Reviews by ultraclear

weather channel music

Pulling from a lot of different genre influences, but rather than resolving into something like an "eclectic mix", which I'd be more on board with, it just becomes a sludge

Arctic Monkeys are always interesting to me, since on paper they're the exact right era & genre that I should be a fan, but I'd overlooked them back then, and they still fail to click every time I go trying to get into them

Yes are always kind of a mixed bag for me; sometimes they're great, sometimes they make boring songs, but also the boring ones usually have interesting passages within them. A lot of the time I feel like there's not enough delivery on Bombast that justifies the buildups

He's sounding kind of Country in this? Not a fan of him going that direction. idk the story of "Springsteen ends an 18-year hiatus with a 9/11 reaction album" is more interesting to me than the music itself, especially since that Reaction was apparently attuned to "messages of hope and uplift"

Always a coin flip if I'm going to enjoy a punk rock act, but I liked these guys. The songs sounded very similar to each other, but none of them wore our their welcome

Great for going on a rainy morning walk, but only great in that exact context

unbelievable that these bozos got two albums onto the list

Fond memories of my dad playing this one on nighttime car rides. There were only two songs on here I set aside on the project highlights playlist, but when the thing's good, it's great.

It was incredible to look up stuff about this, each new detail more insane than the last. E Street band fresh off of "Born to Run?!" Todd Rundgren producing it after nobody else wants to touch this? One of the best-selling albums of all time, but barely seems to have sparked any imitators?? (in the US mainstream at least. A young Tobias Sammet was probably extremely warped by listening to this, entire subgenres of metal owe a lot to it, etc)

Only knowing him from "Hallelujah" I was kind of gritting my teeth heading into this, expecting the exact kind of singer-songwriter music that I can't deal with, but I ended up being really won over by this! the backing arrangements really elevate his voice & make the thing work for me

Hendrix's last album, and I think also the last time he's coming up on my generator list. It's easily my favorite of them; it feels more energetic than the others and he's putting guitar pedal effects to wonderful use.

Obligatory "Watchtower" hot take: the original's actually pretty decent as far as Dylan goes, but he still comes out looking like a drip compared to what Hendrix does with it

Classic touchstone of Dad rock (maybe Mom rock actually? I think the Police albums we had on the shelf were hers in any case). I thought I knew what I was in for with this based on knowing only "Every Move You Make" and "King of Pain", so I was impressed with how different most of it was from those, like the A-side was often discordant and evil in a way that was really interesting

I always like hearing C.S.N.&Y., but I also find myself wishing a lot of the time that the rest of their stuff was as angry and bitter as "Ohio"

With only a couple examples under my belt by now, I think I like trip hop generally, while also finding it distractingly british sometimes

This one's apparently really divisive among the generator audience, but suits my ADHD brain just fine. I think for me it's like... 4/5 for musical enjoyment (at the end of the day, I liked "In A Silent Way" more), 5/5 for interesting production story, 7/5 for album art.

Didn't care for the last thing from her (Pieces of the Sky, 1975), didn't care for this. There was pretty clearly some effort made to modernize the instrumentation to the era, which sometimes made for interesting fusion, because she's still doing country singing over everything. Like they had synths in the 70s and weren't using them back then, so I'm fascinated that the year 2000 apparently called for bringing them in

Post-punk's hit-and-miss for me, and this one's got plenty of both. It's an interesting reference point for like... There's a spate of psychedelic surf rock groups that cropped up in the 2010s that clearly came from this type of roots, but the journey from here to there is still pretty murky to me

Never been the audience for this kind of mellow R&B. Kind of the same problem I run into with Dylan, the music itself doesn't land at all for me, which has me then zoning out on the lyrics, which is unfortunate, because I understand those to be the main draw here!

I had a better time with this than Dookie, but I think that's mostly from familiarity (I'll cop to kinda liking "Holiday/Boulevard of Broken Dreams," but otherwise I've really disliked their stuff). I'm definitely in the age cohort such that this one was a big, big deal to people when it came out, so it was nostalgic to play this and realize I knew each song on here really well. But it's also interesting to pull the lists of what else was going on in rock music at the time, and 2004 had a lot going on! Like that's the year that brings us Franz Ferdinand and "Hot Fuss," Modest Mouse released "Good News," White Stripes had just put out "Elephant" the previous year... idk I know emo went strong into the aughts, but my personal big music touchpoints for that era tended to be alt-rock/indie stuff.

lol this ended up being pretty fun, had a very specific 90s brattiness that shows its age, but is kinda charming for it