Reviews by ikejiri

Nixon
I came to Lambchop and this album specifically through a very early 2000s combination; a free cd on the cover of Select Magazine with the Zero 7 remix of Up With People on it.

His vocal delivery is a bit of an acquired taste, and the mix of country, soul, chamberpop and alt-rock on here can sometimes feel like it falls between the cracks of those genres, but it’s got a nagging, eccentric, unhurried charm to it, with plenty of great moments strewn across it.

Up With People is still my favourite but there are some great songs on here; The Old Gold Shoe opens with a lovely dreaminess and You Masculine You slow climb to a string, horn and guitar saturated close is excellent. Indeed many of the string arrangements stand out, picking out some very 70s soul motifs as they hang above the more country guitars, particularly on the excellent Nashville Parent.

What Else Could It Be is another great one, sliding along gracefully underneath his deliberately forced falsetto. The doleful mariachi horns of The Distance From Her to There are another highlight, as well as the slightly awkward and vaguely psychedelic feel of the brilliantly titled Petrified Florist. Butcher Boy is the most uptempo track, feeling a little like Calexico and also Radiohead with its slightly chaotic horns.

I get why Kurt Wagner’s voice and style doesn't land with everyone, and there are plenty of other people doing similar things that I dislike, but there’s something he does that really resonates with me.

It’s not quite a top tier album, but it’s one I like a lot, so I’ll go with a high 4.
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Playlist submission: Up With People

The Bends
I think this is still just about a 5, even if it doesn’t appeal as much to me as it once did. The inventiveness and quality of what they did from Kid A (and OK Computer) onwards I think throws into relief how conventionally alt-rock much of this one feels. It, of course, is a demonstrably superior version of alt-rock compared to their peers, and has 5 or 6 killer tracks in The Bends, High and Dry, Fake Plastic Trees, Just, My Iron Lung and Street Spirit, and there touches of genius and ingenuity all over it, but it does broadly stick broadly to typical structures and instrumentation, and lyrically it feels very similar to Pablo Honey with more than a touch of adolescence to it.

Street Spirit really is transcendently superb, it could easily grace any of their albums, and those other big songs are still excellent, and while nothing else on the album is quite at the level of those, they are of a sustained quality, even if the Nirvana-isms are a bit naked in places. Nice Dream and Bullet Proof are probably my favourite of these, with Sulk being possibly the weakest track.

It may be revisionist and from a viewpoint of the totality of their career to date, but I feel you can see why they wanted to do OK Computer and then Kid A, they must have felt they had taken their guitar heavy sound as far as they could, I can see how they wouldn’t want to just keep making The Bends over and over, especially when plenty of other bands would base their career off this template - Bullet Proof is very Coldplay’s first album.

In the final weighing, it has to be a five, if only for the presence of The Bends, High and Dry, Fake Plastic Trees, Just, My Iron Lung and Street Spirit, songs that many bands would kill for, even if it in context of their career it feels _relatively_ limited in scope and ambition, as fair or unfair as that comparison might be.
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Playlist submission: Street Spirit (Fade Out)

Music for the Jilted Generation
I was never into this as much as Fat of the Land, although I probably didn’t hear this until well after Fat of the Land.

It definitely doesn’t feel like a whole, considered album like FOTL does, and it reminds me of Exit Planet Dust a little in that regard. But as a collection containing some excellent techno-rave-breakbeat electro it's a great listen.

Their Law, Voodoo People, Poison, No Good and One Love of course stand out as absolute bangers, but there some other great tracks, Break and Enter synths are great, Full Throttle feels all sweaty like a dank nightclub, Speedway has a video game manicness to it, it makes me think of Gamesmaster, 2 Kilos’ flutes are great and Claustrophobic Sting is excellent, a bit of a banger.

It’s not as satisfying as FOTL, and it is a bit long at nearly 80 minutes, but it’s easily good enough to get into the low 4s.
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Playlist submission: No Good (Start the Dance)

Time Out Of Mind
It’s great revisiting this, I listened to it a lot in the mid 2000s, around the time Chronicles and No Direction Home came out.

It’s interesting how death and the sense of old age permeates lots of it, particularly the stellar Not Dark Yet, adding to the perception that it was considered an old man’s album back in 97. But he was only 56 when he made it!

Although Dylan says he didn't particularly like the sound of it, I think it's superb. Lanois’ languid, swampy, humid, crepuscular, evening at a New Orleans graveyard production combined with how he treats Dylan’s parched and rough(er) 90s voice gives it a superb, bewitching, slightly spooky atmosphere.

Love Sick is absolutely superb, the funereal march of the organ and the and the rippling minor key sense of despair matches the lyrics beautifully. Standing in the Doorway is another beautiful song and there’s more of that humid atmosphere on the fantastic Million Miles. Trying to Get to Heaven picks back up the idea of mortality and I love the fiddle weaving through it, and it’s a great, great later period Dylan song.

Not Dark Yet is the centrepiece of the album and one of my all time favourite Dylan songs, dropping like a heavyweight between the light, bluesy Till I Fell in Love With You and the excellent, rockier Cold Irons Bound. It’s hard to judge Make You Feel My Love post Adele/X-Factor, it’s hard not hear it as a hugely effective, belted out talent show song, and the spareness of the arrangement here does make it feel a little like a demo, even if the quality of the melody is obvious.

Can’t Wait has a nice nagging, hypnotic bluesiness, especially as it leads into the fantastic Highlands, a brilliantly quixotic, bluesy epic, languidly easing itself over 16 excellent minutes.

It's easy sometimes to overestimate late period albums from great artists, an ‘it's not terrible, therefore it must be great’ type thing, but this, I think, is a genuinely great album. It of course doesn't have the feverish intensity of his mid 60s albums, but it’s blues and rockabilly and mid tempo atmospherics are very affecting, matching the resigned and aging tone of the lyrics.
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Playlist submission: Not Dark Yet

Metallica
Enter Sandman is of course brilliant, a truly great song. I’m of course also aware of The Unforgiven and Nothing Else Matters

Beyond that there isn’t a great deal that sparks much interest, although it's certainly better than the feeble and wretched And Justice For All. As I’m not really into metal I suppose I’m responding to the slowed down tempos, simplified structures and more commercial polish, and it does have some decent songs. But no matter what they do they always feel so creatively and emotionally stunted, in a genre that is broadly creatively and emotionally stunted, that a full album is a bit of a struggle, especially when you add Hetfield’s voice, Lar's drumming and that it is over an hour long.

Enter Sandman is great, a five star track for certain, I quite like The Unforgiven and Nothing Else Matters, and overall it is much better than And Justice For All, but the sense of turgid juvenile heaviness is pervasive, and there’s really not much else to pull it above a 2.
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Playlist submission: Enter Sandman

Out of Step
I didn’t have particularly high hopes for this, but I quite liked it in the end, much more than many albums like this we had. I think mainly due to the guitar and bass being more interesting and diverse than standard thrash-riffing, and ultimately it felt unusual for a hardcore punk album to not be unlistenable.

Betray I liked, the bass riff and guitars are great, It Follows has a nice bit of bass too, and Think Again has a slight funk/disco feel to the verses with a new wave drum pattern. Obviously it does start to feel a bit samey once you get 5 or 6 songs deep, but there is just about enough to them, with little moments of bass or guitar, like the riffing at the end of No Reason or the bassline and faint echoes of Devo of Cashing In.

Betray, Think Again and Cashing In are great, and it’s the best of this type of album we’ve had, but I’m not sure how often I would think to come back to it, so it’s on the cusp of 2 and 3. Hmm, I’ll tip to 3 as I think I would actually come back to this in the right mood, particularly for those tracks.
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Playlist submission: Cashing In

Olympia ‘64
This is as French as the cover of the Tricolore Encore text book and the faint tang of sewage as you walk the streets of Paris, watching people in striped shirts riding bikes chomping on onions going hon-he-hon-he-hon

That's no bad thing, even if Chanson is not necessarily a genre I’d reach for, and his gallic sense of drama and flair, particularly on the arrestingly overwrought Amsterdam is great. That style could get a bit grating, but thankfully he tends to switch between songs like that and songs like Les Timides, or Le Plat Pays, both lovely, yearning songs, and the overall effect is very enjoyable, ending on another climax of melodrama with Les Toros (I looked up the original tracklisting, and the definitive vinyl release was the first 8 songs of the streaming version, but not in the same order, Les Toros is the original closing song).

I wouldn’t normally think of listening to this sort of thing, but I’m glad it came up as I very much enjoyed the earnest sincerity and distinctive Frenchness, which I think gives it a high trois (which is French for 3).
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Playlist submission: Amsterdam or Le Plat Pays, I’ll go Le Plat Pays

Don't Come Home a Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)
What’s often great about the 60s country albums is that they don’t often go beyond 30 minutes, and the genre really suits that brevity. This a great example of that, the humorous directness of the lyrics and efficiency of the arrangements and melodies, whether they skip along like the title track or the excellently Elvis-y Get Watcha Got and Got, or whether they wallow in bottom of the bottle balladry like I Really Don’t Want to Know or There Goes Everything or Living in Two Worlds add up to a sharp and succinct album.

She really does have a great voice, whether she’s exaggerating the countryness or on I love her vocal on I Really Don’t Want to Know, where she has a lovely tremulousness in the verses before stretching out soulfully. The playing is great too, there’s some great steel of course, but there is some great piano and guitar playing too.

It all adds up to a high 3 I think, an easy going and enjoyable listen
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Playlist submission: Get Whatcha Got and Go

Zombie
The story behind the aftermath from this album is crazy, his commune being attacked by 100 soldiers and mother tragically being thrown out of a window, before he went on to marry a load of women.

The title track on its own is worth a 5, a fantastic, nagging, insistent groove, punctuated by horn riffs and I love the organ/keys towards the back end, giving it a spooky, churchly accent. Mr Follow Follow pulls much the same trick, another great groove matching jazzy horns with soul/funk guitars and a deceptively catchy refrain.

Observation is no Crime is a little jazzier, with a slower more languorous beat, and is another great track, if a notch below the first two tracks. Mistake loses me somewhat due to it’s live sound, but the organ is superb, and the band are incredibly tight, they don’t lose the groove at all over the 15 minutes.

I loved letting this go round and round, and while the last track doesn’t feel quite part of the album like the other tracks it's an excellent, excellent listen.
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Playlist submission: Zombie

fROMOHIO
I listened to this one many times. I’d never heard of them before, but I loved its combination of country, alt, rock, punk and folk with hits of funk and disco, and it feels like one of those great discoveries from the list.

You can hear some Replacements, Big Star, Smiths and R.E.M. and it has an Exile on Main St looseness, sharing the feeling like it’s going to break down at any minute, but it always manages to stay on track. They must also have been an influence of White Denim, it shares the same kind of spirit and energy.

And I think Mike Watt has now become one of my favourite bassists, as he is arguably the star here with loads of killer basslines - In My Mind, Whisperin’ While Hollerin’, Mas Cojones, What Gets Heard (Duran Duran vibes on this one), Time With You - mixing a punkish tone with post punk, disco and melodies.

There’s some excellent guitar playing too, it's never too flashy but there’s loads of catchy riffs and hooks and the playing always seems to serve the song. I love the Nile Rogers-esque opening riff to Riddle of the Eighties, before it shifts into a great jangle-pop track, the refrain in In My Mind is naggingly excellent, and the Gang of Four style playing on Whisperin’ While Hollerin’ is great. It’s superb on Time With You too, mixing a weightier, rocker sound with more of a disco-funk under the verses.

It's a really strong set of songs overall, even with the two skit style tracks in Let the Drummer Have Some and ‘Nuf That Shit, Geroge and the vaguely aimless, if still fun, instrumental Mas Cojones. As well as the tracks mentioned above I love the folk-blues of their version Vastopol (a song I didn’t know before), the shifting styles and tones of If’n, the very White Denim Some Things, the classic sounding Understanding and the spacey, droning psychedia/proto industrial feel of The Softest Hammer.

This is definitely in my top discoveries from this, alongside Holger Czukay, Keith Jarret, Mekons and Pere Ubu and is a nice, loose and rockin’ 5.
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Playlist submission: Time With You

Scissor Sisters
The opening 4 tracks really are superb, Laura, Take Your Mama, Comfortably Numb and Mary, all of them neatly and joyously encapsulating their obviously displayed influences; Stevie Wonder, disco, pop, rock, Elton John, the Bee Gees, etc.

You might think it would struggle to maintain that stellar start, but Lovers in the Backseat, riffing on the excellent Everything She Wants by Wham, is also fantastic. And Tits on the Radio also isn’t merely a brilliant song title, it’s another disco-sleaze banger. I always thought Filthy Gorgeous sounds a bit like the ‘What’s Mr Chips doing’ music, and although it's fun and I like it, it's never resonated as much as those first 4 songs. Music Is The Victim clearly uses Nutbush City Limits as its launching pad/raison d’etre and I think they get away with it through sheer sense of exuberance and charm.

Although it's by no means bad, from Better Luck to the end is where it starts to fall away for me, where the jubilant satin inspiration starts to give way to more polyester perspiration, a slight sense that the gleeful nicking and interpolations of the first 3/4s start to run out of steam somewhat. Despite that tailing off, it doesn’t outstay its welcome at all, all being wrapped up in a nice 43 minutes.

It generally treads the tightrope of pastiche and tribute brilliantly, and the playing really is excellent, particularly the bass, and it's all tied together with a palpable sense of infectious fun, with 4 absolute bangers. It’s a shame it does tail away at the end, so I don’t think it quite makes a 5, but it's easily a high 4.
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Playlist submission: Take Your Mama

Space Ritual
_Our drummer wants to know if there’s any Liverpool supporters_

I don’t mind Hawkwind at all, but they’re a band I would rarely think to listen to, and I definitely wouldn’t think to listen to a double live album.

It’s pretty much as you would expect; long space rock jams, some excellent bass playing, saxophones wailing away, and plenty of portentous nonsense in the introductions and in the lyrics. But it’s not unenjoyable for those same reasons - there is a notable Krautrock/Motorik element to the drumming as well as some of the guitar playing having the same spacey atmosphere as Neu and the general feeling of over the top silliness is fun.

But it does get hard to differentiate anything after about half an hour, it essentially being 85 minutes of the above invarious unvarying configurations, but a couple of songs I liked - Lord of the Light, The Black Corridor, Orgone Accumulator, Brainstorm, Time We Left This World Today

There’s not much else to say, if you love Hawkwind I imagine it's excellent, if you don’t mind them its fun but long. Think it just scrapes 3.
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Playlist submission:Lord of the Light

All Hail the Queen
Overall this was much better than I expected, mixing proto progressive hip hop and house beats with a lot of samples and with Queen Latifah’s late 80s ‘well my name is x and I’m here to say’ rap style.

The first 3 tracks are really strong, the Sly Stone sampling Dance For Me is fun, I love when Trugoy drops in on Mama Gave Birth the the Soul Children, and the house-hop plus Anitwa Ward noises of Come into My House are great. Wrath of My Madness is also great with its Meters sample and although I like the reggae/dub of The Pros, I don’t really like Daddy-O’s vocals. Ladies First is of course a banger and Evil Men That Do is excellent, the Gil Scot Heron sample is brilliantly used.

Despite those songs it does suffer from repetitiveness, both in vocal tone and cadence and subject matter. Although her voice has a retro charm to it, it feels stylistically pretty one note, and thematically it does go back to the well of royal boasting pretty often, making it feel a bit longer than it’s 49 minutes.

Still I enjoyed, there’s good songs, great samples and it's a nice snapshot of 1989, so I’ll go for a solid 3.
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Playlist submission: Could be Evil That Men Do, but I’ll go Ladies First

Fun House
I don’t think I’ve ever listened to a Stooges album properly, but I thought this was excellent. It’s easy to take their reputation with a pinch of salt, but the raw, straightforward aggression is genuinely great.

Their influence on punk and metal is obvious and well stated, but they are more compelling than that sometimes dubious legacy might suggest. Their garage rock’n’roll directness provides the backbone, but there is real groove to the rhythm section, with a relentless motorik-ness to the drumming and some brutally melodic bass playing, and Iggy is of course incredibly charismatic. And on the second side they throw in some discordant sax wailing, not dissimilar to the upcoming Hawkwind, giving a nice variation in tone, and adding a bit more dissonant chaos to it all.

The sound/production is quite wonky, but it seems that was intentional, and it works brilliantly, the bleed and distortion only adding to the sense of manic energy.

Song wise it's also excellent, it’s only 7 songs, but they’re all great, particularly the opening three tracks in Down on the Street, Loose and TV Eye and the closing cacophony of L.A. Blues. And in between the sludgy tempo and bass of Dirt is superb as are 1970 and Fun House. And you can hear all sorts in the mix, there’s a bit of John Densmore to some of the drumming, you can hear Black Sabbath and the Velvet Underground too, and you can see how many garage rock bands of the 2000s were influenced by this.

There’s no reason for this not to be a 5. Often the progenitors of new styles of music don't quite hold up, but there’s a real thrill to this, the sound of a band striking out into a new, aggressive direction, for all the good and ill that birthed.
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Playlist submission: Loose

Hearts and Bones
I’ve not really listened to this properly before, but as you get older you find yourself starting to appreciate Paul Simon’s sardonic ruminations on life and relationships on albums that aren’t Graceland or his first 3 solo albums.

His melodic facility really is remarkable, as we’ve often said, up there with Macca for moments of seemingly casually tossed off melodic brilliance. Allergies is a great opener, a classic Paul Simon bit of sideways observation and melody, akin to The Boy in the Bubble or Wristband from Stranger to Stranger a few years ago. Hearts and Bones is a beautiful song, great lyrics and has a bit of proto-Graceland to its sound and backing vocals. Actually I think you can hear Graceland coming in a lot of the songs, the bouncing bass and keyboards of When Numbers Get Serious. Think Too Much (b) is a great song, I love the marimba pattern. Song About the Moon is also rather lovely, one of those melancholic Paul Simon gems.

Think Too Much (a) is pure 80s movie closing credits music, and is therefore great, particularly with Nile and Bernard on board. Train in the Distance is another great song, recalling some of the bluesy- jazzy keyboard sound of Still Crazy. I love the imagery of Rene and Georgette, as fans of doo-wop strolling around New York. Cars are Cars seems to get a lot of opprobrium, but if Think Too Much (a) is pure 80s movie credit music, this uber pure 80s movie credit music - and it's also great. I really like how The Late Great Johnny Ace manages to walk the line between tender and sentimental, and it's a lovely song.

Through multiple listens I thought this would be a rock solid 4, but looking back I can’t really see a weak track. However I do think it’s a slightly odd choice over There Goes Rhymin’ Simon or Still Crazy or even Rhythm of the Saints, as it sits just below those, as well as Graceland and Paul Simon, so I’ll stick with a 4.
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Playlist submission: Hearts and Bones

Time To Pretend, Electric Feel and Kids still stand up, with Time to Pretend and Kids in particular being excellent songs that put me right back in the late 00s.

I don’t think I’ve listened to this since around then, and I don’t think I listened to it a great deal then either, and it definitely feels like one of those albums that hit a moment and then fade from consciousness quite quickly. But listening now, even though not everything works, or matches the quality of those songs, it’s a very enjoyable album, not least for their cherry picking of influences and the slightly wonky charm of them performing the whole album themselves.

Weekend Wars has a nice finger picky-ness before moving into a bit of Prince and a bit of Beck and into a spacey rock conclusion. It’s a real highlight outside those well known songs. I really wasn’t keen on The Youth on the first couple of listens, but it really grew on me, the strings and slightly sad feel to its evocation of young idealism.

The bass on Electric Feel is superb, that three note riff in particular, and the overall loping disco-Prince feel is great. I never noticed that the keyboard riff of Kids has echoes of Believe by Cher to it, which is not a bad thing. 4th Dimensional Transition has a bit of Neu!’s Hallogallo to the guitar, even if the rest of it is quite proggy, and there is a great Ghost Town-esque organ line in there too. They then dip into a bit of acoustic, grunge alt rock on Pieces of What, before their synthy predilections re-surface, and it's a nice stylistic diversion. Of Moons, Birds & Monsters has a nice late 60s feel to it. The Handshake and Future Reflections are enjoyable too, even if they don’t quite capture the imagination of the previous tracks.

It’s got a bit of Beck, a bit of Prince, a bit of Bowie as well as synth pop, folk, disco, prog, space rock and psychedelia influences, and that eclecticism serves its scattershot, silvery, neon charm really well. 4.
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Playlist submission: Time to Pretend

New Wave
I think this is probably more interesting contextually as a harbinger of Britpop, rather than necessarily for its quality as an album in its own right.

It’s certainly noticeable that it seems to signpost a way out of early 90s alt rock. There’s a bit of Sonic Youth and Pavement, but also a bit of Smiths and mid 80s jangle pop as well as elements of 60s baroque pop, notably on Bailed Out, which all of course became foundational in Britpop

As an album though it does get quite boring after the strong opening 3 tracks. Show Girl is great and along with Bailed Out and American Guitars front loads the album, after that it just merges into one sound, with perhaps only Home Again standing out.

The context definitely is doing the heavy lifting, it is interesting as a stylistic forerunner, but despite there being a degree of quality, overall the music itself isn’t that arresting, and I think I’m unlikely to come back, so I’ll go for a high 2.
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Playlist submission: Show Girl

Hejira
30 years ago if you’d have asked me if I liked jazz-folk I would have said who are you and why are you in my bedroom?

I only know Coyote from The Last Waltz, and although Jaco Pistorius’s fretless bass does date it somewhat, it’s not an unpleasant sound, and the song is fantastic, evoking the wide open spaces of the highway, but representing confinement, rather than freedom.

Clearly this is her ‘road’ album, but many of the songs seem to be about that same paradox, of the characters being trapped by their own escape, even if, as she alludes to in the album title, they ran away with honor (after plenty of banging - good for her). Amelia is a lovely song too, I didn’t notice the shifting between two keys until I read about it on Wikipedia, but it has a lovely, floatingly odd sense to it. Furry Sings the Blues continues that shifting, undulating feel, making a superb opening 3 songs.

Those three songs also set the stylistic template that doesn’t vary hugely, apart from the more overtly jazzy (and pleasingly ethereal) Blue Motel Room, but it’s a template I like. A Strange Boy has a slight bluesyness and a fantastic vocal. Her voice really is fantastic throughout, possibly the best sounding of all her albums? The fretless bass also sounds great on the title track, again, the shifting, undulating effect it gives the song is fantastic. I love that moment when the backing vocals kick in on Song for Sharon, and it's another superb song, winding its way beautifully over the course of 8 minutes. Black Crow has slightly fraught feeling, which I really like, especially as its followed by Blue Motel Room and the melancholic Refuge of the Roads.

I ended up giving The Hissing of Summer Lawns a 5, even though I thought didn't quite resonate in the way Court and Spark did, and on the first few listens I similarly though this didn't quite resonate as much as Summer Lawns, but I kept wanting to re-listen, and I ended up really getting into it. Maybe it’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, but I really grew to love this, and I think it’s also a 5.
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Playlist submission: Coyote

Playing with Fire
Honey is a great opener, especially with the spacey, synthy part, and I really like How Does it Feel - a bit MBV in its dreaminess, but with a great hypnotic hook and nagging rhythm part. The churchly organ on I Believe It is excellent too, as are the slightly country guitar twangs and the slightly Stoogey melody, as it builds, without it quite reaching a crescendo. It often feels like many of the songs do that, having that sense of build, but never quite getting there. I assume that is intentional, or it may be they are so slow it would take each song 45 minutes to actually get to a big climax.

Revolution is also quite Stoogey, but I’m not that keen - I prefer the more hazy, dreamlike atmospherics of songs like Honey, How Does It Feel, I Believe It, Let Me Down Gently, the very lovely Lord Can You Hear Me, or the more terse hypnoticism of Suicide.

This was a real grower, I liked it more and more with each listen, with the only weaker moments being Come Down Softly to my Soul, Revolution or Let Me Down Gently. Although it has an appendage in the Shoegaze box, its much more enjoyable than that, bringing in some Neu and Krautrock influences as well as Velvet Undeground on the Sister Ray adjacent Suicide and a bit of Stooges too.

On the first few listens it was a 3, but after multiple listens it ascends to a spacey 4.
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Playlist submission: Suicide

G Love & Special Sauce
A couple of American friends I had in Japan were really into this band, but I never listened to them - mainly on the basis of the name and their description of them.

Listening now, with that in mind, I was a little trepidatious, but it was much better than I was expecting, even if, ultimately, I wasn’t that sold on it.

I don’t think I like his sing-rapping, more from the put on slurriness than the rapping, and there is a touch of Kings of Leon to his vocal tone, but also a touch of much easier to listen to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion with a much looser, blusier feel. That looseness is probably the best thing about it, giving it a degree of sloppy charm. I suppose Fun Lovin’ Criminals would be another comparison, although FLC have a slightly more diverse set of influences and a bit more about them.

It's pretty long too, at nearly an hour. 30-40 minutes would suit it much better, so many of the songs have a similar feel that it definitely drags from Walk to Slide onwards.

This Ain't Living is the one true highlight, sharing a similarity with Concrete Schoolyard by J5, and that loping piano stands out against the rest of the guitar driven songs.

It’s on the border of 2 and 3. I didn’t mind it at all, and it feels like a 3 on that basis, but realistically I don’t think I’ll actually remember it and think to listen to it again, so I’ll go 2.
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Playlist submission: This Ain’t Living