R.J.

An incredibly good album from an artist who would eventually reject their own pop ambitions. Speaking of career rejections, her singing style reminds me of David Sylvian in how her voice conveys depth and drama so effortlessly.

I don’t take this album for granted.

All killer no fucking filler.

They took the groove, texture, and anguish from Korn and used it to make an album better than God's Country. The drums sound like they were recorded in a boxing ring. Great album.

A snarl of an album that sounds a lot like ambition limited by its production quality. It’s synth-pop with a dingy denim jacket that smells like desperation and cigarettes. While Depeche Mode leaned into sounding vulnerable yet detached, Trent Reznor sounds absolutely pathetic (complimentary) all over this album. It rules!

Dream Theater at the start of their me-too metal phase, losing sight of their direction as a prog-metal band. The songs are laughably angsty and the album is running on fumes by the end.

I wouldn’t recommend this album over It’s My Life. Mark Hollis doesn’t sound entirely genuine, like he’s working out what type of music he wants to write but isn’t confident in any of the compositions that ended up on the record. Their next couple of albums are so much better.

Dead Man’s Party and Weird Science are A-tier. The rest of the album… not so much. Not bad, just forgettable.

At its core, Secret of Mana is about the imaginative backyard adventures any kid could find themselves in. The kind where you stumble into a grassy area with 3-4 tall trees, maybe with a pond nearby, and something about it inspires magic in you. Then you notice it's getting dark out and you have to get home before your parents get worried. Straddling that line between fantasy and reality is part of being a kid. Secret of Mana leans into that, as its core gameplay loop guides the player from cozy villages through bustling forests into dank caves and then back again.

Hiroki Kikuta's soundtrack reinforces that feeling by effortlessly merging modern jazz/prog-inflected pop sensibilities with folk guitar and… More

The sounds of crushing hard in your mid-20s. Who knows what will happen. Who knows where you'll be in a year.

Shannon Funchess' gritty take on Alison Moyet-styled vocals is what makes this album worth listening to. Beyond that it is a sinewy and rigid kind of synth-pop that might impress you with its disarming sincerity. EBM can easily fall into the trap of disaffected posturing so it's refreshing to hear a take on the sound that chooses to confront the listener from a place of clear vulnerability.

This album teeters on the edge of pretension, staying just enough in the realm of earnestness that it’s rather impressive a group of immensely young British guys could write an album so sophisticated in its sound.

It sounds like a band of four guys—well, five if you count guitarist Rob Dean, who was one foot out of the door during GTP’s production—desperately trying to be better than the sum of their inspirations. Their previous album Quiet Life, while good, hardly sounds like anything more than a little bit Velvet Underground, a little bit Roxy Music, and a little bit David Bowie. Gentlemen Take Polaroids sounds like a group of young guys trying hard to take their… More

This is such a collage of an album, not song-to-song but beat-to-beat. Grimes had a great sense of what worked within a pop framework and really wielded it like a weapon throughout this album. Every hook, beat, and texture sounds like you’ve probably heard it before but you would never be able to place its origin. The way she smashes together layered vocals, synths, guitar tones, drum programming, sub bass, and all kinds of effects really works in a way that never feels incoherent or inconsistent. She’s as much as a producer as she is a songwriter and it shows.

Honestly, there hasn’t been an album that’s really sounded like this before or since its release.… More