Reviews by dohej

60s throwback whimsical indie rock with a lot of fuzzy chorus-ed out guitar parts. Dreamy power pop psych sounds with busy arrangements and major harmonies mixed with Lo-fi shambly vocals drenched in reverb. Some pretty guitar leads with clean warbly delay tone - prolonged into textural playing like at the end of desire lines. Slows way down sometimes into something with jazzier chords and clean guitar tones and very little in terms of rhythm section for a very bedroom feel - these tracks are kind of boring. Too many animal bands from this era, they all get blurred together.

Favorites: memory boy, helicopter

This saccharine overdose has me reaching for the insulin. The vocalists all deliver brilliant performances, the melodic phrasing remains surprisingly fresh despite the saturation of these songs, and the hit machine soul side of the production/arrangements (horns, swinging rhythms) is in full effect. But I can't stand these damn strings all over every track and, going full Grinch-mode, the songs are truly grating at this point.

Pretty overrated. More noteworthy than actually great, this one ends up being significant mostly because of some boomer mythology about guys getting mad bc a guy played a new kind of guitar. Like a Rolling Stone is obviously a great song, the star is the organ part, but I never need to hear it again. For all the electro-furore, the rest is surprisingly basic folk blues cowboy chord stuff - high energy and well performed but musically not that creative. The slower moodier and atmospheric Ballad of a Thin Man is a nice change of tone that sounds way ahead of it's time, anticipating dozens of dark balladeers to come. Queen Jane Approximately is another great organ part combined with a busy lead guitar arpeggio part hinting at a surf sound. Tom Thumbs Blues has a woozy feel from the barroom piano and vibrato sweet sixths guitar slides. Overall, the lyrics and distinctive singing are the real featured elements - they're an effective combination and he has some great acerbic lines but there had to benin these endless verses. I've never thought they're worth the detailed parsing that's sustained the Dylan industrial complex...

Folksy soul with jazzy RnB harmonies and arrangements supporting a powerful vocal performance. The singing displays an incredible range - most comfortable in a warm and intimate low-mid range, she drops down into some smokey lows and raises up for alto flashes. It's light and easy going, singing in service of the song not to feature virtuosity. To start, the songs are driven by an acoustic guitar in a classic singer-songwriter mode but fleshed out with strings, horns, piano and some restrained electric guitar along with simple bass parts and swinging drums plus he odd solo from a pretty lap steel, or a smooth jazz sax. Songs are generally slow and atmospheric, wintery Sunday morning fare. In the middle the pace picks up for some funkier tracks like Join the Boys, People, and Tall in the Saddle that combine a bit of Funkadelic fuzz with the artificial sweetner of Stevie Wonder pop. It ends with some hot twangy blues on Like Fire and Saggle that have a rampant bass and astral slide guitar and a bit of country flair. The production is crisp and clear, a full sound but still roomy with lots of space between the instruments. I'd never heard this before but wow.

Favorites: Down to Zero, Join the Boys, People, Like Fire, Tall in the Saddle

Dark and melodic with a surprisingly dancey industrial underpining from the bass & drums that I hadn't really picked up on when this was all over the radio. Dense production ala Smashing Pumpkins - the sound is really full across all the channels - very little breathing room. The hits have really catchy hooks and instantly recognizable line delivery, but the rest is a lot less memorable - fades into the morass of decent mid 90s alt rock.

Jangly and bittersweet poppy alt rock. This is a solid debut that sets out the sound REM spend the next two decades evolving. The best bits are the hyperactive interactions between the bright clean guitar arpegios (great right-hand work here from Green) and the melodic Beatles-y bass lines. The singing and lyrics are in Stipe's distinctive style, but don't reach the heights that would come in later albums.

The mainstream gateway to underground backpack rap, this album is feels like the conclusion of the arc of 'conscious hip hop' that kicked off with the Native Tongues scene in the late 1980s and is the representative of that tradition within the amazing cannon of 2002ish rap. There's fun production and some great (if not especially innovative) beats with a neo-soul psyche flavour - taken to it's furthest in 17minute combo off Break You Off > Water. This isn't a party album with big choruses, anthemic hooks or danceable repetition, instead the emphasis is on the verses' complex lyricism: all densely packed-with allusions, playful and incisive lines and rapid fire delivery.

Trip-Hop feeling combination of drum-n-bass beats, electro beeps & boops, and jazzy acoustic instruments (lots of piano in particular and some acoustic guitar leads) with that classic airy unresolved almost a-melodic Brazilian singing. The percussion parts are cool: lots of hand-drum fills in between the beats. Wierd that a potentially unique Yugoslav new wave x Brazilian jazz collaboration ends up sounding so generically 90s chill electronica - maybe something lost a move away from synths and into digital production?

After realizing they're crap at psychadelia, this is the start of the best era of the Rolling Stones, initiating a 5-album cycle of country and gospel inflected blues rock. Sure, it's wierd British guys doing Americana cosplay, but they're better at it than any of their US contemporaries and nowhere near as gross as other English bands doing it. It's loose and free and fun throughout so much so that they even pull off a non-annoying honky tonk piano. The lead guitar work is dead simple and perflectly effective with a nasty snarling tone and quicky dirty bursts. The bass likewise is just right, dropping little fills and chord tones to propel it forward and tie it togther harmonically. None of these are my favorite RS songs, but the album as a whole is so consistent and coherent sonically and thematically.

Favorites: No expectations, Sympathy for the Devil, Salt of the Earth

More energetic than I expected with kind of a Stone Roses feel coming especially from the bass and the bright shimmery melodic lead guitar lines. But it isn't as as poppy and does a lot more of the drone shoegaze thing: big washy sounds, lots of delay/reverb on the guitar, vocals are kind of flat and buried in the echo. It seems like they do a lot of things well all at once that other bands took a lot further to be more distinctive - slowdive with the slow contemplative thing, my bloody Valentine the dense intense thing, spiritualized the orchestral psychedelic thing, the verve the pop adjacent accessible indie thing, radiohead the textural anxious tension thing.

Favorites: nowhere, sennen, kaleidescope

Well I gave Adele 1* yesterday so credit to the algorithm for turning up something that definitely isn't that.

What if you had a hardcore band, got rid of the superfluous high frequency instruments and just cranked up (in every sense) the bass and drums? Stripped down riffs marinaded in terrifying distortion and blasted out furiously. Frenetic noise and untamed feedback played so fast you can feel it slipping out of their hands as they try to wrangle the squal. Having been in bands that wish we could've pulled this off I know it's harder than it sounds. Some cool melodic bits, some almost danceable riffs, some tension/release, a bit of a prog vibe sometimes then some nearly ambient stuff. It's not going into regular rotation, but not everything needs to be 'chillwave folk to study/stare out a rainy train window to.'

Favorites: Dracula Mountain, Longstockings, Wonderful Rainbow, Duel into Deep

If you're making a list of albums that defined a time period in terms of pure ubiquity, this would have to included for 2015-2017 - but that does tell us what a bleak pop landscape that was. This is very bland music combined with generic EMOTIONAL lyrics and BIG singing. It borrows some interesting sounds from 2007 indie synth pop on Send My Love, but ruins with with the millenial ooOOaaAA. But's its mostly just bleak piano dirge: Coldplay with the range for the tv singing talent show era.

Shoegaze Sinatra. A Thom Yorke impersonator with a wider range and maybe a bit more vocal talent but far less songwriting or sonic creativity, this album is all mid-low tempo woozy piano ballads. Some of it is pretty, some of it is pompous, most of it is boring. I never understood why this kind of indie crooning singer was so popular in the mid 00s?

Bay area boomers pretending to be cajun swamp guys - what a wierd premise. The vibrato-tremelo guitar tone is pretty cool, even though it sounds like Austin Powers. Has this band been ruined by pop culture? Probably, but was there ever really that much there to begin with? Not really. It's not that there's anything really to dislike, just that there's nothing there. It's such dull plodding blues rock with no real stand out elements in terms of performance, song-writing, anything. It's like a high school jamband that hasn't learned how to move beyond a vamp + solo. They put out 3 albums in one year - terrible idea. A tight 30-minute 7-song best of CCR album would be a fine 2* entry in over-played classic rock lane, but 2 of their mid hits and 5 tracks of good ol' chooglin' not so much.

Discordant and tense, these songs whip things up into a frenzy that either all comes crashing down or breaks like a wave into a (relatively) serene plateau. They have some of the best guitar in post punk, detuned drones, dense textures, airless distorted riffs that resolves into roomy crystalline chords, shoegaze use of effects combined with a faster punk energy - there's some really pretty melodic playing buried under the layers of
dissolution. Individual songs don't really stand out to me because the songs all have a couple of pretty different parts that are hooked together by tension/release moments or bridging riffs and there are lots of parts that happen just once rather than verse/chorsus structures: it's rare to return to a familiar place. But the album as a whole is very cohesive sonically and stylistically. One exception is Hot Wire My Heart which is like an oldies rock-n-roll song processed through the SY sound and comes out sounding like a classic punk. Overall though instead of songs there are individual parts that stand out - the amazing slow building part on Pacific Coast, the jangly introductory part of Tuff Gnarl, the break in Pipeline where it opens up and dissolves, lots more - but this feels like an album meant to be swallowed whole.

Not even the slide-god Duane Allman can rescue Eric Clapton from his native bland blues-dad territory. Layla is a good song I never need to hear again, but otherwise the best tracks on here are like filler on an 80s ABB album - big broad major-key southern rock chord progressions, mildly funky basslines, and mostly aimless noodle. The best bits are the harmonized gual guitar leads and Duane's slide solos/fills. Clapton's vocals are flat and soulless and, Cream aside, I've never understood the hype around him as a guitar legend - he's just a technically proficient but very mechanical Buddy Guy/BB King impersonator with nothing special about his phrasing, tone, or anything. There are so many licks on here some are bound to be good, so every couple songs there's something ear-catching like a cool descending run, a minor pentatonic->mixolydian transition, or a big melodic line. It's all very mid, but hey, there's a lot of it - real discount bin stuff...

Doo-wop harmonies, blues rhythms, country licks on a bright and crisp edge of breakup strat and a great ear for pop melodies make for a catchy and hugely influential album. I liked it more than expected though it's hard to hear it beyond the 'oh this is where the Beatles/beach boys/ventures got it from' reaction.

Gorgeous interlocking lead lines from the guitars, kora and vocals, a relaxed mostly acoustic palette, and trance inducing drone/rhythm parts made of layers and layers repeating melodic figures and hand drums. There's a totally distinctive approach to guitar playing here that I wonder maybe has something to do with a applying a kora-informed sensibility combining rhythm and lead playing and featuring short expressive runs?

Rappin' Pavement, pretty good. Alt rock with some great guitar sounds, genre-bending songs, warbly off kilter vocal delivery and a very practiced looseness. I both hated this and was intrigued by it when I was like 11 - I always listened closely to figure out why I didn't like it, until I started to actually really like it. One of the the best iterations of the eclictally ironic but earnest postmodern gen-X spirit.

Powerful griot-style vocals and an array of Senegalese instruments like djembes, talking drums, fula flute and kora paired with nylon-string classical guitars, electric bass, full drum kits, the cheesiest keyboard sounds, epic guitar shredding and high-tech production techniques to create a pulsating polyrhythmic ambience. The vocals carry the drama of the songs with classic call and response story singing while the backing music tends to settle into a trancey groove that builds and intensifies then chills out as instruments come in and out to add layers or perform solos.

There's a such a fine line for artists like Baaba Maal before they slip into the lucrative boomer birkenstock and tie-dye 'world music' lane, losing contact with the living musical traditions and youth audiences that actually animated them. Oddly here its the most dated 'inauthentic' keyboard/synth stuff (like Hamady Boiro) that grounds this in actual West African popular music of the 80s/90s and keeps it wierd and interesting enough to be mostly on the right side of that line.