Reviews by dohej

Pretty and melodic, overall this is a hushed and chill album that either fades into quietly into the background or demands close attention to the masterful song-writing, subtle phrasing, and understated instrumental prowess. Paul Simon loves a bit of the old cultural appropriation: the soaring Andean melodies and harmonies with pipes and charangos on El Condor Pasa are great and woven nicely into the structure of the pop song. Unobjectionable, and I get there's a lot of craft to it, but its never been my thing. Music for coffee shops and used book stores.

Not to be that guy, but it true: their early psychadelic shoegaze stuff was better than their commercial breakthrough album. Sadly this album finds them less as a Slowdive rival or a ladish Spiritualized and more as a proto-Coldplay. It retains elements of their early sound - big spacey reverb-laden ambience, swirling wah-wah & delay pedal guitar parts, trance-inducing slow riffs and looping bass parts, big builds and breakdowns - but it's filtered through a much more mainstream alt-rock, almost Pearl Jam-like, approach with a much bigger emphasis on the balladeering mournful vocals front and center which makes it somewhat more generic. I'm a sucker for the twangy lapsteel accents which give it an extra element of angelic spaciousness - functioning as a blissful contrast to the misery of the lyrics on a song like "Drugs Don't Work"

This album has a consistent Americana indie jangle going on (kind of like Tom Petty twang meets the Smiths chime with some U2 bombast). The two huge (The One I Love & End of the World) hits are memorable anthems I'm still happy to hear after thousands of listens and the album tracks are all solid to great. Peter Buck has fantastic guitar sounds, inventive parts, and great hook. The rhythm section is tight and expressive. Michael Stipe's vocals are charismatic, earnestly open and his melodies catchy and engagingly overwrought. The songs are concise pop gems with a just right blend of power-pop bright energy and post-punk snarl. The production is flawless and it all sounds crisp, clear, and perfectly balanced. But for some reason despite liking every component of REM individually their albums have never really clicked with me. I put them on, sing along to the hits, and enjoy the rest in a kind of zoned out way.

Favorites: Oddfellows, The One I Love, Occupation, Disturbance

Textbook generic rock by numbers. The guitar tone is the only standout element with a tight bright distortion sound ringing out in the open chords and a generally fun & concise if unoriginal approach to solos. Good clean crisp drum sound too. Otherwise it's just dudes doing rock noises. Pretty stripped back in terms of production. They had a formula and somehow it worked for them for decades, but good God is it tedious. Truly the Top Gear of bands.

Driving beats, funky riffs, gloriously corny tones, and a catchy sense of melody - it's like a darker harder disco sound played through a Nintendo for a rave in an abandoned train yard.

An unfunny comedian doing a Billy Joel impression. What could go wrong?! Everything.

Why do they spend 6 minutes demanding the funk?! They are the goddamn funk. Great fun from the most effortless band in show business. Parliament has an amazing combination of exuberant musicianship, total mastery of a genre and complete comitment to goofiness. There's a wide cast of singers chiming in alongside George Clinton for a wild poly-vocal performance, but really this album is all about the deep interstellar bass grooves endlessly adorned with horns riffs, guitar stabs, and an unlimited supply of elecric pianos, organs, and synth licks. The bass tones are so good - clean and precise with a magnificent pop and then suddenly as sythny and bizarrely distorted as a malfunctioning robot melting down at a disco in Spaceballs.

Euphoric and anxious, this album is a masterpeice of unsettling texture and rhythm. Beats drop in and out, strings swell from nowhere, bells and chanting synthetic vocals echo across vast open spaces, dense synth/drum machine disonance packs in and in and in to create some claustraphobic chaos. Bjork's voice is mostly wispy (breathy, intimate, inviting) but occasionally titanic (powerfully belting out big crescendo as the music swirls around). Quiet tracks like Cocoon crackle and click along with ambient Eno-style synth bedding. Poppier (lol) songs like It's Not Up to You hover in major keys, resolving the album's pulsating tension into blissful choruses. Mesmerizing, absorbing, and stressful - this is an incredible expression/exploration of isolation and romance.

Overall this is one of those iconic touchstone albums with a basically indisputable canonical status that actually isn't as good as I remember it being when I first encountered it... It was very funny to learn that they were considered a Cream/Jeff Beck Group rip off. Guess it's all just heavy fuzzy blues by some English hippies.

Jimmy Page's playing is pretty much untouchable - riffs so ingrained in they're basically default setting on any electric guitar and frenetic blues rock solos that've been emulated for 50 years ever since. The bass and drums are rock solid, big, bold, melodic and deep. The vocals are harder to listen to with every year of hindsight.

Lots of the songs are a overly long and pretty repetitive - relying on a great riff, but just looping it over and over. Good Times Bad Times & Communication Break down are much tighter and quick-hitting with a sound/riff structure verging into punk - though with a way more exploratory bass. Your Time is Going to Come breaks out of the blues template for a more original and anthemic rock sound, with cool instrumentation and overdubbed slide guitar parts giving an uplifting astral kind of sound. Black Mountain Side is a nice rustic instrumental acoustic folk guitar workout with a hint of a raga edge. How Many More Times is a rip-roaring sometimes psychedelic finale with an all-time classic fuzz riff and guitar heroics that breaks down and builds up and breaks down over and over. All good fun, but not one I need to hear in full all that often.

Dark brooding stormy synths replace the classical guitar on this very 80s sounding album. LC is playing with a much bigger persona, stepping with some swagger out of the confines of his folky singer-songer writer era into a new phase as a disco-goth front man. It's a bit like Depeche Mode. The lyrics - cynical, jaded, lusty - and vocals - deep hoarse crooning - are still the main thing, but the production and arrangements are totally different than his early work. He's drawing on a pretty eclectic sonic pallette: synths and cheesy keys, drum tracks, gospel choirs, lap steel guitar, and even a bit of the old classical guitar for added flair.

Favorites: First We Take Manhattan, I Can't Forget, Tower of song

Elaborate upbeat funk with a pop sensibility that's the template for tons of the RnB and neo-soul that would follow. Lots of these sounds have become genre conventions (the reverby guitar hits, rising and falling horns, sexual healing-style moaning vocals, bass grooves carrying the song through the changes...) that it's hard not to hear them as conventional 35 years later. But the very 80s sounding bits (amazing synths and drum machines) are certainly signs o the times (not to say they don't sound awesome, just quintessentially 80s) and Prince's vocal style in terms of both delivery and melodic phrasing marks it as uniquely his own - hardly contained to a genre and certainly not generic. Except on the almost power-pop 'I Could Never' he's not in guitar god mode, here he's in sensual song-writer and immaculate vibe curator mode. I've never really listened to this in full before but it sounds really familiar nonetheless - I think because so much 90s stuff was influenced by this. Maybe also because it's a like a hybrid of Madonna, Parliament Funkadelic and Marvin Gaye filtered through the medium that is Prince.

Favorites: Hot Thing, Housequake, The Cross, I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man, got that look

There's not a better hard rock album. GnR distilled everything good from 70s/80s rock and channelled it through a world-historical dose of cocaine and ego to put out a record that nobody can top - all written and recorded in like a month or something. So many all-time great riffs, licks, solos, and hooks - incredible songwriting. Slash comes in like a squal - blasting constant leads and squealing pinch harmonics all over the place (even while the verse is going on). His playing is blistering but also that much more melodic and memorable than the 80s shredders and the sound is so huge. The rhythm section is rock solid - Duff Mckagan's punk background means the energy never drops. Axl's range is all over the place, starting with a gruff growl and ending up with a glass-shattering scream. He has a really playful articulation, stretching out words or rampaging through them with almost a rapper's cadence - pure rock charisma. This, not grunge, killed hair metal - why bother with anything else once you've heard this?

When I was 14 and this came out I loved scar tissue the first few times I heard it and got the album. I was disappointed in how bad the rest of it was, but that was common with 90s radio bands' albums: full of filler. Then I heard scar tissue 500 times a week on the radio and stopped liking that one song too. Then Californication was played out even more and I can't even here a note of this band without instinctively reaching for the car radio knob. So, it's been a long time since I revisited this album but good to know that my 14 year old self was correct: there's one good song on here ruined by overplay and the rest is boring dreck. Embarrassing little raps, self-parody level slap bass, the most vapid lyrics imaginable, and annoying whiney vocals. Some pretty guitar bits and solid drumming apart there is basically nothing here. BSSM was goofy and fun, this is somehow goofy and self serious. How is this band so big? America's Coldplay.

Gloriously juvenile garage rock. Sometimes they sound like a filthy rolling stones tribute act, sometimes they're inventing punk, sometimes they're off on a psychadelic adventure. The guitar is way stripped back and basic, like a kid who just got a fuzz pedal and a wah wah going nuts with it. Some quick and nasty solos and some pretty straightforward but thoroughly effective riffs - I wanna be your dog especially. Iggy Pop is basically a fully formed punk front-man on his debut, a limited singer but all drawling-snarling throat shredding charisma.

Pure 80s excess. This album is overflowing with ideas, each song is layers and layers of synths, huge reverby drums, virtuouso guitars, and charismatic vocals popping in and out of every range possible. It all (more or less) coheres around big catchy hooks and memorable choruses, then departs into extra codas, tacked on solos, refrains, and returns. The production and performances are so tight - its bursting at the seams and gloriously excessive without being distractingly busy or chaotic. It's obviously a pop album, but there's something ineffably wierd and singular about the conception and execution of these ideas that transcends genre.

Someone gave the guy mumbling at the back of the bus a classical guitar. Turns out he can play a bit and has a lot to say. It's bitter, glum and acrimonious in an undirected kind of way - lot's of ambiguous 'yous' have wronged him. The country-rock adjacent Diamonds in the Mine is a bit of surprise but works really well - soaring lap steel sounds against the dark brooding strum.

Poppy RnB combining fairly traditional 60s motown-style instrumentation and arrangements (lots of good horns) with 2000s elements: hip hop pop beats, chorus-heavy song structures, rap verses, turntables, and self-aware sampling of her own hits. This album is leaning into the gospel diva thing and all the songs function as platforms for big vocal perfomances. She has some pipes and isn't afraid to use them. She's an undeniable talent, terrifying range, astonishing control, surprising tonal variety and this is a virtuoso performance in an style that's not usually my thing, but I liked this more than I expected. The first half is hard to distinguish this from the rest of the generic pop radio landscape of this period and it blurs into the morass of post-boy band American Idol bubblegum. The second half, where she escapes the 2006 hit factory to campily mess around with woozy blues and horny jazz stuff is fucking great (the ballads & orchestral less so though). Why is her dedication to the fans 4 minutes of voicemails of people praising her?

Favorites: Nasty Naughty Boy, I got Trouble, Mercy on Me

Hard hitting big beat/DnB techno with a charismatic lead singer and a band kind of feel that got it out of the rave and onto the radio like few others from the genre. At times it verges into NIN industrial territory but clubbier. Too long and a bit samey as an hour-long album, but the hits, Breathe especially, are great - catchy hooks, head-banging synth riffs, distinctive snarled vocals, and tension/release build ups & drops, and some big bass booms. Surpringly good as a getting stuff done on the computer album.

Funk pop that sounds way better on headphones than speakers. At it's best this is a hard rocking wah-guitar workout. The standout track is Take Me Higher, all driving fuzzy bass and energetic horns. Simple Song and You Can Make It have a great NOLA funk sound with organ/guitar riffs establishing the dominant hook, back and forth interplay between singers, and horns for big hits. Sex Machine is a psych-funk wah excursion - fun but a bit repetitive. Everyday People and its B-Side You Can Make it are really awful though - EP is forever tainted from being played to death in a cloying Toyota ad - boring arrangements, slow dragging composition, and a meaningless quasi-political message.

The interplay between Johnny Marr's jangly hyperactive constantly changing rhythm guitar and Andy Rourke's pulsating melodic bass parts creates the distinctive signature sound of the entire Smiths' catalogue: pulsating overlapping rhythms, bright poppy chords, harmonic leads with droning open high-strings. Morrissey's may be a reactionary clown, but he was a brilliant lyricist and lead singer, crafting unexpected melodies and bittersweet anthemic choruses and delivering them with sui-generis baritone/falsetto operatic flair. It's all so melodramatic I could set myself on fire.

I can never pick a favorite betwen this, Meat is Murder, and Strangeways, and in any case none of their studio albums are as good as the singles compilations which are pure hit upon hit, but there're very few albums I've listened to as many times as this one and am still excited to put on at least every few weeks. A+ material from the best band of the 80s.