Reviews by therealab

I went into this with the wrong mindset, this first track is great. This is great funk music. This is how world music should sound. Other than the lyrics not being in English as an impediment, this should be way more well known to funk fans. I love the organ, the drums. Jazz albums are hit or miss for me and this one is a hit.

In the last four albums I've gotten two Elliott Smith albums and a Cure album...I think this website is trying to get me to kill myself. This album is more like what I think of when I think of Elliott Smith, much more melancholy sound. Some of his song's have a throwback sound, like a 60s pop thing. This is like better REM. 2:45 a.m. is great, I've never heard it before. Then Say Yes, the album gets better as it goes on and closes really strong, maybe more pop as it went on?

I think I like The Cure but I am only familiar with the hits and not familiar with their early work at all. This might be the one New Wave band I like. This is like a less intense version of The Cure I'm familiar with. Robert Smith is going to Robert Smith though. This is not the kind of music I expected or am used to from The Cure. They definitely took a hard turn towards the mainstream later or at least put their more crowd friendly songs out as singles. A forest could have been repurposed as a James Bond song, work in the fanfare somewhere and you can replace one of those Timothy Dalton Bond songs, no one would miss A-ha or Gladys Knight. The band that spawned 1,000 goth looks. I bet the Venn diagram of people who own The Cure t-shirts perfectly overlaps with people who own Morrissey t-shirts.

My friend who turned me on to this project calls the death metal voice "Cookie Monster Voice". It's on full display here. I'm not a metal fan, especially all the horror and death references but if you could take the unintelligible lyrics out of this, the music is pretty cool. Punk + Cookie Monster + Death = This. Really short songs make any album easier to listen to, even if it is twice as many songs. Having some trouble discerning one song from the next though. I cannot understand a single word of these lyrics. Some of these "songs" are just noise. The longer this album goes, the less I like it...not because the songs are worse, but because they are all undistinguishable from one another. I'm only guessing that the lyrics are supposed to be more coherent than The Cocteau Twins but they are equally unintelligible. This is broken up into 28 songs but could just as easily be one 33 minute song if they skipped the breaks between tracks. "Microsongs" are stupid, the song "You Suffer" is less than 2 seconds long, it's like one note and one word.

Elliott Smith, made famous by the reference to the sadness of his music in Lego Movie 2, with a relatively more upbeat song, named after a serial killer, opening this album. He was the indie rock darling and you can hear both why some loved him and others found him insufferable. The influence on his peers and successors is obvious, he's like a stripped down version of all the alternative indie rock that came out in the late 90s and 2000s. The Shins, The Flaming Lips, Regina Spektor...a million others, you can hear echoes of this. In 2000, he must have been on top of the world and this album is pretty upbeat which would track. Bye is a nice instrumental to end the album but while everything else on the album has that Elliott Smith sound, it does not.

These ladies sound great. These women could have done the witches scene from O, Brother Where Art Thou. Hells Bells, Mr. Lund! They recorded this while Linda Ronstadt was engaged to George Lucas. Why is there so much Americana music focused on hobos? World class harmonizing. Those Memories of You is definitely an inspiration for Man of Constant Sorrow. Dolly is a natural show woman and comes across as the "leader" for most of the songs.

The lead singer's voice is annoying to the point of distraction. It's like a joke I'm not in on. He sounds like Daniel Johnston or the lead singer of Dr. Dog. One he was probably influenced by the other he probably influenced. I want to write this off but there's a whimsical quality to it that is kind of endearing. It's growing on me, there's a sadness behind the happy vibe that is appealing. There's a similarity to The Shins. I listened to it 30 minutes ago and I cannot tell the difference between Race for the Prize and Race for the Prize (Remix).

Why do all of these albums have to have these found sound intros? I love The Velvet Underground, I'm not loving this as much. This could be a Tom Waits album. Stephanie Says by the Velvet Underground > Caroline Says by Lou Reed. His delivery has a William Shatner quality to it. It should be noted that Lou Reed basically repurposed Stephanie Says for Caroline Says Part II...don't like it. There's something about this album I like despite itself. Sad Song is the perfect culmination of this album.

Halfway through the first song and I'm already exhausted by the pretentiousness of this album. The organ is grating on the ear. This is like a novelty album. And to finish off, the ELP version of the Nutcracker Suite.

Def Leppard is mid. They are to 80s rock what Cheap Trick was to 70s rock. Cheap Trick might be generous...Journey might be better than this. There are a lot of hits on this album, Photograph, Foolin', Rock of Ages. I have always hated the German at the beginning of Rock of Ages. Actually, I hate Rock of Ages.

First things first, hilarious album cover. Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough is an underrated Michael Jackson song. If Marvin Gaye's heirs got money from Pharrell and Robin Thicke for Blurred Lines being stylistically close to Got To Give It Up, Marvin Gaye could have all the money for this song. Rock With You, another great song. Workin' Day and Night sounds like it should be from a soundtrack for a Richard Pryor movie, could totally have been the song for the opening credits of The Toy. I Can't Help It sounds like something I can't place but I like it. Michael Jackson could have done straight R&B rather that pop and been great. Mac Ayres is what I Can't Help It reminds me of and I love his music.

5 stars. I love this album. I've always loved this album. I will always love this album. Agree or disagree with their politics, there's no debate that this album is an amazing debut. Bombtrack in the running for best opening track off a debut album. Settle for Nothing is the one weak link on the album...lyrically and musically it's the one song that just doesn't resonate with me. This is the sound of righteous anger. No one talks about Rage Against the Machine being the successors to LA Hard Core punk but you can hear it on some songs. Morello is underrated as a guitarist, you hear a song he plays on and you know it's him, there aren't many guitarists whose signature sound is so recognizable. This is the sound the Beastie Boys would have had if they'd been given a record deal by a punk label instead of a hip hop label. This was a band of and for me at the right time, they brought something familiar, something new, something interesting, something angry right when all of that was the thing I wanted to hear. Hard to separate the quality of the album from how I felt when I first heard it. Freeeeeedom! William Wallace would be proud. Your anger is a gift...it was on my t-shirt and in my mind. Great debut album, one of the best ever.

I have to quit reading the Spotify profiles and Wikipedia entries for these albums before I've listened all the way through because I am not able to separate my evaluations from what is written. The lyrics are literally nonsense words. This album apparently influenced later "shoegaze" music which is a genre I just now learned existed and am also pretty sure I will not be a fan of. A girl making up silly wordless songs over "dreampop" (another genre I just learned about) is not an alum you need to listen to before you die. I just put the shoegaze genre and the title of the Alabama Shakes song together. This is worse that ambient noise music because this woman "wrote" these lyrics knowing they are just sounds. She should have just gone to Japan and read off the strange English you find on some t-shirts there. The lyrics are dumb, the music is terrible, there is nothing redeeming about this album. This could be the music from a Final Fantasy game and I wouldn't know the difference.

I hear the punk influence, this is a "post-punk" band, you can hear the punk influence in the guitars and bass parts. This has a very Pretenders feel to it, same time period...rock just before New Wave. Listening to all of this music for this project makes me realize that everything is just a mash up of everything else because there's a Pink Floyd/Piper at the Gates of Dawn vibe as well. You can definitely hear the influence on later bands, I'm thinking in particular English Beat. Some of this album seems weirdly out of place, like it's 10 to 15 years after its time. I read REM loved this band and I can hear it on some songs. The opening and final/title track are the weakest on the album, most of everything between is better.

There's an REM sound from the late 80's/early 90's that is unmistakable. It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) is the best REM song. Upbeat with an edge, with only the slightest hint of whining. It's a very "teenager-y" song. Followed by The One I Love which is one of my least favorite REM songs or at least their popular songs. This is better than Murmur, more rock, less new wave. I can understand why this album was popular, situated in time amidst hair bands and prior to grunge. Lightnin' Hopkins has a great bassline.

With a title like this, the album better deliver. This is a very jazzy Ray Charles. I do like jazz standards, but I don't like this as much as Country and Western Ray Charles. The horns are very prominent for an album by a piano player. Violins>Horns on this album, perfect example: Don't Let the Sun Catch You Cryin'. I like the sad songs the best.

I remember them getting super popular in the early 2000s but never really listened to them. It's almost like the rock version of reggaeton? Or is it Latin rap rock? This feels a lot like Santana's pop albums only without the famous featured artists. I don't remember exactly what their first album sounded like but this feels very heavily influenced by those Santana albums. I like Charli 2na, but I'm not loving this appearance. The more traditionally "Latin" songs are worse than the more rock/rap ones. The back half of this album sounds like a Richard Rodriguez bar band.

Willie Nelson is such a great songwriter that I forgot what an original interpreter of songs he is. That he has an affinity for these songs is clear, they way he sings them it feels like he's sung them without anyone recording a million times. Some of these songs I'm unfamiliar with and I only know they are covers because it's a cover album. Georgia on My Mind, Willie vs. Ray...like Ted Lasso's arm wrestling match up. Just an old sweet song....that's as good a theme for this album as there can be. Blue Skies by Willie is the definition of wistful. There's like a country-jazz-blues thing that he just nails with this album. That's the best Moonlight in Vermont ever. This album feels like a Willie Nelson album, that's hard to do when it's all someone else's material. This is a masterpiece of performance, an all-time great singing some all-time greats.

This is not starting off well. I'm beginning to think that either the critics who chose these albums were trying to show how cool and smart they are or I have bad taste. If this album was less interested in sounding weird and being "genre-bending" there's some parts I like. Her voice is lovely. It's getting better. She's like an R&B Annie Lennox with Kanye producing. Two Weeks is good, maybe I was rushing to judgment after one song and after being exposed to some truly terrible albums in this project. Her singing is amazing but the music is distracting sometimes. The songs almost barely hang together at some points. As soon as I think I'm starting to get it, the next song just feels off. Video Girl is sexy as hell though. Every song has something to like, but almost none of them are good through their whole length. I guess I like this. If I listen to it again, I feel like I might not. This is a confusing album.

This is good. Has like a Thievery Corporation or Massive Attack kind of feel. I like the co-lead singer approach. Very chill sound. Their general sound is kind of moody so when they so a more upbeat song it has a strange effect. This is the first band that has been a revelation to me in a positive way. I would listen to another album.