Reviews by similartie

Sure, her voice is an acquired taste and yeah, this folky material isn't necessarily the best fit for her. She would immediately pivot away from this style on subsequent albums in favor of a stark, doomy, gothic, proto-slowcore sound, which is shocking and amazing.

This album is still pretty good though and I think it has grown on me after multiple listens. There are no other records that are like this.

About 20 years ago, a good friend introduced me to the song "Into My Arms," which he was obsessed with. Great song, but now I'm saddled with the curse of forever keeping Cave on my radar even though I don't really like most of his stuff.

This album put me off right away, but of course I kept listening and there are just enough positive elements to keep the pipe dream alive. Dammit, Nick, don't give me hope.

My only complaint about this album is that Aretha's voice can be overpowering. She swings for the fences on every track, which would be fine if she were the lead singer for Led Zeppelin, but too much of the material here is just softball stuff.

There's some okay stuff on here, but I can't stand anything that screams EIGHTIES like this.

I want to like Leonard Cohen, but — like Tom Waits — the more I listen the less I want to hear.

Far out man.

In my top 25 all time. Easy 5 stars.

Back when I was a little kid, there was a neighbor kid who described this album to me as "scary" and said that in his house you were considered brave if you could listen to it all the way through. Sometime after that, this album came up in conversation with someone else and I repeated what I had heard from the neighbor kid. The person I was talking to was like, what do you mean? And I didn't know how to respond.

I think about that a lot.

Now all these years later I'm listening to the album for the first time and it occurs to me that the kid was probably talking specifically about the song and not the album.

Feels a bit like a mash-up of a few bands and styles that were popular at the time. Not really my cup of tea.

It can be hard to digest an entire album when the group is so immemorially identified by their huge hits. This one was fairly listenable. But it’s a bit like Blind Melon: Sure that one song was great and the video was iconic, but do we really, 30 years later, need to know what else you did?

Like if the Jayhawks made alt-pop instead of alt-country. Not great, not terrible.

I don’t have much context for this album, but it feels like part of a larger whole— a contemporary high point between classic jazz and fusion.

Okay background music maybe. The music is good but rap vocals are just not something I enjoy.

From an objective, critical point of view, this is a 4. The songs are well-written, well-played, well-sung, well-produced, etc., etc.

For me, it is missing that certain quality that either resonates somewhere in my soul or that demands to be listened to repeatedly.

I'm not really an electronic music guy. I'm usually too busy listening to non-electronic music.

But I get it, it's cool. Synth bass can be very satisfying.

I'll be honest. I don't like Prince and I'm frankly sick of hearing about him. Still, I had to give this a fair listen and it's not all bad. The song Purple Rain kinda redeems the whole thing, even if it is 3 minutes too long.

Pretty good, especially the first 3 tracks. Gets a little same-y after that, but it's well crafted overall.

Based on “Da Funk” and the fact that this duo maintained popularity for a fairly long time, I figured there was a chance that this album would be really good. Unfortunately, that was not the case. Maybe if I heard this in a left bank club in the 90s I would have more sympathy, but that’s not what happened.

I don't really like the format of this album, which is overdubbed live tunes combined with a couple outtakes from the studio. It's also half acoustic and half electric, which makes it feel even more disjointed.

There's good-to-excellent material here, but the execution was flawed.

I'm sure this blew some minds in 1966, but I found it to be kind of underwhelming.

The 60s psych-rock scene was littered with bands that were probably a lot of fun live but couldn't really craft an enduring studio album. Love managed to overcome the odds a year later with Forever Changes, but this ain't it.

This doesn't feel like any kind of artistic statement by a talented creative duo, more like a pandering commercial endeavor by pop-music opportunists.

I will give them a little credit for being on the bleeding edge in 1981, before this sound had really developed as it did later into the 80s.