post-yu era.

Heavy riffs, dark ambient, pessimism, and unique vocals (unique to our area) adorn this album. The album starts off fast on the first two songs "Vraćam se dole" and "Ime", but then digs in deep on the rest of the album, culminating in an atmospheric ode to their friend Miodrag Jakovljević, a poet who died of colon cancer at the age of 30. Everything in between is commanding, hard, and twisting. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The funny thing I've come to find is, I used to think that this album is absolute shit compared to their debut, but once you fully listen to this, you realize there was nothing like it before, during, or after it's release.

Drug Song is one of the better slowcore tracks to have been recorded, while the rest is a religious eye-opener that only a burnt out hippie one foot in the afterlife could record.

im lsitening to this while in bed with a fever hopped on some pills, syrups and steams and honestly ic an see cave danxcing in the conrer wtf. to fix when i get better

EDIT:
After the dust of the shock value sets down, on which the album heavily relies on to the untrained ear, we're left with this uneven punky blues experimentation that has elements of what Nick Cave will be using later on in his career.

Not a bad album, but has some tracks that make me wonder what was the reason behind putting it. Nonetheless, no regrets about listening to it. Standouts include the opener, Nick the Stripper, King Ink, Yard

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2026: #41 A Live Album (11th Album)

Here we have three shows (more like 2 and something) collected into one archival live album.

The London show is my favorite out of the two, with the run from The Dim Locator to Nick the Stripper being my favorite tracks. It sounds more "clear", if such a thing exists with the Birthday Party, than the Germany show, which also has its moments, like Dead Joe and the punk blues She's Hit. At the end, both shows suffer a bit from having filler sprinkled in-between the great songs, and it hurts the overall album.

But I think the most powerful thing on this album is the Funhouse cover. The Stooges are, in my opinion, a hard band to cover, despite them having a plethora of tracks that are "easy to pin down", because most of those bands sanitize the energy the Stooges created into a bland 3-minute rock song. The Birthday Party managed to actually ADD more power and energy to an already ludicrously powerful song, and it standing at the end of the track list puts the icing on a very good album.

But thank you [~SpeedKills] for the rec!

Somewhere in the depths of this site, someone said that Billy Talent is, simply put, At The Drive-In without that avant-garde moment that made them an incredibly meh and pretentious group to me (then again, this is an opinion based on my very, very limited listening to Relationship of Command, an album that should be listened to with a more focused mindset, much more focused than a high schooler mindset). A large part of my experience with Billy Talent was already engraved somehow when their third album was released because my brother from some mysterious sources (still unexplained to this day) got 3 CDs from them. More precisely, their first three albums, which, with the rest of the essence of pop punk and nu-metal in the 90s and 2000s, made up the daily diet of a ten-year-old.

What surprises me is that this album still holds up some 15 years after the last listening. Of course, it is no longer part of the routine, but listening to it brings back that knowledge of lyrics and melody. I guess it's that neurophysiology that things learned as a child are so engraved in the brain that a person can't forget them even after some serious brain damage. I don't know how competent a person I am to talk about this album, but I really don't see a single part where you can say that it stayed in the cliché of the early 2000s (unless pop punk is that cliché, but we won't talk about that lol). Surprisingly, Benjamin's vocals don't bother me, and I quite like the backing vocals of the guitar section, which provide variability in tone. The lyrics are the standard youthful anger and rage that every person goes through, both then and now, and the instrumentals, although they are simple in nature, fit really nicely into the album and do not create an obstacle to enjoying it.

Billy Talent's debut album is one of those albums that I can say is really, objectively, not a bad album. For now, it's worth a minimum of 3.5 stars, because I kind of outgrew it, although I don't see a reason why it wouldn't grow into a 4-star album sometime in the future.

Orpheus Listening Challenge 2026: #35 An album between the years 1992 and 1995 that is categorized under the Riot Grrrl scene (39th Album)

Riot Grrrl is a new thing for me, so might as well start from the most famous band.

Right from the get go: a very angry album. And it works very well in a female fronted setting with the screams and growls and whatnot.

Rebel Girl is a fun song. Very noisy and very moving. The rest of the songs follow the same pattern of a noise fest with some vigorous, vulgar and rebellious lyrics that I can't be mad about. It's punk after all, and I'm glad guys didn't get all the spotlight, and that we got some free-flowing consciousness on tape. Not mainstream at the time, but it needed saying.

The more I listen to this, the more I'm glad Tifa had that premature exit. For those out of the loop, this album was intended for Tifa, but due to his firing, it fell down to the other vocalist on the scene who had some semblence of soaring quality that Tifa's voice was abundant in, i.e, Alen Islamovic.

An album with varying worth. The quality of those pop rock songs are abysmal, probably some of the worst they've made through their career, but what they lacked in that department, they made up with ballads, which were their ace in the sleeve in this part of their career, mostly because of the soaring vocal chops their frontmen possessed.

It's skippable for a reason. I nmy opinion, their next album is the definitive Islamovic-era Bijelo Dugme experience, while this is just a confused period where they had to scramble to put something that will net them money. And money and fame retainment it got them, but not much more. Definitely.

Misunderstood album. Of course, this is not Bijelo Dugme from the 70s, not even close, but to take this album and say that it is at the bottom (or at the very bottom) of their discography is insane and just prue heresy. Brega has not lost his charm and power to turn some ideas that would have independently built a mediocre album into an album and a half.

While before he flirted with the motifs of autochthonous Romani music, here more than ever there is that atmosphere that will make the gentleman in question get the stamp of a plagiarist in a class of his own. Take that how you will, but for me, it's not if he is or is not a plagiarist, but how well he uses those plagiarized notions and moments to create an album, and he uses them far better than I would expect, given his track record.

Although at times there is classic "80s cheese" in the form of synths and electro drums, it is not a minus, because the rest of the group shines as usual. Alen's vocals give that smack and power that is a characteristic sign of this band. Because of this album, I'm starting to like Alija more as a vocalist (maybe even more than Bebek). Epic tracks such as "Djurdjevan", "Evo Zaklet Cu Se" and "After All These Years" are proof of that. The rest of the album is just as good in other ways. The songs have staying power and are quite infectious and catchy.

The more I listen to it, the less I regret buying this LP instead of Time's debut.

Other than Pediculis Pubis being the shitpost moment of Bijelo Dugme's career, the rest of it is all worthy of an induction into an imaginary greatest hits album. Tifa's vocals carry yet another album, with ballads you wish you can replicate like Lazes, Jer Kad Ostaris and Da Te Bogdom Ne Volim, and fun AOR numbers like Lipe Cvatu, Za Esmuu and Aiaio Radi Radio.

Goran Bregović fully embraced Slavic folk music here, and I think it's a home run, even if it is plagiarism at moments. The gypsy pop sound was unique on the mainstream scene, and while rockers and lovers of Bebek's Bijelo Dugme disagreed on the decision, I believe it to be a necessary risk that paid off both commercially and artistically.

I dredged until the 9th track and then realized that this stuff blows. It's long, it's monotonous, it's bloated and it has that god-forsaken late 2000s/early 2010 indie musical feel that won't die out, and that I want to lock in a basement for the next 30 years and then unleash as INDIE REVIVAL (ヽ(°〇°)ﾉ). I'll finish this by saying: go listen to Everlum, Elliot Smith, or Sufjan Stevens instead of this, you'll thank me later.

Overall, a good album, but not as perfect as people make it out to be. It takes the greatness of pop rock that the Beatles have chiseled to perfection while also adding the jangly pop of west coast America.

What we get is a precursor to the 80s American alternative music scene. I love the optimism and love it exudes, something I'm always on the lookout for these days. Standouts are tracks like "Feel", which has this glam rock energy, "Ballad Of El Goodo", "Thirteen" (which I didn't quite enjoy on my first run, but it has slowly crept up), and "Watch the Sunrise", a good closer alongside ST100/6.

The only downside is the two tracks "Don't Lie To Me" which sounds more like Slade than the Beatles, if you catch my drift, and India Song, which is redundant. Rest is great, and it might actually go in my library sometime down the line.

One of the hip hop pinnacles.

It's an urban painting the more you look at, the more details seem to arise. The instrumental aspect is okay and nothing spectacular as some other albums out there, but Big L's boastful, vulgar and violent nature with a lot of technical prowess carries the album really hard.

All the songs are great, but some compared to others feel like filler. Songs like Da Graveyard are above with the rotating cast of rappers (including a young Jay-Z), and the first two songs, which albeit different from the rest of the album, capture the boastful zeitgeist of the time. All Black has a great beat to it as well.

It's sad how top-heavy this album is. Like, really top-heavy. Baron in the Trees and Graceless Lady are pure witchy bliss, and then it kinda tethers between being full of good ideas, but also too long and uneventful. It also doesn't help that the instrumental, gothic tracks lose their charm on subsequent listens. But still, worth a listen, and if you can spare 50 minutes, a rewarding listen for these autumn times.

Big Black's second album is a continuation of the sonic onslaught laid down by their debut,. And while the rating may seem to tell you that they lost part of their charm somewhere in the year span, I wholeheartedly disagree.

Songs About Fucking is as good, and maybe even at times better than their debut, with a lot of moments where they seem to branch out into different soundscapes, but still stay in the same noisy realm they're known for.

It's hard to choose a favorite to showcase what I mean, but just compare the first few tracks to the dancy "Colombian Necktie", the dredging "Kitty Empire", the anxious "Ergot" and "Tiny, King of Jews", which totally sheds the noise rock approach, and gives us a industrial/post-punk show the band was clearly capable of making. That's what I'm talking about.

Even if it's abrasive as shit, it's still very accessible and likable. Love Durango's and Steve's driving guitar, Roland plays the drums like a damn machine. The bass sounds beautiful. Also, Steve's delivery is spot on and the lyrics, even if they're simple in nature, when paired with the music, want me to punch a hole in the wall in sheer rebellion, anger, and hatred towards the world and the state we're headed.

Oh, and it was recorded in 1985, some 35-40 years ago, and it still feels like it was recorded yesterday.

Holy shit.

A landmark in music. Fucking recommended the whole way.

Also, Steve, if you're ever reading this, I love you and everything you do.