Reviews by ultraclear

Depeche Mode beach episode. A fun diversion, but I like their moodier stuff better

Oh no, music styles that I have nostalgia for are now acceptable retro mining!

Oh no, Chaise Longue is already extremely dated as an earworm, I'm late to the party on the retro mining too!

Really interesting experience. Swedes basically invented the production for american pop music, so we have here something that's unmistakably That, but also something where I've osmosed absolutely none of it from hearing it out in the wild. Pretty fun for a single listen, and I'm grateful that I can escape it by just pausing it and walking away—nobody's out there cramming it down my throat

The 90s truly were a golden era of white funk. Sounded like the experience of channel surfing

Put it on the main list, cowards! It's so, so refreshing to finally draw an audience un-favorite that's actually weird and difficult, instead of just boring.

I was actually pretty into the first disc—"Mindtrain" in particular is a blast, and Ono's weird vocals throughout this thing honestly don't bug me the way they seem to for most others. "Toilet Piece" also made me laugh a lot. Like for most of this thing, she seems to be in on the joke.

Disc 2...is admittedly a bit much, though. Very much not a fan of the 22 minutes that the title song took up.

German rock/electronica hybrid, comes a little bit close to trip hop a lot of the time. Good rainy morning music

Fundamentally it's coffee shop music that talks dirty to you, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't pretty fun

*Much* more fun than the blue album. Departing from 70s & 80s aging rocker attitudes, it takes the position that there is nothing even a little bit cool about being sleazy

Wish I were better able to get past the vocals sounding like an obnoxious mashup between CAKE and Smash Mouth, because there's a lot of very fun things happening in this on the music & production side.

I'm not quite able to get past how bloated the album is as a whole, but *man* that opening stretch of songs is just hit after hit. Bands really gotta start playing around with brass instruments again, we were wrong to leave that behind in the 90s.

A titan of oldies radio. Agreed with people that this could easily bump something off the original list, but I'm not exactly Invested in the fight

Didn't hold up as well as I thought it was going to.

Like in context of the movie, sure, it's the only worthwhile part of the thing. But on it's own, it only really shows some signs of life for "Derezzed," and the rest of it is just variations on That One Motif over and over and fucking over.

Indie Rock of the whiny guy variety

Proggy psychedelic music, of the "sacred altar in the haunted forest" variety

Now *THERE's* an album cover!

Extremely stupid cheesy 80s metal, which is usually a coin toss whether that'll be very fun or very annoying. This one is fun!

Ambient's got a pretty high floor as far as genres go. Rare instance of feeling like I'd prefer longer than E.P.-length

Occupies a middle ground between R.E.M. and something along the lines of They Might Be Giants. Holds up worse than either of those examples, though.

As far as the movie goes, it's a great time for about 2/3 of the thing, but it blows its biggest song ("Time Warp") *extremely* early and runs completely out of steam by the time it gets to "Eddie." That stretch of all the slowest songs at the end is an absolute slog to get through.

The soundtrack here follows that basic pattern, but since it clocks in at about half the length of the movie's runtime, it's less of a crippling issue.

I was really surprised by how much I vibed with this one. Mild & relaxing, and I really like the fuzzy guitar tone they have going on it.

Honestly pretty solid, but he's also the Beatle whose post-Beatles career I'm least interested by