Reviews by dohej

Lo-Fi indie centered around the acoustic guitar/vocal with clean tremelo+reverby electric guitar parts adding some color and a drum/bass to give the rockier songs a full band sound. His voice is hushed and breathy, constrained to whispering in a fairly high range. He has a fairly distinctive melodic sensibility that backs away from the big crescendo, building up to deflate and deflect away from the major resolution. The way its recorded sounds like demos or bedroom tapes, which, combined with the vocals and introspective lyrics gives the album an intimate almost parasocial feel.

I've given this album a go so many times, but this time with good headphones, a lyric sheet, and close attention I get it much better - it just disappears as unobtusive kinda boring background music unless you zoom in. Still not the biggest fan of his voice, but this overcast afternoon I appreciated the autumnal moodiness of this much more than I have before.

Favorites: Alameda, No Name No 5, Punch and Judy, Cupid's Love

Never got the hype with these guys, despite a few real tries. It's all so...fine? Feels like a college project about americana - well thought out, tastefully arranged, and performed skillfully, but without any real gusto it ends up pretty bland and lifeless. I didn't realize the last few songs on the album are so good, but it turned out Spotify was just auto-playing Gram Parsons and Buffalo Springfield.

Lots of different iterations of the RnB band sound showing its range. There are jazz fusion tracks like Contusion that are fast, with great riffs and guitar/keyboard tones and tight collective playing through intricate parts. There are funky uptempo style songs lead by the horns and melodic bass playing like Sir Duke that have a motown basis but incorporate a bigband jazz sound with harmonized horn/guitar leads. There are songs like Ordinary Pain that anticipate the galactic funk of parliament. The bass is the star on so many songs, relentlessly grooving through the changes with imaginative lines and perfect anticipation. Lots of good stuff, but the slow songs are really dire, with orchestral strings and horrible overwrought lyrics like 'babies die before they're born infected with disease'. Isn't She Lovely is so sickeningly sachharine I have diabetes now. If It's Magic is a warbly and tuneless 4 minute ballad. I know he's a legendary singer, but I find his voice to be very nasal and almost thin at times and just at the edge of being off key like on Summer Soft - I'm sure it's intentional and has to do with the jazzy chords/modes he's using where he's delaying resolution to the tonic? But still, find it kind of unpleasant at times.

Favorites: Contusion, I Wish, Ordinary Pain, Another Star, As, All Day Sucker

Truth in advertising; Otis Redding does, indeed, sing soul. Fantastic song selection and thrilling performances all across this album. The vocals are warm and honest, with controlled runs and embellishment but also gruff and occaisonly raspy with a break when it all gets too much. The backing musicians are the definition of in the pocket, on cue and on point. The basslines are so smooth, floating things along, the guitars clean light-reverb sound sets a relaxed tone, the drums keep it all moving with quick little fills to pass from section to section, and the horns build and swell to build up the tension and release it when they hit the big riffs just right. Immaculate.

Kind of a nothing album. The 4-6 real songs are good but not great WN songs - his gentle nylon string guitar melodies accompanied by a piano, subtle country bass and very light drums with the odd lonesome harmonica solo. Very minimalist sparse sound throughout. His voice is great, but doesn't do too much with it here. 'Can I Sleep in Your Arms' 'Blue Eyes' and 'Hands on the Wheel are the real stand out vocal perfomances with some emotional depth. Given the way the sparse arrangements emphasize the vocal, you'd want more. There are so many pointless micro-songs - it's like the score for a cowboy movie that does really well setting the mood and fading to the background. The album tells a story but not as well as some of the classic country story songs. They really went nuts with the concept album thing in the 70s and it was not a good idea.

Favorites: Hands on the Wheel, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain

Dudes having fun goofing around with synths and drum machines and keyboards. Hard to imagine this being a massive cultural touchstone and the frontier of cool now since it sounds so corny, especially the rap - the beats sounds and samples are still pretty decent. Perfect Eddy Murphy sliding across the hood of a long car music. At this point more of an artifact than an in the rotation album.

What if a band that wrote really good 3-minute rock songs drew out an idea for a 70-minute album? What if that album told a story? And what if the songs were subsumed to telling the story? And what if the story was extremely goofy?

Pinball Wizard is a very dumb idea for song but is way better than it has any right to be. The rest is extremely boring. Random guitar parts throughout sound good and I always love JE on bass - but these songs are such a drag.

One to sink into and let wash through you. This album captures the anxiety and anomie of the millennium - the dark depths below the shallow sheen of Blairism and Brit-poptimism. Unsettling poly-rhythms, dissonant harmonies, glistening shimmering textures that shift and mutate as instruments come in and out, fade outs where you realize there's been a guitar hiding in the mix that entire time, that warbling thin and piercing singing (I get way it's not universally loved, but it works so well for this music - how insane would this sound if they had a normal rock singer on this?!), the fluttering panning what is that sound snyths, electronica inspired drums and bass, melting horns and washed out strings. Korn for softboys, dance music for shut-ins, this is dismal and alienating exploration of the dismal and alienating feelings of shiny glass cities and the empty boom of the FIRE economy.

"How about no?" - Dr. Evil

Little Britain CSNY. Psychedelic folk prog with lots of ideas - few of them good.The bass sounds like farts, pretty cool! Nice acoustic instrumental on The Clap in a virtuoso folk style. The guitar and bass interplay on Starship Troopers is great throughout, especially the spacey ending. But the vocals are irritating, flutes have no place in rock music, and there're too many parts all jammed together into each song, you're just getting into a groove then here comes a tempo/key/instrumental change. Very taxing to listen to and the whole thing reeks of cider. Oh, 'All Good People' is by Yes? Hadn't realized. I hate that song. I gather this was a very influential album, unfortunate.

The coolest album there is. They perfected post-punk basically before punk even happened. Two thrilling guitars wrapped around each other like chaotic DNA. All sparse jangly-disorted chords and scattering frenetic leads with an incredible sense of melody and dramatic tension. The bass adds an extra layer of propulsive energy and counter-melodic riffing while the drums drop in and out, sometimes restrained with almost jazzy cymbal work, rolling high-hats, establishing the beat on snare-rim, and tight fills, until breaking into some hyper intense punk verve. Insouciant vocals with the occaisonal pubescent break, brilliant with off-kilter delivery and surpring phrasing. Damn I love this album so much. F. R. I. C. T-I-O-N!

This album is fun and pretty consistent with one big highlight: Take me Out is a great song. But its mostly par for the course wake of The Strokes 00s indie-rock.

Rod Stewart : Country : : Billy Crystal : Jazz

There are some good Rod Stewart songs, but these are not them. You're English, stop singing about hobos. Seeing how badly this mash-up can get makes Exile on Main Street look like an even bigger achievement. Why does the guitar double the vocal melody on Gasoline Alley? Why these songs so long? Dylan, Stones, and Elton John? Yeah those guys did okay, but hold my beer...Ronnie Wood's guitar tone sounds good even if he isn't doing much particularly interesting and I do like Rod's raspy voice.

Favorites: Country Comfort (for 2.5-3 minutes, but get out while the going is good!), the violin, 12-string & slide guitar bits on Cut Across Shorty, thinking about how good Young Turks is the whole time

Overall this is a very woozy dreamy album - slow paced and meandering tipsily through different sounds and arrangements.
- Folky/classical acoustic instrumentation: nylon string guitars, pianos, flutes.
- Jazzy psych with drums electric bass and drums and a clean tone electric gutiar strumming.
- crooner strings + 12 string guitar and horns with a melodic jazzy bass lead.
- spaghetti western psychadelic with reverby chords and horns on top.
- gentle bedroom-pop with hushed chords and expressive nylon guitar melodies.
- jangly upbeat indie-pop with a warbling clean guitar chime leading.
- Beatles-eque 'eleanor rigby' strings riffs.
- piano ballads.
- Far out chaotic soundscapes
- fuzzed out guitar over minor7th harmonies and driving bass

Despite the wide variety of sounds, there's a coherent relaxed, intimate, and warm feel across the whole album. The vocals throughout are a breathy and dramatic tenor. Something about the melodic phrasing and harmony in Brazilian music really doesn't work for me - combined with the all the intricate chords and complex voicings it never seems to resolve as I'd expect and feels incomplete - tonal ambiguity. That's decades of harmonic acculturation for you, but I ended up liking this a lot more than I expected because of the chill feel and the combination of sounds and styles.

Favorites: Dos Cruces, Clube de Esquina No 2, Paisagem de Janela, TREM DE DOIDO

This such a dark thematically consistent album: slow and brooding, desperate and disillusioned, Neil Young is the friend telling hippies they're pissing in the wind at the end of an era. The upbeat opener 'Walk On' is a nostalgic good-time song about yesterdays, but things get real real quick. The wavering tremelo organ on 'See the Sky About to Rain' is the ominous sound of heavy clouds and the lapsteel is the wind of a dew-point drop; they serves the song perfectly. The chaotic bass and angry guitars on 'Revolution Blues' channel the dark vibes from the up Canyon. Vampire Blues slow mesmerizing groove disolves into a deconstructed guitar solo, scratching and scribbling on the stings as the song fades out. Contrast that with the peircing clean tone through the slow reverby minor-key 'On the Beach' - where the guitar perfectly extends NY's voice - thin, faltering, fragile and introspective, but deeply expressive. 'Motion Pictures' & 'Ambulance Blues' close the album with sparse acoustic songs - the violin and harmonica interplay on AB give it an almost raga-drone feel, while the detuned guitar parts on MP make it feel like watching melting film.

Favorites: Revolution Blues, See the Sky About to Rain, On the Beach

Don't forget the joker! Sabbath mashing the NOS, god damn this goes so hard.

Melodic punk verging into power pop. They do a lot with so little - just some power chords, dead-simple riffs, yelped out vocals, and a guy blasting away on drums at 2x speed. On some riffs the lead guitar has a fantastic chorus-pedal sounding tone - almost doubled up an octave giving a tiny bite of a brighter pop sound. The stripped back sound delivers a 36 minute dose of pure brash energy.

These 70s punk albums sound so much less aggressive and in your face with nearly 50 years of hindsight - this is just old fashioned rock and roll played faster and through crappier more distorted amps. The genre of punk kind of just dissolve into post-punk, proto-punk, power pop, leaving basically just the Ramones and Sex Pistols.

Favorites: I Need, I Don't Mind, Love Battery, No Reply

Some Riot? More like Slow Quiet. Trudging low-tempo rock like Beta Band with the handbrake on or Arcade Fire smothered by a lovely pillow. Some songs have elements of some good 90s bands: Cake, Beck, Tom Waits, Calexico. It's pleasant enough and very unobtrusive, some lush sounds and pretty bits. The yearning vocals are the only thing that captures the attention. They seem to always be advertising a show in town, truly can't see the appeal of this as a live act. It's like the score for a movie about 42-year olds loosing interest in each other while hiking in a fjord. Boring!

This one is all about the Wailers. The ensemble performance on Catch a Fire is perfect and the production/arrangement is amazing. There's so much space within each of the songs, making room for a big band and massive range of instruments who each add something to building up the texture, rhythm, and harmony on each track but never sounds cluttered or overly busy. The root of this is the sparse but bedrock bass that leaves tons of room within its melodic phrasing and big hits on the 2 & 4. This lulls you almost hypnotically while the other parts float around. The clavinet sound throughout is really distinctive, adding funky synchopated counter-melodies and melding in with the edge-of-break up guitar chord stabs. The dirty slide guitar brings an ethereal country sound to Baby We've Got a Date and the wah-wah guitar gives Stir It Up's chill groove a psychadelic edge - both of these are Wayne Perkins overdubs. The reverby guitar parts on Kinky Reggae give it a dub sound as it fades out. Obviously Bob Marley is the star vocalist and his performance on all these is at once richly emotive and smoothly controlled. Peter Tosh brings his own unique, edgier, angrier, delivery and tone to his songs. The the backing singers perfectly occupy the space between the organ and the lead vocal, doubling the downbeats and doubling down on the lyrics. None of the songs on here are as burned out as the mega-hits from Legend so this feels fresher to dig back into.

All bangers, but favorites: Concrete Jungle, 400 years, Stir It Up, Midnight Ravers

I primarily know this as the arena-rock radio hegemon against which the amazing music of the late 70s defined itself. I certainly didn't need to hear these songs 8000 times and ambiently absorb 40% of the lyrics and its hard not to hold that against them. Not an album of subtle pleasures, this is the corniest rock imaginable. But, Boston, "there is something about you," and somehow I find myself begrudingly enjoying this fun anthemic and melodic album. The guitar tone is the star here - overdriven, over-dubbed, and over the top. And yet, I really am in no rush for the 8002nd time hearing this.

Favorite: Hitch a Ride

Classic bay area psychadelia - more bluesy and less poppy than its UK counterpart (think Buffalo Springfield/Jefferson Airplane rather than 1960s Pink Floyd). The signature sound here is the combination of the swirling whirling organ with the overdriven pentatonic guitar spasms. The bass alternates between a solid motown-inspried bass that keeps a groove going under it all on some songs and on others a more melodic arpegiated textural thing higher up the fret board. The vocals are the staple blues-rock delivery and they sometime edges into a Pig Pen-style RnB rave-up. Songs are mostly conventionally structured. Just the organ, lyrics, and the aesthetics convey psychadelia. Mostly pretty upbeat/uptempo and busy, without the spacier darker sounds other bands were developing. A good album example of the original 'Nuggets'-era style that's always been a pretty limited sound to me - I like the stuff that went more garage rock or more exploratory/improvisational and this is neither nor. This album is mostly interesting as an artifact of a time and place in rock history more than something I want to put on.

Favorites: Death Sound, Sad and Lonely