Oh god. Foo Fighters are not a good band. Foo Fighters are a band with zero personality, just like Dave Grohl himself. It's lowest common denominator, paint-by-numbers rock that fits together elements of every style of alt rock around it so that it can function as the perfect segue between any two songs on a radio station, and that's exactly what they've been doing for 25 years. I used to lump Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam in together, but having been forced to listen to a Pearl Jam album during this project, I can conclude that Pearl Jam have a level of production, songwriting, and dynamics not present whatsoever in Foo Fighters. I still don't like Pearl Jam, but they are significantly better than this. Foo Fighters are muzak with crunchy guitars. If the 90s alternative scene was the crisper drawer in your refrigerator and the many talented, original bands were the variety of vegetables you have, Foo Fighters would be the pooling liquid at the bottom from the various bits of lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and mushrooms that have gone bad in the back. Ugh. This isn't the worst album generated by the list so far... but it's probably in the bottom five.

I really don't understand this list. I feel like the authors haven't done a very good job of living up to the title they chose. Why must I hear these boring-ass Rod Stewart albums that keep getting generated before I die? For every one of these bland, forgettable snoozefests, they could have populated the list with more cutting edge jazz, fascinating avant garde, challenging heavy music, or statement-laden singer-songwriter pieces. This is music for your aunt. It sounds the an ashtray full of Parliament light cigarette butts smells. This album has no legacy, it has influenced nothing noteworthy. It's stale white bread in a cabinet that smells faintly of mildew and is lined with a tacky layer of faded orange and green plastic sheeting. This is an album that was meant to take up space at a Goodwill or a Salvation Army in between Barry Manilow and a six volume Christian music box set that's missing two records and the vinyl is warped. Once you have heard Neu! you never have to hear this album. It offers nothing. Throw in that punch bowl, tupperware, and Garfield mug you found a few aisles over and maybe you'll break $5.

I couldn't even make it two full tracks in. I wanted to give it a more thorough listen and lay out all the reasons why Coldplay is boring music for boring people, but life is too short to waste listening to Coldplay.

In the pantheon of adult contemporary singer-songwriters who meandered out of the 70s, Billy Joel sits somewhere in the middle with Springsteen. A touch better than the bland whiteness of Rod Stewart, John Mellencamp, and Bryan Adams, but no where near the quality of Warren Zevon or solo Paul Simon. It's not an awful album, but it shouldn't really be on a list of essential listening. This is an album to listen to while bonding with your aunt over herbal tea and zucchini bread while she busts out old 35mm pictures of bridges she took while on a bicycle tour of the US.

This is the first 1 I've encountered where I was completely unfamiliar with the subject matter. The vocals feels completely divorced from the music and both are absolutely inane. This is directionless and passionless and reflective of bad 90s reggae in general. I have no idea how this made the list.

This is the first 1 I've encountered where I was completely unfamiliar with the subject matter. The vocals feels completely divorced from the music and both are absolutely inane. This is directionless and passionless and reflective of bad 90s reggae in general. I have no idea how this made the list.

I've often had a problem with singer-songwriters where a lack of emotive performance will cause my eyes to glaze over in reaction to some otherwise excellently written songs, and I've previously written off Jeff Buckley on cursory listens as having that problem, but this album is fantastic. This is one of a select few albums that I've completely come around on as a result of this listening exercise. Good show.

I'm a huge Nick Cave fan, and I've listened to Abattoir Blues quite a bit, but I haven't given The Lyre of Orpheus its due in close to a decade as the slower of the two companion pieces. Revisiting it now that Cave has released albums like Ghosteen and Carnage puts it in a very different light. Orpheus is still the weaker half, but it has a warmth not present in some of his more recent somber outings. While I overall prefer the Blixa era of the Bad Seeds, this is still a great album.

This would be a five star album if it weren't so bloated. Still a fantastic, classic album, but it really starts to drag as it goes on...

Truly amazing album, only overshadowed by being released just prior to Rain Dogs, one of the greatest albums of all time.

A really good album in a genre I practically never want to listen to

The New Stone Age is such a banger but the rest of the album just drags after that.

Having long hated The Cure's radio singles, I have been pleasantly surprised by each Cure album I've listened to, with this being the best I've heard so far.

With each new Blur album I hear, the more I become convinced that they are the epitome of a singles band.

I'm a huge Nick Cave fan, but this is one of his most boring albums.

I really don't understand this list. I feel like the authors haven't done a very good job of living up to the title they chose. Why must I hear these boring-ass Rod Stewart albums that keep getting generated before I die? For every one of these bland, forgettable snoozefests, they could have populated the list with more cutting edge jazz, fascinating avant garde, challenging heavy music, or statement-laden singer-songwriter pieces. This is music for your aunt. It sounds the an ashtray full of Parliament light cigarette butts smells. This album has no legacy, it has influenced nothing noteworthy. It's stale white bread in a cabinet that smells faintly of mildew and is lined with a tacky layer of faded orange and green plastic sheeting. This is an album that was meant to take up space at a Goodwill or a Salvation Army in between Barry Manilow and a six volume Christian music box set that's missing two records and the vinyl is warped. Once you have heard Neu! you never have to hear this album. It offers nothing. Throw in that punch bowl, tupperware, and Garfield mug you found a few aisles over and maybe you'll break $5.

Now here's an album that I'm intimately familiar with, but have cooled off to over time, putting me in an interesting spot. How do you rank something like that? Ultimately, it's not a bad album. Some of my change of opinion is based around outside factors - my overall opinion on the band, their musical output since then, Wayne Coyne's ego and behavior. This probably ranks somewhere in the middle for me... a pretty solid indie/alternative rock album, but not revolutionary by any means.

This list made me re-evaluate LCD Soundsystem when it generated American Dream. Prior to hearing that album, I had written this band off based on multiple listens. Sound of Silver isn't nearly as good as American Dream - and I don't think anything else in their discography is going to measure up to that album for me - but it is pretty good.

A mild surprise.

Pretty good album, but I feel like the bar should be considerably higher for a live album to make this list. Outside of Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison, I'd be hard pressed to think of one that has the significance to be on here. The Quintet's Jazz At Massey Hall?

Easy five stars.

I've never understood the appeal of this album. It has its moments, but it also has a really ponderous pace that never makes the album feel way longer than it actually is.

I don't hate this album, but this is pretty antithetical to my musical tastes. I guess I would call this album... inconsequential? Odd inclusion.

Having just gotten to Mr. Good Bar, I have to ask... how can anyone find this anything but incredibly cringey? Some hip-hop acts from this era have aged pretty well... Rakim, Run-DMC... but the punchiest moments on this album feel like Will Smith trying to be Ice Cube.

This is a tough album for me to rate. PJ Harvey is an artist that I have tons of respect for, but I never want to listen to her music. I recognize it as good, but it just doesn't speak to me personally. It almost certainly is in the upper 50% of albums on this list, though.

All right, this is the third Blur album in 131 albums. This is some serious over-representation on the part of this band and Brit-pop in general, a genre that was only a factor for a small handful of years in the 90s and barely a blip on the overall landscape of music, making me thing that there is a bit too strong of an Anglocentric slant on this list. As far as the album itself, it's probably the best of the three Blur albums on the list (so far... I wouldn't put it past the authors to include the band's entire damn discography), but that isn't saying too much. As I previously noted, Blur feels more and more like a singles band with each new album I hear with not much to say in regards to the deep cuts. Still, the band is better than their contemporaries and rivals, Oasis, so there's that.

This is so close to something great, but it falls short. There is a spark of something really interesting here, but it flies a little too close to background music. Still, not unpleasant. Just... not living up to its full potential. This is music for people who hear something like Budos Band or Dub Trio and think, "this would be great if it was toned down even further."

Now this is good. Not great necessarily, but a very solid good. And it made me realize that I really like ELP. I think I spent like two hours after I listened to this album listening to random ELP songs. So that's a strong feat.

It's a fine album if inconsequential, but the entry in the book reaffirms my beliefs of the Anglocentrism of the list.

A one hit wonder with a bunch of meandering ballads for deep cuts. Wannabe Donovan.

Another easy five.

Meh.

Love, Moby Grape, now this. I'm sure this is heresy to some who can pick apart the subtle nuances of these bands, but I find a lot of rock from this era to be very samey and redundant. This is probably the best album generated from this style/era so far, but this all feels like dress rehearsal. These musicians would need a few years still to break through to something actually interesting.

Another album strengthening my argument that this list is way to Anglocentric. That being said, while this album is incredibly dated, it has a certain simple charm as an early 90s dance/r&b hybrid sort of thing. Generally inoffensive and fairly pleasant but it gets old fast.

Weirdly I got this album and Bookends back to back, forcing a comparison between two albums by the same artist. I rank them - and Graceland, the other Paul Simon album that's been generated so far - about the same. I like Paul Simon as a songwriter quite a bit, but to me he never cracks the ceiling into greatness. All of these albums hover around 3.75 for me, with Graceland probably being the best overall, but I do like the echoey, doomy drums on the title track of this album and The Boxer. They always felt weirdly industrial, an odd backdrop for folksy 60s music, almost like a precursor for some of Swans' 90s albums like White Light From the Mouth of Infinity or The Great Annihilator. That's a pretty left field association to make, and the average Simon and Garfunkel fan isn't probably going to find much tonal similarity to latch onto the majestic but joyless music of Swans, but these are my observations.

A great album, to be clear, but I feel like it's both overplayed and overrated in the White Stripes' discography off the back of Seven Nation Army. At this point in my life, I'd rather listen to any of their first three albums or Icky Thump (which I feel is extremely underrated in their discography). Not that I'd rank it as fifth overall - it's better than their debut and arguments can be made for how it fares against the others - but (much like OutKast's Stankonia), it drops down in my personal ranking just based on how ubiquitous it's become. There is a certain charm to being an earlier album by a band that exploded in popularity and having just as strong of songwriting but having some grit over polish. De Stijl (and in OutKast's case, since I'm using them as a comparison, Aquemini) are those albums for me. But White Stripes are one of those rare bands with almost no duds - outside of Get Behind Me Satan, I feel like they have a perfect discography. It's a shame Jack White hasn't released a single good album since they disbanded.

Is that Andy Samberg? Anyway, pretty meh album. I've never been that big of a fan of this style of electronic music - overly clean production with a thin, wiffly soundscape. None of the rhythms are interesting or compelling, none of the textures are evocative of anything at all to me. This is dance music with all the personality of the paint on the walls of hospital hallway.

What can I say? An absolute classic. The only question is whether this is a 4.75 or a straight 5 for me. I find this album more personally enjoyable than Dark Side or Animals, which are the consensus and music nerd picks for the best late era Pink Floyd album respectively. All three are great. (The Wall doesn't belong in this discussion, IMO. There's a number of great songs on it, but it's one of the most blatantly bloated albums of all time.)

Not my favorite Miles Davis album, but that doesn't really mean much. I'm ranking this a three, but it's a pretty high three. If I rounded up my scores, it would be a four, but I don't.

Probably the most influential album on the music of the last four decades, super easy five stars.

Well, this is devoid of personality.

An incredibly important album... that hasn't aged incredibly well sonically. It's not a bad album at all... but while this might have been a four or five star album upon release on many metrics, time has not been kind to it and now it ranks... three? A high three? Yeah, a high three.

Ah yes, the godfathers of incredibly boring indie rock. I've tried so many times to get into these guys, and now, upon this most recent listen, I can safely say it's never going to happen.

What an odd choice to include this album - which is pretty by-the-numbers thrash metal - when the following Sepultura album, Chaos A.D., would see them making a genre-defining groove metal album incorporating elements of traditional Brazilian tribal music. At least Roots made the list... but Arise over Chaos A.D.? Weird. Very weird. Still good... but not the album that should be on the list.

Weird, I was just thinking today that sooner or later I would have to deal with this album on this list. How do I rate this? I used to love it (well, like it a lot) and since cooled off on it quite a bit as I have developed a pretty negative opinion on pop punk and California punk in general. Green Day's downward trajectory as a band haven't helped things... although my opinion of this album hasn't gone downhill as much as my opinion of the Sublime discography since my adolescence. Do I hate this album? No, not really. But when you evaluate an album for its role as an influential album - which this certainly was - shouldn't you take into account what it influenced? What Green Day influenced was garbage. Much like Nirvana, the music that took after it was a musical dead end. Should the parent be punished for the sins of the child? No, not necessarily, but Green Day also isn't anywhere near as good of a band as Nirvana (and I wouldn't exactly call myself a Nirvana fanboy). I suppose all this hemming and hawing is just navel-gazing while I decide if this deserves a 2 (probably a 2.75) or a 3 (no higher than a 3.5). Either way, it falls somewhere in the middle - not U2 terrible, not Kate Bush great.

I don't know how a band so talented at arrangement can make such utterly boring music. This is artisan ear oatmeal.

I feel like I *should* like this... I like Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and Elvis Costello quite a bit, I like this style of cinematic 60s belter... it just doesn't connect for me. Maybe it's the darker modern production and the heavy leaning on strings over brass in the arrangements... this needs some big ol' Henry Mancini swells or something. This style of music is self-aware enough to wink at the audience but it's being blended with songwriting so self-serious that it keeps its winking behind closed doors. However, I could see this album being a grower worth revisiting.

I had written off The Byrds as by-the-numbers psyche-pop, but this an incredibly solid country album. I'm dubious that the need a whole five albums on the list, but this album sounds like what Wilco is trying to sound like on any given day.

I love Fiona Apple, but I feel like this album is more than a little overrated and the buzz around it overshadows the superior previous album, Idler Wheel. That being said, it's not a bad album at all. For Her is an amazing song.

Oh god. Foo Fighters are not a good band. Foo Fighters are a band with zero personality, just like Dave Grohl himself. It's lowest common denominator, paint-by-numbers rock that fits together elements of every style of alt rock around it so that it can function as the perfect segue between any two songs on a radio station, and that's exactly what they've been doing for 25 years. I used to lump Foo Fighters and Pearl Jam in together, but having been forced to listen to a Pearl Jam album during this project, I can conclude that Pearl Jam have a level of production, songwriting, and dynamics not present whatsoever in Foo Fighters. I still don't like Pearl Jam, but they are significantly better than this. Foo Fighters are muzak with crunchy guitars. If the 90s alternative scene was the crisper drawer in your refrigerator and the many talented, original bands were the variety of vegetables you have, Foo Fighters would be the pooling liquid at the bottom from the various bits of lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and mushrooms that have gone bad in the back. Ugh. This isn't the worst album generated by the list so far... but it's probably in the bottom five.

Huh, I had not heard this before, but this might actually be better than It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet. Maybe those are more widely acclaimed because they have iconic album covers and this cover looks like a high school stage adaptation of Anansi Boys.

I guess I've never really "gotten" Slayer. To me, it always just sounds sloppy. Thrash is pretty far from my preferred style of metal, but even in thrash, they never really struck a chord with me. They're better than Metallica, I can say that at least.

I skipped over this when it came out because Kelela featured on one of the few mediocre tracks on Danny Brown's Atrocity Exhibition (an album that should really be on the list), but this is starting out extremely strong - and I'm not a fan of R&B in general. Interestingly, this album is not in my version of the book, which is the most recent update, so I have to assume it was cut despite only being four years old. I would think the editor would cull older albums, many of which are redundant or dated instead of cycling through new additions. Seriously, we don't need the full Byrds discography, especially at the expense of pivotal newer albums. Music is a living organism, constantly evolving, and the list has a terrible track record when it comes to 21st century releases, omitting important releases from Swans, Death Grips, Run the Jewels, Danny Brown, Sophie, Mastodon, and, well, basically anything remotely heavy. I don't think there's any metal on this list after nu-metal collapsed in on itself. Hell, it looks like they cut Fever Ray's self-titled too, and that is one of the best albums of the 21st century. This list is atrocious. Goddam embarrassing.

The entry in the book made this album sound like a joke, but it's not bad... a variety of styles of world music interspersed with dated 80s hip-hop interludes. The book said this "facilitated the birth of world music as we know it," which is kind of absurd - world music is just an umbrella term for folk music from around the globe so it could be easily marketed to Westerners. If the implication is that this is what started the trend of popularizing those styles of music, it probably does deserve some credit, but as much as David Byrne, Joe Strummer, or Paul Simon? This is certainly more forgotten to history than those other artists and their experiments, probably because of their higher pedigree. I don't really have any intent to return to this... it wasn't bad, but this is one of those albums on the list more for its role as a historical footnote than its timelessness.

Oof, okay. So AC/DC aren't *terrible*, they have a degree of self-awareness that other big dumb rock bands like Metallica and Aerosmith are completely lacking. Their riffs and grooves were simple and effective for what they were, but I'm not going to pretend to like them. I made a comparison a few months back that AC/DC were to rock what Lil' Jon was to hip-hop, and I stand by that. I can drunkenly shout along to both if I'm in the right headspace. But I'm going to apply the same metric to AC/DC that I did to Green Day: If we give influential albums credit for the good music that was inspired by them, we have to also apply the blame when they inspire absolute garbage, and AC/DC has inspired some of the most garbage. Alongside Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, and a few others, they deserve a lot of blame for the universally terrible hair metal genre to follow them in the 80s. This is probably going to place this album in the low 3's for me. We'll see, I haven't listened to it in like a decade outside of the singles that I'm forced to hear literally every day on the butt rock radio station at work.

Why?

Well, this is an awkward album to review since like half of it isn't available on Spotify. I could switch over to youtube, but I'm not particularly motivated. The first track is some decent dance punk, kind of feels like something LCD Soundsystem would do three decades later... but after that it feels pretty dated. There's one track from the second half that is on Spotify that feels somehow dated and ahead of its time simultaneously.

This is just a meat-and-potatoes great album. Not flashy, not exciting, just a classic. 4/5

One of the best Stones albums. Easy 5.

Not bad. I'm a little surprised I haven't heard of this rapper before, I've explored a lot of underground hip-hop from this era. This wouldn't be one of my first choices to represent the genre/era... My one big complaint about this album is that none of the beats really hit hard enough. The whole album has a frustratingly ethereal quality, like aural blue balls.

I couldn't even make it two full tracks in. I wanted to give it a more thorough listen and lay out all the reasons why Coldplay is boring music for boring people, but life is too short to waste listening to Coldplay.

Tough one to rank. I prefer Cave's rockers to his more somber work, but this is easily his best somber album. Haunting and beautiful.

I've never been able to take Sinatra seriously and I still can't. Jobim is great, but this album would have been better as an instrumental.

The entry in the book for this album made it sound really gritty and interesting, but this is the blandest Britpop album yet from this list. You know, I didn't really have a problem with Britpop before starting this project, but I'm really growing to dislike it now.

There isn't a single U2 album you must hear before you die, certainly not one released after the 80s. This album is definitely better than All That You Can't Leave Behind, the other album I've gotten from the list so far, but that's not saying much, since that's one of the worst albums I've ever heard. I can't believe I used to own this tripe.

Not a terrible album, but this album absolutely does not belong on this list. This is essential to nothing.

After a brief flirtation with liking Queens of the Stone Age in my late teens, I quickly grew tired of Josh Homme's songwriting, guitar tone, and personality. There are a ton of genre adjacent bands like Melvins or Sleep or Clutch or Mastodon who I would take over QotSA. I guess QotSA are a little catchier, a little more radio friendly, but I'm just not impressed. This album isn't terrible, it worked fine as background music while I played video games, but it's just kind of blah to me. Low three.

Not bad, but it hasn't aged super well. There's a lot of early hip-hop on this list that feels very dated. Some of it is important from a historic perspective, but compared to the amount of more recent hip-hop inclusions, it's pretty overloaded.

Hard album to evaluate since the only available version is greatly expanded from the original release and features a number of other musicians. Normally you ignore expanded versions... but the added material is the rest of the original concert. I guess at the end of the day, it's a great concert, just not as tight or iconic as Folsom.

I know that with the country stats recently tallied that Britain came in second to the US as far as overall albums on the list, but so many British albums stand out simply because they don't stand out. A lot of British bands aren't that distinct from one another so you just wind up with a wash of whatever genre it is, whether it's punk, post-punk, Britpop, or whatever. There are some incredibly vital British albums, but the list needs to be pruned. This is a perfectly average British post-punk album that is a fine 3 and nothing more. It isn't necessary to have this much representation on the list when the music scene isn't that diverse.

It's been quite a while since I've given this a listen, probably since my early 20s. From what I remember, it was a pretty big departure from TVU&N and WL/WH, and as I revisit it, I can see why I put it down and never returned. There are moments of songwriting beauty, but for the most part this is pretty lifeless. John Cale is sorely missed from this.

It's... okay? I know there is a disco revival currently going on, and disco had a huge stigma for a long time, but I find it hard to really feel one way or another about it. For me, disco is to funk and soul what yacht rock is to prog rock. There are some cool bass lines here, but the songs just kind of drag on without much in the way of a climax. I've heard a lot worse (including on this list), but I'm not running out to buy a pair of roller skates anytime soon.

M.I.A. is one of those artists where I like all the elements of the music, but I can't really get into it.

Dire Straits are such an odd band to me - a lot of talent, but inconsistent. Their good stuff sounds like Gordon Lightfoot mixed with blue eyed soul and their bad stuff sounds like cheesy solo John Fogerty. And then there's Money for Nothing, one of the most overplayed songs in classic rock radio history. It might have been good at one point, but it winds up really throwing the tone of this album all out of whack. Once you get to the deep cuts, though, this album really gets good. Your Latest Trick sounds like it belongs on the soundtrack to Law & Order... it's a great arrangement... until you get to that cheesy saxophone. Some mixing changes might have saved it, but it winds up sounding very 80s in a bad way. Why Worry? has some nice little synth licks that hint at the band's proggier Telegraph Road. Ride Across the River is a straight banger. It kind of sounds like the soundtrack to some 16 bit video game's jungle night level in the best way possible. The Man's Too Strong has a strong Western vibe with a hint of apocalyptic folk a la Great Annihilator-era Swans. One World's not bad either, although the slap bass dates it a bit. The guitar does some heavy lifting here. The album ends with the moody synth swell of the title track, a song that was destined to be played during a pivotal scene in The Americans. This was one of my mother's favorite albums, and it has a lot of emotional pull for me - both negative and positive, nostalgia and rebellion. Listening through it, if it didn't have Money for Nothing and Walk of Life, it would be almost a five star album for me. As it stands, with those two tracks on it, it will wind up a three or (more likely) a four. Before I relistened to it, I wouldn't have ranked it quite that high, but like I said, the deep cuts on this album have a lot of fantastic elements, many of which I forgot.

Meh. The story behind this album is more interesting than the actual music. Not terrible, but not great.

An important concert from a historical context, but this begs the question: should a recording of a concert that took pace in 1966 be included on this list as a release in 1998? Should it be included at all? The cultural impact it had was as a concert, not an album. And, to be honest, they aren't the best performances of these songs. This loses quite a bit of the impact of the actual concert because you aren't there, experiencing the event live. The atmosphere is completely lost in the translation.

Starts off pretty good, but after the ill-advised cover of Imagine, it never really recovers.

Well, I'm not the Nine Inch Nails fan I was when I was 16, but it would be disingenuous to not give this album a 5. Trent's output after The Fragile has been largely terrible outside of Ghosts and some soundtrack work, but in the mid 90s, he was riding a creative high. Downward Spiral was more in tune with industrial's roots than a lot of his contemporaries like Skinny Puppy and Ministry but also comfortably couched in the alternative rock of the era. This was a great entry point and also a strong display of songwriting and cohesive theme and storytelling. It's not without its flaws, but it's a classic.

It's not as good as Combat Rock, but I'm going to take the controversial position of saying that this is better than London Calling. More immediate, more visceral, no sappy filler. Just a great punk album.

I've struggled with The Fall over the years and only a couple of months ago developed an appreciation for them. There's a certain style of early post punk that kind of blurs together for me - The Fall, Gang of Four, Wire, Mission of Burma... some of it is good, but it lacks some of the personality that set apart some of the better examples of the genre for me (Talking Heads, Joy Division, The Pop Group, Pere Ubu, This Heat).

Reading the entry for this, the book gives this album a lot of credit for being the first (or at least an early example of a) concept album. It may have been a huge inspiration on Tommy, but as far as standing on its own as an album... it's okay. It's fine.

Exile On Main St. marked a point of decline for the Rolling Stones, but it was a decline from a trilogy of albums so great that it would take a decade before the Stones would truly settle into mediocrity. There were a number of 70s albums still amazing, but nothing would come close to touching Beggars/Bleed/Sticky. I would say it's a shame, but the Stones had more great albums than most bands. The fact that only three are perfect five stars is still a great accomplishment.

Five star classic. Both an incredibly fun album and also an incredibly important album in the history of sampling, hip hop, plunderphonics, intellectual property law, etc.

I don't rank Smashing Pumpkins as low as Foo Fighters or RHCP when it comes to arbitrarily beloved but overplayed and overrated 90s bands that have made this list, but they're in that category. This album holds up a bit better than the overlong, overblown Mellon Collie and its headache-inducing compression, but it's still just kind of... meh. A sacred cow of 90s alt rock that really should be skewered and laid to rest. Just because something's popular doesn't mean it's great - the Pumpkins sit in this weird spot in between the grunge scene, shoegaze, and the slightly gothy industrial rock of NIN and Manson, making them a bit of a lowest common denominator of 90s alternative rock. Maybe the should have committed more to a distinctive sound that didn't rely on Billy Corgan's signature nasal delivery?

The problem with frontloading your album with the biggest, most epic-length tracks is that you're going to burn out the listener right off the bat. Unless you're, I don't know, Kraftwerk, you shouldn't do it. Even Rush couldn't really pull it off... I find myself shutting off 2112 after I make through the title track, and that's a much better album than this. This album starts with two tracks that each clock in at over 15 minutes, making it a tedious exercise to grind through while checking this album out for the first time. There are some interesting ideas here amidst some dated textures, but the structure of the album has killed its forward momentum for some auditory dick-wagging.

This album began TV On the Radio's descent into blandness that eventually swallowed them up. There are a few decent tracks on here, but nothing that really lived up to Return to Cookie Mountain.

Another band that I've tried to get into at various points and never really jived with. There are a handful of really good songs on here but the overall album is too sonically samey. More stylistic and vocal variation and this would be a great album. As it stands, it gets kind of tiresome in the second half and would work better as an EP.

I've never really been a Metallica fan... I gave them their time of day when I was a teenager, but I soured on them awfully fast. There's a weird sneer to Hetfield's vocals, and they always seemed too well off for their heaviness to be grounded in anything. There was too much pageantry to it. Not always, I guess. ....And Justice for All was stripped down to the point of sounding amateurish. But S&M is super representative of that pageantry problem - if anything, it's the worst offender. It feels less like a concert album and more like a ride at Universal or Disney World. I feel like my chair should be vibrating and I should be wearing some special eyewear. None of this feels like what I want from heavy metal. It's too rehearsed for there to be any danger, any improvisation. There is no audience participation. I doubt beer was served at this concert. It's all of the big and stupid and none of the human.

I am not a fan of Bruce Springsteen, and I don't understand the appeal. There are some moments of good songwriting on here, but the arrangements are so incredibly hokey. This album is drenched with just the cheesiest saxophone... in fact, I'd argue that this album is probably responsible for the saturation of cheesy sax that would happen in the 80s. This is a huge step up from the Rod Stewart albums this dumb list has generated for me, but it's the same genre of bad.

Oh, good. More Zep. A good rhythm section, a solid guitarist, but it doesn't add up to a sum of its parts. It winds up being a mess of plagiarism, pedophilia, and horrible, shrieked vocals and masturbation sounds. Zep were the most self-indulgent band that people still (somehow) look upon positively despite the fact that it's just proto-hair metal. Outside of a smattering of good moments like Immigrant Song and Kashmir, this band's discography is disposable pulp on a pedestal made of statutory rape charges.

This isn't in my version of the list, but I have to wonder why it's on the list at all. Aside from my own negative feelings towards the early 2000s garage rock revival, this is a compilation. Why is (was) this on the list over an actual album by the band?

When the Levee Breaks is a good track, the rest of this album is pretty bad. Stairway to Heaven is one of the worst songs to get constant air play on classic rock radio.

Not my favorite Toure album, but I haven't heard a bad album from the man.

I'd say that I never liked this album, but I owned it at one point, so something about it inspired me to buy it. I'm definitely not a fan now. I can't give it a 1 in good conscience, but it is a very low 2.

Morrissey is so shit that Henry Rollins' hatred of him made me like Henry Rollins more. Also, The Smiths were always shit.

Nice. Not my favorite Zorn album - I would have rather seen the incredibly fun Morricone deconstruction The Big Gundown or the somber and poignant Kristallnacht on this list, or if you're going for the hyperactive cartoon jazz specifically, the first Naked City album, or the jazz/grindcore crossover, Painkiller's Guts of a Virgin. With all that being said, this is still a great Zorn album, and I'd rather have this on here than nothing at all.

One of the best albums on the list that I hadn't heard before I began this project. Solid four stars.

Why? This album and band have always been painfully average.

I've never experienced an album so forgettable that I would forget what it sounded like while I was listening to it before.

It's amazing just how many great prog albums Bill Bruford has touched.

I'm not super familiar with this particular Costello album, I mostly know it as the one with (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding and that song where Costello drops the N bomb. It's pretty good. I would call it mid-tier Costello. A little too smooth to be the top of the barrel for his early work, but it's got some serious highlights.

This is better than the other Muddy Waters I've heard, but the problem with Chicago blues is that it all basically sounds the same. There hasn't been any innovation in the genre since it left the Delta almost a hundred years ago, and that's painfully obvious here.

Was it deliberately seeded that this would be generated on Christmas Eve? Anyway. These are some of the best renditions of these classic Christmas songs ever recorded... but they're still just Christmas songs. Hard album to rank.

Time to give this album ANOTHER try. The first track is pretty good, but the rest of this album is pretty meandering and dull. It's ambitious for Wilco, but Wilco are a boring band to begin with, and their best work is when they are just trying to make simple, poppy country rock. Their entire career sits in the shadow of The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

Not Mingus's best album, but still an easy five stars.

Pretty good, but this feels like another example of the people writing the list skipping over the obvious classic for a second or third best choice. Why this album over Perfect Prescription? Why Warehouse by Husker Du over Zen Arcade? Why Blue Lines and Protection by Massive Attack over Mezzanine? Head scratchers, the lot of 'em.

Delving into one of the two most overrated figures in hip-hop of the last twenty years, we get Yeezus, an album inexplicably on this list when Death Grips doesn't even get a footnote. Death Grips are the most influential act of the 2010s - indisputably. The barriers they lowered between bedroom acts and professional musicians, the relationship they cultivated with the internet, the approach to abrasive textures that led to a resurgence of interest in industrial and noise influences on everything from metal to pop. Death Grips changed the game, and Kanye casually cribbed their notes three years later in a messy facsimile. Is this a bad album? No. But it isn't original and it has some of Kanye's worst lyrics on it. So why is it on here?

Classic. One of the best and most important 70s glam/art rock albums.

Meh. I've said it before, but Chicago blues is so samey and boring. It's such a shame that a genre as interesting and diverse as the Delta blues evolved into it.

This album was removed from my version. Another example of a newer album added and then tossed out instead of pruning the moldy old sacred cows. I don't love this album. I'm a Wu-Tang fan, but I take the unpopular opinion that Ghostface albums aren't that great. He is an undisputed master of storytelling, but I don't find his albums compelling as someone listening to a piece of music. Fishscale is a concept album about coke dealing, so more than most even, it's a thick narrative with the songs themselves de-emphasized. On top of that, it is 24 tracks with far too many skits. As an adult in their 30s, I want my hip-hop albums to be about 14 tracks with zero skits. I'm a firm believer that each genre has its own optimal album length - it's not a hard rule, but on average, I want my punk albums about 25-30 minutes, my hip-hop albums to be about 45-50 minutes, my rock albums to be about 50-60 minutes, and my drone albums to be about 100 minutes. At 65 minutes with 7 skits, this album drags. Still, it's not terrible. There are plenty of forgettable Moby Grape and Love albums on this list that deserve to be on it way less.

This is a little better than the other Springsteen album I've had generated. At least this one isn't completely smothered in cheesy saxophones.

As much as I love Bob Dylan, I feel like this era of Dylan (Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, Modern Times) is pretty overrated as critics were desperate for something to latch onto with Dylan after a string of duds following Oh Mercy. These late-era albums aren't bad per se, but if they are the highlights, his career was definitely in decline at this point. Still, after dozen or so actually great albums Dylan has released, he's earned quite a bit of leeway.

I listened to this for the first time about four or five months ago. It's not exactly my style, and it's kind of uneven, but I respect it for being one of those albums that was clearly an important stepping stone in music's evolution.

Kind of a boring, overlong album, innit?

Finally, a good album. It's been almost two weeks since this thing has generated anything that's cracked a 4. It isn't Zappa's best, but at least there's some representation on this infernal list. Why is this the only Zappa album on here? Boring-ass REM and U2 have four albums apiece on this thing, and they couldn't spare a second slot for a guy whose discography is over twice the size of both of those mundane bands combined?

I've never liked the singles from this album, so I'm basically evaluating how much the deep cuts redeem it. I'm in Touch With Your World is better, but definitely a more lowkey track, not something to bank on as a salvation. Don't Cha Stop is pretty obnoxious, like the big hits. Moving in Stereo is the best song on here, sounding like if Brian Eno had never left Roxy Music. All Mixed Up continues in this vein but also adds some Queen-like vocal harmonies. So there are three tracks on here that move this from a low 2 to a high 2. Not a statistical change, but it makes me dislike them less, I guess.

This album is fantastic. Every time I hear a new Waylon album, the more I like him.

I have NOT been looking forward to this. Hopefully this garbage doesn't jack up my youtube algorithm too much.

This album is not in my copy of the book. It's also not bad. Not something I'd seek out outside of this project - I'd say the production is too clean, it would benefit from being a little more lo-fi, a little more grungy - but it's much better than the inexplicably highly rated garbage album from Oasis I had to listen to yesterday.

Radiohead are an overrated band. Not a bad band, those don't mean the same thing, but an overrated band. Their morose forays into depression and alienation lacked the passion to give punch to their themes. Much like Sonic Youth's bored rich kid noodling, it largely makes me ask, if you're not excited about the music you're making, why should I be? The Bends is a good album. It's one of their albums that suffers from this problem the least. There is a greater sense of urgency than on OK Computer or Kid A, which are the only other two albums that I would consider worth any amount of attention. Outside of that, too much of Radiohead is mumbling over skittering electronic beats.

Goddammit, not another one. I guess the question is, is this album worse than (What's the Story) Morning Glory? It doesn't have any songs as obnoxiously overplayed as Wonderwall or the other hits off that album, but I feel like outside of being driven into my brain over and over again by the dull trepanation blade that is commercial rock radio, the songwriting on that album is, overall, slightly better. Not Wonderwall, that song is like the Chernobyl of pop music, but outside of that, it strives for something better than the blandness that is this album. If you inspire hatred, at least you're inspiring an emotion.

Another album not in my copy of the book. There's an awful lot of divergence between different versions and (as I've noted before) a lot of more contemporary releases added and then quickly removed. It's almost like the people who curate this don't know how to evaluate modern music for its lasting impact. Anyway, I had never listened to Ozomatli before, but I knew of them as Cut Chemist's other group. In addition to Cut Chemist, Chali 2na has also collaborated with them, further cementing their connection to Jurassic 5. Ozomatli also share some of Jurassic 5's issues - namely, their lack of depth. They're fine, there's nothing wrong with them, but like a meal lacking much caloric content, you're going to be hungry again in an hour. There's a wiffliness to them, a lack of edge, a lack of bite. It's frustratingly clean and safe and, well, kind of boring. It shouldn't be. It's blending elements of a lot of genres, but it never feels like more than the sum of its parts. Why? How can you combine disparate elements and sound somehow formulaic? Better than Oasis though.

What's there to say about this? It's an almost perfect pop album.

Oh, good. Irrelevant, overplayed 70s arena rock, one of the most tepid, unnecessary dalliances in the history of rock music. This album fails the "must hear before you die" test.

It's no Mezzanine (which is embarrassingly absent from the list), but it's still pretty good. A tad dated, but pretty good.

What a pleasant surprise. This is a lot better than I expected and much better than Lynard Skynard deserve.

It's good, but it's an odd choice over either Gnarls Barkley album.

In some ways I like this better than Metallica's thrash era, but in a lot of ways I don't. I honestly want to give this a 1, but just looking through my rankings, this slots in between some very low 2s. Just know that it's disliked. This album is the godfather of butt rock, and it really feels ugly to listen to. Sad But True always reminds me of the time it came on the modern rock radio station while I was sitting in the parking lot, waiting for a friend to get out his meeting with his parole officer while I was incredibly hungover so we could go score some meth afterwards. It might have been the perfect song to encapsulate that ugly moment in my life. I hate this album for the music it influenced and for the aura it exudes... but I suppose it is better than all of the albums I gave a 1 to and a small handful of the albums I gave a 2 to. Maybe I just need to re-evaluate my scale and be a little bit more liberal with my 1s.

I've never really listened to Pulp before (outside of that one song that was on the Venture Bros. - which I liked a lot), but this is pretty good. Better than Blur and significantly better than Oasis. I was starting to think there was no hope for Britpop.

This album was cut from my version of the list, the only Winehouse album on it is Back to Black. Which is as it should be. This album is good, but it's not list-worthy.

Mark Kozelek is right. I don't even like Sun Kil Moon, but this is some pretty bland beer commercial rock right here. What an embarrassment for a list of supposedly essential music.

While overall I don't consider myself - in the broad sense - a fan of punk, I am a huge fan of this album. Keith Morris really embodies the snarling 'fuck you' attitude of punk. There's a sense of irreverence to this album that doesn't swirl out of control like later California punk albums but keeps it from becoming overly sanctimonious like some of the more political-minded punk albums of the time. It's fast, blunt, primitive, and doesn't overstay its welcome. While the band's best track - the cleverly ordered medley Golden Shower of Hits - isn't on this album, this is the most focused burst of overall quality from the band.

This project is really starting to wear me down. Too many generic, uninspired rock albums, too few classic jazz albums and boundary-pushing avant garde albums. Every heavy metal album on this list is incredibly obvious and mainstream. This album sounds like a bunch of songs written to be on commercials for cell phone companies. This is so polished and clean and antithetical to the rebellious spirit of rock. It's not clever, or unique, or original. I listen to this and all I can ask is "why?" Why does this exist. I'm sure it will score in the high threes to mid fours too. Much like Metallica, Oasis, and Foo Fighters, this is the sort of basic shit that people on here really eat up. Downvote Pere Ubu and John Zorn and Laibach and upvote this generic garbage.

Considered entry level by some grime fans, Boy in da Corner is one of the most consistently good albums in a genre more focused on singles. This is easily one of the most consistently good UK hip-hop albums in general. It's a shame none of Dizzee Rascal's subsequent albums were able to live up to it, but it set the bar pretty high.

As noted in my review of Highway to Hell, I'm not an AC/DC fan, but they aren't as terrible as their contemporaries despite being one of the forebearers of hair metal. For the longest time, I was dismissive of Brian Johnson, and while I'm not overall a fan of his voice, I think this is a better album than Highway to Hell. It plays like a greatest hits album, and while I don't like all of these songs, Hells Bells is one of the better AC/DC songs, so it gets some credit for that. This album is gross and dumb, but I don't hate it. I would never put it on of my own volition, and I don't think it should be on this list, but I don't hate it.

Overall, I consider this band to be a little to ethereal for their own good, but I've always liked this album and would rank it with the best of post-rock.

God, I hate Morrissey. I hate his singing style, I hate his lyrics, I hate his personality. He doesn't make the worst music on this list, but he is one of the more unlikeable people making mediocre music on this list. I gave this album a listen and it's just so blah.

Not my favorite Bowie album, but not a bad one either, and even mid-tier Bowie is better than most of the albums on this list.

More boring garbage from Coldplay. This sounds like it has some better songwriting than A Rush of Blood to the Head, but it's still duller than dishwater.

It's fine, it's a bunch of British white guys playing blues rock. Maybe it was a stepping stone in rock's evolution, but now it's a culturally irrelevant relic. It might be noteworthy for huge Clapton fans, but as someone who feels like he didn't become relevant until Cream and had rapidly diminishing returns afterwards, it doesn't wow me.

It's just kinda Burt Bacharach-y schmaltz.

Absolute classic that I'm sure will have a pretty low rating on here.

Ew, gross. I'm forced to hear this garbage every day on the butt rock radio station at work that a bitter old white trash coworker forces everyone to listen to. GnR is easily the worst of the hair metal bands, which is the worst genre of popular music of the last 70 years. This is worthless. This is one of the two worst albums I've had to listen to for this project so far.

Eh... at some point, the reputation of over-the-top rock bands like Motley Crue and Kiss usurped the actual music and created this larger-than-life rock-n-roll monstrosity. It made for great comedy fodder in Wayne's World, but since then there have been a number of tongue-firmly-in-cheek bands like Steel Panther and Turbonegro who play some amped up version of the larger-than-life rockstar. Steel Panther lingers in the hair metal genre while Turbonegro is more of a sloppy blend of punk, hard rock, and metal. I suppose if that's your thing... you want something like The Sword or Queens of the Stone Age but more tongue-in-cheek. It's safer than Brainbombs and less charismatic than Queens of the Stone Age side project Eagles of Death Metal. As you can see, there's no lack of bands to compare them to, which is the problem. None of this is original. None of this stands out. It's not funny to see people behaving badly, there is nothing to distinguish the people making fun of the assholes from the actual assholes. There's no such thing as ironically being a dick. So what you're left with is pretty uninteresting music. It's probably fun to the people who like this sort of thing. But I'd rather listen to Grinderman and hear it from a top tier songwriter like Nick Cave.

High 3.

I have mixed feelings on this album - and on basically all releases from NWA and its former members really. It's an important album in the evolution of the genre and it certainly has its strong points, but there's also a lot about it that hasn't aged well at all. I'm not going to make a whole point-by-point dissertation... I think this ranks as a medium three and that's about it. It doesn't really need more said about it than that.

Having only been familiar with them from their famous cover of Mrs. Robinson, this band is essentially a one hit wonder to me. I always figured they were grunge-adjacent folky pop rock like Blind Melon, and this album pretty much confirms all my expectations. This is a bit more upbeat than Blind Melon but not nearly as interesting. It's perfectly listenable, if bland entry in 90s alternative rock.

High three.

This is the first of almost 300 albums generated that I really don't know how to feel about it.

What an incredibly boring album to come from a "supergroup." The title track is ok, but the only really good song off this is just a rerecorded Mott the Hoople track. This feels like a prototype for Bon Jovi - which is not a good thing.

It's no Minutemen, but these guys still deserve some love.

Stevie Wonder had a string of albums that delicately balanced cheese with badassery before descending entirely into cheese. This was the end of the streak, and you're starting to see the tightrope walker wobble. There was still some decent soul, but the funk bangers were a thing of the past at this point.

Better than Darklands and I would argue better than Loveless.

I'm a bit cooler on Leonard Cohen than most, but I still think he has some amazing moments. This album, isn't one of them. The opening track starts out all right albeit with thin, weak production, but the instrumentation could be improved with some remastering. But once the back-up singers take center stage, it goes way downhill. The entry in the book says that some moments on this album are now dated, but that's selling things remarkably short. The sax opening on the second track is a sad little salvo for the 80s. That pretty much sums up the album - awkward, cringey production choices backing up otherwise good songs.

Well, that was boring.

Man, I hated AiC growing up, but as an adult, this album has got to be one of the high points for grunge. I've always been more of a Soundgarden man than a Nirvana man (and don't even think about bringing up Pearl Jam), but this ranks up there with some of Soundgarden's best.

Arguably the greatest hip-hop album ever recorded.

Weird choice. This is a band and album that I'm intimately familiar with, having long since grown out of them. The entry on the list calls this nu-metal's "finest hour," a statement patently absurd in a world where System of a Down and Deftones exist - the latter of whom are conspicuously absent from the list. Maybe don't posture yourselves to be experts on something if you speak from a place of ignorance? Anyway. Incubus are barely nu-metal. They began as more of a watered down Mr. Bungle, sacrificing the majority of its weirdness in favor of accessibility. They quickly began to morph into a 311-ish beach hippie baja hoodie sound. It's hippie music with distortion, but it lacks any real depth. All of its ponderings and naval gazings are just lay-in-the-grass far-outisms. It has a certain amount of charm that mostly comes from its calmer moments that can evoke a sort bittersweet yearning. That capture that emotional vibe very well. But the rest of the album feels utterly unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. Once you've heard Tub Ring's Drake Equation, there's no real need to listen to Incubus - outside of maybe Wish You Were Here, which is the song (not on this album) that distills that yearning vibe that I described above down to its essence and removes all the whiteboy dreadlock frills that fill out the rest of this band. The Warmth plays a similar role on this album, but the cheesy turntables (and boy are the turntables in Incubus cheesy) overall really lower the quality of the song. I'm not 16 anymore. I'm now (painfully) aware of how shallow most of the music I listened to when I was 16 is. The authors of the list should as well. The drummer's pretty good though.

Pretty good (if overrated) moment in psyche-rock/jazz fusion. This wants to be a Latin-flavored intermediary between Axis (Bold As Love) and Bitches Brew. It doesn't really hit the highs of either Hendrix or Davis, but it does showcase some serious talent. It's like an unfocused but tighter studio album from a jam band - there's talent there, but not from anyone with a clear, concise vision.

This project has introduced me to a lot of great soul albums that I haven't previously heard. This one doesn't really click for me, unfortunately. I've never been a big fan of That Lady, and the rest of the album didn't do anything for me either.

This starts off pretty strong with some Crosby, Stills, and Nash vibes. The vocal melodies remain impressive into the second track, but the band settles into the whoa-oh BS that ruined folksy indie rock. The third song is more of the same. This is a band I've avoided for years because this is exactly what I've expected from them. The vocal harmonies are a pleasant surprise, but twee instrumentation that's just made for a commercial for some tech company that promises to bring people closer together is so, so, so cringey. I know this technically predates the 2010s, but this is the sound we will remember when we look back on the 2010s, and not in a good way. Much like how the entire decade of the 2000s will be summarized by ARE YOU GONNA BE MY GIRL and shutter sunglasses, the 2010s will be this sound and the lumbersexual look.

Weird choice. It's okay, but this being the sole Jay-Z album over Reasonable Doubt, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, Black Album, or 4:44? I don't get it.

CCR is the quintessential 'high 3' band. All of their albums are pretty solid swampy blues rock, but none of them are in any way transcendental. They're impossible to hate, but I find it really difficult to believe that anyone out there has ever had their mind blown by a CCR album. Also, why is the best CCR album, Willy and the Poor Boys, not on the list? You have Bayou Country over WatPB? Wtf?

I saw the entry for this on a different list that included it just for Beyond Belief, which is a pretty ridiculous reason to include an album on an essentials list - if you're including an album for a single, song, you're doing it wrong. Now Beyond Belief IS a damn near perfect pop song, and the standout of the album, but there is more here. I'm not a fan of the song Shabby Doll, but this album is a high point in Costello's career, and the Beatlesque pop polish Geoff Emerick brought is on point throughout. This might be Costello's third best after Blood & Chocolate and When I Was Cruel.

As I mentioned in my review of Yoshimi, I've grown to dislike The Flaming Lips over the years after having once been a fan. I think Wayne Coyne is an unlikeable asshole who crawled up his own ass at some point. I also think the music has lost any sort of bite or charm it may once have had. That being said, I can be objective and view their music through the lens that I once did. Yoshimi holds up as a pretty good indie/alt rock/neo-psyche album. The Soft Bulletin doesn't hold up nearly as well. It's a good album, but I always got it confused with Clouds Taste Metallic, with my only point of reference being "one of them had This Here Giraffe, the most annoying song I've ever heard." Fortunately, that album is Clouds Taste Metallic. For their early albums, I much prefer In a Priest Driven Ambulance, which continues to hold up as my favorite album of theirs - a little more punk grit, a little more krautrock weirdness, and a bit of a throughline on religion to make it cohesive. I don't hate this album, but listening to it was more work than pleasure. The big crunchy drums on A Spoonful Weighs a Ton sound pretty cool though.

Not as great as Low, still great.

Going into this listen through, there's a lot of baggage. I'm aware that it's one of the lowest rated albums on the list, but I tend to like most of the low rated albums quite a bit (outside of general garbage like the trailer trash magnum opus Devil Without a Cause). The Birthday Party, John Zorn, Laibach, and Pere Ubu currently reside there with some legitimate great albums. I've seen Butthole Surfers down there as well. Napalm Death, the lowest rated, isn't a favorite of mine, but it's much better than some of the garbage people on here seem to like for no discernable reason like Guns 'n' Roses and Oasis. I'm familiar with The Young Gods. Not intimately, but they are in a similar orbit to a lot of music I like. I've heard their music a bit, I've heard some remixes Franz Treichler has done, I have heard a number of Roli Mosimann projects. I don't believe I've heard this album specifically, but I've gone around the bend a few times, trying to get into this group. I like industrial music, including industrial metal. I like arty, pretentious stuff. The Young Gods have always felt like an industrial metal band with arty leanings. Despite my attempts though, they always felt maddeningly out of my grasp. They couldn't hook me. I do respect them though. Quite a bit. And while I don't jive with them, I can say the music doesn't belong on the bottom of this list by any stretch of the imagination. It sounds pretty good, it's got some good grooves. It's better than a lot of the shit industrial that came out in the wake of Skinny Puppy and Ministry. The pantheon for great industrial for me has always been Foetus, Einsturzende Neubauten, Coil, and Nurse With Wound. Only one of those artists is on the list along with the requisite genre founders Throbbing Gristle. The writers would do well to better represent a pretty important genre that has had its influence come back with explosive momentum in the 2010s. While they aren't my favorite band in the genre, at least The Young Gods provide a little bit of representation of this sound. I won't be returning to this album anytime soon, but I'll give it a high three. I'm tempted to give it a four for its role of token inclusion, but my rankings run straight. No grading on a curve, no bonus points.

In the pantheon of adult contemporary singer-songwriters who meandered out of the 70s, Billy Joel sits somewhere in the middle with Springsteen. A touch better than the bland whiteness of Rod Stewart, John Mellencamp, and Bryan Adams, but no where near the quality of Warren Zevon or solo Paul Simon. It's not an awful album, but it shouldn't really be on a list of essential listening. This is an album to listen to while bonding with your aunt over herbal tea and zucchini bread while she busts out old 35mm pictures of bridges she took while on a bicycle tour of the US.

Another blink-and-you'll-miss-it addition that was removed from the current edition. I have vague memories of disliking the slow, twee single Two Weeks, but upon revisiting it, I kind of like the song now. Unfortunately, the rest of the album is a bland, meandering, dull mess. 2000s indie rock was a really tepid genre of music overall.

One of the best albums from one of the bands most influential on 90s alternative rock. Although not currently in the lowest rated albums in this project, I've seen it down there before, and it's probably in the top 10% of albums on here.

I actually listened to this a week ago, having seen it among the lowest rated albums on the list for a while and been curious. It feels like a precursor to Richard Dawson's weird explorations of medieval music. Not as good, but not terrible. It's definitely a difficult listen, akin to Trout Mask Replica, but challenging isn't the same as bad. It is nowhere near as good as Trout Mask Replica (which I have a lot of thoughts on whenever we get around to that album), but it doesn't deserve to be rated lower than Kid Rock. I wouldn't put it on the list at all, but there's at least 500 albums on here that I wouldn't put on the list. I'd call this album a 3, but it's also a litmus test. If you gave this album a 1 but Appetite for Destruction anything higher than a 2, we probably won't get along.

It's a little heavy on the ballads, but it's still a great album. It's Tom Waits, the man is a national treasure.

Holy shit, I haven't listened to this in like twenty years. This album, more than The Prodigy, more than Basement Jaxx, more than Chemical Brothers or Crystal Method or anything else really made big beat blow up as a popular genre of music, and along with the popularity of trip-hop, Moby, and Aphex Twin made people realize electronic music was more than just cheesy techno. But... is it good? There are songs on here that still get radio airplay, which is kind of mindblowing considering none of its contemporaries do. Maybe The Prodigy? I've personally gone back to The Prodigy a bit more, including in the last year. I feel like they might have aged a little worse in places, some of their samples being more dated and cheesy, with their image being more self-serious and edgy. That being said, there is a lot more depth to what they were doing. Music For the Jilted Generation was a reaction to British rave laws and had a real dark, sinewy sound compared to the overly bright memelord energy of Fatboy Slim and You've Come a Long Way Baby. Expanding my focus, I have to compare this to other albums I listened to at the same time in my life that appear on the list and how they've held up. I guess this is comparable to Green Day's Dookie - inconsequential, irreverent, but ultimately harmless.

Are you fucking kidding me?

It's an album with one great song and a couple good songs. It's okay.

Not as good as Songs of Leonard Cohen, but it's aight.

I don't get the appeal of this album. Low rent Rolling Stones knockoff mixed with cheesy, dated early 90s house music. It probably sounded cutting edge at the time, but it hasn't aged well at all.

Wait, there are two Echo & the Bunnymen albums on this list? Why? Seriously, why? I guess this one will be rated moderately higher for having The Killing Moon on it, but I don't even remember what the other one sounded like. Outside of their one hit, this band was an entirely forgettable new wave act. Not worthy of being on a list of essential albums.

Another album no longer on the list. I'm mostly familiar with Antony/Anohni from her guest vocals on Lou Reed's The Raven and her later solo album, I'm not super familiar with the Johnsons. It's not really my thing, but it is pretty.

Outside of Adam Raised a Cain, this album does NOT match the tone of the title at all. There's a deeply cheesy, saccharine sound to Springsteen's music that the guy just cannot escape.

Better than Dry.

Absolute classic.

Oh hey, it's that band that did Golden Brown, that song kicks ass. Oh, but it it's not on here. The album is pretty good, though. Not great, but pretty good.

It's good, but it shouldn't have been included on the list over SAW II. But after omitting Mezzanine, I'm convinced these people don't understand electronic music at all.

The best Beatles album. The tightest of the psychedelic era.

This album suffers in my eyes simply because it's been so overplayed throughout my life. It's not as good as Aquemini, but it's an absolute classic and one of the best albums of the 2000s.

The list is on a roll for once, it's been one 4 or 5 star classic after another this week.

The best Soundgarden album? The best grunge album? An argument could be made.

Easy five. Kraftwerk's best album.

Shit.

I think this is generally regarded by Roxy Music fans as the band's best, but I find the album kind of uneven. It's good, but I prefer the self-titled personally.

What a ridiculous mess of an album. While more interesting than the typical 80s one hit wonder, this still doesn't belong on any sort of essential listening list. Someone really needs to curate the contributors of this list better, they're including some really absurd, pointless crap. This is an evolutionary dead end. There are no bands out there talking about the influence Frankie Goes to Hollywood had on them. The entry for this album made mention of the producer and his clean production style, but that's barely a historical footnote. You can do better.

This is not in my copy of the list, so I'm assuming it's been scrubbed from musical history. There was one Doves album on there, but not this one. I gotta say though, this is kind of a thin, wiffly, watered-down Radiohead blended with some of the twinkle of their contemporaries who fell more under the Britpop umbrella. It's quite boring, really. I actually forgot I had music on at one point.

REM are a boring band with two good songs and neither one is on this album. REM basically sound like Husker Du if you stripped out all the punk and vitality and just left aborted scrapings.

I'm not a Sonic Youth fan. I listened to them a lot when I was younger, but after a while, they came to represent something I didn't like in rock music. They sounded like bored, disaffected rich kids. The noise in their noise rock wasn't visceral and energetic like that of contemporaries like Unsane or Big Black or Jesus Lizard. They didn't sound like the dirty underclass, they sounded like trustfund brats. Their music sounded like the soundtrack of waking up after three days of partying in a ritzy hotel with a nasty hangover and cigarette burns all over the carpet and wine stains on the drapes. But if I were to pick an era of Sonic Youth I did like, it would be early Sonic Youth. It was *more* urgent. It was *more* visceral. There were moments didn't sound blase. It still isn't my favorite... it's an artsy fartsy sort of noise rock that took the Velvet Underground's blueprint and amped up the emotional coldness without replicating the tunefulness that gave Velvet Underground a sense of balance so they actually felt like potentially likeable human beings. The biggest offender, though, is the production, There is a smothered, squashed sound to Sonic Youth's music while it would benefit from a lot more separation and dynamic range. If you're not going to commit to the heaviness of noise rock, don't compress it like you're making heavy music. The fuzziness of these recordings doesn't add anything to these songs and just feels like an artificial attempt to make the music sound warmer. I don't know, it's better than the buttheaded heaviness of Metallica, but as far as rock critic sacred cows go, I find less redeemable qualities than Radiohead, who I also find to be pretty overrated. I guess they're better than The Smiths, though. And Tom Violence slaps.

So my last album was EVOL by Sonic Youth, and now I've got Pavement, a band that I largely consider to just be an inferior, rural version of Sonic Youth. They're less tuneful, the production is worse, and the Velvet Underground pedigree is just that much more watered down. Pavement exist in a shaky grey area where they aren't heavy enough or poppy enough to appeal to to me one way or the other. It's all just a sloppy grey mess with no dynamics. I have no idea why this band is so highly regarded, nothing stands out to me.

Hard album to evaluate. It's broadly speaking very good, but it's massively overlong. Even if you view it as two albums that just got bundled together, each disc of this loses momentum and meanders. Outkast were one of the best hip-hop acts of the 2000s, but this album should have been shaved down and tightened up. Rap double albums rarely, if ever work. Also, if anyone didn't already know, The Love Below is the far superior of the two discs.

I like Piper at the Gates of Dawn quite a bit, but this sounds like a Monty Python skit making fun of psychedelic folk. Barrett even sounds like Eric Idle on some songs.

It's okay, but Madelene should have been on the list in its place.

I get the influence Kanye has. His role in hip-hop history. How he created a new lane, one that wasn't gangsta or conscious/backpacker when that was really all there was. I just don't think it's that great. Kanye was always pretty averagely rated as a vocalist and extremely overrated as a producer. He has some great moments, there are a few great songs on here, but people act like everything he touches turns to gold. There have been a number of producers who have done it better. Being an important historic footnote isn't necessarily and indicator of quality. This album is just average. For every Jesus Walks or Spaceship, there's a mediocre track like Workout Plan or Slow Jamz.

The list described this as Neil Young fronting Pink Floyd, but to me it sounds more like sad, somber Flaming Lips. Dece.

Better than I expected. I've held onto a longstanding animosity towards this band because Love Shack is one of the most overplayed and annoying songs of the last forty years, but it's fortunately not on here. The one hit single on here that I'm familiar with is Rock Lobster, a song I actually do like. Maybe the band is better than I give them credit - my only real exposure has been Love Shack, Rock Lobster, and Roam, a song that always felt like a particularly weak Blondie track. I also can't say I'm a fan of their kitschy aesthetic, something that always felt like Devo/Talking Heads idiosyncrasy but lacking the level of social commentary and taking a detour to the 50s/early 60s by way of John Waters. And while I like Devo and John Waters and love the Talking Heads, something about what the B-52s were doing always felt a little toothless by comparison. TLDR, I didn't hate it like I expected, but it didn't completely win me over.

This is bad. Really bad. It's an early 90s one hit wonder (strike one), the hit is awful (strike two), and the rest of the album sounds like poppy, watered down Morrissey (strike three). This album is best left forgotten and its one stupid hit is best left to shitty direct-to-DVD romcom soundtracks.

It's okay. I want to highlight two laughably obtuse statements from the entry on the list, however. "In the period that remains the high-water mark of pop music..." No, just no. The 80s were easily the high-water mark for pop music, with artists like Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna towering over the genre while new wave gave us a cross-pollination of post-punk weirdness and radio friendly hooks. To think that pop peaked in the 60s is to live with your head in the sand. You shouldn't be writing about music. And second, "Pop-punk just does not get any better." No. Just no. To call this album punk is an absurd stretch - the genre was embryonic at this point - you could make an argument that it's proto-punk, but that's still a stretch. There are a couple moments here and there on this album that share a clear lineage with the punk genre. But this most certainly isn't the best pop-punk. Beyond the absurdity of calling something the best of a genre it isn't even in, it's not even as good as a Ramones album. It's about on par with the best Green Day album, but Green Day isn't the peak of anything. Fuck outta here with this jobber BS.

Better than expected. Smooth Operator is a banger

Hard album to rate. In a vacuum, I would give it a 5 for being perfect at what it does, but when you compare it to other albums, I would say it rates below some of my high 4s. I suppose that makes it a 4 with the caveat that I don't think this album could have been made better. It is quintessential and perfect in its moment, but it is a "small" album. It doesn't have the ambition that would make it a 5 for me, great though it may be.

It's okay. I can't really judge the album fully since Spotify omitted like three of the tracks, but I got the gist of it. After getting the Sade album two days ago, I realized that I kind of like this era of R&B before Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson ushered it into the 90s. This isn't on the level of the Sade album, but it's not bad.

He sounds like a less depressed but even more boring Thom Yorke.

I used to like this album a lot when I was a teenager, but I haven't listened to it in about 20 years. I don't really care to listen to it now, so I perused the big hits from the album to remind myself of what it sounded like. There are some catchy pieces on here, some clever uses of samples, but the production is kinda flat and the beats are pretty dated. This feels very locked into an era of the late 90s that doesn't do it any favors. I listened to this alongside Fatboy Slim and Aphex Twin and The Crystal Method and Basement Jaxx and Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy, but this album is closer to Enigma. It somehow slipped into popular culture, but it's essentially new age music with samples. The problem with this is that it's groundbreaking, but it's groundbreaking in an area that proved to have no real depth for innovation. In only a couple years this trend of 80-year-old samples would go from cool and fresh to novelty when entirely too chipper people would market electro-swing to people with no social skills. Hey, remember when that vaguely grunge band Primitive Radio Gods became one hit wonders by sampling BB King on a song that sounds like nothing else in their catalog? Want to hear an entire album of that? Boy, have I got the album for you. Here is That One CD In Your Collection You and Your Mom Can Agree On So You Don't Have to Argue the Entire Car Ride to the Mall! I wonder which version is the version on the list, the original, or the re-released one with Gwen Stefani's vocals plastered onto Southside. I don't care enough to look up the entry in the book.

My favorite Bjork album. I feel like it's severely underrated by her fans.

Fantastic album. The one thing this project has taught me is that I like soul way more than I thought I did.

I like a chunk of jazz from the swing era - Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Raymond Scott, some Louis Armstrong, some Cab Calloway... but this in particular sounds like something you would hear in an old folk's home. Time has not been kind to this.

One of my favorite Bowie albums, but by no means perfect. There are a few dud songs on here that hold this album back, but it's loaded with high points. Do the bad songs (Kooks is godawful) mar the album enough to lower it from a five to a four? I gave Fleetwood Mac's Rumours a four because Don't Stop is terrible and ruins the flow of the album. It's also one of the big singles off the album and poorly represents it. Kooks is a throwaway deep cut... but it is goofy as all get out. Does that do enough to lower the quality of an album that gave us Changes, Queen Bitch, Life On Mars, The Bewlay Brothers, Andy Warhol, and Song for Bob Dylan? That's a tough one. Overall, Bowie is a significantly better artist than Fleetwood Mac. His catalog runs circles around theirs. Is the bass line on The Chain as good as the string swells on Life On Mars? Tough call. Really tough call. On the flip side, I gave Blood On the Tracks and Blackstar fives, and those are not perfect albums either. If you're reading this, you already know the rating I gave it, but as I write this, I'm still pondering it. It's one of the toughest albums I've had to rate up to this point. Go figure it's one of my all time favorite albums.

The best Hendrix album. Are You Experienced? is great too, but a little played out IMO. I've never been a fan of Axis: Bold as Love personally. But Electricladyland is still fresh.

This is not on my copy of the list, once again putting on full display the absurd turn around time for new albums getting tossed on the list and then relegated to the dustbin. The single is a banger, but Adelle is a talent for making bangers. I've never bothered to give an album of hers a deep dive. Momcore isn't exactly a go-to genre for me, although I guess I'm glad there's someone out there not bad carrying the torch for Cher and Melissa Ethridge. I'm about halfway through at this point and, unfortunately, the singles are carrying this album pretty hard. Final verdict: A few standout moments but overall not essential.

High three.

Bob Marley is far from the worst reggae I've ever heard, but it is the most boring reggae I've ever heard. There's a lot of standout reggae from Toots Hibbert to Jimmy Cliff to the dub guys like King Tubby and Augustus Pablo to modern stuff like Buju Banton and Marley's own son, Damien "Jr. Gong." But outside of popularizing the genre, I fail to see what Marley deserves credit for. This is painfully average.

Boring and overrated, but not absolute trash. There are some solid grooves on here. Maybe I just need some molly to appreciate it.

This is not worth anybody's time.

This band is so ludicrously inconsistent. Every so often you'll hear something badass, and then you'll get a really dated-sounding canned drum loop. It meanders from wiffly Britpop to big beat to electropop without any sort of flow to it. This is a band that could have benefited from a much better producer.

The Model is a mediocre song that drags this otherwise excellent album down a little bit. The krautrock era in Germany in the 70s was one of the high points for music in the 20th century, and Kraftwerk were one of the bands at the forefront. While I don't rank this album nearly as high as Autobahn, it's still absolutely fantastic.

Well, this is surprisingly up tempo and un-morose for Morrissey. I choose to give all the credit to Mick Ronson. But I don't hate this.

Well, I thought that Babylon song was by Harry Nilsson and recorded in the 70s, so I guess that says something about the timelessness of the sound of this album.

Oh lord. This is one of those albums that really speak to the low quality of this list - this has no place on any self-respecting list of essential music. I say this as someone who listened to Korn in general and this album in particular a lot when I was in my early teens. I am intimately familiar with everything about this album. What pivotal role does it play? I could see arguments for the first Korn album, which has redeeming qualities. It was highly influential on metal and drastically changed the direction of music in the 90s. This? This is Korn reaching commercial success. But choosing this album over the first, you're signifying that the purpose of the list is to reference popularity over historical significance. But casting aside the list's failings, is this a good album? No, not really. It doesn't really hold up. It's better than any Korn album that came after it, but it really showcases the band fitting their sound into a cookie cutter to crank out. While the self-titled debut actually felt like Jonathan Davis had things to say about childhood trauma, this feels too glossy, too produced, too manufactured by comparison. It's got a couple catchy singles, but it's also got an abysmally cringey Fred Durst guest appearance. It's not the worst album ever. It (probably) doesn't deserve a 1. But this is a relic of a bygone era when angsty teen edgelords were a huge marketing demographic. What does this say to anyone now? Your dad really thought no one understood him? I would expect that the people who grew up with this album (those that don't work in gas stations or sell meth for a living) would be really embarrassed by this. Lord knows I am.

Probably the most consistently good project both Wilco and Billy Bragg have been involved with.

God, this band took any sort of bite out of jazz when they shoved it into their soft rock snoozefest, paving the way for all the Kenny Gs of the world. Do It Again is a good song, but the rest of this album can fuck right off.

Why?

Another tough one to rate. While this album doesn't hit the creative highs of later albums or show off the ambition the band is capable of, it is one of their most consistent albums.

This somehow sounds bored and drunk at the same time, like an overtired child just making noise with its mouth because it doesn't want to go to sleep.

Have you ever had Pirate's Booty? The little puffed corn snack food? You eat a handful of it, and you start to feel the flavor coming on and then it's gone. Like biting into a Cheetoh only to have it turn into nothing more than air. That's what this album is the equivalent of. It sounds like it's going to be something but then it's just air. Nothing there. Gone. I hated her mumbly, just-ate-a-handful-of-Ambien cover of Doin' Time, but that's the only song of hers I can even point to and identify as a Lana Del Rey song. This album might as well be a green room that Lorde was in the night before after stopping at Taco Bell - the lingering ghost of a thousand farts from someone more memorable.

Another weird choice, this album was definitely a bit of a sophomore slump for Lorde as it didn't really live up to Pure Heroine... an album that was decent but carried mostly by the strength of its singles. Still, this is more memorable than Lana Del Rey, as I noted in a recent review of hers. There are a lot of these not-quite-art-pop-but-more-serious-than-bubblegum-pop pop artists who came out in the last decade and they all kinda hit that "eh, it's all right" note for me. In the 90s these singers would all be filed away under the "adult contemporary" label, so it's weird to me that the majority of them are aimed at teenage girls these days - I think Adele is the only one aimed squarely at the white wine and ice cream crowd. Maybe I'm just a boomer, but it's weird to me that what the kids are into is comparable to the blandest music of my generation.

This list really loves low-stakes 70s and 80s one hit wonders that are all but forgotten outside of classic rock radio stations that play on an endless loop in the workplace as bland, inoffensive background noise. Not. Fucking. Essential.

Low three.

Not my favorite album (or even my favorite Pink Floyd album), but I can't rate it anything less than five. It's just one of those albums that's perfectly executed. There isn't a single moment out of place on here.

Nah.

So it seems like with newer printings of the book, some versions include more additions than others. Mine only has one new album per year after 2017 (and barely more than that for the previous years in the 2010s) and doesn't include this particular album. It's frustrating evaluating albums without entries for them, because I have no idea what made the authors find these albums essential when listening to them in a vacuum. While I often find the entries laughable, appalling, or eye-rolling, it does provide a starting point or context for some of their choices. This is a fine album. Pleasant, acceptable, but pretty ordinary to my ear. I wouldn't mind hearing it again - and I want to give it a few more listens before I evaluate it on its own merits, but the nature of this project makes that difficult. I can't really sit with this album and let it marinate to see if it's a grower with deeper significance if I'm rushing off to the next album in 24 hours while also listening to all the music I would normally be listening to in that time span. At best, I can probably squeeze one more listen in to see if something jumps out at me. This project - this exercise - has really highlighted the bizarre publishing habits of the authors. I know there are localized versions for non-English speaking countries, are there two separate volumes printed, one for Americans and one for the British as well? Why do we have contemporaneous versions in the same language? Why include more updates in one than the other? It makes the whole thing feel like a mish-mash with little thought put into what is actually essential listening and more a localized marketing gimmick to sell books. The absurd choices and flippant reasoning had already lowered my overall opinion of the series, but my general enthusiasm has almost completely given way to frustration. I continue to stick this out because I'm stubborn (plus sunk cost fallacy) and I'm a huge music nerd, but I feel like my time would be better suited doing almost anything else.

High three.

Barely a three. I've always found Tortoise to be the most boring of the first wave post-rock bands. I much prefer Slint or Talk Talk.

Ready or Not is a terrible song. The rest of the album is fairly average.

Considering how bad this band got pretty quickly after this album, I would put it in the guilty pleasure category (alongside White Zombie before Rob went solo and turned himself into a meme). It's a decent album for mainstream punk - better than Green Day's Dookie, which was its even more accessible contemporary - but I don't want to admit liking it.

Stereolab has always just felt like bland, watered down krautrock to me. It's not bad per se, it just lacks the adventurous spirit of krautrock - rather than going on a journey, you're going on a theme park replica of that journey.

Sometimes brilliant, sometimes awkward and dorky, this album just barely squeaks into the four star slot. When it's on, it's one of the best R&B albums of the last 40 years. When it's not, Monae still has enough charisma to stick the landing with only mild turbulence.

What the actual fuck. There are eight David Bowie albums currently on the list, and this isn't one of them, but why was it ever on the list? Even before it was put in context as a speed bump on the road to Blackstar, this was already being viewed as a middling effort from Bowie; an awkward, bumbling step back into music after over a decade absence. Furthermore, there are a number of Bowie albums not on the list that should have been on before considering this one - The Man Who Sold the World, Diamond Dogs, Lodger, Outside, Earthling, and Heathen are all significantly better albums than this. Hell, I'd say Space Oddity, Scary Monsters, and Reality were all better than this too, and those were all pretty hit or miss. I'm a huge Bowie fan, and this was a terrible inclusion and is a mediocre album.

One hit wonder who didn't even write her one hit... not a great track record. Not a terrible album, though.

Over the last five decades, we've made a lot of societal progress. We've recognized human rights for marginalized groups, developed language to describe differing experiences, and expanded communication on a global scale. We've also come to realize that the Eagles suck ass. By blending the instrumentation of rock with the crossover country singer-songwriter stylings of guys like John Denver, Jim Croce, and Gordon Lightfoot, the Eagles watered down both genres to audio diarrhea. Lacking the punch of the former or the songwriting chops of the latter, these guys produced music with all the personality of a faded denim jacket. It's pretty sad, because a number of members of this band have produced much better music in their solo careers. I guess they brought out the worst in each other.

Early Zappa/Mothers output was a hairy, drooling, lumbering beast. I guess to some extent, all of Zappa's discography was a meandering cacophony, but there was a more honed edge to all the silliness once the band abandoned its hippie freak mockery and doo-wop parodying for something more akin to progressive rock and jazz fusion. Whatever loose narrative threads this album has, it doesn't hold a candle to Joe's Garage. That being said, this sloppy mess is still better than probably 90% of the albums on this list.

One of the big positives of this project has been introducing me to a lot of soul that I was only vaguely aware of before and have discovered to be fantastic. This isn't one of those albums. This is bland, uninteresting, easy listening dreck.

Oh lord, I was just thinking earlier today that sooner or later I would have to listen to one of this band's awful albums. I was spared for so long, but I guess I jinxed myself. RHCP started off even more aggressively mediocre than the Foo Fighters and while FF were content to waste away in banality, RHCP got worse and worse and worse until they made U2 look good by comparison. RHCP have been self-parody for several decades now, but let's take a look at the album that launched them into popularity in the early 90s. This is a sound that did not age well. Even much better bands who were playing around in a similar vein at the time like Faith No More came away much better after abandoning this late 80s/early 90s rap-rock/funk metal marriage. The best moments on this album is when they get away from this dated pastiche - Breaking the Girl stands out both in lyricism and its unique groove. Ultimately, this isn't a terrible album. It isn't a 1. All of the band members outside of Anthony Keides are actually quite good, but they are hampered by playing in a dated style that went no where and being led by an idiot manchild whose songwriting became more and more derivative as time went on. If this album was an instrumental, I would rate it significantly higher... it would still have its flaws, but the musicianship would shine through a lot more and not feel so aggressively stereotypically California. As it stands, this comes off as a white Lenny Kravitz blatantly thieving from Prince with milquetoast, Cypress Hill-adjacent raps over some solid grooves with dated production.

Well, this is a pleasant surprise.

First of all, ba-dum-tsch, funny. Second, I'm getting really sick of all these Morrissey albums that are throwing off my Spotify algorithm. The drums on the title track are good, but the rest of the album is standard Morrissey namby-pamby fare. Blah.

I don't get the lionization of Sinatra at all. This is absolute drudgery. Good album cover I guess?

This is an album I've cooled on since my teenage years, but upon relisten and reflection, it's still a perfect punk album. I don't turn to this album the way that I did when I was 18, and I'm never going to return to it like I did then ever again, but I can't help but acknowledge its greatness. I might not want to eat cheesecake every day, but I can still acknowledge that it's delicious.

Another post-2000 album that didn't survive long enough to stay on the current version of the list, which is fine. This should never have been on the list. Muse is butt rock masquerading as prog, it's arena garbage for people who think they are smart, it's pseudo-intellectual pap, it's music for people who think they are smarter than the room but never bother to enter rooms they know will challenge them. It's music for people who think it's clever to talk shit about NIckelback. It's an evolutionary stepping stone to Imagine Dragons. Burn it and bury it in a shallow grave.

The most overplayed Depeche Mode album. Still good, though.

Five stars. One of the absolute best albums on the list.

Used to be a fan of this album, but I feel like it's a bit of a chore to listen to now and David Longstreath is a self-righteous prick.

Fantastic surprise.

Garbage fire of a human being, pretty decent album.

Cheesy, but still kinda not bad?

After the first two tracks, I almost called this a snap four star album. The subsequent tracks dipped a bit, lowering the overall album to a high three, but they were still very good, and the album is overall still very enjoyable.

Fuck, it's a Rod Stewart album in disguise. At least he isn't in the driver's seat, but you still have to put up with his "aunt with a two pack a day habit" vocals.

The weakest of the three studio Hendrix albums. It's still good, but I don't know if it's a radical enough departure from the other two to require inclusion? This list suffers from an inability to kill its darlings, and while the three Hendrix albums aren't as egregious as the over-representation that some artists have on the list - Costello and Bowie are easy targets - there's more eclecticism in those discographies. Is this essential? I would argue no.

Sepultura were the superior groove metal band, and as an added bonus, their legacy wasn't tarnished with redneckery and cryptoracism.

I've never been a huge fan of this album, but I have to admit that it's grown on me a bit. I used to find it dull and vaguely corny, whereas now I think it's all right, but head-scratchingly overrated. There are some decent grooves on here, but there's also some really obnoxious timbre choices. There are a lot of recordings from this era that come across livelier and more exciting. I'm assuming I lack the historical context to appreciate this album for what it was at the time, but I guess that means that it didn't hold up to the test of time as far as I'm concerned. It's all right, no great shakes. Moving on.

Arcade Fire fall at the center of a Venn diagram with many overlapping circles: "mediocre," "bland," "arrogant," "wearing their influences on their sleeves," "worshipping other mediocre artists." They really embodied a lot of the worst elements of mid-2000s indie rock scene. They didn't hit the lows of Foster the People or Mumford and Sons, but short of being industry plants like those garbage factories, they were pretty miserable. This is another album that has been scrubbed from my version of the list, so I don't know the authors' justification for including it, but judging from the entry they wrote about Funeral, it wouldn't be the sort of inspirational write-up that would make me reconsider my dismissal of this dreck. Listening to this is a chore.

It's really telling when the entry for this album on the list spends most of its time talking about how it doesn't live up to their earlier work and the cracks were forming.

The Doors are one of the dad rock bands whose legacy has aged the worst - while they share the blame for influenced hair metal with Led Zeppelin, they offer in place of muscular guitar riffs the cheesy timbre of electric organ, dunderheaded mysticism, and sweaty self-importance. Jim Morrison's mysterious death doesn't really hold sway the way it once dead since we've gone through whole generations of Kurt Cobains and Elliott Smiths since then. In a world of consequence, the bad boy swagger Morrison had is no longer really held in reverence. It's just Vegas lounge lizard chicanery speckled with dried flecks of peyote vomit.

This is a horribly dated album. On top of that, the list's entry for it namedrops her stepfather, Don Cherry, despite not having a single album by him or his bandleader, Ornette Coleman, on the list. What is this garbage? Why isn't there a single album from the founder of free jazz but there's this dated, obnoxious, late-80s rap album from one of his bandmembers' step daughter? Can we get someone who knows something about music to curate this stupid list?

Some terrible skits hold back a pretty great pop/r&b album

Pretty middle of the road for Radiohead with a few standout moments.

Absolutely fantastic album. Five stars. Gets a pretty regular rotation from me.

Overall a better album than L.A. Woman, but The Doors are still a heavily overrated band.

While Nebraska eschews some of the cheesy trappings of later Springsteen - the horns, the over-production - it doesn't completely avoid all of the stylistic missteps of his sound. The characteristic dusty, breathy vocal style that would define a whole generation of singer-songwriters, not just Springsteen - but also Rod Stewart, Bryan Adams, John Mellencamp, and even Tom Waits at some of his more saccharine moments and the overly serious small-town troubadour songwriting style are still there. As a standalone album, it's one of the strongest of Springsteen's career, but I can't get back the overall flaws of his sound to see him as anything more than bland momrock. While he's across the board a better songwriter than Bob Seger, he loses when it comes to production choices, hook writing, and general timbre - and Bob Seger is not a highwater mark.

It's good, but From the Choirgirl Hotel is the album that should represent Tori Amos's discography on an essentials list.

I wasn't expecting the You're So Physical band to sound like analog Animal Collective.

Please no more bland indie

A perfect example of an older album that should be cut to make room for newer releases. The album The Monkees wrote themselves because they wanted to be taken seriously as musicians? So?

I just got generated Mudhoney's excellent Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge only to find its global ranking to be under three. I fully expect this album, like every Zep album, to be a high three or perhaps a four on the global ranking. I honestly find this absurd. I can't believe any thought goes into the lionization of Led Zeppelin's catalog. It really feels like an emperor's new clothes situation to me. I haven't heard a single Zep album as good as Mudhoney's Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge.

Having heard this album plenty of times already, I'll pass on listening to it again... forever.

What even is this? This sounds like Nurse With Wound's Huffin' Rag Blues, but minus all the experimentation and humor. It's just a cavalcade of jazz vomit. Nothing sounds terrible, but it's like AI-generated art. The closer you look at it, the more it just reveals itself to be nothing.

I got excited when I saw this album generated, but then I realized I got the Everly Brothers mixed up with the Righteous Brothers, and then my excitement faded.

No one needs to hear this. This is just knockoff Robin Hitchcock.

An album so good that I'm sure it won't crack 3.0.

Kind of a boring album from a band that would release three nearly perfect to perfect albums later in their career. This is pretty much carried by Psycho Killer, but it's still worthwhile to hear the origins of one of the best bands of the 80s.

How many boring Paul Weller albums are on this damn thing?

Are you fucking kidding me? Arcade Fire is boring garbage. I'm so sick of getting generated two star albums.

You cannot convince me that this isn't another Paul Weller project.

After the run of 2's this list has given me this past week, this low 3 sounds like a goddam masterpiece.

Do I really have to listen to a neo-funk album from that white band led by the lame guy in the cheesy hat? How is this one of the 1001 most essential albums of all time? Have these people listened to music? There is music out there. Music worth listening to. Music that isn't this. No one goes to a garbage dump and reviews the mounds of trash. This is absurd. No one passes off rotting meat as culinary greatness. Who compiled this? Who conceived of this? Who thought this garbage was noteworthy? Not music fans. Not people who spend time listening to music outside the top 40. Not people who have listened to thousands of artists and tens of thousands of albums. This is essential to people who think Dave Mathews is impressive. Is this terrible? No. Is this noteworthy? Absolutely, positively, unequivocally, fuck no.

As great as The Who are, they have major a problem with filler, and this album is one of the worst examples of it.

Ha! No. Somewhat pleasant but forgettable low three.

Probably the most iconic Roxy Music cover art, but as far as the music goes, it lacks the highlights many of the other albums have. It's good - Roxy Music has a certain level of quality - but it's not one of the band's best.

Chali 2na has one of the best voices in hip-hop, but this is overall pretty unexciting.

Slipknot blew up when I was already outgrowing my nu-metal phase, so my exposure to them was entirely through their radio singles and edgy imagery. Blending Korn's angst with Manson's shock rock and ratcheting up the white trash didn't do it for me then, and it doesn't do it for me now. It's not the worst album from this era on this list, but it doesn't deserve to be on this list over a Deftones album.

One of the greatest albums ever recorded, period. (Be My Wife is a lame track, but otherwise... perfection.)

A little too sleepy IMO, but not unpleasant.

This is so far the best Paul Weller project this list has forced on me, and it's still pretty meh. It's like a mix of an Elvis Costello who is a worse songwriter with an XTC that has less interesting instrumentation.

Arguably the worst album on the list. I've spent a lot of time questioning the legitimacy of this list based on some of the inclusions, omissions, and the general approach to updating the list, but this album goes beyond pretty much every other questionable choice to such a degree that it feels like self-parody. The cultural impact of this album is only negative.

There's a couple solid riffs on this album, but it's mostly unmemorable, and I can't help but wonder if it's in part because of the production, which softens and muffles everything. This is an album that would benefit from sharp edges and crunchy textures, but there's this gentle reverb on everything that mushes everything together. It feels like they tried to hard to make it radio palatable and by doing so, made it sound like something that wouldn't stand out on the radio.

What is up with this list giving multiple listings to one hit wonder bands? These guys should not have three slots when the only song by them anyone knows is Come On Eileen. Hell, that one song doesn't earn a whole slot by itself. This is pretty blah.

Rod Stewart is awful, boomers.

Whoever put this in over Zen Arcade is a fucking idiot.

Much better than the other Elliott Smith album on here, but way too long.

I'm kind of shocked I didn't hate this. The singles are overplayed garbo, but there are a couple of decent deep cuts on here that make up for them.

Traffic pleasantly surprised me. This... this is horrible. Tepid arrangements and ugly synth pads make this yet another embarrassing entry in this shoddy list.

The only thing worse than cheesy butt rock wankery is cheesy butt rock wankery with cheesier synths.

I always found this album to be kind of overrated and unnecessarily vulgar compared to Tender Prey, Henry's Dream and Let Love In. It has some absolute bangers, that goes without saying, but I would put it slightly lower than some of the other greats from this era. It also reduced Cave's songwriting to be kind of one note with every song being about the same subject matter. Good album, but not top tier Cave.

Why?

Another bizarre choice - why this album over the far superior Electro-Shock Blues? It's not bad, but it's not the one.

George Michael is basically the low rent Prince, but even the low rent Prince isn't that bad. I wouldn't seek this album out, but I don't hate it.

This has aged painfully.

Clapton's musical career was a steady decline from the highs of Cream. This album, like the rest of his solo discography, is tepid and boring.

Do the authors of this list feel that every random album to make a blip on the radar of pop culture deserves mention? This cheesed out dweeb rock is so bad.

Costello's best album.

How do you rate an album that has one incredibly great song and a series of painfully cheesy deep cuts emulating some sort of Vaudeville style that was never not a misstep?

Ugh. Another album I haven't listened to since I was like 15, but unlike Kid Rock, I felt like I owed it a refresher since Wes Borland's Big Dumb Face side project has a really good album under its belt. It's kind of amazing how little charisma Fred Durst has. "Aggressive bro whining" really shouldn't be a thing that exists. While Kid Rock swims in a cesspit that matches his tobacco spit personality, Durst lowers the quality of some mid-tier grooves that could have otherwise been saved with a better frontman and some better production.

So boring it makes Coldplay sound exciting.

Is this the music they play during intermissions in AM radio broadcasts of baseball games?

A little dated, and not as good overall as Jilted Generation but it's got some bops.

The metal choices on this list all feel like the contributors haven't listened to a metal album in 25 years. It has big "how do you do, fellow kids" energy. This album, though, is one of the best metal albums to grace this list. Unlike the hordes of painfully obvious inclusions, dated choices, and household names, this album continues to hold up. Five stars.

Not bad, but I prefer Robyn Hitchcock's solo stuff.