filling in the gaps #9

Filling In The Gaps is an ongoing series of blog posts I’m working on, where I’m listening through all the music from CDs I’ve purchased over the years that, up until this point, I’d never actually listened to. If this is the first entry in this series that you’ve come across, please click here to catch up on the past entries.

Before we get started on this list — this is the last entry in this series! I started this back in April of 2017, thinking that it would take me a couple months at most to listen through all checks notes 264 albums that I own but had never actually listened to. I didn’t realize at the time how quickly and easily fatigue would set in, causing me to put this project on hold for months at a time. Three and a half years later, and I’ve finally reached the end. It was fun, and I discovered some truly great music through this that I look forward to cherishing in the years to come. That said, there was also a loooot of crap that I had to endure in that time; I’ve learned that I thought way too highly of post-grunge back in my high school days, and have spent way too much money buying music sight-unseen over the years that turned out to be garbage. And, dad, if you’re reading this, I love ya, but I inherited a lot of crappy music from you (along with some good stuff!).

For stats nerds — I’ve been rating every single album some number out of five as a way to quantify how much I liked them. As we’ve gone along, my very first post in this series is tied with the fourth post for the highest average score of the albums reviewed in those posts at 3.1/5.0. This post that you’re about to read is the lowest-rated by a good margin — 2.5/5.0 (the next lowest was 2.8). And overall, across all 264 albums reviewed, the average score was 2.84/5.0.

So, thanks for sticking with me through this long, oftentimes arduous process, and enjoy this last entry in my Filling In The Gaps series!

Sept 15, 2020

System of a Down – System of a Down (1998)
SOAD are an intriguing band, if nothing else; I don’t dislike them in general, and the kitchen-sink approach they take to making insanity a core part of Who They Are is pretty distinct in the world of music — no one really sounds like them, at least no one that got as popular as they did. That said, in the wrong state of mind these guys are grating. I can’t say I particularly enjoyed a single song from this album (“War?” was probably the closest I came), and after three or four of them the band’s entire gimmick starts to wear a little thin. If you’re coked-up and angry, I can’t recommend this album enough, but that’s a state I’ll never be in so all I can conclude is that as weirdly endearing as some of this is, it’s ultimately just not for me. — 2.5/5.0

Talib Kweli & Hi-Tek (Reflection Eternal) – Train of Thought (2000)
Kweli popped up on my radar back about 10 years ago when I got really into The Roots and heard him guest on one of their songs; for some reason though I never listened all the way through this. I liked it! It’s pretty long (one of my main hangups about a lot of hip hop albums, especially from the ’90s and early 2000s), but Kweli has great flow and the beats here are nice enough. The last two tracks — “Good Mourning” and “Expansion Outro” — are both probably the album’s highlights, and it’s a rare treat to have an album as long as this end on such high notes. Nothing here is really weak, and there are lyrical gems throughout (from “This Means You”: “My facts more than make up for what you lack in imagination”). I dig it. — 3.5/5.0

Talib Kweli – Quality (2002)
Production on here is a mixed bag — some of it is pure early Kanye-as-producer goodness, like “Shock Body” and “Good to You”, which are both incredibly good tracks for the genre and the time. A lot of this though really fails to stand out — it easily fades into the background. There’s nothing on here that’s really sonically offensive, but a lot of it is unfortunately bland — look at “Joy” as a perfect example of this: a track where Kweli does everything he can to minimize Mos Def’s talent and relegates him to a shared chorus without giving him a verse. (It’s frankly kind of weird that Kweli would choose to bring in a guest on that track at all, given the extremely personal nature of the lyrics.) There are other examples too, like the extremely out-of-place hard-rock guitar riffs that underpin “Rush”, an otherwise fine track. The inconsistency is a little off-putting.

Overall it’s not a bad album, but very underwhelming and occasionally confusing; I’ll cherry-pick a few songs from this and probably more or less forget about it. — 3.0/5.0

Sept 16, 2020

Talking Heads – Stop Making Sense (1984)
Remain In Light is a good album, but everything else I’ve listened to from the Talking Heads (which amounts to 4 of their first 6 studio albums) has never clicked with me. Stop Making Sense is a live album, and I didn’t find much here to change my mind about this group or their music. Yeah yeah, innovative, influential, all that good stuff — no argument from me. The music just doesn’t do it for me, for the most part. There was some stuff on here I did actually enjoy, especially “Genius of Love (Tom Tom Club)” (although I’m pretty sure David Byrne was not involved in any of the vocals of this performance, which might have made the difference), but for the most part it was very much what I expected, which is to say: — 3.0/5.0

Sept 17, 2020

Taylor Swift – Red (2012)
I don’t think I can easily overstate how much I loved this. I’ve been a Taylor Swift fan for a while now; my complete ignorance of radio pop from the late 2000s on has pretty much inoculated me against all the (perhaps well-founded) criticisms of her music being overplayed. For my part, there’s never really a time when I wouldn’t welcome listening to pretty much anything she’s released, and this was a thrill. The opening “State of Grace” and the next song, “Red”, are great hype-up tracks and the album as a whole feels very balanced between the upbeat pop that Swift has perfected so beautifully over her career (“22” is a great example of this) and the more heart-on-sleeve ballads that can at times get overly saccharine, maybe bordering on insincere (“Sad Beautiful Tragic”, “Begin Again”). The thing is, I love both of these sides of her, and as much as some of this stuff can come across as manufactured, Red is really just a shining example of spotless, pure pop music, untainted by the needless shock value that too often worms its way in to the charts. This rating has every opportunity to go up in the future. — 4.0/5.0

They Might Be Giants – Lincoln (1988)
I often forget these guys exist, and it’s too bad because I do enjoy their nerdy, cartoony take on the indie pop framework. Goofy lyrics and catchy melodies are all over this thing; the one piece of the puzzle that keeps me from getting too into them (and probably the main reason they often fall off my radar) is the vocals — the super nasally approach puts a hard limit on how much I’m able to enjoy this stuff, especially over an extended period of time (say, the length of time it takes to listen through your average TMBG album). Even so, I really do enjoy this, and I’m glad I finally made time for it. — 3.5/5.0

Third Eye Blind – Out of the Vein (2003)
Back in high school, I bought this album at a used CD store because they were having a buy-two-get-one-free sale. At the time I apparently had no idea how these sales worked because I found two cheap CDs that I wanted and then scoped this one out — it was like $9 which was a lot for a used CD, even back then. In my naivete I picked it up, brought my three CDs to the counter and pointed at this CD and said, “I want this to be the free one.” The cashier either didn’t hear me or decided not to acknowledge my stupidity, and she charged me full price for this one and gave me the cheapest CD for free. I learned a lesson that day and I still think about this exchange way too often. Also, I found out when I got home that I had bought the censored version. So I’ve kind of had a grudge against this album for like 15 years or so.

Anyway, I actually really liked this. I’ve always enjoyed 3EB’s self-titled album, although I haven’t listened to it in probably over a decade. This one’s at least as good, if not better — it’s just really solid pop rock, the catchiness of which is often through the roof. My only issue with it is its length — it does kind of melt together near the end. Still, I slept on this for way too long. — 3.5/5.0

[EDIT: Since writing this, I’ve gone back and re-evaluated Third Eye Blind’s first two albums and realized I seriously underrated these guys growing up.]

Sept 18, 2020

A Thorn For Every Heart – Things Aren’t So Beautiful Now (2004)
If you guessed that this is another generic screamo/emo-lite band from an era when you couldn’t walk through a high school hallway without tripping over some edgelord with a Hawthorne Heights t-shirt — well shucks, what gave it away? The band name? The album title? The names of the songs? Yeah, not much here to recommend, although I will note that, much like on my blurb about Further Seems Forever’s How To Start A Fire that I wrote on this blog post, the singer has a decent voice that is just kind of wasted here, on an album where every song is pretty much 100% indistinguishable from those surrounding it. Not the worst thing I’ve listened to over the past three and a half years — not even the cringiest lyrics! — but the fact that these guys never made it big and promptly faded into obscurity is distinctly not the greatest crime against music so far this millennium. — 2.0/5.0

3 Doors Down – The Better Life (2000)
Much like Cracked Rear View, I feel like anyone at all who was buying CDs in the ’90s and/or early 2000s found their way to this sooner or later, whether out of some feeling of obligation to the radio gods who made sure “Kryptonite” was played at least once every two or three hours on every modern rock station in America, or from some top-secret government conspiracy to mass-plant these CDs in every American home, I couldn’t say. And while I do admittedly have a soft spot for “Kryptonite”, after that song (which is, ahem, the first song on the album) it’s all downhill. This is just more post-grunge garbage that is best left in the dusty annals of turn-of-the-millennium radio rock to rot and die. — 1.5/5.0

Tokyo Rose – Reinventing a Lost Art (2003)
Other than the fun, albeit stupid, opening track “Saturday, Everyday”, this is a boring, repetitive slurry of trite emo-pop with a singer whose vocals start to grind against my eardrums after the third song. Thanks but no thanks. — 1.5/5.0

Sept 21, 2020

Tonic – Lemon Parade (1996)
The massive riffs that open this album in “Open Up Your Eyes” are so good — this style of grungy alternative done right. Pretty much everything after this song though is about par for the course, and if you’ve been following along you know my general disdain for this kind of music. I’ll take this over most of the other albums I’ve listened to in this vein, but it’s a low bar. — 2.5/5.0

Train – Drops of Jupiter (2001)
Harmless pop rock that I’ll listen to any day over, say, Maroon 5, who took a somewhat similar career arc but who I can stand much, much less. I do really like “Drops of Jupiter” and the closing track “Mississippi” (which is super chill and has great use of horns), the rest is pretty forgettable but not unpleasant. — 2.5/5.0

TV On The Radio – Return to Cookie Mountain (2006)
Oof, this is like the textbook definition of mid-2000s Pitchfork-core. I really like TVOTR’s album Dear Science, which they released after this one, but moving backwards in their discography has revealed a severe lack of hooks which, if this entire Filling In The Gaps exercise has taught me anything, is something I kind of need in order to connect with music on any meaningful level. I get why this album was dearly received at the time of its release by the critics — it’s not straightforward, it’s not pop, it’s not “easy”. In my reading of the Music Critic’s Dictionary this translates to “pretentious, boring music that hipsters eat up” more than 90% of the time and TVOTR don’t get off the hook here. Now, “Wolf Like Me” is one of the best songs they ever released but it’s also, surprise surprise, the catchiest thing on here by miles. Nothing else even comes close, and I just really don’t have the time or patience to try to like music these days — I either do or I don’t and this lands squarely in the latter camp. — 2.0/5.0

Sept 22, 2020

Unwritten Law – Elva (2002)
Nothing to write home about. I got this based on the merits of the single “Up All Night” which received plenty of radio play on the local alternative station way back when, but I’ve cooled on that song over the years. The only song that really stood out was “Sound Siren”, the rest was mediocre alternative-influenced pop punk that never really piqued anything in me as I was listening to it. Fun fact: I was pretty naive in my high school days and it wasn’t until an embarrassing number of years later that I realized that the line “…and catch up on the back porch / Fire up another roach” wasn’t about the lead singer setting cockroaches on fire. — 2.5/5.0

Utah Saints – Utah Saints (1992)
If you think this album is showing up on this list because I purchased it based off of the remix of “Something Good” that Nostromo used in this AMV, well, dang, you know me pretty well because that’s exactly why it’s here! And let me tell you — it was not worth the $2.00 I paid for it. The original version of “Something Good” is, uh, okay, I guess, but nothing else on here is the least bit interesting or has aged well at all into 2020. I’ve said it before but techno and house from the early 1990s is, for me, generally much more of a historical curiosity than a pool of music that I find the least bit enjoyable, and this is a prime example. — 1.5/5.0

U2 – The Unforgettable Fire (1984)
Truth be told, I’ve been looking forward to this part of the series as it’s been a while since I’ve listened to U2. Despite their being a very important part of my musical development, with Achtung Baby being one of the first CDs I ever owned, I often forget they exist these days — all the intervening mediocrity they released between 2001 and now has inadvertently erased them from my radar, for better or worse.

As the first stop on the U2 Albums I’ve Neglected Tour, The Unforgettable Fire was about what all the ratings and general discourse surrounding it would have me believe — above average, but far from being overly notable given some of the band’s other output throughout their career. It does have “Pride” and “Bad”, both of which are outstanding examples of what U2 was capable of in the ’80s, and “A Sort of Homecoming” was excellent as well (I was surprised to learn it was a single? Nani?). Overall, a good album, but not quite on the level of either of the albums bookending it (although to be completely honest, it would be hard for any U2 work to top War). — 3.5/5.0

Sept 23, 2020

U2 – Rattle and Hum (1988)
This is a weird entry in U2’s discography — a mix of live and studio recordings, with plenty of covers and political grandstanding throughout. For the most part it’s fine, but never really rises above that evaluation besides “Bullet The Blue Sky”, which happens to be one of my favorite U2 songs — I’m not sure if I would call this live rendition as good as the studio version, but it certainly does it justice, and was far and away the highlight of the whole thing. When you boil it down though this album is more or less a mess, and the new songs from it are good-but-not-great. File under: Hardcore fans only. — 2.5/5.0

U2 – Pop (1997)
I was ready to be pretty open-minded about this album — it’s generally considered a low point in U2’s career, at least pre-2004 (where most music nerds think that everything How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and after is generally worthless), and I was hoping to hear something here that its critics just didn’t, but nope, they’re all pretty much spot-on. While there wasn’t really anything here that I actively recoiled from, it’s some of the blandest music I’ve listened to in a long time — no hooks, no emotion, no theater. This is distinctly different from most everything else I’ve heard from U2, in that even in their less interesting albums they still manage to find one or two melodies that absolutely soar. There’s nothing like that here, it’s just colorless, tasteless mush that runs against everything this band otherwise does so well. — 1.5/5.0

U2 – 18 (2006)
I think I reached my burnout point for U2 about two songs into Pop, so this was a pleasant but utterly ineffective collection of singles that, I realized as I was listening to them, I’ve mostly heard so many times throughout my life at this point that I think I could do without hearing them again for a while, or at least played one after the next so relentlessly as this collection forces. I don’t dislike…any song on here, really, but I’m generally not a great fan of compilation albums like this, barring a few exceptional circumstances where that format was my introduction to the band in question. In this case, pretty much all of the songs on here are codified for me into their original album-based context, so hearing them in an unfamiliar order, surrounded by songs from different eras, didn’t exactly sit well with me. If all you’re looking for is the cherry-picked, arena-filling U2 you know and love, this is as good a compilation as any of the numerous others you could choose from. For myself, I’ll take these songs in their original context, thanks. — 3.0/5.0

Sept 24, 2020

Van Halen – Van Halen (1978)
Classic Rock Radio has ruined this for me — I mean, I probably wouldn’t care for it much anyway, but the first six songs on this album have been so overplayed that I found none of them enjoyable in the least anymore. The rest of the album wasn’t really anything special, either. I can’t deny the musicianship, or at least the guitar work, but hard rock of this sort, in most cases, tends to be nails-on-chalkboard annoying to me. — 2.0/5.0

Van Halen – Best Of Volume I (1996)
I…didn’t hate this? To be clear though, that’s because it contains a lot of Sammy Hagar-era songs, and even back when I was younger I always secretly thought his version of Van Halen was better than David Lee Roth’s. Not a popular opinion among my friends at the time who were into ’70s rock, but I feel secure in my opinions on this particular corner of rock history now. “Why Can’t This Be Love” and “Dreams” make up the peak of this compilation, but pretty much most of the entire second half (which these two songs kick off) is actually great. None of this makes me want to go and seek out any of the albums off of which these songs come, but there’s some great stuff here that is glorious in its ’80s excess and cheesiness. I’ll take it! — 3.0/5.0

Sept 25, 2020

Vendetta Red – Between the Never and the Now (2003)
Utterly average alternative/screamo; besides the opening “There Only Is” and the minor radio hit “Shatterday” (which I have to believe is the reason I purchased this, although I can’t 100% remember), there’s nothing here that isn’t done better by other groups from the same time period. Interestingly, “Seconds Away” reminds me quite a bit of Bends-era Radiohead, kind of, and that song is alright too I guess, but overall, probably not something I’ll be returning to. — 2.5/5.0

Vertical Horizon – Go (2003)
This album very quickly became background noise that was indistinguishable from almost any other radio rock that would have been popular 15-20 years ago. I originally bought this album based on “I’m Still Here”, which I still kind of like, but besides that there is absolutely nothing here that is the least bit worth my time or attention. — 2.0/5.0

The Verve Pipe – Villains (1996)
Very, very boring post-grunge butt rock with little in the way of melody, hooks, or sincerity. Except for, that is, “The Freshmen”, a song I had pretty much forgotten about but is actually spectacularly good and totally unrepresentative of the rest of the content of this album. That song raises this score by half a point but, I mean, this album as a whole is still pretty bad. — 2.0/5.0

Sept 28, 2020

The Vines – Highly Evolved (2002)
Back in high school I had a friend (well, more of an acquaintance, really) who kind of looked like a younger Conan O’Brien and who loved The Vines. I always think of him when I think of these guys, which is admittedly pretty much never, but hey, fun fact. Anyway, this album is ok — ’60s-influenced garage rock with the occasional lean towards Beatles-esque psychedelia (“Autumn Shade”, “Mary Jane”). The best song is definitely the single from the album and the reason I bought it in the first place, “Get Free”, which is a super high-energy proto-punk kind of thing. But overall it’s a pretty dull 43 minutes, not really my thing. — 2.5/5.0

The Wallflowers – Bringing Down The Horse (1996)
Enjoyable! Lots of Counting Crows vibes throughout — occasional twangy guitar and in general, it’s basically a folkier take on ’90s pop-alternative. I’ve always loved the first three songs on this album but never could get past them when I’d tried to listen to this album in the past; while those three songs are definitely the album’s best, it’s got some other high points, too — “The Difference” and “Invisible City” are both great. It’s all-around a very nice album that goes on for two or three songs too long, but is enjoyable nonetheless. Don’t know how much I’ll be returning to it when I could just listen to Counting Crows instead, but still, not bad! — 3.5/5.0

Watashi Wa – Lost a Few Battles…Won the War (2000)
Some of the most amateurish music I’ve listened to in this series yet. Based on the cover art, I’m sure you’ve come to the conclusion that this is turn-of-the-millennium skate punk, and it sounds every bit like these guys just learned a few chords and then smashed them together in the least creative ways possible. It’s the same song over and over and over for 45 minutes, with very little in the way of melody or depth.

An aside — I bought this album because I was familiar with Watashi Wa through a song of theirs used in this AMV, and proceeded to then buy the album off of which that song came (it’s worth noting that the band as they represent themselves on that album is significantly different, and better, than how they sound here). At some later date I was scrounging in my local used CD store and stumbled across this album for cheap, and bought it based on liking what I knew from them. I later looked up this album on Amazon and at the time there was only like one used copy that was selling for I think in the range of $70+! I thought I had stumbled on to something really rare, but it looks like I missed my chance to make some cash as it’s selling for a much more normal price now. — 1.0/5.0

The Weather – The Weather (2003)
Trying to find anything at all about this band or this album is an exercise in futility; for all the Internet is concerned, they may as well have never existed. I remember buying this album because the CD store had a buy-2-get-1-free deal, and by this time I had learned my lesson (see: Out of the Vein by Third Eye Blind, above) and sought out a cheap CD that looked interesting. I have no idea what drove me to this one (I think I may have been in a rush to leave and my choice was more or less random), but I bought it and it sat stagnant in my collection for over a decade.

It’s very ’70s-influenced garage rock. Initially I was surprised and had high hopes because the opening song is actually pretty decent, but it quickly becomes clear that these guys are a one-trick-pony and the wannabe-rock’n’roll shtick gets old quick. It’s mostly fine I guess but it’s not something I’m likely to ever listen to again; although, thinking about it, this short review of this album might be the final thing ever written about this band on The Internet, so I’ll close with a “You tried guys, it’s not terrible!” — 2.5/5.0

Sept 29, 2020

The Wedding – No Direction (2012)
Through this whole Filling In The Gaps experience, I’ve learned something: it’s actually quite difficult to come across music that I think is legitimately bad, in a way that offends my senses — we’ve come across some of it here and there, but for the most part I’m willing to give most stuff I don’t like the benefit of the doubt in terms of my ratings because even if I don’t like it, I recognize that musically it’s at least competent, I guess, I just don’t prefer the sound. No, by far the biggest sin that I’ve come across in these albums is that they’re just straight-up boring, generic, bland, choose your synonym. If I could choose a poster album from this series for music that offends by being totally, reprehensibly uninteresting, it’s this one. All the most played-out emo/pop-punk tropes show up here, with a singer whose voice is fading into obscurity as I write these words. Pass at all costs. — 1.5/5.0

The White Stripes – Elephant (2003)
Wasn’t expecting much going into this — “7 Nation Army” wore out its welcome many years ago and modern bluesy ’70s-style rock like this rarely excites me at all, so I was actually surprised to find myself enjoying this here and there. “There’s No Home For You Here” was probably my favorite cut from the album, “The Hardest Button to Button” was pretty great, and the closer “Well It’s True That We Love One Another” was a fun little call-and-response song that I quite enjoyed. The rest was hit-or-miss, but even the stuff that hit failed to stand out too much. Overall, maybe slightly above average, but only just. — 3.0/5.0

The Who – BBC Sessions (2000)
This was surprisingly fun, especially for the format — a collection of Who songs recorded live at the BBC with occasional dialogue from an interviewer and The Who themselves. I probably should have listened to this two months ago when I was exploring a lot of music from the ’60s and ’70s, but even though I’m not exactly in the mood for this type of music right now I found this to be quite enjoyable. It’s always interesting to hear the super early stuff from artists whose later (and better-known) work resembles it little to not at all, and much like the Rolling Stones I was surprised to hear a lot of ’50s rock’n’roll beating through some of these songs. It’s a nice album! — 3.5/5.0

Sept 30, 2020

Yes – Union (1991)
This was terrible. I really don’t have much more to say — bad songwriting, boring melodies, bloated arrangements. Very representative of where ’70s prog giants were in the ’90s. — 1.5/5.0

Yo La Tengo – I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One (1997)
I think I could learn to love this — it reminds me a bit of a mix between like Broken Social Scene and The Velvet Underground. Mostly really laid-back, dreamy noise pop. Very early-2000s-indie-core. That said, it was a bit boring when my attention wasn’t completely on it, and the songs weren’t always interesting — the meandering, almost 11 minute-long instrumental “Spec Bebop” was a real test of patience, for example. But there’s some good stuff in here that is worth diving into when the right mood hits me. I’ll keep it on call for now. — 3.0/5.0

===
…And that concludes this series! Actually, just kidding, we’re not done yet. As time went on I came across a handful of other albums that I realized I’d never listened to that I discovered too late to sneak into the proper place in these posts, so here are an additional 10 albums to cap this whole journey off!

Oct 1, 2020

Andy Hunter – Colour (2008)
Waaayyy better than I was anticipating, but one still has to have a stomach for cheesy vocal trance to be able to enjoy this. I can’t say it was anything outstanding, but there were some pretty decent tracks, my favorites probably being “Stars” and “Shine”. It’s decent, but don’t think that there aren’t better examples of this kind of music if you spend more than five minutes looking. — 3.0/5.0

Collective Soul – Hints, Allegations and Things Left Unsaid (1993)
I’m pretty fond of Collective Soul, at least as far as their singles are concerned, but a whole album of them is difficult to stomach. The best song on here is “Shine”, which is also probably their best-known, the rest is throwaway pseudo-grungy alternative. Not terrible, but not for me. — 2.5/5.0

The Darkness – Permission to Land (2003)
I mean, I guess it’s fine, but not at all to my tastes — hard/glam rock with a singer who is absolutely excessive with his use of falsetto. When his voice isn’t in the stratosphere he occasionally sounds like Robert Smith of The Cure, especially on “Friday Night”, but I’m not really saying that as a compliment, more so you, dear reader, can get your bearings on what exactly this music sounds like if you’re unfamiliar. These guys were a minor hit in the U.S. back in 2003 with “I Believe In A Thing Called Love” but even that song doesn’t really appeal to me anymore. I’m very unenthusiastic about this album so I’ll just leave it with a: — 2.5/5.0.

The Fire Theft – The Fire Theft (2003)
A story about this album: Back in high school, I was attending a relative’s wedding, and his and his bride’s first dance used the song “Heaven” from this album. As it was playing I knew I recognized the singer, but could not in the moment figure out who it was. Afterwards I asked him about it, and he told me that it was The Fire Theft and I immediately felt stupid because not only was I a huge Sunny Day Real Estate fan at that time (the lead singer from The Fire Theft, Jeremy Enigk, is also the lead singer for SDRE), I owned this album but had never made it past the first song or two.

Anyway, I was hoping to enjoy this much more than I did — it’s unfortunately just pretty boring for the most part. “Heaven” is still probably my favorite song here, followed by “It’s Over”. The rest is a bit too mushy and undefined for me to really get excited about. It sounds occasionally like if Peter Gabriel decided to make an indie rock record — which is not the worst way your work could be defined, to be sure. — 3.0/5.0

Flyleaf – Flyleaf (2005)
This is just a really unappealing mix of genres — alternative rock, post-grunge, screamo, Christian rock — coalescing into some of the edgiest youth group music you can imagine. At least the depressed kids have something they can crank up in their room that mentions Jesus here and there? I dunno, I don’t want to rag on it too much, but this is definitively not for me except for the closing track “So I Thought”, which, if I’m being honest, I probably only really like because of a particular nostalgia I have for this AMV. All things considered, though, I’ll just take Paramore. — 2.0/5.0

Oct 2, 2020

The Forecast – Late Night Conversations (2005)
I got into these guys because they were close to The Graduate, a band I loved and saw live multiple times in college and after. Both bands formed around the same time from the same place, so they toured together and promoted each other’s stuff. Actually, “got into” is a little strong; I enjoyed all of one song of theirs and only picked up this album because I thought it was wild that I came across it in a used CD store (they were never exactly a “big” band). I’m surprised at how much I enjoyed this; it’s scrappy indie infused with pop punk and although it’s rarely overly catchy, there’s something to these songs that makes me want to return to them later, which I always know is a good sign. “Fade In, Fade Out” and “Exorcise Demons” were the high points, but honestly I could see myself latching on to others and bumping this rating up by half a point over future listens. — 3.5/5.0

Jay Chou – Fantasy (2001)
Back between my junior and senior years of high school (and then the following summer, too), I went on a two-week missions trip to Taiwan with peers and a few adults from my church. Both times we went were amazing and to this day rank as some of my favorite trips ever, despite several typically cringey memories I have from then. While there, though, I befriended a Taiwanese kid a little older than me who was a big fan of this artist, Jay Chou, and I ended up buying this CD as a souvenir and because I was generally interested in some of the stuff I’d heard from him. My friend who was with me bought another of Jay Chou’s albums as well, and I ended up liking that one much more than the stuff I heard when I tried to get through this one, so that one was the one that ended up keeping my attention.

Listening to it now, it’s actually not that bad, but it’s aged really poorly — this is early-2000s pop music with all the awful tropes and production tricks that have not survived gracefully almost 20 years later. Cheesy, soulless drums, saccharine synths, occasional hard-rock guitar riffs, you name it. To be fair, a lot of the stuff here is simply an outdated version of the same kind of stuff that comes up in the K-pop I listen to regularly, which is why I’m a bit more willing to let it slide. Still, it’s nothing you haven’t heard before, and, I just gotta be honest here — the Chinese language is not my preferred language for pop music. It doesn’t have the same complementary sounds that the other major Asian languages in the pop music world — Korean and Japanese — have that make it pleasing to listen to for my American ears. Still, this has a nostalgic quality for me because of the circumstances around which I bought it, so — 2.5/5.0

Mos Def – Black on Both Sides (1999)
I liked it, but it was way too long. Mos could have trimmed like half the album off and achieved the same result — one of the problems here is that there isn’t a whole lot of variation between tracks, they all begin to run together pretty quickly. Nothing really stood out to me, but I didn’t mind having it on in the background. — 3.0/5.0

Mourning September – A Man Can Change His Stars (2004)
I included this album here because it was the only album I had rated at 0.5/5.0 on my RateYourMusic account, and I wanted to see if it was really that bad, plus I don’t remember ever actually sitting and listening through the whole thing. I’m happy to say that, no, it’s not actually a 0.5-star album, but it’s pretty bad nonetheless. Whiny emo with some pretty cringetastic lyrics and a sound that is wholly unoriginal and badly mimics a lot of the trends of the time is all I should have to say to convince you not to waste your precious time like I did. — 1.5/5.0

O.A.R. – The Wanderer (1997)
This is the end of the road, folks. For the past three and a half years, off and on, I’ve been listening through tons of music from CDs that I bought but never actually spun — some of it great, some of it utter trash, most of it somewhere in between. I had hoped that my last album on this journey would be bombastically terrific or hilariously terrible — something extreme to cap off this exhausting, often mind-numbing exercise. Unfortunately, The Wanderer is microscopically close to being the most ok thing I’ve listened to in this entire series. Jam band reggae-influenced pop rock that does everything in its power not to excite you — a fitting end, if ever there was one. “That Was A Crazy Game of Poker” is the only thing that shows any promise of rising above mediocrity, unfortunately it has enough awkward lyrics to keep things right where they were always meant to be: in the middle. — 2.5/5.0