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Bon Jovi - Crossroad |
| August 6th, 2003 under Album Reviews. [ Comments: none ]
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Released: 1994
Tracks: Livin’ on a Prayer; Keep the Faith; Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night; Always; Wanted Dead or Alive; Lay Your Hands on Me; You Give Love a Bad Name; Bed of Roses; Blaze of Glory; Prayer ’94; Bad Medicine; I’ll Be There For You; In & Out of Love; Runaway
Best track: Wanted Dead or Alive, possibly Livin’ on a Prayer
Tracks to skip: Keep the Faith, Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night, Always, Bed of Roses, Prayer ’94 (damn, they took all the fun out of it!)
Damn this is some catchy stuff! How could Livin’ on a Prayer NOT have been a hit single. I gotta laugh at that key change though; Jon Bon Jovi can barely hit those notes! Speaking of him, he sounds awful on Always. It’s a dumb song anyway (very bad lyrics), but Jon’s voice makes me cringe. Yes, this is the soundtrack to my Junior High years (also a bit of late elementary). It’s really hard for me to not laugh while listening to these songs. Granted some of them are very well written, but there’s also just a plethora of Total Cheese all over this disc. And it’s so serious too! Of course they take their music seriously and I shouldn’t rag on them for that. It’s just that to me, songs like Always and Bed of Roses are so pompous. If you’ve been paying attention to anything on this website you’ll know I pretty much despise love songs. They do have their time and place, but for nearly all pop music to be solely concerned with the topic of love is a tad ridiculous. I know, I know…all this coming from a guy who loves the Beatles and Journey. I never said anything about loving all the love lyrics. I just think love songs are overrated and overdone.
Anyway, I’m railing on dumb love songs (I’ll Be There For You) while I’m supposed to be reviewing this time capsule of my youth. There’s too much Bruce Springsteen on these songs. Specifically Saturday Night and Bed of Roses, but it’s just all over here. I’m not a big Springsteen fan so the obvious influence on Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora is naturally going to annoy me. You know what, who really cares! It doesn’t matter. For me, I like music with more substance than this. I skip a good number of these songs, most of them aren’t that great. I think Richie Sambora’s a pretty good guitarist, but Jon Bon Jovi does NOT have a good voice. It’s really grating. Of course if *you* like all these old Bon Jovi songs then by all means pick this up. It does have all the hits on here so it’s as good enough of a starting place as you can get.
Rating: 71
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Tony Geballe - Native of the Rain |
| August 6th, 2003 under Album Reviews. [ Comments: none ]
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Released: 1997
Tracks: Native of the Rain; Evening Tower; Per Moana; Flock; Dancing Inside; Star of the Dust; Pages; Prelude; Awakening (for Aileen); Prelude
Best track: Per Moana, maybe Native of the Rain
Track to skip: none
This is a gorgeous album. Solo 12-string acoustic guitar played by an exceptional musician. Do you need to know anything else? Awright, fine. Tony Geballe is officially a student of Robert Fripp’s Guitar Craft and was in the League of Crafty Guitarists for a few years before ‘going solo’. Geballe’s not as well known as fellow Crafties Trey Gunn or the California Guitar Trio, but like those two he makes excellent music. Compared to the CGT, Tony’s playing sounds a lot less like Fripp. The CGT have been getting away from that for a while now, and here on Tony’s first album you can hear a slight Guitar Craft influence, but mostly it’s his own voice. This is a really short album, only 38 minutes, but the time works in its favor.
Most of this music is very mellow, calm stuff. The time does go by really quickly and it’s really relaxing music. Per Moana is probably my favorite on here; it’s just beautiful. Native of the Rain is probably the showcase track on here and it’s really impressive. The song Pages has some excellent changes it. Yeah, there are great things about all these tracks and as a whole it’s a great album. I frequently just put it on repeat and let it play for a few hours. Very enjoyable and excellent stuff.
Rating: 93
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Pearl Jam - Ten |
| August 6th, 2003 under Album Reviews. [ Comments: none ]
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Released: 1991
Tracks: Once; Even Flow; Alive; Why Go; Black; Jeremy; Oceans; Porch; Garden; Deep; Release
Best track: Either Once, Release, Even Flow or maybe Jeremy…I don’t know!
Track to skip: none
So how can this be considered the same style of music as Soundgarden, Nirvana and Alice in Chains? I’m still a bit confused by referring to all these bands as ‘grunge’. Could there have been grunge bands from California in 1991? Probably not. This is obviously Pearl Jam’s debut and it’s one that hasn’t been out of my listening rotation for any more than a year these past 12 years. So yeah, it still holds up well. I mean, theoretically *any* album that has 5 singles from it (and the rest were probably played on the radio too) is going to hold up 10-15 years later.
When going back and listening to this critically like I’ve been doing the past few months (this review has been put off for about 3 months I think) the biggest thing that pops out of this is how huge of an influence Jimi Hendrix is on guitarists Mike McCready & Stone Gossard. Every lead they play on here just screams “HENDRIX”. No, this isn’t a bad thing at all. There are certainly worse guitarists to be influenced by. Regardless of the presence of Eddie Vedder, this is still a Guitar Album for me. I love Jeff Ament’s fretless bass on here too, as very few bassists in rock bands play fretless. It’s a nice touch and adds great coloration to these already great songs. I still say that Pearl Jam aren’t the greatest musicians on the planet, but that’s really unimportant because of how good the songwriting is. Don’t think I’m ragging on them because of their musicianship; I’m not. They’re fine. They’re tons better than Nirvana that’s for sure. I do like the songwriting very much, however. And the guitars, and bass.
It’s hard to single out just one song that totally rises above the rest. All of the singles (Once, Even Flow, Alive, Black & Jeremy) are all great songs. So are most of the rest of them. Deep and Porch (and Why Go to an extent) are just decent, but I don’t ever skip them. I like how the end of Release (another great song) features the same fretless-fest that opens up the album. It makes nice bookends to this thing. I think this is a good, solid album and justifiably a ‘classic’. The only really negative thing I can say about this is all the horrid crap it spawned (Creed). But that’s not Pearl Jam’s fault, they just did their thing.
Rating: 86
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Megadeth - So Far, So Good…So What! |
| August 6th, 2003 under Album Reviews. [ Comments: none ]
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Released: 1988
Tracks: Into the Lungs of Hell; Set the World Afire; Anarchy in the UK; Mary Jane; 502; In My Darkest Hour; Liar; Hook in Mouth
Best tracks: Set the World Afire & In My Darkest Hour
Tracks to skip: 502, Anarchy in the UK, Liar
That is such a horrible album cover. As we’ve learned since 1988, this album basically came out to fund Dave Mustaine’s drug habit. Did the other guys use drugs too? Who knows. Mustaine is the important one here. So Far, So Good features two new members of the band and they wouldn’t last to the next album: guitarist Jeff Young & drummer Chuck Behler. Anybody heard of these guys since this album? I haven’t. Into the Lungs of Hell is a nice instrumental to start the album off. Hm, Anarchy in the UK is playing and it’s OK, but Megadeth are just WAY too precise for this song. It’s probably one of the better cover versions of this song I’ve heard, but it still is just kinda lame. That’s a big problem with this album: there are some great songs but then there are the lame ones. It’s really obvious that Dave and Dave didn’t take the songwriting extremely seriously. All the playing is precise, but the songwriting sounds lazy to me.
Of course, there are a ton of cool riffs and some good lyrics on here, and some of these songs (Set the World Afire, In My Darkest Hour) are excellent. Mustaine of course gets some nice solos and he’s singing a little better than on Peace Sells. However, all that good stuff doesn’t really make this anywhere near as exciting of an album as Peace Sells. Ha, that solo in 502 sounds like Neal Schon! 502 still isn’t that great of a song though, it’s pretty lame. Liar’s not good for much more than a laugh. Another thing that’s really bugging me about this album is the production. There’s some sort of weird reverb or maybe it’s the drums. I can’t place it. “It” is annoying though.
I’m all weirded out by this album. It’s one of those that I know every single lyric, riff and solo to and I want to slap on some mid-high 90 grade on here and order all you to get it. I can’t though. I’ve tried reviewing this for a few months now and I want it to be a good grade, but it’s not gonna ever be that. So it gets a ‘less than good’ grade. If you’re serious about Megadeth then you should already own this, but if you’re just getting into the band then head to Peace Sells and Rust in Peace first.
Rating: 83
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