1001 Albums Summary

Excellent album. Excellent moods. Seamless movement from expression to expression and every instrument contributing in a way that makes them each stand out on their own and yet somehow simultaneously get lost in a blend that is something infinitely more than the sum of those parts. Something approximating the music a rat might hear when they trying cheese and grapes together.

Holy shit this album. I had the misfortune of being born after the Beastie Boys heyday but I still felt their influence in pop culture throughout the entirety of the nineties. I don't know what I USED to think about them, but I do know it wasn't a critical or thoughtful opinion. This is the first album of theirs that I've seriously listened to all the way through and I'm just fucking blown away. The influences and styles they've managed to wrap up in this album are just wild - every track feels completely new but still connected to the previous track. I've seen complaints about the runtime but honestly it feels perfect to me. Through this album alone I've been convinced not only of the magnitude of the Beastie Boys' impact on hip-hop, but of the sheer sickness of the group itself.

God damn what an album. Every song is varied and yet fit together excellently. Her voice seems to add something different to every single track. It's one of those albums where as soon as you try to think of your favorite track, a small part of the first track to naturally pop into your head - maybe a specific rhythm, an interval, an instrument, the tempo, anything - reminds you of another equally good track, which then reminds you of a third, and so on until you've gone through every track and returned to the first one again. And you can do so many such loops because every time a track pops into your head you identify a new aspect of it that you liked.

Whoa, I've actually heard one of these songs before! A radio cut of Dominion got a lot of play on my hometown rock station in the 90s. The kind of play that makes you think these dudes made exactly one good song and made knowing the name of the artist useful literally only for pub trivia purposes. Pleasantly surprised to have enjoyed the whole album. It scratched a dark, almost gothy rock itch that hadn't been scratched since I last hung out in the garage listening to the radio with my dad while he drank Buds and worked on his motorcycle.