Reviews by therealab

Great start with A Message to You Rudy. And....they've lost me with Do the Dog. The talking over the song is a strange choice. One good song and a bunch of terrible ones after that. The straight ska songs are their best songs. Too Hot is a welcome respite. Monkey Man was in a cruise ad I think, I do not like it. The chorus is annoying. Listening to these albums it does become clearer that nothing exists in a vacuum. I wonder if I would feel differently about some of these albums if I listened to them chronologically rather than randomly. This is Cake's favorite band. I'm ready for this to be over. There is a reason ska songs aren't six minutes long. The lyrics leave a great deal to be desired. Little Bitch straight up rips off the Rolling Stones' Brown Sugar.

The First Ladies of Grunge or Garage Rock or Alternative? My college roommate loved Sleater-Kinney, I guess I didn;t give them enough of a shot. One More Hour is a really good song. This album is really good. I got a little lost in this (and doing my actual work). I like it more than I ever thought I would.

I like jazz trios, feels both cool and accessible. I like this album. It's not super memorable and I wouldn't be able to tell it apart from a hundred other jazz trio albums, but I like it.

This is not the Everything But The Girl I was expecting. In fact, maybe nothing could have been further from what I was expecting based on the one song I know than this. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I think I like it better than an album of Missing clones. I bet Lisa Stansfield loves these guys. Michael McDonald too. Maybe I spoke too soon though. This sucks. It's getting much worse. This is easy listening garbage. This feels like a joke. This is the softest music I have ever heard and I changed my mind, I'd take 100 Missing dance remixes over the songs on this album.

This album is more like the Britpop sound that Oasis started than anything else they ever did. Live Forever was the hit. I honestly don't remember this album being big and I loved (What's the Story) Morning Glory? Cigarettes and Alcohol is on the Gallagher family crest. I like this album better than Pulp and Supergrass, but you can definitely feel more of a similarity on this album than later Oasis. Digsy's Dinner is the inspiration for one hit wonder Jimmie's Chicken Shack's Do Right. I am always a sucker for piano in rock music. There is too much of Liam repeating "slide away", he rivaling Paper Doll from PM Dawn. (What's the Story) Morning Glory? is a much tighter album. Good, not great.

Americana is not one of my favorite genres. Love At the Five & Dime is better than the title track. This is Emily Kinney's favorite album. There's a style of delivery for this style of music that makes everyone's voice sound put on.

She's like young, New Zealand, dance Bjork. I don't get music critics. I like this album but is it better than any other recent pop diva? Chaos Chaos heard this album and knew they wanted to make music for Rick and Morty. She also has kind of a pop Regina Spektor feel too. I like this album more than I thought I ever would. I really like this album.

RIP Ozzy. He was truly one of the legends. This is my last Sabbath album and can honestly say I like them much more than I thought I did. And I realize during The Wizard that people will deal with things in music they like that they will not in music they hate. This is a song about a wizard. If this was a different band these lyrics would overshadow everything else. These guys hate politicians...that's a message I can get behind. This album is better than I anticipated as well.

The music is fine. The pan-African lyrics is like a poor man's Bob Marley. His dad's live album with Ginger Baker was better. All of these songs sound the same. Over an hour of this is going to be tiresome. If this was just instrumentals it would be better. I'm realizing albums can get bumped full stars by just hitting me at the right time or based on what I've listened to recently. It doesn't help that the individual songs are very repetitive and very long.

The Queen is Dead is one of the best Smiths songs. Good start to the album. And Frankly, Mr. Shankly gives all of that goodwill right back. The more Smiths I listen too, the less I like all of their albums. I don't get how these guys, and Morrissey specifically, got some many high school girls to love them. That he seems vulnerable is not enough, is it? I just got it, he's the Inside Out boyfriend. In There Is a Light That Never Goes Out when he's talking about how amazing it would be to die by your side. Teenage girls are powerless against that shit.

I always liked their debut LP and Quality Control better but this is good. 2na has a voice that is instantly recognizable. I could do without cut chemist interspersing every song with a bunch of old television and movie dialog. It's Golden is their biggest hit, it's a good song. It's weird that Nelly Furtado was such a big thing at the turn of the century. One of Them is a jam.

The album that took ZZ Top from That Little Ol' Band from Texas (great documentary as well) to a worldwide band. Gimme All Your Lovin' is one of their best songs. Many people would say this is their best album. For me, it's still Tres Hombres. Got Me Under Pressure is one of their most overrated songs. Sharp Dressed Man is their biggest hit, the video probably had as much to do with that as anything. It's crazy to think a bunch of blues rockers from Texas got super famous off a music video. I Got the Six has lyrics that a 13 year old boy would write. I wonder who got more out of sex joke lyrics, ZZ Top or AC/DC? Interesting they are like the first band and last band in the Classic Rock pantheon. Legs, another classic video. These guys are goof balls. The hits are the highlights, but it's a pretty good album.

The Overture is a dumb into but the two songs after it are good. This feels both futuristic and like a throwback to 60s R&B at the same time. You can hear the Outkast influence throughout the album...beyond just the Big Boi guest spot on Tightrope. Tightrope is a great song. I'm really liking this album. You really realize what a pretentious ass Robert Christgau is when you listen to this album and read his review of it. At the start Oh, Maker had me thinking it was the beginning of a downward slide, I was wrong about that. But starting with Come Alive (War of the Roses) and Mushrooms & Roses has me thinking I was just one song too early. The overtures feel like a nod to this being an "art&B" album more than an integrated part of the album. The balk half of the album is not as good as the first half. It's hard to get 9 songs right, let alone 18. Also, concept albums are almost always, hat tip to Ziggy Stardust, an annoyingly contrived restriction on quality rather than an invitation to tell a compelling story. Say You'll Go is an improvement. An almost 9 minute closing effort...I do not understand why artist after artist insists on having an irrationally long final track on what in some cases is already a long album.

Victoria is a good start. These guys are like an even sillier Beatles. Drivin' is like a song the Beatles rejected for having silly lyrics. Australia is another silly ass song. The songs just get goofier and goofier, Exhibit A: She's Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina. Nothing to Say is the best song since the lead track. Arthur is good too. I wonder if the Arthur is also a reference to royalty?

One massive hit and then some other middling Madonna. The title track is good though. I wonder what Tarantino's take on this one would be. I would have thought Express Yourself was a bigger hit. Maybe Spotify streams aren't the best barometer of how big a song was. Madonna and Prince, unfortunately, two great tastes that do not go great together. Love Song is a Prince song on a Madonna album. Cherish has never been one of my favorite Madonna songs but it is a highlight amongst the album tracks. Dear Jessie sucks; stupid lyrics, awful music. The difference between the 70s and the rise of FM radio where entire albums or sides were played and the more singles driven format is nowhere more clear in the loss of overall album quality than this album.

I can do with out the talking interludes. I like the songs a lot though. Although, I miss the days when R&B songs were sexy rather than sexual. I like the honesty on Price Tags and of course Anderson.Paak is awesome. I'm really liking this album (except for the chit chat). Two solid guest spots from Anderson.Paak and H.E.R. Maybe it's something to do with female empowerment with all the periods?

More Than a Feeling enters the conversation for best first song off a debut album. Every song has gotten slightly worse. I will say that it's crazy that I recognize the first 4 songs though. It was a different time on FM radio when this came out. Thank god for streaming. The album is basically a 45 degree line down as each song is not as good as the one before it.

Rich is not a great Yeah Yeah Yeahs song. Date With The Night is better. I like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and they have a really distinctive sound, but I like It's Blitz! better. Maps...great song and by far their biggest hit. It also apparently had some resurgence on TikTok in a fifteen second clip of the chorus. Kids are so stupid. It's got THE hit and everything else is good. It just isn't hitting me the same way.

Everything they do sounds different but also sounds like Radiohead. I'd say the best adjective to describe that "Radiohead quality" to their music is haunting...a lot of it is due to something in Thom Yorke's voice. The title of Backdrifts makes me want to do an edit of Backdraft with this as the soundtrack. You can hear the U2 influence on this album, Achtung Baby and Pop. Radiohead definitely transitioned to a band that makes albums from a band that generates hit singles. There, There is the best song on the album. A Wolf at the Door has a very ominous feeling about it.

I don't remember any of their music except for the cover of Mrs. Robinson which apparently Evan Dando hated and only did for a rerelease of The Graduate...what a sell-out. The first two tracks sound like the themes for 90s tv shows. This is like if Foo Fighters did Big Me for every song. I bet Ben Folds loves these guys. This is so forgettable, probably why I forgot it. It is both short and non-offensive, which makes it better than a solid 30% of this project so far.