Reviews by nevele

A spoken word / hiphop album that tells a story of lost money, relationships, cheating, drug use, clubbing and gives a very 'common-UK-man' of the early 2000's vibe.
Back when this came out, Fit But You Know It and Dry Your Eyes were everywhere, but I was more enamored with the better storytelling of the one-pill-too-many-night of Blinded By The Lights.

This album was a refreshingly original new direction for UK hiphop, but the execution was somewhat lacking. The production of the songs is all over the place and while the talking/rapping gets annoying at times, you do really want to keep on listening what he has to tell.

I haven't heard this album in a while and it doesn't fully hold up with how strong I thought it was. 3,5*

The quality of this album far exceeds my enjoyment unfortunately

Fire Of Love is an album clearly made on bad drinks and questionable medicines, and suitable for fans of the raw, hyped-up, uncontrolled feel of the first Pixies albums or the late punk.

And this is not even their best work

This is it. This is the most enjoyable album of the 2000's

The clever and funny lyrics, the incredible speed and hooks, youthful rock&roll and not a song to be skipped. Songs about being denied entry to the club, underage drinking, tarted up girls, boredom and fake tales.
These are the incredibly relatable and lived stories of your late teens and twenties.

41 minutes of unpretentious clever fun.

You expect absurd entertainment and you get entertaining absurdism

What a superb collage of sounds, from ambient to upbeat, from languid to dramatic.

This album exceeded all my expectations. What a concept album! An album with a theme that could almost no longer be made these days; social media would explode. Now it was also quite provocative in 1971, but 2 years earlier the big hit "je 't aime, .....moi non plus" was released by this Serge Gainsbourg and his muse and partner Jane Birkin, which already caused quite a stir. Now Serge liked provocations and the more reactions that generated, the better. Much later he managed to shock half of France with 'Lemon Incest' sung by him and his very young daughter Charlotte, accompanied by a clip that again caused quite a stir.

In any case, the story of 'Histoire de Melody Nelson' is not complicated. A 40-year-old man drives a Rolls Royce in a somewhat seedy neighborhood and muses about his life. Not paying attention, he runs over a young, doll-like girl on her bicycle. He seduces her and after a short passionate relationship (a cooing Jane Birkin in L'Hotel Particulaire) Melody leaves back for England, but her plane crashes.

The record is first and foremost an ode to Serge's muse and long term partner Jane Birkin: Melody is a conjugation of Jane Birkin's middle name and Nelson was a national war hero and also a hero of Jane's father. You will of course also recognize 'Lolita' by Nabakov, a book that immediately appealed to Serge Gainsbourg.

The music, especially the first song of 7.5 minutes, is particularly sultry with the languid, lazy bass, the organ and the unruly guitar. It's easy to imagine why this record was such a source of inspiration for the trip hop movement from the 90s (Tricky, Portishead et al).

Serge talks sometimes, then sings, and musically it is almost impossible to imagine what comes next. It's a complete musical spectrum of funk, soul, jazz rock, but also strings and a whole choir. The music was not written by Serge, but by his friend Jean Claude Vannier who might've made his best work of a lifetime.

Superb

Man, it's too bad that the crazy eventually completely won the battle with talent in this dude.

Between the harmonies, songwriting, production and revolutionary chord progressions that are still used all over the world today, this is such a phenomenal album that its minor flaws can be easily forgiven.

Again, my least favourite band in one of my favourite genre's of music

Especially some of the songs where they slow down are good. And I'm hearing the first real steps of blue-eyed soul.

This is of course a good album, but I think it is a shame that many songs are simply turned away or faded out, sometimes in the middle of a solo.

And compared to his other albums, there there are four songs from the top level of those records. These are Little Wing, Spanish Castle Magic, Castles Made Of Sand & Bold As Love. Wait Until Tomorrow is not bad either. But the rest is still below the usual level of the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

I enjoyed this album much more than I thought I would judged on the last album I heard.
This one though is a feast to listen to, even if it's a bit front-loaded and trails off a little at the end.

After so many good hiphop albums on this list, this was bound to happen. An entire music style built for saying a lot in a short time.
But after having finished this album I don't think anything of substance has been said in an entire hour. I feel dumber having listened to it.
I'll be back in the other corner of hip-hop.

I never realised just how good 10cc actually was. This album was just spot on.
A great balance of silliness, pretentiousness, satire and good old rock.

Don't know if it was my expectations of a such famous band, this album was decidedly mediocre. Maybe even a bit less than mediocre.

It's a whiff of folk, mixed with white people blues, with a sprinkle of country and some psychedelics. And it excels in none.

This is so incredibly bland that I now have to read up on how this became such a household name in counter-culture. Because it can't have been the music.

Some really interesting ideas on this album. But like the other Barry Adamson album on this list (Did we really need two?) it's still the fact we're listening to a few film-score tracks for different non-existent movies.

Lots of sound that might be better if they were, indeed, used in movies instead as music on an album

Not a single bad song on this album that grabs back to his Berlin trilogy time.
Marvelous.

It's my least favourite band in one of my favourite genre's of music

In amongst the (deserved) adoration for Innervisions and Songs In The Key Of Life, this album sometimes seems a bit overlooked. This one is a bit more melancholic, more subdued in character than the other two albums, but in regards to songwriting is not much less than the other two.
This is Stevie Wonder at his (1970's) prime