Reviews by verlainemorrison96

As much I appreciate this album for the versatility it displays - Bowie can sustain a basic soul/pop record w/o weirding out all that much - I find it thin if I'm being honest, as well as incoherent: 'Fascination, takes a part of me'; 'Fame bully for you chilly for me / Got to get a rain check on pain.' It's not that he can't be soulful - he certainly can be - it's that if he was going for 'plastic soul,' he got something closer to the real thing, and just didn't quite make the cut. 'Young Americans' has an undeniable chorus, his cover of 'Across the Universe' is capable, and 'Fame' is a justifiable favorite. But I don't know what to do with: 'Can you hear me? / Can you feel me inside? / Show your love, love.' If it's sincere, it's bad; if it's ironic, what's alleged?

I know they get credit for initiating metal - that thematically, there wasn't much like it, and their riffs established something heavier than Zeppelin or Jeff Beck - but I can't help but feel they're magnitudes richer and more pleasurable than most metal, not merely b/c they came first, but b/c they're really another sort of thing entirely. They may sing of Iron Man, electric funerals, and hands of doom, but they can hardly be said to embrace the make believe, so realist is their ethos, whereas much metal as I see it is Halloween w/o recreation. For instance, this isn't fantasy, but portentous: 'Burning globe of obscene fire / Like electric funeral pyre.' And the riffing is an impossibly sustained adventure - so luxurious it's nearly unfair.

'Deliver Colonel Sanders down to Davey Jones' locker'; 'I got a girl in the Castle and one in the pagoda / You know I got rhymes like Abe Vigoda' (or is it Phyllis Diller?); 'Now your mom threw away your best porno mag (busted).' The Beasties spend a fair amount of time rapping about 'girlies with the def behinds,' and really girlies of all shapes and sizes, but that doesn't take away from the fact that this album remains sonically fresh and persists as a cultural touchstone that few other records approach. Behind the boasting, rhyming, and stealing is the inception of the hip hop avant-garde, persevered by Kool Keith, MF Doom, etc. Sampling is a form of cultural allusion, and when the lyrics are equally, hilariously allusive, you get something that is truly sui generis. And fun as hell.

It's a truism that period pieces sell a lot of records. This one sold mucho and periodized a piece. The more Gray belts, the more generic the music; the more powerful, the more insignificant. He can sing, but he can't be for real: 'Seems these days I don't feel anything / 'Less it cuts me right to the bone.' This isn't soul-baring, it's barely soulful - and proof that if it's big in England, it may be a big flop elsewhere. To make it worse, the songs are twice the length they ought to be. 'I put my heart in your hand' - and I've given it right back. No thanks!

No who w/o Bjork? Probably loads, tho such a unique and daring artist may not be the progenitor of many - that's fine, even enviable. Anyway, this is a helluva debut, otherworldly but corresponding to ours as well: 'But then we'd have to rush back / To the town's best baker / To get the first bread of the morning.' If that's the soul of provinciality speaking, I'd like to request a bundle of that old world bread. But she's clearly a figure of the future in other words: 'This small town hasn't got room / For my big feelings.' She sings of 'big sensuality' too - I guess big, not love, has got to do with it. It is a bit sappy at times, which wanes ('Like Someone in Love' averages out), but not to the degree that I forget: 'It takes courage to enjoy it.'

'I'm a world runner.' She means it: 'When you go Rwanda, Congo / Take me on a genocide tour / Take me on a truck to Darfur / Take me where you would go.' I can't think of a better album about moola. Foregrounding war-sponsored capitalism, Maya triumphs as few rappers do: not only is she smarter than most, she avers proudly that she doesn't read, that she just guesses ('The Turn'). Those 'guesses' figure into precise and luminous choruses that catapult M.I.A. from a 'conscious rapper' to our conscious feeler - our very own funky, can-do-no-wrong t'cha: 'I put people on the map that never seen a map.' Inimitable; unstoppable. What she doesn't do is preachify; what she does do is dig and inform. And make bangers.

An excellent album for many reasons, but mostly b/c it shows us who Elvis is and who he is not. The 'first rock star,' he was a star but not necessarily a rocker. Prolific as a balladeer and a country western crooner, at least on record, he seems hardly to have a sense of humor, which isn't a failing, but can hardly be considered the appropriate stance of one who rocks, i.e., see Chuck Berry and his ding-a-ling. His business was in being austere. When that's understood, it gives a whole new dimension to tracks like 'I'll Hold You In My Heart,' 'In The Ghetto,' 'Don't Cry Daddy,' 'Kentucky Rain,' and 'Mama Liked The Roses.' I'm not so sure he cared about getting us to shake our asses or to move our hips - I think he just wanted us to listen.

'And what hits the spot, yeah, like Gatorade?'; 'Please don't defend a silver lining / Around the halo of what is already shining'; 'Maybe you meant no intention.' Hard to describe, sure, but not hard to feel. Lyrically is where this album has every opportunity to break down, but it never does, saved not only by the stunningly balanced instrumentation, but by the words themselves, which are authentically poetic, drifting enuf into outer space for me to want to do the work to ground them, a challenge that pays off in the end. Longstreth can sing all he wants about a 'fluorescent half dome' and I'll trust that there is, indeed, intention behind it. And not that intention is all what matters when the music is sheer pleasure - guilty if anything.

I found a playlist on YouTube for this album since neither Spotify nor Apple Music streams it. I don’t know enuf to judge it, not merely b/c I don’t speak Arabic but b/c I can’t calculate its influence. Musically, I’m not moved, but I’m not repelled either. In other words, I conclude benightedly that it’s middle of the road.

Not the greatest blues master - that'd be Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, or a live B. B. King for me - but most likely the greatest exponent of the genre: 'I'm a man / I'm a rollin' stone.' We know where the Londoners got it. 1977: amazingly, this is not a throwback or nostalgia trip, but a profound barrage of raw deals and comedy, i.e., the real deal - the blues: 'I be troubled / I be all worried in mind.' A music about the psychologically downtrodden did more to describe our societal malaise than mucho sociology and theories of economic nadirs. Muddy Waters effectively gets that vision across on this album, a perfect entry point into the music that had a baby we named Rock and Roll. Essential for its history, so it is also for its pleasure/urgency.

'I'm spilling over like a heavy loaded fruit tree'; 'Fig, fruit, flower myself inside out for you'; 'Gonna wash that man right out of my hair.' This one grows on you b/c you start believing it, whatever it is that warrants belief. Not as obscure as Patti Smith, Harvey's also not encumbered by feminist messages or cultural critique, tho they're there and good for her for being involved. Angry, not angsty, she's full of details, stories, and memories, which is more than you can say about a whole lot of artists doing similar things but far less impressively. Musically, the drums are the unsung hero while the strings on 'Plants and Rags' are heavy and sensible. As 'Oh My Lover' started, I didn't think I'd be down. By the end, I very much was.

I caught: 'your wasted space is mine, too.' Ironically, MBV can't be said to waste space, instead filling every second w/ a sonic entirety. It's one that seems to be emptying, however, so minor and drowned out is the reality the album portrays. I'm not sure I'm in love with the aesthetics, but I know that I don't want to stop listening to it, which must count for something. I wish I knew what they were saying, it would be nice if it didn't drone as much as it does, but I also know that if it were any different it would be far less interesting, that it'd hardly be the creative statement that it is. I don't think I would throw this record on any chance I get, my mood normally not inclined to gaze or shoe, but I'm happy enuf to attend when it is on.

'Don't get any big ideas / They're not going to happen.' I'm not sure if this album qualifies as a 'big idea,' but it by all means 'happens.' Explosively subdued and gorgeously produced, this record is like a bargain that keeps on giving: I'll offer Radiohead the benefit of my doubt and they'll exchange that for something that's rich, that's immense, that's really quite special. I shouldn't like it is as much as I do, mainly b/c Yorke teeters dangerously on the pretentious: 'I get eaten by the worms / and weird fishes.' Yet, for all like that, there're also these: 'I am all the days that you choose to ignore'; 'I only stick with you because there are no others'; 'I love you but enough is enough, enough of that stuff.' And yeah, 'Reckoner' is prolific, it's superb.

This record is effectively laidback but I find myself wishing it was more off to no good than it is. The synth takes away from the treble and the vocals diminish what could otherwise be a powerful and urgent experience. 'Air' and 'Moon' are apt descriptors of an album that is too spaced out, too ungrounded, too up in the air, and too over the moon. The production is certainly inventive, and while I admire the coherence of the project as a whole, its suave sensibility, exacerbated by Beth Hirsch's singing, serener and even more full of it than Beth Gibbons's, is not one I naturally gravitate to. Perhaps that's just it - I don't want to gravitate - I want to be pushed and pulled and then made whole again. With this, I only hover, or is it drift?

'And no religion too.' That's a breakthru in pop and rock's political and cultural messaging. It fits right in, you don't gotta say anything more, and I'm relieved someone had the nerve to say it. The song is therefore rightly iconic, but the rest of the album consists of songs that are good but never great, with the exception of 'How Do You Sleep,' which as a putdown track ranks with Dylan's 'Idiot Wind' and 'Positively 4th Street': 'The sound you make is muzak to my ears / You must've learned something in all those years.' 'I Don't Wanna Be A Soldier Mama' is thundering and grand, but also confirms that Lennon is often a better chanter than lyricist. When the chanting gets into my soul, I'll be there for the picketing. Otherwise, it's a bit truthy for no reason.

'Though nothing, will keep us together / We could steal time, just for one day.' That has the joyous, fall-up-the-stairs desperation of Marquee Moon, the night so young and carefree it may as well be the end of time. Tho not quite as profound as Low, it's just as complete as the trilogy's first, and is structured the same: vocal dance tracks to start, pensive instrumentals to conclude, with the exception of 'The Secret Life of Arabia.' Where it takes me is vaguer than I'd like, but I'm still moved, I'm still awed by the play-it-cool but make-it-strange aesthetic that defines Bowie's output. You could say it's the best of the trilogy - you wouldn't be wrong. I just prefer Low that little bit more.

Santana's performance at Woodstock is all-time stuff. Their studio albums aren't the stuff of the gods, however, and tho this has classic rock staples, I'm no more convinced by it than I am by the Eagles. To be fair, it's better than the Eagles b/c the percussion - the principal Latin import - does give it a rounded and foxy sensibility. But the songwriting is mediocre, and the instrumentation is mostly thin, with the exception of 'Incident at Neshabur,' an effective nonvocal track, and 'Se a Cabó,' which is short and persuasive. But this one doesn’t crescendo when I’d want it to, tenderize when it ought to, or complicate when it needs to. Suffice to say, there's better out there.

The fact that this pairing 'works' doesn't foment in me a new appreciation for a band I don't know particularly well, or a genre of which I'm honestly suspicious. If anything, the orchestral potentialities of Metallica fortify my aversion to a music I already find to be wearyingly epic and conceptually overwrought. Lyrically, it smacks of a bad interpretation of a verse play by Goethe: 'Drain you off your sanity / Face the thing that should not be.' The instrumentation is 'big,' and I guess therefore symphonic, but Wagner gone electric (or is it the other way around?) is not my jam. For fans of the band, this is most likely a treat, and I don't know their music well enough to really judge the collaboration. As an idea - as a project - it certainly succeeds. It doesn't, however, satisfy or convert. With that, I'll go w/ middling.

One of the smartest records of the 20th century, and one of the tastiest to listen to. For me, it ever so slightly edges out Curtis Mayfield's and Marvin Gaye's socially aware masterpieces b/c it incorporates gravity w/ humor, and connects our psychic lives with upfront realities: 'shady as a lady with a mustache'; 'You're in trouble when you find it's hard for you to smile / A simple song might make it better for a little while'; 'I am everyday people.' You gotta etch out a special place for albums that make you feel good like no other. This is one of those informed blisses; groove-daring answers to our problems. You throw it on and may as well have a great day. Why not? You may also pick up a copy of Das Kapital and scold a landlord. Hell yeah.

While I admire the production to some degree, Trent Reznor's abrasive whisper has a one-dimensional flow, and his flimsy allusions to Nietzsche ('God is dead / and no one cares') don't even excite this hardened atheist. 'Closer' is a miserable ode to rough animal sex: 'I drink the honey / inside your hive / You are the reason / I stay alive.' His junky and unimaginative philosophizing is incredibly tedious, and tho the instrumental moments can sustain an authentic energy, too much of it sours from Reznor's annoying poetry: 'And nothing comes bleeding out of me / Just like the waterfall I'm drowning in.' In Romanticism, the child is revered. Reznor, however, is only childish. There is a huge difference.