Reviews by dohej

So smooth it hurts. Schmaltzy disco funk but without any of the fun. This is cruising down the soda aisle at suburban 90s supermarket music, it's what's playing while you argue with your mom over getting Mug vs store brand root beer. Africano is ok smooth jazz blacksploitation soundtrack material.

Known about this for a long time as an actually good proto nu metal album but never made time to listen to it until now. It's not a wrong take but kind of minimizes what they're up to with the deep grooves, thrash riffs, hardcore screaming, Brazilian percussion, gutteral death metal howls, industrial production and epic breakdown & rebuilds. Extremely good at its best, but 72 minutes is probably 33 too many. I'm not pissed off enough to REALLY love this, but if I were, oooh boy...

I can't stand the title track having had to hear it so many times, and the ballads & slower tracks (Somebody Loves Me, Easier to Love, You're a Friend) are pretty dire schmaltz, but the uptempo disco tracks (Greatest Dancer, Lost in Music, One More Time) are perfect: wild funky bass grooves, that drum beat, Nile Rodgers going nuts on guitar, a bit of surplus percussion, some delightfully cheesy production touches, the alto vocals and tight harmonies floating gently over the track, just taking it easy. Pure fun. The recording is so crisp and there's so much space in the mix which makes it really warm and inviting.

That bass tho *Homer Simpson drool*

I used to listen to this all the time, but it's so much more eclectic than I remember - maybe it all used to blur together into what I assumed 70s British punk was, but now I hear it as like a sample platter for post-punk where you get a little taste of every sound and style that would follow - some slow chugging riffs, some funk infused beats, sped up hardcore powerchords, snarling drawled out vocals, aggressive angular guitars, grinding industrial sounds, power pop harmonies, a deadly serious but also constantly unserious affect, some hi-energy poppy jangle, lo-fi production. It really has it all and shows how much you can accomplish with minimalist instruments and more talent for song-writing than musicianship, but a huge amount of creative energy to invest in messing around and making stuff - it's dark and angry at times, but also kind of a joyous artifact of the diy spirit and ethic.

Favorites: Reuters, Mannequin, Three Girl Rhumba, 12xU, Lowdown, Strange

The band is funky and very tight, the production is lush with layers and layers of synths, spacey effects, overdubbed vocals, disco beats, and fuzzy guitar solos and little neo-soul fills. The songs feel kind of baggy though, overlong and under formed and the vocals, delivered in the classic nasal Bowie style, don't really stand out to provide a catchy anchor point. Its post-pop/rock in its aspirations, more like astral psychedelic dance music that wants to ride the vibe and float around the groove.

Favorites: Stay, Word on a Wing, Wild is the Wind, golden years

Indie rock Graham Parsons, even down to the Emmylou Harris collaboration. Its so easy to be tedious and dull in this folksy acoustic introspective singer songwriter country genre, and there are a couple of plodding duds on this album that fall into the trap, but the handful of really incredible songs, the wide open heartbroken songwriting, the spare, spacious very pretty arrangements, classic Americana instrumentation and the vital tender thrilling performances make this an alt country great.

All nervous energy and funky grooves, this is the tense and frenetic music of a band in a hurry, pushing post punk into new wave and already looking beyond - they're not fully realized yet, but when a band's first song is Psycho Killer they're in for great things.

Like so many RS albums, this is extremely uneven with a handful of really great songs, the ones where they delve in psych sounds, incorporate the exotic instruments of the empire, and create some incredible vibey grooves. Under My Thumb is such a good track spoiled by its extremely fucked lyrics, White Room is an all time great rock song, Mothers Little Helper a fun jaunty ode to meth, Out of Time is a pure Motown rip off but an incredibly poignant one performaned with amazing charisma. And that bass! But there's so much filler in their pretty generic honky tonk blues mode. Nobody needs Going Home's 11 minutes of them pretending to be Delta Blues guys, or the boring chuga chuga Chuck Berry stuff like It's Not Easy or High and Dry. It's frustrating listenting to them trying to write the material they'd just been covering up to this point, instead of writing more original stuff that they're actually way better at. They just released way too much music for a decade and lots of it sort of sucks. They are the quintissential greatest hits band.

The disconcerting house band of a horror movie carnival freak show.

A rip roaring good time full of furious drumming, frenetic guitars and anthemic vocals. They sound like guns n roses at times and black flag at others, a really great combination of pop sensibility, rock musicianship and hardcore energy. Always knew the name and associated them w the dumb sound of 1st gen punk, but there's way more to it than I expected - what a gem!

Love the warm overdriven guitar sounds and the faux-effortless shaggy feel of the whole thing. His melodic phrasing, use of the pause and change of direction and slacker cadence are great, kind of sardonic and full of ennui. They're basically power pop songs - quick hits that get you a little hook, a couple verses, chorus and solo but recorded Lo-Fi and wierded up and given a thick layer of almost shoegaze fuzz. Bored and erudite but pretending to be lazy (as opposed to pissed and strung out and actually stupid) - this is the epitome of that pole of the 1990s white dude specturm.

Everything in this album sounds amazing from the energetic bright horns to the crisp reverb and clean tremolo tone of the guitar, the drum sounds and the RnB bass, it's a great recreation of the classic soul band recording which sets the stage for a stunning singing performance. Hugely charismatic and inviting. Amy Winehouse's voice is warm and coarse and covers a huge range of tone and emotion - in the tradition of great soul singers, she aspires to a model that's come before but adds her own 21st c contribution to that lineage in the lyrics and delivery. Used to be very overplayed, but it was so good to return to after a couple years not putting it on.

Sometimes you have to let your inner Bevis take over and just enjoy stuff that is dumb as hell but indisputably rocks hard as hell. These are pretty basic essential thrills: big distorted riffs played at a medium-high tempo with some guitar heroics, a machine of a drummer, and an incredible vocal performance that really pushes into the high end extremely forcefully. The more time passes the more the distinction between metal and classic rock fades away and the idea that this is an especially hard, loud, or aggressive sound or a distinct genre seems kind of absurd.

Find someone who loves you the way people in the 90s loved listing to the same sentence over and over and over again.

Maximalist millennial indie rock lead by the voice of skinny jeans, a nasal yelp that's powerfully belted out despite seemingly being unable to fill the diaphragm. Very distinctive and weirdly affecting. This debut album is their best work; they hadn't turned their sound into the arena filling formula yet and so there's a vitality and urgency to the songs and performances here. I always passively liked but was never the biggest fan of this band and haven't really enjoyed their subsequent work much despite dutifully giving it a listen, so I thought this would've aged bably, but damn this album is very good, actually way better than I remember. The sound is so massive it's like they've build a runaway train they're struggling to wrangle back into control, and it's exciting to listen to them do it. On Wake Up they make such a big engulfing noise and have such massive simple sing along chorus, inviting you to join the choir, its got a transcendent religious feeling to it. Rebellion moves the melody to the strings, which combines with the propulsive rhythm that just keeps going to induce a similar feeling being washed along into a larger collective being. Shame the album ends on kind of a dud.

Rastabilly. Pretty good, but I'd rather just listen to reggae.

I've tried so many times with this band, and have come to appreciate the impossibly dense and unforgiving sound of Loveless, but this album just feels like a step along the way rather than essential listening. They're a jangly chamber-pop band with the reverb dialed up high going into the pre-amp to create a load of washed out overdrive that's a gossamer sheen over the songs, but they haven't really reached their final form yet, the maximalist take it to its logical conclusion pure barrage over overlayed fuzz and reverb and phaser and tremelo they'd get to a couple of years later. That said, there are a couple of pretty great songs on here that have incorporate the bright clean jangle to drive the scuzzy sounds along and even some pretty vocal melodies emerging from the fog.

Favorites: All I need, You Should Never, Sueisfine

You know that feeling like when you're at a freaky circus show and its too hot and humid in the tent and you're running out of air and getting increasingly anxious and they keep bringing out more clowns with basoons and chimps doing a one man band and then somebody starts doing gnarly sax solos and shredding fuzz guitar hard panning the delay effects and now its time for the tiger taming and the elephant parade and you've eaten more cotton candy than should be allowed and are really thirsty but the only thing there is is warm monster energy drink, and the key changes and tempo picks up and the trapeze artists are going nuts flipping around, and all you want is deep gulp of fresh air, but now its time for a soft-rock Isley Brothers tribute and you're bouncing on a trampoline for some reason and getting way too high and there are more clowns and more sax solos bouncing up with you and there's nowhere to land, but it's ok because there some Grays coming to beam you up into the spaceship from that one Boston album cover?

The least overplayed and so the most fresh to listen to of Led Zeppelin's first 4 albums was always my favorite growing up. You get the big riffy rockers (Immigrant Song) and the blues guitar/vocal workouts (Since I've been Loving You), but the acoustic folk driven stuff on the second half is the best, from the driving mandolin on Gallows Pole to the tender 12-string psychedelia of Tangerine, jangly stoned dream That's the Way, and traditional Bron-Y-Aur Stomp. But it's not actually as great as I remember it being not having listened all the way through in a few years. They take this combination of sounds a lot further on Houses of the Holy where it fits the peaks of arena rock glory.

Black Hole Sun is one of the best songs of the 90s. Fell on Black Days is a solid alt-rock radio staple. Yelling SPOOOOOONMAAAANNN is about as fun as grunge gets. The rest is very consistent - heavy detuned riffs with a bit of a groove to them, high-caliber vocals, and some cool guitar stuff - but it's all a bit samey and there's too much of it. Very butt-rock. They've become pretty overrated in retrospect: their best stuff is great, but it's spread out over a bunch of CDs with tons of filler.