I will give it 4 stars because it was a unique album with a great sound that I hadn't heard before. Fun listen.
Some of the songs sounded like movie soundtrack fodder, but serene thoughtful tunes.
Always fun and bouncy, with good vibes
An album I've never heard and it was a brilliant blend of indie and hard rock.
Such a great band and this is probably their 4th best album.
Quirky, irregular music with a great vibe
The National have swirled around my musical consciousness for a while now but I keep forgetting how amazing they are. I need to set an reminder on my phone to listen to The National at least once a month.
Better than I thought it would be.
I almost want to give this album a 5, I think it is highly underappreciated. It captures a 90s vibe outside of the basic grundge that was so important to future work.
If you take some of the weird John Mayer persona out of the equation, this is a really solid blues/rock album. The licks rival those of Buddy Guy, Carlos Santana and Albert King.
A solid 3.5 stars with a classic Buffett sound
These are some funky fresh flows
Fun pop punk with some deeper thoughts as well.
Beautifully sparce but driving sounds with a grundgey backbone
This is some gnarly R&B funk
Nice try, Roy, but not my bag. This album represents the things I like least about 80s rock.
Honestly, kind of a basic boring album. Maybe it was innovative for its time.
This album propelled music into a true Indie Rock era. Until "the Blue Album" there was heavy metal, grunge, and classic rock. Weezer came in and shook things up with a new sound and style. The songs are bangers too.
A bit intense but some great songs 🎵
One of the best albums last year
I would go 3.5 stars on this one. A great mix of eclectic hard rock songs.
The mystery that shrouds this album helps to catapult it into the upper echelon of the all-time greats.
I am incredibly impressed at the beautiful musicality and orchestration of these songs for a jam band.
This was a beautiful and chill ambient album
Cocker has some crazy, funky soul. I am interested to see someone who made most of his rock career built in performing covers.
It was ok, there was one iconic song. The rest was a bit above average
I mean, I like The Weeknd but he isn't my favorite
Kinda meh really. It sounded like basic Northwest pop-folk. I gave it 3 stars because I thought it was lyrically interesting.
Ok, so yes it is a great album but overall I think I have it #6 for Pink Floyd.
Good album for when you want to be filled with rage and foreboding.
A couple of hard rock standards of the 2000s
Primus is a super funky rock band and this might be their best album.
Another great find. I had never heard this album before but it was quite the banger.
Some albums are good, some are great, then there are those like Discovery that is innovative and transformation. This is a brilliant album...I am going 4.5 stars.
Not unique just more of the same
Why is this on the list? If this came out in 1972 maybe. Didn't love it
I'm gonna give it 3.5 because of the last song. Their version of Easy is fantastic!
Listening to Pushin’ Against a Stone is like trying to categorize a ghost—technically impossible, but you can feel it hovering. It's folk and it's soul and it's country and it's blues, but it’s none of those things if you’re a purist. June’s voice is what you'd hear if Dolly Parton was raised on Memphis street corners by Billie Holiday and sprinkled with stardust from Sun Ra’s closet. It's nasal and creaky and cosmic. It's the sound of someone who never once considered auto-tune but might use moonlight as reverb.
The album opens with “Workin’ Woman Blues,” a declaration that feels like it was etched onto a train car with a switchblade. It pulses with upright bass and fluttery horns like it got lost on the way to a Stax session and decided to invent a new genre instead. It’s not just a working-class anthem—it’s a séance for the ghosts of every underpaid waitress in Tennessee.
And then there’s “Somebody to Love.” This isn’t the Queen song. It’s not even the Jefferson Airplane song. It’s the Valerie June song, which means it feels like it came from an alternate universe where heartbreak sounds like banjos orbiting a dying star. And when she sings “I want somebody to love,” she’s not whining. She’s testifying, like someone who already knows the cosmos heard her and is just being fashionably late.
The production (helmed by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys and Kevin Augunas) is refreshingly analog in an era where even folk singers sound like they’re performing inside a MacBook. It’s messy in the right ways. It breathes. It creaks. It wears boots instead of shoes. Auerbach tries to keep the album on the tracks, but Valerie June keeps steering it toward the woods—and thank God for that.
What makes Pushin’ Against a Stone remarkable isn’t just the songs (though they’re phenomenal) or the vocals (which are extraterrestrial), but the spirit of it. It sounds like the work of someone who’s been around for a thousand years, scraping stories off the walls of time. It’s the kind of album that makes you re-check the release date because it doesn’t make sense that this came out in 2013. It doesn’t even make sense that it came out on Earth.
To say that Pushin’ Against a Stone is good feels like missing the point. It's not just good. It’s elemental. It's an album that resists commodification. Valerie June doesn’t want to be famous; she wants to be eternal. And albums like this? They are.
Ugh...not a fan of scream rock. Solid guitars and tight sound, but oh, the screaming
Wow! That was a great kinda lo-fi album
I really enjoyed this beautiful Americana album. The instrumentation with Isbell's voice is a perfect blend.
One of the better albums of the past 20 years.
Some of the best work of the modern era but not as good as his debut album. I would probably put this at a 3.5 but I will round up to 4 because its not Taylor Swift 😉
