Reviews by dohej

It sounds like the music that a band in a movie about the rise and fall of a shaggy glam rock band with a real bastard singer would play and you'd think, hey that sounds pretty decent for a band from a movie, they really nailed how a band like that would sound.

Some good atmospheric reverb&tremolo guitar sounds. The songs are dark and moody with a driving propulsive energy that suits the histrionic spiraling vocals. He has a very vegemite hit or miss voice, and it's a miss for me. That makes paying close attention to the lyrics - which meant to be the selling point? The storytelling and the characters? - a bit tough since it means focusing in on the most annoying part of the music: his pseudo Jim Morrison goth crooning.

I guess they have a cult following, from decent live shows and lyrical lore, but I wonder if it isn't maybe among people who, in general, prefer movies to music? Even the cover suggests that interpretation.

Alternates between heavy industrial brooding beats that set a dark ominous atmosphere and jazzy RnB numbers with a warm relaxed feel. On one of the industrial tracks (Boss), the vocals are pushed into the red, distorting and fuzzing out, matching the intensity and aggression of the delivery. Venom has a tense string part and ride cymbal part that's there to ratchet up the anxiety underneath the heated quickfire verses. On the jazzy tracks (Wounds, Selfish) everything is buttery and smooth, a quick but deliberate unhurried flow taking turns with gospel/soul backing vocals. A real lush vibe from the bass and piano, horns and guitar, even some flute. 101 FM sounds like the hip hop take on the hold music for a Chinese Restaurant. Inflo's production is excellent, lots of live instruments that come through crystal clear and give a real sense of space and presence to the recording. Succinct, self-assured, and coherent without being repetitive, this is a super solid album I wouldnt otherwise have known to pick out from the crop of Little London rappers.

Favorites: Selfish, Boss, Venom, Wounds

Sometimes the dumbest things are the best things. This is one of those times.

Common's delivery isn't lightning speed, but he works his way through some serious verses here - more reflexive and inviting than the relentless 'lyrical mystical' style - smoother and easier going, this oozes relaxed confidence. There's a solid verse/chorus structure to all these songs, bringing the lyrical excursions back to a central hook and thematic idea every minute or so. The production is all Gospel soul and funk woven together for some a rich warm sound over pretty laid back loungey beats.

Genius pastiche of the Mafia movie genre, appropriating it's poses and cliches to present scenes of a youth spent hustling. Playful, funny, and deadly serious - this album is an endless stream of verses from a hugely talented groups of MCs coming into their prime. Coming in a couple years before the total commercialization of hip hop and it's total take over of pop, there's a lot more room in the wu-tang formula for this expansive wordy delivery with minimal use of refrains. The production is stripped down - basic drum-machine beats, crackling samples, and simple melodic hooks on a loop give a cinematic atmosphere that gives a bare bones rhythmic structure and mood for the rappers to flit around.

Bright and jangly up-tempo songs that channels the Beatles and, with a tad harder edge, lays the ground for power pop to come. Great lightly crunchy guitar sound. There's a near constant backing vocal part that takes on the function an organ might have of giving some bedding/continuity alongside the more stochastic guitar/drums parts in addition to being a harmonic counterpoint. A few songs (Mr Churchill, Australia) get a lot looser, delving into a trancey psych jam that has an almost Can feel to it.

They kick this one off with one of their best songs, and a perfect opener - the fade in, uneasy tremelo as the signature guitar part emerges conjuring a storm and the vocals jump in begging for relief. Like most of their stuff in this period, the rest album finds them doing Southern-face: it's all drawling vocals, slack slide guitar riffs, harmonica trills, honky tonk pianos, and a lot of choogle. This material is loose and fun and fine as it goes, but not as good as the some of the other stuff they put out in this golden era of Rolling Stones Americana. You could condense the best of this, Exile, Goats Head Soup, Sticky Fingers, and Beggars Banquet down into three perfect 8-song albums that'd all be five-stars. It's their best era but still pretty bloated, this album especially. The middle three minutes of Midnight Rambler is a rave up that goes nowhere, fades out, then comes back for no good reason - like they're trying to do a 60s Grateful Dead/Allman Brothers thing, but don't really get how to improvise because Mick Jagger can't not sing for a more than 50 seconds.

They have some amazing songs across their catalogue, but this is the cure's album masterpiece: 70 minutes of lush heartbreaking miserable bliss to wallow in. The washy sort of out of focus synth/guitar textures wash over you in waves and waves of warm beautiful atmospheric gloom. The drum and bass parts draw you further in creating a trance to lose yourself in. But when you're cascading and adrift, the lead guitar comes in, the sweet in the bittersweet brew: jangly and clear but drenched in reverb and delay and phaser, it picks out instantly memorable bright melodic lines that float gloriously above the trance and cut through the gloom, pointing up towards something light and ephemeral (Picture of You, Plainsong). Or it finds a swirling path through a minor key deeper into the bleak darkness (Last Dance, Disintegration). After a few heavy tracks in a row they mix up with a pure pop banger like Lovesong or the groove of Lullaby. Fascination Street brings it all together, a hard-driving pop-industrial beat/riff, a miasma of syths and guitars, and an anthemic belted out vocals. Robert Smith isn't gifted with huge virtuouso range or power, but uses his fragile voice to perfect effect, pushing beyond its capacity into a vulnerable wavering tone that perfectly suits the lyric's mix of pained anger, lovelorn infatuation, and nervous hope.

#1 in bands you'll hear 1001 times before you die whether you like it or not. Probably a 2 on its merits musically, but subtract 1 for how many times I've been subjected to it. The first 30-90 seconds of these songs where they play a catchy little intro lick then run through the main riff are pretty decent - the guitar sound is bright and noisy with the compressed tightness of an overdriven Marshall, pure rock. But then the vocals kick in and it's awful and the guitar just play the same dull riff over and over. So many of these songs sound just like each other. Think about what else was happening in rock and pop around 1977-1980 and this just sounds totally regressive. Music for grandads clinging on to being 14. AC/DC is so tame and rehearsed, lacking the exhilarating thrill and rawness of the actually fun great adolescent bands.

Such a discrepancy between the heavy noise the cover promises and the chilled out woozy grooves of the music. It's a mellow sunny album with it's feet grounded in mid tempo blues guitar rock and it's head in the clouds of excursions into lush & orchestral blissed out psych. Never got the hype with TRex though, it's all very competent and there's nothing I actively dislike but it's pretty plodding and a bit boring.

The soundtrack to depressing microwaved ravioli and cloying sentimentality. Musically, this genre for me is primarily associated with Looney Toons and the vocals with comedians using the style as a way to do bits. So its hard to take seriously as real pop and I expected to hate this, but it was better than I thought - there's plenty of swinging big band stuff with energetic horn parts and dynamic bass/piano interplay that makes up for the occasional plodding schmaltzy orchestral ballad. The vocals arent exactly my thing but he is a masterful performer oozing cool confidence and control. The melodic phrasing always has some little surprise like a downward resolution running against the grain or an unexpected modulation.

The scratching and rapping really suck and surely would have sounded old-fashioned even by 1989 standards. The pop RnB stuff, while still incredibly dated (those synths! those drum machines! the keyboard strings! that reverb tone! that rangey breathy vocal belting out the hook over a vaguely house beat!), has much more of a classic enduring quality just for being a lot of fun. Would be better if they cut 1-2 minutes off each song though - nowhere near enough ideas to flesh out all these 5 minute tracks.

Favorites: Inna City Mamma, Love Ghetto, Buffalo Stance

Incredible to think that this was one of the biggest British pop stars of the 80s - even if this didn't sell like her other albums, it's existence speaks to a much higher public demand/tolerance for wierdness and a level of artistic risk taking and experimentation at the top of the charts that no longer exists. The thing about experiments though is that they don't always turn out. This one finds Kate Bush leaning way into some of the most annoying aspects of her sound: the alternatingly fluterring operatic and chimpmonky vocals, the challenging melodic phrasing defined by huge leaps into the high range, and the extremely slow arhythmic compositions, and overuse of cheesy strings. The ornate baroque arrangements are pretty cool, lots of random instruments, synth tones, shimmering effects and textures.

Favorites: Leave it Open

If we think of classic rock as a genre rather than era, this album is one of the few that makes the case that their is some continued relevance and room for new contributions to the genre in the 2010s beyond bar bands and tribute acts. Part of the early 2000s rock revival indie era, The Black Keys along with the White Stripes, BRMC, Hives etc kept trying to make garage happen again. They're my favorite of that cluster of bands, and this is both their commercial breakthrough and fullest realization of that vision.

If you're going to be a guitar/drum duo, both of those parts need to be top tier, and this album pulls it off with flair. Even if you've never heard this, it feels very familiar: there's nothing super original in it, but the guitar work is a masterful and tasteful display of rock playing that's digested the rock canon - a huge range of tones (fuzzy, overdriven, bright clean, heavy, soaring, jangly, muted), rhythm parts that establish a solid groove and keep things interesting with fills and licks without being distracting or showy, some ripping solos that don't go on too long, total command of the pedal board with dialed in delays/reverb, textural tremelo, whooshing phasers/flange and a bit of wah. There's room left over to fill in with fun bass/organ parts to round out the sound. The drums are similar - nothing spectactular but perfectly in the pocket and committed to a groove. The vocals are played like a guitar on the edge of breakup, pushing into the red for a bit of scuzz around the edges of the verging on falsetto belted out impassioned delivery.

Favorites: Ten Cent Pistol, Sinister Kid, Tighten Up, Black Mud

The culmination of the post-hardcore indie trajectory before it's absorption into the majors as alt rock in the wake of Nirvana, the Pixies had forged a wicked blend of aggressive and abrasive punk sounds, slowed it down a tad and mixed in melodic elements from surf, angular guitars from post-punk, and some new-wave beats. Nothing on here is as good as the best songs on Doolittle (or Surfer Rosa) and you can kind of tell it's a band that has already accomplished it's perfect form and is trying to do more of that. But, they are damn good at doing that thing still. The vocals are just at the edge of control, a voice breaking yelling out the lyrics' abstract images. They're obviously most famous for their use of dynamics, mashing the distortion pedal to kick things up and switch intensities on a dime, but on this album they expand how they're doing dynamic juxtapositions. On Ana & Havalina, the bright clean tone on the lead guitars cuts through the dirty mix, highlighting the understated poignancy of the lines, keeping the fuzz at bay until it can't anymore and is overwhelmed. Joey Santiago is the star of this one, playing great melodic lead parts tying these songs together and standing out against the sometimes repetitive riffs.

Favorites: Cecilia Ann, Ana, Havalina, Down to the Well, Hang Wire, All over the world

A more eclectic version of The Ramones, X has all the downstroke chugga chugga chugga distorted guitar, but mixes it up with more direct influences from surf, rockabilly, and funk for a slightly less teenage sound that straddles the vintage punk/post punk styles. Seeds of pop-punk and emo here as well as hardcore - fast riffs, (top notch) active melodic bass, catchy singing and even some harmonies.

Favorites: Adult Books, In this house, Universal Corner, White Girl

Magpie songwriting with bits of reggae, Andean pipes, jazzy folk, Django jazz, overdriven electric guitar, bluesy finger picking, to go along with the main strummy acoustic sound. The recording and mixing is crisp and balanced - every part sits just right and there's a ton of breathing room making this very relaxing and unobtrusive background music verging on boring. That said, there's a lot of subtle songwritery stuff going on in the chord changes, voice leading and all that if you tune in and pay close attention.

Favorites: run that body down, peace like a river

Synth pop revival from France in the vein of Future Islands or La Roux. Bright and upbeat tones with a darker minor key mood give it that darkly euphoric bittersweet feel. Tastefully indulgent and skirting the line between earnestness and irony, the album is full of all sorts of corny stuff from the Nile Rodgers disco guitars to the cheesy synth/keyboard patches. Falsetto singing: fragile and introspective until it reaches for the big power lines. It's all pleasant enough, but it sounds like music for a Parisian H&M - trendy and fun presentation of glossy surfaces that suggest a darker understory.

The most Black Sabbath sounding of the grunge cohort, this album is all about the top of the line sludgy sludgy riffs coupled with some great guitar lead lines that reinforce the main idea before going off course into some wah-wah territory. The chorus-effect on the dirty leads sounds really cool, bringing some bright tone tone the dark moody pallette. The vocals are the star though, soaring and diving they cut through the thick heavy mire of the slow grooves, belting out some massive anthemic lines. How he makes YEAH HERE COME THE ROOTSER sound so badass is hard to explain. They shouldn't held responsible for the Butt Rock that came after them, but you can see the template here - slow distorted and heavy with a hint of groove and a pissed-off sad guy wailing over top of it. They're so good at it you can see why it spawned so many pale imitators.

Sample heavy and uptempo electronic music - I never really get what this kind of music is for, its not exactly danceable club music and is too busy to work as background music and too stupid to be worth paying attention to. It's what they play in a heist movie during a quick cut montage, or what you have to shout over to have a conversation because someone thought it'd be a good idea to have an annoying DJ at a reception but it's too loud in an echoey venue.