Reviews by dohej

Decently atmospheric mid tempo indie radio rock but it's so bloated and aimless and the vocals are a whiny bore, Thom Yorke rip off but lacking any angst or dynamism. The strummy acoustic guitars are meant to give it energy but just make it tiresome. Some good instrumental passages with shimmering guitar leads and the feel of explosions in the sky doing Champagne Supernova, really pushing for epic and sweeping, but ruined by the whinging singing.

Favorite: Rise

Another insanely overhyped album. Changes is great but the rest is really pretty bad. His voice is thin and weak and the songs are just crap Elton John piano rock with cheesy strings and corny brass arrangements to go with the irritating showtune style.

I think this is my final of the 62 Bowie albums on the list, and I've come to the conclusion that I just don't like him very much. You could compile a pretty great 72-minute CDr best of that would be mostly bangers, but there's so much boring crap on all his albums, and the only one that was really good was the one that's basically a Brian Eno album.

Britpop Sinatra, without the charisma of either. Dull, gray, bloated - like a whale car ass washed up on a beach. When it's not boring it's annoying.

Classic San Francisco sound - close harmonies, bluesy electric guitars, a bit of a soul/RnB feel, and some country jangle, and some folksy acoustic stuff all blended up for a lightly psych sound. They don't push the boat out as much as the dead or nail the countrified harmonies of CSNY or the raunchy raw blues of Big Brother & the Holding Company - sticking to a more Beatlesy power pop. It's fine - but their best song, Omaha, isn't on this one.

The combination of acoustic guitar strumming and laid back but melodic bass lines on this album gives that are really very simple songs/arrangements such a depth of feeling - gentle, sad, tender, warm - that just invite you to dwell in it.

One of those that's next to impossible to listen to outside of the 'influence', 'for its time' and 'pathbreaking' and 'changed everything' descriptors that turn it into a sacred artifact in ROCK HISTORY. It's a lively combination of jump blues, high energy RnB, and honky tonk - all the most danceable music the mid 50s had to offer distilled into one super charismatic package.

At best a rip off Radiohead with pop ambition replacing creative ones. At worst they're wannabe U2 at their most bloated and boring. Grating vocals, unearned peaks, predictable dynamic shifts, corny electronica. Piss poor. Just some of the worst stuff the 21st century has churned out yet.

Industrial horror - the only thing more terrifying than the despair of clanging machinery is the howl of post-industrial collapse, the looming void, the creeping rust, the screaching noise of iron wrought from itself. I can't watch any more of these German sitcoms.

Maximalist soft rock, like Gram Parsons meets Stevie Wonder - piano-driven songwriting with lush arrangements, loads of synths, easy-going moods, gentle harmonies, a hint of twang, and a blissed out hazy California sunset vibe. But its so easy-going and so soft it rarely coalesces into anything tangible, its a series of loose impressions, of passing feelings. It feels like it was made as a demonstration of what you can do with a state of the art early 70s recording studio.

Synthy psychadelic goth disco - Depeche Mode is the obvious comparison, but this is a bit jazzier, poppier, brighter, and more uptempo. Fun, bouncy stuff with a dark undercurrent.

Bombastic beats and big braggadocios raps - he is such a boring one dimensional man, a pure money mind. But the feel of the is great: propulsive energy, stylish sounds, a giant party.

New Wave Synths, keyboards and chorus-pedal guitars combine with a high, almost falsetto, vocal and lots of poppy arrangements and an art-rock approach to songwriting. At it’s best (Earn Enough for Us), it’s bright and upbeat power pop that presages a lot of 90s Brit-Pop. Other good bits head for the weirder artsy end of New Wave, with spacious deconstructed songs like Another Satellite, based on bizarre sparse soundscapes. But there are also some over-elaborate fussy songs with lots of strings that give have a bloated, annoying feel, like bad Sgt Peppers imitators. Some jazzy stuff that mostly sounds out of tune.

God, hippies are so annoying.

Along with Cream, Allman Brothers, Hendrix's Band of Gypsies, and the Dead this is 1970 jamband ground zero, exploding psychedelia beyond the fussy over-composed twee pop of London by sprawling out into improvisation of blues funk and jazz and, here, latin rhythms. The percussion and the guitar are the stars on this - constant polyrhythmic power and gritty dark overdriven SG tone and dorian / harmonic minor harmonies. The songs/writing and vocals aren't really much to remember but function as the vehicle for the jam/groove.

A couple of incredible era defining pop hits and some solid filler tracks channeling disco and all the 80s production wizardry available but also a lot of slow burning ballads that really stink up the place. Definition of a greatest hits not an album artist, but what hits!!

Some of the most generic blues rock the 70s has to offer.

The Svefn-g-englar single was a perfect release - an introduction to this otherworldy band conjoring this sweeping, ambient, spacious windswept alien sounds. This album is twice as long as the 4-track single and a bit baggy - the extended strings section and trip hop adjacent stuff drag it down a bit. Also not being a first encounter with the band it's a bit less special. But even so, the highs (Viðrar vel til loftárása &
Svefn-g-englar especially) are pretty stunning: landscape painting as music - ethereal, dreamy, cathartic, spiritual, oceanic stuff.

One of the more sui generis 80s indie acts, taming the dissonance of post hardcore and combining it with jaunty funky popping bass parts and guitars that twang and jangle. Everything's familiar but assembled and performed in surprising combinations. Only the vocals - nasal, flat, weirdly coffee shop open mic earnest - bring it down.

Extremely English, Extremely annoying, forced whimsy, the sound of taking mushrooms mistakenly thinking nursery rhymes and folk guitars and the renaissance and ripping off the Beatles worst tendencies makes a good combination. Tiresome. 1966-69 is so overrepresented it's a chore.

Bouncy, dialed a notch or two above ambient, but still pretty chilled out, great synths, energetic beats - a few tracks are full acid house ala Happy Mondays - but it's mostly loungey wallpaper stuff. Good fun though.