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It's amazing that this album has received the most reviews by far of any Todd record since the late 80s (in fact, there are more reviews for this one than for ALL of the records in the 2000s combined).

This is not a Drill and Deaf Ears are the only tracks worth mentioning, and are the closer and a track in the middle of the album, respectively, which illustrates why this one makes no sense, even as a tribute to various artists and dance music forms that have inspired him (and becoming interested in bad dance music in the 90s is what sank Todd).

And the odd part is that it's bad. It's so so bad. Todd continues to act as if he were 19 years old all the time and wonders what music he would be listening to and what he'd be playing if he were 19 today. Even more oddly, much of this sounds like bad AOR music from the 80s (Don Henley) or the turn for the worse that synth pop took in the mid 80s. If Todd had made records like his last few from 1986-1992 instead of now, we'd have all thought them great and he might have continued to evolve as an artist, rather than nostalgically playing with various forms as if they were toys from the scenes he was not part of (his musical approach now seems to be to pretend he's 19 and join whatever new scene there is).

He's trapped in some corner and his records get worse and worse, and maybe Mr. Uber Environmentalist doesn't know what Bucky Fuller said about how textiles are the single most exploitative industry in human history (or a dummy with white privilege like he wouldn't have written the execrable Buy My T).

It's incredibly rare when an artist hits it out of the park on a debut--copies of Burning Blue Soul, a solo record, were incredibly hard to find when this dropped, and it now sounds like juvenilia, a languid effort to master the recording process, and as such seems in retrospect almost like a demo presented to a record company--but Johnson has done just that with his real debut.

It's easily the most experimental and interesting of all of his works. The composition is wonderful, the instrumentation is varied, the lyrics are great, the cover art is magnificent, and the emotional impact is that of a gut punch.

His work would immediately move toward the mainstream and become far less interesting and experimental--down to the cover art--but for one brief moment in 1983, however, Johnson was the most important musician on earth to those punk/new wave/electronica fans seeking something that digs deep and satisfies musically. None of his work would ever come close to this masterpiece.

The clarion call of a siren-like guitar impels the listener to turn up the volume and announces a revolution while foreshadowing the song that would, at the time, become a bit of a manifesto for the group (I saw Bob fall down drunk during that line in Echoes Myron when he played a show in Madison WI on my 40th birthday).

The most remarkable thing about this album is that Bob had seemingly given up on the band and any dreams of success when a small offer prompted him to assemble a new album around a pair of songs that might only have been a single (though Gold Star for Robot Boy and I Am a Scientist might have been the greatest single of all time). Like the collages that grace his covers, the album was assembled from scraps dating back a decade or more, whipped into shape by a few sympathetic musicians and the inimitable recording talents of Tobin Sprout. The result was a pop album that functioned as prog rock--but without the wimpy production that made the guitars thin, or the pretentious keyboards that ruined the era--but sounded more like punk rock and maintained that DIY energy. The lyrics and Bob's vocal performance were the finest of his career, fluid and powerful and open to any number of interpretations, and Toby was in the midst of providing the very best songs of his career on this and the next few albums (his solo career and later reunion with GBV cannot ever be spoken of that highly).

I attempted to rank each song and found perhaps four in the twenty that I would rank as 4 star songs, but this is not a fair way to view this album, as many of the shorter songs act as bridges to the meatier pieces.

It's not simply the singular masterpiece in Bob's career, but a defining moment in rock history and the best--and arguably most influential--album of the 90s.

Only slightly overrated by fans, Vampire also ranks ever so slightly below the wonderful breakthrough that was Propeller (perhaps the true starting point for GBV, thus making this the sophomore slump LP). The overall sound of the music is phenomenal and the album boasts such stone cold classics as Expecting Brainchild, Sot, Jar of Cardinals and Gleemer and also features quite a number of near classics (Giant, #2, Dusted, Unstable, and the last four tracks), but the whole enterprise is marred somewhat by vocals that are extremely buried in the mix.

Much of the rest of the album is pleasantly above average, with the exceptions of the utterly awful World of Fun and nearly as bad E-5, but by strict individual rankings of each song I came out with a fine average of 3.72 stars.

The sequencing is not Bob's finest and the buried vocals prevent me from bumping it up to a 4 star record simply because the flow is halted by those truly bad songs (Propeller, on the other hand, drags only slightly in one spot and I feel somehow that its heights are far greater than those experienced here).

I do often think that if Pollard had been a more refined editor at this point in his career, he might have dropped his first masterpiece a bit sooner by compiling the very best songs from these two albums and relegating the average material to the margins of EPs and the singles from this set.

After opening the 2000s with his third best album, it's been entirely downhill for Moby every since, all of his records bland, uninspired, mainstream, and designed for the dullards of upper middle class white privilege (despite getting all those black girls to sing for him). The songs here are the weakest of his career and would rank as among the worst of his 3 greatest records, Be the One and After are both marred by horrible production on the voices, ruining two of the best tracks on the record (even if the former is sort of a shoegazey epic, though I can't stand that genre). The Low Hum and The Day have a low key charm and are the only memorable tracks, the rest just treading no new ground in the ambient territory (which would soon make people believe he is an actual composer and let him run loose with symphonies!).

Dance music began to suffer horribly after the heyday of New Order, Heaven 17 and others from the original "intelligent" movement that favored political lyrics over the shallow, repetitive wanking from the late 80s House movement. Moby joined right in after that epoch was ending and produced the single dullest and most repetitive album of 1992. It's simply bad on every level, with no memorable tracks aside from Go. His next record was even worse.

Moby would go on to produce 3 of the great dance classics of all time (EIW, Play and 18), but the vast majority of his other records are without any merit beyond a couple of songs (particularly the late period stuff with orchestras, proving that he was an NPR darling all along, not a great musician).

A thrilling debut that evokes the same feelings one had when they discovered Wire (while all the genre references in the review are correct, those didn't exist when Wire debuted and helped create them). This, however, manages to sound wholly original, the work of soundscape artists wielding potent guitars (and a tight and off kilter rhythm). It should be the front runner for debut of the year, because it may be the front runner for indie record of the year.

There are a few tracks in the middle and one near the end that almost rock, but the rest of it is the sort of ambient music you hear at bad gallery openings, ask the host about it, and then find yourself disappointed when you purchase it hungover the next morning (though it shouldn't disturb you in that state).

It does nothing more than remind me why I hated every post rock band from the 90s (and had hoped this execrable sub genre had died a long time ago). It's apparently live. And not well.

It's a pretty decent first effort that I wouldn't necessarily call post punk, more indie pop with a bit more edge than virtually all of that ilk. Broken Biscuits, Best Tears, and R & B are the obvious highlights here.

I will say that the musicianship is top notch throughout and that it doesn't drag or get samey as some have indicated. It's actually quite diverse and indie oriented at times, a skewed sort of gothy epic pop that recalls some of Siouxsie's more mainstream work.

It's a great first effort, but the youthful lack of insights into the world and their selves shows, but it's far from the masterpiece the fans believe.