Reviews by nirutam2

It feels wrong that I'm about to give three stars to The Temptations, but I'm afraid that's how I feel about this one. The turn toward a funkier sound is brilliant, and the tracks that actually sound that way are really enjoyable. But much of the record is in the 60s Motown style... timeless when applied to the right material, but nothing particularly inspiring here. I suppose it's an album that matters more as a sign of where the group (and the whole culture) were heading, but I don't think it's one I'll return to for a complete listen.

This was fun, especially some of the instrumentation, but nothing about it really stayed with me.

I have a playlist called “remedial hip hop” where I try to collect all the gems I missed over the years due to internalized boundaries of genre and race. When I heard this album, I enjoyed it enough to put the title track on the list. And there was a friendly funkiness I enjoyed across all the tracks. But at the same time, I’ve heard enough hip hop at this point that the critiques of the album expressed by other reviewers hit home. It does kind of feel like your friend who everyone said would be the next Lauryn Hill… you can still like them even if that didn’t turn out to be true. That’s kind of how I felt about this… enjoyable but not life-changing

The starting point here is that Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” is my favorite album. It is pure yin energy in its darkness, its doubts, and its devotion. It is in a class by itself. So in some ways I can’t even compare “Court and Spark” to it, but I think my best story about it is that it is Blue’s yang counterpart, brilliant and brash. And I can see that in some ways it is so much more challenging because here a woman is being braggadocios and brilliant in a way pop music had never quite seen before. She’s hip, she’s horny, she’s a wizard, she’s Joni. So I could see why for may people this could be here greatest album — no doubt about it being a 5 for me.

I really believe this is a perfect, indispensable album.

I first listened to it a few years ago when I wanted to understand Talking Heads better (I only knew their hits). This one intrigued me because I had never seen the cover before, unlike the later albums that popped up when “Burning Down the House” or “Road to Nowhere” streamed.

“More Songs About Buildings and Food” doesn’t have a song like that. In re songs, someone wrote a while ago that for all the changes in how we consume music in the last century, the song remains the basic building block. But every once in a while you have albums that truly function as albums, where the songs fade into the background. The collection is really what matters.

I do NOT mean operatic concept albums, which are okay in their place. If those are epic poems, a collection album is something like William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience… an arrangement of verses that reveal transcendent themes.

“More Songs” is doing that in relation to our contemporary corporate civilization, looking through David Byrne’s alien eyes. There are so many fun turns of phrase and observations. Yet it’s also fractal… you can zoom out, zone out, just jam to it if you want. Weirdly it is an album you can work to. I think its palatability is due to the fact that Brian Eno is confident enough to treat Byrne and all the other member bands as instruments, just another part of Eno’s quest for music that is “as ignorable as it is interesting” (as he said of ambient). Dude had just made Low with Bowie, he could do anything.

The uniform tension of the first nine tracks is finally released courtesy Al Green in the “Take Me to the River” cover. I don’t think I understood the brilliance of this cover until I heard it on the album… it really is like being splashed in the face with cool water after running a marathon. It provides just enough asymmetry to remind you that this music was made by humans and not intelligent machines.

Anyway, I could listen to this every day, and just might for a while!

I have been trying to figure out what was really going on in Michael Jackson’s music since I was a little kid.
An origin story: Around the time my dad walked out, my mom and sister and me recorded this video at the mall. It was part of this touring MTV exhibit where you could put yourself in a music video. It’s mostly us and a family friend swaying around aimlessly to “Bad” … I think I attempted some preschool version of break dancing. But on the last “Who’s bad?” there was this perfect freeze frame of us all. It came to symbolize the new kind of family we were creating after Dad’s departure, which of necessity was less traditional, more improvisational. I think MJ symbolized that for my mom and she remained a fan throughout the various scandals.

I got older and too cool for MJ, too cool for pop. Too faux-sophisticated to admit that for a few years in the 80s all us kids wanted to be this protean child-god-man creature. Even though the text of his music was often about romance, the subtext pointed to these weird internal cosmic struggles that clearly none of us understand even now. And of course it is mixed up with his own trauma and the trauma he visited on others. Every time I try writing about this, that’s the stumbling block… I want to research things like what the heck was going on with the Moonwalker arcade game, but then I just think of the poor kids.

Anyway, I was disappointed to find that revisiting Bad at the album level doesn’t illuminate all that much. The filler here truly is filler… maybe the hits aren’t as great as those from an album like “Dangerous” but on that record you can see the search for a theme, and the theme here is clearly “Let’s do Thriller again.” But the other half is legendary singles. I think maybe by the time of “Bad” the music video had become so dominant a form that the artistic energy beyond the singles went there instead of into the album.

Maybe I’ll have figured out more by the time I get to Thriller. Until then, Shamone, lay it on me, etc.

The OG rock Christmas album, so glad it’s on the list.

This is a bit underpowered since it is Christmas Eve. I kinda missed the whole Amy Winehoise moment in pop culture… I heard the hits but did not understand the devotion to her or how deeply folks felt the loss when she died. I didn’t do the deep dive I might have preferred in response to getting this album but I do hear how much of a storyteller she is, and an unflinching one, which I love in a songwriter. I’ll return to it and her other work.

The fact that I like metal at all is entirely due to the fact that my high school girlfriend was into it. She’s now my wife, and even though I will independently play Metallica or Tool, it all still feels like I borrowed it from her CD collection.

And she *hates* Slipknot.

So this is not my scene. But approaching it with fresh ears, I can see why someone might like it. There are certainly days I feel the feelings expressed in “Gematria” or “Dead Memories.” Overall, though, this kind of metal feels kind of tedious to me… oh, you are going to do that with the drums *again?* I hope it’s helping some kids get by somewhere, but I’ll stick with my wife’s CD binder.

The only reason I hesitated about giving this a 5 is that Doolittle exists, and that’s one of my gold standards for what a rock album can be. Surfer Rosa is not that… even in a 34 minute record, there’s songs they could have cut. But the tracks that work work so goddamn hard. “Bone Machine” brings all Black Francis’s absurdity and perversion and violence and beauty right from the outset. “Cactus” impressed Bowie enough for him to cover it. Everybody feels like they have a “Broken Face” after they hear it.

And “Where Is My Mind?” Like everybody my age, I got to know it through the last scene of Fight Club. No sane person likes everything in that movie, but the choice to end it with that song make the last scene sufficiently transcendent that you think, “Wait, maybe that IS what I want.” You met me at a very interesting time in my life…

Yet it’s also a silly song I sing with my preschooler. “Daddy, play the swimming brain song…”

A subreddit user recently asked us to provide our 100 favorite albums. I knew Bowie would need to be in the top five, so I put in Low at number 3. Hunky Dory ended up at 17, which in retrospect seems like a mistake. There are plenty of days in which it is my favorite Bowie album and even my favorite album of all time.

Why? The same explanation everyone has: this is the album where Bowie becomes Bowie. But it might be more accurate to say it is the album where he most clearly demonstrates the process of becoming Bowie 1.0. Bowie 1.0 (before Berlin) was the changeling who became Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, and all the less developed characters in between. Bowie 2.0 (Berlin and after) was David Bowie, the man, sharing what it was really like to be him (while also donning occasional costumes). If Bowie 1.0 is Major Tom, Bowie 2.0 is “We know Major Tom’s a junkie.”

But David Bowie wasn’t a known quantity before Ziggy Stardust. People still thought he was a novelty artist, a one-hit wonder, a theatrical freak dabbling in rock and roll. He covers a Tiny Tim song on Hunky Dory; listeners wouldn’t have been crazy to group the two together. Looking back, we can see the genius of his earlier output, but very few people were paying that much attention in 1971.

(Since I got this one over the weekend, I also listened to Divine Symmetry, a four-disc set that explores the process around “Hunky Dory,” including demos and live performances. You can tell from those sets that while the songs were great, the story of the album or the artist or the band is far from worked out.)

So when Bowie sings about “ch-ch-ch-ch-changes,” he isn’t yet referring to his protean public persona. He’s talking about what it is like to be him, or the people around him, or the contact high formed by the connection of the two. There is so much “thou” in this album, whether it is the angelic rising generation of “Oh! You Pretty Things,” his newborn son in “Kooks,” or the grabbag of name checks: Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Churchill, Himmler, Greta Garbo, Aleister Crowley.

Bowie was such a chameleon that he was always afraid of becoming of whoever was around him, yet here he seems to have no shame around it yet. Why not write a song about Bob Dylan the same way Dylan wrote a song about Woody Guthrie — isn’t that just what we artists do?

And yet. Dylan’s first album was an unabashed tribute; Bowie is up to something different here. Would you really want to be the object of “Queen Bitch,” “Song for Bob Dylan,” or “Andy Warhol” (which apparently made Andy leave the room the first time he heard it)? Each of these songs shines a spotlight on the difficulty and tension of worshiping other artists. “Andy Warhol, Silver Screen, Can’t tell them apart at all.” It was Warhol’s whole deal, of course, but are you comfortable with someone calling it out so clearly?

As others have observed, these references to the pseudo-reality of film are the throughline of “Hunky Dory,” showing up in most of the songs. Bowie is aware that he is seeing, experiencing, projecting, critiquing, all at once, without ever quite making it into a film school seminar (thank God).

It’s this detachment that make things like the flirtation with fascism tolerable. This used to bother the shit after me, but the best explanation I’ve read is that Bowie is shocked by the extent to which he is fascinated by the same set of ideas as Himmler and others. He wants to be as pretty as “the coming race” of “Homo superior” yet also frightened about what that means. And eventually that all congealed into the much more accessible character of Ziggy, the self-loathing starman who can’t quite save us.

But for now, it’s just Bowie being weird as shit and making it sound like chamber music. I still have no idea what a tactical cactus is, yet the phrase gets stuck in my head all the time. That’s Hunky Dory to me, the crazed hidden notebooks that foreshadow everything yet also refuse to be any one thing themselves.

I couldn't listen to it properly here in the US but was able to find most of the tracks. I didn't have strong feelings about it overall. It reminded me of being in high school and buying a CD based on a track I'd heard on the radio... oftentimes those bands seemed perfectly nice, even clever, but there's no mistaking the feeling of "oh, so there's no magic here." I liked a few moments along the way, but as soon as it was done I put on a mix of new wave stuff I enjoy a lot more.

Thanks to listening to this and reading about it, I learned about Asian Underground and how it influenced all sorts of other stuff I like. And the album itself grew on me, but not quite to the point where I can imagine returning to it in the future. I disagree with the folks who say it's just drum and bass plus Asian instrumentation... I can hear that there are some real ideas there. But I felt more like I was listening to some cuts by a session museum who contributed to some other record I really like... I can appreciate it but don't feel like it changed me in the way I like a record to do.

I wanted to love it but in the end I just like it.

1) I had only ever heard “Take On Me,” which is obviously legendary. So I was happy to hear that it’s a new wave album and not twelve different versions of the same thing.

2) But it never quite solidified into anything that felt essential or compelling to me. Not driving enough to be like the new wave I like most, not quirky or spacey enough to be like the synth pop I like most.

3) I appreciated the ideas behind a few of the songs and would be happy to encounter them again, but I don’t think I’ll ever wake up feeling like I have to listen to this album today. It’s too bad because it was close… I might have given it 3.5 or 7/10 on a different scale.

Really struggled with whether to give this a four or a five... in the end, I'm going with five. Why: the good moments on it are extremely good and created a portal that brought the whole world into metal and metal into the whole world. For that it deserves eternal glory. My reservations... I always feel like I get kind of lost in the last third of the album. The worst moments make you say, "Great, a Metallica song like every other Metallica song." And even though I like the song, I'd be happy if I never had to hear the phrase "don't tread on me" again in my life.

Still... look at The Blacklist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metallica_Blacklist ... look at the artists who took this album so deeply to heart. It's in all of us. When I pulled it at 10 p.m. last night, I put it on to go to sleep, because even though it's metal, it's as familiar and soothing as a lullaby. "And nothing else matters..."

I keep giving albums five stars but it’s because the generator keeps giving me iconic shit. I mean it’s THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL. Trent famously apologized for the album when he sent it in but the things that were inside him now seem so necessary for the understanding of our world. For scratching that particular itch, this album beats Nirvana or Pumpkins or even Radiohead. Even if it might not rank as high as those folks’ records on favorite lists, I’d argue its sound and style may be even more influential. And it remains so when you hear it today.

Weirdly I think the only part of the album that feels dated now is “Hurt” … because as Trent recognized, it’s Johnny Cash’s song now. But that just shows how much it mattered that folks who were still listening to it, still thinking about, still interpreting it.

This will always speak to a certain place in my soul. My college roommate and I played Damon Albarn's Mali Music project over and over again when reading or studying, which then turned me on to Ali Farka Touré and others. Learned more about him in an African musicology class where the musically versed in the group could explain his skill and influence. Just a great story and a fascinating person. I'm still pretty much an uninformed Westerner so I can't speak to where this particular album might fit into his discography or the larger scene of Malian music, but I love the sound so much I have to give it a five.

The essence of hardcore. Couldn't love it more. I wanted so bad to be a punk in high school but at best came across as a latter-day hippie. But the kids gave me credit for being "straight edge" AKA too scared to do drugs. "You think you're the only one? Think again... think again... think again..."

I was a little annoyed by this since I just got What’s the Story Morning Glory? To figure out how I felt about it, I listened to this album too. I determined that I prefer WTSMG even though it seems most people think Definitely Maybe is a more authentic sound. I actually felt kind of the opposite, that WTSMG is distinct if poppier, while Definitely Maybe is more like a Britpop type specimen.

But… I like Britpop. I like this more than Pablo Honey. I find even the kinda dumb lyrics charming. “She done it with a doctor on a helicopter”? Sure, makes me smile. And the various kinds of hate Oasis gets makes me want them to give a boost because in spite of it all, I always enjoy hearing them. If we were using a different scale this might be a 4.5 or a B+ or I don’t know what, but tonight I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.

It's perfect. I just wish we had so much more.