Reviews by ultraclear

Solo acts/singer-songwriter music living or dying for me based entirely on the backing music. She did good work here

Didn't recognize the people on the cover or their names, but the vibe of the album cover had me bracing for like a simon & garfunkel sound. But no! It's a couple of King Crimson members doing a quick side thing! Good stuff.

I get that Whedon Voice hadn't yet worn people down in 2013, but this is insufferable in 2025. Lyrics are clumsy and trying too hard for "colloquial," and the vocalist can't pull off the Cake thing he's aiming for.

Honestly after checking the wikipedia for the band, "Trying Too Hard" is just kind of the issue in general. I like Trying Too Hard bands when they're applying that effort to the sound production & musicianship, but Mathias Kom's whole deal seems to be an overeducation in the *social* production of music, and the end result comes across like something like The Oatmeal, or any of those other comics that wants very badly to be relatable, so that you'll share it with your facebook friends (in 2013). More SEO than any kind of artistic statement. And apparently a lot of people like that kind of thing! I find it offputting.

On the better end of stuff I've heard from shoegaze: a genre I don't care for very much

Very fun album, which is weird because I hated Green Day, and this doesn't seem all that different. Mysteries for the ages

Pretty glad to have drawn this one on a dark, quiet, rainy morning.

Pretty big gulf between what I thought this was going to be, and what it actually was. Kept me interested through the whole thing. Not minding what this scamp is getting up to

New Wave-adjacent. Gothy, but not in a fun way. It's like halfway between Joy Division and The Cure, and not as good as either

Man this era of soft boy indie rock has been nonstop whiffs as it comes up. Flaming Lips couldn’t do it for me, these guys had no chance

Lol the people here are such babies about Phish.
Phish is a band that wasn’t on the original list at all. They deserved to have *exactly* one slot on there, and this is probably the best one to represent their whole deal, given the live-experience tape sharing schtick they had going on during their peak. It's got the arpeggios, it's got the distinctive guitar sound, it's got the white guy funk passages. The arrangements are complex and varied enough to pass the 2+ hour length of this *way* faster than a lot of the 75-minute entries from normal 90s bands. Sorry you guys met an annoying hippy once.

Midway through the 2010s was a really strong period of Garage/Psych rock. King Gizzard’s kind of evolved in the last ten years to take up Phish’s torch, but the rest of them for some reason haven’t really broken their Scene containment into much of a mainstream.

This one is very much part of all that stuff; space alien vocal affect aside, it leans lots more Garage than Psych. Pretty fun!

Get up and DANCE! Music that puts me in a very good mood

Wasn't really sure what to do with this until learning that the Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf guy was part of this group. It's ~EcLeCtIc~, you see.

I was a TMBG guy back in my youth, probably would have gone wild for this shit if I'd heard it when it came out

Pretty solid alt-rock, and from decently early on, as far as that specific scene goes

My head’s turned into an empty cavern. Sole occupant: one cello. Fun headphones listen, did not need to be over an hour.

Go! Go! Power Rangers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFyCPicGbXM

Honestly for coming out late 80s, this sounded relatively fresh

Shares some DNA with the Korns and the Slipknots of the world, elevated by having decent production/mixing

Fucking outrageous, it's like he's doing an Elvis Costello impression for some reason. On the one hand, I guess mission accomplished from the original project that I can pick up on that now. On the other hand, all of Costello's six albums on there sounded identical to each other. The People wanted more of that in the feed?

A lot of fun ideas and moves in this, all of which fail to transcend the extremely stale production sensibilities of the time