Reviews by dohej

A perfect mix of dark and light, earnest and ironic. Poignant pop, debauched glam, seedy rock. Loads of great lyrics, tender intimate arrangements, understated but deeply affecting vocals.

Jaunty bluesy rock n roll straight from the Chuck Berry Bo Diddley recipe book with a few British pop and early pysch touches. The songs are pretty generic and the vocals have nothing going on. Makes sense this band is most famous for what it's former guitar players did next. The guitar really is the star of the show with a snarling dirty sound, he's hurtling through the turnarounds, ripping licks. I don't fully get the hype with Jeff Beck, especially here, it's energetic and tight but there's nothing especially inventive to his playing. Is it the tone?

A key peice of the early 2010s synthpop revival, this is bright and bouncey, bittersweet and yearning. It's hyperactive, all glossy surfaces and polished artifice, purposefully failing to conceal a pained desire for more, the minor tragedy of fomo turning to banal dissapointment. Pure pop masquerading as indie dance music; Taylor Swift and Carly Rae Jepsen rip this aesthetic off entirely in the next two years and harness it to even more massive hooks and their commercial rocketship. Ends with a very cool moody shoegaze track with fuzz and shedloads of reverb.

Almost the platonic ideal of a good work album - spacey, driving, varied enough to keep it interesting, repetitive enough that it fades back and focuses your attention. Trip Hop ambience, downtempo breakbeats, ecclectic world music melodic leads and instrumentation, some annoying RnB stuff.

Slashing biting guitars from Keith Levene, dark dub bass from Jah wobble, trancy krautrock drumming, and snarling vocals from John Lydon - foundational formula for dancey post punk - jammy and loose songs with a bit a disco remix approach of stretching out the dance bit, but with a squall of guitar riffs and noise. Reverby and kind of muddy production makes it sound like a rave happening a mile away under a highway. A total racket. Great fun.

There's basically no way to sustain that three song opening sequence, possibly the pinnacle of rock as pop - the rest isn't bad, it's just there. But the production is the star. The guitar sound on this album is spectactular: chiming, echoey, textural and melodic at once and the interplay with the simple but thundering post-punk bass parts creates such a huge space.

Slightly sped up RnB covers with the vocals pushed just into the red and more charisma than anyone in 1964 Britain could legally be exposed to.

The highest spec version possible of totally generic classic rock.

Fun and actually quite exploratory psych rock, integrating proto-synths and electronic sounds, some pretty amazing rumbling bass, a swishy space age futuristic lounge sound, and all the classic psych trappings: fuzz, jangle, whispery vocals, ecclectic blends of hard hitting foundation with a whimsical silly decoration, pre-modern folk, circus music, and Beatles knock offs. Not always successful, sometimes annoying, sometimes gnarly, often both one after the other very quickly. But a nice artifact of the experimental searching tendency in California counter-culture.

Swishy mellow jazz with fado style crooning. A laid back lazy Sunday morning sound, it feels flighty and wistful, but listless and melodically aimless.

Jazzy neo-soul beats and a conversational reflexive set of verses from a rapper with nothing to prove, but not much to say. Feel good optimism with a nostalgic throwback feel.

Not one of theirs I'm super familiar with, but it's great. Dark and noisy, gritty, a menacing ambience that explodes into violent dissonance. Deconstructed hardcore, where instead of speeding it up, they space it all out, turn it to texture, play it inside out, haunt it, have a breakdown, and dwell in the feedback.

Favorites: Secret Girl, Tom Violence, Starpower

Pop reggae made for a British audience descending from the frenzy of Britpop - there are some trip hop production touches and some indie rock accents. It's mellow, a stab at the vibe of roots reggae but too plastic - it ends up sounding thin and superficial - a disposal simulacrum with generic upstrokes and bland upbeat one love messaging.

Surf guitar riffs and doowop vocal harmonies and some jangly chords - it's sunny and bright, deeply corny and exuding a backwards looking dinners and maltshops 50s nostalgia sexuality.

Obscure, mysterious, an album hinting at hidden depths that turn out to be shallow surfaces reflecting back at each other. Haunted dub production - deconstructed samples reworked into ambient fodder. A deep bass rumbles at a slow ambling pace leaving loads of space for the echoes to scatter and skitter across the high end. The middle is dj scratching, diva vocals, mumbled raps, and snaping snares that punctuated the trippy tipsy stoned blur.

One from my Mt Rushmore of hated bands. Generic cock rock Stones / Zeppelin rip off that got way overplayed and just sucks. Sweet Emotion would be ok if I hadn't heard 14 million times, the guitar solos are good in that classic rock style, the bass rips. But its dominated by the grating vocals and banal riffs so it's just a boring tediously high energy slog.

Tune in and zone out to the loops, ambience, shifting mood and textures, propulsive trancey locked in rhythm and slowly iterating synth scenery.

Respect the songwriting, there's a lot going on and it's all very cleverly and melodically put together, but it just does nothing for me. Showtuney, a bit annoying. It sounds good though, very well recorded, the bass rips, and some of the hooks and harmonies really work. But it's all just a big so what. Lyric driven music for music critics.

Hippies pretending to be cowboys and fucking around and establishing the country rock americana style that's been a recurring staple, re-iterating itself every decade or so, re-articulating with new sounds in rock. This is a great synthesis of classic country styles (the close harmonies, twangy outlaw guitars, gentle schmaltz, heavenly slides) with the jangly dreamy pop and fuzzy psych of the 60s. It's warm, nostalgic, easy going stuff.

I know it's boring to point out that this sounds like a crap Coldplay, cyncically replicating the radio friendly pop rock formula of slow grandeur, big arrangements, and overwrought emotive vocals, but they're a boring band so it's ok to make a boring observation about them. There are some pretty parts when the get vaguely into Friday Night Lights post-rock territory, but don't worry the vocals, or some microwaved britpop riffs, soon come along and ruin them. Caught by the River is a good closer though.