Reviews by dohej

A fun blast of 80s cheese - fwompy bass, disco guitars, unabashed synths laying down some funky pop.A great voice.delivers a strong vocal performance and some catchy hits. But it's basically a Stevie Wonder / Michael Jackson / Prince photocopy, so why not just listen to the real deal?

Favorites: who's loving you? Wishing well

Lots of the songs are basically genre tributes and so don't feel especially original. You get the sense that this is a performing bar musician comfortable doing a lot of sounds but without a sound of his own. The consistent point is the vocal delivery and lyrical POV - he has a very distinctive and well developed sense of melody and acerbic lyrics. It's mostly all pretty uptempo and driving with a consistently restless feeling and relentless energy. The backing band brings a lot of that, plenty of fun accents and fills to go with the solid bass/drum foundation. He doesn't slow it down too often, and when he does it stands out: Allison is a classic lament to seeing a fleeting crush be with someone else in a deeply disappointing way.

The best part of New Order (apart from the hard-driving bass) is the transition from the dark minor to the uplifting major - but this Balearic inspired album mostly sticks to the majors, which combined with the pure corny synth tones gives the whole thing a very candyfloss feel. Sometimes that sugar rush really hits just right though and a wave of pure 80s cocaine indie disco fever washes through your veins. The bass is just as good as ever and the choruses are really huge. His voice is so limited and he rarely pushes it beyond a very narrow range close to a speaking voice - the melodic phrasing within that is also pretty limited, but very much part of the signature New Order sound.

As much as I love New Order, this isn't one of the albums I would have chosen for this list. But, they're a singles band not an albums band, but I guess you can't just include Substance, even though it really their most iconic release. Listening to it more closely than I had before, and not evaluating for what it's missing (the remants of Joy Division and post-punk), it stands on it's own very nicely and is pretty much a perfect dance rock album from this era alondside albums like Screamadelica. It's an intersting transitional album between the new romantics 80s synth pop sound and the 90s house/techno Ibiza rave thing.

Loved this when I first heard it a few years after it came out but assumed that the emphasis on the storyline would make detract from it as a re-listen, but not too much. It's still a very funny and closely observed take on being at a bit of a loose end as an aimless youf all hanging on little details and clever lines expresses the quick escalation of a temper around minor irritations, the sense of purposelessness, being bored of your friends, the desire for something more but easiness of feeling defeated along the way, banal disappointments from everyone around you, the ordinary shitiness and small-mindedness of everyday life, simpe contentment turning into self hatred, the annoyance of going out and not really enjoying yourself but kind of trying, hearbreak and accrimony. The production is simple and effective, basic mood setting beats link the feel and emotions of the story to the rhythms and color of the music - the modal shift in empty cans is perfect, but mostly the music settles back, letting the verses take the lead moving things forward.

Favorites: Blinded by the Lights, Such a Twat, Fit But You Know It, Dry Your Eyes

Now a camp classic, but camp is about knowing something sucks and loving it anyway for the lols. I don't understand why we're all supposed to retcon this into being good. bUt ShE's aN iCoNiC pOp KwEeN! Who cares? Does pretending this is good somehow make it worth the abuse we now know she endured bc of it? Celebrating this is just celebrating the abusive corporate monoculture that victimized her. Sure, it was a defining sound of its time, but so was kid rock and the chilli's baby back ribs song. This music sucked in 1999 and it sucks now and nostalgia for pre 9/11 adolescence isn't fixing anything.

Usually a teenage release is a nasty mess, but this one has some real spunk. 'Alright' on its own makes this worth a listen, an unbridled blast of underage hubris and swaggering world at your feet energy, pure joyous optimism. They won't let you make em like that now of days. The rest of the album is less distinctive, drawing on the familiar pallette of British 90s guitar pop, but they do it as well as just about anyone: bright and crunchy guitars, propulsive bass, hyperactive drums and exuberant vocals. The Arctic Monkeys really stole these fellas' bag and ran with it, huh

Tight, heavy and high-strung nnu-metal that stops and starts on a dime. Great tension building breakdowns, moody intros, and some pretty huge riffs. Doesn't have the rapping element of nu-metal, but does the bass/guitars perfectly - thick, compressed, down-tuned sludge tone with a bit of groove to the riffs. The vocals are the most unique element, a snarled rapid fire delivery with melodies using the harmonic scales for a slighly exotic flair, they push into the red for some intense operatic belting andlow growling screaming. Not sure why this one got picked over Toxicity, which made a much bigger impact and took their whole sound to its fullest expression...

Favorites: Spiders

Easy going relaxing jazz. The melodies and solos flit playfully around the rhythms where the beats never hit quite when you'd expect, the distinctive time signatures keep everything slightly and delightfully off kilter.

Prog on easy mode. Peak 70s bloat. A aliant effort at making a perfectly smooth album. Like using a firehose to fill a half pint glass with Paul McCartney's worst impulses. Or if Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote a musical based on Space Oddity. Once in a while there's a bridge that really hits, but it's a bridge over something you'd want to hear between to things you don't.

The 1990s 'world-music' sheen diminishes the forecefulness of the previous generation's afrobeat, buffing off the edges and taming the wildness of the Kuti sound, turning it into something a lot more generic as it circulates primarily for a European/American audience. Femi's band's keyboard tones, super compressed bass sound, and bordering-on smooth jazz sax bits really detract from the hard-hitting funk fury of Fela. There are still some fantastic deep grooves here though and the horn riffs really rip. "No Shame" is a powerful anthem for migrant labor, reminding workers to take pride in who they are despite the degradations they face.

70s prog with a goofy sci-fi style title, not an auspicious begining. Randy California is an all time great name so +1 for that. Some of it pretty basic blues guitar rock - fine but boring and done better by others. The more original stuff is more exploratory, combining that ye olde acoustic folk sound that English bands loved for some reason with wierder instruments/arrangements in a vague approximation of Zappa. Some of that stuff suffers from the prog tendency to shove way too many ideas into a song. Some songs are doing that theatrical Ziggy Stardust thing, very annoying. The best parts are the kind of trippy spacey songs that eschew those fussier prog elements and let the fuzzier riffs breathe. But this is basically the turd that you can polish enough to turn into Boston.

Favorites: When I Touch You, Street Worm, Rougher Road

Playful and uplifting, this is an unbridled expression of youthful goofiness and pure creativity combined with a pathbreaking flow and refined taste in the sampling/production. Soul, funk, jazz, country, psych all paired with simple drum-machine parts and scratching give this a party feel of sharing records and swapping verses, roasting each other, doing bits, telling stories, flirting. Somber spiritual moments about love and transcendence flip immediately into teasing each others' gear and BO. Swagger, joy, reflexivity, and unmatched cool - the whole Native Tongues indie Hip Hop thing had it all.

What a voice! What songs! What a performance! What harmonies! What a recording! Hot damn.

The plucky little guitar parts on the second half take away from it, giving it a dinky jazz-psuedo-bluegrass sound that distracts from the core strengths of the album. It's like they accidentally left on a track of the engineer noodling along on top of the recordings. Otherwise, this totally nails the arrangements/instrumentation. The bass is great, the clean little guitar stabs are perfect, even the strings aren't too cheesy and I loved the Spanish bolero style horns on Can't Love em All. But that voice, damn!

The up-tempo funk/RnB stuff with a full band is great, lots of intricate interlocking parts, Stevie-Wonder level textures/instrumetnation and loads of melodic energy - they jam some of the songs out with a borderline psychadelic flavor to go with the James Brown style rave-up. Their covers really bring their own thing to enliven what are originally some pretty bland soul RnB pap. Fuzzy wahwah guitars over basically a disco song is a surprisingly good combination, I'd never heard the full version of That lady, but it rips! Same for What it Comes Down To & Sunshine & Summer Breeze. The slow smooth ballads are kind of nauseating though - needs some acidic tang to go with the molasses!

Those are some pretty big beats you have there, it'd be a shame if something happened to them.

I used to really love this album but can't remember why - good feelings left over from discovering them via Yoshimi and seeing their amazing live show a couple times? It's pretty listless for long stretches. Dreamy slides into dreary. Too many songs never really get going and when they do collapse back into themselves before too long. It feels like inflating a balloon with a hole in it. The strings and elaborate orchestral arrangements kind of bog it down and don't let the riffs really come through. There are some good moments of course. The sense of melody is great and even though its thin, underpowered, and just off key his voice is really affecting in it's wavering faltering earnestness. Some pretty moments of quite reflectivity, some nice little guitar parts...

Favorites: Prize, Spoonful, Superman

The guiltiest pleasure. There's something that deeply and essentially just sucks about this band, but if you suspend critical judgement and let the cheesy vibes wash over you it's possible to feel that easy feeling, like the warm fading rays of a desert sunset and the chill of an evening breeze. But the you notice how trite it is or remember what creeps they are and it jerks you back to the vacuous reality of sad 70s corporate rock.

This is what the future felt like in the 1990s. There would be two jobs: hacking and making techno to play at the permanent rave happening in the basement of an abandoned factory.

This album serves both ends, mostly chill ambient stuff to put in your ears and hack into the mainframe with the odd harder edge dance track for the rave. It's decent at the latter and good at the former in a boring but pretty way. So it'll get put on a work playlist and listened to much more often than stuff I like more but is too engaging.

Funkadelic, Prince, Stevie Wonder, Hendrix... he's copying from good source material. But the problem with wearing your influences on your sleeve is that when you're this bad it just reminds everyone how much better music there is they could be listening too instead. Insipid lyrics. "There is a woman who does drugs and has sex for money, ain't that a shame." "What if we like, did a love, instead of like, doing a hate?" It's so embarrasing when dumb rock guys really go for it with the deep social issues songs. Thin grating voice. Slow repetitive songs that just play the one-line choruses over and over again. The sax is good at least and Fear has a a pretty good groove until the boring riff kills it.

It's not that its bad, just that it's nothing. They had the crazy idea to make stripped back blues based rock music with some fuzzy distorted guitars and emphasis on big riffs, for some reason this is very exciting to a large number of people and they're treated as important artists. They'd be a fun local band to see live doing throw-back rock, but 7 Nation Army catching on as a stadium rock anthem elevated them way out of their league. I guess being one of the last big bands standing holding a guitar and being very deferential towards rock tradition has meant they're carrying the torch for rock dudes. But they're scrapping the bottom of that barrel and coming up with pretty minimal ideas.