Music

I recently went back to Automatic. It was pretty good! The Jesus and Mary Chain went full rock ‘n roll on Automatic, and that of course turned many people off. No more of the sugary pop that was on Psychocandy…

Honey’s Dead sounds disturbingly like Screamadelica. “Sundown” makes that much really obvious. Disturbing because Bobby Gillespie left The Jesus and Mary Chain after Psychocandy to form Primal Scream, of course. The Jesus and Mary Chain are a hard band to critique.…

Often cited as the origin of the noise pop genre, "Psychocandy" by The Jesus and Mary Chain is as archetypal now as it was then. And just as much of a classic.

(Original publication date unknown) We all know Psychocandy, the landmark album to introduce writing songs with noise. Yeah, The Velvet Underground were one of the first to use noise feedback in their songs, but they used it in a more abrasive manner,…

Featured on the front page of RateYourMusic.com! On first listen, this has less variety in songcraft than The Big Roar. Primarily because there’s a lot less dynamics this time around. Most songs on Wolf’s Law have no surprises in them like…

The first Kinks album consists mostly of a bunch of mediocre R&B covers and terrible original songs penned by the band’s producer at the time Shel Talmy. Odds are you already have any good songs on here on some Greatest Hits album.…

All over the place. Can’t decide how much of it wants to be tribal industrial or electronic dance and when or where. There’s no pattern here and it isn’t schizophrenic in a way that’s interesting because it never goes beyond…

The debut album by the legendary indie pop artist The Magnetic Fields features vocal contributions from Suzan Anway. Distant Plastic Trees will leave you cold—but not in the way you’ll expect.

Two fantastic songs here with “Meeting of the Spirits” and “A Lotus on Irish Streams.” The former has a slow, brooding, dark ambiance to it rarely heard from its era. I had just finished a gothic metal album before starting…

The more the Melvins try to sound young, the older they get. This is true of many artists. Nick Cave immediately comes to mind: whenever he tries to rock nowadays, his first priority is convincing the world he still has sex appeal.…

The fourth album by The Monkees is among the greatest rock records of the ’60s, exceeding all expectations.

The fantastic thing about Freak Out! is that Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention made it as a direct satire of dippy-hippie flower power culture, yet even as a psychedelic rock album it competes at the quality level of…

To this day, Uncle Meat remains one of the most unique listening experiences I’ve ever had. Unique to the point where I almost don’t even want to call it “music.” Not as a value judgment, but because it genuinely feels…

You know all those retro indie bands around today that make music styled in the vein of ’60s psychedelic pop, only mildly updating it with more modern (but still tepid) production tricks? Well, that stuff has actually been going on…

Broken Boy Soldiers has a lot of decent to good songs, but not enough great ones. “Steady, as She Goes” is an obvious winner. I also quite like “Hands” and “Intimate Secretary,” but the album gets tiring quickly. I suppose…

Brilliant approach: just bash your guitar on the wall until you hear a new sound instead of reaching it naturally. I can’t respect The Parable of Arable Land at all. Tunelessly playing your instruments at random as if one gave…

Let It Be is the weakest of The Replacements “power trilogy,” despite what its reputation may tell you. Too much of the band’s punk phase still lingers without the induction of power pop that earned them their alternative sound and…

Haha, what the hell is with Helen Wiggin’s drumming? She never stops tapping away for even a second. It’s like someone sat her down at the kit and flipped a switch on her back to the “on” position and walked…

Good stuff, the faintly shimmering guitars of First and Last and Always are catchy and what keep you coming back to the dreariness. The vocalist is pretty bad though, you can hear him really putting pressure on his throat to…

Floodland has the same dark atmosphere as First and Last and Always, except bigger and badder. And all that bombast in an attempt to be more powerful actually makes it, well, less oppressive and bleak than its predecessor. In a way, it works…

“Kiss the Carpet” and “Lights” are your brooding post-punk taken to an extreme, trudging along at a pace that would make a snail seem exciting. They lack the intriguing menace and subtle hooks of The Sisters of Mercy‘s album material…

On The Smashing Pumpkins’s fourth studio album, the band trades in its guitar heavy grunge-influenced playing for the more subtle, sensual textures that pervaded the band’s previous album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Gone are the roaring guitar and…

The Smashing Pumpkins’s first album Gish arrived at the forefront of the coming alternative rock and grunge movement, and like other acclaimed bands of the time, the Pumpkins pioneered the new sound and attitude shift from the currently mainstream ’80s…

I went through a phase of the music side of my life where I frequently said that I really liked double albums. This was when my experience with them was primarily the best stuff: London Calling, The Beatles, etc. It…

Buh buh buh, time to listen to the new Smashing Pumpkins album, Monuments to an Elegy. I’m a real fan, by the way. To prove it, I think the Machina albums are great alt rock all around, that Adore is…

Zeitgeist is more of a disappointment than “bad,” if that makes sense. It’s disappointing because The Smashing Pumpkins have seemingly completely abandoned their layered, psychedelic sound. I liked Machina II, but Zeitgeist comes off as mostly standard modern alternative rock.…

Yes, the title track of Meat Is Murder is really stupid and just a shortsighted version of “How Soon Is Now?” (which is even on the American version of this album), but pound for pound, I consider this the best…

Strangeways, Here We Come is an admirable attempt by The Smiths to explore new sonic territory, understandably so with the limited structure and format of the jangle pop genre. Here, the jangle is all but gone. Without a doubt, the…

Catchy jangling guitars, fantastic lyrics and delivery, and the very understated yet very fantastic additional string sections make The Queen Is Dead as pleasant to listen to as it is touching. People who defend “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others”…

The Soft Machine are a rightfully-named band. Their compositionally-layered blend of jazzy, psychedelic rock with frantic organ playing sounds like a machine straight out of a cartoon huffing and puffing, tooting and whistling while it bounces around, blowing smoke everywhere.…

Here Are The Sonics!!! is the 1965 debut album by The Sonics. Considered very influential to both punk music and garage rock, the album receives near universal acclaim. But helping to pioneer some burgeoning genres does not alone make this…

It’s surprising how big of a leap The Stooges made from their self-titled debut to I. Ron Asheton’s guitar freakouts are sparser and not as wild as they would be on the next two albums, underselling the band’s raucous energy that…

Expecting Taste to be all shoegaze could seem honest mistake due to the melancholy, acoustic opener “And Let Me Drift Away.” However, immediately after, the band makes an immediate 180—the first sign of Taste‘s true punk aesthetic—and explodes into fast-paced…

Oi, The Wake tricked me with Assembly, so this review is dedicated to the other five fans of The Wake. The compilation Assembly ostensibly has five unreleased songs, but it’s actually two. “Rise and Shine” is a demo of “Sail…

If you’re looking at Make It Loud, it’s because you loved Here Comes Everybody and/or Something That No One Else Could Bring and wanted to know if later efforts by The Wake continue in their style and quality. You might see the poor reception…

I’m gonna be upfront: I hate rock operas, honestly. Tommy is not an exception. A melodramatic story that’s impossible to relate to in its campyness and is amateurishly written to boot. There’s a reason The Who are musicians first and…

Come on, did The xx run out of album covers already? Anyway, Coexist isn’t much of a departure from their first album—I don’t know how you could have expected it to be. Likewise, it’s just as inoffensive, overly self-conscious indie-pandering…

‘Odessey and Oracle’ is one of the greatest psychedelic pop albums—heck, one of the greatest albums ever made.

‘Blue Afternoon’ returns Tim Buckley to a more conventional, modest-length song format, a departure from the ethereal album cohesion shown prior.

The Waiting Room sounds like a different band trying to rip off Tindersticks’s sound but failing at it because they aren’t Tindersticks. However, this is Tindersticks, so that’s concerning. Doubly so, because their previous album, The Something Rain, is one of the best they’ve…

Often called “the best album Paul McCartney never made,” Todd Rundgren’s 1972 double album Something / Anything? is indeed as good as any album the master of pop put out during his solo career, if not better. The album is…

Night Castle lost a lot of points just for being two fucking hours long. Every song follows the exact same format. Every lyric is predictable, and trying to cover up the amateurish lyrics with the most melodramatic vocals and instrumentation is…

It’s very rare to find a trip hop album that pushes the boundaries of the genre, but Pre-Millennium Tension is one of them. The production is damp—and I mean damp. Some of the thickest beats I’ve ever heard, strange off-kilter instrumentation,…

I love Dear Science for taking post-punk the closest to the dance floor it’s ever been, as well as just being a great update of R&B-inspired rock, but that’s not enough for me to call myself a TV on the Radio fan. Return…

Tourist History is a fun little album but entirely a one-trick pony. At least Two Door Cinema Club has the sense to cut it at 30 minutes, making the album work as a short blast of energy. The band could…

To no one’s surprise, the best post-Kyuss John Garcia album is the one that sounds the most like Kyuss. Not enough, though. That attitude isn’t quite there on Coping With the Urban Coyote. Unida has that fuzzy, psychedelic guitar tone,…

Vampire Rodents’s Lullaby Land is brutish, misanthropic industrial in the vein of Skinny Puppy. In fact, Lullaby Land has a lot specifically in common with Skinny Puppy, most noticeably in Anton Rathausen’s sinister gremlin-like vocals that sound almost identical to…

Coming from the odd place of having listened to Peter Hammill‘s solo work first, I continually found myself feeling Pawn Hearts lacked the immediate, intense insanity of the wild The Silent Corner and the Empty Stage. I feel much of Pawn Hearts…

It’s easy to deride Van Halen in the light of the dozens of mediocre spawns they birthed, and they hold a large responsibility for ushering in the worst era of rock: glam metal—but make no mistake. Van Halen aren’t your…

(Original publication date unknown) For someone who’s into a lot of “indie/alternative” music, I don’t think anything gets me more puzzling looks from like-minded listeners than the fact that I really like Van Halen. It seems younger, “hipper” music fans…

Rough Trade are two independent record stores (Shops!) located in the UK. For a little over a decade now, these stores have compiled several albums of varying genres with song selected by the staff. Eventually, the record chain opened a…

Surprisingly, the post-Kyuss project with the most Kyuss members, Vista Chino, is one of the alumni’s weakest.

Nublu Sessions brings a breath of fresh air that trip hop really needed, but unfortunately long after the scene had died. Still, great music exists out of time. Norah Jones sings on two sublime, more traditional, soothing trip hop tracks.…

A bit amusing how hard of a time I had finding this release for a moment. I wasn’t aware that Wendy Carlos had a sex change after making this soundtrack and changed her name, and her previous name was cemented…

It’s really cool listening to Is This Real? and realizing how much Nirvana took from it. Of course, Kurt Cobain cited Wipers as an influence constantly. That influence is never more obvious than on songs like “D-7” and “Potential Suicide,” which Cobain…

Despite its mild reception, Land of the Lost is a good album. It doesn’t have the cohesiveness or distinct identity that the previous three Wipers albums had, such as Is This Real?‘s punk-inspired new wave, Youth of America‘s perfect bridge…

Wipers Box Set compiles almost all of Wipers’s best work—certainly their best albums. Wipers produced some of the catchiest punk tunes of the ’80s. Greg Sage is a wonderful guitarist who mixes melody with aggression in a way that predicted…

The murky production on Youth of America is amazing—dark and hollow. Perhaps the perfect halfway point between punk and post-punk music. The music is still aggressive, it’s just that the textures contain it, allowing that energy to echo in its…

On Skylarking, songs are varied, have compelling instrumentation, and most importantly, are great. I kept listening to Skylarking expecting the quality to suddenly take a nosedive after each track, like many seemingly great albums (disappointingly) do—but it never happened. Fan-flippin-tastic…

The thing that puts Chrono Trigger‘s soundtrack above that of most 16-bit SNES RPGs is the fact that while pretty much every RPG of the era tried to emulate the composition and “epic” feel of classical music (the predictable thing…