Reviews by dohej

Some decent bluesy psych rock with a nice groove and soul/RnB arrangements and some solid mellow country/folk rock ala Neil Young. Best on the higher energy tracks or in full out spacey ambient mode - the folksy ballads with medeival melodies are a drag. His voice is bearable for the most part, but fundamentally annoying and very nasaly - he really pushes it with some of the extended wailing portions.

Favorites: Pleasant Street, Once I Was

Don’t know why I never listened to Stills more. This is a really solid country-rock album from the heart of that era. Stills + Byrds vet Hillman rip it up here - the best stuff is the close harmonies and gentle pretty country stuff, but they veer into wah-wah blues rock and some slide-guitar ABBesque stuff too and it’s actually pretty good. Then there’s some acoustic folky stuff that’s a bit more boring. Nothing groundbreaking, but I wanted to add almost every song to my country-rock playlist, just to fill it out. Extremely dad core easy going stuff.

A fitting album cover since everything jack white does is through a knowing referential/reverential backwards looking buzzard's gaze on the rock canon - he's constantly devouring and regurgitating blues- country- garage- psych- rock - he's tasteful and talented so it's usually pretty decent but never especially interesting. But blues rock addicted boomer critics can't get enough so he's been lauded for being an anachronism his whole career.

Tense dissonance, a thrumming ambience suggesting something's off, expressive and restrained guitars that are at once vaguely punk and darkly jazzy, meditative and absorbing but disquieting.

Singing is emotional and the louder you do it, the more emotional it is.

For a band that is basically byword for the excess, stupidity, and mindless violence of turn of the millennium metal this is actually surprisingly good. The riffs are, of course, hard and heavy and downtuned to mud, but have a good groove to them and the dj/effects give a bit of higher end texture. The screaming vocals have a guttural power and the odd bit of melody to them, once you get used to it it works. The sound is insanely thick and bricked, it fills all the space available instantly - the double blast drums especially leave no breathing room, to space to think - collapsing distance and submitting you fully to the noise - you either succumb and give yourself over to it, or switch it off immediately. Good thing the lyrics are all unintelligible bc they are so stupid it hurts and the raps are awful, but at least they're relatively rare. The most stressful thing possible to just passively have on in the background.

Pretty standard issue RnB infused hip hop, sounds like a lot of the music that dominated the radio and charts around the late 2000. The most distinctive and best best bit of this is the organic instrumentation with horns and clean jazzy guitars creating a lively warm soul sound, like a rap Amy Winehouse.

They had the smarts to clean up the vocals to offer a counterpoint to the scuzzy guitars, giving the sound a lot more dynamism, creating a bit of breathing room in the mix. They're like an American Jesus and Mary Chain, fusing noise and pop into louder fuzzier heavier version of basically the 60s garage rock template, complete with surf solos. The dirty bass parts rip and the nasal slacker rock singing works perfectly for the dgaf affect.

Bright jangly and bouncy pop with a vocal that varies from soft crooning to dramatic post punk snarl. It's super smooth sounding: extremely clean production gives it a light breezy feel - there's plenty going on, but it isn't cluttered or chaotic. The guitars are great - jazz chorus sounding clean tones ringing out catchy leads and arpegios - the best bits are when they take the lead in the mix. The synths sound cool, but tend to wash out the songs and don't get used well when they're at the forefront though.

Opens with a hard driving funk tour de force, a thick steamy dance party with endless layers of brass, percussion, keyboards, and a relentless bass - an undeniable groove with call and response vocals delivered forcefully, woven between sax lines and trumpet stabs. Mellows out into a slower jazz fusion number to breathe, a patient groove with slinky melodies. The band is huge and with so many parts locked in together it creates a kaleidoscope effect, ever shifting, always a new element or detail, fractal funk.

Fragile glassy shimmering surfaces with ethereal vocals. Hazy atmosphere pierced by bright clean guitars, propped up, sometimes, by a Cure sounding bassline. It’s so consistent in tone, timbre, pace and style that one track is rarely distinct from the next. It feels unstructured, like the parts never cohere properly into something recognizably a song. But it sets a mood, anxious reflexivity, dreamy nostalgia, stoned longing.

Another album of demented carnival music, for a 1980s idea of a 1930s depression era travelling circus - hokey accordians and a carnival barker lead singer warbling on about film noire protagonists, twisted lovers, and dark dealings in the underworld. His voice is not as obnoxious here as on some of the other albums. But. the best bit of this by miles is the dark twisted demented guitar work of Marc Ribot - pure skronk: bluesy leads through the looking glass, huge leaps in the melody, harmonic minor scales, sharp overdriven tone, repulsive and alluring all at once. Lots of very fun raunchy saxaphone leads, swinging jazzy grooves, and lively bass lines.

Jazzy Native Tongues beats with a classic old school boom bap basis incorporating lots of reggae funk and soul samples, agile rapping going through verse after boastful verse, and poppy RnB hooks/choruses. One of the best sounding classic hip hop albums of the 80s, this holds up way better than most of its peers.

Great voice that works its way around the melodies beautifully for a powerful perfomance, but this style of stringy jazz is too schmaltzy to bear.

Every dipshit who walked past a guitar in 1967 ended up this book, huh? More boring baroque pastoral folk psyche with Dylan rip off vocals, cheesy strings and dorky harpsichords, forced whimsy, and flower power imagery. One of the more derivative albums of the San Francisco psyche scene.

There will always be a near endless supply this kind of fundamentally silly dirty rock n roll post blues band because the way electric guitars work mean it's the easiest and most fun kind of music to play, the first thing you can do in a group setting, and a ready template to pick up and goof around with. Totally understandable why these bands exist, much less so why they have an audience - I guess it's for guys who like to say "they don't make music like this anymore" while listening to music like this being made right now.

The main focus is the low end - the construction of spacious dark beats, propulsive but laid back - borrowing styles from dub and house music, the interplay of repetition and iteration, of subtle variation and constant looping, of synchopation and resolution, of reggae basslines's flair and the machinic precision of the drum machine. Then the high end they fill with whatever - house diva vocals, raps, toasting, jazzy piano - and it just works. Impossibly icy and steamy, the sound of a damp warehouse recently packed with bodies - the contemplative calm after the heat of a rave.

Yeah, that's what indie rock sounded like in 2007.

Power pop songs with post grunge arrangements. Full of great melodicism and vocal harmonies that go with Courtney Love's forecful throaty delivery, that cut through a mix of heavy, sludgey, buzzsaw distorted, and bright jangly guitars. I only ever knew the title track, but there's a ton of good stuff going on this album.

Favorites: Awful, Malibu, Heaven Tonight, Petals

The blues based hard rock arena bombast of Led Zeppelin, the chaotic energy of CBGB glam punk, gnarly guitars and a megalomaniac singer. How does it end up so boring? Why does this suck when Guns and Roses rule and even Motley Crue have their moments? There's no inspiration, no fun, tired riffs, stock solos and the best high spec coke fueled production that their 80s corporate behemoth record label could splurge on, designed to max out radio airplay. Janies got a gun is good because it's a least a little weird, the rest sounds like them ripping off the generation of bands who ripped them off. Tap water hard rock.