Reviews by ultraclear

Really Interesting! all the big recognizable hits were from The Love Below, but listening to it all the way through, I really liked the Speakerboxxx side a lot more

good hit rate of radio classics. Older songs than I would have guessed.

This shit ain’t nothing to me man

Aw uh oh I think "Debut" might be the only Björk that I like... none of her other albums have really grabbed me, and I've listened to quite a few of them now

Should have just put another Oasis album on the thing, because at least Oasis can get credit for sounding like Oasis back during the days when Oasis was putting out bigtime Oasis albums. This one's just derivative, completely uninteresting

This list is full of such a specific type of psychedelic hippy folk stuff from the 60s, where they're like deliberately aiming for sparse medieval-sounding instrumentation. I've mostly found these extremely bad and boring, this included, and I've been hunting for a good articulation of what exactly's not working for me. Because back in the Pandora days, I was being served up a lot of stuff like Celtic Woman and Loreena McKennitt, both of which I liked a lot, and both of which I'd use similar terms to describe.

So I think there's basically two things going on:

1. Acoustic is totally fine, but I like the arrangements to be on the busier side

2. singer-songwriter stuff puts a lot of onus on the singer to be able to deliver, and I don't think Donovan's all that impressive of a vocalist*

(I think I also probably got a bit of bias against being impressed by men's singing. Like idk if I could name a man's singing that I'd call like Conventionally very good. Most of what's memorable to me is like Robert Plant, Bob Dylan, or Tom Waits etc where their voice is just extremely weird and they lean into it. Much to unpack some other time.)

So I do know and have myself listened to better and more effective examples of "world music" imports than this... but also I do think that running with that influence was to the benefit of paul simon's music, and actually like this album quite a bit.

I feel like for most matchups, I tend to like british interpretations of what "folk music" is, compared to americans', so there was a part of me like "man what are you doing" at Bragg doing American-style on this

hm, I think I'd rated "Dark Side Of The Moon" lower than this, which maybe I didn't mean to do that, when I'd listened to that one I was less oriented with what Pink Floyd is and does. Though actually, I think I maybe do like this one better, even if it's probably not conventional opinion. Overblown rock opera theatricality is something that works on me pretty well.

k apparently every Nirvana song I knew was off of "Nevermind." So speaks well for them that a cold listen of their stuff was still good for me, most other grunge doesn't manage that.

Having heard more now from other acts ascending in Detroit around this time, White Stripes even more solidified as an oasis in the desert of mid-aughts pop culture

Think I actually liked *Imagine* more. Dunno quite what to do with that.

low-rent lou reed and I don’t even like lou reed that much to begin with

I, hm, y'know...

AC/DC checks all the boxes of Dad Rock, and as much as I like to dismiss groups for that...

man, this album actually really fucking rips, to a degree I wasn't at all ready for

All-time Pantheon album

oof, idk if the problem's that this was an earlier album, or if the turnaround on being served another Run-D.M.C. album was just too short, making the novelty wear off, but I thought "Raising Hell" was delightful and that this one was really boring

Nice! Adding to the short list of new wave acts that actually could maintain quality for an album

Oh man! I went in for some reason thinking this was a 90s act, then when the thing got going I was like "wow this sounds like something straight out of 2011". And then here we are! Really pleasant surprise, wasn't expecting danceable indie-pop + adjacent to get representation on here. no less dated than the 90s electronica, but it's dated to an era that I actually got some nostalgia for, dammit

this sucks, but in a way that's charming and makes me like it. End of the day though, if I were being made listen to this kind of thing, I'm probably reaching for Evanescence first (and *really*, I'd ideally try to make a case for Nightwish, but that'd probably be too much of a genre stretch (in this hypothetical (their version of shouting is too melodic)))

Lmao what a tool.

This was a letdown; I've never listened before, and by reputation I had got myself hyped up to hear something truly dreadful and cursed, but instead it was just dull and dumb, dime a dozen