Reviews by nevele

A lot of the discourse around this album I read in the reviews is that Pulp already have two albums on the original: Different Class and This Is Hardcore. I understand why people feel a third Pulp album isn't necessary, especially when This Is Hardcore is close to a perfect album, the genuine swan song of Britpop, encapsulating the whole end of that era.

Taken on its own though, His 'n' Hers is a really good Britpop album. Clever lyrics, clever music, a bit sharper and more distinctive than a lot of what else was around at the time. Acrylic Afternoons, Pink Glove, and Happy Endings are all incredibly strong.

It's not Different Class and it's certainly not This Is Hardcore. As an album by itself I'd call it a four star record. But with two better Pulp albums already on the list, I'm marking it down to three.

Currents was everywhere when it came out, and here in Australia it swept the awards. Triple J, best of the year lists, all of it. I don't get the appeal, and I've genuinely tried to understand it.

The production is meant to be immersive, a headphone experience that washes over you rather than grabs you. I've never really bought that as a virtue on its own. Steely Dan spent years obsessing over drum sounds and guitar tones too, but it never made me forget I still needed the songwriting to hold up underneath. Currents doesn't clear that bar for me. Strip away the swirl and the phasing and there isn't much left demanding my attention.

Pleasant and non-confrontational is a death sentence for music as far as I'm concerned. It's like calling a beer crisp. This is elevator music, coffee shop background, the kind of thing designed specifically not to bug anyone.

Not for me.

I'm fine with most things in modern music but autotune remains my one old-man-yells-at-clouds moment. Even on a really decent album like Oklou's Choke Enough, I just can't get past it. I know it's here to stay; some battles I just accept I've lost.

Combine the dreaminess of Cocteau Twins, the melodies of The Smiths, and the production of The Go-Betweens, and you get The Sundays: a very enjoyable pop group that relies primarily on the heavenly voice of singer Harriet Wheeler.

Black Celebration marks the start of the darker era of Depeche Mode, though the end of Some Great Reward already hinted at where they were heading. And this album is likely the reason they've never been able to shift that 'depressed leather goth'-image. Sitting in the run from Black Celebration through Music for the Masses, Violator, Songs of Faith and Devotion, and Ultra, this isn't as even as what came after. Violator for instance doesn't have a weak moment. This one does.

But the highlights here are among my favourites in the whole catalogue. A Question of Time, Stripped, Dressed in Black, New Dress (a genuine goth dancefloor anthem). This might be the darkest, most brooding album Depeche Mode ever made, and possibly the most influential. Even a genuinely sexy song like Stripped comes out sounding depressing and heavy here. That's the whole personality of this record in one example.

You can draw a direct line from this album to Nine Inch Nails, to Rammstein, to a huge swathe of industrial and darkwave that followed. This is where a lot of that darkness started.

Not their most consistent album. But one of their most important, and one I keep coming back to.

Vampire Weekend is at its best when it fully delves into the full Paul Simon oeuvre. Opener Horchata is perhaps just a little too exotic to truly withstand the resemblance, but the second track White Sky could easily be on Graceland. In fact, the similarities to Crazy Love, Vol II are just a little too great to be a coincidence. Granted, the Simon influence remains present after these two songs, but nowhere near as unsubtle. Unfortunately, it is precisely these two songs that really stand out in terms of quality on the album. A third standout track is Run, where the electric sounds are used in a truly original way.

One generally cannot fault Vampire Weekend for not being original enough, and for lending a certain individuality to world music-inspired electro-pop, but unfortunately, it is often just a little too bland to truly be a classic in my opinion.

Beat Happening are one of those bands where some of the enthusiasm is about what they represent as much as what they sound like. The deliberate lo-fi aesthetic, the childlike simplicity and the conscious amateurism. Apparently all of it was genuinely influential on a generation of indie artists, and that cultural significance is real.

As a pure listening experience though, it's a pleasant three stars. You Turn Me On is genuinely cool, Calvin Johnson's baritone is distinctive and charming, and the mix of grittier songs and pop tracks gives the album enough variety to hold attention. Heather Lewis's voice is an acquired taste I haven't fully acquired yet.

I may be missing something. But I'm enjoying it on its own terms regardless.

Auri is the side project Tuomas Holopainen of Nightwish spent seven years writing and recording with his wife, Johanna Kurkela, alongside fellow Nightwish member Troy Donockley. Music that apparently didn't suit Nightwish, and after hearing this, that context makes a lot of sense.

The opening two tracks are surprisingly bombastic for something billed as folk, closer to Nightwish's grandiosity than the intimate atmosphere the pedigree promises. It's only once Skeleton Tree arrives that the album finds its actual identity, with Donockley's Irish and Celtic influences bringing real tension and giving every instrument room to breathe in production that's genuinely crystal clear. Underthing Solstice is the other standout, working for the same reasons.

The name Auri and Name Of The Wind are nods to Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicle, which explains some of the fantastical, otherworldly quality running through it, even if it took me a while to place the reference.

Kurkela's voice is excellent throughout and the musicianship is never in question. The problem is that too much of the album plays it safe once the initial bombast settles, competent and pleasant rather than genuinely adventurous.

Mekanik Destruktïw Kommandöh is unlike anything I've heard, and it took me several returns to find it a place. I skipped on the day I listened to it and kept coming back, until it finally clicked. This is a classic.

Christian Vander invented an entire genre for this album, Zeuhl, sung entirely in Kobaïan, a language he also constructed himself. It really doesn't matter that it's a made-up language. I did look up the story behind it afterward, the mythology of the planet Kobaïa, and found it genuinely funny and full of humour.

Musically this is science-fiction jazz-rock, a unique and eclectic rock opera in the most literal sense of the word. The predominant choral singing invites comparison to Orff's Carmina Burana, though that only applies partially. There's Stravinsky and Verdi in there too, free jazz, Coltrane's influence coming through clearly, Zappa's Uncle Meat period, even gospel.

Wonderful. It took me a bit, but I love it.

Growing up in the Netherlands, Racine Carrée was everywhere in 2014. Inescapable. At the time I'd have given it a three, maybe three and a half. Usually overexposed albums wear out completely. This one went the other way for me.

Stromae isn't really French or Belgian. He's Brussels, that specific urban melting pot of Flemish, Walloon, African, and French culture, filtered through his Central African roots and his Rwandan father's absence. Paul Van Haver wearing all of that simultaneously, in a language that's technically French but culturally something a bit more complicated.

What makes the album work is the central trick: devastatingly sad lyrics in relentlessly upbeat music. Papaoutai (Dad, where are you) about growing up without a father, delivered as something you could dance to. Quand C'est with its clever wordplay on cancer that only works in French and only works if you're willing to make a pun about something terrible. That combination of joy and grief in the same breath connects to something deeper than European electropop and connects more to the Congolse rumba tradition underneath it where music carries enormous grief in joyful form.

I saw him live in 2014 and it was marvellous. He was one of the more extraordinary live performers of his generation. The album holds up just as well.

Deceit took a couple of full listens to get through properly. This is not music that reveals itself easily or quickly, and it's not music that's meant to make you feel comfortable.

This Heat were working in 1981 at the height of Cold War paranoia and Thatcher's Britain, and the title is not subtle. Deceit is scary. The industrial textures, the tape manipulation, the sudden shifts, none of it feels random. Underneath the chaos I think is a precision that makes the unsettling quality land hard rather than just feel like noise.

Excellent, important, and deeply uncomfortable. Exactly as intended.

Charles Aznavour performs chanson the way it's supposed to be done. This is the real thing. Full of emotion, poetry, and the weight of a life fully lived behind every word.

It might sound elitist to say, but there's a difference between someone performing a tradition and someone who is the tradition. Aznavour is the latter.

This was among my favourite albums of 2024, and returning to it now it's even better than I remembered. That doesn't happen often enough.
There's a working class wit and directness in Lily Fontaine's lyrics that just sits well with me. Sharp, personal, political without being preachy, and occasionally very funny.
But it's the music that keeps pulling me back. Especially the bass playing is outstanding throughout, melodic and driving simultaneously, giving the songs a sounds that most indie rock simply doesn't have. Combine that with the guitar jangle and the precise, ticking rhythms and it lands somewhere unexpected. Different and cool in equal measure.
Yes, it's only from 2024 and perhaps we should give albums a little more time before submitting them to a list like this. But this is, I think, one that might endure.

Swampy, guitar-driven roots rock with a distinctly left-field quality underneath. Reminding me a bit of CCR filtered through something harder to pin down, or The Golden Earring at their most confident.

What stands out most is the detail. The slide work is excellent throughout, the bass playing inventive in ways that reward close listening, and the guitar duo of Rob Baker and Paul Langlois weave together with the intuitive interplay that only comes from years of playing together.

And then there's the singer. A quirky, extraordinary voice delivering lyrics that are sometimes quite incomprehensible, but delivered with such complete conviction that it feels like you're simply the one not understanding it. Which is exactly the right effect.

A very fine classic rock album from a band that deserved considerably more attention outside of Canada than they ever got.

Pleasant and atmospheric pop

Diesel & Dust is a concept record with a clear and urgent central theme: the First Nations people of Australia and the ongoing consequences of white colonisation. This isn't political music as brand extension, Midnight Oil earned every word of it by actually going there. The Blackfella/Whitefella Tour took the band and their audiences deep into remote Aboriginal communities, to places that bore the scars of what had been done to them. The red dirt and dust of that journey is literally in the recording.

The album is thoughtful and well-sequenced, and the individual songs reward close attention to their lyrics. Beds Are Burning is the obvious entry point, its conscience striking immediately. Put Down That Weapon turns its fury toward nuclear testing in the South Pacific, the weapons budget that threatens both people and environment. Dreamworld reaches into the concept of "Dreamtime" : the Aboriginal understanding of past, present, and memory as one continuous living thing, and sets it against the Westerner's plans for the land. The Dead Heart is about Uluru, the symbol of the First Nations story, and settles accounts with the mining and plundering of resources. Bullroarer, in my imagination at least, symbolises the bulldozer of the colonist mercilessly flattening the balance of the country.

Peter Garrett is the obvious focal point, but the band behind him is equally important. The sparse, dry guitar work and the powerful rhythm section give the music a physical quality that genuinely sounds like the landscape it's describing.

Diesel & Dust proves that music where lyrics and message take centre stage can still rock straight ahead. And Midnight Oil's credibility in doing so puts them streets ahead of the Stings and Bonos of this world.

A creative and fun mixmash shitshow of an album. Compared to their debut this is moving away from the broader mix of contemporary trap and other influences and doubling down on music that was in the revivalism scene in 2023.
There's plenty of hyperpop here, but also a lot of ska, nu-metal, and blown-out pop-punk. That combination sounds great on them, and I particularly like how much they lean into their ska influences. It's a more focused approach than on the debut, while still being completely ridiculous.
And despite all the noise, this is surprisingly accessible. "Dumbest Girl Alive" and "757" could almost be late-career Ween songs.

A creative, energetic, and surprisingly approachable mess.

Little Joy is at its best when you're not really listening. A pleasant, warm, technically accomplished bossa nova and California pop blend that falls away a bit.
The Arctic Monkeys' Tranquility Base Hotel era comes to mind, that same lounge-lizard retro quality that works better as atmosphere than as foreground listening.
Which is fine, but not really what you want from an album submission on a list like this.
Decent. Just doesn't excite.

Joy as an Act of Resistance hasn't left my playlist since it arrived yesterday afternoon. I'm on playthrough six and counting.

IDLES make what I can only describe as middle-aged men punk. Grown men processing grief, rage, tenderness, and community through the most direct musical form available. Joe Talbot's lyrics are full of lived experience and surprising turns that reward close attention. "Islam Didn't Eat Your Hamster" is one of the great punk lines of the last decade: funny, furious, and completely specific all at once. It sounds like a slogan until you realise it's dismantling one.

This is strength through tenderness. Not sloganeering, not performative aggression, but genuine vulnerability delivered at full volume. Danny Nedelko is a love letter to an immigrant friend that makes you want to shout along. Samaritans takes toxic masculinity apart line by line while sounding like it wants to start a fight.

I have many friends, mostly men in their forties and fifties, who absolutely adore this album. I am one of them. This is collective music, designed to be shared, to fill a room or concert venue, to make you feel less alone in whatever you're carrying.

Five stars. And it's still on.

This album opens in TV on the Radio territory: dense, layered, ambitious from the first note. The title track and Grand Paradise are excellent and justify every bit of that ambition.

The problem is the production, which sits firmly in the maximalist indie rock school of the mid-2010s. The reverb is relentless, and while the stronger songs survive it, tracks like Lich Prince and Game Shark get buried under the weight of it. When the songs are strong enough to push through, this is genuinely impressive. When they're not, the production compensates for what isn't there.

By the end it settles into Foals territory (Holy Fire era specifically) which is not a bad place to be, just a slightly airless one when the dial never gets turned back.

Decent throughout, excellent occasionally, frustrating in between.