Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. This is so inventive that I’m not even sure how to approach talking about it… yet what’s strange is that all the components are completely standard – there are no strange undefined sounds or crazy synth effects here. Instead, you just have completely masterful songwriting. The two “songs” (more like movements) pass [...]
Great bit of Glam Rock. The music sounds like some sort of cross between Roxy Music and David Bowie, and the singer like a Syd Barrett/Bob Dylan hybrid. In other words, it sounds very familiar. However Mott the Hoople do bring enough personality along for it not to feel generic; the chemistry between the singer [...]
I like it. I’m not flabbergasted, but that’s likely because I’m hearing it filtered through decades of music that was in fact influenced by it. It’s basically a mashing of Funk and Jazz with some light experimentation thrown in (“Watermelon Man” and its flute chants come to mind). It’s fun, stylish, and fresh, but maybe a [...]
For some reason I found this to be a really hard album to get a proper grasp on. It’s all over the place tonally, ranging from 12 minutes of constant buzzing on “Krautrock” to a harmless bop with sinister undertones on “The Sad Skinhead”, a spaced out guitar instrumental that turns into synthesizer insanity on [...]
Oh man, the popularization of syntherizers has really messed with Rock, hasn’t it? Not that I’m complaining, as this is pretty fascinating. To me this was better than their debut; the music somehow sounded both more experimental and more listenable. The trio of synthesizers, guitar and saxophone makes a comeback, but each one is massively [...]
Absolutely stunning. I couldn’t pin this down to any single genre if I wanted to; it’s an ingenious blend of Blues, Jazz and Folk, the result of which is possibly the best laid-back album I’ve ever heard. To be fair, it’s not always entirely low-key – you’ll find the occasional bit of passionately held-back wah [...]
Good stuff. Whereas Gaye’s last album was soulful social commentary, this one is smoky, funk-tinged and sexually charged. The title track is of course well-know by everybody, and gets used in movies quite a lot (often as a joke) for its clear romantic implications. Behind it hides a slew of other great, torrid soul songs, [...]
This record actually took a while to grow on me, but I frickin’ love it now. Something about it felt strangely off to me at first, and indeed it’s a special kind of Prog-Rock that I’d never really heard before. I suppose King Crimson came closest with its debut album, by blending Rock with a [...]
I’m surprised this was so poorly received by critics when it was released, because in my book this is better than Transformer. To be fair, this is an entirely different beast; instead of a catchy collection of Glam Rock songs, we have a dark epic of a concept album, lush with orchestral backing and lavish [...]
This is brilliant. It’s a lush, progressive soundscape, and yet it never relies on guitars like most Prog-Rock seems to. Instead, noises you often can’t even identify softly glide past as you lose yourself in the mesmerizing blend. It comes as a welcome change from the psychedelic insanity of Tago Mago, and everything here feels [...]
