Reviews by dohej

Oh yeah...I remember them! Crisp smooth and clean beats with a propulsive high energy feel. The delivery is similar: precise and clever with some quick turns of phrase and conscious content. Continuing the Native Tongues/backpack rap tradition, but it's kind of generic sounding across the board and nothing strikes especially powerfully - but maybe it's another one that'll need a few relistens to really sink in...

It's funny how time tames music - this is nowhere near as extreme sounding today as I'd remembered from when I first delved into thrash. It's so much like Iron Maiden or Judas Priest, sped up for sure, more aggressive with a punk/hardcore influence, but the same basic premise: hard chugging riffs, discernable hooks, powerful drums, and a singer with some serious pipes. Anthrax keep it pretty tight - the sound is dialed in and focused, the guitar solos are concise and scarce, and the songs come in quick and heavy. They mastered the thrash template they co-created and set the machine to full blast. But it's a bit samey as a result. This definitely goes hard - can't go wrong if you're looking 50 solid minutes of blasted riffs and belted out vocals.

Dark and moody droning synths going through the chords at a glacial pace, as drum machine rhythms urgently try to beat out a pulse, breathy chanted vocals rise from the depths of goth despair with a bit of insouciant Lou Reed flair, some organ swells and bells and xylophones adorn the high end to and add counterpoint and texture. Extremely good brooding mesmerizing psych-punk.

You know you've done something special when the first four notes of your album are, 40+ years later, still the go-to signifier of horniness.

Millennial dad rock with all the excitement of a Prius. The National's sound is sweepingly cinematic with big orchestration and spacious reverby/tremelo u2-style guitar swells. Slower and more stately than their 00s indie counterparts like interpol, the walkmen or broken social scene - they elements in common with those bands but its just never connected for me. It's mature and sophisticated and polished and ultimately pretty plodding dull stuff that's successfully repressed the libidinal teenage agita that animates better rock. They're good at conjuring a mournful contemplative mood, but there's not enough dissonance to make the peaks satisfy or cathartic - it just ebbs and flows, no tension no release.

Steeped in the history of space funk and psychedelic soul but ahead of their time in terms of beat making and their pop / hip hop sensibility this album is an eclectic epic full of hits and hooks, catchy as hell, raunchy, funny, and perfectly executed. It's It's too long, but it's the pinnacle of their career: great features, distinctive voices, signature production style.

There's some fun jammy blues stuff with George Harrison on guitar and pretty groovy bass, but that's not what you're listening to John Lennon for. Jealous Guy is a great song sullied by what's known about his behavior. Imagine is so embarrassing it hurts, imagine being moved by that. His voice and the cadence of his vocal phrasing are the best bits. But this is mostly pretty dull stuff.

Piano based rock is always at risk of becoming showtunes, and this is no exception. The vocal performance is really good, and at its best there's a fun flamboyance to the unbridled 70s cocaine excess of the production/arrangements. But I have never, and still don't, understand the hype with Elton John. The songwriting comes across as clever and referential/winking genre tributes more than anything. He was early on the reggae appropriation trend (Jamaica Jerk Off), but good lord is that an abomination. He anticipates some of the sound of new-wave with the hoped up synthy rock & roll (Sister Can't Twist). His attempt at a Rolling Stones honky tonk song (Saturday Night) is good and would be a nice fit on Sticky Fingers. It's impossible to listen to Candle in the Wind without your skin crawling from the mawkish sentimentalism the British public has imbued that song with since the 90s. Bennie and Jets and All the Girls Love Alice and are fun. The Nashville-sounding country twist with cloying strings and lap steel on Roy Rodgers is a funny touch, taking a silly saccharine ballad about a TV cowboy to ludicrous levels of camp - I think it might be my favorite track.

Bombastic production: big rock/jazz samples where the beats are kind of frenetic and don't settle into grooves or emerge as jams - instead they're high energy complex stop/start collages with an emphasis on organic guitar horns and piano parts (and less successfully, synthy strings) over right clean drum machine tracks. His flow is easy going uptempo and precise but doesn't have a really stand out style or a distinctive flair. The verses are the stars bc the hooks are kind of weak, none.of the songs have a really catchy memorable chorus or anything, surprising given his association w Jay Z and Kanye who are so good at exactly that. The songs w Gemini are good. A bit too much filler at both album and individual track level. "The Instrumental" sounds like Linkin Park.

Goddamn I love this band so much. That signature thing where they start with a spacious slow groove and detached flat affect vocals, then build up layers and layers of guitar lines, dissonance distortion and feedback, filling in the space until it's super saturated as the vocals get more and more angst and it eventually bursts and a clean guitar arpeggio comes in like the cool feeling after a quick dew point drop and a downpour have taken all the oppressive humidity out of the air. Masters of tension and relief, of the hard-earned explosive climax, of time and texture. The two-three guitars going back and forth, interweaving lines, bouncing ideas off each other, extending each others openings, or just layering give this such an dense exciting feel - like Television re-invented for the grunge era. This album is packed with so many riffs, melodies, turns of phrase, powerful sounds, and they come across so forcefully and precisely and with such control even as they're pushing every meter deep red.

There're basically only two different songs, nothing special about the arrangements, and hardly brimming with virtuouso musicianship - but it's deservedly one of the best regarded country albums and live recordings due to the sheer magnetism of the vocal performance, the magic between the performer and the audience, and the capacity of these simple country song structures to tell a story of guys who started fucked and then fucked up descending further into fuckedness and reaping what they've sown and being self-pitying and self-hating about it.

Paranoid combines the two strands of Black Sabbath's early sound - atmospheric goth horror and fuzzy blues power-trio rock - into a an avalanche of terrifying sludge: heavy riffs that come in two speeds but just won't stop pouring out, banshee vocals wailed from the depths, powerful rangy bass, all-over the kit drumming, and, most importantly, the concept of some kind of man, but of iron?! The seeds are sown: stoner and doom metal, thrash metal, speed metal, hair metal and even punk, post-hardcore and grunge are all here in germinal form. It's always funny how Ozzy's vocal melodies are just the riffs - total idiot song writing that still kicks.

I only new Michael Franti from Spearhead being on the bill at jamband festivals and had no idea he had a early incarnation as a Boots Riley/the Coup style conscious political rapper. Very much an artifact of early 90s post-coldwar left cultural production, the main concerns are war (in a kind of generic sense), consumption, media/TV, corporate power structures, the war on drugs, militarism. Musically, it's pretty straight over the plate early 90s hip hop production - drum machine beats, jazz and rock samples, some turntable scratching - the tracks are busy but not lushly produced. This is self-identified brocolli hip hop you listen to because it's good for you - impactful in terms of the merging of content/form, but a document of its time, more like watching an old episode of the daily show than listenting to a timeless classic.

I'd always assumed this was a folksy acoustic guitar singer songwriter album, but it's got a lot more fleshed out instrumentation than expected- the piano is dominant, with the often bass punctuating rather than carrying the rhythm, some tracks with congas/bongos and latin rhythms, acoustic guitars, flutes, and other kind of floaty instruments come in and out to adorn and jazz it up, some small doses of electric guitar leads give it a belated CA psychedelia flavor. Her voice is warm, relaxed, rich and well suited to the songs/arrangements. The recording sounds great. There are a few 'Oh, this is Carole King? huh' songs - familiar and ubiquitous, but not ones I'd ever really liked enough to look into. It's all very tasteful and adult and pleasant, just like all that early 70s chilled out James Taylor Joni Mitchell Cat Stevens Billy Joel Paul Simon easy listening stuff, but that means aesthetically conservative, predictable and kind of dull.

A classic Black Atlantic album from the multi-cultural wake of the slave trade and migration in Bristol, this album draws heavily on Jamaican dub, on British rave scene (via Detroit) electronica house and techno, soul & RnB, hip hop and reggae, slowing it all down and spacing it all out, opening up the sound to create more pockets, a more relaxed feel. The production is era-defining. They'd take this formula and improve on it on their next albums, but the three big tracks on here are just incredible: Safe From Harm, Blue Lines, Unfinished Symphony.

Song by song I just kept turning the volume down until it wasn't on anymore and that was a nice change.

Slow and stately country ballads with easy listening arrangements: nylon string guitar, piano, organ, cheesy strings, some nice horns and a light hand drum/bass rhythm section. His understated lead guitar playing on the nylon strings is great on a few tracks, simple, melodic, and spacious - says a lot with very little. Willie Nelson's warm baritone is the throughline on the album though: technically limited but aged and inviting, he croons his way through a set of jazz & country standards. It's an interesting companion to Ray Charles' 'Modern Sounds in Country' insofar as as we see a canonical artist interpreting the songbook - but it's not really a good representation of Willie Nelson's actual contribution to American music. Phases & Stages or the one with Waylon Jennings would be much better picks. That said, this sets an incredibly gentle relaxing mood - it's the audio equivalent of taking a hot shower after a dusty day.

I find it impossible not think about how calculated this all is, like, 'ok we need a song that's going to go on a million treadmill workout jams playlists, we need a song to hit the 27-36 tequila & kombucha cousin demo, we need to perfectly tread the line of being racy enough to get tweens excited but tame enough their moms don't mind' - but that's just mega pop production, so its hard to begrudge her specifically for it, it's just annoying to realize you're in the '34-43 working on the computer rock uncle demo' and that they successfully hit you with a few. And she did! Some of these songs are catchy as hell and have some amazing anthemic hooks. There's some really cool atmospheric textural stuff and kind of euphoric blissful spacey production I really enjoyed. It's upbeat and energizing without being obnoxious, propulsive beats and plenty of changes. It's not meant to challenge the listener at all and doesn't, but just delivers pure pop straight to the veins. It's meant to be a throwback to 80s synth pop, but it sounds like she was just stealing all the drum machines and keyboards and producers from the 2008-2013 indie synth scene, the whole vibe of people LCD Soundsystem imitations - the best of that stuff is pretty good, and it's not a bad idea to rip it off to make yourself zeitgeisty and one of the era's biggest stars.

Too much of an OK thing. A landmark in sample-based production, the problem is it is full of reminders of cool soul and jazz and reggae and bluegrass tracks I'd rather be listening to instead.

Heroin raga, this is an exercise in texture and pulse. No bass, no drums - the rhythm that there is comes from the trance-like vamping strings and droned guitars that disolve into frenzied feedback. Flat monotone vocals with all the enthusiasm of an exhausted au pair singing a lullaby, a great performance of alienated ennui, of a bored hipster affect aggresively unimpressed with everything that could possibly exist. I know the mood, but it's not exactly fount of creativity. Way too much irritating flute. These Days is very good though, the only song that comes close to her songs on the banana album.