Reviews by stevey_

From soft ballads to industrial influences, jazz, and dance tunes, this album covers a lot of ground! Björk’s voice is all her own and these compositions are pretty weird and whimsical (in a good way). It’s like the pop music you might invent for a futuristic sci-fi movie, except it actually happened here on earth in the early 90s. What a time to be alive!
If anything, I think the dance songs have aged the worst - “Big Time Sensuality” the worst and “Violently Happy” slightly less bad. Both still enjoyable, but they definitely stand out.
This is a solid 3.5, but missing that extra something that gets it to 4 star “save this record for later” status. For now.

Karen is wearing open-toed shoes and you can see her ankles on the album cover, so it’s impossible to say this record doesn’t take ANY risks. Musically, it’s a little more challenging to pick out the spicy* choices, but they’re there.

For instance, I don’t remember “We’ve Only Just Begun” going quite so hard - maybe I’ve always immediately glazed over when that first harmony kicks in around the 40sec. mark, but that horn punch at the start of the verses kinda slaps!

As much as I don’t want to admit it, "Love Is Surrender" isn’t spiritually dissimilar to a lot of Bossa Nova records that I love, it just centers more English vocals than I'm accustomed to hearing. If you made the horns more prominent in the mix and/or put the lyrics in Portuguese, I’d probably love this track.

The Beatles cover, “Help”, is actually pretty good; the harmonies do the song justice and it provides a good "Hey, I know this song" moment.

The first 7sec of “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again” are like fresh-cracked black pepper on mashed potatoes. A quick burst of flavor you’ll look for, but never get, in every subsequent bite.

Surprisingly, this record contains two songs that don't seem to be about love at all - “Crescent Noon” and “Mr. Guder”. I would have never guessed.

This is like a 2.5/5 for me so it'll get a soft 3 (not the first time that's happened while this album is playing, I'm sure).

*spicy is a relative word

This is a rare case where I wrote no notes on my initial listen and now, 5 days later, I can’t for the life of me remember anything I might have wanted to say about this record (good or bad). Like, I can’t even recall the general genre anymore; Brit rock, maybe? ”Everything Must Go" indeed. Complete memory hole.

There's only one Thelonious Monk... album on this list, so listen up. While obviously not as important as acts like Joy Division or Pixies (who have several required listening albums), Thelonious Monk's innovative rhythmic style did leave a mark on jazz. This is very much a textbook on improvisation and soloing and feels more like it should be studied than listened to "for fun" (as I've mentioned on other jazz album reviews). This kind of highly technical composition lends itself to being "music for nerds", but those nerds start jam bands or invent prog rock and suddenly the ideas are creeping into the mainstream.
For me, jazz is great background music when I'm working with my hands. Its busy enough that I can't entirely zone it out and that means my mind stays focused on what I'm working on instead of wandering onto a 3rd thing. This would be a great addition to my workshop rotation.

The initial blast of mariachi music struck me as a bit appropriative, but this is a long album and I tried to give it a few minutes. I think time is your friend with this one because it covers a lot of ground. In total, the mix of influences feels genuine for a band from the Southwest and might not be surprising from a few former members of Giant Sand.

The album feels like it has a few different acts, broken up by short instrumentals. The Mariachi gives way to some psychedelic country and Cake-adjacent indie rock with some reverberations of Fastball’s “The Way”. The sound will always peg this record as “of its era” in the late 90s or early 00s, but it’s not so trendy that you can nail it down further.

Except for the album art, this record makes a convincing case for a timeless list like this one. I’m convinced these guys are actual musicians, not just some kids looking for an exploitable niche.
I listened to this several to this several times in the few days after I got it. The live disc attached to the rerelease is a great listen too. Easy 4.5 for me

There may be more Pixies albums on this list than there are Bossa Nova records. I guess it’s interesting to hear how different all of their albums are from eachother, but I’m not convinced we need this many.

For a band that inspired Nirvana so much, this is a decidedly non-grunge album for them to put out in 1990. I think that helps demonstrate how eclectic the Pixies catalog really is.

This album gave us "The Number Of The Beast" and "Run To The Hills" which are both genre classics. I'd classify this as Hard Rock except the suggestion of the title track makes it feel real edgy for the early 80s. If this is Metal, it's gateway metal almost purpose built to appeal to young teens. It's well made and easy to listen to, as long as you can stomach the screeching vocals. Hard to get very worked up on this one either way.

An absolutely killer Christmas album. All of the artists really hit their marks, and that wall of sound really pops! It's a shame Phil Spector's name has to be all over it, otherwise this had a real shot at 5 stars.

Wow, this is a super long record of the same mopey song over and over and over again. Frank has a great voice, but I need a little more variety in a record this long. I understand this is a concept album and it’s supposed to tell a coherent story, but I don’t think that story needs to be 50 minutes long.
The album mix keeps the band super low so you can hear the full force of Frank's voice, and that doesn't help to break up is monotonous soliloquy. If you, like Frank, love the sound of Frank's voice, then this record is great background music.

I’ve never actively listened to The Avalanches, though I’m sure I’ve heard them in passing. I recently reviewed (and was underwhelmed by) Massive Attack’s debut album Blue Lines, which is cited as the origin of trip-hop. I appreciate this isn't strictly trip-hop, but I think this record shows how far the idea developed in its first decade. I love hearing the evolution of sub-genres. The Avalanches used almost 1000 samples on this album, which seems like it would have taken absolutely forever to compile and arrange. That's an impressive feat and maybe explains why it took 16 years to make a follow-up record.

My biggest criticism is that the repetitive vocal samples get a little tiresome over the hour-long runtime. It's listenable, but more dynamic vocals - or less vocals all together - might have punched this up for me. They figured it out for 2016's Wildflower and 2020’s We Will Always Love You, which are both great records.

In the heyday of Prog Rock and the height of Rock & Roll excess, The Stooges managed to be ahead of their time by going the opposite direction - creating a raw, low-brow masterpiece that would generate more garage bands than any Yes album ever could. It's both more raw and more powerful than their earlier records and couldn't have been named anything else. The point-of-no-return in the creation of Punk Rock.

Far from the sour suggestion of their name, this record is full of sweet tunes that won’t leave a bad aftertaste.

But really - in the landscape of early 90s Alt Rock, The Lemonheads occupy a melodic and lightly overdriven space somewhere between the raw angst of every grunge band and the poetic earnestness of bands like Counting Crows. Listening to this album actually kept reminding me of the softer parts of the first Foo Fighters record, if that tells you anything.
You might know the cover of “Mrs. Robinson” from this record. I didn't feel like I needed to skip anything, but I also didn't save any new 'liked songs'. It’s a fun album to throw on for a change of pace.

Trip Hop seems like my kinda thing on paper, but this album was underwhelming. Maybe I’m too conditioned by bands like Dirty Art Club or The Jazzual Suspects who have a much more dynamic take on this style of music (with less vocals). Consensus opinion is that Massive Attack created the genre, so this record feels pretty important from that perspective, but things just get better from here!

Fats is the king. This record is short and sweet, annd every song is excellent. Is it Rhythm & Blues or something more? Yes.

There’s a restaurant (and venue) here in St. Louis called Blueberry Hill, because of course there is. Why wouldn’t you name a restaurant after a song with such immaculate vibes?

I have heard this band mentioned in passing, but I had no concept of their music until listening to this. My thoughts are pretty scattered, but we'll see how I land after getting them all out on paper.

Listening to the opening track, "Under The Pressure", I really appreciate the vision here: a Dire-Straits-esque version of country new wave updated for the 2010s. Honestly it's not so different from the 'post country' kinda sound I've been noodling around with lately and it's nice to hear a working version out there in the world. However, the vocals do feel very Mark Knopfler meets Tom Petty meets Bob Dylan in a way that doesn't feel wholly original or authentic.
Track two, "Red Eyes", is the most popular track on the album, based on Spotify listens. It feels like it took A LOT of inspiration from Grateful Dead's "Touch Of Grey", like probably too much inspiration. A great song to take inspiration from, but on the heels of the derivative opener, it's not setting a great tone for the album.
Track three, "Suffering", is piano-forward (except for the big guitar solo) and its down-tempo really carries this listener into the dreamy place promised in the album title. So far, this is the most original sounding track on the record.
"The Ocean In Between The Waves" brings us squarely back into Dire Straits territory and I'm starting to wonder if I'll have the same complaint about this album that I had about the DS debut album... it's a great idea but the whole album is just slight variations of that same idea without much differentiation.
"Disappearing" doesn't do much to change my mind, but I appreciate the minimal vocals. This feels like a solid base for that 'post country' thing I mentioned earlier; but it needs a little more build and crescendo.
"Eyes To The Wind" delivers more of that build I was looking for, but it also takes us further down the same road. We're halfway through the album and it's all mostly the same.
Thank God for "The Haunting Idle" for pumping the brakes a little bit, we were getting pretty crazy. This slow ambient cooldown is exactly what the record called for.
"Burning" is all Bruce Springsteen. Honestly, not an unwelcome BPM boost, but I hate that we're back in derivative country.
"Lost In The Dream" is lost in the album. I'd maybe hoped for more from the title track, but by track nine we're pretty much locked into our thesis. Maybe this IS the thesis and the final track will go a different direction and launch us back into reality?
"In Reverse" does not promise to do that. It starts off as "The Haunting Idle" with 100% more vocals (Free!). It does swell into rock-adjacent territory, but settles back down to sleep again; not the finale I'd hoped for.

Ultimately, this record feels like an hour of very vibey background music. That's not high praise, but I honestly don't hate it. I just can't get past how much it borrows from the past. I think I end up in the same place I did with Lloyd Cole And The Commotions (the other 'we have Dire Straits at home' act I've found on this list).

Hot (Out)takes:
"What if Kings Of Leon were more boring"
"Muzak for your urban hipster housewares & vintage store"
"We asked AI to imagine what song Bob Dylan and Tom Petty would write if you told them that Queen and David Bowie collaborated on a song called "Under Pressure" but didn't actually play the song for them."

Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill blew everything up in 1995, but by 1993 standards, there's some pretty edgy female singer-songwriter stuff here. I think that's important context. This record shows a remarkable range of songwriting for a woman who would have had that range closely monitored (at best) or heavily restricted (at worst) by an industry that only wanted to hear a certain perspective from women. Fortunately for Aimee, her "razor-sharp" lyrics are nestled into "sunny, surreal melodies" which make them a little more palatable for a wider audience (shoutout Rolling Stone for those descriptors). Some of this feels a little dated now, but songs like "Fifty Years After The Fair", "Stupid Thing", or "I Could Hurt You Now" sound exactly like what you'd expect from a pop-rock album in 1993. And you also get 'acoustic guitar music' like "4th Of July" and "I Know There's A Word", piano music like "Mr. Harris", and blush worthy double entendres like "Put Me On Top" (nope, Aimee swears it's not actually about that!). There's even some horns on "Way Back When"! That said, it's difficult to pick out an obvious radio banger, and that probably held this album back.

Overall, this is an impressive debut solo album worth of the praise it gets (and probably more), and I say that as someone who's definitely not a singer-songwriter person.

"I Should've Known"
"4th Of July"
"Put Me On Top"
"Stupid Thing"
"I Know There's A Word"

If this is Frank Zappa, what does Evasive Zappa sound like, am I right!?!

But really, I have a lot of respect for Frank Zappa and his general philosophy on life and music, even if “jam band” music isn’t my thing. I’ve watched a lot of interviews of Frank over the years and he’s always struck me as the kinda guy who is very intelligent but got mediocre grades as a kid because he was chronically under stimulated and didn’t apply himself (and also just hates authority). Jam Band music like Frank’s is a great place to go for lessons on improvisation and how to craft a solo… but for the life of me I can’t understand why people listen to it purely for fun, especially without drugs; do y’all read textbooks before bed too?

This album is very guitar-centric, but I do want to highlight some fun instrument spotlights that stood out to me, like the clarinet parts on “Peaches En Regalia” or the glockenspiel (maybe it’s just a keyboard that sounds like a glockenspiel?) on “It Must Be A Camel”. Both feel like underutilized solo instruments and I enjoy the change of pace. This was a fun listen and a wild way to start a Tuesday. I should have played it at 4am to see what kind of dreams it would have evoked. Maybe another day.

“Peaches En Regalia”
“Little Umbrellas”
“It Must Be A Camel”

There are better Neil Young albums in the world, and you shouldn’t be required to listen to this one. It’s a split live/studio album but a bunch of the live stuff was overdubbed in the studio so, who really knows what’s what anymore. To add an extra gimmick, side one is acoustic and side two is electric (yes, like Dylan did in 1966). Neil Young can’t really sing on either side, but that's never stopped him before.

The only real standouts for me are “My, My, Hey, Hey (Out Of The Blue)” and “Welfare Mothers”.

Nothing on this record jumped out of the speakers at me, unlike 1979’s Unknown Pleasures. But actually, if you pulled “Disorder” and “Interzone” off of that record, you’d end up with a muddled collection of dark, hitless, 80s goth songs very similar to this record. If that’s what you’re into, you’ll love this. I understand having Unknown Pleasures on this list, but the entire Joy Division catalogue shouldn’t be required listening.

The album cover and title project a pretentiousness that I wouldn’t otherwise choose to engage with, but John Cale is “the other guy from The Velvet Underground”, and that’s the only reason I gave this more than one passive listen. That first listen was pretty unimpressive, but I’m glad I stuck with it because it’s improved with every listen (especially with headphones). There’s a lot of interesting small instrumentation that leaves something new to hear each time through.

Realistically, I don’t expect I’ll revisit this much but I’ll be optimistic and give it 4/5 stars anyway. We’ll see.