Reviews by wotanmjolnir

A bit of an odd one for me. There's nothing stand out bad here, and there are some absolute gems, but it just feels a bit bloated and too damn long. There's nothing wrong, but it just didn't grip me like The White Album or Physical Grafitti does.

Ian Curtis was preventing us from getting New Order. Dreary, sludgy bullshit that certain people think you have to like because it's Joy Division.

Fucking shit.

There is a fairly widely held opinion that music is the 80s was shit, which is untrue. There was an awful lot of really good, groundbreaking music in the 80s that shaped modern music - Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, New Order The Smiths, 'Africa' by Toto etc.

This album is the reason people think the '80s were shit. Horrible, insipid songs, over-produced and layered with syrupy synths and sax - it's the kind of music that people who have Luther Vandross's entire back catalogue buy, and keep in their car.

Good, good album. The first gig I ever went to was Steve Winwood in the late '80s, and whilst his solo stuff is very different (and significantly less enjoyable) than this it's still his voice, and he really does have one of the great blues rock voices.

This reminds me of Steely Dan, in that it is very shit. Bland, boring, over-produced uninspired and uninspiring pop pap. A limp dick of an album.

Very British, very 90s ... and very good. There's maybe a little bit too much whimsy in places like The Debt Collector, and Parklife has been played to death and I can well do without Bank Holiday but there is so much sublime stuff here the less good just disappears. End of a Century and To The End are real standouts, but there is a lot to love in all but the exceptions noted above. I'll dock it one point out of ten for the minor crapness, but that still makes it a good 5 star album.

This is my second Deep Purple album. The first one I had was Live in Japan, which I hated - so much self-indulgent fart-sniffing that it just made me want to wrap barbed wire around my cock and then pretend I was trying to start a very old and rusty chainsaw as a more enjoyable pastime. Naturally I was not particularly looking forward to this.

I was very pleasantly surprised. Yes, there is still a huge amount of self indulgent solowanking, and some of the lyrics sound like the song that Homer Simpson wanted Tom Petty to write in the episode when they went to rock school, but it is a very enjoyable time. Smoke On The Water is hugely overplayed, but you can't deny it is a good tune, and it doesntbstand alone here. As a whole there is far too much bullshit to make it five stars, but this is definitely four for me, and probably my first entry in 'Controversial Artists'

I got Something/Anything a few weeks ago, and hated it. Naturally I wasn't expecting much from this, but was very pleasantly surprised. Its a very strange, all over the place kind of album with so many changes of style and tempo (sometimes within a single track) that I ended up with whiplash. There is quite a lot of horrible smooth jazz / yacht rock shittiness, and the amount of saxophone confirms that there is one single rock track in history where the presence of a sax has improved the song. Having said that, there is enough on this album that I enjoyed that it rates significantly higher than Something/Anything - it's not a four star, there's just too much crap for that, but it's a very high three

I don't think Elvis Costello likes Elvis Costello as much as the compiler of the book likes Elvis Costello.

I've never been a Thìn Lizzy fan, but I obviously knew of them, and a few of their songs. This is alright, and really clean for a live album (it makes me wonder how much was overdubbed in the studio), and it's good to hear the bass so high in the mix but I guess that's not surprising.

Not bad, not great, but that album cover is a sight to behold - Mr Lynott could have knocked my hat off!

I like Simon and Garfunkel, but this is not their best - it's not at all bad, hut its mot stellar.

If he hadn't taken that flight would he be anything more than a footnote in music history?

It's perfectly OK noodling, but it's very repetitive, and very, very long. It wore out it's welcome after about 30 minutes in, which is not even half way through. It's not bad as such, just uninteresting and absolutely never going to cross my mind again.

So very, very unmemorable.

Sounds like the sixth disc of a seven disc collection that gathers together all the lost studio snippets from a great artist, that only insufferable bores ever buy and no-one listens to. It feels like a collection of work-in-progress song ideas that would be played by a pretty average band in a studio while working on their third album that never gets released, whereas in actual fact it's a full-length major label release that made it onto the list of 1001 albums that I apparently have to listen to. Bollocks.

I was ready with my standard criticisms of rap and hip-hop - skits I don't understand, over long, boring, bland and repetitive ... but this is really good. Yes, it is still a long album an hour on the original release, hour and a quarter on the re-issue with bonus tracjs), but the production and rapping is clear, Ice Cube and Eazy-E especially have great flow, and there are no skits to annoy me. Over all, I enjoyed this - easily one of the best rap albums I've heard.

Listening to Coldplay is like fucking with a limp dick - whilst to a casual observer it may look fun and interesting, actually everybody involved gets angry, frustrated and upset, and if you tell your friends about it they will laugh at you.

This JUST scrapes 2 stars, because it's not actually really bad and offensive, but by the christ it is close. It is so bland and humdrum, Chris Martin has an annoying voice, and that fucking song about spies coming out of the water, but you can't touch them because they are spies is nearly as bad as Cars Are Cars by Paul Simon.

My first Bowie album of the project, and my first Bowie album full stop - I've tried before, and he never really stuck, and I think the problem was that I had a best of, and if this album is anything to go by his work really benefits from being heard amongst other tracks that were recorded at the same time rather than being cherry picked. What I'm saying is that I enjoyed this album, and really enjoyed the first half especially. The second half is a bit aural wallpaper, but it wasn't at all bad and the first half was really good. Glad I had this today.

This is an OK album - the musicianship is great, and the big songs are good, but it's not exciting, and I won't be listening to it again. Background music at best.

This is OK- nothing bad, nothing memorable. It's a score not a soundtrack, sonisnperhaps a bit kore symphonic than may be expected, but it's nice enough. I'm not going to seek it out again, though.