Reviews by dohej

Very high-production value country with a real compressed studio pop to every twang, the album nonetheless has a neo-traditional sound, highlighting classic folk instruments - fiddle, mandolin, banjo, accordion, lap steel - on the solos paired with a classic bright clean telecaster with dialled in slap echo+tremelo providing in the main licks and a big reverby drum sound. The vocals are straight from the nose in a classic kind of pinched 'high lonesome' style and the lyrics are textbook stuff all about the women that break your heart and the trucks that break your back. The accordion tracks especially bring a Tejano/cumbia sound to the Bakersfield style while the melodic phrasing and harmonies are often straight-up bluegrass. Overall, an odd combination of polished and rootsy that I can imagine annoyed a lot of people invested in the authenticity aura of country but it sounds good and is a musically fun strut through some bleak themes.

Favorites: I Got You, What I Don't Know, Buenas Noches, Pillow

Spacey post-new wave sounds, the music is pretty slow mellow minor key stuff with a mix of piano, acoustic guitars strumming, electrics chugging and some synth/keyboard accents. It's all bedding for the wide-ranging and impassioned vocals/lyrics which are the real driving force of the album. Nothing Compares 2 U is an incredible performance but none of the rest reaches those heights - it's not bad, but a bit slow and samey.

Extended soul funk jams with the smoothest baritone vocals you'll hear, some ripping guitar lines, and a full on set of arrangements. I feel like this one is relatively overlooked and underrated, probably bc the song lengths make it very radio unfriendly and it doesn't have the tight pop song-writing of other soul singers' best work, but the performances are amazing and they really nail what they're going for in terms of setting a mood.

Loose laid back funk with a jazzy feel and a tropical psych vibe. Busy rhythms with drums, bongos and more percussion doing polyrhythmic stuff and a tight bass sound high in the mix linking that to the array of textural instruments: acoustic guitars, flutes, strings and horns and cheesy keyboards. There's odd fill/noodle but no leads/solos really - like pure background jazz bordering elevator music. The singing is a bit tuneless and flat. Pleasant but dull overall, great for the pre-show music at your next coffeeshop poetry open mic.

Favorites: sweet thang, Island letter, strawberry 23

Autumnal and nostalgic, this album wears it's influences unabashedly and unironically. In 2014 being a rock band is like wearing a vintage shirt, it's inevitably a self-consciously retro enterprise whose success/failure is predicated on having good taste and knowing how to make old stuff fit. So this isn't the most original album you'll ever hear, but they have great taste in what vintage rock elements they borrow and a knack for arranging them all into something that's warm and cozy and fits perfectly. The guitar playing is simple, melodic, and totally effective, focusing on tone and texture over fireworks, it's echoey and washes in and out, sometimes fuzzy or all phaser warble and tremolo tremble, sometimes bright and clear and cutting. His voice isn't spectacular but sits just right in the mix; hoarse mumbly and shy but very affecting, it flits in and out of the layers of keys, synths, sax and guitar. They build tension and energy slowly through repetition of basic chord progressions, lead riffs and drum-machine sounding rhythms that becomes trance-like, peaking and deflating and going again.

Powerful debut album introducing the core elements of the clash sound which they'd take to the next level over the next few albums. I'm always struck at how accessible clean and poppy this album is for being one of the foundational punk records. Garage rock bands were scuzzier than this, which seems relatively mild compared to like the Stooges. The guitar distortion is distorted but tight and compressed with very controlled playing. The songs have classic blues chord progressions and verse-chorus structures. The bass is fast and loud but melodic like an amped up Jamerson. There's some sneering snarling singing but way more harmonies than screaming and there are some really catchy hooks. Between the vocals guitar leads and bass parts the album is overflowing with melody. 3-4 really standout tracks, the rest is a bit generic but in a genre defining way.

Favorites: Remote Control, Police & Thieves, Janie Jones, Deny

The beats are inventive and lots of fun. Eminem's delivery is totally distinctive with his unique cadence, internal rhyme schemes, clever word play, and poly-vocal bits. It's a nasty artifact of late 90s shithead suburban white guy culture from the Kidrock and South Park era. He's rapping in character doing misogynist fantasy, but it's not like he has anything interesting to say about that other than repeating and performing it apart from the knowing patheticness of the character. But instead of really developing that he just inserts skits that voice the stupidest possible strawman moral majority critique of his work which he then gets defensive about. But damn he such an annoyigly good rapper and Dr Dre really killed the production on this one.

Alt-Country with a Southwestern flair - why does a tremelo pedal sound of the high desert? It just does. Hushed vocals and a generally mellow approach: acoustic guitars, laid back drums, unobtrusive bass and then some 'flourish layers' of electric guitars, synths, and vocal harmonies - then the whole thing is drenched in reverb. Some songs take a harder rock approach with a bit more distortion and some squealing guitars along with a more robust drum part, but their hearts don't seem in it and it fizzles out quickly, returning to more relaxed coffee-shop fare. Somehow I'd never heard of this before despite it being up my alley and only slightly before my era, wierd.

Favorites: Punishing Sun, Shiver,

Texas country with a rock influence - particularly in the rhythm section. Great guitars: delicate crystaline steel string acoustics, twangy as hell tele sounds, gorgeous lapsteel and slide solos. The vocals are classic semi-nasal country baritone with the odd yodel and some close harmonies thrown in - lively, engaging, and well suited to the melodies. The titular honky tonk comes mostly from the pianah-based tracks like Fingernails that are just basic I-IV-V blues tunes played fast with a twangy vocal. I could do without the frequent accordian parts with make a lot of the arrangements sound like really corny fake Irish folk music. 4 pretty great tracks, a bit of filler, and 2 pretty bad ones.

Favorites: Because of the Wind, Jericho, Downtown, Masquerade

The sounds isn't great the but the performance is pure heat. Incredibly tight rhythm section doing instant switches between soul ballads and funk rave ups so uptempo it sounds like they're playing on 1.5x. The horns and bass carry the songs along, with some subtle guitar counter melodies and syncopation. It's all about the the vocals though: they reach beyond his throat's breaking point becoming raw screams and then dive back to controlled crooning. The songs are mostly short RnB/pop compositions that don't develop into the deeper grooves of later 60s/70s funk. They introduce James Brown and then it's over before you know it.

If the Grateful Dead is the psychadelic outcome of a bunch of talented California hippies dropping acid, King Crimson is the English nerd counterpart. It lets loose and gets exploratory for a while, but returns to a fussy prog version of psych with a stronger emphasis on composition than groove. The first half of the album album goes 'out there' through accumulating layers of overdubs (strings, flutes, horns, wind effects) and tight technical riffs in odd time signatures and songs with lots of different parts then it gets shaggier (and more fun) in the middle. Easy Money is a brilliant track with some amazing guitar work and a long 'jam' sandwiched between a tightly orchestrated head/tail. Talking drum builds slowly from some wind effects into a Soft Machine meets Kraftwerk repeat pattern with more and more lead instruments (violin, Fripp-ed out guitar, synth effects) coming in as the jam builds and builds in energy and tension into a somewhat artificial crescendo that sounds like birds screaming. The bonus track session recordings are more of the really good stuff - looser trance-like tension/release phillip glass + riffs and math rock stuff, deeper bass grooves and more guitar histrionics.

Ive always loved 'don't you want me' but somehow never listened to the rest of this album. It doesn't reach quite the level of earnest anthemic belt-outable pure pop genius of that hit, but is a demonstration of the possibilities of synths for making era defining sounds. Bright and light instrumental tone combined with a dark moody vocal, robotic rhythms and human heartache. 'Seconds' does all that perfectly with a deeply affecting minor key Electro Joy Division dirge. Generally though it's more towards the pop new wave side of the spectrum, it still retains a lot of the energy of talking heads style post punk.

Favorites: seconds, dont you want me, sound of crowd, darkness, love action

Controlled chaos that's both genre defining and genre bending - bringing elements of jazz, rnb/soul, reggae, and rock together for a 45 minute funk dance party. There's a real house party atmosphere to this - like a performance going with a constantly rotating cast. Each song is loaded with ideas pulling it in different directions - vocalists come and go, guitar shredding fades in and out, the bass sets up the main beat then goes for a melodic wander, there's a guy standing next to the mic just making little comments, synths and horns have cameos for quick riffs and solos - but all it coheres around a rhythmic idea and tonal center, under a groove. The constant guitar solo over the top is such a funny touch, it's like a guy noodling along at home to an album accidentally got overdubbed onto the official release. The party vibe means it's pretty unfocused: the songs are a good time, but also a long time.

I know it says opera in the title so they're intentionally going for this massive sound and songwriting excess, but it just ends up overblown and pompous. Freddie Mercury's vocals are spectacular - what a range and capable of so much stylistic variation. Brian May's guitar sound rules - all squealing barely contained chaos and an amazing combo of technique + melody with creative use of recording tricks for double harmonies. The electric piano(?) sound on Best Friend is funky and fuzzy and the bass is dynamic and lively in a Beatlesy way. '39 is an Irishish folksy jaunt, there are some prog-style tracks, some kind of Elton John piano pop rock. So, lots of interesting elements - but all together its a tedious chore. The songwriting is so maximalist, like just adding more parts, more key changes, more tempo shifts, more tonal breaks is the way to make a song better. The epitome of this, Bohemian Rhapsody, is the most overrated song in the canon - but they also include Love of My Life, a B-grade knock-off of themselves! With a harp fade out followed by a ukelele intro on the next track - stop it. The 70s would be so much better if all these rock dudes had never learned about the existence of opera.

He could've just been a good beat producer for some poppy hip hop, but instead had to become the most cursed invention of the 1990s: the celebrity DJ. The beats are pretty good and there are some cool electronic sounds/samples but just repeating the same stupid vocal clips over and over and over and over and over again on so many tracks is incredibly annoying - who is that for? "check it out now it's the funk soul brother" is a sentence too dumb to hear once, and now I've had to hear 475 times? Fuck you. The best part of this album is that it led me to Camille Yarbrough's Take Your Praise.

3 all time great pop hits, 1 all time abysmal collabo. The production on this album is so good, so many different parts all balanced just right and sounding crisp and clean and perfectly polished. Funky synth tones, tight compressed guitars and a crazy EVH solo, bright horns, energetic bass and an incredibly charismatic vocal performance. Its like the motown sound dragged voguing and screaming through the disco era into a world of soft-focus 80s sheen. Sometimes it's sickening how dripping in cheese it is, sometimes its so gloriously corny you have to embrace it. Lots of references to young things and who owns what babies - yikes!

Grunge founding fathers or the last great classic rock band? At the time it seemed like the birth of something new with this dirty and heavy punk/metal infused break with the canon but 3 decades of hindsight and radio play make it seem more like the culmination than a rupture. Big 70s Zeppelin style riffs and grandure, Hendrix-inspired wahwah guitar leads all over the place, and Neil Young's chaotic electric intensity combined with a punk sensibility disenchanted with the overblown pomp of 80s rock. There's not a ton of variety on this album and they set the template for 1000s of terrible mid-tempo buttrockers to follow so its hard not to hold that against them, but these songs pretty much all rule. Energetic playing, impassioned vocal delivery, incredible hooks and anthemic choruses throughout.

Jangly 90s power pop with an alt-country accent. Mostly guitar driven sound with dueling leads, high arpegios, and big open chords, though some songs have a piano foundation hinting at the more singer-songerwriter style Aimme Mann would turn to later on. Fairly standard stuff in terms of rock song structures and sounds. The vocal parts are the stand out - she has an engaging accessible sometimes a bit nasal voice, a good sense of pop melody and some very nice harmonies, all of which are in service of delivering a heady introspective and romantic set of lyrics.

Now that's what I call music for airports Vol 62. I used to put this on a lot when I was working. It's the sound that birthed a million 'chill focus: lofi vibes to study to' playlists - the main virtues are being louder than background noise, pleasant and ignorable. They're good at it, but it's not exactly the highest praise ...

Swinging drums, tight solos and emphasis on the horns harmony - fairly short compositions. Very jarring when the singer comes in on the last track.