Reviews by dohej

Wistful and blissful country tinged rock. His voice is so frail it really sells the tender heartbroken songs. He dials in the Americana sound perfectly with that combination of acoustic guitars, piano, harmonica, and vocal harmonies - everything very simple and understated but just right. My favorite Neil Young is live over studio and the harder rocking stuff - the rockers on this aren't his best, but "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" "Don't Let it Bring You Down" "Oh Lonesome Me" & "I Believe in You" are the pinnacle of soft rock intimate NY.

The snarling vocals are obviously the standout element of this, but somehow they found a way to play and record every instrument snarling. The guitars are bright and brash and sound really amazing, especially when they go from tension building palm mute to full bore power chord thrashing. 50 years have tamed this so much as what's considered too hard/too loud/too abrasive has gone miles beyond, making this sound like Chuck Berry with a DS1. Not sure how well it worked as a gimmic to sell trousers, but they certainly inspired loads of way more talented creative people to fuck around with guitars and find out what they could get up to.

I love screaming "School's Out for SUMMER, School's Out for EVER!" every June as much as the next guy, but had no awareness of the rest of this album, which is both blandly generic classically rock and oddly all over the place stylistically - bits of prog, psych, RnB, funk, blues... It's fine, but pretty boring basic garage rock stuff despite the unexpectedly fun breadth - a singles band really.

I've tried diving into The Fall's discography before but always had the wrong starting point I guess and got too frustrated by the grating noise and aggressive anti-musicality - but this is much friendly water to wade into. He's assembled a pretty fantastic post-punk band here with a funk driven bass high in the mix, guitars that jangle and slash and swirl around, propulsive drums for dancing including high-energy nearly D&B drum machine patterns, and some awesomely cheesy 80s keyboard sounds. They're playing pretty conventionally organized songs - verses, choruses, hooks, melodies, everything! -borrowing a bit from two generations of alt rock: the post-punk of 80s bands like Gang of Four and the Manchester rave rock of Stone Roses & Happy Mondays - going pretty close to full disco on 'Service' & 'Past Gone Mad'. It's powerfull and driving, atmospheric and exciting, restless and frenetic music. It all makes for an accessible and, even appealing, platform for the vocals - which are snarled and sneered and drawled out more than sung. The whole thing is unhinged in a very fun way. Should've started here with them, let's see if this works as a gateway into the rest...

Dark hipster psychedelia, it still sounds alive and urgent. I'm Waiting for My Man and Run Run Run are incredible high energy rock songs, all propulsive rhythms and distorted guitars, and actual hooks. The best bits are stripped back and spare without any studio frills or production wizardry, when it sounds like a band in a room playing themselves into a increasingly frenetic trance drawing on a whole repertoire of ragas and drones and changes and a pharmacy full of downers. The viola does so much work here, like on Heroin where it adds a layer of tense anxiety buzzing along barely in one channel, a bare bones vamp that itself descends into screeching noise as the songs climax. Lou Reed's gift for disarmingly sweet melody means there's a bright core to everything, shining through the darkness and chaos. To balance out the descent into madness, there are perfectly crafted little loungey bubblegum songs, Femme Fatale, Sunday Morning, I'll Be Your Mirror - sweet and jangly and atmospheric, ironically naive but bittersweet pop gems undercut by Nico's flat dettached deadpan delivery.

If I wanted to listen to a bunch of nerds on keyboards run up and down scales in weird time signatures, well, I'd listen to this. But I don't, so I won't. The cover rules though.

I'm the late 90s, a record label genius thought, "damn! We'd sell a lot more of these Usher CDs if he was a white guy!" So they found a handsome shape to stand in front of some literal Michael Jackson offcuts and 20+ years later we still have to listen to this guy. What a world. It's not bad, it just sucks.

The production is great, but that's like saying Toyotas are well made or cinnamon toast crunch is nice and sweet. It certainly is a perfect example of what 2002 sounded like - teen pop remade with hip hop production to create the hegemonic radio sound for the next two decades. 3 huge singles and 60 minutes of filler made you 100s of millions of dollars, but does it make an album? Dire stuff, perfectly smooth predigested and inescapable.

Her most maximalist and most accessible album, Hounds of Love cannonballs deep into the pool of 80s pop production to immerse the songs in gated drum machine beats, whoompy bass, massive synth lines, huge gospel backing vocals, riffs on the strings, and a kitchen-sink load of sounds and samples. It feels like Peter Gabriel at some points, in the best way. For all the lush production though this is a very cold album, icey and blue and windswept.

Patient exploratory jamming that captures the very best of the early psychedelic Dead for one of the best live albums of all time - not just the hits performed in front of an audience, but an album who's liveness, the presence of performance, is what makes it what it is. Dark Star alone makes this a five-star album: the interplay between the band, listening, responding, building, and turning each others melodic and rhythmic ideas as they improvise their way through the (more structured than you'd think) segments of the peice is staggering. There's so much space in the music despite the number of instruments contributing to it. Through Dark Star > St Stephen > The Eleven they ratchet up the tension, go dark to dwell in some minor key modes, bring it back to a bright joyous major key, let the music dissipate, wrangle it back together for a verse, segue from song to song to keep it rolling. The album climaxes in the raunchy RnB rave up Lovelight, before the mournful dark blues of Death Don't Have No Mercy, which eventually dissolves into feedback, the controlled chaos of signal becoming noise becoming signal.

A bit of 1980s for the synth pop beat, jangly guitars, and big U2 sounding production and a lot of 1880s for the industrial era invention of tradition folk music. Alt country, but the country is Ireland.

Genre hopping always risks incoherence, but this album has enough of a narrative through-line concept (always a risk in and of itself) and a clearly consistent voice & overall aesthetic that it ties together the eclectic pallette it's drawing from. It dabbles in hip hop, neo-soul, prog, punk, synth pop, psychadelia, smooth jazz, monastic folk, and intergalactic funk, but it's produced and sequenced in a way that these are smooth and emergent segues rather than disjunctive leaps. JM is comfortable and confident as a performer across all of this. There aren't any big standout catchy songs and despite the genre variety it is a bit samey tonally for 70 minutes - you're meant to absorb it one go for the story I guess, but the rock opera thing is always a chore.

A British approximation of some of the best American RnB & Soul songs and sounds of the early 60s. She brings a lot to the material - a charismatic performance and a wide ranging rich voice that's as comfortable belting out a powerful anthemic chorus as whispering a soft hushed line. The production is great too - nothing original really, but a solid recreation of the Stax, Spectre sound - lush and maximalist: gospel singers, horns, swelling strings, crispy clean guitars, jazzy drums, and a propulsive bass. The album is at its best on the uptempo RnB tracks that are brimming with energy, the slow soul ballads get mired in the mush of sentimental strings.

Favorites are the ones I instantly recognized, incredible hits: Mama Said, Will you Love Me Tomorrow, I Only Want to Be With You

Her song writing really emphasizes lyric above all else, the songs never resolve into a clear form, instead meandering from verse to verse with some nice melodic phrases but not enough repetition to anchor them as compositions. Combined with the very consistent instrumentation, it means the album sounds very monotonous and samey over the course of 50 minutes - all blurring together a bit. Her voice is expressive and emotive, really chewing over and delivering the verses, but has a thin warbly timbre that always feels underwhelming. The music itself is a washed out jazzy folk where the signature sound is the whoompy fretless bass cast against the bright acoustic guitar. Lots of open extended chords that defy resolution and keep everything open and ethereal and very heady.

Replacement level 60s soul pop with all the edge of the Sesame Street house band.

One of those germinal 'this is where it all comes from' artists - swinging bluesy piano jazz with a big band and charismatic vocals that sets the template for rock and roll. It's so foundational it ends up sounding very basic and over-familiar going back to it, so hard to enjoy as something other than a kind of museum peice.

The full band stuff sounds good when there's a more complex and layered platform for his voice that balances out his strident earnest singing. The jangly opening single New Brunette is a poppy gem of a love song; the bluegrass tinged Wishing the Days Away is a classic bittersweet ode to wasting time; the simply arranged The Passion has whistful interplay between Marr's pretty arpegio's and Bragg's tragic vocal in a cool hommage to British folk tradition; the bugle on Home Front add a powerful melodic counterpoint and a solemn timber that establishes the mood. But the more sparse arrangements with just acoustic guitar or piano sound focus too much attention on his voice which I find to be quite grating and flat. It's a lyrics driven album, but I don't have the attention to focus in closely on his verses. His political songs are engaging with their moment but that means they end up sounding quite dated and limited, or overly broad and generic. The romantic songs have a longer lasting appeal and manifest the tender humanism that's the actual emotional core and ideological center of his politics.

I was so primed to hate this as soon as I saw the cover and that it was a French DJ, but you know what, it's a pretty fun 90s version of a disco album that's full of great synth sounds and decent beats. It's dumb and fun, and doesn't really have ambitions beyond that. The vocals are pretty awful though and the samples are extremely annoying, and they just get played over and over and over and over and over. We get it, music makes you lose control - shut the fuck up already! So the songs get extremely grating very quickly making it much harder, sometimes impossible, to just enjoy the synth stuff and electronica production.

I like so much about this album but wish I liked the sum of its parts more. Abrasive and uncompromising, this album is a feast of distortion and discordance, a harsh sounding exploration of harsh feeling. It has the sonic signature of late 80s/early 90s alt-rock in the wake of the post-hardcore DIY bands like Husker Du, Fugazi, or the Pixies - dark, aggressive, and brutal guitar-driven noise that leans into soft/loud dyamics and gritty texture to build up loads and loads of tension, taking a punk ethos but a more expansive experimental approach to song-writing, with strange time signatures that change, and evocative personal lyrics. It sounds amazing, all the instruments are presented raw and direct in their full intensity, overwhelming the vocal, which struggles valiantly to rise above the riotous noise. It's not an immediately approachable album, the songs don't have instantly memorable hooks/melodies to invite you in or allow you to hold on, and so requires a few listens to work its way toward familiarity so its power can sink in.

Love to listen to this while tossing power pellets into my giant triangle mouth and escaping from ghosts.

A perfectly realized 35 minutes of hardcore's sound and spirit. Visceral and raw, this album hits hard, fast and loud - an onslaught of lightning riffs, pulverizing drumming and a whole range gutteral screams from agonized drawn wails out to raging machine gun blasts. Damaged captures suburban alienation from the bland world of Reaganism and 80s mass consumerism, articulating its pure hate of the hollow life they promised. Beyond that though Black Flag epitomized the ethos of DIY counterculture, the desire to live differently and make your own way - and the grueling commitment and burnout that involved. This sounds like that - flailing angrily to create rigorously rehearsed chaos.