Reviews by nevele

I too belong to the camp that considers A Day at the Races slightly better than A Night at the Opera. The reason is simple: there aren't really any weak tracks on it, everything ranges from quite good to absolutely stellar. I also prefer the production here, a beautifully clear, warm sound that suits the material. Queen take the strong elements from their previous records and either revisit or combine them, further developing their signature sound rather than just repeating it.

The Millionaire Waltz is a perfect example, a blend of rock, opera, and waltz executed brilliantly. There's classic Queen hard rock too, in Tie Your Mother Down and the powerful White Man. And You Take My Breath Away and Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy are both genuinely beautiful songs worth singling out.

An excellent and diverse album, and the better of the two for my money.

Afrociberdelia introduced me to a genuinely great band I knew nothing about, and I'm delighted it did.

This is manguebeat, a movement founded by Chico Science and Nação Zumbi in Recife, in Brazil's northeast, fusing traditional Afro-Brazilian and Pernambucan rhythms with rock, funk, and hip hop. It feels steeped in the same era as early Red Hot Chili Peppers, Urban Dance Squad, and Chucklehead, but filtered through a distinctly South American lens that gives it real identity of its own. And it feels political even without understanding the lyrics, which makes sense once you know it's tied to a real cultural movement rooted in one of Brazil's poorer regions rather than just borrowed funk-rock aesthetics.

The guitar work is a highlight throughout, alternating rock riffs with funk phrases, and the bass has real character, occasionally veering into reggae and dub territory.

I'll be putting this on more, and I'm already looking forward to checking out the rest of their catalogue.

Another decent Canadian alt-rock band on this list, and Whale Music fits right into that pattern. Pretty okay. The band tries its hand at a whole range of styles across the record, and to their credit nothing here is annoying. Nothing really stands out either. Fun enough while it's on.

The drummer is out of this world

Sometimes you meet a person in their twenties who's going through an experimental phase. They put on a strange voice, get into weird things, do a brief inquiry into online relationships, proclaim that they love America and America loves them back. Plenty of people find this person intriguing. I could never stand them.

Then you meet them again a few years later and they've turned completely beige. All the experimentality is gone, and you were proven right the whole time, that everything strange and provocative about them was just a way to cover up the fact that underneath it all, they're a really bland person. Empty.

That's my relationship with The 1975, and Being Funny in a Foreign Language is the beige version showing up right on schedule. I possibly like this less than A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, which I didn't think was possible.

I don't normally write very long reviews, but this EP means something to me, so this one's going to run longer than usual. Thank you to whoever submitted this.

The Decline is one of the best punk EP's of all time. Maybe the best. One song, eighteen minutes, no breaks. Musically it works as a genuine suite rather than a single idea stretched thin, moving between straightforward punk drive and short atmospheric breaks, ska-inspired stop-and-go sections that keep you engaged throughout rather than letting the length become an endurance test.
Fat Mike's bass playing is a standout across the whole thing, and the odd-metered ensemble sections show a level of ambition in composition that punk rarely reaches for. The transition into the "one more pill to kill the pain" section is one of the record's most effective turns, a shift in tone and pace that resets the emotional register right when the song needs it.

Lyrically this is NoFX at their most serious, tackling gun control, loneliness, corporate greed, drug abuse and the Christian right, among other things, all woven through recurring musical and lyrical themes that tie the eighteen minutes together into something coherent rather than a string of unrelated verses.
The heaviest moment for me is the section built around the pun on 'Sarah Tonin', a devastating piece of wordplay that disguises real bleakness behind cleverness until the darkness of it lands.

(Serotonin's gone, she gave up, drifted away)
Sara fled, thought process gone
She left her answering machine on
The greeting left spoken sincere
Messages no one will ever hear
Ten thousand messages a day, a million more transmissions lay
Victims of the laissez faire
Ten thousand voices, a hundred guns, a hundred decibels turns to one
One bullet, one empty head

And the closing section is where the song delivers its hardest gut punch, a direct address to the listener that collapses class and identity into a single confrontation right before it ends. I could write hundreds of paragraphs about that recurring theme alone and the emotion it carries every time I hear it.

“Fellow members of Club "We've Got Ours"
I'd like to introduce you to our host
He's got his, and I've got mine
Meet the decline

We are the queer
We are the whore
Ammunition In the class war
We are worker / We love our queen / We sacrifice”

I grew up on NoFX's earlier work, Punk in Drublic especially, as a teenager, and I've grown with them since. Their music got better over the years in my opinion, and War on Errorism, released three years after this EP, might actually be their best full album, alongside Pump Up the Valuum and the severely underrated 2016 album First Ditch Effort. Songs like Idiots Are Taking Over, Leaving Jesusland, and Franco-Unamerican take the same political and societal ideas found here and wrap them neatly into songs a fraction of the length.
But The Decline is the epic they wrote, and it stands entirely on its own. It also set the tone for the politically engaged, anarchic spirit that would define Fat Mike's songwriting from War on Errorism onward.

I saw NoFX play both shows in their farewell tour in Melbourne, and on the second night they played this EP in its entirety, front to back. Hearing eighteen minutes of this performed live, after knowing it for so long, was something else entirely.

Five stars, without hesitation.

'The Past Is a Grotesque Animal' is a small 12-minute masterpiece. It is quite a stylistic departure from the rest of the album and also the undisputed highlight. Nevertheless, this album contains more beautiful tracks, although the inconsistency is also noticeable.

It's a playful and highly experimental album.

Wow. Love at second sight. I knew this album already but dismissed it upon release. But why? How? I have no idea anymore. This was incredible.

I keep wondering how many Canadians ended up on this user-submitted list. After music ranging from Chucklehead to the Tragically Hip, and now this, I feel like I've gotten a pretty thorough education in Canadian music along the way.

2 is another pleasant listen from that stretch. Mac DeMarco's loose, detuned guitar tone and laid-back slacker charm are all here in their earliest form. Short, well played, easy to sit with. This man writes really great songs for when you're feeling a bit crazy, in the middle of the night on a weekday. I have a lot of admiration for his guitar work.

Nothing mandatory. Just pleasant.

Chaise Longue is the best single from 2022, and possibly the best of the decade so far. The wit, the deadpan delivery, that riff, the way it refuses to take itself seriously while being genuinely brilliant songwriting underneath, I could hear it a thousand times and still think it's incredible.

I have to be honest here and ask the question directly: would this have been submitted to the list if it wasn't a female Japanese jazz pianist from the 80s? Because on pure musical merit, I'm not convinced this stands out from the thousands of artists making equally good jazz-funk-fusion at the time.

That's not to dismiss the playing. The piano is grand, the bass playing is genuinely excellent, and the drums hold everything together well. Production values are strong for the era too, and I understand why it's rated so highly on sites like Discogs and Rate Your Music, that crate-digging, city pop revival crowd tends to reward exactly this kind of rediscovery.

But some of it hasn't aged gracefully. A few tracks slip into what I can only describe as 80s sitcom tune territory, dated synth sounds pulling focus away from the genuinely strong musicianship underneath.

Good, well made, well played. I'm just not hearing what makes it spectacular rather than simply competent within a crowded field.

I've always found Foo Fighters a bit of a singles band, strong songs surrounded by a fair amount of mediocrity, and The Colour and the Shape doesn't really escape that, even though I still think it's their best record.

Everlong, My Hero, and Monkey Wrench are the actual singles and remain the clear highlights, the songs that have stayed in setlists for a reason. Hey, Johnny Park! and New Way Home are close behind. Beyond that, it thins out, and judging by other reviews here I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Many of these songs do great during their live shows. But as a front-to-back album, it's just solid rather than essential.

Madvillainy is genuinely pleasant to sit with, DOOM's flow and Madlib's dusty, sample-heavy production make for a great listen even before you've caught everything going on lyrically.

I'll admit I'm not the most versed judge of hip hop, and with English not being my first language, dense wordplay like this takes more than a couple of listens to fully land. What I can say after two is that the flow is excellent and the sample base is genuinely good throughout.

I'll be returning to this one to listen more closely to the lyrics. For now, judged on sound and flow alone, this earns its reputation.

Breathy, childlike vocals over folky guitar tokkeling. Unfortunate to listen to, and I say that as someone who's generally all for including lesser known albums on a list like this.

This is clearly the kind of record built to divide people, and reviews on here confirm as much, some hear haunting charm, others hear the Shaggs on a bad day. I'm firmly in the second camp.

Two stars in general. One star for its place on this list.

Scenery pops up constantly on lists and recommendations, and it seems it almost has a status as a bit of a cult-classic. So now after it appeared on this list, I finally sat down with it properly, three listens in total, and I'll be honest, it didn't live up to the reputation for me.

I don't really understand all the fuss surrounding this album. The performances of the standards, in particular, are quite bland, fairly cliché and mostly reminded me of better versions elsewhere. Ryo Fukui is clearly technically skilled (especially as an auto-didact who'd only been playing for about 4 years), but his idea of conveying emotion often seems to be pounding on the keys as hard as possible, which gets tiring after about three minutes.

It's quite listenable overall, and the rendition of Early Summer is genuinely nice and makes up for some of it. Yoshinori Fukui on drums is amazing.
But the Autumn Leaves here is clumsy, and that's a song that's been played to death by better hands.

I still have this on LP. Straight from this albums' liner notes:

"Rounding out the 1970s and completing a trilogy of acoustic jazz-folk albums that included "In The Falling Dark" and "Further Adventures Of", Bruce Cockburn's "Dancing In The Dragon's Jaws" stands as both an era-ending album and a cumulative release that neatly built on the strengths of its predecessors. It also serves as a high-water mark for Cockburn in several respects. Featuring some of his finest guitar work ever, the album was voted an "essential" recording by "Acoustic Guitar" magazine, putting Cockburn in the prestigious company of such revered pickers as Django Reinhardt, Andres Segovia, Bill Frisell and Mississippi John Hurt.

"Dancing In The Dragon's Jaws" boasts a bright, celebratory tone. The album, Cockburn once said, was about "being joyful in the face of everything". But, as the title suggests, it also alludes to danger and hardship. "I wanted to give a concrete expression of the suffering" he admitted. "That's all too evident in the world".
Overall, the album is fuelled by the elation of Cockburn's deepening spirituality"

This isn't an album I'll put on much, but it's absolutely one that should be added to the official 1001 Albums list at the next edition. The Shins are a special band, writing clever, catchy pop songs that occasionally hit near perfection, and the lyrics throughout are genuinely excellent.

The album works as a whole, but the mixing and track order hold it back slightly. Red Rabbits could have sat further up the record. Moved earlier, the album would have carried just a bit more substance overall.

Spilt Needles is my number one song here, stunningly beautiful, the kind of song you can fall in love with. Not everything reaches that level. Phantom Limb is loose and sweet but lacks the charm that makes Spilt Needles so special.

A genuine gap in the original list.

Fuzz was apparently huge in Boston and Massachusetts, a funk rock album from 1994 doing the same thing quite a few bands were doing everywhere in the early 90s. There's a bit of Living Colour in there too. I grew up with this sound as well, Urban Dance Squad and Gotcha! in the Netherlands were playing songs in this exact style, and they were simply better at it.
Apparently Chucklehead built their reputation as an incredible live band, and I can believe it. Would have loved to see them back in the day.
Decent enough on its own terms. Just not essential.

Turns out this is the same band that wrote Heat Waves, a song I genuinely hated. This is a lot better than that, which raises the question of what happened to them in between.

How to Be a Human Being has sultry rhythms suitable for a summer festival, and Life Itself and Take a Slice, my favourite here, show a band with real texture and personality. But it has proper lows too, Cane Shugah being the clearest example, and the flat vocals become tiresome over a full album.

Decent, with genuine highs and genuine lows. I won't be revisiting it, but it was fun while it lasted. If they're ever on a festival lineup here in Australia, I might actually go check them out.

Clarity was balancing between two and three stars for me until roughly halfway through, and ended up at four. That's a bigger swing than I expected.

I'm not the biggest fan of emo or proto-emo, and the first half of the album is fine but fairly straightforward, nothing that particularly grabbed me. Then something shifts. The back half gets fuller, with orchestration and extra layers that would normally scare me off, but it works here, and the songwriting feels stronger too. Just Watch the Fireworks, For Me This Is Heaven, and the title track are the standouts, and Goodbye Sky Harbor earns every one of its sixteen minutes. I've never minded long songs, so length was never the issue.

A second listen, knowing what was coming, only made the gap between the two halves more obvious. The first half isn't bad, just more conventional. The second half is where this album actually justifies its reputation.