Reviews by ultraclear

Like a gothier pearl jam

Dispatch from the ambient waters of 90s rock and post-rock sounds

Kind of a letdown. I'd heard some buzz around this one when it came out, so I was excited to fill the reference point, but that first half was just so slow and monotonous. Glad that there was some spice in the back half.

Deeply annoying club music, ran out of steam after like three songs, but went on for much, much longer.

The secret is that this shares a lot of DNA with stomp clap bullshit, and I think would truly have been better standing in its truth instead of getting mired in the slow maudlin swamps

Through several eras The Shins have been as mediocre as they've been ahead of the curve on where indie rock was going. Pioneers whose music I respect more than enjoy

I see the band name, I think of the mediocre Beck song with the same name, I start playing the album and get music that's very unlike Beck (who I do normally like, tbc). Had a really pleasant time with this! It's got more bounce and lift than most of what I associate with shoegaze, and I think if it were less aggressively lo-fi, it'd probably be sitting more in dream pop territory.

Out of context it’s just kind of whatever. Different than what brat was up to; grandiose. Movie was terrible though. Not the worst of the 2026 additions, but with them putting brat on there already, this is probably the second-most redundant pick out of them.

Fine enough modern (kind of peppy?) shoegaze

St Vincent's an interesting type of artist, where I've given her a couple of tries, even saw her live with a friend, never had anything bad to say about her music, and yet I still can't really get into her stuff properly This was a pretty good time, but it wasn't able to exactly sell me on her.

modern electronica that I think got added because it reminds the panel of older electronica that's already overrepresented on this thing

Feels a little bit like the editors are trying to compensate for how sparse the electronic music gets after the list bombards you with 90s techno, because most of these new additions are in that general space. Interesting that this one seems to have been pretty obscure, though.

The first run of albums i’ve been getting during this coda period have trended on the overproduced side, so the calm tempo of this was extremely welcome. I like how he arranges a song, too. Feel like with most things in this genre space (Bon Iver comes to mind, to pull an artist popular on the user submissions) I get completely sick of it by the end. Not so here.

Plus I’m a big fan of international crossover and fusion, so Liberian-Appalachian Folk is an inherently interesting project to me.

Kind of a throwback riff on a type of music not represented anywhere in the book. Unclear why they’d go with this instead of the originals, like why not just go back and put Evanascence on there or something. Any case, I’m not much of a nu-metal liker at the best of times, and I’m not super thrilled to hear it coming back

Alright so obviously this is an indefensible addition to the book. There's albums in the Rolling Stones' own goddamn back catalogue that would have made more sense than this. Empty calories. Lady Gaga LARPing Merry Clayton is particularly dire. Out of context this would be like a 2 or 3 star "this is forgettable" from me, but I gotta drop it to 1 out of protest. Literally none of the 13 albums that they cut justifies this one.

Calls to mind David Bowie's The Next Day, which was put on for likely similar reasons of "this old guy that we like has broken a hiatus with new stuff," and was then removed almost immediately because Black Star came out with actual substance to dig into. I even kind of liked The Next Day! but it was dumb to add back then, and it's dumb to put this one in the book now.

I absolutely despise the production on this. Muddy overloaded midrange hell on earth. Completely obnoxious.

This was an interesting curveball, especially in the context of my having been making my way through the users list for over a year now. The user submissions now include a couple albums from trans artists, but most of those have been firmly Electronic joints, either recognizably flavors of pop music or more experimental distorted glitchy sounds, and the album cover here had me expecting more of that. So it was a big surprise to spin this up and get a 4-piece band out of Manchester. Guess that’s what’s required to convince the editors to allow in some more explicitly-queer music. Reading wikipedia, seems like there’s a Phoebe Bridgers bridge bringing this to some more mainstream attention.

Any case, I haven’t traditionally been the biggest liker of Manchester bands, and I wouldn’t exactly say this won me over. A better update than more goddamn rolling stones, though

Glad it cut it out with the whispers after the first little bit, but it's still just brutally slow pop ballads all day

Some prime-cut oi bruv music

An interesting experience if for no other reason than I really hated Dookie and only barely tolerated American Idiot, yet had an ok time with this one. Can’t tell whether it’s actually better, or if all the emo and pop punk on the users list has just sanded my ire down over the last year and a half