Reviews by dohej

Heavy hitting beats and fun synth sounds, hyperactive songs full of ideas that're constantly changing and introducing new elements, textures, samples, and rhythms glitching in and out. Anytime there're vocals it drops way off though, very annoying inane stuff.

Pure uncut boomer sentimental schlock. 35 minutes of lullabies for adult babies. Hey, it works - a real snoozefest!

Pretty much the most standard issue boomer dad rock imaginable. Jazzy blues jams with a ton of organ and piano in the lead paired with lightly fuzzy guitars, swanky horns and, urgh, flute. Loose playful feel and organic arrangements and some funky bass parts give it a warm relaxed vibe. Winwood's vocals have a hoarse timbre and an ambitious range but can be kind of grating - I guess that's why I like some of these (and other Traffic songs) best as covers.

Abrasive and relentless spooky punk with high drama operatic vocals, chugging dissonant riffs, burning intensity and a loose shaggy style.

Breathy and intimate and drenched in reverb - this is the highest production lofi album ever. Simple piano parts and delicate guitar pushed through a small low headroom amp to breakup gently. Master of the generic bizarrely asexual love song and heartbreak song and lovelorn song about ‘you’ and ‘I’. Indie guitar folk rock aesthetic, slow songs and tender sounds (her attempt at a wonderwall? at Tom petty?) complement her vocal style, the hurry up and wait phrasing, melodic sensibility and range. It's very nice and cozy, but kind of boring. The heartland rock sounding cowboy like me and the poppy champagne problems are best.

Incredible vocal performance demonstrating total control over her voice, even as she pushes beyond comfort - dynamic, richly expressive, subtle when it needs to be, explosively dramatic when it needs to be. The music is ecclecctic, some schmaltzy ballads, some folk standards, but the best bits are the bluesy big band jazz tacks with lush arrangements led by her piano and fleshed out with a mini orchestra for a classic soul sound.

A standard bearer of British punk/post punk cool blows all his cred making a blues dad album. It's easy going easy listening stuff without any edge. But the rubbery bass, whispy vocals, and generic funkiness are tragically middle aged. Some of the guitar sounds are really good at least and the looser jammier parts are fun. But the crooning smooth blues...oof.

Favorites: shadow of the sun, has my fire really gone out

The production is damn good and his flow, wordplay, rhyming and delivery are brilliant and totally distinctive. An incredibly talented rapper with nothing to say, but a million ways to say it, Eminem give us a window into the ugly feelings, vile prejudices and idiot ideas of 90s dirtbag masculinity, even in the way his focus shifts to reacting to his own fame. There WERE a million guys just like him, grown men with the personality of Cartman.

Could you mosh to this? Enjoyment is the wrong criteria for evaluating this. Of course it isn't enjoyable - it's free jazz played with the pummelling abrassiveness and agression of hardcore punk. Each song is surprisingly tightly structured, you can hear them racing through the head before erupting into the cacophony of free improvisation and then, somehow, wrapping it all back together with a synchronized refrain. It kind of chills out half way with peices that have a bit of a groove and more approachable lead lines - even sounding like a deranged version of an early 90s sitcom theme song for a minute.

It sounds like the sun going down on a freezing cold blue sky day with deep snow on the ground. Dark Americana, the sound of going to cabin in the woods with a guitar to work some shit out. Fraile alto vocals on the cusp of tears give this a delicate fragile mood: sombre, reflective, hurt. They're doubled and split, with a small gap between them, playing with multiples of one voice and amplifying the unsettling psychic environment of the album. Sparse arrangements let everything breathe, fill and linger in the space available for a melancholy ambience.

I don't know what it means that this is a band that I really dismissed as a teenager but have come to appreciate more and more over the years - something about the unabashedly dumb fun unseriousness of it just really hits. Eddie Van Halen is most famous for the shredder pyrotechnics, but it's rhythm playing that really stands out here - the riffs and licks, the squealing tone, the style, and the interplay between guitar and synths over the driving thudding rhythm section. They have a rock solid greatest hits compilation from the David Lee Roth era, but the albums are all half killer half filler.

Favorites: Jump, Panama, I'll Wait

Wild rock and roll played on, and often way past, the edge of control, descending into a noisy furvour of wah wah and feedback and pounding drums. An inspiration to millions of garage rockers, amped up punks and stoned shredders. It's basic blues rock in the 60s mould, so there's something over familiar and a bit boring about it at root, but it's played with exhileritating abandon you just have to kick along.

Mrs Buttersworth : syrup :: the carpenters : folk

Liked this way more than I expected to - it's big orchestral soul, saccharine soft rock emotions, totally bloated arrangements and maximalist production, but the melodies are there, the performance is solid and the mood is chilled out and fully relaxed; it just feels nice - a warm bath of album.

The title track is an all time great outlaw country anthem, the rest is rock solid mid tempo twang about women and liquor and the problems they get you into and the ever tempting promise of escape to the rails.

Sparse shambling psych folk with a real outsider artist feel to it, an auteur album that's also a document of a hallucinogenic breakdown. Sparse instrumentation with droning guitars, trance like bass parts, and skittering percussion.

Fun new wave pop with some dreamy shimmer and post punk angularity to go with the bouncy bass - the mix is cure, siouxsie & cocteau twins combined with devo & talking heads. Synthesizes a lot of 80s sounds and presages a ton of 90s alt rock style. What a voice! A spectacular range from guttural lows and shattering highs within moments.

Beautiful sounding album with a mix of acoustic guitar jangles, controlled chaos feedback, gentle pianos and energetic organs, distorted cellos, slide guitar melodies against lush strings, and rich super expressive vocals. It shimmers and pops and blossoms wonderfully, warm and nostalgic, mournful sombre and full of pathos. Slowed down songs, mostly ballads, allow all this room to breathe. It's pretty incredible this was a muddy post punk band less than a decade earlier, 90s major label recording budgets were a whole other world! It's way overblown but damn it works

Famous for a great music video (for a song not on this album) and for wearing a stupid hat, this has a retro disco funk sound updated with 90s electronica style. It's a fun enough album - the live horns, jazzy basslines and swirly organs on the instrumentals especially - but his voice is grating (like someone doing a Stevie Wonder impression).

Mellow sleepy vibes with gentle acoustic guitar picking and beautiful close harmonies. They're really good at what they do, but what they do is so insanely boring. Good to put on to counteract the stress of an intense 30 minute email inbox sprint I guess.

Seems like they have a lot of albums on the list beacuse they had a few 'can't leave this song out!' songs spread out over like 4 albums - a good candidate for a greatest hits/best of band, but even that would be a boring 45 minutes.