Reviews by leon1001

There are two Tom Waits the piano bar jazzy-bluesy guy from the first albums and the more experimental weird one from a second era. I like them both but I enjoy and appreciate more the second one. This albums seems to be trapped in the middle. Most of the songs sounds like they belong to the first Tom Waits, but there is a couple that sound more experimental. That is reason that I don't give this one 5 stars, it feels incoherent at times. Still most songs are great in their own.

As I approach the 100 albums I realize that in genres that dominated on different eras there are the greats that everybody knows about even if you have never listened to them, some great unknowns that for some reason didn't get the recognition the others did and then there are some acts that just are not as great but they belong to the same category of music. I've listened to a lot of brit pop, some grunge, some country that is nothing great and this album is precisely that on the blues rock. It's good, every song has the energy and the talent of other rock blues acts but it feels like it's the cheap version, the copy of the copy. It's a good album that surely I won't ever listen to again.

Took me 3 full listens of this album to start appreciating it. And I liked it. Good melodies. Probably just not the genre I listen to the most. It's kind of a folk pop rock. I knew that there was something there and I found it

I don't know. I liked it a lot.

Like hell was I going to listen to a 3 hour album!! I looked for a ranking of the songs and listened to the top 12 and I thought: a great album will come out of this. But no. It's minimalistic in its most boring form. At least the other bad albums had the decency of of being less than 1 hour long.

I think the beatles are great but not as great as they've always wanted to make us believe they are.

They seem to be good at creating melodies with the vocals but the instrumentation feels flat and at times non existent. Fun music but inconsequential, easily forgettable and too long for what it offers.

There are some melodies hidden in all that noise that will surface more clearly in the next albums. I can only blame them being too young and wanting to push their sense of humour and experimental sound to make it less amicable but they outgrew that. They all do. We all do.

I like jazz and I like latin jazz so it was not hard listening to this album but even at 40 minutes it felt repetitive very early on. The conga is just too limited to be the central point of a whole album, I need more melody.

I only listened to the first album. I always thought I didn't like vocal jazz beyond Frank Sinatra but I enjoyed this. However I am recognizing that some albums are just not going to connect with me just for their genre. This has a little bit of that.

All good. Nothing remarkable.

This band came to exist just to make Take on me. It will play forever and probably solved their lives but at least in this album there's not even a glimpse of the same inspiration that wrote that song.

5 stars for Gryffindor and for take on me, 2 stars for the album as a whole for having the song.

When I sold all my CDs because I was moving too often and was hard to carry them with me and I had everything in digital I only kept Tool albums because of the packages and this Elliott Smith album. A lot of people say it's a Beatles tip off but I think it's an improvement and I love every second of this.

The lyrics are what you would expect from a rapper, black or white, man or woman, English, American or from anywhere "I am a very good rapper" "I was poor and now I'm rich" the music supposedly is not sampled and it's good. The best songs are when she is accompanied by other musicians , "Selfish" "Wounds"

Never listened to a whole album of this genre so maybe it's not the best but I loved the whole vibe. I genuinely felt happy while listening.

Very easy to listen to this album despite being longer than one hour but it made me think they the stones are probably the longest running band for being a sacred cow, if you like rock then you like the stones but Mick Jagger is not the greatest song writer, not I've ever seen his name in that discussion. Someone else mentioned that the best moments were by guest musicians and I think he is right. It's like Gimme shelter, the best moment is the chorus not anything that the main members do. Not a single track is bad but not a single track in it's entirety is memorable beyond those piano, sax or trumpet parts. It did help me to find the names of those musicians and l discover new music. I probably won't listen to this album again.

I've listened to this album so many times through the years since I was 15 that of course its one of my favourite albums. The problem comes when we try to treat music as a competitive sport and want to say that a lot of people like an album not because it's good but because it's better.

Maybe Springsteen is an American taste, maybe he's been there for so long that everybody already listens to his music and accept it as the work of a great musician but outside of the US he has never been so present as other musicians like Bob Dylan that I sense he is perceived in a similar manner. The lyrics are good, better than average at moments, others they are really simple. The musicians are good and know when to be present and when yo step back and realize that the act is Bruce Springsteen. Yet, the sum of those parts don't seem to give a great album.

Favourite songs: Born in the USA, Downbound train, the kind of creepy I'm on fire

Am I too old to learn to play trumpet? No

It's always a pleasant surprise when you discover that a one hit wonder is part of a good album, still, this sounds like the first steps of a genre that would be perfected by other bands with more solid bases.