Reviews by dohej

Somehow Moby comes across as the biggest douche in those Woodstock 99 documentaries that also feature Fred Durst and the promoter who ran it all. Boring album that sounds like the music from every airline video about the nearest exits. Every track has basically the same structure: looped sample + default drum machine pattern + some ambient keyboard chords or a twinkly piano melody. Can anyone explain the appeal of this and Fatboy slim? Why was there such an audience for tedious loops repeating the same stuff over and over in the 90s? I guess this is on here because the more interesting downtempo and electronic artists he's copying didn't work in the album genre? It's pretty relaxing though and at least he has the courtesy to not put a loud track on the second half to wake you up if you doze off...

It used to be easy to hear this as a creative exploration of the wild persona formed by the combination of American racism and cult of celebrity, a look at the bipolar contradictory pressures placed on Black artists in particular. He's funny: Proclaiming 'I am a god' to demand being satisfied with the most banal desires like croissants. He's poignant: tender gospel harmonies run through autotune testify to personal and family suffering, substance abuse and more. But he's so stupid: it turns out this wasn't an incisive skewering of megalomania, but just the early stages of it - a man driven into chaos by the structural conditions of the idiotic attention economy he used to be smart enough to observe but now, like so many, just exists in reaction to. The sound of the album is great - rich but spare, the beats the drops the samples and the textures all work perfectly together to create a dark introspective mood for the vocals to lash out against with extremely non-reflexive lyrics that just excrete straight from the id. The pairing of a sample of strange fruit about lynching with verses about issues with his wife and beef with his rivals shows how he transmutes structural critique into rationale for interpersonal self serving ego serving self justification.

This isn't as good as I remember. Taxman is simple and effective pop rock w reactionary lyrics. Eleanor Rigby seems like the point where they start to get hugely impressed with themselves and lean into their pompous era - insanely overrated song. I'm only sleeping dabbles in studio effects for a psych101 rocker with great melodies. Love to You has a sitar drone and raga beat to an exotic flair that's quintessentially 60s. Here there Everywhere is tender chamber pop with a jangly guitar lead that adds an spikey element to the bittersweet smooth harmonies. Yellow submarine is Barney level pap. She said has the most iconic 60s pop psych sound with the massive swooping sounds, jangly guitars, and doubled vocals. Good day sunshine is more stupid kids music with an oompah doompah beat and idiotic chorus. And your bird can sing has a great high energy riff and catchy vocals - the guitar sound is great. For no one is a way less successful harpsichord song than Girl, but has a cool horn part. Dr Robert is generic LSD pop. I want to tell you is more of that iconic distinctive combo of close harmony and jangly guitar leads. Got to get you into my life is by far the best McCartney song here, carried by a Motown sounding horn part and bass line and a great vocal performance that builds and builds until a very satisfying break. Tomorrow never knows wraps it up with an all time great psych excursion into drones and trance and studio trickery. The guitars do sound great on all these songs, and they're having fun with more exploratory instrumentation and studio experimentation and I do love the way they bend a song with bridges and melodic variations twists and turns.

More ambient than the popier Moon Safari, this soundtrack reminds me of Pink Floyd style spacey pscychadelia updated for the EDM era (no surprise since PF did a few scores/soundtracks before DSotM). Washy synths, trancey chord vamps, groovy basslines, trippy effects, a combination of tight drum machine patterns and more free live drummer fills, instrumental apart from random samples with clips from news. Good working music: interesting enough but unobstrusive. Builds some light tension, quickens the pulse, but then a slow release...

More boring blues dad stuff. A few hits on here have been on permanent radio rotation for 5 decades so have that warm familiarity. His voice is great in its gritty overstretched way. They're not reach for the dial songs, but equally nothing worth seeking out. Very disappointing that 'Who'll Stop the Rain' wasn't the far superior 'Have You Seen the Rain'. It's just totally inessential replacement level rock by numbers - listen to Marvin Gaye or Little Richard or Chuck Berry or Jimi Hendrix instead of their pale imitator.

It's Marvin Gaye, so there's a great vocal performance. It's Tamla Motown so there are incredible bass parts. It's late 70s soul, so there's some deeply funky Rhodes parts with jazzy hand-percussion. But I'm not sure it amounts to much - the songs themselves are a let down, leaning into that washy unresolved lounge sound and ending up cluttered with too many instruments. But when that sultry sax hits, oooohhhhh baby

Favorites: Anger, Is That Enough, Time to Get it Together, You Can Leave

A little commercialism goes along way in taming prog excesses. This is a tighter, more focused, and way less annoying version of Rush. Just write some rock songs, not a suite of pseudo classical nonsense with an overture ffs! The flanger and drums and then the riff to kick off Tom Sawyer is so damn good. YYZ sounds like a corny Joe Satriani track where there's an alien-style complicated backing track for some virtuoso guitar histrionics. The instrumental is a nice break from the piercing vocals though, yikes. Some great bass playing throughout, the guitar tones are all pretty cool and the drums patterns are intricate as you'd expect from a guy with 700 piece kit...

Transition between the psychedelic blues of the 60s and the new wave of British heavy metal of the 70s, that has a touch of the prog. The huge organ sounds give it a big cathedral effect, but slows it all down. The guitar compensates with fast heavy riffs and faster shredding solos. The vocals wail over the top, shattering the stained glass with some massive high notes. Propulsive bass energy. It's tighter than the bloated live album, but still kind of boring 50+ years later, especially showoff guitar stuff, but that's a bit unfair since that's so much to do with how many copies of this there have been since.

Slint took the power of the post-hardcore underground and slowed it down, expanded the emotional and sonic range, and created something terrifying and brutal. Even more so because the patience and psychotic control over the stop-start soft-loud dynamics, with precise abrupt transitions. Tensely coiled and balanced on a knife's edge, the soft parts are anxious and ominous - muted dissonance just waiting for the slightest trigger to explode into a distorted fury. The explosions are raw and powerful, the guitars just slam a pedal, but the singer tries to turn himself inside out lungs first. The whole thing is like a grainy horror film: teens wandering into the woods, going off alone, and being ripped apart by some unknown monster you just catch in glimpses. The bleak sound of being cold and hunted and salvation never comes.

This was one of the first CDs I ever bought, and I was desperate to like it. It was the guy from Nirvana so it had to be good. And the music video was so goofy and fun. But that's all it was in the end, a novelty act with good pedigree but not much in terms of musical ideas or memorable songs. I wasn't mad, just disappointed. Nowhere near as good as the other mid 90s alt rock radio staples, but they somehow outlasted them all became one of the longest running most beloved bands of the last 30 years, which I'll never understand, they're so boring and generic. A band for people who've heard of rock music and like the idea of it. An album for big fans of room temperature water. Even saying that, I'd put The Color and the Shape on the list because there are some much stronger songs on that, but this album is just factory settings post-Grunge. Every mildly good moment on this album sounds just like something Weezer or Smashing Pumpkins or Stone Temple Pilots or Bush or whatever other band from the time did way better.

Favorites: Floaty, exhausted, this is a call

Pretty run of the mill lo-fi indie: a bit of a folksy sound, a bit of a pop melody, an overall bittersweet mood, some messing around with effects and wonky instruments, a shaggy bedroom feel to the arrangements and production. A very endearing artifact of the DIY creative spirit and of a basic impulse to make music. But it's only like one level up from coffee shop open mic stuff.

Did this album fall in a tub of body lotion? It's so SMOOTH! It's like a simulator for being on hold with an airline. It's the soundtrack to going grocery shopping in the suburban 1990s when someone decided that this combination of disco, funk and jazz should be the default sound for all commercial space - no edges, just positive vibes and mellow moods. It's kind of a nadir for all three genres - the saccharine strings, the glossy production, the total coked out mundanity. But it has some fun elements: the bass especially goes hard, a d the guitar/sax solos sometimes rip off a hot line amidst the smooth noodle.

N'Dour takes the jazzy relaxed open feel of 70s West African Golden-era of Afro-Cuban rumba (from his Star Band de Dakar days) and opens it up. This album lowers the role of the guitar and makes space to incorporate more Senegalese musical traditions (the interwoven griot-style vocals, the wide range of hand drums and the talking drum) and for some smooth jazz sounding horns/keyboards. The horns are great, but the keys, combined with the very 80s production and the bass tone in particular, do give this a very corny dated feel. Along with Salif Keita's, N'Dour is one of the cornerstones of the whole Putomayo world music 'genre' and forged a sound that would become the somewhat stultifying generic default for West African musicians seeking an international audience, combining glossy global sheen with the authenticating use of local instruments. But here in its nascent stage, there's plenty of energy and excitement to the music, and even the corny keyboard sounds have an endearing nostalgic wistfulness to them.

It's not that it's bad, its just so boring and there's such a surfeit of this kind of 70s blues rock shit that's been hyped for decades that I just can't bring myself to care. I love jambands so have a high tolerance for indulgent instrumental wank, but my god this is some tedious stuff. Shredding blues licks over a hard rock riff is the lowest form of virtuosity! He's not even that good at guitar - nothing interesting in terms of tone, technique, phrasing, harmonies, musical approach, anything...he's just pretty fast and had loud Marshalls. The vocal solos are even worse, just a dude screaching. Then the endless drum solos that go nowhere. Urgh. No sense of improvising as a collective process of discovering emergent music from listening and responding to others, just turn taking showing off on dull solo after solo. Who cares?!

60s psychpop harmonies and bright open sound and a touch of surf rock guitar tones + 70s krautrock driving rhythms + 00s indie synth maximalist instrumentation & production = an upbeat high energy immersive and engaging bit of fun.

Swishy beats and swanky synths, amazing bass lines, luxurious textures, high gloss production. Somehow it's catchy despite being essentially instrumental lounge music. Music for a montage riding elevators up and down a fancy art deco arcade turned mall wearing some Wes Anderson type outfits.

As one of the most ubiquitous albums of the 90s I know all the words to half these songs and have a good time belting them out at first jokingly then it gets serious, and it's like damn, you really do ought to know. The bass sound is so whoompy. It rules. It's like RAAAIIIIIAAAAIIINNNM....

Fast, melodic & basic. Cost $10 to record and you can really hear it. Crunchy and bright guitars, relatively low in the mix and the vocals really dominate. A ton of songs, none more than 2.5 minutes - most under 1.5 mins - it give this a pretty thrown together half thought out feel. Unsurprisingly the longer songs are best, because they’re actual songs, not just self-recorded demos to come back to and finish. Many ideas, little execution, lots of wasted potential bc there are some great moments and sounds. But the songs finish before they even start. Classic slacker trick: if we don’t really try nobody can say we failed.

Kirkland Signature Depeche Mode. Synth pop that has a bit of jangle, a bit of hooky new wave power pop, a bit of dark and moody, and even a bit of heartland twang, but doesn't lean hard enough in any direction to be really satisfying. It's easy listening, but most of the tracks seem like they'd be filler on the good bands of the era's albums. It gets more cloying and boring as it goes on and the endearing novelty of the unrestrained 80s production wears thin. Last 4 songs end it on a high note with more subtle radio pop bright bass forward sound (and the bonus disc demos let the instruments and songs shine through the cheesy production).

Low? More like LUSH! This album is like diving smoothly into a lazy-river made of synths and floating around letting the current push you around. Eno's presence is huge in the creation of these layers of tone and texture and pulsating sound and slow swelling rhythm, with Bowie crooning louchely over the top, bringing a bit of edge and charisma to the chilled out mood. Sound and Vision is an all time great electropop song. The rest is a lot less individually memorable though. The first half distills emergent 70s synth pop to forge the foundation of the 80s new-wave sound (it's also a cool extension of the song-writing style and aesthetic on Iggy Pop's the Idiot). The second half is an excursion through krautrock ambience.