This album is every bit as enjoyable as I thought it was when it was originally released. Which is to say - not very. The longer the album goes on the more it becomes something akin to an aural military endurance test. About half way through I’m tapping out with the same ferocity as I would if I found myself in a Ronda Rousey arm bar inside the octagon. I love the concluding statement on the write up from the book… “So did this angry, twisted music do anything positive? It certainly made a truckload of money.” If that is your take - why the hell put it in the book? If I am being completely fair - Freak on a Leash is definitely a unique sound that lended itself to a lot of other music and I shouldn’t discount that simply because that particular sound is almost certainly the soundtrack in my own personal version of Hell. Still - the “beat box/scatting” is atrocious and I’ll die on that hill.

Every song on this album sounds like it should be the soundtrack underneath a montage of a complicated character in an indie film walking through the streets of their city at night as dawn breaks while figuring out their purpose/finding peace.

While this isn’t something I’ll likely listen to again anytime soon, I do appreciate how evocative and thought provoking some of their lyrics are. “Three Great Alabama Icons” definitely lead me on a rabbit hole of researching the band and their perspective on things. I don’t agree with the notion that we should praise George Wallace for eventually coming around to a perspective that I think should be the bare minimum for a decent human being, but they did present their perspective fairly and honestly & it definitely made me think - which is what good political/protest music does.

3 Years doesn’t get the credit it deserves when talking about all time great albums - even when I make my own lists, it doesn’t always pop right up despite being a forefather of southern hip hop and my personal gateway to music meaning something, sharing history, & meaningful stories. Prior to this my idea of hip hop was Beastie Boys, M.C. Hammer, Vanilla Ice, & DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. License to Ill remains my favorite hip hop album ever, but it’s mostly about being rebellious and partying and the others were more “pop” radio hits that are fun, but didn’t contain a lot of substance. 3 Years…came along and addressed issues like slavery & homelessness in the black community and opened up my eyes as a white kid in a rural area to issues I hadn’t given much attention to - and they did so using music that still felt upbeat and optimistic. I don’t want to use too much hyperbole to overstate the importance of this album to my personal growth, but it is the perfect middle ground between the clean mainstream rap like “U Can’t Touch This” and “Parents Just Don’t Understand” and the “The Chronic” that came later that same year. It was clean, but it was real and raw and made a difference.

This album has not aged well. It made me cringe in a couple of places while listening with my 12 year old son. Has a couple of great songs.

Interesting. Little Fury Things is an excellent opening track.

While this isn’t something I’ll likely listen to again anytime soon, I do appreciate how evocative and thought provoking some of their lyrics are. “Three Great Alabama Icons” definitely lead me on a rabbit hole of researching the band and their perspective on things. I don’t agree with the notion that we should praise George Wallace for eventually coming around to a perspective that I think should be the bare minimum for a decent human being, but they did present their perspective fairly and honestly & it definitely made me think - which is what good political/protest music does.

I don’t know enough about genre to know how influential or important this genre is. It’s not really my type of vibe personally - but it’s kinda funky I guess. :)

I had forgotten how much I love Stankonia. It’s amazing how frantic and up beat it is, but at the same time functions as chill background music.

The quality is a lot higher than I imagined it would be. My only tiny negative is that it largely sounds the same all the way through, but that’s just music from that era.

Such good stuff. There is such passion and honesty in the blues and this just drives from the opening note. Unapologetic and timeless greatness.

This album is every bit as enjoyable as I thought it was when it was originally released. Which is to say - not very. The longer the album goes on the more it becomes something akin to an aural military endurance test. About half way through I’m tapping out with the same ferocity as I would if I found myself in a Ronda Rousey arm bar inside the octagon. I love the concluding statement on the write up from the book… “So did this angry, twisted music do anything positive? It certainly made a truckload of money.” If that is your take - why the hell put it in the book? If I am being completely fair - Freak on a Leash is definitely a unique sound that lended itself to a lot of other music and I shouldn’t discount that simply because that particular sound is almost certainly the soundtrack in my own personal version of Hell. Still - the “beat box/scatting” is atrocious and I’ll die on that hill.

3 Years doesn’t get the credit it deserves when talking about all time great albums - even when I make my own lists, it doesn’t always pop right up despite being a forefather of southern hip hop and my personal gateway to music meaning something, sharing history, & meaningful stories. Prior to this my idea of hip hop was Beastie Boys, M.C. Hammer, Vanilla Ice, & DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince. License to Ill remains my favorite hip hop album ever, but it’s mostly about being rebellious and partying and the others were more “pop” radio hits that are fun, but didn’t contain a lot of substance. 3 Years…came along and addressed issues like slavery & homelessness in the black community and opened up my eyes as a white kid in a rural area to issues I hadn’t given much attention to - and they did so using music that still felt upbeat and optimistic. I don’t want to use too much hyperbole to overstate the importance of this album to my personal growth, but it is the perfect middle ground between the clean mainstream rap like “U Can’t Touch This” and “Parents Just Don’t Understand” and the “The Chronic” that came later that same year. It was clean, but it was real and raw and made a difference.

Not something I’m likely to listen to often, but I can appreciate it’s importance within it’s genre.

It’s fine…not particularly my thing.

I tried playing "Songs From a Room" in the background while doing my morning routine and quickly learned that Leonard Cohen isn't really suited for that. I dig that his songs tells stories, I wish more modern artists would do that. The problem for me is that his vocal tone doesn't exactly make me want to sit down and really take them in. If an album is going to require me to focus on nothing else - it has to have something that draws me in and engages me. Cohen's monotone drawl doesn't do that for me. Like Bob Dylan, his song writing genius is undeniable but the listening experience is so polarizing that you're either into the extremely stylized sound or you're not.

Not something that I'm likely to listen to a lot, but it definitely rocks.

If “License to Ill” is “Meet the Beatles”, then “Paul’s Boutique” is “Sgt Pepper’s.” 
License to Ill is more easily digestible, fun, and in the best way possible, safe listening experience. It takes me back to a very particular place and I remember playing it over and over as a kid. Now 30+ years later as an adult, I can still do that without tiring of it. Paul’s Boutique is the more artistic and edgy album and takes risks. Those risks didn’t pay off at the time as the album was a commercial and critical failure, but listening to it now the experimental and ballsy quality of the writing shows the Beastie Boys growl as a band. They were moving from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and the changes in perspective after the success of License to Ill definitely shines out and seems daring even when it doesn’t always make for the most enjoyable listening experience. It serves as a love letter to their hometown. Like most letters written after the fact, it romanticizes things in different way than we did when we were there. License to Ill will always be my go to Beastie Boys album, primarily because of it’s simplicity, familiarity and fun. (Girls not withstanding, but the band has addressed that problematic like product of its era). That doesn’t take anything away from Paul’s Boutique though which is a brilliant album with influences you can easily hear in the works of Lin Manuel Miranda, Eminem, & even Jay-Z. There is plenty of room for both, and like the Beatles albums - the differences hidden within the similarities is part of what makes these albums great.

This is a good summer evening chilling in the backyard, roasting marshmallows on fire pit and swatting away mosquitos as they treat you like a human buffet album.

Really, really didn't age well. Oh well, 10 year old me will always love it.

Every song on this album sounds like it should be the soundtrack underneath a montage of a complicated character in an indie film walking through the streets of their city at night as dawn breaks while figuring out their purpose/finding peace.

As I am listing now I am remembering why this album doesn't rank higher for me. Musically - it's a brilliant & extremely complex album - that is apparent. It definitely isn't as easy to just put on and enjoy as Debut or Post. I think it's clear that she was in a certain headspace after doing *Dancer in the Dark* and Vespertine stays a bit more somber and subdued and doesn't reach the more manic highs of the previous 3 releases - and that's what I always loved most about Bjork.

This may very well be the least appealing album yet on this list… and I listened to Korn.

An oldie but a…meh.

If there is Punk Muzak genre, this album would be the Sgt Peppers. It was fine and harmless - which is not how I want my punk music.

Didn’t really do it for me. More like a 2.5, but I was expecting to love it.

Can definitely understand how influential and important this album is. It probably won’t be my go to ambient album in 2021, but the ones I would go to likely wouldn’t be here without this.

Nope. Not remotely interested and was also out off by the “how many girls out there want a little Irish in them?” line. I find it difficult to like and respect that sort of tone in 2021.

Excellent album.

Not something I’m likely to go out of my way to listen to again, but it was interesting.

I enjoyed the more mellow tracks like Just Like Honey, Cut Dead, Sowing Seeds, My Little Underground, but the harder stuff like The Living End, In A Hole, etc I didn’t like as much. Overall, it’s just not my kind of thing, but I can 100% understand how this album would be very influential for a lot of punk and grunge bands and all that.

Thriller is such an iconic album that it is almost difficult to separate it from the heights. That said, it is an incredible album and I think it firmly deserves its place in the top 25 or so of the most influential/significant albums of all time.

Frank Sinatra is almost impossible to critique, but I'll make an attempt. This is a very enjoyable album with a very calming jazz samba vibe combined with Old Blue Eyes crooning. Though I will say that no one really needs to bother with "The Girl from Ipanema" as the Getz/Gilberto version is pretty much perfect as is - and we definitely don't need 47 different versions of it. It got a little tedious towards the end.

Metal is not my genre and this album does nothing to change that. It sounds very cliche to me and is largely in distinguishable from most of the other metal albums from that are. I respect their place in music history and acknowledge that there are intricacies that I might not get, but I don't find it particularly enjoyable.

Despite being a child of the 90s, I had never heard of this band or album. It was fine, but didn't particularly stand out for me. I'm not super well educated in Brit Pop but I can think of a lot of albums from that era that I did enjoy more than this one. Almost certainly a case if I had heard this 25 years ago I'd feel differently.

I enjoyed this album well enough. Lyrically, it felt ahead of its time..."Machines disregard my pronouns" as a lyric in 1984 is astonishingly relevant in 2022. At 75 minutes I could do with a little bit less of it, by the end it was starting to border on boring/tedious. If the album had started around track 22 or so, I think I'd have rated it a little higher.

This album is literally what I think of when I hear the word funk. I can't really describe it beyond, "it is just so funky". Great album.

I had never heard this and actually enjoyed it quite a bit more than I thought I would. I'm not sure I'm ever going to seek it out, but it was far more enjoyable than some of the other albums I've discovered this week.

I realize that I'm in the minority on this, but I absolutely despise the quality/tone of Leonard Cohen's voice and this album did nothing to sway me on that fact. I just put this album and it had that 80s sort of synth vibe and I was like, "Oh this is pretty cool." And then the frog croak of "They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom..." came jarring in like Fran Drescher in an otherwise quiet room... and I remembered. A few times a song started and I was like, "Oh, I might like this one, it sounds pret...nope, there he is again." I realize he is a legend, and the lyrics are interesting, but this is 100% not for me.

It was fine.

I wouldn't call myself a huge Tina Turner fan, but this album was a fun listen. The hits are always fun even though I don't particularly have a huge amount of nostalgia for them. Also, points for having a black cat on the cover!

The hits on this album really hold up the rest of it. It started to feel a lot longer than 39 minutes by the end. It did seem appropriate that the last track on the album is titled "Just Go Away" though.

This album isn't bad. Love the opening track. It could stand to be about 15 minutes shorter though.

I want pizza.

This started out interesting and proceeded to being weirder and weirder as it went on. I don't recall the last time I was so uncertain whether or not I even liked an album. There is no cohesion to this album whatsoever as one track would have a Beck vibe followed by a spoken word in Shakespearean style and then back to a Leonard Cohen sort of vibe. That sounds a lot cooler than it actually ended up being for me. I'd put this somewhere between a 2 and a 3 if I could.

Enjoyable album. I don't have a ton of nostalgia for this in particularly which I think would have maybe bumped it up to a 4.

I'm definitely familiar with the hits, but I don't think I ever sat down and just listened to this album I've always enjoyed them though. It does seem like they got popular and then became a meme to shit on a little bit from the "cool kids", I think a lot of people have come back around and realized that they aren't bad.

This is pure nostalgia for me and it turns out may also have been the origin album for my new found love of Trip Hop. Ray of Light, Frozen, etc are among my favorite Madonna songs. Post-Evita Madonna with this album and Music is peak Madonna for me. Also, creeper - this isn't a 3, so SMD!

;)

Buffalo Stance is a nostalgia grenade for me, but the rest of the album didn’t particularly stand out as anything more than fine.