Reviews by ultraclear

Austrian trip hop kinda thing. Pretty good stuff, the use of voice samples for rhythm was interesting, but kinda grated on me. Non-ideal headphones experience

Not my preferred indie flavor. I’ve never really been able to muster up an opinion on these guys one way or the other

I submitted this one. A pick inspired by Django Django on the main list, of all things. You guys remember "Django Django" by Django Django? It was one of those entries where they were flailing for something from the 2010s and went with a random British indie group. And honestly it was pretty fine! I gave it a 4/5, but nothing from it made the cut for my highlights playlist, you know the type.

The reason "Django Django" reminded me of Yeasayer, though, is that listening to it finally resolved a long-standing cliffhanger in my life. Back in 2012, I was visiting Portland, Oregon with classmates, and became obsessed with the idea of going into a music store and buying some indie music, like I'd heard about "the hipsters" doing. I picked up Yeasayer's "Fragrant World," and the clerk suggested I should check out Django Django. I then proceeded to not listen to Django Django for over 10 years, until they showed up on the albums list. And once I'd listened to it, I came away thinking "that was pretty good, and I get why that guy thought to recommend them to me, but also any of Yeasayer's first three albums could have pretty easily gone into Django Django's spot on the list."

All of which to say, that was my favorite type of experience I got from the main project, and I felt like submitting Yeasayer's most consistent album to the user list was a good way to pay that forward. Breaking from the audience consensus here, I think this one opens *and* closes extremely strong, but meanders a lot in the middle. It's also interesting the number of reviews contextualizing them as part of a larger Brooklyn Indie scene—I'd just stumbled across these guys by accident, without knowing anything about that, and just kind of latched on.

Like all 90s rock, it wildly overstays its welcome, but honestly way better than I was expecting from them

Won me over once it stopped aping Springsteen and specifically The Killers, and mellowed out some, but man that all had made a horrible first impression.

I was really into this one. Ambient-adjacent, and hit a real sweet spot of making good background music, and also rewarding close listening. Rounding up the 4.5

It was fine. Was surprised to learn about the Vampire Weekend connection, wouldn't have picked up on that on my own

Making another tally mark under the "Alternative Music By and For Sardonic Geeks" column, which has kind of become one of the flagship genres for the users list.

Could swap one of the original list's 60s psych acts for this, for the sake of getting some Dutch representation in there, but imo it doesn't bring much to the table that the other 60s psych acts didn't

Instrumental Post-Rock's got a pretty high floor as a genre

R.E.M. is both good, and already pretty well represented on the main list

Dippin' Dots Elevator Music of the Future

"Post-metal" which basically just sounds like post-rock with screamier vocals. Above average in terms of American heavy metal sensibilities.

Little bit like if Beck had a little brother who learned to play the trumpet instead of getting really into audio engineering

There's a lot of CAKE-alikes out there, but the original is one of the few cases where that lazy vocal affectation works for the thing rather than against it. The trick is that most of CAKE's lyrics are impressionistic blather, rather than the zingers that their imitators tend to go for.

It’s definitely a vibe. Bonus points for using the slot for a soundtrack, that’s a super cool use of the user albums list

Spruce Bringsteen

I got a soft spot for the title song, but otherwise it's ordinary pop punk. The first couple songs had me thinking for a moment that it was going to be diet Linkin Park.

More or less alternates between interesting vibey pieces, and boring folk noodling. Overall pretty pleasant

It fell off for me in the back half, but the first stretch of songs was up to some interesting things

Status Quo indeed. Pretty straightforward blues stuff, meaning it’s fine, but I pretty much got my fill of this sort of thing during the main list