Reviews by dohej

It's the production approach and beat making skills of what's usually consigned to be back-up support in music, taken to the extreme point where the otherwise dominant element of hip hop, rapping, becomes extraneous. This one's been in my regular work-listening rotation for years. Does a good job keeping out other noise, interesting and varied enough to not become annoying, but relaxed and chill enough to not demand attention or take focus.

A common problem with this style of 60s psychedelia across the board is that there're too many whiplash style changes within individual songs as if pure juxtaposition is an incredibly clever compositional technique and that eclecticism means doing lots of different things in quick succession. It just ends up being annoying, like listening to someone else flicking through radio stations trying to find something good and then changing as soon as you're settling and starting to enjoy it. Likewise, the production is overly full and distractingly busy - too much flute and the chamber pop arrangements are cloying. Learn to say no. The songs where they keep it simple and stick to one sound are ok, at least not actively unpleasant. Something about Portuguese saudade style melodic phrasing just doesn't work for me either, every line can't be an anti-climax. I've tried to like tropicalia so many times - on paper sounds so cool - but it just doesn't work for me at all.

Favorite: Eles

Slowed down alt-country that like a blues band doing a shoegaze album. Haunting Nico-like lead vocals over glacial chord progressions and loads of instrumental flourishes that flesh it out. You get a very atmospheric live feeling - it was recorded off one mic in a church apparently. Lots of covers they give their treatment to. Because of the languid pace and familiar country sonic palette (sliding steel guitars, harmonica, accordion, fiddle, acoustic guitar, gentle bass lines carrying it along, very quiet drums) it’s incredibly unobtrusive and undemanding, perfect chill background music that fades away soothingly.

Another album in the creative nadir of 80s blues-based classic rock saved only by some raunchy guitar tones, the high driving tempos with a bit of groove, and that they aren't taking themselves too seriously. It's extremely stupid music but hey they're having fun with it.

Congeals the disparate veins the 80s underground - art school punk, hardcore, post-punk, post-rock, no-wave, experimental composition, noise rock - into an album that's dissonant & melodic, angry & blissful, distorted & chrystaline, grimy & pure, heavy & ethereal, earthy & haunted, driving & sprawling, tense & cathartic. Perfect.

3+ hours of 90s jungle/drum & bass/whatever electronic microgenre bleeps and boops that's great for two ends of the spectrum of human activity: either getting off your gourd on E in some overpriced and uncomfortable room inexplicably called a 'lounge' or sitting down to hammer out some work on the ol' laptop. I've listened to this lots in the past for the latter purpose and always liked it but don't have the time today. The signature sound is the contrast between the fast drum machine beats and the chilled out synth bedding that gives it an extremely alientating pseudo-relaxing but actually high-energy feel to it, like it's designed to produce that uneasy uncertain anxiety you get in a busy mid december Zara and challenge you to sublimate that ambient stress into productivity by using it to block out everythign else and then forgetting it's on as a means of focusing. It works, but horrid stuff when you think about it. This isn't an album, it's a sampler or more like a box set, albums are not this long. What's the rationale for the like 3 compilations that appear on here?

One of the most unique deployments of the 80s sonic pallette of synths, big reverby drums & drum machines, rubbery bass, compression, and synthetic production excess as nylon guitars, electric pianos, string sections and saxaphones make cameos. Its full sounding but also full of space, each instrument filling it's niche and leaving room for the rest to come and go, particularly the plaintive mournful vocals that occupy the center channel, the main line of address. Strange and compelling, a relatively recent discovery I like more each time I listen.

The beats are made from classic soul and funk samples with a bit of live bass to animate them, for a smooth easy going sensual strip club feel that fits well with the horny songs and offers a stark contrast on those that deal with the violence of hustling life. He's got an incredible lyrical gift and delivery, layering rhymes on top of each other relentlessly in a fluid direct cadence that plays around the beat to create a autobiographical/self-mythologizing narrative, that ends in a remarkably introspective reflection on lovelessness and how little it all amounts to in the end. The skits are so annoying and it gets a bit samey over an hour, but there are torrents of masterful verses and Big-Poppa has probably THE most iconic sound of 90s hip hop.

Massive vocals raging over heavy & tightly played staccato mid tempo riffs with some electronica adornment. A combination of trip hop and nu metal. This sounds like when Serbia or somewhere enters a hard rock song for Eurovision. In other words it's overblown, ear-piercing and somehow both irritating and dull.

Music to make you feel like your bus ride is part of an epic action montage when really you're stuck in traffic outside and abandoned kebab shop.

GZA delivers some of the best verses in the Wu Tang cannon, so no surprise his solo album is rock solid. The main theme is violence in the drug trade, starting with street dealing but moving cinematically to demonstrate that there are levels to the violence - mafias, international smuggling, political corruption, and the degrading economy of CREAM that makes the world cold. The album connects the brutality of the streets to the sophisticated schemes of states and corporations. The tracks are intersperced with Samurai samples that put violence, especially duels, at the center of their interpretation of social life and the struggle for survival, positing rapping as the extension of this tradition of deadly combat. The whole Wu-Tang clan features at some point, one or two guests per track, but GZA's is the main voice throughout. RZA produces his signature beats, spacious, ricketty and off kilter. It makes for a very cohesive album with a cinematic ambition - life as movie - that is just a bit repetitive and homogenous compared to the more varied collective Wu Tang projects.

It doesn't always work when a lo-fi bedroom artist transitions to deploy the full suite of studio tools, but this album really does, marking a big leap in Elliot Smith's music - the songwriting and vocals remain more or less the same - Nick Drakey influenced sad slow songs sung airly with slightly offbeat chord changes and rhtyhmic patterns - but the arrangements are a whole other level: either lush and orchestral chamber pop or harder rocking full band, it combines huge sounds with intimate vocal performances, replacing the lo-fi static fuzz that used to suffocate the singer with arrangements that either lift him up, or bury him in. Lots of good stuff on this, a creative amalgam of lots of 90s indie/alt rock production, I just can't get past not liking his voice at all.

The melodies are full of surprising turns and pretty harmonies. But it has some of the blandest folksy psychedelic jangly touches, the arrangements are mostly a big schmaltzy pillow, and it's a tedious 30 minutes with an overall extremely irritating precious vibe with one huge hit I never need to hear again. Music for babies.

Ambitious orchestral and cinematic a bit like Nick Cave or Tom Waits, but with a 90s indie sensibility. Slow and melodramatic songs with a big crooning baritone vocal. The best songs, at root, are blues piano & guitar based rock dressed up to sound like an opera, the worst ones ditch the rock and go fully orchestral arrangements and composition. Respect for the songwriting and performances, but this really has 0 appeal to me and I can't understand who the audience for this maudlin grindingly dull bloated stuff is? A few good lines though - "If you were a horse, I'd clean the crap out of your stable" - that have enough of a sense of humor to save it from being the most up itself thing imaginable. And the trumpets are pretty cool.

Favorite: I'm All You Need

Sustainably made using the offcuts of an Outkast album. The Soul Machine is straightforward Virginia Beach hip hop from its heyday: tight clever pop production, that incorporates some disco & techno elements, lots of samples and allusions to 70s soul and funk, dynamic and upbeat beats, call and response choruses with a choir, quick wordy rap verses and big catchy hooks. Better than I expected from what I thought was the Gnarls Barkley one-hit wonder's side project, but it does just sound like filler from the bigger & better albums these producers made at the same time, so it's familiar and accessible, but not especially compelling on its own terms. 73 minutes? fuck off.

Shaggy garage rock from an arena filler, loud and heavy and thick as sludge - NY is at his best in hard rock mode with guitar blazing and this is a giant dose of that. Not quite at the level of his 70s albums, but full of verge and reinventing himself for the 90s as the godfather of grunge - you can really hear what Pearl Jam in particular took from him here. The songs aren't especially remarkable, but work perfectly as mid tempo blues grooves for him to stretch out. And his guitar playing on this is great: controlled chaos on the precipice, the tone and phrasing and squall are so distinctive.

Favorites: white line, fkng up, love to burn, mansion on the hill, love and only love

Dark moody synths and extremely 80s tone blues guitar set the mood: brooding and sultry. The vocals are nasal and hoarse. It's like Nega-Fleetwood Mac.

One of the classic rock guys I've always overlooked, but why? This is so good. Full studio wizardry and song-writing prowess on display. Orchestral without being corny. Huge swelling sounds like synth padding before Eno made them cool. Effortlessly poetic and classically melodic. Ok, sometimes a bit corny and so literary its up itself.

Make Yourself combines lots of the elements of late 90s radio rock - the heavy detuned grooves of Nu Metal, the whiney vocals and loud-quiet dynamics of emo, the influence of electronica, the hip hop DJ sounds, the post-grunge mid tempo sludge of butt rock yearning, the handsome guy singer of MTV rock, the DEEP emotional acoustic ballad, the aimless suburban rage of the time. I thought it sucked in the 90s and that their fans were a pathetic combination of frat morons, rollerbladers, and losers who couldn't commit to going full nu-metal goth. The music is maybe a bit better than I initially gave it credit for, but it is so tedious. 311 does the hip hop metal way better, Deftones do the serious emo stuff much better, Korn and Slipknot are way heavier hitting, and as much as they suck Limp Bizkit are more absurd and fun, so what's the point of this?

The whole 80s production gang is here! Rubbery bass, disco guitars, digi synths, gated reverb big drums, awful strings, hyper compression, diva backing vocals, corny keyboard sounds, crazy decision making... It's like an AI amalgam of 80s pop, lacking its own personality aside from the drama in the vocals. Bands with better songs and more interesting taste can wrangle this sound into really effective distinctive albums that bear the scars of their era but stand the test of time - this band isn't one of those though. Not terrible, but it just constantly reminds you of the bands who made the same songs but 45% better.