tedorton

I'm not the sort of guy who spins albums multiple times a day, let alone a couple times in a row. Had I come of age in the early 90s, maybe that'd be a different story. I wouldn't have a vast musical landscape available to me via the Internet, I wouldn't be constantly taking in new band names and pirating new albums every day. But this album, when it came out, it went from album I found modestly enjoyable to an album I found pretty easy to listen to, to an album I was ... read more

None of this stuff compares to her Ghost-and-later stuff, and lyrically it gets pretty damn dumb, but it's fun dumb, enjoyably goofy dumb. Considering the label manipulation and her young age, this definitely coulda turned out the bad kind of dumb.

The War on Drugs imagines an alternate history where, instead of Brian Eno and David Bowie discovering Krautrock and repurposing it for pop audiences, it was the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne and other soft/heartland rockers of the late 70s/80s, nicking the motorik beat to power "Dancing in the Dark" and blessing "The Boys of Summer" with that pastoral, nostalgic reverb. The line is so blurred between the psychedelic and the straight-ahead rock that one has ... read more

It's not music you can listen to all the time, but not because it's something you only want to spin occasionally - it's an album that benefits from being given one full uninterrupted spin, maybe even scheduling your whole day around it, allowing yourself time to take in the sheer power of it and then process and digest it.