Reviews by dohej

Pure Americana - twangy country and lush gospel, warm and laid back, a pleasantly stoned swimming hole on a sweaty afternoon of an album.

Raucous noise, thick distortion, punishing drumming, nervous tension that releases into explosive stress. The rhythm guitar layers are so dense and dissonant, pushing back and forth between two open tuned chords, droning, shifting, warbling in the fuzz - magic.

Goddamn it now I just want to play Red Dead Redemption again.

What if they made a whole album out of 'the cut'? Warm and buttery, mellow and pillowy soft, an easy going blend of funk jazz and soul with rich arrangements and laid back but perfectly in the groove playing across a huge swathe of instruments. Her voice fades in and out of the blend, an extra texture, a bit of high end melisma floating around, a fleeting focal point - an album that's more about the vibe than the hook.

The twang! The heavenly slides! The voice! The harmonies! The tender melancholy! The swagger!

One of the best albums of the 1990s that brings is an amazing combination of the dynamics and dissonance and melodicism of radio alt rock with indie/shoegaze texture and density, and the arena rock bombast of U2. Because it's 'just' guitar rock it doesn't get held up in the same way their more boundary pushing next few albums do, but these are some of the best songs they ever wrote - they perfected the style before outgrowing it.

Propulsive beats and dissociative repetitions - it's all about ambience but is more energetic than ambient. Dense textures, shifting rhythms, alternatingly spacey and then overwhelmingly tight.

I can't figure out what these kinds of albums are for - like, if you're a fan, when do you listen to this? what does it do for you? what mood does it set? what experience are you after? He's a style chameloeon, hoping around sounds from light new wave, to adult sophistipop, to jazzy Parisian bossa nova - but it's always the same scaly big eyed chameloeon - the distinctive voice and melodic phrasing.

One where I like all the elements but have never been able to really get into the final thing. Crunchy alt rock guitars, dissonant chords and dark timbre, moody and expressive, great dynamics, and vocals that range from grunge angst to Jeff Buckley falsetto wail. No hooks, earworms or really standout riffs to hold onto though.

Smooth synthy pop with French and Arabic vocals and lots of harmonic minor scales. The fancier higher tempo stuff has the feel of music videos blastic at a late night falafel shop, the slower ballad stuff is tepid.

High energy low quality ska&funk rock with good bass parts and some bright horns, but annoying songs and grating vocals. The jammy instrumentals passages where they just ride a reggae groove for a minute hit hard - dark, heavy, deep - but then it's back to the whiney vocals.

All the famous sounds of the Sahel are here - the mesmerizing repetitions and flourishes of the kora, the trancey polyrythms of layered percussion, the call and response vocals, the bouncey balafon. It's a meditative - pairing loops and variations constantly iterating and articulating, building light dissonance and gentle tension that ebbs away rather than peaking. The genre has been saturated and somewhat homogoneized and stagnated in the decades since by the Putomayo/Rough Guide/WOMAD world music institutions, that have turned it into a middle class object of cosmopolitan conspicuous consumption, but this is still a nice capture of the sound.

Grew up seeing tons of post Fugazi DC bands that sound just like this and was always aware of but never into SK, but that was dumb because this rips way harder. Jello Biafra style nasal punk vocals, crunchy pixies riffs and sonic youth dissonance, great interwoven lead/rhythm guitar parts the Strokes would soon steal, loud/quite and spacious/dense dynamics that make the songs explosive.

Ecclectic to a fault - the best bits are when they leans more into reggae and dub or ska vs soul or 50s pop. There'll be some playful toasting, some nice heavy bass, but then some goofy steel drum calypso stuff or wierd doo wop psych.

Easy better than I remember we it expected - dismissed this as belated gangsta rap & pop club music at the time, so never gave it much of a chance. It is all those things, but the production is great (in a dumb af microwaved gfunk meets late 90s party beats meets GTA sound effects way), there's plenty going on with the verses -(vivid story telling, lively jokes, endless bragging, and more beefs than a San Antonio steakhouse), and his vocals have a real charisma despite the flat monotone flow and straight syllables on the beat delivery. It's relentless hustle, restless money rap, a bold unapologetic scheme it's on get rich quick (it's in the title!) that he pulled off as well as anyone ever has, delivering a couple of all time bangers on the way.

He has a good ear for a hook and the bass lines arebfull of verve - but his voice, the hyperactive songs, and really percussive pounding approach get grating fast. 'I Want You' has some cool spindly guitars.

Thrilling repetition, robo-rhythms, meditative ambience, a nervous breakdown, a total freakout, calming and disqueiting, punk and prog balled into one.

Blissful and blissed out, dissociative, mesmerizing and trance inducing - a warm bath of sound. Soothing, depressing, tender, hurt and hopefull. Rich arrangements, melodies and beats bounce around, pulse from section to section, refracting off each other, replicating, duplicating, doubling and canceling each other, sound waves washing over each other. An album to give yourself over to.

Top of the pile of albums that do crazy things to your blood pressure. Sickly sweet pop meets blinding white disco, it's as corny as it is undeniable.

Ecclectic and exploratory, a restless artist making the most of the freedom to do his own thing, mess around with new styles, instruments, genres, and arrangements - he stumbled and and shambles into some great stuff but it's also often half-baked and cummulatively overlong.