Welcome, dear music lovers!
Here be the blog in which a group of music enthusiasts reviews various music albums in a series of challenges and games that include assigning records to each other, reviewing albums from a particular year, whole discographies of certain artists or just random albums of their own choice.
I hope you enjoy reading our stuff!
Review by: Victor Guimarães Album assigned by: Alex Alex
Labels such as “incredibly sad” or “probably the saddest album ever” were stuck upon The Mess We Made like they’ve been welded. The album was also labeled as an electronic music album by a dark folk guitarist and singer from England. Too many labels, huh? And pointing to the same sad thing. I braced myself.
“Let it play, already!” - My mind screamed.
However, when I first listened to the record, I didn’t find it as depressive as it seems. Strange. It was the right moment, the mood was there. After waiting for a while, I opened a beer at a particularly cloudy dawn.
“Let it play, again!” - I needed to try once more. And I did.
Matt Elliott’s oeuvre is an amazing piece of art. Technically, he’s amazing. Complete instrumentals, be it either creative riffs who never get too much repetitive or cohesive melodies whose progression and tempo flows like a cold winter breeze. Yeah, the labels were kinda right. It is, by all means, a completely sad record. It was imagined that way, designed that way, recorded that way. I can picture Mr. Elliott reminiscing at a particularly cloudy british day, lazily strumming his guitar and getting ideas for those melancholic riffs and vocals. Lyrics point to the same place as well, always full of loneliness and regret but, as every sad album should have, there’s the “light at the end of the tunnel” in the track “The Sinking Ship Song”.
Full instrumental tracks, distorted vocals, melancholic lyrics and melodies are the labels I give to The Mess We Made. Strangely, a potential candidate to “the saddest album ever” didn’t made me sad. Instead, I found myself thinking about what inspires Elliott to compose like this, to express himself that way. I checked some of his other works and these moods were there over and over again. Regardless of the themes, his contemplative melancholy seems omnipresent like he is a man with one single intention, to pass these feelings on. After all, art is supposed to make you feel something, right?
The music video that first opened my eyes to the extent to which the *right* sort of visual imagery can directly affect how you experience, and most of all, how you can subsequently hear a piece of music, was Beyonce’s ‘Crazy in Love’. It wasn’t that up until that point I had seen music videos as essentially disposable, mere promotional vehicles for songs that should and would stand on their own musical merits or that I hadn’t grasped that on rare occasions they could qualify as pieces of art in their own right. It was more that having grown up without satellite or cable, I had never experienced MTV as the all-pervasive cultural force that so many of my early to mid 90s peers had, and I therefore failed to realise just how integral to the listening experience music videos had become. Beyonce’s supple but muscular cavorting to the accompaniment of a song I already loved, but which I began to love exponentially more after seeing the video, was enough to convince me of the necessity of something like the Wagnerian idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, but scaled down and tailored to contemporary popular music: a concept that would explain the appeal of modern pop by encompassing everything, words, music, dance, visuals (and all of this is highly appropriate given Queen Bey’s Wagnerian-scale ego, but anyway). A growing appreciation for Bollywood song and dance numbers around the same time helped to further cement this conviction (I used to hate it when they broke off into song at the end of a scene, but then later realised that the musical interludes were usually the best thing about the film).
All of which brings me to the music video that triggered my current fascination with Nina Hagen and that ultimately led me to undertake this series of mini Hagen reviews, since it strikes me now that which first drew me to Nina was precisely her success in marrying the visual together with the musical. I say ‘the’ music video but in fact there were two, though the first of these can’t really be called a music video per se. Instead what we’re talking about is some black and white footage of a very young Hagen singing ‘Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen’ (the title means ‘You have forgotten the colour film’), which was taken from an East German broadcast from back in the days when Nina was still a citizen of the good ol’ DDR. Truth be told, I was only vaguely aware of Nina prior to stumbling onto this video; I think I’d previously dismissed her as some variety of crazy screaming German goth lady or other. But Hagen’s manic star quality, even as a seemingly demure young woman in a sober dress, sitting all prim with her knees placed together, shone through so brightly that I was in no doubt that this was an artist I urgently needed to find out more about (she dropped the whole innocence thing pretty quickly upon defecting to the West).
The second video, and the one that made me go even crazier for Nina, is a promo for the song ‘Hold me’ taken from her eponymous sixth album, the follow up to In Ekstasy (and don’t worry I’m about to get to the album itself, I haven’t forgotten I’m supposed to be reviewing her discography). This time round the video is a full on showcase of her extraordinary, kinetic show(wo)manship: that superlative combination of the comic, the voluptuous, and the absurd that is uniquely Hagen’s. The video itself is shot in Paris and brazenly so; it’s the City of Light in the late 80s we’re talking about here: the Paris of Mitterrand, and er…whatever else was going down in Paris during that not particularly celebrated period. It starts off with a swift pan down from a street sign (‘Rue de Rome’) to Nina in a gold lamé jacket and a black mesh umbrella with a strapping blond angel in tow; then cut to Nina in an octopal-turban on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur, executing a busy vogue-type weaving gesture with long lithe black-clad arms; then we’re treated to a derriere shot as Nina gyrates towards a wall with her rather impressive arse waggling and poking up in the air; next, cut to our Diva giving a warm and welcoming smile; then a close-up of Nina shaking her head in an exaggerated succubal pout and emphasising her gorgeous silent film star eyes; then finally cut to a shot of Nina flapping her tongue out rather suggestively and also rather ludicrously. And this is all just for starters, the rapid succession of clips a perfect visual accompaniment to the intro to Hagen’s brash version of this gospel number. Nina’s in particularly fine form voicewise and the song, despite its cheesy 80s europop stylings, is brassy without being vulgar. But it’s the combination of saucy video with saucy music that really gets you going, that is wondrous to behold: Nina's extraordinary repertory of facial ticks and exaggerated childlike expressions — pulling her beautiful, elastic face first one way, then the other — and the way she manages to flesh out and give body to the music with her whole physical presence.
What is absolutely not wondrous, on the other hand, is the LP that the video was trying to promote — and here the contrast between the efficacy of the video with the rest of the album is glaring. But the news gets much worse: for Nina Hagen was only the first in a succession of thoroughly second-rate albums that Hagen released after In Ekstasy, and that, barring a few stand out songs like ‘Hold Me’ (which in no way redeem these albums as a whole), are best avoided by all but the most ardent of Hagen completists. It takes a while to get accustomed to the mediocrity of a record like Nina Hagen — like eyes adjusting to the darkness and the murk of a dimly lit room — but regardless of how far you manage to lower your expectations, you can never really escape the feeling of the pointlessness of it all. How, for instance, anyone could have ever felt that there was any sort of motivation for inflicting Hagen’s miserable, dead in the water, cover of ‘Viva Las Vegas’ on the world is completely beyond me. Her vocals sound lacklustre and her performances seem dialled in for the most part. Fair’s fair though, I’ll admit to a bit of a soft spot for her version of ‘Ave Maria’ (3/10).
Trust me when I tell you that the best thing about Street, Hagen’s unimpressive 1991 follow up to the truly dire Nina Hagen is the cover: simply put, you get three beautiful avatars of Nina — looking utterly spectacular, mind, all dressed up in Jean Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood — rather than just the usual, though still really quite awesome, one. Once again Hagen manages to wield her visual allure forcefully and so demands your complete and undivided attention: promising so much but failing to deliver anything that comes close in terms of musical stimulation. However if you periodically suffer from pangs of nostalgia for early 90’s techno-lite euro pop — and by now I’m convinced there must be a substantial contingent of us out there — then there’s a certain pleasure to be had from an album that sound wise so clearly dates back to that heady cultural moment. In particular, if like me, you have fond memories of listening to the BBC top 40 chart rundown of a Sunday and dancing about in your pyjamas to the pseudo-house keyboards of the C+C Music Factory, ‘Stars’ era Simply Red and the Ace of Base, then Street might well be right up your… street. Don’t get me wrong, the album is not completely without its other merits (and I was going to give the album a much lower rating until I realised just how cleverly ‘Divine Love, Sex und Romance’ had managed to sneak its way into my psyche), still, ‘Street’ comprises yet another staging post on Hagen’s ongoing musical journey from subversive and avant gardist to full-on soulless commercial banality; and it’s worth giving a wide berth to, if only to spare yourself Hagen’s feeble cover of ‘Good Vibrations’ (4/10).
Sadly the situation doesn’t really improve much with 1994’s Revolution Ballroom — well, apart from the fact that this time round the cover art is even more terrific than on Street. Here Nina is clad in glossy black latex and tied with rope to her chair, two magnificent raven ponytails sprouting from the top of her head and a look on her face that’s somewhere betweenindignant sex doll and social realist art mural (the kitschy soviet font at the top also contributes to the effect). If it had stopped there, if Nina and the gang had gone as far as just making a mock-up of the cover and left it at that, we could have passed right onto FreuD euch, which SPOILER ALERT is actually quite a good record. But no, Hagenonly had to go and make a record that, if anything, manages to outdo her previous two efforts for blandness. And you might think it strange, if I follow that up by affirming that the songs on the actual album are much more memorable than on Street and especially than on Nina Hagen — but that’s what makes it all worse, as promising as these songs are, they’ve been smothered at birth: the arrangements and the production are simplistic and Nina’s lackadaisical vocals are underwhelming throughout. I mean, I ask you friends, how can a song called ‘Berlin’ and sung by Nina Hagen possibly be so fucking dull? (4/10)
Nina’s all round devotion to Babaji and the higher powers, which she was so eager to demonstrate on her previous albums, seems to have eventually paid off because the following year (on New Year’s Day 1995 to be precise) she released FreuD euch, which was by far the best thing she’d done in ages. Indeed the record feels like a reinvigoration, long overdue, of Hagen’s very singular talents after years and years of putting out substandard product. This doesn’t mean that FreuD euch is Hagen’s long hoped for return to the riotous bedlam of nunsexmonkrock, far from it. Ultimately it’s just a very enjoyable, but fairly conventional punk rock record, and although she’s in fine fettle voice wise — almost enough to make you forget the apathy that crippled her previous three albums — Nina’s vocals (sadly) never come close to scaling the transgressive heights of years gone by. But you know how the saying goes, never look a gift horse in the mouth. With FreuD euch Hagen produced the kind of straight-ahead punk record that — setting aside the fact that she’s supposed to be the mother of punk — she’d never actually attempted before. And boy, does it work well. Presumably we have Dee Dee Ramone, listed as rhythm guitarist and with a co-writer credit on four of the songs on here, to thank in large part for this, one of the most convincing entries in Nina’s discography since nunsexmonkrock. And fuck me, even her cover version (in German) of ‘Sunday Morning’ is actually quite decent, which given Hagen’s miserable track record with covers is an exceptionally pleasant surprise. The whole album is in German and maybe that’s ultimately what makes it so convincing: Hagen is always at her most credible in her native tongue. But still, this Hagen’s for everyone: it gets a well earned (8/10).
Review by: Charly Saenz Album assigned by: Jonathan Moss
I am travelling while writing this review, on a hot spring day, oddly calm and just a tad older than Richard when he wrote these songs. In a way I feel we're travelling together. And it's a fantastic trip.
There's a thing about solo artists in the days after the Great Music Decades. The nineties are a blur for me sometimes, I gotta admit. But many artists found their feet then by the end of the Bad Production Party of the late eighties. And I feel that as years go by it is more sensible to think of artists doing things on their own terms, their own timing and resources. After all who's buying records? Play for the Torrent Kids. They're the here and now. If the 80s were the Ego Decade these are the NobodyElse Times.
Richard is supposed to have made a great “mainstream friendly” album here. A deceiving trick I would say, as he reaches great heights in terms of subtlety while adhering to friendly hooks that only Fleetwood Mac might dream of. “Grey Walls” is an immense achievement in that category, and “I Dream Too Much” is the great tune Lindsay Buckingham never dreamt of. He stays on that nice tone, keyboard glares here and there, a shy secret weapon, guitar-shaped.
And after such mundane joy, I arrive to my destination, evening starting to fall and shadows beginning to unfold, and Richard just manages to win my heart too. And he teaches me..
“Why must I plead with you darling/
For what's already mine”
And I've done that too, yeah... And he brings me an anthem for the years to come (“1952 Vincent Black Lightning”) or he reminds me how “God loves a drunk”. Who else would he love? A banker? Come on.
And he manages to end the affair with an awkward song, “Psycho street”, which ably marries a bass-laden part with poignant lyrics.. To move into the sweetest musical box chorus ever. Genius.
And that's the feat you know, that's the trip. A little joy, a little nastiness. And a shy guitar, and a voice of your own.
Oh I've arrived, lucky me for the brilliant company. Wish you all the same and the trip is worth it. Godspeed!
Review by: Alex Alex Album assigned by: B.B. Fultz
Captain Beefheart (hereafter Cb) is a maker of capitalistic things: music (1), paintings (2) and poetry (3). In the Year of Water Dog, having realized (1) and (3) require an industrialized workflow which could not, at that time, be sufficiently provided by an individual, Cb retired (1) and (3) from production, concentrating solely on (2).
The object of the review is the #11 in the (1) + (3) output, consisting of 0xC entities in two groups of 6 (see Fig. 1).
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C
Fig 1. The layout of the entities.
The lengths of the entities vary from the minimum of 60000000000 to over 38039985927014 ns.
7 human beings are credited: Cb (DVV), JMT, EDF, RAW (not to confuse with JPEG), BLF, JF(D), GL.
(*) Cb plays: the reed wind instrument, a transposing instrument on which a written C sounds like B♭, a woodwind instrument with a high F# key and a range from A♭3 to E6, 鑼 and several others.
The lyrical contents of the album is, due to its analogue nature and as usual with any poetry, difficult to almost impossible to translate. For those interested, I can only give you a fragment of how it sounds to the author of this review, personally: “Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги!” which, hopefully, is instructive enough for any further attempts at the studies.
Fig. 2 presents one of the possible layouts of the human beings involved in the production of the entities.
Cb(DVV) JMT EDF RAW BLF, JF GL, JPEG
Fig 2. A possible layout of the human beings
As an addendum and following the long-established reviewing tradition we present eight random words from a single product review in the ascending order of their lengths
a to the over Vliet singer vampire because
Fig. 3 Eight random words from a single product review in the ascending order of their lengths
Fig. 4 presents the possible ratings of the product on a hypothetical 5-stars scale. Further studies seem to suggest that the same algorithm can be applied to any of the separate entities, as well.
☺ ☺☺ ☺☺☺ ☺☺☺☺ ☺☺☺☺☺
Fig. 4. The possible ratings of the product on a hypothetical 5-stars scale.
Exercises:
(1) Design a thumbs scale
(2) How does “Беги краска беги! Беги краска беги!” sound to you and your friends? Discuss in groups.
(3*) Estimate art compression boundaries if JPEG is used instead of RAW
Review by: Joseph Middleton-Welling Album assigned by: Syd Spence
“Coltrane for tryhards”- Blob Nayld, PhD
Like a door creaking. Not in a good way. Sounds like fucking ass. This is a bad album. Right i like some free jazz but this is a load of wank (“its pretty wank”). Oh Coltrane was apparently on LSD during the sessions, probably thought his saxophone was a snake or something. Honk honk honk. Like elvin jones sounds like he has no idea whats going on. The best bits on this record are the chants. Sounds a bit like magma. It’s a fucking horrible album.
Review by: Roland Bruynesteyn Album assigned by: Alexander Shatkevich
Although owning most JT albums up to Heavy horses, for the last 20 years, I have grown ‘unused’ to Ian’s voice. The snarling sounds hurt my sensitive ears. So it was with some trepidation that I looked up this recent solo album.
For better and for worse, I can say that nothing much has changed: still very much in the folk rock genre with proggy flourishes (courtesy of that flute), and a pretty good use of dynamics (quiet, slightly melancholic parts interspersed by louder, hard rocking parts). We have here a collection of songs that is still sometimes marred by that voice. It is, to my inexperienced ears, firmly in the Jethro Tull vein, to the extent that it is indistinguishable from what I imagine a 21st century JT record would sound like.
But! To my surprise (I’m not ashamed to admit) the quality of the song writing is actually very good. I keep thinking “What could Peter Gabriel, or Jon Anderson do with this material”? And Ian’s voice still distracts me, but imagining the music with different singers is, in this case, a big compliment to the actual music.
But, to be honest, just as in classic songs like Aqualung and Locomotive Breath, sometimes Ian’s soulful pleading vocals or cynical almost sadistic vocals (think Roger Waters) DO match the music. Some songs are a bit more rocky, like Doggerland, the impressive start of the album. Others are more proggy, such as Tripudium ad bellum, even if it lasts not even 3 minutes.
I like it. Ultimately, if you like classic Tull in any way, this (solo) incarnation will not disappoint!
Review by: Francelino Prazeres de Azevedo Filho Album assigned by: Joseph Middleton-Welling
Italian prog and communism! The best combination since guava and cheese! In the foreboding acoustic opener, Stormy Six already show what they came for: “on its frozen path, the Swastika knows / that from now on, Stalingrad awaits in every city”. Lovely lyrics! Lovely strings! And the rest of the songs just keep up with the style. Too bad I’ve only been able to find translations for the lyrics to three of these, because this blood-pumping leftist themes are exactly what I need to help me face these grim times of neo-fascism. I could at least understand a bit from every track. Have I mentioned the strings? They’re not attempting to be “classical” like those common progressive acts, no sir. They incarnate Italian / Mediterranean folk music, instead, and I welcome this. Instrumentation is folky throughout the record; I don’t think I’ve listened to anything electric save for the bass, which is pretty good. On the other hand, a large diversity of acoustic guitar-like instruments brings variety, always exchanging the spotlight with violins, always catching my attention. The voice is just as good, a strong baritone that brings the right amounts of intonation and feeling. The album is emotional, alternating between ominously melancholic and sombrely blood-pumping. There’s a preponderance of the former, however, so the songs where the latter appears, for example the opener “Stalingrado” and the homage to Italian anti-fascist partisan Gianfranco Mattei, are the strongest. The other tracks sort of blend with each other, but are very pleasant nonetheless. This review was made on-the-go on my first listen of this record, so maybe further listens might show me hidden depths. I don’t need any more, though, to say that this is excellent, and stands on its own amongst all the greats of Italian prog.
Review by: Tom Hadrian Kovalevsky Assigned by: Roland Bruynesteyn
This is an album for depressed, balding middle aged men who stagnate in their rumpus rooms behind a disused pool table, swimming with flies and their own filth, as they shoot back more beers in a desperate attempt to forget the traumas of ageing and their ageing wives.
This is an album for beige-and-tan diners on the motorways of flyover states with tattered PVC seats in need of replacement, where the cigarette ash of the underpaid and angry women who work there (some are single mothers, all are jilted lovers) falls with an angered and dissatisfied plop into the coffee percolator as they strain to wipe the thick and browned layer of fry-grease of the table tops.
This is an album for horny teenaged boys with dirty mussed hair and thin, sad lines of hair on their upper lips who see women as sex objects and have semen-encrusted girlie mags stuffed, haphazardly and rather off center under their beds.
This is an album for failures. Only the everyday ones, though.
Review by: Alexander Shatkevich Edited by: Dina Levina Album assigned by: Jonathan Moss
I think it’s symbolic that my first review will be about an album that was released in the year of my birth, 1984. The first thing that came to mind at the first listen – the album didn’t get old in any way. It’s like all those synthetic apples from supermarkets that always are red and fresh. But in a difference from apples, Ocean Rain is nowhere near to the famous synthetic and drum-machine sound of the 80’s that I hate so much.
Ocean Rain is still very fresh, and from the very first sounds it hooks you by the arse and holds you up until the very end. The mood and the atmosphere create a whole new world that you explore with Echo and the Bunnymen. On the cover of the album, the band members are knowingly pictured in a boat making their way through an underground cave. When I listen to Ocean Rain, I can’t get away from imagining them sailing in that boat and singing all the songs, though I wonder where the 35-piece orchestra is hiding. But all the musicians are there, believe me, and their sound is reflecting from the cave walls and fulfills the album with lush and charm.
Actually, in spite of all of these cave allusions, it’s only the background on the cover - the main thing is the boat. Ocean Rain is a journey album, full of ordeals, gloomy experiences and courage. From the very beginning you’re sailing away with the band and not on a boat but on a large ancient ship. Uncertainty and storms are waiting for you, but maybe in the end you will find your Shangri-La nevertheless.
The album opens with bombastic violins and cellos, followed by the whole 35-piece orchestra and the band. The name of the opening song is Silver, just like the name of the famous pirate from The Treasure Island. Silver is filled with the mood reminiscent of great discoveries and something unexpected. The ship swings on waves, the captain gives the last orders on the bridge, ladies on the pier look at the rising sails with admiration. What’s waiting for us ahead? Silver is the kind of a song you always want to return to from time to time; and when you do, you can’t keep yourself from listening to the next one and then the whole album. It’s like with a good film, when you know the ending, but want to live thru the whole story with these characters once again. An excellent beginning, it gives a tone to the whole album.
Nocturnal Me begins where Silver ends. The orchestra is there, and it’s way more heroic and decisive. The ship had sailed away and it’s now ready to face the uncertainty. It’s a beautiful and atmospheric composition, full of concerns and fatalism. “Do or die. What's done is done. True beauty lies on the blue horizon”. Powerful drums beat out the march and lead the song. After a while, the affected bravado set by Silver fades away, the pier and the admiring ladies are long gone, and you’re digging into fears and doubts. As the song continues, the fears are growing bigger and bigger. “Take me internally forever yours nocturnal me”. Now, you almost don’t hear the march, but only the gloomy orchestra and the melancholic voice of Ian McCulloch. It’s like the sound of doom that the sailors of Captain Magellan felt when they were leaving Portugal. Will they find the way to India or the end of the world? Generally, they had more chances to face the end of the world and terrible death than reach other lands. How can you reach India sailing away from it? Round the Earth? Ah, bullshit!
But after a dark night there’s always dawn. The sun is rising and rays of light are playing on the waves, and it seems there is still hope. It’s Crystal Days. For me this song is a little bit weaker in comparison with the first two. Maybe because of its light and optimistic atmosphere. But actually this lightweight feeling and hope are illusive. In the visible simplicity of Crystal Days hides the same dense sound and dim feeling of anxiety. I am not a fan of this song but it’s in its place here, and it gives a small emotional break before the new tests befall our sailors.
These tests are already there. On The Yo Yo Man we hear another dense and gloomy march. The sound of drums is so great on this album! Pete de Freitas is doing a fantastic job here and it’s a real joy to listen to him. The Yo Yo Man is wonderful and it’s one of those déjà vu feelings, when you listen to the song and you think “wait a minute, I think I’ve been knowing it for a very long time”. It’s like when you’re meeting with someone and after an hour of talking you feel like you’ve known each other for ages. Beautiful arrangement, hooks and twists are all there. It is a great song!
And after The Yo Yo Man there goes Thorn Of Crowns. It begins with eastern motives and is then followed by drum beat even more powerful than before. The drums here are not eastern, but very solid and distressing, bringing the feeling of anxiety. Drums set the mainline of the song and submit everything else around them to themselves. Thorn Of Crowns has really weird lyrics, and that’s the case when I don’t like it a lot. Stuttering McCulloch singing about cucumber, cabbage and cauliflower, what the fuck does he mean? Nah, I don’t wanna know. But on the sound scale it’s a great song. It sounds almost like The Doors. McCulloch shouts out the words just like Morrison and I always imagine him dancing one of those shamanistic Jim dances. The first side of the album ends on a mystic note and leaves us in confusion. What’s going to happen next? What will be the end of this journey?
The second side begins with a huge hit – The Killing Moon. It continues the basic theme of the album – fate, choice, predeterminancy. It’s a beautiful, melancholic song, and here the orchestra is shining once again. Grim violins and cellos bring a very dramatic and heroic sound to it. So even if the hero cannot fight fate, it sounds like he can. That’s the ideal way to continue our journey if you ask me.
The next song, Seven Seas, brings a little optimistic break to the record, as Crystal Days did on the first side. It is the poppiest song on the album, too simple for me and for this album. It’s no surprise that it was chosen as a single after all. I didn’t find any hooks or interesting bits going on here, Seven Seas is a rather plain and forgettable tune, especially after such great song as The Killing Moon. The only plus of Seven Seas is less orchestra so you can hear more guitars than strings. But as they’re not very interesting, there’s no real benefit from that, too.
So let’s move forward to the next song immediately ‘cos it’s much better. My Kingdom has not much orchestra as well, but there are some great guitar work by Will Sergeant and light heroic vocals by Ian. The drums are powerful as usual. And as opposed to Thorn Of Crowds, here the stutter is okay. All those B-b-b-burn the skin and k-k-k-k-k-kingdom are very energetic and bring the drive to the not so very fast album. I like this song and I like the lyrics, too: “I've lost and I've gained and while I was thinking You cut off my hands when I wanted to twist”. And, thank you very much, now I know what the hell Boney Moroney is, the campaign against illiteracy is in action.
After the dynamic My Kingdom here comes Ocean Rain, the final song that gives its name to the album. It’s the end of our journey, peaceful and melancholic. When you listen to it you churn to the beginning. The blame is on the violins and cellos which are back, and they step forward once again. But if on Silver and Nocturnal Me they were powerful and broke out of the speakers, now they’re floating quietly like a river. And if in the beginning the strings were the sign of future ordeals, now they’re rays of hope that spills on the melancholic atmosphere of the song. Listening to Ocean Rain you may think that our bad feelings about the journey came true and we didn’t succeed, but the strings give hope that there’ll be another day and we’ll find our Shangri-La. I think it’s a really optimistic ending and I like this song very much.
Ocean Rain is a beautiful album. Great arrangements, atmosphere, vocals, lyrics (exc. cucumber and cabbage, yuk). It’s very equable, which is both its strength and its weakness. Dialectic as would say Moss… or Hegel. The songs are so equable by their atmosphere, sound and rhythm, that I would say I’d like to hear some more variety. But on the other hand it has some light numbers such as Seven Seas or Crystal Days. The problem is, I don’t like them that much. My Kingdom is good, but the best songs here are melancholy and gloomy. Maybe I need the light numbers to be on the same level as Nocturnal Me, I don’t know. Even the light numbers have the same atmosphere and the viscous sound. In any case, it’s not a big problem at all. I like the concept of the album and I like that all songs are submitted to it. Anyway, almost every album has its ups and downs. And the downs of Ocean Rain are not very deep at all. Honestly, I can say that it has no weak song at all.
Ocean Rain is a great album from any side. When it was released it was marketed as "the greatest album ever made”. Of course it was not, but I think Echo and the Bunnymen had all the rights to say the opposite. It’s a truly great album and it doesn’t disappoint rock lovers even after thirty years had passed. It’s not the greatest album of all times, but it certainly deserves your attention. You don’t believe in advertising after all, huh? I don’t advise you to believe me, so if you’ve never listened to it, grab your legs and go find yourself a copy. Have a good listening!
Review by: Dinar Khayrutdinov Album assigned by: Joseph Middleton-Welling
I have to start this review with a confession. I tried to crack this album for years and was never really able to get into it. I forever memorized Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom as an absolutely murky, depressing, tuneless and joyless experience, made even worse by some really pretentious atonal experimental instrumentation and very weird singing. God knows I had tried my best to appreciate this music – for instance, I read up on it, learned the background. You probably all know that story: former Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt fell from a third-floor window and was rendered paraplegic by the incident. When he almost gave up on life while staying in hospital, he decided to write and record this album. And I thought the album felt… exactly like something recorded by a man who just gave up on life. It felt hopeless to me. It literally was rock bottom. I could find no pleasure or aesthetic satisfaction found from listening to it. That was what I felt about this record some time ago.
But then I was assigned it in the reviewing game. That meant I had to listen to it again (oh God! no! fuck! not again! please!), but it also meant I could try and look at it from a different angle. Which I did. And maybe I could also try to re-evaluate this album and finally find good things in it. Which, can you believe it, I also did.
Rock Bottom is indeed a difficult listening experience but everything kind of comes together when you understand that murky, depressing and uneasy is exactly what this album is supposed to sound like. The title and the water-themed album sleeve are not coincidental either – the record does feel like drowning under water with next to no hope of coming to the surface. This IS an album about pain and suffering – and very genuine pain and suffering at that. But I also discovered one more thing when revisiting Rock Bottom: there IS hope amidst all this depressing stuff. And when you finally notice these glimpses (or even flashes) of hope, you also start noticing that this album does have place for some love poetry (some of the songs are dedicated to Wyatt’s wife), some cool jazzy sax solos, some legitimately great musicianship and even some humourous and silly moments (I have learnt to especially enjoy Ivor Cutler’s nonsensical poem recital with a funny exaggerated accent in Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road)! At some point I simply understood that, even if still I don’t really enjoy this record that much, at least it’s nothing like anything else I have ever heard. It’s absolutely unique, and that probably is where its brilliance lies. As for the musical enjoyment part, well… I guess it is a matter of taste.
It is also highly possible that all music is purely a matter of taste and our appreciation of it depends on our background, current mood and other insubstantial factors. So try and listen to Rock Bottom. Maybe you’ll love it at once and it’ll become one of your favourite albums. Or maybe you’ll hate it at once, turn it off and forget about it forever. Or maybe you’ll just feel indifferent. But I still urge you to give this record a chance. It might take a lot of patience, but with some effort you can learn to at least respect this music, like I did.
Review by: Ali Ghoneim Album assigned by: Roland Bruynesteyn
Steven Wilson has been behind many of the recent reissues of classic prog rock albums, and after listening to one his own albums, it’s easy to see why. This is a guy who is thoroughly familiar with the prog sound. Unfortunately, while that makes him suited to helming reissuing projects, it doesn’t help make albums like Grace for Drowning terribly exciting. The album faithfully reproduces elements of ITCOTCK-era King Crimson -- the apocalyptic choirs, soothing mellotron, hysterical sax, etc. – and mixes them in with drum machines and some metal guitar heroics. The end product bears much of the form of a prog rock album, but in my opinion little of its spirit. I can’t put my finger on it, but the album comes off like the pet project of someone who is more of a producer than a songwriter, making all of the songs seem a bit perfunctory. Instead of being an independently vital and distinct work, Grace for Drowning ends up sounding like a generic calling card for Wilson’s skills as an excellent producer.
To be fair, I should probably give his other albums a shot before I write him off like this.
Today we're taking a nice little stroll through the world of post-Beatles decrepitude! Imagine, it's 1982, three million in the U.K. are unemployed, there's a flipping gas crisis, and the world is seen permanently through beer goggles...
But hark! A hit single arises from the flames like a beacon of hope! Many ex-hippies shake their heads in disgust, then continue on with their macrobiotic diets. Roger Waters is in tears, understandably.
Are we ready? Okay now, put on your hearing aids, dads!
The song is "Take It Away" (my thoughts exactly!), from "Tug My Finger, I'm Paul McCartney, Bitch!"... wait, no, that's not right...
aw, who gives a shit, really?
My, my, this is some real easybeat for the teenyboppers! You can just shake your head or jerk your calf muscles spasmodically - it really don't matter, 'cause no one on the record's got rhythm anyhow!
But oh man, it's got a hook! Smooth as whipped butter! I gotta sit down now, 'cause I'd shit myself standing!
...
Ringo Starr? Who the fuck is that??
...
In the lyric, this song seems to address all manner of self-descriptive somethingsomething impresario something band put on a show something, someone got my coke stash? Take it away, let's play 'til the lights go down, then smack my ass silly!
Frankly, this song fails to grab my interest, as the postmodern aesthetic within seems to be invisible...
Dear God, it's almost pre-modernist! Throw some autotune on there, granny!
Fortunately, it seems George Martin really saved the day once again on this one, adding a nice, tight little horn chart for the coda followed by... A GOD DAMN FADEOUT!!!???...
(sounds of McCartney II eight-track being smashed to bits)
...
AW, FUCK YOU! MAKES ME WANNA GO MICTURATE ON A POLICEMAN.
...
OFFICIAL (UPDATED) LIST OF MUSIC FOR PISSING ON COPS:
Reviewed by: Alex Alex Album assigned by: Schuyler L.
Hilariously Google Play gives you “I Remember Learning How to Drive” instead of “I Remember Learning How to Dive”!
Thus already robots can work as art counselors!
When I was learning how to drive it was BOOM! BOOM! FUCK! FUCK WHERE!!!??? FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU STOP FUCKING STOP!!!
It was interesting, challenging and very personal unlike the diving routine. What's to learn about diving: you stand HIGH you touch WATER with your FINGERS. They also brought harp. At this point artistic robots must interfere AND THEY DID!
GLORIOUSLY COMPUTERS HAVE CONQUERED THE WORLD!
One can learn how to dive still, surely. Yet, with the above correction diving and driving is the same thing, only happening in parallel on different driving lanes. Or maybe you see water there. The operations are losing their names, a ticket to your concert is your driving license and this is not a typing mistake but the vision of the universal passage to Hell.
Review by: Irfan Hidayatullah Album Assigned by: Dina Levina
This is a weird, weird album (or at least kinda weird-sounding--for a pop album, that is). I have never subjected myself to more than one listen, but here goes my thoughts anyway.
The band did certainly make their way to make this album sound interesting, different, or whatever it is--there’s an unconventional chord changes here and there, there’s a crazy sounding keyboard/synthesizers, and the singer guy sings in a rather unconventional way, adopting a slightly vaudevillian (?) attitude. The band also insert a hook for every now and then--they certainly know how to draw the listener’s attention. There’s an attempt to diversify their songs too--unfortunately, in the end the album still does nothing for me. For the starter, the album feels deadly long--even though it clocks at 48 minutes in 14 songs, it feels like it should have been shorter. Maybe that’s because the lack of fresh musical ideas. (At sixth songs or so, I feel enough already, even though I’m getting used to their sound). The lack of musical ideas also means that in the end you’ll have a hard time distinguishing the songs, although the first six songs are quite, uh, tolerable.
Of course, the impression might be improved on subsequent listens.
Alright motherfuckers, I just finished Lolita and I’m ready to write my Nabokovian masterpiece in the form of a Coil review. Well, John Balance would probably prefer something more Blakeian in tone, so I guess I’ll just be myself.
Look, I like to think when people read my reviews they listen to the albums, but sometimes I’m not so sure, so please please please listen to Coil. Specifically this album, but most of their shit is great. But I find this one in particular to have a strong mix of songs and a good eclectic style. They’re a very underrated band, especially since that fucker Clive Barker booted them off Hellraiser.
Coil are kind of part of the same underground containing bands like Current 93 and Nurse With Wound (hence why the three bands were covered together in Englands Hidden Reverse) but, despite enjoying C93 and NWW a lot, I prefer Coil. Sleazy was a production genius, and Balance wrote great poetry, and sang it pretty great as well! Sure his voice betrayed his bourgeoisie origins, but he sounded really menacing all the same. An upper class punk! Well, he’s also quite capable of tenderness as well, but you can tell especially from this record that he was taking inspiration from stuff like Throbbing Gristle. But maybe he had a couple of classic prog era Genesis records as a guilty pleasure. Back to Sleazy though, his production on this album is so varied, from great electronic stuff to much more out there shit, but in general united by the same kind of lo-fi patchwork style, it almost reminds me of those hammer horror movies, but if they had been inspired by romanticist poetry!
Hey, I just came up with a great idea, I’m going to try and avoid using the word “esoteric” in this review!
“The Anal Staircase” is the first song on this album and I imagine it’s introduced a lot of people to Coil. It’s probably the most industrial Coil get on the album, but it’s very catchy as well. And erratic! And sloppy! It really is like an anal staircase (what a great title). The song starts with a strident sample from The Rites of Spring, then this spastic chiming keyboard line joins in. There’s also the sound of what sounds like children playing (this ends the song), clanging percussion, and what sounds like a crappily synthesized horn line, as well as other beautifully low quality keyboard shite. Also a weird sort of fast whooshing sound. Now imagine all that stuff happening at the same time. It’s a very dizzying performance. John Balance sounds in complete power over it, especially when he commands “blow the fucking thing apart, blow the fucking thing apart”, in his slightly high-pitched voice. If Halloween had retained its pagan roots this song would be played during it. So yes, this is a supremely good introduction to Coil.
“Slur” follows on and manages to be great in a different way. John Balance’s vocal melody is quite subtle but it’s there and once you notice it you won’t be able to get it out of your head. The song has a sort of rustic post-punk vibe, very Nick Cavesy. There’s a really gothic harmonica sound. It sounds like the harmonica has become very rusty with time, fading into the desert atmosphere and becoming an integral part of it. The guitar sound is kind of goofy and baritone, but very catchy and bouncy, like a snapping elastic band. The song has a pretty menacing atmosphere but it’s a different menace from “The Anal Staircase”, it’s the menace of a saloon being slowly burnt by the sun with the people inside unable to escape and being too drunk to notice or care.
“Ostia (The Death of Pasolini)” is a fucking tune as well. It starts off with creepy atmospherics, a kind of melancholic but jeering harpsichord line and a very passionate eastern sounding violin. This makes it a rather tense, majestic song. It shits all over “Kashmir” by Zep, that’s for sure. And most Led Zeppelin songs, for that matter. Balance delivers another great vocal performance, cool modulation, and the “throw his bones over, the white cliffs of dover, and murder me!” The gloomy repetition of the song gives it an intensity, so that when the next song, an interlude comes on, blasting a brass band, the juxtaposition is hilarious.
The next few songs to me don’t stick out as much but they’re still good. “Penetralia” doesn’t seem so much a proper song as a collection of bizarre sound effects and a heavy guitar riff that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Killing Joke album (well it would, plagiarism is always out of place, after all) . It’s still a lot of fun to listen to, I love the blurting horn instrument. And the song in all has a nice cheap and dirty quality, maybe their attempt at doing Foetus. “Ravenous” is a creepy song with creaking sound effects, droning choir, and an eerie harpsichord. There’s also a melodic horn line as well. “Circles of Mania” is the gayest song on the album, and it has a great agitated jazz punk vibe. But dirty and synthesized! “When you swallowed one you just swallow another”. Fun acoustic bass line and screaming from John! Fab slurping noises at the end. “Blood from the Air” has this weird, clinical buzzing sound, maybe Steve Stapleton had a hand in it. More clanging noises, some gothic synth and harpsichord. Menacing shit, Balance is at his lowest, most sinister croon.
“Who by Fire” is one of the best covers I’ve heard! And with the recently and sadly departed Leonard Cohen everyone should listen! It has a very catchy keyboard line at the beginning, ghostly groaning background vocals from Marc Almond, the keyboard line getting louder and other various instruments swirling around it. John Balance sounds great as well, delivering a convicted performance doing Leonard justice, and bringing his own gothic vibe to it, not that Leonard wasn’t gothic, of course.
“The Golden Section” is a rather jaunty tune with some pseudo-scientific occultist narration, and a gothic choir underneath. It’s a bit cheesy but it’s a fun song and the martial drumming gives it a driving vibe. Good music to walk to. “The First Five Minutes after Death” is a great piece of wintery melancholic electronica, with a catchy as hell synth line that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Tangerine Dream song. The percussion is neat well, kind of African or whatever, and there’s some woodwind instrument that’s very pretty. And some nice noise as well! Hell yeah!
So, to conclude, with the styles included on this album and the considerable vocal and lyrical talents of John Balance, I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to listen to it. Unless you’re a cunt.
Review by: Dina Levina Album assigned by: Charly Saenz
The man who gave birth to this album declared himself a Man of a Thousand Faces in the opening song, and I expected an adventure, varicolored and bizarre. However, the faces he presents here are all samely and somewhat Bon Jovi-ish. Pleasant but a tad pretentious lyrics-wise, the first song is more or less okay.
Then comes One Fine Day, a retro little thing about rain and hope, and I’m hoping for something to happen. Still, all I get is some preachy obscure message and melancholy music I try hard to enjoy, up until the second when the nice dramatic effect given by piano and strings is violently murdered by the olden guitar, and all hope goes to hell.
I’m waiting for something strange and fascinating, but as the lyrics say, “beginning to wonder if we'll wait in vain”.
After One Fine Day, we have 80 Days, all of them equally fine. ‘Tis an uplifting song in which the singer is gently trying to get sexual consent from someone while riding in a car. There is certain harmony in it, since this song is perfect for car rides, plain and optimistic. In the middle, someone from the horn section gets loose for a few seconds, but an invisible hand silences them quickly.
After the car ride we spend almost eight minutes in a meditative state in Estonia, being cosmic and monotonous. The xylophone is giving it a mysterious touch, the lyrics carry the same obscure wisdom the author is so desperate to preach. “I wonder if my rope's still hanging from the tree”, he wonders, and I feel eternal gloom grabbing me by the throat, attempting to drown me in string-ridden despair.
The jolly Bon Jovi vibes are back in An Accidental Man, the rope around my neck loosens, but my will to live and listen further is shaken. “It's not that I'm complaining, It's all the same to me”, sings the man, and I nod mournfully. It feels like being in a particularly claustrophobic Stephen King story - we’re still riding in that car, but the scenery doesn’t seem to change.
Preachy again, the song suddenly breaks out into something African in the line of The Lion King, which is nice and refreshing. Also, nice flute. The author declares repeatedly that he’s carrying a message of hope, and I still want to believe him - we have the last, thirty-minute long song ahead of us.
I regret to say that it fails me.
P.S: Phrases like “the womb of time” in poetry and lyrics must be punishable by death.
Review by: Joseph Middleton-Welling Album assigned by: Eric Pember
This is a record about the small things but the things that are also perversely the most important things in the world-like particles!
First a bit of background, ‘They Might be Giants’ (TMBG), ‘Flood’ is their third album and their first for a major label, it’s also probably their most well known and, full admission, the only album of theirs that I’ve heard all the way through. There were only two guys in TMBG at this point John Linsell and John Flansburgh, and they split most of the instruments between them with a few parts played by session musicians. Notably all the percussion on this album is provided by various drum machines. The sound picture is coloured by various synths and organs which combined with the drum machine, lends some of album the feel of an early Magnetic Fields LP or a less frantic Devo. Not that the album is monochromatic, some songs such as ‘Your Racist Friend’ and the closing track ‘Road Movie to Berlin’ tip the balance more strongly towards guitars. A lot of the tracks feature prominent accordion melodies and this combined with the tight songwriting lends the album a good sense of diversity. Binding together the various musical threads on this album is an atmosphere of DIY experimentation. It doesn’t necessarily feel like a band record, more like, perhaps, a group of intelligent (but emotional) scientists piecing together songs together using diagrams, test tubes and a wide range of slightly archaic instruments.
What stops the album turning into a piece of experimental art musik like Throbbing Gristle or Coil is that musically this album also harks back to simpler forms of American music from the 50’s, 60’s and in some cases even earlier. Songs by Carol King and the various Rogers, Hammersteins and Schopenhauers who seemingly wrote all the songs back in this halcyon era are often brought to mind when listening to many of these tracks. By that I mean the songs have simple and catchy melodies that nevertheless bound to formally conservative structures. Verses, choruses and middle eights are all well in evidence here. TMBG even include a 50's cover ‘Istanbul’ that makes the connection to older forms of music explicit. This combination of high quality songwriting in the 'classic' mould combined with somewhat modernistic and unorthodox arrangements helps create a quirky but overall charming aesthetic that draws you in even as it surprises you. Much of this surprise is conveyed by the lyrics.
Lyrically, the songs on this album address potentially trivial subjects but these themes mask deeper and more essential emotions that come to the fore after repeated listens. ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul’ is both about a night light and sung from the perspective of the object itself. Other songs on the album are about being reincarnated as a bag of groceries and the need to wear prosthetic foreheads. When first listening to this album (at least for me) I didn't pay too much attention to the lyrics but I really enjoyed the melodies and the arrangements. After listening a few times I came to notice the quirky subject matter and I was amused. However the problem with 'funny lyrics' is that they often they are only funny or interesting in the short term and after that rapidly become tedious (Weird Al et. al.). With these lyrics it’s the fact that they're often used as cover to talk about some deeper emotional stuff. For example 'Birdhouse' is really a plea for companionship and 'Dead' is a song about deep regret. Obviously the songs are also funny and quirky but if you scratch through the surface there’s often real emotional resonance buried inside.
Take for instance 'Particle Man', which might be the signature song on this record. On first listen it’s easy to get caught up in the bouncy accordion and child like references to a cast of characters that wouldn't be out of place on a Nickleodeon Cartoon. But have a read of this verse:
Person man, person man
Hit on the head with a frying pan
Lives his life in a garbage can
Person man
Is he depressed or is he a mess?
Does he feel totally worthless?
Who came up with person man?
Degraded man, person man
The song is actually about the vacuity of existence in modern late capitalist society and how it leads an unsatisfyible sense of longing and questioning within people at the bottom of the economic pile. Adorno would be proud.
In conclusion this album will worm its way into your head like a tiny particle and then beat you over the head like an angry triangle.
Review by: Syd Spence Album assigned by: Francelino Prazeres de Azevedo Filho
Ever since this project began, I’ve been given records whose taste doesn’t suit my palate, which is good to a degree. It get’s me out of my ghetto of listening patterns. So far though, I’ve not really enjoyed any of them, which i find weird because I think i have a wide palette. I mean my current listening collection has reggae, jazz, metal, and pop rock, and yet, you Only Solitairians keep giving me music that I don’t enjoy. Apparently, i’m more narrow minded then I think I am.
However, this round I was assigned an album that I should like. It’s this Brazilian funky hip hop alt rock fusion group with leftist politics and fantastic hand drumming (that only Brazil could do.) Essentially, Brazil's answer to Rage Against the Machine, a group that any child of ‘90s knows and loves. Yet, I don’t like this record.
First let’s start with the MC. Now I don’t exactly know what he is talking about, I’m a dumb American that can’t speak Portuguese. It’s pretty terrible how monolingual my decaying empire is, but that’s the fact of the matter, but I digress. I’m pretty certain all the lyrics are leftist in tone, I believe i heard a Viva Zapata, and who doesn’t love Emiliano Zapata? Well, fascists of course, but surely any sane person loves themselves some Zapatistas. So good for Chico. It’s just his delivery sounds like a macho football hooligan that wanted to be a hip hop MC. I just find his tone and style unsavory. He probably is spitting the truth, but my dumb ears can’t decipher it or more to the point enjoy it.
The next problem is the guitar. The tone is so ‘90s, it’s like a mixture of generic hardish alt rock and funk, which just turns me off. Like if he sounds like a local bar band’s guitarist attempt at sounding like John Frusciante or Tom Morello, and the guitar tones he uses are so generic ‘90s altrock that it sucks all the funk out.
With all those problem, I must say the percussion was on point. I love those tribal drums, and this album has a lot of it. Unfortunately, they surround subpar songs with subpar guitar and a subpar MC. Not for me, perhaps next session, I’ll get a new album that I will love.
