Reviews by kuvien

annoying MTV vocals

It's good, sure, but who wants to listen to this over and over again?

Something about this album makes me so happy. I loved it the moment I first heard it, and every re-listening experience delights me. Everything feels right about this recording--every groove, every moment of passion, from "Modern Man" to the illimitable and unassailable "Sprawl II". Is the album over-dramatic? Yes, of course, in spots, but for me that's part of its charm. Searching for a place in the modern world, a world dominated by the lifelessness, the creative barrenness, of the suburbs. It's weird... this is kind of a coming-of-age album, but only kinda, as if it's being sung in retrospective, for the point of view is very much an adult one considering the futility of continued human generation. Ambition has rarely been more captivating than the magic caught on this album.

This is that classic folk rock album that everyone knows the two singles to: “Father and Son” and “Wild World”. Two songs that jerk tears from sentimentalists everywhere, despite how trite the lyrics can be in spots. Ah fuck it. Just sing along! La la la la la la laaa la.

In my mind, nothing defines grunge like "Nevermind", and nothing Nirvana did touches that masterpiece. However, this album is better, more melodic—despite having a dirtier sound—than I remembered. It’s got some really catchy tunes. The back and forth between acoustic and electric bits highlights how effortlessly the band can switch from delicacy to harshness in quick changes.

When love affairs go wrong, they go spectacularly wrong, and when it’s an artist who has fucked up and/or gotten his heart broken, it’s the fans who reap the benefits. So what’s going on here in this at once disjointed and unified narrative? Well, it all started when he got nervous as she bent down to tie his shoes, and then he realized she was his twin...he swears he can change...people don’t know how to act around him...he’s only known careless love...he’s hoping that the cliché is true, that the darkest hour is right before the dawn...but he’s face down, just like the Jack of Hearts...he gets a chill whenever he thinks about how she left that night...he remembers how she gave him shelter from the storm...he’s seen people disappear like smoke. He’s saying goodbye to more than just her, and the regret stabs through almost every song.

If you've not heard the New York Sessions bootleg, do yourself a favor!

I had kind of a shower thought while listening to this album, specifically during the second track in which Stevie ponders why people think of him as a lesser man because he’s black. This made me think of a lot of other Stevie songs that deal with discrimination and race relations. Here’s a blind man who deals with issues of people judging people based on skin color. Color. Something he’s never seen. Being blind, Stevie simply cannot judge people on what they look like, including skin color. But here he is singing about being black. That’s just so fucked up...that prejudice is so strong a blind man knows what it means to be black.

This is some kind of weird unidentified weapon album, the warm and magical musical hinting at the development (discovery?) of the Softest Bullet, the strange "prize" everyone had been racing for, its element so heavy that a spoonful weighs a ton. This whole album glows with radioactivity, some of it being from the laboratory, some from comic book spiders, and a lot more of it from outer space, where our supermen come from. How long have our heads been bleeding and we've not realized it? How is it that we are all glowing with this...substance? This wonderful album explores the intersection of the material and the immaterial, the chemical and the emotional, helping us understand that we are ineffable, hybrid beings, a mix of the physical and the spiritual. And it's okay to be so.

Leaving the politics of this album aside, probably because they’ve been analyzed and referenced to death, I’d like to focus on a deeper truth explored in this document: the quest for discovery as a race against time. Indeed, this album is aptly named, for the harvest is plentiful, and the workers are few. Whether it’s the junkie or the philosopher, we’re all searching for meaning, and we have a limited time in which to discover it.

Syd is just so damn beautiful! I’m intrigued by the title of this album. The madcap laughs. “Madcap” is often used an adjective, so is he describing the silly laughs of someone? Or is he using “madcap” in the noun place, as in “a clown”? The clown laughs? The clown is laughing? This album’s got an overall fragmented feel (which isn’t a criticism), but that’s to be expected what with the three different recording sessions as well as five different producers. Barrett was known for his unpredictable, erratic antics with the Floyd, so perhaps that’s the origin of the use of “madcap”. And what to do with a madcap person? Why, nothing but take him by the hand and lead him into the studio. Because he’s not going to go himself. He’d probably rather be gardening.

"Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks." This is where it all started. There's just so much affirmation and positivity all over this album, and even the female vocals chanting on the all-too-short "Everyday People" sound like something they'd sing while skipping rope on the pavement. The dark side of this is that this album stands in the shadow of Sly's massive cocaine addiction. One thing this album does well is evoke the feeling of the emotions it's trying to communicate, like how the raunchy electric guitar is the exact sound a sex machine might make, complete with the increased rhythm of the pounding percussion that leads to inevitable orgasm. In the end, this album is bookended with songs meant to uplift the listener. Stand up and try! You can make it.

Bad music. I hate anyone who likes this.

To me, this seems to be where all the 21st-century artsy indie suburban teenage angst started. You know what, Will? Wherever you go, there you are. And that’s all I really have to say about this one. Good tunes, though.

Look, Mr. Gaye, I understand that “push” rhymes with “bush”, but no matter how iconic and sexy your title track is, it still strikes me as thirsty. When his father shot and killed him before his time, I wonder if Marvin had his “If I Should Die Tonight” running through his mind. And if so, I sure hope the “you” in that song was a real person.

The band's final and best album, Synchronicity blueprints all the cynicism of the 80s in one artistic statement, focusing on the uniformity driven into us by the tendencies of societal conformity, and how though we may all look alike, we are alienated and dissociated from one another, in some dystopian world where God isn't dead--He's sadistic. And where you have to yell over your Rice Krispies if you expect anyone to pay attention to your bogus suicide attempts.

An exquisite album... that's not for me. But I bet it's for you, so check it out.

This has at least three iconic folk rock songs direct from the popular hippie free-love consciousness of the end of the 60s. Pretty good stuff overall and a fine album to mellow out to. The trio really benefited from collaborating with Young, and vice versa, since based on the popularity of this album all their solo stuff sold better.

I love the conflation in music of sex and religious experience. That album opener is like standing in a violin downpour at night. The instrumentation on track 2 is actually quite experimental, demanding the listener's ear. Then a walk in the wet garden after the downpour. If this music doesn't speak to you, it's because it doesn't speak to your heart. Because that's the only thing this album can speak to. The heart. I think this is the perfect album when you're returning home after staying out all night. I love how the harpsichord goes hard then silent then hard again. If music were an embroidered object, it would be some of these songs. This album is about turning points--when the rain gives way to clear skies, when the night gives way to the dawn--standing on the cusp of love. "Madame George" is spellbinding, the last song you listen to as the dawn comes, when you've been out all night and are dead tired but still enchanted by the memory of the stars. This is falling in love, not with a person but with an experience and a forgotten but remembered snatch of some whispered line. Here's that violin downpour again. Feel it on your face as you turn your collar up, as you turn your face toward home. This is an album detailing the life portals we must all step through, the last being death. I love that final moment of experimental dissonance. The music--like life--is over. The music is disrupted.

There's something about his voice that I just can't put into the proper words--a mysterious smoothness, a complete lack of vibrato without sacrificing melody, singing from the back of his throat but not from the lungs, so that the vocals are immediate and profound without being overbearing. For a depressed man, Drake didn't make depressing music. Soft, nuanced, beautiful yes, but not depressing. It is quite introspective, though, like a man looking at things and saying everything by saying as little as possible. This definitely is less-is-more music.

I've got a few Neil Young albums in my collection mostly because (a) I like his music well enough, and (b) he is highly regarded. There are a lot of serious music lovers out there who adore this man's music, even going so far as to say he is the voice of a generation and that his albums are the best of their time. I wouldn't go that far, but I do sense there is more to Mr. Young than I've yet discovered. Every once in a while one of his songs really grabs me. The eponymous track on this album does. "I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day to day." Although this isn't a state of mind I can personally identify with, I know a lot of people who feel this way, so I try to sympathize. As for me, I learned long ago that people just ain't no good. I avoid them whenever possible.