Reviews by similartie

Pretty fun listen except for that ridiculous instrument.

The trend continues of 90s alternative albums where the only good songs are the ones you heard as singles.

Good, original art-rock is hard to come by. You can feel this band has some heat behind them. Williamsburg hipsters in post-9/11 NYC, the last vestiges of Old Weird New York disappearing.

The stage was set, but ultimately I think their range is pretty narrow and if this doesn't hit you straight-on, it doesn't hit you.

A bit narcoleptic and theatrical, but there are too many good songs here to simply launch the album into the endless sea of three-star albums.

I don't like her free-flowing songwriting style at all. The jazz and pop inflections just make worse, IMO. Not a good listen.

Stalwart classic rock band. Pretty good album.

It's pretty easy to say "pass" on two minutes of standard R&B ravings-up (Ooby Dooby, etc.), but the payoff of the 11-minute "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" is so worth it.

Two things stand out to me listening to this album now:

First, you can tell it was recorded to tape in someone's basement in the 90s— probably the golden age of basement recording. (It wouldn't be long before computers and digital recording would change a lot of things.)

Second, it's an historically great album with an understated and unique kind of beauty.

Just had this band five albums ago. Still don't like this guy's voice. The whole thing sounds regressive for 1994, a time when rock bands in general were innovating pretty fearlessly.

I don’t really know what this is, but I didn’t like it.

Yep. Pretty good. Not quite mind-blowing in 2025 although I bet it was pretty progressive for the time.

Well, I guess it’s time for me to admit I don’t really like this album very much. It’s overproduced, overorchestrated, and most of the songs kind of float around and don’t go anywhere. The sociopolitical messaging is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Yeah, sorry, background music.

If there is a standout element here, it's Bernard Butler's guitar playing. The rest of it is pretty forgettable. Including the overly-British-sounding vocals.

About the most fun you can have listening to an album you don't like and hope to never hear again.

That one sort of dreamy psychedelic song was pretty good. The straight-ahead rock songs, which is most of them, are not very good. In my humble opinion.

The UK rock scene must have been pretty bleak in 1994 for this record to come out and hit it big and sell millions of copies. This feels like very lowest-common-denominator, generic, arena-style rock. Somehow the band has maintained relevance well into this century.

The Doors make sense in context, but I imagine a lot of people who have never heard them before are thinking What The Fuck Is This Shit. In the 60s you could eat this stuff with a spoon.

Anyway, for me, I'm left wondering why a band that was capable of making cool stuff like The End would waste their time making third-rate crap like the Alabama Song.

I am pretty familiar with the album Dummy from back in the 90s. That was a good album and it had a strong sense of self, but I this is really something else entirely. I'm glad they were able to regroup and generate some new original music. This feels complete.

From what I know of the Beastie Boys, I was prepared to hate this album, but I get why people like this. I don't know who the Dust Brothers are, but they do good work. I still don't like the group. The album as a whole isn't entirely unlistenable, and that's really the highest praise I can give.

I like Johnny Cash. He's earned his place in the pantheon of great Country artists. His performances at Folsom and San Quentin are legendary. But on a fundamental level these recordings are only mildly enjoyable as a listener in 2025.