Reviews by therealab

I am skeptical heading into another Brian Eno project so soon after Roxy Music. Rightly so to this point. Art "rock", if this can even be called that, is terrible, art "pop" maybe. Whatever it is, this is not good. In Dark Trees sounds like it could be the soundtrack to a David Lynch film. I guess I should be grateful there aren't a bunch of weird experimental lyrics too. There they are. Once you've made a name for yourself, you can be as weird as you want and critics will eat it up like they're at a buffet. This is a major drag. Even the songs that are "better" aren't good. Last song was the best one and it was still terrible.

The White Stripes rule. From the first chords, you know it's going to be an experience. Everything has the same stripped down sound, in less talented hands every song might have sounded the same, not here though. Fell In Love With a Girl was the hit and the video was awesome. Fell In Love With a Girl is one of my favorite rock songs of all time, Joss Stone's cover of it is great too. There's a stripped down metal sound to this, like a garage band Black Sabbath feel. The lyrical conceit of The Union Forever is corny, but the music is cool. We're Going to Be Friends is a great song too. This album has everything: hits, sleeper singles, great album cuts.

Doyle Hargraves himself. I've never really listened to bar room country, but after the k.d. lang album, I think it might be an underappreciated genre. Dwight Yoakam has the right voice for the style of music, but there's something about it I don't love. This is fine. There's something that feels very mediocre about it though. The addition of Tejano music on Streets of Bakersfield is not a plus.

Smells Like Teen Spirit...the anthem for a generation. I know Nirvana released an indie album before this but if we're only counting major label debuts, Smells Like Teen Spirit is a contender for best first song off a debut album. Come As You Are is my favorite song from this album. Kurt Cobain's voice is annoying. Smells Like Teen Spirit, In Bloom and Come As You Are is a really strong start to an album. Lithium was a big hit for them but it's the weakest song from this album so far. This album peaked at Smells Like Teen Spirit and is downhill from there. Territorial Pissings is punk. On A Plain sounds like every song on the Singles soundtrack. Everything in the early 90s was grunge and gangsta rap. Endless, Nameless is the worst song on the album. It's their take on metal and it's terrible. And it drags on forever and it has a a full minute of guitar distortion and some weird background sound.

There is a Fiona Apple/Alanis Morissette vibe to this album. Way less punk than Rid of Me. A Place Called Home is a really good song. There's and undefinable quality that's really great about this album. Radiohead...that's the quality I couldn't find maybe, Thom Yorke on the album makes it seem like that's the answer at least. Kamikaze has some of that old punk PJ Harvey feeling, great song, like a tribute to the Ramones. Horses In My Dreams is a great song but very much like Fiona Apple.

Pearl Jam was definitely my favorite grunge band. Even Flow is an awesome song. Once, Even Flow and Alive is a really strong contender for the best three songs to start a debut album. That's a pretty specific take, but I stand by it. Alive is an all time great song. A lot of good songs on this album...it feels like everything after was a slow decline from this peak. The America of the early 90s was a bleak existence if you were listening to grunge or gangsta rap. I remember liking Oceans more than Jeremy and having them linked in my mind because of their proximity on the album. The album cuts are good too. Something on Garden reminds me of Tenacious D's Tribute. The obsession with ending albums with long/secret tracks was a huge thing in the 90s. The end of secret tracks is hopefully one of the only good things to come out of the digital music revolution. The start of Once and the hidden track both sound a little like the beginning to the PeeWee's Playhouse theme song.

2 hours of electronica?!? I'm exhausted already. This is incredibly boring. A 21 minute song to kick things off is not an auspicious start. These dance albums have to be the least listened to albums, start to finish, ever. No one just puts on a Goldie record and lets it play and listens to the music. This is background music at an overpriced salon or in a restaurant that has uncomfortable chairs and $16 drinks. The first song is hard to endure and there is another hour and a half of music to go. This music must only be good on E. This is "boots and pants" music. This is more a trail of endurance than an evaluation of an album. This album is terrible, one of the worst so far. The ambient waves and one of the most annoying electronic seagull noises imaginable in Sea of Tears makes this a rival for one of the worst songs I've listened to so far. This is all so repetitive, every song, every minute, just boring beats. 7 minutes at the end are remixes from the US release, not the initial release so that is great news. Every song is exactly as bad as every other one in it's own special way. The only thing that makes one better than another is the length (shorter is better). Still 27 minutes left and I cannot wait for this to be over. I will continue to listen but the Kenny G sax in Adrift is the end of my observations. This isn't dance music, it's not jazz, it's just awful. This is like music from a dream sequence in a porno movie. I'm not sure if I like the fake jazz songs less than the dance songs. In any case, they are both awful.

This makes me think of Mark Ruffalo's character extemporizing on The Clash in Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. I did not realize this was a double album. This is a punk double album though, 19 songs, just over an hour long. Green Day are Clash rip-offs. It's not even an homage, they could be a London Calling cover band. The distinction between "eclectic" and "experimental" is whether I like an album or not. Is this the first new wave album? Madness bought this album and decided to become a band. Why is there so much Spanish on all their albums? It's hard to hear how this is related to the Sex Pistols or Black Flag. The Guns of Brixton is the music for Cypress Hill's What's Your Number? Good stuff. It's almost literally the music, net of the goofy sound effects, including the bridge, with B-Real rapping over it, a real Frank Ocean vs. the Eagles song. Train In Vain (Stand By Me) is a great song and a great song to close the album on.

Brian Eno's band, I'm guessing he's the most represented person in this project between Roxy Music, his solo efforts and the albums he produced. He has the famous quote about the Velvet Underground and there are moments where you can hear the influence. A lot of bands loved Roxy Music and I simply do not understand it. David Bowie, yes. The Sex Pistols, no. The Bob (Medley) revisits a theme from If There Is Something and expands on how terrible it is. Art rock is generally not a good genre. The album gets worse as it goes on. What happened to bands in the late 60s that made them think that an album with random guitar distortion in the background was appealing? Drugs?

Soundgarden was always kind of an afterthought in the grunge discussion behind Nirvana and Pearl Jam. I think I like them more than Nirvana though. Chris Cornell has a rock star voice. They sound like Stone Temple Pilots on some songs. I never got into Soundgarden, I liked Pearl Jam the best out of the grunge bands, but this album is good. Black Hole Sun is probably why I never got into them...it was the hit and I don't really like it that much. The Day I Tried To Live is the best song on the album. Chris Cornell has a throwback rock star voice, there's a Robert Plant like quality to the way he sings, not that their voices are similar. There's something to their delivery that is similar or the way they approach the songs. There are some weaker songs on the album, but this is better than I was anticipating and a new found appreciation for Chris Cornell.

A live double album by a psychedelic band....this is truly going to be a test. Space sounds are the entire first song, not an auspicious start. Maybe those sounds are the Hawkwind. The singing on Born to Go sucks, but the music is cool. Psychedelic jams are not my jam. Who doesn't want some flute in their rock music...the girl from American Pie definitely does. The music could be Blue Oyster Cult. The Awakening....a reading of a stupid poem with space sounds behind it again. I bet this album syncs up with something. And now another poem over cosmic noises. It's ZZ Top meets Jefferson Airplane on Orgone Accumulator, cool blues riff. 10 Seconds of Forever is another stupid slam poetry moment. These guys are like the Isaac Asimov version of Led Zeppelin with Tolkien. The lyrics and vocals are terrible. There are parts of this that are good, but songs drag on forever and the space sounds and poetry readings are laughable. If Flight of The Conchords made this album as a joke, I would believe it. The talking segments are absolute nonsense. There's a hint of something cool in this and it just never gets any space to breathe with all the psychedelic jabbering and jamming and space noise. Closes with another little chat.

Yay! More NuMetal! To quote the voice of his time, Fred Durst, "If it were not for Bennington's voice and his words, nu metal would never have reached the masses and affected so many lives." To that I can only say, I wish Chester Bennington had chosen to be an accountant or oceanographer or literally anything other than the singer in Linkin Park because, according to Durst, he was directly responsible for one of the worst genres of music ever created. Linkin Park is a stupid band name. I wonder if some marketing exec told them that misspelling a word with extra 'i"s was cool like in Limp Bizkit. Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park are two sides of the fake hard ass/whiny bitch nu metal coin. Nu Metal sucks so much even Linkin Park didn't want to be associated with the label. There are a number of songs that I absolutely hate and that you could not avoid in the early aughts. This could be the soundtrack to a Transformers movie. At least Korn isn't so whiny. In the End suuuuucks. No song longer than 3 minutes 36 seconds, that's a plus. The whole album is only 38 minutes too. Mike Shinoda's rapping is awful. What was wrong with America in the late 90s/early 2000s? This is what spawned from Rage Against the Machine? Linkin Park is the 31st most listened to band in the world according to Spotify?!? In 2024?!?

Red Hot Chili Peppers heard this and thought "We can do this." This is what was left of punk before it was completely swallowed by pop punk. A punk band hates commercialism?!? Now I've heard everything. At least these guys stayed indie their whole careers. A young Trent Reznor would have thought this band was either not hard enough or not experimental enough. The lead singer sounds like Brian Johnson from AC/DC. Could be that I just had an AC/DC album that's making me think that.

Move Any Mountain was definitely all over pop radio when I was a kid. I don't think Jock Jams existed when this album came out so I don't think the intentionally created a song that would inevitably become one. Human NRG (Massey) is one of the dumbest titles of a song ever...it's like the tagline for an actual energy company's commercial. Electronica has come a long way, this album makes me want to positively reevaluate any electronic music I've previously rated. The robot filtered vocals are even worse than the music. This is the music you would have heard in an overly hip hair salon in the 90s. It's not possible that anyone not in a club or hosting a lame house party would just put this album on and hit play. It's a long album too. This is terrible. I thought the music was on shuffle because the lyrics of Lightspan are just "energy" over and over again. Hear Me's lyrics are a speech from an Indian politician, I can't identify who, but it is misplaced over techno music. 666 Edit is the best track on the album so far and is the most "techno" of them all. And then they add the Move Any Mountain lyrics and ruin it. This album never ends. The tuning noise on Lightspan Soundwave is one of the most annoying noises in a song I've ever heard. Three songs with the beat or lyrics to Move Any Mountain...this is an absolutely awful album. THis was apparently early rave music further solidifying the fact that rave music doesn't have to be good to have a bunch of high and horny kids listen to it.

Highway to Hell is a great way to kick off an album. AC/DC has a sound, and they have stuck with it through thick and thin. These guys are super horny, every song is about getting laid. I can understand how some people might confuse some AC/DC songs. With as many hits as they have over their career, it's surprising that this album only really had one big one. This one delivers exactly what an AC/DC album promises.

This is like if CSN, The Mamas and The Papas and Jefferson Airplane came together to make an album...it's terrible. The hippies were too high to realize what they were listening to was no good. Draft Morning is the best track so far, kind of a Youngbloods Get Together vibe. Harmonized vocals are overrated. A song titled Space Odyssey by a psychedelic band in 1968 is exactly what you would think it is. A fitting end to a wildly overrated album.

This sounds like someone....I can't place it. This album is trying too hard. I don't know but there was a British band that sounded like these guys at a roughly similar time. This doesn't sound "bad" but it's not compelling.

It's hard to classify exactly what genre the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are in. Indie dance rock? Pop rock electronica? Heads Will Roll was the dance rock hit from this album. I love Karen O's voice. This came out the same year as The XX's album and you can hear some echoes in this. We're all prisoners of our own times. It's hard to make an album where no songs are duds or filler and everything doesn't sound identical. This is good. Little Shadow is different but showcases what's great about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

I had a musician friend who was way into Jeff Buckley in college. If Jeff Buckley lived, this album would not get all the love it gets now. Music critics are just as sappy and deluded as everyone else. I don't mind retrospective reviews, but I definitely feel like once something gets a following, critics are forced to eat their words or look like they are out of touch. This is like alt-rock lite. This does feel like a synthesis of 80s music rather than something new. And at the same time grunge was making punk and garage rock cool again. His cover of Hallelujah is the hit and probably the main reason this album is so famous. It's a good cover of a great song. Maybe because it was the first major cover of it, but it's not so amazing to warrant all the attention. Lover, You Should've Come Over is the best song so far, it still has that 80s pop rock ballad sound, like a good Jamie Walters song. Followed up by the worst song on the album, Corpus Christi Carol. Forget Her is a highlight to close the album. If you caught me on a different day, I might love this album.

I think this is the Mission: Impossible soundtrack. I would take the first track and it's techno movie score over the second all day, every day. This has no business on this list. The distorted vocals that sound like a mix of Donald Duck and the Chipmunks is ridiculous. The Rough and The Quick is more like stereo instructions for having sex rather than being actually sexy. Primarily instrumental pop music strikes me as soundtrack music, it was the same for Tubular Bells. Alaska Street is probably the worst song on the album....so far. The drill bit sounds is particularly annoying.