Reviews by ellesnayr

Spotify has the release date of this album as 2005, so when it started I thought wow they did a great job of making this sound like the cheesiest 80s shit of all time. Turns out it was originally released in 1986 and boy does it sound like it. This album stinks, it’s technically fine, but everything about it is 80s cheese and I did not enjoy it for one second.

Wildly creative and hugely influential. This isn’t one I listen to very often but it’s a certified classic.

So Brit pop is just bands trying to be Oasis. I’ve never been much of an oasis fan, so knockoff oasis is pretty boring to me.

It’s rare for an album that’s only 4 songs to be all filler, but this album accomplished it.

This is good rock and roll, uh, music

Not a bad song on here. This album/band was a huge part of my youth, and Kurt Cobain turned me on to a lot of other bands. I’m preferential to In Utero, but this album is all killer, no filler.

Sloppy, dirty garage rock, and I’m here for it.

The first half of this album sounds like Waits was in one room with a microphone and the band was in another room and they recorded whatever the microphone picked up. The second half sounds better, at least you can hear more instruments than a skeleton playing its own rib cage like a marimba, but it’s still pretty forgettable stuff.

So Jacques Brel is known as a “master of the modern chanson”. A chanson is a lyrically driven French song. So this may be a great album of chanson but if you don’t know French (me) it kind of just sounds like a guy reading poetry while a band plays next door. Most of the album the music is almost nonexistent, when the instruments are more forward in the mix the songs aren’t bad, but when it’s mostly a guy talk singing in French it’s not much fun to listen to. It’d be like listening the odyssey in Greek, it may be a classic tale but if you don’t understand the language it’s nothing but noise.

I like a lot about this album. The guitar sound is great. Fast and to the point songs. Rise Above is a great opener, a classic punk anthem. And some of the themes were ahead of their time, specifically Depression, it’s not the lost nuanced, but I don’t think mental health was talked about much in 1981.

I liked the solo on bodhisattva, and the interplay between the guitars and the keys. The guitar work on gold teeth was also really cool. The album as a whole is solid, technically proficient but also a little stale. Also, the singer for steely Dan has always sounded kinda doofy to me and I can’t get past it so it kind of ruins all their songs for me.

Maybe it’s just me but I didn’t think it was necessary to have the guy shaking a tin can full of quarters on Every song.

Could’ve trimmed some of the fat. I was ready for it to be done a few songs before it ended. That said, I did enjoy most of it. I love the raw production.

That first song is a real red herring. It sounds like none of the other songs. I was digging the album after the first song, but it’s mostly downhill from there. Horsing Around and Angels were decent, but the rest was pretty bland. And why did every singer in the eighties have the same voice?

This was ok, usually I’m into a 17+ minute jam but that was not great. The rest of the album was nothing special either, run of the mill 60s soft rock.

How is this on the list but not Sound of Silver. This is an album that didn’t really need to be. It’s fine, but it waters down the discography.

This was fine, nothing special though. Ever since the world began was cool, almost proto-metal for the first part, then the transition to jangle pop was unexpected but fun.

Happy: it’s over
Sad: it exists

I’m giving an extra star because of the heavy use of marimba and vibraphone, that was dope.

No Intention was a pretty sweet song. The rest was fine, but nothing really stuck with me.

This just sounds like a rip off of Dr. Octagynacologist to me.