Journey Complete!
Finisher # to complete the list
1045
Albums Rated
2.95
Average Rating
96%
Complete
Rating Distribution
Rating Timeline
Taste Profile
1990s
Favorite Decade
Soul
Favorite Genre
other
Top Origin
Perfectionist
Rater Style ?
36
5-Star Albums
1
1-Star Albums
Breakdown
By Genre
By Decade
By Origin
Albums
You Love More Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Atomizer | 5 | 2.72 | +2.28 |
| Histoire De Melody Nelson | 5 | 2.75 | +2.25 |
| The New Tango | 5 | 2.88 | +2.12 |
| D.O.A. the Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle | 4 | 1.88 | +2.12 |
| Leftism | 5 | 2.9 | +2.1 |
| Music Has The Right To Children | 5 | 2.91 | +2.09 |
| Behaviour | 5 | 3.04 | +1.96 |
| Hejira | 5 | 3.13 | +1.87 |
| Actually | 5 | 3.18 | +1.82 |
| Selected Ambient Works 85-92 | 5 | 3.21 | +1.79 |
You Love Less Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Led Zeppelin IV | 2 | 4.36 | -2.36 |
| The Wall | 2 | 4.14 | -2.14 |
| Rage Against The Machine | 2 | 4 | -2 |
| Led Zeppelin III | 2 | 3.96 | -1.96 |
| Electric Ladyland | 2 | 3.95 | -1.95 |
| Cosmo's Factory | 2 | 3.93 | -1.93 |
| The Stranger | 2 | 3.86 | -1.86 |
| Ananda Shankar | 1 | 2.83 | -1.83 |
| In Utero | 2 | 3.83 | -1.83 |
| At San Quentin | 2 | 3.8 | -1.8 |
Artists
Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Miles Davis | 4 | 4.5 |
| Stevie Wonder | 4 | 4.5 |
| Pet Shop Boys | 3 | 4.67 |
| Depeche Mode | 2 | 5 |
| Radiohead | 6 | 4 |
| Prince | 3 | 4.33 |
| Kraftwerk | 3 | 4.33 |
Least Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Deep Purple | 3 | 2 |
| Yes | 3 | 2 |
| Van Morrison | 3 | 2 |
| Kings of Leon | 3 | 2 |
| Morrissey | 4 | 2.25 |
Controversial
| Artist | Ratings |
|---|---|
| Joni Mitchell | 2, 2, 5, 4 |
| Pink Floyd | 5, 3, 4, 2 |
5-Star Albums (36)
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Popular Reviews
The Mothers Of Invention
2/5
Aggressively juvenile. I guess once had to be there to get the joke. I wasn't, and I don't
16 likes
Jimi Hendrix
2/5
To describe an album as being full of album cuts seems ungenerous (as well as illogical). But there we have it. Lots of noodles and doodling, some esoteric songwriting, but nothing of note, really.
9 likes
Miles Davis
5/5
Do I have to do this? Yes, I will do this. This is the album that changed my life, and that still surprises me anew every so often.
Of the many things I have learnt (thus far) from In A Silent Way, the most influential was the presence of the edit as a live instrument. The raw material was recorded in a three hour session; Miles and Macero did not rearrange it as much as reconceptualize it, conjuring something that clearly belonged to the source but said something different altogether. One gets the sense of working through a maze in the dark: there is a destination, but experimentation, muscle memory and optimism are the only things that can take you to that end point.
It is an exaggeration to say that if I had to chose my Desert Island Discs, I'd take eight copies of this one. But I would be quite happy with this alone, should it come to it.
5 likes
American Music Club
2/5
Q were always crushing over Mark Eitzel and AMC. Also Karl Wallinger and World Party Thing is, without radio play, there was little to no way of figuring out what they were like.
Now I know. Judging from this, they weren't really worth the wait. For me, that is. Perfectly competent tv movie soundtrack music.
3 likes
4-Star Albums (181)
1-Star Albums (1)
All Ratings
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
and "Dancing in the Dark", the last to be recorded, on February 14, 1984. The latter was written overnight, after co-producer Jon Landau convinced Springsteen that the album needed a single. According to Dave Marsh in Glory Days, Springsteen was not impressed with Landau's approach. "Look," he snarled, "I've written 70 songs. You want another one, you write it." After blowing off some steam, Springsteen came in the next day with the entire song written.
Marsh, Dave. Glory Days. Pantheon.
Born in the U.S.A. became the first compact disc manufactured in the United States for commercial release when CBS and Sony opened its CD manufacturing plant in Terre Haute, Indiana in September 1984.
Wikipedia
Dusty Springfield
4/5
However, the album's best-known track, "Son of a Preacher Man", was not among these, and was originally written with the idea of submitting it to Aretha Franklin. (Franklin cut her own version of the song in 1969 after Springfield's single reached the #10 position in the Billboard Hot 100.)
The recording was a challenge for Wexler. In his book Rhythm and the Blues, Wexler wrote that out of all the songs that were initially submitted to Springfield for consideration, "she approved exactly zero." For her, he continued, "to say yes to one song was seen as a lifetime commitment."[9] Springfield disputed this, saying she did choose two: "Son of a Preacher Man" and "Just a Little Lovin'".[10] He was surprised, given Dusty's talent, by her apparent insecurity. Springfield later attributed her initial unease to a very real anxiety about being compared with the soul greats who had recorded in the same studios. Eventually Dusty's final vocals were recorded in New York.[11] Additionally, Springfield stated that she had never before worked with just a rhythm track, and that it was the first time she had worked with outside producers, having self-produced her previous recordings (something for which she never took credit).
During the Memphis sessions in November 1968, Springfield suggested to the heads of Atlantic Records that they should sign the newly formed Led Zeppelin group. She knew the band's bass player John Paul Jones, who had backed her in concerts before. Without having ever seen them and largely on Dusty's advice,[12] the record company signed the group with a $143,000 advance.
(Mick Wall (2005). "No Way Out": 83.)
Despite modest sales, it was the first of a small wave of "in Memphis"-style albums that were recorded by pop singers at American Recording Studios.
Nina Simone
3/5
Funkadelic
3/5
Popular music scholar Yuval Taylor described it as "a burning hot prefiguring" of the music that Miles Davis would perform on his 1975 live album Agharta.
Other sources say the title is a reference to band leader George Clinton finding his brother's "decomposed dead body, skull cracked, in a Chicago apartment."
According to legend, the 10-minute title track was recorded in one take when Clinton, under the influence of LSD, told guitarist Eddie Hazel to play as if he had been told his mother was dead
The cover artwork depicts a screaming black woman's head coming out of the earth; it was photographed by Joel Brodsky and features model Barbara Cheeseborough
In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked Maggot Brain #486 on the magazine's list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, with the magazine raising its rank in 2012 to #479, calling it "the heaviest rock album the P-Funk ever created". In the 2020 reboot of the list, the album's rank shot up to #136.
Cyndi Lauper
3/5
Bob Dylan
3/5
The Who
2/5
Garbage
3/5
Shirley Manson had been performing with the Edinburgh-based rock band Goodbye Mr Mackenzie since 1984. In 1993, several of the members, including Manson, formed the side project Angelfish. Their only studio album, the self-titled Angelfish, was as commercially unsuccessful as preceding albums by Goodbye Mr Mackenzie, selling only 10,000 copies.
Initial sessions with Vig on vocals and the members' past work with all-male groups led to the band's desire for a woman on lead.
Marker was watching 120 Minutes when he saw the one-time airing of the music video for Angelfish's "Suffocate Me". He showed the video to Erikson and Vig while their manager, Shannon O'Shea, tracked Manson down. When Manson was contacted, she didn't know who Vig was and was urged to check the credits on Nirvana's album Nevermind, which Vig had produced. On April 8, 1994, Manson met Erikson, Marker and Vig for the first time in London. Later that evening Vig was informed of Kurt Cobain's suicide
Garbage continued to work on the album throughout the start of 1995, delayed by Vig's work producing Soul Asylum's Let Your Dim Light Shine album and the songs being "piecemealed together in the studio". Vig described the composing process as a "dysfunctional democracy" where someone would bring a loop or a sample, which was followed by jam sessions in which the band members would "find one bar that's kind of cool, load that into our samplers, jam on top of that, [and] Shirley will ad-lib", with the process continuing until the song was finished, often with "all of the original ideas gone, and the song had somehow mutated into something completely different." Among the songs that were completely reworked, "As Heaven Is Wide" went from "a big rock track" to a techno-style song with Tom Jones-inspired beats, only keeping Erikson's fuzz bass and Manson's vocals from the original recording
Jerry Lee Lewis
4/5
Incendiary!
Elvis Costello
2/5
Megadeth
2/5
Not that it is bad per se. But, like, Masters of Puppets covered this territory almost a decade earlier. Underwhelmed.
Can
3/5
Choose your own (aural) adventure…
ZZ Top
4/5
Huh. Bit off piste here. Pleasant surprise
LL Cool J
3/5
“I want a girl with extensions” (Around the Way Girl).
Boy, nothing dates the album like this. (Although, to be fair, the diversity of hair clip use these days could give this line a new lease of life…)
The very conservative use of samples and loops makes me realise, belatedly, that this album was pointed directly at the mainstream. Got there just in time too - The Chronic and Gangster Rap reshaped that landscape just a year or so later…)
On the whole, a period piece rather than a classic. Mama Said Knock You Out
is still banging, tho…
The Replacements
3/5
Neil Young
3/5
Carrie Snodgrass. That's a blast from the past. Ambulance Blues stands up with the best of Young's work.
I got this on CD not long after it had (finally) been re-released. It was already been discounted heavily, which was a surprise. At first.
If (a huge counterfactual here) Youtube had been around a decade earlier, would this record have attained a cult status? I think not. It's not quite the digression from the commerciality (bestowed retrospectively) of Harvest, it's a rather middling endeavour. But scarcity created a sense of value.
The Mars Volta
3/5
One to return to. Intriguing, if noisy
Alice In Chains
3/5
Q: what sets Nevermind (and, perhaps, Ten) apart from the rest of the Grunge crowd?
A: It’s pretty hard imagining an R n B cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit.
This is not a diss of 90s RnB, much of which I liked. The point is that much of it, and 90s HipHop, was producer-driven brilliance. So too Grunge, but lacking the brill bit.
The drums on Dirt are fucking fantastic, the guitars intriguing, and Layne Staney’s voice would carry anyone for an age. But it’s at least 60% producer wizardry, isn’t it?
(If I were more committed to this task, I’ll search out the demos for this. But there’s only so much time in the world…)
Imagine SWV or Aaliyah hitting Would? :)
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
2/5
This is quite frustrating. I've spent my life happily untroubled by the need to justify my dislike for Elvis Costello. And then I get two of his albums in a week.
There is an important place for irrational loathing in this world – mainly the fact that one never feels motivated to act on it. Having struggled through this milquetoast offering, I now have the distinct urge to kill an ant or something equally unpleasant.
(Note to self.) I generally do not pay attention to lyrics. Too intellectual a response. I need my my music to grab my by the short and curlies, to drag me down to uncharted emotional depths. Searing guitars, plaintive voices (not lyrics, mind: voices), bone-juddering bass lines, ethereal chants: All have done the trick in the past, all will do so in the future.
I'm sort of tempted to listen to this again, just to see if there is anything in the word arrangement that justifies the foolishness people express about Mr C. But this may make me even angrier yet. So no.
The Temptations
3/5
So-so. Inoffensive, a little dull. The wikipedia entry for the album was more entertaining. (i.e. didn't know that Gladys Knight and the Pips were first on the slate with I Heard It Through the Grapevine. As for the performance shenanigans of the Dennis Edwards era...life is sometimes more scandalous that fiction.)
The Specials
3/5
So...I'm going to have to (at least slightly) revise my opinion on Elvis Costello, given that he produced this album.
It is a period piece, true, but a fairly good one. Odd thing about this is that it is easy to be pessimistic about the state of the nation etc. But even it its pessimism, stuff like ska actually pointed out other viable possibilities, an organic reorganisation of the order of the day.
The point is to remember this, and not what the naysayers have to say. They always have something to say. Most of it is useless.
Radiohead
4/5
Q: What's better, The Bends or OK Computer?
A: Kid A
Which isn't entirely fair...on OK Computer. But that's by the point
What one often forgets is that Radiohead are a *brave* outfit. They're restless, adventurous, and have never been afraid to explore new territory. Which is saying something for a band of five guys who've been making music for 30 years.
This is their last *explicitly* commercial album. Not in the sense that they aren't in the business of scoring and retaining a hold on a distinct fanbase (I think every musician wants this – its always a matter of scale, rather than intentions), but rather that they've worked from instinct rather critique ever since.
I always think that the transition occurs somewhere between High and Dry and Street Spirit (Fade Out). The former is serviceable, but it's music making by supervision – where are the hit singles, etc. The latter isn't very far away from it, but it's much looser, less constrained, more ... real?
It hasn't always been a smooth upwards trajectory ever since (Hail to the Thief and King of Limbs both have notable bad patches). But its been their own journey ever since The Bends
Barry Adamson
3/5
John Cale
3/5
Indifferent, to be honest. Quite excited to *rediscover* Chris Thomas, though. Had no idea that he produced songs on the White Album, for instance. Sounds like quite an affable chap. (I suppose one would have to be to work with Pink Floyd. Writs and all that.)
R.E.M.
4/5
Did a REM binge a while ago, so this is still relatively fresh in the conscious mind. It's a bit of a bridge album – doesn't have the fresh looseness of their first few albums, and the songwriting feels a bit forced. But it is better than Green, which I (personally) think is the weakest of their pre AFTP albums.
Anyway. I only now found out that Jefferson Holt got the boot for what may have been an alleged#MeToo situation. It seems that he got our learned friends to keep the matter nice and quiet. Shows how much my thinking has moved on from them days. I always assumed he'd be fast and loose with the double entry ledger...
REM and "College Rock" will always be synonymous in my head. Unwashed, unshaved, reeking of stale beer and cheap aftershave. The audience, that is. I do not say this mockingly. I got to REM at a slightly more advanced stage in my evolution, but I had been that dude. Just with different music.
Shack
3/5
You know, Comedy is one of my all time favourite singles, and it really breaks my heart that the album doesn't get anywhere close to it. They set the bar too high, they did. So it goes.
The Cramps
4/5
Oh this is so joyful.
The Clash
3/5
The xx
3/5
It’s a good album, it’s different to most stuff of the time. But it kinda sets itself an almost impossible task with the opening track, which is a killer and a half, before becoming distinctly domesticated. It is what it is, I suppose.
Les Rythmes Digitales
2/5
Well. Le Cont is Stuart Price. Which makes that shtick an extremely worthwhile proof-of-concept.
Still didn’t like it, tho.
Pixies
4/5
I quite like the fact that Ken Norton produced both The Pixies and Busted.
(Wikipedia quite charmingly describes Busted a a punk band. O tempora, o mores...)
Fleetwood Mac
3/5
I guess you had to be there to get it. 'Chains' earns it a lot of goodwill, though. Ok, the second half of chains. The ‘Top Gear’ bit.
And that skateboard song too. Laidback and fuck. But otherwise, the album is largely caterwauling for a live studio audience.
Taylor Swift
2/5
The Swedish album. ABBA (who I love) have a lot to answer for.
A quick poll of a few teenagers who were in the sweet spot for this album when it was released: they remember nothing.
Pop, good Pop at least, must be memorable and enduring. This album fails on the second count. (I’ll pass on the first.) Nobody argues if the new Taylor Swift album is better than the last, because no one remembers the last. (This may be a failing of autobiographical Pop too…)
Talking Heads
4/5
Dire Straits
4/5
If I ever needed reminding that I was a teenage Tory, then this is it. In my defence, my location and surroundings made this more or less inevitable. At my school, the furthest left anyone would have been would have been fair bit to the right of, say, Bill Clinton. (Some of us who relocated Stateside would have enthusiastically voted for him in 1992. And I'm not saying that this is (necessarily) a bad thing, but, you know. Youth. Radical politics. etc. Not on our register).
it holds up pretty well. Some absolute AOR (to borrow an Americanism) classics here, like The Man's Too Strong. And, I mean, this was more cutting edge than Christopher Cross. And in the somewhat privileged West African milieu I inhabited back in the day, guitar Rock was a fucking radical thing to enjoy.
(Note. Yes, I listened to Police, and Prince, and Depeche Mode, and the Pet Shop Boys, and Kraftwerk, in 1985. Favourites then, still favourites now.)
(Also in my defence. Brothers in Arms was a gateway drug to Def Leppard, then Metallica, then Anthrax, then Industrial, then Einstürzende Neubaten, then Nick Cave etc etc. No, not a gateway drug to REO Speedwagon and Journey. Anyway, just saying that some good did come out of this album for me, via one of my many make-your-own-adventure musical lifetimes .)
The Beach Boys
2/5
God that was dull
Tears For Fears
4/5
Belle & Sebastian
3/5
The Kinks
3/5
well. You know. Waterloo Sunset.
Nick Drake
3/5
Is it me, or is Poor Boy the proof-of-concept for Screamadelica?
Suede
3/5
Circa 1993, it was impossible to read Q and not have a nuanced, often contradictory opinion about Suede. (NME and Select readers, accustomed to being told what to think, had no opinions worth noting.)
On the balance, Suede were not the collective Messiah. But they did have a picture of two lesbians kissing on the cover of their album 30 years ago. That’s one in the eye for the young ‘uns who think that history started in 2010. (Yes, I was the same etc etc)
(The full image is actually quite interesting. The artists didn’t give them permission to use it. More trouble than it was worth, she thought.)
Earth, Wind & Fire
3/5
<yawn>
Ok, a bit unfair. However. My introduction to EW&F was thru unscheduled interstitial on NTA2 Channel 5 (if you know, you know) - snippets of a TV Special hosted by Natalie Cole.
The costumes. The hair. The unbridled exuberance. Next to that, this is like Protestant church music. My argument is that six albums in or not, they hadn’t quite found their metier. Thank the heavens they did.
Faith No More
2/5
Mike Patton is on record saying that he shakes his bottom better than Anthony Kiedis. True or not, he’d have done better if he could sing better than AK.
One theory is that this is low on the evolution chain that runs from swamp dwelling to Nu Metal. A competing theory posits that this is pretty far along the chain - just that the genre didn’t go very far.
Epic is still fun. Thy said, it’s weird listening to albums like this, a generation after deciding not to spend my pocket money on a whim and the influence of a hot single. Thank goodness for common sense.
Funkadelic
3/5
Well, you know. Worthy. Indulgent. Sometimes plain dull.
(Ok, to be fair, idk how groundbreaking this was in the day itself. But I do know that other groups - Brass Construction, Skyy, Dynasty, the funkier parts of the Solar Records roster, generally - grabbed the ball and ran much further with it.
Give the guy a living legend medal and move along, I think.
R.E.M.
3/5
Dire Straits
5/5
as first albums go, this is fucking ace. As first singles go (is this right? to lazy to check) Sultans of Swing is neither the best, not the most radio-friendly cut. Embarrassment of riches.
When I first heard this (retro-tracking the back catalogue in the wake of Brothers in Arms) I used to imagine the ideal listener of the time. Its late. Co-habitants have buggered off to sleep. Outside, the silence lays thick. Indoors, single lamp by most comfortable armchair. Brushing off the vinyl, pouring out a subtle malt (generous serving), and settling down for 40 minutes of me, myself and I.
Subtle malt and vinyl aside (I lack the resources for one, the temperamental inclinations for the other), I did this last night. God, it felt good.
Blur
4/5
This is the breakup album, right? Not that it should be anthropomorphised to one person's unhappiness, obvs.
(Later)
No it isn’t.
Apropos of nothing, time for a self-clarification of this wretched star system.
Five stars. Indispensable. It is a privilege to be (re)acquainted with this masterpiece. Will be downloaded onto my device and listened to regularly.
Four Star. A fine album. My impressions may be tainted by subjective memory muscle responses (on the whole, albums released between 1985 and 1999). At the least, a prompt to explore the artist/band’s back catalogue, get a sense of context. Or an excuse to wallow in nostalgia for a bit.
Three Star. Serviceable. At the worst inoffensive, at the best well made but ephemeral. Every so often, a song or two give cause for closer consideration, but on the whole nothing here that will change any aspect of my life.
Two Star. Poor/cynical/unformed. Like most music, it will mean something g to someone somewhere. I’m not that person
One Star. Mum got her church group to buy a copy each. You know the Brian Eno anecdote about the Velvet Underground? Well, whoever made this album went to a Kenny G concert and was similarly moved. Poor us.
Blur is a four star, even though objectively I think it might be a three. It was a big break from Britpop. In retrospect, they did a Radiohead before Radiohead. (Alburn, who is one of the most curious people in pop - a compliment) was all over Pavement and Dinosaur Jr. at the time.) Aside from the radio ‘friendly’ unit shifters here, some underrated classics (Strange News from Another Star - Bowie for the 21st cen., anyone?)
Blur don’t deserve the opprobrium heaped on them. Yes, they were (are) precious. But never opportunistic.
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
When Spike Lee came into town to promote The 25th Hour, he had a Q & A at what is now Everyman Islington. Someone had given him an Arsenal shirt; he immediately started playing the hooligan by applying American race relation tropes to the UK situation.
Ah, I miss those innocent days…
Anyway. Bought this album purely on the basis of the Springsteen song on the Spike Lee Joint’s soundtrack (‘The Fuse’)
(I’m just going to say now that, for all sorts of reasons, the record company bloc had downloading and streaming coming for them from a mile away. The saw it, and waited for the catastrophe like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Buying an overpriced album because it’s the only way to enjoy a song at one’s leisure. Sheesh. It wasn’t home taping that killed music, it was EMI)
Anyway. It sounded pompous then, and still sounds pompous now. The loathing I had for Springsteen many a year ago has mellowed to a grudging respect (although, tbh, why should anyone give a hoot about what I think about The Boss?)
(Murder Inc was the song that forced me to give his back catalogue an honest reappraisal. Anyone who can do that must be half-way to good at the least)
Bruce, like Spike, is a prisoner of the hype around him. Because we live in a hyper literal age now, once again, the circle has closed and he fits properly in the zeitgeist. But this album, nevertheless, belongs to a different time. About 20 years past. When fairly or not, not many people were too bothered about what he did, and his main constituency were men who then were about the age I am now. Nostalgia blunts our critical facilities, I fear…
2Pac
3/5
Ok, here’s something odd. Even though the Tupac lost cuts cottage industry continued to roll out albums for donkey’s years after his death (or, if you haunt some seriously unserious corners of the internet, after he removed himself from the fame game and relocated to Peckham) I have never sat and listened to an album of his from start to end.
First time for everything…
(Afterwards). Great delivery, shame about the production
John Martyn
4/5
Siouxsie And The Banshees
3/5
Spellbound is still lovely. Still an odd mix.
Not totally-related observation. In Notes on a Scandal, the Cate Blanchett character puts on a vinyl version of a S+tB song, Dizzy. She says (I think; if I were diligent about this, I'd do a check, but...) that it's an old favourite. This is impossible, tho. Said song didn't exist in this past, not on vinyl or anywhere else...
William Orbit
3/5
so-so. Very much of its time. (cf. Fascinating Rhythm, which is much more adventurous.)
Fleet Foxes
2/5
There's something contrary about leaving one of the best songs of the 21st century (Mykonos) off your debut album. I've really worked at this album over the years. But, I'm sorry to report, there's much less to it than meets the eye.
Aretha Franklin
5/5
Is "Respect" a Toploader? Yes, but only in the sense that it is one of the ten best songs of the twentieth century (and probably the best cover). Everything pales beside it...
Public Enemy
3/5
The Blue Nile
4/5
The La's
3/5
Paul Weller
3/5
The Icarus Line
4/5
Q-Tip
3/5
Billy Bragg
3/5
Uneventful. Never quite figured why I skew Calexico over Wilco so strongly.
The Divine Comedy
3/5
The joke almost goes on too long.
Haircut 100
2/5
First album I didn’t listen to all the way through. It isn’t bad, it’s just determinedly undistinguished. Brings nothing new to the table. At best, an example of common-or-garden variety Synthpop circa 1982. Fungible to the nth degree.
The White Stripes
3/5
Michael Jackson
5/5
Ah come on. I don’t need to do this. Anyway, in no particular order:
Greg Phillianges; the red zip up jacket in ‘Beat It’; Ola Ray; Eddie Van Halen; Mr Quincy Jones; bunched up jacket sleeves; Paul McC genuinely relevant (even if not genuinely good) post Beatles; tiger print pocket square; Say Na Na Na - Na Na Na; Hot Rod Temperton; etc etc.
Guided By Voices
2/5
Rubbish.
T. Rex
4/5
Yes, we can boogie.
The Rolling Stones
4/5
A good listen. Older and wiser, the "contrivances" (i.e. this didn't emerge whole from a jam session) are clearer
(actually, would it be fair to say the the craft, as opposed to a natural predisposition for aesthetics, is more obvious now?)
but still a jolly good listen
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
3/5
3/5
Perfectly sound for what it is, but not for me, I fear
Paul Simon
3/5
Remarkable what an imaginative singer-songwriter can do with basic melodies. (I didn't like it *that* much. But it is good for what it is. And I'd always assumed Mother and Child Reunion was a cover...)
The Specials
3/5
Belinda Carlisle on a Specials album. Huh.
Coldplay
3/5
I sometimes think (unfairly) that Coldplay was what pushed Radiohead firmly into the leftfield. The chronology doesn't quite work, obviously. But, nonetheless, it is interesting to note that after early material that tracked pre-Kid A Radiohead, A Rush of Blood went headlong after a stadium pleasing bombast that aligned more closely with another big album from the year 2000 – U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind.
The best of this album are the songs that bookend it - the 9/11 influenced Politik, and the elegiac Amsterdam. In between, any number of above average, slightly over-polished excursions on a basic theme.
I'm not sure whether A Rush of Blood...has aged well, or that it simply stands up well against the hackneyed material Coldplay have served up in recent years. Either way, it's definitely a fan favourite, a pleasant stroll into nostalgia for raging pop-pickers like me, and a perfect introduction for the 15 year old who doesn't understand what Coldplay did to deserve the platform they have today.
U2
4/5
You know, it'll be really good to give The Joshua Tree this treatment.
Oh, Zooropa is better. Don't care what anyone says. But this is good
The Modern Lovers
3/5
Sisters Of Mercy
3/5
Dominion/Mother Russia is a goth masterpiece. The last of the album flags a fair bit, and has aged rather poorly. But still has its time and place intact...
Beatles
3/5
The Yardbirds
2/5
nah. not for me.
Muddy Waters
4/5
There's a charisma to this recording that eases itself across time, space, even the setting for the recording (live albums always capture a different kind of energy, I think. There's an intimacy here that is neither a natural presence on the stage or even in the studio.).
The Jesus And Mary Chain
3/5
Not quite fun for all the family. I never quite figured out the fuss about JaMC in the "mature" music press back in the day. Older and "mature" myself now, I sort of get it. Sort of.
The Black Keys
2/5
Long, occasionally tiresome. I'm not at all familiar with the band, but I did listen to the album when it came out and thought much the same thing then. Seems a bit like a proof-of-concept than a work with an internal sense of direction, if you know what I mean...
Sinead O'Connor
5/5
The Shamen
2/5
Ok, so they aren’t one hit wonders. (Boss Drum is a miracle of the electronic age). But this is just a long cliche looking for a beach to happen.
Gene Clark
4/5
Quite the discovery. I knew a bit about the Byrds, but nothing of Gene Clark, before listening to this. Elegiac, lucid, really lovely album
Otis Redding
4/5
Sepultura
2/5
not for me. Interesting to capture melody as a distinct element of thrash metal. Still, merely a curiosity for me, I don't think I could warm to this. Rating here is purely subjective.
Tangerine Dream
2/5
Aretha Franklin
3/5
OK. Chain of Fools is a jam, of course. Otherwise, competent but conservative.
Arcade Fire
3/5
Beastie Boys
2/5
"Frat boy" is an over used and (probably) unfair pejorative often used to describe early Beastie Boys. Nonetheless: I still think, many years on, that this album cleaves closer to the philosophy of performed hip hop than to the organic spirit of the genre. I guess someone coming in cold to their oeuvre (unlikely, but bear with me) today might find some retro appeal to production techniques etc, but not much else.
Or maybe I'm wrong.
Caetano Veloso
3/5
Bruce Springsteen
2/5
Bombast. At least I know know why I didn't like The Boss back in the day...
Various Artists
3/5
Whimsy fun.
Johnny Cash
2/5
Isaac Hayes
3/5
Indulgent fun for (specific) indulgent occasions. No real point in spinning this disc before 11pm, or alone.
Mercury Rev
4/5
I can't really detach this from the halcyon days of XFM etc. Still a good 'un.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3/5
Maps is a great song. Album with attitude, which perhaps wins out over the actual music.
Mj Cole
2/5
Arrested Development
3/5
Huh. An interesting time capsule. The version of People Everyday isn’t the hit single version which is both surprising and not at once.
Burning Spear
3/5
Nirvana
4/5
Sufjan Stevens
4/5
Minutemen
3/5
Mmm. I see the charm. But not really for me
Echo And The Bunnymen
3/5
Fela Kuti
4/5
Sly & The Family Stone
2/5
The 14-minute 'Sex Machine' captures this album in...well, not quite a nutshell. Exciting, enthralling, fades into repetitive dullness, then just as it seems to have outstayed its welcome sparks back into something interesting again.
The Verve
3/5
Singles aside (especially "Sonnet" and "Lucky Man") hasn't aged as well as one might have thought back in the day...
LCD Soundsystem
2/5
Electro-Punk? Post-New Wave? Neo-Techno? My thinking about LCD Soundystem has always been that you had to be there to get it. And I was a long way away from here...
It has that false DIY vibe (cc. Arular), but with none of the charm home made one man shows are supposed to promote. It just seems rather mechanical...
Deerhunter
3/5
SZA
3/5
Good contemporary stuff, although a bit too forward for my sensitive ears. Don’t think it has long term staying power though, very much on the disposable end of the pop spectrum (unlike, for example, Solangés album, which is a clear inspiration)
Ice Cube
3/5
Al Green
4/5
Gary Numan
3/5
Electro Punk in the wild.
Janet Jackson
3/5
I'm genuine surprised by how much I enjoyed this album. Velvet Rope has sort of smothered the genuine ...well not charm, more like excitement, of 1814. It might be that the mechanised aspect of the lead video and production lumped it, mentally, with the proto-techno of the time (this demands unpacking – another time, another time...). Anyway.
Led Zeppelin
3/5
Primal Scream
4/5
Metallica
3/5
It was a ...not a genre breaker, but certainly thrust Metal into the mainstream. I wonder how the album would have done without Nothing Else Matters. Matters not, we'll never know. That was the gateway to Everywhere I Roam, and for this we shall always be grateful
It must be said that it has aged not quite as gracefully as, say, ...And Justice for All. Something about compromising for the zeitgeist?
Roxy Music
3/5
Michael Jackson
3/5
Is it fair to think of Bad in the same way one (now thinks of Kanye West's 808 and Heartbreaks? An underrated album, belated recognised as the first step in an artist's creative zenith?
Yes and no. Bad is underrated. If it were a couple of songs shorter, it might have been a flawed masterpiece (exit stage left, Speed Demon, for example). As it is, it is flawed. But with more than the occasional flash of genius (Smooth Criminal, Liberian Girl, Man in the Mirror).
Kanye did MBDF, the first great album of the 10s, next. Michael, unfortunately, became a circus attraction: the good in his subsequent albums (and there was a lot of good) swamped by gossip, eccentricity, and ultimately tragedy.
So it goes...
Led Zeppelin
3/5
OK. Kashmir is a jam, obvs, but I think it's the drumming that stands out most on this album. Surprised to discover a direct line between this and Jeff Buckley's Grace
The Fall
2/5
not for me in the present frame of mind
The Band
3/5
Super Furry Animals
3/5
Dusty Springfield
3/5
Few things, now or ever, like Dusty's voice.
Alice Cooper
3/5
Lambchop
4/5
Wagner's voice is like salted caramel chocolate. It shouldn't work but it does. Likewise, Nixon feels too mature an album to be a genuine breakthrough hit, but here we are...
Buzzcocks
2/5
2/5
I don't think very much of this, and its predecessor, Leisure. Neither really speak to me, and I don't think that either transcended the hype of nascent Britpop. But. Gems of genius can be seen in the rough ('Miss America', for instance) and it's nice to think that their record company persisted with them long enough to allow for Blur's glorious mid-career run in the mid and late 90s...
Dexys Midnight Runners
3/5
Not unpleasant; still, I doubt that I'd be drawn to actively listening to this album ever again.
The Beach Boys
3/5
I see the charm but still...it still feels like an album that lots of people like because they have been told that it is a likeable album. I don't feel that it holds enough – whether in the context of its release, or retrospectively – to justify its mythological status. But that may just be me. (cc. Dylan)
Fiona Apple
4/5
She has such a sonorous voice! When the Pawn...tops this, I think. But as debuts go, it is something special
Louis Prima
3/5
Harmless fun
The Smiths
4/5
You know, we have to come to terms with the fact that The Smiths were a pop group. Literate and verbose for the genre, but still a pop group. And extremely good too. How can anyone hear "Stop Me" and not be lost forever? I don't know.
Curtis Mayfield
3/5
Anita Baker
4/5
Wow. Still a winner
The Strokes
3/5
Did 'New York City Cops' cause a fuss at the time?
That aside. I'm still, 20+ years later, unsure as to whether this was a futile squeak of resistance or a brave stand against a homogenising juggernaut.
Either way, the dear lads were romantics, weren't they?
Todd Rundgren
3/5
Surprisingly (sunny why, tho – no idea why I expected what I was expecting) melodic and enjoyable. The outtakes and extras were a bit...extra. Still
Eagles
3/5
The Stooges
4/5
KISS
2/5
Can
3/5
Don't think I've ever wanted a joint so badly whilst listening to an album
Supergrass
2/5
Thirty years ago. Relieved of the responsibility of aging gracefully from the start, giving that it was conceived in pretty juvenile circs in the first place.
Lorde
2/5
Pop-by-numbers.
Fleetwood Mac
3/5
Siouxsie And The Banshees
3/5
The Who
3/5
Miles Davis
5/5
Bad Company
2/5
Undistinguished. I guess one had to be there to get it.
Carole King
4/5
Mike Oldfield
3/5
Hugh Masekela
3/5
Beatles
4/5
Lou Reed
3/5
Bauhaus
3/5
The National
2/5
Once, on the strength of a gushing profile of Jony Ive's production team at Apple, I went out and bought Interpol's Turn On the Bright Lights. (It's complicated, ok? Let's just accept that I was a shallow and callow young man.)
Not entirely surprisingly, the album was not to my liking (I did try bloody hard, I have to say), and I eventually disposed of the evidence of my foolishness in a charity shop.
Never thought about Interpol until listening to this, many years on. I didn't buy High Violet at the time (thank you, unnamed music blog. God, those were the days...). I did like the anthemic pomp pf "London" (and, turns out, I still do); and like Turn On...I tried hard to like the cool new alt-rockers on the scene.
I failed better with The National. But the point is that I wasn't their constituency, and neither them mine. Sometimes, it is best to accept the natural order of things as it is.
Spiritualized
2/5
Prince
5/5
It’s easy – and helpful – to forget that this is the soundtrack to one* of the worst films of the 1980s. I mean, I really worked on liking this film. Really worked. But after a fourth watch, I pretty much lost the will to live.
(I was, in a dumb 12 year old kind of way, quite shocked to discover that it is actually ok to like the album but hate the film. Sort of like loving the sinner but hating the sin.)
*‘Purple Rain’, believe it or not, is not even the worst film Prince made in the 80s.
Astrud Gilberto
4/5
Iggy Pop
3/5
3/5
Oh. Trevor Horn. Now that makes a lot of sense...
Everyone likes "The Look of Love" and "Poison Arrow", but I'd never bothered thinking deeply about ABC beyond this (other than once when Montell Jordan gushed lovingly about them in an interview, which was a bit of a surprise).
I want to call this "polished", but I think the appellation unfair. Competent tunes carefully shaped into sums greater than their parts; complicated but never overbearing production; carefully calibrated balance of voices, instruments, and ambience, forming a pleasing whole.
In short, Trevor Horn.
The B-52's
3/5
If you’re not having fun, then what’s the point?
Joan Armatrading
3/5
This got me thinking (via Kelafa Sanneh's excellent book about genre and music) about shortcuts, approximations, and the slippery slope that ends in shouts of cultural appropriation etc.
The temptation is to place an artist in a box – commercial considerations, fear of the unknown, if-you-liked-that-then-you'll-like-this, etc.
In this case, my first instinct was to think of Armatrading as proto-Tracy Chapman. Two things about this
(1) Astonishingly lazy thinking on my part. They're nothing alike
(2) I bet you Armatrading came up in an early marketing meeting for Ms C.
it is what it is, I suppose. Creativity and imagination do exist in the sausage factory. My task is to enjoy the former without becoming a hostage to the latter
"Love and Affection" is an amazing song, by the way.
The Prodigy
3/5
Were they the first rave ‘band’ - full length albums, tours etc?
King Crimson
4/5
Came to King Crimson via a cycling blog on Facebook (‘Epitaph’, scoring Merckx’s last day ever in Yellow, when he broke on Puy-de-Domê. Real pathos. Anyway, groovy jazz funk album, precursor for a decade of the excess and indulgence that is (British) Prog.
3/5
(The drummer aside) a triumph of enthusiasm over ability. But that’s what rock and roll should be about, no?
B.B. King
3/5
The White Stripes
2/5
The Clash
3/5
The Incredible String Band
2/5
Strewth. Kill me now.
Joni Mitchell
2/5
I get the attraction, but something about j. M's voice rubs me the
Wrong way
Lou Reed
2/5
Emmylou Harris
3/5
Gentle.
The Stooges
3/5
Jimi Hendrix
2/5
To describe an album as being full of album cuts seems ungenerous (as well as illogical). But there we have it. Lots of noodles and doodling, some esoteric songwriting, but nothing of note, really.
Iron Maiden
3/5
I’ve always thought of the NWOBHM as an authentic precursor for Drum and Bass, Jungle and (for its sins) Gabber - in short, an aesthetic and musical precursor to some of the more interesting (and some of the more appalling) aspects of rave culture of the 90s.
Anyway, never listened to anything by IM other than their ‘Straight in at No.1!’ strategically timed single releases. This is actually entertaining, in a slightly overwrought way.
(Fun fact - Bruce Dickinson flies planes (commercial jets? I think, but not entirely certain) these days.)
David Bowie
4/5
If I must…
Deep Purple
2/5
The solo in Smoke Over Water excuses a multitude of…well, not sins. But something not good.
New York Dolls
3/5
Badly Drawn Boy
4/5
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
3/5
Big Brother & The Holding Company
2/5
Raucous. Unpolished. Summertime is a great cover, though.
On a completely unrelated note. This is listed as an “Apple Digital Remaster”. Sounded like it had been filtered through Woodstock mud. Not sure whether noise cancelling headphones have made me a (far) more discriminating hearer, that my hearing is deteriorating, or …
Creedence Clearwater Revival
2/5
Meh.
Beastie Boys
3/5
Bob Marley & The Wailers
4/5
Tom Waits
3/5
Overrated, if you ask me. (So is Swordfishtrombone, but that’s another matter altogether)
Buena Vista Social Club
2/5
The Chemical Brothers
3/5
Echo And The Bunnymen
3/5
Morrissey
3/5
As someone said once.: if you are ever disappointed in Morrisey, that’s entirely on you. Anyways. Good, robust melancholia..
My Bloody Valentine
3/5
We need to talk about headphones culture. Seriously.
Steely Dan
3/5
A bit rushed, no? Mind you, we spend forever and a day complaining about the perfectionism on Aja, so, you know, dismounting high horses and all that.
The Fall
2/5
Terence Trent D'Arby
4/5
Ah - ah. Why do this to me?
Didn't know
until recently that Martyn
Ware produced this album
Kraftwerk
5/5
Gateway drug for Kraftwerk was Africa Bambata, then "Breaking" (the scene where Shrimp dances with a broom, scored to "Tour de France". Nice thing about coming late to the party is that there is so much waiting to be discovered...
2/5
Love
2/5
k.d. lang
3/5
Neil Young
3/5
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
4/5
Brian Wilson
3/5
An album of its time. In this case, ‘time’ being the aborted sessions of the late 1960s rather that its belated release in 2004. It does have its charm, but it doesn’t add anything to the Beach Boys canon (completists, you can pretend I don’t exist. I’m cool with this)
Massive Attack
4/5
It took me a *very* long time to warm to this album. On the balance, though, it is the most ... authentic? organic? ... of MA's first three albums. (Mezzanine, which is my favourite, has Del Naja's bleakness hanging over it; Blue Lines is a great album, but a little bumpy win places.)
Anyway...
Violent Femmes
2/5
Undistinguished. "Blister in the Sun is fun", but aside from that ...
The Mothers Of Invention
3/5
Huh! That was fun in a subversive way. As for the number of unrequited/rejected/betrayed love songs...
The Young Gods
2/5
“Hey Siri, what is French Nihilism?”
Unfair to rate, as not for me *at all*
Simon & Garfunkel
3/5
Sister Sledge
4/5
Fred Neil
2/5
Never heard of him (had heard covers of his songs, of course.) Rich, sonorous voice coupled with rather unimaginative arrangements. I’m guessing that there’s something here I’m not seeing - perhaps one had to be there to get it. Anyway, imho a rather undistinguished album…
Le Tigre
3/5
Playful and self-deprecating, despite the earnestness of the project.
The Byrds
3/5
Baaba Maal
3/5
David Bowie
3/5
2/5
Whoa. Exuberant sonic assault. I mean, I'm pleased for them and all that they were able to have fun, but this just smacked me in the goolies. For half an hour.
Slayer
3/5
Bob Dylan
2/5
I remain impervious to the charms of Mr Zimmerman...
Lynyrd Skynyrd
3/5
So, the correct answer to this is anchored by whether (or not) you like the second half of “Freebird”. I do, and this will overlook the multiple crimes against creativity that the rest of this album commits.
Sonic Youth
4/5
I'd love to run a marathon with this on repeat. I''d finally break 3:30. But. I probably won't be able to walk for a week.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
3/5
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
2/5
An album-length reprise of ‘Rocking in the Free World’. Not really worth the trouble, imho.
Eminem
3/5
So, all things considered. It helped that Eminem actually can spit lyrics. And that he kept his nasal whine. And that Dre saw beyond the physicalities and focused on the potential. And that 1999 was not 2019, and we had a more nuanced understanding of 'cultural appropriation'. (Don't get me wrong, there was hot shit on stilts then too. And far fewer people were paying attention to the egregrity of this behaviour. Nevertheless...)
James Brown
3/5
John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers
2/5
Strictly irrelevant, but still...Motown Records? Possibly a licensing issue...
Anyways. Dull.
The Allman Brothers Band
2/5
God, that was dull
Solomon Burke
3/5
Soporific. Probably also laxative.
Kate Bush
2/5
I get the artist's prerogative, but still...
For good or for bad (probably bad), my least favourite KB album. It's the one that saddled her with the 'away with the faeries' label. Which is an unfair distraction from her marvellous body of work, and has inspired a generation of lesser beings to (try to) emulate something they don't quite get.
Amy Winehouse
4/5
I first heard Frank in a wine shop. Which makes me sad. Not the booze and stuff, but because I was trying to become domesticated at the time (I failed), and for a while this became semiotic cue for all the things I foolishly wanted to be at the age of 30 whatever.
I guess it was actively disliking Back to Black (I've gone back somewhat on this over the years) that nudged me into listening to this a little more carefully. Winehouse's voice here was subtle, delicate, abrasive, plaintive, brash...I wonder what a different set of producers might have made of her?
Beastie Boys
4/5
The Teardrop Explodes
2/5
New Wave Emo. tbf, the presence of Julian Cope ought to be warning enough of this...
Incredible Bongo Band
2/5
Meh. "Apache" or not.
John Prine
2/5
Hot 'meh'.
Actually, this 'meh' is becoming predictable shorthand, with no thought behind it. So:
(1) Sounds like sub-par Dylan.
(2) I hate Dylan . (To be fair, this falls under 'meh' criticism. My dislike of Dylan is capricious, untested and quite possibly unsubstatiable.)
(3) The production is really weedy. Lots of places where a bit of backbone would have made a big difference. But no banana.
(4) Lyrically, absent without leave.
I suppose this must strike some person's sweet spot. And it is helpful to remember the subjective element inherent in any ranking and recommendation process (mine included0. Even so...
Hanoi Rocks
3/5
Harmless fun
The Smashing Pumpkins
4/5
Sharon Osborne and Billy Corgan. I think about this a lot
Kate Bush
4/5
Sharon Osborne and Billy Corgan. I think about them a lot sometimes. I mean, how the hell did they think they could work with each other?
Never mind. Great album. Still too long. But that’s the distinction between great and magnificent
Depeche Mode
5/5
Is this actually random? 200+ albums and the first DM I get is the day after Fletch dies.
Reminds me of the problems Apple had with the shuffle facility on the original iPod
(summary: peeps refused to believe that random was random, and so an algorithm was introduced into the software to create randomity. If such a word exists. Which probably mirrors the whole process of creating a random sequence. For people with a very fixed idea of what random should mean.)
Robert Wyatt
3/5
Elliott Smith
4/5
The cover of "Because" (Deluxe Edition) is the perfect synthesis of past and present.
Pseuds' Corner observation over.
Rush
3/5
Ayn Rand was once acceptable in polite Canadian society. That, and/or there are a lot of Boomer Bros north of the border...
Michael Jackson
4/5
Queen Latifah
3/5
A hip hip artefact (meant in a positive way). Funny to think that once, there were next to no female MCs. (The conversation about the job specification for female rappers is for people wiser that this writer.)
Production credits are a veritable who's who of late 80s hip hop – De La Soul, KRS One, Prince Paul, with Fab Five Freddy lurking in the wings. Happy days...
OutKast
3/5
Sprawl. Good sprawl though.
Fever Ray
4/5
3/5
Earnest and well-meaning in '87; pompous and self-important in '25. But give credit where credit it due. Fathomless self-belief alone produces this material. They ought to bottle it up and sell it.
Thundercat
4/5
Noice
Simply Red
3/5
Japan
2/5
The Pogues
2/5
Schmaltz. Steeped in nostalgia ie a world that probably never existed. Still their right to do what they wish etc
Jimi Hendrix
4/5
The hill I am prepared to die on: Mitch Mitchell is the star of this album
John Martyn
3/5
Brian Eno
3/5
3/5
Bad Brains
3/5
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
4/5
Miriam Makeba
4/5
Enchanting
CHIC
4/5
The Byrds
3/5
Joy Division
4/5
So. It's nt a *great* album. But it is good, and it did things that no one else in the post-punk period were doing, and it set a template for a style of music that is – literally – timeless.
The Go-Go's
4/5
Kelela
2/5
Production -4 Stars
Talent - Well, let’s just say that copious use of the word ‘Fuck’ usually indicates a limited contextual vocabulary.
‘Fuck’ is, of course, an important aspect of relationship life - the terrain of Ms Kelala’s album. But (surprise surprise) other things come into the mix too. Not that you’d know it from the patchy lyrics and lavish use of auto tune, pitch shifter and other audio black magic.
Not worth the time or the fucking money. And yes, I know it cost me nothing to listen to this album. Still…
Grateful Dead
3/5
First time for everything etc.
Actually, I get the appeal. But I don't get the fanaticism. Nor the line in The Boys of Summer. So what if a Deadhead wants to drive a Cadillac? We all succumb to the dark side eventually, one way or the other...
Manic Street Preachers
3/5
Promoted above its station. (‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, in and of itself, stands as proof of this.)
It’s a better-than-ok album, but (1) its primary utility was to introduce me to MSPs back catalogue, which I was only vaguely aware of before then, and (2) I guess is a ‘narrative’ album - the narrative the press latching on to here being Richey Edwards - the REM palaver, ‘For Real’, and finally his disappearance. Lots of people (like me) knew about all this without actually knowing their music.
Ray Charles
3/5
‘Two Years of Torture’ ‘When Your Lover’s Gone’ ‘You Won’t Let Me Go’.
Is it actually possible to ‘like’ an album so lachrymose?
Tortoise
3/5
Jazz rock or post rock? Important question, because then one can determine whether to compare this to - say - Electric Miles and Mahivishnu Orchestra, or to Mogwai and Godspeed! You Black Emperor.
Why does this matter? The album is improvison weak, but sonically adventurous.
I’m going with Post Rock.
Chicago
2/5
For someone who always associated CTA with Peter Cetera and his works, this was a sharp (and bewildering) shock.
My preferred response would have been not to rate this, because I simply don’t get the smorgasbord served up here. But since this isn’t an option…
The Avalanches
4/5
Frank Zappa
4/5
Zappa gets such a bad press
Soundgarden
3/5
Dr. Dre
4/5
I'm going to skip this, simply because I know this album as well as I know my little brother. (Quite possibly better)
Side A (tape, since you're asking) remains one of the most incendiary passages I've ever heard in pop music (pop music: music explicitly intended for engagement by and the entertainment of anything more that an niche audience. A useful, if complete heuristic: if there's a third party budget on the table that extends beyond minimum wage, then it's pop.) Side B...actually, I will listen to this again. There may be stuff I've missing. I don't see how, but neither do I see how the two sides could be the creation of the same entity.
(Later). Nah, Side B still sucks. So my rating is purely on the energy, the inventiveness, the playfulness, the shamelessness of Side A
Michael Kiwanuka
3/5
Anthrax
3/5
Do I have to have an opinion? Well. I always forget that Dave Mustaine was a Metallica once upon a time, until I hear certain thrash chords and Ride The Lightning comes charging into my head.
Anyway, largely indifferent to this.
T. Rex
4/5
Leonard Cohen
4/5
Pretty good for a first album. But Cohen was, largely, a one trick pony, wasn't he? (A fair-to-good trick, to be fair. And in any case, I'm playing the man not the ball. And there is, too, Manhattan.)
Herbie Hancock
4/5
The Kinks
2/5
twee
Ozomatli
2/5
Pompous *and* nondescript. Quite the achievement
The Rolling Stones
3/5
The Stones were a great covers and singles band. Sue me.
Frank Black
2/5
Rather disappointing, to be honest
Pere Ubu
3/5
Coldplay
3/5
I forget who it was that described Coldplay as making ‘music for bedwetters’. Alan McGee, probably. Unfair. But you know where he is coming from.
Something linking Coldplay and McGee’s golden goose, Oasis, is that I have no idea who produced the albums of either. It’s not that producers are usually high profile, but most of the best do have a distinct thumbprint. With the two, nowt.
(Also: Coldplay swallowed Brian Eno live. This suggests a black hole of conventionality, or a curiously ruthless streak. Hard to say which of course he two.)
4/5
Swagger can take you a long way. (They blew it by putting a lyric sheet in Be Here Now. Some people haven’t stopped laughing…)
Korn
3/5
I owned this once, briefly. I have absolutely no idea why. Remarkable to think that this entered the Billboard Top 100 at No 1. I wonder what happened to all the unhappy young men who bought it at the time?
Anyway...
Brian Eno
3/5
TV On The Radio
3/5
There isn’t a single song here that matches Wolf Like Me. But as an album, it stands head and shoulders above Return to Cookie Mountain - and perhaps anything else they’ve done.
I think the ‘African’ rhythm guitar trope is overused a bit (did they influence Vampire Weekend? Or the other way round? Does it matter), but still a sterling album.
M.I.A.
3/5
So. MIA clearly has something going for her. But her albums always remind me of a snarky schoolgirl armed with lots of toys. (XR2 proves this point in more than one way).
Paper Planes is a song for the ages, all the above notwithstanding.
OutKast
3/5
After a generation of rap sampling funk, was this the first post-funk rap album? As I write this, I can't help but think that this is an intellectual reach to far. But there is a lot about this album that goes beyond a mere shoehorning of rap sensitivities into a funk sample.
I bought this on the strength of "Ms Jackson", and didn't really like it. Now, it warms the cockles in a surprisingly non-nostalgic way. Different bases, true, but I think Kendrick Lamar (amongst others) owes this album quite a bit.
Stevie Wonder
5/5
LOLZ. Like you need to ask.
Soul II Soul
4/5
The first great British album of the 1990s. (Yes, I know that it came out in 89. But rave changed everything, innit?)
The Band
3/5
Nirvana
4/5
The Who
3/5
I’m fairly sure I’ve had this already. Can’t think of any other reason to have listened to it, I have an irrational aversion to Townsend. Anyway, Baba O’Whatever is good fun, the rest ho-hum +
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
3/5
Astor Piazzolla
5/5
What a find. Wow.
John Coltrane
5/5
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
Just as I manage to work my lifelong (and completely irrational) dislike of The Boss out of my system, a new round of hagiography hits me in the face like a dead fish. (The new biopic is slinking out of cinemas as I type.)
Anyway. Credit where credit is due. Springsteen, songwriter, is a consummate storyteller. It's only in the lack of similar in the current age that this awareness has full come to me.
On the other hand. Storytellers, across the ages, have often been mythologisers too. Caveat Emptor etc...
My Bloody Valentine
2/5
Buck Owens
3/5
Not for me
Milton Nascimento
3/5
Stevie Wonder
3/5
The ‘weakest’ in Stevie’s legendary run of albums in the 1970s - to my mind, a sustained period of creative genius unmatched in popular music ever. (Beethoven and Bach composed for mass audiences too, by the way).
It isn’t a weak album, obviously. But the introspection sits a little heavily upon it at times. Still a pleasure to listen to it, though.
George Michael
3/5
At the time, I thought that it took a lot of guts for George to go down the ‘grown up’ route away from teeny bop (high grade variety, it must be said) so determinedly. With hindsight…
With hindsight. I’m not really a lyrics person, but listening to this now, I think, gosh. I wouldn’t want to contend with this degree of anguish, and to be permanently resident in the public eye for…
Pet Shop Boys
5/5
I don’t need to do this one because… ok I will. I don’t need an excuse for listening to one of my all time favourite albums,
(Later)
Gosh. ‘Kings Cross’ is a masterpiece of observational melancholy. It shouldn’t work in the same album as ‘Heart’. Or the plaintive complaint of ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This’.
That’s the thing about this album. The whole is a lot greater than its parts. Not so many artistes really think about putting together a complementary suite of songs nowadays, rather focusing on bangers and necessary fillers. This is the package. THE package.
Prince
4/5
Something satisfying about knowing that I had good taste in 1986
Germs
2/5
I did this so you wouldn’t.
Roni Size
2/5
The Chemical Brothers
3/5
Simon & Garfunkel
4/5
First: Bridge... Is the strangest choice for an opening song that I have ever heard. It was made to end the album, it must have been.
Second. How did DJ Shadow get away with sampling El Condor?
Beatles
3/5
Hole
3/5
Surprisingly commercial. But that's not the point. Thanks to this I learnt that Billy Corgan and Courtney Love were once an 'item'. And once again, I am wrong footed by the company Billy Corgan keeps (or the people who choose Billy Corgan as company - it could go either way).
Sebadoh
3/5
Hm. To compare them to Nirvana is to say nothing. Really liked the second to last song
Moby Grape
3/5
Don't believe the hype.
No, that's not fair. I guess one had to be there etc. One thing I will say in their favour is that there is a complexity to their melodies that belies a stoner reputation.
Living Colour
2/5
A historic mistake.
Pearl Jam
4/5
Nostalgia tinted.
Jazmine Sullivan
2/5
Dull. Mercifully short. She has a great voice, and some of the multitracking is inspired. But as a complete project…yawn.
Stereolab
2/5
Whimsy on steroids. In other (and fairer) words, not for me.
Depeche Mode
5/5
ABBA
3/5
Gil Scott-Heron
3/5
Talking Heads
3/5
Elastica
2/5
Damon Alburn didn’t write or produce this album. That much ought to be obvious.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
3/5
I have this game where I try to figure out how a release from the past will be received today. If it is d genuine classic or not. No idea where californication as a whole would land. Good listening fun though
Roxy Music
3/5
I know this is pre (sophisticated) multitracking; I know that I’ve been spoiled (in both senses of the word) by 320 kps and WAVs. . Still. The sound balance on this is absolutely atrocious. The melodies win out, but only just - and at the expense of the rhythm that does exist, and does seem to be quite adventurous. Pity…
Kanye West
3/5
I’m not entirely sure why Kanye is rated as a ‘genius’ producer - compared to, say, Dilla or DJ Premier or Pete Rock. Matters not. He is a good entertainer and (judging from the collabs here) a good man manager. Fun album with more than a few pointers to the future. (‘Never Let Me Down’, for instance, with a killer 16 bars from ‘Hova)
Yes
2/5
If the Greatful Dead dipped a toe in Prog.
(Context. ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ is the only Yes song I have knowingly heard. However, I am familiar with ELP (and splinter groups), Van Der Graff Generator, etc.)
Expected something completely different…
Emmylou Harris
3/5
So. Country music, this album brought me to understand, is about storytelling. Problem is, I’m not a strong lyrics person. With, say, the artistic end or hip hop, this has never been a problem, since the best DJs create a collage of samples and soundscapes intricate enough to take up all my attention. Country tilts in a different direction, compositionally; since I don’t usually pay much attention to the lyrical content, I get bored even more quickly than usual.
(This, of course, is entirely my problem. It’s like a Christian complaining about a Muslim/Jew because he doesn’t eat pork.)
One or two tracks aside, I doubt that I’ll consciously revisit this album. I did, in a way, enjoy it, though.
Booker T. & The MG's
3/5
‘Green Onions’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here…
Massive Attack
5/5
This album changed my life. I don’t think I can actually say more than that.
XTC
4/5
Wow. A genuine find here. I sort of knew about XTC ('Making Plans for Nigel' etc), but had never troubled to explore further. Rundgren I met thanks to an earlier selection of 1001. 'Dear God' has left me in a puddle of inchoate emotion
Sugar
3/5
So. I started off by mistaking this for "Throwing Copper" by Live, beloved of 120 Minutes-types in 94 and 95. Trying to unpick this cognitive dissonance in my head took me down quite a few unexpected rabbit holes. (Why was Chad Taylor fired? How does Ed Kowlacyzk own 55% of Live? How does one calculate this?)
But I digress.
I really wanted to like Hüsker Dü once upon a time. They seemed like a band that I should like. (See also Interpol).
I could't. Not for trying, very hard indeed. But I did learn quite a bit about Mould, Hart and Norton.
This, by Mould's post Hüsker band Sugar isn't *bad*, but ... let's put it this way. It was NME's Album of the Year in the early 90s – its most reactionary era, befuddled by rave and trip hop and acid jazz etc. (fair's fair - I'm still befuddled by acid jazz.)
David Gray
4/5
Deep Purple
2/5
Live albums, doubtless, have a point. But you won’t find it here. It isn’t bad, just very ‘contractual obligation-y’. One for the collector.
The The
3/5
I think I’m going to do a playlist of ‘God’ songs.
A Tribe Called Quest
3/5
Good but not their best. Actually, probably their least best album. (Unpopular opinion. Sorry.)
Morrissey
2/5
Morrissey is the law of diminishing returns in human form. I think it works both ways though, I must say. The more the listener put into successive releases after, say, 1988, the less they received. Smart people simply accepted his existence and went about their business
Jane's Addiction
3/5
Count Basie & His Orchestra
4/5
When Jazz was allowed to be something other than A Credit to the Race. Halcyon days...
The Smiths
3/5
Good to know that this isn’t exactly random 😁
Madonna
3/5
I thought I'd done this already. It seems not. Anyway. This was brill in '99. Less so now. (The Veronica project underlines that this style was not as timeless as might have been thought once upon a time.)
Screaming Trees
2/5
The dull margins of proto-grunge. Mannered, and thus inconsequential.
The Rolling Stones
3/5
The hypnotic percussion of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ aside, rather middling.
Richard Thompson
3/5
I have a thing for ‘reinterpreting’ lyrics. Which is to say (1) mishearing, (2), taking out of context, and then (3) reinserting said mishear lyrics into a totally different context.
(An example. Start spreading the news/I’m leaving tomorrow. For a good two decades, I thought Ol’ Blue Eyes was a man of advance planning etc. as it happens, I still think ‘today’ makes no sense)
Anyway, I thought ‘The Little Beggar Girl’ was ‘My little bagatelle.’ If Richard made Linda sing this on stage, no wonder they had a tempestuous relationship and so on. Talk about projection.
She has an interesting voice, his is Kwiksave basics. Arrangement effective but just about that. Doubt I’ll go out of my way to listen to this again.
PJ Harvey
2/5
In the late 90s or early Noughties (too lazy to check) Chris Anderson wrote a book called the Long Tail. I'm going to own up to never reading it, but being familiar with Anderson's writing over the years, the various reviews and synopses coalesced around a graspable concept in my head: the capacity of the internet to facilitate the aggregation of niche networks would create significantly expanded possibilities for social discourse.
Many people read, in place of "social discourse", "commerce". [Insert boilerplate reference to Neo-liberalism here].
I suspect that we are all hand-maidens to the rapacious beast that is Neo-liberalism. But that's not the point.
The "significantly expanded possibilities for social discourse" hasn't, um, ended well. On this point, I intend to write an essay on the virtues of indifference one day. But that's not the point either.
Music lovers (and music sellers) were long familiar with this paradigm. Any committed music listener (pre-downloading, I suppose, but that's another story altogether) would have lived this. And Ms Harvey's album popped this thought in my head once again.
To cut a complicated and boring exposition short: why would the record company commission Steve Albini to produce this album, other than to shore up the niche audience that PJ's army were back in the day, other than to maximise the potential of the long tail.
Will happily expand on this random and not-completely-grounded theory for money. I can be contacted through the usual channels.
The album? Oh. Overdone in an underdone way. Does that make sense? it's like trying to magnify the virtues of a demo, when the demo is actually just the starting point. Didn't really work for me back then, still doesn't now. Not that it's bad or anything, but I think I (now) have been swayed by a meta approach.
And the fact that Steve Albini was probably hiding Garbage (and Garbage 2.0) in him the whole time, waiting for an opportune moment to release Shirley Manson on the world.
(ps. I quite like the techno-futuristic polish of the first Garbage album. But it must have been quite a shock for committed followers of Albini's low fi aesthetic. Like Billie Eilish in a Basque on the cover of Vogue after years of baggy jeans.
If you must have role models, kids (and you shouldn't), please choose carefully.
Radiohead
4/5
circa 1998: what’s better, The Bends or OK Computer?
This is one way of settling a pointless argument.
Beck
3/5
199-whenever: huh?
2022: Golly, the guy's a visionary, etc.
OK. Truth is, when this popped up, I thought to myself, ini this order: "Why?" "I hate Loser" and "This is hype with a life of its own", in that order.
Its still an oddball album, but not only does it work well, it was a long way from most of the stuff being done in the mid-90s. Arguable, a long way from most stuff done ever in popular music. (I mean, even Beck can get this vibe back any more). Lots of people have tried, but it's never again like the first time, is it?
I guess the best way of explaining this is to propose listening to a lot of mid-to-late 60s British pop, and then listening to Revolver and Rubber Soul for the fist time. And then the penny drops.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
2/5
I forget who it was that described The Bad Seeds as punks who can read music.
Albums like this show up the inadequacy of the ranking system. I can appreciate the craft that went into this album, and it seems obvious that this collection of songs will speak to people in a way that no one and nothing has ever spoken to them and change their lives and etc etc.
So, saying "I didn't like this" is both correct and uselessly subjective. A couple of songs did catch my attention, but it's more abrasive and/or less melodic than the Nick Cave stuff I do like ("Push the Sky Away" and "The Mercy Seat", as respective examples).
Oh well...
Curtis Mayfield
3/5
Every so often, I wonder why I didn't listen to albums like this in real time.
To be fair, I was not of an age to actively choose anything beyond nursery rhymes in the mid-seventies. Still. There was an overlap between Mayfield's active period and my active music listening, and whilst I had head of him and knew a few of his bigger 'hits', I never sought out any of his work until after he died.
(this may not be entirely true. Hip Hop sampling opened a magnificently endowed world to me, for which I'll always be greatful).
Anyway. Short, dreamlike, with a sharp lyrical undercurrent. Great for Sunday afternoons and the like
LCD Soundsystem
4/5
I her this and I hear instant nostalgia. I'm not sure if I'm being cynical or not. What I do know is that If this album had been released, say, a decade earlier, I would have loved it. Now...not meh, but I'm engaging with it dispassionately. Maybe there is something to that theory about our music tastes being hard wired in early adulthood. (LCD Soundsystem bubbled up just at the point when I started pretending to be a mature adult, and stopped following music and cricket obsessively. I lost out on both fronts – fooled no-one about the former, lost touch with the two things that matter more than anything else in the world to me on the other.)
So actually this isn't instant nostalgia but an eternal sadness.
Malcolm McLaren
4/5
In early 1983, I was crazy about breakdancing. The only thing left in life (having satisfied my parents by being admitted to the most selective * secondary school in Nigeria **) was to become a professional breakdancer. To throw shapes. To have the MC hail me by name (what happened to MCs, actually?). To be an associate member of the Rock Steady Crew (and for a while, in a ghoulish extension of the rumour that Crazy Legs had broken his neck doing a headspin, a full member.)
Anyways, all I did all day was to to watch pre-MTV videos incorporating breakdancing in one form or another. Bits of Herbie Hancock's 'Rokit'. MJ backsliding in 'Billie Jean'. Kraftwerk's 'Tour de France'. (Tour de France's video, as far as I recall, does not have any breakdancing. But there was an alternative clip that they showed on telly sometimes, that scene from Breakin', Shrimp with the broom. It moved me to tears every time. Tears of rage and frustration, mind; he was so good, I was so...not.)
And Malcolm MacLaren and his All-Stars' 'Buffalo Gals'.
MacLaren was a thieving magpie. But (and I'm not sure whether this is to his credit or not), he never denied it. And (and this is to his credit) he was usually very curious, and thus creative w/r/t what he was thieving and repositioning.
In '83, this song was kind of like Gaga's Let's Dance 25 years on. Dazzled by the video, I never really considered the song on its merits at the time.
But unlike the song that launched a thousand to the power of a thousand Little Monsters, 'Buffalo Gals' is actually good. Very good. As too is Duck Rock. It's belongs to a narrow and narrowing school of inquisitive pop, made by people who have large egos, great memories, and enough bluster about them to get crazy great things funded and made. (Damon Alburn is another example. And to be clear, this is intended as the highest praise possible).
* At the time. Also depends on how you define the word "selective"
** I thought I had satisfied my parents. [Hollow/bitter laugh]
The Sugarcubes
2/5
I know this is post Punk and everything, but this album feels like the producer (the head honcho at One Little Indian?) misread the brief, simply polishing the demos rather than building on them. Ho hum. Still, we do have this fortuitous discovery to thank for...well, Vespertine, for example. And Hyperballad.
Death In Vegas
2/5
Back in 2000, I bought a paperback copy of Armadillo, by William Boyd. Read it on the Oxford Tube, going to visit my sister, finished it on the way back. Felt proper clever with myself. Idly wondered about the fake-Fela musician he invented, scratched my head a little about his coterie of neighbours and their very bijoux building (come on, the housing market was daggers out at dawn then. I mean, even the Guardian had a property supplement. Which, incidentally, once reported that the best thing you could do about N15 was to drive through it. But this is a digression nested under a digression...)
I re-read Armadillo a couple of years ago. Christ. Was I so gullible? It's an intelligent, well written, and essentially empty book, in that a very talented author basically dictated sixty thousand words down the line, safe in the knowledge that any number of readers would fall for its faux-realism and earn him back his advance.
(It was adapted for television too. I didn't watch it because I "didn't want to contaminate the vibe of the original". Yes, I said this. Yes, I should be taken out at dawn, blindfolded, and shot. Incidentally, the adaptation sank without trace).
This has nothing at all to do with The Contino Sessions, other than I feel exactly the same about this album. Actually, a little worse, because I have absolutely nothing to say about it other than to say that I was conned by it in the same way that I was conned by Armadillo.
Radiohead
4/5
One day, we'll be able to fully celebrate Nigel Godrich's contribution to the Radiohead sound the same way we talk about George Martin and The Beatles.
This isn't to take away from the drive and curiosity of the Oxford Five. I'm not suggesting either that Godrich isn't already acknowledged as a pivotal influence on Radiohead. (Radiohead themselves talk about this a lot, particularly with regards to Kid A and In Rainbows.
Still.
Listening to OK Computer OKNOTOK for this, and for the first time (I didn't see the point in listening to it on random demand. I've listened to it perhaps a thousand times (I'm not exaggerating) and only will now, otherwise, if I feel an active yen for it) gave a real feel for the paradigm shift Radiohead made in 1997. (It was a paradigm shift until their next album, which made this one seem like an adventurous but nevertheless predictable progression from The Bends). The OKNOTOK songs are all fine, but they mirror the sonic trajectories of their BritPop peers – more of the same, with more production money.
The understanding I take from this is that Godrich's nudging and prodding pushed Radiohead along until they found themselves in a place they didn't recognise. And, to their credit, decided to hang a round and make the best of it.
It's impossible to listen to this now without thinking about the canon as a whole, and in that sense this is (unfairly) smothered, slightly, by Kid A/Amnesiac. For all that, as an album made with both eyes on the audience, it is up there with the best.
Queens of the Stone Age
3/5
Gotan Project
3/5
Credit should be given where credit is due. If I hadn't heard this in early 202, I wouldn't have listened to the Astor Piazzolla Prom in 2002 (it wasn't just Piazzolla, but that's what took me to it, and that's what stuck, and that's why he gets the credit, damnit!), and my life would still be much the poorer.
It was a fun album then, different enough to actually be considered a little sophisticated – in much the same way a certain demographic thinks of the Pete Tong Classical "crossover" albums as a little sophisticated – but now feels a little worn. Maybe it was commercial-breaked to death, tarnished by association with the neo-bourgeoisie.
I'll be generous. A lot of its afterlife isn't directly its own fault.
The Waterboys
2/5
I don't like fishermen (long story). I don't like the blues (shorter story - trigger for disproportionate melancholy).
Back in the day when a written review could be (and very often, had to be) enough information to buy an album on, Q really pushed The Waterboys, World Party and Karl Wallinger. (Incidentally, I just acquired a complete set of Q, 1-100. Still trying to figure out what to do with them next. Watch this space). However, the only places outside Berwick St where I brought records were blissfully aware of the existence of the Anointed One. And the dirty look I got from one of the guys at Reckless Records discouraged me permanently.
Fortunate, that. Everyone likes The Whole of the Moon. Everyone who has heard it lies Glastonbury Song. Neither are on this rustic, heartfelt, but thoroughly unmoving collection of authentic folk-pop songs. And, truth be told, I doubt it'll do anything for an outsider coming to it cold.
Gene Clark
3/5
Soporific.
The Cars
3/5
Post-Punk or New Wave? UK or US taxonomy?
Ah, who cares. Interesting artefact from a long gone era.
Jorge Ben Jor
2/5
Dinosaur Jr.
3/5
Well, I would have washed my hands of this had it not been for the intuitive/counter-intuitive (yes, it can be both at once) cover of "Just Like Heaven". It showed imagination and range; it took enough from the original to make the cover a worthwhile venture, without doing a Continental Philosophy free interpretation.
Up until then, I was a bit bored by what seemed like predictable three chord grunge,( I did wonder idly about the fade-outs, which were unexpected.)
Ranking here only reflects that fact that I'm gonna have to listen to this a few more times before I can form a confident pov.
Aerosmith
2/5
Really? In 1989, when I was 17, I though this was juvenile and poorly considered. Good to know that I am consistent with a few things.
Entertainment value rooted to time and place, no doubt ('Love in an Elevator', and its "x-rated" video, were considered a bit risqué back then. (Does anyone use the word risqué any more? Does the concept still exist? We go from prudery to full-on porn with no intermediate steps these days. Or maybe I'm being a silly old fuddie duddie). Musical value was close to zilch. And trust me, they knew this. (Check out the album cover. No one with any aspirations towards taste and aesthetics would want to be associated with that eyesore. I mean, the trucks are so ugly!)
Anyways. If you know why this album found its way here, please do not @ me. I am the better for not needing to know such things.
Elvis Presley
4/5
Elvis was good. I don't think this needs to be qualified in any way.
Randy Newman
3/5
Lester Maddox was quite the piece of work, it seems. Without passing judgement, interesting to read that Bobby Lee Fears, once of the Ohio Players, formed a twosome (gruesome qualifier subjective. perhaps.) late in the day.
As for the album. I'm not going to say that it is irony free, but it does strip the joke down to its bare bones. That aside, one has to applaud Mr Newman for his resistance to change over the years. If it works, why change it?
Actually, I'm being a bit unfair. For good or for bad, everyone knew who Lester Maddox was, and was able to make up their mind accordingly. Free world, freedom of association, etc.
(yes. I know that Maddox went to extreme lengths to ensure that the only black folk in his diner were his workers. No, I'd have never stepped in it, even if I could. yes, I would judge anyone who, in full possession of the facts, did so. Yes, there is a powerful element of inequity and a lack of fairness in the story. But yes, so it is in many other aspects of life, many of which we cannot/choose not/simple do not engage with. We should always work towards fairness. Even in the full knowledge – particularly in the full knowledge – that we will *never* get there. Ever.)
Did I like this album? No... Would I turn it off if it popped up unexpectedly? No. Do I remember anything at all of it? No. But all of this is me, not anyone else.
Three stars again, but out of indifference (indifference of the most positive kind, mind)
Kraftwerk
4/5
The one 'official' Kraftwerk album I don't own. 'Autobahn' was on the radio a fair bit when I was a child. Which, if you grew up where I grew up, you would acknowledge as being rather odd.
On a different note. Ignoring the uselessness of the term as a taxonomy, never quite figured out why Germans aren't (or don't seem to be – I've asked a few) pissed off by the term 'krautrock'.
Paul McCartney and Wings
4/5
Sounds just like you’d expect if you were getting high in Las Gidi back in ‘73. (‘Let Me Roll It’ aside. Me and that song do not get along at all).
On the topic of getting high. When I was at school, there was a (possibly apocryphal) story about Shanna Ranks going to The Shrine during a tour in Nigeria, partaking of the sacred herb with Abami Eda himself, and promptly passing out.
Nationalist pride takes strange guises sometimes.
Joni Mitchell
2/5
Nope. God knows I've tried long and hard over the years. (Largely due to a Mr H. Hancock. If he recommended trying a dog's fart on loop, I'll do it no questions asked.)
I guess this is one of those "it is *definitely* me, not you" affairs.
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
This album is proof of the clout Mr B must have had back in ‘83. ie before Born in the USA. Remarkable.
It’s an album that either moves you or not. I’m sort of moved…
The Youngbloods
2/5
Nah. Mountain too high for me.
The Cardigans
2/5
I'm sure this album will appeal to someone, somewhere. In fact, I can understand why this album did, and still will, appeal to someone, somewhere. Just that I'm not that person.
There's a point where wistfulness crosses over into whimsy, the charming into the contrived ... actually, this is ad hominem. I didn't like this, and I'm only writing this because I have to give the wretched thing a ranking before I move on.
Megadeth
2/5
I was going to say something charitable about needing to understand the vernacular in order to get what the band is saying...then I remembered that for a while, I actually liked this sort of thing. Thrash wasn't ever an explicitly political stance, much more reactionary pose. Mind you, this was 1986. "Morning in America" and all that self-serving horseshit. One can excuse reactionary impulses.
My sense is that outrage is worthless unless tempered and targeted usefully. And that takes a lot of work. This album is brimful with enthusiasm, a little short on reflection, and wouldn't have done more than preach to a niche band of coverts.
Alanis Morissette
4/5
AS a point of principle, I'm not going to listen to this. I still have fond memories of it, memories that I've allowed to lie undisturbed for the better part of 20 years. (Occasional radio flashbacks aside.) I really don't want to have to overthink this now. And I know I will.
Marvin Gaye
3/5
Yes, I know that it is a "contractual obligations" album
(of a sort—settlement for a failed marriage, rather than rounding up a stupid seven-album deal. But then, since the ex-spouse to-be in question was actually the big sister of Mr Gaye's record label boss, there is an overlap, no?)
...but still, and "A Funky Space Reincarnation Aside", it feels like it was phoned in from Bruges.
Flip side to this is that Mr Gaye's offcuts score higher than the entire oeuvre of some of his counterparts. So...
Sade
4/5
The percussive intro to this album is one of the iconic moments in 20th century popular music. The end.
Culture Club
3/5
So. I sort of knew that Karma Chameleon, Victims, and Church of the Poison Mind must have had a parent. But I'd never for a moment thought to seek it out.
AS an aside – this is only the second 80s pop album I've been recommended thus far, after more than a year. We already know that "random" is infused with a dose of ... something (cc. Depeche Mode and The Smiths) . So...
(Actually, I'm barking up the wrong tree here. Lets try again.)
I can't be bothered going through the original list, but there's a bit of a bias here. The 80s are the decade where pop music became proper legit cultural capital, and 80s pop...
(actually, I'm barking up another wrong tree.)
Never ever saw this one at Our Price. Jolly good fun, neither disposable pop nor brooding over seriousness.
Love
4/5
Nothing to do with the album itself, but the Apple remaster (compared to my tape and CD versions) sounds really off. It's as though the instruments have been relevelled by someone who hadn't actually heard the songs first.
What you can take from this is that I like this album a lot, and I've liked it a lot for a long time.
The End
Harry Nilsson
3/5
Empty brain day. Nothing to say, nothing to do. (The reviewer, not the artist).
Ash
3/5
I would never have thought that I will have any residual fondness for this album. Nostalgia is an odd thing.
I remember reading a profile of them in Q that pretty much broke my heart. I can't remember why (hey, this was almost a quarter of a century ago!), but I'm pretty certain it was as much about what was not said as what was said in the piece. I'll look it up sometime.
Remember thinking (from the grand old age of mid 20s) that they were impossibly young. The energy of the performance is what carried them through then, I think.
Personally, I don't think it belongs on this list; personally, I'm sort of pleased that it is on this list.
Janelle Monáe
2/5
I like the idea of the ArchAndroid. But try as I have, it seems impossible to warm to. Too clinical and calculated for my liking
Queen
3/5
So, when "Bohemian Rhapsody" (film) came out, my then 12 year old asked if we could go watch it together because...I'm actually not sure. Rami Malek did have a name then, from 'Mr Robot'. But my kid's quest to watch every programme ever made for television is largely platform specific – Robot and Netflix and first-born never co-existed in the same televisual universe.
Anyway, thanks to all the palaver about first Sacha Baron Cohen and then the director who is not David Fincher (who I think is a genius) but for some reason always crosses that particular identification wire, I wasn't keen.
Also, I had a peculiar relationship with Queen. Like 3 million brits, I own Greatest Hits, and love pretty much every song on it. (Ditto Greatest Hits II) When Freddie died, I was devastated in a way that has only ever happened once since with someone in the public eye (Warne, since you ask). I liked Queen, liked them a lot, but had never ever owned a full album of theirs. (I had listened to The Works in full, but that's about it.)
Anyways, I had no real expectations for the film. But (1) I was quite surprised to discover that I knew extensive chunks of the Queen Story, such that I knew exactly where the various fudges and smudges and reordering of the chronology were trying to hide;
(2) it bothered me not a jot, because I loved the film. Really did.
Still have no idea why the 12 year old wanted to. Musically, he's on the Grime end of the spectrum. Still he liked it enough to go back to watch it again. and a third time. Go figure.
I guess its the music. It cuts across so much, almost without trying. Queen II is sort of like that. You wouldn't expect it to work, but, like, it does despite itself. And despite me.
Oh, I have listened to another Queen album in full and more the once. The one with Death on Two Legs. I'm guessing that was 'A Night at the Opera'. Or maybe 'A Day at the Races'. See? This is so weird. I know all the albums off head, and probably in correct chronological order too. (including 'Flash')
Prince
4/5
Prince's perviness did him no favours. It distracted from the music. But, then, perhaps: the perviness was a part of what made the music what it was, i.e., amazing
Janis Joplin
4/5
Janis, obviously, is the difference here. She had complete mastery over her voice, technical and emotional, and she knew it. The claim is hay she was plagued with self-doubt for much of her short life. You wouldn’t know it to hear her sing. Somehow, she made it sound like her life depended upon it *and* that she had no more fucks to give.
Charles Mingus
2/5
This isn't very good, I fear either subjectively* or objectively. Getting his psychiatrist to write an introductory essay muddies the critical waters sufficiently to distract from this basic understanding. It's a cacophony of undistllled discontent, but much more likely to disengage than to rope people into the cause.
*You have listened to Pithecanthropus Erectus, right? So what the hell I'm I supposed to do with this?
Eels
4/5
Happy (miserable) days…
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
3/5
More than with any other Neil Young album (it's a matter of the falsetto), the adjective that comes to mind whenever I hear this is plaintive.
The Black Crowes
2/5
A lesson in musical education and cos-playing. I loved 'Hard to Handle' when this album was realised - 1992? 1991?. Because I come from a household where musical tastes were as uncoordinated (and as limited, in their own way) as Jim Reeves, Abba, Millie Jackson and Boney M
(and yes, I know I could describe this as "eclectic". But that would be a lie, a lie crying out to heaven for vengeance)
...I had no cause to consider this as anything other than an original composition.
Boy, Otis knocked me for six.
(The story of how I came to hear the Otis Redding version is pretty revealing in its own way. Everyone knows "(Sitting on) the Dock of the Bay". I knew pretty much nothing else about Otis, or indeed about 60s soul beyond Aretha and Motown.
One day, saw somewhere that Bryan Ferry named his first born after the singer. I've never liked Roxy Music very much, but Eno has always intrigued me. So, even though I hadn't listened to anything by RM other than Virginia Plain, on the basis of a deep and conflicted investment in Mr E, I decided to figure out what it was about Redding.
In other words, I took the scenic route to the Truth.
The Young Rascals
4/5
This album has surprising depth, belying its vocal pop roots. Interesting to see that they wrote most of their own stuff too.
Britney Spears
2/5
What. Fresh. Hell.
Even for 1999 pop.
An aside. If in any doubt about the motives of Ms Spears backers: the music on this album is on a par with the music of S Club Seven. Which is to say, aimed at twelve year olds and made by a notional big sister or brother.
It's impossible to unthinkable "(Baby Hit Me) One More Time" (although the Travis cover does help. But it'll be interesting to do the Lady Gaga test on this song and video.
Queen
3/5
Traffic
3/5
Interesting.
Pink Floyd
5/5
Anything I say will simply detract from this masterpiece. The end.
Joni Mitchell
5/5
Pink Floyd
3/5
Is it bad to say that I prefer pompous Pink Floyd to this? (Actually, my favourite PF album is WYWH, so not quite. But I do prefer, say, The Division Bell to this.) Dunno, both from a historical and an artistic perspective, this seems neither avant garde enough to warrant a deep exploration, nor accomplished enough to endure 50 odd years. But this is me...
Christine and the Queens
3/5
I read an interesting article a few days ago on Tedium.com
(butchered by The Times a few days later – I imagine they came to it through the same source as I did, Popbitch. Make of that what you will of the "paper of record")
about chord changes and pop music. Essentially, the author claims (on the basis of a geek level analysis) that the chord change is a dying art in pop music. Interestingly, he isn't necessarily a fan of this compositional 'trick' (he repeatedly cites Michael Jackson's 'Man in the Mirror' as an exemplar of emotional manipulation. Rather, he is interested in the changes to the act of composition – specifically the increasing use of DAWs like Logic Pro, and the ever-suffocating and acontextual embrace of hip hip tropes. The article is really worth reading.
Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that Chris is a good album. It is passionate, and it seeks to communicate this emotion unambiguously with its listener. Think about it as torch music for the 21st century. Perhaps I'm being calculating, or even cynical, but I do get the sense that a few switches from minor to major keys would have turned a good album into a great one.
I think.
George Harrison
3/5
So. Even ignoring dic 3 (original iteration) this is still too long and too ramble. But the good bits are very good indeed. Probably a 4, but because I can't magic away the extraneous material...
The Magnetic Fields
2/5
A concept album, self evidently. I can't say I felt the concept translating terribly well. Irony is a selection of about 10 of these songs would have made quite the album.
Sonic Youth
2/5
So. There ought to be a rule here. 1 artist = 1 album.
All rules are honoured in the breach, of course, so there will be room for exceptions.
The point is that with such an injunction, this 40 minute dirge wouldn't have had a look in. Not even as a second album (Daydream Nation and A Thousand Leaves both wipe the floor with this. And that's without even thinking too hard about the SY back catalogue.)
Björk
4/5
Along with Medúlla, Björk at her absolute best. The attraction of Vespertine is the unexpected (for the time, and tome some degree even now) synthesis of organic and electronic. There's a warmth to the sound (not talking about the voice here – and, interestingly, I think this album showcases Björk's vocal range more effectively than any of her other albums.)
I'm not, and I'll never be, a close parser of lyrics. but there is an edgy contentment that runs through this album. Sort of like, "I don't know how I got here, and I'm not sure that it's going to last, but I'll certainly enjoy the moment." Which is a lovely sentiment (assuming I'm not reading too much into the evidence, as it were.
Miles Davis
3/5
Bert Jansch
3/5
I'm never sure what yo make of undemanding albums like this. One's relationship with them is less about the music itself, and more about the circumstances in which it meets one. I'm in my office on an unexpectedly sweltering November morning, construction work assailing me from the street. I can appreciate Jansch (whom I had heard of, a lot, but never heard) clinically, but there's little chance of a musical epiphany or whatever.
I'll try to remember to listen to this at home some evening and reevaluate more closely. For the moment, perfectly fine for what it is.
Femi Kuti
4/5
Sometimes, I wonder what would have been of Femi if Fela hadn't existed.
For one thing, he'd be accorded *far* more respect as an artist. The natural, and lazy, thing to do is to think about him as a derivative of his father, rather than (like a million other artistes, most not one-half of him) as influenced by him.
I think he is a far more adventurous band leader than his father. I think that he was condemned to singing about social issues by his father. I think that I am doing him a disservice by evoking Abami Eda repeatedly here.
This is a fine album. True, some lyrics are just this side of cringe – but, then, this was almost 30 years ago. It has matured well, and deserves your attention.
The Slits
3/5
Counter to much of the presumptions about Punk today, a degree of musical knowledge and awareness was useful in the genre. To break the rules, you need to know what the rules are in the first place. Reference points are an important aspect of building a canon.
So this album certainly pushes away from the over-elaborate theatricals of prog (and, in a sense, Disco), but retains a attachment to melody as the ('a', actually) motif that can hold a song in place – without feeling bound to engaging with the trope in the same way that their musical forebears did.
There's something coy and endearing in Ari Up's delivery, which too marks it as not fitting the Punk consensus.
Good find
Fiona Apple
2/5
Lord knows I tried. I tried because Tidal and When the Pawn... are two of my all-time top 149 albums (don't ask). So I'm happy to accept that (1) this is me, not you or her or anyone else, and (2) to acknowledge that once again (probably for the 20th time) I've tried and failed to listen to this album through to the end. I think is is a psychosocial trigger, possibly related to the eeriness of the pandemic period. Every time I hear it, I just seize up completely. It is unbearably...ok, I'll shit up now. Point made
Jethro Tull
3/5
I've listened to this already, and forgot to rate it. I"m struck by how pleasant, but completely unmemorable, the experience was. To be fair, the songwriting skews complicated, but not a single line or melody was recalled on the second listen through. Feels like reverse alchemy
Goldie
2/5
Underwhelming. An artefact from a specific moment in time – of historical interest/significant alone.
An analogy: compare Dizzee Rascal and Goldie. Rascal was a Grime pioneer. He earned the right to 'Bonkers' (which is a cool song, btw. But, you know, cred and all that.)
Goldie had been in the D n' B trenches. But much more a water-carrier. An enthusiastic water-carrier, but still. Enthusiasm just meant that everyone was hydrated. it doesn't change the course of wars or anything.
Lauryn Hill
5/5
If the only thing Lauryn Hill ever did was...oh, that's more or less right.
Oddly enough (and I'm going to have to factcheck myself later), I think this was the album that first gave me cause for pause about the Q ratings system. Four measly stars. (cc Be Here Now).
Musically, The Miseducation...did not bring anything new-new to the table. But, like The Score three years before, it is actually more than the sum of its parts. From the interstitials to the cover art to the videos to the exquisite sample choices
(actually. this was peak Puff Daddy era. The Miseducation...approached sampling with a restraint that was pretty atypical for the era - the only other mainstream example from the era that comes to mind is Mos Def's Black on Both Sides. Which, of course, id G.O.A.T. material)
...basically, Ms Hill was, for a while, better than sliced bread. Probably still is.
(I can't abide her cover of "Can't take My Eyes Of You". Dictionary definition of milquetoast. But then, if we we moved the world one inch to the left, it'll be perfect too.)
Ryan Adams
3/5
With the benefit of hindsight: nah. Perfectly serviceable etc, but nothing to take home with you. I guess this is why he is so prolific
Marvin Gaye
3/5
'Let's Get It On' either (1) disguises the perfunctory nature of the rest of this album or (2) highlights the perfunctory nature of the rest of this album. Depends on how you approach it. I think (2). It isn't a bad album, but the lead song always flags up what Gaye could do and didn't (or wouldn't) with this material. That Let's Get It On is, in effect, reprised half way through adds despair to disappointment.
All that said: still stands read beanie , if not head and shoulders, above most of the mainstream soul of the period.
Dennis Wilson
3/5
I can see the charm
Magazine
3/5
Unlike Orange Juice (see 419) this is, for good and for bad, post-punk in sensibilities and outcomes. Which is to say, lest nihilistic but just as (perhaps more) ambitious than punk. "The Light Pours Out Of Me" is the clear highlight; enthusiasm counts for more that songwriting chops 5 days out of 7, so the slightly repetitive vibe of most of this album can be excused on the grounds that the vibe isn't a bad one.
Sonic Youth
3/5
Orange Juice
4/5
Of course it is correct to describe this as post punk. But it feels almost like the antithesis of punk, with melodic pegging, considered (if not necessarily complex) lyrics, and clear investment in post-prod. Which is to say, it doesn't feel like it has the cynicism that sometimes overwhelmed new wave and Brit-Synth of the same period. But doesn't cleave *that* closely to punk either.
The Monkees
3/5
I'm very curious about the process that led to this album cover. Aside from being the antithesis of cool, it doesn't disguise the normalness of the Monkees—at a time when the wind was blowing counter-culture.
Fine, Jangle-pop overlaid with melodic singing was tried and proven at this point. But...you know...talk about freezing a moment.
Interesting, Wiki tells me that this was the first album that the band had a creative control over. It doesn't not work, but it seems rather unambitious. But then, it doesn't seem to be looking for a bandwagon to hijack either, so that's something.
And the facts don't lie – it was a hit album. Perhaps young adults just functioned differently 55 years ago.
The War On Drugs
4/5
Odd how nostalgia can manifest in more than one dimension simultaneously.
On the personal: this was the last album I bought during my first music collection era. (Yes, I was seduced by the bright future of streaming. But just to make clear, I'm not a vinyl returner. If for no other reason, I lack the space and I have a developed talent for scratching records and breaking needles).
Beyond me, as most things should be: it evokes an age that I was never a part of but somehow seem to think that I can identify acutely. Which, I think, is very much a positive thing to say about the record.
It starts with the cover and the title. A sepia-tinted photograph, simple iconography, a distinct yet understated distinction between band name and album name. The individual is in repose, but hunched into himself as though conducting an accounting of the soul rather than opening up to the world.
(Re-reading this: what a load of Pseuds' Corner)
I guess I like this not because it is an exceptional album (it is good), but because it speaks to me in very distinct and individual ways. This happens sometimes, when I listen to and fall in love wit a specific album, but have no real curiosity in exploring the rest of the band's catalogue.
I short, I like this, but I don't think my reasons why will have any real bearing on anyone else.
Shivkumar Sharma
3/5
I'm gonna pass on this.
Blondie
3/5
Willie Colón & Rubén Blades
3/5
Salsa is music for dancers. Which is to say, its fans engage with it viscerally. With the mind with the feet, a holistic integration senses and sensations, of the tangible and the intangible.
Long story cut short: this is excellent mood music
Sleater-Kinney
3/5
Honest clean fun.
My (perhaps uninformed) pov on the Riot Grrl movement is that they were largely uninterested in what anyone else thought about them – their concern was what they thought about themselves. Which is cool.
The Dictators
3/5
Enthusiastic, exuberant, ebullient,
Elis Regina
3/5
The challenge I find in post bossa nova genres (apparently!) is that they seem to surrender their viscera to something rather subdued and restrained.
Thus this. The voice and arrangements are impeccable - to impeccable, perhaps. File under ‘world music’…
Moby
5/5
D’you remember when what’s his name who is now the voice of Apple Music had a show on MTV? 7pm four nights a week or so?
(Zane Lowe. Fuck, I’m getting old. I was thinking Eddy Temple Morris and at the same time that that couldn’t be right.)
Anyway. Good programme. He played Dead Prez and shit. And really have this album a push when it needed it. (Which sounds a pretty odd thing to say, but Play wasn’t always the every-track-licensed-to-a-commercial juggernaut that it became.)
The sleeve had lots of earnest and questioning essays about … if I recall correctly, how you can have strong views but only beat yourself up about them. That didn’t age well lolz.
Album has, though. It really is the sweet spot.
R.E.M.
5/5
This was the first CD I ever bought (well, one of two - the other was Mary Jo’s What’s the 411).
A tenner for both. My guess is that they’d fallen off the back of a lorry. AFTP was about one week old then. I’d heard ‘Drive’ and liked it, but I don’t think I would have bought this if not for my free trade fella on Wood Green High Street.
Good on him. 30 years on, still an all time favourite. Some grumble that it is their sell out album. Maybe, but if so they did it in style.
The Stone Roses
3/5
Dad Rock as a proof of concept. Which is cruel, (and, for someone who knowing enjoys albums press-ganged into this snark, a bit close to the bone). But this is (more or less) what TSR has become. Needless to say, I Am The Revolution and Fools Gold are worth the rice of admission many times over.
Pulp
3/5
Because Cocker remains a public image, one can't but wonder what he'd make of this album today. For what it is, and when it was, it is what theorists would describe as social observation. And for that, it is very good. The recurrence of key themes – lust, longing, betrayal – does make one wonder about the lives of others (the singer/songwriter other).
In the UK, the working class narrative is under constant threat from the imperative to social advancement – an aspiration that sort of elides the uncomfortable that that this kind of hierarchy is relative, rather than absolute. If we could all become middle class, then we'd be living in a class-inflected Ponzi scheme. As it is, Cocker's biography strongly suggests that he has leapfrogged (by way of talent, and positioning, aided by that impenetrable variable which is public taste) to a point that (thanks to the surrounding eco-system, not by way of conscious intent on his part) would frame him something close to a class traitor. This is rubbish, of course. But this album does seem firmly bedded in a tribal understanding of social interaction.
I ramble. This is still worth listening to, even if the Brit Pop context and the social critique are somewhat worn now...
David Bowie
4/5
It isn't that Bowie – Station to Station is a victim of his success (far from it). And it isn't that albums like this (or, as another example, Lodger) were buried by the success of some of his other stuff. (This album was top 5 on both sides of the pond; thereafter, Bowie wasn't a "commercial" draw until Scary Monsters and Super Freaks in...81?, and then (Stateside) with Let's Dance)
(Yes, yes, the Berlin Trilogy. Brilliant albums, critical darlings, did nowt for many a year. Facetiously (partly) I can't help thinking sometimes that Bowie Bonds were a way of chiseling out the commercial rewards that they deserved and were denied.)
Station to Station is overlooked, I think, in part because it defied characterisation – as did the Thin White Duke, heroin chic aside. (Cocaine Chic? Qualuudes? Who knows. Probably the lot.)
Likewise the album. Station to Station, the opening song, is (if I may coin a genre) industrial blues; Wild is the Wind, which closes the album, is a torch song and I'll fight anyone who says differently). It's a great album that doesn't instruct the listener to do anything (dance, smoke, fuck) other than to shut up and pay attention.
It's a good 'un
Cocteau Twins
4/5
Could have sworn I'd done this before. Anyway. Always think of this as the spiritual forebear of trip-hop.
Portishead
5/5
A friend, an early Dummy proselytiser, listened to my copy of the album once. I'd bought it on CD in 1996 or 97, I guess, from the cheap CD shop across the way from Reckless Records.
I always assumed there was something slightly dodge about their sources. They were cheap. Not as cheap as Cheapo Records up the road, but, you know, they had new stuff. And I didn't peel the skin off my cuticles while rifling through their stacks. And I didn't leave covered in dust and sneezing. I did love Cheapo Records by the way, I must say.
Anyway, my suspicions were confirmed when my friend, who had been tootling about with a spliff and a kebab and only God knows what else, very almost had a heart attack when the "It's A Fire" loop kicked in.
Turns out I had (and still have) a Japanese import – for some unfathomable reason, the UK pressings didn't, include this absolute epic.
God, I'm old. First encounter with Portishead was when Multitrack 3 on BBC World Service played the hell out of "Sour Times" *before* it won the (ahem) Mercury Communications Music Prize.
(Anyone remember Mercury mobiles? Free calls all evening and weekend? My cousin had won. Used to go all the way to deepest Sarf London to rinse that thing...)
Is it me or was the Mercury Prize much earlier in the year then? Have a vague recollection of it being in February. Must check.
That, I think, was (at least in the years that I actively paid attention) the strongest shortlist – and thus the most deserving winner.
Ice Cube
3/5
The Rolling Stones
2/5
There isn't very much I can do any more about my core conviction – viz, that the The Rolling Stones are the the most celebrated singles band in history.
I understand that this is their first album of solely self-penned material. The fact that the UK edition does not have the superlative Paint It Black aside, this really feels to me like when Big Fun broke free of the clutches of SAW.
Country Joe & The Fish
2/5
[crickets]
The Charlatans
3/5
Nice (albeit diluted) grooves here. Explains (sort of) the attraction of \"My Beautiful Friend\" (not on this album)
Bonnie "Prince" Billy
3/5
"Prosaic" and "pastoral" come to mind. But neither work. Aside from both being Music Crit. 101 cliches, the album has an edge that pushes aside the notion of bucolic domesticity.
For what it's worth, I didn't not enjoy the album, but its lyrical subtlety could (not would) only speak to me in rare moments of introspection. So not sure this rating is a fair reflection of the album's potential.
The Kinks
3/5
Lachrymose-adjacent. What has always puzzled me about the Kinks is how they managed to sound so...unprofessional, when they were clearly anything but. (This is meant as a compliment, to be clear. I tend to compare them to The Stones, who always sounded (to me, at least) as if they were faking it.)
Creedence Clearwater Revival
2/5
Who is Cosmo? Why the factory? Why the very backhanded compliment to Marvin Gaye? (I wonder whether this may possessed something of the Eric Clapton/Bob Marley "I Shot the Sheriff" dynamic – or just wishful thinking on the part of CCR?).
Anyway. Rather than rubbish an album that is fond to many, I'll simply say that I'll acknowledge this without quite understanding why.
Circle Jerks
2/5
From a chronology of punk, an interesting contribution. But. Song titles like "I Just Want Some Skank" nod at the historical, rather than contemporary interest that this recording would offer most listeners in AD2023.
(Having said that: in this halcyon age of polyamory and consensual non-monogamy, albums with titles like "Group Sex" might succeed in finding a natural audience. Perhaps. The edge of this tape*...
...the edge that this tape communicates might just be at odds with the everything-is-permissible-with-the right-amount-of-mutual-respect vibe of the present day. Again, perhaps.
No. you shouldn't listen to it on anything other than tape. Authenticity matters, as does a natural disregard to matters like sonic fidelity. With the latter, our eardrums should be grateful...
The Isley Brothers
4/5
Neu!
4/5
FWIW, I don't see the change as such between Side A and Side B. A distinction without a difference, thankfully?
Crowded House
4/5
So. We are in the age of the long tail. Why then is it hard for intelligent, non-formula-ised music (like this) to find a place in the charts
(even the lower reaches; Crowded House never threatened the higher reaches of the UK Top 40. But then, they never sought to, in that as water finds its level, so too they understood the true commercial and critical appeal of their particular brand of music)
?
I blame pop journalism. (Yes. the definition of 'pop' has massively changed in the last thirty years).
We are all the poorer for this.
Napalm Death
3/5
Think about what would happen if this energy were directed elsewhere. World peace, for example.
Jimi Hendrix
2/5
Red Hot Chili Peppers
3/5
Rick James, James Brown, and RHCP all subscribe to the genre called Funk. Discuss, with examples.
This aside (and all three have places in my musical heart, albeit for very different reasons), Under the Bridge is the ultimate bait and switcher. Personally, I think they deserved all the new people it introduced to them.
Small Faces
3/5
Don't know enough to have an informed opinion about this, but. OK, interesting.
Ravi Shankar
2/5
Nah. Guess one had to be there (paisley, psychedelia, weed and all) to get it.
Billie Holiday
3/5
Sweet, sometime bordering on saccharine. Nevertheless, the undeniable emotive force of Ms Holiday's voice and phrasing wins over elegant but largely linear orchestration
Machito
2/5
Not for me. Shrill, incessantly so.
Doves
2/5
In relation to ‘Lost Souls’, this is the biggest letdown since Alaa Al-Aswany’s ‘The Yacoubian Building’ and ‘Chicago’.
(Not bigger than, mind. Still convinced a shapeshifter was responsible for that travesty. This is not bad, just dull. And ‘Lost Souls’ is an amazing album.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3/5
Creedence Clearwater Revival
3/5
Not. Again. It's like when this supposedly random selection kept ramming Elvis Bloody Costello down my throat.
This was ok, in that it didn't grate. But at best mood music – music for a mood I don't very much identify with.
Ella Fitzgerald
3/5
So, it's pretty hard to say anything at all bad about Ella. Or Ira, for that matter.
Lana Del Rey
2/5
Jamie Loftus is an LA-based comedian and audio producer. A while ago, she did an epic audio series exploring Lolita – the book, and how its complex legacy has evolved (and has been contested) over the last half century or so.
It's a complex, nuanced and fascinating listen. (It's also 11 hours long.) It also reserves a special place in hell for two people, Adrian Lyne and ... Lana Del Rey.
The first is understandable, even though I think he ought to be given a right of reply, if not necessarily the benefit of the doubt. You had to be in the 80s to understand the 80s. Not to justify any of the very many excesses of the decade (and his enabling hand in some of them), but at least to see them in context.
One of a number of British Ad Men who transitioned to Hollywood filmmaking in the seventies and eighties, Lyne as a creative is (I think) both a prisoner of his time (unreconstructed) and his original profession (borderline unconscionable a lot of the time, even though this is dressed up along the lines of giving the audience what they (don't yet know that they) want.)
(Lyne's cinematic output: Foxes, Flashdance, 9 ½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Jacob's Ladder, Lolita; Unfaithful; Deep Water. The semi-colons mark lengthy career breaks. I've watched them all. Jacob's Ladder – a fascinating and unhinged film – aside, there is an identifiable motif in his work. First time happenstance, second coincidence. The third time is enemy action etc etc.)
There is an element of agency attached to choosing to make flashy erotic dramas – films that sometimes bordered on soft porn and often objectified their female leads. (Karina Longsworth's equally epic mini series about the Erotic 80s, for her film podcast You Must Remember This, explores this complex and beguiling swamp in exhaustive and engaging detail. Recommended.)
Anyway, the point is that Lyne's hands aren't clean. His Lolita, in Loftus's eyes, was a crime against literature, filmmaking, and moral sensibilities. It is also worth pointing out that he did nothing illegal, and that he was the public face of the much larger collaborative effort that enabled the film. If anything, I'd argue that his Lolita forced (or at least accelerated) the end of a sometimes discomfiting film genre (one which, in the spirit of full disclosure, I acknowledge actively enjoying as a teenager), by taking it to its logical (and deeply illogical) conclusion.
Del Rey? Loftus's ire derived from what, at length and repeatedly, she taxonomised as the commodification of a certain aesthetic, for personal (and commercial) gain and with no interest in the wider consequences.
It's a complicated argument. I had had lots of thoughts about Del Rey before listening to The Lolita Podcast, many of them ambivalent. I hadn't thought about her as a spiritual enabler, though. I wonder whether Loftus credits her with more intelligence than she has, or with less intelligence. (Both measures are relative to Loftus's position. I have no claims to any knowledge about Del Rey's intelligence.)
Anyway. As a voice and perspective of a generation now some way away from me, Loftus came across as...far removed from the stereotypes appended to "Millennials" (I don't subscribe to the Generation Game, but it is there so I shan't ignore it). The Lolita Podcast (my time suck caveat aside) is worth listening to as a piece of invested literary and social analysis.
As for Chemtrails. Like I said, I've thought about Del Rey's output a lot over the years, mainly from the perspective of an enduring paradox: Del Rey as a manufactured product, yet with undeniable talent. Style is a lot to her. But there is a lot of substance.
A bit over a year ago, I listened to all her albums in chronological order. (Streaming does have its uses). This, by a margin, was the least engaging. Some framed it as part of her evolution into a grown up entertainer. I found it untethered, a concept without a proper vehicle.
Songhoy Blues
2/5
Nah…
Grizzly Bear
3/5
A bit on the precious side, but with undoubted high points. There. That's a bland a generic enough statement, isn't it?
Paul Simon
4/5
Interesting that five songs are co-credited on the streaming version I listened to. Can't remember if I ever did read the sleeve notes on my CD version (I usually do) but pretty certain I'd never heard of the Gaza Sisters before now. More certain that they aren't mentioned in "Under African Skies", the documentary about the making of this album. Might be a factor in the occasional claim of self-centred cultural appropriation pushed in Mr Simon's direction every now and again.
Anyway. Sound album, one for the ages.
The Byrds
3/5
Gentle. Undemanding. I wonder, is there is a Rock Family Trees of the Byrds? That would be quite a task, thrashing the myriad associations into anything resembling a coherent narrative.
(mind you, there's no reason for it to be coherent. These relationships were anything but.)
(Re. RFT. There isn't. Cowards. There is a Fleetwood Mac one, though. Needs updating, one imagines. Never a dull moment with those ones either.)
The Cure
4/5
Lol Tolhurst remains one of the mysteries of modern music. If he were a bassist, I think I would have him figured out (Paul Simonon, Sid Vicious). Or, from a different perspective, a drummer (John Bonham)...oh. Tolhurst was a drummer. Well. He was the drummer on this. The percussionist, I think better to say. Not in a bad bad way. The sense of brood hanging over this album would not have been complemented by anything more than a good time-keeping.
Great album. Mood music, if the desired mood is radical apathy. A Forest is, and will always be, a song to cherish
Leonard Cohen
3/5
It is possible, I think, to acknowledge the appeal of Cohen without actually warming to him.
Part of it is to do with the fact that (to my unending sorry) I am not, and now will never be, a lyrics person.
Part of it is reactive, and thus illogical. I live in a place captured by the Cult of Cohen, largely uncritical and in thrall more to the social image that coalesced around Cohen during his lifetime (reinforced, unsurprisingly, by his death) than to, say, his actual music.
(This too is reactive and subjective on my part. Perhaps I should simply go to a therapist, rather than working out my issues with my habits via intermediaries like stylish singers of a certain age.)
All that said. Songs like Chelsea Hotel are indubitably from the top drawer. this album is of far more modest origins, and should do him no favours.
(I do like the cigarette on the sleeve. But there you go, I'm imprisoned by trite superficialities myself...)
Jefferson Airplane
3/5
What links the Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane and the Grace Slick of Jefferson Starship? The ability to tap into the youth zeitgeist of the moment, I suppose.
"You can do jazz, classical, blues, opera, country until you're 150, but rap and rock and roll are really a way for young people to get that anger out"
"Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" – a Reaganite anthem if there ever was one – was as connected to the moment as "White Rabbit" two decades earlier. This is a hard proposition to prove, not least because very few people could have (emotionally, subjectively) inhabited both milieu. Still, I stand by this thesis.
"Somebody to Love" was on the soundtrack to one of the most hyped films of the 1990s, Jin Carrey's "Cable Guy". My theory is that it was always intended to be a dark and malevolent critique of consumer comfort – but got sidetracked by the outsized and unexpected success of The Mask. Dunno. Should look it up sometime.
The Byrds
2/5
Just not for me, '8 Mile High' notwithstanding.
Arcade Fire
3/5
Bit of a plod, with a occasional quasi transcendental moment
Common
2/5
Not listening to this. Electric Circus was a flawed but adventurous and sometimes very good album. This was closer to music by committee.
"So, Mr Common, we have to tap back into the zeitgeist of 'One Day It'll All Make Sense' etc. You don't have the material? Worry not! We have you, and we have the incentive..."
Yes, Be made lots of money. Still doesn't change the fact that it is a poor shadow of Common's first albums, and locked him into a creative cut-de-sac that I doubt he'll ever get out of now.
yes, I am bitter. Can you tell?
Jeff Buckley
4/5
A small part of me wants to say that this was a narrative hit. (If I could be bothered, I'd cross reference sales before Jeff Buckley's death against reviews and features either side of the sad event, and then look for the plugger who earned his Christmas bonus many times over in 1997.)
But then "Grace". God, what a song. Even now.
(I was very surprised to discover, not that long ago, that Joan Wasser – Joan as Police Woman – was dating Buckley when he died. I liked it more when I was less cynical and could easily believe that talent (yes, she is good) naturally finds its place. I'm not saying anything as crude as JaPW riding on her late paramour's coat tails. Not at all. But, you know, the narrative effect has a long reach. Even back in the day when music journalism was still respectable and listicle-free.)
Van Morrison
2/5
If Van Morrison's voice didn't seem so...wheedling...would I take against him so viscerally? Probably not.
(On the other hand, TB Sheets (not here) is a masterpiece, and proof in itself that I can get over myself and my irrational dislikes when the moment calls for it.)
(That said, music is nothing if it isn't about irrational likes and dislikes. Summat to do with issues of internal narratives, I suspect.)
Ryan Adams
3/5
Quite puzzled that I own Ryan Adams' first two albums. Anyway. This is ok in an undistinguished sort of way.
Steely Dan
3/5
Gonna confess to being conflicted. This is one the the albums that I think I ought to like; I would have probably given it a milquetoast 3 stars if not for the fact that I went into the 1001albums review archive first.
Lots of grudging acknowledgment of the production values, offsetting a general loathing of the product itself. Can you polish a turd? I think not. Aja isn't a bad album, just somewhat inoffensive and unmemorable – superior elevator music, perhaps? Maybe if De La Soul hadn't taken samples from Aja on Three Feet High... (source material was just a bit over a decade old then), it would have died the social death experienced by (say) Christopher Cross, rather than taken on its current legendary status.
Perhaps/
Miles Davis
5/5
Technically, I have no need to do this. Whoever is spying on my data at Apple would know just how many times I've played this since I got iTunes 20 years ago (they would also have to extrapolate backwards, and also account for the many times I've listened to the CD rather than streaming, but never mind.)
Whether the Art Vs the Artist argument comes up, I think about this, and In A Silent Way, and excuse myself. My subjectivities mean that I have nothing of use to contribute to the conversation.
Talking Heads
3/5
Erykah Badu
4/5
Van Halen
3/5
'Jump' is quite good. Synth-metal, less so.
a-ha
4/5
This is why I hate streaming platforms. I really want to know the production credits of this album.
On the other hand. I only had this on tape. Even if I still have the tape
(doubtful – and if so, it'll be at my mum's, which is much the same as not having it)
...and playable (more doubtful), I'll actually buy a record player before buying a new tape deck...
Actually. I have a Walkman in working condition. This may be the start of a fun project. Me, my Walkman, and Sennheiser 250 headphones on the tube. Retro Steampunk futurism or something...
Anyway. Fun album. Even the weak songs have a sharp production sheen. Enjoyed, still enjoy. And Blue Sky still puts something good in my heart each time I hear it.
Suicide
3/5
Alan Vega routinely lopped a decade off his age. I'm not sure why, but that takes guts...
I know why people like this album, or why people think this album should be liked (not always the same thing).
I know that Death in Vegas and LCD would not exist without this album. (A mixed blessing in this household, tbf, but the underlying principle stands.)
All that said. I'm going to bed.
Slint
3/5
The Undertones
3/5
Elliott Smith
3/5
Figure 8 remains my (subjective) benchmark (in that whilst I was aware of Smith, it was the first album of his that I listened to 'properly'). I'm not going to slight this with faint praise (Cupid's Trick, for instance, is up there with his best), but I couldn't and still quite warm to this. The retrospective gaze always sets a high bar, I suppose
Fats Domino
4/5
Jolly romp
Radiohead
5/5
Amnesiac (and Miles Davis' In A Silent Way) has contributed more, from a technical perspective, to the recording of popular music than any other album made in the last...60 years? Yup. I do believe this.
Brian Eno
2/5
Not one of his good ones. Very Drone-y
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
3/5
Manu Chao
3/5
Well, yeah, not transcendental, is it? I can parse its appeal; but it doesn't appeal to me, not very much. But one must be fair
Pet Shop Boys
4/5
Given that this was the tail end of PSBs 'imperial phase', this album still stands up to scrutiny very well.
The Mothers Of Invention
2/5
Aggressively juvenile. I guess once had to be there to get the joke. I wasn't, and I don't
Sarah Vaughan
2/5
alternating between maudlin and lachrymose – and sometimes, dear god, both at once.
Adele
3/5
Solid disposable pop. Which is not intended as a slight that , but rather a cautionary comment warning about overstating its lasting power.
Boston
2/5
Smashy and Nicey ruined this genre for me.
PJ Harvey
4/5
PJ's masterpiece.
Rod Stewart
2/5
Antony and the Johnsons
2/5
I actually liked this once upon a time. I was a sensitive youth once...
Oasis
4/5
I remember the first time I heard "Live Forever"...
Actually, I don't. In my head, it was the same day as the OJ Simpson chase. But, unless the single was on rotation on MTV a good six weeks before its release, that can't be right. (Yup, I checked).
Anyway. I wish I could hear it again for the first time. I really do.
Frank Ocean
4/5
Finley Quaye
4/5
Randy Newman
3/5
Gentle. Pleasant. Sank without a trace.
Donald Fagen
2/5
Elton John
3/5
Black Flag
2/5
The Afghan Whigs
2/5
Exuberant, but largely uninteresting. Or maybe I’m uninterested.
The Streets
2/5
This was the moment when I realised that I was no longer in touch with contemporary culture.
JAY Z
3/5
What makes Hip Hop? I think the flow, the beat, the samples, the swagger. Not necessarily in this order.
Best test of flow is imagining the song acapella, as rap once used to be. A voice and perhaps a beatbox. "All I Need", for example, wins hands down here. Some of the other songs, most emphatically not.
Kanye is not a bad producer. (He *was* not a bad producer – I'm not sure what exactly he is now.) Here, though, his palette seems rather narrow at times. Cratedigging for a good loop + pitch shifting does not a good melody make. At least, not alone. Or, well, i suppose it's the dividing line between pop and hip hop. (No one would ever dare call Pete Rock a pop star. Nor J. Dilla, despite his recent (and long overdue, imnvho) canonisation. Now, those guys knew what to do with a sample. Or samples, which is another dividing line.)
Hov had the swagger. Y'know, this album is 22 years old. Damn. He still has the swagger. I mean, now, he's a silver fox. But he never was a yung 'un. Mature before his time etc. (As mature as the music industry and its inherent braggadocio can ever allow one to be. Back then, the notion of elder statesmen of rap simply didn't register. How could it?)
Did the MPC 1 elevate or destroy hip hop? Not a provocation, an honest question. It is an instrument, which is to say it is only as good as the person playing it; it also was the harbinger of the washed out sameness that runs through a lot of hip hop production nowadays. Perhaps the question should beg would we be (on the whole) better off if the MPC never existed? We'll never know. Listen to (say) DJ Shadow sample a good drum beat and you'l get what I mean.
My Bloody Valentine
3/5
Can't be faulted for enthusiasm. Actually, I'd love to meet the person who thinks that I should like this. And then form him/her to explain why.
PJ Harvey
2/5
Worthy. Not dull, but...you know. A specialist taste. (Odd that I've like PJ much more over the years. Has she matured or has she sold out? depends on one's point of view, I suppose)
3/5
Jimmy Smith
3/5
Aphex Twin
5/5
Nice to come back and meet this. I'd give this six out of five stars every day of the week.
By coincidence, I've been listening to an IDM essentials playlist on Spotify, and was idly musing to myself yesterday that one out of every four songs seems to be courtesy of Apex or derivatives therein (Polygon Window, for example.)
Let's ignore the presumptions, both loaded and imagined, behind the name, and acknowledge a basic fact: whatever the IDM label represents, it exists (not "it was created") thanks to this album. Up there with In A Silent Way, the Breaking and Entering OST, Music Has The Right To Children, and 76:14 as the albums I'd give my first born away in order to keep. (My first born is 17. If you knew him, you'll understand that this isn't quite as drastic as it sounds :)
Stereo MC's
2/5
I hope they made a lot of money from the advert, because the one-time ubiquity of 'Connected' via Vodaphone almost put me off listening to this...
All that said. Nothing against this, but it speaks to me as indistinctly now as it did in 199-whatever. I think the problem is that the songs are in essence variations on an interesting but not inventive theme. It isn't an album that one really needs to pay a lot of attention to...
Radiohead
4/5
I paid nothing for this album. This is a historic mistake, indeed a disgrace. I shall seek to rectify it forthwith. (In my defense, I own every other Radiohead album, have seen them on tour twice, have the t-shirt, and was given a branded jigsaw puzzle once. So, I think the scales are only slightly tilted in their favour!)
Sheryl Crow
4/5
December 1994. The Saturday before Bar Exam week, the most stressful week of my life up until then. Trying desperately to stay awake on approximately zero hours sleep, trying to memorise one more ruling. Radio on Ray Power, Casey Kasem’s America Top 40 on syndication.
And then All I Wanna Do comes on.
I still have a soft spot for that song. Shame the album as a whole is a bit uneven, but, you know. The magic moments are the ones that count.
G. Love & Special Sauce
2/5
Pink Floyd
4/5
I wonder when and why I listened to DSotM for the first time. My guess is that it was the late 90s, and my curiosity had been piqued by the Wizard of Oz urban myth. (It's very difficult to proof-of-concept this whilst stoned. This should have been a clue.)
Because my parents didn't listen to music (Jim Reeves aside) I never had a cultural inheritance to build my taste around. That said, my seventeen year ol evinces approximately zero interest in my cultural lynchpins, other than for curiosity value.
Of course, in 199 whatever the gatekeeper consensus was far more dominant. But, to be fair, whilst it was limiting and did sift out a lot of stuff that ought to have had a seat at the (a) table, more often than not what did get in got in on the merits of the case.
It's funny that this and, say, Marc Nolan (whom, I should say, I like) co-existed in the same general cultural space. Although one can draw a direct line linking Bowie and PF, and Bowie and MB.
Bowie explains a lot of things, doesn't he?
The Great Gig in the Sky still sends shivers up and down my spine. ...
Marianne Faithfull
3/5
Picked it up on a whim for a dollar in a second hand CD shop in Los Feliz a couple of years ago, and it seems like a bargain at the time.
I don't have anything profound or useful to say about this album, other than that I like it a little but not a lot.
The Roots
3/5
One to admire rather than to love. Like everything else by The Roots
The Pretty Things
2/5
Pixies
3/5
Arcade Fire
3/5
3/5
Probably the first album thus far that I have come to completely cold. Well, not quite. The wikipedia article links Suba with Bebel Gilberto's first album, which was an absolute delight to listen to in the summer of 2000 (it still is, just to be clear).
This is more Bossa-Electronica than Gilberto's contemporary Bossa Nova, so there isn't more than genre generalities to guide one here. Suba, it seems, brought a fresh and alien ear to the world of Brazilian music. This is usually a good thing. In this case, however, it feels that an organic warmness has been squeezed out at the expense of repetitive and unsubtle loops complemented by ethereal harmonies. Not a bad thing, but not really music that demands attention or concentration.
The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy
3/5
Not fair to describe them as a cut-price Public Enemy. But…
Two thoughts. 1. Hip Hop was a very broad church (if not wholly ecumenical (at least, other than in the fervid imagination of the moral right)) back in the day. Space for everyone. (2) Many of the themes that the lyrics explore are cut-and-paste relevant 35 years on. Go figure…
Prefab Sprout
3/5
Prefab Sprout are as English as summer cricket - the enjoyment is linked to something as completely unpredictable as the weather.
(Songs like ‘Horsin’ Around’ only add to this)
Anyway, a chancy innings: dropped for an absolutely sitter in single figures, a few streaky fours, a glorious six over mid-on, run out in the last innings before lunch after a disastrous lapse in concentration. They could do much better.
Miles Davis
5/5
Do I have to do this? Yes, I will do this. This is the album that changed my life, and that still surprises me anew every so often.
Of the many things I have learnt (thus far) from In A Silent Way, the most influential was the presence of the edit as a live instrument. The raw material was recorded in a three hour session; Miles and Macero did not rearrange it as much as reconceptualize it, conjuring something that clearly belonged to the source but said something different altogether. One gets the sense of working through a maze in the dark: there is a destination, but experimentation, muscle memory and optimism are the only things that can take you to that end point.
It is an exaggeration to say that if I had to chose my Desert Island Discs, I'd take eight copies of this one. But I would be quite happy with this alone, should it come to it.
Cornershop
3/5
Undemanding. I suppose a part of it is that their No 1 (Norman Cook's remix of Brimful of Asha) detracts from their core musical mission significantly, creating a sort of cognitive dissonance vis a vis what to expect from them.
Gillian Welch
4/5
I don't have the background or the knowledge to say anything about this other than I liked it quite a lot.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
3/5
Trevor Horn wrote an entertaining, fascinating, and (I suspect) rather partial memoir a little while ago. Worth having a look at what he has to say about Holly, the rest of FGTH, and *that* court case (the big one before George Michael V Epic Records) (Someone should write a book about the Law/Entertainment interface.
Anyway, it's amazing what studio wizardry and commercial nous can do with a fundamentally sound starting point. Horn (and Paul Morley, and Anne Dudley, and everyone else who was hands-on at ZTT) did not create WttP; but they did fill in a lot of gaps in what, ultimately, became the album of 1984.
(ps: 'Album of the Year' does not mean best album of the year. Just to be clear.)
Soft Cell
3/5
Travis
4/5
Really stands up well. Thank you Zane Lowe (discovered this via M2 on MTV in mid 1999 - Driftwood, then Why Does It Always Rain on me.)
Happy Mondays
2/5
<Boom Boom Boom Boom>
<Husky Drawl/Whisper>
Blah Blah Blah.
Oakenfold's remix of WFL is the only reason that I have submitted myself to this swamp of murk.
Ok. Not fair. "Hallelujah" is epic.
Come to think of it. "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die" is not quite the same as "1001 Absolutely Spiffiing Albums You Must Hear Before You Die". Other than if existential despair is your leitmotif...
,
Dagmar Krause
2/5
Nope. Sorry, I wish I could say something, anything about this, but I have no reference point. Okay, she has a good song voice that goes well with the oompah of the music. Does that help? Didn't think so. Any ranking given here is unfair.
Richard Hawley
3/5
soporific (literally. I fell asleep). Pleasant enough, but surprisingly weak songwriting for an album so highly praised.
Public Image Ltd.
3/5
Talk Talk
4/5
Art Vs Commerce. A pyrrhic victory, I fear. Still...
Snoop Dogg
2/5
Time is a goon. I guess the main reason why I took so violently against this album way back then was because, you know, Side A of The Chronic. This was hopelessly overhyped, overwhelmed by Mr Dogg’s murder trial, and smothered by the Death Row Records publicity.
Anyway. I caught myself foot tapping and head nodding to this. Familiarity is a thing, even if it is the familiarity of deep dislike. Or maybe I’ve finally caught up with Mr Dogg’s elusive charms..
k.d. lang
4/5
"Sumptuous" is the word I am looking for here.
Mike Ladd
2/5
doesn't speak to *me*
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
2/5
This was a useful listen. I think that I should like NC, and often feel ...guilty? for not quite warming to his stuff. This album...however presents like pastiche of something not quite successfuly comprehended. So I'm quite comfortable in saying that I am underwhelmed by it. :)
Iron Butterfly
2/5
That's 36 minutes of my life I won't get back.
Cream
3/5
Devendra Banhart
2/5
Alan McGee had it right.
Barry Adamson
3/5
James Taylor
3/5
The Doors
2/5
Now seems as good a time as ever to sort out my ranking philosophy
5 stars - thank you, will go out and purchase immediately
4 stars - stick in my Discogs basket for a treat
3 stars - will buy if I come across in a charity/thrift/goodwill store
2 stars - will not purchase. It’s me, not you
1 star - Duke Ellington is my guide : ‘there are two types of music: good music and the rest.’
Solid 2 stars here. Wouldn’t warm to this if I worked in it for a week.
The Zutons
2/5
Not for me. Perfectly serviceable etc but that’s about that.
Eagles
2/5
The Lemonheads
3/5
Very much of its time. Much better than the one song I knew (the cover of ‘Mrs Robinson) had led me to expect.
Underworld
4/5
So…this can’t be a five star album because it is (let’s face it) a bit of a one trick pony (compare with Barking as a reference point).
But fuck. What a one trick.
Guns N' Roses
2/5
Oh. It *is* that bad.
The Electric Prunes
2/5
Not feeling this at all. A strong two stars.
"However, the original group disbanded by 1968 when they proved unable to record the innovative and complex arrangements by David Axelrod on the albums Mass in F Minor and Release of an Oath."
Huh.
The Stooges
3/5
Energetic. No surprises there.
The Cure
3/5
Gawd, The Cure do self-loathing well, don’t they? I appreciate this, but do not wish to spend any appreciable length of time with it…
Hmm…never thought about this before today, but The XX do owe Smith + Co a moral debt (ie, non -enforceable but nevertheless very real)
The Velvet Underground
3/5
Soooo...this *isn't* "The Velvet Underground and Nico". Why didn't anyone tell me? I just kinda thought this was a different cover, or some arcane copyright issue had led to a re-release with Nico's contributions expunged, or something.
yes yes commercial yada yada...it is consistently listenable, which is much more than one can say about their preceding album. Will I listen to it again? I don't know. maybe.
Genesis
2/5
George Michael
4/5
Strange as it sounds, I think that George Michael is *still* the most underrated recording artist of the 1980s and 1990s. Despite all the retrospective positivity of the last few years.
This is *such* an album. Pop music at its very best.
Beatles
3/5
The Mamas & The Papas
3/5
I read something positively awful the other day, along the lines of successful 60s pop groups doing one of two illegal things – and at least one member of the M & the P doing both.
This is a cool and laid back album and I'll never stop trying to figure out the dark side that most of us conceal from the world.
Billy Joel
2/5
3/5
A game of two halves. Literally :)
The Velvet Underground
2/5
For an album I knew I didn’t like, I’m surprised about the number of songs I recognised from their opening chords alone (Venus in Furs, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Heroin). A part of it, I suppose, is that supposedly great albums need not be spectaculars; they just need to change the way people listen to and play music.
‘Just’.
Kendrick Lamar
4/5
*This* should have won the Pulitzer.
(Well, no. But it is head and shoulders better than that dull and uninspired prize winner...)
Paul Revere & The Raiders
2/5
I have nothing against this, but I don’t think I’ll be listening to it again
Merle Haggard
3/5
That’s the good thing about this project. Discovering completely uncharted territory…
ZZ Top
2/5
Interesting discovery, that in essence this was a studio creation. Still don’t like it, thiugh
Bob Dylan
2/5
It’s very annoying, having one’s irrational dislikes challenged. I didn’t really warm to this album, mind; but I can understand why people might…
Calexico
3/5
Syd Barrett
2/5
This is a set of demos, right?
Duke Ellington
3/5
‘Skin deep’ is F I R E.
Drive Like Jehu
2/5
No. I will not drive like Jehu
Nick Drake
4/5
Exquisite
Cocteau Twins
2/5
I’ve always felt a bit of a mismatch between the intricate goth-baroque melodies that define Cocteau Twins and Elizabeth Fraser’s ethereal voice. Still, nice to know that bands like this could gain commercial cudos once upon a time…hang on. Do I mean the Thompson Twins? And how do This Mortal Coil fit in the puzzle?
Fairport Convention
2/5
It’s me, not you.
Happy Mondays
2/5
Engagingly shambolic. But nevertheless, shambolic.
Weather Report
2/5
Weather Report went through more drummers than Spinal Tap. No 'bizarre gardening incidents', though.
Gang Starr
3/5
Describing this as dated is, I think, a compliment – and not in a backhanded way. The journey from unique to passe, via quotidian, is not afforded many people.
Franz Ferdinand
2/5
Many years on, I no longer feel angry about the bait and switch (in my opinion) of "Take Me Out". Nevertheless...
Primal Scream
2/5
The (very) poor man's "Velvet Underground and Nico"
Liz Phair
2/5
The Good, The Bad & The Queen
4/5
Despite (because of?) Alburn being as lachrymose as ever, this is a really good album. Completely forgotten about it. If I could voice a (minor) quibble, it would be to say that Allen is underutilised. But, then, sometimes less is more.
Everything But The Girl
3/5
Inoffensive. I must say, there is something about this album having a place in the mid/late 80s music scene that quite pleases me.
Everything But The Girl
2/5
1. Weird that this pops up immediately after Idlewild
2. I’ve always had the impression that EBTG did a hard pivot to mellow dance after the unexpected success of the ‘Missing’ remix by Todd Terry
3. I had no factual information in support of this presumption other than the stark difference between that and the Rod Stewart cover on Idlewild. I’d never consciously listened to anything else they did
4. There is a chronological gap between Idlewild and Walking Wounded. Still, one can see a common thread linking the two.
5. Music enthusiasts are condition to listen in genres. This is unfortunate, and takes a lot of effort to overcome.
All that said. I didn’t really like this. It’s ok for what it is etc, but I don’t think I’d actively seek out a listen to this album again. Ironically (or not) the Todd Terry remix of ‘Walking Wounded’ is (I think) the best thing on the album.
Faust
3/5
Tim Buckley
3/5
I wish I had the energy to determine if this is derivative or innovative. There’s an album - I think it is one of Terry Callier’s early ones, but I may be wrong - that parallels this very closely. Anyway, it’s very Emo-Pastoral, and pleasant enough if not obliged to pay it too much heed.
Also. Wish I had the energy to investigate the extent of Tim’s renown before the ascendency of Jeff. The mechanics of music promotion etc (cc Joan as Police Woman)
Muddy Waters
3/5
So the question is, how does one evaluate an idiom that one is not familiar with other than through the aggressively subjective?
There are elements of this that I think are pretty cool, but the 12-Bar blues format has always left me cold (emphasis on ‘me’). So I’m not sure how I can insert this in the context of, say, Robert Johnson or Robert Cray. (Or either of them in his context.)
So it seems both futile and unfair for me to say anything other that…dunno. Nothing, I guess.
(Very cool album cover, though.)
Mekons
3/5
Boards of Canada
5/5
.
The Sabres Of Paradise
2/5
Uninspired, on the whole. I suspect (and I should check the chronology) that this borrows a fair few of the tool used to better effect on Screamadelica.
Tom Waits
4/5
Deee-Lite
3/5
Allegedly, Steve Miller’s The Joker beat Groove is in the Heart to the no.1 spot by 8 record sales. Oh well…
Belle & Sebastian
3/5
Quite liked this
Ali Farka Touré
2/5
Worthy. Dull. (It’s me, not you.)
Justice
2/5
Not really sure how this sits in the same shelf as Etienne de Creacy, Sebastian Teller, Daft Punk, Phoenix, Cassius etc.
Actually, I know. It doesn’t. This is loud and obnoxious.
Robert Wyatt
3/5
Try though I did, I always resisted the apparent charms of Wyatt’s reedy tones. That said, this was a pleasant melange of styles.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
3/5
Keith Jarrett
5/5
Let’s leave out all the back story about the faulty piano and so on. Not needed. A masterpiece of improvisational piano-playing.
Incubus
2/5
Fine for what it is etc. Not for me.
Suzanne Vega
2/5
The Damned
3/5
Pleasantly surprised
Frank Sinatra
3/5
Dwight Yoakam
2/5
Bee Gees
2/5
nah. unmememorability in a minor key
David Bowie
5/5
In…I guess mid 2019, I bought my first pair of high-end* headphones - Beats by Dre Pro overhead cans with noise cancelling**
By chance, the first song I listened to with them was Warszawa, from Low - an album I had systematically played to death over the preceding quarter century.
Reader, I heard things I had never heard before. I burst into tears in the middle of the street. I’m not kidding.
* So, I’m cheap. More to the point, in the pre-streaming age, my argument always was: do I want flash headphones or do I want more CDs? CDs always won out. For the record, I now use a pair of Senheisser HD 700s at home.
**talking about spending money on CDs. For all the people wondering where the money in the CD market went to - my theory is that the iPod’s white buds (useless aural experience) created a premium headphone market. And so a transfer of consumer purchase interest (and money) from one class to another…do I make sense? Ah, who cares!
Ray Price
3/5
Never worked out why my parents liked Jim Reeves and Jim Reeves alone. This is not Jim Reeves, but the country-western crooning took me back to a place in my childhood, and to some very mixed emotions
The Triffids
2/5
Today, someone sent me an audio clip of Nirvana's "Tastes Like Teen Spirit" if it had been recorded by an 80s band. Reminds me a bit of this. Just a bit. To be fair, I am an 80s kid and liked (still like) synth wave and (American) New Wave (if we must use these grubby terms), up until just before the point where it met what eventually metastasised into Bubblegum Metal
This is a masterpiece of 80s production values – gated snares, reverb a room wide etc. Emphasis on creating a series of pocket epics. On the whole, it's a creation of its time and place. Probably belongs there.
The Soft Boys
2/5
Sparks
3/5
That albums like this exist makes me very happy - even though I doubt that I’ll consciously seek this out ever again. It’s just so…joyful!
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
4/5
I’ve finally figured out the purpose of 1001…
It’s to make me pay attention to Elvis Costello. And it has succeeded.
Pro tip: look on youtube for Mr McManus and Fiona Apple singing ‘I Want You’. This is life-changing stuff. Honest.
Hole
4/5
Maybe its nostalgia, but I still like this a lot.
Public Enemy
3/5
Stands up quite well
Khaled
2/5
Presence on this list , imho, suggests one of three things: that an album is technically innovative, creatively imaginative, or simply capable of sparking joy in the heart of the listener.
There isn’t anything wrong with Kenza. But, I fear, a rather anonymous piece of work. Nothing sharp, nothing new, indeed a little…boring, I suppose.
(It might be that he is a magical presence on stage. Indeed, I can quite imagine this. But that’s a different matter altogether.)
Os Mutantes
2/5
The line separating playful from shambolic is awfully vague, isn’t it?
Destiny's Child
3/5
I don't think the intention was to make a good album, which is a shame. The singles are absolute killers.
The Only Ones
2/5
So so. I do like the voices, tho.
ABBA
3/5
The 13th Floor Elevators
3/5
Johnny Cash
3/5
'Hurt' aside (and even that is debatable), one's response to this album hangs on (1) the level of attachment one has to the songs covered here, and (2) the degree of affection one has for Americana.
I respect everyone who has added this to their heavy rotation pile, but I won't be in these parts again anytime soon. Sorry.
Sigur Rós
4/5
Discovered this by chance late one night in 1999. Got in late from Goldsmiths, watched The Sopranos, then Viǒrar … came on on Channel 4. It accompanied a video of young people with Down’s Syndrome dancing. Sounds tacky and borderline exploitative, in fact was dictionary-definition ethereal.
HMV in Wood Green had an import in stock when I went there the next day. (So many weird things about it. That I got the name of this weird Icelandic band without Shazam (Shazam still seems like magic to me); that there was a huge HMV in Wood Green High Street; that they had an import copy of album by said weird Icelandic band…)
Can an album that was Sui generis age not well? No. If anything, it was imitated too many times, and I became perhaps a little too familiar with it. Took it for granted.
I’m sorry.
The Velvet Underground
2/5
PA Ponzi scheme at 33rpm. So many reputations are vested in this being good, it’s well on nigh impossible to say anything else.
It isn’t.
Black Sabbath
3/5
Someone once anthropomised Black Sabbath for me as the guy who would re-use a condom to save money.
Even thinking about this appals me. Buy it is a very vivid image. (Sadly.)
Julian Cope
2/5
Underwhelmed.
FKA twigs
3/5
I suppose I am ok with the idea of this album without quite being able to surrender to its rather ambivalent charm.
The Cult
2/5
The cover of Born to Be Wild felt like low hanging but unripe fruit - gorge, puke.
I think Tom Hibbert, of blessed memory, would have had lots of fun with Rick Rubin. There’s less to him than meets the eye, I sometimes think.
The Bees
2/5
Undemanding. I get the sense that the musicians had more fun making this album than I had listening to it. (Which isn't to say that it is bad or anything. Just rather unfocused.)
Penguin Cafe Orchestra
4/5
magic at 33 revolutions per minute
Beck
2/5
For people who have one, I rather suspect that their favourite Beck album is inseparably entwined with their biographical highs. (Mine is Sea Change).
This feels like Mellow Gold Redux. Not really for me.
Alice Cooper
3/5
Americans never did Glam Rock terribly well. Or Punk. (Poodle Metal, though? 👌🏿)
I digress. I can’t imagine what t would have been like to listen to this album in 1973. But, judging from the stuff from the era that I know, I guess it would have been a bit like listening to Marilyn Manson in 1999
(Note. Alice Cooper aka Vince Furnier, turned out much better on every front.)
Holger Czukay
3/5
endearingly eccentric
Dolly Parton
2/5
Ray Charles
3/5
Gang Of Four
3/5
Who came first, Gang of Four or A Certain Ratio?
The Jesus And Mary Chain
2/5
How on earth did they end up on the soundtrack of a John Hughes film?
Didn’t like it then. Can see its merits now but still don’t like it.
Taylor Swift
2/5
I can respect the appeal TS has for her fans whilst remaining immune to it. This is a pleasing thing.
Little Richard
3/5
Honest dirty fun
Bill Callahan
3/5
What I do like about BC is how simple effective Melodie’s are married to intricate, exquisite production values. This isn’t the best I’ve heard of him, but it does give a nice nudge for me to do a deep dive …
Deep Purple
2/5
How to frighten the horses: a cut-out-and-keep guide.
The Smashing Pumpkins
3/5
Billy Corgan and Sharon Osbourne. This will never cease to amuse me.
(Has nothing to do with this. Liked it then in a low-key way, still like it now.) Ice-cream vans and paint captured my imagination in an odd way. Very surreal for Top of the Pops, I must say.
Solange
4/5
The Jam
3/5
Lightning Bolt
2/5
Sam Cooke
2/5
Ok. Take a deep breath and consider. This is the first time you’ve encountered Sam Cooke. Will you go back for more Y/N?
Thought so.
The Temptations
2/5
The wondrousness of PWARS notwithstanding, this is odd assortment of tubes - most ok, one or two quite good, but resolutely refusing to play nice with each other.
Bob Dylan
2/5
I wish I could learn how to like Bob Dylan. It would make so many things much simpler…
Tricky
3/5
You can actually tell the point at which Tricky gets bored - about 2 minutes into Brand New You're Retro.
Yes, this is a joke. Album not recorded in sequence, at least as far as I know. But true that its incendiary opening piddles away into nowt a fair bit before the end.
(As covers go, Black Steel is up there with the best.)
Method Man
3/5
An aesthetic that has grown on me over the years. Nostalgia is a goon.
The Go-Betweens
3/5
Big in ‘88. Or something. Every Aussie band of that period that I know seemed to be into this sort of melodic rock. (I knew three.) (Ok, four. INXS were not into this stuff. )
The Thrills
2/5
Ma! Sean forgot to flush the toilet again. etc
Ian Dury
3/5
A delightful discovery.
The Auteurs
4/5
I heard 'Showgirl' on The Chart Show (remember that?) At the time, my natural music buying habitat was Woolworths. To be fair, they did usually carry the top 100 albums. New Wave was not, and so they did not. Neither did Our Price. (There were two on Wood Green High St. I never quite understood why. But that's not the point. Imagine two record shops on a suburban high street.)
Back then, discovering new music involved (1) listening to the radio, (2) hanging round the record shops on Berwick Street and being nice to the chaps (they were always chaps) behind the counter if you heard something nice, (3) reading a review in the NME or Q, liking what was promised and buying (metaphorically) sight unseen.
A few years later, Virgin on Piccadilly Circus put in a load of digital listening stations. You scanned the barcode and got 30 seconds of each song on the album, (from 15 to 45 seconds in). I used to spend hours there.
I don't really have any truck with the people complaining about Spotify ruining their music discovery vibe. I guess it is true, up to a point, but then you can listen to virtually anything you want on Spotify, your choice absolutely. All you need to do is to cough up a tenner a month and follow your own instincts.
In any case, gatekeepers have, and will always exist. The nice thing about living in a democracy is that one has no obligation to pay them the slightest bit of attention.
There is so much fucking great music out there, beginning to be listened to. Do the final mile and seek it out, at least occasionally.
Oh. New Wave. Found the CD second hand in a charity shop in 1995, I think. I was a bit disappointed by the time – the actuality did not live up to the mythology I'd built up in my head. But I kept it, and I listen to it every now and again, and the thought of going out hunting for it (and discovering a few other unexpected pleasures along the way) still makes me smile. And now, older and a little bit wiser, I think I can say that it isn't half bad.
Air
4/5
Q raved about this, but Sexy Boy was such a perverse choice for lead off single that I only got round to it the year later, Kelly Watch the Stars and All I need were released as singles.
An aside. The Olympics closing ceremony was sharp reminder that the Brits have always done pop better than their Gallic cousins. If Air had done their mash up with Daft Punk rather than Phoenix, I may have been moved to rethink this position, though...
John Lennon
2/5
Not interesting enough to be considered avant-garde, but too edgy to qualify as pop. Poor John He probably suffered from the break up of the Beatles more than any of the others...
Ananda Shankar
1/5
Good God. Abandoned after four songs.
With the benefit of hindsight, All That… was not a return to form, but rather a speed bump in U2’s precipitate descent into bombast.
Case for the prosecution:
1. Walk On. Whilst a delightful song, it has aged pretty badly. I won’t be so unfair as to say that U2 had run out of icons to eulogise by then. More to the point, Aung San Sui Kyi is not a baddie in the Cartesian sense. But this was U2’s uncritical (albeit heartfelt) mode of engagement by this time; as far as the dynamic of polarisation is concerned, they chose wrong.
(2) New York. As TY said in another song from that period, the glorious Music to Fly By, ‘Sept 11: all of a sudden, we’re talking about a problem that didn’t start on the tenth.’ Even at this point,New York was more in line with the dystopia of The Pogues, as far as fairytales are concerned….
(3) They left The Ground Beneath Her Feet off the original pressings. (tbf, this may have been a songwriter credit issue. But hey, I’m prosecuting a subjective argument here.)
For the defence
(1) Beautiful Day. Still Euphoria incarnate (insomuch as songs do not incarnate. But you know what I mean)
(2) Elevation.
It’s an ok album, and I suspect we got excited about it because it was head and shoulders above Pop. But it isn’t the great album it is touted as being; I don’t think it deserves to be in the glorious shade cast by Achtung Baby/Zooropa.
The xx
3/5
Dion
2/5
There is nothing wrong with this album per se. There is everything wrong in citing it in a list of the 1000 albums to listen to before I die because it almost killed me with boredom.
New Order
4/5
Nirvana
2/5
So…we can now say that this was pants, can’t we (RFUS aside. That’s just funny.)
50 Cent
2/5
Mainly filler, not really a killer.
Stephen Stills
2/5
Useful point to remind myself that the star rating system is not really fit for purpose. How *i* feel about an album has little to nothing to do with its independent merits. Most of the time, anyway.
w/r/t this: heartfelt I think, ponderous I know. I did have high hopes for about half of the opening track but after that it was a bit of a slog.
Led Zeppelin
2/5
Messieurs Boombastic (Not quite telephontastic)
The good here is very very good. The not so good is just that.
Johnny Cash
3/5
At least some of the audience reaction was added in post. So, the choices about where to amplify the crowd noise (‘Cocaine Blues’, for example) are…interesting.
Also. JC’s choice of songs seem a little out of place for a penitentiary audience. But what do I know?
Elvis Presley
2/5
(The rating excludes 'Fever')
Dr. John
3/5
Hm. I’m too long in the tooth to be ‘conned’ (to con myself is fairer) by this as I was by, say, Gomez’s Liquid Skin.
Still. I liked this.
Leftfield
5/5
Some of my favourite albums are albums that I
(1) bought in the immediate period after I got my first CD player (1993)
(I didn't buy very many CDs, they were too expensive – upwards of £10 a shot, which is a lot of money if you are an undergraduate and working at BHS weekends. I borrowed from the library and dubbed them to cassette) (does anyone use the word 'dub' in this sense any more?)
(does anyone remember BHS any more?), and
(2) were cheap enough (i.e., with the benefit of hindsight, had probably 'fallen off the back of a lorry') that I was willing to take a chance on them. REM's Automatic for the People was one; Mary J. Blige's What's the 411? was another. And so too this.
I vaguely remembered Leftfield's collab with John Lyndon briefly residing in the singles charts a couple of winters earlier, and I did did like the song on the Shallow Grave OST. That was pretty much all I knew about them, but it was enough for me to hand over a fiver to the well dodgy bloke in the Enfield Town Street Market. Summer of 1995. Unusually warm.
(We were still talking about aerosols and the ozone layer then; 'global warming' as a catchphrase was still a few years away. I didn't care. I wasn't used to summer sunshine and girls in shorts. England were doing battle against the Windies; on the days I was working, I'd call my sister during my lunch break and ask her to check the scores on Teletext p.341.)
Best fiver I spent on anything between 1991 and 1999. It's great because Leftield did things no one else was doing at the time, sustained this over the length of an LP (although, I guess, Afro Left wouldn't be treated so kindly today. Pity that, imho), and did these things very well indeed.
Bonus points: Listening to this thrust me back to one of the happier periods of my life. No money but no responsibilities = living fully in the moment. God, I miss that.
Judas Priest
3/5
A Surprisingly Fun Album I Will (probably) Not Listen To Again
Run-D.M.C.
3/5
On the one hand, it did do John-the-Baptist service. On the other, Run DMC did (perhaps unfairly? I dunno) find themselves headless rather quickly.
Groundbreaking as Walk This Way is, I don't think they fully earned the sobriquet of ground breakers. There is too much sameness in this album for that.
The Associates
3/5
Um...operatic punk? I like it (never listened to it) even though the first rack sounds like it was misprogrammed...
Television
3/5
A Three Star ranking is such an unhelpful grading. (Yes, all gradings are subjective, and thus probably unhelpful, but stay with me for a moment.)
Two Star is no thank you, Four Star yes please. One Star and Five Star are self explanatory - what fresh hell is this, and my life is now complete.
But Three Star? Milquetoast, quotidian, sound but dull; but also hmm, must explore more. And also it’s ok but it’s not for me. And competent but not inspirational.
And so on and so on.
Ok, on to this album (and you can guess the grade I’m giving it, if not why):
Halfway through the title track, it struck me that popular music has always been the same. Very few instrumentalists or vocalists are virtuosos or exceptional in their craft. But most of the successful ones share a…I’m going to call it curiosity, a curiosity that pushes them to use their imagination and do strange and unusual and unexpected things in their lyrics or arrangements or even choice of instrument. They go searching outside the reservation, in short.
Marquee Moon (the song) is eight and a half minutes long, never wanders far from its basic key and refrain, and yet doesn’t bore (this) listener at all.
Dizzee Rascal
4/5
Big Star
2/5
A cut price Velvet Underground. Cruel but true.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
2/5
(1) Nick Lowe produced this album. According to Wiki, for the American pressing he swapped out one song from the original UK pressing and replaced it with a cover (indifferent, if you ask me) of his (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding. Knowing what I know of the music industry business now, thanks to Andrew Hickey's excellent A History of Rock in 500 Songs, I can't help but wonder whether this was linked to...
(2) Columbia's concerted efforts to push this album in America. If so, it didn't work because it seems that Mr McManus was determined to saw the feet off any hint of commercial gain.
(3) Wiki coyly refers to 'an incident with Stephen Stills that nearly destroyed Costello's reputation in America.' I suppose that's one way of describing it. Here's another
https://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/index.php/Uncut,_June_1997
(4) To be fair, Costello tried to row back as soon as he sobered up, and has repeatedly recanted over the years. Whether or not that is enough is a matter of individual opinion. I do note, however, that one of the individuals involved later remarked that "Anyone could get drunk once in his life... Drunken talk isn't meant to be printed in the paper, and people should judge Mr Costello by his songs rather than his stupid bar talk."
(5) Needless to say, Nick Lowe did not get the payday my crafty and quite possibly unkind brain imputes as a reason for the inclusion mentioned above.
And, as before. I wish I could come up with a good reason for disliking Elvis Costello. I can't, because there isn't other than sheep prejudice, in part due to that wretched R. White's Secret Lemonade Drinker advert. You don't know the advert? Lucky you.
Oh, obiter: God. Music journalism is awful nowadays. I doubt any publication would produce anything like that look back now. God alone knows why. It'll be easy enough to produce...
U2
3/5
And so we're told this is the golden age/And gold is the reason for the wars we wage.
Stuff like this is why people still like U2
Scott Walker
2/5
It isn't possible to unhear Scott 4 before listening to this, which is unfortunate. I can say, nevertheless, that Marc Almond's cover of Jacky is better than Scott's. (Yes, this means nothing, obviously. Just wanted to say it.)
Led Zeppelin
3/5
I guess it takes a fair bit of self confidence to come up with this swagger for a first album.
The Stranglers
3/5
good enough fun but that's about all I have to say...
Skunk Anansie
2/5
I don't know a great deal about this style of music...this album brings System of a Down to mind as a key reference point. And it doesn't really match up. Sorry
Baaba Maal
2/5
Ever wondered what the bigotry of soft expectations sounds like? Here you are. It isn't bad per se, just an indifferent collection of songs, indistinguishable from much (not all) of the bunk from the Sahel labelled "World Music" (Yes, it is just a name. But like "Classical Music", a lot of presumptions coagulate behind the cognomen.)
Fairport Convention
3/5
Could have sworn I’ve had this before. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Sandy Dennis was an inspiration on Joni Mitchell, no?
Peter Gabriel
3/5
Years and years ago, on a whim. I bought this and the one where, on the cover, he’s sitting in a car. LPs. (This was in the tape/CD transition era, long before we began to call them ‘Vinyl’.
I didn’t own a record player.
Anyway, always been a bit odd to me that I have repeatedly listened to all of Gabriel’s post Sledgehammer albums, and and very familiar with a small selection of his earlier work through 16 Golden Greats, (or is it 12?), but never gone to explore his earlier work.
That’s the thing about subscription streaming. Everything is available, but we (I) don’t do enough to explore my curiosity. Just graze through what is brought to my attention in an apathetic haze of instant gratification.
Infinite Jest is real and we are living it out, maybe?
Anyway. I like this. I don’t have any real reference for it, other than Steve Lilywhite’s past and future work.
Rage Against The Machine
2/5
I’m not quite sure how something so enthusiastic can also be so dull. Quite the achievement.
The KLF
3/5
The Merry Pranksters of British Pop. I'm still not sure what was more audacious – burning a million quid or writing.a manual on how to get a No 1.
The original of this album, which is not available on streaming platforms, is superior to the Director's re-release – the latter feels vaguely like new wine in an old bottle (can't put my finger on what what exactly marks the difference. My original disc is in storage and I'll have to overcome multiple layers of inertia to compare the two...)
The Adverts
3/5
I read somewhere once that HG Ginger and Ridley Scott had an extremely limited props budget for Alien. So, rather than trim the cinematic ambition, Giger built models of sections of the eponym; Scott then used tricks of light and shadow to suggest at the fearsomeness of the aggressor. Don’t show, don’t tell.
So, The Adverts aren’t one chord wonders. But, like the best of their peers, it’s actually fascinating to see what they created out of a limited (self-imposed? one can't always tell) musical palette. There’s a wave of energy, anchored by sometimes unexpected melodic choices. Not at all making it up as they went along, but nonetheless preserving a spontaneous enthusiasm that … well, yeah. Not a big punk fan but I like this.
Sex Pistols
2/5
Given the production tricks at play here, I'm not terribly surprised that alcohol plays such a big role in the Sex Pistols story.
Or, in other words: it's easy to be sniffy about cultural icons preceding one's reference point, not just after. Either way, this leaves me cold.
Cypress Hill
2/5
1. I didn’t smoke dope in the early 90s, so the social appeal of CH never made its way to my ends
2. This music hurts my head. How on earth is it compatible with weed consumption?
Steely Dan
2/5
Andrew Hickey (A History of Rock in 500 Songs) has this theory about songs that fade out as opposed to songs that end on the beat, as it were. The latter are favoured, he claims, by bands who intend to go out on the road with their music - fading out is an artifact of the studio, and clearly won’t work on a stage. The Beatles, for example (he says) favoured the abrupt halt until ‘66, when they stopped touring.
This got me wondering how music may be changing today. We already know that songs are getting shorter, and tend to leap straight in, in media res, so to speak - both the consequence of streaming dynamic.
Streaming, also, has eviscerated the recorded music industry (not, as was the case of every major change in the industry before then, where the money was redistributed but remained in the game - streaming is taking money out of the industry and putting not very much back in); touring hard and heavy (as opposed to Live Nation spectaculars) and live performances are increasingly the bread and butter of the recording artist. I wonder how this reality is shaping their output?
Anyway. Pretzel Logic is supposed to be the halfway point between the gigging Steely Dan and the studio perfectionists Steely Dan. And, unsurprisingly, it’s neither fish nor flesh. Ricky… and Any Major Dude… are AOR classics. The rest of the album is…not fully formed ideas, I guess. A bit over thought through, and not to good effect.
Santana
3/5
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
2/5
Crikey. This puts the pompous into pomp
Blur
4/5
Odd that this comes up just a week after revisiting Leisure.
Boys and Girls is the pop song of the 1990s. The end.
Amy Winehouse
3/5
Still don’t really like it. It is more polished (read produced) and cohesive than Frank. But Frank was genius; this is a Motown cosplay (albeit with ok tunes, and two or three good ones)
Queen
3/5
Glam Rock > Prog Rock.
I'm always tickled by the fact that the four members of Queen once held a Guinness World Record as the highest paid corporate executives in the world.
I'm ok saying that this is a middling album, in the main because I know where (for me) it sits in the Queen catalogue.
American Music Club
2/5
Q were always crushing over Mark Eitzel and AMC. Also Karl Wallinger and World Party Thing is, without radio play, there was little to no way of figuring out what they were like.
Now I know. Judging from this, they weren't really worth the wait. For me, that is. Perfectly competent tv movie soundtrack music.
The Fall
3/5
That hoary old chestnut about six monkeys and Shakespeare quite clearly isn’t correct. It fudges the time issue, for one thing.
Nevertheless. Mark Smith clearly thought that there was something in it - if he goes through band members frequently enough, he’ll eventually come up with the perfect combination.
This iteration ain’t it. But there are fun moments in it, like the (completely unexpected) second best ever cover of Lost In Music *
*The best belongs to Dirty Three, of course.
Public Enemy
3/5
No surprise this hasn’t aged well…no, not fair. It once sounded sharp, now a bit antiquated. 1n 88, PE were doing stuff no one had done before - trailblazing can be a rather lonely business …
Buffalo Springfield
3/5
Tim Buckley
2/5
Tom Tom Club
3/5
Pere Ubu
2/5
I’m not really sure why this is consistently rated so poorly. That said, it was a bit…workmanlike? And not in the way that punk’s key virtue was its lack of virtuosity. Just workmanlike dull.
Kate Bush
3/5
My first proper encounter with Mme. Bush. It’s a very eighties AOR album, isn’t it? I felt so sophisticated for getting The Sensual World and Deeper Understanding. (Mind you, iirc, The Sensual World was a Top 30 ‘hit’, and This Woman’s Work made the Top 40. Popular music has changed enormously over…oh, that was 35 years ago. Sigh.)
Sonic Youth
2/5
For me this is a kinda redundant exercise, because I can’t unhear Daydream Nation.
(Incidentally: retrospective reviews in music mags are the worst form of weasel words imaginable. The worst thing about it is that it doesn’t even have to be so. As practised, it tends to be an exercise in goalpost shifting, to match one’s (in)ability to give informed and consistent cultural commentary.
Anyway. This is all edge and attitude and not that much in the form of, you know, good songs. (On the whole. A couple of tunes are enigmatic enough to capture attention/imagination. Just a couple.)
Youssou N'Dour
2/5
So. Of all the Youssou albums I must listen to before I die, why in earth this? His voice and the occasional inspired arrangement aside, this is just space filler.
Roxy Music
3/5
Hm. Might Radiohead owe RM an unacknowledged debt?
Brian Eno
3/5
Great sampling material
Hawkwind
2/5
The Germans had Kosmische. The Brits had … this. Ok, and Amon Dul too. Not much of a competition.
(Yes, this is unfair. Up to a point. In any case, i did crush hard on Silver Machine, so I probably have no standing for my sniffy-ness)
Ministry
3/5
Good blasphemous fun
Slipknot
2/5
I always thought there was room in the pantheon for a good Drum and Bass/Metal crossover album.
Listening to this, I think I’m wrong. Metal (and its variants) is essentially nihilistic; Drum and Bass is hedonistic.
In any case, this album won’t be the one. It’s not a bad album; just, like, predictable, I guess.
Throwing Muses
3/5
Meat Loaf
2/5
Huh. So the six minute radio play version of Bat Out Of Hell is an edit. Who knew? (Not me, evidently…). Making eternity last just that bit longer. Cruel.
Basement Jaxx
4/5
I wonder if The Junction is still there. Haven’t been that way for at least 20 years. <sigh>
Iggy Pop
3/5
Is this punk? Post punk? I don’t know, and I don’t really care. (Subtext - beware of labels. They tend to serve someone else’s purposes.)
George Jones
2/5
‘If she’s not with the one she loves/she’ll love the the one she’s with’
Damn.
(Can’t really assess this objectively. Not for me etc)
Tom Waits
2/5
Schtick perfection in process. To be fair, he inhabits it completely these days …
If this is the representative TW album in this list (I’m 700+ in and this is the first) I’ll be very cross indeed.
3/5
A brilliant idea in search of a home.
Hmph. Sniffy, I am. I forget that this is the groups that made ‘Dear God’. That excuses them everything…
Sabu
2/5
Bit monotonous, no? I guess it was an exotic curiosity in its day…
Paul McCartney
3/5
Three stars because Paul.
Isaac Hayes
3/5
So, you know, this is an OST. So, like without the visual impetus of the film it has huge mountains to climb before it sounds even halfway good.
(Arguably, a good soundtrack is redundant without the accompanying visual text.)
Anyway, this is half good. It’s unfair to grade it. I actually think that without this soundtrack, Shaft would be a footnote rather than the iconic introduction to the 1970s that it is
David Holmes
2/5
That aged badly…
Jeru The Damaja
2/5
Hip Hop luminaries in 1994: Warren G, Snoop Doggy Dogg (sic), Craig Mack, Biggie, Tupac, Bones Thugs-n-Harmony, Queen Latifah, The Brat, Nas…
Nah. Jeru didn’t cut it then. Still doesn’t.
DJ Shadow
5/5
Guess my A/S/L in 1996 ;)
Mudhoney
3/5
Why do I like this and not like, say, Hüsker Du? I have no idea. That’s the privilege of the listener :)
Dr. Octagon
2/5
(After 20 minutes)
I’m not doing this. The beats are generic, the delivery laconic, and the lyrics are really playground puerile. I don’t see the point in whacking my head against a brick wall for another 44 minutes.
Neneh Cherry
3/5
RLS shows its age…quite gracefully! Pre Massive Attack, it’s easy to forget that the UK rap scene’s reference point was the South Bronx. (Worth pointing out that Ms Cherry part bankrolled Blue Lines).
Anyway.
The good bits of this album (Manchild especially) are exceptional. The less good bits stand up quite well too.
The Psychedelic Furs
3/5
Who knew melody could be find amidst such cacophonous energy?
Laibach
2/5
Describing this album as ‘electronic’ is like suggesting that all amplified music is electronic. I’m not a fan of genres anyway, so I don’t know why I am fixating on this.
A Tribe Called Quest
4/5
There isn’t very much to say other than that this was the most precocious album of the 1990s
Aimee Mann
3/5
Pink Floyd
2/5
If this were a shorter album, it would be on the same shelf as Wish You Were Here. But then it wouldn’t be a portentous (ponderous) statement of intent, would it?
The Human League
3/5
It’s an odd one, isn’t it?
Patti Smith
3/5
There’s a bit of smoke and mirrors at work here. But you can’t deny the energy at work here.
2/5
Grant Lee Buffalo
3/5
They owe a bit to Bowie, no?
Metallica
3/5
Exhausting listen. Quite tickled to catch some clear foreshadowing of The Black Album here
Lars Ulrich is a magnificent drummer btw.
Leonard Cohen
3/5
Dude got away with a lot, didn’t he?
Hüsker Dü
2/5
They would have actually ruled live. Not so much on disc. Fairly one-dimensional
Marty Robbins
2/5
Nice and gentle and sonorous and not at all for me thank you very much.
Jacques Brel
3/5
I love the cover of this album.
Morrissey
2/5
For all sorts of reasons, Viva Hate is the only Morrissey album anyone really need pay attention to. Perhaps Bona Drag too, but that’s a bit of a toss up. There isn’t anything bad, per se, about this. But there isn’t anything good either. The aural equivalent of Lorem ipsum, I suppose - but with nothing more substantial ever replacing it.
To be clear: the music is ok, the lyrics are pedestrian. We expect much more of SPM.
(An aside. After one of his more intemperate outbursts, someone pointed out that if you allow yourself to disappointed by Morrissey, that’s entirely on you. Harsh but probably correct.)
Blood, Sweat & Tears
3/5
Somehow, I expected them to be closer to Janice Joplin than to Tom Jones (nope, that one song aside (and I didn’t know it was them anyway) never consciously listened to to them…)
Tim Buckley
3/5
Fatboy Slim
2/5
Peak Big Beat. For good and (mostly) for bad
Peter Gabriel
4/5
Fishbone
2/5
I was going to say, ‘it’s not you, it’s me’. But the last song highlights Truth and Soul’s narrational … ‘incoherence’ is a bit strong. That said, stylistically this album is all over the place, the Jack who never got round to mastering anything.
Mott The Hoople
2/5
Subjectively, drab.
Objectively, drab.
Would anyone be talking about Mott were it not for Bowie? I doubt it.
Van Halen
2/5
Digital Underground
2/5
Good god. Frat boy level puerile. A very poor man’s 2Live Crew
David Crosby
3/5
Lenny Kravitz
2/5
It pains me to say this, but I must. Dull. (But, like Blur, nice that the record label kept the faith.)
Throbbing Gristle
4/5
First time since I started this (700+ albums ago) that I’ve listened to an album a second time immediately after the first listen.
It’s not great but it is strange and weird and fun and adventurous and different and has an air of insouciance that is simply absent in most pop music. (Yes, I think this is pop. We belong to an ecumenical place of worship.)
Duran Duran
3/5
This is better than I remember. Save A Prayer is worth the price of admission all by itself…
Foo Fighters
3/5
Much more fun that In Utero - no surprises there, with the benefit of hindsight.
10cc
3/5
Beatles
2/5
Van Morrison
2/5
Wilco
3/5
Hmm. I know I really disliked this the first time I listened to this, but can’t really remember why. I suspect listening to Sparklehorse (entirely by chance) a day before may have something to do with this.
Tina Turner
3/5
There’s something heartwarming about the knowledge that TT’d renaissance was eased along the way by the blokes from Heaven 17.
(See also ‘The Hardline According to TTD’A’, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis X The Human League)
(I wonder whether Northern Soul might have nurtured , unconsciously or not, this fertile valley.)
Fela Kuti
4/5
Ginger Baker was quite something live. (So was Fela, but I’m lucky enough to know that first-hand)
David Ackles
3/5
More a Singer/Storyteller than a Singer/Songwriter
D'Angelo
4/5
An education.
Morrissey
2/5
What were we smoking in 1992?
If one can last past the execrable fatty song, it gets better (maybe being inspired by Bowie’s Rock and Roll Suicide on ‘I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday’ helped?). But by then it’s already late. Way too late…
Simon & Garfunkel
3/5
The Pharcyde
2/5
Juvenile anarchists (anarchist juveniles) with a rich/unsophisticated repertoire of ‘your mama’ jokes.
Passin’ Me By is not representative. Caveat emptor etc.
2/5
Boring schnooring
David Bowie
3/5
The Undertones
2/5
The Beau Brummels
3/5
Reminds me a lot of Forever Changes by Love. I like this.
De La Soul
3/5
N.E.R.D
2/5
An uncommitted reprise of In Search Of (which ought to be here instead of this).
Neil Young
4/5
Yes
2/5
Silver Jews
3/5
Tito Puente
3/5
I didn’t think I’d like this. I did.
The Everly Brothers
3/5
This is all thanks to BBC’s Arena. Lovely doc from the 80s about their comeback, which I watched a couple of years ago. Before that had never paid any attention at all to them.
Dinosaur Jr.
2/5
Cacophony, unlimiy
Wilco
3/5
After listening to this, I now get a lot of things about Wilco, their fan base, and their records.
3/5
You really can’t imagine how difficult it was to listen to the Beatles in the 1980s, indeed up until the Past Masters discs came out on CD. (Other than if you had music loving parents who had the records. I didn’t.)
The reputation of Sgt. Pepper preceded it. Naturally, I was disappointed, thinking it nowt but an indulgent mess. It’s the only one of the post-‘Help’ Beatles albums that I don’t return to on a regular basis (Let It Be aside, for obvious reasons).
Ok. It is indulgent, but it isn’t a mess. There are glorious moments here and there. A Day In The Life is probably one of the best pop songs ever composed. As a whole, the songs on the album (I still think) don’t play nicely with one another. But it is a treat.
The Doors
3/5
More to this than Morrison’s reputation permits.
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
3/5
I’ve waited more than a decade for an excuse to listen to this again. A little less scary second time around
Afrika Bambaataa
3/5
Missy Elliott
4/5
For the first 25 minutes, I could not for the life of me understand why I have not listened to this every day for the last twenty years. Then after the first 25 minutes, I understood exactly why.
The latter songs aren’t filler, not exactly. But they don’t hold a candle to the orgasmic pleasure of the first half of the album. (Side A? Could this be The Chronic redux? No idea, I got this on CD.)
All that said. It is a very good album.
Buddy Holly & The Crickets
3/5
Bebel Gilberto
3/5
Simple Minds
4/5
‘Open your mind’ ;)
Bee Gees
2/5
Ms. Dynamite
2/5
The road to hell is paved with good intentions…actually, no. Amy Winehouse’s ‘Frank’ owes a fair bit to this proving ground.
Turbonegro
2/5
I’m sure that this is a fine album, but it simply isn’t for me. Sounds like any number of other poodle metal albums I liked in the late eighties…
Ramblin' Jack Elliott
3/5
Yeah, well, I just don’t have an opinion about American Folk Music, I guess
Jungle Brothers
3/5
Being the least known of the Native Tongues is actually pretty high praise
Beatles
5/5
I wonder what would happen if Taylor Swift stopped touring? (I don’t like Taylor Swift, but she’s very good at what she does.)
Anyway. This is my favourite Beatles album.
Scissor Sisters
2/5
Interesting. I loved the cover of ‘Comfortably Numb’ when this album came out. Probably the main reason I got it, along with ‘Tits on the Radio’. (The title of the latter alone appealed to my puerile post-adolescent sense of humour.
Now it leaves me vaguely nauseous. It hasn’t changed. I have. I can’t with any confidence say that I’ve changed for the better, though…
Pet Shop Boys
5/5
The Pet Shop Boys were the first British pop band I knew that did things differently. A remix album. An album of 12 inch cuts. Art house videos. ‘British’ rapping. And, with this album, choosing to go back to analogue synths because digital synths weren’t cutting the mustard.
(Note: audiophile tendencies do not translate that well into cassette tape. Still, a nice touch.)
If they’d kept ‘Miserabilism’ on the original pressing, this would have made it a six star album (for me). But then, truely, the album would have been very gloomy…
It’s so hard to believe this is 35 years ago soon. My! October! Symphony celebrations are in order, I suspect. I was in a different place then, this was the place I waited years to leave. I did, eventually; there was a bit of jealousy involved, I suppose, but that’s what happens when people are being boring.
I did say that to them. They were both lawyers like me (undergrads), and consequently found it a tad difficult to face the truth about themselves. One farted surreptitiously around us, claiming when caught that it’s only the wind. Barefaced lies like this, when it must be obvious that you’re telling porky lies: how can you expect to be taken seriously?
Still, speaking frankly was something I did nervously…
Did I ask say that PSB were the first (the only) group I stanned? I even had a BOY cap like Chris Lowe. Cost me a tenner from the BOY boutique in SOHO, which was a lot of money for a baseball cap in the late 1980s…
Pavement
2/5
I actually liked 120 Minutes.
Jurassic 5
3/5
Concrete Schoolyard. The only thing wrong with this album is that it doesn’t come close to that four minutes of aural perfection.
3/5
So, Devo are, like, punks who know how to play their instruments, right?
Kanye West
4/5
With the benefit of hindsight: was the King Crimson sample a plea for help?
Brian Eno
3/5
I wonder…if one counts producer and contributor credits, would Eno be the most prolific participant on this list?
Anyway. If I were to pick one Eno album for this, it would be Discreet Music.
The Beta Band
3/5
It must be tough, constantly being measure against your best work. Especially when that is close to the first thing you ever did.
Thin Lizzy
2/5
This feels like a live albums recorded in a studio. If that makes sense..
Here’s the thing. It sounds like it’s been polished up for release - it has a very, dare I say it, flat sound. But the appeal of live albums is the unpredictability that comes with (sort of) spontaneity. One doesn’t get anything of that here.
Elton John
3/5
When does prolific become prolix? Ask Elton John.
13 albums in ten years (including Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, the first album to enter the Billboard 200 at No 1). Any number of absolutely magnificent songs scattered amongst them; no one album rising above satisfactory.
Goodbye Yellow Brock Road is typical of the trend. The ten minute epic Funeral for a Friend/Loves Lies Bleeding draws a line in the sand, which the rest of the album backs away from timidly. It’s terribly frustrating. He could have been a contender
Cowboy Junkies
3/5
Soporific. (In the nicest way possible.)
Metallica
2/5
Conceptually, it makes sense. Metallica were always the band of the grand statement. But it does jump the shark, doesn't it?
Tori Amos
4/5
Metallica
5/5
I fell asleep listening to this album last night, it’s so comforting. Welcome back, old friend…
The Hives
2/5
I hated this then and I hate this now.
Parliament
4/5
Serge Gainsbourg
5/5
<sigh>
Kings of Leon
2/5
Frank Sinatra
3/5
Paul Simon
3/5
The Flying Burrito Brothers
3/5
Billy Bragg
3/5
Bob Dylan
3/5
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
3/5
Joy Division
3/5
Echo And The Bunnymen
2/5
Songs in the Key of Glum
Koffi Olomide
3/5
The Sonics
2/5
They bring nothing to these songs but insouciance. In a different age, they would have been football hooligans.
Norah Jones
3/5
You know, I liked this once. I don’t dislike it now but golly, it’s so anonymous
Pavement
3/5
C+W for the chronically depressed
The Doors
3/5
Beck
3/5
I’m not sure why I liked this when I did, because it was supposed to be the happiest period of my life. Oh well. The melancholia matches my mood more precisely now, many years on…
David Bowie
3/5
Nice to listen to it a healthy distance from the hype. Next: Blackstar.
The Birthday Party
3/5
I’m not sure whether this is merely combative, or wilfully confrontational. Either way, TBD certainly intended to shake things up a bit.
Goldfrapp
2/5
The ‘wrong’ Goldfrapp album…
Sonic Youth
3/5
Frank Sinatra
3/5
Urgh. Awks. I don’t really see the point in rating this because this was a completely anonymous album for me, but it is blindingly clear why so many people still keel over for it (and for him)
Nine Inch Nails
3/5
This album makes me toe uneasy to genuinely like it.
TV On The Radio
2/5
Meh. Curiousity value alone. Ok, not fair. They were adventurous and must have had a way with words to have succeeded in getting a major label to engage with this. But. Not all art rock is pretentious…
‘Wolf Like Me’ changed everything b
Adele
3/5
Rolling in the Deep is one of *the* great pop songs. Otherwise, so-so
Giant Sand
4/5
👌🏿
Nitin Sawhney
2/5
In 1999, I ignored this on the basis that it was catnip for the dinner party crowd.
In 2025, I can come to the conclusion that I was largely correct. However, this smugness is tempered by the knowledge that if I had been 26 years older in 1999, I would have so into this album.
Sigh. Time is a goon.
Gram Parsons
3/5
Perversely, this album had belatedly prompted me to recognise Emmylou Harris’ true worth
Nas
4/5
Interesting that the mix of producers works so well.
The Offspring
3/5
Punk 2.0 was never my thing. Too clean and shiny. But this had its moments.
Soft Machine
2/5
I have no reference point for this at all…
Eric Clapton
3/5
Still can’t forgive him for that awful cover.
Wire
3/5
They’re getting royalties from Elastica, right?
‘Field Day for the Sundays’ is my new national anthem 🙂
Animal Collective
2/5
I suspect that this is what my 18 year old would call ‘virtue-signalling woke nonsense’. Which I understand as him saying that the perpetuators of this … [insert pejorative here] are cynically exploiting the freedom of post-modernist expression to throw paint at a wall and call it art - with the additional demerit of not even owning up to their cynicism.
Broadly speaking, I agree. There isn’t a cohesive theme running through this recording, such as to all them the cover/justification of intentionality. And, at the same time, it’s too tightly packaged to permit the excuse/contextualisation of excessive drug use.
It’s just a disjointed melange of occasionally interesting sounds, masquerading as art.
(My son’s description is better than my logorrhoea, I think.)
Genesis
2/5
God that plodded.
Cee Lo Green
3/5
Not his best work … anonymous, essentially.
Stephen Stills
2/5
Pompous *and* dull
Mudhoney
2/5
Sonic Youth did this in 1988
The White Stripes
3/5
Meg gets a raw deal. It would have been easy to touch up her drumming in post. Keeping it as it is was a conscious choice.
That aside. I actually remember nothing about this album, even though I saw them when they were touring it - Hammersmith Apollo, perhaps? It’s pretty anonymous, I think.
Ride
2/5
Peter Gabriel
3/5
Unexpected flashes of glam here. That said, Gabriel did have some spectacular sartorial choices whilst at Genesis. Talking of Genesis, there are implausible…echos, foreshadow, something of ABACAB here. I think.
Scott Walker
3/5
Tempted to give this four stars on account of The Old Man’s Back Again. But no. (The Boy Child retrospective of 60’s Scott Walker is very good, and neatly reins in his prolix instincts. That deserves at least four stars.£
Cat Stevens
3/5
Steve Winwood
3/5
I guess this must have been quite the thing in 1980. Because I knew and loved Higher Ground in real time, that’s my threshold for SW - I guess I’m spoiled a little..
2/5
I want my money back
<you didn’t pay any money for this>
I don’t care.
Iron Maiden
3/5
I read something not so long ago about the loss of the key change in recorded music, and how this relates to the paucity of storytelling in contemporary songwriting. I didn’t expect to find vivid proof of this in an Iron Maiden album, but there you are.
This isn’t to my taste at all. But listening to it dispassionately, I’m struck by the rigidity of the composition, the clever juxtaposition of rhythmic variations - and, yeah, key changes to underscore pathos or passion.
Also: I swear there are echoes of both Blondie and Metallica’s Black Album here. That was not at all expected.
Björk
3/5
Histronical. (Is that a word?) Thing is, Vespertine and Medulla, both more than a decade before this, covers the same ground with more warmth and … dare I say it? Feeling.
(All opinions author’s own etc.)
The Divine Comedy
2/5
Precious. Twee
Jean-Michel Jarre
3/5
Oxygène 4 was the soundtrack to my childhood…
Joni Mitchell
4/5
IMHO, this is *the* first great JM album.
As an aside: the Moog revolutionised bass lines, didn’t it?
Kanye West
4/5
Doves
4/5
The day I bought this was a real Dry The Rain (High Fidelity) moment. Our Price, Brixton, April 2000. Four of us at the counter, all asking what was playing. Cash for Happiness.
Thelonious Monk
4/5
Adventures in listening.
Grateful Dead
3/5
Bon Jovi
3/5
Popular music (‘pop’) works to an identifiable formula. (Not that it is formularistic, which is something else altogether.) I only fully understood this when I started to learn piano (the first of many times. I should accept defeat gracefully and get on with my life.)
Slippery When Wet is pop music, given the bells and whistles necessary to fit it into a sub genre of pop (in this case, to be ultra-specific, late 80s poodle metal. Yes, they were pioneers.)
It’s ok for what it is, with a couple of cracking songs (‘Livin’ On A Prayer’, ‘Wanted Dead And Alive’). But no more than ok, and largely disposable. No one learnt anything ever from listening to this album, which (I think) is the base criterion for a truely indispensable recording.
Stan Getz
4/5
Sunday morning bliss
Kings of Leon
2/5
Ditchwater dull. Sorry.
Van Morrison
2/5
Boring the pants off me since ‘68. Sorry. But I’ve invested way too much time I’ll never get back in figuring out why this particular album. It’s not as though I don’t recognise the talent of The Man (‘TB Sheets’, for example. A masterpiece.) But this is just lachrymose introspection lacking a destination.
MC Solaar
2/5
You know when you really want to like something, and work hard at liking it, but just can’t? Yeah. That.
For a long time, I thought I simply had a bias against Rap Not In The English Language. But it occurred to me that the best rappers, most rappers, use their voices as an instrument for conveying emotion and passion, one way or the other.
Solaar’s delivery is as flat as a pancake.
Big Star
3/5
A perfectly sound album I won’t listen to again. (It’s me, not it, to be clear)
Gorillaz
3/5
The impressive thing about it is that it sits well together, despite the assortment of influences. I want to say that it’s the overarching sense of anarchy, but I don’t know that I would have necessarily thought that if I hadn’t seen the avatars.
Three stars only because Demon Days is one of my favourite albums, and this isn’t that (if that makes sense.)
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3/5
Boy, this selection has worked hard to make me an Elvis Costello convert
Saint Etienne
4/5
Sarah Cracknell was the rightful
Holder to the title ‘Come Down Queen’ and not Beth Orton.
And Bob Stanley is a brilliant writer. You know, St Etienne are probably the most underrated band of their generation.
Traffic
3/5
Bob Marley & The Wailers
3/5
Dexys Midnight Runners
2/5
Rahul Dev Burman
2/5
Leonard Cohen
3/5
Not that I’m an advocate for it or anything, but how the hell did Leonard Cohen get away with not being cancelled?
Not that this has anything to do with anything. Middling album. Is this the one he did after his accountant ran off with all his money? If so, explains a bit. (You know, there’s a genre there - the financial obligations album)
Slade
3/5
Would we still be talking about Slade today, were it not for that Christmas song and their eccentricities? Not really sure. Their glam ness didn't stand out. Perhaps their Black Country roots? I dunno.
UB40
4/5
The Monks
3/5
Bit gimmicky, I thought. I guess the time and place make the difference…
Elvis Costello
3/5
This has nothing to do with anything, but it occurs to me that Costello is an almost exact contemporary of Springsteen. Perhaps, if this list were America-oriented, I might have been bludgeoned into submission vis a vis Springsteen too.
Laura Nyro
3/5
Joanna Newsom
3/5
Twenty odd years ago, I thought that this was precious. (Actually, I framed this thought in the form of an obscenity that I’m still proud of.)
I still think it’s precious. But I can admire the craft that shaped it now, particularly in utterly transcendent moments like when Smog’s voice kicks in a bit more than halfway through Only Skin
CHVRCHES
2/5
Undistinguished. Very catnippy but nowhere near enough to sustain repeated listens.
Arctic Monkeys
3/5
The Smiths
4/5
Was Morrissey the first Emo? He certainly wasn’t a Goth…
Stevie Wonder
5/5
Everything that ever needs to be said about this album, and about Stevie in the 70s, has already been said.
The Cure
4/5
808 State
3/5
1. Surprised/not surprised by the strong hip hop vibe running through the album
2. Pacific (202? 707?) casts a long shadow over everything else.
Beyoncé
3/5
A triumph of presentation over content. (That said, Lemonade is good. Which isn’t quite the question being asked here…)
Lupe Fiasco
2/5
Boring. Weird that this is in the same era as J.Dilla, The Ummnah, even KanYe.
The Beach Boys
3/5
John Lennon
3/5
Haven’t listened to this for years. Was thinking to myself that it is terribly sentimental. Then ‘How Do You Sleep?’ comes on. Ah-hah.
Super Furry Animals
3/5
Little Simz
3/5
Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart
3/5
Not really moved by this, to be honest. Competent but uninspired
Röyksopp
4/5
Tempus Fugit. Sometimes in a good way.
Aerosmith
2/5
Shuggie Otis
4/5
Fatboy Slim
2/5
Willie Nelson
3/5
Mylo
4/5
For me, the last great dance album. As it happens, I got married the year this came out. Odd coincidence, no?
Kid Rock
2/5
I don’t blame him. I blame the people who enabled this.
The Byrds
3/5
Christina Aguilera
3/5
Inoffensive, in the nicest possible way.
fIREHOSE
3/5
Rufus Wainwright
3/5
Why Two and not the two? That aside, I think I prefer One to Two.
Justin Timberlake
4/5
This is the album Michael Jackson should have made in 2003
Supergrass
4/5
Insouciant.
Madonna
2/5
1. Madonna had her first hit in my first year of high school. My son has left high school. Even if I had had my son when I was in high school (I didn’t), this would have been a very impressive run in a world that is at best ephemeral.
2. Madonna, of course, is anything but ephemeral.
3. In general, and specifically in the context of this project, she is bound, though, to be victim of her success.
4. I’ve generated 931 albums and this is the second Madonna album. I’m working on the presumption that no others will turn up in the 80 or so to come.
5. That means no True Blue. No Like A Prayer. No Erotica To each their own and all that, but this is risible.
6. The other Madonna album (thus far) is Ray Of Light. She’d had an indifferent run (again, subjectively) in the decade before that. Ray Of Light is one of the few times when the phrase ‘a return to form’ has been used correctly.
7. But it also cast a long shadow.
8. You fill in the rest.
Girls Against Boys
3/5
The Last Shadow Puppets
2/5
<listen with cocked eyebrow>
Hot Chip
3/5
Nanci Griffith
3/5
Marvin Gaye
3/5
I actually don’t rate this album, at least within his body of work. IITA here?
Quicksilver Messenger Service
2/5
Not just indifferent, but reminds me of The Doors.
Joan Baez
2/5
Ok. IATA here. But this just doesn’t sing to me at all.
GZA
2/5
not feeling it
Tracy Chapman
4/5
As fresh as it was in 1988
Ghostface Killah
3/5
Rufus Wainwright
3/5
So Want One and Two should really be the same album. I did like this a long time ago. Less now.
Django Django
3/5
This is an odd one. There's nothing wrong with the album – a slightly more commercial Vampire Weekend, perhaps? but making a list of classic albums...I don't think even their mums would sat this.
(as an aside, the Mercury Music Prize is quite the graveyard, isn't it?)
The Police
4/5
I still think The Police were the most interesting thing to come out of punk.
Raekwon
3/5
So, this is the third album by Wu Tang alumni that I’ve had in the last fortnight. Still vaguely underwhelmed. Still puzzled that the two best solo ventures by members of the collective (Tical and Return to the 36 Chambers) haven’t featured.
Bobby Womack
3/5
Again. Neither the best of the genre nor of Mr Womack’s catalogue. And in this case, I think the gaps are pretty glaring. On the whole I’ve enjoyed this project - it bludgeoned me into accepting Elvis Costello as a legitimate artist, for instance - but some of the selections are, well, peculiar.
Tom Waits
3/5
Tom’s most abrasive album?
The Louvin Brothers
2/5
Yup. Tragic.
Red Snapper
2/5
Butthole Surfers
3/5
Alexander 'Skip' Spence
2/5
The Prodigy
4/5
Some day we have to have an honest conversation about the geniuses of sampling. And about the charlatans who pissed in this pool of genius.
Liam Howlett, self evidently, is not of the latter category.
The United States Of America
3/5
Straight link from this to Stereolab, surely?
4/5
Talking Heads
2/5
Nah. Pales in comparison to their other albums. It’s just a bit…anodyne?
The Style Council
3/5
Always thought of SC purely in terms of their singles - first time I’ve listened to a full album.
It shows its age, but would have been an intriguing to the sophistipop canon back in 84…
Electric Light Orchestra
3/5
Wu-Tang Clan
4/5
The mother lode. You had to be there to really get it. And even so, I didn’t. Not then. (It does occur to me that this might be reconstructive nostalgia. Sort of like I now think I always liked ‘Pump Up The Jam’ by Technotronic. But I don’t think so.)
Bill Evans Trio
4/5
Interesting counterpart to Waltz With Debby - more open ended and expansive, I think. In a good way. Superior stuff.
David Bowie
3/5
My least favourite 70s Bowie album. (Not counting Pin Ups.) it stands up ok, but (as has been pointed out umpteen times) it suffers in relation to what preceded it…
2/5
I thought I liked Muse once… I probably did. Which is why I’m loathe to say bad things about this album. Not because of me, in the narrow sense, but rather because it’s a reminder that lots of music can be competent, even quality, without necessarily speaking to everyone. This doesn’t talk to me at all, but that don’t mean nowt.
In case it isn’t clear: this rating is all me.
Stan Getz
4/5
Delightful
Portishead
3/5
The third best Portishead studio album. Sorry. A bit to aggressive for me.
Supertramp
3/5
It took an age for me to find Breakfast In America on CD. One reason why I was, once upon a time, a big endorser of streaming. Halcyon days…
Oh, yeah, this. So so.
Pixies
3/5
Klaxons
2/5
Jesus. The Mercury Music Prize has a lot to answer for.
Apropos of nothing: the evenings and weekend tariff was a game changer. iykyk :)
Radiohead
3/5
My least favourite Radiohead album. Complex time signatures don’t really cover the thinning out on top.
But then, without this we wouldn’t have had In Rainbows.
Green Day
3/5
OK I guess. Indifferent. Has a brash and shiny feel to it which seems the antithesis of punk. (Nope, hadn't ever listened to the album before today).
Jeff Beck
2/5
Nah. I'd have fallen asleep to this in 196-whatever as well. It's actually ok, but it *feels* (ie., in a subjective way) a bit pompous.
2/5
Ok for what it is, but didn’t really warm to it. Sort of like LCD Sound System…come to think of it. Complete different genre wise, but the two do seem to have a similar energy.
John Lee Hooker
3/5
I keep saying to myself ‘I should listen to more of the Blues’ and then I don’t. So this was helpful (caveats about authenticity (not from me) aside).
Quite liked this.
Lucinda Williams
3/5
A note about (other people's) methodology:
This isn't Ms Williams' first, or last, or best album. (on the last point, try Essence, for example).
It is, though, the first album she made that got 'breakthrough' attention – reviews in the broadsheets, appearances on late night music programmes, etc. (These are UK reference points, I should point out. But since this list is subtly UK-centric, I think that's ok.)
Equally important is that this album is from a time before streaming, where it was actually rather difficult to check out an album without, you know, buying it.
(There's a lot to be said about how this may have influenced attachment to music, and the perceived disposability of much new music nowadays. This is a discussion for another time and place.)
The point here is that it was possible to have a perception of an album without having engaged very closely with it. A reputation built on the amplified opinions of a few taste makers. (Another example, that ticks all the boxes above, is Yo La Tengo's Summer Sun)
Anyway. This isn't the Lucinda Williams album I'll take with me to a desert island.
SAULT
3/5
The Inflo/Little Simz issue made me think, in an apophenic way, about judgement calls. I assume that the deal was made in good faith; if so, then putting on a show of that (financial) magnitude points to hubris. OK, poor judgement...
Sault have produced some of the most engaging music of the last decade in the UK. They've also put out a lot of filler. I wonder whether a steadying hand might have shaped something much more significant out of them.
(This album tilts filler. Nothing at all wrong with it, but it only highlights the collective's real genius sporadically.)
Common
4/5
J. Dilla. I love how this guy pops up like Zelig in all the 90s albums I loved.
Einstürzende Neubauten
2/5
Pantera
2/5
Displays of power are always vulgar, no?
Drive-By Truckers
2/5
Jack White
3/5
I admire Jack White. I wish I could love him.
The Crusaders
3/5
I really dislike the alto saxophone
Ali Farka Touré
2/5
Somewhere on the soporific-stultifying continuum
Kraftwerk
4/5
Apparently I own every pre-82 Kraftwerk album. Not sure how that happened :)
Beach House
3/5
I suppose the problem is that I only listened to this after hearing the sublime 7. Sorry, guys.
Madonna
3/5
I feel like an old grump for consistently insisting that 1001 Albums keeps picking the wrong album by the right singer. But in this case…I mean, True Blue. C’mon guys. (We can’t even frame this as the ever nebulous ‘return to form’, because Who’s That Girl isn’t a proper album.)
Oh Father is, though, one of Madge’s best songs ever, though. And she’s done a lot.
Daft Punk
3/5
Homework isn’t a great album. It isn’t even Daft Punk’s best album. But it did stuff no one else was doing at the time. Also, it’s not a bad approximation of the energy of their DJ sets. Basement Jaxx and Soul II Soul are the only other collectives (of that era) that I can say that about.
Come to think of it, why isn’t Club Classics Vol. 1 here?
Linkin Park
2/5
Scritti Politti
3/5
So 80s…
Pentangle
3/5
Charming
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
3/5
This group should have never made a recorded album. I mean this as praise, mind you.
Joe Ely
3/5
It seems uncharitable to offer an opinion about an album I’ve never heard about and a genre I do not really understand. Anyway. Pleasant enough.
The Darkness
2/5
Didn’t this joke wear think in 2005?
Aerosmith
3/5
I miss liking music like this
Eminem
3/5
Credit where credit is due. He knew what he was doing.
Fun Lovin' Criminals
3/5
Bass and beats sameness. Not bad but less than the sum of its parts.
Ramones
3/5
Wait. What. The Yanks invented Punk?
(Yes, I know the debate. But I’ve never had any real interest in the birth of the three chord band, so never paid attention to it…)
Kacey Musgraves
3/5
A surprisingly fun album I don’t think I’ll listen to again. Most certainly me, not Ms Musgrave. It’s a very well put together album that, sadly, doesn’t trigger any emotional responses in me.
Steve Earle
2/5
Adam & The Ants
3/5
Surprised to discover that it is quite good. I think the drumming does it for me particularly
Jamiroquai
4/5
Jazz-Funk *only* properly works live. That said (1) Thirty years on, this album still (almost) works; (2) I’ve seen Jamiroquai live, and they were very good. (cf. St Germain)
Ute Lemper
3/5
I can’t not vote. But I have no context for giving any sort of appreciation of this.
Nico
2/5
Tom Wilson is one of the more interesting NPCs of the sixties. (NPC in quotation marks. Anything but)
Nico…odd to hear a voice so strong, yet so resolutely stuck within a narrow register. It’s like listening to drone music with lyrics.
Public Image Ltd.
3/5
Todd Rundgren
3/5
Could swear that I’ve done this album already. Anyway. Endearingly eccentric. Almost.
Elbow
3/5
Sigh. Somehow, Elbow’s earnestness stopped working for me at their highest point.
The Saints
3/5
Billy Idol learnt a lot from this, I’d wager.
Sly & The Family Stone
4/5
I like to think that this album encapsulates the age. Shambolic, ethically unsound (y’all know the story about why the sound quality is so muddy, right?), but ultimately endearing.
The Flaming Lips
2/5
Whimsy
Björk
4/5
This, and Vespertine, are (for me) Björk’s sweet spot.
The Flaming Lips
3/5
Precious. Not in a good way. It isn’t bad, though
Black Sabbath
3/5
Bye, Ozzy. It was good a lot of the time.
CHIC
4/5
👌🏿
John Grant
2/5
What an odd album. Starts off glorious baroque pop, eases into a Scissors Sisters pastiche, then dissolves into incomprehensible whimsy.
It occurs to me that for an album to make this list, it should be something that rewards constant revisiting.
I won’t be in these precincts anytime soon.
The Rolling Stones
2/5
Self-indulgent. Yes, this is the hill I will die on.
The The
3/5
Dolly Parton
3/5
New Order
4/5
…I mean, electronic twiddles do not make a song or an album ‘dance’. One wouldn’t, for example, set anything here next to Voodoo Ray or French Kiss on a set list.
But it is good. It is still good.
Skepta
3/5
It has the energy of a generation other than my own ie I’m not best placed to evaluate this.
Peter Tosh
3/5
Very little reggae here - pretty odd, given its contribution to the innovative edge of contemporary British music - ska, trip hop, the interface with punk etc.
Anyways. This one’s milquetoast, imho.
Blue Cheer
2/5
Nick Drake
4/5
I was told off today for ‘enjoying’ Nick Drake. To be fair, the person (he runs a record store) said that the intellectual bridge spanning Drake’s ethereal music and his tragic end was too tasking for him.
I mumbled something about discovering the music before the biography (true - I knew the general contours, but only full appreciated the full extent of his collapse after reading Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles.
I don’t enjoy Nike Drake. I am stirred, deeply, by Nick Drake.
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
3/5
Hm. Not the Observatory Coast album but accessible nonetheless. Bit of a surprise. Perhaps I should stop running away from the good captain.
Jane Weaver
3/5
I genuinely don’t get why this is here. Nothing wrong with it but it is more or less anonymous.
Goldfrapp
4/5
Nightmares On Wax
3/5
Like the XX’s first album, a deceptively electric opener paves the way for somewhat more generic fare.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
3/5
The Dandy Warhols
3/5
I had tickets to see them in April 1998. For some reason I didn’t go. Regretting it now.
System Of A Down
3/5
I admire the indefatigable energy of this album, even as I wilt in its wake…
White Denim
2/5
White Denim - the satirical choice - evinces grave disregard for common decency.
This album isn’t that. But, the odd (in every sense of the word) exception aside, it is a rather rum do.
Talvin Singh
2/5
…and finally, I’ve cracked it. The Mercury Music Prize of the 90s and 00s was all about what MAMIVinyl thought the young ‘uns ought to be listening to.
Nah then, still nah now.
Christina Aguilera
3/5
It's good for what it is. But on the whole the waste of a magnificently expressive voice. If she did a Seal-kind pivot to soul standards (she may have done this already, I have no idea) it’ll be a killer.
Don McLean
3/5
Fugazi
3/5
When I was a young 'un, Fugazi were cited as a cautionary tale. The stuff you wheeled out when you wanted to scare the horses.
Turns out they're just pussycats. Ok, not quite, but the distance between them and, say, Hüsker Du or Sonic Youth (to name two alt contemporaries who got far more airplay and column inches) is rather small, I'd argue.
Derek & The Dominos
2/5
I’m playing the man, not the ball here. But seriously. Layla, and perhaps one other song aside, this is quite meh.
Wild Beasts
2/5
Leonard Cohen
2/5
Odd that, he sounds like Bob Dylan trying a bit harder to hold a note here.
The Partisan and one or two others aside, not much moved by this.
Spacemen 3
2/5
Pish
Bonnie Raitt
3/5
AC/DC
3/5
Good fun that wears a little too thin…
Stevie Wonder
5/5
Can we have too much Stevie Wonder here? No, I don’t think we can.
The Residents
2/5
Really? Whimsy on steroids.
Cheap Trick
2/5
Big in Japan. Huh.
Rush
2/5
Puts the 'ous' in 'pompous'.
Crosby, Stills & Nash
3/5
Beth Orton
3/5
Sarah Cracknell was the true Come Down Queen. This is the new hill I have chosen to die on.
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
3/5
So. I have to give this four stars because it is a flawed, but superior work. It shouldn't sit on the same shelf as some of the indifferent-but-broadly-inoffensive stuff I've given three stars. Urgh. This is hopeless.
The Pogues
2/5
Since I know that I can hear Fairytale at will one month a year for the rest of my life, this album will not be troubling me any longer.
Spiritualized
4/5
The Gun Club
3/5
Pretenders
3/5
I did not know that Grace Jones’ Private Life was a cover. Not that it matters.
This is a cool album.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
2/5
Bleurgh. Good job I didn’t know about this before watching ‘Yes Minister.’ It would have put me off a classic.
David Bowie
4/5
King Crimson
2/5
Hookworms
3/5
Worthy. Dull-ish
Maxwell
4/5
This is very much a time and place kind of thing. It certainly won't be everyone's cup of tea.
Orbital
3/5
Enthusiastic but not fully formed. Traces of the glorious In Sides (why isn't that the selection?) here and there.
Pulp
3/5
A very dark yang to the A Different Class's archly humorous ying. Doesn't come out that well in the wash.
Coldcut
4/5
Wow. A time capsule of sampling anarchy.
Orbital
3/5
And again the wrong Orbital album. You’re just doing this to spite me, right?
The Verve
3/5
Dirge-y
Dead Kennedys
3/5
It's nice to get, once in a while, an album that I know I'll have no opinion on whatsoever.
The Beta Band
2/5
There was always less to The Beta Band than met the eye. I guess we all lived in hope that they'd do something again that came even close to the transcendent glory of Dry The Rain...
Carpenters
3/5
Why we should listen to the Carpenters.
The Police and Carpenters were both signed to A&M. One day, Sting (I believe it was) was whinging to the label boss about the amount of attention given to Richard and Karen. Label head’s response? Thanks to Richard and Karen, we were able to sign you lot and stick by you. Stop whining and at least pretend to be grateful.
(Full disclosure - I fact checked this on an AI platform and it claims that I am hallucinating. Fairly sure I’m not, though…)
I don’t mind the Carpenters at all.
Led Zeppelin
2/5
2/5
Nondescript
Bob Dylan
3/5
Sigh. I’m being bludgeoned into submission
N.W.A.
2/5
For an album that is a deliberate provocation, not at all bad. Not terribly good either, but that goes with this territory.
Donovan
3/5
The Vines
2/5
Aged without grace.
Waylon Jennings
3/5
Not my thing but highly amusing to listen to. (Yes, ugly syntax. Shoot me.)
Mariah Carey
2/5
A time capsule from the 90s.
The opening song credits both the Ummnah and Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs as producers.
Mariah’s Prince cover (supported by Dru Hill) is surprisingly adequate.
Don’t open a 90s time capsule if you ever come across one. There’s too much that needs to be explained.
R.E.M.
3/5
Neil Young
4/5
The Coral
2/5
Earnest. Dull.
Madness
3/5
An album of nostalgic longing and wistfulness. Listened to from a position of nostalgic longing and wistfulness, some 40-something years on.
Very disconcerting parallax effect, bestowing depth and (perhaps artificial) meaning to the randomness of (my) youth.
Steely Dan
3/5
There are points when I thought ‘but Thin Lizzy did this better’.
Ricki Don’t Lose My Number is great, though.
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
2/5
Lloyd Cole And The Commotions
3/5
(Trying to) rhyme ‘Norman Mailer’ with ‘Tailor’ is a hanging offence.
Fugees
4/5
Def Leppard
3/5
Brits do Poodle Metal better shock
(Hysteria is better, btw)
M.I.A.
3/5
Björk
4/5
It isn’t what it was thirty years ago. But it was really good then.
Kings of Leon
2/5
(No reflection on the merits of the album. Just doesn’t do it for me.)
Air
3/5
Manic Street Preachers
3/5
The Police
4/5
…and once again I have to acknowledge that this process is steeped in personal bias. I can’t listen to this without being transported back to the end of 1983. Which was a good year.
Rod Stewart
3/5
Big Black
5/5
You know what it’s like when you’ve been stripped to your keks and there’s a gun at your head and you’ve been told to play the guitar like your life depends upon it (and it does) and you’re shredding for all you’re worth and your palms are clammy and the tips of your fingers have began to bleed and your heart is bounding and your mouth is dry but somehow, somehow, you feel that charge that says ‘this is what it means to be alive and to actually be living’?
No. Me neither. But I bet Steve Albini did.
MGMT
3/5
Tom Waits
3/5
Dirty Projectors
2/5
Joanna Newsome with attitude. Precious, but with teeth.