Reviews by dohej

Bratty vocals. Adolescent lyrics. Brilliantly nasty sounding guitars: metallic, violent, buzzing dissonance. Anxious dynamics and a mood so tense its fraying at the edges, on the cusp of snapping. Deep dub bass keeps it all in check, holding down the low end so the riot above burns. The songs stretch out to 6 minutes, room to settle into a funk groove and thrash around a bit, but they outstay their welcome. The title track rips through its 3 mins though, it's the most direct and sex pistols sounding track with the best vocal melody on the album. The recording isn't great, feels like it's all compressed into the mids and has no room in it. They'd improve on the formula.

Shut up and play her guitar is the best advice Zappa ever took. None of the annoying unfunny comedy bits, just shredding, jazz rock riffs, prog compositions, studio wizardry and virtuoso performances. Sounds like mario music, like a demonic fire pit seance, like classic rock radio run through a kaleidoscope, like a hard bop acid trip, like a funky riverboat.

Chilled out psych folk. Ironically though the follower stuff is the worst on here, suffering from that annoying medieval sound British psych loves and ultimately very boring. My favorite bits are the drones and meditative tracks that take a lot from Indian music as well as the CSN/Buffalo Springfield sounding bluesy bits with prominent basslines swirly organs and a spacey feel. I assumed this would be much more saccharine sunshine and flower power fluffy hippy stuff, but for the most part it's not really that at all despite being possibly the most 60s sounding thing imaginable.

Favorites: Three King Fishers, Season of the Witch, the trip

Is this meant to be fun? Enjoyable? Sophisticated? Clever? Impressive? An exhillerating display of virtuosity? A great lesson is just because you can doesn't mean you should? It's not even THAT technical is it? I truly never understood who this kind of stuff is meant to be for. There's a crowd going wild, who are you people?! Just listen to classical music, avant-garde experimental music, hard rock, OR do some math homework. But don't try to do them all at once - it just ends up as this tepid psuedo-smart dross.

Soft schmaltz, bouncy RnB bass, warm brass, and a masterclass in breathy hushed singing. Easy listening, effortlessly cool, warm and chill, an instant mood raiser. The jazzier flutey & bossa nova songs ruin the mood though, urgh.

Great fun - bouncy synth pop made from the cheapest keyboards 1980 had to offer but capturing a gritty determination to fuck around and throw the best party possible. Dark, funny, ironic, detached, but earnestly throwing themselves into the moment.

I have a higher tolerance for fuzzed out psych garage guitar solos than most people, but this was tough even for me. A surprising debut from a band I associate more with super corny 70s radio rock, this album pairs fuzzy garage experiments with big brass riffs and soul/funk/jazz arrangements. Sometimes it works to create a kind of unique pop sound (heavy Abbey Road era Beatles with sax). The best bits are the countrified funk psych (I'm a man) but when they tighten up the sound gets really stressful and agitating but also bland (Someday). Sometimes they go full prog noodle experimental mode and while that was maybe interesting in 1969 (even then, not really) it really isn't in 2026.

Favorite: South Carolina Purples, I'm a Man

The most flashy guitar player of the post hardcore bands, J Mascis plays like someone who grew up on Hendrix and the Stooges and came of age with Black Flag and Sonic Youth - virtuosity, but channelled into chaos, deconstructive violent playing on the edge of feedback, riffs and solos ripped from a wall of noise, loud, aggressive, but sensitive and emotive, leaning into something recognizable and melodic as it disintegrates. I've been listening to them more and more over the last couple of years and the alienating dissonance and nasal singing grow on me, the songs open up with familiarity to be, almost, singalongable.

Jangle & Glam. Cool surf sounds but sadly just on the opener. A mix of sounds that synthesizes the wave of bands that followed the Smiths in twee indie pop (c86), artsy college rock (REM), and his classic touchstones - 60s girl group and 70s glam - into a blend that anticipates some of the more literate Britpop that would come shortly (pulp, suede). The production sounds good and his voice is in good shape, still some life to his performance. Lots of drama and self pity and dodgy (especially in retrospect) nostalgic nationalist declinism.

An electric performance - so thrilling a delivery of what has become the most tired sound in music that it still stands out and demands attention. It's hard to hear this as anything other than the tempalte, the generic form, the seed from which rock and roll boomed, the sound a billion guitar guys have been riffing on and ripping off, iterating and paying homage to over for the next 65 years with huge degrees of creative success. His guitar playing is solid but not as great as some of the other blues-rock transitional figures, the vocals are really the most amazing bit: rich, emotive, drawing on a deep resonance to power through, breaking engagingly, wraping the voice around the phrases, pushing out the lines and wails. The band sounds great too - the jazzy piano tinkling especially.

The spirit of uncut cantancerous spite in audio form. Wierd rhythms, staccato performances, shifting song structures, none of the parts really cohere - it's like all the parts of the album were thrown into a cement mixer and poured straight onto wax. Sounds like total shit - a terrible singer spitting out putrid verse, awful musicians using cheap keyboards and tinny amps, recorded poorly for a weak thin sound - nastiness so pure it's inspired. Grotty, rebellious, annoyed and annoying, the sound of lashing out.

Some cheeky Irish Ramones have only gone and bloody invented pop punk! Lots of chugga chugga chords, lots of hooks, lots of harmonies, lots of that thing where the bass goes up and up and up. A very non-aggressive approach to punk that’s more about having fun with the boys than raging against the man - kind of a new wave feel to a lot of the songs, despite no synths/keys.

Funky synthpop with huge hooks, boundless energy, a super kinetic nervous twitchy feel, and a lot more of a bouncy new wave feel than I expected paired with the eclectic astral jazz style of Parliament. Funny, horny, hugely charismatic, virtuoso, apocalyptic - real party at the end of the world stuff.

Trippy psych jangle with a nostalgic 60s feel, woozy shoegaze atmosphere, a touch of electronica production, some Bittersweet Symphony style string bombast. Perfectly nice, very well made stuff that's pleasant enough to have on - hazy and dreamy in an upbeat lifting way - but doesn't leave much of a mark.

Aggressive emo ala Rites of Spring with throat stripping vocals, high energy high frequency live wire guitars thrashing around, and a very tight rhythm section that’s feeling the funk a bit. SoCal Fugazi. Big on quiet/loud dynamics, post-hardcore riffs, and descending into feedback only for a gnarly bass line to emerge from the chaos and bring it back. Some longer songs go into a textural grimey Sonic Youth direction, layering on the guitars over the bass groove until they whip it up into a closing frenzy, laying the groundwork for post-rock/screamo crossovers. Goes very hard, damn.

A five star album I never need to hear again.

Searching restless exploration that pushes, pulls, and stretch harmony, rhythm, timbre and melody to create an uneasy feeling of dissociation, disjuncture, and disconnection. Music that's full of gaps and anxiously seeking to resolve itself, to cohere, to transcend - finding fleeting moments of joy, of blissful color that, with a the slightest twitch of hue, shifts tone, destabilizing the mood, casting back into the search.

Albums from one-hit wonders are always a funny mix - songs that inevitably end up feeling like rough drafts, rehearsals, first takes, knock offs, or siblings/cousins of the anthem. This follows the script...but Take on Me is such a mega-hit and really stands up despite the overplay, hyper commercialization, endless parodies and use as shorthand for cheesy 80s mass culture. The rest is pillowy synth pop, all neon moods, glossy surfaces with dark undertones, and the jarring juxtaposition of earnest crooning with totally artifical instrumentation from the synths to the drum machines and produced to death bass sounds. The sound of the spirit become ensconsed in the digital cocoon, and at once lamenting and delighting in it.

silky smooth and buttery soft neo-soul. an incredibly humid album. warm and sultry, relaxed and totally at ease, the album is an hour of lush arrangements, jazzy sax, porno funk bass and keyboard parts, and falsetto crooning.

One surprisingly good soft rock track (Nick of Time), a few unsurprisingly boring blues ones, and the worst of it combines the two, or just goes into incredibly slow ballad mode. Thing Called Love is a surprsingly new wave sounding uptempo blues track.