Reviews by suspiciousnumber

You ever have an album that sounds cool, and it's on your list for a long time without you ever hearing it, and then you feel kinda stupid when you do hear it because it's as good as everyone said it was?

So anyway, I'm gonna buy this album

5/5

I went back and forth on this album a bit. I think it could be produced much better (or else the copy I listened to was pretty poor). What got me about it was the 60s soul/girl group feel to it. You can hear it in the music, but it's also there in the vocal harmonies. They get a bit muddy sometimes, but I've given albums the benefit of the doubt before for production issues, and I when I set them aside here, I really like the style of this album. It's vintage, but fresh at the same time

4/5

This album is really cool and different for the time it came out. I remember people being really excited about this band when they came out, and it's easy to see why it felt so fresh

4/5

I've listened to this album before, but it's nice to come back to now that I've got a lot more musical context. Just a very fun album that staggers from genre to genre like a bar hopping drunk that somehow manages to hit trick pool shots at every bar they visit. Every song is so different from the others and so lovingly crafted. It was great to come back to this after 15 years or so since my last listen

4/5

This is a cool postpunk album. It's definitely got a sensitive boy approach like a lot of Morrisey stuff, but this is early enough that it can't have been influenced by the Smiths or anything like that. It sounds like a lot of other things, but I would guess that's because it influenced a lot of things that came after it

4/5

This album was okay, but it's hard to take as too meaningful. If this was made in 2005, I could see it, but in 2014, this was not a groundbreaking album, and there were plenty of artists who were doing this style of mashup much better. It's kind of funny and quirky, but it doesn't feel like there's a lot of artistry to it

2/5

I've tried to listen to this album a couple of times, and I still don't know what to make of it. At first I thought it was two different albums mixed together, but nope, it's all one thing. I like the dude's style overall. It doesn't feel coherent, but there's also nothing wrong with liking to make a few different types of music. I think a double album is a bit much, which is why I didn't give it a higher score, but I also appreciate this dude's versatility

3/5

You know what, this is pretty much exactly what I expected, and that's totally cool. It's got his big hits, and the other songs don't fall off too hard from that. It's a nice little time capsule for the transition in rock between the 70s and 80s. I have a hard time rating it all that highly, since I don't think that this was pushing the limits compared to some of his contemporaries, especially Van Halen, but it's a really solid listen

3/5, but a very upbeat 3/5

I wasn't really familiar with The 1975 until getting to the user-submitted portion of the list. I thought it was really cool. I think I liked the previous album that I got more (A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships). This album felt much more coherent, but perhaps was a bit less fun because I didn't have the feeling of never knowing what I would get. Still very much worth the listen

4/5

Just a really beautiful album that I want to come back to some day. His voice is exquisite, and he uses it so well. The music often makes this feel like a folk album, but he makes it much more than that

4/5

In a stunning turn of events, this album ended up being exactly what I thought it would be. It's pretty cool to listen to, even though it gets a bit repetitive at times. I don't know that I'm going to listen to it as a whole work again, but there's some cool shit I could sample on here

3/5

This one just wasn't for me. I've gotten much more into metal in the last couple of years, but I really like it when metal spreads out and incorporates other genres. This seems like straight ahead metal, which is fine, but it doesn't trip my trigger. Everything is competent, and the album is well-produced, but it doesn't feel like like it meaningfully pushed the genre forward compared to what bands like Slipknot had been doing for close to a decade by this point

3/5

When this came on, I was really tempted to dismiss it as another 90s punk band that is largely indistinguishable from the horde of other bands that came out at that time. What sets this band apart is their vocal harmonies. It adds so much to these songs that they would be missing with a single vocalist or if they did shitty harmonies. Putting effort into the vocals makes all the difference here

4/5

I've spent a lot of times singing the praises of Scottish pop rock bands here, and perhaps I should extend that circle to include the Welsh here. This album just works great. It feels fresh, and it kept me interested the whole time. I'm not sure what's going on with this band, but they should put out another album

4/5

Listened to the whole album, still don't know what it is, but it's pretty cool overall. I'd call it an industrial album, but it strays pretty far from that at times. Definitely far less abrasive than I was expecting from the album title

4/5

I'm so glad this didn't end up being an album performed by Burt Lancaster like I originally thought. I was ready to listen with an open heart, but I was also totally prepared for it to be terrible.

What I got instead was an album that sometimes sounds like it was made in the mid 80s, and sometimes sounds like it was made by people who had been influenced by 90s music. Overall, it's really neat and feels a bit ahead of its time

4/5

This really sounds like an Elvis Costello clone at first blush, and certainly Costello was not the only British musician that had this particular vibe going on in the late 70s. It's a good album that falls somewhere between Costello and Yacht rock. It's very much of its time, but it's a fun listen, and that's what really matters. It's a bit sad that this album marks him moving away from using horns, because a brass section would have slapped on this shit

4/5

I don't know what to say here. This album often had really cool stuff, then it would fade into the background, and the next time it jumped to my attention, it would sound like a completely different album. I liked everything I heard overall, but I have not earthly idea how I would describe this if someone asked me.

However, genre certainly isn't everything, especially when a work is well-executed. I don't have to know how to describe something to like it

4/5

Well, I've heard Faith No More albums that I enjoyed more than this, since I liked them more when they were a little funkier as a band. However, this album really shows off Mike Patton's incredible range as a vocalist, and there's still some of the funky stuff here, like Be Aggressive, that sounds like everything that RHCP could have been if they tried harder. Overall, it's a good album, even if I wasn't super focused on it for parts of the album

4/5

I feel about this album the way I feel about most Modest Mouse albums, which is that I like it, but it's also something I'm not likely to seek out on my own. They are a fun band, and are great to watch live in my experience, but I never really want to sit down and listen to their albums, despite the fact that their albums are solid overall and feature a lot of good songwriting.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's not you, Modest Mouse, it's me. I have a lot of work to do on myself, and I just don't think you deserve to be in a musical relationship with someone who can't full commit to you

4/5