The reunited classic lineup had some serious gold! Class Clown Spots a UFO was really good, Motivational Jumpsuit was excellent, and The Bears for Lunch was bordering on a late-period masterpiece, still the best thing Guided by Voices, regardless of lineup, has done since Universal Truths & Cycles. Obviously the other albums from the reunion had some gems, too.
I have struggled to get into the stuff since. I actually disliked Please be Honest and the stuff since has been alright but rarely stuck with me. But I always hope one day one of them will get through to me.
"Quinlan has taken everything she learned from leading a rock band and applied it to creating more dynamic compositions, songs that burble and bounce. The sound isn’t too far of a leap from Hop Along’s most recent full-length, Bark Your Head Off, Dog"
Huh? They sounded a lot more dynamic on Painted Shut than on Bark Your Head Off.
You single out SATURDAY as the wonky day? Sunday is clearly the weakest to me. Friday & Saturday are comparable, but Saturday has the better headliner.
I don't think anyone would argue that Diplo isn't an opportunist with no real genre loyalty (I'd also argue integrity, sure). But you seem to be creating some kind of false equivalency between the two, like you just wanted to shoehorn a Kanye bit in where there was none.
What an awesome surprise to see some Zevon love here! He truly was a singular, underrated talent with a wicked sense of humor, a great knack for writing about stuff nobody else wrote about (and doing it with zeal), and a genuinely tender touch for dealing with heartbreak and outcasts.
One of my best friendships to emerge from my 20s hinges on Zevon, too.
This is so lame, but I've tried and failed a couple of times over the years. It says to do it at gravatar, I did it there, when I sign in it still shows the two avatars I've tried to use over the years, the current one has shown up on other sites...and yet never a thing here. How am I like the only one here who can't figure it out when even bloc has one?
Absolutely. It's one of my two or three all-time favorite musical collectives/scenes.
And Hell yeah, Electric Circus is underrated. People were not ready for it at the time. It's imperfect and messy, but it's bold, vibrant, inspired, and crazy engaging. I like that you can see in that & Phrenology that the Soulquarians rappers, having already mastered soulful, live-session hip-hop on their first round of releases, were starting to push HARD at the boundaries of hip-hop as a whole. They didn't get the appreciation they deserved for it at the time, but it still makes for some exciting, tight-rope-walking music.
"Untitled", "Left & Right", and especially "Devil's Pie" clicked right away, then "Spanish Joint", then "Chicken Grease" & "One Mo Gin", then "The Root", then "greatdayndamorning/booty" (how did that one take so long?).....god damn, what a tracklist.
(I was also in my early 20s when I first checked it out, maybe it wouldn't have been such a gradual falling in love with it had I found it later. Black Messiah hit me like a bomb on impact, but it's also less dense).
I'll read the write-up in a minute, but just wanna say - this album rules and is one of the truly great examples of an album that takes multiple listens to fully connect with but turns out rich and masterful beyond your expectations. You've got to live in those deep, sensuous grooves for a while - it's a long album that doesn't give a fuck about easy hooks, but there's not a better album of steamy soul-funk out there. It was such a delight haviung new songs reveal themselves to me with subsequent listens.
All hail the Soulquarians (also amazing that we got an equally mind-blowing female counterpart in the same year in Mama's Gun), all hail D'Angelo!
I finally listened and I like it! Way more interesting and just better than everything post-S/T.
It's jarring at the very start where he's really doing his David Byrne thing, but it doesn't take long for it to become their own thing.
I know it's a hot take. I like Yield a lot, but put it well behind Vs, Vitalogy, & No Code. And I happen to really love those other two, especially Binaural. Maybe I'm pushing it with S/T.
You're missing out by dismissing s/t. I don't have anything good to say about the two that came after, but s/t (and the Into the Wild soundtrack for Vedder) are strong mid-2K efforts.
Yeah, FM really have had a legacy surge and a half these last ten years or so, haven't they? I know classic bands have ebbs and flows in their popularity/hipness (compare the Doors & The Who's status in the 1990's to now) but I don't think I would have expected Fleetwood Mac to become the in-band of the 2010s.
Cool little lineup! The Strokes, Robyn, Wu, Kaytranada, Tycho, Stereolab, Bedouine - that alone is pretty good for a two-day festival, as long as there's no overlap among them.
Haha, wow - I somehow knew when I clicked the article that he would turn out to be a Trump supporter and it would come up, possibly as part of the reason for his estrangement.
God I wish we could leave the current political era behind so I wouldn't have to have ideas like that come to my mind every time I see some hair-bleached asshole and for those ideas to be on the nose.
As someone who never liked them, I'm kind of glad they're not because they'd be considered a big act (a big rock act even!) and would thus just occupy a space that could go to someone I do care about.
But yeah, I am surprised.
Mike Love has had them playing theme parks, Full House, and state fairs since the late '80s, which is ridiculous since they had a genuine hit around that time.
It would be cool if they scored a few hotter contemporary jazz acts though. Jazz is experiencing more mainstream play post-Kamasi than it had in ages but that doesn't seem well represented here.
The top line here is butt (I hope this incarnation of The Black Crowes is worth a damn and I guess the Lumineers & Lionel Richie are the only ones I outright wouldn't watch, but there's not much exciting up there and I say that as a Grateful Dead and Who fan). But with all of those acts, there's a ton of cool music listed.
I also love that they immediately give daily lineups, but I guess when something is that spread out you kind of have to.
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