Review for www.nomoreworkhorse.com
Showing posts with label David Bowie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Bowie. Show all posts
Monday, January 5, 2026
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
Friday, March 25, 2022
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
David Bowie - hours...
So now? Thursday's Child feels very 'adult-oriented', or even 'radio-friendly', with its washes of keyboards and cooing female backing vocals. Something in the Air, is deceptive, the kind of complex yet catchy song only Bowie could pull off. Acoustic guitars on Survive and especially Seven give these songs considerable warmth. The latter in particular sounds like an instant classic
Faster material like What's Really Happening and The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell fare less well. They are by no means bad songs, just less resonant than the rest of the album, ultimately a little forgettable. Brilliant Adventure even channels the second side of his Eno collaboration Low.
There's very little edge here, the vaguely Nine Inch Nails pulsing at the start of final track The Dreamers wouldn't unsettle anyone. But it's definitely an underrated album, there's little grit on it and plenty of polish. But also some very listenable songs.
Friday, December 16, 2016
Best Albums of 2016 – Killian Laher
Article for www.nomoreworkhorse.com https://nomoreworkhorse.com/2016/12/16/best-albums-of-2016-killian-laher/
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Tuesday, January 5, 2016
Monday, January 4, 2016
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Album Review: David Bowie – Outside
Written off at the time as an over-ambitious folly, David Bowie’s 1995
album Outside (or 1. Outside) may be trying a little too hard to be industrial,
and may be overlong at 19 tracks and 74 minutes but there is some great music
on it.
Leaving aside the pretentious storyline, odd-sounding character
names (Ramona A. Stone, Algeria Touchshriek, Baby Grace), the fact that each
track has a subtitle, and some borderline annoying interludes, what’s left is a
series of strong, very consistent songs.
Although the feel of the album is somewhat claustrophobic, there’s
hardly a bad song on it. The first song
proper, the title track, is really dark and brooding, before The Heart’s Filthy
Lesson really goes for the whole Nine Inch Nails vibe.
Hallo Spaceboy (the album version, not the horrid Pet Shop Boys
remix) is full of pounding drums as
Bowie croons “this chaos is killing me”.
After this, The Motel is excellent, a slow space ballad giving Bowie’s
voice plenty of room to really fill out the song. The vocals are really excellent here and
across the whole album.
The material is mainly really good, but there is a lot of it to take
on board, and after a time it becomes somewhat homogenous. Not all the tracks work, Wishful Beginnings
drags a bit with shades of David Sylvian.
Later, I’m Deranged has another fantastic vocal over industrial beats
and the upbeat, clattering melody of Thru’ These Architechts Eyes work
particularly well.
The album finishes with the much smoother, tension free track
Strangers When We Meet, a kind of standard issue Bowie-crooned ballad. It doesn‘t quite fit in with what went before
it. The album had been billed as part of a trilogy, but we haven't got to
hear parts 2 & 3 (yet). Although
there is plenty to criticize on this album, it’s an enjoyable listen, and far
superior to most of his 80s and 90s albums.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Album Review: David Bowie – Low
As well as having one of the coolest album covers ever, David Bowie’s 1977 album Low is very much an album of sides. Before CDs, albums came on double sided vinyl/cassette and were often considered as such. I’ll focus on the music rather than the Berlin-inspired backdrop to the making of this album, of which much has already been written.
The first seven tracks are made up short zippy little songs, bookended by 2 instrumentals. Apart from the hit single Sound and Vision, none of the melodies are as strong as his ‘classic’ early seventies tracks yet they worm your way into your brain. Opening track Speed of Life has a strong melody, with soaring keyboards and pounding drums. Some of it can sound a little dated, the ‘video-game’ style noises back up What In The World can be a little annoying but in the main it still holds up.
At its best it sounds pioneering, in the case of Always Crashing In The Same Car, where he lays down the template for Gary Numan’s career and some of U2’s work on Zooropa. Be My Wife on the other hand is the most anthemic track here, with a fine vocal from Bowie as he croons “sometimes you get so lo-nely”.
The other side of this album is something else entirely. Bowie and Brian Eno linked up here to create a kind of ambient, Teutonic chilly classical electronic music, without any conventional singing from Bowie. The first of these, Warsawa, perfectly evokes a kind of wintry, Cold War-era Eastern European landscape with gloomy keyboards and some wordless chanting from Bowie in the middle. Art Decade fairs less well as the melody is somewhat meandering, sounding somewhat like the type of music that TV stations used to play many, many years ago over the test card.
Weeping Wall is less obviously melodic, and sounds like it could be used over a documentary charting the progress of recession-bitten immigrants, while Subterraneans sounds darker still, yet uplifting. Bowie chants some very strange sounding wordless vocals, yet it avoids the ambient music clichés and works. Even the saxophone manages not to ruin it. It’s very much night time music, best heard in darkness.
These instumentals gradually reveal themselves over time as hidden melodies come to the fore on repeated listens, and of course were hugely influential in terms of electronic music. Then again Bowie had been a pioneer for some time, right back to Space Oddity. Low is a timepiece frozen forever in a Berlin Wall era moment.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Are there any really consistent bands?
In an age of intangible music formats, X-factor here-today-gone-tomorrow clowns, more so-called indie bands than you can shake a stick at, not to mention every second older band reforming, today’s music scene is arguably more transient than ever before.In the supposed ‘golden age’ of rock, there were consistent acts like the Rolling Stones, Neil Young and David Bowie to name just 3 who had a superb string of albums (especially the last 2) and seemed untouchable. Until the crap one came along.
In the case of the Rolling Stones, this arrived in 1980 with Emotional Rescue, which took some of the disco beat experiments and Jagger falsettoisms from their previous album, the not-too-bad-at-all Some Girls, and fleshed them into a basis for an album. The impact of this was to render them unable to subsequently release any more than 2 more tracks of musical merit, the following years’ Start Me Up and the excellent Waiting On A Friend. And they still haven’t gone away you know.
Neil Young’s case is less straightforward. After a string of almost flawless albums from 1970’s After the Goldrush to 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, 1981 saw the release of the pretty uninspiring Re-ac-tor (featuring the 9 minute repetitive yawn-fest T-Bone). Since then his solo career has not been totally merit-free (Freedom, Harvest Moon and Silver and Gold all had their moments), though it never scaled the heights of the 1970s.
Similarly with the aforementioned David Bowie. He bestrode the 70s like a colossus, with some brilliant albums (Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane, Low), some very good ones (Ziggy Stardust) and some critically acclaimed (though overrated) ones (Diamond Dogs, Station to Station, Heroes). He inspired punk, post-punk and even the new Romantics, and invented Berlin as a cool destination for making music. So he could have defined 80s mainstream music. Unfortunately he let it define him. Let’s Dance was the start of it. Commercial as hell, aside from the title track it featured a terribly sanitised version of China Girl, which he wrote for Iggy Pop in 1977, which set the benchmark for the remainder of the decade. He released cheesy albums like Tonight and Never Let Me Down, before forming the noisy and tedious Tin Machine. Since then, he has been less relevant, releasing a series of albums in divergent musical styles, none of which has been awful but few with any really high quality tracks.
I can’t claim ownership of any of the above as I was too young for them in their prime. So what of the next generations of bands. Are there any who have managed a string of consistent albums, without any let downs?
Definitely out of the reckoning: Morrissey (Kill Uncle, Maladjusted, Years of Refusal), Mark Eitzel (despite the quality of the American Music Club albums, his solo albums are generally pretty patchy), The Cure (should never have been allowed release anything after 1989), Jesus and Mary Chain (ditto except fast forward to 1994). Also out would be Sonic Youth - too many dodgy noise experiments, key piece of evidence being their collaboration with Mats Gustafsson, Hidros 3, which consists of little more than noise and some particularly nasty groaning from Kim Gordon.
The Lemonheads released a pretty awful covers album last year (Varshons), and Primal Shame are really just a bunch of chancers. And Lurid (Lou Reed) had the same problem in the 1980s as Bowie and Neil Young. As for the grunge scene, Pearl Jam didn’t keep their initial momentum going, in fact they deliberately pulled back, while Soundgarden were all well and good but I don’t know if Chris Cornell’s credibility will ever recover from last year’s Timbaland-produced Scream.
Arab Strap were a candidate, though I was reminded that they were off the boil sometimes, and had too many albums that sounded the same. And the problem with Ryan Adams, apart from the awful Rock N Roll, was the media attention he received turned him into a pain in the neck really, which manifested itself in some of his music, of which he released too much to even approach consistency.
REM is an interesting one. 1994’s Monster is probably the most bought REM album. What I mean is that, with their critical stock at an all-time high after Automatic for the People, everybody wanted Monster. What an aptly named album though, within months you could pick this up easily in any second-hand music shop (of which there used to be plenty in the mid-90s). They haven’t released anything of note since. But imagine Michael Stipe had died after Automatic for the People, he would be deemed way more important than Kurt Cobain. There were rumours about his health at this time. Thankfully he is alive and well, though if a hypothetical premature death had occurred I’d say he’d have been revered, almost deified.
As for the possibles, the first band that occurred to me was the National. Although the first album wasn’t really anything special, subsequent albums have been way better. Though perhaps it’s them remaking the same album, just better each time? Radiohead would probably be the most obvious candidate, though it’s hard to make a case for Hail to the Thief as a truly enjoyable album. Nick Cave probably counts as one but he’s just so goddamn unloveable really, I can never get truly moved by him. He seems incapable of getting bad reviews though.
Mark Kozelek is probably an example of this, ever since his Red House Painting days, and perhaps Mark Lanegan would count too, no serious mis-steps (in my opinion). Tindersticks would also be one, though it’s probably just for my ears really. Richmond Fontaine are discounted as they don’t really make much impact, and I actually prefer Willy Vlautin’s books, I’d argue that’s where his true talent lies.
The problem is that many bands just make the same album over and over (often with diminishing returns), does that make them consistent? All feedback welcome!
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Album Review: Morrissey - Swords
Swords is an album of B-sides from 2004 onwards. Morrissey has a long history of rounding up his harder to find tracks into a neat package and this is a welcome one.
In my view, Morrissey’s voice has never sounded better than his most recent work, though his songwriting can be a little hit and miss at times. It starts out with the uptempo Good Looking Man About Town, which is a very Morrissey title. Indeed a lot of it can be described as Morrissey-by-numbers, ie not remarkable, but generally very, very good.
It’s a nicely produced collection of songs. Only Sweetie-Pie is a misstep, quite an odd sounding song dominated by Morrissey’s blurred sounding voice. Some tracks suffer from the ‘kitchen sink’ production that marred Years of Refusal (If You Don’t Like Me, Don’t Look At Me). Others are like a not so good revisiting of former glories (Ganglord echoes How Soon Is Now). Yet some of the slower tracks (The Never-Played Symphonies, Christian Dior) see Morrissey in fine voice, aided by the fact that the music on these tracks gives his voice a chance to breathe.
Shame Is The Name features Chrissie Hynde on backing vocals and reminds me for some reason of November Spawned a Monster, while Teenage Dad On His Estate and Children in Pieces handle challenging subject matter (children out of wedlock and clerical abuse respectively) in an engaging way. My Life Is A Succession of People Saying Goodbye is another quintessential Morrissey title, as is the performance. Here Morrissey ruefully sings about the aforementioned subject matter with a soaring melody. He also covers Bowie’s Drive In Saturday which is a decent version, though not dramatically reinvented.
So not quite A-list Morrissey, but quality tunes nonetheless.
In my view, Morrissey’s voice has never sounded better than his most recent work, though his songwriting can be a little hit and miss at times. It starts out with the uptempo Good Looking Man About Town, which is a very Morrissey title. Indeed a lot of it can be described as Morrissey-by-numbers, ie not remarkable, but generally very, very good.
It’s a nicely produced collection of songs. Only Sweetie-Pie is a misstep, quite an odd sounding song dominated by Morrissey’s blurred sounding voice. Some tracks suffer from the ‘kitchen sink’ production that marred Years of Refusal (If You Don’t Like Me, Don’t Look At Me). Others are like a not so good revisiting of former glories (Ganglord echoes How Soon Is Now). Yet some of the slower tracks (The Never-Played Symphonies, Christian Dior) see Morrissey in fine voice, aided by the fact that the music on these tracks gives his voice a chance to breathe.
Shame Is The Name features Chrissie Hynde on backing vocals and reminds me for some reason of November Spawned a Monster, while Teenage Dad On His Estate and Children in Pieces handle challenging subject matter (children out of wedlock and clerical abuse respectively) in an engaging way. My Life Is A Succession of People Saying Goodbye is another quintessential Morrissey title, as is the performance. Here Morrissey ruefully sings about the aforementioned subject matter with a soaring melody. He also covers Bowie’s Drive In Saturday which is a decent version, though not dramatically reinvented.
So not quite A-list Morrissey, but quality tunes nonetheless.
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