Reviews by dutch-point-pro

The temptation here would be to overrate this album based on the famous band name. The truth, however, is that this is a far cry from the legendary songs we know The Temptations for. This is repetitive in most cases and the formula grows tiresome very quickly. There is no groove that lets a song stand apart from the rest. There are some hallmark elements but nothing comes together here at all. Mostly a forgettable wash of generic soulless soul.

I’ve always found it hard to take Alice Cooper seriously. The whole image is so much schtick and always felt juvenile. Now, having listened to an album in full, I can confirm that the lyrics are basic and painfully obvious and the simplistic, sophomoric musical compositions are not performed by anyone that could be called a virtuoso on their instrument. Like a bad night at a high school Battle of the Bands.

This is the funkiest elevator I’ve ever been trapped in.

Music for drag queens to unwind to after a long night in their heels.👠 This might be the longest feeling album in the history of the compact disc.

In order to make a great hard rock album, there’s a very simple trick - pull together a band and make sure that one person is named Ian. Don’t believe me? Ask Judas Priest, The Cult, Fugazi, Jethro Tull, Minor Threat, hell even Joy Division, Europe and The Stone Roses used the Ian trick to take their styles of ‘rock’ to the charts with an Ian on board. The Rolling Stones original lineup featured an Ian. True story.
But, with the release of this album, Deep Purple took it too far and broke the rule - you can never have MORE than one Ian in the band. On this album, there’s one Ian singing and another Ian on drums. This can ever work. The Ians cancel each other out. In fact, this is the only time in the history of rock where two Ians have attempted to exist in the same band at the same time. King Crimson had an Ian who left the band and was replaced with another Ian. Jen’s favorite troubadours, Fairport Convention, did the same, no doubt because they were aware of the need to keep an Ian in the band.
These facts demonstrate what should be abundantly clear by now - Deep Purple went one Ian too far with this album and the result is an uneven, screamy mess - organ riffs galore, guitar screeches to the tune of a manatee in the middle of an unnatural birth, and an Ian viciously howling for no apparent reason throughout most of this noise fetish.

Please learn from their mistake. Never gather with more than one Ian at a time. Nothing good can come of it.

As suggested via another review, this feels like the soundtrack to an unmade Police Academy movie. I would much rather have listened to an hour of the Police Academy guy making cool sounds than this soft-core sonic sodomy.

The man in black commanding the stage and the audience in a way few performers ever could. Both Cash and the band were a little out of tune and out of sync in places but the overall effect was a fun, rollicking good time for all of the murders and rapists in the audience. Great sense of being there with this album.

It’s Lynard Skynard. It’s Southern Rock. It’s got Free Bird. Any questions?

Lauryn Hill is one of the best rappers ever. Period Full stop. Not one of the best female rappers, one of the best rappers ever. Not a single wasted bar here, where her brilliance is commonplace and taken for granted throughout this album. Her verse on How Many Mics is deadly … dropping ColecoVision and Deuteronomy in back to back lines, rhyming licorice with syphylis and callous with Dallas - intricacies and knowledge that make other rappers look foolish. Wyclef’s creative and layered approach is a perfect complement to Pras’s clean technical edginess in the production elements.
While there are great songs throughout, the skits and interludes don’t really hold up 30 years later. Between that and the legendary douches that Wyclef and ‘Ms. Hill’ have developed into, I’m tempted to ‘score’ this album a 4. But it is too good to let those things pull it down. I can’t deny how amazing and unique these tracks are amongst the sea of sameness that was 90s rap.

Significantly better than Parklife, so the corner that they turned on this album from BritPop to Indie Rock was a very welcome change. That said, this does little more than prove that they can sound as good as one of those interchangeable 90s bands like Better than Ezra or The Verve Pipe. But, we don’t need another Vertical Horizon or 3 Doors Down, do we? The 90s gave us enough of The Toadies and Hoobastank to cover us for a lifetime, so we don’t need Blur coming late to the party like some long lost Dishwalla. They can hang out with Harvey Danger, Eagle Eye Cherry, Tonic and Deep Blue Something over in the corner. I’ll go listen to something less derivative.

Cultural Ethnocentrism is the belief that one's own culture is the standard by which all others should be judged, often leading to viewing other cultures as inferior, strange, or wrong. It manifests as judging others through one's cultural lens, causing prejudice, discrimination, misunderstanding, and reinforcing power imbalances.
Example: Take a flop of a Bollywood movie, but since it’s one of the only ones that they put Western actors in, treat it like a masterpiece and put the soundtrack on a list of 1000 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Never mind that the music sucks and the kitschy collection of styles is overblown and demonstrative.
This is a ridiculous album, a pandering attempt at diversity and a pointless inclusion to this list.
It’s not great, Dan.

Even Radiohead hates this Radiohead album. Why should we disagree?

Classic Shoegaze. It is perfectly ignorable. There is literally no statement, no musical point of view, no reason for existing. Album cover is perfect … almost there but not really … if you take the time to look closer, you’ll just be disappointed.

I woke up this morning to 8 inches of snow and this album. This might be the only time that a Slipknot album would be useful. I strapped on my boots and my AirPods and headed out. Let’s just say that that snow did not get shoveled… It got annihilated.
While there are some interesting moments on this very long offering, overall I find this kind of music to be foolish. I feel like it has to be tongue in cheek even though I’m not sure that it is. I know nothing about the musicians, but I imagine that these are the kinds of people that would shop at Spirit of Halloween all year long. Yes, they can play their instruments, but they make poor choices as musicians. Being technically good and musically gifted are two very different things. As I’ve said before, I’ll never ‘appreciate’ or give extra credit to the musicianship in a metal band like this because, as musicians, you choose how to deliver your music. The simple fact that your choice of style is screaming and growling makes me question your overall artistic integrity. A better musician makes a better choice.
Next snowstorm, I’ll stick to a podcast.

When I was in high school, I was a theater kid. This one weekend, I was in a new play festival at a local university, where I spent 3 days on campus with other high school kids. There was one kid in my group (I definitely don’t remember his name, so let’s call him Noah) who was decidedly the coolest kid on campus. He had a brother who went to the college so he knew all the cool things - where to hang out after rehearsal, how to get into the secret tunnels beneath the dorms and how to interact with actual college students. Anyway, on the second day, Noah showed up wearing a Talking Heads Remain in Light t-shirt. Seeing this shirt on the cool kid was like finding a cheat code revealing how to be cool. I needed to get this album!
Now, this being the late 80s, I couldn’t jump on the internet to listen, much less download it, so I had to wait until the weekend was over and I got my parents to drive me to the local Strawberry’s Music and Tapes to pick it up. When I popped the tape into my Walkman, I was completely confused. What was this shit? I didn’t get it. It was weird. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t like it.
I guess It turns out Noah actually was cooler than me because he liked this and I honestly didn’t understand it at all. I was lost. I filed the cassette alphabetically in my wooden tape rack and didn’t really ever listen to it again - until today.
Now, 40 years on from that weekend, I understand this album much better. It is world music, or at least Talking Heads’ version of world music. Having a much broader musical and cultural knowledge these days, I can recognize the African influences and the circular hocket patterns at work. I read about the inspiration from Fela Kuti and the band’s desire to include roots and reggae patterns. All of this makes everything make much more sense to me sonically. I still don’t like it all that much. But I appreciate it more.
It’s a good musical exploration from a good band. I just don’t care for the results of the experiment all that much.

Ahh, the Christmas spirit! What could be more pure and innocent than an album of timeless holiday classics? Can’t you just picture it?
Recorded in the sweltering heat of a Los Angeles August by a domineering megalomaniac who yelled, screamed and cursed his way through the sessions, making everyone involved completely miserable. When he wasn’t screaming orders, this married man was trying to shag one of the female vocalists, so he gave her all the solos and best songs, which pissed all the other artists off. By the way, he was also Jewish, so perhaps he was not the obvious choice for a quintessential Christmas album. Ah, Phil Spector… the man, the myth, the murderer of a woman that he shot in the face because she wouldn’t have sex with him. It’s like a holiday carol come to life!
The result of this Yuletide madness is a buffet of force-fed Christmas standards. Much like the holidays themselves, this amounts to a thinly veiled respite from the reality of what is really important and meaningful to real people in their daily lives. Enjoy the mirage and roast those chestnuts, bioch.

As a man of a certain age, I’ve reached the point where I now recognize the opening side of this album as one of the greatest runs of the entire 70s. The intricacies and unique blend of instruments, the soulful and passionate vocals and the unadorned lyrics make this a timeless classic. Yes, it’s folk rock and the vanguard of the easy listening genre, but that’s okay because these are also 5 amazing songs. Unfortunately, like most gifted artists, he doesn’t know when to stop and has trouble editing his own “genius”. The second side of this album needed trimming or, at least, refining and it’s lack of the same crisp focus detracts from the amazing front side.
Lastly, while, I review the music and not the person, I have to note that Morrison is famous for being a complete prick and a rude, arrogant bastard. Google the time he tried to widen his driveway and took the legal case all the way to the Irish Supreme Court. Or, to get really annoyed, check out his anti-vax album featuring 4 tracks about how Covid-19 was a government initiated attempt to control the population. Maybe 45 albums is enough, Ivan. I think we’ve got your point of view now. Thanks for playing.

At the supermarket, there is one aisle I never go down. It has the dog food and the baby food - admittedly a strange pairing - but since I don’t own either, I don’t visit. Plus, it smells unclean.
Listening to this album is like walking down that aisle. There is nothing there I want or need - everything they have here is for made for others. I understand what it is and what it’s there for, but I don’t have any use for it.
This project is clarifying that there are so many styles of music out there and I simply don’t give two shits about some of them. This is one of those.

This is a bridge album for R.E.M. and it shows high points of two styles they are between: the tuneful, folk rock of their early music (like So. Central Rain, Driver 8, and Fall On Me) and the more raw, rock-driven edge of songs like The One I Love. This album works that line, albeit clumsily at times, with Stipe vacillating between kitschy sing song and passionate lyrical delivery. The instrumentation is strong, and overall, the full package holds up well. This album is definitely uneven but features a lot of great moments and hints at the big things to come.

There’s too much 60s on this list already, and now we get a mediocre 00s band trying to sound like the 60s. Ooff.
This is not very compelling, rather overproduced and very indulgent. Honestly, the album has no soul, no guts, no truth behind it. It’s musical posturing and it’s transparent. It’s clear that this mistake was not made for me.