What does this man think of your favorite album?
>>60674847
he'd probably think it's great
>>60674847
Panda Bear's Person Pitch (Paw Tracks, 2007) performs a spectacular deconstruction of pop and folk music. The vocal harmonies recall the Beach Boys, the melodies evoke cheesy bubblegum acts such as 10 CC. Comfy In Nautica a-cappella children's hymn with loud rhythmic clapping amid assorted electronic effects. The spaced-out vocals, the multi-part harmonies, the cascading melody of Take Pills sound positively like harkening from the psychedelic Sixties, but the song is typical of how the rhythms, whose effect is often enhanced by loops, transport Panda Bear's ditties into another orbit and another planet. Panda Bear weaves singalongs that ride layers of humble arrangements according to an ancestral logic of tribal repetition and jovial self-parody.
Sometimes his music sounds like folk-rock in the hands of a primitive tribe, as in the hypnotic, epic 12-minute Bros, sung with an attitude that sits halfway between Brazialian saudade and a stoned hippy's nonchalance (the vocals are distorted and reverbed) while the jingling percussion gets more and more intense. (The next song, I'm Not, sounds like an appendix focusing mostly on loops of dreamy vocals without the rhythm).
Moments of percussive trance and ecstatic singing also surface from the melodic crevices of the 13-minute Good Girl/Carrots, that replaces the collective hammering of Bros with dissonant industrial loops and beeps and hisses. The singing here is a mere corollary to the grotesque soundscape. (And, again, the orgy is followed by a piece of floating free-form vocals).
Panda Bear has installed a giant mirror in the sky to project Earth's life onto another galaxy.
Who gives about this psuedointellectual faggot lmaos
He has the worst taste
Pls sage all Scaruffi interns
6.5/10
The scruffy memeing in 2015 has really died down after a big start.
>>60674847
"It reminds me of my doctor's waiting room"
>>60674847
I don't give a fuck
he doesn't know it
2patrish4him
8.5
I bet you can guess it
>>60674994
ITCOTCK?
>>60674917
same
He actually thinks I'm a homosexual.
No, seriously, he thinks I'm a fag.
>>60674881
nice
The duo debuted with the tenderly dissonant post-psychedelic electronica of Spirit They're Gone Spirit They've Vanished (Animal, 2000). This extraterrestrial android vaudeville evokes the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev in their most anarchic ventures. The shorter pieces simply revel in their accustomed eccentricity. Spirit They've Vanished is a tentative ballad drenched in harsh electronic noise (no other instruments), basically a duet of voice and electronics. Drums and guitars debut in April & The Phantom, a spastic rave-up with pastoral vocals and whistles. Bat You'll Fly drowns in nostalgic keyboards and vocals that are looped around. The longer pieces, though, toy with creative processes to construct a song and let it evolve into something else. Buzzing electronics and terse piano notes slowly coalesce into the tender piano-based elegy of Penny Dreadfuls. The simple lullaby over vibrating organ of Chocolate Girl picks up strength as it goes, incorporating a loud bass, syncopated drumming and pastoral guitar, while the keyboards sound more and more alien. The 13-minute Alvin Row unleashes dissonant free-jazz jamming, a vibrant piano sonata, snippets of circus motifs, vocal sounds that are not quite singing and a samba-like percussive frenzy. It is all (deliberately) chaotic and unfocused, but nonetheless gentle. It is hard to pinpoint the rhythms and the arrangements, although the melodies are quite hummable and even serene. Cacophonous rock music had always been a game of subverting everything, while Animal Collective only subverts the instrumental parts.
>>60674994
HOOM or a Can album
>The prolific Cardiacs never quite produced a great album
F-fug
He's still a great critic though.
![R-370737-1248361820[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Yu5Cwwy.jpg "R-370737-1248361820[1].jpg")
Don Caballero II (Touch & Go, 1995) is truly a landmark in the history of instrumental rock, an hour-plus work issued two years after the Pittsburgh band's brave debut, For Respect. Guitarists Mike Banfield and Ian Williams play at maximum levels of strength and creativity, and the acrobatic drumming of Damon Che is often the bright spot.
The sound is ever more analytic, despite such chaotic surroundings. The various aspects of the music are meditative, like an orchestra made of seasoned instrumentalists. The psychedelic edge so prominent on For Respect has not dissolved, but here it's more a part of a radiant harmonic imagination. The avant-garde extremes of Please Tokyo are never pedantic or fanciful, rather they are melodic figures caressed in a trance, pauses, breaks and time changes, reckless fugues and carefully spread out dissonance everything peacefully co-exists, with an end to all of the excess somewhere in sight, between the screechings of what sounds like an electric saw at maximum volume, and one colossal distortion that is extended for eternity.
Better still is Repeat Defender, a party for thin ears that lashes from an exhausted beginning to an interval of supersonic hisses articulated in the most urgent fashion. In the fierce roars that shake Dick Suffers If Furious With You, to the insinuated counterpoints that cradle No One Gives A Hoot, one hears the echo of Soft Machine and The Nice, absorbed in the brutal noise of our times. There's a lot of erudition in this atonal funk, blues and jazz blend. And it's curious that it surfaces most in brief passages of Stupid Puma and P,P,P, Antless, where the searing guitar heat and the body-rocking vibrations tip-toe toward Joe Satriani or Eric Johnson territory. Less clear is the pure abstraction of the reverberating and out of focus chords Cold Knees. Don Caballero II is more ambitious, sophisticated and incendiary than For Respect, even if some resemblance of that album's menacing outlook is lost.
7/10
Brock's in-depth look at the lumperproletariat and middle-class of the USA grew much sharper and musically assured with The Lonesome Crowded West (Up, 1998). His portraits of drifters, losers and disillusioned fools could now rely on supporting structures made of fiddle-driven folk (Jesus Christ Was An Only Child), country-rock (Trailer Trash), atmospheric pop (Polar Opposites) and even blues (Styrofoam Boots). The band could now rock, albeit in a goofy way (Lounge, reprised from This Is A Long Drive, Shit Luck, halfway between Led Zeppelin and punk-rock, and especially Doin' The Cockroach, their most ferocious song yet). Lyrically, Brock's specialty remained the road-song (Out Of Gas, the eleven-minute Truckers Atlas, and especially Long Distance Drunk, which is also one of the most original creations of the album), a genre to which he was making the most significant additions in decades. But songs such as the emphatic and convoluted Teeth Like God's Shoeshine, Cowboy Dan and Convenient Parking showed that he was capable of destabilizing any genre and style he decided to toy with. Generally speaking, the songs were more cohesive and less anarchic. Gone were the lengthy nonsensical codas. Brock was now firmly in command, and he was angrier and more bitter.
>>60674847
He's never heard it.
>mfw he loves it and agrees it's the best microphones album
Does a more perfect reviewer exist?
>>60674889
can you intern with scaruffi? Where do i apply?
Their sound further evolved on the next album I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One (Matador, 1997), which from a technical point of view represented their most daring experiment. The guitar strumming pushed upon the sleepy rhyme of Moby Octopad and overtook it by the continuous roar of the guitar, and by the industrial noise and fuzz, and replaced it with the instrumental bridge in jazz scales as well as minimalist piano. Solemn organ chords and Native American drumming transformed Autumn Sweater into a kind of church service. Damage was a psychedelic nightmare of dissonance and drones, and Green Arrow was a mirage of Hawaiian beaches and fields of cicadas. Sugarcube was marked by a violent jingle-jangle of guitars to the limit of psychedelic raga. However, the melodies were the most reduced of their career, and the album was surprisingly disparate (for intellectuals), alternating between a country ballad (One PM Again), a Brazilian sound (Center Of Gravity), a deafening grunge (Deeper Into Movies), and a tenuous rhyme for children (My Little Corner Of The World); all these points worthy of a group of novices. Little Honda put electricity to work for a boogie resembling the Velvet Underground, paying homage to their beginnings. The cacophonic instrumental Spec Bebop, which dominated the album (10 minutes), linked itself to that early tradition. On the down side, the brief Stockholm Syndrome was a sleek pop tune resembling the Beatles/Bacharach, replete with falsetto lead and backup harmonies. This became the "classic" album of Yo La Tengo, not necessarily their most creative, but probably the album on which their sound was the most personal and emotional.
I think his criticism is misplaced, personally, but the ranking and overall feel of his critique is about right.
My top 10:
8/10
8/10
8/10
9/10
7.5/10
7.5/10
9/10
No rating
8/10
6.5/10
>tfw scaruffi drone
The fact that so many books still name the Beatles as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from becoming a serious art. Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all times are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all times. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics are still blinded by commercial success. The Beatles sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past, they barely know the best sellers. No wonder they will think that the Beatles did anything worthy of being saved.
9/10-tier
>>60676204
My Top 10:
None
7.5
None
9.5
5
None
None
None
None
None
7/10
The rage of Fugazi seemed inexhaustible. In On The Kill Taker (Dischord, 1993) concedes nothing: it is another determined attack. The songs even renounce the experimental architecture of the two previous albums and concentrate mostly on the energy. This album makes excitement a mode of expression. The level of violence is more elevated in compensation for the hyper-neurotic atmosphere of the preceding discs, which are more subdued. The album is the most accessible of Fugazi's career (as in the melodic and syncopated Public Witness Program). It is an album in which the energy is not limited to a few explosions but channeled into noble songs of freedom (as on Facet Squared , a fearless attack with a pow-wow style rhythm).
Conscious of the limits of this form of expression, the group was probably in search of a new sound, as demonstrated by the intermittent signs at the start of Facet Squared (and the tribalism that follows), the endless distortion that makes up framework of 23 Beats Off, and the instrumental Sweet And Low, that drowns their volatile sound in abandonment, with a (relatively) relaxed, almost jazz-like sound.
At this point Fugazi are in danger of parroting fIREHOSE, as evident in their new compsitions, which are hummable but aggressive, dramatic, and at the same time innovative, e.g. Smallpox Champion and Cassavetes. However, their best tracks remain close to the style of Big Black, such as Rend It or Walken's Syndrome, where the group loses control of their emotions and MacKaye screams like a wolf howling at the moon, yet without surrendering the harmonic quest to "classicism", of this rock style without confines.
>>60674847
The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (Interscope, 2006) contains more anthems in the old manner, such as Sowing Season and especially The Archers Bows Have Broken, but also compositions of complex dynamics such as Degausser and especially the eight-minute dirge Limousine as well as the elegy Handcuffs. The sonic quality is worthy of Pink Floyd, and guitarist Accardi especially shines as an atmospheric soundpainter. It is not a coincidence that this is an emo group capable of haunting instrumentals, such as Welcome to Bangkok and Untitled. Few bands have changed so dramatically in the course of just three albums. If Brand New is beginning to sound like Radiohead, then this is their OK Computer compared with the debut's Pablo Honey. The lyrics still classify it as emo though: the production sleekness couldn't be more antithetic to the pessimistic themes of the lyrics and the agonizing quality of the vocals.
(1/2) The first Bugskull album, Phantasies And Senseitions (Road Cone, 1994), is a fantastic collage of sonic nonsense. The (mostly short) fragments rarely coalesce into a true song. They proudly exhibit a dadaist persona, although they are often conducted at funereal pace. It's like listening to Frank Zappa or the Residents transformed into serious composers. The Intro, embellished by an orchestra which is tuning the struments, is an allegorical manifesto of Byrne's ambitions. If such a thing as symphonic garage-rock can exist, instrumental piece Shorty could claim to be its archetype. Bugskull's music is rock, and certainly garage-style rock, but the atmosphere is hardly 'garagey", rather somber and threatening. The keyboards play a solemn requiem that contrasts ghoulishly with the guitars' theme and the drums' pace. Another instrumental piece, Old Towne, is instead a delicate lullaby full of nostalgy, its tender melody hummed by a clarinet: were it be played by guitars only, it would fit in a Leo Kottke album. Elfin Magic's minimalist fanfare is created by looping frogs, flutes and organs. Long Corridor manages to compose a jam of industrial music for broken objects, hissing, metronomies and pots. as far an instrumental rock goes, all of these tracks are masterpieces that revolutionize the traditional genres. You wouldn't believe that they last only two minutes or so...
However, the core of the album is the songs. Bugskull do not disappoint when they sing, although "sing" is not the appropriate term: the songs are "recited" in a tone which is annoyed and depressed; they are arranged in a madly spartan way, below "lo-fi" level, and developed through a logic that is without logic. Recoder is almost a classical piece masqueraded by rock song.
The setting is often more important than the singing. The cadaveric whisper of Opening Theme surfs through cycles of out-of-tune violin and our-of-mind flute.
(2/2) Byrne strums casually on a terrifying background of noise in Death Valley '94. The jazz-flavored chaos of Almost Blue yields the least humane clarinet solo since the times of Captain Beefheart. Seguara soars in hypnotic jamming. Concrete Boots expands in a magma of hallucinated echoes. Inhuman is steeped in musique concrete and electronic turbulences. The catalogue of impersonations is endless. Possibly, the apex is reached with Concave Life, when Byrne's distorted whisper delves in drones and rhythms which smell exoteric. What these songs share is that they are situated in a sonic and moral landscape which is extremely depleted. This landscape, this tragic waste land, is interior, psychological, and almost trascendent. Bugskull's music tests the subconscious, adrift in the vast ocean of irrationality. Bugskull's feast of fatal harmonic mistakes and gross sonic misunderstandings, is unrivaled, except maybe for the german band Faust, 25 years before.
when you least expect it, Byrne manufactures two regular songs: Sit On This and Olympic. On another planet the latter could become a hit.
Byrne, which has behaved for most of the album, vents his avantgarde libido with the abstract piece of Space, a blasphemous hybrid of John Cage, free-jazz and Edgar Varese.
As far as "lo-fi" rock goes, Bugskull may be vaguely related to Pavement and Guided By Voices, but the level of creativity is just tremendously higher. It's not the melodies (and it's not the lyrics), but rather the sonic landscape as a whole, and each detail in particular. Red Crayola, Supreme Dicks, Faust, are probably better reference points.
8/10
Ever since I discovered Tonetta I can't help but associate his image in my mind with Scaruffi. They're both old, unconventional, intellects who love music and the avant-garde.
He put it at the top of his 'greatest jazz albums of all time' list
>>60674847
7/10. Although some of the things his says about it makes me wonder whether he actually listens to an album or just writes a sentence or two based on what others have told him.
>>60676204
>Not rated or described
>Doesn't have page
>Not rated or described
>Not rated but ranked as 11th best jazz album of all times
>Doesn't have a page
>9.5/10
>6.5/10
>7.5/10
>Doesn't have a page
>Doesn't have a page
it's pretty obscure, but he'd probably absolutely hate it like most people
6.5 for Thick as a Brick.
>implying I go to living memes for opinions on music
He thinks exactly this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8__zZ2E3y4
>>60677593
>>implying I go to living memes for opinions on music
You just did
>>60676204
This is a neat idea
>7/10
>7/10
>7/10
>9/10
>6.5/10
>6/10
>7/10
>6.5/10
>8/10
>7/10
Bonus points to anybody who guesses the albums
>>60677668
Sorry, I should have said
>implying I let living memes form my opinions on music
He called it disjointed, convoluted and pretentious.
>>60674847
In 1967, producer Peter Knight had the idea to use the mellotron, an instrument just invented that allowed you to play the majestic sound of an orchestra. That became the hallmark of Days of Future Past (Dram, 1967), the album's artistic renaissance. The rediscovery '"orchestra", the Moody Blues also rediscovered the charm of Renaissance vocal harmonies. The hits were composed by both Hayward: Tuesday Afternoon and above Nights In White Satin , a gospel melodramatic (with the phrasing almost gospel invocation stolen Signed DC of Love) that rivoluziono` the concept of pop song, giving to the "script" much of the charm.
>>60676879
7/10 is a very good score from scaruffi, you shouldn't be upset
>>60674847
He hasn't reviewed my favorite but my 2nd favorite is a 6/10.
This guy put Ummagumma, and no other Pink Floyd record, on the list of 'Best progressive-rock albums.'
literally their worst album: no. 4 on scaruffi's best prog rock list
>>60674847
I had to use google translate for mine.
Civilization Phaze III (self-released, 1994) is a double concept album, entirely played by Zappa (the main sessions dating back to 1991) to synclavier, whose instrumental pieces are interspersed with dialogues recited inside a piano (dialogues that were excluded from Lumpy Gravy). The long and complex N-Lite and Beat The Reaper are the culmination of a search that had begun on assembling the sound naive with collages of the early records and had blossomed in production techniques too "polished" of commercial discs. Here become a "tool" and not just half. Waffenspiel closes the album in the name of one of unbalancing barrage of sound effects (the effect, come to think of a patient near death that captures the chaotic sounds of the street) and the bucolic sounds (the sounds you hear in the cemetery? ).
With this record really closes the career of Zappa.
6/10
