Reviews by shoegaze_vulpes86

Guru’s delivery is so even that I start tuning it out after a few tracks. That wouldn’t bother me as much if the instrumentals gave me something else to follow, but those leave me cold too. The beats change without giving the songs much individual character, and the rapping rarely breaks out of the same measured tone.

I don’t need constant fireworks, but I do need something to get attached to. Here, neither the voice nor the production gives me enough. What might sound relaxed to someone else just feels flat to me.

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘰𝘸𝘯𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘚𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘭 is harsh, ugly, and surprisingly addictive. The guitars grind, the beats feel mechanical, and Trent Reznor often sounds as if he is barely holding everything together, yet the album never collapses into shapeless noise.

What keeps it compelling is the amount of contrast. 𝗖𝗹𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗿 is almost perversely catchy, while the quieter passages make the aggression around them hit even harder. By the time 𝗛𝘂𝗿𝘁 closes the album, the restraint feels more devastating than another wall of distortion ever could.

It is not an easy listen, and I would not want every album to sound this miserable. But for something this abrasive, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋𝘰𝘸𝘯𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘚𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘭 is remarkably good at pulling me in.

There’s no shortage of intensity here, but I find myself getting tired of it surprisingly quickly. Harvey’s vocals and the abrasive guitars keep hitting the same nerve until I struggle to distinguish one song from the next. The tracks change; my reaction doesn’t.

I don’t need the rough edges smoothed out, but I do need something beyond them to hold my attention. On 𝘙𝘪𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘦, they’re too often all I hear. By the end, I remember the album’s abrasive sound more clearly than any individual song.

It still feels strange that Lauryn Hill’s solo studio discography basically begins and ends here, because 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘥𝘶𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘓𝘢𝘶𝘳𝘺𝘯 𝘏𝘪𝘭𝘭 makes it very obvious how much range she had. She can rap, sing, and move between hip hop and neo soul without making the album feel like it is constantly switching identities.

That balance is what I like most. The hip hop side gives the record bite, the neo soul side gives it warmth, and Hill’s voice ties everything together with a lot of personality. The album feels confident and polished, but never so polished that it loses its emotional weight.

It is a shame there was never a proper follow-up. One album is not much of a solo catalogue, but this is quite a way to make that one album count.

Joy Division’s final album, before the remaining members started over as New Order. What works best for me on 𝘊𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘳 is Ian Curtis’ voice. His low, sometimes almost detached delivery fits the cold, uneasy atmosphere remarkably well. He can sound distant without sounding indifferent, and that makes the quieter moments particularly unsettling.

I don’t connect with every song, but the combination of voice and music keeps me interested. The darkness feels convincing rather than put on, with Curtis sounding less like someone describing it than someone caught in the middle of it. Not an album that completely wins me over, but his presence makes a real difference.

𝘔𝘰𝘰𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 is warm, polished, and easy to like, with a smooth blend of soul, folk, jazz, and R&B. The band sounds excellent, and there are plenty of moments where everything settles into an effortless groove.

What I still struggle with is Van Morrison himself. He is clearly a distinctive singer and songwriter, but I rarely connect with him as strongly as his reputation suggests I should. The music is good, sometimes very good, yet it keeps me at a slight distance.

A solid album with a lot of craft, but I’m still waiting for Van Morrison to fully click with me.

This was released in 1986? It barely sounds dated at all. The drums still hit hard, the guitar riffs are huge, and the Beastie Boys bounce off each other with so much energy that the whole album feels immediate rather than historical.

𝗙𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗥𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 is the obvious highlight for me: loud, stupid in exactly the right way, and almost impossible not to shout along with. But the album has that same reckless charm throughout. It sounds like three guys having far too much fun and somehow turning that into a genuinely great record.

For something nearly forty years old, 𝘓𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘐𝘭𝘭 still feels ridiculously alive.

𝘛𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘪𝘲𝘶𝘦 feels further from my idea of New Order than I expected. The bright synths and club rhythms make the strongest impression, while the familiar basslines and bittersweet melodies occasionally bring me back to the band I recognise. Dance music isn’t unfamiliar territory for them, but the balance here takes some getting used to.

There are good hooks, and the guitars provide a welcome contrast to the electronics. Still, I enjoy the album in stretches rather than getting carried along by it. I don’t need New Order to make the same record every time, but this particular version of them leaves me with a fairly restrained “not bad.”

Ah, so this is hard bop. The music swings, but Monk’s angular melodies and unexpected pauses keep catching me off guard. There’s something playful about the way the pieces refuse to go quite where I expect them to. The playing is impressive, but I enjoy the little surprises more than the technical display.

𝗣𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮 is my favourite, particularly for Monk’s celesta playing. His tribute to jazz patron Pannonica de Koenigswarter has a tenderness that really appeals to me, and those bell-like notes give it a lovely, unusual colour. It’s a gentler sort of surprise than the twists elsewhere on the album, but just as effective. I came for the hard bop and left wanting more celesta.

Supergrass make Britpop sound a little less predictable here. The big choruses are there, but the heavier guitars and psychedelic detours give the songs more to offer than a tune to sing along to. I like how something apparently straightforward can suddenly open up into a much stranger arrangement without losing its momentum.

There’s also a real pleasure in hearing the band play. They can pile on the detail without sounding stiff, and even the more ambitious passages have a scrappy energy that keeps things fun. For a band supposedly just in it for the money, they certainly seem to be putting in the extra work.

There are some fantastic songs on this album. 𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘂𝗯 𝗥𝗼𝗰𝗸 and 𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆 get the balance between huge guitars and memorable melodies just right, while 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗮𝗿𝗺 shows how much the band can do without turning everything up. Those songs would make a strong case for the album on their own, but there’s plenty worth hearing beyond them.

The guitar sound is a big part of the appeal. It’s thick and fuzzy, sometimes almost swallowing everything around it, yet the melodies still come through. I like the softer, dreamier passages just as much as the heavier ones, particularly when the two meet in a song like 𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗮. That build-up is worth the wait.

My problem is less with any particular long song than with how long the whole album takes. By the final stretch, I’m starting to tire of a sound I was thoroughly enjoying earlier. There’s no shortage of good material, but that doesn’t mean it all needed to fit on one record. A little trimming would have made an already very good album even better.

I know this is a groove metal classic, but those riffs are a lot to sit through. Pantera are impressively tight, yet the constant hammering wears me down instead of firing me up. The guitars certainly make an impression — unfortunately, it’s mostly a headache.

By the end, the title feels less like a boast and more like a warning.

𝘈𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 has one foot in ambient, but to my ears it still feels closer to art rock. The album constantly shifts between conventional songs and short instrumental pieces, making it sound more like Eno experimenting with what a rock album could be than fully committing to the ambient music he would explore later.

My main problem is Eno’s singing. His voice simply does not do much for me, and on the vocal tracks I often find the sounds surrounding him more interesting than the singing itself. There is plenty of imagination here, but Eno clearly has a better ear for unusual sounds than he has an unusual voice worth listening to.

Christina Aguilera has a beautiful voice, but there’s only so much it can do for songs I find fairly average. I understand that 𝘉𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘵𝘰 𝘉𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘴 deliberately looks backwards, yet the retro styling often feels dated rather than inspired. Other pop records from the same period give me much more to get excited about.

𝗛𝘂𝗿𝘁 is one of the exceptions: here, I’m drawn into the song rather than simply impressed by the singer. I wish that happened more often. Much of the R&B material leaves me cold, and I’d have liked more departures from it rather than quite so much of it.

The length only makes that problem worse. There are highlights worth keeping, but too much in between that I could happily lose. A beautiful voice deserves good songs, not necessarily two discs’ worth.

𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘳’𝘴 𝘚𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘴 has the dreamy, slightly blurred atmosphere I often associate with shoegaze, but Mercury Rev take a more orchestral route here. The fragile vocals make an interesting contrast with the grand arrangements, giving even the prettiest moments a slightly uneasy feel.

What I like most is that there are good songs beneath all that decoration. The melodies are easy to follow, while the arrangements keep taking little detours that catch my attention. I enjoy the quieter passages just as much as the moments when everything swells.

The orchestral touches make the album stranger rather than simply prettier, and that’s a big part of its appeal. There’s plenty to get lost in without losing track of the songs.

𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘐𝘝 gives me the same feeling as Leonard Cohen’s 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘞𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘐𝘵 𝘋𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘳: an ageing artist singing with a voice that has lost some of its strength but gained something far more important in return. Every crack, breath, and moment of hesitation seems to carry decades of life with it.

That is what makes the album so powerful for me. Most of these songs were written by other people, yet Cash rarely sounds like he is simply covering them. He seems to absorb them completely. 𝗛𝘂𝗿𝘁 is the obvious example: in his hands, it becomes less a Nine Inch Nails song than a final reckoning with memory, regret, and mortality. The rest of the album repeatedly achieves something similar.

Cash sounds old here. There is no point pretending otherwise, and that is precisely why the record works. His weathered voice against those sparse arrangements gives me genuine goosebumps. When he sings about death, faith, loss, or looking back on a life, none of it feels abstract anymore.

𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘐𝘝 is not great despite Cash’s age. It is great partly because of it. Few albums make the passage of time sound this human.

I’d put this right alongside 𝘛𝘰 𝘗𝘪𝘮𝘱 𝘢 𝘉𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘭𝘺. The appeal is a little different: here, Kendrick’s storytelling grabs me as much as the production. He can sound full of himself one moment and deeply unsure the next, and those shifts make the story more convincing. There’s a person behind the rapping, not just someone determined to impress me.

The songs are catchy enough to enjoy individually, but I get much more out of hearing them together. Even the conversations between tracks add something, letting other people interrupt Kendrick’s version of events and giving the story a life beyond his own voice.

Its successor casts a long shadow, but this hardly sounds like a warm-up. I like them equally, for different reasons.

𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘺 𝘙𝘰𝘤𝘬 & 𝘙𝘰𝘭𝘭 has plenty of good melodies, and Mylo has a real knack for making electronic music sound light, catchy, and immediately accessible.

My problem is less with the album itself than with where it sits in the 1001 Albums experience. From the 1990s onward, the list contains so much British electronic music that another polished electronic record inevitably feels a little less special than it might in isolation.

So this is enjoyable enough, and occasionally very good, but it never quite convinces me that it needed to be one of the chosen ones.

My Bloody Valentine were never going to get a completely unbiased review from me, and 𝘮 𝘣 𝘷 arrived at exactly the right time: shoegaze was enjoying a major revival, and plenty of newer bands seemed to be asking themselves, “What if we sounded a bit more like My Bloody Valentine or Slowdive?” Then, after twenty-two years, My Bloody Valentine themselves finally turned up again.

Among the major shoegaze bands of the original era, MBV were the first to release a proper comeback album, and thankfully 𝘮 𝘣 𝘷 does not sound like a museum piece. It feels like a continuation of the same strange universe: buried vocals, warped melodies, huge guitar textures, and songs that seem to exist somewhere between pop music and controlled structural damage.

Kevin Shields’ guitar walls are still the main attraction. I have no idea how long he spent building them, but given his reputation, there is a fair chance some of these sounds took longer to finish than certain bands’ entire careers. The important thing is that they still sound magnificent: dense, shimmering, disorienting, and somehow just as physical as they were on 𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴.

And that is also the problem. 𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 exists. 𝘮 𝘣 𝘷 is excellent, adventurous, and far better than a twenty-two-year comeback had any right to be, but it never quite reaches that impossible standard.

Still, there is something deeply satisfying about MBV returning in the middle of a shoegaze revival they helped inspire and immediately reminding everyone who built the blueprint. As of 2026, it has now been another thirteen years since 𝘮 𝘣 𝘷. Maybe Kevin is working on the next album. Maybe he is still adjusting one guitar layer by half a decibel. Either explanation seems equally plausible.

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘤 𝘔𝘳. 𝘉𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘦 is exactly what I would expect from a top-class big band: sharp arrangements, powerful brass, and a rhythm section that keeps everything moving with effortless precision.

There is very little to criticise from a technical standpoint. The problem is that I admire the playing more than I connect with the music itself. The album sounds polished, confident, and consistently strong, but it rarely surprises me.

A very good big-band recording, even if it never becomes much more than that for me.