Reviews by ikejiri

Golden Hour
I’m charmed, this album charmed me, particularly over the first half and towards the end, being a nice mix of country with pop accents and pop with country accents.

Slow Burn is superb, my stand out, a lovely country-folk track with a keening atmosphere. Lonely Weekend adds some poppier percussion and is a really nice track. Butterflies is really nice too, the parping synth giving a spacey feel combined with the pedal steel. Oh, What A World continues with the spacey country vibes, the pedal steel giving it a great ethereal atmosphere.

Mother and Love, Wild Thing, Happy & Sad aren’t as strong for me, although Mother is a solid enough ballad. Space Cowboy returns to the ethereal space country vibe and I like it, and it has a nice nod to Neil Young in the lyrics. Velvet Elvis, Wonder Woman and High Horse, successfully move into a more pop and disco feel, without losing the country fully, High Horse treading the line of Katy Perry and Jessie Ware. Golden Hour returns to the vibe of the opening songs and is another lovely track, and Rainbow ends things on a very pretty ballad with a nice progressive lyric.

Although the more deliberately pop songs in the middle are good, I do find the spacey countrified songs more satisfying, and Slow Burn in particular I absolutely love, and overall is it has lovely shimmery, warm evening of a sound, blissed out, and drowsy in places, with the disco pop of High Horse as a pick me up. I’ll go for a 4, I’ve listened about 5 or 6 times and found more to enjoy each time, and another one I wouldn’t have listened to without the list.
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Playlist submission: Slow Burn

The Stranger
It’s hard to quibble with anything on here. Even if The Way You Are and Always A Woman have been pummelled to death under the feet of 100,000 first dances, the screech of 1,000,000 karaoke performances and the weight of 100 rom-coms, it is undeniably a great album.

Movin’ Out is a soft rock banger, a brilliant bit of upbeat catchiness, commenting on ‘makin’ it’, before the disco-funk inflected The Stranger, with its lovely, wistful piano motif at the start and end. And whether you think it’s cheesy or not ( I don’t) Just The Way You Are, with its Stevie Wonder feel and Macca-esque melodic facility is just a brilliant bit of romantic songwriting. Scenes From an Italian Restaurant is the centrepiece of the album, and is also Macca-esque, in its shifting sections, and typically Joel in its bittersweet, observational, New York based narrative, and it's a fantastic song.

Vienna feels very Madman era Elton John, particularly in the vocal intonations, and it's another cracker, with a wistful lyric observing the passing of time and growing older. Only the Good Die Young has a great 50s throwback feel, rocking along with a great chorus and, on balance, a dodgy lyric about taking catholic virginity. Again, Always a Woman’s ubiquity hides what a great song it is, a mellow, folky feel with a sincere, heartfelt lyric and a fantastic melody. Get it Right the First Time might not be the strongest song, but its upbeat Elton John-esque soft rock nature works as a break between Always a Woman and the slow burning, blue-eyed gospel soul of Everybody Has a Dream, a suitably big conclusion to the album.

The sense of honed craft is everywhere; the precision tooled songwriting, the superb arrangements and sequencing, the smooth, warm 70s production and the economical 9 song 40 minute run time, all in all a superb album and a straightforward 5 stars.

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Playlist submission: Scenes from and Italian Restaurant

Exodus
Although I really liked Natty Dread and Catch a Fire, this feels like a different pr.You can also see how this birthed the student stereotype of Marley Legend and Take Me to your Dealer posters, badly rolled cheap weed and 6 cans of red stripe for £3 from the offie.

Natural Mystic, So Much Things To Say, Exodus, Jamming, Waiting in Vain, Three Little Birds and One Love are all fantastic songs, irrespective of genre, and the tracks I wasn’t aware of, Guiltiness, The Heathen, Turn Your Lights Down Low are great too. It's also brilliantly sequenced, the loping groove of Natural Mystic draws you in, before skipping through politics, spiritualism, love via uptempo and slower jams, and then its backloaded with Three Little Birds and One Love, ending on an upbeat, mood altering note.

Can’t think of much else to say apart from its just a fantastic album, some great individual tracks, but as a whole it is a superlative listening experience. 5.
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Playlist submission: Three Little Birds

Odessey & Oracle
740-odd albums in and I had to check if we’ve had a Zombies album before, or if I’m thinking of The Pretty Things, The Electric Prunes, The Sonics or The Beau Brummels. We haven’t had a Zombies album, and this is another album in that general field, although after a few listens I think it's definitely one of the better ones, and is a great little album.

I knew a few tracks, Time of the Season obviously, A Rose for Emily and This Will Be Our Year, all of them great songs. A Rose for Emily’s classical piano and charm is undeniable, a really lovely pop song, This Will Be Our Year is fantastic, I love it when his voice gets a bit bluesy and raspy, and the horn arrangement is superb, with echoes of Penny Lane. Time of the Season is also of course a corker, a brilliant bit of psychedelia edged jazzy soul-pop, rightly an enduring classic.

Outside of that there is some great stuff, some more in the Baroque-Chamber pop vein, like Brief Candles, the opener, Care of Cell 44, Changes, some in more classic mid 60s pop style, the folkish-to-pop Maybe After He’s Gone, Hung Up in Dream, Friend of Mine, or more psychedelic tinged like the atmospheric Beechwood Park. Occasionally the baroque tips over into theatricality, I Want Her, She Wants me gets a bit too close to Queen for me, and there are more hints of that in Friends of Mine and Care of Cell 44.

I like how among the baroque and 60s pop it has a pleasing jazziness and there are some very nice harmonies, their voices all blend nicely, often with a West Coast/Beach Boys feel, all tied together with a slight sense of otherness across the whole album.

And considering they funded and produced it themselves it sounds really good, there’s a nice spaciousness and clarity to it, especially when you compare it to some of their contemporaries.

It’s been a real grower, my favourite of these types of album we’ve had, and something I’ll definitely come back to.
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Playlist submission: This Will Be our Year
Ps, my streaming version didn’t have Butcher’s Tale on it.

Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
I know California Uber Alles and Holiday in Cambodia and I’m aware of Dead Kennedy’s influence and reputation in US punk and hardcore, and this album is exactly what I expected it to be:

Politically charged lyrics that manage to avoid triteness and cliche, while still maintaining a righteous anger.
High tempo punk-thrash
A couple of catchy, shouty choruses.

Being British we look back at seminal punk albums like Never Mind the Bollocks or The Clash and can see their place in the musical landscape, whereas with US punk it’s trickier for me to see that context and how it must have sounded back in 1980. And if I am going to compare them, I think those two albums are musically more interesting than this. Alongside California Uber Alles and the excellent Holiday in Cambodia, Kill the Poor and the cover of Viva Las Vegas are great, and there are the odd nods to surf rock, but the rest, apart from perhaps Drug Me, while solid enough examples of thrash-punk, don’t do a great deal for me, I think mainly due to the rhythmic monotony, I really miss a bit of swing or syncopation that someone like Topper Headon gives (despite that bit in Chemical Warfare).

So, musically It's a solid punk/hardcore album with a couple of great tracks in California Uber Alles and Holiday in Cambodia, and those combined with its lyrical content means I think it deserves its status as a seminal album, and nudges this to a 3, even if I probably won’t revisit very often.
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Playlist submission: Holiday in Cambodia

Hour of Bewliderbeast
I listened to this a lot when it came out, but I can’t have heard it in 20-odd years, so I was quite intrigued to revisit it.

It's a very pleasant and nostalgic listen, with a gentle strain of self-effacing humorous melancholy running through it. There are some lovely melodies, some great instrumental touches and arrangements, particularly the horn and string lines.

It does get off to a great start - I love the cello and horn on The Shining, locating immediately as being very British and quite northern, hitting a great mournful tone, before the lightly grunge toasted feel of Everybody’s Stalking and the great little instrumental, Bewilder.

From there is skips lightly across lo-fi folky baroquey pop rock; Camping Next to Water, the bouncy and catchy Once Around the Block, the Tsunami-esque Bewilderbeast, the mildly acerbic Pissing in the Wind, the soft rock and catchy Disillusion and Say it Again all great songs.

It is a bit long though, with too many tracks, and although there are great passages and songs throughout, it does feel tonally and thematically very much in one furrow. Knock about 15 minutes off and this would solidly be a 4, but as it is it's right on the edge. It's a very nice, very agreeable listen, and it feels like it's been forgotten about over the last 20 years, so with that in mind and the added dollop of nostalgia I think I’ll go for a low 4.
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Playlist submission: The Shining

Sister
And with this album we say goodbye to Sonic Youth.

I could say this sounds more accessible and immediate than their other albums, but apart from Goo I can’t really remember much about any of them. It's interesting looking back at my previous SY reviews to note that in most of them I mention looking back at my previous SY reviews to see what I thought on my previous SY, and that I gave them all 3s.

I think this is the same, I like it but I don’t love it, and it ultimately cements my feeling that they are a band I like the idea of and the spirit of more that I actually like listening to. Noise, abrasion, droning, female-male vocals, surf pop haze and a deliberate outsider obtuseness are all things I like about them, but I’m much more neutral about the actual music that produces. I did like Schizophrenia, Tuff Gnarl, Hot Wire My Heart and Cotton Crown on here though.

So, yeah, a 3.
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Playlist submission: Schizophrenia

Axis: Bold as Love
When I was more into Hendrix around Uni times I don’t think I was aware this was a proper album, bI think I thought it was one of the myriad posthumous Hendrix estate releases.

It probably does get lost between Are You Experienced and Electric Ladyland generally, despite If 6 was 9 and Little Wing being two of his more famous songs, being released only a few months after Are You Experienced.

It’s not quite as good as either of those, it lacks the number of great songs on Are You Experienced and doesn’t have the drugged out cosmic expansiveness of Electric Landlady, and also suffers from him leaving the masters of side one in a taxi, but it is still a better psychedelic 60s rock album than many of his peers, and there are a few indications of the more funk-rock direction he’d go in with Band of Gypsys a few years later.

Spanish Castles Magic, Little Wing, If 6 was 9, Castles Made of Sand, One Rainy Wish and Bold as Love are probably the strongest tracks, with the superb Little Wing, the funk rock of If 6 Was 9 and Castles Made of Sand being the standouts. While there’s nothing awful, the rest feel largely either unfocused or less strong retreads in the style of the first album

It’s right on the border of 3 and 4, but I think it settles as a high 3. There’s a couple of great tracks, some decent tracks and some more forgettable tracks, and it probably rightly sits in the shadow of the albums either side.
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Playlist submission: Little Wing

Exile on Main Street
It doesn’t matter how many times I listen to this its always superb, for all the reasons everyones talked about for
What really struck me about it was the dynamic of Charlie and Bill (and Mick Taylor on some tracks). Despite most of the songs being firmly in the the soul inflected rock’n’roll, country and blues milieu, Charlie’s jazz background is prominent, the songs are swinging as fuck, and often feel on the verge of breaking down, particularly on something Tumblin’ Dice. That swing in combination with Bill’s (and Mick T’s) melodic but efficiently and economically brilliant bass playing gives the songs such a fantastic push and pull that even after 1,000 listens the songs have a rhythmic freshness that never seems to fade away.

And I suppose that allows Mick, Keith and Mick (and Nicky, Bobby, Ian and Billy), to play between the two, giving the whole album its famed, dishevelled, decadent, gunslinger looseness and loucheness, and it really is the apogee of their incredible run from Beggar’s Banquet.

I can’t think there’s a weak track or a track I don’t love, apart perhaps from Turd on the Run, but that's a minor quibble, and it's unusual for a double album to feel like it doesn’t need any editing (although obviously its shorter than many CD era single albums), the 67 minutes absolutely fly by and its sequenced brilliantly, the first side mainly composed of rock’n’roll boogie, culminating in Tumbling Dice, the second side delving more into country folk blues, side 3 going from my favourite Keith song in Happy through to the blues-groove of Ventilator Blues, the spookily brilliant voodoo-soul of I Just Want to See Her Face to the gospel-rock of Let it Loose, which continues on the final side with Shine a Light and Soul Survivor, via the brilliant cover of Stop Breaking Down and All Down the Line

Obviously a 5, I’ve loved listening to this over the last few days, especially taking the van out for a spin in the sun the other day. 5.
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Playlist submission: Incredibly hard to choose - over the years I’ve variously been very into Sweet Virginia, Torn & Frayed, Sweet Black Angel, Loving Cup, Happy, Ventilator Blues, I Just Want to See His Face, All Down the Line, Shine a Light and Soul Survivor. Its between I Just Want to See His Face and Soul Survivor. So in the style of Gianni Infantino, today I feel gay, today I feel Soul Survivor

Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not
I loved I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor when it came out, but for some reason that never translated into getting into them, so this is the first time I’ve properly listened to this.

There’s no doubt they are an excellent band in the field of post britpop garagey punkish post-punk inspired mid 2000s indie, and are set well apart from many their peers by Alex Turner’s great, observational lyrics that belie his teenage years. Taking in teenage nights out and stories of people you might genuinely meet, with his wry, northern sense of humour (the band were fucking wank and I’m not having a nice time) and uber-Sheffield delivery, it's great in combination with the charge of the music, especially the bass and drums, resulting in some great songs in I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, Fake Tales of San Francisco, Red Light Inidcates Doors are Secured, When the Sun Goes Down and A Certain Romance

However, despite that, I do struggle to get excited by them - I think had I been a bit younger when it came out, or it had managed to catch me at the time I would be well into it, but as it is it just seems to me like a solid album overall, even if its a superior example of that particular genre/time. 3.
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Playlist submission: I loved I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor

Ragged Glory
This does feel a little unnecessary as one of Neil’s entries on the list. It’s an enjoyable enough album in Crazy Horse's signature style, and I know people saw it, along with Freedom, as a comeback from his poorly regarded period in the 80s, but from 2026’s perspective I don’t think it has too much that makes it stand out from the 3,000 albums NY has released in the last 10 days.

Having said that I do like it, even though it is loooong, and does get quite samey outside of a few tracks. Country Home and White Line are great, and carry additional interest as originating in the 70s. Fuckin’ Up is excellent, an angry rumble of admonishment and classic Neil guitar. The cover of Farmer John’s odd rhythm and style is a nice point of difference, and I like Mansion on the Hill a lot. And although it's quite heavy handed in both its lyrics and tribute to Hendrix I like the hippy-sincerity of Mother Earth (Natural Anthem).

Ultimately, though, it’s not his strongest set of songs and not the most interesting from this period (Harvest Moon from 2 years later is among his best albums for), and definitely not compared to some of his genuinely great albums not on the list, so I think this settles as a 3.
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Playlist submission: Fuckin’ Up

Peter Gabriel (Car)
There are of course vestiges of Genesis and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, particularly on the opening and closing tracks, but whereas with Genesis there was a sense of po-faced prog rock ponderous pretension, Moribund the Burgermeister is winningly charming and Here Comes the Flood has a pleasing Grandeur.

Solsbury Hill is rightly a classic, where the words and music work beautifully in tandem, evoking a sense of timelessness and a sense of place. Solsbury Hill is also just round the corner from me and Ben. Modern Love feels a little rote in comparison, but the chorus really lifts it. Humdrum returns to proginness, but has a nice delicate weight to it and works really well. Slowburn is a bit of banger too, with a great sense of urgency. And Down the Dolce Vita channels Survivor for a bit of funk rock that simultaneously seems to work and not work.

Its stylistic diversity is fascinating, but it can feel a little scattershot and not everything works; the diversion into Randy Newman territory on Excuse Me isn’t my favourite, and while it might be a parody, it is a bit annoying. Waiting for the Big One’s solemn, staid blues-rock feels anachronistic amongst all the diversions into interesting places elsewhere on the album.

But you can see why Gabriel and Eno would eventually converge, there is a similar spirit of curiosity and diversity, and some parts do feel like Here Come the Warm Jets, particularly Modern Love.

So, a bit of wandering focus stops this from being a 5, and it doesn't feel as strong as subsequent albums, even with a song as great as Solsbury Hill, so it's a very good 4.
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Playlist submission: Solsbury Hill

Surfer Rosa
I really liked Doolittle, and I enjoyed Bossanova, although I didn’t find it as engaging as Doolittle. This probably falls a bit closer to Bossanova, although I think it benefits from being their first proper album, with all the rawness and rough edges that come with that, suiting the raw and rough edged music, and allowing their characteristic oddities and little moments of melodic gold to stand out.

It also benefits from being a short, sharp 33 minutes, alternating shorter songs with longer ones, and their quiet-loud template works really well on Bone Machine, the uber-catchy Gigantic, River Euphrates, Oh Golly and Bick is Red. Combined with their alt-rock groove on songs like Cactus or Tony’s theme and the excellent Where is my Mind it makes it a decent listen.

It's not as good as Doolittle but is a bit more interesting than Bossanova, so I think it lands as another solid 3.
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Playlist submission: Where is my Mind

Killing Joke
I don’t think I’ve heard a Killing Joke song before, and I’ve never quite been sure what they’re like, I kind of assumed they were a metally-grunge band, but based on this album and a bit of reading they are much more of a post-punk proto industrial band, and you can hear the antecedent of NIN in the synth-guitar-drums and the sludgy rhythms.

Requiem is a great opener, a little Bowie, a little punk-ish with a great electronic throb. Wardance feels more post punk with its driving bass and plenty of toms, again throwing forward to an industrial sound - the guitar/synth stabs feel very Marilyn Manson, but its relentless groove is excellent. Tomorrow’s World maintains that same tempo tempo, this time with a Cure feel, and that little keyboard riff is naggingly brilliant.

It struggles to keep up with that great start thereafter, losing me somewhat with Bloodsport and The Wait. While they aren’t bad, they do feel like inferior variations on those first 3 songs, and that sameness of feeling continues to the end, with only perhaps Complications and S.O.36 standing out from the prevailing style. I suppose if you’ve come up with something pretty unique and exciting then why wouldn’t you hammer that template. It’s a shame that the B-side Change wasn’t on the original track listing as that is a great, Gang of Four style bit of heavy new wave.

Despite the tail off it’s nicely concise at 35 mins. And after the excellent first three tracks I thought this was a nailed on 4, but I think it ultimately settles at a high 3.
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Playlist submission: Wardance (but could be any of the first 3)

Here Come the Warm Jets
This doesn’t feel a million miles away from Pere Ubu, it’s less obtuse, and experiments with a greater range of styles, but it shares a similar feel of putting pop and rock through a filter and coming up with something non conformist, off balance and rather brilliant.

It may be more immediate than some of his subsequent albums, but it's no less dense, and similarly rewards repeat listens as little lines, melodies and production touches reveal themselves; a song like Driving Me Backwards becomes a fantastic slow burning build, reminiscent of Radiohead in some ways, and Needles in the Camel’s Eye and Baby’s on Fire start to feel like pop classics.

Some songs do feel like a continuation of Roxy Music, which makes sense with members of the band appearing, and some elements feel like nods to music of the past, Cindy Tells Me has an 50s, do-wop quality to itwhereas some feel way ahead of their time, laying the groundwork for Berlin-era Bowie and lots of New Wave and post punk bands, as well as coining some innovative approaches to production and arrangements. On Some Faraway Beach is a lovely song, hinting at the atmospheric and ambient sounds to come and The Paw Paw Blowtorch and Blank Frank have the scratchy energy of Talking Heads (or Pere Ubu), but 4 or 5 years before they emerged. Dead Finks Don’t Talk feels very akin to what Bowie was doing. The Title Track is a brilliantly odd track, mixed strangely and giving a hazed dislocated end to the album

I may prefer some of his later albums, but this is rightly a classic, a slow burn in places, more immediate in others, and indicating how fascinating and influential Eno is, particularly in regards to the artists I love that were inspired by him.
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Playlist submission: Dead Finks Don’t Talk

Dub Housing
Looking back I gave The Modern Dance a high 3, I wasn’t fully sold, but I liked it and was intrigued to listen further and investigate more of their albums. That was May 2024, and I haven’t actually listened to again, or listened to anything else by them, and I can’t actually recall that much about it.

So after listening through to this I felt I needed to go back to The Modern Dance. Although it feels a bit reductive to compare the two, I needed a bit of context and a reference point.

So being reductive and comparing the two, Dub Housing feels a bit tighter than The Modern Dance. It still maintains similar avant garde new wave-isms, but The Modern Dance felt slightly more wilful and deliberate, with a notable sense of drift in the second half, whereas Dub Housing feels slightly more comfortable in its own skin, slightly more melodic and maintains its quality to the end, and as a result is probably more enjoyable.

Navvy is a great opener, the ‘that sounds swell’ recalling early Talking Heads and Television, and it has an infectious jittery energy. On the Surface is also excellent, the recurring organ riff is a superb, nagging hook and the whole thing comes together brilliantly. The title track feels to me like their take on smooth AOR early 70s rock with the sax refrain, but obviously it comes out all weird through their filter. Caligari’s Mirror recalls Talking Heads again in the driving bass of the refrain, but also recalls PIL in the spacey verses. Thriller! almost reminds me of the breakdown in Whole Lotta Love, and also reminds me of Kraftwerk a little, and Radiohead, and is probably the closest to The Modern Dance in spirit. I Will Wait has a B-52s feel to it, and is a great example of how they manage to make what sounds like 3 different songs come together to sound discordant but also great. Further evinced by the pulsing, off centre, slightly menacing groove of Drinking Wine Spodyody (great title). I love (Pa) Ubu Dance Party, another excellent and disconcertingly hypnotic groove, with some catchy, poppy Na Na Nas, which feel like something they wouldn’t have included on The Modern Dance. Blow Daddy-O also has a Kid A/Amenesiac feel and Codex is excellent, a kind of 70s horror soundtrack feel, with ominous chanting and lyrics.

It's notable how many other bands, both contemporaneous and subsequent, that it put me in mind of, showing how influential this is, or at least how influential it has been on other bands who are perhaps more influential.

The bass really is the thing that holds it together, groovy and melodic, and often the first thing your ear to latches on to, while the sax wails, or the organ tweeps, the drums skitter around and the vocals bark around all over the shop.

I probably should have given The Modern Dance a 4, and I think this is a step on from that, getting better with each listen. And as I haven’t got carried away too much recently I’ll chuck out a 5 for this.

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Playlist submission: (Pa) Ubu Dance Party

Giant Steps
Looking at their list of albums on Tidal it jogged a memory that I had C’MON KIDS, the album after the one with Wake Up Boo, on as I really liked the title track.

That’s nothing to do with this album, as I’ve never listened to Giant Steps before. It's hard to get a handle on it as a whole album experience I think. Some albums are varied and disparate and all over the shop in a charming way, eg SFA, and some just feel a bit of a mess. I think this falls somewhere in between, and boils down not to the stylistic variance but the quality of the songs. There are a handful of very good songs, and it certainly has a degree of scattershot charm, but there are also a few clunkers and it falls back on their shoegazey instincts a little too often, meaning it feels like it gets a bit stuck in places, especially when it runs to over an hour over 17 tracks.

But I do like a lot of the country touches, and a lot of the brass is excellent. The obvious Belle & Sebastian influence on Wish I Was Skinny and the Cure-esque Barney (...and Me) are both great, as is that brass and the woodwind of the lovely Thinking of Ways. Some of the dubbiness is fun too, particularly in the intro to the probable stand out Lazarus, a track that moves nicely to a fuzz guitar mariachi horned conclusion. Some of the shoegaze and Pavement-esque moments are where I get a bit lost.

I do like their eclectic approach, and they do hit some little seams of indie-pop quality, but in comparison to someone like their labelmates Super Furry Animals, it doesn’t feel like they are quite at the same songwriting level, or don’t have quite the same self editing skills, so I think this settles as a solid 3.
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Playlist submission: Lazarus

The Rising
I bought this when it came out and I remember being really into it at the time, but I can’t have listened to it since then, although I still dig the title track

It’s kind of odd thinking back then that people were very keen to hear his thoughts post 9/11, and obviously that colours the whole album. Although thankfully for the most part he manages to allude to it indirectly with the odd line and some of the music, rather than literally and specifically reference it. Into the Fire is probably the most direct song lyrically, but it manages to avoid too much heavy handedness and it is a moving song.

Elsewhere it’s mainly standard later era Springsteen/E Street Band classic rock - earnest, heartfelt, country twingedanthemic, sweetly played, but lacking some of the edge and excitement of classic 70s and 80s Bruce, with a slightly anodyne production/sound and in many cases it can be hard to distinguish some of them. To be fair though, he does occasionally venture into more unusual avenues - World’s Apart’s middle eastern sound and Qawwali singers is excellent, whereas The Fuse’s attempt at smouldering sexiness with modern sampled beats feels very middle aged. And The Rising is great, it’s sense of urgency and Bruce-collectiveness clearly standing out against everything else.

It’s also very long, with a CD bloat runtime of 72 mins, and you do question the need for many of the songs to exceed 5 or 6 minutes. And even if they do clock in around the 4 minute mark, the general tempo of everything means they feel longer.

It's a solid elder statesman album, with some great tracks - Lonesome Day, Into the Fire, Empty Sky, Worlds Apart, The Rising, My City of Ruins - but also a lot of somewhat stolid, stodgy ‘classic’ rock. Not his best, and not necessarily essential, and a bit of a slog to get through, but still decent enough for a 3.

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Playlist submission: The Rising

Tank Battles
I’m sure that there is an audience for 1930s German Marxist Cabaret songs that aren’t by Kurt Weil, sung with lyrics in English by a strident German musical theatre lady, but I don’t quite think I'm it. It obviously doesn’t help that it's a YouTube listen, but even if it was easier to access I’m still not sure I’d fall in love with it.

Having said that, I do admire its uniqueness, and I appreciate the artistic endeavour of showcasing a forgotten songwriter. Lyrically it is very interesting too, it makes a nice change of pace to hear songs about wheat harvests and welfare states, and something like Song of a German Mother is in fact very moving.

It's also for the most part very well recorded, the tone of the horns in particular is lovely and warm, and it feels like it is genuinely evocative of what I imagine Weimar Republic cabarets sounded like. Although occasionally it does belie the time period it was recorded, with the guitar at the start of The Rat Men (although it could have been The Perhaps Song, as its hard to know ithe YT sometimes)

However it boils down to a style of music I’m just not that keen on, a bit too oompah, a bit too musical theatre and it kind of puts me on edge, Bettellied in particular bothered me on that front.

Happy to file this under ‘Glad I listened but it's not really my cup of gluwein’. 2.
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Playlist submission: Song of a German Mother

Exit in Guyville
This reminded me a little of Teenager of the Year, perhaps not as scuzzy, but with some of the same lo-fi alt indie rock feel, the sense of a singular person behind it, and in the number of tracks.

Although Frank Black is possibly a better tunesmith, I think this feels more successful to me than Teenager of the Year. She’s an excellent lyricist, and the varied viewpoints and attitudes, ranging from sneering, to heartfelt, to angry, to caustic, to funny around the connected themes of sexual politics and relationships is great (and blow jobs). That’s not to say there’s nothing catchy on here - 6’1”, Never Said, Mesmerising, Fuck and Run, Flower, Johnny Sunshine are all great melodies, from classic lo fi pop to slightly odd and off kilter.

It’s also an album that gets better on repeat listens, when you can digest everything, and there are songs like Glory, Soap Star Joe, Canary, Shatter or Gunshy that I didn’t really notice the first time around. Occasionally it does drift into standard-ish alt-rock, but even when it does like on Dance of the Seven Veils, there’s always a great line or two; I only ask because I’m a real cunt in Spring.

I haven’t listened to Exile on Main Street side by side with it, but I like the idea of it, although I would presume its more of a feels and vibes match up, as lyrically and musically they don’t seem like they are direct responses.

I’m keen to give this more listens, as I think it will improve further, but for the moment I’ll go with a solid 4.
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Playlist submission: Fuck and Run