Reviews by dohej

drowsy and uplifting - it's the feel of an icey cola in the shade on a baking hot day. Afro-cuban jazz combining Spanish guitar, Caribbean rhythms, jazz piano and salsa horns with close vocal harmonies. Loads of harmonic minor/phrygian melody for that distinctive phrasing. Could listen to this all day.

The foundation of the songs are fairly standard bluesy pop rock structures gussied up with Zappa's signature baroque doo-wop and jazz approach to composition, zany arrangements and instrumentation, and his satirical view on both the 60s mono-culture and emerging counter culture. Like lots of Zappa stuff, this plays with the boundary between novelty songs and real rock. He's at once one of the most serious, curious, and experimental composers in the rock cannon and one of the goofiest exponents of musical and lyrical silliness. It means his work both rewards careful attention and relistening, but also becomes more tiresome and less exciting the more you hear it. 'Trouble Every Day' for instance is a perfect execution of the California psych blues-rock genre but also demonstrates Zappa's boredom with and scepticism of the scene surrounding it. 'Help I'm a Rock' takes this even further with a Kafkaesque premise for a dissociative freak out anchored in a trance-inducing bass phrase - it's ludicrous but extremely good.

Hard album to make sense of out of context - made for a party and a parody of the party, it's an artifact of a multi-national european dance scene and chaotic 80s postmodernist dada, it's hard to imagine this was ever intended to be listened to off youtube sitting on a sofa. Though it works unexpectedly well for a sunny Scottish winter weekend afternoon. The first half is hedonistic trance: big beats house music full with a hip hop flair from the samples and the odd rap verse. The second half is the hang over: ambiently melancholy and reflexive with slower tracks, strings and churchy lap steel sounding synths, and a reggae dub feel.

Favorites: The White Room, Build a Fire, 3am eternal

There are a few good riffs and heavy sounds on here that presage what Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin would extend in the following years. There are also some real stinkers (Blue Condition, yikes) too though, and a lot of it just middling. Brave Ulysses is decent, but basically just a first draft of White Room. Plenty of fun guitar playing, but Clapton has to the luckiest right place/right time musician - just being around as a competent blues guy when fuzz and wah-wah pedals came out and plugging into that gives him this reputation as a pioneering wizard. The falsetto vocals are so annoying. I guess they were an exciting live band that jammed these songs out beyond the confines of mid 60s blues rock - the way the bass/drums hit on here I can see how that would work, but as a studio album it doesn't really capture that thrill.

Industrial soul that's forward looking and deeply rooted. Emerging from BLM, the lyrics are urgently political; at their best they're an expression of pain and rage, at worst it's a ripped from online a mix of sloganeering and irritating self-help affirmation. It's never very subtle, but that's not what the moment demanded of artists - and the songwriting transcends the immediate overt 'relvance' of the content. Overall this is a stylistically rich blend of sounds from across a wide spectrum of genres woven into a cohesive affecting album pushing soul forward.

Stop Dem and Hard Life are haunting church harmonies set against slow brooding grooves that erupt into joyous gospel jazz. Sometimes these transitions feel very forced, like mandatory optimism - they can't end on a down note so have a sudden turn out of nowhere from the deep solemnity of dark techno into kind of vapid 'everything's going to be alright' hippy outro. Wildfires, Monsters, and Sorry Ain't Enough swap the techno-bass for a jazzy RnB bass and more organic arrangements that continues the dark melancholy feel. Bow, the song with Michael Kiwanuka, adds an afro-psych (fuzzy wah-wah guitars + soukous arpegios) sound and pan-African thematic to the mix. Eternal Life floats on a blissed-out synth pop riff that the vocalists orbit around and as the beat rises and falls. Miracles combines a reggae groove and a trip-hop vibe to make a platform for powerful back an forth between the main vocalist and her backing singers. The album closes on the Motown sounds of Pray Up Stay Up, a simple dinky piano+deep bass hook with a southern spiritual refrain looping along - the chant remains even after the fade out.

9 albums in two years does suggest they're a prolific collective, but might benefit from some curation. A trimmed down double album of this and Rise would be really incredible.

Favorites: Wildfires, Sorry Ain't Enough, Bow, Eternal Life, Monsters

Sloppy psychadelia, loose let it all hang out acid rock based in blues. The bass provides a solid danceable foundation with some pretty deep grooves, the drummer kicks it along, and then the extremely awesome sounding fuzzy as hell squealing guitar and Janis Joplin take it turns wailing over the top (or not and both just go for it at once). I used to have a licorice-type reaction to Janis Joplin's vocals, but they've grown on me. She's maxing out, pushing her voice into the red: there's something earnest about the hoarse, scratchy delivery where you can hear the effort exceeding the limits of her ability. Nothing complex musically here but its very effective and one of the most enduring artifacts of hippy culture. The guitar on here is really great - that 60s Santana, loud and fuzzy reverby mostly pentatonic thing that gets epic/melodic and then descents into scattered squealing - basic as hell, but so much fun.

Favorites: Oh Sweet Mary, I Need a Man to Love, Ball and Chain, Peice of My Heart

Bright and Jangly guitars doing electrified folk fingerstyle picking arpegios combined with perfect close harmonies, sutbly melodic bass, and some well crafted arrangements mean this album is overflowing with melodies. It's at once exuberant and tightly controlled, exemplifying the style of tight fractal baroque psychadelia that proliferates inwards (vs say the let it all hang out liquid light show psych of 60s Grateful Dead). Eight Miles High gets into more 'freak out' territory with frantic drumming and guitar spasms, but they reign that back in quickly with a tight harmony. The raga-style drone on Why portends a lot of what's to come, but again, even though it emerges nicely from the chorus they confine this to a tightly bracketed segment that ends with an abrupt shift back to the verse, keeping the psych on a leash. Not sure what it means that I think this band is best at arrangments and stuff, but also I prefer the Dead's version of I know you Rider and Hendrix's Hey Joe - I guess it's the looser more improvisatory open approach they take over the tightly structured Byrds versions. The sitars and sitar-sounding guitars all over this album are really great and they're probably the best at that renaissance 9?) sounding melody/harmony in rock.

This list has made me realize that I like the Byrds more than I'd thought, but 5 Byrds albums, 2 Gene Clark, 1 David Crosby Solo (+2 CSNY), and 1 Graham Parsons might make this the most over-represented group after only the Beatles.

Favorites: 5D, Eight Miles High, Wild Mountain Thyme, Why, Psychodrama City

If you'd asked me before starting the 10001 albums if I liked Bowie I'd have given a pretty unequivocal yes - but the more of his albums I listen to closely and completely the more I find him kind of tedious and annoying, with a few amazing songs scattered through a huge and hugely uneven catalogue. He's doing interesting stuff in pop culture, but I don't actually want to listen to most of most of his albums...

This album opens with a Rolling Stones style honky tonk track with that tack piano sound and bluesy guitars. The title track is more distinctive, chaotic pianos and woozy unresolved vocals harmonies flit around a solid groove on the bass. Then there's one of his signature show tune style story-sining tracks. Panic in Detroit sounds like Ziggy Stardust: bright overdrive and hand-drums for an upbeat glam sound that and climaxes with a fun dueling/harmonizing guitars panned left/right section. The doubled guitar lead sound re-appears on Time, another broadway style song with some cool piano/guitar interplay that opens up into an intense gospel meets glam choral outro. Let's Spend the Night Together gets back to the high tempo honky-tonk piano & dirty guitars Rolling Stones sound for a horny high energy rave up. Jean Genie is back to the glam blues formula: harmonica and a I-IV-V chord progression with theatrical singing all about fame and sexuality.

In a way, it doesn't make sense to rate this one as a discrete album. It's part of a whole multi-media project of film/video, stage performance, interviews etc through which he developed and played with this glam persona and carved out a space in pop culture and so much of that was responding to trends, styles, moods etc that would have made more immediate sense to a contemporary audience. It asks the important question, what if Mick Jagger was even more queer coded, but in a kind of space way? This album's meaning is so contingent on that multi-album multi-platform aesthetic project, that taken on its own outside of that context it isn't really that compelling: none of these are among his best songs and the sounds are all pretty familar stuff.

Stop trying to make sax happen. I've never gotten the hype with these guys despite giving it a good go a few times. They're like a band made from the most annoying bits of David Bowie's discography and a twist of prog-rock fussiness. The operatic singing doesn't do it for me, the guitar tone is like a beginner dialing a DS1 to 10, the compositions get in their own way and never let any rhythm build up. Somehow the sax ends up being the best bit.

"Dre makes the beats so fun-fun-funky" its true. You can hear the roots here of the production that would dominate the 90s emerging from the sparse drum-machine big BOOM BOOM TISH formula with layering samples from a deep well of jazz, funk and soul - taken to an extreme on what's basically a genre-reinvention cover of Express Yourself, but more varied on most of the other tracks that borrow from 4-7 songs at a time to put a rhythm together. Having a bunch of different rappers performing across the album keeps it fresh, but the songs are all too long/repetitve and the album could be trimmed down a bit too.

There's nothing complicated or difficult here in terms of musicianship or composition, yet it's absolutely original and genre-defining. Punk slowed down until it becomes atmosphere, a gloomy spacious and echoey void they fill in with a sparse reverby snare, stabbed dischordant guitar chords, searching lead lines, ominous bass riffs, and miserable melody. The sound of a haunted and grim post-industrial winter. Primal, despairing, perfect.

Funky new wave from the wierdly prolific Sheffield post-punk scene. Lots of that Nile Rodgers-style strat rhythm guitar high in the mix alongside the synths and cheesy keyboard sounds. Sometimes crosses into Talking Heads territory, sometimes into Donna Summer remix land. The very heavy disco influence and a sing-songy vocal style make this feel really plastic and goofy - but the Clockwork Orange reference in their name and the gang of Patrick Batemans on the album cover hint at a level of playful post-industrial cocaine satire going on here alongside the earnest embrace of some of the most excessively silly in retrospect 80s excess that's part of a liberation from the tiresome self-seriousness of authenticity-punk/rock.

The albums opens with some uplifting major key synth pop with a melancholy undercurrent, like a spiritual New Order. The bass is driving in a hard 4/4 time and the wave patterns on the synths accumulate into mesmerizing rhythmic layers ala Kraftwek, topped off by shimering keyboard melodies. This style alternates with more slowed down bleak introspection with long low drones and drums that clatter out of synch and out of the mix. In 'Georgia' we're back in pure pop territory almost Gary Numan, with a bright high synth lines weaving together more of a groove feel in the bass/rhythm parts. Guitars kick in on Begining of the End with a chiming clean chorus tone arpegio that really rips through the synth pallette. The vocals are classic 80s British electo-pop (a bit like Depeche Mode?) with a spoken feeling that's mostly low but breaks into song and reaches up for the emotional climax. The second vocalist (on Souvenir) has a higher range, but similar slow enunciated nursery rhyme delivery.

I'd heard of but never listened to this band, I guess they barely on the radar in the US in the 90s/00s before the LCD Soundsystem era revival of interest in 80s synth stuff - but this seems like a big step in combining the ambience of Eno and the trancey robo-disco of Kraftwerk with a pop emphasis on catchy melody and radio friendly song structures.

Favorites: She's Leaving, Joan of Arc (Maid), Begining of the End, Extended Souvenir

Surely there's nothing left to say about the vocal performance on this one: deeply emotional, sensitive and hyper controlled, fully attuned to the music. The backing band is incredible and the sound is amazing - lush, vibrant, and rich but full of room and atmosphere - some of the best bass playing recorded to go with memorable horns parts (the sax intro to What's Going On has to be the among most recognizable few notes), keys, organ, and the full motown thing. In that vein though, there are couple of schmaltzy string songs where there's an overdose of Maj7 chords and the vocals get a bit too wailing. This always gets a lot of credit as a protest album, but the politics are really pretty anodyne - "won't somebody think of the babies" "why are there so many problems" "who did this?" "save the children" it's all pretty apolitical really especially considering what was happening in Black politics at the time.

Folk sounds, punk approach, pop sensibility - a stripped down and lively album that's all strumming acoustic guitar, melodic bass, simple energetic drums and the odd violin. The vocals are great in the Lou Reed Jonathan Richman style: ironically swaggering and off kilter delivery. Blister in the sun is an all time great feel good radio song and there are few other stand out songs. Incredible that this from 1983, feels really 90s in a way I can't quite pinpoint.

Rock revival ala Black Crows but for the post Strokes era. They're pretty eclectic in their influences and have a wide range of sounds/styles on the album - classic rock, funk, folk, ska, balkan jazz, indie pop, and alt country - and to go with that there's very diverse instrumentation. It's an enjoyable but pretty unoriginal album though - they're like a really good local band but with a pretty defined ceiling. Boomer hegemony is when a perfectly fine but nothing remarkable band like this is included in a list of essential albums because of how well they hue to the same preconceived template of guitar-based rock that conservatively defines the cannon.

Favorites: Not a Lot to Do, Remember Me

Music for an alienated middle schooler's bedroom or a midwestern kind of racist strip club. Heavy and aggressive metal with enough industrial Trent Reznor influence that the slow sludgy riffs and intensely distorted guitar sounds have a distinctive groove to them. The higher pitch reverby guitar stuff - short phrases or tones repeated as a riff is intensifying - work well to build up an atmosphere and add space to the hyper-compressed mix. The singing is a nasty snarling growl screech that perfectly serves the shock-the-suburban-christians aim of the album, and boy did it. Hook line and sinker. I haven't really heard this since the 90s and in retrospect see how influencial it was on a lot of the screamo punk/metal/grindcore stuff like pg 99. Seems like them and Korn had a couple years head start on the rest more boring Nu Metal they ended up getting lumped in with and sharing a lot of bills with, but that let them establish themselves as a distinct thing. They were the band of choice for my middle school goth friends but even though I liked the songs and videos they were never really my thing. A 2-disc best of Nu Metal compilation could be a 3-4* album, but this is another victim of the late 90s 'CDs are 80 minutes and need to be full' approach to albums. One big hit, a few solid tracks, and probably 40 minutes of filler.

Title track is one of my favorites but the rest not so much - kind of tuneless and searching for a hook in an operatic style. Some cool sounds and production with the synths and stuff, but not put to much effect. The ambient Eno tracks at the end are great though. Best of Berlin Bowie would be a welcome release as in between the hits there's lots of mediocre stuff clogging up these mid to late 70s albums.

Combine dark and light to create moody bliss - a dead simple but totally effective formula. A brooding reverby atmosphere pierced by bright melodic lead guitars playing simple major key melodies that soar over gloomy the distortion. Hit a big minor chord to kick off the bridge and release the tension back into a major by the end. The vocals seemingly straining their limits even in a pretty modest range make it somehow vulnerable and poignant. Contains one of only like 4 songs that get away with a 'do do do' chorus. A punk approach to loud stripped back musicianship combined with a pop melodic sensibility, an ear for richly layered guitar texture, unhurried songwriting and the patience to dwell in an atmospheric slow (maybe a bit too one-speed) zone make for a gem of gothy proto-shoegaze near perfection

A thorough response to anyone who ever accused them of denying being bad company, this album is the factory settings of state fair rock.