straf's (Totally awesomer than G's) Review Thread

[straf]

Pink Floyd - Piper At The Gates Of Dawn

Released in 1967
Track Listing
Astronomy Domine
Lucifer Sam
Matilda Mother
Flaming
Pow R. Toc H.
Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk
Interstellar Overdrive
The Gnome
Chapter 24
Scarecrow
Bike
And -- on the American release -- See Emily Play

The band's first album was a really childish album at its meat. With both whimsical lyrics and whimsical music, this was a quintessential psychedelic album back in the 60's, and probably still is today. It's eleven tracks are quite amazing, but some of them suffer from drawn-out bombast('Interstellar Overdrive for example), but you can't expect much more from proto-cosmic rock, now can you? Some of the lyrics and riffs may make you cringe at times -- it did to me -- but that's because this album is overly kindergarten. If it weren't for its occasional mature theming, you'd think that these really WERE made for/by kindergartners. If you're a huge metal fan, you may want to stay away from this one. And the next, too.

Interesting cuts include: Lucifer Sam, Bike, The Gnome, See Emily Play

8/10

[straf]

Aphrodite's Child - 666

Released in 1972
Track Listing
"The System" - 0:23
"Babylon" - 2:47
"Loud, Loud, Loud" - 2:42
"The Four Horsemen" - 5:53
"The Lamb" - 4:34
"The Seventh Seal" - 1:30
"Aegian Sea" - 5:22
"Seven Bowls" - 1:28
"The Wakening Beast" - 1:11
"Lament" - 2:45
"The Marching Beast" - 2:00
"The Battle Of The Locusts" - 0:56
"Do It" - 1:44
"Tribulation" - 0:32
"The Beast" - 2:26
"Ofis" - 0:14
"Seven Trumpets" - 0:35
"Altamont" - 4:33
"The Wedding of the Lamb" - 3:38
"The Capture of the Beast" - 2:17
"∞" - 5:15
"Hic et Nunc" - 2:55
"All the Seats Were Occupied" - 19:21
"Break" - 2:59

This is AC's only good album. This is also their longest, most bombast, drawn out, pretentious, frightening, interesting album. It's a concept album, yes, probably about religion(it really seems like it, but there's so much to wrap your head around, I'm not really all too sure). Because of its length though, you WILL get bored with it really fast. Not to say that it's the least bit dull -- of course not -- especially with all the occasional dynamic changes and occult-esque chants and ramblings. It keeps you on your toes. But mixed in with all the amazing music are a few wankers. And a few rip-offs(*coughHicEtNunccough*) but it's definitely worth the listen.

This is The Wall before The Wall was conceived, pretty much. And it also suffers from the same flaws as The Wall, namely all of the horrible amounts of fluff. The concept of this album definitely doesn't have enough content to last through 80 minutes(huh. It's like that first Star Trek movie. >.>) and it's really obvious, especially when they start padding the songs with useless instrumental sections. And just like The Wall, every song is "important" to the overall "story". Yeah. Go figure. If this were abridged some, I'd definitely tell you to go find it and listen to it. Unfortunately, you're stuck this big segueing piece of music. I'm still telling you to definitely go find it and listen to it though, Why? 'Cause it's that good.

EDIT: The strange, Eastern sounding instrumentation is also very interesting, as this album is worth listening to just for that reason, whether you like Prog or not.

Interesting cuts include: Not applicable. It's all one large piece.

B+

[straf]

Queen - Queen

Released in 1973
Track Listing
Keep Yourself Alive
Doing All Right
Great King Rat
My Fairy King
Liar
The Night Comes Down
Modern Times Rock 'N' Roll
Son And Daughter
Jesus
Seven Seas Of Rhye...

When talking to Queen fans, you may notice that their first album is often looked over in favor of stuff like Queen II or A Night at the Opera for very unjustifiable reasons. I mean, there's nothing on Queen that isn't found on "Bohemian Rhapsody" or "The Seven Seas of Rhye"(different from this album's "Seven Seas of Rhye...") or the like. If you ask me, I'd say that all of those elements are -- in the long run -- presented better here on Queen. But I guess my opinion doesn't really matter seeing as it's on some internet music forum and not in some wildly popular music resource like Rolling Stone or Q. However, Rolling Stone and Q do in fact agree with me on Queen(or I agree with them, if you'd prefer, even though I don't read them). RS in particular, as they are long-time Queen haters but don't have many negative things to say about this album(maybe once Queen started to get bigger than them, they tried to influence the public or something by pretending to hate them >_>). The point is though, don't listen to Queen fans because they're usually idiots who laze around in bed all day, eating Cheetos and putting "Flash Gordon" on infinite repeat and rather listen to crap like News of the World instead of Nevermind the Bollocks or something. Queen is a good album.

At the time this album was being recorded, Queen were probably as self-indulgent as they could get(Queen II may have been the actual peak, but...) and were really going crazy with putting stuff in this album. They probably had enough ideas in this to constitute for several albums and not just one, with each song having a number of "movements". And all of the guitar overdubbing... damn. Each track seems to have it's own complex arrangement(I seem to remember somebody saying that it sounded "neo-classical, but I wouldn't say that exactly) and the whole thing seems to really come together nicely. And it's all very rewarding. Think of A Night at the Opera as being Queen's bastard child.

Queen aren't known for being a "heavy" band, but Queen is in fact pretty heavy for something from the early 70's and them being Queen in general. "Great King Rat" definitely has some heavy metal aspects stuck in it and "Keep Yourself Alive" harbors an almost obligatory Led Zeppelin comparison(I'm not the only one that compares bits of Queen to Led Zeppelin it seems, but others use much larger portions of this album when they do it). But while they're rocking harder than they ever could, they still make time for pop-ish bits and ballads, but even those have a tendency to lapse over into something "heavy". They're self-indulgent bastards~. Which makes me wonder if they know that this album suffers from being bombast, but being bombast is something that makes it work. If they weren't being so ostentatious, we wouldn't be getting the whole complex album that we did. Too bad they were never that good with lyrics ("Great King Rat died today/Born on the twenty first of May/Died syphilis forty four on his birthday/Every second word he swore/Yes he was the son of a whore/Always wanted by the law")

Queen to me comes off to me as being a generally strong release. While not being as consistent as something like Their Satanic Majesties Request, it's a whole lot more satisfying, as it's a lot more accessable and has a lot more hooks. Nothing trippy, nothing tedious... Just straight out rock. Straightforward rock. It'll definitely have you listening from beginning to end, even through dampers like "Modern Times Rock 'n' Roll". Check it out.

Other interesting cuts include: "Doing All Right", "My Fairy King", "Liar" and "Jesus"

B

[straf]

The Rolling Stones - Their Satanic Majesties Request

Released in 1967
Track Listing
Sing This All Together
Citadel
In Another Land
2000 Man
Sing This All Together (See What Happens)
She's A Rainbow
The Lantern
Gomper
2000 Light Years From Home
On With The Show

It always funny to read arguments by hardcore Christians who call rock music satanic and cite this album as one of the main examples. Of course, every argument like that is extremely flawed(understatement) and citing this album is where the argument really starts to fall apart because honestly, there's nothing satanic at all about this album except for the title. Sure, the music video for "2000 Light Years From Home" is questionable in that sense, but I'll look over that for the sake of criticizing the hardcore Christians(>_>). The whole album's a joke anyway. This is about as satanic as, say, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or Highway 61 Revisited.

For a joke though, Satanic Majesties is a pretty damn good album. Far from a "Grade-A" Stones album of course, but it does stands as a "Grade-A" psychedelic album, no matter how many people say they hate it. But the haters mostly come from the Stones fanbase who are used to the usually sleazed-out garage rock sound they have. Not many albums have had the same effect on the ear as this has. And I couldn't really describe how this album sounds to me in words(mostly because I'm horrible at forming thoughts into words. No lie~) but if it helps any, I'd take this over Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band any day. And that's probably another reason why people say they hate it -- they compare it to Sgt Pepper's so much. Honestly, it sounds more like Pink Floyd's debut(which was released about 4 months before Satanic Majesties in the UK and two in the US) than it does Sgt. Pepper's.

As you go through Satanic Majesties, you'll notice that the Mellotron is a very prominent instrument here(at least, I think that that's a Mellotron. It really sounds like it.) and it seems to underline the whole "psychedelic" idea. And some of the songs are slightly muddled in not quite an unpleasant way. It appears as if this album was really planned out, but I guess with close to nine months of studio time, they had time to really fix it up. Actually, if you ask me, Satanic Majesties probably had more effort put into it than other Stones albums, and it comes off as sounding polished yet still rough like the other Stones albums. But then again, the Stones can't really escape their roughness. It's been with them ever since they were formed(which was somewhere between the Big Bang and biopoesis).

Satanic Majesties opens up with a fun little sing-a-long that does a decent job of setting up the mood for the rest of the album, as it's both dark and playful. But the real fun begins with the bouncy(?) and almost alien-sounding "Citadel". Think of "Sing This All Together" to be a rabbit hole and "Citadel" to be the little locked door that leads to Wonderland. Which is a pretty apt metaphor, since the song after "Citadel" is the strange "In Another Land", a Bill Wyman highlight. And that's an appropriate name, because Satanic Majesties is really like some weird, acid-induced adventure through some alien land.

The rest of the album is pretty consistent and holds up to the standards set by the first three cuts. All except for the bore-fest "Sing This All Together (See What Happens)", anyway, but that can be easily looked over with the help of a fast-forward button. But after that, it continues on as if that piece of trash was never there. There also seems to be tastes of foreign music here-and-there(foreign to America that is) which just adds to the experience. Satanic Majesties is a masterpiece.

Other interesting cuts include: "2000 Man", "She's A Rainbow", "2000 Light Years From Home" and "On With The Show"

B+

[straf]

Lovin' all the feedback, guys. :D

[Sway]

Can I request a review?
I'd like to see the new Linkin Park album. It's actually pretty good.

[straf]

^ Maybe.

Pink Floyd - The Wall

Released in 1979
Track Listing
In The Flesh?
The Thin Ice
Another Brick In The Wall Pt. 1
The Happiest Days Of Our Lives
Another Brick In The Wall Pt. 2
Mother
Goodbye Blue Sky
Empty Spaces
Young Lust
One Of My Turns
Don't Leave Me Now
Another Brick In The Wall Pt. 3
Goodbye Cruel World
Hey You
Is There Anybody Out There?
Nobody Home
Vera
Bring The Boys Back Home
Comfortably Numb
The Show Must Go On
In The Flesh
Run Like Hell
Waiting For The Worms
Stop
The Trial
Outside The Wall

The hard thing about trying to review The Wall is that there is quite a bit of fluff on it, but all of that fluff is "important" to the whole "story" of the album. However, Pink Floyd is really good with working with fluff. Take Meddle for example -- the whole damn album is fluff and it's pulled off pretty well(but I'll save that for later~). The thing about The Wall though is that its fluff can get really monotonous. In fact, the whole album is monotonous, and that's not helped by the fact that Roger Waters is taking the whole thing seriously. For reference, I bolded all of the songs that I dub "fluff". Not all songs up there are fluff in their entirety -- songs like "Comfortably Numb" start off as a normal song then slowly turn into fluff by continuously jamming to take up space before fading out. And all of those noises that make the album's songs segue are completely unnecessary and sometimes are just annoying. They break the flow, really. If The Wall was condensed down more than it originally was, it would definitely be worth the listen.

Most of the enjoyment that The Wall tries to bring you actually comes from the worthless social commentary it presents(Well, it may not be social commentary exactly, but...). It's interesting stuff(Well, that's actually kind of pushing it, but...) but the casual listener might not catch all of that, and without the worthless social commentary, all that's left to hold the album up is its music, which about 30 minutes of that is fluff. (Yeah, back on that again.) Looking past the fluff though, all the other songs are well made and are probably worth the listen. Sure, it can get long-winded, but Floyd had always had the ability to piece together great melodies that try -- and usually succeed -- in hooking you in. If you can force yourself through the entire 80 or so minutes of it, you probably won't emerge feeling rewarded or fulfilled or anything, but you might emerge knowing that you just heard some weird musical anomaly that tricks you into thinking it's good when it's actually really flawed.

And there's really not much more to say about The Wall. I'm not trying to half-ass this either. It's... an okay piece of music. Long, tedious, but really good in some parts. Nothing special, and definitely not as good as other people make it out to be. It's a confused piece. A little stone recorded during the decline of a band -- something that might have been a gem if the band were in top form and not bitching at each other. Who knows what it might've turned into.

Interesting cuts include: "Another Brick In The Wall Pt. 2", "Mother", "Young Lust", "One Of My Turns", "In The Flesh", "Run Like Hell", "Waiting For The Worms", "The Trial"

C

[!Takuto Fucking Cat!]

Sept 30, 2010 20:05:45 GMT -5 Sway said:

Can I request a review?
I'd like to see the new Linkin Park album. It's actually pretty good.

I dont care what other people think, I also liked that album

[Zilla2112]

Sgt. Pepper's gets a higher rating than The Wall? OMFG!!!!1111111111

[straf]

^ I wasn't going to be a biased bitch. I said that. >.>

The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers

Released in 1971
Track Listing
Brown Sugar
Sway
Wild Horses
Can't You Hear Me Knocking
You Gotta Move
Bitch
I Got The Blues
Sister Morphine
Dead Flowers
Moonlight Mile

With Sticky Fingers, the Stones started to stick with their sleazy, raunchy music that they do so well. On their previous two albums, flirtations with country took up a nice fraction of the albums, but most of that has been removed now in favor of straight out rock 'n roll/blues/scary, morbid ****. What really stands out is that in between all of that sleaze and sex and cocaine, the Stones have a soft side. And that soft side is really... soft. Oh yes. You see, included in this album is the greatest ballad ever(and it is, dammit), "Wild Horses". Now, if you compare that to other songs on the album -- like "Bitch" for example -- and then you'll see what I mean about being "soft".

However, on this album, the Stones got really... nasty. Sure, the Stones had lots of innuendos and sexual metaphors before, but on Sticky Fingers, they didn't hold back. And I'm not just talking about the zipper cover either(where it zips down to reveal a close-up of some dude's groin. Kinda disturbing). There's songs about rape("Brown Sugar"), lust("Bitch"), dudes fucking themselves up with drugs("Sister Morphine"), it's just... Eck. And on the subject of "Sister Morphine", if you thought that Let It Bleed was dark... No, if you thought that any song was disturbing before, you. Have. Not. Heard. Sister. Morphine. Aside from the lyrics, there's also that twangy(?) guitar, and the... Oh damn. Just listen to it.

Sticky Fingers, if you ask me, is probably the most accessible Stones album out there. There's no country/blues messes and there's no wild experimentation, but there is a balanced amount of almost everything the Stones have tried before. This is one of those rare albums where the band gives it their all(or rather, how much "all" alcoholics and junkies can have). All of the riffs are damn catchy, the instrumentation is damn well made and the whole album is just pieced together really, really well.

But even with the Stones "all", Sticky Fingers still comes off as a somewhat "exhausted" album. There's no real crashing rockers or bluesy stoner jams like in Let It Bleed or Beggar's Banquet. No interest in making fun music like in Satanic Majesties. It's simplistic but raw. Exhausted yet bursting with that Stones energy. It's just rock 'n roll. And maybe that's just all we need.

Other interesting cuts include: "Dead Flowers" and "Moonlight Mile"

B+

[Zilla2112]

I know, I just wanted to see your reaction.

[straf]

The Rolling Stones - Beggar's Banquet

Released in 1968
Track Listing
Sympathy For The Devil
No Expectations
Dear Doctor
Parachute Woman
Jig-Saw Puzzle
Street Fighting Man
Prodigal Son
Stray Cat Blues
Factory Girl
Salt Of The Earth

This is it. Yes. This is the album that started it all. It started all of the sleazy, washed-up poor man's blues that the Stones are best known for. It came before Sticky Fingers mind you, so don't get confused by it's placement in this thread. Anyway though, this was probably the most controversial album of its time because of its overly-sexual lyrics and darkity-dark stoner sound. I imagine that the Stones inspired the Doors' sound back when they were still confined to the Matrix.

The musical content itself is rather weak though even though Beggar's Banquet was far more critically acclaimed than the Stones' previous efforts. Perhaps is just my dislike of country-blues(which this has a lot of, by the way) showing through, but I like Let It Bleed tons so that can't be it. I'm getting way off track though. The point that I'm trying to make is that the sound here is very, very stripped down. It sounds like something that you could cook up in your basement, and -- knowing the Stones -- this is probably exactly the case. It's really predictable if you ask me, with some songs sounding very similar, but oddly enough, this album doesn't offer any wankers.

If you ever wondered what the Doors would sound like if they were from Britain, this would probably be their L.A. Woman. And I really mean that. It's very blues but very stoned out and the set-up is quite the same. Of course, it's not as good as L.A. Woman, but... I'm still getting off-track. >____>

Banquet's opening track, 'Sympathy For The Devil' is the best track on here, and the most misleading. It really sets you up for some amazingly awesome, breathtaking, shitstorm-causing album, but it throws you a quick "screw you" after 'No Expectations' rolls around. Everything even slightly rock 'n roll gets thrown out, and pretty much remains that way until the end of the album with two or three exceptions. Sad isn't it? The Stones never did country-blues very well anyway, so there's a good chance that you won't like much more.

To be fair though, they do try and redeem themselves with the stoner epoch 'Jig-Saw Puzzle'(which is fucking amazing) and the pounding political statement 'Street Fighting Man'(which is not so amazing). Which I guess is fine, but they continue on with their little country gig, that it doesn't really matter. They even try to go gospel with the closing 'Salt Of The Earth'! It sounds pretty good, and is a worthwhile closer. But notice the country tasters thrown around in there. Thry've obviously been listening to too much Bob Dylan. >.>

All-in-all though, Beggar's Banquet is way above average but nothing to go ga-ga over. It's certainly a turn for the better if they'd just stop trying to be the next big country hit. You should check it out, even if just for the stoner statements.

Interesting cuts include: 'Stray Cat Blues', 'Prodigal Son', and 'Factory Girl'

7.5/10

Sorry for rambling in this one. I might fix it up later.

[straf]

The Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols

Released in 1977
Track Listing
Holidays In The Sun
Bodies
No Feelings
Liar
Problems
God Save The Queen
Seventeen
Anarchy In The UK
Sub-Mission
Pretty Vacant
New York
EMI

The problem that I have with this album -- the only problem that I have with this album -- is that, while it is horrendously fun and full of hooks, it's horrendous fun hooks don't last through the entire album. It's all that amp-kicking, head-banging fun all through the first six tracks, then it gets really hit-n-miss. Towards the halfway point and until the end, all the songs start to sound the same, and it finally loses all its fun after 'Anarchy In The UK'. Everything before that though is absolutely amazing for the most part, with only one wanker('Seventeen').

This album, though, was obviously written and performed by wannabe punk rockers. All of the ideas tossed around are mostly flawed and one-sided, most definitely coming out of the deep, dark anal recesses of problematic, disturbed teenagers. And what's sad is that Johnny Rotten and the rest of the band probably hold wholeheartedly to these ideas and there's probably a bunch of other pubescent, socially-scorned boys out there who also believe wholeheartedly to the ideas in this album. Poor sods.

You should check it out though, if only for the first half, because you'll definitely have some fun with it. Everything else... meh. Don't get me wrong though. This is getting played at my funeral. :3

Interesting cuts include: Well... that one where they're screaming about their ideals... Oh wait...

D+

[straf]

You guys should feel special. I'm listening to Nirvana just for you.

[richarddjames]

Sept 30, 2010 22:38:39 GMT -5 straf said:

You guys should feel special. I'm listening to Nirvana just for you.

are you insulting nirvana?