Strawberry Hotel - Dirty reviews

[ultradave]

Originally Posted by TheBang

Shin-kan-sen (pronounce kan as Khan)

Thank you for the phonetics. I was totally mispronouncing it! . After some more time I do have to say it's growing on me because of its solid tracks. Will this be a go to album for me? No, but the standouts will be on regular rotation for sure. In whole it does make sense for me in a way that none of their other albums have, especially mid-album from Lewis to Harlem with Hilo right there in-between. As far as the vocals on some of the tracks - I feel it's totally intentional because Karl can still hold a solid note. King of Harlem has totally grown on me - the lyrics are catchy and at first I was like WTF... but that bouncy beat - gotta love it! Ottavia is so different I give it to Esme for the emotion in that track. That shriek in Lewis feels more like agony and pain than an O, but that's just me, it's still unsettling. It will likely fall to the wayside. I find it interesting that they decided to close the album with an acoustic number, but it really closes out this album.

[aphasein]

And as a follow-up here's my final album cover that I'll be using for my gently remade SH. I use the artist's own work of the period, sometimes swapping out completed covers from a related single release (actually pretty rare compared to swapping audio, and haven't done this for UW before apart from letting the Drift single covers be their album collection covers).

For this one, it's a still from their Denver Luna video that had the same colors as the actual album cover and with the magenta circles pattern kind of suggesting an abstract strawberry. Couldn't get the source resolution above 1000px due to this, but think it's good enough for digital use. The title stack is based on the back of their new album shirts and placed similar to the single covers. Your mileage will vary...

[potatobroth]

Originally Posted by ultradave

Karl can still hold a solid note.

Really? He can hold a LOW note, but almost every high note on this album sounds 'wrong' to me. Or intentionally wrong? Which is totally baffling. I just heard Velvet Does for the first time and oh man, its just more of this weird out-of-key singing.

[ultradave]

Originally Posted by potatobroth

Really? He can hold a LOW note, but almost every high note on this album sounds 'wrong' to me. Or intentionally wrong? Which is totally baffling. I just heard Velvet Does for the first time and oh man, its just more of this weird out-of-key singing.

I was basing that comment on previous live tracks. I highly doubt his vocals have deteriorated since seeing them live earlier this year. There is a distinct and I'm pretty sure intentional quirkiness to his vocal style for this release. I think UW have earned any right to experiment however they'd like at this point. I do dare say that I would love to have a full Instrumental version of Strawberry Hotel. There's a whole lot of great going on in the background of most of these tracks.