lux

Well, yes, also some DT (what an indelible mark..), but not like I was at 16 with the Queen X-D

Have you seen Mike? The pumpkins have partially reunited us :-). I listened again with great patience to the two discs of Mellon Collie... it's an album that can give you diabetes for how sugary it is, with some successful moments (Tonight, Tonight, Bullet With Butterfly Wings, which is the only truly unhealthy and most sincere track among the hard songs; not bad also Zero, 1979 doses the "sugar" more intelligently, Love’s "industrial" and a couple of others), and some anonymous moments (the end of the second disc is unbearable; my grandma's jewelry music box is industrial rock noise compared to it, with Stoner-Doom-metal-noise scraps scattered throughout the second disc). Anyway, it’s curious to see that an album based on such a melodramatic attitude is actually lacking in melodies: apart from Tonight, Tonight and a few other ideas, most of them are practically pathetic lullabies, even the harder tracks, among other things, exude sugar. Stumblaine seems to me the most sincere and least pretentious. Porcelina is pure garbage, a drawn-out progressive drone, banal and even long! The worst of all. Overall, the album is the exaltation of the rock stereotype, in the sense that it is ambitious; it wants to create the ultimate eclectic universal rock opera, it pathetically touches every genre (perhaps this is the thread running through the album), it's trying... but it ends up being too verbose and pretentious in wanting to play a little of everything. Corgan seems more concerned with cramming in as much stuff as possible than worrying about how to actually play it.

mmm... I'm a die-hard ultra fan only of Queen X-D Which other bands are you referring to?

Excuse me, but here we are talking about Germans, Italians, English, and Americans, as if the people, the indistinct mass, decided the intrinsic artistic value of a work, as if everyone could weigh in on certain things. The Queen have made the "cultural-mainstream" history of rock, they've sold a ton of records, they've put on colorful and varied concerts... but Art should be judged in a different way. Even in their most successful albums, the Queen never innovated anything; they played with elegance and irony with already acquired elements from the past, they created a distinctly personal style up to a certain point in their career, but it was a style that began and ended there, nothing shocking, nothing truly relevant and historically heavy, no starting point or ending point for rock as a whole. Music videos and concerts fall outside the artistic value of a group, for obvious reasons. Instead, I would also underline, like Percy, the thrash metal riff of "Stone Cold Crazy" and the "hardcore" one in "SHA," two of their most interesting insights. Then the 80s unjustly erased even what good they had created in the past. I speak as a former die-hard fan of the Queen.

Vic, I took a quick look at the story of this Bob, but it seems to me that many physicists and experts in the field criticize him harshly as they believe he lacks the fundamentals to talk about gravity, gravitational waves, etc. They consider him somewhat incompetent. However, what he saw could still be true, regardless of technical expertise.

But Blackdog needs to have some expressive thread connecting the tracks, even if minimal, right? It sounds like an average rock compilation; for me, it's anything but special. I'm not talking about a thematic unity tied to the concept; I'm referring specifically to musical style. It seems like they want to show that they can play everything that comes to their minds, but where is the underlying unity? The individual tracks aren’t terrible (sure, some are tedious fillers and/or pathetic), but they don't shine with originality either. You can find the average grunge song, the average synth pop song, the average hard/prog, the average pompous ballad, the average simple ballad... And they just stay there, each floating in the air on its own. Creating a rock summary like this doesn’t require great genius. For me, it lacks the glue to define it as a great album.

Anyway, the album is worth it for the first 4 tracks. 3.5

WHEN AND WHERE DINOSAURS IN ITALY???????

Then we should agree on the meaning of "indispensable." With this term, do we want to indicate something that has influenced and changed history? If so, then the Dt are also "indispensable," as they have indeed influenced millions of progressive metal groups and beyond, and one cannot say that the history of rock in the '90s would have been the same without them. But the problem with the Dt is that if you listen to one of their albums, it just doesn’t cut it, despite that. Why? Because a hypothetical influence on the future that a band's music has cannot be enough to consider it good music. The album must also be taken on its own merit, for what it is in the present context. Train of Thought is awful, I’m saying it today. It’s awful because it’s a blender of stereotypes with zero personal interpretation. Maybe tomorrow it will influence the music of a thousand other bands, but I’ll still say it sucks. It’s like wanting to see the good in a band through the legacy it leaves to the future; thus, we end up saying that Ministry are great because they influenced the Nin... but first, tell me concretely why Ministry are great IN THEMSELVES, and THEN, if necessary, let’s talk about their influence on the Nin. Often, the alleged greatness of a band is justified simply by the manifestations that their music will take in other bands, and to me, this is a blind chase toward speculative nothingness, quite castrating, I would say.

Essential bands include, for example, Pere Ubu, VU, and the early Pink Floyd, not Queen. The underlying problem is that to judge good rock, one necessarily uses absolutist expressions like "essential," as if an album must be so to be considered positive. There are great albums that are not essential, and there are essential albums. It’s not that an album must be in the top ten of the best albums on earth to hold any value. It just needs to have a touch of personal style.