Rated 6/10
As a KLF newcomer I can’t be sure if what I’ve just heard is the actual version of The White Room, or that even matters. The director’s cut is the only version available on streaming.
I enjoyed the instrumentals. I pretty exclusively didn’t care for the vocals. All together it was a pleasant and pretty unaffecting listen.
Rated 6/10
For the first two thirds of this record there are an overwhelming number of things going on. Several layers of intricate instrumentation vying for space against vocal performances that include what is often thoughtful rapping and soulful singing. It’s a more layered sonic palette than most rappers would choose to work with. A skilled producer has done their damndest to hold all of these parts together and has been about as successful as you could hope, given the strength and complexity of the various flavours.
It’s not a smooth or easy listen and I can’t decide how I feel about that. Part of me wishes the more gentle songs were pared back to make the most of the soulful, delicate vocal performances. Another part of me is in awe of how skilfully overloaded it is. It’s exciting - your brain is not given a second to rest.
In the last third everything settles down and you get a more focused product, without losing any of the variety and experimentation. (Thirsty is such a wild way to close this album.) It could have been cool to hear some of these songs shuffled into earlier parts of the album, or for this approach to have been employed a little more elsewhere.
Rated 8/10
Wild is the right word. This album is not just fun, it’s actually quite surprising and strange in parts.
These songs are mostly catchy, fun and good natured. On the few occasions they are not good natured (such as the amazingly titled: ‘(I'll Be Glad When You're Dead) You Rascal You’) they are totally unhinged and excitingly unsettling - even if it's all performed with a bit of a wink. The lyrics are frequently bizarre, performances are crazy, but never off putting. This elevates it well beyond being "just some swing record." Its a subversion of the form.
It would be impossible to make traditional swing led pop music like this today without it being an annoying 1950s pastiche. But in its original context it works beautifully.
Rated 4/10
This is my second Creedence album and I have to admit a bit of a disconnect. There are moments when I can really see what others see in Clearwater: Green Water, Bad Moon Rising and Lodi all have a bit of pop appeal embedded into its sound which rounds out the songs nicely, but elsewhere Revival’s songs are lacking an X factor for me.
Rated 4/10
I enjoy Ryan Adams’ subtle, less overbearing take on Americana which makes a palatable form of a type of musical expression that I usually struggle with. New York, New York and La Cienega Just Smiled stand out positively. That said, it's a long, long old album that required a fair bit of commitment from myself to sit all the way through. By the third quarter end any memory of songs that I was digging at the start felt distant as I lulled from one mid tempo song into another.
Rated 6/10
Having only heard the amped up singles collected on Legend, it is a beautiful thing experiencing Bob Marley in this more low key, chilled out setting. He is a beautiful performer. There is a true skill in keeping things engaging when the music is just simmering along for a while 40 minutes.
The original version of No Woman No Cry took a couple of listens for me as I was more familiar with the live version, but it’s got a very charming feel to it. It’s a totally different composition with a different energy and shows you just how much a single song can be transformed by how you play it.
The final track is a bit of a climb down after a very consistent record, probably the only thing holding it back.
Rated 8/10
REM are one of my absolute favourite bands and Green is a record which I often come back to, especially if I need a bit of a boost. It’s got some of their most high energy, sugariest, uplifting songs, balanced out by more tempered tracks with gorgeous, spooky harmonies. Like all REM records it’s an album bursting with empathy and human emotion, but also undercurrents of haunting melancholy. You can never quite be sure where the band will take you next.
On their first Warner record, and off the back of the radio hit heavy Document, you get the sense that they are keen to continue their push for the widest audience possible. You could just about imagine a hooky song like Get Up on an earlier record, but the way the band go for the jugular on Orange Crush and deliver a cathartic pop song with a capital p does feel exciting and new. It’s rewarding to hear REM inhabit this new mode without any dip in quality. Despite the big singles, Document is one of their darkest LPs - that darkness has very much lifted here.
Even on the less friendly songs (of which there are many) with creeping major to minor transitions, the production continues to be a world away from Document. It’s plush and crisp and high fidelity, a shock when you consider that before this REM’s production was without exception obscure and smudged and fuzzy. In retrospect you could imagine Document benefiting from a more “expensive” sounding treatment but also how records like Lifes Rich Pageant or Reckoning would be totally ruined by it.
Green is not as highly rated as I believe it should be amongst fans. If I was to theorise why, it would be because it confronts us with the fact that while it shares a lot of the same DNA with their first LP, their sound has developed and moved on. In 1988 there were two REMs. The one of the past who mumbled, and even as they got bolder and more direct, were not polished or prepped for anything beyond college radio. There is a charm to both bands but it’s a different kind of charm with no guarantee of crossover appeal.
As a poptimist though, my experience of both these REMs was that I got to fall in love with the band twice. Once as a child listening to the records in the zeitgeist, and then again as a teenager finding out that (what?!) they had 5 relatively undiscovered gems from the 80s where the band benefited from unchecked creative freedom. It’s this variety that makes them one of the greatest bands of all time.
This is not the last time the band would develop and change. It's these changes that made them so prolific and led to some of the most consistently exciting consecutive releases of any band ever. I hope one day I can reconcile myself with where REM went post 1994, because it would be great to experience that joy all over again.
Rated 8/10
Something less commented on about early punk music (~1977) is that it can, in the best possible way, be camp and theatrical. Years before the word punk had passed anyone’s lips as a genre title The New York Dolls were serving up music with a mixture of camp and aggressive, pent up sensibilities that points to an entirely new type of music. Other than Iggy Pop I’d struggle to identify who they were in debt to, but could point to plenty of bands who are indebted to the dolls.
This LP is chock full of propulsive beats, hooky melodies and surprising gear shifts. Looking For a Kiss has a bizarre quality to it - it’s like having a drag queen shout in your face. Compare this to the more reflective Lonely Planet Boy. It keeps you on your toes and keeps your pulse racing. The dolls are not just influential, they are packing a wide variety of hits.
Rated 6/10
I can see the appeal of The Grateful Dead. The band is a well oiled machine, in sync enough to provide an enjoyably loose performance with what sounds like a lot of improvisation. While I like the performance a lot, the songs themselves are merely “good.” I could have done with a killer The Doors-like single.
Rated 6/10
Here Sting manages to bring bits of reggae into the performance without going ridiculous on the voice - he’ll need to keep an eye on that. There’s some great pop songs in Message in a Bottle and On Any Other Day, the rest is totally fine but not particularly attention grabbing.
Rated 4/10
While it’s not to my tastes it’s an interesting listen. You don’t get concept albums with such literary aims as telling the story of a ship lost at sea nowadays. It’s very operatic and I like how it weaves in classical elements, but it’s a bit dry for me.
Rated 6/10
This is the best Queen album I’ve heard. What I liked about LP2 was how restrained the first half was, and I liked the fun and carefree nature of LP4. Sheer Heart Attack combines these two things into a neater package. It doesn’t go off the rails at any point, which Queen are prone to do.
Killer Queen is my favourite of Queen’s big hits. It’s a very speedy, smoothly crafted single. I’ve never heard someone so effectively sing both the lower and higher octaves within seconds of each other as I have on Brighton Rock. Impressive vocal control.
Rated 6/10
Kiwanuka’s strength is the quiet but substantial power he generates with his voice. There is a serious, even mournful quality to much of the tracklist, which is quite touching. This is a very pleasant, consistent album which at points bursts with a bit of added colour.
Rated 4/10
I don’t get it. Beck is trying something different but it doesn’t settle into a distinct, cohesive style. The lack of cohesion is almost the style, a sort of experimental slacker rock, which is not for me.
Rated 8/10
My band played a gig at a small venue in Cardiff a few years ago which was next to a giant stadium. During our sound check 15 Paul Weller fans walked in to get a drink from the bar. We knew they were Paul Weller fans because they all had Paul Weller’s haircut. It’s a normal haircut to see out and about, but a group of 15 uniform men is quite arresting. We started soundchecking and were charmed that they all stopped talking, watched the stage, leaned in and took us seriously. We were playing post-punky sort of stuff, but there was nothing tribal about their reaction, they just loved music.
I’d not really heard The Jam properly until today, but had been vaguely aware of and unenthusiastic about Weller’s solo career. Listening to All Mod Cons made the above experience click. It’s a beautifully put together album, not just with hooky bits to sing back to the band in a stadium, but bits that make you think.
It’s also a lot less uniform than the haircuts would suggest. There’s moments in both the performance and production that sound like it’s straight from the britpop era. I like the appreciation of poppier, rockier songs, but then also more emotional, stripped back ones.
I love that so many of the songs are about longing to be someone else or have a more exciting life - it’s sweet. Similarly, I was surprised by how domestic so many of the lyrics are, “a piece of toast from the one you love most.” Romantic, but a kind of romance you don’t see represented in music often.
Penguin Cafe Orchestra is doing a lot. It may be doing too much. There’s no one element, in the band or the orchestra that grabs me, and all together at points I even find it off putting. Dialled down a bit it could be a nice background piece. What I can say for it though is that it sounds very modern for 1976.
Rated 6/10
A very charming debut from a band who on the whole like a poppier Nirvana, which is no bad thing. They do deviate into more shouty territory on Weenie Beenie which I particularly like. I suspect I probably would have checked in with this band sooner had I been exposed to songs like these, rather than the more radio friendly stadium rock they are now better known for.
Rated 8/10
Bjork has a consistently surprising voice which is hard to describe. I keep wanting to say “fragile” but it’s actually pretty robust. Weirdly, it’s both. Part of the surprise comes from the way she chooses which notes to sing. Usually once you’ve heard someone sing a verse of a song, you can more or less guess the melody they will sing on the next verse, even with variations. But Bjork will sing one note, then shoot off to another which, while perfectly complimentary (not erratic or kooky) could never have been guessed.
Another surprising thing is hearing how she has influenced other artists that I love. On Pagen Poetry, one of my favourite tracks, I can hear bits of Four Tet’s 2003 and Iglooghost’s 2017 records.
Both sides of the album are excellent but my favourite is the elaborate, abstract pop songs of the first half. It’s Not Up to You is absolutely essential. It’s quite a journey in the second half riding through the even more abstract and ambient tracks which are then punctuated nicely by Unison at the end.
Rated 6/10
There is an over-polished, untouchable sheen to the production of the record. I am into melodic, well crafted forms of glam rock, but combined with hard rock it is not my vibe at all. There are elements when they push the performance into harsher or even more romantic territory where it gets a little more interesting, but I feel distanced from the majority of the performance which lacks an emotional core. It’s not bad necessarily, but very professionalised, it could use a bit of spice!
Rated 4/10
The first half is very smart, very retrained. Exactly how I like Queen, with their eccentricities paired down and focused into a tight formula. It makes me think “huh, maybe I like this band more than I realise?” The second half is unleashed Queen with all the bells and whistles, which I would imagine is the more exciting half for a fan of the band. For a non-fan it sounds like an annoying kid in school desperately trying to get your attention, doing backflips, puffing out their cheeks, making unusual noises. I was relieved when it ended.
