Reviews by nevele

ARTPOP is Lady Gaga's grand artistic statement, and the ambition is real. The production has genuine experimental moments, textures that wouldn't be out of place near Aphex Twin or Flume, and you can hear her pushing beyond the polished maximalism of The Fame into something stranger and less certain.
The problem is that three listens in, nothing quite lands. The excess swallows the hooks rather than amplifying them, and without the hooks Gaga's maximalism has nothing to hang on. Someone put it better than I can: this is sexual but not sexy.
Three stars, but on a list with this much quality it feels closer to two.

Happy Hour opens the album and sets the stage immediately: aggressively cheerful music with quietly savage lyrics underneath. Office workers drowning their lives in after-work drinks, wrapped in a tune you can't help bouncing along to. That gap between sound and content is something Paul Heaton is very good at. He remains a genuinely underrated British lyricist. Sharp, funny, politically pointed without being preachy. The openly left-wing politics combined with Christian faith is an unusual combination that gives the album a specific character.

The problem is the same one that would follow Heaton into the Beautiful South, an album I had about two weeks back: the music underneath is thin, and across a full album the songs start blurring into one another. What saves it here is energy and brevity.

It actually always kind of escapes me why this album is so highly rated. I just find many of the songs a bit... boring. Or at best, they don't stick in my head. Dreams and Linger are beautiful, of course, but as a whole, I prefer both No need to argue and Bury the hatchet. Well, giving it the benefit of the doubt just this once: 3*

Imaginal Disk arrived on virtually every best-of-2024 list, and with the layered production values that was quite impressive for an album this ambitious. Mica Tenenbaum's voice sits somewhere between Kylie Minogue and a young Gwen Stefani, and the melodies are frequently memorable. Killing Time, Image, Watching TV, and Angel on a Satellite are all strong.
The problem is that cheerfulness is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The darkness critics keep pointing to underneath the surface didn't quite reach me, and when the retro pop influences show a bit too much, it tips into pastiche.

Tom Petty has always had the image of the perpetually resentful teenager. A loser in the schoolyard, rejected by the girls, distilling that into a wry humor that's actually quite funny. On this album he tries to take it a step further, a bit purer, more from within himself. A tad heavier in some places. And for me, partially successful.

Rick Rubin's production is the foundation. Stripped back and intimate, leaving a lot of space so every note matters. It suits the material perfectly and gives the album a warmth that Petty's Jeff Lynne era Heartbreakers records rarely had.

When it lands, it really lands. “Time to Move On,” “You Wreck Me,” “It’s Good to Be King,” “Crawling Back to You,” and “Wake Up Time” are Petty at his most open, drawing from Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Elvis Costello without losing his own style.

The problem is the hour running time. Like many albums from this era, it stretches to that 1 hour mark and beyond what the material needs. “Only a Broken Heart” and “Honey Bee” fall below the albums standard, and at forty minutes this would be better. Knowing it was cut down from a double album already makes it a bit easier to accept.

Still one of his finest hours, even if it's slightly too many of them.

This was actually much better than I gave it credit for when it came out.
I'll admit. I was wrong.

This album has two very different faces. One is fast, energetic, and genuinely fun. The other is slower, more drawn out, and considerably less interesting.
When The Vaccines keep the tempo high, this works extremely well. “Wreckin’ Bar,” “If You Wanna,” and “Nørgaard” are full of energy, strong melodies, and that simple singalong quality that good indie-rock needs. It’s not innovative, but at this point rock rarely is, and the band compensates with conviction and strong melodies.
The problem is that too many songs slow things down, and once that happens the limitations start to show. Tracks like “Blow It Up” and “Wetsuit” drift into that polished early-2010s British indie sound that reminds me a bit too much of White Lies, a band I never fully connected with.
Ironically, one of the slower songs, “A Lack of Understanding,” ended up becoming one of my favorites. Along with “Post Break-Up Sex,” makes it a very enjoyable indie-rock album when it’s moving

Brand New Eyes has enough going for it to make the mediocrity frustrating. “Ignorance” and “The Only Exception” show that Paramore can write genuinely strong pop-rock songs. Hayley Williams is a real good vocalist.

The problem I have is twofold. First, too many tracks just don’t go anywhere. Pleasant in the moment, forgettable immediately after.

Second, the production. For me it's a common issue with mid-2000s pop-punk and emo-pop. Everything is quantized and locked to the grid. Drums and guitars are tightened to mechanical precision, with no micro-timing, no sense of push or pull. Songs start and end at the same tempo and rarely surprise or feel played by humans. That level of control strips the performances of life.

Honestly, it's half an album worth keeping, half that isn't. A band with more potential than this record suggests.

Jaskier from The Witcher makes exactly the music you'd expect. Epic TV-show folk that sounds emotionally enormous without doing the work to earn it.
It makes you tired without giving anything in return.

Frosting On The Beater knows exactly what it is and delivers it without pretension. Inoffensive power pop: and for once that's not an insult.
Dream All Day opens the album perfectly: massive hook, crunchy guitars, harmonies that sit somewhere between Lennon/McCartney and Big Star. The rest of the album follows through on that promise without ever quite matching it, but also without ever dropping the ball. Slightly more accessible than most of what grunge was doing in 1993, but solid and powerful enough to never become boring.
The Posies are clearly exceptional craftsmen and the songwriting intelligence is real. But the album delivers exactly what it promises from start to finish, no more and no less. Sometimes that's enough.

This album kept pulling me back in before I’d even decided what I thought of it. I’d be doing something else, half listening, and suddenly I was fully inside it again. The guitars, the atmosphere, Mark Burgess’s voice drawing you in without announcing itself. That’s quite the quality for an album.

The Chameleons sit comfortably alongside bands like Echo & the Bunnymen and The Church. John Lever’s drums give the bleakness something to push against, and the guitars are layered and interlocking rather than just atmospheric.
You can also hear clearly where Interpol took inspiration, though they never quite matched this.

Picking favorites feels almost beside the point. In a melancholic mood it’s “Second Skin” or “Pleasure and Pain.” In a rock mood, “Don’t Fall” and “Paper Tigers.” Dreamy, “View from a Hill.” The album meets you where you are rather than demanding you come to it.

The lyrics deepen the atmosphere on closer attention, exactly what this kind of music needs.

A genuine post-punk masterpiece that as far as I can see never got the recognition it deserved.

A bit more metal than their early

I will be short on this one: I gave In The Court Of The Crimson King a resounding 5* on the original list.

This album is even better.

Yes, that for sure was an Americana album from the late 2000's

This is a well-executed patchwork of borrowed parts. Hip-hop backbone, carnivalesque blues, lounge swagger, flashes of avant-garde noise. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but it does.

The lyrics match the music. Darkly comic, street-level, and sharp enough to keep it engaging.

It’s not entirely original. I spent quite some time placing references. But after a few spins, that stopped mattering. The energy and personality hold it together as its own thing.

A fun, chaotic, and surprisingly coherent ride.

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You arrived with enormous critical baggage, which I largely ignored going in. First impression: slight country alarm bells from Adrianne Lenker’s voice, which luckily didn’t pan out.

“Time Escaping” sets the bar high early. That rhythm section is incredible, and for a moment it suggests the album might fully grab me. It doesn’t, quite, which is an interesting place to land with a record this good.

The craft is undeniable. Lenker is a genuine talent, and Big Thief play with a looseness that takes years to develop. But the album feels sequenced for range rather than momentum, and for me that creates unevenness rather than depth.

The more straightforward folk songs are consistent and subtle, but rarely surprising.

When it strays, it’s excellent. “Little Things” brings needed energy, “Flower of Blood” edges into shoegaze, and “Blurred View” has a Portishead-adjacent haze that feels genuinely unexpected. “Love Love Love” stopped me cold twice. These are real highlights.

“Simulation Swarm,” the consensus favorite, did nothing for me.

Ambitious, and often impressive, but it doesn’t fully land as a whole. The standout tracks form a coherent subset I’ll return to.

3,5*

Speak & Spell is a historical artifact more than a listening experience. It's Vince Clarke's album. It seems he wrote most of the songs then left immediately to form Yazoo, taking the blueprint with him. Nodisco basically is Don't Go.

What remains is synth-teeny-bop-pop: catchy, lightweight, and mostly disposable. New Life holds up surprisingly well and wouldn't sound out of place in current 80s revival sets. But tracks like I Sometimes Wish I Was Dead and Boys Say Go are empty despite their ambitions, and Just Can't Get Enough, for all its fame, is just more of the same to be honest.

The track that stood out for me was Tora Tora Tora with a genuine atmosphere and lyrical weight that was not on the rest of the album. This was apparently a Martin Gore song. Also Photographic has a tension underneath that makes Gahan's voice actually work. Together they're a preview of everything Depeche Mode would become once Clarke is gone.

And that might be the album's real legacy for me: it's the foundation of a building that looks nothing like its foundations. Historically important for synthpop broadly, and essential context for the DM story. But if this wasn't Depeche Mode, I would not be listening to this.

Angel Dust is one of those albums where the vinyl goes grey before you get tired of it. After the mainstream breakthrough of The Real Thing, Faith No More did the opposite of what anyone expected: they made something deliberately difficult, carnivalesque, and completely on their own terms.
What makes it work is contrast. Not just loud and quiet, but grotesque and sublime sitting right next to each other without apology. The sequencing earns every transition. Land Of Sunshine opens hard, RV pulls the floor away, Malpractice drags you back. The heaviness ebbs and flows, and just when you think you know where you are, Be Aggressive hits: a children's choir spelling out something filthy over Roddy Bottum's keyboards, playing it completely straight, and somehow it's the moment where everything locks together.
Bottum is massively underrated throughout. That keyboard and bass interplay on Kindergarten alone justifies closer attention. He's what gives the album its eerie, unsettled undertone beneath the aggression.
Everything here feels intentional. The diversity, the transitions, the constant tension between ideas. Messy on paper, completely coherent in execution.
Five stars.

Welcome to the Beautiful South opens with “Song for Whoever,” which perfectly sets out what The Beautiful South do. A breezy pop song about a songwriter cynically mining women’s pain for hits. The tune and the lyrics pull in opposite directions, and that tension is the whole point.
Paul Heaton is a genuinely underrated lyricist. Dry, sardonic, very British. The album rewards paying attention to the words, and there’s a lot to admire there.
The problem is the music underneath. It’s thin. Standard pop that doesn’t even fully commit to being great pop, just pleasantly filling space while the lyrics do the heavy lifting. Smooth, but ultimately empty.
Great writing, forgettable music.

Separation Sunday isn’t a band reinventing anything, but sometimes that’s not the point.

Like on their other album on the list, nothing here is original, and Craig Finn isn’t much of a singer, but he delivers his lines with conviction, almost spitting them out, giving the whole thing a rough, punky edge.