Cactus_can_spel
Recently Rated
Pinned Review
Let’s paint a picture, you’ve been on tour for half a year, 27 shows, North America, England, and you’ve been singing some songs from your newest album, but most of it is stuff that you wrote years ago, but that’s what the crowd wants, creatively, you’d begin to feel like you peaked when you wrote those songs. People love your stuff, but you don’t even think you love your stuff. Bob Dylan, May 1965. He was dead, he almost had nothing left in him by this ... read more
Recent Reviews
Nothing mindblowing, nothing unenjoyable, in essence just a nice little indie psych project, and of course that genre's not really lacking, but I think this is a good addition to that pantheon. It's a pretty short record, so there's not that much to dig into, especially since all the songs sort of blend together, as they all have that sort of blow out indie psych sound that any act like that usually goes for. That's not a bad thing, it's just not the biggest subversion. ... read more
Randy Newman is a criminally underrated singer-songwriter and I'm tired of people just knowing him as the "toy story guy" let's make him known as the "short people guy" that's much more flattering. Newman is really someone who I think knew how to keep himself relevant, he wasn't unsuccessful by any means at the start of career, but the fact that most people know him as the guy who sang "you got a friend in me" shows how much he could change to a ... read more
The third of Bert Jansch's 3 great albums, L.A. Turnaround is his greatest post-pentangle, and the album where he's grown into his voice, and into his playing the most. It's very much impressive seeing the transition in vocals especially, he has a certain calmness, and a certain new ambience to it that feels fresh even for an artist whose career peak may be behind him. There's a carefree nature that comes out on this album that we haven't really seen from Jansch until ... read more
The second of what I consider to be Bert Jansch's 3 triumphs, and the most traditional. In fact, almost all of these songs are in fact traditional. It is of course quite similar to Jansch's debut as it was only made a year later, but while almost all the songs there were written by him, here we have almost all traditional, including the 10 minutes title track, Jack Orion. That combined with the fact that Jansch was more used to the process by now makes this record feel all the more ... read more
It's an honest tragedy that it's taken so long for me to review this record as it's genuinely one of my favorites, and while I think Jansch would go on to do much more robust things with the likes of pentangle and his solo LA turnaround, this album scratches a very specific itch that nothing else can scratch. It's practically the simplest form of folk you can have, simply guitar and vocals, but the guitar is genuinely quite good, and has a consistent tempo with genuinely ... read more
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Rating Distribution
| 100 | ||
| 90 - 99 | 95 | |
| 80 - 89 | 155 | |
| 70 - 79 | 37 | |
| 60 - 69 | 6 | |
| 50 - 59 | ||
| 40 - 49 | 1 | |
| 30 - 39 | ||
| 20 - 29 | ||
| 10 - 19 | ||
| 0 - 9 |
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Recent Lists
We go back and forth reviewing and listening to an album we've (usually) never heard before at the same time, it's a lot of fun.
Cactus_can_spel & NoSleepThug
List Order: from earliest ...
Updated 1y ago 1
the title pretty much explains it, if I've heard multiple albums from the same country then I'll choose whichever one I feel like.
Updated 1y ago
Member since March 7, 2023