Reviews by henry-winchester

POV: It's the 90s and you've just moved into a new house, so you put on "Moon Safari." You're making a television program about moving into a new house, so you put "Moon Safari" on the soundtrack. You're having a bath, so you listen to "Moon Safari." You want to imagine what it's like to be stoned, so you put on "Moon Safari."

Or you put on "La Femme d'Argent" and "Sexy Boy" and "Kelly Watch The Stars" and skip the rest. When it's good, it's great, but tracks like "You Make it Easy" are hard to like. "10,000 Hz Legend," Air's follow-up, is better, even if it sounded worse at the time.

My son summed it up well when he asked, "Does this band have any good songs?"

It's mostly intensely irritating clown music, with a couple of soppy melodramas. "Girls and Boys" is a definite highlight, but it's downhill from there.

Seems that Syd was as bored singing this album as I was listening to it.

Never not fun. The volume is oddly mixed though.

Intelligent folk rock, pretty good.

This is the Taylor Swift album you've been looking for. Less strummy folk, more polished bubblegum pop, and "Shake It Off" has to be her best song. I do still wonder how Taylor's had her heart broken so many times without dying though.

I think this was the point where I realised Radiohead had completely ran out of ideas, other than novel internet distribution methods. "All I Need" is OK, the rest is bland, indulgent, forgettable twaddle. Thom Yorke's lyrics are just interlinked platitudes.

I feel like taking part in this project has changed my Spotify recommendations algorithm to the point where it's started pumping out tracks from albums on the list. Case in point: "Heatwave" by The Blue Nile, which I've definitely heard before, very recently.

The album is good though, its percussive soundscape still sounds great and ensures it hasn't dated as badly as music by The Blue Nile's peers. I also assumed they were from downtown New York, not the highlands of Scotland.

Definitely standing on the shoulders of the Beatles, but it has just enough baroque touches and acerbic humour to make it a bit different.

I've never been massively into reggae, but I enjoyed this. Absolutely, convincingly doing its own thing while being tuneful and accessible.

Just exactly what blues should be. Frantic, convivial, frenetic fun.

I enjoyed the bits that weren't weird.

Music for overweight truck drivers in the 1970s and no one else.

I remember owning this at the time and selling it after the first listen. But time has been kind to it. It helps that the songs aren't played literally everywhere, all the time, like they were in '99. (I'm currently sitting in a Caffe Nero in Bristol and a man keeps trying to make conversation with me, which is distracting.)

Anyway, I really, really love "Honey" and "Run On," and I did at the time. They're doing something interesting and unique with folk and blues. "Porcelain" can fucking do one though, namby-pamby spiritual advertisement shite.

Linkin Park's sound is very well-polished, but I found this album relentless and exhausting. Maybe that's the point; I just wish it let off the gas for a little bit. I hate to say it, but I think Limp Bizkit are a better nu metal band - at least they knew how to have fun and injected some variety into their albums.

This reminds me of a classic southwestern UK joke about Simon & Garfunkel having engine trouble over the Somerset town of Bridgwater. It's a terrible joke. But the album is good! Too many good songs to choose from, some that I didn't even realize were performed by Simon & Garfunkel. Don't ask me for specifics. I just liked it.

Annoyingly, I only listened to Ray of Light a few weeks ago. Too much Madge!
This album perfectly encapsulates the late-90s tech-spiritual zeitgeist, something Moby would build on. Some tracks are great (Ray of Light, Nothing Really Matters, Sky Fits Heaven), others seem to have been recorded by a 12-year-old girl with access to a studio.

Why are all the hip-hop albums of this era so long? They're always an hour plus, and there are inevitably a few obvious filler tracks. The tracks that aren't obvious filler tracks are good though.

AKA Cool Bass Sounds: The Album.
This definitely pushed dance music forwards and it's better, and less cringeworthy, than The Prodigy's output at the time. But the production sucks. It sounds like it was mixed more like a rock album than a dance one, and the drums sound especially washed out and lost in the mix. It makes you realise how much the French Touch improved the genre by applying a lick of polish.

Here's a fun fact I probably shouldn't admit: I used to think Utero was a city in America, and that this was a live album. This is still an absolute kick in the balls of an album, more aggressive and weird and artistic than Nevermind; Cobain's recorded suicide note. If Nevermind reflected teenage angst, In Utero is about adult anxiety.