Reviews by therealab

There's a reason Seven Nation Army is the preferred sports arena jam now...because it rocks. Great song. It's a shame Meg didn't have more opportunities to sing. Ball and Biscuit is so stripped down and amazing, another great song, one of the all time great album tracks and one of my all-time favorites by The White Stripes. And then The Hardest Button to Button? It's like Ruth and Gehrig hitting back-to-back. Maybe only Fell In Love With A Girl has such great lyrics in their catalog.

Mannish Boy to start an album? It's easy to imagine that everything is a disappointment after that opener. Every song could be great an just pale in comparison to the quintessential Muddy Waters/blues song. Bus Driver is a good song. Do I like the blues more than I thought or just Muddy Waters? This album is great and Muddy Waters is an underappreciated genius. I Can't Be Satisfied is another great song. There's an old-timey element to it that is really fun. Maybe it's just because I had it as the album before, but you can hear the influence of this record on the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan, both in terms of the music itself and the playful tone of the album. I am loving this, every song is good to great. The back half of the album is less impressive than the front half, but not bad at all.

Blue Orchid is my favorite White Stripes' song. Great start to an album. The Nurse is a great album track. My Doorbell is another great song. This album is a great introduction to the White Stripes; well produced, whimsical, accessible but also representative of their larger body of work in a lot of ways. This album has the feeling of some Led Zeppelin's more humorous songs, like Gallows Pole. Little Ghost is really catchy. Blue Orchid, My Doorbell and The Denial Twist were the singles and it is hard to argue with those choices. Meg White's singing on Passive Manipulation has a Nico-like quality to it. I would describe this album as "playful", even by Jack White standards. This is a great album from start to finish. The singles are amazing and the album tracks are great too. It's hard to pick a song that isn't good or misses.

Starting off really poorly. Horror movie cosplay meets NuMetal. Honestly this isn't the worst thing I've heard. I don't like the yelling vocals or the needless record scratching. Hard to know when one screaming NuMetal song ends and the next one begins. Actually, the yelling is better than the singing or Fred-Durst-talking in the songs. These songs are getting worse, Wait and Bleed and Surfacing manage to be very different than each other but equally bad. Tattered & Torn combines the annoying NuMetal talk, yelling, stupid turntable sounds and an annoying, repetitive what I assume is guitar sound but sounds like a creepy sci-fi klaxon. It's hard to listen to fifty minutes of yelling. Scissors incorporates some Einstürzende Neubauten pipe banging which is always a great additional to music. The record scratching feels like they had one friend with no musical talent but always got the best drugs so they had to find something for him to do in the band. Or maybe he was the one with all the clown masks. The lead singer sounds like he's trying to channel Trent Reznor....unsuccessfully. Yes, as Eric Cartman once said, "Fuck, fuckety, fuck, fuck!"

Combine this album with Born to Run and it's basically Springsteen's greatest hits. Born in The USA might have the most misunderstood message of any song in history, great song though. Cover Me is another good song. This album is Springsteen's most overrated, but that doesn't mean it's bad. I'm On Fire is the best song off an album full of great ones. The album tracks are definitely second rate compared to the singles. But those are some pretty amazing singles. I'm Goin' Down is an underrated song. Glory Days, Dancing In the Dark and My Hometown is a Murderers' Row of songs to close an album.

Their cover of Freddie's Dead is a travesty. This is like a novelty band and it's an essential album? The fire alarm sound over mouth noises is making a bad cover worse. More ska. Something about this reminds me of The Birthday Party. Bonin' In the Boneyard is like a cross of Prince and James Brown and is the best song on the album, very funky. The more funk based tracks are better. Why are there so many socially conscious ska bands?

Between the year of release and the band name, I'm not encouraged. Two songs in, this album is exactly what I expected. The early 80s is without a doubt the worst period for popular music. The edge got sanded off punk, hip hop hadn't been developed yet, rock was in decline, even hair bands hadn't come into their own yet. This is maybe the missing link between 70s pop punk like The Clash and New Wave music. Many of these songs sound the same. That's Entertainment is the best song on the album...Man In The Corner Shop is the worst. The album is a good length and it doesn't have any really long songs to drag on. Scrape Away has that ska sound that all of these bands had. Did The Clash ruin rock for half a decade?

Another goddamned double album! They're like catnip to these critics! The guitar solo is pretty good on Introduction, and I am a fan of horn sections in general, but this is like a cross between Santana and Al Stewart. There's too much horn on some of these songs. There was a chance for Chicago to rock, Poem 58 proves it. Free Form Guitar is terrible, but I bet Eddie Van Halen listened to it and thought, I can do this but good. They changed their name from Chicago Transit Authority to Chicago because they were afraid of getting sued. Nothing but losers on both sides of that threat, god forbid they besmirch the good name of a public transit authority. On the songs without the horns, I'd have a hard time not guessing this was Santana. The guitar style, the electric piano, the general vibe are all very much of that style. The 1968 Democratic Convention chanting is so dumb. As a kid, i thought political bands stood for something. Now it all just feels like a marketing gimmick. I could see the Beastie Boys being into this album. The first half of Liberation is good but it goes off the rails at about 10 minutes, just a lot of random instrument noise. Yes, you use a lot of instruments. No you do not need to make random noises with all of them for 90 seconds. Not a strong ending for not a strong album.

Two Blur albums in a row? It's like getting a double album. There aren't enough good Blur songs to get their greatest hits on this list, let alone two albums. This is the spiritual descendant of glam rock. In the battle between Blur and Oasis, count me as a firm Oasis vote. This is better than Parklife except for Boys & Girls. They are a Beatles cover band that made some original songs. When people say that Greta Van Fleet are a Led Zeppelin cosplay band, they are also saying that Blur is a Beatles coplay band without the clothes. Blue Jeans is terrible. This album is terrible. British people just love crappy pop rock. The second half of Chemical World reinforces what a bunch of self-absorbed, twee losers these guys are. This album feels twice as long as a normal album, I think that's a function of having just listened to a Blur album prior to this one. Resigned might be the best track on the album but it's too little too late.

Girls & Boys is a catchy opening track. These guys took the "rip off the Beatles" thing a step too far, End of a Century sounds like an original song written by a Beatles cover band. Bank Holiday is terrible. This is taking "post punk" too literally. This album starts with it's best song and gets steadily worse as it goes on. To the End is the worst song so far. I spoke to soon, there are many bad songs on the album, London Loves being one of them. Lot 105's goofiness doesn't help, especially with the Beatles' Eight Days a Week melody.

I'm not the biggest jazz fan, but this is good. It does sound a little bit like the background to a cartoon from the 50s though. Blues to Be There sounds like George Gershwin. Before the rise of pop music, every thing sounded like a score to a movie. This is a good listen. The longer this goes the more I like it. This is a great album. I only listened to the original release version but I will definitely check out the 2 hour complete recording now.

Oh my god this is awful. This sounds like a YouTube rapper. The rap acts that aren't in this list is astonishing, but Dizzee Rascal makes the cut. This is like a cross between Azalea Banks and The Streets, both of whom are probably in the list too. The beat is distracting, the accent is annoying and seems almost comical when you think about British gangsters meeting up with, as Easy put it, Real Muthaphuckin' Gs. The voice distortion effects turn this from bad to bad and ridiculous. The delivery is so terrible. I bet MIA loves this album. This is considered "the greatest British hip hop record of all time", that's insane. They should stick to rock and roll. Jus' a Rascal is the best song except for the chorus. This is one of the worst rap albums I've ever heard. The robot filter on the vocals makes it sound like EV-99 from Jabba's palace is on the album. This is also a very long album. The UK bias of the editors are on full display with this absolutely terrible addition.

Steely Dan, perennial favorite of music critics and assholes. The start of Black Cow is the sample used for Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz’s Deja Vu (Uptown Baby). That’s a better use of the music. This might be the first yacht rock album. Which band is more responsible for “adult contemporary” music, The Eagles or Steely Dan? Either way, they both suck. That’s unfair, they are definitely better than The Eagles. Aja sounds like Rikki Don’t Lose That Number in parts, I guess that’s just the “Steely Dan sound”. Deacon Blues is more of the same, but I definitely have a soft spot for it. Maybe it’s what I always assumed was a college football reference but probably wasn’t. This might be the most 70s album of all time. There are a lot of “hits” on this album. Peg is another one. If you took the lyrics away from these songs, they’d all be gold music. Is that Michael McDonald in the background of Peg? It is! That guy is good. Home At Last is the best song on the album. Donald Fagan’s voice exactly matches his appearance. Another Michael McDonald guest spot, instant improvement. I liked this album more than I thought I would which is not a very high bar to cross, but a pleasant surprise.

What a horrible band name. Starting the first song is only distortion or static and some hospital equipment beeps which promises that this album is going to be a slog. This is not music, this is a collection of annoying sounds. The second song is better solely by the fact that someone is singing and there is definitely a bass being played. Then they play their big debut single at 16x speed or rewinding or whatever. More found sound, this time a foul mouthed conversation over some "musical-ish" sounds and rain. Two alternate conversations, if this was the sound of a restaurant I was in, I'd leave. Einstürzende Neubauten heard this album and thought, "Hey, we can do this in German." It's hard to decide who did it worse. Dead On Arrival has the most music and is still somehow worse than the songs made up of annoying noises. That this album exists is a testament to the condition of modern humanity that enough freedom and leisure time and income exists to make this possible. Now it's the idiotic babble of a child over weird space-age sounds. The kid does have a cute voice. And know it's scientists talking about e. coli. These "songs" are terrible. It's hard to know if the songs with terrible tape recorded talking are better or worse than the songs with no human voices at all. That was a truly terrible experience.

Another country rock group. There were 100 of these groups in the 60s and then in the 70s it was just the Eagles and they became the biggest band in the world. This is Crosby, Stills and Nash with less of an edge. Dark End Of The Street is a good song. This reminds me of Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. This is Cotton Jones' favorite band. There's something missing from this album. The country/gospel/roots rock influences on this album should make it something, but it just feels corny, like another bunch of fake cowboys. Hippie Boy is the worst song on the album because the vocals are so ridiculous.

The Pretenders are like rock Blondie. Over/under on Ohio based references is one per song. This is more New Wave than I would have thought. The lyrics are ridiculous. LCD Soundsystem must love this album, this is what they would have been if they came out in 1980 instead of 2000. Stop Your Sobbing is not good, the 60s girl group vibe is out of place on the album and in the song. There is a Pretenders sound that carries through every song though. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs probably love them too. There are too many songs that are dominated by Chrissy Hynde's stange delivery and voice. And some of these songs are rock songs and others are just straight New Wave/Ska. Brass in Pocket is the hit, for good reason, it's a great song, maybe the perfect Pretenders song. They definitely had an influence-Beck, Scissor Sisters- you can hear pieces of this album in a lot of places. This is a hard album to rate, a lot of things to like and a lot of things to hate.

oh baby is the hit to lead off the album. The music matches the album cover. I could do without the sci fi lab noises in other voices. I do like this album. change yr mind is not good. It sounds like those human body songs on Kids Learning Tube on YouTube. how do you sleep? is like bad electronic U2. Their other albums are better. black screen sounds like the soundtrack to Blade Runner, or maybe Blade Runner: 2049. The ee cummings titles is a stupid affectation.

This feels more like an early 90s pop-rock band than an early 2000s band. It's like Oasis-lite. This reminds me of something I can't place, something much later. They sound like a band Zach Braff would feature in one of his films. M62 Song sounds like Guster's Satellite. This is not bad, but it isn't a standout either. There's a song called Satellites on this album! Friday's Dust is bad. The Sulphur Man is cool, good use of the glockenspiel . I have never heard of this band so it's hard to know what the hit off this album was, or if there even was one. This isn't a terrible album, but I am glad it's over.

Sleep to Dream is in the running for best first song off a debut album. The title is also apt, there's a dreamlike quality to the piano and vibraphone. Sullen Girl is also appropriately named, the vibe fits the title or maybe vice versa. Shadowboxer was the first single and her first hit. It got overshadowed by Criminal later, partly because the video had her in various states of undress. Norah Jones is a pale, poppy imitation of Fiona Apple. The First Taste has a Latin(?) or Middle Eastern (?) vibe that doesn't really fit the rest of the album. But I'm nodding my head to it, maybe it's her big dance number. Never Is a Promise is a beautiful song. Pale September is great too. There's an aggressiveness coupled with a vulnerability in her voice and these songs that is amazing. Carrion too. This album is amazing.

Is this acid jazz or jazz rap? This album definitely borrows from jazz, funk and soul. The beats are always unique, A Tribe Called Quest was always "cool" in that way. And Ali Shaheed's signature sound, the scratches, the beats, it's all there, he's an underrated DJ. And Q-Tip is probably an underrated MC. Footprints is a jam, it's got that Stevie Wonder Sir Duke horn sample. I Left My Wallet in El Segundo is a classic. Bonita Applebum is another great song, smooth beat, great lyrics. It's like a rap slow jam. Can I Kick It? samples Lou Reed's Walk on the Wild Side, which makes these two maybe the greatest non-cover version of original song and song that samples it. Go Ahead In the Rain is a great deep cut.