Rated 4/10
Nice and gentle, unobtrusive alt country with a bit of jangle, not that much twang really, and a lot of pretty indiepop inspired songwriting and production. It's atmospheric, laid back, a bit dreamy, and easy going stuff that's not especially original or as far as I know influential or iconic of a time/place, so not sure why it's included really.
Rated 4/10
An all star cast of Laurel Canyon & SF psych scene fixtures get together for a loose jammy album with very unstructured and honestly pretty weak songs, but a very chilled out, if uninspired, vibe. Bluesy, folksy, astral, primal. It's got some great vocal harmony and the a strong performance from DC, but mostly it's at it's best when it's basically a Grateful Dead live session with some great Jerry Garcia noodling and fun exploratory bass from Phil Lesh and Jack Casady.
Rated 8/10
A continuation of the jazzy hip hop conscious rap tradition with a lot of unfashionable (at the time, peak Trap era) sounds from 90s RnB, 70s funk, smooth neo soul that end up sounding fresh and vital - a live band in the middle of a chart full of laptop producers will always sound extremely living and dynamic. The lyrics are a mix of urgency - responding to police violence and mass incarceration - and complacency - an Obama era faith that "we're going to be alright" and that the civil rights movement is an going if painful and painfully slow inexorable march forwards. A very of its era thematic approach, with the political juxtaposed with personal, social and individual experiences of violence weave in and out of each other, hustling in world of mutual and self exploitation, grappling with contradictions and inconsistencies of the world and the self all at once, one through the other. Earnest and cynical and really on the nose. His flow is great, his phrasing precise with a rapid fire cadence, the timbre of his voice isn't my favorite though: thin and nasal. It's really good, but also extremely overrated - critics and audiences needed to anoint a rap genius for the 2010s and he was the vessel for all that cultural weight.
Rated 8/10
The whimsical psychedelia of posh boys messing around with hallucinogens. Sounds like Austin Powers but trippy, demented, unstable, a dream that inverts to nightmare and back- astral in theme but sometimes quite contained and tightly structured musically, baroque and sing songy, until it does descend into much shaggier looser spacier exploratory jams, before returning to songs that're short and tight and buttoned up nursery rhymes about gnomes. Extremely English.
Rated 6/10
The Lonely Planet of albums, music for tourists who insist on calling themselves travellers, the Che t-shirt of artists. A topical tropical dream of counter-globalization, of a world of cultural exchange as resistance, of hybridity and translation and multi-lingual genre hopping code switching as a global musical commons, of joyous self expression and feel good partying. A dream that curdled over and after the 1990s and was revealed to be just a French guy on holiday, primarily a project of bourgeois first world self-making, just as subject to the stultifying forces of capitalist co-option, of commodification, standardization as any other cultural product - something that becomes just another cultural signifier, the default soundtrack of a certain kind of bar, hostel, or cafe in the gringo district of whatever popular backpacker region. Still, some of those evocative trumpet parts, latin harmonies, and Jamaican basslines really are pretty nice and laid back. An album I've heard a thousand times without ever putting on myself but never minded at all.
Rated 2/10
Classic rock for epic bacon IPA millennials. A standard issue southern rock rolling stones cover band who heard the strokes first album and jumped on the trend to become, somehow, arena filling corporate indie stalwarts. Too bland to be bad, they're the buffalo wild wings of 2000s hipster rock.
Rated 6/10
Sounds terrible, doesn't make any sense, rarely in tune, but a jolt of pure party energy and magical guitars.
Rated 2/10
One of the most baffling figures in music history. The musical equivalent of Lenny Bruce - held up as a legend but truly sucks to listen to. Good at the one trick of pairing banal sentimentality with cutting sarcasm for sickly sweet cyncism that, I guess, passes as world weary wisdom. I guess you can see that working for songwriter, but when you have that voice, to release a solo album? I suppose the sheer audacity to step into a recording booth to lay down the vocal tracks is admirable.
I used to listen to it a lot when it came out and I was working in an office - it drowned out the rest of the office successfully. This is perfect office work music - unobstrusive enough to fade into the background but interesting enough to listen to for a second here or there, it's mellow and calming but has enough going on rhythmically to keep the energy up, there are hooks with enough verve to occupy the back of your mind but the vocals are delivered in a flat monotone that begs to be ignored by the front, the arrangements are fully fleshed out and varied enough but have a coherent feel for the duration. It's totally fine but really quite boring.
Rated 4/10
A backing band that sound like Steely Dan noodling over Crosby Stills and Nash make for a surprisingly good sound - warm and loose, jazzy jammy, with a touch of controlled fuzz and something approximating funk - she's getting a little bit wierd with it, incorporating dark synths, dense soundscapes, and lush tropical arrangements. I still don't like her voice though and there's just so much of it.
Rated 6/10
Bucolic folk with picked acoustic guitars and lightly played stand up bass, flute, hand drumming, and an overall gentle jazzy cabin feel to it - his voice is as ever, whispery and expressive. None of the songs here reach the level he'd soon get to though, and it's a very pleasant but not gripping album.
Rated 10/10
Damn this hits so hard. Sprawling hallucinatory jams that conjure a a primal scene, a fire in a cave, deep grooves plumping unknown depths of dark funk, febrile keys that come in layer and layers, swelling atmosphere and chaotic noise that dissolves as it resolves, a sweaty heat punctuated by a fire alarm trumpet from a nightmare echoing through and out of time. Frenzy. Fever. Fear. The bass arrives just in time, giving something to hold on to, a life raft for the soloists to climb aboard and keep the party burning. The jazz trance descends...
Rated 2/10
I struggle with lyric-first songwriting so have never connected with JM, especially since while her voice has a great expressivity I just don't like listening to it and dislike her distinctive style of melodic phrasing. The music is superficially gentle and warm acoustic stuff but actually has more complex dissonance and jazzy harmonics. The songs are more intricately structured than classic verse chorus folk - de emphasizing repetition and refrain and instead unfurling narratively. The arrangements are nice on here, with her voice and guitar at the front but supported by acoustic bass, hand drumming, and backup singers. The piano stuff not so much. I've tried so many times with her and with this album in particular but no matter what it's never for me.
Rated 8/10
Hard hitting boom bap beats and verse after verse deconstructing the violence of American racism, the routine violence it engenders the lives lived amidst that violence. The sound is definitive of its time, dated but iconic. The eviseration of racial liberalism and the dominant banal ideologies of white supremacy are remarkably, tragically, timeless 30+ years later.
Rated 4/10
Dum dumdum dum dum dummm dum. Some good riffs and lots of nice guitar sounds, but it's really just a microwaved and kind of boring version of English blues guys from 1967 who just learned about Muddy Waters & John Lee Hooker and got to be the first ones to rip them off while using really loud amps with fuzz pedals. The slower, acoustic stuff on here is really awful - when your voice is this thin and weedy don't put it front and center. This is surely fun music to make, but it isn't that fun to listen to.
Rated 4/10
This what happens when someone good at Karaoke is off-handedly told they could start a band but takes it way too seriously and only bloody goes and does it, but just stole a bunch of songs from those compilations put out by record labels that scour the third world for obscure Peruvian cumbia synthpop, Zambian circus psych, or Balkan disco jazz vinyl to re-release.
Metallica are already two albums deep into their buttrock era when this came out, so they have a well of mid tempo bloated ballad songs to further bloat with orchestral arrangements where the extra 100 instruments don't slow them down too much. The songs that are meant to thrash really suffer from the bloat though, the heavy layers of extra instrumentation don't add anything extra to the raw power and energy of thrash metal. The best songs are the slower ballads from the early era that already have a bit of that metal neo-classical grandiosity to them or the 90s radio hits that benefit from throwing more instruments at just ok hooks and kirk Hammett's wah wah pedal. An orchestra can't chug, and can hardly riff, but sure can crescendo. Is this the most pompous dumb guy album ever? Makes sense that this is only a couple years before the hilariousness documented in Some Kind of Monster...
Rated 4/10
The Bees combine the lo-fi acoustic singer-songwriter psychedelia of Syd Barrett with a globalized hipster appetite for the sounds and styles of world music for a pleasantly warm and dreamy swishy lounge meets indie bedroom pop vibe that's tastefully arranged and expertly crafted. Very nice, but lacks excitement.
Rated 8/10
More abrasive and raw than the polished Nevermind, drawing more from the post punk/hardcore 80s tradition than the metal well that fed Soundgarden or Alice in Chains, this is a bracing mix of aggression and melody. Pummelling riffs and pop hooks, violent textures and dissonant harmonies, guttural screams and brutal lyrics.
Rated 10/10
Arch drama and jangly magic and some of the bounciest bass in pop.
