Reviews by henry-winchester

The audio equivalent of being slapped in the face over and over again for 30 minutes.

Gets pretty dark in places!

Messy and lo-fi and chaotic, but you have to hand it to Jack and Meg for not letting the fame and money from "Seven Nation Army" go to their head, and just carrying on with what they do best.

There's something very sweet and naive at the core of this.

Surprised by this, it's pushing country about as far as it'll go.

Remember when Bono had something to be angry about? For one song?

The jangly and bland stuff that would inspire the absolute worst Britpop. But then there's a track on here called Satan and it's kind of insane.

I know Morrissey is a dick etc, but I don't think anyone has ever nailed that balance of depression and ironic humour in quite the same way.

Nothing jumped out at me.

Drum and bass perfection, the production is so clean and it's so well-mixed that it doesn't feel like it's dated at all, especially when compared to Roni Size's more crowd-pleasing but less even "New Forms."

I do have a soft spot for The Verve, especially their earlier work. This album continues some of the shoegazing sonic philosophy of their first two albums, but mixes it with crowd-pleasing maudlin tracks. 50% of this is really good, and 50% of it just isn't.

"Orange Crush" is clearly one of the best REM songs, but the rest of this album can do one.

This caught me off-guard. A quick and angry recoil to Cobain's suicide, and every bit as good as Nirvana's output. But there's something more here: a tender take on grunge, honesty replacing irony with a mid-Western drawl, but still as loud and as raw as hell. Every song just hits so hard and sounds so good, even if the production isn't great, but that's part of the charm.
I never realised what a place this held in my heart though. It's just so perfect and ugly-beautiful and unique as an album. Grohl wore his heart on his sleeve and it paid off massively for him.

I'm a big Eno fan, but somehow I've never heard this. And it's so good, one of the few albums on here I listened to twice. Just immaculately produced and tuneful and whimsical and somehow not as dark as his other work but still breathtaking.

Just two guys and some instruments and drum machine. The flipside to My Bloody Valentine, the British Sonic Youth. It's rough around the edges but kind of beautiful in its sheer brutality.

"Big Ten Inch Record" has got to be the absolute worst attempt to hide what it's really about.
But this is OK, otherwise, it's easy to forget that Aerosmith started small as a pioneering rock/blues band, and a lot of the tracks here ("Sweet Emotion," especially) could fit in with late-80s/early-90s alt-rock.

This is what Stevie Wonder's dreams sound like.

You know those in-game radio stations in GTA? Listening to this album feels like I've tuned into a sad-alt-country-rock one. Not particularly bad, just interminably long and better as background music.

I've never quite got Bob Marley, but I think I do now. This album is just so immaculately consistent. Nothing about it particularly stands out, but there's nothing bad about it either. It just is. It exists to function and functions to exist. But somehow brilliantly so.

This has grown on me. Thinking of it as Eno art-rock instead of pop has helped. It sounds great. I can't think of much else to say about it. Sorry.