1001 Albums Summary

Best Song: Airborne. A great first track that sets expectations the rest of the album doesn't come close to fulfilling. Worst Song: Bought It Again. This low-fi punk rock doesn't fit with the rest of the album, and sounds (weirdly) like early Neil Young, in an unflattering way. Overall: Pretty stock-standard melancholy singer-songwriter stuff.

Best Song: 8. This almost bordered on a sort of punk, which I enjoyed. Worst Song: Round. I didn't like the borderline screamo elements. Overall: I like some aspects of emo and post hardcore, but for whatever reason I didn't connect with this one. I never saw the heart of it. It certainly had all the trappings of an emo album, yet for me it was never once emotional.

Best Song: Venus. A love this kind of big, brash, high-concept pop music. Worst Song: Jewels N' Drugs. None of this feels like it fits the rest of the album. This felt like it birthed from an executive thinking that rap features are necessary on a pop album. Hearing Twista was a nice hit of nostalgia though. Overall: The title "Artpop" definitely feels appropriate, as these songs really feel like artful attempts to do something different within the domain of pop music. That said, it felt like there was often too much done, as many of the songs felt like they had just a few too many components added, or changed their tack too frequently to let any of the good artistic choices really sink in.

Best Song: Comme un fou. This was probably my favourite vocal performance on the album. It was definitely also the highest energy. Worst Song: Chanson Noire. The high hat is mixed so high it sounds like it's coming from inside my head. Overall: Sometimes I thought this was going to be really good, with interesting arrangements and grandiose instrumentals, but more often than not it felt really overwrought and melodramatic. It is definitely more structured than a lot of prog rock (which is a point in its favour, for me), but it also feels bloated with a lot of wasted space, especially in the latter half.

Best Song: Goodnight Alt-Right. There's a solid energy to this track, and obviously it's topical, but it lacks the punch of the Dead Kennedys that it tries to invoke. Worst Song: All Day & Night. The song is like 60% breakdown, and the vocals are so shrill they sound goofy. Overall: Really easy to feel the influence of bands like RATM and Meshuggah. That said, it never really does anything to separate itself from those influences, so I found myself wondering why I shouldn't just listen to those influences instead. Also, although I appreciate the political bent of their lyrics, the lyrics are often weak and juvenile ("Money makes the world go round / Money makes the world burn down"). That very surface-level attempt at these topics pales in comparison to what you get from some of the better bands in the domain, like Dead Kennedys, RATM, or Propagandhi.

Best Song: Nobody Hurts You. The most palatable of the songs on the album, but even this one was rough. Worst Song: Saturday Nite is Dead. Really quite remarkable that they could repeat such an inane phrase so many times in such a short song. It made it feel like an eternity. Overall: Absolutely not for me. This sounded like the bargain version of artists that I already don't like. An Elvis Costello impersonator. Diametrically opposite of my musical preferences. No thank you.

Best Song: Matte Kuadasai. His voice really pairs well with the sorrowful guitar work. Worst Song: The Sheltering Sky. One of my least favourite forms of prog rock: directionless space stuff. Overall: Maybe it was just my headspace when listening to this, but I found this album far more annoying than interesting. Something about the tone of the guitars was grating, so that even when the rhythms were interesting, the actual sound of them was too often shrill and piercing.

Best Song: Ciel Ouvert. I kind of dug the "spooky western" theme. Kind of. Worst Song: Oh Yeah. This is basically just a joke/meme song. Certainly it is by now, but I can't imagine that this song was ever really earnestly enjoyed, but rather laughed at as a quirky oddity. Overall: Oof, another album that is very much not for me. Further proof to me that the 80s was the absolute worst decade for music.

Best Song: Television Rules the Nation / Crescendolls. That rolling drumbeat that comes in at 3:02 is so goddamn good. Worst Song: Face to Face / Short Circuit. The beginning of this song is by far my least favourite part of the whole album. It's such an energy kill and feels unnecessarily quiet for this point in the show. The song never goes anywhere, it just fizzles out. It honestly feels like its whole purpose was to provide a lull that amplifies the energy on either side. Overall: This album is so good that it is the only way I like to listen to Daft punk now. If I hear any of these tracks in their original version, I cannot help but think that there is something missing. It loses a bit of its magic in the middle, but still this is by far the best way to listen to Daft Punk.

Best Song: Be Calm. I wish the album contained more songs like this, where the singer really shows of their vocal chops, especially in the upper register. Worst Song: Walking The Dog. The "quirkiness" factor of this song is turned up too high. Overall: A very earnest pop album with vibes of musical theatre. I vaguely remembered this band from a few mega hits that they had (evidently from the album that followed this one), but had heard none of these tracks before. It's alright... very particular in its presentation. Listening to the lead singer, I can't help but imagine he's standing on a stage, impeccable posture, chin held high, singing to the upper rafters. Pop music for concert halls.

Best Song: Dine Alone. Nice bass tone. Worst Song: Can Opener. Budget "Hells Bells". Overall: A perfectly serviceable hardcore album. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing annoying. Straight down the middle. I will not remember this.

Best Song: WANDA WANDA. An absolute fucking banger, holy hell. How this track isn't the highest played on the album is a mystery to me. Worst Song: Red Rose with Gin & Tonic. This is verging on babytalk in a way I do not like. Overall: Boy am I glad that someone submitted this. I had no expectations coming in (I only played part of a Katamari game ages ago), and damn if it wasn't a refreshing album. Samba, jazz, just random silliness. Tons of variety, super creative. Hella fun to listen to.

Best Song: A Pitcher of Summer. I liked the female vocals and the addition of brass (?) in the background. Worst Song: The Antique. One great noisy, sleepy lullaby. Overall: I just don't like music that is this slow and atmospheric. Everything plods along, the mood feels off. It feels like heaviness simply for heavy's sake.

Best Song: Helicopter. Really great, ripping rift. Worst Song: Price of Gasoline. By this point in the album, I think I had started to grow tired of the sameness of many of the tracks. Overall: I've always liked it when a British singer's accent is still prominent when they sing. These guys have always felt very "English" to me. It's a nice, very smooth, rather modern-sounding form of rock. The more they incorporated electronic elements, the more I found myself enjoying it.

Best Song: Gronlandic Edit. Groovy start to the track, even if the singer ended up undermining it a bit. Worst Song: Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse. A song cooked up in a lab specifically to annoy me. From the obnoxiously repetitive chorus to the inane ululating. Overall: Good golly god damn, does this vocalist ever get under my skin. Endless falsetto, grating repetition of syllables. The backing music was often fine, but I found the lead singer's "Manic Pixie Dream" energy so awful to listen to. It just sounds like another young person who listened to too much Bowie and fashioned themselves a Ziggy Stardust.

Best Song: Beautiful Telephones - Pt. 1. In an already sparse album, it felt doubly infinite to reduce the influence of the saxophone and bring the bass and piano to the fore. Worst Song: Beautiful Telephones - Pt. 3. That piano run was not interesting enough to warrant the attention it received. Overall: A soft and brooding sort of jazz. I'm very green when it comes to jazz, but I did enjoy this. Understated, evocative of a kind of cloudy melancholy. I could read a book to this music.

Best Song: Rainbow's Cadillac. White Dad Gospel Music. Worst Song: Passing Through. Really? A wankery guitar solo? I thought this album was better than this. Overall: I wasn't much of a fan of the jazz parts, but the more traditional rock sections had a clean, Springsteen-esque groove to them. Slightly refined DadRock. FatherRock.

Best Song: Chips Ahoy. That keyboard riff is pretty gnarly. Worst Song: Arms and Hearts. A limping conclusion to an album that was already too long. Overall: This kinda just feels like budget Elvis Costello to me, and I don't even like the brand name version.

Best Song: Better Get Hit In Your Soul. A track that does everything it can to live up to such a fantastic title. Love this amount of energy. Worst Song: Jelly Roll. The energy of the album had really petered off by this point. This felt like a bit of a quiet anticlimax compared to the rest of the album. Overall: Such a lively and energetic jazz album. I'm not much of a jazz guy, but I've listened to this one a fair few times. It just feels wonderfully playful.

Best Song: Monster Ballads. Just a well done ballad. The piano was a nice touch. Worst Song: Thin Blue Flame. Something about the rushed delivery of this song was unpleasant for me. Why put so many syllables in the line if you have to speed through to get them all? It runs contrary to all the other vibes of the song/album. Overall: A decent entry into the genre of "Melancholy Guy with Guitar". It doesn't stand up - lyrically or vocally - to the greats of the genre, but it's also not terrible.

Best Song: Widow's Reed. Loke a cacophonous and noisy outro. Worst Song: Dead Queen. I really dislike when an album starts with something so discordant, without giving you time to adjust to its feel. Overall: I wanted to like this more than I did. It's darkly atmospheric, but it's also at times a bit directionless. Good for a brooding background vibe, but not something that I feel wants to be listened to in the forefront.

Best Song: Wetsuit. Really liked the drum rhythm here. Worst Song: Post Break-Up Sex. A really disappointing song, because it felt like they had found a nice little vocal melody and then decided to ride it into the ground. A good thing repeated enough times becomes a bad thing. Overall: Very okay. Wildly middle-of-the-road. I don't dislike it, it doesn't excite me. It feels like music that you hear in car or clothing commercials. It's fine.

Best Song: Loch Lomond / Molly Malone. This isn't the best cover of this song by any means, but it's earnestly performed. Worst Song: Hoot Owls. This feels like a campfire song for small children. Overall: There's a quaintness here that is somewhat endearing, but it also feels so very ordinary that it feels strange that it's even been put to record. This feels like music the music of an old family friend who performs at family functions. Absent any connection to the man himself, the music isn't anything noteworthy in any way.

Best Song: Visit to Vienna. This had a great energy to kick off the album. Almost feels like a track from The Go-Gos. Worst Song: Static. The guitar solo in the background felt very out of theme, and clashed with the rest of the vibe. Overall: A fun, upbeat sort of pop rock. It feels very radio friendly, but there's nothing to hate about it.

Best Song: Load Me Up. Pop this song on and get on the #1 Highway headed west. Pure Canadiana. Worst Song: A Boy And His Machine Gun. This song isn't as edgy as it appears to be trying to be. Overall: My Canadian heart won't allow me to give this album too low of a score (although I might have chosen Underdogs, if I were to choose one of their albums). Sure, it's a bit slow, and a bit meandering, but I've always thought Matthew Good wrote compelling lyrics and was capable of evoking a good sense of melancholy. That said, the album is full of middling tracks that don't do much to differentiate themselves.

Best Song: Adam's Song. I'm a sucker for upbeat songs about sad things. Worst Song: Anthem. The arrangement feels punk but the vocals are so egregiously pop. Overall: I missed the boat on blink-182 when I was younger, so I have no nostalgia for a band that really feels like it relies on nostalgia to be listened to in 2026. It's pop-punk in name, but the "punk" part feels at times like the thinnest veneer over a deep core of pop. Combined with vocals so nasal they're basically Neil Young, it's a lot to deal with.

Best Song: Cerberus. Goodness gracious that's groovy. Worst Song: She Came Through the Chimney. This is just several different sounds in a trench coat masquerading as a song. Overall: A pretty fun, mostly instrumental album. Seems great to have on in the background. Little bit experimental, little bit heavy, little bit jazz. I like it.

Best Song: The Real Me. This feels like a legitimate, hard-hitting track, not just another interlude between interludes. And more importantly, the Entwistle and Moon fucking rip on this one. Worst Song: Sea and Sand. Could we not have understood the sea-based metaphors without the addition of beach sounds? Overall: This is like the final boss of dad rock. Like all Who albums, it feels like it should be a theatrical production more than it should be a rock album. It's full of odd little in lyrical asides, none of the songs follow anything approaching a standard formula. It's ambitious - and I applaud it for that - but in the end it sounds like it was written to make old dudes in khaki shorts cry.

Best Song: Untrust Us. Very videogamey, in a good way. Worst Song: Xxzxcuzx Me. Videogamey, but in a bad way. Overall: This really feels like "maximalist" music in a way that makes it difficult to thoroughly enjoy. Every song contained 2-3 things that I really liked, but then also 1-2 things that just annoyed me. It is a very busy album in a way that could feel grating if you're not in the right mood.

Best Song: Ogre. Maybe it was partly benefitted by how terrible the preceding song was, but this song really exploded in a beautiful, colourful way. Worst Song: Herald. Truly just a chorus of farts. Overall: After that first song, I was really prepared to dislike this album, but the more it went on, the more I found myself endeared to the grand mysticism of this thing. It feels like properly old folk, but also has more modern sensibilities, especially in the sort of "wall of noise" presentation. Granted, there are also occasional stretches that I can only describe as "old man clanking" that detract from the overall album, but the broad strokes are bold and compelling. A wonderfully imperfect album.

Best Song: What Do You Want Me to Say? One of the few songs in the album that felt like it had an internal direction. Worst Song: 8 1/2 Minutes. Songs from the dentists office. Overall: This was too scattered for my liking. It reminded me of a less cohesive Mars Volta. Everything felt very chaotic, and obviously this chaos was intentional, but for whatever this particular instantiation of chaos was frustrating to me. I never felt like I had any place to get my bearings, it was all confronting noise without direction.

Best Song: Obstacle 1. An iconic (or at least memorable) guitar riff. Worst Song: The New. The piano and downtuned guitar weren't doing it for me. Overall: For whatever reason, this made me very sleepy. It has this mumbling/droning quality that I don't really like, and it's mixed like the singer is standing way back behind the rest of the band. Not bad, but not for me.

Best Song: Who's Got a Match. 9/15ths. Give me a gospel choir any day. This was cool. Worst Song: Now I'm Everyone. I really didn't like that car alarm alert going off in the middle of the track. Overall: It started out as something that felt really interesting and unique, but the longer that it went on the more it defaulted into a sort of pop-rock/pop-emo space that wasn't very compelling. There's glimpses of something really cool here, but it feels obscured by the more conventional parts of the album.

Best Song: X-French Tee Shirt. The highpoint of this album is a mid alt rock song. Worst Song: No Rm. 9, Kentucky. Have you ever wanted to listen to Marilyn Monroe sing JFK "Happy Birthday", but cursed? Here you go. Overall: Not for me. I was never entirely sure what it was even going for.

Best Song: Everything's Ruined. I really liked the groove on this one. Worst Song: Midnight Cowboy (Theme From). Every part of me that respects them for adding this track as a bit also thinks that it's just not fun to listen to, and a total vibe killer. Overall: Although it started rather "nu-metal", this ended up being a lot more diverse and varied than I expected. Like, just taking the final three songs of the album in sequence it would be fair to assume that they came from entirely unrelated bands across different genres and generations, not that they're neighbours on the same album. Not everything hit, but this is clearly a creative group that is afraid of being silly or of exploring the spaces between genres. Not totally my thing, but I can respect it.

Best Song: Mull Historical Society. This had a nice, summer-beach-town swagger to it that I liked. Worst Song: Instead. I really didn't like the twinkling arrangement. Overall: Nothing gripped me here, and I wasn't a fan of the lead singer's voice. The whole package is kind of aggressively indie.

Best Song: Bubblehouse. This song has such great pacing. I love how fast it is while always feeling controlled, never frenetic. Worst Song: Lifeblood. too long, and a lot of the organ riffing in the middle didn't land for me. Overall: I'm a fan of MM&W (although I think their best work is with Scofield added). This was classically fun and groovy like all their stuff, although I can't say I would have chosen this album over some of their others.

Best Song: The Calling. Brooding, with a nice interplay between the male and female vocalists. And it builds steadily towards a singular crescendo, which I love. Worst Song: Drinking Song for the Socially Anxious. Terribly twee and modern. This song alone does a great deal to undermine the feeling of the entire album. Overall: There's some decent, highly-produced folk here, but sometimes he comes at it with a bit too much of a "theater-kid" energy. He sings with a little too much projection, enunciates a little too cleanly. Also, from an aesthetic and (especially) lyrical standpoint, the album works best when it attempts to emulate some kind of conception of a "timeless" folk music, evoking a sort of fantasy theme. When the lyrics make explicit reference to modern concepts it feels anachronistic and breaks that tenuous feeling of immersion.

Best Song: Stations of the Cross. Probably the best chorus on the album. Worst Song: Feels Like Fun. Really weirdly mixed. Overall: This album could have fit well on the original list in that it is a totally regular British rock band that does little to differentiate itself from its contemporaries. It's not bad, but it's also not particularly interesting.

Best Song: 7 & 7. The fiddle was the star of the show. Worst Song: 1968. Jesus Christ, his attempt to make a "69" joke (or mention, I don't even know, it was so low effort) was so pathetic it made me physically cringe. Overall: I was hoping for some kind of transformative country, but no, it's just your stock standard modern pop country.

Best Song: Tone Bone Kone. The shortest song, with a bit of rhythm(?). I don't know, even the best song here is bad. Worst Song: The Name Of The Next Song. I believe I made a similar sounding song when I was 6 years old and my parents gave me a tape recorder to play with. Boldly announcing, "The name of the next song is..." followed by literally whatever my child brain could come up with in that moment and some atonal mumbling. Overall: No thank you. This feels more like a guy in his basement playing with various pieces of recording equipment than it does a comprehensive or cohesive record. It feels like I'm listening to him discover what various buttons and effects do in real time. Everything is so painfully low-fi and scratchy, with overlapping and discordant effects added for no discernible reason. The 80s represented such a wasteland for music that you could truly get away with anything.