Might as well

[Space-Dementia]

May 9, 2019
Brutalism by Idles
I don't know why I waited so long to check out their first album, especially after falling in love with Joy as an Act of Resistance pretty much immediately. This is another fantastic modern punk record from a band with so much energy that it's impossible to sit still while listening to them. The riffs are killer, the drums and bass are a fat wall of pavement, and the vocals are filthy and in your face.
Speaking of vocals, the lyrics here aren't really great, in that they're not very imaginative and they get the point across in a really straightforward way. It's something that is also present in their next album, although a little less so, as Joe finds more interesting ways to get his social viewpoints across. I do think that there's bands that have similar ideas but present them more intelligently and poetically. For example, compare these lyrics to those off Parquet Courts' recent album Wide Awake. A song like "Total Football" uses metaphors and phrases that really get you thinking, whereas a song like "1049 Gotho", as killer as it is, is so straightforward lyrically. You look at it and go "it's about depression", whereas with "Total Football", I really didn't know what the hell he was talking about until I looked up the lyrics and read them and thought about them.
All that being said, I'm not here for the lyrics, I'm here for the bangers, and there's tons of them here. Right from the start, "Heel/Heal" is terrific in its immediate attack and ferocious vocals, and that level of quality pretty much continues for at least the first half of the album. Similarly to Joy, the first half is definitely stronger than the back half, and it gets a little samey after 7 or 8 songs, but the energy is always there. In the future I'd like to see them explore a bit more, because you can only make so many albums of the same style before it starts to get boring. But as of right now, these guys are one of the most exciting punk bands around.
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These are my favorite albums right now.

[Space-Dementia]

May 21, 2019
Dogrel by Fontaines D.C.
It’s interesting cause these guys definitely have a modern post-punk vibe reminiscent of Idles and Shame but they also remind me of britpop bands like the Stone Roses and the Cranberries, as well as older bands like the Clash. But the vocals definitely give them their own vibe, because of his accent but also because of his singing/talking style which is really interesting. Sometimes it gets a little grating, especially on songs like “Too Real” where he’s just “singing” the same note a lot, but for the most part it works and it gives them their own identity. And the songs are great too. There’s not many modern debuts that are so consistent and interesting, especially in a genre that’s so simple and that’s been around for so long. The bookends are great, with “Big” as a terrific opener and statement of purpose and “Boys in the Better Land” ending with a huge burst of energy, before “Dublin City Sky” puts you to bed after a wild night out. But the energy carries throughout the album, with “Roy’s Tune” coming in right in the middle as a calming summer tune, giving you a break between all the fast and heavier songs. I think it’s cool that they formed and bonded over their love of poetry, which puts things in context since their music is pretty simple and there seems to be a lot of emphasis placed on the vocals. These guys definitely have a lot of energy and it’s gonna be fun to see where they go from here.

Chelsea Girl by Nico
Here's another album that I should have checked out at least two years ago but I kept putting off. Although she only co-wrote one of these songs, this is a fantastic collection of tracks that really come together to form an entire atmosphere. It seems kind of timeless, because it sounds really cold and kind of creepy at times, but other times it's so inviting. Take two of its best songs: "These Days" sounds like a peaceful, pensive, and romantic walk in the first weeks of autumn, while "Chelsea Girls" sounds like a funeral. But in spite of the variety of moods, the whole thing feels really consistent in terms of instrumentation and an overall melancholic theme. It reminds me a bit of Leonard Cohen at times, Van Morrison at other times, and, of course, the Velvet Underground as well. And I also hear remnants of it in songs by Dirty Projectors and Belle & Sebastian, which I thought was interesting. Initially I wasn't a big fan of the heavy use of strings and flutes, and I would like to hear what the album would have sounded with only a guitar backing her voice, or even a traditional rock band with drums and bass. But the orchestration definitely grew on me after a couple listens and now it seems like a vital part of the album. I'm excited to hear her own stuff after this, because, based on the fact that the only song she took part in writing here was "It Was a Pleasure Then", it could be really weird, but it also seems like she's a fan of beautiful, relaxing folk songs, so it'll be interesting to see what her other albums sound like.
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These are my favorite albums right now.

[Space-Dementia]

May 23, 2019
Igor by Tyler, the Creator
So, my first impression of Igor was that it kinda seemed like a forgettable album that he just sorta threw together because he had to. There were some things that stuck out to me, though, like the intro to "Igor's Theme", which I thought was really cool ever since he posted that snippet on his Instagram, and the "My love's goooone!" chorus to "Gone Gone / Thank You", which is what really led my change of heart towards this album. Basically, I knew that there was a chance I was missing something, because I didn't love Flower Boy when I first heard it, and it ended up being probably my favorite album of 2017, so I kept coming back to it 2, 3, 4, 5 times, and by now, as I'm listening to it while writing this, I can say it's definitely grown on me a lot. What makes it different from Flower Boy is that there's not as many memorable hooks, and it's definitely a little weirder. I think the lack of catchy hooks is what really kept me from liking it at first. But as the album comes to a close, I'm realizing how consistent this thing is. I realized I liked it more than I thought I did when I started giving each song a rating, and I realized they're all about the same quality. The only song slightly lower than quality than the rest is "I Don't Love You Anymore", and that's only because the titular chorus is kind of annoying. Overall, it seems like Tyler's comfortable in his new sound that he started formulating on Cherry Bomb and perfected on Flower Boy, and he's not afraid on this album to take it even further from traditional hip hop. The highlights as of right now are definitely "Gone Gone", whose chorus I'm absolutely in love with, and "Are We Still Friends", which is a terrific closer. But "Igor's Theme", "Magic Wand", and "A Boy is a Gun" are great too. I get the feeling this thing's gonna keep growing on me for now, so I definitely think I spoke too soon after listening to it for the first time. Now let's just hope the "I like Brockhampton and Mac DeMarco" kids won't ruin it for me.
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These are my favorite albums right now.

[Skinny]

[Space-Dementia]

May 26, 2019
The Idiot by Iggy Pop
Right from the first few seconds of "Sister Midnight" I could tell that Bowie played some part in the making of this album, but it wasn't until I read about the album that I realized how large of a role he played. It's hard to tell exactly who did what but it looks like he produced the whole thing and probably wrote most of the music, which kinda blurs the lines between whether this really is an Iggy Pop album or a David Bowie album, but I'm glad they released it under Iggy's name, because, although it does sound very similar to the stuff Bowie was doing in 76 and 77, I like to believe that the whole mood and atmosphere was thought up by Iggy and Bowie just kinda helped him put it all down onto tape.
But anyway, the music. It took a couple listens for me to actually start enjoying the album, but after repeated listens, this thing is really great. The first two songs are the best songs, with "Sister Midnight" setting a tense and dark but funky sound that continues on for the rest of the album, and "Nightclubbing" serving as a weird sinister soundtrack to what I imagine were some wild nights that Iggy and Bowie shared walking around Berlin by night. "Baby" is probably the weakest song on here, but only because the repeated titular vocal line gets kind of annoying. "China Girl", meanwhile, is a good song, but kind of overrated because it takes about two minutes to build up, and even then it's a pretty basic track. I think the fact that Bowie later did his own version brought more popularity to it, but I do admit that it's a good song, full of energy. "Dum Dum Boys" and "Tiny Girls" kinda seem like twin songs that complement each other well, both kinda jazzy, kinda loungy, kinda glammy. And then "Mass Production" is a cool psychedelic-industrial song that closes out the album perfectly.
I really am fascinated by the whole 'alternative' rock scene of the late 60s to late 70s. It just makes so much sense the way everything comes together and progresses. From individual artists' own progressions, like Bowie smoothly transitioning from folk to glam rock to funk to art pop to ambient pop and beyond, to the influence that everyone took and gave to and from each other. Like, the Velvet Underground influenced both Iggy and Bowie, Iggy basically invented punk, Bowie popularized the rock opera, then they worked together on this album and Lust for Life, then Bowie worked with Eno, then Eno worked with the Talking Heads, whose keyboardist also played keys for the Modern Lovers, who were produced by John Cale of the Velvet Underground and whose drummer later played for the Cars, etc. There was so much collaborations, so many relationships, between all these ridiculously talented, innovative, and influential people, and all the music was so good that it's just unbelievable. And even in genres outside of this glam rock / proto punk stuff. I mean, the whole krautrock scene in Germany was unbelievably cool, the way King Crimson and Yes and Soft Machine all factor into it too, even though they were kinda doing their own prog rock thing. It's fascinating, and I think the best way to study it is really just to listen to all the music and hear for yourself how everyone's related.
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These are my favorite albums right now.

[Space-Dementia]

[Space-Dementia]

May 29, 2019
Faust IV by Faust
I wrote a whole review for this and then it all got deleted so this is gonna be rushed cause I don't feel like writing it all out again.

This thing is all over the place. "Krautrock" hits you with a wall of guitars and other assorted noises while a tambourine tries to figure out where the beat is for 7 minutes until finally the drums come in for the last 4 minutes but still don't make things much clearer. But as soon as you start to expect the whole album to sound like this, "The Sad Skinhead" comes on and completely changes your perspective on Faust IV. It and "Jennifer" are basically pop songs with some weird German psychedelic elements to them. It's cool the way the two songs each convey a different mood, with "Skinhead" taking a more lighthearted approach and "Jennifer" being a more melancholy and thoughtful tune, but they're both fantastic. At this point it seems like "Krautrock" was just a long noisy intro track to a weird pop rock album, but the noise and weirdness comes back with "Just a Second", which honestly is pretty forgettable, but luckily quick enough to make way for "Giggy Smile", which is probably the weirdest song on here. The intro sounds like it's gonna lead into something completely different than what it actually becomes, which is this weird campfire jig thing, but that only lasts about a minute, and ends up leading into what's probably the best part of the album, a four minute vamp on an interesting guitar/synth line that just keeps going and going before it abruptly ends "I Want You (She's So Heavy)"-style. "Lauft..." is completely different -- a folk tune in 13/8 that's really relaxing after the foot-tapping-madness that is "Giggy Smile". But of course that one changes up halfway through too, ending with an ear-piercing fat synth, which then leads into "It's a Bit of a Pain", an unexpectedly pretty closing track.
The tracklist for this thing is hard to decipher cause it seems to be different everywhere I check. So this review is based on the Spotify one, which I'm a fan of. The album is cool because, unlike the other krautrock album that even reaches this level of psychedelia, Tago Mago, Faust manages to intersperse the weird noisy elements with the pop stuff really seamlessly, whereas Can kind of divided that album into a pop half and a noise half, which makes it hard to sit through the whole album. It took like 7 listens for this thing to really grow on me, but it just keeps getting better with each listen. The whole thing feels loose, but still focused enough to the point where Fuast really created a whole world with this album. Although individual elements of the album remind me of other artists, as a whole this album is really unlike anything I've ever heard and I love it.
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These are my favorite albums right now.

[Space-Dementia]

June 2, 2019
Gal Costa by Gal Costa
This is a surprisingly diverse album. I was expecting a typical samba pop album, but right from the start Gal makes it clear that there's more to her than that. The album opens with some weird abrasive noises which clear up pretty quickly and make way for a beautiful latin pop song. But the next four songs are all over the place. "Sebastiana" hints at a more rock-oriented sound that she later takes even further on "Namorinho de Portao", with its fuzzy guitars suggesting some garage rock influences but quickly disappearing to present a fun pop song behind all that. Meanwhile, "Lost in the Paradise" sounds like a Miles Davis track and "Vou Recomecar" is more bluesy. But while she clearly covers a lot of ground on here, she manages to keep a consistent mood, a relaxed and romantic sound with some hints of psychedelia that manages to sound like a world-influenced product of its time while also having a somewhat timeless quality to it, especially on the more beautiful and melancholy songs like "Nao Identificado" and "Baby".
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These are my favorite albums right now.

[Space-Dementia]

June 5, 2019
Afrodisiac by Fela Kuti
Clearly this is a really similar style to Zombie which leads me to assume that Fela's the type of artist who basically finds his own sound and sticks to it, rather than doing something completely new with each album. And that's perfectly fine when the music's this good and innovative. He really mixes jazz, funk, and African elements better than anyone else I've listened to, so I think it's forgivable for all his music to sound the same, even if it's all this repetitive. He keeps this stuff interesting enough to the point where he could honestly draw out the shorter 6-minute songs on here to twice their length and I'd still love it. What really succeeds on this album is the way they switch from loud to quiet so smoothly and the solos. The electric piano work on here is really off the charts, especially when the rest of the band all quiet down and just let him go crazy. The drumming, bass lines, and horn sections are terrific, as usual, and I really don't have anything negative to say about this album. Sure, it's not the masterpiece that Zombie would end up being three years later, but I'll take as many albums like this as he's got.
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These are my favorite albums right now.

[Space-Dementia]

June 7, 2019
The Orb's Adventures Beyond the UltraWorld
I first found out about these guys when I heard "Golden Clouds" off their collaboration album with Lee "Scratch" Perry. I was instantly hooked on this weird dub/house track with Steve Reich samples and a nice soothing Jamaican accented voice telling me something about Babylon. But it wasn't until a few weeks or months later that I realized they were actually sampling an earlier song that they had put out about thirty years prior. And reading about "Little Fluffy Clouds" really made me wanna check out this album, so I did, a few months ago. This thing is daunting, at ten tracks in almost two hours, and I can only listen to the whole thing on YouTube, so it took me a while to give it a few listens and decide how I feel about it.
This thing covers so much ground it's ridiculous. I can't even describe it under one or two genres. It's got house, trance, ambient, techno, new age, dub, and a bunch of other stuff, and a lot of the time there's some kind of field recordings in the background, whether it's birds chirping or raindrops or two people having a conversation or a chorus of people singing some kind of chant. It's a really weird album and it definitely didn't have to go on for an hour and 40 minutes, but it seems like the Orb just wanted to make a sprawling, psychedelic record that lives in its own world. And in that sense it succeeds because this thing really does exist on its own plane. But in terms of the actual music, it's somewhat hit and miss, but there's so much ambient sound between each actual musical piece that when a song does show up it's always a pleasant surprise.
The best song on here far and away is "Little Fluffy Clouds", and it's also kind of an anomaly. It starts with the crow of a rooster, then a voice talking about "the new music" or something like that, and then a question, "What were the clouds like when you were young?" and as the girl starts explaining the "purple and red and yellow" skies of her childhood, a ridiculously catchy and bouncy house track starts playing in the background, creating a nostalgic but groovy atmosphere, until the track fades out after about four minutes and we're met with the sound of what might be a spaceship taking off to space, signaling the complete change between the first track and the rest of the album. "Earth (Gaia)", the next track has a two-minute intro of eerie-sounding synth pads backing some guy talking about earth as if he's an alien or a god, which leads into another trance track that's just as bouncy as "Little Fluffy Clouds" but has a much darker mood. It goes on for another 8 minutes or so before dissolving into "Supernova", an piece made up of various field recordings and abstract synth tracks coming together over a downtempo drum track. From there, the album goes in all different directions. "Back Side of the Moon" is this weird 14-minute ambient new age thing that sort of sounds like what could be the menu music for like a PlayStation or something, but then "Spanish Castles in Space" is completely different. A deep Russian voice invites you to the track, and then you're met by a Kate Bush-sounding fretless bass, twinkling piano keys, and atmospheric percussion. The song doesn't change much over its 15 minutes, besides the various voices and animals coming in and out of focus, but it sure is interesting. It sounds reminiscent of a world I've seen before, whether in a dream or in a movie or somewhere else. I'm not sure what it reminds me of, but it's definitely one of the more pleasant tracks on the album. After that is a dub-sounding track complete with off-beat staccato reggae guitars that just kinda comes in out of nowhere for a nice change of pace. Although the album obviously visits a lot of different sounds and styles, it kind of sticks to a similar formula throughout: techno/trance/house/dub track fades in, peaks, fades out into random ambient sounds with maybe a synth pad or something keeping it "musical", then that fades back into another song and it just kinda continues like that.
This is an album that would be great at introducing someone who mainly listens to rock, and especially progressive rock, into electronic music. I've seen a lot of comparisons to Pink Floyd and, while I don't really hear those too much, I can see where those people are coming from. It's an electronic album whose main function isn't to make you dance or to build up to a drop, but to create an atmosphere and progress throughout that atmosphere. It does seem kind of immature at times, like a little too up front about what it's trying to be, but I'm sure if I had discovered this when I was 13 I would have loved it. Either way, it still stands as an interesting album that can captivate you or at least make whatever else you're doing a little more interesting.
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These are my favorite albums right now.