The trio play together very well, it is all Byrdsy zoom lens and undertow harmonies, tugging the glorious melodies deep into your consciousness. A fine album, maybe not your Daddy’s power pop but all the better for it
You compromise, you throw yourself at your work, your home, your friends, you shake it up and you shake it off, and you even compromise with the guy and become buddies with benefits and then in the end, the pain isn’t gone, it is just dulled
Big Apple Blues – Tomas Docker Band – Yusef Komunyakaa and Tomas Doncker concern themselves with what people do and don’t do for each other, with a sidetrip to Alabama and a layover in Fun City.
Just what the world needs right now: a born again religious fanatic singing the blues. And singing it if no not badly, with a song here and a song there even better than that, not very well either
It doesn’t peak as high as Red, “This Love” isn’t as great as “State Of Grace” and “Shake It Off” isn’t as great as “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together Again” but there is no weak spot, it is consistently superb. A major work but how much more?
This is an electrified tour de force, a statement on the art of the art of music and an important addition to the myth that is New York City. It has been called a journey through black America but that is to damn it with faint praise. This isn’t about black people, it is about what human people should and do and don’t do for each other.
On song after song, Destiny and drummer Mark Smollin find the joy in creation, in song, in raising your voices and if polemic doesn’t swing, songs like “Hooray For The Salvation Army Band” and the sublime “Patriotic Class warfare” swing from the rafters.
The surprise here isn’t that Jamie T is still alive, or that he can write a song, it is that he is better at everything he does. He sounds like a rock start, and he sounds like a mess but one who has the real gift, who might be able to be big time… not in the US, of course, but still this went Top 10 in the Uk.
50 St. Catherine’s Drive isn’t merely a downer, but it is a bummer as well. But extreme sorrow is a great pop music subject and the album has the powers of its conviction. The last song finds Robin back in “Sydney”, “I’m back in Sydney, my brothers are with me, do it or die”.
It might actually be catchier than I am giving it credit for. I’ve really sorta grown tired of the band and I don’t like waiting four years for crap albums, but this one could have been worse; extended childhoods could be their own rewards.
This is a truth Mellencamp seems to instinctively understand, these songs are about people with a different sort of understanding of life, a different type of connection to the land: that’s why he plays Farm Aid. Plain spoken, from the earth to the earth, American homeland, Mellencamp plain spokenly speaks for it and us on a fine, folk rocker album
Popular Problems – Leonard Cohen – He is melodic the way a bassoon is melodic, or maybe the way the memory of a teenage love is melodic, the contours remain there even if the details are lost forever and the two first songs are among the best he has ever written and everything else is damn near perfect as well.
Tyranny is a tyranny of sound and lowered expectations. It explodes and then it subsides, it is kinda like waves which roil and return. “This isn’t for everybody, this is for nobody”, Julian warns on the very first song, “The customer is obviously oblivious and wrong”.
If the dark ages were over so long ago, why dos it feel like they are back and why does it feel like this is the music England was listening to in 1066. “Pink Section” sounds like the wind that blew from Agincort to Flanders Field to Kirkuk and Al Quaim. It sounds like a horror moving through history
If you love Strait you had to be effected by the late “Troubadour” and closing “The Cowboy Rides Away”. What the album has going for it is it is a literal, all of a piece, live document, of one of the great Red Staters, a country giant saying goodbye. Is it enough? Sure, if your exes live in Texas.
ABBA’s Gold: Greatest Hits from 1992 is the second greatest greatest hits of all time, only Bob Dylan Greatest Hits Volume Two is better. And there are two differences, Dylan isn’t a single artist and Dylan had a handful of new songs on his. Oh, and Abba sold 28 million copies
The album is filled with brief songs transcribing an impressive range of raw emotions with gorgeous piano melodies, melancholic strings, experimental synths, electronic violence, piercing screams, noisy beats and Hadreas’ fierce and touching vocals.
It is the dub portion that really blows your mind, “Bato Bese” sounds like dub goes to broadway, it is a strange and beautiful thing and even with that the album reaches its zenith with the large and transgressive the Mighty Diamond’s cover “Why Me Black Brother Why” – Lee “Scratch” Perry would be proud to put his name on
It is an ongoing process of decay and degradation and iteration on on his fine, though maybe not as fine as Older Than My Old Man Now, look back in astonishment at pops and at age. LW was 63 years old when he died, LWIII is 68 years old.
Americana by way of its many restless meshing of genre’s, Hey Harley is a seamless meeting of minds,two entwined sensibilities playing off each other as they effortlessly move from country to jazz, to soft shoe shuffle, with a deft intensity.
A step sideways and while still good enough to be worth a longer look, it is a strange hybrid new country (or is that Americana?) mood music. If you listen to new r&b, folks like the Weeknd, the sound here would be less Bristol in the 1990s, or George Jones any time, and more moody sounded deep sounds that sink your soul down.
The difference lyrically isn’t the difference between love and indifference towards men but about her sense of physicality: her self image. Which has improved vastly. Now she can spend her time worrying about which guys only want her because she’s famous.
Horizon was a terrible album and Songs of Innocence isn’t. There is something disquieting and a little disturbed about it. U2s stories of innocence isn’t giving them much pleasure. It isn’t a happy album. Perhaps because when it gets past punk and surf, it finds a dead mother, priest pedophiles and bloody Sundays.
Some eleven months later and Arms have released a covers EP, Backwards Record, on Spotify only and I like it a lot though I am a little baffled by these lo-fi slowed down almost operatic versions of songs which, for the most part, weren’t that popular in the first place
These are off tune tracks which are not quite good songs, and you can’t quite imagine somebody actually covering them,, maybe I mean they are innocent songs of intense and extreme love. Jad is jumping for joy on track after track and you just think if he had collaborated with someone, these songs would be too much: they are so heartfelt you are stuck wondering what to do now
If I wanted to start a fight I might claim it isn’t so ambitious, it is just what it is and no more. But my heart wouldn’t be in it, not when what Singles Mothers is is one perfect song after another. Justin is a musical genius, one of our greatest living songwriters and this is a great achievement.
Tahliah Debrett Barnett aka Formerly Known As twigs, is the most exciting thing to happen to UK soundscape soul pop since Lana del Rey and like Lana she doesn’t sound like anything else: a deeply arranged indie soul hybrid. Imagine if Massive Attack had been so big 1D and a girl in Gloucestershire, England, became completely obsessed with them…something like that.
The first track off Smokey And Friends, the Motown giant’s duets album was so indifferent, Cee Lo joining him on “The Way You Do (The Things You Do)” and for the most part I was right but the album did have moments. Smokey is in fine voice throughout but he gains nothing special from the duets, nobody spurs him to heights.
S she is really all over the eleven song album she is mostly singing back up and only gets Lorde-y on “Piece Of Mind” which, considering she didn’t wrote it, has the sort of shaking bigness we associate with her nowawdays
Caraway is a really good songwriter, and the album’s theme, faith in people, isn’t heavy handed: you can pick up on it as you choose; he has been doing this for years, he is a good, sometimes great rocker, and on the two albums I’ve heard, even at his worst he is never less than a complete pro.
Moanin’ At Midnight – Tomas Doncker Band – Rewrites the story of Howlin’ Wolf for the 21st century by a man who defies pigeonholes, especially blues pigeonholes, but finds himself a blues star despite himself.
It ends with one of the worst tracks, “Shadow People” -another blues vamp with nothing much happening and another disappointment. when Petty and his band are not on their game they can be astonishingly boring. This isn’t that bad, it isn’t ;s Mojo, but it is missing a big big song to sail in on and in the end it is all a little shrugged filled.
The album as a whole is short and sweet, and upon first listen, I thought definitely too short. However, upon further listening, I realized that if it had been any longer, it would’ve been repetitive and simply not as good. I feel like I could never get tired of having it on repeat, which is a quality Joyce Manor’s had since the very beginning
The two songs that open Jungle “The Heat” and “Accelerate” are serious keepers, and if by “Platoon” you’ve kinda gotten the point, better repeating this album when necessary, the sound is samey, the horns, synths, falsettos, and strings, all a touch manufactured, but that doesn’t make them any less perfect.
the rest of the album doesn’t make it at all. Perhaps the problem is that if you don’t like what weird Al is making fun of how can you like the song he is playing? This goes doubly for the painful “With My Own Eyes” and while “Mission Statement” with its “Carry On” opening and CSN harmonies, should work very well, but the song isn’t good enoug
When I listen to S&G Greatest Hits it takes me back to being a child and not just a child but a lucky child. It is not that I had discovered girls, I, like Woody Allen, don’t believe I ever had a latency period, I always dug girls, but in 1972 girls noticed me. And in 1972, I felt that weird safety that only the young can have, where death, disaster, loss –none of them are quite part of your make up. I was, if you will, innocent.
Maybe they were the picture you put on the front page of a dating service, the one where something in your expression and the way the light hits you makes you look like Brad Pitt, when most of the time you look like Jonah Hill. But CSNY 74 begs a different answer
The songs aren’t that hot. “Peace”, “Neal Cassidy Drops Dead”, “Kiss Me A Lot” –they have something incomplete about them, it is like they couldn’t quite close the door on the songs. “Mountjoy” sounds important with its martial beat and destructed depression (it is about Irish prisoners) but it isn’t a good song.
I am not talking voice here, Earle sounds like Earle, I am talking tempo, it slows to a crawl, it pours itself like molasses, it lacks all edge, it is like earle is strangling himself. This isn’t a blanket condemnation, the three song with Harris are all magnificent oil and water, sour and sweet, scratch and soothe, especially “Goodbye” – alone it is worth the price of admission.
The Moz has some lovely moments, I think, it is a little hard to settle into it, it needs concentration and the CSNY took Graham Nash used to cut and paste from a whole tours worth of music, someimes changing a single line from one version to another. CSNY 74 has everything you thought it would and plenty I for one (admittedly, not a huge fan) have no idea about, including “Goodbye Dick”, Neil Young sticking in the knife to one former President Nixon.
“Oh I know that she has made a fool of him” Costello sings in “No Dancing”, “Hey girl I wanna shake your hand, all I ever do is bow”, “I wanna get right through the way I feel for you”, “I can’t be wounded because I’ve got no heart”, “they told me everything was guaranteed, somebody somewhere must have lied to me”, “if I was a Saint with a silver cup…” , “I can hear you whispering as I crawl by your door”… it is like every line goes bing in the back of your pain valve.
This is unspeakable but it isn’t exactly songs. Songs have catchy melodies, and smart lyrics, and you can do something with them other than sneer. There is something shameful about this product. It abuses Christianity for a bob or two, and sure, Hillsong didn’t invent it but this goes a long way to perfecting.
What I got was the sophomore effort, the delightfully titled High Tea though I won’t be getting the tour I don’t think. The Britannicas are the Dr. Luke of rock, they build songs through file sharing, Herb in the US, singer Joe Algeri in Australia, and guitarist Magnus Karlsson and drummer Stefan Johansson from Sweden
Timing is everything. Pressed for time and a lane at the grocery store opens and your next in line. The synchronization of the street lights turning green – GO. Turn on the radio in the car and your (current) favorite song is playing – Stay With Me by Sam Smith. Kept meaning to Google him because there are only so many artists who ‘hook’ me.
Noise Vs Beauty – Bassnectar – The House album of the year lives up to its name as one of the best DJs Lorin Ashton, the Santa Cruz party album who added metal to a taste for bass. This is a step forward, a hard pressed masterpiece of beats and sound effects.
Caryn Ganz’s (for editor at Spin) excellent Rolling Stone review of Lana Del Rey’s sophomore effort Ultraviolence does exactly that. “the epic schmaltz of Ennio Morricone, reflected through the haze of a thousand dramatic selfies” is a pretty damn good description of the album. It isn’t a put down, Lana is what she is and what she is is the teenage girl locked in her bedroom, imagining her mom and dad crying at her grave with a sort of grim satisfaction.
It is fertile ground for the tumultuous sound of pop, even when played on blue notes, it is as extreme as human love can get and on song after song here, it is as good as pop music can get as well. Grade: A
After all these years, Micky emerges as a song and dance man, adept at just about every form of rock and pop with a history and a present he can tap into at will and an unerring sense of moment at tempo. This should’ve been the entire show
It is, the word is, mediocre. The songs aren’t good enough, Jack’s voice grates by the end because there isn’t enough oomph to bring it all back home, and int he end, if you think Jack is an asshole any way, there is no reason to do much but dismiss it.
Life repeats itself three times, first as tragedy, second as rap music and third as farce. Ice T has been on the third revolution for a long long time and any idea that the former Tracey Marrow is still using memory recall from his gangbanging, drug selling (not to mention stint in the army) days has to be taken with a huge huge dose of reality TV
