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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 7, 2021 13:23:09 GMT
David Bowie - Station to Station (1976)..........7.5/10
I always call him overrated - because he's overrated (um) - but that doesn't mean he wasn't occasionally great and great over a long stretch too. I'll just take Changesbowie, thanks.
He was also a pain in the ass because he's specifically impossible to separate importance from great records in his case - and this record is full of contradictions. A record that Iggy........Reed and especially Bolan could never have made - and I prefer all of them - especially Bolan his arch rival with Electric Warrior/The Slider - but this was just outside his grasp and artistry.
It was also outside of Bowie's grasp too - this is his best singing ever but on his chilliest and weirdly robotic, icily faux human record to date. I rarely play it, but when I play it I do enjoy it though not as much as Rolling Stone magazine which routinely often places this record in its all-time top 100........GTFO.
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Deceit
Full Member
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Post by Deceit on Feb 8, 2021 18:32:40 GMT
I'm just going to list all the albums I've listened to since my last post:
Social Interiors - Traces of Mercury (9/10) 93 Current 93/Sickness of Snakes - Nightmare Culture (7.5/10) Vasilisk - Acqua (8/10) Takehisa Kosugi - Catch Wave (8.5/10) Test Dept. - Beating the Retreat (9/10) The Residents - Duck Stab/Buster & Glen (8/10) SPK - Information Overload Unit - (8.5/10) Graham Lambkin/Jason Lescalleet - The Breadwinner (10/10) Graham lambkin/Jason Lescalleet - Air Supply (8.5/10) Chris Watson - El Tren Fantasma (9/10) KK.Null, Chris Watson & Z'EV - Number One (9/10) Matthias Urban - Dialoge____Gideon's Disease (9.5/10) Matthias Urban - Passagen (9.5/10) Yellow Swans - Going Places (8/10) Gen Ken Montgomery - Endogeny (10/10)
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Post by themoviesinner on Feb 8, 2021 20:25:22 GMT
Amorphis - Elegy (1996) -- 10/10Among the greatest albums of the 90s. A mixture of melodic death/power metal, atmospheric/psychadelic rock and folk that was particularly unique and peculiar when it came out and probably still remains as such even today. The musical arrangements in this are surprising and most songs take some unexpected turns. But despite of this mixture of, seemingly, unconnected elements the album is incredibly consistent and not a single moment sounds forced or out of place. A unique, inspiring effort from a band that is generally overlooked in the rock/metal scene and definitely their crowning achievement.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 9, 2021 13:45:05 GMT
The Nerves - EP (1976) - (4 songs).........9/10.......
Seriously, we're not really going to be friends if you don't like this. I mean, I'll lie and say "oh I liked that movie too!" or something but the whole time I'll be suspicious because you are lacking some key pleasure receptors within your noodle.
This is 4 songs in LESS than 8 minutes......that's around 2 minutes a song - the scientifically proven perfect length to induce multiple popgasms. If you're sad and play this you will become instantly giddily happy........if you are happy and you play this you will start dry humping parking meters and/or STOP signs.....not many things (legally) have ever had such affects on the human mind.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 10, 2021 11:08:04 GMT
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Smash Hits (1969) .......8+/10In one of the great weird contrasting things in Rock history I'd argue that the initial reason Hendrix was/is considered a greater guitar player than the "big 3" of the 60s - Clapton, Beck, Page is that he wasn't just flashier, he could actually write songs. Page later could (I guess), Beck (Hendrix's true guitar hero rival imo) never really could (and didn't sing), Clapton eventually transitioned to a singer/songwriter more than a guitar hero but that wasn't initially the case. But Hendrix could write from the beginning, with no collaborator and this odds and sods collection plays like a greatest hits collection while just covering a little over a year - with only 2 covers. Youtube doesn't have this song in a studio version - "Stone Free" - a B-side on Smash Hits - but what's the most striking part of this song (?) - is it the solo, the structure, the way he allows himself a chance to show off vocally ("Now dig this baby....." before unleashing a great swinging wang line "woman here, woman there, trying to keep me in a plastic cage!" - yeah I hear ya buddy),.......... his cool as fnck voice, the fact that the song ends so quick with no guitar circle jerk, the way he sets up the solo vocally in his writing too - "Turn Me loose baby!".......he had all of this right from the jump. He was also the flashiest........ and you know, um, maybe just the best guitarist too.......
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 10, 2021 23:38:53 GMT
The Scruffs - Wanna Meet The Scruffs? (1977) - ~ 8 ++There's a couple of people on this board who dig Power-Pop as much as pacinoyes....... Mattsby ....and maybe Archie also ....that one other dude ..........but no one, here or anywhere else might know this record that much. The Scruffs were Big Star fans/fanatics when no one else was really - ok, maybe Cheap Trick were - and the sound is right in between #1 Record and Radio City with a little Beatles, Raspberries and Badfinger mixed in. They were from Memphis too so they were girl crazy naturally because of the air/water/BBQ in Memphis ....they just didn't have a Thirteen or Ballad of El Goodoo.......but that's a little unfair. It's still a great-ish full length - very rare in Power Pop - and in 1977 there were just a handful of those total period - and in 2021 I've played it twice in a row while "working" today.
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Post by themoviesinner on Feb 11, 2021 16:51:26 GMT
Grave Digger - Knights Of The Cross (1998) -- 9/10I own this album, but hadn't listened to it in years and had forgotten how awesome it was. Grave Digger's concept albums almost never disappoint and this is probably the best of the bunch. Within the course of eleven heavy, catchy, inspiring tracks (and an intro that puts the listener right into the mood) the band recounts the story of the order of the Knights Templar. A great album and among the best old-school heavy metal releases of the 90s. Pure heavy metal awesomeness!
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 12, 2021 20:39:59 GMT
Natalie Sweet - Oh By The Way .......It's..............Natalie Sweet (2019) - 7.5 / 10
Like pacinoyes recent raves The Regrettes, Exbats, Lucy and The Rats - Jesus, what great taste! - Natalie Sweet is the right mix of catchyness, poppyness and brattyness. She is also dangerously close to being too cute for her own good - and at least 2 of these songs border on iffy, knock it off already novelty.
But when she nails this schtick - which she does a lot - she has more melodies than you can count and these songs blur into a heady, fizzy mix that goes snap/crackle/pop!.....Sweet is the singer for The Shanghais and Control Freaks but much like Lucy Ellis she got better when she left and went solo.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 13, 2021 11:07:40 GMT
Squeeze - Singles, 45s and Under (1982) - 1978-1982.......8.5+ / 10
Bunch of great Squeeze singles and radio tracks - almost perfect but not quite (where's Vicky Verky! - too much like Up The Junction probably). But where's In Quintessence!
Only rivaled by XTC in their late 70s/early 80s peak radio ready run as bands who wrote dynamite pop. Not just ace music but a gateway album that opens you up to some classic bands and for their era newer harder edged bands too.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 13, 2021 22:17:23 GMT
The Coolies - Uh Oh...........It's The Coolies (2019) - 7.5 / 10
2nd to last record that our High Priestess, the late great Kim Shattuck made - a side project EP with Melanie Vammen & Palmyra Delran....... it's 6 tracks with no bad ones and a couple of the expected high points on anything Shattuck played on from 1991-2019.
If she was still alive, she'd be doing this song on SNL and smashing her guitar just like .......um.......... nah she wouldn't be doing either of those things but she'd probably be laughing to herself and her sarcastic ha-ha-ha at the end of this song is a typically Kimagnificent kiss off.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 14, 2021 18:49:36 GMT
Screeching Weasel - My Brain Hurts (1991) - at least a 9 ...... / 10
Kurt Cobain was born in 1967 and in 1991 changed Rock.......Ben Weasel was born a year later and in his own way changed Rock the same year too.......that year difference in age was crucial between them and how they saw music.
Cobain knew the iconography of Rock - loved it and used it - and wrote from that perspective (often great too). But Weasel outright rejected almost all the touchstones Cobain liked - he wrote about a teenagers POV exclusively - not the iconography around it. It was all boredom, girls and bad reruns - without any self conscious adult elements added here.
By removing an adult perspective - irony or astute commentary - this was music teenagers would have made themselves: disposable, faddish, snarky, piss your pants funny but smart too. Weasel didn't explicitly court dorky middle aged Rock critics in 1991 - or shitty Pitchfork critics 30 years later.
Not just a classic.....a subversive classic.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 15, 2021 17:26:00 GMT
The Lillingtons - Death By Television (1999) - ~ 8 / 10
Too loud, too fast........too stupid (even for me), too gloriously catchy with lyrics that are like Ed Wood fronting a bunch of morons playing so hard that they may break their wrists. That this album can keep this caffeinated energy up for 14 songs (!) is the reason it inspires such awe from its legion of followers.......that it isn't 4 songs shorter is the reason the rating isn't higher from this old dude.
Stupendous album cover though......
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 16, 2021 10:23:37 GMT
The Jacobites - Robespierre's Velvet Basement (1985) - Well.......it's real good, but you won't play it a lot....... ~ 8 ish
Ghostly, dirge-like record made under the heavy influence of dope and self-indulgence and recorded like it's coming in over two paper cups connected by a piece of string and often sounding like first takes on top of it.
Not music you can dance to, sing along to, or even live with in any sustained way - it's rather music to die by, or to come down to or to pull the covers over your head and sleep for hours.
Evokes the Stones, Dylan, T. Rex but not at their most exciting or "best" - more like at their most acoustic, fragile and ragged with dead ends approaching.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 17, 2021 11:25:08 GMT
The Undertones - The Undertones (1979) - 9/10
Fantabulous debut that was a classic in its original 14 songs but got even better a few months later when their landmark first single was added to EVERY edition since.
Such simple energetic genius that they made their influences - The Buzzcocks and The Ramones sound like they were Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 18, 2021 11:16:25 GMT
Hayley and The Crushers - Vintage Millennial (2020) - ~ 5.5 /10 "Kiss Me so I Can" is a genuine standout track, kinda love it - like The Go-Gos crossed with Wild Cherry Pepsi right down to those Belinda Carlisle-like vocals but nothing else hits like that song .......and there are 10 other songs on this thing.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 19, 2021 10:54:14 GMT
Peter Doherty - Grace/Wastelands (2009) - ~8/10
"Peter" - not "Pete" - which lets you know this a serious, grown up affair which mostly means it's often missing drums, and Carl Barât - co-songwriter on just 1 track (below) or anyone who can play that crucial role.
The first 2 songs and the last 2 (the last is hidden) are padding - the meat of the record is tracks 3 through 11 with several stunners and those are of the kind that are mostly outside his two previous bands.
Producer Stephen Street a veteran of British foppery (Blur/Smiths) manages this entire poetic conceit with a veneer of stiff upper lip good taste..... though the very best moments are when you think it might veer outside all that and into a spectacular trainwreck.
Those moments - haunted, knowing and absinthe soaked - well those are all Pete(r)'s.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 20, 2021 9:56:21 GMT
The Smiths - Singles (1984-1987)..........(1995)........~8.5/10)Like many important British bands The Smiths can't be summed up with their studio album catalog. So even though, to me, they cut just one-all timer (1986's The Queen Is Dead) I'd say you still need this which serves as a supplement, and a historical document and a cheat sheet for my funnier jokes about the conflict between front men and guitarists and these two guys specifically.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 21, 2021 11:01:43 GMT
The Queers - Don't Back Down (1995) - 8.5+/10
Hilariously immature and offensive - dissing Chicago beer while celebrating Punk Rock girls (and flat chested girls too), aspiring to be professional dishwashers and by default worshipping both The Ramones and by extension The Beach Boys.
About as much fun (and funnier) than any record has a right to be - a whacked out American classic that couldn't care less about about any band from the UK basically ever or if pop music stopped in 1977.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 22, 2021 6:34:02 GMT
Richard & Linda Thompson - Shoot Out The Lights (1982) -10/10 On the original record there were 8 songs .......at least 7 were great - no ......maybe all 8 actually so yeah that's a 10. Missing from our 80s poll because sometimes we do stupid stuff.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 23, 2021 11:11:55 GMT
The Rolling Stones - Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out (1970) - 8.5+ / 10
The greatest band in the world when this concert was recorded - and they had been since '68 - in the middle of their GOAT run and they sort of prove it........and not. New guitarist Mick Taylor takes a previous great song - Midnight Rambler and turns it into, in this version, a chilling reinvention or a disturbing call to murder. It's an unbelievably frightening performance.
The rest of the way they find time to sloppily, tightly (they go in and out!) cover Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry (twice) and they queue up for the bathroom round about 7:35 which really has nothing to do with what people normally do in bathrooms.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 24, 2021 11:47:18 GMT
The Queers - Don't Back Down (1995) - 8.5+ / 10
Right from the opener, The Queers - they're not btw - offer a tribute/commentary on the singer's girlfriend's flat chest - weirdly sweet, immature, objectifying, sexist, romantic, all at once!
The album rips-off The Beach Boys via The Ramones without caring who to pay a settlement amount to and they don't stop there either - dissing a specific "Chicago" beer, their own potential job opportunities (dismal), all while loving love - it's a whacked out, specifically American kind of record.
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Post by themoviesinner on Feb 24, 2021 17:03:46 GMT
Within Temptation - The Unforgiving (2011) -- 9/10I absolutely love this album. Far and away the best the band has ever released. It is a concept album (the story it tells later become a comic book series) and it is extremely energetic, bombastic and relentless right till the very end. It's an incredibly successful combination of rock and symphonic elements, all the songs are incredibly catchy, nothing seems unecessary or feels like filler and everything blends together extremely well to highlight the concept. Among the best albums of the previous decade for sure.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 25, 2021 12:09:18 GMT
Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures (1979) - 10 / 10Wait, did Joy Division miss out entirely in our GOAT poll? Um......GTFO, MAR.....twice. Here aided by the most important producer to a bands recorded sound - ever (?) - Martin Hannett - who introduced recording them in a way that emphasized each element, removed each element and increased the silent space between them simultaneously - they struck on a sound and sensibility that turned Rock inward, into itself. There'd never been anything quite like it......and won't be again either.
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 26, 2021 11:14:58 GMT
Dave Edmunds - Tracks on Wax 4 - (1978) - 8/10
Rockpile - the worlds best traditional Rock band from '78-80 - played on 4 full lengths in this era - 2 for Dave Edmunds, 1 for Nick Lowe and 1 under their own name. This is the 1st.....the playing on this album like the other 3 is perfect - a mix of ragged and sharp.
The closest you could get to vintage Stones or Faces in the late 70s.......The covers are great too......
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Post by pacinoyes on Feb 26, 2021 15:28:12 GMT
Julien Baker - Little Oblivions (2021) - 5 2 / 10..........even re-thinking the 5 tbh........
Edit ^
You would be hard pressed to find a new album that I would make more fun of than this one: With its grand poetic conceits, its hushed vacant singing suddenly morphing into vocal gymnastics to match swelling music (EVERY time!), its rave critics reviews and emphasis on lyrical detail - excruciating detail - this is some low hanging fruit on the pacinoyes Please Kick Me scale. The kind of album that people use words like "stunning and transcendent" to describe when I'mmina use words like "exhausting and tuneless" ....but hey for people THIS in touch with their feelings - every miserable last one of them - and into oddly named scented candles - congratulations........ you have just found your album of the year.
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