Reviews by dohej

Sleepy and lush, dreamy and emotive, acoustic cutting against electronic for a pretty ambience, somber feeling but overwrought. Too much of an ok thing.

Swishy indie lounge with a lo-fi DIY sound, budget electronica palette, and a woozy warbly modulated feel. Warm but shy, homemade, introspective and very personal/intimate. His voice is deliberately not great, a bit flat and monotone, reaching earnestly in a charming way.

Aggressive, explosive, exhausting and exhilarating. A grinding noisy blur of thick heavy riffing, throat shredding screaming, and demented percussion. The best bits are the slowed down, ominous, doomy passages where they're gathering force and threatening the chaos to come - the chaos itself is harder to enjoy, at least on headphones, though you can image a crowd going absolutely bat shit for it. Great version of a genre I can appreciate without it really being my thing.

Hard to imagine an album combining more of the elements I dislike.

rippy psychedelic indie with electronica influences and a cool highly manipulated vocal delivering chanty verses over with the dancey beats and kaleidoscopic eclectic arrangements sourced from the world music aisle.

Dark and somber, a depressed trudge of an album, with densely layered arrangements and percussion that keeps the momentum going. Prettily cinematic. The best bits are like pretty good Interpol cast offs with fuzzy guitars rumbling into some searching cathartic riffs. But it gets a bit ponderous and at times turgid the more the piano takes over.

Slow building ambient electronica with some trippy digital delay bluesy guitars jamming and trippy chanting indie rock vocals over trancey, glitchy beats. Patient, calming, relaxed starts reach mesmerizing psych-house peaks. Very nice.

Raucous and relentless. Pop punk hooks for days and a barrage of riffs delivered with a contagious edge of your seat energy and lo-fi diy sound. The sound of kickflips and scuffed knees.

High spec but generic bluegrass with clean production where every instrument pops cleanly, coming forward as it takes the lead. Traditional arrangements, harmonies, and melodies. The distinctive part is, of course, the lead vocals which has a unique hoarse timbre, exquisite twang, and forceful charisma that really stands out in the mix.

80s style boom bap beats but with rock and hardcore riff samples instead of soul breaks. DJ scratching all over the place, some cool jazzy basslines and organs/flutes that give it a Native Tongues feel. Pretty much all delivered in their signature flow with 3 guys yelling the rhyming word at the end of the line. They've moved on from the novelty hits like girls and fight for your right, and getting a bit more experimental pushing the production further on this album. They have a great combined best of, but their albums are really laden with filler.

Why is he doing that with his voice? Why is the bass so aggressively jaunty? Are they being serious, or is this a joke on some level I don't understand? Is this Canada's version of ska? So many questions...they sound like they couldn't decide to be a novelty act or a real band and this was the compromise. Extremely annoying.

I bought this CD as an 11 year old after liking Aeroplane on the radio and knowing rhcp was a band to like, but was annoyed at how much filler there was, even compared to other 90s radio rock CDs I was buying at the time. Time has not aged it well -- the funk bass is solid but so corny, the Janes Addiction style guitars don't fit at all, and his voice is a tough listen. The songs are bad, like, just rip offs of themselves, 90% of the album is shooting for Another Under the Bridge and missing wildly.

Weezer spawn. Pop punk singer songwriter stuff, thinking man’s emo, like a millennial Elvis Costello with random ska outbreaks. Whiney, hooky, overwrought, excitable and on the nose.

Stretching the meaning of album to include how music is released, circulated, consumed in other genres, this is a DJ Mix in which PO remixes, sews together, reworks and adapts a bunch of other peoples’ music into a cohesive seamless set of hard hitting bass heavy house/trance music. There’s something that always strikes me as douchey about this sound palette - the diva samples, synthetic bleeps, the repetitive big dumb beats - when I encounter it in the wild: it’s giving neon & and strobe lit box full of coked up Brits on holiday. But on headphones it works very well as toe tapping head nodding lock in, zone out music.

The musical equivalent of tea lights and mason jars and Christmas lights: generic upper middle class southern suburban Americana wedding aesthetics. Slow acoustic guitar songs, overwrought vocals, hetero-harmonies, insipid love is great lyrics. Not unpleasant, but dull. Pretty production - clean, bright, and easy, the instrumental parts like soaring lapsteel dressing and the piano/violin outro are nice.

Krautrock goes pop lol. Short songs rather than deep grooves, Instrumental synth experimentation, but on something of a leash with bright tones and emphasis on melodies. Drum machine beats, a couple of tracks of bleeps and boops, lots of woozy textures. Proto-Eno ambient stuff and clear line of influence from here to Boards of Canada

Lush dreamy electronica that’s all floaty atmosphere and icey cold glistening surfaces. Synthy textures cut with warm organic instruments make a bedding for ethereal reverby hushed vocals that weave in and out, jumping over and below the surface for a neon pink oceanic feeling. The EDM touches loose it for a split seconds, but then it returns to an ambient trance hazy feeling stuff. Pretty cool wow.

Mumble core cinematic indie. It’s dark and moody, narrative driven. The arrangements are complex and varied with horns and strings and lots of keyboard sounds to go with the basic rock drum/bass/guitar foundation. The vocals are low like Leonard Cohen but mumbly and deliberately obscured. At times they’re a bit like Calexico, sometimes like a French movie soundtrack, lots of songs are like the VU or Belle & Sebastian story songs.

There was a dangerous surplus of acoustic guitar boys in the early years of the new millennium and this certainly wasn't helping the situation. I've tried a few times with this album over the years, but it's always been a not for me, dog. He has a nice voice and the sound is clean and captures the guitar beautifully, but the songs are dire dirges, at once dull and overwrought.

This combines the riffing of grunge with the noisy atmosphere of shoegaze for a dense, heavy & moody album. Thick guitars, muddy production, and flat vocals give it a distant sealed off feeling, but then you get explosive moments of release breaking through. The stepping stone between Nirvana and Deftones in 90s alt rock genealogy.