Reviews by similartie

I think the songwriting is pretty good, but the execution is just okay— a better album could’ve been made with these songs.

The music might be interesting, but the many layers of thick, murky fuzz ensure that the final product is nothing more than tolerable.

Absolutely dreadful album. Although even I can admit that, under the right circumstances (blind drunk and in a joyful mood)— You Shook Me All Night Long is sublime.

Some ups and downs on this one. I like it more than some of the other Bowie albums I've had on here, but it makes me feel restless and untethered.

The vibe of the album is like, it's 1999 and you're 16 and you're going to your girlfriend's house to meet her parents for the first time. At some point her turtleneck-wearing dad corners you in the living room and you make the mistake of casting a glance in the direction of his CD tower. Then he spends the next 20 minutes explaining why this album is so great and he's thinking he is coming across as cool and hip and you just want to get the hell out of there. Oh no, he's about to go off on a tangent about Van Morrison's "His Band and the Street Choir" when you are saved by the distraction of your girlfriend's whiny little brother shooting Nerf guns from behind the couch.

Also, Natasha, if you're out there, I'm sorry your dad died of brain cancer.

Pretty bad, not gonna lie.

Like sandpaper to my ears. I’m surprised it was released like this, to be honest.

Great album, but if we're being honest, the first half is better than the second half.

At times it feels like the production is doing the heavy lifting and at other times it feels like the production can't get out of its own way. I guess it depends on how you look at it. But her talent is evident and I think her career seems to have borne that out.

I like this more as an electronic/avant-garde project than I like it as a rock/new wave record. I'd be interesting to hear it redone without the rock drums and with perhaps an alternative vocal of some kind (maybe Annie Clark would be interested?).

Sometimes I wonder if the people who made the record ever look back on it and say, "yeah, we were young, having fun, doing drugs, messing about. This album we made really wasn't that good."

Okay, okay, I admit it. A good album can indeed be too long.

Aretha is obviously a total powerhouse. My issue is that because her voice is set to "blast" about 90% of the time, I find it fatiguing. I could listen to any one of these songs and say, hey, that's a good/great song, but it's hard for me to tolerate in an album-length format. Too much of a good thing, unfortunately.

Perhaps I'm suffering from a bit of whiplash after going from Lou Reed to Joni Mitchell to Nirvana to Scissor Sisters, but I just could not absorb this one and frankly I'm not sure I would have devoted a spot on the list to an album like this. (It's not bad, per se, just not particularly notable.)

I'm just gay enough to not care how gay this album is.

I'm not really a big Nirvana fan, but all the accolades for this set are deserved. There are a few tracks I could have done without, including 2 out of 3 of the Meat Puppets songs, but the rest is top notch.

I have to give Joni some credit for being an original. If you look up her supposed influences and contemporaries, none of them really sound like her (with the exception of CSN). There are also not a lot of singer-songwriter albums in this vein that are considered classics like this one without any standout tracks. I don’t mean that in a negative way, it’s just clearly meant to be a full, complete album and not just a compendium of songs that happened to be recorded at the same time. That said, I still don’t like her style as a lyricist and it sometimes feels like she is in a bubble and the rest of the band is [gestures] over there somewhere. I listened to this twice, and there were times I thought I could give is a two and times when I thought I could give it a four.

This feels like an exercise in storytelling rather than attempt to make an album of good music. I'm here for the music; if I wanted a short story I'd read one.

The background music was good and the vocals were easy to ignore.

The production, songwriting, and execution are all very well done. If I had to make a criticism, I would say it feels slightly performative. We all know what it sounds like when an artist cuts themselves open and bleeds all over the page; this ain't that, but it is still an excellent listen.