I am not a fan of Björk. Like... REALLY not a fan. She tries too hard to be weird for the sake of being weird and the music suffers for it. This lo-fi, chamber-chill, trip-track album is rough enough without Bjork's whispery, wavery, warbling vocals. She goes out of her way to avoid anything resembling a song structure or an actual melody, instead choosing to wander around aimlessly like a wino on a three-day bender. This album is utterly pointless. I fail to understand how it has garnered so many awards and accolades. I can only assume it's some sort of Emporor's Clothes situation where the pseudo-intellectual music critic crowd wants to appear smart so they gush about the beauty of something that nobody actually sees just because it's Bjork so they're supposed to like it.

I mean, it's a masterpiece. It's just so good I don't even care that there's a saxophone solo in it. Three monster hits (Welcome to the Machine, Have a Cigar, and Wish You Were Here) bookeneded by two 12+ minute pieces of some of the best prog-rock music ever written. No complaints, only positive vibes for this one.

Oh man, I love this album so much. It's just so damn good. Almost 30 years later, and it holds up so well. Almost too well, honestly. The lyrical themes feel super relevant to today's America and that's kind of depressing. Actually, given current events, it's super depressing. "Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses." Damn, del la Rocha. It ain't changed yet. The machine is still grinding along despite our rage.

Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, and a slew of Hall-of-Fame-worthy musicians in the prog band that launched them all to stardom produced a singularly weird and schizophrenic record even for prog. From track one, this thing is a wandering mess. Maybe that's why I found myself mostly ignoring it. The lack of a consistent through-line within a single song made my brain just sort of shut off.

I unashamedly love this album. A lot of folks point to Document as R.E.M.'s best album but I would argue that it was simply the album that brought them into the mainstream spotlight. THIS is the best R.E.M. album. The songwriting, production, and performances are all on point. Sharp, emotional, layered and complex, it's just a damn good album from every angle. Even on the slow jams, there's an ENERGY that pulses behind the music that is just compelling. Back when I was doing critical listening as part of my degree, this was one of our reference albums—basically, an album that was SO well recorded and mixed that you could listen to it on super high-end audiophile equipment and pick it apart to understand what was going on.

There are some absolute monster jams on this album. It comes right out the gate with a beast of a song (My My, Hey Hey). But it's also Neil Young so there's a lot of whiney navel-gazing and jingle-jangle acoustic guitar which isn't my favorite. The second half of the album is better IMO. It's the "electric" side of the album (remember when albums had 'sides'?) and it has a lot more guts. While the first half is clearly influenced by country music, the second has more of a proto-punk feel that I'm into. Paticularly "Sedan Delivery" is an unsung deep cut for ol' Neil and is so DAMN good this 'Bama boy can almost forgive him for "puttin' her down" because of this one track.

This nonsense is so damn early 80s it makes my soul hurt. Bloopy synths, saxophone solos, and overly-stylized, Devo vocals are utterly cringeworthy. The lyrics are also mostly vapid. The second track is a bit of an outlier in that regard. I can hear shades of Sex Pistols here but like, if Sex Pistols had an older brother who thought he was super cool, had Flock of Seagul hair, and wore giant shades and lots of cheap cologne. The album is a mess, honestly. It can't decide what genre it is which, in many ways, embodies music in the early 80s. I gotta say, I'm not a fan at all.

This is two days in a row I've been served a Scottish band (last one was Orange Juice) but this is a completely different experience. The songwriting is excellent. Lyrical, nuanced, and nostalgic while remaining modern (for 1988) and relevant. Shades of Dylan meets Springsteen but with an undeniable celtic energy. Overall, a really intriguing and engaging album. It came out in '88 but holds up really well overall.

Another Scottish band from the 80s (that makes three in a row). Lloyd and his boys have a touch more punk to their 80s pop which is nice. It's relatively non-offensive musically for an album from '84. Good guitar tones and the lyrics are relatively deep for the time. The first track (Perfect Skin) is pretty good (turns out it was the band's very first single and well-chosen). This is an entire album of songs that would be great as modern covers, honestly. The songwriting is good, just hampered by it being a product of its time. I'm honestly surprised by how much I liked this album. Gonna have to give this one a second listen at a later date.

I really don't like Neil Young. Like... I really don't. This release from '75 has an undeniable disco stank on 'em. On top of the unappetizing disconess, Neil's voice is... raw and unrefined. Again, not in a good way. More in a, "Oh buddy, maybe you shouldn't try to hit those notes" way. It makes me appreciate the earlier Neil Young album that I reviewed a bit more. That said, after reading the wikipedia article on this album, I think I understand it a bit more. Apparently, this album was written in a time of grief and recorded over the course of two days while Neil was processing the loss of his friends. This DOES have an exceptionally raw feel to it and, for all that I don't think these songs and recordings stand on their own, the album really does communicate the almost nihilistic grief of post-Vietnam era young man.

An undeniable songwriting talent, Bob Dylan is already one of my favorite titans of music. This bootleg recording from '66 is a great example of both his one-man-acoustic style and his full-band-electric style. Just a dang good record front to back.

Boy, John Lydon (formerly of Sex Pistols) wants you to work for this album. Track one is a 9-minute long, post-punk, noise-rock grind. Track two is a spoken word tirade against organized religion. Track three is that SAME tirade but put to music. It isn't until track four that it starts to feel like an actual album. This is often credited as the first true post-punk album and it really is that. Lydon takes the in-your-face, don't care about aesthetics approach of punk and the "I really have something to say about humanity/culture/you" ethos that he brought to Sex Pistols... but then strips out all of the nihilistic, anarchic, devil-may-care FUN of the genre. This really feels like Lydon's expression of discontent with the state of the scene and anger at the industry that supports music. Even with all that, I found it interesting and engaging as an album. Maybe that's because I actually really love punk so I can appreciate this album. Despite Lydon's rejection of punk, this album is still so very punk. Standout tracks are: "Public Image" for its strong ties to Sex Pistols and "Fodderstompf" for being the most experimental. Seriously, that track is WAY out there.

A distinct departure from the artists that I've been served so far, Ministry is definitely more in my wheelhouse. The post-punk, industrial metal band is familiar to me though I do tend to associate them with the cybergoth, doomcookie, techno-twerking crowd. That said, I'm aware that they have a reputation for being hella smart and socially-concious so I listened to this album with the culural context of 1992 in mind. It didn't disapppoint. It's smart and contextual even if it is a bit on the obvious side as far as commentary goes. That said, the album only has a few tricks in its pocket and wears very thin by the end. It gets docked a point because I felt worn out and more than a little bored by the time I finished the last track.

Bowie! It's hard to dislike anything Bowie has done, honestly. He was so alien and ahead of his time that there's always something new and strange to learn when listening to his albums. This was one that I hadn't spent any time with in the past so I hit the wikipedia article for context which was helpful. It's electronic and pop and undeliably Bowie. Is it dated? Yes. But it also feels like it's a decade younger than it actually is. While the rest of the world was making disco pop, Bowie was making electro bangers and synthetic, cinematic dreamscapes.

I've never really been much of a fan of Elvis Costello. I generally find his tracks to be bubble-gum, pop-sugar imitations of punk songs. The opening track, "Pony Street" did nothing to change that impression. Things picked up with the second track, though. "Kinder Murder" is fun and approachable while keeping with a more punk lyrical ethos. That carries through the remainder of the album. While some of the tracks are definitely dated and haven't necessarily aged well, the guitar tones on this entire album are outstanding, the engineering/mixing is impeccable, and the lyrics are generally compelling and thought-provoking, at times reminiscent of The Beatles and, at other times, bringing to mind classic funk/soul masters like James Brown and Aretha Franklin. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by this album.

One of the cornerstone west-coast hip-hop acts of the 90s, Pharcyde is just one of those bands that you know if you're into hip-hop. They offered a completely different take on the genre with their lighthearted (at times straight-up goofy) lyrics in a time when the genre was already starting to take itself too seriously. I always liked the bands that they inspired more than I did them but the elements that contributed to my love for Jurassic5, Digable Planets, and Blackstar are all here. It's just damn fun. That said, "Officer" stands out in sharp contrast as a track for back then but also RIGHT NOW. It's NOT funny. It's a legit converastion piece about racial profiling and feels very contemporary.

Here's a band I didn't know anything about prior to today. Very indie. I was in a band once that had this same indie feel and I wonder now if the guitarist/singer was a fan. The first track sets the tone for the album in an unfortuate way. It's a 5-minute mishmash of rhythmic noise, sulky guitars, and shoegaze vocals. While the album does pick up from time to time, the rythmic noise elements and shoegaze vocals remain constant irritants. These lyrics are so far into their own navel that they can see their backbone. The album is self-indulgent and self-important to the point that it loses all connection to the audience and listening to it begins to feel uncomfortably voyeuristic. That said, the album is saved from a one-star by the fact that there are a few tracks that still manage to connect and because the recording production is top-notch. It really is very well produced. But you can only polish a turd so much. No matter how shiny it is, it's still crap.

This album was an unexpected joy to listen to. While I feel like everyone has heard or at least brushed up against the biggest track on this album ("Rock Lobster"), it's not truly indicative of the rest of the album or the band as a whole. There's so much more to unpack here. Tracks like "52 Girls" and "Hero Worship" are much better indicators of what this band is capable of. While this album is close enough to 80s new-wave that I should hate it, it somehow manages to avoid almost all the stuff that I hate. The guitar and organ tones are so great. The relentless rhythms are mesmerizing. And the lyrics have the same joyful near-nihilism of my favorite punk bands. I can hear the influence that this band had on later new-wave acts but I think most of them missed what The B-52's were doing here and just decided that stupid lyrics were cool and ran with it. These lyrics are... nonsensical. But they're anything but stupid. In fact, I would say that the kitchy nonsense is, in itself, a significant cultural commentary. Especially with the benefit of hindsight to know that the decade that immediately followed this album's release was one of record excess and rejection of personal and cultural responsibility.

Oh, Funkadelic. This is exactly what I wanted to listen to on a Monday morning. This album is absolutely genre-defining. It's almost like George Clinton and his boys were looking at their contemporaries and saying, "Sure you can rock. Sure you got soul. Sure, you're funky? But how far are you willing to go?" And the answer was: not as far as Funkadelic. This albums pushes the boundaries of what was rock/funk/soul/psychadelic music at the time. The opening guitar riff of the album on the title track "Maggot Brain" is a face-melting. 9-minute shred worthy of Hendrix. The guitar tones on this whole album are phenominal. They range from sharply atmosheric to heart-poundinly organic. The tracks are a bit all over the place and thee album lacks cohesion but, even so, manages to work as a whole unit of expression. Much of that is due to George Clinton's peculiar lyrical contribution which, in keeping with the psycadelic/funk ethos, are sparse but pointed most of the time, highlighting culture, race, drug-addled nihilism, and sheer, pleasure-seeking, self-serving abandon.

Little Richard's first record. This is the absolute powerhouse of a record that rocketed him into the American cultural conciousness and paved the path for him to grow into the funk god that he became. The bones of his later music are here in the way that he attacks his vocal performances with reckless abandon and faultless control. The songs are firmly rooted in the musical ethos of the 50s but that's not a bad thing in this case due to the fact that Little Richard defined the style going forward in the minds of music fans. This debut album is thick with bangers like "Tutti Frutti," "Ready Teddy," "Miss Ann," and "Long Tall Sally." Little Richard is one of the main artists credited for bringing "black music" to white america. THIS is the record that white teenagers hid under their beds to listen to when their parents weren't around. It's no hyperbolic to say that, in his own way, Little Richard was a civil rights pioneer. And the record reflects that. It's relatable, using the musical shorthand of mainstream 50s pop, but keeps the undeniable edge, angst, and sheer sexual energy that was missing from white popular music at the time but which was available by the bucketload in black music.

I've never really been a Cat Stevens fan, TBH. He's a little too chill for my taste. That said, the songwriting is pretty damn solid. This album was apparently his big "here I am world" moment and it shows with songs like "Wild World" that have stood the test of time and been covered a thousand times. Mostly, this album is kind of ho-hum for me. It's not offensive or exciting. It just... is.

Man, 80s metal is so hit and miss. But THIS was a hit. Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, and AC/DC defined a whole genre and spawned a dozen half-assed offshoots (coughHairMetalcough). This album is an absolute face-ripping example of the style and I love it. Normally, I comment on guitar tones but the real stand out on this album is the drummer. Dave Holland keeps things tight and crispy without the drums feeling overproduced. The whole tone and feel of the album is built on his nearly mechanical but powerful approach to his drums. Not much else to say. Just a great frikkin' album.

I don't know, man. Rod Stewart. He's just... Rod Stewart. He's nothing special and he's never been something special. He's just a dude with a scratchy voice who can play piano but is only so-so when it comes to songwriting. This debut album... it's 110% a product of the time and hasn't aged well. I find it inoffensive with nothing realy exciting to recommend it. A little on the boring side, honestly. Just really middle-of-the-road background rock.

Synthpop. Dammit. The worst thing to come out of the 80s. It's blippy-bloopy, arpegiated, slam-drum crap with Devo-esque non-singing vocals. Also, there are random saxophone solos inserted for some reason. I hate everything about this genre. In the interest of fairness, there ARE some pretty groovy guitar and bass tracks on this album that are not typical of the genre. They're just buried underneath so many layers of blippy-bloop that they lose their grooviness. Even throwing it that bone, this album is awful and gets one star.

Prodigy, while electronic, couldn't be any further from the electronic band I reviewed yesterday (Heaven17). This album is dark, industrial, filled with great break beats, and actually has a ton of balls to it. What it DOESN'T have, unfortunately, is anything resembling melody or song structure. I vaguely remember liking their later album, "Invaders Must Die" so I was interested to give this a try. It's about what I expected but I did come across a couple of tracks that I actually knew ("Voodoo People" and "Poison") and liked. This album is great as high-energy background music. There are so many interesting layers of sonic texture going on that can be interesting to try to pick apart but, as a focused listening experience, it falls very short when one is sober.

I freaking LOVE this album. I have since it came out in 2002. It's been a few years since I last listened to it and I'm kicking myself. This is easily one of my top 10 albums of all time. Smart, culturally relevant lyrics, powerful break beats, serious in-th-pocket swings... it's the whole package. This is what the best of hip-hop sounds like. There's nothing more that needs to be said. It's the best. Period.

There's so much that can be said about this album. It's a cornerstone piece of hardcore punk history. This was one of the albums that began the spit into hardcore as its own genre and put Henry Rollins - the world's scariest boyscout - into the spotlight. It's rough and agressive and very socially concious. It's just damn great and I love it. Full marks.

African (Malian to be specific) blues is... well, it's a niche sound. I've rubbed up against it in the form of the artist Bombino before but this is a whole different level of unique. It... it FEELS like the blues. But, at the same time, it feels distinctly african. There are harminicas, banjos, and guitars... but also hand drums and some sort of unique stringed instrument (Zither? Kora? Not sure.) mixed in. It all combines into a wild and entrancing musical experience. Ali's voice is pure blues. Even though I can't understand most of what he's saying (though some of the album is in french, thankfully), his emotion comes right through the language barrier untarnished. Apparently, this album was released posthumously and, while I'm glad the world has this album, it's a crying shame that we lost this talent because the album is just really really good.

Ambient music is not my jam. I always prefer something with energy and drive. I expected this album to be a complete waste of my time. But... somehow... it's not. It's totally ignorable but also not offensively bland. It DOES have layers of interest. The engineering on this album is absolutely top-notch. Way beyond its time. I was actually kinda into the first track. The second track, however, completely lost me with its constantly ebbing and flowing generic human voices. It was creepy AF, to be honest. The third track redeems those vocals by using them as texture to a primarily piano-focused track. But it's only the first and fourth tracks that are listenable, in my opinion. It gets more stars than I anticipated giving it but it's still not a great listen overall.

So, yeah. Slipknot. Look, I'm really into hard music. I cut my teeth on punk and grew up on hardcore metal. I spent almost every weekend of my 20s at any hardcore show I could get to. Slipknot, though... they were always a joke in the hardcore scene. They're fashion metal. They're gothy pop-metal. The slipknot guys would show up at the hardcore shows in uniform and get laughed out of the venue. It was poser-metal. As I listened to this album, I tried really hard to get past those past notions of the band and listen with a fresh ear. What I found was that those past impressions... were not entirely wrong. But they weren't entirely correct either. There's some good stuff in here. It's a little sing-songy and filled with cliches but, at the same time, there are some killer groves buried underneath all that. Overall, not as bad as I expected it to be.

I'm not huge into Ska but I like The Specials (they're close enough to punk) and haven't ever seen them live so this was a relatively fun album to listen to. That said, a double-disk live album of ska quickly wears on the ears. One can only take so much skeedoodle in one go. Ghost Town is a great song, though.

Oh man, I love this album so much. It's just so damn good. Almost 30 years later, and it holds up so well. Almost too well, honestly. The lyrical themes feel super relevant to today's America and that's kind of depressing. Actually, given current events, it's super depressing. "Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses." Damn, del la Rocha. It ain't changed yet. The machine is still grinding along despite our rage.

2 of 5 (10/30/20) Well, this was unexpected. This is very much not my genre. It's dancy and poppy with smooth vocals and slick production values. I have been known to call this kind of stuff musical exlax. There's something about this album that keeps it from tripping over into the diharrea zone, though. Maybe it's the conceptual nature of the thing that keeps it on course. It does feel like every track leads into the next in a cinematic storyarch. Perhaps that's what makes this work. Somewhere around track 6, it picks up and findsome funk and that was a lot more enjoyable. That said, it never really got anywhere interesting for me.

Dammit. More crappy 80s music. It's post-punk so there's that but it's still full of bloopy synths, over-stylized vocals, horn solos... all the crap I hate about the era. The wiki calls this "neo-psychadelic" and I think that's a load of crap. It's just an excuse for repetitive keyboard parts that never go anywhere. I'm pretty sure this album is only on here because the band was fronted by Julian Cope and brits love to tell people that they love Cope. Also Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen. But, honestly, it's not an awesome album by any stretch of the imagination. There's nothing particularly ground-breaking in the musicality or the lyrics. It's sorta dancable, though? I bet this was big in the early 80s underground clubs in Liverpool...

So... I've never been into the smooth smooth stylin's of Mr. Gaye. But this album is really interesting. It's got the smooth sound you'd expect but, if you take a moment to listen to the lyrics, they're REALLY raw. Apparently, half of the earnings of this album were forfeited to his ex-wife even before he wrote it... so he wrote it about her. And damn. He put it all out there. Lyrics like, "You don't have the right to use the son of mine/To keep me in line/One thing I can't do without/Is the boy whom God gave to both of us" are balanced in the same song with "May love ever protect you/May peace come into your life." It's a really fascinating record, honestly. Not something I foresee myself listening to again but an album that I ended up enjoying while I listened to it.

This album is SO 90s alt-rock. It's got that shimmery chorus over doubled vocals and the thick, grungy guitar riffs that make up that iconic sound. It immediately transports me back to my youth in a (mostly) good way. Sure, the sound is totally dated but it's still grunge, man. That said, I'm not sure why it's on the list. It's not exactly a shining beacon of alt-rock/grunge. In fact, one could argue that it's kind of riding the coat tails of much better bands and albums. It was enjoyable in a nostalgic way, though. I need to go find a flannel to tie around my waist now...

This is a pretty dang iconic album. It's a top-shelf cocktail of groove, blues, and blistering social commentary. Honestly, I'm at a loss for what to say about this album other than it's just damn good. It ticks all the boxes. It's iconic, in the pocket, vocals are on point, lyrics are heavy, production is excellent, and it's so thick with sheer musicality it practically oozes. Just a real fine record.

I felt like I should like this album but, the more I listened the more I hated it. The musicality was good but the songwritiing was lazy. You could tell which songs were traditional songs that Cave left mostly intact and which ones he took liberties with. In every case, it seemed that the changes were designed to shock listeners and not to make the songs better. Additionally, Nick Cave's vocal performance on almost every song on this album was sub-par which was surprising to me b/c, in the past, I've enjoyed his performances. Overall, a very disappointing album and one that I frankly am mystified is on this list.

Oof. This was a challenging album for a Monday morning. The chaotic, frenetic energy of cuban jazz is something I have to be in the mood for, not something that gets me in the mood. That said, this IS a damn good expression of the genre. It felt like the soundtrack to a 1970s spy movie and I am not sad about that. It was an enjoyable listen and I'll be saving it for another time when I AM in the mood.

Easily Hole's biggest release (and their last), Celebrity Skin is a powerhouse alt-rock album. It's got everything you could want from a rock album in '98. It has bad-ass female power vocals, chunky riffs, meaningful lyrics, and all the attitude you can eat. It's a great album.

A live Thin Lizzy album is not high on my list of things I want to listen to. The music is pretty middle of the road and this album lacked the energy of most good live albums. Turns out, that's because Thin Lizzy straight up cheated and overdubbed a bunch of the parts after the fact. So it's only kinda live. The result is a the audio equivalent of flat beer. You can taste what it should be and it'll deliver alcohol... But it's just not enjoyable.

Alright, so here's an album that was released in the mid-60s but sounds like it's from the 50s for the most part. A lot of the records on this list are ahead of their times but that's not the case here. Dusty gets points for some really great recordings of really great songs but they're mostly rips of other people's work. That was common for the time (especially among white performers covering songs by black artists) but it still makes me wonder why this was included in the list. It was enjoyable but nothing groundbreaking. Hence the 3 star rating.

Ok, so here's where I lose a lot of cred with most folks: I don't actually like Michael Jackson. Never have. This record, however, is the one MJ album I have on vinyl. It's probably his best known (follwed closely by Bad), is the best selling album of all time, and on top of that, has some pretty good tracks on it. I play it once a year on or near Halloween and that's enough MJ to last me a whole year. I totally get why this is on the list. It's a good album. I'm just not much of a fan.

Classic. Just damn classic. There's not a single song on this album that's not just fantastic. Maaaybe "Moby Dick" could be left off the list as it's really just an entire track of drum wankery. But, for drum wankery, it's still really good.

Tricky is one of the members of Massive Attack (an electronic group that I actually like quite a bit) so it's unsurprising that I found this album pretty listenable. It's slower, darker, and more moody than most MA albums are generally. And that's saying something since MA lives best in that heavy trip space. This is a good album. Is it amazing? I don't know. To me, an amazing album is one that I can listen to almost any time. This isn't that kind of album. But, when I'm in the headspace for something moody, chill, and beat-driven, this is exactly what I'm gonna want.

Whew. I thought I had listened to this record before but maybe not. It was WAY more experimental and chaotic than I expected. The musicianship is undeniable but it's not exactly an enjoyable listening experience. For some reason, though, it absolutely pushed me to heights of productivity while I listened to it this morning so there's something there that's working on my subconcious. Overall, I absolutely understand why this is on the list and I think I'm going to have to give it a second listen to understand it.

I wondered when I'd get to this one. Every "best of" list seems to have this record on it, for some reason. I remember listening to this as a kid on my dad's record player. I actually have not one but TWO copies of this on vinyl for some reason. And yet, I could never understand why people love this record so much. I can't quite wrap my mind around the cult of Rumors. That remains true this listen-through however, because I've been doing this project which has forced me to listen to records with an open mind, I am finding more to like about this record than I have in the past. Songs like, "Go Your Own Way" and "The Chain" are great tracks, no question. The thing is, they're separated by "Songbird" which is a turd of a song. There's a lot of that on this record. Killer tracks separated by duds. Ah well, maybe it's just because of the separation in time between release and now.

I am not a fan of Björk. Like... REALLY not a fan. She tries too hard to be weird for the sake of being weird and the music suffers for it. This lo-fi, chamber-chill, trip-track album is rough enough without Bjork's whispery, wavery, warbling vocals. She goes out of her way to avoid anything resembling a song structure or an actual melody, instead choosing to wander around aimlessly like a wino on a three-day bender. This album is utterly pointless. I fail to understand how it has garnered so many awards and accolades. I can only assume it's some sort of Emporor's Clothes situation where the pseudo-intellectual music critic crowd wants to appear smart so they gush about the beauty of something that nobody actually sees just because it's Bjork so they're supposed to like it.

Here's another artist where I break from the pack. I do not like Kanye on the whole. I think he's an extremely overrated, egotistical, pampered artist that's been told he's a genius so long that he thinks he's a god. And all of that comes across in his work. His rhymes are decent (if self-indulgent) and his delivery has that lazy "I'ma get to it when I get to it" cadence which isn't my favorite. The production is, of course, off the charts good because it's a Kanye record. It's telling that the best moments on this record are the ones where the guest artists bring heat. The production really IS phenominal, though. And, when I stop and listen to THAT instead of trying to evaluate this record on Ye's bars (like I would any other rap artist), I like this album a lot more. I just can't with these lyrics though. So much shit. Giving it three stars because the production is huge.

Big band music isn't generally my favorite - it's generally background noise to me - but this was surprisingly listenable. There are significant shades of harlem-esque jazz in here. I enjoyed it far more than I expected to.

It's been a hot minute since I last listened to this record and... Well, I don't know that it's aged all that well, to be honest. I really liked Californication when it came out so I was surprised to find that I didn't feel the same this time. Turns out, while the music is fun, most of these lyrics are really dumb. Like... Really stupid. On top of that, aside from the hits that everyone knows, the majority of the tracks are really dated sounding. I expected to give this a five-star review. Sadly, it only gets a 3. The years take their toll on everything.

Look, it's the Pogues. I love this band and their albums are, to a one, pure fun to listen to. But I can't, for the life of me, understand why they're on this list. I don't see how anyone could say that this is an influential band with a straight face. Anyway, it's a ton of fun and that's worth some stars.

Not much to be said about this one. It's one of the greatest albums of all time. Another Brick in the Wall, Comfortably Numb, Hey You, Is There Andybody Out There?... the hits just keep coming on this one. It's an all-time great for a reason.

Van morrison sounds so much like the era in part because he helped define the music of the late 60s early 70s. More than 50 years later, I found it to be mostly ignorable, if still pleasant, background music. It's not bad at all. It's just not awesome. Kinda boring. Minus one star for committing the sin of using flutes in rock music.

Holy mouth noises, Batman. Massive recording fail. Minus two stars for the mouth noises. Dang. I think I'd almost be into this if it didn't have any vocals. But the vocal style and the shit-ass-knuckle-dragging-moist-face-juice-dripping vocal recordings are absolutely trash. Also the lyrics are just inane. They include such gems as, "I'm very good with plants. When my friends are away, they let me keep the soil moist." Stupid. And it's honestly a shame because the actual music is layered, nuanced, and interesting.

"What? Harmless? Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One word!" Ford shrugged.

There's a reason people gush over Rumors and not Tusk. This whole album feels like a really long demo tape. And I'm listening to a 2015 remastered version. And still, the album is full of rough ideas, unfinished thoughts, sketchy instrumentation, and half-assed lyrics. I get that, among a certain generation of music critics, Fleetwood Mac is one of those darling bands but I cannot understand why THIS album is on the list. I'm not a FM fan and even I know that they have better albums than this one.

I didn't expect to like this but I ended up quite enjoying it. It's lo-fi, post-punk, idie rock and the vocals are sketchy but... it has... something. It feels like these guys were legitimately into this and enjoying themselves. It reminds me a lot of some of my favorite indie bands and artists (Gasoline Heart comes to mind) and I'm into this. The sparse instrumentation lends an opennes to the mix that makes the whole album feel like it's breathing. It's so different from the Phil Spector "Wall of Sound" mix style that's so popular these days and it's refreshing...

This is one of my top-ten, all-time favorite records so it's an easy ace. I love this album so much. It feels like what it is: a joyous collaboration between musicians who just love to play and like each other. I have to be careful not to wear out the vinyl of this one b/c it's easily my go-to "I wanna listen to a record" album. The pacing of the track order, the guitar tones, the way the instruments weave in and out of the mix, supporting each other and providing context for each and every part... It's all so good. So good.

Look, I'll be the first to admit that I probably just don't "get" this. But the plain fact was this was painful to listen to. It's repetitive noise. You would have to be just REALLY into conga drums to love this album. There's a 6 minute track that's NOTHING BUT CONGAS. And the next one is a 4 minute track of MOSTLY congas broken up by random yells and loud samba whistles. On the tracks where there ARE vocals, they're off-key shrieks accompanied by extraordinarily shrill "harmonies" (if you can call them that). It's. The. WORST. Hands down. Listening to this album makes me angry.

There's very little to dislike about this album. Sure, Kim Gordon's vocals wander around looking for the key like a drunk in the dark trying to unlock their front door. But, other than that, it's a pretty good post-punk, post-grunge, alt-rock album. The issue is that there's not really a whole lot that amazing about it either. The lyrics are culturally relevant but stop short of being pointed commentary. The musicality has an edge to it (that's often missing in a lot of grunge-adjacent rock) but it's stops short of kicking anyone in the nuts. The album is good but it's just not great. Guitar tones are on point though and it was fun background rock.

I mean, "Smoke on the Water" amirite? I feel like you get an automatic 2 star bonus just for that song. That said, I can see why this band is often (erroneously) included on one-hit-wonder lists. Their songwriting is, for the most part, mediocre. It's just generic 70s, white-guy, early-metal. The guitar solos in particular are just really REALLY uninspired and boring. But this band was a powerhouse band that was instrumental in moving metal into the mainstream cultural conciousness. This album is an integral piece of the heavy metal story... but it's not the most important or impressive piece. I ALMOST gave this 3 stars but the insane keys intro for "Lazy" tipped it over to a 4 star review. That track is tasty as hell. In fact, the album is back-stacked with the last 4 tracks (starting at "Smoke on the Water" and ending with the non-album b-side, "When a Blind Man Cries") being head-and-shoulders better than the first 4 tracks.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a british rock band recorded an album at Abbey Road in the 60s. No, not that british band. This one recorded their album two years before that band. It's kinda crazy how much this sounds like The Beatles, honestly. It makes me wonder what else was going on in the British music scene at the time. Whatever the case, this was a very enjoyable album. Everything I love about The Beatles is on display here. The songwriting isn't quite as good (unsurprisingly) but the vocals are better and the harmonies are all on point. I think the most interesting thing about this is how clearly one can hear the thumbprint of the studio itself. The recording is immaculate and the production is just SO good. It sounds like an Abbey Road joint. Almost gave this a 4 but the last track is Time of the Season which is just a monster of a single. Took it to a 5 easily.

Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, and a slew of Hall-of-Fame-worthy musicians in the prog band that launched them all to stardom produced a singularly weird and schizophrenic record even for prog. From track one, this thing is a wandering mess. Maybe that's why I found myself mostly ignoring it. The lack of a consistent through-line within a single song made my brain just sort of shut off.

The wikipedia article lists this album genre as "sophisti-pop" which gives you a good idea of what you're getting into. This is some of the most pretentious 80s crap ever. The lyrics are incoherent, the instrumentation is a disconnected mess, and the song structure is completely nonexistent. I almost gave this a star because the singer has a pretty good voice. But, no. It's not enough to save the album. It's like some some guys in a highschool drama club got really into Bowie and decided to give it a try "but, you know, let's make it ours, right? Let's get experimental." Luckily, the whole album is only 38 minutes long. Because it's utter trash.

This is an interesting album for me. I'm on the record as being anti-Neil Young and yet here's the band that kind of launched Young's career and... it's good. Perhaps that's because Buffalo Springfield is better known as the precurser to Crosby, Stills & Nash (later to become Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young). It's extremely folksy, a little bit rock, and overall just a chill record. I neither loved nor hated it. Was going to give it 4 stars but Neil Young barfed all over track 4 with a solo track (thereby negating the positive influence of Stephen Stills) that was pure crap. But THEN I hit track 6 (Hung Upside Down) which was really good (sick fuzz paired with bright, shimmery electric guitar tones.... so good) and then I hit track 8 (Good Time Boy) which was even better so it got back up to a 4 again.

It's hard not to appreciate the sheer musical powerhouse that is Rush. Lee, Lightson, and Peart are musical titans and, even if you're not a Rush fan (which I'm not), you can't deny their skill or impact on music in general. Just being Rush earns this album 3 stars right out the gate. That said, a 20-minute track is a hard pill to swallow. Especially as it contains a section around the 7-minute mark that's just guitar tuning. It's pretentious as hell and I'm not okay with it. The second half of the album is much more digestable and absolutely redeems the album from that 20-minute monstrosity.

Honestly, it didn't make much impact on me. I neither hated nor loved this album. It was mostly ignorable, early-90s poprock. Just... meh.

What a monster of an album. So many huge tracks. Bridge Over Troubled Water, The Boxer, Cecilia, The Only Living Boy in New York, Baby Driver... Huge. There's one weird duck in the mix (So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright is SUPER weird) but, other than that, it's pretty much folk-banger after folk-banger.

I mean, it's The Rolling Stones, right? So much good stuff here. For the most part, The Stones have really aged well (musically, at least - let's not talk about the immortal Mr. Richards) and these tracks are still immensely enjoyable. Really jammy and fun, it feels like they were just having a good time and not taking anything too seriously. Which is odd given the lyrical content of the album, which is often kinda dark. There's an almost punk ethos to it. Kind of a, "things are really gross and ugly so we might as well party" mentality. The result is just a really fun album. I have no negative thoughts, only positive vibes. Full marks.

So, here's the deal... take Badu off this album and it's a groovy slice of funky gold. Badu's uninspired, lazy (and at times really harsh) vocals, however, are slathered over on the groove, covering the flavor like ketchup on a fine steak. Every song's vocal lines are nearly identical, substituting lazy, mostly monotone vocals for true melody. I think she's probably capable of more than this but, for some reason, she decided to just phone it in. The saving grace of the vocal element is the lyrics which are pretty smart on the whole and which, along with the super tasty backing tracks, save this album from a lower-than-average score.

Nothing to hate here. It's full of great reditions of classic songs. Hard to hate. Nothing truly outstanding but I wouldn't expect there to be from an album put together by Spector.

Geeze, this is a great album. Another cornerstone crew of hiphop, Tribe is just... just great. They defined the genre for a whole generation of artists and their influence continues to be felt in the work of artists like Childish Gambino, Chance the Rapper, and more. The way that the verses are built over hooky boom-bap beats is compelling, neither element distracting from the other but each remaining engaging individually. So good. Just so damn good.

The first word that comes to mind when describing this album is "fun." It's all kinds of post-punk, neo-grunge, alt-rock, fem-fronted fun. It's pretty much right up my alley. That said, it does get docked a star because some of the songs have amazingly dumb lyrics while others have amazingly brilliant lyrics. But, overall, it's a super great record.

Grinding, driving, 70s metal. This album is relentless. It starts big and just keeps going until the end. Good stuff, mostly. It got docked a star because there was an inordinate amount of pointless, wordless screeching.

Apocalypse 91 is iconic but it's also really annoying. A lot of later music wouldn't exist without this album but, man... it did not age well. Three stars for its importance to music. Minus two stars because I just don't like it.

Honestly, this is a pretty solid entry. It's fun and energetic with catchy hooks and just enough edge to remain interesting. I don't know that the world needed an entire album about sex but here it is. Very good but not quite great.

OuKast is an undeniable hip-hop power duo. So, of course, they chose to release a double solo album to follow up Stankonia, arguably their biggest release ever. Weird decision but one that paid off. Both Speakerboxxx and The Love Below are stuffed with bangers and clearly demonstrate what each member brings to the mix to make OutKast so damn good. Neither album feels like an OutKast album but they both feel like distillations of an OutKast album and I unashamedly love 'em both.

Wow. This album is so tasty. Every groove is in the pocket, every note sung is perfect, the mixing and production are smooth as hell and yet retain enough energy to stay super interesting. There some really dated, Casio-level synth drums on here that would usually lose an album a star but this was 1974, so this was cutting-edge stuff at the time. No penalty. Full marks.

Violent Femmes are punk/alt-rock royalty. And for good reason. Coming into this one, I had very very positive feelings for this band and this album in particular. But this project has got me listening to things that I know far more critically than when I'm listening for fun. That's why Violent Femmes only gets a 4 instead of a 5 star rating this time. While I still absolutely adore this album, and it's full of absolute killers (Blister in the Sun, Kiss Off, Add It Up, Gone Daddy Gone, Good Feeling), there are some real stinkers as well (Please Do Not Go) and the musicality is... not awesome. Many times intentionally so... but not always so intentionally so, you know? Violent Femmes, I still love you... I just can't give you full marks.

12 tracks, 27 minutes of music total. Kinda digging that as a musical ideal. That said, this album is hella dated. The opening track asserts that the reason that women are created is because "Girls, girls, girls were made to love." In fact, that's the reason some of them are 5'2" with blue eyes (apparently a physical ideal) and it's also why you can't help but watch them walk down the street like a creeper. Because they were made for it, see? Also, if you're wondering if you should get physical with a woman, you should just remember: that's what they were made for. As a lyrical choice, that's pretty much awful. Luckily, it's a 2-minute song. The album as a whole isn't bad from a musical standpoint. It just has the unfortunate stench of mid-century American chauvanism and white people problems all over the lyrics. I was going to still give it a 3-star review until I got to the cover of Lucille. They killed all the swing and swagger of the original Little Richard version. It's so white it hurts. I hate it. The only thing saving this album from a flat 1-star rating is that the music is good.

Oh. Another britpop album. What a surprise. Honestly, all of these bands are starting to sound exactly the same. Much like their food, British pop music seems to be mostly bland and uninspiring.

Man, I'd totally forgotten about this band. There was a short period where this album was on regular rotation in my college apartment. I had a roomate who became totally enamored with them after hearing one of their tracks on a commercial. I actually really like several of these tracks despite Air being part of that same European school of electronic music as Daft Punk. The repetitiveness of the songs tends to annoy me after three minutes in or so. The songs are, on average, about a minute longer than they should be. That said, it's an album full of good, chill, background jams. I still a fan of La Femme d'Argent, All I Need, and Talisman.

This one took me by surprise. I didn't know anything about Nilsson before today. Turns out people used to call him "The American Beatle" and The Beatles were on record saying that Nilsson was their favorite American group. Turns out, yeah, he sounds a lot like an american version of early 70s Beatles. Surprisingly good! Also, he's the guy who did the "lime in the coconut" song. I always wondered why that song had such a presence in pop culture. It's because Nilsson had an outsized presence in pop culture for a hot minute. But he never toured or played big concerts and, after Lennin was killed, he stepped away from the music industry (they were good buds, apparently). That said, there were some killer tracks on this album and, apart from the last two tracks, I really enjoyed listening to it.

Cypress Hill is on that leading edge of gangsta rap going mainstream and, for purposes of cultural relevance, belongs on the list. That said, it's not my favorite. The boom-bap beats and devil-may-care delivery are fun but the lyrics just wear me down after a while.

Oh, man. The sound of this album sends me way back. I was in an indie band once and the main guitarist absolutely LOVED this album which had a huge impact on the songs he wrote. Weird time signatures, amusical vocals, mid-song shifts in tone... all so familiar. David used the word "pretentious" to describe this album and it's 100% on point. While that band stretched me musically, I didn't actually enjoy the music we made. Nor do I enjoy this album. It almost got 2 stars anyway because the punk roots are strong... but every song is AT LEAST a minute too long and I can't abide bands who don't know when to shut up.

It's Bowie. I'm gonna like it. The man was a legend and consistently ahead of his time. That future-thinking is on heavy display with Heroes. It's from '77 (the same year as Low) but features sounds that wouldn't become ubiquitous until the 80s. Sadly for me, those sounds aren't my favorite which knocks a star off of this review. The songwriting is still brilliant and Bowie is still a beast and the album was still great. I just don't really like bloopy synths. Low was a better album.

This was a fun one. At times, it's light-hearted, at times it's full of pain and sorrow... it runs the gamut in a way that most records from this era refuse to and it comes out the other end stronger for it. While Respect is weird (and a little dark) when sung by a man, it's balanced with wonderful covers of the perennial classics, My Girl, (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction and Wonderful World. So much great music and misicianship on display. Easy five.

Well, country really isn't my genre. Not by a long shot. So I wasn't thrilled to get this album. But I hit play with as open a mind as I could and, wouldn't you know it, it didn't suck. It's still SUPER not my genre, don't get me wrong. But Prine's lyrics are clever and funny and so sharp they cut. It's amazing to me that this album came out in '71 and still feels so daggum relevant. Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore is painful in its relevance. COVID-19 took Prine from us this past year and that also feels too close for comfort. What a debut album.

So there are a lot of really dated and, frankly, cheesy tracks on this album. But it also has Welcome to the Jungle, Paradise City, and Sweet Child O' Mine which are such absolute monsters that you can't not give the album as a whole a 5.

This... is not hardcore. Not at all, in fact. It's a fairly ho-hum album. Most of the songs live in that in-between tempo that's neither up-tempo or down-tempo what I like to call lazy tempo. It's unchallenging and uninspiring. After the last Pulp album that I reviewed (Different Class), I expected more from this band. Unfortunately, it sounds like a college garage band that's REALLY into Bowie. Not the best listening experience. I was disappointed.

This is an interesting album. I... I think I liked it? There are certainly no stand-out tracks. Nothing to point to and say, "that was a great song!" but, at the same time, I really enjoyed listening to it as background music. Nothing disagreeable in the album (apart from a brief saxophone solo which was as tasteful as that sort of thing can be). Nothing great either. So strange. Not entirely sure how to rate it so it's getting a middling 3.

I actually quite like this album overall. Television is an essential part of that initial, American post-punk exploratory period that birthed bands like Violent Femmes and The Replacements. It's nihilistic and nonsensical at times, sure. But that's just true to its post-punk underpinnings. It also hits with some strong, jazz-rooted drums and more than a few prog-rock-leaning instrumental sections. Is it an amazing album? No. But it's pretty damn good. The title track, Marquee Moon, in particular, is great from both a technical and musical perspective.

Sly & The Family Stone were one of the more formative bands for me as a bassplayer. I used to pick apart their basslines along with Parliment Funkadelic, Graham Central Station, Mandrill, War and more. They were instrumental in me understanding the idea of "the pocket" as a player. That said, this is NOT Sly's best album by a long shot. It's rough and unfocused. While the great musicianship that one would expect is still on display, the vocals show the strain of a completely drug-addled frontman. The result is a chaotic, fragmented mess of an album. Great band, not such a great album, sadly.

Well, I was prepared to hate this album but I didn't. It's... weird. The album starts off with a cover which is a bit of a turn off. But, after that weird start, the album takes off in its own direction. I read this described as "glam rock" but I think that's an incomplete descriptor. The songs here bounces wildly from Deep Purple to Rolling Stones to Velvet Underground and even sometimes hits some Dylanesque notes with all flavors of 60s and 70s poprock in between. It seems like it should feel disconnected and disjointed but, somehow, it doesn't. It ends up feeling like Mott the Hoople is just... doing its own thing. And I like that.

Not my most favorite album. While I can dig a good bit of WuTang, This solo project by Raekwon, not so much. The beats are fun and the delivery is pretty good but rarely great. It would be an easy 4 star rating if it weren't for the pseudo-mafioso lyrical nonsense. It's... less than great. I get that these cats were living rough on the streets of mid-90s NYC and were struggling (like a lot of youth of color at the time) to find an identity that could be "theirs" but, dang. It's kinda dumb. That knocked it down a couple of stars for me. But, like a lot of 90s hiphop, if you listen to it long enough, it grows on you a bit. The samples lifted from old movies are a WuTang staple and a lot of fun and while the content is generally crap, the delivery really is good and the writing is periodically brilliant despite the content. Not often enough to save it from a middling grade but enough to keep it from failing.

So this album made one thing abundantly clear to me: I REALLY HATE STEEL GUITAR. The first couple of tracks are heavy on the slide steel and I was in misery. Then it got to Pass Me By and She'll Love the One She's With and... I didn't hate 'em. In fact, I kinda liked 'em. In fact, about half the album is pretty alright. The other half, however, is like fingernails on a chalkboard. I was fully prepared to give this one star after song one. But the good songs brought the score up. Also, even though it's 11 songs, the album is only 28 minutes long. So, an extra star for brevity.

This is a pretty remarkable album. It's absolutely choked with monster hits. The thing is, most of these hits I know because of other artists covering them. I don't think anyone can deny the sheer songwriting talent of Carole King. She's incredible. But every song is delivered in such a soft, chill manner that they rarely just GRAB you. But, ultimately, that's ok. The album feels whole in a way that very few albums do. Like it's all part of one, big... well, tapestry. Great songwriting, good performances. Overall, a pretty killer album.

This is my most hated form of country. Sad sack crooner bullshit. Love sucks, you suck, I suck (but I'm going to blame it on you), everything's terrible so let's just make everything even more terrible (but it's your fault). I found exactly ZERO songs that were worth a second listen or even half a first listen. Hated it. This is why people don't like country music.

I knew, before I'd hit play, that I'd give this one a 5. I love The Streets so much. This album, along with Original Pirate Material and The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living were on regular rotation in my car in the late aughts. The delivery is aggressively conversational, the lyrics deliver a beautifully sharp narrative, and the sparse beats provide the perfect bed for the vocal performance. I just... I just love The Streets. I just do.

Ok, so.... this is New Wave. BUT. It's also full of iconic tracks for a reason. The Cars might be the best of the new wave movement. Good Times Roll, My Best Friend's Girl, You're All I've Got Tonight, Just What I Needed... monsters of the era. It's synthy but not bloopy. And the guitar tones on You're All I've Got Tonight and Bye Bye Love are killer no matter the genre. It's got an edge and an energy that is just missing from the vast majority of new wave albums. I expected to hate it but didn't. Solid album.

Huh. That wasn't what I expected. It was startlingly mediocre. Boring, even. Nothing stood out to me as particularly groundbreaking, exciting, or exceptional. I was glad to be done with it and sad to be glad. So much of Prince's catalog is phenominal. This album just doesn't have any of those songs, I guess.

A mediocre selection of working-class mumbles periodically broken up by unimpressive guitar solos and unnecessary saxophone solos.

I expected to hate this and I didn't. It wasn't like ... super interesting or anything. But it was good background music to my morning. Easy to ignore but still providing a good energy. Honestly, if these were break beats behind a rap vocal, the songs would crush. As it is, they feel mostly incomplete. Still good tracks, though.I expected to hate this and I didn't. It wasn't like ... super interesting or anything. But it was good background music to my morning. Easy to ignore but still providing a good energy. Honestly, if these were break beats behind a rap vocal, the songs would crush. As it is, they feel mostly incomplete. Still good tracks, though.

Pointless bullshit noise. These aren't songs. The're pieces of songs desperately trying to pass themselves off as complete songs. Useless and angering. Why the hell is this even on the list?!

I mean, it's a masterpiece. It's just so good I don't even care that there's a saxophone solo in it. Three monster hits (Welcome to the Machine, Have a Cigar, and Wish You Were Here) bookeneded by two 12+ minute pieces of some of the best prog-rock music ever written. No complaints, only positive vibes for this one.

4Jack White is an undeniable talent and this album is mostly enjoyable but there are several moments where you can tell ol' Jackie Boy is just being wierd for the sake of weird. That's the thing that's made him the darling of the East Nashville scene but I personally find it annoying. Not so annoying that I can't enjoy the album but annoying nonetheless. The thing that really makes this album interesting to me is also the thing that makes Jack White interesting to me despite his eccentricities: the mixing. It deviates significantly from the established norms of "how to mix an album" and it stands out as very different from its contemoraries. I believe that unorthodox approach to mixing is what has made Third Man Records such a powerhouse in the industry in such a short time. A Jack White joint just ... feels different. It stands out.

This is one of the most important hiphop albums ever produced even though a lot of folks outside of the scene haven't heard of it. In a time when hiphop was fracturing and trying desperately to find out what it was and what it could be, Gang Starr brought heavy, intellectual, clever lyrics over deeply funky boom-bap beats. The influence of this album can be felt in modern artists like The Roots, Sho Baraka, Nappy Roots, and Blackalicious. Musical significance aside, it's just real damn good. Just DAMN good. An absolute pleasure to listen to.

Well, that was an unexpected joy to listen to. I don't understand a word they're saying but dang if I don't wish I did. They seem to be having so much fun. In some ways, I'm glad I couldn't understand what was being said. It made the whole album into a killer soundtrack for work that enhanced the experience but didn't distract me from the words I was writing. Musicality is so on point it should be bleeding. Just really great.

I can think of a lot of albums more deserving of being on this list than Make Yourself. It's not that it's bad, necessarily. It's just not good. This album was tops for the whole nu-metal scene which I'm just not a fan of. Be metal. Don't be metal. Either is fine. This shake-and-fake, half-assed, sing-song nonsense is honestly kind of annoying to me. Every song sounds the same, the vocals are whiney and emo punctuated by repeated "daddy won't hug me" refrains. Not my jam.

Honestly, there's nothing really stand out here. Some of these songs are duds some are okay but nothing tips the scales either way. On balance, it's decidedly mediocre. I liked A House Is Not A Motel and Bummer In The Summer alright though. So it's saved from a failing mark on the weight of those two songs alone.

While I'm a fan of Sonic Youth in theory, this one didn't do it for me. It was very experimental and... noisy. Just really noisy. Not very enjoyable to listen to. That said, I can ABSOLUTELY hear the foundations of a hundred other bands in this one album. It's a critical album to the american music scene. Just not one I'd want to listen to on a regular basis. It does earn bonus points for having several William Gibson allusions including a whole song inspired by Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy. Not enough to lift it past a 3, though. Did I mention it was noisy? It's just so damn noisy...

Man... apologies to the folks who love the guy but Rod Stewart is just so daggum mediocre. There's literally nothing special about 99% of his songs. Even "Maggie May" his big break-out song is just... meh. It starts with some weird chamber music piece which doesn't even segue into the main song. It just stops. Then starts a relatively bland song. Just not a fan.

Well, this one took my by surprise. Everyone knows The Go-Go's big hit "We Got The Beat" of course. That's where my knowledge of them ended until today. This is considered a cornerstone Nu Wave band but damn if it doesn't sound like a poppy punk album to me. A freaking great one at that. I found myself absolutely cranking this one and loving it. No negatives. Haters be damned, this album is fire. Loved it.

It's not my favorite flavor of hiphop but this album is solid. I mean, Ice Cube has always been ready to get up in faces and speak hard truths. That is very much on display here. Commentary on race, violence, inequality, culture, etc. is delivered with agressive poeticism. The biggest issue is that the beats are hella dated. SUPER dated. A related issue is that every track sounds so similar to the last that that my ears are worn out by track four.

This one started out rough but, by track 4, it finds its literal groove and starts bringing the deep funk that one expects from a Sly joint. That's not to say that the first few tracks are bad. From a songwriting perspective, they're solid and drop you neck deep into some serious social commentary. They're just rough... and not very funky. Still an absolute crusher of a band and a really good album with some of their most recognizable hits on it ("Everyday People" and "You Can Make It If You Try" being the biggest).

This is a solid album. Like, legitimately great. The only reason it didn't get a 5 is because there's a significant amount of batshitcrazy on display that detracts from the overall goodness. Also, as a point of personal preference, I'm not a fan of the overly R&B tracks. So, yeah. Great record docked a star because "it's me, not you."

This is one of my favorite Beatles albums, hands down. I don't actually have much more to say about it. I just love it.

Well, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I still really hate that whimpering steel guitar sound with a deep and abiding passion and the lyrical content of most of these songs absolutely do not connect with me. But not all of them. There are some solid tracks here. Enough to give it a middling grade from me, at least.

You know, this one didn't age as badly as I expected it to. That said, actively listening to a KISS record feels like an exercise in cognative dissonance. On one hand, you have a whole album of youth power anthems. But, when the album was released, Gene Simmons was 26. It feels like pandering. You're also talking about a band who was considered "so evil" at the time but, in retrospect, their songs were super plain-jane vanilla even in the context of their contemporaries. Overall, I felt like it was "meh" but not in an altogether bad way.

Tom Waits makes Bruce "King Mumbles" Springsteen sound like a paragon of enunciation. Holy crap. People pay this guy to sing?! I mean, it has a certain kitsch but geeze. I found myself struggling to understand what the hell he was saying and I listen to hardcore metal where the vocalists are often screaming sentence fragments instead of singing. From a musicality standpoint, the songs are great and the recording quality is on point. It's just Ol' Tom's singing ... it's hard to get through sometimes. There are a few killer tracks on here where Tom's voice isn't ... as bad. "Downtown" is a great song. So is the title track, "Heartattack And Vine" (though I prefer the Screamin' Jay Hawkins cover). But "Saving All My Love For You" is almost unlistenable. And it's not the only track dragging this album's score down.

One of my favorite Bowie albums to date. Something about it is especially touching compared to later albumbs. It's tender and understated but also powerful. Bowie's undeniable talent comes through with a strength and softness like a velvet hammer. SO good.

I needed exactly this album today. I mean, this is one of those all-time-great albums anyway but there's nothing like listening to the perfect album for a particular time. This morning, this is the album I needed and I'm not even a U2 fan. But these tracks are undeniable monsters.

Not my favorite. I know that The Slits were a ground-breaking, genre-defying band and, for that alone, they deserve a place on this list. That said, this album is a total mess. There's really one good track here ("Typical Girls") and the rest is kinda noise for the sake of noise. It's okay. But it's not good punk. It's just punk.

This is a great record, honestly. It only gets docked a star because it's not ALL great. Just MOSTLY great. But the songs that are great are REALLY great. "Waitin' For The Bus," "Jesus Just Left Chicago," and, of course, "La Grange" are just ... man. So good.

What a waste of time and energy. Why this is on the list, I have no idea but it needs to be removed. It's just utter shit.

Cohen is an undeniable songwriting powerhouse but his performance on this album is just ... boring. Musically, every song is strikingly similar even while the lyrics are deeply different and, frankly, brilliant. This is also Cohen before his voice went pear-shaped so his singing is pretty dang good for Cohen. I want to like this album more than I do. But I don't.

You know, I didn't hate this album. I didn't love it either. It was just ... okay. I enjoyed listening to it in the background as I got stuff done. There aren't really any standout tracks and, on a whole, the album felt like a bit of a jumbled mess. Maybe it's my lack of connection to the material. The wiki says that this was a bit of a love letter to New York. That city doesn't need a love letter. It needs a tetanus shot and a month in rehab. But it wasn't bad by any stretch of the imagination. It really wasn't. Perfectly adequate. Extremely middling.

I unashamedly love this album. A lot of folks point to Document as R.E.M.'s best album but I would argue that it was simply the album that brought them into the mainstream spotlight. THIS is the best R.E.M. album. The songwriting, production, and performances are all on point. Sharp, emotional, layered and complex, it's just a damn good album from every angle. Even on the slow jams, there's an ENERGY that pulses behind the music that is just compelling. Back when I was doing critical listening as part of my degree, this was one of our reference albums—basically, an album that was SO well recorded and mixed that you could listen to it on super high-end audiophile equipment and pick it apart to understand what was going on.

Such a beast of an album. Just legendary. Every song is a banger. Every track a shredder. "Relentless" is a really great descriptor for this album. It never lets up, never slows down, never lets you rest. It's the opposite of a rickroll.

So, I never really listened to Nas much before today. And I'm decently versed with most hiphop. Nas just never really appealed to me, though. Luckily for me, this project is forcing me to listen to things that don't appeal to me because Nas really IS an extremely talented rapper. His rhyme game is on point. The constantly interweaving internal rhyme schemes are out of control and really unexpected for an east-coast act in '94. According to the wiki article, it kinda started with him. Well, thanks Nas. Docked a star because, while the lyricism is off the chain, the content is ... repetitive and shallow (though still better than 99% of the east-coast rap of the time).

I feel like I'm SUPPOSED to like Joy Division. On paper, at least. They were the front wave of the post-punk movement and it shows. It's still mostly punk. But something about it just ... doesn't hit. I think it's mostly that it's missing the sheer, nihilistic joy of punk music. Instead, it's unrelentingly dark and moody. It's not bad and, if I were in the right mood, I imagine this would absolutely hit some buttons. But I'm not generally in a dark depressed mood so, instead, I'm left just feeling "meh" about it.

Yeah, that's a no for me, dawg. I never realized, before listening to this album, that something could be simultaneously excessive and not enough. This album is SO MUCH. Long tracks, extended vocal and instrumental stretches, a whole, spoken-word story for some reason. And yet, it leaves me wanting and feeling like I'm missing something. There's a lack of substance that I just don't get. The only reason this was saved from a one-star review is that the musicianship is incredible even if it's not being leveraged to its full potential.

Yeah, no. This was boring as hell. Just ... nothing much interesting at all. Even as background music, it bored me to tears. The only reason this isn't getting a single-star review is because the production is excellent. And it should be. That's truly Eno's greatest strength.

The saying, "Don't just a book by its cover" doesn't usually apply to albums. Generally speaking, you WANT your album covers to give people an indication of what they're getting into. Before I hit play on this one, I had a definite idea of what I was about to be listening to. I was wrong. This was ... good. The Wiki article has this pegged as "glam rock" and "prog rock" but, to me, it felt like proto-punk. In a good way. I don't know. Whatever it is, I dig it. Docked a star because a lot of the second half is too damn Brian Eno for my liking. Also, WTF is up with that last track? It's a rip off of the damn Monster Mash. Why would you do that?

I mean. It's a top 5 hiphop album for me for sure. The whole album is just packed with top-of-the-game, unrelenting, socially-concious spitting backed by power beats. Impossibly good.

I expected more from this album. The big single from it ("Psycho Killer") is a crusher but, sadly, the rest of the album doesn't live up to that track. It feels ... lazy. And not in the good, "gonna sit on the couch with a bourbon and a good book" kind of lazy. The whole album feels phoned in. Boring. It's only saved from a truly failing mark by "Psycho Killer" being so damn good. It's like they poured all their energy into that one song and had nothing left for the rest of the album. Disappointing.

Just a damn great album. Just ... just so great. If I didn't have a soft spot for the sheer quirkiness of "Rubber Soul", "Revolver" would be my #1 Beatles album. Great songwriting, performances, production, and arrangments from top to bottom. Hands down, one of the all-time greats of rock and roll.

I really enjoyed this way more than expected. Clearly punk, but with strong jazz influences, Minutemen live up to their name. The longest track on the album is 2:58 long and it's very much the outlier. Most tracks clock in well under 2 minutes which is why they can get away with an album that's 43 tracks long. Because of the track lengtsh and the sheer volume of tracks, I assumed, before listening to it, that the album would feel scattered. I was pleasently surprised to find that not to be the case. It feels coherent if frantic. I really liked it, honestly. I was going to give it 4 stars but, as I listened, I realized that the musical talent on display here is actually phenominal. It just goes under the radar because of the short-form, punk rock format.

This is a top ten album for me, no question. I love every track. It's iconic and genre-defining. I've got nothing else. It's just everything I want from a punk album ... of from any album really.

I mean ... meh? There's legitimately nothing that stands out. As background music, it's utterly ignorable. Which means that there's also nothing BAD here. Nothing that snags the ear. It's just .. meh.

Utterly pointless waste of time. Milquetoast britpop. Apparently, people compare Suede to early Bowie. Those comparisions are bold at best and insulting at worst. The only reason this doesn't get one star is because there's nothing TECHNICALLY wrong with it. The musicianship and production values are fine. It's just so damn bland. It's cream of wheat to Bowie's strawberry tart.

I'm on record as being morally opposed to any "rock" band with a horn section. That comes into play here as every damn song is horn driven. I'm so sick of saxophones. Also, blue-eyed soul is just the worst. The. Worst. In short, this album was a trial to listen to and I didn't enjoy my time.

Let's get one thing out of the way: this album is DATED. The mixing, the songwriting, the instrumentation ... everything about this album firmly plants it in a specific time frame. Usually, that's a bad thing when the time frame is mid-90s. Somehow (and I'm not sure how, honestly), "Jagged Little Pill" manages to be both a perfect example of an album from '95 AND a great album. There are things that I don't like ... but not enough for me to give it anything less than 5 stars. There are too many great tracks. It demands a 5-star review.

I know that Wu-Tang is like, rap royalty. They're boom-bap kings. But ... I kinda hate 'em. The lyrics are trash. Content and delivery. All pointless. The beats are repetitive and unimaginative. The whole kung-fu flavor just comes off goofy as hell. Every single member of Wu-Tang went on to make music that was SO MUCH BETTER THAN WU-TANG. Two stars for cultural importance only.

The Temptations are a weird group. They were early pioneers in funk but they came out of the motown scene. Most bands who straddle the genre line like this produce songs that sort of smear the line between. Not The Temptations. Oh, no. The songs on this album are very solidly either funk or motown. I love the funk tracks so much. They hit the pocket and just grind. They're great. The motown tracks no so much. They're great examples of motown soul ... I just don't dig the genre.

Just a solid punk album. I really enjoyed it. There wasn't much that stood out but it was fun. The lyrics didn't take themselves seriously, the tracks were full of energy, and the production was solid but not polished (which is proper for punk). I liked it.

Exceptionally boring. Eminently skippable. Utterly unremarkable. SAved from a one-star score because I recognized that one song from the "Father Ted" credits ("Songs of Love") and because none of the songs are actually offensively bad.

This is pre-disco Bee Gees which means it's not even interesting in an annoying way. This was just bleh. Insipid lyrics, music that's trying SO HARD to sound like other bands, and mediocre production combine to create a completely forgettable experience.

Elvis Costello is highly overrated. This album is no exception. Literally. There is not a single exceptional track on this album. The mixing and production isn't even very good on this album. It's all mids and compressed to hell so everthing sounds flat.

Utter. Garbage. Disco is the worst thing to ever happen to music. So much hate.

I fully expected to give this album a 1 star review. Maybe it's because I had to listen to Abba yesterday but, in comparison, this is ... not offensive. And really, that was Elvis's whole deal, right? Let's take music being made by black people and remake it so that it's just white enough that white people won't be offended by its blackness. And it worked. And it had a lasting impact on the world because it - this album - helped bring Rock and Roll into the mainstream. Every track is still a shadow of the original but they're not bad. Just ... whitewashed.

This is so not my genre. I can tell that Ravi is hella talented but the constant, repetitive, droning of the sitar absolutely gives me anxiety. There are some really interesting bit in here where Ravi gives short lessons on how Indian music is built and what to listen for which is the only thing saving this from a one-star review.

I actually had to listen to this album twice. The first time, I was doing stuff and it mostly just felt like generic 70s singer-songwriter stuff. But I could tell that I was missing something so I gave it another listen in the afternoon and yeah, the songwriting is really deep. The album is simple. It's just a single vocal and a single guitar. The focus is entirely on the songwriting which is quite good. It's dark and depressing. But very very good.

Well, that's just a damn good album. Cash can be hit and miss for me but this was 100% a hit. Every track perfect and powerful. Even more so knowing his audience for this one. Just damn good. His reputation is earned. Elvis be damned. Cash is King.

I liked this way more than I thought I would. It's a weird mash of genres: proto-industrial, post-punk, metal... But the mix works. It was also nice to have some actual rock and roll for once. It falls shy of full marks only because a few of the tracks are a bit (or more than a bit) monotonous/obnoxious.

So much of this album sounds like a Casio keyboard demo that it's hard to give it any stars. The only thing saving this from a one-star review is "Superstition" which is good enough to garner almost two stars on its own. It's truly a standout track. Literally. It stands out because it doesn't match the rest of the album at all. There are a few other tracks that aren't too bad but nothing approaches the mountain of a track that is "Superstition".

I'm an unabashed fan of experimental hiphop and this fits the bill. The lyricism is clever, the content is (for the most part) interesting and, at times, real heavy. I like that. The biggest issue with it that the tracks start to sort of blend together about a third of the way through. There are a few that break the mold but, for the most part, it's a pretty one-note album. No bangers, very little fire. Still real good, though. Just not 5-star fare.

I'm starting to suspect that Nick Drake might have been one of the greatest songwriters the world has ever seen. His early death at 26 robbed the world of something great. These songs are heartwrenchingly beautiful. Their dark sadness offer a window into the heart and mind of a man who overdosed on anti-depressants. He just wanted to feel better. Absolutely heart breaking.

Two days in a row I've gotten a Nick Drake album. In fact, I have been given his entire catalog (it's sadly only three albums) in just over a week. I'm not mad about this. If anything, it's solidified the fact that Nick Drake was absolutely one of the greatest songwriters to ever live. This album was my least favorite of the three but it was still amazing. It perfectly expresses Drake's struggles with depression without being dark. It's a perfect picture of depression, honestly. It just IS without being a whole dramatic deal. The production is more involved on this album than on the one before and the one after and that detracts from the power of the songs, in my opinion. It's a testament to how damn good these songs are that the album still receives full marks from me.

I had so many friends who were into this back in the day. I didn't get it then and I don't get it now. Proto-emo, cutsie-tootsie, shoegaze bullshit. The only reason this got 2 stars is because the production quality is excellent.

This is generally not my genre. That said, the sheer unbridled energy brought to music on this album is infectious. It's 100% a protest album and also 100% and act of creative freedom. It was his way of saying "screw you I'm going to be me and be free no matter what." And you have to respect that. Even so, it really really wasn't my jam. So I can't give it full marks.

Shite, twaddle, and unredeemable, synthetic trash.

Like the last Mott album I got, I was pleasantly surprised by this album. Maybe it was due to lowered expectations (I've had a lot of duds lately) butthe songwriting is surprisingly solid and, while there are some tracks that are way too try-hard, the band sticks to its own thing for the most part. And that thing is solid. Not amazing. But really solid.

I knew I would enjoy this album if only because it's been ages since I was served a legit rock album. What I wasn't prepared for, for some reason, was the level of musical skill on display. This is (checks notes) their first album and they're all playing like seasoned veterans. Really impressive chops. It does get docked one star because of the cheesy, try-hard, "ooh, we're so scary" lyrics.

This band is listed as "psychedelic rock" which ... isn't wrong, exactly. But it's also not entirely right. At times, it feels very Stones and at times, it feels like early punk but with more skill. It was like the best of psychedelia and the best of punk and it was really enjoyable... mostly. I loved it up until the last track which got very self-indulgent and then the vocalist just sorta started screaming... not the best experience and it did kill what was going to be a 5 star review. Still a good album, though.

I don't know what I expected from this album, honestly. Not this, though. Half of the album felt like a Stones ripp-off band. The other half was more metal ... but not by much. I know it was early days for metal but, still. I don't know. It's not bad but it's also not special. Except for "No More Mr. Nice Guy" - one whole star for that track alone.

This one his hard. I mean, it's punk, right? You don't expect pretty vocals from a punk album. And, as a fan of punk, I'm not much bothered by harsh, off-tone, or grating vocals. Nor do I have issues with female vox that are brash and rough. I kinda dig the riot grrl thing, to be honest. That said, I do think that the main vocalist is the primary issue here. The problems are two-fold. First, the vocals are super inconsistent. One track will be great, the next will be indiscipherably mumble-shouted. The next will start great and then turn into atonal nonsense. The second issue is Corin Tucker's leaning into her vibrato too heavily. Her vocals on this album are a one-trick-pony that's asked to perform so often that the trick loses its novelty. Overall, though, this is a solid punk album and I'm here for the riot grrl schtick. It works for me.

It's not exactly BAD but it sure is super boring. There's nothing–literally nothing–about this album that stands out except for the fact that the vocals are utterly indescipherable which takes the album from a "meh" 3 stars to a "nope" 2 stars.

I feel like one would need a belly full of E to really jam to this album. It's poppy without being catchy, edgy without being cool, eclectic without being interesting. It feels like some kids who were big fans of The Crystal Method tried their hands at something similar but missed the mark. It listens like a "nailed it" meme. The only thing saving this from a one-star review is the production being top-notch and because the track "Frontier Psychiatrist" is actually a really fun track for being a giant, jumbled sample-salad. It's about a minute too long but it's fun nonetheless.

Meh. Left very little impression, TBH. It's not bad by any means. It just doesn't do much that's new or interesting. I might need to give this one another try later.

I didn't expect to like this one but I did. Great lyrics, good production, and Joni's voice grew on me. Not much more to be said there, to be honest. Solid 4 stars.

The 80s were a hard time for music. Technology was making a lot of new sounds possible and it seems that very few people stopped to wonder if they SHOULD use those new, blippy-bloopy, zip-zap synths just because they could. The end result is a lot of music that's just not good. This album among them. "Time After Time" is a fairly well-written song and Cyndi Lauper is a pretty talented vocalist so the album is saved from a failing mark ... but only just.

Oh man, for something classified as "emo" this album sure has teeth. It's vicious in all the best ways. If emo still sounded like this, I'd absolutely be an emo kid. Froburg's vocals howl at you from the speakers with all the passion and fire that you get with all the great punk vocalists. The guitars are wielded like dueling power saws artfully slicing apart the melody and recombining it into something beautiful and vulnerably raw. Basically, this album is everything that I love about punk and hardcore but with the added layer of emotional openness and honesty. Loved it. Couldn't love it more. Wish I could give it 6 stars.

B.B. King is THE king for a reason. He's just a phenomenal performer. This live album is a great demonstration of his power, skill, and sheer magnetism. There are so many great, utterly classic blues tracks here that it's hard to find much to fault. The biggest issue is that there isn't MORE B.B. King on this list.

You know, this was surprisingly enjoyable. Not what I expected. It rides the edge of punk without ever quite getting there but it's entertaining not the less.

This is just a great album. Super fun, razor sharp, and just a bit ridiculous. Nothing to hate, lots to love. Full marks.

Beautiful. I don't understand a word of it and I don't have to. The acapella harmonies wash over you and just leave you floating in a sea of sound. It alternates between lively and hauntingly beautiful. Sure, it gets pretty repetitive, almost hypnotic at times, and I felt my attention wandering which is why it doesn't get a 5-star review. But, despite that, it's a great album and I'm glad it's on this list.

Meh. It's just sloppy noise-rock. There are so many Sonic Youth albums on this list. I don't get what all the fuss is about.

Apparently, you can't actually listen to the original album on Spotify. What the site links to is a some sort of re-recorded version by Shivkumar Sharma's son? I was able to find a version on Youtube, though. Which is great because the version on Spotify (apparently a remake by his son) was trash. The ACTUAL album is hauntingly beautiful. I can see how this inspired a generation of musicians.

This whole album is a mood and I'm here for it. Brilliant production, great vocals, lots of energy (without being frantic). I'm sad that it took me this long to experience it.

I'm sorry, what? What the hell did I just listen to? What's that? "Experimental" you say? Listen, mate. You can't just say something is "experimental" as though that excuses everything. It's shite. Unlistenable shite. Call it what it is.

There are too many Talking Heads albums on this list. Just like all the others, about a third of these tracks are okay, the other two-thirds are pointless, repetitive, boring, or annoying. I'm being generous with two stars.

I really REALLY enjoyed this album. The very best of protopunk, you can hear the seeds of the Ramones, Sex Pistols, Violent Femmes, and more. Loved it. Full marks.

Nothing much going on here, to be honest. A decent attempt at an early-Bowie-esqe take on post-punk music. I didn't hate it but it sure didn't have much of note to recommend it.

It's a great example of early 90s alt-rock. It really is. Only problem is I can point to a dozen bands that sound exactly the same from the same era. But, for what it is, it's good and deserves a place on the list.

This is Old Dylan at his darkest and I mean that in the very best way. Dylan's voice has aged so well. Granted, his early voice wasn't the best so it's not a far trip to "better" but, even so, Old Dylan's voice is a pleasure to listen to. It feels like it has finally grown to match his powerful songwriting. The end result is an amazing piece of art that cuts hard.

You know, this started strong and I was like, "heck yeah, this is four stars easy!" but dang does it ever get repetitive as hell. Halfway through, my ears were exhausted. An few songs later, I wanted to stab things. By the time I was finished, I was mostly just angry that there is more than one LCD Soundsystem album on this list because that means that I have to do this again at some point. Also someone needs to have their cowbell confiscated until they can prove that they can be responsible with it.

I mean, it's Shaft, right? Baby, if you can't groove on this at least a little bit, I don't know if we can jive, dig? This is prime, buttered funk. But ... well, it's a bit dated at this point, you know? For example, "Cafe Regio" sounds like it should be playing in an elevator at some resort in Miami. Still a great album filled with sick grooves, though.

Eh. Very little to recommend it, TBH. There were a couple of tracks that were alright but they're outnumbered by how many were just a pointless mess. Not impressed.

A few decent songs regularly broken up with pointless, atonal noise. It might be "art" but it's not art, if you know what I'm saying.

This ... this is parody, right? Like, a joke album? No? Are you sure? Huh. Well, it's not very good then, is it? Half-assed crap, really. I mean, kazoos? Really?!

The only reason this doesn't get five stars is because it not timeless. The beats and delivery style absolutely peg this as a rap album from the late 80s-early 90s. But, for the time, this album is absolutely head of the class. The lyrics are so sharp they draw blood just brushing against them. It's rare for a debut album to be such a great indication of an artist's legacy but, with "All Hail the Queen" Latifa made it clear that she was here to stay and ready to rumble. And she has. Her impact on music (and film) in America is undeniable. And it's all on display here. Great album.

Hey, this doesn't suck. It's like Sonic Youth finally discovered the magic elements of "song structure" and "composition" and used those to make an album that wasn't unlistenable bullshit noise. Still not, like, good or anything. But it's not awful and that seems to be the bar for the Sonic Youth albums on this list.

This one held up really well. Just a great album. The composition, instrumentation, and lyrics are all on point. I know a lot of folks hate on Corgan's voice but it's never bothered me and it matches the lyrics and feel of these songs so well. Just really great.

Morrissey has low self esteem but he's a complete tosser so he's going to take it out on everyone else. Anyway, enjoy this hatefuck of an album.

Well. That's just ... really boring, innit? Shame.

Well, that didn't age well, did it? Nope. This album exists in a very narrow slice of musical history and it should stay there. We've already got Bowie filling out the "weird 80s electropop" portion of the list. Let's just let this budget ripoff disappear into obscurity, alright?

Man, there's nothing quite like old-school speed metal. Is it a bit dated? Sure. But it still shreds so damn hard. The sheer, raw musicianship on display is out of this world. Really fun record.

It's really hard to find any fault with this album. It's just solid. Maybe not the most exciting at times, but not a dud track in the listing. And, honestly, "Reelin' In The Years" is one of the most iconic songs of the 70s for a reason. Super solid entry to the list.

Solid entry. A bit pretentious at times but what do you you expect? It's The Yardbirds. Fun listen, though.

This was a surprisingly fun record. I did not expect to enjoy this album NEARLY as much as I did. It felt like the soundtrack to an old black & white film or a modern Pixar movie - in all the best ways. There's so much life and joy and energy here. It's just a blast. That said, it's definitely a particular vibe and I'm not usually in the mood for something likt that. But I'm making a note of this one to come back to when I AM in the mood because, when you want it, it comes in hot.

I didn't think that I was super familiar with Boston before today but it turns out they are the soundtrack to every movie ever set in the 70's. Enjoyable listen.

A lot of reviews call this "funky" and I call shenanigans on that. It's BORDERING on funk but stays too solidly in the smooth R&B camp to be funky. And "smooth" is another word for "boring" when applied to music. Boring is exactly what I found this album to be.

It might not be the best of their albums but "Rubber Soul" is my personal favorite Beatles album. The lyrics are clever and funny and deep and the musicianship is of course top notch. Great record.

I have never been high enough to appreciate this album. Even so, it was almost good until the pseudo-intellectual nonsense monologues started. Kind of a mood killer.

Elevator disco trash. Utterly pointless.

You know, it's not bad. Good songwriting, great harmonies... It's definitely its own vibe and if you're feeling it, it's good stuff.

You know, pre-comeback Morrissey isn't as bad as post-comeback Morrissey but it's still pretentious, self-centered, sad-sack twaddle and I'm not here for it.

Sure, it's peak 90s R&B but is that really saying much? For what it is, it's good. It's just that what it is isn't much, you know? It's an entire album of shallow sexism wrapped in a thin veneer of so-called romance. Nah. Pass.

Nothing to hate here. Very solid representation of a time and place. There's some ... we'll call it "experimental" engineering choices on this album that didn't exactly work out all that great but, overall, it's a chill, fun, 60s britrock album.

For a debut, it's not bad but there sure is a whole lot of Springsteen-esque garbage in here. Not enough to tank the album but enough to take the score down significantly. I'm really glad Petty and his boys figured out their own thing and got better from here. "Breakdown" and "American Girl" are both great tracks, though.

When I was much younger, I remember encountering an album entitled "The Shape of Punk to Come" by Refused and thinking, "Boy, they sure think a lot of themselves. That might be the ballsiest album title I've ever heard." Well, it turns out Ray Charles beat them to it. A black man in '62 claiming he's got the key to modern Country & Western was all balls. He backs it up with this album, though. It's real damn good. It's clearly country but also clearly not. The combination of styles coupled with his clear appreciation for the source material make it really hard to deny how damn good the album is. I mean, I don't even like country and I'm digging this record. I can see why it has been hailed as not just a great album but for breaking down racial walls in the music industry.

It's just hit after hit and even the songs that aren't radio singles are good. This album lives on the fuzzy, disallusioned edge of the punk movement and I love it for its sheer nihilistic angst.

There's no chance of this destroying rock & roll. It doesn't have the energy for that. It's just going to sit on the couch, baked out of its mind, and talk shit about rock & roll instead.

Again, I feel like I'm supposed to like Nick Cave but I just don't. He tries SO HARD to be dark and broody and edgy and uncomfortable. It just leaves me thinking of that kid in drama class who wanted all the lead roles but overacted EVERYTHING so always got relegated to bit parts so he wouldn't screw up the whole show. You're not Hamlet, Nick. You're Rosencrantz.

Geeze. Someone give this bastard a hug and a cup of strong black coffee. It's nothing but a stack of sad-sack, hipster, pseudo-deep lyrics that are utterly lacking in perspective or passion. The only saving grace is that the musicianship and production are absolutely stellar.

Hit after hit after hit. It almost got a 4 from me just because it's super dated and, at times, kinda cheesy, but it's just so dang fun.

I haven't listened to OG since around when it came out so it was really surprising just how brilliant it is. I was blown away by the lyricism and the consuming beats. Really dang good work.

There are some really classic brit-punk anthems on this album and Poly Styrene is one of the most iconic female punk singers ever. Punk is my genre and I'm generally here for the riot grrrl thing but I'll admit that, even for me, a whole album of this started to wear me out. 'Oh Bondage, Up Yours" is still one of my favorite punk tracks but I can only take so much. Also saxophone solos can suck it.

Nope. Unrelentingly repetitive sine-saw-synth with atonal vocals shouting disconnected lyrics. This didn't need to exist. Hard no.

Meh. This one's pretty boring, honestly. There's nothing that stands out as particularly interesting or unique and a lot that just sounds like low-budget rip-offs of other bands.

Well, that was a delightful surprise. This album was just fun. It was energetic without being frantic, proud of its roots while staying accessible, complex without being too complicated. I really enjoyed it.

The point of a live album is to take everything that makes the studio album great and amp it up with the energy of a live show. Unfortunately, Cheap Trick is just a sloppy mess live, apparently. The hits are still good but everything is just... loose. And the recording isn't even hight quality. It's just not worth it, really.

Someone's middle school band director lied to them. Flute is not rock and roll, buddy. This album has no idea what it wants to be and it's utterly frustrating. Every track starts off really great ... and then the flute shows up and wrecks the whole rock vibe. Without the flute, this would have been a 4-star album easily. As it stands, I'm being generous with a 2-star review. Extremely generous. That damn flute...

This, boys and girls, is why it's important to listen to an album all the way through before rating it. I was pleasantly surprised by the first three tracks of this six-track album. They're chill but interesting melodic soundscapes and they made a nice backdrop to my morning. Unfortunately, those first three tracks are followed by 20+ minutes of incoherent screaming and mind-numbingly repetitive drums that utterly tanked the album for me.

This try-hard, bad-falsetto, weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird album full of cut-rate Elton John and Freddie Mercury impressions and discount-bin creeper-ballads for some reason just didn't manage to impress me. It's not even an also-ran with its contemporaries, it's just a bad knock-off.

I mean, it's not bad, right? But it sure as hell isn't good. The vocals are ho-hum, the songwriting is faux-deep, and the whole thing suffers deeply from that horrible 80s studio production that leaves every instrument feeling plastic and synthetic. Acoustic guitars really shouldn't need that much processing.

So this album is great. Obviously. And, taken by itself, it's a masterpiece live album against which other live albums should be measured which is why it's earned a 5-star review from me. That said, I'm unclear as to why this list contains both "At Folsom Prison" and "At San Quentin" since they're essentially the same album. The amount of deja vu that I experienced listening to this after having listened to the other was uncomfortable. Sure the tracks (barring one, "Folsom Prison Blues", which is on both albums) are all different but the banter, lyrical content, and delivery is so similar that you'd be hard pressed, if the tracks were mixed up, to tell which song went on which album.

Yet another mediocre new wave band on the list. I'm not even surprised by it anymore. I just expect to get at least one a week. Like ALL the other so far, this is ignorable bordering on annoying. At least the singer's voice is half-decent. That earns it a two star review.

Did you know that "Good Times" is over 8 minutes long? I sure didn't before today. Let me tell you, that's about 6 minutes longer than it needs to be. And, as annoying as that song is, it's the best part of this whole record. Disco is just the worst.

Yet another crusher by Sabbath full of bangers and fire. Docked a star because of a few overly tryhard, "oh, I'm a scary boy" moments but, overall, a fun listen.

The album name is exceptionally appropriate as it never actually manages to reach a climax, just slowly builds to what one assumes is one. Maybe it's performance anxiety. I hear it's very common.

Let me tell you something. The world did not need nearly two hours of live Motörhead. Especially since a) the recording quality is super low and b) they blew their wad early by putting "Ace of Spades" as the very first track. It's 100% downhill from there with each track progressively sounding more and more similar. The end result is two hours of growling over a bed of fuzzy mess.

This album is a good reminder that those crappy demo buttons on cheap Casio keyboards used to play something that sounded like popular music. Unfortunately for Pet Shop Boys, this album has aged exactly as well as those awful Casio demo tracks. Which is to say not at all. "Behaviour" is an absolute trash album that only serves as a monument to how truly terrible music was in the late 80s and early 90s.

While the songs themselves weren't blatantly BAD, they also weren't awesome. I get that Ol' Jack was in the mix with influential people but I just can't get past the fake, put-on southerness. You're from New York, sir. Don't tell me you've ever actually seen a boll weevil, you poser.

I almost gave this album 5 stars just because it's been so long since I got an album with teeth. But, listening to this objectively, it's not a 5-star album. So many of these tracks sound exactly like each other. They're solid for all that, though. The album is full of energy and grit and attitude and I'm here for it.

Boy, this one was a bit of a rollercoaster. It's a collab with Midlake and they're amazing talents so it sounds great. But there are several problematic things with this album. Grant's lyrics are often just ridiculous and out of synch with his delivery. The song "Sigourney Weaver" has a line that goes, "I feel like Winona Rider in that one movie about vampires. She never got the accent right and neither did that one guy." And the song "Chicken Bones" is just utterly ridiculous. On top of that, several bits of music are directly bitten from other artists. "Where Dreams Go To Die" hinges on the musical hook from "Across The Universe" by The Beatles and it just goes downhill from there. Which is a shame because it's a good listen ... until you start to really listen.

Man, this album is just classic. I miss the days when 3-minute songs were the norm. Hit 'em hard and leave 'em wanting more seems to be the Sinatra formula and damn if it doesn't work. Just super enjoyable.

Solid reggae album. Excellent example of the genre, well-produced, and generally quite interesting. It does go on a bit, though. At some point, all the songs start to blur together into a low-tempo, dubby, backbeat hash. Not in a bad way, necessarily... it just gets a bit old by the end.

Absolutely wonderful album. A beautiful but authentic mix of genres that just feel good. Nina's songwriting is both challenging and comforting and she has the voice of an angel. Really surprised and pleased with this one.

I'm not a fan of Bauhaus the art movement, Bauhaus the band, or even Bauhaus the font. It's all too tryhard. This album is no exception. It's trying so hard to be dark and gritty but without committing to the bit. Ultimately, this is just bland British take on a boring German art movement. The end result sounds like someone dropped their doomcookie in the schoolyard sandbox. And just like that sand-covered cookie, it's unpalatable.

I studied this album as part of my college degree, it's that big of a deal. Even so, I wasn't prepared to give it a 5 start review. But, as I listened, I realized that this really is a milestone album in the history of recording. So many of these songs are OBJECTIVELY great songwriting and (despite Brian Wilson's penchant for lazy fade-out endings) the production really is astounding. Wilson truly was a mad genius and his capacity for brilliance is on full display here.

What a great album. It's nothing but jam after jam that manage to just barely avoid being cheesy and, instead, come off as truly iconic. Just a really fun album.

Look, I'll be the first to admit this isn't my scene, ok? But this ... thing ... is so unrelentingly synthetic and repetitive that it hurts my soul. I get the motivation behind it which is why it doesn't get a fully failing score. Bey wanted to git duurty. Sure. Maybe hire some studio musicians next time instead of just a stack of producers, though. Because, despite the vocal and lyrical talent, it's just frikkin' boring.

I saw "britpop" on the wiki and groaned. Not another britpop album! But whoever wrote that genre classification was either an idiot or a sexist who believed that, if it has a female singer, it's pop. Because this isn't pop. This is post-punk rock. And barely post-punk at that. It was tasty as hell and I loved every single track. Will be listening to this again on the regular.

Cohen's strenth was always in his songwriting, not his performance and this album is far from his best performance. Even when this was released in '88, the instrumentation and arrangements were outdated and cheesy. About two-thirds of the songs on the album are really well written, even so (as you would expect from a Cohen record). The other third, however, are ... well, they're not Lenny's best work. (I'm looking at you, "Jazz Police") The duds are bad enough to tank this down to a middling grade.

This was not what I was expecting given Kraftwerk's later work. It's ... symphonic. Sure, it's repetitive but it's also layered, textured, and nuanced. Sure, it's electronic but in a way that somehow feels natural and not overly synthetic and robotic. Autobahn (the title track) in particular, truly feels like driving on an interstate highway at night. They nailed it. I'm impressed.

What a beast of a punk album. Full of joyful energy, aggressive attitude, biting intelligence, and succinct social commentary, this is everything you want your punk music to be. One of the best. Nothing to hate, everything to love.

The thing with YYYs is that the lyrics bounce back and forth between inspired and insipid with little to no warning. That said, this album is really quite good and just gets better as the album went out. The back half of the album is straight fire. This only misses a 5-star review because of a few, pretty goofy tracks at the beginning.

Meh. Listen, I usually love experimental hiphop. It's generally smarter, more musical, and more pointed than your standard, run-of-the-mill gangsta rap. Every time I was like "oh, that was clever," the lyric came from a guest artist. Even the social commentary on this album was softer and less pointed than I was led to believe. I came with high expectations and I left disappointed.

Well, it's a classic for a reason. It's mostly fire from top to bottom. I have a few issues with the mixing (why is the kick scooped out like a used melon rind?) but not enough to take the score down from full marks.

Man, what a great album. Everything you love about Iggy, Violent Femmes, and all of the great american punk/post-punk bands is on display here. It's clever, fresh, different and, at the same time, oh-so familiar. Loved everything about it.

This album is an utter, rotten mess. There is one hit and the rest is stream-of-conciousness rot. There's no structure to most of the songs and the story they tell is utterly reprehensible and pointless. The ONLY reason this is getting 2 stars is because "Pinball Wizard" is still pretty good, though I don't like it as much as I did before I had this album as context. What a waste of time.

Honestly, this is really not their best album. It's full of the oooeeeooo, falsetto, saccharine-sweet fluff tracks that they became popular for but has none of the brilliant deep cuts that made them legends.

I don't know anything about this band but I know I a synch album when I hear one. Every track a vibe, never an anthem? No bangers just moods? This album was made to be background music. Well, it manages to be exactly that, unfortunately.

I expected to hate this album (I'm not a big jazz fan) but I ended up loving it. The grooves are tight, the musicianship is superb, and the performances are top-notch. The only reason that this didn't get full marks is because a couple of the tracks do drag on a bit. At 45 minutes long and only 5 tracks, this is somewhat inevitable. The really remarkable thing is that most of the tracks DON'T feel like they're too long.

Meh. Nothing standout at all here except for a few, very stupid lyrics.

I'm a sucker for a good cover album and this is a very good cover album. I also love the story behind this. Record label was like, "You can't cover these songs! You're the king of outlaw country!" And then Willie is like, "Screw you, I'm Willie Nelson. Here's a bunch of covers. Deal." Album goes quintuple platinum. Moral of the story? Willie does what Willie wants.

This was a really good album. It's well written, clever, emotional, and fun. It's the kind of album that, had I been in a different mood, would probably have gotten a 5 star review from me. Objectively, it's a little too easy to ignore but it's easily a 4-star album.

There's nothing in the world that sounds like a Missy joint. When Missy's on her game, she's unstoppable. Unfortunately, there are a few tracks here that DON'T feel like Missy joints (I'm looking at you "Pussycat", "Nothing Out There for Me", and "Play That Beat") hence the 4-star review. But the rest of the album is just so good, she almost pulled a 5-star anyway. These beautiful, throwback traps feel so good with her effortlessly confident flow draped over top. Legendary talent.

It's kinda not good, right? Like... almost good... but then not. The The has managed to fill up an entire album with the kind of pseudo-intellectual, half-aware, social semi-conscious lyrics that make so much of 80s music super cringey. It's not good, fellas. It's just not good.

I generally cut punk albums a lot of slack. Pretty music isn't the point, right? But, dang. This album is a royal mess. It makes no sense, the production is trash, the songs are poorly written and poorly performed ... it's just not good. It's not good punk, it's not good hardcore, it's not good rock. It's just not very good.

Okay, Aunty Entity. Aunty Entity, okay. This record is painfully 80s. It's so 80s, it goes to work with a Lisa Frank trapper keeper tucked under its arm. It's a plastic imitation of real music with a rough coat of paint slapped over top to give it the impression of edginess. Not good.

Ray Charles is just a delight. It's a bit big-band over the top for me as an album but the songs are great and man can Ray sing. Pretty fun album top to bottom.

The problem with early funk is that it's still close enough to its roots that it has the stank of disco on it. The bits of this that were funky were really funky. But there were so many bits that were cheesy, gross disco to keep it from being a good album. Not enough to tank it completely, though. The funk keeps it afloat. But only barely.

"Headquarters" is a mismatched mishmash of mediocrity that is merely a meagre mimicry (one might even say maliciously so) of "modern" music. It leaves the listener feeling mocked, miserable, and more than a mite mad with the meretricious marketing machine that is the Monkees.

Every track sounds exactly like the track before it. It's not bad, exactly. It's just like ... I already heard that. I don't need to hear it again, thank you.

I mean, "Tuesday's Gone," "Gimme Three Steps," "Simple Man," and "Free Bird" all on the same album. How you gonna argue with that? I almost gave this a 4 but I couldn't actually come up with anything wrong with the album especially given the release date. I sometimes find myself a bit put off by Van Zant's penchant for socio-political posturing but, for 1973, several of these songs are super pointed and progressive. That's worth a star.

I really enjoyed this one. The songwriting is intriguingly subtle (especially for The Velvet Underground), the performances have an enchanting energy, and the production is appropriately raw. "What Goes On," "Pale Blue Eyes," and "Beginning to See the Light" are absolutely fantastic examples of alternative songwriting. It's a power album for The Velvets where they flex and show their depth. My guess is that most detractors get stuck at "Murder Mystery" which is admittedly extremely avant garde. But it's not enough to tank the whole album and, if you take the time to dig into what's being said, it's actually a really great piece of poetry about existential identity confusion brought on by an onslaught of popular culture. It's often considered to be a great example of the power of modern poetry.

2 of 5 (10/5/21) When people ask me what it was like to be part of the Nashville music scene, they're hoping to hear about a vibrant, exciting community creating innovative and unique new musical offerings for the world to hear. "What's it like to see a songwriter set at the legendary Blue Bird Cafe?" they ask, wide eyed and eager. Well, 90% of it sounds exactly like this. Generic, country-adjacent, sad-sack, wanna-be-crooner, singer-songwriter noise. Boring and samey. God forbid you be an actually exceptional female singer-songwriter in Nashville. It's nearly impossible to rise above the noise of all of the girl-and-guitar acts glutting the stages, bars, and coffee houses of Nashville, TN. The main reason this didn't get a 1-star review is because the track "I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll" is excellent and completely different from the rest of the album. And no wonder. It's recorded live at The Ryman and produced by T-Bone Burnett who's exceptionally good at what he does. If the whole album had followed the lead of this one track, this review would have been significantly different. Sadly, for everyone who has to listen to this album, it doesn't and this track stands alone, an island in a sea of mediocrity.

Even though I'm on record as a fan of metal, I've often skipped Sepultura because they just always seemed so try-hard. They seem to work so hard to come across extra shocking and creepy. But this, friends, is why you shouldn't judge an album by its cover. This record is straight up fire. It lives in that liminal zone between thrash and death metal that lends itself to really tasty grooves which practically spark with high-voltage current. It's super energetic without being frantic or chaotic, controlled without being robotic, and switches from face-melting guitar licks to heavy, pounding groves without missing a beat or losing an ounce of power. It's a damn good example of the genre.

Look, I'm willing to admit the possibility that I'm listening to this album from too modern of a perspective. But it's not good is it? The songwriting is bland, the arrangements are mediocre, and the performances are lackluster. The ONLY reason this album is saved from a one-star review is that the engineering and production are out-of-this-world good. I don't know when the last time was that I heard such crispy drums and such a perfectly balanced stereo mix. This production is so good. It's just a shame it's wasted on such a turd of an album.

The greatest punk album by the greatest punk band. Ever. Full stop. Each track overflows with the sheer, joyful, nihilistic abandon that makes punk so great. Haters gonna hate ... but they're wrong. This is peak punk perfection. Full stop.

"Beggar's Banquet" is a bit of a roller coaster of an album. It's blues, it's rock, it's got some country-ajacent moments ... it's kinda all over the place but everywhere it goes is good. It's a raw sound in all the best ways. This is where The Stones came back to their roots, tried a bunch of stuff out, and decided who they wanted to be musically and culturally. These songs are objectively great. The recording, however ... well, there are some significant issues with the production which pulled it back a star for me.

This was a hard album to rate. Each song–on its own–was quite good. But Lana seems to be a bit of a one-trick pony and her sleepy croon is delightful only in small doses. Every song sounds so very similar to the last that the album quickly starts to blur into a long, underwater sleepwalking session. There are moments when her voice echoes the effortless charm of Billie Eilish but she never manages to summon the emotional intensity that makes Eilish so compelling. Lana seems to be content to sit back and take the easy route. Consequently, she never quite hits the greatness that seems to lurk in the wings, just behind the curtain of her sleepy vocals.

Honestly, this didn't age as well as I thought it would. I know that, when it came out, it was somewhat groundbreaking and I appreciate the injection of comedic and lighthearted storytelling elements into a genre that, at the time, was preoccupied with being "hard" above all. But it's just not that great 20+ years later. There are still good moments and solid hooks in here and "My Name Is" is still a fun joint. But it's not enough to pull it above a middling 3-star score.

For a band I've never heard of, this album was freaking great. It's everything I love about The Rolling Stones with a healthy dose of Violent Femmes sprinkled on top. This came out the same year as "Sticky Fingers" even. Apparently, after listening to "Teenage Head" Mick Jagger was like, "Oh yeah. That's what we were trying to do with 'Sticky Fingers' but they did it better." And he's not wrong. Put the two albums up against each other and "Teenage Head" just might come out on top. Absolute monster of an album.

This is the album that made Oasis a household name. And for good reason. It's an undeniable powerhouse of a record. There's not a bad track on here. Anyway, here's "Wonderwall."

Somehow, I'd managed to forget how much of an adrenaline-fueled, psychotic, circus side-show this album is. If you don't know (or remember, in my case) what you're getting into, hitting play feels like being physically assaulted for asking a coworker how their weekend went. But, if you can hang in, by the time "Sugar" rolls around, you've caught the fever and are happily riding the insane-train like the good little distopic droog you always knew you could be. It's just such a mad, manic ride from start to end. Impossible to get off, you just have to hold on and smile at the approaching and inevitable carnage of a head-to-head train wreck. All that to say, I quite enjoyed it.

"Club Classics Vol. 1" is the Fruity Pebbles of music. It's technically breakfast but is utterly devoid of nutritional value. It's just bright colors and empty calories. Soul II Soul managed to put out an album that's technically music but utterly devoid of musical value. It's just bright colors and empty lyrics.

"Crossing the Red Sea With the Adverts" is an utterly perfect example of peak UK punk. There's not a bad track on the album. Everything you love about punk is on display PLUS great vocal performances and a higher production value than is usual for the genre and time. What a great album.

This is Missy's first album and it feels like a freshman attempt. It's a bit jumbled and weak, missing that weird snap that makes a Missy joint so recognizable. It's far more generic R&B than hip-hop but the unique spark that makes Missy the queen is there, just barely visible, buried in the sand. I'm glad she dug it out for further albums. Sadly, there's not enough here to save this first one.

One of the greatest voices of the 20th century singing songs by one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century. There's really nothing to dislike here. Not a damn thing.

Mr. Monk is surely an accomplished player but 45 minutes of winding, seemingly groove-phobic, saxophone solo is trying at best. I shouldn't have to work this hard to enjoy listening to a record.

Legendary. This is the album that started it all. When DMC broke big with this album, they threw the doors wide open for hip hop to step onto the main stage of American (and world) music. If, to the modern listener, it seems a bit hokey in delivery, it's worth remembering that this was a genre in its extreme nascency and it was still trying to figure out what it was supposed to sound like. So it borrowed from rock, techno, and R&B and then added that unique NYC hiphop flavor. The end result is a groundbreaking work stuffed full of powerful messaging, clever lyrics, and unapologetically fun beats.

An absolutely legendary experience from the moment you punch play and get hit with that iconic opening riff of "Purple Haze" all the way to the closing solo of "Red House." There are few albums as stuffed with hits as "Are You Experienced" is. Every track is perfect, every lick is tasty, every song leaves you wanting more. What a beast of an album. What a legend of a musician.

Even in a release year crowded with banger albums (Jimi Hendrix, "Are You Experienced" and Beatles, "Magical Mystery Tour" among them), Cream's "Disraeli Gears" stands out among the very best of the year or even the decade. It's got everything you want form a 60s rock album (self-aware lyrics, social commentary, a bit of psychedelic juju, driving rhythms, the works) but with that extra dose of face-melting blues guitar from the the one and only Eric Clapton. The man's a guitar legend for a reason. Clapton's guitars, Baker's rhythms, and Jack Bruce's vocal performances combine to push out such a great vibe I can't help but love every minute of it.

This three-star review hurts to give. Biggie's skills are literally the stuff of legend but, man ... the album just didn't age well. The lyrical content is a one-note gong that he just keeps banging over and over and over. The majority of the album can be summed up in the phrase "I'm gonna shoot you." There's very little that strays from that central theme. And that ... well, that gets old after a while, doesn't it? Even if the delivery is fantastic. And then there are the skits. Pure cheese. The skits alone dragged the score down a whole star. Overall, a disappointing re-listen from one of the greatest rappers of all time.

The first thing that hits you in the face is that these beats are peak early hiphop. They are just so damn tasty. Then you start listening to the lyrics and are forced to confront the depth of the social commentary on display here. Chuck D and Flavor Flav are on the very top of their significant game with this album. It's intense. It's rowdy. It's aware. It's brash. It's fun. But it's also surprisingly balanced in the way that it approaches racial issues while staying angry that there are still issues. I get that, Public Enemy. I feel that anger and hope still, 32 years later.

There was a point, while listening to this album, that I was prepared to give it a five-star rating. I thought to myself, "Dang! An experimental album that manages to blend genres effectively while never losing the plot or falling out of the pocket! These grooves are so great!" And then it all fell apart in dramatic fashion. Track five brought an eighteen-minute collection of disconnected noises punctuated by random moaning and lost the album a star. Track six continued the downward trend with eleven minutes of tangled strings and a violently bi-polar time signature. There goes another star. Track seven, the last track, managed to pull a grove out of its back pocket to save the album from truly failing marks. Overall, an interesting but extraordinarily frustrating album.

I do not understand the appeal of Tom Waits in general or this album in particular. Every track is essentially the same. Tom says, "Weeell. Mumble mumble grumble mumble, vague rhyme, mumble mumble, vague rhyme, grumble mumble. Yeah." And then the crowd applauds his pretentious, pseudo-intellectual bullshit. The real star of the show isn't Tom. It's the bass player who's working his fingers off trying to carry the whole album on his back. Jim Hughart is a beast of a player. He's the only person doing any significant amount of work and is the only reason this album got two stars from me. I almost gave the album an indifferent three stars but then Tom had a nice long monologue about masturbation and, well, he sort of lost me there. I spent the rest of the album just waiting for the damn thing to be over.

Tracy Chapman as a singer and performer is a delight. Tracy Chapman as a songwriter is a damn national treasure. The fullness of the human condition can be found in this one album and it's heart-achingly beautiful. The world is better for having these songs of love, loss, despair, and hope in it.

You could be forgiven for forgetting that you're not listening to The Beatles or The Rolling Stones or any of a half-dozen britrock bands. There are some bands that are just pillars of a time and place. The Kinks seem to just bounce around in the in-between spaces that aren't occupied by the greats. They don't offer anything really new or unique to the britrock scene. They're just sort of filler. Not that the album is bad. It's not bad by any measure. There's a lot of good stuff on here. There just aren't any tracks that stand out. In every case, someone else did it better.

Neil Young is easily the most overrated artist on this whole list. He's an awful singer, a boring musician, and a mediocre songwriter at best. This is some of the most vanilla, cardboard cutout, middle-of-the-road music I've ever heard. It was on track to get a bland 3 stars from me but somewhere around the middle of the album, someone started committing warcrimes with what I think was a fiddle. Hard to tell. All I know is that the atonal screeching most certainly violated the Geneva convention and should have landed Mr. young in jail for crimes against humanity. Two stars is generous.

I almost knocked a star off because of the saxophone solo but I couldn't do it. The storytelling on display here is top-notch. Joel's performances are flawless and his songwriting is compelling. Just a really great album stacked with songs that are full of all the feels.

I feel like I should like Amos (or at least appreciate her) but .. I mean, it's just a really annoying album. Amos comes off as a cut-rate Morrisette and every track grates on the ear. The album is entirely populated with noisy, cardboard songs sung with more energy than skill and oddly lacking in anything approaching passion. I never get the impression that she actually cares about anything she's singing about. And the constant, often atonal warbling and wailing quickly gets legitimately painful. It's fingernails-on-a-chalkboard levels of cringe.

This album is so "smooth" it slid in one ear and back out the other, leaving no impression behind other than a slightly slimy film to mark its passage.

This is a surprisingly good electronic album. I know it's basic to compare electronic bands to Moby but this album really reminds me of peak Moby. It's got a great down-tempo vibe, killer trip-hop groves, the vocals are sparse and textural, and the whole thing just oozes sophistication. You can tell these guys care deeply about making sure that everything is perfect and balanced. The attention to detail is astounding. This album is a whole feeling and I'm here for it.

You know, it's not a bad album. But it does tend towards the "weird for the sake of being weird" side of quirky. Songs about robots will never not be cheesy and this album leans into the cheddar. But, for all that, the musicality is solid, the performances are fun, and the production is great. It's just ... well, it's just really goofy.

OK, Talvin. Talvin, OK. I legitimately don't understand what the hell I just listened to. But it wasn't enjoyable, I know that. Nope. Not at all. Sorry, Talvin. That's a no for me, dawg.

I mean, it sounds like what it is: a rock album from the 70s. It's kind of a slow chug through chunky riffs with rough vocals over top. If that's what you came for, you'll be happy with what you get. Otherwise, it's just kinda meh.

Man, the hits here are absolute bangers. But the tracks that aren't hits are major misses. Miles off the mark. It's insane to me that the same album that contains "Black Dog," "When the Levee Breaks," and "Stairway to Heaven" also contains "The Battle of Evermore" and "Four Sticks" which are ... well, there's a reason you probably haven't heard them. They're not bad enough to tank the album but they do pull the rating down a star.

I mean, it's great. If you're into punk, this is going to work for you. It's everything you love about punk - all the energy and the sheer, nihilistic joy - but with the added spice of funky beats, great production, and skillful arrangements. I just loved it.

I mean, it's The Cure so it's WAY too dramatic for its own good. That said, this is a remarkably solid album for a) 1989 and b) The Cure. "Lovesong" and "Fascination Street" have both been covered so many times I'd forgotten that the original recordings are as good as they are. And they really are quite good. Overall, pleasantly surprised by how well this album has stood up over time.

This album taught me an interesting lesson. Namely, that Lennon really needed the rest of the Beatles to avoid being a bullshit artist. I think it's because he was pretty much a trash human being and, without the balancing influence of his bandmates, all of his egotism, hypocrisy, and pretension didn't get filtered out. Instead, he spent the whole album spotlighting his worst traits to the detriment of his (few) positive traits. To say it's distasteful is an understatement. Giving this one a very generous 3 stars...

Absolute beast of an album. Quintessential, essential, cornerstone work from one of the most important artists in American music. The man is a legend and this album is legendary.

Pretty great album, honestly. I'm here for the riot grrl thing and Souxie delivers that in spades. It's fun, witty, and well put together.

My first thought, when listening to this album, was that it was a pretty decent, run-of-the-mill rock album for the mid '90s. That I looked and saw that it was released in '87. Turns out, it's actually a pretty decent rock album that was ahead of it's time. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Solid 3 stars.

It's a really solid freshman album. The songs are put together well, the production is admirably transparent, and the performances are energetic and skillful. There's nothing to dislike here.

Somewhere in the secret vaults deep beneath the Vatican where they lock away the secrets deemed too dangerous for the world, there is a book titled "Things That Could End the World as We Know It Probably." This book contains lists of potentially apocalypse-causing items and scenarios. It's quite a large book. All of the items are grouped into sections by type such as “Thermonuclear Missteps,” “Plagues, Diseases, Germs, and Cooties,” and “Musical Indiscretions.” The latter category is surprisingly lengthy, though not as lengthy as the category simply titled, somewhat ominously, “Birds.” Nearing the top of the list of dangers in the “Musical Indiscretions” category is “Sitar Covers of Rolling Stones Songs.” How the album “Ananda Shankar” by Ananda Shankar made it past the Illuminati’s shadow censors is anybody’s guess given the fact that it begins with a sitar cover of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Equally mystifying is the fact that the world is still mostly un-ended. Experts speculate that the only reason that the album didn’t summarily destroy the world is that the first track is balanced by an equally destructive sitar cover of “Light My Fire” by The Doors and, somehow, the two evils have managed to cancel each other out. This is, of course, purely speculative as nobody would be so reckless as to test the theory in a lab. Not even on a small scale. The risk is simply too great. For now, we must simply be grateful that, somehow, Ananda Shankar did not, intentionally or unintentionally, destroy the world as we know it. Probably.

Well, that was a fun little trip down memory lane but not a trip I care to make again. Anthrax was genre-defining in their day, for sure. But there are just so many better metal/hardcore bands out there now. With the perspective that comes with the 34 years between now and when this album came out, it's clear that the vocals are amateurish and the songwriting is ... really shallow. It's pretty lame, honestly. But the musicianship is excellent and the performances are on point. Anyway, it didn't suck overall but it wasn't as awesome as I remember it being.

Sounds like what it is: mediocre, drug-addled, pop rock. Pretty boring, honestly. Ecstasy is not a good drug for making music, apparently.

This album started out SO GOOD. Then (apparently) the drugs kicked in, the saxophone came out, and everything started falling apart until, by the end, the tracks were reduced to atonal, tempo-agnostic, guitar "solos" and random horn bleating. I tried so hard to give it the benefit of the doubt (after the mandatory 1-star subtraction for saxophone solos) but it just never recovered itself. By the time the last track wrapped I was legitimately angry at Zappa for putting this nonsense out into the universe.

Boy, that really didn't age well, did it? Gross.

Well, I don't know what I was expecting but it sure wasn't a store-brand Beatles album. If it weren't for Gibb's ridiculous vibrato and the blatant rip-off nature of the album, it'd almost be good. But it's not.

While the album has some decent post-punk bones, it's ruined by some really terrible early-90s electronic trash. At times I was able to look past that and enjoy the very Stooges-esque spoken-word vocals but it was always wrecked by the bloopy-blippy, synthetic trash that covers the whole album like bubblegum-flavored syrup on pancakes. Nobody wants that. Stop it.

Another Cohen album, another review that says pretty much the same thing. Namely that, while Cohen was a world-class songwriter, his songs are best when someone else performs them. He really can't sing and the guitar playing on this album is pretty dismal as well. At first listen, there's nothing to really recommend the album... until you really listen to the lyrics. Because those are brilliant. Shame Cohen can't perform worth a damn.

I expected to like this as I'm generally a fan of the Lou Reed-fronted Velvet Underground. But I didn't. Reed's performances here are utterly boring and uninspired, the lyrics are extremely repetitive, and there's a saxophone solo (automatic one-star deduction). And then a tuba solo (there goes another star). And then there are jazz flutes... it's just an unredeemable mess, to be honest. Which is a shame because I had such high hopes.

So. Many. Bangers. This album took me back to middle school so hard I broke out in pimples during the opening chords of "Even Flow." There are a few tracks that didn't age all that awesome but, overall, it's a freaking killer album.

I know he's supposed to be the King of Croon and the Sultan of Smooth but, to me, Sinatra always comes across as a sleazy egomaniac. That's what's on display here. The album gets three stars from me not because of Sinatra but in spite of him. Jobin is an amazing musician forced to play second fiddle to Sinatra's ego and it's a shame. I could have used ten times more Jobin and way less of ol' Frankie Blue Eyes.

I went into this album expecting to hate it. Turns out, I was right. It's a hateful album. How something can be so insanely pretentious and mind-numbingly boring at the same time is beyond me. What a waste of an hour.

I was expecting a country album or at least a blues album. What I got was a cheesy soft rock album instead. Whatever the genre, this was a boring, cheesy, greasy, over-produced lump of an album with no consistent through-line and no sense of itself or where it belonged.

Dolly is an undeniable force of nature. She has aged with grace and poise and power. In some ways, that makes this 3-star review hard to give. But it's possible to utterly adore a person for who they are, deeply respect their accomplishments, and still not be a fan of their work. Unfortunately, that's where I am with this album. Dolly, I love ya, but this album is fairly pedestrian, steel-guitar-soaked, hillbilly country. Except for "Here I Am" - that song is amazing. On the second to last track, Dolly finally slips the lead and lets loose with the full force of her voice and the result is fantastic.

I don't know if I've ever heard an album that's all bangers and no hits before this one. I loved every track but none of them were legit hits. The album was soaked in that sick vibe that you know and love from Zepp but not a single track had any of the monster hooks that you associate with the band. Still a super enjoyable listen, though.

I was in a band on e with some guys who were really into D.Jr. and that band suffered from the same issues as D.Jr. does which is that, while the musicality and technical skill are quite impressive, the overall effect is less than enjoyable. In fact, after a few tracks, I found myself just exhausted from following along. There's too much going on, too many time changes and mismatched parts. Again, it's really impressive from a musical standpoint once you stop and pay attention but that same action will leave you just worn out. It's just not an very enjoyable experience.

While the musicianship is clearly good, they just feel like a store brand Pink Floyd. It's Floyd-style prog without the hooks which leaves the album feeling kind of empty and, ultimately, forgettable.

What the actual hell did I just listen to? Two hours of pointless, repetitive noise is what. The first track "Timeless" (a 25-minute drum loop) is clearly the title track. However, it should be the fourth track that gave the album its name: "This Is a Bad." What a trash album.

Eh. Kinda basic garage surf rock. Not bad but not all that exciting, either.

I had to go back and gave it a second run-through just to be sure but it turns out, this is a pretty good album. I started skeptical but, the more I listened to it the more I ended up really digging it. The songs are fun, the production is great, and the guitar tones are truly exceptional. I'm honestly shocked that this wasn't on my radar before now.

You know that Wilson guy from the Beach Boys? No, not Brian, the eccentric genius. The other one. No, not Carl! Why would you even mention Carl?! Nobody ever talks about Carl! No, I mean one who was all mixed up with Charles Manson. Dennis, yeah. Well, it turns out he was a damn fine songwriter. In fact, "Pacific Ocean Blue" is a great album. It has a little bit of that Beach Boys smell to it but it veers hard into funk/rock/blues territory, at times evoking Clapton, The Stones, George Clinton, and a half-dozen other artists who were cutting absolute classic tracks at the time. It's really a great album. Too bad about that whole Manson thing.

Well, I mean... It's definitely more thrash than black metal but it was early days and they sorta invented the genre so I'll cut 'em some slack. What I won't cut any slack on is the lazy, cheesy, try-hard, doom-cookie, "ooh aren't we so scary" lyrics. I was digging some solid shredding until I listened to the lyrics. So stupid. So very lame and stupid. Shame, really.

I mean, it's Bowie. It's great. Is it his best? I don't think so. But it's Bowie. So it's great.

This woman is a monster of a performer. There hasn't been another voice like hers since she left this earth. Raw power harnessed by perfect control combine to create unforgettable performances that leave you with no doubt as to her meaning, feelings, or desires. Perfection.

What an overrated, low-talent hack. Elvis Costello has hung his whole career on leveraging the misplaced, rose-tinted-glasses nostalgia of white middle class America. And they've eaten it up thinking that this plastic imitation is the real deal.

On first blush, this should have been a no for me, dawg. But it wasn't. Stereolab manages to take a genre known for repetitive noise and turn it into an interesting and enjoyable experience. Is it all amazing? No, it's not. There are definitely some bits that are a bit twee but not enough to tank the record. "Emperor Tomato Ketchup" (that's gotta be a translation error, right?) was a pleasant surprise.

They're no Beatles but Coldplay is still one of the best acts to ever come out of Ol' Blighty even if it does seem like poor Chris Martin is always desperately in need of a hug. Not all of the songs are bangers but that's not really the Coldplay vibe so I'm not bothered. Any of the non-hits would be cornerstone tracks for any other band. Their brilliance is just dimmed because they sit in the shadow of tracks like "Clocks" and "Amsterdam" which are monsters. It's a great album, no contest.

While the musicianship is undeniable, Robinson's voice wears me out after about song 3. Something about his constant, slightly off key, fake blues Man wailing just ... wears me out. That said, it's still a good record and a good representation of rock at the peak of its game in the '90s (including all of the dated production techniques of the time).

I love when I get to hand out unexpected 5-star reviews. I didn't anticipate enjoying this album nearly as much as I ended up doing. The vocals are great, the production is top-notch, the composition is fantastic. The whole album is a great vibe. Even the lyrics, while being very "20-year-old-people's-problems" were clever and well-written for all that. I really enjoyed it. Listened through it twice.

I mean... dang. Old Cash beats the pants off of Young Cash any day. These songs, covers and all, are so hauntingly beautiful. You feel the weight of life lived, mistakes made, and perspective gained in Cash's performances. It's a damn near perfect album.

It hurts to give this 4 stars instead of 5 but I've got to be consistent and this thing is hella dated. Don't get me wrong, I love it. It's jam after jam and it's a hell of a lot of fun. But... well, "Girls" exists.

I expected to hate this record and ... I was not entirely wrong. This whole sad-sack, outlaw-country crooner schtick is exceptionally cheesy and comes off disingenuous. That said, I can't deny the musicianship and high production values. But I just hate the way Merle slides into every damn note like the last-chair trombone player in a middle school band. I mean, just hit the note, my man.

I've heard this album referred to as either "excessive" or "lush" depending on whether or not the person liked the end product. I think the truth is that it's both in turns. The real issue with the album, however, is the lack of substance beyond the production. None of the songs have any significant lyrical or melodic hooks and, throughout most of the album, the songs themselves feel like an afterthought to the production. Like a fancy hamburger restaurant where the toppings are outrageous but the beef patty itself is just a flavorless, overcooked grey slab of meat.

I expected ... I don't know? More? I've previously reviewed their album, "Autobahn" and quite enjoyed it's layered symphony. This album, however, seemed... amateur. Kinda boring, really. Shame.

From the cover and the band name, I was kinda hoping for some sort of electric bluegrass situation. I was mildly disappointed, upon hitting play, to find out that Supergrass is just another britpop band. After getting over my disappointment, I realized something else about this band: this is where Jack White got his sound. He legitimately lifted it wholesale from Supergrass. I had to check the wiki to be sure that this wasn't, in fact, an early Jack White project. The two are utterly indistinguishable. Jack White, you're a dirty thief and I didn't even know it. As far as the album goes, it was fun but, like a Jack White joint, nothing super exceptional.

Man, the Temptations... What a wildly schizophrenic band. I feel like most of their albums have the same issue. You'll be grooving along to some truly quality funk and then, all of the sudden, it switches to track after track of doo-wop, Jackson 5 style R&B. Just stick with the monster funk, guys! It's so good when you're just funkin' it up.

Kate Bush suffers from what I like to call "Björkism." Björkism is a disease that causes vocalists to wander aimlessly; rarely, if ever, approaching anything resembling a melody, let alone a legitimate hook. In fact, vocalists who suffer from Björkism often seem downright phobic when it comes to hooks. Instead, they choose to warble endlessly and leave the listener exhausted from trying to follow along. I call this syndrome Björkism, not because I believe that Kate Bush bit the style from the eponymous Björk, but because Björk is the ultimate example of this disease. Accordingly, "The Sensual World" by Kate Bush receives a slightly better score than your average Björk album because, as annoying as it is, at least it's not Björk.

I think I get it now. I understand why The Stones were so big in their day. This album, while feeling very middle-of-the-road today, was stand-out-from-the crowd in '66. Sure, there were other British acts reaching across the pond to make a splash in the US but they were either The Beatles or riding the coattails of The Beatles. The Stones took a different direction - real, old-school blues - and then went further by not pulling punches with the lyrical content. "Mother's Little Helper" and "Stupid Girl" while being almost painfully misogynistic, were certainly not playing around lyrically. I can see why this appealed to the disaffected youth of the time the same way that Sex Pistols, Ice T, or Tool did in later years. Musically, the album is solid. Lyrically, it's solid if a bit dated. The performances, however, are stand out and pull the whole thing up from a middling grade to a solid 4 stars.

Undeniably great and groundbreaking at the time. Even so, it does feel a bit dated and weak at points. The skits? So '90s hiphop and cringey. They're super cheesy but not enough to tank the album. Amazing performances all around. Haters gonna hate but Lauryn Hill is a singularly amazing talent and she absolutely shines on this album.

It's so strange to hear so many covers on a Beatles album. That said, even the covers are exceptionally well done. It is The Beatles, after all. They almost lost a star for covering "Please Mr. Postman" which just doesn't work from a boy band but they gained it back with a great cover of "Money" which was an unexpected joy. The main reason this album gets a four-star review instead of a five-star review is because the listening experience is dominated by the songs that The Beatles covered rather than by the songs they wrote. And, from writing monsters like this - even this early in their career - that's a shame.

Maybe I just had low expectations for this album but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, the first several songs were pretty decent. Bruce "King Mumbles" Springsteen actually belted out the lyrics full-voice and fully enunciated! Miracles do happen! But then we hit "Downtown Train" and I couldn't understand a dang word. Why, when you CAN sing, would you choose to sound like you just got out of oral surgery? King Mumbles strikes again. And can we also talk about the themes here? Pining for the "glory days" of your youth is such a pathetic, boomer thing. And yet, here it is, raised up on a pedestal for all to worship as some sort of American ideal. It's gross and lost the album another star.

"Wild Gift" is the musical equivalent of being woken in the middle of the night by two cats having sex outside your bedroom window. There's a lot of confusion and some truly horrible noise going on and you just want it to stop. I generally give punk and punk-adjacent music a pass where vocals are concerned but, in no key are these vocals hitting actual harmonies. They're just wailing. Which is a shame because the lyrics are legitimately poetic and the backing music is pretty decent. The wailing, though. Dang.

This is one of the very best Bowie joints ever. It's a remarkably tight and smart album. Every track is enjoyable and engaging. Bowie as Ziggy is lightyears ahead of his time and this album stands up as a remarkable even 50 years later.

At this point, I think it's obvious that Taylor Swift is a beast of a songwriter and a powerhouse personality. She's shaped her career with sharp talent, unending energy, and sheer willpower. This album seems, on the surface, to be full of the breakup/hookup songs that seem to stuff the albums of 20-something female artists. But, once you stop and listen to the lyrics, it quickly becomes apparent that her writing is head and shoulders above her peers. The song "happiness" in particular is utterly brilliant writing. "When did all our lessens start to look like weapons..." Damn. Line after line, the song is arresting in its depth. Exceptionally impressive, emotionally aware, and surprisingly mature. I never thought I'd give a T. Swifty album five stars but here we are. Completely deserved.

It's definitely better than "License To Ill" so there's that. The beats aren't built, though. They're wholesale ripped off and, while that was a thing, it's still kinda crappy. The lyrics, while dated, are almost entirely better and more mature than their freshman effort, though. Not hard considering how young they were when "License to Ill" was released. Overall, it's a fun record and worth the time.

I'm pretty sure it's a generational thing but every Randy Newman song sounds like a movie soundtrack to me. Thanks, Pixar. That said, there's definitely some ground covered here that's not going to find its way into a Disney flick. As someone from the south, I think Newman does a masterful job of skewering the worst of what passes for "southern culture" while showing compassion and understanding for the rest. It feels very authentic to my experience growing up in the south and it's made all the more palatable wrapped in Newman's specific brand of upbeat style and expert delivery.

Well, that's just really crappy, isn't it? Egotistical, nihilistic, misogynist, sad-sack, crooner bullshit. This doesn't need to exist let alone be on anyone's "best-of" list.

It feels almost blasphemous to give this album only three stars. It was and is a cornerstone of west-coast hiphop. But. How much do you really need to talk about your dick? At some point, you gotta move on to a different subject or people are going to start thinking you're compensating for some shortcomings, you know? Honestly, the album didn't age very well. Both Dre and Snoop are capable of more and, as time has moved on, they've proved it, leaving this album to stand by the road as a milestone but not a destination in its own right.

Clearly inspired by the late, great Ali Farka Touré, Songhoy Blues brings the same unstoppable energy to their music that made Ali so influential. "Music in Exile" is powerful and moving in a way that modern American blues so often isn't. The electric tones of Muddy Waters and Albert King find whole new dimensions when they're shaped and guided by the unexpected rhythms and patterns of Malian music. It's a whole vibe and I couldn't be more here for it. I don't understand a word that's being said and I don't care. This is just so damn good.

Legend. John Lee Hooker is a legend. And for good reason. Though the record is full of guest artists who all put their fingerprints on the songs, John Lee pulls everything back to a cohesive whole, grounding every track in his particular flavor of electric blues. "The Healer" is a canvas across which John Lee Hooker and his guests provide contrast to each other in a way that allows everyone to shine. It's an incredibly balanced record and an absolute pleasure to listen to.

Honestly, that was a mostly okay Doors album. Nothing to hate and it's The Doors so there was a lot to like. Problem is, there wasn't much to LOVE. So it gets four stars instead of five.

What a beast of an album from a legend of a talent. Aretha always demands my attention and this album won my heart. So good.

I mean yeah, it's a solid album. "Bitter Sweet Symphony" in a monster of a hit to come out of the gate with and the album just kinda coasts on that momentum, never really gaining any additional oomph. By the time the album crosses the finish line, you're left with the impression that you've just heard some decent rock music but with very little memory of any particular track besides the first.

I was always given the impression that people with external genitalia we're not equipped to "get" Fiona Apple. So I didn't really listen to anything she'd done until this album. I was pleasantly surprised by the first few tracks. Then I was pleasantly surprised by the next few tracks. Then... the whole thing fell apart. "Slow Like Honey" marked the beginning of the end. The album just drowned itself in self-indulgent, singer-songwtiter twaddle. Shame.

I had this friend who was just ... well, he was a good guy but he was pretentious AF. Just really into the "you couldn't possibly fathom this" side of art. He was also the biggest Radiohead fan I've ever met. Consequently, I've never had much interest in exploring Radiohead's catalogue. But, if this project has taught me anything, it's to be open-minded so I approached this album with a clean slate. I'm glad I did. It was not nearly as bad as I imagined it would be. In fact, much of it was exceptional. Was it a bit up its own butt? Assuredly. But the production was stellar and the songs were fun for the most part. Great background music for a morning of "git 'er done."

Well, that's ... that's something. Definitely not as good as their later work. This one feels like a band still trying to figure out who the heck they are and what they should sound like. The result is an album that comes across rough and unfinished while still, somehow, being just SO pretentious.

I really didn't expect much from this album. Maybe that's why I found myself enjoying it. Sure, the skits are super lame and a lot of the content is dated but it turns out that Ghostface Killa is a damn good writer. The delivery is on-point and these tracks are just so tasty. Color me surprised.

Man, that first track was awesome. The second track was... Well, it was good too. Kinda experimental acid rock bust still good. Then the whole thing went off the rails. Every track to the end of the record was worse than the one that proceeded it. Half-baked song ideas with repetitive sentence fragments thrown on top of them masquerading as "experimental" when, in fact, they were just banged out with no actual craftsmanship applied. Two stars. One for each track that was actually half decent.

Fats is the tits. He's excellent and these songs are utterly classic for a reason. That said, putting a compilation album on this list is 100% cheating. But I just I love New Orleans Jazz and delta blues, so I'm here for Fats.

The thing with ska is that it tries to have all the energy of punk but with none of the self-reflection. What's left is sugar-coated but meaningless and empty. The Specials exemplify this emptiness perfectly. Even the covers of once meaningful Jamaican songs are so dumbed down that they become meaningless, whitewashed noise. A lot of that comes down to Elvis Costello being an absolute hack. By all reports, The Specials were aggressive and angry on stage... until Hack Costello got his hands on them and produced an utterly milquetoast album. Overall, it was a painfully lame listening experience and one that I don't wish to repeat any time soon.

As the opening strains of the album started creeping out of my speakers, my initial reaction was very negative. Those super dated synths are just so cringe. But the thing about Prince is that he's brilliant and, by the end of the record, I was just bopping along with him, enjoying the heck out it. Princes music isn't timeless. I is, however, perfectly timely. Every album seems to be a perfect distillation of the cutting edge trends in music at that exact moment. And then Prince, being Prince, takes everything up several notches with his immaculate musicianship and consummate showmanship. I'm shocked, but this is an effortless 4-star album after all.

Man, that's just an utter mess of a record. It's a bunch of half-baked melodies over half-formed song ideas. The end result isn't even half-assed, it's a quarter-assed at best. What an annoying waste of time.

There is a startlingly stark difference between this freshman album and everything else Kanye has released. There is an energy and hunger here that's utterly lacking in everything else I've heard from him. It's good. I mean, duh, right? This is the album that rocketed him to stardom, after all. But I'm surprised at just how good it is. The lyrics are great, subject matter is relevant, and the production is on point. There are several unexpected musical twists and turns that are just wonderful. Missing is the bloated ego and disingenuous subject matter of his later work. Instead, there's a bare honesty and energetic aggression to these songs. The word I keep coming back to is 'hungry." The Kanye we get to see on this album is hungry for recognition and it drives him to great heights. The real question isn't, "How is this album so good?" The question is, "Why is nothing Kanye has put his hands to since this album even close to this good?"

It's not their best by a long shot but it's still The Beatles, you know? The hits are there and they're amazing and the other tracks... well, it's still The Beatles. There's not a bad track on the album. But there are some fairly mediocre ones.

Dylan is one of those polarizing artists. People love him or hate him. I'm in the first camp. I think he was a genius of a writer who just wasn't blessed with that great of a voice. This album showed that, I think. Great songs, deep metaphors, beautiful imagery. The only thing holding it back is poor Bob's vocals. It's not just that his voice isn't so great, it's the melody lines themselves. They're dumbed down and monotonous to match his abilities. Understandable, for sure. But also frustrating to listen to for a whole album. But that is Dylan in a nutshell. Brilliant where he's brilliant. Not so much of a singer, though.

I expected this to be pretentious. It was. I expected this to be insufferable. It ... was not. While I'm most definitely not a fan of the gothy lounge-lizard vocals, the album has its moments of brilliance. There are tracks that are evocative of a film score and are enjoyable. The album on the whole, however, it just so very tryhard and the end result is less than satisfying.

This isn't an album of songs. If you go into it expecting that, you're going to be disappointed. I sure was. The (very) few songs that incorporated something resembling a melody line simply took four bars of a hook and repeated it ad nauseam. See "Da Funk" for reference. What it IS, though, is a masterclass on how to build a beat. These tracks are layered and complex and fine tuned to a precision edge. It is the ultimate loop record for DJs to create mashups with. I have a good buddy who was an acclaimed mashup artist (until he got sick of fielding cease & desist orders and takedown requests). He used the hell out of these beats to great affect. Unfortunately, the tracks don't stand on their own and a whole record of them is exhausting to listen to.

I mean... it's alright? There were a couple of fun tracks. A couple of stupid tracks (I'm looking at you, "how do you sleep?"). When it was all said and done, I realized that it really hadn't left much of an impression on me. And that just doesn't seem like something you generally want out of an album, does it?

You know, that wasn't bad at all. Kinda poppy, kinda punk, all-around enjoyable. Quite liked it.

What a surprisingly fun album. A couple of monster hits followed by some really solid metal. It even manages to avoid most of the cheesiness of some of the OTHER early metal bands (I'm looking at you Megadeath). Nothing to hate here and a lot to love.

"Green River" is just a classic. It came out in a year known for its music and it still manages to stand out from the crowd. It's one of those iconic albums that is firmly pinned to the time. It's an essential part of any soundtrack from '69 along with "Bayou Country" which came out the same year. With two absolute beast albums in the same year, it's no wonder CCR outsold The Beatles in '69. I was going to give this a 4 but I realized that I can't justify knocking off a star. There's just not a bad track on the album.

Oof. This is peak 80s and not in a good way. Michael Jackson did it better. And he was way less sleezy. Which is saying something because Jackson? Eesh. But ol' Georgie boy here takes the sleeze cake. The whole album is just so slimy. Every single track feels gross. And that's even if you leave out "I Want Your Sex" which ... what the actual hell. I'm pretty sure this album gave my ears an STD.

It's... it's really boring, isn't it? SFA doesn't seem capable of committing to a bit. Consequently, the album slips and slides from one flavor of mediocrity to the next without leaving any lasting impression whatsoever. I can't give it a one-star review because there's not anything actively BAD about it other than it's just not good.

This was such a refreshing throwback to the origins of hip-hop. The beats are peak boom-bap and so tasty. It has to be remembered that this album doesn't exist in a vacuum. The intentional step away from gangsta rap to talk about life, love, and loss is well executed - especially in context. It's a direct reproach of current trends in hip-hop at the time. It's an attempt to remind people that hip-hop was and can be a positive change platform. It's a little crazy, when you think about it, that this gets categorized as "alternative hip-hop" when it feels so throwback. The primary reason, I think, is that it did end up inspiring a whole host of artists to embrace hip-hop and push it past its gangsta pigeonhole. To push the genre in an alternate direction. You can hear the origins of bands like The Roots, Nappy Roots, Outkast, Jurassic 5, Blackstar and more here. No disrespect for the supremely talented Mr. Glover but Childish Gambino wouldn't exist if it weren't for acts like Arrested Development stepping away from the easy dollars of gangsta rap to embrace elements of funk, jazz, and rock and create something different. On top of ALL THAT, there are just some killer tracks on here. "People Everyday," "Mr. Wendal," and "Tennessee" are undeniable power jams and essential parts of the soundtrack of the early 90s. Haters gonna hate but this album slaps.

I've never really been into WIlco so I wasn't looking forward to this one but I did my best to go into it with an open mind. It took a few tracks for me to get it but I'm glad I stuck it out. It's really not bad. Somewhere between Counting Crows and Tom Petty with a smidge of Nirvana tossed in. Overall, fairly enjoyable. It's worth taking a moment to recognize the recording style and quality for this record. It FEELS like an indie record in part due to the space that's been given to all of the instrumentation in the mix. But both the initial recording quality and the overall mixing/mastering are absolutely top-notch. Compared to other recordings in the both the alt and country spaces at the time, many of whom were following the Phil Spector "Wall of Sound" ideals of filling up the entire spectrum with whatever they could, "Being There" embraces the open spaces in the EQ. This serves to make the album feel more intimate while leaving room for the big moments to feel even bigger. It's masterful engineering and deserves an extra star all on its own. That said, 19 songs is too many. If this album had been distilled down into 10 to 12 killer tracks, it would hit so much harder. I'm into these short track lengths, though. I'd love to see more artists putting out 3-minute tracks. Keeps things fresh and avoids the repetitive chorus trap that so many songs fall into.

I love punk. I really do. "Pink Flag" is a great punk album. But. It's missing one of my favorite aspects of punk. The sheer, nihilistic joy of punk is missing here. The classic punk stance of "the world is screwed up and screw the world" seems to be missing. Instead, Wire has leaned hard into the angrier aspects of punk. The overall theme is darker, angrier, and more raw than other punk albums of the time. This is often cited as a reason for calling this early post-punk or even pre-hardcore. And for all that, it's good. The sheer intensity of the minimally produced, almost raw sound is enticing in the same way that great hardcore is. It's compelling. But I do so wish there were some lighter moments. I prefer my punk to be delivered with a knowing smirk, not a glowering scowl.

Jimi Hendrix on his worst day is still an unchallenged musical legend. That said, "Electric Ladyland" is not his best work. It's a bit of a disconnected mess. At times, the songs seem to lose track of their own melody and wander off into unplanned directions. Despite having some of Hendrix's biggest hits ("Voodoo Child" and "All Along the Watchtower") the overall impression is ... addled. Confused. Unfocused on the music. I suppose this is to be somewhat expected given Hendrix's mental state at the time but it's still a damn shame given his sheer, unbridled talent. It hurts to give this album 4 stars. While "Electric Ladyland" lacks the intensity and fire of "Are You Experienced" it still delivers the goods and absolutely deserves its place on this list. But it's not Hendrix's best work by a long shot and, sadly, it's not quite 5-star material.

Nope. While I guess I can appreciate the technical ability on display here, it's not, on any level, an enjoyable listening experience. Both tracks (because there are only two) are repetitive, atonal, empty of melody, and utterly lacking in structure. Saved from a one-star review because the musicianship is good. Too bad they didn't put those skills to better use.

What a weird little pop-folk album. It's not good. It's not bad. It's mostly bland. The production is so overly inoffensive it's ALMOST offensive. The lyrics and music are actually so mismatched that they create a level of cognitive dissonance and the overall effect is very ... cultish. Like, these people are clearly in some sort of cult that's barely papered over with a weird, mid-century, Brady Bunch/Beach Boys veneer.

Why, dear God, WHY are there SO MANY KRAFTWERK ALBUMS on this list?! "Trans Europe Express" is easily one of the most repetitive and boring albums I've ever had the displeasure of listening to. The whole album is an endless loop of arpeggiated synths over boring beats periodically broken up by repetitive vocals. The title track is essentially 6 and a half minutes of phase-filtered synthetic drums, people chanting "Trans-Europe Express" and an out-of-context mention of David Bowie. It's mind-boggling to me that this is considered by anyone to be worthy of inclusion on the list. The listening experience was utterly angering.

I expected to hate this album. And there were times when I started to feel the hate flow through me. But, somehow, Radiohead managed to bring it back around before it got too bad. Is it pretentious? Hell yes. SO very pretentious. Is it repetitive? ||: Yes. :|| Is it a noisy mess sometimes? Again, absolutely. But, for some reason, it's still not totally off-putting. In fact, a lot of the album is actually engaging and fun. So, while I didn't love it, I certainly didn't hate it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it was pretty alright on balance.

I'm so conflicted about this album. I absolutely hate eurotrash synthpop. Utterly despise it. But. The songwriting isn't half bad. Unlike most albums in the genre, these songs actually have something resembling a structure and I appreciate that. Not enough to give it more than two stars, mind you. It's still bloopy, blippy, zip-zap nonsense.

I'm kinda torn on this one. Not every song is a banger, for sure, but none of them are snoozers either. The one thing they all seem to have is a strong sense of groove and I'm here for that. The cover of "Ol' Man River" is far from my favorite, though. Tympani were a poor instrumentation choice. There's also some really funky stereo panning going on that's just disconcerting. That cover alone almost earned this a 3-star rating. But, once you get past that (and the weirdly out of place "Greensleeves" instrumental), there's a bunch of really solid blues. Like, REALLY solid blues. Very tasty. It's a 4-star for me. But it's a soft 4.

The only reason this is classified as "chamber pop" is because nobody had coined the term "emo" yet. It's mostly a bunch of sad-sack, poor me, rain songs which just wears on me. The orchestral arrangements are good, though, and the production values are high. The vocals are a bit overly-dramatic but not offensively so. The best thing that can be said about "A Short Album About Love" is that it's appropriately titled. All the songs are about love in some way or another and, with a runtime right at 32 minutes, it's blessedly short.

Disco is the worst. But the guys from Chic did a decent job writing an album for the ladies of Sister Sledge considering that they never even met them before writing it. See that?! THAT sentence is part of the problem with disco. One artist was asked by their label to write an ENTIRE ALBUM for another artist that they'd never even met. That's bullshit and I hate it. While the songs are alright (for disco), the whole idea of the album is enough to kill a star. Disco is the worst.

Well. That was a surprise. Everyone knows 2Pac is a legend but I've personally never just sat down and listened to a whole album. I was utterly blown away by the lyricism, creativity, and delivery that he brought to the table. But the real surprise was the depth of the content. I expected the same ol' shallow gangsta rhymes that you get from 2Pac's contemporaries in the genre. What I experienced, however, was incredibly self-aware social commentary. 2Pac comes off more like a really cool older brother dispensing heavy wisdom than a hard-ass, bragging gangster. This album was just great. 2Pac really was one the greats. R.I.P.

British trip-hop is for sure not my genre but this Goldfrapp album wasn't too shabby. They clearly went into this project intending to produce something sweeping and cinematic and they nailed it. The vocals are, by and large, beautifully performed and the production values are top-notch. It really is a pretty good album. The only reason this didn't get a 5-star review was that, like so many electronica albums, it got a little too deep into its own navel. Somewhere around the middle of the album, I got tired of the overly-dramatic presentation and started wondering when it would be over. It came back around but that feeling of "I'm over this" is enough to pull it down a star.

"Tubular Bells" is an hour of pretentious, self-indulgent trash. But, most damning of all, it's boring. Prog absolutely isn't my genre but even I know it should be complex, edgy, and challenging. The few times "Tubular Bells" broke away from being vanilla, it was to do something cringey. And don't get me started on that last track. Utter trash. Why's that on the album? Buggered if I know.

So. Much. Jazz flute. HARD PASS.

Man, does this album ever sound exactly like it was recorded in '91. The vocals are right up in your face and everything is mixed so dry it feels like it will crumble to dust at a glance. And, honestly, the songwriting DOES fall apart the minute you look into it. All the lyrics are locked in a specific date and time. A chorus about Tammy Baker right out of the gate? That doesn't make sense to anyone anymore. And there are too many words crammed into too few bars. Just too many words. It's just not a good aesthetic. Not a good aesthetic at all. That said, there's not really anything specifically WRONG with any of these songs. There's just nothing right either. Hence the "meh" 3-star review.

Certified. Legendary. Status. It really doesn't get much better than this. It's innovative and creative and manages to alternate between fun and meaningful without giving the listener whiplash. "Stankonia" Is a masterwork of the genre and deserves its place on Mt. Olympus in the pantheon of the greatest albums ever made.

Man, that's an album that feels dated. And not dated to 1998, when it came out, but dated to somewhere around the middle of the 60s. And not in a good way. I was going to give it a "meh" 3-star review but there were multiple saxophone solos which lost it another star.

I was prepared to hate this album. It's new wave and that one song that I already know is kinda annoying. But I didn't hate the album. Sure, I hated some of the TRACKS on the album but not the album as a whole. That, in itself, is quite the achievement. Congrats, A-ha, on being new wave and not entirely sucking. Here's a 3-star rating as a reward. Don't spend it all in one place.

If rock and roll was breakfast food, "Calenture" by The Triffids would be unsweetened oatmeal. Sure, it'll do the job but it's not going to be interesting and you're going to be thinking about bacon the whole time. I can't imagine anyone actually wanting to listen to this. But then, some people actually choose to eat plain oatmeal so I guess there's no accounting for taste.

On paper, I shouldn't like MGMT. It's electronic indie-pop. But MGMT manage to avoid all of the pitfalls of their peers by creating compelling rhythms and melodies accompanied by fun and surprisingly coherent lyrics. This whole album was just a jam. Each successive track built a mood that I found compelling. By the end, I was involuntarily tapping my feet and bobbing my head. It's a great album.

It's saying something about Bowie as an artist that, even starving and cracked out of his mind, he was able to produce an absolutely exceptional album. It runs the whole spectrum from blues to funk to experimental at an absolutely (and unsurprisingly) breakneck pace. A less-talented musician in the same drug-addled state would have created something frantic and broken. Bowie, though he barely remembered even making the album, managed to craft coherent, compelling, beautiful, and haunting songs that stand up decades later. The man wasn't human. He had to have been something else.

I'm giving this one 4 stars... but I'm not entirely sure why. There's nothing exceptional here. There's also nothing objectionable. Normally, that'd earn it a middling 3 stars. But here we are at 4 stars anyway. I think it's a combination of things. It's a short album, clocking in at just under 40 minutes which means that none of the 11 tracks linger too long. Instead, they say their piece, set a mood, and move on. That's a really nice aesthetic and I'm here for it. By the end of the album, I found myself favorably inclined towards it as a whole, though none of the tracks left a strong impression. In fact, I found that I liked it best when I wasn't actively paying attention to it. That's when my head started bobbing and my toes started tapping. So, yeah. 4 stars.

Synthetic sounds, plastic production, and wooden writing. Nobody needs this album. There's nothing remarkable to experience here.

I really expected to give this at least a solid 4. Unfortunately, it's just not quite there. There's nothing terribly wrong with the album. It's relatively fun and energetic even if all the tracks sort of run together. The biggest issue is that there are no hits. They got a vibe but no bangers. Much like Led Zeppelin's first album, you can feel the shape of things to come. The seeds of "Number of the Beast" are here but, with this freshman album, they're just not quite there yet.

This was completely unexpected and utterly delightful. Michael Kiwanuka seems like the British answer to contemporary American artists like Gary Clark Jr. and Leon Bridges and I'm not mad at that. The musicianship is top-notch, the songwriting is excellent, and the production quality is fantastic. I have nothing negative to say. Everything about this album was enjoyable.

Yeeeaaaahh, boooooyeee! Props to Chuck D, Flavor Flav, and Terminator X for being the bleeding edge of hiphop just as it was truly breaking wide... but this didn't age all that well. The beats are basic, the rhymes are primitive, and the lyrics are more hype than substance. It feels undeveloped... rudimentary. But, at the end of the day, that's okay because this was the golden age of hiphop. The genre was still finding its feet as a mainstream art form. Every track was an experiment and every album a thesis statement. That ethos is prominently on display here which means that some tracks slap while others flop. Ultimately, it's an enjoyable bit of history that's more than worthy of a listen before you die.

I know Tribe has their detractors. "They don't come hard enough." "They're trying too hard." "They're too silly." "They're too serious." It's exhausting to hear people whinge on and on about 'em. The truth is this album is just so chill and fun it's hard to hate on it unless you're really trying. If you're too hard for Tribe, it's time to rethink your life choices and calm the hell down. Because this album is just fantastic. It's all boom-bap tracks and laid back raps and the whole thing just slaps. It's impossible to stay still during tracks like "Can I Kick It?" The head nods are compulsory. Easy 5-stars. Easy.

I'm so sick of Neil Young's bullshit. "You know what we do too much of? Thinking about making good music. Let's just play some stuff in a barn. People will buy that." Screw you, Neil Young. This albums sounds exactly like what it is: a half-assed attempt to milk the wallets of his misguided fans. Every track falls flat. There's no energy in any of these songs. They're flaccid. At the same time, they feel bloated. Every song laboriously plods on for at least a minute longer than it should. "Ragged Glory" is a waste of everyone's time. Doubly so since I had to go hunt the album down on Youtube because Young threw a boomer-tantrum and pulled his shitty music off of Spotify.

What a supremely strange album. The vocalist sounds like Alanis Morissette doing her best Tina Turner impression and the result is grating. Pair that with a pretty decent nu-metal backing band and you've got a recipe for cognitive dissonance. And just regular dissonance, for that matter. I can't love it. The vocals are too extra. But I can't hate it either. The music is good more often than not. This is case of two opposing vibes earning an album a tepid three-star review.

Just a huge album stacked with huge songs. Were they all crushers? No. But the songs that do slap, slap hard enough to make up for the rest.

It's so fascinating to me that Bowie and Iggy were contemporaries and friends. According to all reports, they loved and respected each other's music. And yet, in most respects, their music is so different. This album is probably the closest that Iggy ever got to Bowie's style in part because Bowie had his hands all over it. And a good thing, too. Without Bowie in the mix, it's unlikely that Iggy would have managed to make "The Idiot" even happen. Lucky for us, it did happen and it remains a quintessentially Iggy album lyrically, musically, and vocally. I'm an unapologetic Iggy Pop fan so I found very little to dislike here. There were some mixing/engineering choices that aren't my favorite and, unlike Bowie who can make a whole album while utterly cracked out of his mind and still perform flawlessly, Iggy's struggles with substance abuse left and audible thumbprint on this album. The end result is an almost spectacular album that falls short at merely a very good album.

Seeing as how the album started with a saxophone solo, this was never going to be a 5-star review but I really thought it would get four stars. At least, I did at first. But the vocals and lyrics, man. They're so bad. And they don't have to be. Look, I love the Violent Femmes. I really do. And Gordon Gano's (Violent Femmes) vocals have a lot in common with Peter Perrett's (The Only Ones) vocals. But, where Gano's vocals are raw and natural, Perrett's are definitely put on. "How could you possibly know that," you ask? Because, suddenly, at track 6 ("Creature of Doom") Perrett can sing. I had to double check to make sure they hadn't switched vocalists, the difference was so stark. No, that's definitely still the same guy which leads me to the only logical conclusion: the vocals up to this point were bad on purpose. And I can't excuse that. All that said, the musicianship is really good. The MUSIC of the songs is all just great. Perrett is the problem. The vocals are bad and the lyrics are, more often than not, just stupid.

I bounced back and forth between a 4 and a 5 for this album. It was alright, then it was great (man, "Wild Horses" is just so good), then there was an extended saxophone solo, then it was really good again... I don't know, man. I think it's a 5-star album but it's just.... not quite there. It wanders a bit too much. So here's a 4. But it's a really REALLY strong 4. "Sister Morphine" is such a killer deep cut, though. So is "Moonlight Mile." Dang it. Okay, here's a 5. But it's a soft 5.

I don't know, man. Afrobeat never was my genre but here's just so much saxophone on this record. The songs are slickly produced but, somehow, rarely engaging and, by about halfway through, everything began to sound the same. And there were just so many saxophone solos. So many.

The roots of what made "the sound" of the nineties are all here. Credit where due, Primal Scream did it earlier than almost everyone else. But almost everyone else did it better than Primal Scream. "Screamadelica" never really finds its feet. Most of the tracks are 2-3 minutes longer than they need to be and the album bounces around between rock and pop with an odd ballad and electronic dance track thrown in here and there. None of it really works. Every track feels like the band got about 80% of the way there and then they just gave up and called it good enough. But it's not really good enough, is it? It's just... disappointing.

It seems like cheating to have a compilation album on this list. But then, this album was always intended as a cheat. The Hives didn't make an impact with their first two albums so they just took the good songs off of those albums, smashed 'em together into a single album and re-released them on a new, 28-minute album. And it worked. They absolutely cheated their way onto the charts. But, cheating aside, "Your New Favorite Band" is a super solid, concentrated, distilled rock album. It's a lot of fun and, at under 30 minutes, it definitely doesn't overstay its welcome. Very enjoyable.

Man, the 80s really were a bad time for music. As much as I wanted to like this album, "Synchronicity" is plagued by all the worst diseases of 80s pop. Metronomic drum lines, painfully primitive synths, and saxophone solos that pop up like mushrooms wherever the mix gets dense. Seriously, what's with all the saxophones in 80s pop?! The first half of the album is an odd, muddy, mishmash of pop music tropes and mediocre songwriting. Which is why "Every Breath You Take" is such a shock when you finally get there. It is distinctly unlike everything proceeding it. The tempo slows, the production takes a big step forward, and Sting's vocal performance is suddenly deeply emotional. Is it creepy AF? Yeah, it really is. But it's also just good. Especially in the context of the rest of the album. Also, no saxophones. Win. The following track, "King of Pain" is also pretty decent. But, sadly, those two songs are the only standouts. The Police immediately step back into the pattern they established by the first half of the album with "Wrapped Around Your Finger" and it's a quick slide downhill from there to the end of the album. The Police were arguably the biggest band in the world when this album came out and, by all measures, "Synchronicity" was a massive success. But, by the time the pseudo-jazz car crash that is "Murder By Numbers" wraps up, it's painfully clear to a modern listener that the 80s were just the worst for music.

Look, I'm one of the last people who's gonna dump on anything that purports to be about female empowerment. I'm all for that. But just because it's got its heart in the right place doesn't make it good. And let's be clear, "Heaux Tales" is not very good. The production values are damn near non-existent and the backing beats are minimalist homages to authentic R&B tracks at best and amateur-hour ripoffs at worst. But where it really falls apart is the lyricism. While the intent is clearly there, the execution is... immature. Juvenile, even. Everything comes off as the rantings and ravings of someone who hasn't seen enough life to understand the depth of what they're talking about. There's no pathos here. No perspective. It has the form of protest without the substance. This is serious stuff and all Jazmine is doing is skimming the surface. I can't help but feel that "Heaux Tales" was added to this list too hastily. I don't imagine it will stand the test of time. I expect it will disappear into the noise of the dozens of similar hiphop/R&B albums that have come out in the last few years.

My feelings about The Smiths have changed over the course of this project. From apathy to dislike to disdain. Much of that downward progression can be attributed to Morrissey. He's such a vapid, pretentious ass. Listening to him whinge on and on about himself for a whole album leaves me filled with hatred and loathing. He's just the worst.

What a great album. Marley has an uncanny ability to write scathing social commentary and put it to music that just feels good. There's anger and frustration here but it's mixed with enough joy to stay sweet. The result is so balanced that I find myself digesting the message without any of the jaded defensiveness that "message" albums often provoke. It's great. Marley and his Wailers were brilliant.

"Affect: to put on a false appearance of (something).” In this case, The Jam put on a false appearance of being an original band making original music with an original sound when, in fact, they were just biting sounds and styles and, in the case of the song "Start!", an entire (and iconic) bass line from other popular bands. And they did it on purpose. In fact, that was apparently the goal of this album. To pull enough influences from other bands to make this record successful. I guess it worked with the critics because it's on this list. But it's just not working with me. Feels like what it is: an also-ran band making a look-alike album. If this list wasn't so brit-pop slanted, there's no way this album would make the cut.

You know, I'm usually here for the psychedelic jam band vibe. And, for the first few tracks at least, I was digging this record. But then I hit track three which dissolves into pure, nonmusical noise about a minute in leaving the listener to suffer through five minutes of pointless cacophony. They brought it back around to, you know, actual music on the next track but it took most of the remainder of the album to regain its groove. And then, it totally lost the groove all over again on track ten before ending with an atonal rendition of a country song for some unknowable reason. Which is a shame because I can tell that these guys really do have chops. This should have been a much better experience overall. A talented psychedelic jam band recorded live at not one but BOTH of the legendary Fillmore venues? Should have been a slam dunk. But, at the end of the day, it never quite managed to be great. Grateful Dead did it better the very same year. And they only needed one Fillmore to do it.

Long story short, I really enjoyed this album. It felt like Grohl took the attitude of Nirvana, mixed in a healthy dose of straight up metal, and then cranked the tempo up several notches. The result is an album that comes out of the gate hard and never lets up. Even the "slow jam" on the album ("For All The Cows") has an absolute buzzsaw of a chorus. The album is jagged and sharp and merciless from beginning to end and I'm here for it. This album is really the beginning of Grohl's ascendance from rock royalty to a legit rock god.

I really didn't like this album. But I get the impression that that Barry Adamson doesn't want people to like this album. He's clearly capable of creating music that people will genuinely enjoy but, Adamson seems to be of the school of thought that "art" and "entertainment" are mutually exclusive. As such, he's made this album unenjoyable for more than a minute or so at a time by making a point to dial up the "nope" factor any time the album starts to get good. It's no surprise to learn that Nick Cave was attached this project as it has his distinctive stench smeared all over it. Adamson and Cave both seem to be cut from the same, soiled cloth and I just don't have the patience for the feces they try to sell as "art".

I mean, it's one of the greatest punk albums ever and I love it. This beautiful, frantic mess has inspired so many musicians to stop just bitching about life, pick up a guitar, and pour their feelings into music. It's angry, angsty, nihilistic, and fun. The band just about ripped each other to shreds making it and I'll be damned if that's not just the most punk thing ever. And, as if that weren't enough, "E.M.I." is one of the biggest middle finger tracks ever written. It's such a hard-core snub. A perfect punk-tuation (couldn't help myself) to end a truly monumental punk album.

I feel like I just got tricked into listening to Rod Stewart. And, you know, I was mad about it at first. But then I just resigned myself to fact that I was in for an album full of growly, overly-dramatic vocals. And you know what? I really enjoyed the album. It's just solid, middle-of-the-road, rock and roll. Nothing super unique or surprising but everything was just... good. Even though there was a ton of Rod Stewart singing. Go figure.

This is such a beast of an album. There's not a single bad track. The whole thing slaps end to end. How is that possible?! It's a perfect mix of mainstream rock traditions and club electronica concepts. The samples are all purposely chosen and perfectly used. The beats are concrete, they're so solid. Everything is so layered that, even on a second, third, or thirteenth listen, there's more to explore and enjoy. It doesn't get old. It's just... damn. So good.

Often imitated but never duplicated, Marvin Gaye is everything that all the modern R&B crooners want to be. And, for what he does, he's the best. The problem is, he only does the one thing. If you've heard "Let's Get It On" (and you have), you've heard everything that Gaye has to offer. That's it. It's everything. The rest of the album is just that on repeat. I'm not sure it belongs on a list of albums we should hear before we die. It's really just the one song. And a ton of saxophone. So. Much. Saxophone.

I'm generally here for experimental hiphop. It's the dark corner where hiphop goes to try out new flexes and find new vibes before bringing it out into the lights for folks to look at. I think Mike Ladd did a good job here for the most part. The beats are avant-garde and the flows are non-standard. He's trying things, you know? I love that for him. Unfortunately, every track feels like our mad Ladd was trucking down a path towards something great and then... stopped short of crossing the finish line. Everything feels incomplete. And that extends to the lyrics, unfortunately. I was hoping for some significant social commentary. What I got was same-same, lazy, middle-of-the-pack verses. Half-assed and boring. Which sucks because what's here COULD have been so much better. The foundation is there. Shame, really.

I find it hard to muster any enthusiasm for songs that are so incredibly passive and unchallenging. Simon's songwriting on this whole album is just so soft that they left no impression whatsoever. In short, it's a boring album full of boring songs that frankly don't justify the album's inclusion in this list.

As far as jazz goes, this isn't so bad. All the skill that you expect from a highly-rated jazz album is there but the afrobeat influence gives "Home Is Where the Music Is" an edge over its contemporaries. The extremely strong emphasis on the rhythm section gives the music a structure and drive that's missing from most jazz songs. Very solid entry. Especially for a jazz album.

I wouldn't say that I enjoyed this album but I did appreciate it more than I expected to. If you were alive in '89, you know the hits here. Because they were shoved down your throat along with the unchallengeable assertion that Madonna was a force of nature to be worshipped as a goddess of pop. And maybe she is because I generally associate pop music with vapid lyrics underscored by watered down music. And that's what we've got here with "Like a Prayer". That said, the production values here are frankly insane. I mean, damn. When you've got a Madonna-level recording budget, I guess it shows. It doesn't cover the fact that she's actually not a very good vocalist and most of the songs really aren't that great. Prince even makes an appearance but is unable to save "Love Song" from being an utter mess of a track. But the recordings are beautiful and the mixing/mastering are truly top-notch, so there's that.

Here's an album that I hated when it came out and liked this time around. I don't know that it's the album that aged well. I think it's more that I've become more open to weird shit as I've gotten older. And this is definitely weird. It's a post-prog concept album which... well, it would have been a hard no for me except that the drum work here is exceptional. Jon Theodore absolutely crushes and manages to keep everything on the rails even when the rest of the crew is skewing into chaos. So many bands in the same vein end up sounding like the musical equivalent of the guy who gets so high, walks in the kitchen, forgets what he came here for, and starts trying to bake a cake without a recipe because "that sounds awesome right now, dude." Jon Theodore's strong rhythm backbone keeps everything coherent. The music never forgets what it was doing. The biggest issue with "De-loused in the Comatorium" is the same thing that plagues most concept albums. The songs make no damn sense. In attempting to tell a story that spans a whole album, none of the tracks say anything of substance. Add on the fact that the "concept" is itself kind of a disjointed fever-dream and you're left with mostly nonsensical vocals. And that's a real shame because the musicianship is exceptional, the production is fantastic, and the performances are powerful. But the end result is just... mostly good.

I mean, it's 22 minutes of sheer, frantic fire. While most of his contemporaries were simply imitating the energy of black rock-and-rollers, you can tell that Jerry Lee felt that fire in his bones. As a result, this performance feels like it belongs in the same conversation with James Brown instead of over with Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly where he often gets lumped. It's a fantastic performance and a great bit of musical history from a deeply problematic individual. Docked a star because "High School Confidential" feels especially gross in the light of his incestuous, pedophilic marriage. Sorry, man. Can't get past that.

"Lady in Satin" feels like the soundtrack to every black-and-white film from the 50s. It's iconic and firmly rooted to a specific moment in time. With warbling strings, swelling brass, virtual lack of rhythm section, and Billie's unique croon, it's an album for the age. But it's not an album for the ages. It's timely, not timeless. It's so soft, it's almost painful to listen to. The utter lack of backbone is understandable in an album from the 50s but falls flat in a modern context and, for that reason alone, this is a 4-star album to me. I hate to say it, but it gets boring very quickly. In no way should that be taken as a slight on Billie Holiday or this album, however. It's a masterful work from a truly exceptional vocal talent in a time when it was difficult for a black female to make it in entertainment. She, and this album, belong in any conversation about the evolution of popular music in America.

This is a weird album. It seems as though Hanoi Rocks was unsure of what kind of band they were. It's glam, it's rock, it's pop, it's punk. It's a really odd, and at times exceptionally awkward, stew of genre tropes and my initial impressions were not good, to be honest. But, as the album progressed, it started to win me over. "Back to Mystery City" is very strange but, on balance, it's fun and interesting. I think the novelty is worth a star.

Well, color me shocked. I expected to barely suffer through this album. Instead, I ended up really enjoying it. It's very much a product of its era but, once you settle in and give it permission to just be what it is, you can't help but start tapping your feet. Tito Puente delivers on the promise of the album title. The music is infectious and practically forces you to dance. Not sure what else there is to say. It's just fun.

I mean, it's hard to argue with this blues album. It's so solid. Just a really great representation of the genre. There WAS a saxophone solo which would usually be an automatic 1-star deduction from me but it was actually a really GOOD saxophone solo so I was going to let it pass... but then I hit the drum solo on "What'd I Say" which is 2 solid minutes of pointless flailing. THAT was enough to do what a saxophone solo couldn't do and take the album down to a 4-star rating. It's still a solid 4 stars, though. Just skip track 6 and you're in for a good time.

I don't think I properly appreciated this album when it came out. But now, 20 years later, I understand why Norah Jones was such a phenomenon. Listening to this album just feels so good. Like slipping into cool, clean sheets after a long day. Or like a glass of whiskey, a comfy chair, and a good book. It's such a comfortable listening experience without being boring in the least. I've got absolutely nothing negative to say about this album. What a treasure.

I mean, it's Abbey Road. It's one of those albums that other albums are measured against. It's a no-contest 5 stars. It's full of massive, genre-defining hits but it's the back half of the album that really seals the deal for me. The way they blend together a huge stack of short, but distinct songs into one long, experience is masterful. You just have to hold on and go for the ride all the way to the track titled "The End". "Abbey Road" is an incredible ride from beginning to end without a single misstep. Masterwork.

Eagles, at their edgiest, are just barely sharp enough to be interesting. When they soften that edge even slightly, the songs quickly become mind-numbingly boring. It's boomer soft-rock and I'm not interested in anything but the two hits ("Hotel California" and "Life in the Fast Lane"). The rest of the album is utterly forgettable. In the words of my 9-year-old daughter, "I didn't really like that. It's kind of boring. Like, The Beatles have slow songs but they're interesting. These slow songs weren't interesting. I'm glad it's over, dad."

When this album came out, I was listening to "real" punk, metal, and hardcore and couldn't be bothered with Billie Joe's pop nonsense. I like to think I've mellowed a bit since then. And I must have because I enjoyed this WAY more than I expected to. It's fun. "American Idiot," "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," and "Wake Me Up When September Ends" are great but none of the tracks are snoozers. Every song seems to have a thesis and each track makes its point well. That said, I am not here for 9-minute punk songs. And I'm not talking about the four tracks that are two songs mashed. Those get a pass because of the format. None of them break 9 minutes anyway. No, I'm talking about "Jesus of Suburbia" and "Homecoming" here. There's no excuse for that. You're padding your term papers, fellas. Just make the point and move on.

It's a great album, make no mistake. It has a distinct vibe that flows throughout the whole album. A vibe that I'm for sure here for. The musicianship on this album, in particular, is exceptional. The best Zeppelin has ever played on an album. It's progressive and thoughtful and skillful. Really great stuff. That said, there aren't really any stand-out tracks. Nothing that makes you sit up and pay attention. "Kashmir" is probably the closest thing to a hit on the album and even that drags on a bit. It's great, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't demand attention the way other Zepp monster hits like "When the Levee Breaks" or "Black Dog" do. I'll listen to this on repeat in the background all day long, but it's just shy of a true 5-star album. 4 and a half stars, for sure.