Reviews by dohej

Timeless Americana sound, but somewhat generic as a result. Bright guitars, jangly like the byrds, TP’s distinctive voice, subtle harmonies, tasteful production, appealingly familiar melodies and chord progressions, great sounding spacious recording. One big hit (you don't know what it's like) but not in his top 5, the rest is all pretty good but nothing particularly grea

Slow and dense. Soaring fuzzed out guitars drenched in reverb and modulated to death shimmer through the high end while hushed vocals whisper sleepy melodies into the mic - both float over a dreamy thickly layered pile of noisy but clean washed out guitar/keyboard stuff and a bass that just about propels it forward. Gorgeous at its best, a bit too slow at its worst.

There is so much of this kind of album lately - acoustic and sleepy with hushed vocals, like it was recorded into a laptop and made to be heard on a phone, muted and restrained, afraid to bother the neighbors. A nasty effect of high rents and paucity of rehearsal spaces to make some noise and jam out. This album is best when it sheds these confines and moves away from its dinky ukelele core folk singer song writer starting point into more creative and spacious arrangements with horns and dirty guitars (title track, Hotter Colder). Terrible name.

Slow and studied ambience made of layers of tape loop manipulations & disintegration, softly chanted vocals, thrumming effects and airy ethereal textures - delicate, fragile and solemn.

Funky jazz with an improvisational jamband feel and an eclectic global set of sounds from Afrobeat horns to latin percussion alongside the corny 80s shredder guitars, Framptony talkbox guitars, cheesy keyboards, electronica beats, smooth supermarket easy listening and prog-inflected riffing. Some of the grooves are good, especially the afrobeat Jambone. Way too busy though, kind of stressful.

A surprising omission from the original 1001 list given the predilection for exactly this genre of 70s folksy singer songwriter stuff. Acoustic guitar driven songs fleshed out with strings and a light rhythm section here and there, all putting his mellow low voice and the lyrics - love songs and story songs - front and center. It’s well done for what it is, pleasant enough mellow stuff and not overlong.

Glitchy and pulsating, icy cold electronica palette with dark heavy beats and vibey songs full of space. Wears its influences (Bjork especially) heavily. Fun stuff.

Dreamy indie pop with lots of bright jangle and hazy dense fuzzy guitar, uptempo songs with bounce to the bass and purpose to the drumming, and hooky drama to the alto vocals. Warm and familar, it's a sampler pack of 80s/90s twee and dreampop sounds remembered via nostalgic instagram filters - like, what if Johnny Marr was in Cocteau Twins in a rainy neon music video? - but it works great overall to make some joyous, very pretty, if pretty samey, music.

Deeply synth - multiple layers of synth doing basslines, high end melodies etc to give it a thoroughly artificial texture. The vocals are warbly from being auto-tuned to death and back to life. Her voice is breathy and heavily accented British with lots of cool little inflections and millennial oohhaaahhwaahhs and rap-sung verses a bit like The Streets. There’s a marked contrast between the synthetic sounds and the personal themes of the lyrics, dissociating both, keeping authenticity in suspense. It’s kind of medium paced and the beats are only medium sized - sounds like retail pop music more than dance music. Mall-Goth Katy Perry with all the subtlety of Avicii. But it's pretty fun when it goes nuts.

Surprisingly solid, sounds contemporary while retaining their identity, incorporating some trippy neopsych rock elements ala tame impala. But a basically unremarkable album from an already well represented legacy artist - bit of a theme for the newest 13!

Non of their joyous pop, this is pure despair in the style of Disintegration (if not exactly that level, but nothing is): sprawling densely layered waves of synth and aching guitar driven by a dramatic bass pulse and drums that thunder and echo. The Cure are the best at summoning exactly this gloomy romance, at wallowing in dreary dread, melting into misery until it turns into a kind of bliss.

Dreamy synths and sleepy vocals create a floaty euphoric feeling - pure vibes. Expressive but in an inward looking, introverted way. Slow songs that get more intense by adding layers to the arrangements and delving ever more deeply into the sad pop wallow. The true ballads with acoustic guitars are a drag though. A lot of it is pretty boring. I still don't get how she's a huge pop star with this flat affectless performance. A model of pop stardom based on hushed parasocial intimacy and relatable detachment?But, even if it's not really my thing it' does mark a nice change from bubble gum pop or RnB-based party music being the only path to this level of fame though. I guess she's like the gen z version of Adele with a singing style more worried about waking up your parents than winning a tv show?

Favorites: Birds of a Feather, the diner

Mellow and woozy introspective indie folk that floats along in a very pretty atmospheric acoustic haze for the most part, but kicks into a more noisy overdriven rock mode once in a while. Warbly falsetto vocals, fragile and expressive. Like so much music in 2025, this seems to be a way of creating oases of peace and gentleness, withdrawing from the world by making your own.

A wild hyperpop rehasing of nu-metal combining thick heavy downtuned riffs and hyperactive rap vocals - it's much more silly, deconstructed, and playful than the self-serious original, and better for it - taking the undirected 90s macho frat boy rage and turning it into a set of decontextualized symbols and sounds to rearrange and resignify as an explosively camp noise. It still kind of sucks to listen to though.

Can't stand this soft and floaty superficial spirituality sensitive nice guy sound. Well assembled, super polished, extremely generic over elaborated cutesy pastoral ukulele core indie folk fresh out of 2005 that might as well be AI is extremely discordant with songs evoking a brutal civil war. The artless sanctimonious emptiness of the corporate coffeeshop / megachurch form undermines any possible content. Ends up having all the emotional impact of a college admissions personal essay. Deeply cynical.

Slow, atmospheric and stormy with a thundering low end and an echoey warbly hyper processed set of strings, synths and vocals vamping somewhat aimlessly but moodily.

Favorites: dying for you, chains of love,

More lively than expected for octogenarian rock guys, and it sounds pretty good - but so what? If anyone can hire in competent ringers to churn out high spec generic bluesy rock and capture a decent vocal performance and the occasional guitar solo it's the Rolling Stones. But come on. It's a novelty record and testament to the life extending powers of modern medicine available to the ultra wealthy. Does anyone care about these boring ass songs?

The sound of a dubsteb-addled mind discovering a shipping container full of leftover down-tuned 7 string guitars and double kick pedals from 1999 and trying, pretty successfully, to do epic Evanescence/Linkin Park Eurovision parody of nu metal. The growling screams are great and some of the heavy chords hit, even if they barely ever amount to an actual riff. The longer it goes on the less endearing it becomes. This genre sucked the first time around, why on earth is there a revival?! Symptom of a dying culture.

Another St Vincent album that does nothing for me. It's admirably assembled, artfully arranged, full of ideas and cool sounds, and is nice enough to have on but it entirely fails to grab me, hold my attention, or draw me in.

Crazy Train is pretty much the pinnacle of this genre of arena metal - polished production that sounds amazing, heavy but poppy riffs, accessible hooks, dynamic vocals, wild squealing solos, shredding in just the right quantities, uncut cocaine energy. Big dumb fun and the ballads don't suck too much. But it fades and drags on the bside.