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Ammonia - Mint 400 (1995)

This is an album I picked up purely for its presentation. The spine of the jewel case has the name of the band and album in an intense, clashing blue and magenta color scheme, and the cover has a cool look to it while also looking kind of cheap. It’s functional, eye-catching and kind of hideous in a way, and I kind of love it.

The look of the album doesn’t necessarily justify its sound, though - just because I found some ironic enjoyment in the presentation of the album, that doesn’t mean I think it sounds good, ironically or not. While it’s not particularly bad, I think it’s kind of generic - you’re not going to find an Album of the Year contender for 1995 in this album.

The general feel of the album is moody, kinda grungy rock. Maybe alt rock? I’m not sure. The singer sounds kinda whiny imo, and while there’s some decent instrumentation on this album most of the songs just sound like the same sort of muddy rock the whole way through.

There are a couple exceptions, though. The title track of the album, Mint 400, sounds like it could be an early-00′s pop-punk number. As far as title tracks go, this is a pretty okay example of one. And the band likes to experiment with their sound a little bit on this album, and the song “Little Death” is a prime example of this.

It starts off with sounds taken from a porno - not just in-studio moaning or like some stock audio footage of a woman moaning from a movie or whatever, like actual audio taken from a pornographic film. How would I know the difference? Easy - the slippery, squelching sound effects that are also present. It’s not over-the-top or overly telegraphed like a skit would be, and it doesn’t come across as something they whipped up in the studio with some foley work and by hiring an actress to voice some lines - I honestly believe it’s audio taken from a real porno, based on the compression of the audio and just the general vibe of it all.

That’s all I can say for the album’s creativity - a few songs tend to overstay their welcome. The first two tracks, Ken Carter and Drugs, are two songs that I didn’t particularly like by the time they ended. Though as I listen through this album for the third time, I actually find myself not minding the repetition as much - Ken Carter is still a pretty forgettable opening track, but a lot of songs I have listed down as “forgettable” or “background music” left more of an impact on me this time than they did the first two times I listened to this album.

Really, there’s no much I can say about each track - they’re fairly well done, though they don’t appeal to me so much. The music is just kind of there, I can’t distinguish anything special or notable about how the band sounds so most of the songs tended to go in one ear and out the other. I’ve heard albums that sound like this before, so listening to this album felt a bit like running through the motions. The band isn’t bad, though - they’re doing a competent job, and the production on the music does sound pretty clean. It’s just not particularly amazing or groundbreaking in any way. It might still be an okay album to put on in the background for someone who likes how rock sounded in the 90′s.

The only seriously bad things I can say about the album is that Little Death is too long and too repetitive for its own good, and that I didn’t like Burning Plant Smell for how low the verses tended to sound. Otherwise, it’s an alright album - I don’t think it stands out too much, and I don’t think it’s going to be the biggest hidden gem you’ve found in your life, but it’s not particularly bad. I might just be a bit jaded - by all means, listen to the album yourself and see if you like it better than I did.

I think Mint 400 is an album with a lackluster beginning and end, and a bit of a sinker right in the middle, but the main body of the album is passable at worst. I can’t say I recommend it in particular, but you can do worse. It was worth spending a dollar on, but I don’t know if it’s worth much more than that.

For some of the better tracks on the album, I recommend Mint 400 and Drugs. You can find this album online from anywhere between $5 to $23.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Jon Sa Trinxa - Space Tranquil (2006)

Space Tranquil is a release by Jon Sa Trinxa, who is apparently a long-serving DJ at Ibiza according to the blurb on the back of the CD. This compilation release is described as “an eclectic mix of sun drenched Balearic beats”, which has been compiled and mixed by the man himself.

This Jon Sa Trinxa guy really put together some good summertime tunes. The album has this hazy, fumey sort of feel to it, like those days where you can see heat radiate off the pavement. There are a few standout tracks - including one of the better David Bowie covers I’ve heard - but as a collection, even without these tracks, this release would be a pretty decent tracklist for a private beach party.

Ashes to Ashes, a cover of the David Bowie track, is the first song on the listing. It’s a very understated cover, with a couple harmonising vocals - which are hit and miss - and a more empty, deliberate, sort of desolate sound to it. There’s a very bassy synth that plays during some of the song’s tensest moments, and the song’s main accompanying rhythm comes from a very subdued acoustic guitar.

It’s not perfect - I’ve only heard one David Bowie cover I like better than the original, and that’s Midge Ure’s cover of The Man Who Sold The World. The ending refrain of “My mother said/To get things done/You’d better not mess with Major Tom” is arguably the weakest part of this cover. But this is still a really good cover, and it was a surprise and a half to hear it on a compilation like this.

From there, the compilation transitions into a song called Dead Man, by someone named Nitin Sawhney - though this version was remixed by someone named Fink. This song is what sets the standard for the release - it’s a very rhythmic song, focusing on repetition of the chorus rather than on verses, backed by a steady beat and some really intriguing instrumentation that adds an engaging spark to the music. 

A lot of songs follow this sort of formula, with a heavy emphasis on swingy, mellow jams that rely heavily on bass guitar. I felt like a lot of these tracks, like Sail Into The Sun by The Funky Lowlives, give off the feeling of watching heatwaves radiate off of a hot footpath, or going on a slow crawl around town in a hot, low car. Though occasionally, you’ll get more of a hot jam that focuses on sex appeal rather than a more aesthetically hot, steamy day.

The Misterlong remix of Slowly, originally by Max Sedgley, is one of these songs - with a very steady beat to it, and the focus of the song involving “going down, slowly” with a very smooth cadence to the vocalist’s voice. This is one of the better songs on this compilation, with its excellent production and the very infectious, sultry feel that characterises the music.

Yes Boss, by Hess Is More, is in the same vein, though I’m not sure what to think of the whole package. The song has a repeated chorus by a female vocalist, and the “verses” are performed by a guy who’s urging the female singer to repeat the chorus. His verses kind of creep me out, and the song is about this female vocalists trying to give the eponymous “boss” what he likes so he can take her to “the b-part”. The chorus is hypnotising - it’s a very smooth, alluring piece of music. But I was a bit put off by the commentary from the “boss” in this scenario.

City Lights, by William Pit, is a very glitzy disco number - it came out in the eighties, but I think Disco was still going strong in Europe for a good few years after America threw a collective fit about it? Either way, it’s a very good song, with a bassline that’s funky as fuck and a chorus that takes a hit-or-miss first verse and manages to turn it into a hit retroactively. The guy has range, and his lower first verse is meant to be more of a seductive number. It justifies the rest of the song, even if the first verse caught you off-guard and might have put you off of wanting to listen to the rest of the song. This is a really great track - it’s either a disco release, or an 80′s pop hit with a big disco influence. Either way, it’s really great.

Aside from those songs, I don’t have much else to say about the compilation. There were some tracks I didn’t like, but even the issues I had were fairly minor - and out of 18 songs, I only took issue with two of them. About three quarters through my review notes, I ended up falling asleep - I slept for a solid 12 hours, and woke up feeling refreshed. That almost never happens with any media. Space Tranquil put me at ease and calmed me down to the point of getting a good night’s sleep - that should say something about how chill the whole package is.

This is a great compilation. I recommend grabbing the track listing and compiling a Youtube playlist, or tracking down a physical CD release. The jewel case comes with a dust jacket, and the whole product feels really weighty and nice. Overall, it’s a great release.

I recommend any song I specifically mentioned in this review, as well as Radio Citizen’s song “Everything”.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Quick Review: Blueline Medic - 42:19 (2007)

This will be a quick review, because I only have a couple things to say about it.

I grabbed this during my first $1 CD haul. The cover looked interesting, and when I took it home, I was surprised to see that the disc wasn’t totally covered in that shiny, reflective surface and album cover art - there’s a ring of it that’s about halfway between a Gamecube disc and a fully fledged CD, but the rest of the CD’s diameter is clear plastic. I’ve provided a photo of it under the cut, it’s pretty cool.

Unfortunately, that’s the best thing I can say about the album. While there’s nothing seriously wrong with the instrumentation, it’s completely boring. None of the songs stuck out to me as particularly bad, but I don’t remember a single one either - I’ve got a Burning Brides song stuck in my head instead, and I’m not even particularly fond of Burning Brides.

The singer has a good range, but his voice is a bit nasally. I personally wasn’t a fan, but I won’t knock his performance completely - there’s clearly an effort being given from all parties, the singer included. But the music is so generic and forgettable, and it’s incredibly disappointing after the awesome packaging.

With song names like “Between Toora and Hazelwood” and with the title being 42:19, I was expecting a weird Christian-influenced album, even just a weird avant-garde or ambient album with a gentle aesthetic that vaguely evoked Christianity - instead, 42:19 is how long the album runs for, and I’ve listed “Between Toora and Hazelwood” as “generic rock with an aussie accent”. Though the chorus ended up growing on me.

I tried to review this sometime in September, but I was so let down by what I heard that I stopped listening, closed my review notes without saving them, put the CD back in its case and went to bed. It’s only recently I’ve given it a full listen through, and the whole package is mediocre at best. My initial reaction is completely justified - there is nothing here for me, and I don’t think there’s going to be a big crowd who this appeals to either. The playing itself is competent, but the songs themselves are just bland, cookie-cutter, completely forgettable late-00′s rock tracks. On a scale of 0 to 10, I guess that would make that a 5 - but the expectations I had for it in the first place make it hurt all the more that I didn’t enjoy it.

I don’t recommend this album unless you like non-standard CD designs. Again, a picture of the unique disc is displayed below the cut.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Unwritten Law - Here’s To The Mourning (2005)

This is an album I’ve known about for a while. I’m a big fan of the song F.I.G.H.T, which was featured in the game Burnout Revenge - F.I.G.H.T, Red Flag and Lights and Sounds were the only three songs I particularly liked on that soundtrack. Because of this, I went back to F.I.G.H.T a lot - even out of those three, it was my favorite track. Hell, I even downloaded it on Limewire back in the day. So this is the first album I’ve reviewed where I’ve been aware of its existence before buying the CD - because of that, I think I went into the album a little bit biased - I had a reasonable idea about what to expect before I listened to the record.

I’ve actually listened to this album twice before this review, both times while playing Borderlands on PS3. There’s a lyric in the first song that talks about needing to get a second wind, which kind of floored me at the time - I’m well aware that it’s an existing term, but how often does it come up? Because of my prior experience with the album, I’ve had more time to sit back and chew on it than other records - which doesn’t help with the pre-existing bias towards the record. Full disclosure, I went into this album expecting to like it due to a song I heard like eight years ago - if you think that has negatively affected my ability to critically assess it, then feel free to write this review off. Don’t write the album off, though - listen for yourself and judge it by your own parameters.

Buyer beware, this album has several descriptions of recreational drug use - if that is an issue that you are sensitive to, I don’t recommend picking up this album. The review is fairly safe, so feel free to keep reading - but if drug use is a touchy subject, I highly recommend staying away from the album proper, because it is brought up several times in a very prominent light. You have been warned.

Back when I did a review of The Bleeders’ record “As Sweet As Sin”, I mentioned a lack of energy that really brought the album down - the singer just wasn’t that good, he had garbage range and he brought the band down because of it. I mentioned wanting something metal, something really loud and energetic, and that record left me feeling very unsatisfied.

I mention that review because I think I found a record that lives up to the expectations I had for The Bleeders.

The singer of Unwritten Law has range. He shouts, he barks, and he can tone it down and chill out. His voice complements the band, and vice versa - everything just slots together really well. Unwritten Law - in 2005, at least - is the complete antithesis of The Bleeders, and it makes me so happy.

The album starts with a 50 second intro that leads into the opening song, Get Up. It’s a promising start to the record, everything barring the vocals gets shown off before it dives into the subject matter head-first.

Get Up has a good amount of heaviness to it, but it’s also surprisingly mellow in its rhythm and vocal style. The chorus is kind of uplifting, the vocals soar and there’s a really well-worn feeling of being back in the saddle, returning to something you haven’t touched on in a while. I think that’s just the lyric “business as usual, 1-2-3″, but I like the sentiment a great deal.

There’s some pretty gentle subject matter in some of the songs, like Because of You which is like a thank-you note to someone who helped the singer to achieve his dreams. I’m kind of against that sort of thing because something about it takes me out of it, but I don’t have a bad thing to say about this song - even with the theme of the song, it’s as heavy as the rest of the album.

Lost Control could have easily been in a Burnout game. It’s a fast, pounding song with a hype as fuck chorus, where the singer really gets to show his chops. Next to Slow Dance and F.I.G.H.T, this is one of the hardest songs on the album, and it’s awesome.

And speaking of Slow Dance - it takes a different approach than the rest of the album and has more of a pulse to its rhythm as opposed to an ongoing wall of sound. The vocals of the chorus are absolutely biting - there’s more of an edge to the vocals during the end of the chorus, the vocalist barks out these strings of “Go, go, go!”, and I kind of love how harshly he delivers the lyrics “Slow dance/Take a chance on me/Take off your pants with me”.

The only track I didn’t like so much was She Says. Felt like a bit of a relationship song, which I’m not particularly a fan of, and it has the line “Father I’ve sinned”, and I’ve heard that dozens of times in tons of other stuff. There’s also the song Save Me (Wakeup Call), which is kind of like a “I’m not okay, I promise” or “life sucks - I know” type of song - another type of song I personally don’t like. But the thing about Save Me (Wakeup Call) is that I actually liked it a lot - the singer was pretty good, the lyrics had some wit even if they treaded a little bit of familiar ground, and it’s a nice, chill interlude after half an album of roaring guitars and loud singing.

Another negative is that in Walrus, they use the word “gay” as a pejorative - “everything is gay, everyone is fake”. It’s a part of the chorus, and it’s a bit jarring - it kinda shows how much the world has changed since 2005. It wasn’t right to do, but it is what it is. The song is chill otherwise, and an interesting closing to the album, but I understand if the usage is uncomfortable - I mostly just thought about how prevalent “gay” used to be as an insult, and how that’s changed - at least in my life. If this is a dealbreaker from some edgy mid-00′s rock, that’s cool and I respect that - but the record is still really good, and I recommend any other song..

There are a bunch of songs I didn’t mention - thank god, I’m trying to move away from my approach of going down the track listing and describing each song one at a time. Out of all these songs, I recommend Slow Dance, Rejections Cold, F.I.G.H.T and Intro/Get Up. I could easily recommend over three quarters of the album, but these are the ones I liked the best. I didn’t even get to F.I.G.H.T in my review - honestly, you should grab a copy of Burnout Revenge and listen to it there. That’s where it sounds the best.

You can grab the album for anywhere between $6 and $25, and the whole album is up on Youtube. I recommend buying the CD, it’s a great album to own if you’re into hard rock from the mid-00’s.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Kelli Ali - Psychic Cat (2004)

This disc was a random pick-up. I’ve been keeping an eye out for the best looking CDs, but now that I’ve been to this store a few times and lowered the amount of stock they have, it’s getting harder to find really cool or unique jewel cases. So, amidst a handful of interesting titles, I decided to grab this one on a whim.

I actually listened to this a couple days before writing this review, I was in a bit of a slump and I wanted to listen to some tunes without the pressure of having to review it at the same time. This is the first album I’ll be reviewing where I’ve listened to it before starting the review process - though Unwritten Law’s album “Here’s To The Mourning” (review coming soon) is the CD that spurred the decision in the first place.

This album is a bit of a mixed bag. I wasn’t too hot on a good handful of songs, but there are some good tunes on here that swing between mid-2000′s pop rock and more electronic, synthy stuff. The first song on the album, Hot Lips, caught me off-guard with a sound that instantly made me thing of the Rogue Traders - and the tone shifts from that point on.

Hot Lips has an annoying hook that consists of the song title repeated multiple times, but I quite like the riff and the song itself is a good, almost nostalgic pop-rock song. The album’s namesake, Psychic Cat, is right after and instantly brings down the mood with a more subdued, chill sound that takes a deep dive into a very introspective jam. It’s apparent right after Psychic Cat that the production on this album is fantastic - the sound is very clean, and there’s a lot to love about the instrumentation and synthesised aspects of the album.

There are a couple songs I mostly just sat through - Speakers is one of them. It’s still pretty good, good chorus and the production is great like the rest of the album, but it’s not a song I cared enough to list many details for. I can say the same for Ideal and Voyeur.

I will say, upon a second listen, you can hear the synths creeping in throughout the first three tracks - Hot Lips is pretty much all guitar and drum, and you can hear more electronic stuff trickling through in Psychic Cat and Speakers. But Home Honey I’m High is where the album jumps right into electronica, and it’s really good. The vibe reminds me of a slower Hotline Miami track, or like a track from the TRON: Legacy soundtrack.

The album takes a couple of cool turns, including a return to the more Rogue Traders sort of sound on Graffiti Boy, dialling the synths back and putting an emphasis on the vocals of In Praise Of Shadow, or taking a turn towards a more dreamy or sweet sound with the song Groupie. Frankly, this album is fantastic - there’s something new to love about just about each new song, and each track shares enough common elements with the previous one to really flow from song to song.

I will say, I’m not so keen on “Last Boy On Earth”, at least lyrically. It’s all about not being with a guy, even if he was the last boy on Earth. There’s nothing objectionable about the theme except that it’s a bit of a cliche, and that’s what rubs me the wrong way - whether it be a break-up song about the birth, life and death of a relationship and how sad the singer is now that it’s over, or a song about hating school and hating your parents and stuff like that, I really, really hate music cliches.

But even then, the song sounds good and there’s a good line or two - “When you think of me, I hope that it hurts” is just the right flavor of spite and personal hatred for me. Really, aside from a handful of skippable tracks, the album is great.

I recommend the songs Groupie and In Praise of Shadow in particular, but just over two thirds of the whole album is worth listening to. Frankly, I think you should listen to the whole thing. You can grab the album online from anywhere between $6 and $18, or listen to the tracks on Youtube - though I personally think you should own this CD.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Zombi - Spirit Animal (2009)

I picked this CD out today, I was in a mood and I thought it looked cool. The cover art is naturally kind of grainy and blurry, and the case itself has some wear on it that makes it look really fucking rad. I turned it over and read the fineprint, and the first words I read were “metal, hardcore, grindcore, industrial”. That’s what tipped the scales on me getting this album.

This album isn’t any of those things, which was initially a small source of disappointment. I checked the band out on Wikipedia, and they’re catagorised as a synthwave band - with Spirit Animal being considered a “space rock” album. That’s honestly a really good description of the album’s sound, though it also gave me a “power-fantasy” vibe. No, that’s not “power fantasy” as in “this video game is a total testosterone-tripping male power fantasy”, but more like an album with a fantasy sort of feel to it, but with really powerful synth melodies and deep, growling synth bass at times. It’s powerful-sounding synth fantasy, at least to me. Power-fantasy, despite the already existing term, is what came to me while listening to this album.

This album has five tracks on it - I picked it up because I thought I’d write a small in-between blog post before I take on another album I‘ve been dreading. But this is a full-length album - the lengths of each song vary between 6 minutes to 17 minutes a piece. Because of that, I chose to put it on as background music - monitoring where the song went and writing down initial thoughts, but also freeing myself up to doing some other stuff.

I liked this album a lot. The first track, Spirit Animal, gave me a very high-fantasy sort of vibe, like a song that’d be in a game like Baldur’s Gate or a dungeon-crawler or what have you. It had dips and peaks, it followed a similar melody the whole way through, but it never got old. I had a similar reaction to the final track on the album, Through Time - though it gave me more of a cyberpunk sort of vibe instead, being led by a deep, growling synth lead that lets up around the middle of the song before plunging further into darkness.

These two songs are the longest tracks on the album, at 14:01 and 17:01 respectively. I found myself preferring these longer tracks to the shorter tracks, which either didn’t capture the vibe I liked about those longer tracks or had a flaw or two that took me out of the album.

The two shorter tracks, Spirit Warrior and Cosmic Powers, were just not my sort of jam. Spirit Warrior was more energetic, and it gave me fighting game vibes - I hate to compare the whole album to video games, but that’s the personal database I’m working with here. Cosmic Powers, on the other hand, was just sort of okay. I didn’t care much for it, and I didn’t pay much attention to it because of that.

Earthly Powers, a longer track compared to the other two at 10:47, begins with this really obnoxious rhythm to it. It’s just kind of noisy and it takes over the track, and I didn’t find myself liking it - until the instrumentation changed and the tempo slowed down a bit, at which point the rhythm took on this really ominous, evil sort of quality. It finishes on a really strong note - it’s on this track that I began to categorise the album’s vibe as “power-fantasy” in my head.

I want to point out, the first four tracks are paired off in a way. Tracks 1 and 2 are named Spirit Animal and Spirit Warrior, and tracks 3 and 4 are named Earthly Powers and Cosmic Powers. Meanwhile, the last track is called Through Time - this makes me think I might not have been wrong to characterise the tracks as more fantasy-based songs with a cyberpunk-esque track right at the end. That’s a cool detail, I like that.

I like this album a lot. It’s 56 minutes of awesome instrumental synth music, and if you’re into video games, you might get a weirdly familiar or nostalgic vibe to it. I wholeheartedly recommend this album.

You can listen to Spirit Animal on Youtube - the track, and possibly the album. I recommend buying the CD for yourself, or tracking down the vinyl if you’re made of money.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Zebrahead - Waste of Mind (1998)

Zebrahead is a band I’m very vaguely familiar with. I only know them from two things - the song “His World” from Sonic 06, and a full-length music video of theirs that got picked up as a Youtube ad a couple years ago. I’m not a big fan of rap rock, or punk rap in this case, and I kind of expected some decent bro music at best. I picked it up as a joke, and I was ready to cringe - I tend not to take song titles like Bootylicious Vinyl seriously.

But I ended up enjoying this album more than I thought I would. For one, while the band’s style is “punk rap”, this album also has a bit of dub influence - as far as punk goes, I think there’s a healthy dollop of ska and dub influence in there, as is characteristic of third-wave punk music. Because of that, there are some tracks on this album that took me completely by surprise.

My expectations, as I so eloquently wrote in my review notes, were as follows: “I think this is going to be an album of righeous punk-rap jams, and I'm probably going to cringe a whole lot”. The first half of this statement held up - the first track, Check, instantly confirmed my suspicions. This song and Get Back are pretty standard pop-punk numbers, with Check utilizing faster rapping and Get Back balancing the late-90′s bro jams with the lyrics.

The Real Me was the first track to really stand out to me. It has a more chill, bouncy vibe to it - the chorus features the same guitar style as the first two songs, but the vocals are harmonised. It’s a much softer jam, and it reminds me a lot of the sort of music my friend really likes to listen to. The song only does one thing wrong, and that’s the repetition of the words “and I get mine, and I get mine, and I get mine” etc. that leads into the chorus.

The tracks I didn’t like reminded me of knock-off Blink-182 songs - this label applies wholeheartedly to the song “Someday”. It’s about being in school and hating it, and liking an attractive girl that’s way out of your league. There’s a select handful of songs I’m down with that utilises this trope, but I can count them on one hand - I hate when premises like this crop up in music. It’s been done. And the fact that it’s all being rapped just sours the song further for me.

Someday is my least favorite song for that reason. There are a few tracks I didn’t like so much, or just sort of sat through - Walk Away would be completely forgettable if there wasn’t a dub part that comes out of nowhere, and Swing is just completely forgettable. There’s also a song called Feel This Way that has a really annoying call-and-response sort of gimmick to the lyrics, though the chorus was pretty good - the band is really good at harmonising on the handful of occasions they add harmonised vocals. Someday is the only song I can really say I disliked - otherwise, the worst thing I can say is that a lot of the choruses sound like completely standard pop-punk from the late 90′s/early 00′s.

The titular track, Waste of Mind, gave me a bit of a Red Hot Chilli Peppers vibe. Not too much, the weird discordant guitar notes playing on the right audio channel aren’t very good and the chorus is fairly bog-standard punk-pop, but the feeling lingers during the verses. It’s more of the bassline, I think - the song has a total stylistic change to more of a chill, Caribbean beach tune, and that leads into a refrain of the chorus that took me by surprise and made me appreciate it just a little bit more. The hints of RHCP are there for me, but they don’t rule the song.

Big Shot, much like The Real Me, hint at the band’s ska/dub influence, and foreshadow the album’s change of direction in the last quarter. Fairly generic chorus, but it has a really fun, bouncy rhythm to it. I feel similarly about the song Jag Off, which has more of a swingy tempo to it - it has a similar concept to Feel This Way, with a singer and rapper sharing the verses and responding to each other, but both of them get some time to shine and play off each other. The chorus is also one of the better ones of the album.

I don’t have much to say about Time, except the rapping is pretty fucking fast. Blisteringly so, at least in comparison to the rest of the album. Fairly generic pop-punk, with the real highlight being the rapping.

The last three songs of the album - Move On, Fly Daze and Bootylicious Vinyl - take a complete swerve into more laid back, groovy jams. Move On features the singer more than the rapper, and it’s a really pleasant surprise of a song. The singer sounds like a bro, and his notes are a little flat, but it’s really good for what I initially wrote off as late-90′s bro jams. This is one of the longest songs on the album, and I didn’t want it to end.

For the song Fly Daze, they got Ron Jeremy to record a skit for them - he’s a radio DJ who asks all the ladies listening to “give them the clap”. It’s really dumb, but I’m kind of impressed they reached out and got him to do it.

This song is more of a throwback groove number. There’s this really great spacy feel to the chorus, and the song utilises cowbell and sports-whistle sound effects to great effect. The bass rules this song, and there’s this really great guitar solo right near the end too. It’s this song that solidified my opinion of the album - it’s a good record, and I’m glad I listened to it.

Of course, there’s one more song to go - Bootylicious Vinyl. Honestly? Meh. It’s not great. But it isn’t particularly bad, and even if I didn’t like it so much, it doesn’t tarnish the rest of the album.

Waste of Mind was a very pleasant surprise. I was expecting some pretty standard punky trash - my expectations weren’t completely off-base, because a lot of the choruses for these songs were forgettable faff. The best quality to those choruses was the occasional presence of layered vocals. Of course, not every chorus was forgettable, and the album had more range to it than I was expecting. I really liked the album’s late swerve into more laid-back jams, and I had a good time for a great deal of the album. I recommend this album wholeheartedly, even if it’s just to give it a try.

For the more hard, “punk rap” style of songs, I recommend The Real Me and Big Shot, though both are more funky, swingy types of songs that feature rapping and punk-sounding choruses. If you’re interested in the more laid back tunes at the end of the album, I recommend Move On and Fly Daze - in that order, preferably, but they’re both good songs either way.

You can grab the album for anywhere between $6 and $9, and the album has been uploaded to Youtube.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Decade: Ten Years of Fierce Panda (2004) - Side B

(I apologize for the blurry picture, it’s all I’ve got right now and it’s 4 in the morning here. I’d take a replacement picture if I could, but I just finished listening to this CD and I need to strike while the iron’s hot)

This is the second half, or “Side B”, of Decade: Ten Years of Fierce Panda. I reviewed the first ten songs eight days ago - frankly, I worked my way into a bad mood after that review and avoided the CD for a while. But I’m back to finish the review, because there are a couple of CDs I want to get to in time and I can’t do that without finishing this one.

For this half of the compilation, I turned my sound down to help combat the distortion - the main issue I had with the album in the previous review was the sound quality, and I decided to forego the same audio quality complaints for this review. By all means, it’s still a problem - but I’ve decided to focus more on the songs themselves this time around.

Surprisingly, I liked this half of the album a lot more than the first half. It could have been the lower volume making each song less grating, but I think there are just more tracks on this half that appeal to me.

It kicks off with a song by Coldplay - one of the names I bought the album for. I don’t mind Coldplay so much, they release good singles and I think the stereotypical “well, at least it’s better than Nickelback/Coldplay!!” statement is stale and trite - but as far as albums go, I’m no fan. Give me The Scientist and Yellow, maybe a handful of other tracks like Fix You, and that’s about it. This is a singles band for me.

The track on this compilation, Brothers and Sisters, doesn’t fit into that handful of tracks I just mentioned. Lyrics didn’t resonate or stick out to me, especially with Chris Martin’s singing style. The music was good though, I feel like Coldplay is a decent-sounding band as far as instrumentals go - pre-Sky Full Of Stars, anyway. Overall, kind of a letdown considering that Coldplay was one of the key draws to this compilation in the first place. I was hoping to find another track of theirs that I might like, but it’s no skin off my back in the long run.

Hundred Reasons’ “Cerebra” is more of a heavy rock track. Maybe emo, or alternative rock? I dunno. The music sounds good and the singer has a decent voice for this style of music. This is one of the better rock/metal-oriented songs I’ve heard during the course of this blog, which is to say it was well-produced and I liked it well enough.

The song Arienette by Bright Eyes was the first surprise of this half of the album. It’s got a very brooding, almost gothic atmosphere to it, played very well by the band. The vocalist sounds a bit wobbly in his singing, but I chalked this up to the sound quality - if only because I want to believe there’s a smoother, better quality version of this song in existence.

I actually checked out a higher quality version on Youtube, just for background noise as I wrote this review up, and unfortunately the vocalist still sounds like he has marbles in his mouth. Even considering this development, I still like how this song sounds very much. Hell, it works for the latter half of the song - all in all, this is a decent tune.

Hundredweight, by Easyworld, switches between a softer, more beat-driven sound, and a more pop-punk sort of sound for the chorus. I would have preferred if the whole song was in the more pop-punk-sounding style, the singer just sort of annoys me in the quieter sections. If this song was more like the chorus all the way through, it’d be a pretty good track.

Take the Long Road And Walk It, by a band called The Music, sounds like three or four notes being played for the entirety of the song. I hated it.

The Polyphonic Spree’s song “Soldier Girl” runs into a similar dilemma as Hundredweight, though I like this song for what it is. The song starts off with someone laying down a beat by... puffing into a flute the wrong way? I dunno. I had a try of my friend’s flute once, and the discordant puffing noise sounds like when you aren’t blowing into a flute the right way. This sound is what makes up the beat at the start of the song, and I kept hearing it through the song - for that reason, I found it a bit uncomfortable to listen to.

But the chorus gives way to more of a Brit-pop sound, or something a little rockier, and this part of the song sounded really good. It makes up the last third of the song, and I really liked that. This is a song that I can tolerate at worst, and have a smile and a nod to at best - it’s a pretty decent track.

Manhunt, by Winnebago Deal, is another hard rock sort of song. The band sounds good, but when the singer comes in, everyone decides to stop playing when the singer is yelling something out - but they’ll play tiny sections in-between his statements. I don’t know if that has a term, or if it’s a trope? I’ve heard songs do this before. Either way, I don’t like listening to it. There are also a handful of cusses thrown in there that just feel tacked on, like they’re pandering to an edgy teen crowd by saying “fuck” once and “bitch” a handful of times. It’s face level at best.

Six By Seven’s contribution, “Bochum (Light Up My Life)”, is what you get when you mix uplifting, soaring music with more of an airy, ambient atmosphere - and then give that song a tub-thumping drum pattern. The drums kind of reminded me of how the Lumineers would use a drum track, but I think that comparison does Bochum a disservice - it’s a bit distracting, but it’s still a good song. The only disservice that’s been done to this song is how flat the vocals are - otherwise, this is a really neat track.

That leaves two songs: Tiny Vessels by Death Cab For Cutie, and This Is The Last Time by Keane.

Death Cab For Cutie is one of those bands I know about solely from the name. They’ve never been on my radar, and I went into this song relatively blind. I felt like I might have heard a song or two from them in the past, but nothing really stuck out in my mind. This was a pretty clean track, the vocals were smooth and the instruments sound good. The tempo hooked me in, and the rest of the song really delivered.

And finally, This Is The Last Time by Keane. Yeah, this is the last time I listen to this CD! I’m excited, even if the song doesn’t end up being so good.

Keane is the last band that drew my eye on this disc. I have fond memories of playing a Singstar demo on PS2 with Somewhere Only We Know on it, and I was hoping to get some more of that goodness with this track.

This is the only brand-name recognition song on this disc - out of this, Supergrass and Coldplay - that managed to live up to my expectations. It’s got a lively piano line to it, and the vocals are strong right out of the gate. The chorus is very upbeat in its sound, and the vocalist hits these high notes that no other song on this compilation gets close to - the song just comes across as more lively. It has more range than any other song on this disc, and it appeals to me in a very bright, lovely, mid-00′s poppy sort of way.

So - with that last great song done and dusted, how does the whole album stack up?

I’m not going to mince words - I thought this compilation was trash.

I don’t say that because the songs were particularly bad - the first ten songs had some mediocre tracks, but I liked a couple songs on that first half and I liked a fair amount of songs on this half. I say it because the audio quality is terrible.

This could be me talking out of my ass - I’ve made no secret of my own ignorance in my reviews. But I’ve listened to the MP3s on this CD, and I’ve heard rips and official single releases on Youtube for songs that I liked, and the CD quality songs sounded much worse. Some songs sounded like they were buzzing when too much was going on, like they were clipping, and particularly heavy guitar playing or loud mixed instrumental songs would sound distorted as well as have that clipping sound to it. The mixing on this compilation is straight-up garbage.

Because of that, I can’t recommend this album. If you see Decade: Ten Years of Fierce Panda in your local used multimedia shop, or on eBay, or whatever - grab the track listing, and take it to YouTube. I don’t say that as in “pirate this album”, I say that as in “don’t waste your money on gimped versions of these songs”. Hell, buy the albums from each artist featured on this compilation if you want to hear each song and show your support for their craft. Whatever. Just don’t buy this release.

Recommended songs are All You Good, Good People by Embrace, Porchlight by Seafood, Arienette by Bright Eyes and This Is The Last Time by Keane, There are some other songs that are worth a listen, but these are my favorites. You can find the first three on Youtube, I know that for a fact - and it wouldn’t surprise me if This Is The Last Time was uploaded on there as well.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Decade: Ten Years of Fierce Panda (2004) - Side A

This is a compilation of several British bands who have worked with the Fierce Panda record label over the span of their first ten years. The track listing is pretty lengthy - 20 tracks that span over 75 minutes - with bands like Supergrass, Coldplay and Keane catching my eye. I’ve been excited to check this CD out for a while. Given the length, I’ve decided to review it in two parts, or “sides” - much like a vinyl record.

I have to mention before we get started, though - this compilation has been a pain to review. This CD had a track list on the back of the jewel case, but the metadata for each track is completely wrong - it turns out there’s an American track listing and a British track listing, and my copy had the latter with the metadata of the former. I’m very tired, and not in a particularly good mood - but regardless, I’ve tackled the first half of this compilation, and my thoughts are under the cut. 

I’ll be frank - so far, I’m not a big fan of this release. Not necessarily because I dislike the artists, though I haven’t heard many songs I’ve liked, but because I feel like it might suffer from the “loudness war”.

The term “loudness war”, for those who aren’t aware, is a term regarding the artificial inflation of an album’s volume - making something sound louder in post for any number of reasons. Probably because people regard loud music as being better, or clearer to listen to, or commanding more attention. I dunno, it’s probably some corporate line. It was a growing trend in the late 90′s, and persisted throughout the 00′s - though according to Wikipedia, it’s been a point of contention for longer. The consequences of this practice can include audio clipping and distortion, which are both major issues with these first ten tracks.

I made the connection on the second track of the album, Supergrass’ “Caught By the Fuzz”. While I don’t think it’s a particularly good song to begin with, there’s a clear discrepancy between this MP3 and the official single + music video on Youtube. The singer’s voice is harder to make out on the compilation version, to the point of mild distortion behind the (not particularly great in the first place) instrumentation, and it makes a bad song even worse. Honestly, the previous track wasn’t the best either (Ash’s “Punkboy”), but it should still have a particularly clean sound.

This issue persists across every song I listened to on this half of the release, whether I liked it or not. The Bluetones’ song “No. 11″? It was passable, but it was unnecessarily loud and dubious in audio quality. Placebo’s “Bruise Pristine”? Kinda mediocre, at least to me, but it could have at least had better sound quality. It got to the point where I managed to find a song I well and truly enjoyed - Embrace’s “All You Good Good People” - and I listened to it again on youtube to give it the attention it deserved.

Of the songs I’ve listened to so far, I only particularly like two of them - the aforementioned Embrace song, and the Seafood song “Porchlight”. The singer of “Porchlight” really did the song justice - his vocal range and the sound of his voice fit the lyrics he was singing, and he had skill when it came to singing. He wasn’t afraid to go for some ambitious notes, and he hit them really well. You’d think the repeated chorus line “there’s a house on the lake” would get repetitive and annoying, but this guy manages to pull it off - I really liked this song, in comparison to the rest of the album but also on its own merits.

I liked 3 Colours Red for what it was - it was a fairly well-made heavy rock song, though I wasn’t so hot on the tempo of the thing, and I kinda-sorta enjoyed what I interpreted as a bit of a Blink-182 influence on the song “Chandelier” by Idlewild? Aside from that, I was a bit let down. I’d love to say it was due to personal bias, considering how annoyed I was at the hoops I ended up jumping through to get this review on the road, but I genuinely went into these songs hoping for something awesome and mostly came out of them empty-handed.

I started to lose hope with Kenickie’s song “Come Out 2nite”. I’ll be frank - I didn’t think I’d like the song based on its name. I was surprised when the vocalist turned out to be a woman, only because every other vocalist before this track - and every vocalist after it - was male, but it didn’t ensure the quality of the track. It’s just sort of slow and sloppy as a song, and combine that with the pre-existing clipping and distortion issues, and you have a song that lowers the bar beyond the point you were hoping it’d reach.

But nothing compares to the Low Fidelity Allstars’ song “Diamonds are Forever”. I don’t know if it’s a cover of the James Bond theme from the movie of the same name, or a remix, or what - there’s a roboticised text-to-speech voice that calls it a remix - but it is awful. Absolutely terrible on all accounts. There’s an ongoing droning note throughout the entire song, which plays as a singer talk-sings through a couple of completely uninteresting and banal sentences, and as snippets of what I assume are another song play over it later on. I have never disliked a song that I’ve covered on this blog more than I disliked this one.

Okay. I’m tired, I’m not in the best mood right now and I’ve covered half of this album. I’m going to take a break, maybe take a nap, and come back later for “Side B” of this anthology. It has Coldplay, Death Cab For Cutie and Keane on it, so my hopes are high - Coldplay gets a bad rap, but they’re got a couple of alright singles.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Pomomofo - In Super VGA (2008)

(I apologise for the poor lighting, this was a last minute review I cooked up at midnight. I might replace the picture in the morning.)

This appealing mass of pixels is a short techno album I picked up recently. I picked it up for the bright colors, and I expected a little bit of techno/club music. Luckily, I got exactly what I was expecting - it’s not the be-all end-all of obscure late-00′s club hits, but it’s decent. There’s only 5 tracks on it, two of which are remixes of the opening track, so this’ll be a quick review.

The first track, Islands? Honestly, this could have had a little bit of radio airtime in Australia when it first came out. It feels like it could have contended with The Potbelleez for maybe a week, after which I imagined it would have faded out, but I reckon it could have had that 15 minutes of fame. It did score a place in Triple J’s “j unearthed” competition, where they showcased a bunch of new talent and let people vote for their favorites, but they’ve fallen off the face of the Earth since this... EP(?) was released.

The song is a fairly generic club song, nothing really hooked me except the opening notes. The production is tight, and everything sounds crisp and nice. I will say I found the cheeky singer somewhat likable on this track, but his appeal wears out fast - the more you listen to him, the worse it gets. I recommend looking this one up, it’s on youtube - it’s by far the best song on the collection, but it won’t change your life.

Tamagotchi Girl is weird. The first verse is about a girl eating chocolate cake in a mosh pit, then the narrator wiping crumbs off her mouth and kissing her. It’s just a bit weird, and the song doesn’t have the same amount of character that the first one does. I was a bit let down, I was expecting this song to go all-out on the chiptunes - but it’s a fairly generic club beat with some repetitive singing.

Just Cos It’s French is a cheeky sort of song, but it’s the cocky, insufferable little prick kind of cheeky. The chorus is “Just Cos It’s French, doesn’t mean it’s cool”, so kind of like it’s calling out vapid wannabe model-types who parade accessories and such around because they’re French? But at the same time, there’s something almost punchable about that hook, and then the singer ends up screaming it multiple times over yet another generic club beat. It sucks.

The two remixes of Islands? One of them is too long, it just spaces out the song to more of a beat until it’s twice as long as the unaltered version. The other one has more bass, but I don’t have the best quality headphones or speakers? Still, I liked the bass. Ultimately, neither remix matched the vanilla song.

It’s pretty bland Australian techno/club music. That’s all I can really say. I’m a bit disappointed, but I got a nice hit from Islands and it’s definitely worth a dollar. I think this album is actually worth about a dollar - it didn’t blow me away, but it hit close enough to its value that I ended up feeling satisfied.

You can check out a handful of old music videos on Youtube, including for the song Islands, and I saw an eBay link offering the album for two bucks. I recommend giving this one a listen if you have twenty minutes to blow - just skip the Live From Mars remix and it’s an alright package.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

The Bleeders - Self-Titled Album (2005)

So, I was planning to review the Bleeders’ CDs I had bought in chronological order. I skimmed Wikipedia, and I saw As Sweet As Sin and a self-titled album in their discography, with As Sweet As Sin coming first and the self-titled album coming second. Satisfied, I went on and reviewed As Sweet As Sin first - it was the first album I reviewed on this blog.

However, I just did a bit more research, and it turns out that the Bleeders have two self-titled albums. One called The Bleeders, and another simply called Bleeders. This is the former, and it came out before As Sweet As Sin.

I imagine you might be wondering why I care so much. I myself stated that this blog was run on a “$1 budget”, and I would use that as a generic way to cover myself from particularly harsh criticism - I’m just talking about how I feel about the music, who cares about the details. I still feel somewhat similarly. But I spent the entirety of this album thinking it was a sequel, when really it came out before the first album I heard. I’ve basically compared the two albums around the wrong way.

Honestly, I think it’s pretty funny. I listened to this album thinking “well gee, they sure proved me wrong - these guys have actually improved somewhat! I’m glad.” With the revelation that this came before As Sweet As Sin, it means that the band actually managed to become worse in between albums.

So, The Bleeders’ first self-titled album. I actually liked a lot of what I heard. The first track sounds like it came straight out of a Burnout game, and I found myself really liking the instrumentation - the band is actually pretty solid, and I liked a lot more of the music on this album than I did on aSaS. The quality of the instrumentation is actually pretty high throughout the entirety of this album - I liked more songs than I disliked.

However, issues once again stem from the lyrics and vocals. I’ll give full credit to the singer of this band for doing a much better job here - the first few tracks are alright, and while my previous criticisms levelled against the singer still apply, I feel like there was more of an effort made on his behalf on this album. The difference is noticeable, even if the showing is still average at best.

The lyrics, however, were about as mediocre as before. I feel like most of the tracks on this album have subpar lyrics, which aren’t helped by the singer - however, the vocals and lyrics were rarely as bad as each other. In fact, I felt that the tracks zigzagged between what ended up sounding worse - the lyrics, or the voice singing them.

For one track, the vocals will shine as being particularly bad - the singer can’t maintain a note, or the rasp of his voice will stick out as particularly awful. The lyrics won’t sound like high art, but the melody that they’re sung in could have sounded much better with a better singer on the mic. But in other songs, the vocalist puts in something of an effort - and the lyrics are awful, vapid trash. In one way or another, the vocals and the lyrics ruin every song - but they ruin them in completely different ways. The two are intrinsically tied, but the way they fail is unique.

And the worst part is that the music is actually good this time around! I liked most of the songs for their music, it was competent and enjoyable. Like I said, the first song wouldn’t be out of place in a Burnout game - maybe it was in a Burnout game, even. I feel similarly for six of the eight tracks. But the vocals and lyrics ruin everything, and it’s an absolute shame. I hate to be a dick, because I imagine the band are all close friends and promised to share their journey together, but the band is almost wasted with a singer like this.

The only song I disliked on all fronts was one called Family. It’s one and a half minutes long, and it’s just thoughtless noise with two of the band members thanking their families for sticking with them during their hardship. The concept is sweet - it’s genuinely a sweet gesture from the band - but it sounds like a parody from a kid’s show trying to be cool and relevant. It’s like a death metal song preaching the virtues of proper hydration and a good night’s sleep. Something about it screamed “cheap cliche”, and I honestly hated it - it was a sweet gesture by the band, but listening to it made me cringe.

This issue is particularly subjective. If you liked it, for its sound as well as its message, then that’s fine with me. No hate coming from me.

I began listening to this album as a sequel to aSaS. You can tell that I consider it a return to their sound, even though this is an earlier chronological release. Maybe it’s unfair that I’ve judged their material in the way I have. The Bleeders’ first self-titled album is actually a pretty decent listen, I liked it a lot - but it retroactively makes me like aSaS even less. For over half the album, I had a smile on my face because I thought The Bleeders had improved - but once I realised my mistake, all of that flew out the window. I’m mad because I’m an idiot, but also because the band manages to take such a step back from such a promising start.

the only thing I can say in defence of As Sweet As Sin? Its version of A Bleeding Heart is better.

I just had a quick look around, and I couldn’t find a copy of this album on Youtube or Ebay. You might have better luck conducting your own research, or looking through a local brick-and-mortar store like I did. If you manage to find it, I recommend listening to the songs All That Glitters, So Lonely and Cast In The Shadows. They might have music videos on Youtube, so start there if you like.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Barenaked Ladies - Everything to Everyone (2003)

So I’ve never been familiar with Barenaked Ladies. I’ve heard five songs maximum, and it was back when I was a quirky teen who was initially into The Big Bang Theory, and who liked a lot of “nerd stuff” like the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny - which I ended up overplaying to death, to the point that I think I’m a bit too jaded to enjoy it any more.

But I figured that it was worth a shot. I kinda liked One Week? They’ve been categorised as a fun, quirky band, and I’ve gotten into Jonathan Coulton as of late - also a quirky musician guy, though with a separate background from a band like Barenaked Ladies. Maybe there’ll be some appealing material in this album.

Not to give away the review, but I think I like Jonathan Coulton better.

With the opening tracks of the album, I realised I wasn’t so hot on the lyrics. Steven Page’s vocals aren’t for everyone, and I wasn’t a big fan of them to begin with, but they grew on me - the lyrics were the main point of contention I had with the album. They weren’t all bad, I especially liked the song Another Postcard on a technical and vocal level, but the first two songs made me cringe a little.

The best parts of this album for me were the rapping parts. I dunno if it’s considered racist or in poor taste to use the phrase “white boy rapper”? The rapping in this album came across a bit like that, but it was fun and bouncy. I also thought that Steven Page ended up having chops, there were some songs I was surprised I enjoyed due to his vocal delivery.

I have to say, though - given Steven Page’s departure from the band for cocaine use, War On Drugs comes across as a bit hypocritical. There’s a part near the end where it sounds like they’re making a particularly strong anti-drug statement, though I think Steven Page references his own war on drugs at the end? I got a bit distracted during the listening of this song. The song was very poignant and well-made, and I enjoyed it - but considering that turn of events six years after this album came out, I can’t help but laugh for all the wrong reasons.

The song “For You” has a gentle, country-like instrumentation to it, which I liked a lot. There’s something about verbose, wordy songs set to a more country sort of tune that I just really love - I hate vapid “tractor music” country about as much as I hate vapid pop - honestly, probably moreso. But when a song has a lot to say, especially something nice to say, I really do like a more folky sort of sound to it. This was a good song.

Another Postcard is another song I especially liked, and it’s on the other end of the spectrum - it’s a rap about chimps. Wearing boots, holding cats, eating bananas - just chimpanzees being chimpanzees. Y’know, the same sort of thing as the internet’s appreciation of cats. It’s a goofy, quirky rap, and it’s got a swinging sort of beat to it - very lively, very bouncy, very fun song.

The first song on the album, Celebrity, and the song Shopping both gave me Jonathan Coulton vibes. Unfortunately, I think that’s led me to judge Barenaked Ladies unfairly - because I infinitely prefer Coulton’s music over the music of this band. I dunno, there’s something about the quirkiness of both songs that made me think back to Coulton’s “Shop-Vac” and “Today With Your Wife”, two recent favorites of mine - not because they sound too much alike, but because I think I wanted to listen to those songs instead of these ones. I did enjoy a good handful of songs - the two aforementioned ones, plus Upside Down, War on Drugs and Take It Outside - but a lot of songs made me wish I was listening to something else or were otherwise forgettable.

Ultimately, I had a good enough time with the album. I didn’t dislike it in particular, but I wasn’t so hot on it either. I recommend Another Postcard and its hidden demo at the end of the album, and For You. Everything else is passable, and I hope you enjoy it if you choose to listen to the album yourself.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Uncut: The Playlist (May 2006)

Today’s review is a little different. My first two reviews were for full albums by single bands - this is a compilation CD with songs that were released decades apart from each other, each with its own feel and niche. Compilation reviews are going to be a bit lighter than full album reviews, mostly talking about the songs I liked with less focus on how they all fit together.

I actually liked this compilation a lot. I bought it because it had The Funeral on it by Band of Horses, and I managed to find a few other songs that I liked as well. The theme of the compilation seems to be contemporary country/folk - there are some indie songs on here like The Funeral (which I think is indie?), a couple fairly straight country-sounding songs like Candi Statons’s “I’ll Sing A Love Song To You” and even a really charming song by Lambchop - which I had to google after hearing for the first time, to find that Wikipedia has listed the band as “closely associated with the alternative country genre”. Alternative country is a thing. I think I love it.

Uncut seems to be a music publication - the CD booklet (liner notes?) is actually an advertisement for a Johnny Cash compilation release, and the songs on the back of the case all have page numbers next to them. Judging from both the content of the compilation and the ad, I would wager that Uncut is a country music magazine.

Personally I’m not hot on Country, at least not the “Tractors and muddin’ and riding a wet hog” stereotypical sort of stuff. I try not to characterise all of Country music as this, but I have heard songs like this. It’s a cliche for a reason - that type of country music certainly exists. The closest I get to Country is Counting Crows, who have shown traces of folky country-type inspirations for years but have dived head-long into the Dad Rock category over their most recent releases.

Really, I was more into the indie-sounding songs like the Calexico song “Cruel” and - in my opinion - The Funeral by Band of Horses, though there were some notable exceptions. Lambchop, for example - I’ll admit that the singer’s voice turned me off to begin with, but the way this dude delivers lines is incredibly intriguing.

The Lambchop song on this compilation is called “All Smiles and Mariachi”, and there’s this knock-out line where the guy talks about going to get some dip, and tells his partner that while they’re gone he’ll try not to eat all the chips. It’s goofy, charming lyrics like that that made me smile, and the way he delivered the word “chips” just hit me in some stupid way, you know? For some reason, the word “chips” was delivered in a way that I really appreciated. I don’t know what else to say - it’s goofy on my part, but I just loved it so much.

Another song I liked was Say So What by Graham Coxon. This song sounds aggressively british - the guy’s accent is brilliant, and I was getting a Blur sort of vibe from the song. As you can probably tell, I have a bit of a thing for Blur - I’m not that familiar with British rock or pop, so Blur and a handful of Britpop hits are basically all I have to go on regarding contemporary British music of the 90′s and onward. But I think I might have a bit of a handle on the differences between British rock and American rock? Like I feel like if I hear a song that hits the same switch as Blur, it might be British - the style of the song, in both its composition and general sound, feels much different to me.

Frankly, I could be full of shit. Feel free to tell me if that is indeed the case. But I think I’m starting to distinguish between American and British rock aside from the vocals, and I have to say - I’m leaning more towards the British sound.

EDIT: Being the dunce that I am, I didn’t realise that Graham Coxon was a MEMBER OF BLUR TO BEGIN WITH. Fuck, I’m a moron sometimes. Alright, carry on.

There were a couple of oddities on the record - there’s a song by a band called Faust that’s mostly ambient noise, there’s a Bob Marley song called Soul Shakedown Party, and there’s kind of an ill-fitting song by a band called Denim that closes out the compilation. But overall, it was a good, chill compilation, and I liked having the chance to unwind and listen to some decent tunes. About half of the album was background noise to me, but it was background noise that I appreciated - and even if the album had wasted my time, I still get to own The Funeral for myself in some capacity, and now I know about Kurt Wagner and Lambchop.

You can buy this compilation on eBay, or look up the track listing on Discogs.com and track down the songs for yourself. I imagine the songs are on Youtube, so feel free to make your own playlist and recreate the CD for yourself.

I apologise for the especially shitty-looking CD box-art photo today, I’ll go back to the method I usually use with the next review. I like the shitty low-effort look I’ve been going with, but when the image quality is that bad, it gets under my skin. Look forward to a better quality picture on my next review.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Burning Brides - Fall of the Plastic Empire (2002)

After The Bleeders’ As Sweet As Sin, I found another jewel case with a stylised spine. It looked like the band name and album title were written on a sheet of lined paper with a typewriter - kind of a cliche, but I was riding high on As Sweet As Sin and its sick-ass cover art, so I gave it a shot. This album cover was similarly edgy, being a human skull formed out of a bunch of naked women, and I decided to grab it too.

Having not enjoyed As Sweet As Sin, I wasn’t sure what to think of this CD. Maybe it’d be a different flavor of bland, edgy mid-00′s rock/punk/emo. This wasn’t helped by the name of the band - I had misread the band’s name in the store as Burning Bridges, and the name Burning Brides made me think of Black Veil Brides. Which, at least stylistically, isn’t a band i’m all that fond of. Not expecting much, I put the CD into my laptop’s disc drive and queued it up on Winamp.

I can tell you right now that this album is everything I wanted the last album to be. Hard, edgy rock, with some decent guitar work and a singer who wasn’t afraid to strain and scream. Right out of the gate, the band gave me a hint of Alice Cooper - this perception cleared up pretty fast, but it still surprised me how it dived straight into a more hard-rock oriented sound. The lyrics reminded me of a band called Red Vox, which is an online band started by a couple of video game streamers - their music is inspired by bands like the Pixies and other rock bands in the same vein. I’m not well-informed enough to tell you who Burning Brides might have been influenced by, but that’s as good of a comparison as I can provide.

A lot of the songs are very energetic, guitar-driven rock songs. There are some tracks like Glass Slipper that feel like they’d fit on a Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater soundtrack, or maybe Crazy Taxi - I say this with the greatest respect. It’s around this track that the band began to hit another switch in my head - I thought they sounded a lot like Arctic Monkeys. I also thought I heard some inklings of Queens of the Stone Age in there, but I’m only familiar with like 5 of their songs so I honestly couldn’t make an informed opinion one way or the other. However, I learned after I listened to this album that Burning Brides actually toured with Queens of the Stone Age, as well as Audioslave, Mastodon and Peaches - all artists I have extremely tenuous grips on, but whose style I think I can recall in the faintest detail. Frankly, I think it makes the band even cooler that they’ve reached some level of recognition with those musicians.

the songs on this album skew between three different styles - the first is more of a heavy style, bordering on metal, where the singer has a shout and the guitars play deep notes hard and loud. The second style is a more chilled out Arctic Monkeys/Red Vox style, with more of an even tone to the notes and the playing, and the vocals are sung at the singer’s regular range. The third is more of a rhythm and blues sort of pace, with more of a bluesy, swinging tempo to the guitars. The latter style has the deep notes of the harder style, with more of the chill, even style’s vocals. One or two songs have these weird, spoken-word verses, which aren’t my cup of tea, but overall I thought that the instrumentation and vocals on each song were really good, and the variation between songs was a nice touch.

There is an aspect of the album that I’m divided on, and that’s the style shifts in most of the songs. A lot of the songs on this album will start one way, then there’ll be a shake-up or style change for the last verse or halfway through the song, taking a heavier or lighter tone than the start of the song. I like when a song shakes it up, and I liked how these songs were doing that - but the thing is, these shake-ups happen way too often on too many songs. I was most entertained when they were surprises, and by the end of the album I was expecting a surprise on every song - effectively killing the enjoyment that I had felt when I wasn’t expecting anything. Even saying that, though, I think I enjoyed every song on the album bar one.

There’s a song called Stabbed In the Back of the Heart, and it made me cringe from the first verse. Maybe it was intentional? I don’t know. All I do know is that the rhyming scheme made my skin crawl, the lyrics themselves followed a very cliche “this shallow girl dumped me and now I’m bitter about her, grr” sort of formula, and the instrumentation was very samey and bland throughout. This was the one filler song on the album, and while I still liked it more than the entirety of the last album I reviewed, it was a bummer to listen through. There’s a cool lick right at the end of the song, though, so I’m happy.

There are two songs I want to talk about in particular, and they are “Elevator” and “Blood on the Highway”. With “Elevator”, I was hoping for something to blow my tits off. I wanted a head-banger, I wanted to hear some fucking metal. Something about the previous song “Rainy Days” just put me in the mood, and when this song started, I felt a rush of excitement. Elevator is the hardest song on the album, and I really like it. It’s this album’s White Limo - not as heavy or effective as the first time I heard White Limo, but still. It’s that one song that catches you when you need to hear something hard and fast, and it does a very good job of it.

Blood on the Highway is different. It takes more of a plodding, low tone to it, with a weird almost dissonant note that soon gives way to a more palatable sort of tune. The tone of the song is very dark and low for three quarters of the song, like an overcast day where the sky is covered in those really thick, grey clouds - and then the customary shake-up in the song’s style has more of an upbeat, even uplifting tone to it. It’s like the clouds have split and let a beam of light shine down off in the distance. The tempo and style of the song remains similar - the clouds haven’t dispersed into a bright, sunny day, there are still grey overcast clouds everywhere. But the brightness from that sun is the first visual cue that has given your eyes any exercise all day, and it’s like your eyeballs are having a stretch. It’s refreshing, and it feels good to listen to - that’s how I would describe the stylistic change in Blood on the Highway.

The last two songs are great in their own right. The tenth and final song on the track listing, Plastic Empire, has a Blur-esque bounce to its beat, though the chorus is just noise - the singer yells a bit, the guitars flatten out, bleh. The song changes, whatever, and it’s a surprisingly soft ballad interlude. I thought the singer sounded a lot like Billie Joe Armstrong here, which is bizarre - I hadn’t been getting that impression for the whole album, but here’s what could be a potential voice double for the singer of Green Day. Then, to my surprise, the song changed back to a bouncy Blur-inspired riff, and that’s how the song ended. It was a good closing track - until the eleventh track, which isn’t on the track listing started to play. Nothing particularly crazy, just a nice, driving beat and some vocals that gave me sort of a Ramones sort of vibe. I dunno. Overall, the album caps off nicely with some good tunes.

I enjoyed Burning Brides’ Fall of the Plastic Empire a great deal. It’s not a band I would listen to with the same fanaticism as Counting Crows or the Mountain Goats, and even though I’m not particularly hot on Foo Fighters’ entire body of work, I wouldn’t call Burning Brides better than them by any means. But by God, this is a good band and this was a good album. I recommend giving this album a try if you’re a fan of the Arctic Monkeys, Queens of the Stone Age or more serious, heavy classic rock (as opposed to a band like Chicago, with more romantic, chill ballads and grooves).

For a taste of the heavier songs, I recommend checking out Elevator or Blood on the Highway. For more Arctic Monkeys/Red Vox-type tracks, I recommend Glass Slipper or Arctic Snow. To check out the more bluesy riffs, listen to If I’m A Man and Rainy Days.

You can buy this album for peanuts online, and it’s also on Apple Music. The entire album has also been uploaded to Youtube.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

The Bleeders - As Sweet As Sin (2006)

EDIT: At the time of this review, I believed that this was the first album in the Bleeders’ discography. I was wrong.

My mistake comes from a quick scan of a legitimate-looking Wikipedia page, and a careless glance at a Discogs page for another band called The Bleeders. There are two self-titled albums, one in 2005 and another in 2007 - this album is in the middle, in 2006. Because of my negligence, I’ve just reviewed the band’s first full-length release as their second full-length release, and vice versa.

I regret my decision terribly, and I’ve chosen to correct my most egregious errors. The only edits involve my age circa 2006, correcting an awkward turn of phrase, listing that the Bleeders album I’ll be reviewing after this one is their first self-titled album, and I’ve corrected the year of publication as being 2006 rather than 2005.

This is the first CD I picked out of this lot. The name of the band, and the way it was stylised on the spine of the CD case, were what drew my eye - and the kick-ass cover art is what made me keep it. I have never heard of this band before today, and when I saw the cover art I was expecting something metal.

You’d expect something heavy and edgy from that cover art, and when you first play the album that’s kind of what you get - just in a kind of muddy and derivative way. I dunno - honestly, as far as I know, this band used some of the themes and vocal imagery better than other artists of the time, or before edgy teen bands drove them into the ground. I would have been ten or eleven when this album came out, and I didn’t have a musical identity back then aside from “““Classic Rock”““ - I can’t say too much about how bland and uninspired I found the subject matter, I guess, but I will say that some of the songs brought back vague American Idiot-era Green Day vibes. It’s probably just the trappings of the era, or a bit of direct influence maybe, considering how American Idiot came out in 2004. I’m not a music historian or whatever, I don’t know. Just thought it was worth mentioning.

I’ve described the music on this album as sounding a bit muddy and - to my uninformed ears - derivative, and that holds true for the first four tracks of the album. The Kill and Secrets both had riffs that were boring and seem to exist to fill in time, and the vocals basically put me to sleep - I wasn’t hot on the subject matter or the sound of the singer’s voice. I don’t even remember the next two tracks, they basically went in one ear and out the other.

Wild at Heart, however, was actually pretty servicable. The riff brought me back to the album slightly, and while I still disliked the singer (god bless his heart, he’s trying), this song left me in a better mood. That might have set the groundwork for Nightmares, the first song that I actually kind of liked. The chorus sucked, but the music behind the track was pretty solid. This is what made me want to talk about the album - aside from shitting on the songs I disliked, I wanted to mention these little almost-diamonds in the rough that kept me invested in the whole package.

I could go on down the track listing, but really, there are two types of songs on this album - the ones I liked, and the ones I didn’t. They fit into these categories in fairly similar ways, so I’ll talk about them as a whole.

The songs I kind-of-liked were Wild at Heart, Nightmares, S.O.S, Silhouettes, It’s Black II, Eating Up Your Mind and A Bleeding Heart. The ones I didn’t like were The Kill, Secrets, Holding On, Out of Time, Night Sky, Bridges Burning and Femme Fetale. It’s an even 50/50 split of the track listing

I’ve listed the songs I’ve liked for two reasons. The first reason I might have enjoyed them is because they had an entertaining riff, or the music behind it was pretty good all things considered, or I might have even grown to like the lyrics. The second reason is that it might have had a cool fake-out, or a quick little guitar thing, that caught my attention. Not all of the songs in this section were particularly good, but if it sparked a positive reaction from me, I wrote it down as a good track.

The songs I didn’t like were listed for the opposite reasons. The music was mediocre and bland, there’s no variation in the already monotonous and mediocre instrumental track, and the singer’s vocals and the lyrical content were both uninspired or didn’t sound good to me. I fucking forgot how two of these songs even went, right after they finished playing - they were just gone from my head, I didn’t absorb a single modicum of information from them. They’re like musical ghosts.

Special mention goes to the two songs with featured artists on them - S.O.S, which features a guy named Danny Diablo, and Femme Fetale, which features an artist named Roxy. I listed S.O.S as a good track because the 15 seconds of Danny Diablo’s voice on it were the best 15 seconds of the album for me. I didn’t like the music or the feel of the song, but this guy’s very brief verse in this very brief song (1:13)? Best part of the album. Roxy’s feature, however, was sloppy, a bit out of time (which I think was an intended stylistic choice, which I still dislike regardless of the context) and arguably less enjoyable than the main vocalist’s voice. Please note, I already dislike the main vocalist’s voice a significant amount. It’s pretty funny how even the featured artists have split me, I’m that divided on this album.

My main issue with this album is that I simply didn’t enjoy the lead vocalist’s voice. I didn’t feel any energy from him for the entire album, it seemed to hover around the same level of enthusiasm and energy the whole time (which wasn’t much to begin with), and when he’d do a drop, it sounded like his voice had actually been dropped on the floor like a soggy sack of potatoes. The instrumental track could be bland and completely forgettable, but there was the occasional drop or riff that had me thinking “Alright, I could listen to more of this” - but I never once thought the same thing about the vocals. The song “Silhouettes” was the most striking example of this happening, with me really liking the music but being completely bored and turned off by the singer’s voice.

There were only two things that “got” me regarding the vocals - I think he dropped the n-word in the song “It’s Black II”, and his lead vocals on the chorus of the final track on the album were the only set of vocals that sounded alive during the entire thing. Those were the only vocal surprises from this guy, and one of them was more of a shock-value thing rather than actually enjoying what he had done.

To sum it all up - As Sweet as Sin came across as a fairly generic mid-2000′s edgy rock record, even during the best parts. The best parts of the album were usually marred by one of the worst aspects, with the best feature on the whole thing being relegated to the shortest song on the album or the best riff being hidden behind some pretty standard vocals. I was hoping for something, anything, that would blow my tits off - a shriek, an extended instrumental, whatever. And it never came. The closest there was were a couple of cool little fake-outs or little guitar shake-ups that woke me up and got me to pay attention, and even the pretty decent final song was just kind of uniform and there.

I recommend listening to Nightmares, Silhouettes and A Bleeding Heart for the best tracks (in my opinion), and The Kill, Femme Fetale and Secrets for songs that sum up what I don’t like about the album. 

You can buy the album online for anywhere between $3 used, or $11 - $41 dollars new, depending on where you look. I saw it on Amazon, eBay and Discogs, and the entire album is also on Youtube for free - most likely uploaded by a fan of the band. Or you could find it during your local multimedia store’s $1 CD sale, like I did.

I mean no ill will towards The Bleeders or their fans. I picked the album randomly, I liked what I liked and disliked what I disliked based solely on my first impression of the band and their songs - if I had really hated the band, I would have stopped at the fourth track and claimed the whole album was the same bland, forgettable trash. I respect those who enjoy The Bleeders and their music, including the tracks I personally disliked, and I wish the band continued success. I will be reviewing their (first) self-titled album later on (because I bought it in the same sale as this one), and maybe their music will have grown on me - I doubt it, but let’s hope.

[1-dollar-cd-sale-reviews]

Welcome to One Dollar CD Sale Reviews!

This is a side-blog I made to review some CDs I bought for about a dollar each. A local store is just getting rid of their stock, and I decided to go in and grab some random picks. I’m not even through the first CD, and I already regret my decision immensely.

I’ve decided to jam all my opinions into this side-blog instead of drowning my friends on Discord with my shit. I have no journalistic integrity, and I’m not enough of a music fan to offer anything of an informed opinion - all I’m doing is explaining how I feel about each song, and why I like or dislike it. I consider this blog to be run on a $1 budget, so you’re gonna get your money’s worth.

If I shit on a cult classic or piss you off as a fan of one of these obscure artists, then I apologise. You’re entitled to your opinion, and I don’t claim to be an expert on anything. I’m just talking about how I feel, and I respect your opinion if it happens to differ from my own.

So yeah. That’s my mission statement. Hope you enjoy the blog.