Reviews by dohej

There some surprisingly good stuff verging on Krautrock on here (Soldiers, Visitors), but it swerves into cheesy Puttin on the Ritz territory inevitably. The ballads are awful - slow and sickly sweet. Some good bass playing and Steely Dan style jazzy stuff, the harmonies and melodies are undeniable pure pop genius. But there's just a bass layer of inescapable Eurovision corniness.

Quiet folk pop acoustic-guitar driven songs that emphasize Tracy Chapman's distinctive voice: kind of nasal/heady nearly yodeling on the highs, rich and warm in the lows, controlled and expressive in a deceptively wide range. The solo acoustic stuff is bit boring, her best songs bring in a backing band to speed things up and have a rich full sound and very pretty accents. Fast Car is such a great song, the simple guitar hook rising and falling restlessley, the call and response vocal urgently optimistic but full of ordinary disappointment, the big chorus's meaning shifting with each iteration of slow heartbreak.

Part of that late 60s/early 70s rock turn towards Americana, BS&T looks to Jazz and Big Band as well as the more expected folk and blues, bringing plenty of horns and (unfortunately) flute and strings into a rock band template. The album is all over the place in terms of genre, but the horns sound good and the bass really does a lot of the heavy lifting giving these songs a bit of energy and momentum lost when the main songwriting instrument is the piano. The extended organ noodling is very boring, but the deeper groove jazzy jams with a trumpet/sax lead did draw me in. It doesn't always work, and when it does it isn't really that good - I'd rather listen to folk rock or jazz rather than both at once.

Warbly vocals over disjointed complicated guitar parts and herky jerky drumming. There are some exciting sounds, including some nice warm fuzz, creative layering of vocal harmonies and instrumentation, and even a few good riffs, but nothing good lasts very long as songs swerve in new directions constantly. It has a very stop-start feel without strong melodic or sonic through-lines. More ‘interesting’ than enjoyable, pretty annoying to listen to really. The synthier soul tracks like ‘stillness is the move’ with more propulsion are good though.

Glasgow's answer to Franco & OK Jazz. The bass and drums are the root of the funkiest sound on the Clyde while the two intertwined clean jangly guitars' rhythmic and melodic interplay bring a bright and breezy indie sound. Jazzy sax and keyboards are scattered across the album for a smooth easy going vibe. There's a distinct West African flavour in the harmonies and guitar parts, with the high-life style sweet major-3rd sounds, densley textured Rumba grooves, bongo fills, and cheesy keyboard/synth parts. This is most clear on 'Million Pleading Faces' and 'Hokoyo', which have an 80s Southern African pop meets Fela Kuti feel, but carries through the entire album. I imagine these are marmite vocals - but I like the off-kilter delivery and one-off style. Incredibly fun album.

Favorites: Rip it Up, Louise Louise, Breakfast Time, Tenterhook

One of my first CDs and still one of my favorites. The imagery, timing, and performance here is responsible for the corny Kurt as grunge angel thing, but this album itself is untouchable. Stepping back from the loud-quiet-loud super distorted style of their other albums, this performance brings out the quality of Nirvana's songwriting (and their taste in covers). The arrangements - replacing distortion pedals for a cello and adding in a second acoustic guitar, generally quite understated drumming - bring the singing to front and make more space for it to stand out in the mix than usual and Cobain delivers the best rock vocal performance of the 90s. Hoarse and desperate, powerful until it breaks, bleak and vulnerable - his voice is incredible. I've heard it a millions times and it's still magic.

Glossy 80s pop with a heavy dose of smooth jazz. Chimey slowed-down Johnny Marr-wannabe guitars and some bright synth sounds combined with a busy neo-soul bass and Kenny G saxophone. It sort of works? The songs are all lush and slow artifice with a chorus-pedal sound saturating the album. No real distinctions between the songs, it's a mood album that's calm relaxed and upbeat- but that's another word for boring. The sound of the milk aisle in the early 90s.

Just a couple steps removed from the "My name is LL Cool J and I'm here to say" era, the production on this album is lean and clean - minimalistic beats driven by boom boom tish drums, funky looped basslines, and sparse synth/sample accentuation that put the vocals front and center. There are just 1-2 beats/parts per song so the sound is fairly repetitive. There are long verses and short infrequent choruses. It's an old-school sound, though rap is pushing into new areas, speeding up a bit with a twisting clever and boastful style that would dominate the early 90s.The delivery on this album is precise and focused - putting an emphasis on the playful wordy verses' stories of love and lust, rivalries and friendships, parties and fights, crafting LL Cool J's smooth bravado persona.

The Rolling Stones are the best Southern rock band, they even have the best racist song.

This album is full a out country blues gospel rocker - maybe not quite at Exile level, but getting there and more concise. 'Wild Horses' is an all time favorite. On 'Can't you hear me knocking' they're doing a Santana/Allman Brothers thing with a loosely psychedelic blues jam. 'You gotta move' works less well, imitating a zither and stomp blues that relies more on Jagger doing old blues guy voice. 'I got the blues' slows it down for a church organ lament, layered with great horns parts and bright clean guitar line. The acoustic guitar + dirty slide guitar on 'Sister morphine' carries the song through a traditional folky verse chorus into the chaotic descent of the Neil Young style second half. Good as he is, Keith Richards has never been a personal favorite but he really is the star on this one.

Weird English guys doing Nashville schmaltz about an old boat and lightbulbs. Not what I was expecting at all, makes me long for disco. Prog adjacent folk with acoustic guitars, lots of strings and bells, the odd French horn - but barely any rhythm section. At best (Marley Purt Drive) they sound like a decent The Band tribute act. Sometimes (whisper, give your best) they sound like a 7th tier Beatles ripoff record playing too slow. Cons: the songs are extremely repetitive and very very boring. Pros: they last forever and there are loads of them.

What is it with this list and tedious British concept albums?!

Kind of a pivot from the psych-pop of the Jimi Hendrix Experience to the psych funk of the Band of Gypsies, this album is Hendrix in transition and captures the full range of his powers. Voodoo Chile is an extended jam over a deep base groove with a virtuoso guitar performance while Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) tames the wild exploratory song into a straight-forward rock single, a successor to Purple Haze. The fuzzed out guitar sounds so damn good, even on cheesy tracks like Noel Redding's Little Miss Strange, which has the unfortunate job of following Voodoo Chile. His playing-style -extended pentatonic blues with constant embellishment - remains distinctive despite being universally copied. The solo on Come On is fast and chaotic blues rock guitar taken to its logical conclusion and the wah-pedal wild panning and multi-tracked parts on Rainy Day and Still Raining show how he was incorporating emerging tools into his playing. There's also some late 60s studio experimentation with reverse tape effects, delays, overdubs, and stereo effects features JH as a creative song-writer and recording artist not just an exhilarating performer. The songs don't reach the heights of the Axis album's gems or the perfect pop singles of Are You Experienced, but even so songs like Long Hot Summer Night, Crosstown Traffic, and House Burning Down show his ability to craft a radio-friendly hits. And Watchtower obviously rules. I prefer both the looser live BoG albums that would follow this and the tighter psychedelia and pop songs of the preceding studio albums, but this is far more experimental and has so many unexpected ideas throughout it that it is still an exciting listen.

Dark and stormy with lots of electronica influence in the bass and drums parts (a bit like Burial) and lots of gothy Cure/Depeche Mode/Nine Inch Nails sounds in the layers of droning guitars and minor-key synth & string parts. Bowie consistenly has the best use of sax in rock music, which continues here, with jazzy parts and solos running under and alongside the vocals, creating a poly-vocal multi-melodic bursting feel to the songs. His voice is distinctively his, but somewhat wispy and injured, fully committed but exhausted. He's giving the last he has singing "I can't give everything away."

Psychedelic chamber pop. The mood is woozy and vague. Slow paced and ornate - with Beatles-y sounds and beach boyish harmonies. Pianos and big churchy organs are the lead instruments, with a high up the fretboard bass. The guitars are all chime and jangle. Very finicky composition - choir boys messing around with mushrooms. Time of the Season is the epitome of groovy.

Smooth jazzy advertising music; makes me want to shampoo and have posh ice cream.

The only good rock opera. The movie version of this is awesome and really conveys the whole story of childhood in the wake of WW2, English institutional authoritarianism, and the vacuity of celeb life degenerating into a fascist cult of personality. But as an album even this suffers from 70s concept bloat with lots of songs there for the story, but that don't hold up as songs. The 45-minute best-off cut of this would be amazing. Odd that on Roger Waters's definitive statement album the real stand out musical moments are David Gilmour's. An all-time great guitar performance here with precise lyrical phrasing, that slow/fast stuff, his endless sustain, and the purest chrystaline-fuzz strat tone recorded. Fuck. Yeah. And it's not just the solos - the big echoing open chords and bright chimey transitional fills are all great.

Tension, anxiety, stress, chaos - Radiohead examines and produces negative affect, it's all disonant chords and disjunctive lead lines, unsettled poly-rhythms, and whatever the opposite of soothing vocals are. At times its too much for the songs themselves to handle and it starts to sound pixelated as they burst the seams. They're holding on the electronic excursions of their last three albums while re-introducing a more direct rock sound, like the Bends-era band playing Krautrock. Lots going on in the production with dense textures establishing each songs ambience and the rhythm section kicking it into gear. So many good sounds: The bass rumble on 15 Step. The reverbed-out guitar lead on Bodysnatchers. The groove on Nude. The low-end synth on All I Need. The chiming riff on Reckoner. The gentle thrumming fuzz of House of Cards. The acceleration/decceleration on Jigsaw...

You can tell from the cover that this album has a lot of psychology. It's a farily diverse album, some tracks have an interesting combination of a broadway pop sensibility with the sounds of 70s arena rock (Movin Out, The Stranger, Get it Right), there's a Long-Island-Stevie-Wonder jazz ballad (Just the Way You Are), some corny crooning (Vienna, Always a Woman), showtune ethnography (Italian Restaurant), barroom (more like golf club bar and grill) singalongs (Only the Good Die Young) and Hey Jude cosplay (Everybody has a Dream). The whole thing is like a Paul Giammatti fronting a Wings coverband. Somehow this is even more boomer than the Woodstock-era stuff.

Can't think of any other artists at the middle of the electronica( )folk venn diagram, and it doesn't seem like it should work, but this album pulls it off perfectly, setting strummy acoustic guitar singer-songwriter fare to Portishead sounding high-hat dominant electronic beats. Fantastic production overall, each instrument, sample, and effect comes into its own, letting the singing star and tie it all together. Like the best bits of Astral Weeks remade with a 90s pallete of trip-hop, dub & some krautrock. A few songs have some great lead guitar work with mildly-overdriven slides and volume pedals to create a swelling swirling edgeless shoegaze sound. Some tracks are more raw stripped down acoustic songs - forceful vocals, loud/quiet dynamics, finger-picked guitars - these are less distinctive in terms of production, but still have the unique voice. She has a distinctive voice and delivery; she hits the highs but lives in a breathier heady middle range, fading out at the end of phrases, the melodies disappearing into themselves, peaking with emotive variations on the hooks. A beautiful and nearly Sui Generis album.

Cool guitar sounds and some hard-hitting riffs. The vocals are delivered powerfully, with a commanding range - but they're somehow impersonal and technical, compared to the more anthemic stuff Freddie Mercury would sing later. Very hard to take this seriously in a post-Spinal Tap universe. The fantasy-infatuated 70s rock always makes for pretty bad bootleg-Tolkein lyrics about mystical lands of Ogres, Fairies, Queens. Don't Care! The operatic prog aspects of this make for some disjointed over-stuffed songs; just get out of your own way and let Brian May rip in 3-part harmony.

Dark and moody, bleak and beautiful all the way through. The layers and layers of guitars with open string drones swirl all around drenched in reverb and flanger giving a dense relentless texture alternating with jangly arpegiatted hooks. The bass carries the main riffs, cutting through the whirling texture to drive things on. You can hear their punk beginings and disco leanings in the pummeling the drums get on when the pace picks up. Great drum sound - the snare really pops. All the instrumentation is in service of giving Robert Smith's vocals a platform for lift off. One of the best not obviously good singers, his range isn't great and his tone isn't rich or anything, but the depth from which he reaches to get the words out gives them a sense of edge-of-control desperation. All the elements are pretty basic really, but sound they make together are so good, and the melodic interplay of bass, guitar, and vocals is brilliant. Album was over before I realized it and hit replay immediately.