Emily: Usually the magazines I read are Cosmo or something equally girly/trashy. Sadly, Magazine the band was not nearly as fun as magazine the publication. Since Real Life is a fairly early post-punk album, and the band was started by a guy from the Buzzcocks, it ended up being more punk than post. I liked that element, but overall I wasn't enthused. Post-punk has started to all sound the same to me, and it takes significant creativity to overcome the standard sounds of the era. Magazine started to do that, but didn't take it far enough. The end result, although not bad, was simply underwhelming.
Favorite Tracks: Shot by Both Sides; Recoil; The Light Pours Out of Me
Zack: I took a break from the deep Wu-Tang dive I’ve
been on lately to listen to this album. I’d initially listened to it like a
week prior but wasn’t really paying attention. I think I was playing around
with ANES data at the time or something, and you know how interesting that can
get. Anyway, Real Life did not sound like any Wu-Tang I’ve listened to, so I’m
going to have to hold that against it. Then again, this did come out 25 years
before Enter the Wu-Tang, and that album sounds like nothing else before it, so
I can’t really be that harsh on that grading metric. Real Life was a pretty
decent album. It didn’t sound quite as boring as a lot of the other post-albums
we’ve come across, which I attribute at least a little to the fact that one of
the founding members was literally in the post-punk phase of his career after
leaving Buzzcocks. A few songs stuck out – those would be the ones listed below
– but a lot of the songs just sounded mildly interesting and didn’t really draw
me away from the GSS or Pew data I was playing with (welcome to my life). If I
had to sum up this album in six words, I would go with: “Good, but didn’t bring
da ruckus.”
Favorite Tracks: The Light Pours out of Me; Recoil;
Motorcade
No comments:
Post a Comment