Reviews by nevele

Would the world listen to this if it wasn't New Order? Possibly not, and that's my honest answer.

Music Complete has genuine moments. Singularity and Stray Dog hold up well on repeated listens, the latter featuring Iggy Pop in fine form, even if it sounds very much like Public Service Broadcasting's "Go!" than anything New Order have done before. Tutti Frutti has a Daft Punk quality that's undeniably fun. But that's precisely the problem for me at times. For a band this influential, finding themselves sounding borrowed from artists they helped inspire is a specific kind of late-career irony.

Plastic feels very Giorgio Moroder. The Kent comparison hovers over Restless, which was inexplicably chosen as the single despite being one of the weaker tracks. And The Game, Superheated, and People on the High Line could have been cut without anyone noticing.

The album is a bit too long and too uneven to fully recommend, but not without its pleasures. I'll return to it in a while and see how it lands with distance.

Sigh. Ok. I'll jump on the bandwagon twenty years too late.

Friends have been singing the praises of The Mountain Goats for years and for some reason I resisted. I assumed this wouldn't be in my wheelhouse, that it was folk music adjacent, not for me. I was wrong, and I should have listened sooner.
It sits closer to the intimate, intensely personal territory of Eels: small details carrying enormous emotional weight, lo-fi production that serves the songs rather than limiting them. John Darnielle writing directly about surviving an abusive stepfather, about teenage years spent enduring something unendurable, and somehow making it feel universal.

This Year, Up The Wolves, and Love Love Love won me over completely. Three very different songs that each do something the others don't, and together they make the case for everything this album is reaching for.

Five stars, and twenty years of apologies to my friends.

I will never get used to autotune used this way. That's my music purist old man card, and I'm playing it. Unfortunately it's central to the sound here, which creates a barrier that never fully disappears.

That said, Brat is genuinely a good album. Sympathy Is A Knife, Von Dutch, and Girl So Confusing are absolute bangers, and the Lorde remix of the latter is even better than the original. The lyrics deal with the anxieties of fame and female friendship with more wit and self-awareness than the club context would suggest.

And credit where it's due: in 2024, Brat made people listen to an album again. In an era of playlist culture and singles, that's no small thing.
Not the masterpiece everyone said it was. But genuinely good, autotune and all.

3,5*

What else can be said about Days of Future Passed that hasn't been said before? Perhaps just this: there is no more glaring omission from the original 1001 Albums list than this one.

Every note is in its place. Recurring themes weave through the album, the orchestra sits alongside the band not as decoration but as an equal voice. Poetry punctuates the journey from dawn to night. Tuesday and Nights in White Satin alone would have been enough, but this works as a complete and coherent arc from first note to last.

The Moody Blues effectively created a genre here. Orchestral rock, proto-prog, call it what you want. Everything that followed owes them a debt that rarely gets acknowledged loudly enough.

Songs of Faith and Devotion is the album that introduced me to Depeche Mode, and Walking in My Shoes has been a personal favourite for years after it came out. When I first heard it, it was a five star album. It isn't anymore.

Getting deeper into the Depeche Mode catalogue changes how you hear this. Violator's restraint and minimalism makes Songs of Faith and Devotion's maximalism more audible in retrospect. This is an album that throws a lot at the wall. The gospel influences, the live drums, the religious imagery, the organic guitars dialling back the synthesizers. Some of it sticks brilliantly. Mercy In You and In Your Room are genuinely excellent. Some of it doesn't. Judas or Get Right With Me feel like they wandered in from a different album entirely, and the religious theme tips into overdone territory more than once.
The organic quality of the music, especially compared to Music For The Masses, Violator, Black Celebration or even Ultra for that matter was of course a deliberate response to the grunge moment and it was the right call for 1993. It just hasn't aged as gracefully as the more minimal work surrounding it in the catalogue.
Still an album I love. Just not the masterpiece I once thought it was.

Contender for the original list.

Fantastic Planet passed me by completely in the 90s, which is a shame because it would have landed perfectly then and it still lands now. Apparently Failure were critically appreciated but commercially invisible, and broke up almost immediately after. They sit squarely in that mid-90s alternative rock tradition with dense, layered guitar textures, a narcotic heaviness and production that rewards headphones, without sounding like anyone else in particular.

The range across the album is wider than the sound suggests on first listen, and the guitar work throughout is genuinely rich. An incredibly solid record and thanks to the submitter for getting this band on my radar.

Gang of Four's coiled tension, Nick Cave's literary darkness, Joy Division's bleakness. If that crossover sounds like your ideal album, Relatives in Descent will grab you immediately and not let go.

I'll be honest: this is so precisely in my wheelhouse that separating genuine quality from personal taste is difficult. What I can say is that four listens in it hasn't worn out its welcome once
An album I'll be returning to, and one that might grow into something more with time. I'll update this review accordingly

This album sounds surprisingly fresh thirty years later, which is rarer than it should be. The Dismemberment Plan sit somewhere between math rock, Fugazi, and indie pop, and they make that combination entirely their own.

What impresses most is that these are Musicians with a capital M, but every technical decision is in service of the songs rather than the performance. The rhythms are irregular, the arrangements restless and creative, and none of it ever shows off. It just makes the songs better.

The lyrics carry a great deal of wisdom that a twenty-something could identify with, which is possibly why the album holds up where so many of its contemporaries don't. The emotional range is remarkable too, moving between anxiety, alienation, playfulness and vulnerability.

One caveat: The voice is an acquired taste and occasionally grating. The fact that the album still lands this well despite that says everything about the strength of what surrounds it.
An album I'll be returning to. And an actual contender for the original list.

The Burning Hell make story-driven folk-rock packed with cultural references, and this album is a better than average entry in a genre that seems to have a lot of enthusiastic submitters on this User-Submitted 1001 Album List. The musical arrangements are genuinely more interesting than most of what surrounds it in this territory.

The one frustration is the mix: the vocals sit so prominently that the more interesting musical details underneath get flattened. A shame, because when you can hear what the band is doing around the words, it's worth paying attention to.

Mostly harmless

That's... a lot of distortion. Lo-fi as an art form? Possibly for fans of Guided by Voices or No Age. They don't quite reach those levels though. GbV had a bit more variation and brilliance in the writing of simple pop songs. Times New Viking are interesting but don't quite reach those levels of writing. The distortion has less to hide behind here.
That said, nothing wrong with it either. Simply a very fine album.

Perfectly serviceable Canadian alt-rock from 1991, a year that produced thousands of albums in exactly this style, of which at least half of them were more interesting than this one. Not horrible, not outstanding, completely forgettable. I don't blame the band. I blame the submitter for thinking this should be submitted to the 1001-album list

After a second full listen of the album, I'm afraid to say that I already felt i heard enough of this and it felt more like a gimmick.

Baroness's riffs used to come at you like a solid right hook in the face. On Yellow & Green they make you float and rest.
This is a genuine and deliberate pivot from the sludge metal of their earlier records, and it divided their fanbase at the time. Listening now, it's hard to understand why. Yellow & Green draws from the entire history of rock without feeling like a museum piece. Some Queen harmonies audible in Green Theme, some dual guitar lines that owe something to Thin Lizzy, a moment in Twinkler that somehow recalls Jethro Tull, and a drummer who throws in disco shuffles when the song needs them. The guitar work throughout is beautiful, dreamy and psychedelic where it once would have been crushing.

John Baizley said in an interview around the time of release that he'd become impressed by songwriters who could catch one direction with a single song and not deviate from it. "As many things as we used to say in one song, now I think we're spreading out into the course of two or three songs." You can hear exactly that on this record. Baroness really wrote songs here, with riffs that stick in your head long after the album ends.

Not a perfect score, but a genuinely addictive rock album that rewards the time you give it.

Wolf is a genuinely great opening track. Atmospheric, interesting, full of promise.
And then the album completely falls apart.
What follows is thirteen in a dozen empty trap beats, whitewashed reggae and straightforward R&B that has nothing to do with what that first track promised. Jim's Story and Left Alone offer brief glimpses of perhaps something better to come, but they're islands in an ocean of filler.
It's almost worse than a consistently bad album. At least that you can dismiss cleanly. This one makes you angry.
Two stars, and that first track is doing a lot of heavy lifting to get there.

My Brain Hurts is exactly what it says on the tin: Ramones-inspired pop punk, short and fast, doing nothing wrong and nothing surprising. You can see why this was submitters introduction to the genre: it's accessible, energetic, and fun.

This feels like a guided tour through the stages of Britpop. Suede's sleekness, the Manic Street Preachers' glam punk swagger, Bowie's theatrical ambition, Stone Roses' melodic looseness, Pulp's wit and narrative detail. It's all in here and somehow held together as a coherent album rather than a collage.
Wide Open Space is the obvious standout and was already familiar as a single, with good reason. The Chad Who Loved Me and Stripper Vicar show the range the band was reaching for.

Crimson is a single 40-minute track and Dan Swanö's progressive death metal epic shifts between brutality and melody throughout, the Göteborg influence audible in every clean passage that breaks through the heaviness. Mikael Åkerfeldt guests, which will tell Opeth fans everything they need to know about the melodic ambition on display here.
The 40 minutes stay interesting throughout, the shifts are well-handled, and the moments where clean melody surfaces from the death metal density are genuinely beautiful in context. Occasionally it feels slightly fragmentary and some of those passages could have been developed further, but that's a minor complaint against something this ambitious.

4,5*

Why didn't I know about this before?
Possibly because all of this arrived in 1993, at the height of grunge, when this kind of maximalist harmony-drenched pop was about as fashionable as shoulder pads.

Spilt Milk is an absolute delight from start to finish. Choirs that wouldn't look out of place written by Brian Wilson or Brian May, arrangements that owe genuine debts to Bowie and Supertramp, and underneath it all some of the most purely joyful pop songwriting of the early 90s. New Mistake is my highlight.

It feels like Jellyfish simply didn't care about the popular music of the time and made exactly the album they wanted to make. That conviction is audible in every layered vocal track.

I read that the band imploded almost immediately after, which makes Spilt Milk their final statement and one of the great what-ifs in pop music history.