Reviews by dohej

I dont get how Green Day have held on to such a big place in American culture - Dookie was amazing, Brain Stew was pretty good, but that Good Riddance song gave them a ruinous taste of sincere balladeering and since then it's been a long steep decline. This album was their big return to the spotlight - an Anti-Bush pop punk opera that is just as embarrasing as that sounds. They still have a nice bright overdriven guitar sound and some decent riffs as well as a gift for a catchy vocal melody, but they're totally wasted on this. Turgid slow tempos turn into forced sped up breakdowns, bombastic production, bloated song writing (8 minutes! 8!), corny arena rock climaxes. The lyrics are pure dumb guys making a statement stuff. Honestly, their songs about teenage disaffection, smoking and jacking off offer a more profound insight into suburban American culture and alienation than this overblown grandiose turd. When Sept Ends is truly abysmal - I know I 've heard this before, but it is so much worse than I could possibly have imagined, how was THIS their return to the bigtime? Good lord this whole thing just sucks so bad.

High energy and lots of fun: punk style and pop hooks. They're like a New Wave act for the post-grunge era with just the right amount of blur/pulp style britpop whimsy. Textbook 90s alt rock guitar sound - crunchy overdrive, compressed tightly to keep the chaos in order, scooped mids.

Sad synths and bittersweet beats. Its glossy and polished, but full of pathos. The comedown after the after-party, a self indulgent apocalyptic disco. Perfect for when you want to cry but are being forced to dance.

Favorites: the end of the world, being boring

Incredible title track and relax is a certified slap, but the rest is extremely uneven synth pop, including a bunch of random covers. Fun enough, some cool bass parts and synth tones, but too long and gets a bit tedious.

Music for people who say they don't have sex, they make love. Gross.

In the 1990s the craziest thing you could think of was 'dude, what if an Indian guy used a computer' and so a billion of these East meets West, Tradition remixed with Modernity, World Music Electronica albums flew off the shelves into the discmen of the most easily impressed and embarrasingly dreadlocked goofs you can imagine. That said, there are some cool sounds on here - especially the interplay between the locked in precision of the DnB drum machine beats and the looser feel of the tabla hand druming and syncopated rhythms of the string instruments melodic phrases. It's spacey and aspirationally uplifting. The jazzy sax is corny and the flute is never welcome. The whole thing is pretty one note and gets kind of boring after 20 minutes but works well as background sound.

Pro-tip: if you're a pale imitation of Van Morrison, don't end your album with an interpolation of his best song, it just reminds us all how much worse you are than him. This is a perfect album for when tap water is too spicy - perfectly crafted and perfectly dull totally disposable slow sad guy acoustic pop. There's a place for this kind of music in the world wherever mellow inoffensive sound is necessary - waiting rooms, fast casual sandwich chains, airport gift shops, overwrought scenes in boring movies. It's music you hear constantly but only involuntarily.

Songs so glacial they becomes ambient. Slow heavy mournful dirges on synth and piano with choral support and swelling strings. His voice is frail and thin, raw and tender, hurt. It's like watching the tide come in on a miserable wintery beach. Dark and despairing with cracks of light coming through.

Cool eclectic cosmic psych rock with bits of garage, jamband, prog and alt country mixed together. It's extremely busy throughout - they don't linger on an idea or a groove for long before the whirlwind carries them somewhere new. Bright and upbeat with a jangly fun feel overall. Would be good live you'd think.

I'd never heard of them so it's a pleasant surprise, but since I was paying attention to this kind of music in the US at the time, it seems like a strange inclusion over bigger bands in the same era/genre that aren't on the 1001 like the jammy country rock of My Morning Jacket, a folksy crooner with a big emotive sound like Bon Iver, a way bigger jamband like Phish, or indie pop rock acts who had more mainstream crossover like the Shins. They weren't a huge hit or critical darlings (37 on NME's album of the year list, not on Pitchfork, NPR, Stereogum, AV club) - not say that's the standard, but just to say it wasn't getting a ton of attention at the time, so why does it stand out in retrospect? Would be interested to read the explanation, but I will just enjoy a bit of swirling whirling vaguely psych indie guitar rock in the meantime.

The headline attraction is the instantly recognizable guitar tone and style. That glassy clear strat sound pops with compression and cuts through with a gentle bite, pairing a touch of country twang with a ton of JJ Cale phrasing. The feel is relaxed and warm, easy going good mood dad rock. I can't get over how great the recording/production is - it sounds amazing! Clean and bright and balanced with a solid low end, plenty of space, subtle dynamics - like an unfussy but equally meticulous Steely Dan. None of the other songs are nearly as memorable as Sultans, but they all know all the chords.

She just died? Wow. I didn't know that. You're telling me now for the first time. She led an amazing life. What else can you say? She was an amazing woman. Whether you agreed or not, she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life. I'm actually saddened to hear that. I am sadden to hear that. Thank you very much.

Prog punk. One of the foundational post-punk albums, this is aggressively weird. Funky bass but robotic without any soul/blues - the rhythm is like it’s all made out of corners and could come clattering down anytime, just pure momentum holding it together. Strange layers of keyboard, synth, and effects stacked up on top of each other. The vocals are sort of sung, more like yelped and shouted and wailed. The guitars are there to mess up the rhythm even more and bring more noise to the high end. Follows in the eccentric auteur Beefheart tradition of avant garde chaos, but angrier, less psychedelic and more ironic. Pioneering, influential, but not one to listen to for fun.

Punk's anyone can do it approach, some ska/reggae/glam rock sounds, some cool uncoventional guitar parts, some classic robotic funk post punk bass playing, and an off kilter detatched sing-songy vocal delivery for some cutting dark lyrics. Cool as hell.

Morons on here getting mad that there aren't any melodies and it gets a bit wierd, as if Throbbing Gristle were trying and failed to make Rumors. It's not really an album you put on to rock out to, but a meditation on bleak alienated life, on the grind of late industrial Britain, on the rotting urban fabric of the 1970s. It's the bleeping and fraying electronics of a barely functional life support system. Musically it draws on ambient composition styles, krautrock explorations of synth/tape loop technology, darker psychedelic approaches to creating strange mental states through drones, repettition and rupture, punk embrace of noise, and the kinds of sounds you'd associate with video art and multimedia installations. All of which creates a collage that captures, reproduces, extends, and aestheticizes a set of nasty latent public feelings: anomie, aggression, resentment, despair, indignity, exhaustion. Of course it isn't pleasant!

Favorites: Hamburger Lady, AB/7A, Dead on Arrival, Weeping

Pulp really goes all in on this one, going beyond the cutsey power pop or laddish rock of their Brit Pop contemporaries for something lush, cinematic, and grandiose. I like the drama, the noire moods, the big melodies and huge sweeping strings, the Bowie-inspired songwriting and the arch delivery full of both earnestness and irony. There's a big gap between the best songs and the rest though - lots of mid-tempo filler without much flair to it.

Favorites: The Fear, Help the Aged, This is Hardcore, Sylvia, Glory Days

An album with a real clarity of purpose, this is a pretty perfect realization of the thrash model, it's full of rage and resentment, furious, aggressive and explosive. Relentless drums blast away like machine guns. Thunderous bass and tight dialed in guitars tear through riffs like tornados before unleashing some gnarly shreding solos and lead harmonies. The chug becomes a groove when they let it sprawl a bit. The vocals are a growling barked sub-scream, a bit one note though.

The jangly bright poppy stuff is pretty annoying in that naive 60s sunshine hippy way, but the spacier jams like the fuzzy 'darkness, darkness' and the jazzy outro to 'Francis Drake' (not the over composed fussy intro) are more exciting. The Motown via garage psych 'Sham' goes hard. You can see how this (the noodly 'Trillium' especially) might've nudged their Marin County comparisons the Dead towards the jazzy Americana they'd get start playing by 1972 when they got a pianist. A pretty mixed album and part of the massive over representation on the list of every niche iteration of the psych-folk continuum of late 60s.

Favorites: darkness darkness, sham

A brutally aggressive despairing grind, and that's just the bass tone. Buzzsaw guitars slash out churning riffs, dissonant noise, and some surprisingly melodic leads over sledgehammer drum machine parts. It's like a hardcore band replaced their instruments with a construction site and it rules.

Feel good beats and playful,. political, afro-centric rhymes, but pretty repetitive and too long.

On the bridge between 1983 post punk and 1993 alt rock, this is full of dirty buzzing guitar, gritty driving bass, and high drama operatic vocals. Borrowing from surf, new wave, and cowpunk, the songs are driven by catchy riffs and guitar figures, oscillating between tight and chaotic sections, building tension up and unleasing it all at once as the drums go nuts.