Reviews by drnanard

I knew three things about Brian Eno before listening to this album :
1. He's the father of ambient music ;
2. He helped popularize synths and therefore paved the way for the 80s' reliance on it ;
3. He worked with everybody, from Bowie to Devo, from Roxy Music to Genesis, from Talking Heads to Peter Gabriel, and U2, and Coldplay, and... Like, seriously, I can't read a Wikipedia page about an artist from the 70s through the 90s without his name popping up at least once.

So, yeah, I was excited to finally discover the guy's music. And it's great! This is early Eno, from what I gathered, so maybe not his most advanced work, but it's very creative, and never boring. Each song goes somewhere, builds something, and it's usually hard to predict. "Baby's on Fire", "Some of them are old"... Those are the kinds of songs that keep on giving.

Eno has four other albums in the list and I hope they're even better.

Well, this is infinitely better than whatever the fuck Ill Communication was. The album seems to have come out before the Beastie Boys discovered the concept of screaming their lungs out into a mic. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that their music isn't still annoying, it just doesn't make me want to drill a hole in my head.

There are some funny songs ("Egg Man" is actually hilarious), and some good storytelling ("High Plains Drifters") but after a while, hearing a bunch of white boys rap (badly) about fucking nothing becomes lame. Also, the back-and-forth singing where they each say a couple of words... That's interesting at first, but a gimmick is a gimmick and it quickly becomes distracting.

At its best, this album sounds like the Beatles if they were kinda bored and making music just for the paycheck. At its worst, it sounds like your coworker drunkenly doing karaoke in a shady basement bar on a Wednesday afternoon.

I will say that Ice Cube knows how to rap. He has a real talent for rhythm and his songs end up very entertaining to listen to.

As for the texts... I'm torn. Some are very good, the ones about the Rodney King incident and subsequent riots especially. It's very angry, but rightfully so, and Cube drops truth bombs after truth bombs. "When will they shoot" is staggeringly good, and "We had to tear this mothafucka down" is raw and makes no compromise. Good shit.

But then... Seriously, what's with rappers claiming they're not misogynistic and then proceed to be extremely misogynistic? You can't write two songs dedicated to how "you can't trust a hoe" and then claim you aren't misogynistic. It's pretty evident that Ice Cube, like many rappers, does not consider women to be equals, and it makes half of the album almost unbearable to actively listen to.

It's disappointing, because there's a real intelligence in many of those songs, something I didn't find in Biggie's album for instance. Ice Cube is smart, and not just street-wise, so it's a shame that he would use that intelligence to write dogshit like "Dirty Mack" or "Don't Trust 'Em". He's even a great storyteller when he wants to ("It was a good day"). But like many others in the genre, Cube wants to be seen as this tough manly man who gets loads of pussies, and it just feels immature and insecure.

I think I might like the concept of David Bowie more than his actual music. Like, he's a tremendous artist with insane showmanship and massive talent, both as a musician and as an actor, and his cultural significance could not be overstated. But the music on this album is not the best of Bowie.

Nothing is bad here, this is still very high quality music, but apart from a few songs (most notably "Life on Mars?", which is one of the best song ever composed), the tracks on this album don't really do anything for me, they kinda sound like filler. "Changes" kind of annoys me too, I guess I listened to it too much.

Still great, but not really something I would revisit, outside of a few chosen ones that managed to intrigue me (that song about Andy Warhol is weirdly catchy).

Here is another album I initially listened passively while doing something else, and couldn't really grasp why it was lauded as one of the most important album ever released. So I listened to it again. And yet again, if I had been asked when it was released, I would have guessed a whole decade later. Its themes of drugs and prostitution feel way more like the kinds of themes that were explored during the 70s, and the music can be quite experimental at times.

A couple songs are a bit underwhelming tho. Some songs are very modern, musically speaking, like "Venus in Fur", but others are boring and pretty classical, despite the themes, like "Run Run Run".

Overall an interesting listen, but while its historical significance can't be overstated, it's not nearly as outstanding as it could have been.

Bland but good.

I liked it, it's fun and bombastic. But why do punk singers all sound the same?

The first time I listened to this, a few weeks ago, I wasn't really paying attention and couldn't really appreciate it. I liked it, but didn't really understand why it was so highly regarded. I wrote "Pretty good", gave it a 4, and that was it. So I revisited it and actually listened to it. More than once. And fuck, it's good.

What struck me is that it feels like something that would have come out in the late 2000s. The Cure was definitely ahead of its time.

Three songs in particular have stayed with me : "Lovesong", "Lullaby" and "Fascination Street". They're among the best songs I've ever listened to.

However, I can't say the rest of the album, especially the second half, captivated me as much. I find that later half a bit meandering. I guess it's hard to follow such a fantastic first half, but it does mean that the album, as a whole, suffers from it. It's not bad at all, just not as good as it could be.

Anyway, I get it now.

To me, slow songs can be a bit hit-or-miss. It all comes down to the voice, the melody and lyrics. And Neil Young sure knows how to deliver.

The album strikes a good balance between folk, rock and country, and the songwriting is pretty mature, you can hear the pain through the melancholy. Some melodies are a bit simplistic though, but others are beautiful.

An album best listened in a rocking chair while looking through the window.

What an incredibly stupid album lmao. It sounds like the Ramones but without the commitment to making actual songs. It feels incomplete, like listening to a work-in-progress jam session from a teen garage band.

If you were a fan of early Van Halen and you hate this album, I get it. I do. When I think about hard rock, Van Halen is one of the first band that comes to mind; and yet here they are with this pop rock album full of synths.

But I don't care. 1984 is full of all-time classics, even if they're the kinds of classics that end up being overplayed on the radio. "Panama" and "Jump" (especially that one) are the worst offenders. But come on, "Hot for Teacher" has one of the best intro of any song ever.

Very good old school RnB / soul, very reminiscent of Marvin Gaye's "What's going on".

However, with that kind of music, it's really important that you like the voice, and Mayfield's high-pitch can be grating at times. The music is also a bit too slow for my liking. And while the texts are good, I didn't need to listen to a whole song praising Jesus. Only the likes of Aretha Franklin would make me like a song about Jesus.

But then you got "Blue Monday People" and "Hard Times", and the truthfulness hits you. It's earnest, humble, and you can hear the hurt, but also the hope. It's what soul does best. And "Love to the People" is just a fantastic song in every way.

Jesus does this album start incredibly bad, with this repetitive, boring 11-minutes-long track that goes fucking nowhere.

It does get better, surprisingly. There are songs I almost like, one being "Picnic on a Frozen River", which at least has something going on in it, but even then, the good parts (that gorgeous sax) are drowned in an ocean of bullshit.

"Giggy Smile" also opens beautifully, but then it remembers to be annoying. "I'm not afraid to waste my time anymore" says the song in French. I guess it tells you in what state of mind you must be to appreciate that kind of music. Fitting.

Ultimately, I still can't hate it too much. The weirdness is bizarrely enticing. It's just that, to quote the album... "It's a bit of a pain".

Damn, that was good.

Each member of the band shows off their mastery of their instrument, but also their mastery of whole genres.

It starts strong with a fully instrumental jazz track, which made my 10-months-old daughter dance.

It then evolves into mostly rock, or at least jazz-rock, and full-on folk with the titular song "John Barleycorn", then back to rock.

I really like the fusion, it's an interesting mix of styles that makes the album pretty diverse, despite the fact that it's only 6 songs.

Outside of "great", the only adjective I could use to describe this album is "eclectic". Elton John is a remarkably talented artist that manages to blend all kinds of styles and genres. He's not afraid to open with an 11-minutes-long double-track, half of which is instrumental, and then proceed with a mix of soft rock, glam, RnB, soul, jazz, country, fucking reggae and even proto-punk according to Wikipedia?? This shouldn't work, but it does because Elton John is just that good I dunno. There's a contagious energy to this album, which makes it incredibly listenable, despite its length. One of my favorite albums without a doubt.

I simply have to accept that I like Morrissey's music, I guess.

This album was pretty good. Morrissey is (usually) a great songwriter, and a great storyteller. As with his solo career, the texts are front and center here, and they're compelling, but they're also accompanied by way better music than his solo songs. The drummer is especially good, as is the bassist. Even without listening to what the songs say, the music is very enjoyable, even if a bit bland at times.

As for the lyrics, I particularly like "Cemetery Gates". With this scandal about the Goncourt frontrunner getting caught using AI, the part about the importance of writing in your own words resonated with me. "Vicar in a tutu" is also a surprisingly progressive LGBTQ-friendly song about a head of church wearing feminine clothes, and as the song says, "he's not strange, he just wants to live his life this way", and who, by doing so, is "combatting ignorance"; and it just sums up the "trans debate" so perfectly, I wasn't expecting that.

But then there's the stupid, repetitive "Some girls are bigger than others" that goes nowhere, so there's that.

Anyway, overall, a great listen.

Man, what a fun ride.

I don't know much about Emmylou Harris. I heard her on the Trio album with Dolly and Rondstadt. She has a great voice, no question about it. And the music is perfectly fine. The texts are also good. But it's also not really my kind of jam, it's all a bit flat, and it lacks energy. Not bad, but not great either. A fine album that's pleasant to listen to.

It's like eating a meatloaf. You wouldn't order one at a restaurant, but you're happy when your mom makes one. That's how I feel about this album : it's safe and cozy, but it does nothing special.

I'm torn on this album. On one hand, there are some very beautiful songs on it; on the other hand, it's also underwhelming as an album. The first half is conceptual and depicts various moments in a life, like a first love, an inevitable breakup, the theme of growing old and what it means to a friendship. But individually, those songs don't quite manage to reach the highs you would expect from Simon & Garfunkel. I also find "Save the life of my child" annoying as hell, and have a hard time figuring out how the fuck it even relates to the other songs, both thematically and story-wise. And then there's the elephant in the room : that weird recording of old folks chit-chatting right in the middle of the first side. Jarring and unnecessary.

Side B is also a mixed bag, being entirely composed of leftovers from the soundtrack they made for The Graduate, most famously "Mrs Robinson", the best song on the album. Even Paul Simon wasn't very fond of that second side. It's clear it was added a bit half-hazardly just to turn an EP into an LP, but the songs also have more standing than those on Side A.

So yeah, it's good, it's Simon & Garfunkel, but it's not great Simon & Garfunkel. And the fact that this was chosen over the Sounds of Silence album is beyond me.