Posts Tagged ‘Album’

23 Feb

K-Packaged

Posted by vagrantesque in K-Pop, Music. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

Yes, looks like another K-Pop post. But this time I’m not writing about the music. I’m even not writing about the people who perform the music. Today I’m writing about just how damn shinily those Koreans wrap up their products. Because it is, quite frankly, on another level, and it is, quite honestly, ridiculous.

At the end of last year I touched on just how important presentation can be to me in my Top Ten Game Cases of 2012 list. I’m the kind of person who genuinely got goosebumps at Apple’s colour-soaked iPod Nano ads from the latter part of the last decade. Good presentation is like a drug to me; it’s a weakness, God knows it really is.

Anyway, yesterday, this happened:

Kpopsplurge1

No really, I can explain.

Continue reading →

27 Jul

Album Review: Overexposed – Maroon 5

Posted by vagrantesque in Music. Tagged: , , , .

The remnants of a truly fantastic June keep trickling through. This time I’m dealing with the latest studio album release from glamour band Maroon 5. I reviewed the Deluxe Edition, which features three extra tracks.

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Released: June 2012
Label: A&M/Octone
Genre: Pop Rock
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With white bars

Now looks terrible on 3rd gen iPad!

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TRACK LISTING

1. One More Night
2. Payphone
3. Daylight
4. Lucky Strike
5. The Man Who Never Lied
6. Love Somebody
7. Ladykiller
8. Fortune Teller
9. Sad
10. Tickets
11. Doin’ Dirt
12. Beautiful Goodbye
13. Wipe Your Eyes (Deluxe edition only)
14. Wasted Years (Deluxe edition only)
15. Kiss (Deluxe edition only)

The measure of a band’s quality does not, and should never, stop at the lead singer. It sounds obvious, but a band isn’t a band without a gaggle of musicians behind the person with the best-tuned vocal chords. They deserve to be heard just as much as their frontman/woman. Maroon 5 seem to have forgotten this basic fact for their latest effort, the aptly title Overexposed. For all the varied beats contained within its run time, it could quite easily have been released as an Adam Levine solo album. I mean, for crying out loud, the group is called Maroon 5.

This isn’t to say the album is complete rubbish, or anything else of the sort. It features some catchy tunes quite ably holding up the “pop” half of the band’s chosen genre, but there just isn’t enough flying the “rock” flag. Continue reading →

30 Jun

Album Review: Living Things – Linkin Park

Posted by vagrantesque in Music. Tagged: , , , .

The latest major offering from the ever-present Linkin Park came out last week and I’ve been listening to it pretty heavily so I could form a proper opinion on it before the end of the month.

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Released: April 2012
Label: Warner Bros
Genre: Alternative/Electronic Rock
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Mummy... thing

Typically abstract stuff here.

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TRACK LISTING

1. Lost in the Echo
2. In My Remains
3. Burn It Down
4. Lies Greed Misery
5. I’ll Be Gone
6. Castle of Glass
7. Victimized
8. Roads Untraveled
9. Skin to Bone
10. Until it Breaks
11. Tinfoil
12. Powerless

I have been a Linkin Park fan ever since I started buying music. My first musical purchase of any kind was Meteora back in 2003, an album I still revisit from time to time without as much as a second thought. That would make me a fan of the band for the better part of a decade, so I’ve been used to their relatively slow release schedule for a while. When I heard that the band was set to release their fifth studio album a mere eighteen months after their fourth, literally half the time they waited between their previous major releases (2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010) I was a little shocked. I didn’t have much of an opportunity to psych myself up for it and in what seemed like no time at all, I had the first track of Living Things blaring from a pair of speakers. I was confused yet pleasantly surprised by what I got. Continue reading →

22 Feb

Album Review: PLAYER – Capsule

Posted by vagrantesque in Music. Tagged: , , , , .

My album reviews start with a left-field choice, but one that introduced me to an entire genre all by itself.

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Released: March 2010
Label: Yamaha
Genre: J-pop/Dance
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omgwhatsonhereyes?

…Nup. Can’t explain the logic here.

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TRACK LISTING

1. Stay With You
2. Player
3. I Wish You
4. The Music
5. Factory
6. I Was Wrong
7. Can I Have a Word
8. What Do You Want to Do
9. Hello
10. Love or Lies

Some time in late June, 2010, I was travelling on a long Singapore Airlines flight to South Africa when I decided to pass the time by checking out some of the Eastern music options available on their (awesome) in-flight entertainment system. The first option I chose was PLAYER, a Japanese electro-pop album that was relatively new at the time and that I knew absolutely nothing about. Continue reading →

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