Reviews by stevey_

Non-Marley raggae is fun. I have to remember that this whole "Legalize It" theme was not as ubiquitous in 1976 as it is now. I'm going to guess it made this feel a lot more edgy and rebellious back then. I remember watching the Peter Tosh "Behind The Music" on VH1 forever ago, and I know he was all in on legalization - it was like his whole personality, in my memory.

The Spotify album doesn’t seem to have the same track order as the original release. That's disappointing, I wish I knew before hitting play so I could have adjusted the playlist.
Reading the Wikipedia while listening to the first track, I was pretty surprised to see them called a ska band. I do hear the ska in later tracks, but good for them for pulling from some other influences and doing what none of the ska bands in the 90s could seem to do (not be obnoxious).
Everything was going well until “Driving In My Car”, which was a real vibe killer. What a terrible thing to put on a 7”.

This feels like a record that my dad could have owned during his jazz phase in the 80s. "Street Life" (the song) sounds like it was somebody's magnum opus, and then they added some instrumentals to fill out a whole album.

When I was a teenager (late 90s/early 00s), Led Zeppelin was my Beatles. Before I ever seriously got interested in "classic" punk rock, this kind of "hard blues" genre was the first 'old' genre that I was ever interested in. If I could go back and live through 1967-1977, I'd do it in a second (minus the Vietnam of it all). Living through the height of Cream, The Beatles at peak creativity (and dysfunction), the origins of Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, David Bowie, The Stooges, the rise and fall of Dust, ETC ETC ETC... and then see punk take off in 1977. What a time, man.

This record is in the canon of greatest debut albums of all time, for sure. Is it perfect? No. Is any rock & roll truly perfect? Besides, I like a little muss. Out of curiosity, I did go back and listen to the first Blue Cheer record (released in 1968) just to get a direct comparison of the two albums. If I was tempted to complain about how many times Robert Plant says "baby" on this record, that Blue Cheer revisit confirmed it was just the thing back then; there's babies everywhere on that record too. If I would have been enthusiastic to hear Blue Cheer in '68, I would have loved this in '69. And then the Sabbath debut in '70, just to make sure I can lose my mind entirely. My new observation today was about how much proto-prog rock there is on this record. It kinda makes me sad that this could turn into prog, but I get it.

God bless rock & roll.

“The album was largely ignored by critics and the public at the time of its release, but has since been recognized as a classic and one of the most influential punk rock records ever made” -the Wikipedia page

I think that says everything. This record is full of early punk bangers and deserves its flowers.

If you do an internet search to ask for album recommendations for starting your jazz journey, this will be in the top 5. I'll probably revise this to 5 stars at some point in the future, but I'm not there today.

"I'll have one Jazz, please!"

Herbie is the foundation of a weirdly large portion of what I listen to lately - The Budos Band, The Olympians, Manhattan Street Band, etc. I have a 12hr long Spotify playlist called “Brass Knuckles” (there are a lot of Spotify playlists called Brass Knuckles) that makes great background music for a bbq.
I acknowledge that my usual rules wouldn’t reward a “godfather of good background music” album with many stars, but this feels different. This feels like a record that made jazz accessible to a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten into it. Zappa is great, but he’s pretty far out there; Herbie has a kind of quiet cool that I appreciate.

Fun fact: Herbie was born in April 1940, I was born in April 1986. This year (2026) I turned 40 and he turned 86. Neat

Elbow, huh? It's like they decided that calling themselves The Bends was too obviously a Radiohead reference and thought, "well, what bends?"

I think the most dissonant part of this for me is the singers slightly husky voice. That's maybe the most notable outlier for all the Radiohead/Coldplay comparisons. "Weather To Fly" almost sounded like Sting. And I got slightly excited when I heard "The Fix" and thought the Richard Hawley/Nick Cave sound really added to the mix, and then I realized it was actually Richard Hawley on vocals there.

I think this occupies a space between Radiohead and Coldplay for me; it's not as compelling as Radiohead but not as comatose as Coldplay. It's been playing in the background all morning and it's been fine right there in the background. The fact that any of these tracks has 113M Spotify listens is truly baffling but so are people. I'd give this a solid 3.25 if quarter-stars were a thing. 7/20 stars.

The name of this album makes me glad he never actually made the movie. I’m curious what the imagined storyline is, but not enough to dig around and see if he ever explained it.
After listening, I guess I understand the vision… but I don’t/can’t care. It’s weird background music that would be fun to talk about if I ever happened upon someone who had ever listened to it before. I bet I won’t!

More-so than the comparisons to The Who, a good portion of this record sounds to me like The Doors, but louder and without Jim Morrison’s overbearing ego. And ya know what? That’s pretty alright with me! 25 years ago, my teenage “classic rock phase” was dominated by Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath, which puts this album firmly in my heavy-blues wheelhouse. I have no doubt I would have loved this record back then and, when you factor in Blue Cheer’s comparatively underground status, I'm sure I would have been Jim Morrison levels of insufferable in my Blue Cheer fandom. I better start making up for lost time!

This album was undeniably influential for crossing over hiphop and rockyroll fans but, 40 years later, it’s not a great listen.
The opening run from “Peter Piper” through “Walk This Way” is pretty legendary, and I liked “Raising Hell” on side 2, but otherwise didn’t really get into the rest of the album.
I’m receptive to arguments that Rick Rubin is actually the MVP of this record.

This was a good reminder for me that “grunge” was a genre defined more by its aesthetics than by a common sound. Just like Elton John and Slade were both “glam” rock but sonically had absolutely nothing in common. That’s how Nirvana and Pearl Jam feel. Sure, they came from the same scene but, did they really?
One of my recent metrics for classifying music is “does this music acknowledge the existence of punk rock?”, and I think that’s helpful for this comparison. Nirvana very clearly knew about punk rock, but Pearl Jam… doesn’t? This record sounds like the evolution of glam and hard rock of the 70s, mixed with some metal from the 80s (glam 2.0), but I don’t hear anything identifiably punk or post-punk. Before you try to argue with me about the metal thing, go listen to the guitar solo in “Porch” and then delete whatever you were about to say.
I didn’t think I’d get here, but it’s hard for me to argue this isn’t a 5 star album. There are so many hits here, and I can hear the echoes of this record in so much of the post-grunge rock n roll. This record is like the 1991 version of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

First sentence on Wikipedia: “Born to Be with You is the fourteenth solo studio album by Dion”.
That’s a lot of records for someone I’ve never heard of. That’s when I knew this wouldn’t go well. There’s really nothing remarkable about this record - it’s not even remarkably bad enough to earn 1 star. If Phil Spector didn’t produce this, I don’t think we’d be talking about it at all. It’s bland AM Gold backed by a moderately sized wall of sound. They really tried to bring out the artillery for “Good Lovin’ Man” but it’s too little too late (and also, I don’t believe you). Kind of begrudgingly, I did add that song to my ‘Boat Rock Of Last Resort’ playlist because it fits so well.

Also, was he ever investigated for soliciting a fifteen year old girl? Because the album art makes him look like he’s tried to solicit at least one fifteen year old girl.

I wish anyone loved me like people love this album.

Listen, it’s end-to-end bangers. It's like every Fleetwood Mac song you know, even if you didn't fully realize they were Fleetwood Mac songs. Did I need Lindsey Buckingham doing all that 'bow bow bow bow' bullshit on "Second Hand News"? No, of course not. Did you even remember he did that? I doubt it. "Dreams" is the very next song and that's followed by "Never Going Back Again", "Don't Stop", and "Go Your Own Way"... that first track could have been audio of Lindsey Buckingham taking a messy dump and you would have forgotten all about it in 15 minutes. And there's still "The Chain" and "You Make Loving Fun" coming a few tracks later (let's ignore "Songbird"). Christ, leave some rock n roll for the rest of us!

Jeff Beck is an amazing blues guitar player, and he should feature more prominently in conversations about guitar legend. But the truth is, it's mostly Rod Stewart here. That should turn me off much more than it actually does, but young Rod Stewart singing the blues could be my favorite version of Rod Stewart. The vocal performances sound incredibly similar to Robert Plant on [choose any future Led Zeppelin classic], even if the instrumentation doesn't quite climb to the same sonic heights as Zeppelin would. For me, Zeppelin were always at their best when they leaned hard into the blues, so this 'proto-Zeppelin' sound is a very easy sell. Every Led Zeppelin fan should also own this record.

Ok, but it's supposed to be a Jeff Beck album, right? I think what Jeff is doing here just comes off as too subtle by modern standards. The guitar playing is top notch, but it's not the kind of bombastic virtuoso performance that we grew to expect from namesake frontmen like Eddie Van Halen, or (Jeff Beck contemporary) Jimi Hendrix. This kind of restraint is valuable in a band leader, but underserves his personal myth building.

As an whole, this is very good album but I think it's missing that one big hit that would keep more people coming back over and over again. That's a shame. It's also a shame that "Blues Deluxe" only has 770K streams on Spotify? What an absolute blues-rock heater.

I feel like I gave this one an honest shot under the absolute best conditions I could imagine - I listened through twice on a drizzly pre-dawn drive to drop my partner off at the airport. Still, I just didn't connect with it. I understand why people would love this, I guess it's just not my thing.

I’ve not found any early electronic music to be compelling (at all), but this album sounds much more developed than I would have expected for 1991. If anything ages this record, it's the brief bits of rapping sprinkled throughout. That discipline really developed through the 90s and makes it easier to date this album back to the late 80s or early 90s.
Much to my own surprise, I think there's a world where I listen to this again and/or throw it on when I just want good vibes in the background; I didn't come in to this expecting that at all. It's unfortunate that it's so hard to find somewhere to stream it (the Director's Cut is not even close to the same record).

Odelay kind of set Beck up to be the 90s version of David Bowie or David Byrne, and Guero furthered that idea but felt a little darker overall. I would have guessed this record was the third of the three I've mentioned, but it was released in the middle. Weird! It's an aptly named record for Beck's transition to simpler and more emotionally charged songwriting. Guero makes more sense as a "return to form" record now, in that it gets back into more experimentation again. I'm not sure what to make of this one though... I understand why critics would have liked it, but I'm not sure it totally connects with me. Perhaps I need to listen to even more Beck albums to appreciate what's happening here?
If I rated Guero a 3, that's gotta be the ceiling for this record too.

This is CLASSIC ROCK (TM). Like, you don't know all these songs, but they all sound like songs that some people somewhere probably know. It's the basis for so much of the 'dad rock' of the 70s, and it's fun. I'm curious to listen to more Traffic now.

That "Chicago" song is pretty neat, and has a special place for me. Last year I did a 350mi bike ride across Illinois to Chicago, and after I finished my brother sent me a Chicago themed playlist for my train ride home, and that song was on it.

Otherwise, meh.