Reviews by dohej

Part of the Nick Cave extended universe. It's cinematic - conjuring dramatic images, tension, and sense of a scene. It's genre-bouncing (from croony jazz to acid house to loungey trip hop to elevator jazz and noir soundscape) in a mostly referential pastiche way. It has expansive instrumentation, not always successfully- vibes and drum machines are an awful combination. Is there a sound more dated than turntable scratching? It was never good. Mixed album that goes on for way too long. The dark ambient soundscapes are cool, the bright jazz is unbearable, the rest is mid background music.

Favorites: set the controls, business as usual, dirty barry, sweetest embrace

The Who at their best - skip the fussy stuff and the overwrought concepts and get right to the rocking. John Entwistle is just a pure monster in the bass rampaging all over the place with a powerful rumble, Pete Townsend isn't that good of a guitar player but just rips hard into some unbridled noise, Keith Moon slams the drums like they banged his mum, and Roger Daltrey is fine, doing classic classic rock guy stuff, but happily gets out of the way to let the band cook.

Percussive piano, jazzy bass, and madcap drumming - it's an unstable teetering foundation on the cusp of spinning out of control, giving the album a nervous unsettled mood. Despite the emphasis on rhythm, the grooves never take off, stuttering, stoping, starting, remaining constantly off kilter. It's a big sound in a small package, like an experimental orchestra rehearsing in a crowded storage room, for a cluttered claustrophobic aesthetic. Pretty cool, but don't really get the hype.

Favorites: Ladies

Want One? No thanks.

Made their name as a Minor Threat cover band, but basically a Chuck Berry tribute act getting trippy off the mildest grass the 60s had to offer. I like the sound: organs, bright chiming guitar, busy drums, some bolero style trumpet - but they're not doing anything distinctive really. This era is wildly overrepresented, just including the Nuggets compilation would save so much space, this is much more of a track on a compilation band than an album on a canonical list band. 'Melody for an Unknown Girl' is one of the most insipid cringey things I've ever heard.

Favorites: kicks, all I really need is you

Corporate indie for elliptical machines and hockey games. Super high-energy hype up music expertly assembling the most excitable elements of millennial guitar rock from alt rock, emo & pop-punk, post-rock and garage revival (epic reverby guitars, driving bass, synth hooks, marching drums) to create an explosive anthemic sound. They blow their wad on track two with Mr Brightside though and the rest can't reach that level. A compilation of the best of Killers, Bloc Party, Snow Patrol, Twilight Sad, post Is This It Strokes, mid-career Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, the Arcade Fire jock jams and all the other bands from this era that sound like this would be an awesome CD-length album representing the last gasps and final dying fling of guitar rock. But there's too much samey filler on this album and oh my god the 'soul not a soldier' and 'INDIE ROCK AND ROLL' bits made me throw my headphones into the bin. What about this makes it sound incredibly British?

Swishy combination of trip hop/instrumental hip hop DJ production techniques and tango rhythms and some jazzy piano. Kind of a novelty, but it works well. Good for working and zoning out or for playing in the atrium of your neo-art deco hotel lounge.

An exuberant global funk explosion, just gleefully letting loose, pure fun. We're going to have a synthesizer party tonight!

Favorites: wordy rappinghood, l elephant, Lorelei

Quintessential New Wave - tight compressed and slightly dirty guitars, a bit of jangle, loads of hooks, a touch of corny cutting edge for the day production, and heavy dose of retro flair recalling the rock-n-roll of the early 60s. I only knew the hits, but there are some bangers on this one and the instrumentals are great surprise.

Favorites: space invader, private life, Kids

Reviewers here seem really mad this this album doesn't allow them to sustain the fantasy that music isn't a commodity. This is an industrial cultural product with the full force of that machinery brought to bear on its production to, unsurpringly, extremely successful effect. People get caught up in the paradox that this industrial product is marketed through a narrative of the individual authenticity of the artist's voice and the delusion of an intimate relationship between performer and audience - no shit, Adorno Jr, it's pop music! Lush, polished, horny, ultra-processed pop-music that distills the latest sounds, skills, technologies and talents of RnB, Hip Hop, House/Electronica, poat-millenial indie rock, and pure-pop into a zeigeist capturing culturally dominant force that creates a wide range of moods and feelings. The corporate feminism stuff is cringey, so are the bio-pic audio snippets, and there's something inherently undignified about the word instagram appearing in lyrics though, throws me way off.

Favorites: No Angel, Rocket, Mine

Turns out combining two boring schmaltzy genres gets you a schmaltzy boring album.

It's interesting to learn about pirate radio and the broader media/commercial environment in which this cohort of classic UK artists came of age and rose to fame. The album is an interesting artifact in that sense, but its appeal outside that is pretty limited. Worth including in a museum of rock, less so in a best albums list. Others did the flower power psych pop stuff way better, and The Who were way better as harder hitting proto-punks and massive guitar noise rockers. There are few moments where they do their thing, but it's always interrupted by something annoying. I think this band's ambition is their downfall - they got tired of doing what they were best at, started reaching for big ideas that got stretched incredibly over the course of a full concept album.

Interminable over-orchestrated plodding pompous schmaltz. Theatre kids were a mistake.

I remember hearing about this band from the English music magazines I read as a teenager, asking for the CD for Christmas and being incredibly disappointed. I get why this band never broke in the US. What I don't understand is why they did in the UK. His voice is grating and the music is incredibly boring mid-tempo over-orchestrated alt rock. It's not even dull enough to ignore, it's like having a persistent whine and high-pitched buzz in your ear.

With so much good Zappa to choose from it's a shame that this mediocre satire album gets recognition. Hippies certainly deserved the mockery but this is Zappa at hist most annoying, taking on the worst tendencies of the flower power psych pop he's parodying and combining it with his own worst tendencies for fussy over-writing and irritating instrumentation. Apostrophe, Joe's Garage, Roxy & Elsewhere, Zoot Allures, Jazz From Hell, Sheik Yerbouti...these are all far more deserving than this one, who's main value is as a reminder that even their contemporaries thought hippies sucked.

My #1 don't understand the hype band. At best they're just an incredibly bland Led Zeppelin rip off, at worst a cloying copy of Bowie's worst albums or a skin tight pleather CCR. The bass parts are pretty cool at least. The most overrated band of the 70s.

It's impossible to evaluate a solo career without reference to their prior band, and when your prior band was the best of 80s your new stuff can only ever pale in comparison. Musically, this is boring adult indie contemporary, missing the jangle genius and thumping bass of the Smiths we're left with bloated orchestration and slow sub-Oasis strumming. So attention goes to the vocals (fine) and lyrics, which are a mix of self-pity (but without the heightened youthful witty melodrama that made this arch and fun I'm the 80s) and banal nationalism. One of the biggest loser trajectories in music history

D-tier 90s alt rock. Distorted hard rock guitars with wah-wah solos, pseudo-Oasis vocals heavy churning mid-tempo rhythm section pounding along. Not bad exactly, but at best a passable imitation of better bands from the era. Hard to imagine much less essential listening really.

Favorite: Innocent Smile

It's fun to hear people messing around with new tools and technologies in emergent genres, using copy-paste sampling, drum machines, scratching, synths and all the rest to create some upbeat beats and dancefloor filling rave music. It's incredibly dated and specific in a nice way - the sound you'd hear in the party scene of a Gregg Araki movie where everything is day-glo goth and covered in neon graffitti.

Soft psych with fluttery guitar, poppy Beatles-inspired vocals, and cutesy overthought arrangements ranging from jazzy horns to renaissance harpischord and strings to children's cartoon music. It's very timid, mild, and straight-laced compared to other psych from the era. It does not rock at all. These guys took the Acid Test, but got an F and went to get Monkees haircuts instead.