Reviews by dohej

Surf punk from the beaches of, er, Massachusetts. This album induces whiplash in all the best ways: stop-start quiet-loud melodic-chaotic tension-release. Squirmy little guitar leads explode into huge riffs and even doubled up harmonic lines. The culmination of the post-hardcore wave, they also borrow liberally from the poppier 80s college rock sound for a bit of jangle, a knack for an extremely catchy chorus and fun lines to belt out. The band is a tightly coiled device that explodes on a whim. The lyrics are all abstract imagery taken from a world of industrial pollution, disillusioned relationships and dreamy free association. Not every song is a winner, but there are 6 or 7 all time great tracks on here.

The first half is big and bold but sometimes woozy and swoony brass band full of glorious horns just bubbling up. RC delivers a hot vocal performance that brings it to a boil. It's big band jazz arrangments of classic blues. The second half is piano ballads with string adornment that cool it all the way down. This verges more into schmaltz, but the depth and range of the vocals overcomes the corny studio treatment its subjected to.

Synth-driven and very atmospheric 80s New wave. Lots of high-tone keys that texture and convey lead/counter-melodies. They get lots of strange and experimental tones/sounds from these keys - like a maxed out chorus pedal sound, a melting song-stopping effect. Vocals are a coy tenor, variously operatic and snapped out (a bit like Bauhaus). There is some swirling textural guitar work creating a stormy unsettling feeling on some tracks. Overall, it's a mixture of poppy major key songs and some dancey tracks but generally more minor key drones/dirges. Reverby drums add a lot of space.

Favorites: Party Fears Two, Arrogance Gave Him Up, Gloomy Sunday, Better This Way

Never heard of this, but (even though the album came out once punk was already dead) it's great 1st wave British punk so basically just regular ol' rock played fast and sloppy with a bit of a snarl to it. Classic teenage themes of being bored, rejecting religion, fighting bullies, staying up late and hanging with the fellas. Lots of chaotic energy, a lingering pop sensibility that leads to some very catchy melodies, and despite the adverts, songs with 3+ chords! The Great British Mistake is incredibly prescient for some 70s punks - staring complacently at your own past as history passes you by. Hmm...

Favorites: One Chord Wonders, Bored Teenagers, Newboys, On Wheels, Great British Mistake

The first Stones album I got into, a sprawling masterpiece of loose blues, twangy country, and gospel harmonies. The recording captures something magical in every performance and the production leaves a lot of space for it all to live in. There's a lot going on in every song, and it can feel crowded like a bunch of people jostling around a bar, but then eases up and opens out for an impromptu jam in a shabby living room - a crappy old piano in the corner, a couple of just about in tune guitars noodling along, some tipsy singers chasing the melody, a guy with a sax walking in to blast a few notes, a laconic drummer doing as little as possible, a bassist taking it most seriously and having the most fun of anyone...so good. This is hands down the Stones' best album and along with the Dead's live shows this same year probably the highpoint of the early 70s country-rock thing.

Prog dorks are so impressed with themselves for having heard classical music. Who cares?! Get over it. This one is better than the yes album bc there is some cool synth stuff (roundabout) and bc they abandoned the flutey folk sound for something with harder riffs (5%) with bass parts that rip (heart of the sunrise) and even coming close to having a groove (the fish). But good lord this crap is always on the precipice of being extremely annoying. Totally incoherent songs where 30 seconds of a good idea immediately ruined by a hard right turn into some goofy nonsense.

Favorites: the fish, the first couple of minutes of heart of the sunrise, the part of America where they're doing an Allman Brothers parody until he starts singing

The backing band on the first half has an incredibly loose and relaxed jamming feel, like they're warming up playing a few familiar numbers everyone has known forever and played a million times. So much of the energy in these versions comes from there, and seems to inspire Dylan to deliver the vocals more freely,.with more to play off and a strong beat to work off. Subterranean wouldn't work nearly as well solo acoustic, so it's so funny that that's the part all the folk dorks got mad at. When it's just him and acoustic guitar and there's a lot less to balance out his annoying voice it's pretty grating, Gates of Eden is just verse after tedious verse and 3 chords for like 6 minutes. It's alright ma has a bit more dynamism and variety, but drags on too. The return of the bass and another guitar on baby blue lifts that song: gentle countermelodies and simple harmony giving so much more to latch onto and deepening the feeling. Some songs just fade out or just stop feeling unfinished - great song writer but not a great arranger - which is why he's been covered so well so many times.

One of the real standouts in the class of 2000 rap golden age, this album is overflowing with musical ideas, huge hooks, kick-ass cameos, hilarious verses, and unstopable energy. Like the rap Prince, Outkast is a sponge steeped in American music from soul and funk to rock and hip hop to disco and house. Electrocute that sponge until it squeezes out an album and you get Stankonia, an eclectic and thrillingly produced 75 minutes (dear year 2000, you don't need to fill up the damn cd!) of otherworldly beats and Atlien rhymes.

Love the trip hop production - great beats and nice spacey atmosphere. Few things have ages as poorly as scratching though, and this album has way too much of it. The flow is smooth and playful, building up the stupid character of Dr Octagon and his porno-bio-political universe. It's definitely more rap for rock critics who prefer a dense lyrical concept album over the actually popular hit-oriented party rap.

This album is nothing if not a testamanent to the raw human urge to create. There's something inherently self-indulgent and obnoxious about this whole project, but they do pretty much pull it off - it's more twee folk inspired indiepop than anyone could ever need, but hard to begrudge a bit of eccentricity and commitment to the bit. Systematically trying to find so may different approaches musically and lyrically to such a familiar topic does produce some great juxtapositions of perspective and feeling.

Somehow it's both eclectic in its genre borrowing and very samey - inevitable after 3 hours I guess. They're good at powerpop, indie folk, alt country, and that kind of high-desert Leonard Cohen meets Calexico thing (Underwear), but very bad at gospel, piano ballads, euro electopop, and all the kinds of jazz.

Some poignant turns of phrase and disarming melodies, lots of pretty guitar sounds, the odd synth lead, lots of duds and plenty of keepers - again, inevitable after 3 hours. Hard to be negative about an album with so many great songs, but there is SO MUCH FILLER. 20 Love songs would be a nearly perfect album. With 69 songs there's so much opportunity to make terrible decisions, like sticking a flute on the otherwise good 60s psych pop Sweet-Loving Man or the excessive stereo panning on Abigail. The really low pitch singing songs are unbearable, especially when he goes into that amelodic warbling (Cactus, Busby) and the ukelele based songs are as irritating as all ukelele based songs (Pretty Girl is Like, Nothing Matters when we're Dancing). It's hard not to resent them for creating the template for Sufjan Stevens and wave of crooning cloying banjo/ukelele twats who followed suit.

Favorites: All My Little Words, I Don't Want to Get Over You, Sweet-Loving Man, Time enough for Rocking, Grand Canyon, No One Will Ever Love You, Papa Was a Rodeo, Epitaph for My Heart, Underwear, I'm Sorry I Love You, Death of Ferdinand de Saussure, Yeah oh Yeah! How to Say Goodbye

The backstreet boys if you dipped them in glue and dragged them through New Wave. Incredibly glossy production and dandelion light vibes. Ahead of it's time, but the bright lightness is a dark ominous sign of the boyband bubblegum tsunami that the pop factory would unleash a few short years later. A few welcome tastes of the signature pet shop boys speak-sing delivery (Yesterday When I Was Mad) and some nice rise and fall melodies with pretty distinctive phrasing, but for the most part they've moved on from the 80s synth pop sound for a fast Scandi techno pop thing that is really not my thing.

Pure kinetic perfection that appropriates all the most exciting energies of its era to create something unheard and strangely alien. Relentless grooves, complex poly-rhythms, hyperactive guitars that are at once post-punk and disco, new-wave sythns, funk bass, Krautrock trance, lush gospel harmonies, intriguing imagistic lyrics and off the wall charismatic vocal delivery. Nervous, ferenetic and anxious and yet totally self-assured in vision and delivery. I've listened to this thousands of times and hope to listen thousands more, one of the best albums ever recorded.

'There she goes' is extremely annoying, just slathered in cloying John Cusack face vibes. The rest is Beatles knock off indie pop for the post-Smiths era with a garage rock twist. It has a nice jangle to it, some psychedelic flair, and the hooks are strong. It gets better and better as it progresses though, dropping the bubblegum pop and getting into more exploratory deconstructed territory with a darker edge.

Favorites: feelin', freedom song, failure, looking glass

Very meditative - lots of long repetitions of pretty simple vamps to establish a harmonic center and rhythm and then free ranging exploration of the melodic possibilities that affords. Some cool emergent stuff where ideas from one hand feed into the other and impromptu phrases turn into repeated figures and themes. Like a lot of long-form improvisation you can focus in on the details or passively let it absorb you to set a mood. Perfectly suited to the work I needed to get done this morning. I've listened to this a lot over the years without ever knowing the background story behind it.

The recording sounds like shit, he only knows two chords and the drummer only does the train chugging beat, but the songs rule, his voice is incredible and it's a hell of a performance. The harmonies and playful back and forth with June Carter bring a dose of levity to a set that's mostly dark story songs about dying at work, being on the lam or getting locke dup. This one isn't quite as good as Folsom, but the cover is way cooler.

As the retro machine recycled flower power for a new generation high on ecstasy and the end of the Cold War, it unleashed some of the most insanely upbeat and joyfully naive music of all time in the early 90s to spiritually balance out the dourness of grunge. There's one idea and it's not that good, but they pursue it to its logical conclusion and its hard to be too curmudgeonly about such a goofy album, all they want is a good beat after all, and they have more than a couple to share. I was wondering where the groove was, now I know: it's in the heart!

Very 2009 indie: in the high end you get shimmering glossy textures from the guitars and synths, in the low end there's a head-bobbing groove but too slow to really get you moving, this leaves middle open for a spacey ethereal feel. The bass keys guitar and vocals swap interlocking melodies in a round in this room. The sense of drama in this spacey pretty vibe comes from the vocals' operatic delivery. Perfectly fine in design and execution but hardly an essential must-hear album.

The combination of drones, complex but lowkey & low tempo percussion, looping recursive melodies, and general spaciousness makes this a very relaxing meditative album. It remains very understated and doesn't work it's way up to an intense peak the way other Indian Classical Music I'v heard does.

Mid-tempo and lushly orchestrated with a massive instrumental ensemble, this is an affecting rumination on having been young from the other side of a kind of disillusioned weariness: "one day they'll see it's long gone." It's an early onset middle age album, and a bit boring at times - partly as a means to produce the feelings its about: uneasiness, tired tension, vague foreboding. But there are some pulsating synths and soaring guitars that whip into a frenzy every so often too. The vocals are searching and warm and earnest, mostly eschewing the massive arena choruses for a breathy 70s singer songwriter sound. They seem very invested in the album as a form, this isn't quite an indie rock opera or concept album, but it is a very cohesive hour thematically and sonically that approcahes its themes from a few vantage points and builds to a big peak. It's got momentum to, like an econoline van rolling down a long hill, but it in a cinematic way. Sprawl II really brings it home beautifully: a synthy neon sound glowing over a dark gloaming.

Favorites: Half Light II, Wasted Hours, Sprawl II

You know how everyone thinks Otis Redding songs would be way better without the vocals? Well finally an album that's just the band!