Reviews by verlainemorrison96

Tho the British folk revival is mostly lamentable, b/c this record consists of 4 Dylan tracks (including a francophone rendition) & one Byrds track, it's at least halfway American. Floating, spinning, ballooning, Richard Thompson & Simon Nicol's guitar playing is beautifully, meaningfully psychedelic while Martin Lamble's drumming is an impressive addition, especially on the long traditional 'A Sailor's Life.' Most memorable, of course, is Sandy Denny's voice, existing somewhere at the in-between of Joan Baez & Grace Slick. Besides 'Who Knows Where The Time Goes,' Unhalfbricking doesn't have a 'big' song, but that's really a nonissue. I like this record for the way these numbers bleed into each other. & b/c it's more fun than you'd e'er imagine.

'Now everybody do the propaganda / & sing along to the age of paranoia.' It's almost inconceivable to think of just how depressing W Bush's America had been given the current state of affairs, but if you need a reminder, this 'punk opera' is a good place to start. 9 tracks, but really closer to 14 or 15, American Idiot is a time capsule at the personal, national, & political level - it's pretty remarkable just how embedded in my unconscious each & every song here is, even tho I don't think I ever sat down & listened to the whole record. In that way, it's a rousing, almost disturbing, success. But it's also preachy, sophomoric, repetitive, &, for lack of a better phrase, it could be better. Anyway, for me, American rock from '01 to '05 is The White Stripes.

New York’s finest rock 'n' rollers between The Velvet Underground & the Ramones, & the best interpretation of The Rolling Stones I think we've e'er seen, the New York Dolls generated two of the hardest, dirtiest, rockiest, & most profound records this rock thing has known. 'Cus we keep on / Ridin,' ridin' ridin.' It recalls the rottener content of '71's The Panic in Needle Park ('Pills') at the same time that it puts you in the upbeat moods of the city's machoest bars, i.e., this has got unironic continuities w/ ZZ Top & the lot. I know they're beloved by most of the right people, & that adds to their wide mystique as still unappreciated innovators, but I promise you, these songs sound & feel really good. 'Oh, trash, don't kick my night away / Oh, trash.'

'I thumb thru the page / I don't come of age / I'm not a deity / I'm far from perfect see.' B/c he's an eminent producer as well as a luminous rapper, Q-Tip really set the precedent for the Kanye explosion, tho Common, Mos, & Talib were certainly closer at hand. 'The clairvoyant micist / Who always come the tightest / Queens everywhere / Demonstratin' who the flyest.' W/ Tribe, hip-hop is perfected to the pitch of the underground living at ease w/ the mainstream, a balance that Q-Tip matches on his second solo release: the 'purest' rap you'll hear b/c so damned unconcerned w/ self-receptions. Of course Kanye, at his best, is deliciously self-conscious, but his magic is an indebted phenomenon. W/o Tip, solo & group, no College Dropout et al.

Like Oasis if they weren’t cool, & Oasis if they weren’t cool isn’t aesthetically interesting. Add this to the plethora of Brits that ought to be left to grow old & forgotten on the shelves. P.S., some Brits I love unironically: Shakespeare, Emily Brontë, Dusty Springfield, Poly Styrene. But this is Radiohead w/ an upset stomach & too much time on their hands. Get lost you lost & white souls from the isles of Britannia! Like, seriously, seriously bad.

Wholesome & gifted, but like a guy w/ a stuffed giraffe next to him in some snowy, Christmas-burdened landscape, Stills is likewise an infantile soul-barer. I wouldn't call it a schtick, or a make-believe - I just don't think he's got a whole lot to say, evinced by schmaltz + drivel: 'She is gone, there is no tomorrow / It is done, so now he must borrow / The life of his brothers.' He can rock out, which he does on some of the better tracks such as 'Old Time Good Times' & 'Go Back Home,' but if I'm not mistaken, he has Jimi & Eric to thank for that. Anyhow, Neil Young rocks better, Dillard & Clark folk better, & David Crosby gospels better. Too self-serious to be charming yet too clinical to be soulfully grand, Stills's debut is a boring ode to no mucho.

Enoish, w/ the same caretaking sentiments of ambiance & abstraction, yet I don't think quite as intelligent b/c not quite as lovable, Boards of Canada are classic to the extent that they're influential, but not much more for me. It's not a matter of being too long - Music Has the Right to Children is indeed too long tho - it's that by track 4 I was wondering how much longer. I like it as a sampled work of art, & it does pay its homages to hip-hop, which I not only appreciate but hold onto as a buoy of both sense + realism, but it also has its allegiances to trip-hop, a genre that, in its atmospherics, faceplants in pretentiousness (often not always). In other words, too Portishead to be anything I'd listen to again, it's a record I don't like but I understand aloofly.

A best-selling, or e'en just a high-selling, jazz record is paradoxical, v much like a book of poems that's sold loads: it's uncomfortable, not b/c we think jazz, or poetry, ought to stay underground but b/c it's difficult to make jazz, or poetry, speak widely. But Robert Frost & Anne Carson exist, poets in the realest & truest senses of the vocation, just as Kind of Blue, Forest Flower, & Head Hunters are albums worthy of their numbers. We can add Jarrett's The Köln Concert to that list, a sublime statement of solo feeling that ends & begins w/ the rebelliousness of an improvisational venture into the heart of the matter. I don't know enuf of Jarrett to say that this is overrated, e'en slightly, as compared to his other works, tho it might be. Whatevs. I love it.

'Now you spit out the sky / B/c it's empty & hollow.' Ethereal but not all that depressive or addicted to bad habits, Echo And The Bunnymen are surely more interesting than The Cure - they at the very least write better songs - but they aren't what you'd call a gift from the world of music &, like Robert Smith, Ian McCulloch has a one-note problem. 'I'm not a praying man / I'm not ready for that.' Some of these tracks, like 'Monkeys,' are authentically chilling & creatively haunting, while others ('Do It Again,' 'Rescue') have a great deal of verve, eliciting some of the magic of Patti Smith, The Modern Lovers, or The Psychedelic Furs. & yet, if you're on the look out for post-punk that's as durable as it is meaningful, this satisfies but mildly, i.e., ehh.

'I love my man w/ all honesty / But I know he's cheatin' on me.' Cooler than Snoop & Dre, hornier than Prince, D'Angelo, & Marvin Gaye, &, I think most significantly, happier than DeBarge, TLC were the true masters of nineties r&b, the best female emulsion of hip-hop & the slower, more romantic arts. B.I.G. exhibited mastery of the synthesis on the 'One More Chance' remix & '#!*@ You Tonight,' Lauryn Hill was of course supreme singer & emcee, but I don't know of a more perfectly indulgent record as this masterpiece. 'Red Light Special' has a guitar solo for crying out loud! 'I was chillin' w/ my cool aid / Did not want to participate / In no silly conversations'; 'I'm feelin' quite sexy & I want you for tonight.' Too crazy, sexy, cool to resist. I won't resist.

'But I never been so broke that I couldn't leave town.' Final albums - & yes, this is the last record The Doors ever released b/c w/o Morrison counts for naught - are about as inconsistent in terms of quality as this group was for their tenure. Turns out The Doors were in the right mood for this one, a last gasp that's more a deep, confident breath in than a gasping for the original magic of a debut. 'I said warden, warden, warden / Won't you break your lock & key.' Not bluesy, nope, tracks like 'Been Down So Long' & 'Cars Hiss by My Window' are the real-deal blues, but this got funk, soul, psychedelia, + that Doors signature grit & smoothness that makes them the imperfect tho essential sixties act: range, I mean. Black Sabbath nearly ('L'America').

Blah has blahed harder before b/c blah blahs hardest w/ U2 - ‘Tall Trees,’ ‘Weather With You,’ & a few other moments are more meh-kinda-okay-I-guess than blah full stop - but blah does blah pretty badly on Woodface, a record w/ little soul & no imagination. ‘Blood dries up / Like rain, like rain / Fills my cup / Like four seasons in one days.’ Another Aussie act (Nick Cave, Triffids) for the Christian majority, I'm not sure, but it has a Christian rock feel, & I don’t trust the band’s ironies, which are soft & boring, i.e., is 'There Goes God' really all that unbelieving? If music doesn't make you feel a thing, it ought to make you feel a whole lot of things, especially pop: you know, that magic of heightened receptivities. Woodface don't do that.

The problem w/ a record like Cee-Lo Green...Is The Soul Machine, which is by no means a bad record, but still a significantly wanting one, is that it's a bit schizophrenic: too conscious to be blinged-out, too superficial to be a soulful romp, too smooth to be deep, too deep to be a sexualized banger, & too a lot of things to be a couple of meaningful things. That has its real & associated pleasures - I don't mind a long, all-over-the-place kind of thang - & Cee-Lo certainly had an all-star cast of features/producers (too vast to list) behind this lengthy release, but it kinda ends up just being large rather than epic. His voice is not only instantly recognizable - it's made to make records (check out 'I Am Selling Soul'). Yet, w/ Goodie Mob, he's still best.

Boogie gets new-waved, new wave learns to shoot pool, men stay manly, & ZZ Top, tho not tops, remains more artful & various than expected. Try to find a lady’s-man record overflowing with this many hormones yet utterly devoid of horniness - I don’t think you could, a strange success in that way. It’s for the next beer not the next lay - that beer’s tasty tho, & kinda, sorta, sophisticated (ironies not so silently abound). Chivalrous e’en b/c blue-collared, mhm, AC/DC ought to take a page from their book. Fun, mostly.

'Hey hey, my my / Rock 'n' roll can never die.' Only, I mean only, Neil Young can turn a line that elementary into a haunting, reverberating, meaningfully American anthem. Like Springsteen's Nebraska, tho perhaps w/ even more art, Rust Never Sleeps is a giving record, one of those albums that feels like it was made just for you & no one else. Its intimacies are complex things - at once rudimentary & obscure (again, think Thelonious) - but it's always, I mean always, rapturous. Addicted to the mythos of America, Young, tho v much a songwriter rather than a poet (I celebrate this), carries on traditions of Whitman thru Hart Crane. 'I would give a thousand pelts / To sleep with Pocahontas / & find out how she felt.' & as per usual, it rocks, rocks, rocks.

Supposedly the soundtrack to a road movie called The White Room, this is certainly a record that makes its living off its momentum, i.e., it's good for driving, but it doesn't have much of a cinematic groove. That's fine, & I'm honestly happy I don't gotta make my way thru an electro-conceptual sort of thing. What you've got here is more hip-hop than I was expecting along w/ a healthy helping of house, gospel, soul, & pop. It's not 'about anything' - that's why I don't go for the soundtrack effect - but it's good for a party as well as contemplative moods. I like that flexibility. I also enjoy the fact that it's not egregiously British, e.g., 'Build a Fire' is gorgeously American. Released in '91, it must've been THE influence on Fatboy Slim, Moby, etc.

'& I don't like these drugs that keep you thin.' This & the debut remain the best Leonard Cohen ever recorded, tho Songs of Love and Hate, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, & The Future ain't so far behind. 'But I don't call soft enuf.' 8 tracks, 6 singles, sure, this is probably the poet's most successful album, but that's not why it's a remarkable thing. It's b/c I'm Your Man is the most profoundly Jewish record in his catalogue, a kabbalistic stroke of pop genius from the man who really did invent a new sort of songwriting. I love how hypnotic yet intelligible it is. Not complex in spite of it's simplicity, just sensibly boasting uncanny flows. Who would've thought the eighties would proffer the most beautifully Jewish pop record of all time? It yet did.

Fucking cool, being what you could also say about Moss Side Story (debut imaginary soundtrack), but yeah, this is a fucking cool record, & I think e'en fucking cooler than Adamson's first. Layer upon layer, vibe upon vibe, the guy sets the scene, a scene that is more than a mood but also shot thru w/ a wickedly hip ambiance. It ain't easy to make 'cool' the functional - really the foundational - aesthetic of an artistic statement, but it's not impossible, as Miles confirms, & Adamson succeeds in this regard. I do wonder if it's necessary to have the talking parts - the villainously licentious talking parts - but they're not exactly ornamental. Just disposable. Say what you want about the Magazine bassist (prob an obnoxious chap), he can do his thing.

'& godsend I don't want to go / To the seal's watershed.' Anohni's voice, w/ vibrato & strength, is a fascinating, tho not always pleasurable, amalgam of Brittany Howard's southern vigor & Kate Bush's avant-garde exuberance - she's, in other words, the direct inheritor of Nina Simone's genius, classical music included, tho she's not as supremely gifted or fully realized as Nina. Who is? But she is believable, & her transgender narratives are both real &, in the dark ages of 2026, as pressing as ever. The Rufus Wainwright track (#6) is a dud (not a surprise), but it's short, just as the record is. If it went on much longer, I wouldn't be as forgiving, but as it is, I'm left moved &, it's a shock to say, in the mood for a (slight) second helping. Well done, sister.

'Hipsters unite, come align for / The big fight to rock for you.' W/ a grungy pulse, abstract lyricism, & Chicagoan sincerity, the Smashing Pumpkins, at least on Siamese Dreams, enter a zone that configures Nirvana, the Pixies, & Wilco into a very successful & very influential aesthetic. Enigmatic yet in your face, soft-voiced yet hard & smashing (pumpkins), Corgan & the crew are rockier than your average indie outfit but are also quintessentially indie, alt, or whatever the fuck you want to call it. 'We are the fossils, the relics of our time / We mutilate the meanings / So they're easy to deny.' As they are not for the bulk of left-field rock 'n' roll of the 90s, Black Sabbath governs the hidden-not-so-hidden influence on this band: a notable contribution.