Reviews by mibbiesaye

Leonard will always get a five from me. Deceptively simple lyrics that set you pondering endlessly if you want to be caught in their spell.

I was obsessed with this when it came out. I can acknowledge now that it drags a bit in the second half. But those opening six tracks are still fantastic.

To go further out check out the two utterly blasted tracks from The Hell ep featuring the RZA, Frukwan and Poetic then all of The Gravediggaz.

The editors get it wrong again. They should have had their next two albums on the list as the ones you need to hear. There is nothing else like them even though Radiohead have been failing to emulate them for the last 25 years.

This one is pretty good and hints at what is to come on their next album Spirit of Eden, especially on the quieter moments.

I have one problem with this album. When Life's What You Make It was a hit I heard it on Radio 1 and Gary Davies proclaimed over the end of it in that weird unplaceable accent of his "Too right mate!". Since then I've always thought of it as a yuppie/80s Tory anthem. It is a bit of a bland platitude to be fair.

Melodically it feels like she has written all these songs before. I thought Norman Fucking Rockwell! was her best?

All these allegations of amateurishness are pure amateur hour. Listen in to how the bass, drums and guitar bounce off one another creating something unfamiliar. Sure you can lazily allege white reggae but when Dennis Bovell is producing you know this stuff is serious.

Labcoaty.

When I bought my cheap copy of this on the Fame label in 1985 I thought I was acquiring an ancient relic. The album was six years old. A blink of an eye to me now.

In more age related pondering I don't understand why armed with this, The Ramones and Buzzcocks you would ever want to listen to stagnant genre bound 90s/00s pop punk. People ten to twenty years younger may disagree.

Pro tip: search out the punk version of True Confessions live on The Old Grey Whistle Test to fully access their youthful exuberance.

This album was a lesson in the shifting sands of 80s youth tribalism in the UK for me. At the start of the decade all the cool kids were mods, New Romantics and casuals while I was a preteen metal kid provoking ridicule by insisting on headbanging to AC/DC at the swimming club disco. By the time this came out I had moved on and thought it was seriously naff and backwards looking but all the cool kids thought it was the greatest. *Insert 'baffled' meme of choice*

Listening now I still think it is a more than slightly ridiculous 3rd generation photocopy of AC/DC, etc. It's fine for about three tracks but it really only has one idea. I also think Love or their first, Dreamtime, and/or an earlier AC/DC album should be in the book rather than this.

I prefer Heaven Up Here which I think overall has better songs and production. However, you can hear on this one that they are developing towards their masterpiece Ocean Rain. I'm always surprised when O read reviews saying they are melancholic or even whiny. I hear them as much too spaced out for that.

The reviews complaining about Queen Latifah referring to herself and her greatness are a bit of shame. That style of rapping comes from hiphop's origins and the mic battles that developed the idea of MCs. It's like complaining that old blues and rock and roll records use the same 12 bar chord progression too much. Maybe I'm showing my age by how much I like the production but again why dismiss old hip-hop/electronic music? Sixties rock and pop doesn't get the same treatment.

I couldn't get access to the album properly so I listened to a few of their top tracks on Tidal. A bit too unrelentingly cheery for me. I'm discovering I don't like most funk rock.

I dont really understand the determination to critically rehabilitate The Monkees, especially the supposedly more worthy stuff they played on themselves. Just let them be what they were - a fun corporate cash in on Beatlemania. Mike Nesmith would go on to write A Different Drum but there's nothing on here that get even remotely close.

They deserve their place for how influential they were. The British Invasion didn't just re-serve the US the blues and rock and roll it also re-served the Everly Brothers. Having said that I think The Beatles improved the further they got from the Everly Brothers influence.

I want a lot of these songs to go on longer.

The slowed down Too Much Too Young always sounds weird to me given how much the high speed live version that topped the charts featured in the local community centre kids' discos I went to back then. But I can sort of understand what they were trying to do listening to it today, making the lyrics easier to hear.

David Fridmann was on fire that year. With this and The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin. I prefer this for its more wistful blasted tone.

Them and Van Halen were responsible for inspiring some of the worst rock music ever made in the 80s but we shouldn't hold that against them.

I'm not much of a fan of Metallica anyway but I was surprised at how bad this sounds. The bland orchestration fight it out with the guitars for the mids and they wind up weakening each other. A huge case of more is less.

There's a certain kind of UK music journalist who can't let go of the idea of Michael Head as a lost genius. The songs on this album are nice enough pastiches of all the 60s tropes you know so well. It's like a gentler Oasis or maybe Cast. It's not really genius. He's put out more than a dozen albums in different guises. So, he's not really lost either. Just there if you like this sort of thing. I think it's OK.

I admire Randy Newman more than love him. The songs are interesting. Gently shocking and sometimes grimly funny but the music doesn't excite me much.