Duran Duran - Big Thing
"Big Thing", like its predecessor "Notorious" was one of those interim Duran releases that kept the band going in the late '80's. John, Nick, and Simon kept the faith (with Warren Cucurillo adding guitar) with their fans by producing some nice, edgy tunes here, mainly the two hit singles "I Don't Want Your Love" (which went Top-10 in the US) and "All She Wants Is". Other notable tracks include "Do You Believe In Shame?" (included in the Mel Gibson/Kurt Russell film "Tequila Sunrise") and the slow-tempo spacey tunes "Palomino" and "Land". A good album, and still very listenable.
Beck - Odelay
Pearl Jam - Vs.
After Ten, Pearl Jam’s hugely successful debut album, expectations for Vs. were massive. Vs. sold nearly 1 million albums in its first week released, but many fans of Ten were actually disappointed. Many were looking for the echoey, polished sound that is present in Ten, when Vs. is much harder and raw. I love Ten, but in my opinion, Vs. is even better. Pearl Jam proved that they weren’t going to cash in on Ten remakes, but that they were going to make music that they wanted. Vs. has an explosive and focused energy that in my opinion shows that they were better than their contemporaries Nirvana and Soundgarden, whose sound had yet to mature.
Smashing Pumpkins - The Berlin Bullet
Nick Cave - From Her to Eternity
Tom waits - Alice
This is indeed an unusual output from Toom Wiats, somehow underrated after its release and definately requires some patience whilst digesting. Still many of the songs are remarkeably well-written, and the overall result is excellent. One of the best albums from the "third period" of Tom Waits' music output. Notice 'Kommienezuspadt' and 'Poor Edward' in particular. The two songs sum up much of either side of his remarkeable musicianship.
David Bowie - Young Americans
David Bowie abandoned the glam/sci-fi personae of Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs with this radical departure. Recorded at Sigma Sound Studios, the home of Philadelphia International, it featured the label's crack house band and, as a result, confirmed the singer's growing love of soul and R&B. Pulsating dance grooves abound, in particular on the disco-influenced 'Fame', which topped the US singles chart. The song was co-written with John Lennon, a compliment Bowie repaid by reinventing the Beatles' 'Across The Universe' as a dancefloor classic. Such self-confidence abounds throughout this album which shows the singer firmly in command of yet another musical direction.
Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Sometimes
Blown a Wish
When You Sleep and others
Pavement - Slanted & Enchanted
Nick Cave - Grinderman (2007)
Foul-mouthed, noisy, hairy, and damn well old enough to know better, Grinderman are Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunos. On 5th April 2006, Nick, Warren, Martyn and Jim
entered RAK studios, London, for a week with producer Nick Launay and recorded new songs. It was mixed in September at Metropolis Studios. Calling themselves Grinderman, the album is set for a March 2007 release.
Radiohead - OK Computer
Although from my above description, it may sound like just a techno album, that is not the case. It is firmly grounded in rock. There is no techno beat or overuse of samplers - these are merely added for effect in a few spots on the album. The majority of the electronic sound is from the style in which the guitar is played. Thom Yorke's voice is a haunting, mysterious one, that fits Radiohead's musical style to a T. This is one band in which the greatness of the music lies not in just one single member, nor with the entire band. Instead what we have here is each single member, working together with a certain texture, to achieve a climax of musical piety, with Thom Yorke's cracked-throat voice in the center of it all.
The songs on the album are not all your basic 4-minute pop rock tunes like those being pumped out by the rest of the music industry currently. "Paranoid Android", the first single from the album (you may remember the music video with the little cartoon), is an epic musical masterpiece. It includes tempo changes, mood changes, wild (but not gross) shifts in dynamics, all topped off with the fits of anger and melancholic depression we can expect from singer Thom Yorke. This song in itself is a modern symphony. These days, it is difficult to find all of the aforementioned styles on one cd, let alone one song. Better yet, Radiohead succeeds in pulling it off beautifully in just over 6 minutes. Keep in mind, this is just one song on the album - there is an another 47 minutes to go.
About halfway through the album we are greeted with an eerie track which probes the value of our lives and where we place our values. This track, "Fitter Happier", includes no actual vocals, but instead a computer voice reading off phrases over a piano led background track. It ends with this phrase "fitter, happier, and more productive. a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics".
Yorke's lyrics are directed towards a a look at the future. Not only in the musical sense, but in a philosophical style as well. He delves into the minds of the listener, grips their psyche, and questions its worth before moving onto his next patient - himself. This is done in a less-straitforward, more artistic style which Yorke excels at. It makes the listener think, and the meaning behind them relies on the listener above all else.
Magic Numbers - Magic Numbers
This is the best album released in 2005, its highly original, cannot be compared to anything else. Its Highly original and refreshing, especially to release this kind of sound where everybody goes arctic monkey or coldplay shit....sweet sweet voice, great melodies, emotional, funny, and the best thing is the songs sound cheerfull where the lyrics are pretty depressing....now thats humour...gotta listen and listen again...
Slint - Spiderland
Bob Dylan - Modern Times
Damien Rice - 9
Before all this, Rice emerged as quite the promising talent. O had its overwrought moments, but just as many of striking intimacy and beauty. It was great to hear someone ape the ambition of Jeff Buckley—rather than just his sound. Before the effects of promoting the album for nigh-on four years took their toll, his gigs were amazing, inspiring reverence for good reason.
But after the long promotional slog, you might have to forgive Rice for making an album that paints him as unhappier than ever. When he catches himself singing a song that isn’t mired in gloom, “Rootless Tree,” he tears it to shreds with its chorus: “Fuck you! Fuck you!” It’s merely disconcerting at first, but soon quite annoying. Unfortunately “Rootless” is probably 9’s most representative track: almost every song is slow and pained, starting almost inaudibly before stretching to a bombastic climax. It’s one way to make an impact, but over ten (long) tracks it gets exhausting.
The biggest problem might be Rice’s vocal technique. On O, he had a tendency to endearingly strain for notes he couldn’t reach. Now, it sounds like he’s purposefully written songs to allow him to overextend his thin voice. “Elephant” shows him actually sucking in his breathe in pain, and in the deeply ugly “Me, My Yoke and I,” he all but whips himself as he decries his sexual desires. It’s a theme that pops up again and again throughout the album, which is a shame: Rice’s lyrics are too tiresomely egotistical and alienating to allow you to ever sympathize with his self-loathing. Essentially they range from the pointlessly vague (“She gives / I get / Without giving anything to me”) to the embarrassingly crass (“You can lie between her legs / And go searching for / Tell her you’re looking for her soul”).
There are some moments worth saving. “The Animals Were Gone” is gradually taken over by a beautiful cello before drifting away on a blissful sea of distorted choral voices. Single “9 Crimes” is bleaker stuff, but benefits from a light touch and the soft, gorgeous voice of Lisa Hannigan. Given credit alongside Damien for last year’s charity single “Unplayed Piano,” Hannigan’s been relegated to just another member of the band, though, and barely gets another look in. It’s a shame, not least because another voice might have done something to break up 9’s interminable navel-gazing.
Cure - Greatest hits
Many reviews I have read, have been centered about the lack of songs Greatest Hits has, which I am sure Cure lovers are all in one unanimous ride together. However, this compilation is a satisfying, nineteen-track treasure and one for the keeping. The icing on the cake, the bonus acoustic hits, are of course a major reason for purchasing Greatest Hits, giving the songs a more relaxed and light-hearted approach to them. This being the first stepping stone to converting anyone to a more wholehearted and devoted Cure lover and thus buying infinite amounts of Cure albums. As well as the two new inclusions; 'Just Say Yes' and 'Cut here', which really completes the album and would absorb anyone into The Cure's blissful music world. Don't be disillusioned by your first glance at it. Indeed, it may miss the more mature-Cure songs, though its relentless efforts of wanting others to enjoy the bustling music it spills, makes up for it.
U2 - U2 18 Singles
Freddie Mercury - Very Best of (antology)
Goo Goo Dolls - Let Love In
Folks who were digging the Goo Goo Dolls back in the early ‘90s have grown to find the band they once loved rendered virtually unrecognizable over the past decade or so. The Buffalo, NY, trio, led by John Rzeznik, always had pop smarts, but it took a couple of hit singles for their smarts to be put on full display. At the beginning of their career, they were sort of an agreeably messy pop/rock band, much like their idols, the Replacements (who I discovered partially due to the Goos). Of course, after the ‘Mats signed with a major label, their sound underwent a gradual transformation from messy to shiny, and the Goos have done the same, albeit with significantly more success. Each album since their 1995 breakthrough, A Boy Named Goo, has sounded cleaner and been more ballad-heavy than the one before it, culminating in their eighth studio album, Let Love In, a fairly decent set of mid-tempo guitar pop that’s likely to be blaring from an Adult Alternative radio station near you every time you turn the dial.
By no means is Let Love In a bad album. Rzeznik is certainly capable of writing a pop/rock anthem, as earlier smashes like “Name” and “Iris” prove. There’s no grand-slam hit on this album that matches up to those, but nearly every song on this album has a chorus that practically leaps out of the speakers and jumps through your ears. Case in point: the anthemic title track, the chorus of which I was humming to myself constantly after only one listen. Additionally, the Goos songs typically have a timelessness to them. It’s very easy to picture many of these songs being hits ten or even twenty years ago, in the heyday of Bryan Adams and Bon Jovi (hey, they both made a couple of good songs, right?). However, the album teeters on the edge of overproduction, thanks to studio vet Glen Ballard. Ballard literally polishes down any sonic imperfection this album could possibly have, sucking the life out of a couple of tracks in the process. The album’s sheen is occasionally detrimental, particularly on the slower numbers, all of which have a very similar quality to them. Ultimately, Let Love In is a mixed bag, but it’s the natural progression in terms of the band’s musical arc.
David bowie - Hunky dory
The Killers - Sam's Town
I do think 'When You Were Young' is a good track. There's a good pace to it, and it takes you back to the sound used all over 'Hot Fuss'. Not too much else really, and there's nothing that's really offensive to the ears...
Bad Points ...
just nothing to really enjoy. I struggled through the album. It's predictable, and even boring for the most part. The vocals don't seem to work as well, with the sound being less 80's disco in this album. In fact, they're almost annoying in places. The song writing has taken a step back too, and all the energy that made the first album so popular has gone.
General Comments
There's no wonder why the radio stations have been completely unenthusiastic about the album since its release. It's not very good. I've read people saying "they couldn't just bring out another album like Hot Fuss, and they had to move forward". Why? Hot Fuss was a masterpiece of writing and production. There was energy and a roughness that made you excited to hear it. All but two of the songs on that album were Killer, and those 2 were hardly filler. What's wrong with that formula? I had high hopes for this album; they'd taken their time writing and releasing it, and the single was promising. Trust me, it's a let down. As for comparisons to Springsteen, that's nonsense. Poor effort boys. Nice tash in the vid though.
Lynyrd Skynyrd - Gold - Remastered
Phil Collins - Both Sides
According to Phil Collins, his first solo LP since the dour ... But Seriously (1989) is so deeply personal that he cloistered himself in his 12-track home studio to record it. A veritable one-man band, he laid down each of the album's 11 songs track by track. This solitary process has spawned a record even more deadly serious than Seriously itself.
Collins is one of pop's great paradoxes: an avuncular superstar who has made morose ballads his stock in trade. There's an honorable sincerity in Collins' effort to grapple with his vulnerability and social concerns on record. But courage and conscience don't guarantee depth, and Both Sides' message music is barely more trenchant than its lot of inarticulate love songs.
True to form, Both Sides is chockablock with drum-heavy dirges, droning synths, ominously ticking rhythm boxes and wailing, double-tracked vocals – all of which are now sonic clichés for the world-weariness, heartache and self-absorption that has become Collins' recurrent and emphatically one-sided story.
Certainly, the hits are here – "Every-day" virtually announces itself as this album's smash single. Still, too much of the music is fragmented, the melodies underdeveloped. An album whose very title advocates dialogue, outreach and the exchange of feelings, Both Sides fails to make its case.
Patti Smith - Exodus
Radiohead - Kid A
For an album that apparently grew out of the band trying to get away from melody, there's a lot of it here. They can't help themselves. They try to do a song with a robotic dance beat, load it up with bleak phrases like "laughing till my head comes off" and "take the money and run" and "this is really happening," call it "Idioteque" for chrissake, and what stands out are not the beat and not the phrases or the apparent concept of dance music being silly when horrible things are happening in the world, but the seven or eight different heartwrenching vocal lines and the amazing way they intertwine.
Allman Brothers Band - Ramblin' Man
Don't be fooled by the two lead guitars, the two drummers, the legendary concerts that only kicked into gear around the two-hour mark: Boogie-'til-you-puke overkill really isn't a part of the Allman Brothers' recorded legacy. Guitarist Duane and singer-organist Gregg Allman knocked around Los Angeles in the late '60s, polishing their chops in third-billed psychedelic ballroom bands such as the Hour Glass and...
Pink Floyd live at Concertgebouw, Amsterdam Holland 17 Sep 69
R.E.M. - In Time (best of 88-03)
Now, this of course is my perception of REM. Do they think that such a stylistic shift happened? Was their songwriting process different? I don't have those answers...because they don't really matter. What does matter is that I've been listening to these guys for a long time. Songs like "Radio Free Europe" and "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville" will always be associated with those college nights spent listening to albums like Murmur at my friend Gene's parents house up in Bangor, Maine. The music made a big impression on me, so that time period comes along for the ride. The rest of the pre-Warner days stuff is in there too because, let's face it, does anyone really feel like an adult when they first get out of school? Not me. It took a few years. A job. A marriage. A mortgage...and then REM comes out with "Stand"...and suddenly, it appears that things have changed.