Reviews by socksonfire

Sixth Bowie on the list so far. He's a legend. He's and icon. We get it. No need to oversaturate this thing.

Heroes is neither a favourite album nor even a favourite greatest hit as a song. But the album has a bunch of serious jams all around that song.

My relationship with George Michael is a long one. Wham was HUGE when I was in Grade 5, and full of enough sugar that the Grade 5ers were all-in. I played along, and there is something irresistible about how fun and poppy those early albums got. That said, I wasn't fully or deeply connected. As George went solo and got more serious, I would say the lack of connection has persisted. I actually feel a lot of empathy about how closeted he felt he had to be, and I respect the thoughtful and personal nature of his music that comes across as very honest and manages not to get too overwrought.
I listened to this and liked it fine and thought all the thoughts I just wrote, and that makes for a good spin.

Summer 2025 I was at a local music festival. A choir I sing in did a set and then I grabbed a beer and joined a friend in the cannabis-smoking area. By the time we wandered back to teh Amin Stage Sleater-Kinney was just starting. Maybe it was the drug cocktail, but killer gig by them. I was very locked in. Anyways, my friend was completely unfamiliar with Sleater-Kinney, but kept telling "they sound just like Sonic Youth" over and over again. He wasn't wrong, but he probably brought it up a couple times too many for polite company.
Dirty isn't peak Sonic Youth in my books, but it is still pretty much beyond reproach. Just goes to show how immense peak Sonic Youth is. I wasn't aware of my project partner's deep love of the album til this week, but that fact put me in a very willing mood once I actually got around to pressing "Play"

Hanging around I never just throw on a Neil Young album. In my late teens I would. But nowadays it just never really pops into my head as hankering. Then, every once in a while, some reason crops up to throw one on. Damn.

There are a lot of bands that started hitting in the mid-aughts I lump together. Postal Service, The National, War on Drugs . They range in quality and scope, but I vaguely think of them as MAB bands, and it’s a bit inside baseball to understand that description until the movie comes out about all that.

Grizzly Bear is one of these bands. And I can’t be more clear about this: these bands range from terrible to awesome, like any bunch of generalized bands from a particular period of time.

So, Grizzly Bear is middling-good. I think this album was actually quite pretty for the most part, if a tad overstaying it’s welcome by the end.

For the second of the “Word Schmord “ series of assigned albums, and I have to assume the second of two, we are all over the map. Something was just missing. I respect the variety, but it felt a bit like soneone running repeating riffs and then just ending them, and nothing seems to go anywhere. In spite of one or two good tracks, overall this did not work for me.

Prince completists needed to get this album, of course, since it contains the WORST PRINCE SONG IMAGINABLE.

Besides all that, I think I used to enjoy some of this. My main takeaway this time is more of a question than a theory. Does drinking milk make you a better singer? It seems like it would, coating your vocal cord with thick lubricating milkiness. Madonna’s singing voice sounds like she’s drinking lots of milk during the recording sessions, and I don’t think it made her a better singer. But going in I thought rate this higher.

I’d call myself an Elvis neutral indifferentist. I rate his debut pretty high, and otherwise pretty much whatever hits are floating around the airwaves don’t really register. I don’t understand the worshipful acolytes. But do acknowledge no one else quite sounds like Elvis. Maybe the Righteous Bros capture it. That sort of rich-mellow but churchy overdrama, but executed in such a casual, natural way. Seems an uncommon skill.

This record hits pretty good. Just a bunch of pretty solid jams, no attempt to link it all up, but everything sounds like good fun. Doesn’t make me want to go out and listen to more, but I could see myself getting down to this album from time to time in life.

I got stuck in an awkward week where I kept listening to half the album of the day, getting distracted, then next day starting the next album of the day and listening to only half. But I have only one real listening rule for these: albums need a full listen in one sitting. It’s the only rule I’ve been militant about. Unfortunately one of the reasons I wasn’t closing the loop is I just wasn’t in the mood to relisten to the half albums from the day before all that much. Typically that just means I need a break and then a follow up blitz down the road.

Well that down the road blitz is happening now.

And to kick things off… oh yeah… now I remember why I didn’t want to relisten to this. Purely for 14 yr olds.

Cheeky cheeky monkeys. But it all MEANS something. The army this wackjob of an album inspired includes me.

Pretty irresistible. When I read the Allmusic’s review and they mentioned Rod Stewart biting Sam Cooke’s raspy vocal style I could stop thinking about it. The one hang up with great live albums is the knowledge that it was infinitely better in the moment, and I’m listening to but a shadow of that feeling. Sometimes that problem’s so strong it actively works against the experience. In this case I would call it a mild factor.

I think my project partner’s assessment of this one perfectly reflects my own experience. While I did think some of the songs were very solid, big step down from No Other. Our other, younger, indifferent and disengaged project partner’s also weighed in verbally that he wants to give this album one-star, and actually complained about it more than I expected. Oh well, Gene Clark. Nobody is five-star all the time.

Way way back in good ol 2022 my project partner and I engaged in the 2016 version of this 1001 albums list, whether we want to remember it or not. We goaded each other into dividing the album list into ten equally-sized groups, and plucking a single track out of every hundred albums to generate 10-track set lists. They weren’t allowed to be songs we’d heard before. While we both chose tracks from the same Kraftwerk album, I also happened to choose a track from this album. Sparks. I think it was an underwhelming track then as it is now.

Taken as a whole I’d say the entire thing is vaguely underwhelming. Not necessarily all bad. But a bit blah.

I’ve probably listened to this about ten times before. I think I even wore ripped jeans for one of the listens, which is pretty hardcore.

A very cool aspect of this project came to light tonight while I listened to this. I have now listened to a bunch of albums that represent the roots of industrial music. Many sometimes strange bands doing some pretty weird stuff.. Some actually pretty great albums.

That new knowledge casts Downward Spiral in a very new light. Some parts I liked better than ever. But in some parts it felt like the tension was released in ways that were disappointing to me. I expected to give this a four or five, but I’m feeling the siren song of a very solid three.

This album dropped in very compelling way way back when. For example, I snagged a disk, smoked a fatty and hit a park where I played it on my headphones from my discman, feeling like I was hearing the most incredible album ever made.

It is still damn good, but not THAT good.

12 solid karaoke options. I wish it was better. Just a bit better would good. But now I actually sort of like it.

When Otis Redding Sings Soul appeared last night my heart sank. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and let a tear or two fall. Why such a sudden and emotional reaction? Well, I’d recently finished granting a glowing review on Low-Life after a few days of similarly high ratings, and I knew with high certainty that this, too, would be a fantastic 5-star listen.

Why would the prognosis that I get to have a sweet and fulfilling album-listening experience render me so crestfallen? Well, I know that any string of 5-star ratings I bestow leads directly to a bolstering of the characterization of my personality by the algorithm, supported by other various sundry observers, as a “cheerleader”. The intent of this characterization is not to flatter, but to imply that granting a bunch of higher-than-average ratings is an attempt by me to artificially build the confidence of undeserving artists, and that perhaps my ratings are biased toward that purpose. The only reason such a criticism may hurt me is that there is a kernel of the same question buried deep inside my own questionable psyche.

In order to address this issue in my own mind it is necessary to briefly discuss the nature and purpose of statistical generalities and reductions. Normalizing data sets and manipulating data to bucket out outliers and use such assessments to develop a better understanding of patterns and trends in the universe is a time-honoured and valuable use of data. We can use this kind of work to predict the likelihood of a particular outcome in a general sense, but the reliability of these kinds of prediction's goes down the closer they come to trying to predict a specific outcome. For example, sockfire has an unusually high likelihood of awarding Korn- Follow the Leader 5-stars. It is the same likelihood of sockfire awarding any album 5-stars. When Korn was awarded 1-star the predictive power of the trend was nil. For this reason, the data can only ever be used as a general guideline informing reasonableness. Any prediction of a specific outcome must be informed by situation-specific conditions to be relied upon, and there must be an assurance that the source of the data is objective. The source of the data cannot be influenced by any objective to generate a specific curve shape. Data reduction or “grading on a curve” in order to develop general observations can only be fairly accomplished once all the data is in and quality assurance is established.

It is important that we, the project users, maintain a high degree of integrity. We are not simply observing this data, but we are also the SOURCE of the data. We cannot allow a pre-characterization of our data set to bias our ratings, lest any characterization of the trend becomes suspect. This reality both invalidates the algorithm’s premature characterization of my ratings as “cheerleading” but also clearly requires that I discount any internal pressure to or to not rank a certain way on any case-by-case basis.

With this discussion in mind, reducing Otis Redding Sings Soul to a single data point becomes simplicity itself.

My little research fingers tell me that Technique landed almost exactly a year ago for this project. For a band I generally like quite a bit, Technique fell very flat.

Low-Life, by comparison, soars. Possibly my favorite album by them. Their Joy Division roots are alive and well, but uplifted by an excitement of invention and discovery that's hard to deny. Absolute ripper of an album.

I don't recall any bigger news in all the world the day this album was released. I think me and everyone else I know had a passionate 3-year marriage to the Pumpkins, followed by a bitter divorce (in other words: it wasn't mutual, and Corgan blamed us). The breakup drama was followed by several decades of general indifferent forgetfulness.

Revisiting this certainly reminds me of that love affair. Hilariously overlong and overblown and overwrought, but still full of some truly wonderful moments. In the end, this is an album made by people who did not believe there could ever be consequences for their actions. But they were wrong.

I was a bit skeptical about this whole Sugarcubes thing. Respect for Bjork is no replacement for a good pair of extra-strength ibuprofen tablets. But I really didn't quite know what to expect.

Turns out the album is fun fun time. So short and sweet! I should have trusted the album cover