Jerk Music Critic: Jean-Michel Jarre, Oxygène

A painful product of its time when monstrous carnivorous synthesizers walked the earth, Oxygène proves that Jarre did not understand the idea of trop d'une bonne chose. (He did learn it a bit later in life; witness the much more enjoyable Magnetic Fields/Les Chants Magnétiques.) Ponderous, meandering and utterly devoid of soul or feeling, Jarre drags the listener by the ear through complex yet meaningless soundscapes he is convinced are textured and subtle but mostly come off as monotonous. The technical construction is admittedly skillful, and the layering is evident, but layers can only amplify; they do not constitute substance. There are moments and flashes of brilliance (especially "V") but they're not generally worth the amount of listening required to find them, and the quasi-single ("IV") only avoids the same drudgery of the rest of the album by being ostensibly danceable, at least if your right leg is slightly longer than your left and you've taken a substantial quantity of Xanax. Yet here I sit, symmetric and sober, trying to find a "there" there, trying to find a musical thread to hold onto to carry me through, as the Moogasaurus that once roamed his studio looms behind me moaning and slavering. (Content: pure instrumental.)

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Express Yourself

The Jerk Music Critic is a collection of amateur music reviews I wrote largely non-professionally between the 1990s and today. Some of these reviews are contemporary and some are retrospective, and a few are rather dated, but all are intended to be free-standing and permanent records of my completely worthless musical opinion. They are presented in no particular order and "new" reviews that occur may actually be simply prior ones I've only now transcribed. Older reviews have been edited to hopefully remove inaccuracies later revealed, as well as add brief content advisories (see "Smash the PMRC") and, where reissues exist with different tracks, brief commentaries on these later additions (the actual star review was not altered).

If you're looking for a specific artist, or just interested to see what I really liked (or really didn't), "When I Break Down" indexes reviews by artist and by number of stars awarded (see "Star Chart" for an explanation).

As we move deeper into the Internet music age where the album format might seem hopelessly antiquated, there is still some artistic value in the LP to those artists who still take advantage of it, and some of these recordings can only be properly appreciated in that context. I hope you enjoy these reviews and recommendations, and don't take them too seriously. — Cameron Kaiser

Star Chart

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
An instant classic. Substantially advances/d the state of the art, either technologically, stylistically, or (preferentially) both, and is outstanding music besides. Buy it.

🌟🌟🌟🌟
A excellent album. Nearly every song is a gem; nearly every piece is a winner. Falls short of 5 stars for want of that certain special something, but the difference is in impact, not in musical quality. Buy it.

🌟🌟🌟
Solid. Mostly good songs with a few clinkers. Salvageable with a good playlist. Buy it cheap.

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Mixed. Some good songs stand out, but not enough to make it listenable as a whole. Buy the good songs on iTunes.

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Bad. One or two tracks of even decent quality. Buy the good songs cheap on iTunes.

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How did this get released?

Smash the PMRC

I don't advocate for censorship or unnuanced black and white stickers, but I do advocate for parents being able to raise kids in the way they see fit, which might include introducing albums of controversial yet artistic merit at a point in their child's life when they can better appreciate it. The content summaries are intended to be a very general guide, reflective of only my own personal sensibilities and mine alone, and do not substitute in any way for a parent actually sitting down and listening to the album themselves. If you excessively rely on my content advisories, then I'm the one raising your kid, and you really don't want that.