Reviews by dohej

Throw away all the boring genre labels with modifying adjectives, this is stripped down, amped up, spun out good time rock and roll with old fashioned beats and classic guitar sounds and timelessly charismatic vocals.

High energy guitar & synth dance music huffing the fumes of the early 00s indie boom. It's uptempo, bouncey pop - rising tension and big explosive choruses and massive hooks with very polished production. Very fun songs that really sound great, even if there's not much too it. Music for jogging, but in skinny jeans.

Mostly acoustic folk arrangements based around guitar picking/strumming fleshed out with fiddles, slides, organs, a touch of bass, light percussion, and the odd fuzzy electric guitar, all putting the vocals front and center. Traditional tools for timeless songs in the peak moment of post Dylan 70s country rock harnessing Americana aesthetics to explore the darkness of cold war nationalism for its own inhabitants through a series of pained character studies.

The ideological basis of apartheid was, aside from white supremacy, the one-to-one mapping of peoples and cultures: each race/tribe has their own culture and they are meant to develop separately. In this context ecclectic music performed by multi-racial ensembles and borrowing melodies, rhythms, styles, and arrangements from a variety of border crossing genres and traditions from within the country and across the Black world was a giant fuck you. A bold assertion of the cultural hybridity and creativity of African life - particularly township life. Hence the persecuccion of South Africa's jazz scene, the exile of star musicians, and the politicization of what would otherwise sounds like some of the most laid back mellow instrumental music - classic big(ish) band cool jazz with South African characteristics and a smooth as hell vibe.

I was pretty disappointed with this when I got the CD in a 12 for the price of 1 deal from BMG music club in the 00s. Surrender is an amazing song and I Want you to Want me is an overplayed but endearingly earnest timeless power pop gem, but the rest is pretty boring stuff, sitting somewhere between 70s classic rock and 80s new wave - chugging along at mid tempo with a bluesy beat, tons of guitar noodling, insistent drumming, and kind of thin but very charismatic vocals. The rhythm guitar tone is great though, bright and scuzzy chords ringing out loudly. They're the of arena rock version of a John Hughes movie - saccharine teenage bubblegum.

Lots of nice guitar and plenty of haunting minor harmonies and dark melodies in the Celtic folk tradition.

Favorites: cavalry cross, bright lights, rainbow

At somepoint in the late 1990s the hotshots at VH1 decided that we all needed WAY more Elvis Costello in our lives. Surely he's one of the most singular and important artists of his day, widely beloved and full of creative energy! No, he was just despertate to get on TV and show off his collection of embarrasing hats. Dude made 2-3 good albums in the 70s and we're meant to care about his long career making the blandest say nothing mid tempo rock? I don't think so, pal. This isn't aggressively bad, it's just relentlessly dull.

The obsession with tracing genres back to some singular origin - a holy moment of conception, an immaculate birth - leads to a bunch of mediocre but early albums having a load bearing weight put on them they really can't sustain. Take away the 'first heavy metal' tag and your left with a classic San Francisco psych blues album that's a bit wilder, louder, and fuzzier than its peers, fun stuff that sounds basically like shit. The vocals are a weak Pigpen, the guitar a pale Hendrix, the bass and imitation Entwistle, and the drums a pretty decent Bonham. Sounds like a very fun band to be in though, tripping your ass off and making a louder noise than anything a boomer had ever heard before. If not a direct inspiration for, a manifestation of the same spirit than has animate a billion basement jam sessions.

The main feeling this album creates is yearning. Specifically, yearning for the low level middle class luxuries of 90s television: lush shampoo, posh ice cream, massive glasses with normal amounts of red wine in them, fire place sex, glass coffee tables and complicated CD players.There's a boringly dismissive reactionary snob response to this that's probably the one I'd have had in my teens or 20s, but - going full Bateman - distance reveals some of the quirky idiosyncratic touches that make this work so well, the warm inviting disco jazz vibe, the soul bones of the song writing, the clean cutting guitars, the tender sensuous vocals. It's pure commercial pleasure, all sheen and gloss, rubbery funk and smooth synths with its edges polished right off, promising to take the edge off.

New Order's best songs are the non-album singles collected on Substance, but this is still a banging album. Humanistic synth pop that's dark and moody but also joyfully dancey, oscillating between Joy Division, Cure, and Depeche Mode sounds of the gothy new wave, but always distinctly New Order with those incredible melodic Hooky baselines and affectless flat vocals that are nonetheless deeply emotive.

The first CD I ever bought. This album was kind of intimidating to me as an 11 year old, there was so much music to absorb, so much harsh dissonance and abrasive distortion, so many densely packed hyper compressed layers to every song, so many explosive riffs, such a singular and often repellent voice. But I must've listened to it a few hundred times, unpacking, exploring, getting more and more familiar with the songs between the radio hits letting it sink in and rework my circuitry. I haven't listened to it all the way through for decades, so I'm surprised how much I've retained and how well it all still works on me, swerving from sonic and emotional extreme to extreme, screaming catharsis and hushed intimacy, fuzz and fury, noise and melody, building pressure and easing off for a relentless 2 hours. The best songs on their earlier albums are better than the these, but this is insanely consistent for being so ranging (it touches on metal, prog, grunge, shoegaze, punk, indie pop, even alt country) - there are some gems buried in the sprawl and the guitars all sound so damn good.

Favorites: Tonight, Zero, Bullet, Love, Muzzle, Take Me Down, thirty three, 1979, Eyes of Ruby, Beautiful, Lily

One last gasp from the corniest guys to ever do it, and this time they're bluesmen! Surprisingly funky opener then it slows into a plodding 12 bar formula for a while. The fuzzy guitar leads are nice in that quintessential 60s psych way and the massive swirling organ sounds work great - they're at their best when they're a jamband. 12 good songs spread over 6 albums makes them a very frustrating band.

The sounds are synthy and industrial, based around marches/martial rhythms, with artificial electronic horns blaring out and a 19th century national anthem style vocal. The whole thing is like what you'd hear over the course of a dystopian fascist rally. But then it degenerates into dissonant bluesy guitar solos. So sometimes it's stirring, but it's mostly repellent, tedious, and bloated, which was the satirical aim I guess.

I found a great RYM review that situates this within the trajectory of late Yugoslav cultural politics, explaining the layers of parody, symbolism, approrpriation and detournement that would've registered to its audience and put this at the forefront of a left critique of Titoism coming from the Slovenian arts world. So that helps position this as a cultural artifact and specifically as a peice of agit-prop. It also means that without a deeper appreciation for that context it's hard to really say anything meaningful about this an album. Partly also because it doesn't seem like it was meant to stand as a discrete album and in fact is part of a critique of capitalist art production and the effects of the commodity form, of which the standardization and fungibility of the album form itself is a major part.

Big dumb fun heavy psychedelia with a massive organ sound, gnarly fuzz tone, lots of bluesy shredding, one of the most memorably stupid riffs of all time, and buckets of self indulgence.

Smooth soul ballads with all the edges polished right off and replaced with strings so saccharine you'll puke. They're talented vocalists and do some nice harmonies, but it's marshalled for some of the most insipid songs imaginable. Dire dire stuff. How are there two bee gees albums and neither is Saturday night fever?!

A joyous combination of miserable love, fuzzy feedback, power pop melody, punk rock energy and lush noise.

How do we get 3 CCR albums and none of them have that song about seeing the rain, their best one by miles?!

Pleasant but plodding Americana. It's the same 12 bar blues chugging along over and over again with a folksy arrangement, predictable guitar licks, and a warm vocal delivering the lines. Inoffensive but so dull - them and the Band are some of the most overrated acts of the 60s. The Dude was wrong - the Eagles are better than this.

Favorite: Lodi

His voice is extremely annoying at first, but once you get used to it works pretty well, wrapping itself around the melodies and heightening the strange affect of the songs. The guitar work and sparse string arrangements are really fantastic. It's cool when folk music is a living tradition with new iterations to articulate it with new musical contexts rather than a fossilized museum genre replaying the same stuff over and over, so respect to DH for that.

Way fewer irritating vocal samples than the other album so a lot easier going, he actually allows the moods and vibes of the beats to breathe, settle, and come through a lot more. Extremely 90s UK mix of dub, house, baggy, trip hop and DnB sounds. Mostly big beat brash bangers that are joyously stupid dance floor fillers, but a few chilled out mellow melancholy numbers to cool off. Still, a lot of songs for really trying to convince yourself your having a good time - no wonder this has become the default inoffensive sound of high energy optimistic advertising for package holidays, sales at the electronics megastore, exciting new biscuits, and 2 for 1 pizza delivery.

Arctic Monkeys swagger mixed with a cool surf guitar sound and a 60s Bond swishy orchestral arrangements makes for a very fun, stylish sugar rush of an album.