(originally posted to Facebook)
Easily the best named album I've yet reviewed. Great sound, great vocals by Hayes, but this 45 minute album contains way too much stuffing. It's more a glorified EP than a real album. Let's do this song by song.
"Walk On By" - The ending should have faded out at least four minutes earlier. The drum beat was too simple to carry on that long, and the guitar "solo" was mostly just a string of repeated notes. For info on how a long outro should be done, see "Telegraph Road".
"Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" - Again, the instrumental section is way too long, and just doesn't feature much creative soloing. Good base line, but too repetitive.
"One Woman" - Pretty standard soul ballad, but the melody was different enough that I didn't mind it. The copy on Rdio had some crunchy noises during the middle section. I wonder if those are from the original recording.
"By The Time I Get to Phoenix" - Uggh, too fucking long. Somehow Hayes thought his cover of a 3-minute Jimmy Webb song should include a rambling 8-minute spoken-word intro. Peter Wolf would be proud of this inanity. The song part of this recording is pretty good, but once again ends with a useless outro that does almost nothing. There certainly wasn't much payoff after my 18 minutes spent!
So to recap, great sound, great vocals, but too much time wasted on instrumentals which did nothing. And really, four songs does not make an album regardless of how long those songs are. I'm actually feeling angry at this album, but I hesitate to only give it 1 star because when it wasn't pissing me off the music was really good. So 2 stars. For shame, Hot Buttered Soul. You could have been really good if only you weren't so stuffed up your own ass.
Side note- So far, after the end of every album I play, Rdio thinks I really have to listen to "The Veldt (8 minute edit)" by deadmau5 (off their inanely... I mean creatively titled album >album title goes here<). Since I'm writing this I've finally decided to just let it play. And it's awesome. No, that's not it. What's that word? Oh yeah, sucktastic. I'm not sure why Rdio thinks I'd be interested in lifeless canned-beat techno junk. Maybe now that I've let it play Rdio will stop recommending it to me.
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