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Finisher #321 to complete the list
1089
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Albums you rated higher than global average
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kollaps | 5 | 1.9 | +3.1 |
| The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter | 5 | 2.15 | +2.85 |
| Rock Bottom | 5 | 2.39 | +2.61 |
| Third | 5 | 2.43 | +2.57 |
| Suicide | 5 | 2.46 | +2.54 |
| Chelsea Girl | 5 | 2.63 | +2.37 |
| Bubble And Scrape | 5 | 2.65 | +2.35 |
| Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby | 5 | 2.65 | +2.35 |
| Yank Crime | 5 | 2.69 | +2.31 |
| Orbital 2 | 5 | 2.69 | +2.31 |
You Love Less Than Most
Albums you rated lower than global average
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ten | 1 | 3.92 | -2.92 |
| The Stranger | 1 | 3.86 | -2.86 |
| Bad | 1 | 3.81 | -2.81 |
| Hot Fuss | 1 | 3.74 | -2.74 |
| Moving Pictures | 1 | 3.59 | -2.59 |
| Bat Out Of Hell | 1 | 3.45 | -2.45 |
| ...And Justice For All | 1 | 3.43 | -2.43 |
| Diamond Life | 1 | 3.42 | -2.42 |
| Come Away With Me | 1 | 3.39 | -2.39 |
| Hybrid Theory | 1 | 3.38 | -2.38 |
Artist Analysis
Favorite Artists
Artists with 2+ albums and high weighted score
| Artist | Albums | Avg | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beatles | 7 | 4.86 | 4.3 |
| Brian Eno | 5 | 5 | 4.25 |
| Sonic Youth | 5 | 5 | 4.25 |
| Led Zeppelin | 5 | 5 | 4.25 |
| Radiohead | 6 | 4.83 | 4.22 |
| Bob Dylan | 7 | 4.71 | 4.2 |
| David Bowie | 9 | 4.56 | 4.17 |
| Pink Floyd | 4 | 5 | 4.14 |
| Talking Heads | 4 | 5 | 4.14 |
| PJ Harvey | 4 | 5 | 4.14 |
| Neil Young | 4 | 5 | 4.14 |
| The Rolling Stones | 6 | 4.67 | 4.11 |
| The Byrds | 5 | 4.6 | 4 |
| Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds | 5 | 4.6 | 4 |
| Leonard Cohen | 5 | 4.6 | 4 |
| Björk | 4 | 4.75 | 4 |
| The Kinks | 4 | 4.75 | 4 |
| Joni Mitchell | 4 | 4.75 | 4 |
| Miles Davis | 4 | 4.75 | 4 |
| R.E.M. | 4 | 4.75 | 4 |
| Black Sabbath | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| The Stooges | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| Pixies | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| Kraftwerk | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| The Beach Boys | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| The Velvet Underground | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| Jimi Hendrix | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| Public Enemy | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| Beastie Boys | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| Nirvana | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| Roxy Music | 3 | 5 | 4 |
| The Who | 5 | 4.4 | 3.88 |
| Stevie Wonder | 4 | 4.5 | 3.86 |
| Nick Drake | 3 | 4.67 | 3.83 |
| Bob Marley & The Wailers | 3 | 4.67 | 3.83 |
| My Bloody Valentine | 3 | 4.67 | 3.83 |
| The White Stripes | 3 | 4.67 | 3.83 |
| The Cure | 3 | 4.67 | 3.83 |
| Simon & Garfunkel | 3 | 4.67 | 3.83 |
| Arcade Fire | 3 | 4.67 | 3.83 |
| Fleetwood Mac | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Pavement | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| King Crimson | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Portishead | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Can | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Iggy Pop | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Joy Division | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| T. Rex | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Siouxsie And The Banshees | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Lou Reed | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Depeche Mode | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| A Tribe Called Quest | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Sly & The Family Stone | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Wilco | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Big Star | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Massive Attack | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| The Clash | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Kendrick Lamar | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| Steely Dan | 4 | 4.25 | 3.71 |
| Blur | 3 | 4.33 | 3.67 |
| Prince | 3 | 4.33 | 3.67 |
| Van Morrison | 3 | 4.33 | 3.67 |
| Elvis Presley | 3 | 4.33 | 3.67 |
| Kanye West | 3 | 4.33 | 3.67 |
| Neil Young & Crazy Horse | 3 | 4.33 | 3.67 |
| Johnny Cash | 3 | 4.33 | 3.67 |
| Bruce Springsteen | 5 | 4 | 3.63 |
Least Favorite Artists
Artists with 2+ albums and low weighted score
| Artist | Albums | Avg | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Def Leppard | 2 | 1 | 2.2 |
| Emerson, Lake & Palmer | 2 | 1 | 2.2 |
| Kings of Leon | 3 | 1.67 | 2.33 |
| The Verve | 2 | 1.5 | 2.4 |
| Adele | 2 | 1.5 | 2.4 |
| Taylor Swift | 2 | 1.5 | 2.4 |
| Rush | 2 | 1.5 | 2.4 |
| New Order | 2 | 1.5 | 2.4 |
| Christina Aguilera | 2 | 1.5 | 2.4 |
| Happy Mondays | 2 | 1.5 | 2.4 |
5-Star Albums (360)
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Popular Reviews
Rush
1/5
Once upon a time, there was a very nice style called Prog Rock, that just looooooved to have little musical adventures, going to the jazzy woods one day, sailing over the experimental lakes on another one, or climbing on the back of their friend Hard Rock, the gentle giant of the East, on yet another one of those innocent years from the early seventies. Some mean, mean children mocked Prog Rock sometimes, but Prog Rock didn't care. First because *other* children still liked Prog Rock well enough. But most of all, because Prog Rock was a good-natured, spontaneous sort of style. And in the land of music, as long as all styles were sincere, creative and artful, they were liked well-enough.
Once in a while, Prog Rock took herself a little too seriously, that's true. But her heart was always in the right place: all she ever wanted to do was to create a world of musical wonders for other children to enjoy (wonders named King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt, Procol Harum...). Who could blame Prog Rock for all that, really?
Little did Prog Rock know that the Eighties were looming on the horizon, and that they had sent to the land of music a band of ruffians known as Rush, led by Geddy Lee, the wicked witch of the west.
Geddy Lee had a voice like nails on a chalkboard and a brain the size of a pea. But if he couldn't sing gracefully, or write interesting lyrics, he was still shrewd enough to find ways to get what he wanted from the lands of music.
He went to Prog Rock and said:
"Look at our trinkets, child, and listen to our nice "modern" sounds--do you like them?"
"I'm not sure," Prog Rock answered. "But people say I have an adventurous spirit. Maybe I could try them, as weird as they seem to me now. Maybe I could turn them into something good."
"Yes, maybe," Geddy Lee replied. "But please, don't overthink it--make the same weird sort of time-signatures you usually enjoy, sure. But don't ever make anything that would be too mesmerizing or graceful in terms of melody. Fill your creations with *stuff*: soulless technical prowess, dumb heavy-metal guitar solos, flashy shenanigans... *That's* the most important thing to do for our masters the Eighties."
"The... Eighties?" Prog Rock asked.
Out of the corners of her eyes, Prog Rock saw that one of the Rush members was trying to ride on the back of Hard Rock, the gentle giant of the east. Hard Rock was shaking and fiercely resisting.
Prog Rock felt a lump in her throat. Something was going awfully wrong here...
"What... What are you here for?" Prog Rock asked Geddy Lee.
"We're here to make music with you," Geddy Lee answered with a sly pout on his lips. "How about giving me a little kiss, for starters? I'm sure this will make the most beautiful sound ever."
"I'm... I'm not sure I want to," Prog Rock stammered with fear in her heart.
"C'mon... Just one little kiss"
"No."
But Geddy Lee had already grasped his hands around Prog Rock's waist:
"C'MON YOU FUCKING BITCH, GIVE ME THAT FUCKING KISS NOW, OR I'M GONNA KILL YA"
All around him, the Rush members suddenly produced machine guns and started to shoot everything around them. Horrid sounds started to be heard throughout the lands of music. Most of the children were horrified--but *a few* of them liked those tragic sounds, oddly enough. Some of those kids were dumb and mean, as suggested earlier. And among them, a few actually liked shallow and soulless creations.
Geddy Lee looked at Prog Rock in the eye:
"Give me what I want, or I swear to you, I'm gonna make you squeal..."
But Prog Rock resisted, just like Hard Rock did. Mad with anger and frustration, Geddy Lee took out a knife. For one second, it flashed under Prog Rock's eyes.
It is said that when Geddy Lee stabbed Prog Rock, a horrid and hackneyed synth sound resonated all around the lands, the same sound that can be heard in the first seconds of "Tom Sawyer":
"Tcccccchhhhhhiiioooooooooonk..."
And so Rush plundered and pillaged the lands of music. But they were only the *first* harbingers of doom. Marillion came not long after, for instance. And *other* styles in the lands would quickly be violated and emptied of their true meaning, just like Prog Rock after her lifeblood left her when Geddy Lee stabbed her to death.
And that, kiddies, is how the Eighties took over the lands of music and murdered several important styles. Other survived and thrived after the Eighties' demise, fortunately. But that's a story for another time, I guess...
The end. At least, the end of Prog Rock, sadly.
Number of albums left to review: 690
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 151
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 71
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 87 (including this one)
63 likes
Linkin Park
1/5
Give me rap-rock or rap-metal crossover albums anytime. Give me a *bit* of nu-metal, even. Give me heavy guitar riffs, true rebellion, sharp politically-minded lyrics. Or, on the contrary, give me brutally sincere descriptions of personal malaise. Anything that finds an artistically relevant way to scream: "I'm alive, this world is fucked up, I suffer, but I'm alive!". Give me Rage Against The Machine, System Of A Down, Deftones, the "Judgment Night" motion picture soundtrack... Even the early Korn albums can work out...
But don't give me this overbloated, overproduced turd of a record. Heck, turds have taste at least, or so I hear. :) As you can, I won't mince words about this band (and first album). But I've got my reasons. To me, *Hybrid Theory* is indeed the epitome of blandness--nothing in it *feels* honest or authentic. You might tell me Chester Bennington's lyrics drew from his difficult childhood experience, I just can't find a way to *care* about them. Because the end results here are just plain corny--there's none of the strong imagery delivered by his pal Chino Moreno, for instance, or the latter's intense, dynamic performance throughout Deftones' discography. The so-called "rebellion" or "malaise" in Linkin' Park's lyrics actually amount to pointing at nothing in particular, with vague references about "bad memories" and the likes. And those lyrics are just *one* ingredient among others in a mechanical formula. They just have nothing to say. And they even manage to say it badly.
The same goes for the cheesy, dated rapping, or the vocal lines for the choruses and singing parts, which are *always* predictable--unimaginative melodies copied-and-pasted over unimaginative guitar riffs, so slick and clean they actually sound like synths. Because no, the instrumentation is not good either, as competent the performers (or production tools) are. The band does the same thing all over again, mostly, with the same sort of lazy, overdone tricks being applied from start to finish. Guitar saturation is here used to raze everything to the same orderly level, devoid of any true *life*. A paradox of sorts, which owes more to protools shenanigans than any thought-out concept behind the music. Which makes sense, given that saturation is also used here to hide the lack of any shred of meaningful idea. That's probably what's "Hybrid" in the "Theory" here--this thing being *both* lifeless AND brainless. Even the electronic/abstract hip hop asides suck, minus the very short "Cure For The Itch", maybe--but to be fair, this minor track towards the end is nothing but a secondhand attempt at a DJ Shadow-like instrumental... And just as everything in the album--that awful cover, for instance--its inclusion in the tracklisting looks like a decision made by a corporate committee, not one made by a real, genuine band showing personality. And just like everything else, it's a stylistic dead end. *Hybrid Theory* made millions, admittedly (not necessarily a sure sign of quality, but OK). It sold a hold a huge lot. Yet it's a dead-end nonetheless. Void. Sterile. We can just all be glad and grateful that teens or kids these days are not listening to such crap anymore. At least, they'll make *fresh* mistakes of their own...
In the light of Bennington's still recent suicide, this personal judgment about what is merely a piece of art here might sound harsh, of course, even exaggerated. May the man rest in peace, God bless his soul, and so on... May people who go through what he had to go through, just like Chris Cornell or Kurt Cobain, or anybody else, find the help they need to survive. To be honest, I wish that this band had at least provided Bennington that catharsis he so direly needed to get better. And this aside obviously goes beyond any personal tastes about music. One could have hoped that years after their first commercial success, Linkin' Park's singer might have found some meaning in his life. But things don't always work out that way, even when you manage to "make it". Friends who knew Bennington seem to say he was a good person. I don't know, I didn't know him. But I just hope that fans who are reading this understand I have nothing against the man. I simply didn't like the artist, and the band he was part in. These things happen... As for the rest, be aware that hope comes in many forms, and that if music, good or bad, can't save you, you can *still* find other ways out--through reaching out to friends or a family genuinely caring for you, or through mental health professionals. Anything that can help you get better.
But I'd rather hear about who Chester Bennington was as a person rather than having to listen to his music again. It's not for me. In a way, critics' accusations that the band had "sold out" for 2017's pop-oriented *One More Light*--that they now suddenly sounded "as if they were selected by committee", to be more precise--were totally and absolutely nonsensical to my ears. Because to me, they've *always* been this way. A few yellings and heavy guitar riffs here and there couldn't hide the fact that they've never been the sharpest knife in the drawer, musically speaking. And Bennington's offensive public replies to those misguided critics did not only show how fragile his mental state was, but also how lost he was as to the sort of audience his band had entertained for all these years. And there's probably a good reason for that. Because a) that audience had never been picky for sure. And b) it was dwindling album after album anyway. In all honesty, it's a bit of a mystery *who* this music is aimed at today, in 2022 (both for what it was in 2017 AND what it had been in 2000). And this, also, makes me kinda sad... Not for Bennington, this time, but for the standards generally followed by this list of records.
So next, please...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 887
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 59
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 29
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 26 (including this one)
59 likes
Jacques Brel
5/5
Being a native French speaker, I've always been aware of the cultural importance of Jacques Brel, even though as a young and hip amateur of mostly *anglo-saxon* music, I was merely relegating him to a singer for older generations, someone who did not have anything relevant to teach the careless youngster that I was. But now that I've gotten older myself, comfortably lying on the couch of my cozy living-room as I'm writing this feature on my phone, I might obviously know a little better. The question is: why did I *really* change my mind about Jacques Brel? Is it because of my current, somewhat comfortable surroundings that I can fully appreciate *chansons* now? Have I turned into an unapolegetic *bourgeois* in the space of only two decades? Or is all of that irrelevant?
If it's because I've turned into a *bourgeois*, the irony is priceless here. Indeed, Brel's wit, sharp eye and acerbic tongue were almost never better channeled than when he used those assets to paint vitriolic portraits of the elder generations of his own time--all those sad, well-off, self-righteous sods never able to admit they cornered themselves into lives ultimately devoid of any meaning. Truth be told, in Brel's songs are *also* other sorts of lessons, though, and ones I could have started learning as a young man. When the Belgian singer depicts younger characters, for instance, his powers of observation are still very much on point, both conveying the humanity and pathetic shortcomings of those characters through the same jeering-yet-elegant wink to his audience. Flawed dunces and endearing dollards can be found in all age groups. And Brel never missed a chance to remind us of this.
Of course, there's a third, more elegiac streak running throughout his catalogue of tunes, which gave out all those signature songs most French speakers still remember today. And for those, Brel was as 'emo' as any tortured young rock act can get. Just listen to those tracks. Even if you're not speaking French, you might still sense the emotion seeping through the perfomance itself, if not through the words used (the man was also a fine actor who had learned this secondary trade exclusively through his experience as a performer giving it all onstage). If anything, English-speaking artists with a keen eye for details and an overall flair for the dramatic--artists such as Scott Walker, Nina Simone, David Bowie, Judy Collins or Nick Cave--certainly sensed this emotion we've just mentioned here. Hence their wonderful covers of Brel's *repertoire*.
Recorded live in 1964 at the legendary Parisian venue *L'Olympia*, this record, as short as its original version was, does a very fine job displaying the three different streaks of songcraft we've spotted up there. Subsequent CD versions later included parts of the show left out from the original 30-minute album, with Brel staples such as "Les bonbons", "Mathilde", " Les bigotes", "Les bourgeois", "Jef" and "Au suivant". But even without those popular extraneous cuts, this live album is essentially Jacques Brel at his best. "Les vieux" (*Old Folks*), about old-timers waiting for death, is for example one of his cruellest songs, because as heartwrenching and detailed as the lyrics are, they can also elicit many mocking snarls in response. Dark comedy and tragedy go hand in hand throughout the tune, whose chorus revolves about a clock relentlessly counting the seconds left before the final demise, nicely supported by a piano motif insisting on each of those fateful seconds. Musicality is rarely forgotten in Brel's *oeuvre*, as shown in most of those cuts here, even though such oeuvre is first and foremost narrative-driven in nature.
Death is also central in two other songs, "Le dernier repas" and "Tango funèbre". The first track pictures the narrator's "last meal" with his entourage, the second depicts his burial, and both are unforgettable lessons in songwriting, ones that Nick Cave, as a connoisseur of Brel's body of work, probably remembered when he penned the similarly-themed "Lay Me Low" for *Let Love In*. Freeloaders and sycophants shedding crocodile tears unavoidably find their way into the afflicted crowd in those songs, closely watched by Brel's ghost. This makes the titular 'tango' in the second track, already a wonderful piece of music, even more gripping, chilling and wry.
Old parasites in funerals aside, younger people are also mocked during the gig, as in "Les Timides" (*Shy people*), where inapt wannabe lovers make fools of themselves under Brel's unforgiving eye ("they just blush and *crawfish*", the singer tells us--yes, "crawfish" is used as a verb here, which is just as grammatically wrong or off-kilter in French as it is in English). And both age groups seem to be derided in "Les jardins du casino" ("In The Casino's Gardens"), a precise study of bourgeois pettiness that goes from micro to macro in its ironic breadth.
As great as those tracks are, however, this live album wouldn't be the historical document it is today without two songs counting among the most famous Brel ever penned whenever he decided to dive headlong into full epic scope. The first of those songs, "Amsterdam", was actually never recorded in a studio, so what we have here is the definitive version, and it does not take a seer to understand why this sweeping tale of sailors and whores rubbing shoulders (and more) in the midst of a drunken, lascivious haze didn't need a studio recording after this live capture at the Olympia venue. Brel's voice is incredible here, each and every one of its inflexions adding weight and meaning to the words sung or yelled. And the orchestra supporting that voice is the *coup de grâce*, its head-spinning instrumentation placing you right in the middle of this grotesque waltz of beautiful losers. You can almost see the lights and lanterns of the harbour behind the dancers. In three minutes, you've been to the Netherlands and back, and it's a trip you will never forget. As for the second legendary track, "Le plat pays" (*The Flat Country*), a very personal ode to Belgium--slow, grim and yet quite tender--there *is* a studio version of it, contrary to "Amsterdam". But this live rendition, backed up by strings circling above the desolate land like so many flocks of crows, equals it, if it doesn't actually surpass any other version available today.
*Olympia 64* is therefore one of the best entry points into Brel's whole body of work, and as such, deserves to be remembered as the timeless classic that it is. One could argue that studio albums *Ces gens-là*, *N*4 (La valse à mille temps)* or the later rerecording of old songs *Ne me quitte pas* could be equally relevant if you wish to get acquainted with the inspired and inspiring Belgian singer. Either those, or any of the comprehensive compilations sold out there. But if first, you want to sense the powerhouse that Brel was as a live performer, *this* is the record to start with. It is by no means a rock 'n roll album. Actually, it's almost the opposite in every way. But for anyone interested in the French language, or international novelty curios, the emotions such a record provides are not so far off the mark compared to more "modern" strands of music. Ask David Bowie, Nick Cave or Nina Simone if you're still having doubts about the whole thing.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 993
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 2 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 4
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 3 ]
38 likes
Leonard Cohen
5/5
Amused by some of the reviews in this section--weird takes such as "How do people even pretend to like this? He's the music version of Shakespeare: people only say they like him because it makes them feel smart," bla bla bla... Are some folks so insecure in their lives that they let their inferiority complex ruin all sense of measure and caution in their judgments? Can't they just explain what they personally don't like in Cohen's songs and music, and then move on? No, they can't, and that's interesting. Pretty sure such a bitter stance would have amused the misanthropic-yet-tender "dissectionist" of human passions that Cohen was himself. Oh, the irony.
I could also take a page out of those disgruntled listeners' book and venture to say that they are the ones at fault here, *objectively* speaking. One can indeed wonder if they're not a little disturbed by the somewhat radical nature of Cohen's debut album--ascetic and dry for sure, yet also hypnotic on a musical level ; a treasure trove when it comes to the lyrics ; and, most of all, a record that leaves you no choice but to actively give your time and attention to it. This record has very few "spectacular" elements in its contents (a voice and an acoustic guitar, basically), and yet in spite of that, it dares you to stop and listen. Which is always a little disturbing at first, and maybe explains why quite a few reviewers are "disturbed" by it. In the end, some of those naysayers just can't help themselves: if they don't get it, that only means that people who do are *lying*. How amusing, as I said.
The irony is that it takes no effort to love this record if you're a Leonard Cohen fan. Because loving this album has nothing do with intellectual shenanigans or the utterance of thesis statements, contrary to what those misguided takes say. Loving this album is a matter of emotion--of how you can respond to the traditional-folk-like purity of the music, here set against the lyrics' modern sophistication (and sometimes wry undertones), along with Cohen's sullen voice being a mock-neutral referee between the two. A perfect balance for many, and one you don't necessarily need to overanalyze, in spite of what I've just written (words are always feeble to describe such masterpieces. aren't they?). After all, some people with a very flimsy grasp of the English language have "gotten" Leonard Cohen for decades (I know that for sure, I don't llive in an English-speaking country), and he's not exclusively popular in 'intellectual" circles either. Which kinda proves all the naysayers wrong all by itself, no matter what it is that they subjectively "feel". No harm in disliking Cohen if it's not your thing--just don't overplay your hand by yucking on other people's yum through the bad faith stance of judging fans' character or their honesty, instead of telling us about your own impressions. It's not graceful at all, to say the least.
Not that those naysayers are anything new. A lot of people are unaware of this today, but when *Songs Of Leonard Cohen* was released, its reception by critics was a bit lukewarm, actually. The partly-hidden rationale was mostly that Cohen came from literary and poetry circles: he was an outsider and no "real" musician--and most specifically, he was no real "singer" (odd how snubbery can take many forms!). Yet those critics were at fault too, because they didn't "feel" the most important aspects to take away from *Songs Of Leonard Cohen*: its earnestness ; its blunt honesty ; its raw nature.
Because whatever technical abilities Cohen lacked as a vocal performer, he made up for them tenfold through the authenticity, earnestness, and unassuming manners in his performance. Fortunately, general audiences were quick to understand the gem that he was, and you can bet your boots that next generations will, too, just as the ones before.
Another layer of irony is that those suspicious critics actually did a huge favour for the Canadian folkster. Rejecting him, they unwittingly underlined his status as a constant underdog--a status he would keep on drawing inspiration from during his long career. The typical Leonard Cohen stance is that he watches the world--and even his own romantic escapades!--from the sidelines with a unassuming, stoic air. And his music gracefully underlines this stance, whether it is wisdom or self-delusion.
Such hardcore stoicism is still what makes Leonard Cohen unpalatable for some listeners today, I guess... Those more recent naysayers should at least be aware that things could have turned out worse for them. Had Cohen fully had his way with this debut, there would for instance be far less orchestral arrangements in it, and even less female background vocals. We can all be glad that producer John Simon stood his ground, because the compromise the two men eventually found works beautifully here. Later, for other albums, Cohen would oscillate from a "less is more" philosophy for his subsequent LPs during the seventies, to some sort of maximalist layering in the eighties--one that was maybe partly ironic. But it's here, for this debut, that the perfect matrix has been set for the Canadian songwriter. Those women singing background vocals would for instance never really leave him--it's a marital "arrangement" between lush voices and Cohen's own somber timber that started with this album, and made a lasting impression to the world of music at large. See the sheer amount of cover versions of Cohen's songs if you ever doubt about that.
As for the orchestral arrangements, listen carefully to "Master Song" and tell me that its minimalistic production values are not one of the most insanely subtle and yet most gorgeous things that has ever graced human ears--each short inflexion of the small orchestra underlining the lyrical proceedings in the exact way it should--whether through strings or a trumpet--and also enhancing the wonderful chords Cohen found for his tune. So called "deep cuts" like that ("Master Song", "The Stranger Song", "Stories Of The Streets", "Teachers"...) all have those sorts of endearing or enlightening details, and as a consequence, they becone immensely pleasurable if you take the time to sit down and listen. And if you add that string of iconic songs to those less famous tunes--"Suzanne", "So Long, Marianne", "Sisters of Mercy"--of which I don't have much to say given how they have seeped through popular consciousness for decades now--what you get is a perfect, perfect record, without a single dud in it.
Running out of time to finish this review, so I'm gonna end it here. If you don't know the wonderful works of Leonard Cohen, don't listen to the naysayers. Have an honest go at it. Maybe you are like "Joseph looking for a manger", and you don't know it yet. Rest assured that once you heart finds shelter in those songs, it is just impossible to forget them.
Five stars, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 447
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 257 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 132
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 167
32 likes
The KLF
4/5
Probably one of those instances of "you had to be there at the time to understand". That said, if really you need just *one* example of what a early nineties eurodance version of a rave party should sound like in this list of essential albums, *The White Room* is your best bet here--even if, more than eurodance, what we have here has layers of opportunistic cultural recycling that were actually very British, and so contrasting a lot with those other Italian or German cheesy dance acts around 1990. See the wealth of samples used here, with or without permission: so many winks to popular music of all stripes that it's easy to lose count, from that sample of MCS's "Kick Out The Jams" to this bassline nicked from the Twin Peaks title theme on trip-hop-like "Build A Fire". Here is a concern for richness, invention and callbacks to music history that low-brow outfits such as Technotronic, 2Unlimited or Snap! would never reach for even one second of their equally short career.
So if you stick to what is usually expected from that often maligned genre of popular dance music from thirty years ago, there's no denying that The KLF were masters of their game. Every track on the first side may have all the clichés of that UK Dance Club thing, sure, yet they are so effective that you may feel inclined to bob your head to them, as "dated" as some of those shenanigans are. "What Time Is Love" and "3AM Eternal" are the most striking examples of such an effective way to rob the charts in 1991 and yet still manage to win hearts in 2023 (in a genre that supposedly never ages well, i.e. EDM). Too bad that the version of "Last Train To Trancentral" on the same first side is a more subdued remix compared to the equally slapping single version--as good as this remix is. Had this single version, filled with an orgy of vocoder-laden vocal parts, been included on this side, you'd have a perfect first part for this record.
What will probably go over the head of most listeners is that Bill Drummond and James Cauty were also very sly foxes as artists and "high concept" creators. They first wrote a book about how to hit the charts from the underground *before* managing to do so for real with the singles from this album. Quite a feat that they held their promises against all odds...but it's not even the most interesting part of the picture. See for example what they did with all the money they earned after they hit those charts--it might be a huge surprise for you, either a pleasant or an unpleasant one, depending on your mileage.
But before they burnt all those piles of dough to the ground--yes, you read that correctly--they also managed to:
- create many fake bands to broadcast their music.
- instill a very "situationist" brand of irony to "dance" music that acts like Gang Of Four could only dream of when they injected funk basslines to their post-punk agenda ten years before.
- Record a classic electronic "chill-out" LP named... well, *Chill Out*--which actually inspired a lot of melodies and arrangements in *The White Room*.
- Erase the lines between high art and blatant commercialism, or the ones between "good taste" and "bad taste".
That last point is the most prophetic of their endeavors, foretelling the success of many later acts going from Daft Punk and LCD Soundsystem to more recent strands of hyperpop such as Charli XCX, Sophie, 100 gecs or crazy pop-post-hardcore outfit The Armed. I have a feeling that this recent hyperpop craze, as weird and probably promised to failure as it is, is not so far from rehabilitating The KLF. Only time will tell. But if such rehabilitation happens, I reckon it's gonna happen very soon at least--before the wheel turns again, which is always sooner than later.
All this is fine, but what really saves this album from all those tired tropes about music cycles and "turning wheels" is its far more ambient second side, with all its groovy, cinematic-yet-lvery-aidback cuts such as the title track or "No More Tears". Those songs are stellar, enough said. Subtly layered and subdued and sounding like nothing else, whether at the time or today.
Concluding the proceedings, the mock-Las-Vegas-novelty cut "Justified and Ancient" returns to the layers of irony of the first side, but this time with an extra grain of salt. What if Drummond and Caulty were actually serious here? Us poor sheep will probably never know. All that"s left for us to do is to take that Trancentral Train to the promises of a future of dance music that never really occured--at least not in that exact shape--but one that could still occur yet, if you listen to this the right way. *The White Room* has always had a somewhat nostalgic feel to its rave party antics--a clearly melancholic subtext if you listen to its arrangements an flourishes--and such subtext made it age far better then many other supposed EDM highlights of the same day and age. Not so bad for a record whose sound is supposedly "dated", at least on first sight.
4/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4).
Number of albums left to review: 419
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 269 (including this one).
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 142
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 176
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Michael Jackson
1/5
Just plain horrible. This is my *first* album in this "one album a day" generator thing, and I can't believe I have to start with that cheesy so-called blockbuster filled to the brim with saccharine-tasting manure "Bad"? As in "Hey look how bad-ass I look"? Er... What? That cringefest of boring ballads and mid-temp snoozers? Really???
This is a record without a shred of true soul in it. And even if it's not "soul" you're looking for, there should always be something *human* in music. Or monstrous, on the contrary. Or extraordinary. Or humble. Unfortunately, Bad is none of those things. It tells nothing. It *is* nothing.
One can argue that "Dirty Diana" is kind of arresting, or that, at least, it's an interesting track towards the end of the album, since that's the only song that expresses something even remotely heartfelt (as ugly as the feelings actually expressed against Diana Ross are). I guess that after all the dumb schmooze that precedes, the aggro atmosphere in that song is a welcome (bad) breath of fresh air, and that we can all be grateful for that last-minute addition somehow. Thank you Slash for that electric guitar. You might not be very alert yourself, but I guess a tiny drop of whiskey in all that kool-aid does have a semblance of... taste (even though the subtle rock intrusions in Thriller were far more compelling and smartly executed than this still quite clunky shit here). As for the bouncy, hectic and hiccupy "Smooth Criminal", it *is* a killer dancefloor track and an instant classic. It would be foolish arguing about that...
But everything else is just lame. Synth basses sound hollow. Horns are an imitation of their synth conterparts. Same with backing vocals. And the writing (both the lyrics *and* the music) is just... irrelevant. If not downright annoying. Case(s) in point,: "Liberian Girl" and "Man On The Mirror". Lyrics, since we must also talk about them, are just ridiculous. And they're made all the more ridiculous by the unmusical and rigid way they are displayed in these songs (just as in almost every other track). Telling the world is in danger, Michael's inapt and disconnected choice of words are no comfort for us. "And-if-you-want-to-o-make-it... a-bet-ter-place", well, just please shut up, Michael, please. And let us die in peace, at least.
Admittedly, Thriller's successor could have gone other ways, and you can almost suspect the ghost of more "interesting" work under the surface from time to time--even though "Bad", probably Jackson's worst lead single ever, tells the lamentable story of the album that bears its name from its very first obnoxious seconds. It's true that this single *does* have something catchy. But embarrassing stuff can *also* catch your attention, and never let it go, unfortunately. And if you can't even tolerate a lead single on those sorts of grand commercial pop albums, how on earth will you find any redeeming features after it? How?
The true problem of the album however, is that it doesn't even hold "Bad"'s promise of at least having a somewhat awkward laugh. From "Speed Demon" (the *awfully clunky* voice placement and delivery on that one, jeeze!!!) to "I Just Can't Stop Loving You", this is an album almost exclusively made of boring *fillers*, which is sort of an extraordinary feat in itself. Reminds a little of a visit to the dentist's (that clinical white backdrop behind Michael on the cover speaks tons about the surgical atmosphere here!!!). But you're going there with a set of teeth already punctured by a record amount of cavities, so the drilling takes an age AND the next one. Plus, it's painful. *Very* painful.
Bad indeed.
[Why, oh why, couldn't I review "Thriller" first? Now *that* was a Michael Jackson album that deserved its commercial success, thanks to its sophisticated production and the quality of most of its pop songs. Hope that one comes up soon...
Number of albums I listened to: 1
Albums left to listen to: 1000
Number of albums I've found genuinely relevant: 0
Number of different albums you should listen to before you die: 1 ]
3/5
Some people are too smart for their own good. You've probably met those sorts of guys before. They're often sitting in the back of the office or the classroom, having that distanced 'I-can't-be-bothered' stare, idly turning their head towards the urban smog outside the window, as if listening to their own inner teacher or boss instead of the real man in charge. If you're a little intrigued by all that cynical, borderline-nihilistic reserve, you sometimes find yourself talking to such a person during coffee breaks, just to see what they're all about. Soon, however, you realize you won't gain much from the conversation anyway, and often leave that coffee break even more nonplussed than you were before. You admit still being fascinated a little, but the unobtrusive words exchanged on the surface keep on screaming "boredom" to your ears. The only real problem being that you don't know for sure if said boredom actually belongs to that person you talked to, or if it's just *yours*.
That bloke is *Modern Life Is Rubbish*-era Damon Albarn. Too smart for his own good, and thereby missing a chance to genuinely impress or fully convince you. Admittedly, this doesn't mean there's absolutely anything Damon and his pals from Blur couldn't say with some sort of force or intent when they recorded their second, aptly-named, album. There is, actually. "For Tomorrow" is nothing but a stellar opener, for example (more on that later), nicely paying homage to a oh-so-brit tradition established by the Kinks--whose shadow obviously looms above the first part of Blur's career (minus-*Leisure*) with decidedly good aftereffects overall. Here the vocal melody floats with a bittersweet, mock-happy-go-lucky charm that belies the existential dread underneath the song itself, and it takes a full string section towards the end of that gem to reveal the full tragedy at hand in that tale about postmodern dread. Following that great introduction, "Advert" is a little punky masterpiece that snarls and rattles the point of the album's title home even better than the opener. The schoolboy's lament "Pressure on Julian", a swampy track that foretells left-field, grungy elements from *Blur* and *13*, owes a lot to Graham Coxon's admirable chops on his six strings, the sort of musical sprinkling that can't hurt a second-tier song. As for "Turn It Up", it is a bouncy pop song that gives some needed levity at the eleventh hour (even though it's no "Song 2" or "Girls And Boys" either).
This list of assets could go on, of course. Production is flawless (courtesy of long-time collaborators Steve Lovell and Stephen Street). Arrangements are artful. But are those tracks *memorable*? Do you remember *that* guy from your old classroom now, as well-dressed as he was? Probably not.
Let's just hope that lad's nihilistic stance hasn't triggered him to do the worst and harm himself at some later points of his life at least. "He's a twentieth century boy / With his hands on the rails / Trying not to be sick again / And holding on for tomorrow". This is how the album starts, namely as an inverted T-Rex anthem where contemplations about suicide have taken the place of the usual calls to hedonism enacted throughout the history of rock'n'roll. On the same song, Damon tells a little more about the alienated individuals having such self-destructive thoughts: "Jim stops and gets out of the car / Goes to a house in Emperor's Gate / Through the door and to his room / And then he puts the TV on / Turns it off and makes some tea". Vacant life at its most obvious here. See also "Blue Jeans": "Blue, blue jeans I wear them every day / There's no particular reason to change / My thoughts are getting banal, I can't help it". Uh, OK, Damon, we *get* it. Consumer society and constant commodification play their parts gnawing us all into tiny little squibs devoid of all life. But the point is: do *you* have to sound so bored yourself to hammer that idea home? Isn't that overkill? C'mon, chin up. Shake a leg. You're turning into an annoying, humourless slob here, and this might go against your first intent, don't you think?
Because... well, yes, duh: *Modern Life Is Rubbish* says it straight right from its title. You can't relax ("Star Shaped"), you're barfing on food and drugs to vent your frustrations out ("Chemical World"), there are leeches in the close-cropped lawns and "eating between meals stifles the appetite". Nice program, right? You also have to deal with publicity sponsors ("Colin Zeal"), militaries ("Sunday Sunday"), or even the CIA agency on "Miss America", an overlong dirge that saps what's left of the album momentum on side 2. This is a record that ends with a song called "Resigned", folks! Even though at that point, we're not necessarily caring any longer either, mind you, as harsh as it sounds to say so.
All this performative angst might actually be nothing short of rosy under the sun for amateurs of works driven by wry, pessimistic hot takes about our late capitalistic societies. But the crux of the issue here is that overall, *Modern Life Is Rubbish* is almost a complete misfire on those topics, bordering on self-indulgence in the expression of mundane banalities, and becoming itself the sort of bane that it supposedly tries to tackle in the first place. And in a way, the music itself is burdened by the exact same sort of problems that are plaguing Albarn's lyrical conceits throughout the record. There is no sense of direction to the whole thing. Melodically speaking, some songs, especially those with the most "Britpop" inflexions, appear lively on the surface, but there's none of that catchy *spark* in them, none of the sheer tongue-in-cheek inventivity and directness Blur will become known for in *Parklife* for instance. It is probably no coincidence the latter was released only a year after this one, as if the Essex boys had felt the need to course-correct the many shortcomings witnessed here as soon as possible, before it was too late and they lost that peculiar zeitgeist they were aiming at in that tentative effort here.
Likewise, what could pass for melancholy or mystery in some of those songs will be better explored later on, first with "To The End" on *Parklife*, and then further in parts of *The Great Escape*. But mostly, it is during the post-Britpop period that this specific dimension will finally bloom. Before those glorious days ahead, what we have is merely a sketch of the promising future, drawn thanks to a somewhat mechanical hand on auto-pilot. The sarcastic Village Green Preservation Society of days yonder has turned brown, and then bare. Blur still tries to summon its wry, ironic poetry, but their heart's not in it, as if squashed by the weight of their own conceptual pretensions.
Fortunately, they found a way out of this conundrum, given that there isn't anything in *Modern Life Is Rubbish* that Blur hasn't done *better* in the three albums that followed it, gving Albarn and company the opportunity to finally have their cakes and eat it too. In those later records (*Parklife*, *The Great Escape* and *Blur*) not only has Blur allowed themselves to grind their axe about the pitfalls of modernity, but this time they also managed to have fun on the wayside. The music there does not merely *snarls*, it also *giggles*, *guffaws* and *rolls on the floor with laughter. Sometimes it also jumpstarts, gets genuinely angry, croons and even cries. In the core of those emotions, commodification and the unavoidable existential responses it triggers in us all are still lying there somewhere, honoring the initial program established in the band's second album. But to target those themes for what they are, you still need to contrast them with a little spice, a little flavour, and it's a lesson Blur has probably learned the hard way through this transitional second LP. Overall, we *do* agree with you, Damon: "modern life is rubbish" indeed. But no one said you *can't* have a wholehearted laugh about it, at least.
[Number of albums I listened to from the list: 2
Albums left to listen to: 999
Number of albums I've found genuinely relevant: 0
Number of different albums you should listen to before you die: 2 (including this one)]
Steely Dan
4/5
It's a quick shot, barely ten seconds. "I'm a fool-to-dooo your-dir-ty work, oh yeaaaaah! I don't want-to-dooo your dirty-work, no mo-o-ore." It's nighttime, the radio plays an old Steely Dan hit, and Tony Soprano is singing at the wheel as he drives somewhere. The endearing yet sociopathic mob boss has the same bored, weary eyes as ever, but that scene is probably the closest thing in the whole series to a moment showing him having the time of his life. Tony knows them oldies-but-goldies standards. And he knows it's always deeply pleasurable to sing along to one of those as they pop up between Journey and Cream on the car's radio.
The thing is, would Tony Soprano enjoy *Countdown To Ecstasy* in the exact same way he enjoyed the early hits from Steely Dan's debut, *Can't Buy A Thrill*? Probably not. Very much a transitional effort leading the L.A. band towards the more refined soft-rock soundscapes for which they'll later be known for, *Countdown To Ecstasy* is maybe too sophisticated and left-field for Tony's more immediate, impulsive, 'it's-either-hit-or-miss', tastes.
Not that Steely Dan would have cared, at least at the time. Having dumped co-singer/songwriter David Palmer (of "Dirty Work" fame) for this second album, now penning cryptic lyrics with a somewhat dystopian flavor (in keeping with the William Burroughs influence on their band's name), and electing for an ethereal cover that would nicely fit in Brian Eno's discography, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker took very much of a gamble here, even if the years that have passed since 1973 might have erased the extent in which those risks were actually *that* bold. First listens today indeed suggest Steely Dan was mostly a band perfectly content to rely on their earlier charts success and technical prowess to write and perform quite innocuous songs ranging from old rock'n'roll, country and rhythm and blues. Admittedly, they did spice things up by adding a fashionable form of prog-rock once in a while. If only said prog-rock didn't sound so irremediably tame compared to the Floyd or Can, this could have well turned up as a lengendary endeavor. Not in here, though, unfortunately.
Such harsh preliminary assessment might not be the full picture, however. As subsequent spins soon reveal, this missed opportunity might actually be a blessing in disguise for amateurs of truly *original* sounds. And playing a huge part in this overall originality, you have the jazz inflexions throughout the album, either in the instrumentation (those vibes in "Razor Boy") or the chord changes, bringing a welcome uneasiness and chiaruscoro ambiguity to the whole shebang, very much in line with the dystopian atmoshere already evoked earlier. Opener "Bodhisattva" is a very striking example of such artful sprinklings. Starting as an old R'n'R standard not sounding too fresh or daring these days, with a vocal hook even bordering on parody or muzak, the track's five minutes still fly by, thanks to those unexpected chord changes, along with slyly imaginative bridges and a synth part whose glossy crispness does a great job as it finally circles around you like a flock of pixellated sparrows, forcing you to let your guard down in front of their aerial spectacle. If this is elevator music (make no mistake, it very much *is*), this might be the sort of elevator music you can hear in Stephen King's "dark tower", granted such tower has an elevator in the first place (can't recall, does it?). The irony that you felt under the surface at the start of the song ends up screaming at you toward its end, and quickly, you begin to reconsider how performative the track really is. Is this stuff *cheesy* music? Or is it a *semblance* of cheesy music, with a more sophisticated agenda behind it, even more shrewd and cunning given that Steely Dan have more or less managed to hide their true game until the very last minute?
Retrospectively, it seems that Fagen and Becker have always aimed at straddling that fine line, being the sly, witty bastards that they are. Fans sometimes see in Steely Dan things that non-fans are unable to imagine or even comprehend while listening to their music for the first time. Sometimes it just takes one weird, off-kilter note in a guitar or keyboard solo to change the picture, as in the hard-bop but otherwise predictable and standardized "Your Gold Teeth". Other times, you find yourself being entranced by the implacable grooves of the rhythm section, even though the rest of the instrumentation sounds a little too nice and dandy overall. Not to say 'bland'. You know this is imaginative writing here, no matter what. Too bad you can't *feel* it sometimes.
As a consequence, one could easily argue that the prog-rock flavors in Steely Dan's music would have gained from being a little more pronounced than they actually were. Or that a true manifestation of genuine psychedelia during those very specific forays would have helped them faring better today, at least. But maybe it is unfair to compare apples and oranges, and expect from Fagen and Becker a program that was far too much in line with their contemporary day and age--it's a program the band visibly had no genuine interest in, for better or for worse. And ironically, Steely Dan's overall sound was nothing but ahead of the curve in 1973, foretelling the set of styles countless "mainstream" soft rock bands would embrace later on, from Eagles to Supertramp (not to mention other 'neat-sounding' acts even further down the line, during the eighties--Dire Straits, anyone?). Yet there is *another* layer of irony to point out, at least from our vantage point in the 21st century, and this one is far more cruel than the first. None of those groundbreaking aspects objectively present during the course of *Countdown To Ecstasy* are easily discernible today, after all that has transpired since. The music is good in this album, there's no arguing about that. But whether it is still *relevant* remains to be seen.
A good chunk of the tracks are saving the record from complete stylistic oblivion though, first because Steely Dan's pop-leaning, post-modernist agenda actually does conceptual wonders from time to time. Or, on the contrary, because the band *also* knew how to drop that agenda in key points of the record so as to focus on the music first and foremost. The mock-country highlight "Pearl Of The Quarter" for instance, is a convincing exercise in style, with its evocative albeit over-the-top steel guitar. And "Show Biz Kids" is a somewhat linear, overlong jam that's probably a little too on-the-nose, but it's stiil part of that interesting postmodern group of songs, thanks to its wry lyrics about poverty (and the fact that "Steely Dan T-shirts" won't save you from it). If nothing else, such attempts are showing how smart and topically meaningful the band actually intended to be. And in the more straightforward tracks, you have rhythm 'n blues homages such as "My Old School", whose Motown-sounding backing vocals suffuse much needed life to the proceedings.
But most of all, you have two stunners, not hits per se, but still the liveliest tracks of the whole program. As a centerpiece of the record, "The Boston Rag"' evokes a sense of nostalgia only belied by the animated performance that supports it. And closer "King Of The World" is an apt, skittering conclusion for the countdown uttered in the album's title, a promised "ecstasy" here tainted by heartbreaking descriptions of a post-nuclear America where said "kings of the world" are actually none but a scattered group of survivors slowly dying from radiation poisoning. From the barren realm of The Dark Towers, we've plunged right into the waste lands of The Stand, but the overall effect is the same. And yes, the shakespearian references do help set the appropriate, despondent mood, finally revealing that the titular countdown was nothing but a countdown to nuclear annihilation. I bet not a lot of listeners saw that one coming, whether today or at the time--even though the cover was an ominous sign of the disaster about to surge. *Gravity's Rainbow*'s Thomas Pynchon, would surely have appreciated such a nice touch here. Wasn't Pynchon's mammoth published in 1973 anyway? If a rock album cover could have been used for thsi novel, the one of *Countdown To Ecstasy* would have done a fine job paying homage to its grim-but-carnival-like contents, if not the music itself.
To be honest, however, all the tragic post-apocalyptic memorabilia displayed by Fagen in that song is NOT the first reason why the latter should be singled out, along with "The Boston Rag". The real reason is simple, as simple as a back-to-basics New Jersey mob boss's playlist. And the reason is that those tracks are catchy and direct enough to allow you to sing along to them, in spite of the other jazzy flourishings out there. This does not lessen the other merits of "King Of The World", and yes indeed, the admirable guitar interlacing in its introduction is still very much in keeping with the other sophisticated arrangements thoughout the album. But here you have that extra cherry on the cake, and you can eat it too: a glorious, roaring, heartfelt, take-no-quarters chorus. Sometimes Tony Sopranos was right, at least when it came to music. It's not always necessary to split hairs if you want to have a good time. Life's too short for this, with or without a nuclear apocalypse looming on the horizon.
[[Number of albums I listened to from the list: 3
Albums left to listen to: 998
Number of albums I've found genuinely relevant: 0
Number of different albums you should *probably* listen to before you die: 1 (so counting this one out, maybe)
Number of different albums you should *definitely* listen to before you die: 2]
Marty Robbins
3/5
Guns blazing out, country and western songs seem to have taken a large part of the American musical consciousness in 1959. This was the year a sleazy and cynical Italian-American crooner such as Dean Martin reinvented himself as a cowboy hero in Howard Hawks' *Rio Bravo*, even managing to have the producers press 'pause' on the proceedings onscreen to have enough time for him and Ricky Nelson to wistfully duet on the unforgettable "My Rifle, My Pony And Me" in front of an elated John Wayne. Only a few years before this endearing musical interlude on film, Marty Robbins' well-rounded persona and clear, juvenile voice had already surged in the US country scene thanks to hits such as "A White Sport Coat" and "The Story Of My Life". But it was also in 1959 that Robbin's real foray into western balladry actually started for good. And for those willing to invest their hard-earned bucks into a collection of records dedicated to such a quaint-yet-charming subgenre, *Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs* is deemed as nothing shorter than a landmark album. (For more information on this crooning, conservative and cosplay take on "country music" taken as a whole, see also: Jim Reeves. Or at least, that's what online specialists are trying to whisper into my ears right now--even though I'm not a horse).
Wikipedia even informs us that years after *Gunfighter Ballads*'s release, members of the Western Writers of America chose six of its songs as being among the Top 100 Western Songs of all time. Three of them were written by Robbins: first his signature song "El Paso", along with "Big Iron", and "The Master's Call". And three were written and previously recorded by others: "Cool Water", "Billy The Kid", and "The Strawberry Roan". Without a doubt, the six songs listed here were the highlights of the album, whether then or now. It's worth noting, however, that in that bunch, "Big Iron" is probably the least compelling track, and its relative fame in 2022 seems to have more to do with the online craze of our day and age than in any relevant influence during the late fifties. In 2010, with the release of Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout New Vegas, *Gunfighter Ballads...* was indeed rediscovered by people who played the game and listened to the in-game radio. The radio feature included "Big Iron," which caused players to seek out the entire album, discovering the other songs online. Many Internet memes were created as a result, with the most common of them being parodies and edits of the album cover, along with edits or mashups of "Big Iron". And this hot trail was then picked up by the Breaking Bad producers, choosing the song for an appearance in the finale of their postmodern spaghetti western. Seems like Hollywood is never really far when something is labelled as 'Western'. It's those dreams shot for wide cinemascope screens, never really burdened by any sense of authenticity. How could those dreams *not* be part of the overall package here?
Coincidentally or not, such a sudden and inexplicable online craze as the one that befell "Big Iron" also nicely ties in with the Tik Tok success of Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" ten years later or so. And even beyond the common country and western influence displayed in those two admittedly very different tunes, there's *another* interesting parallel to point out here. In both cases, what we have is a competent song fooling around with clichés inherent to the genre involved, which often has its charm if it's done in the appropriate, tongue-in-cheek manner, as is the case for both tracks. But can such immediate, albeit somewhat hollow success be equated to art having a truly *meaningful* discourse about our current culture? The jury's out on this one. My best guess here is that all those playful Hollywood shenanigans are just ephemeral excitement, nothing that would change any listener's life in the long run. Not to say that Marty Robbins or Lil Nas X didn't *deserve* to have their fair share of success. But this sort of overwhelming popularity shouldn't *necessarily* have any bearing on any retrospective critical assessment, mind you. And I'll point my pistol to anyone who says I should change my mind and speak more cautiously about all this. Understood, gringo?
All oh-so-serious grumblings about the commodification of music aside (niche or otherwise), the six Robbins songs quoted earlier in this piece still have very clear assets, like trump cards in a poker game explaining why this album shouldn't be totally forgotten either. "The Master's Call", in particular, could remind modern listeners of Nick Cave's killer-rampage rants about outlaws and other low-life thugs swarming in his narrative pandemonium of beautiful losers and desperate psychos (it seems like Cave's aptly named *Murder Ballads* might even have drawn a little influence from Robbins, at least on the conceptual level). And among the three covers quoted up above, the cautionary tale "Billy The Kid" also stands out for sure. Flavored with peppers and hot chili sauce all around its Tex-Mex arrangements (just like in the sweeter, grander and yet more by-the-books "El Paso"), there's even a gripping quality to the rendition of that traditional tune in here, with its smart, bittersweet alternance of major and minor key chords neatly thought out, recorded and performed. The images evoked by such a technicolor-shot motion picture are thus nothing short of stunning. And you can't complain about the script either, even though you know how the story ends (spoiler alert: badly).
As for most of the other unquoted songs, there's nothing in them particularly worth raving about on first listens. If you happen to be obsessed with them tales of the Old Wild West--or if you're right in the middle of a Red Dead Redemption marathon--you will probably find the time and energy to immerse yourself into that hackneyed Grand Canyon vista so as to sort the wheat from the chaff before stacking the good stuff up in your carriage and move on. Other pioneers, however, might elect to go at once and find a creek with fresher water elsewhere to plant their tipees or tents. The American west is large enough for all sorts of pioneers anyway.
Interestingly, *Gunfighter Ballads...* is now part of Sony's "American Milestones" reissue series for classic country and western albums, including, among others, *At Folsom Prison* by Johnny Cash and *Red Headed Stranger* by Willie Nelson. "American milestones", those figures are indeed, mostly because Cash and Nelson knew a thing or two about how they could raise a vast array of emotions in their listeners' souls (laughter, anger, cynicism, despair, romanticism and so on...). And doing this, the two also had a legitimate influence on other genres far outside of their initial reach. Cash's mordant lyrics, deep rumbling vocals and dry instrumentation, in particular, still stands the test of time today. Next to these giants, Marty Robbins kinda looks like a midget holding a water pistol instead of the glittering, proverbial colt. And the Old Wild West is certainly not kind for simpering tenderfoots with a suave voice, as every free-lance undertaker (and music critic) this side of Colorado knows...
[[Number of albums I listened to from the list: 4
Albums left to listen to: 997
Number of albums I've found genuinely relevant: 0
Number of different albums you should *probably* listen to before you die: 1
Number of different albums you should *definitely* listen to before you die: 3 (counting this one out)]
Eminem
4/5
Since it's probably one of the most striking album debuts in the history of rap, it's interesting to assess how *The Slim Shady LP* is holding out more than two decades after that game changer broke all the hip hop rules you thought you knew at the time. Eminem's hectic, cartoonish flow, hilarious-slash-offensive lyrics, technical chops as a rapper, and controversial persona are very much a part of popular music history today, so much that it's actually a little difficult now to realize in which *ways* this first album indeed broke all the rules. The rap game was a seemingly simpler affair then, its opposition between east coast and west coast giving everyone enough basic landmarks to find their way into it (to sketch the whole thing in oversimplistic terms, it was G-funk L.A. vs. rougher developments in NYC--we're leave Atlanta aside for this piece, as well as other strands more or less outside the whole gangster influence, from Wu-Tang street weirdo poetics to the cooler, smoother boom bap heirs of that earlier jazzy "Native Tongues" scene...). This clear-cut world, however, was before Eminem, or rather, should we correct, before his "Slim Shady" alter-ego snarly told us all *what his name* was for the first time. Less a gangster than a dangerous, irremediably irresponsible, white thrash psycho raised in one of them middle-west trailer parks, Slim Shady was the very definition of a loose cannon. And as a rapper's version of Batman's Joker, he was a character actually far more disturbing and downright outrageous than any of those MCs still stuck into circular ego-tripping exercises, too busy launching diss tracks from one coast to the next to really break new ground.
Enter Marshall Mathers, who, even though he picked a "side", so to speak, by collaborating with Dr. Dre of N.W.A and
The Chronic fame, was still smart and savvy enough to let his crude lyrics, nasal voice, unsavory statements and faster-than-light rapping abilities speak for himself without much of an afterthought as to where his place should be in the "game". Of course, Captain Obvious must have a say here: Eminem is indeed not only a brilliant rapper, but also, he is a
white rapper, with all the necessary consequences that such an obvious statement entails. Others have analyzed this elsewhere. Let's just say that one can only imagine how Dre must have felt producing that white-thrash genius, more of an ally to hip hop's cultural cause than Elvis ever was to the African-American songwriters and artists of his time (speaking of *white* rappers, we're not forgetting the fantastic Beastie Boys, but they couldn't count here, having chosen the arty sidelines of that world as soon as 1989, when *Paul's Boutique* came out). With Eminem's irruption, however, one can easily argue that a very important gate for strands of modern black music that were hitherto despised by the mainstream music industry had been blown open at last. Hip hop at large could finally reap what it had sowed for two decades. And more importantly, Dre, as an important and historical actor of the U.S. rap scene, was also at the helm of this phenomenon, not only counting his newly-earned heaps of dollars, but also counting the ways in which said phenomenon could benefit everyone in the "game" in the long run.
But what about the album itself, then? How fresh does it sound now? Just as its author, we won't mince words: the first half is brilliant, almost pitch-perfect. But the second half is not so good as a whole, and this even in comparison to other hip hop masterpieces which often tend to go on a little too long, avoiding the necessary edits that would make them shine even brighter (just like your humble servant here). On the side of the good stuff, there's the funky, Rhodes-driven opener and first single "My Name Is", a grand preliminary statement as to what Eminem's crazy antics are all about. But it's really the second song, "Guilty Conscience", that brilliantly sets up to the task of showing what we're up against here, setting the bar so high on a lyrical standpoint that the album almost doesn't recover from it after. Featuring Dr. Dre playing the part of a better angel urging lost souls to err on the side of caution and dignity (this here is already a riot to write about!), the track is not only a showcase of Eminem's narrative abilities, but it's also a genius opportunity for him to display his talents as an actor delivering hilarious punchlines, each one more shocking and outrageous than the one before. You've probably guessed it already, Eminem plays the part of the miniature devil facing Dre from the opposite shoulders of said lost souls, and he's so competent in this role that the so-called angel finally gives up all pretense to decency and joins the side of pure evil at the end of the song (we won't spoil the way Eminem convinces Dre to join his ranks here... Let's just say that anyone collaborating with Mathers needs to share his self-deprecating sense of humour). What works so well in the track is that it starts as a concept where the two rappers are initially only playing a role, but because of Slim Shady's sheer malevolence, such concept soon goes off the rail, and even Dre-as-a-real-person doesn't come out of it unscathed. Nothing is off-limit, not even disrespecting the album's own executive producer. Carnival at its best here.
Next is "Brain Damage", an exploration of childhood trauma that also goes off the rail to become a mix between Garbage Pail Kids and a gore flick. It is one of the best tracks musically speaking, with its unstoppable bouncy beat and intricate west-coast-style samplings. But the real centerpiece of the album only comes a few tracks later, and here it's not so much its music than its overall concept, along with Eminem's chilling delivery, that will send shivers down your spine. "'97 Bonnie and Clyde" is horrorcore at its most disturbing and off-putting, telling the dreadful yarn of a man killing his ex-wife and getting rid of her body with their daughter in tow, the unrepenting murderer even lying to the small toddler throuhout the song, denying how much of a monster he is (just look at the cover of the album to have an inkling of what the song is about). In the next record, "Stan" will explore such a sociopathic narrative thread even a little further, but for those who are already familiar to that later track, suffice it to say that this is how everything started when it came to Eminem as a horror master...
An aside here, about 'unreliable narrators'. Some commentators at the time were quick to put blame on Eminem's possible deleterious influence on kids and their sense of morality (often in conjunction with their condemnation of the mock-satanist shock-fest of Marilyn Manson). But it is somewhat misleading and even downright stupid to think the kids Eminem was adressing himself to were not aware all of this was just entertainment, a play, an act, spooky tales aimed at placing them into a rollercoaster of conficting and intense emotions. In a way, Mathers later beat those commentators at their own game when he created the 'Stan' character during the course of his next album. Here was an Eminem fan dumb enough to take everything at face value, and so become an unhinged danger for himself and others. But... well... newsflash: 'Stan' doesn't really exist. Just as 'Dada' in " '97 Bonnie And Clyde". Or even "Slim Shady" himself. It's that old "Fight Club" twist all over again, is it not? Teens' minds are always blown away by it, but meanwhile, there's never been a killer-rampage enacted in the name of Eminem or Tyler Durden. It's just pure, trangressive fun. Phew... I guess PMRC members can start sleeping a little better at night now. It will be easier for us to slit their throats in their sleep, at least.
See what I just did up there? Mathers does that all the time. There's never a sure way to know when he's playing an act and when he's dead serious during the course of the album. Well... there's never a sure way to know *if you're not paying enough attention*. Case in point: "Role Model", where Eminem makes it clear he is not one of them, nor should be considered as such. For instance, this is the song where he lists the drugs he is truly addicted to as opposed to the ones he has no interest in, contradicting other statements elsewhere on the album (including that ironic "Er... Don't do drugs..." in the short skit opening the LP). Such intricate, truly postmodern way to mix truths and falsehoods does not merely offer cheap thrills in most songs, it is also a testament to Mathers' multilayered, rich, and even thought-inducing writing. Eminem is smart enough to consider his listeners should still exercise their free will and sense of agency in our sick sad world, contrary to the conservative boomers who found the mirror he was holding up to us all too dreary and unbearable for their delicate, hypocritical tastes.
Unfortunately, past "Role Model", that multilayered, thought-inducing writing starts to wear thin a little, as if Mathers was at pains to find any effective way to fuel the demonic machinery he so brilliantly ignited in the first part of the record. At some point, just as you go through this piling-up of shock treatments, you start to feel a little numb, a little anaesthetized, and it doesn't help when you already know that Eminem's technical chops as a rapper with a machine-gun flow will get *even better* than this in the next LPs. Some of the imagery even sounds a little immature at some point, a pitfall that was probably unavoidable given the nature of Mathers' initial intents here. And the music itself sometimes loses its momentum. Indeed, it must be pointed out that a huge chunk of the tracks' instrumentation in the LP, mostly those composed by the Bass Brothers, does not fare that well today, and one has a sneaking suspicion that even in 1999, such instrumentation could pass off as clunky or slightly outdated, especially when compared to the songs Dr Dre produced himself. The drums, in particular, often sound flat and overmixed, a flaw that will fortunately not occur again in the subsequent albums, where Dre will be more directly involved. For the first of those, *The Marshall Mathers L.P.*, it seems that Eminem effectively course-corrected most of those shortcomings at least. This second album might also be slightly overlong, but there, the killer tracks are sprinkled throughout the record so that the latter never loses its steam. And it is an asset that *The Slim Shady LP* can't boast about.
Rather than listing the underwhelming tracks in the album, maybe it's better to list some of the best one-liners that are still peppered throughout it, in spite of all that lost steam. At least we'll end up on a high note. "But I don't get pissed, y'all don't even see through the mist / How the fuck can I be white, I don't even exist" ("Role Model"). "I'm about as normal as Norman Bates with deformative traits / A premature birth that was four minutes late" ("Role Model" again). Or *this*, about a girl overdosing on mushrooms at a party, with the unmarried girl deliriously moaning : "I don't even have any kids and I can't cook," and Slim replying: "I'm over here, Sue, you're talking to the plant, look!" ("My Fault"). And we should probably mention that two of the best punchlines come at the very end, in "Still Don't Give A Fuck": "I get imaginative with a mouth full of adjectives / A brain full of adverbs, and a box full of laxatives". Either this or the following boast: "Now how in the hell am I supposed to get out of debt? / I can't rap anymore, I just murdered the alphabet". All bragging aside, Eminem did not murder the whole alphabet yet at the time of his first major debut. But he sure came close to it in the couple of records that followed.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 996
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 0
Albums from the list I might include in mine later on: 2 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 3 ]
The Mars Volta
4/5
Their heads barely out of the ashes of At The Drive-In, Omar Rodriguez López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala did not waste any time to rebound by forming The Mars Volta, sprinkling seventies psychedelia, latin rhythm inflexions and Zappaesque circumvolutions in their already charged post-hardcore formula. *Deloused In the Comatorium* is the result of this quick mutation, and akin to a phoenix rising over its former shell's self-implosion, the new band does a very fine job setting up high expectations for what was to come. Standout tracks "Inertiatic Esp", "The Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of) and "This Apparatus Must Be Unearthed" are especially convincing, flaunting a technical prowess that is in service of songs sporting roaring choruses like so many badges of honor. None of the digressions in those tracks are unnecessary, and the overall production is neat and on-point, displaying very clear and panoramic vistas of the multi-layered mess so as to help the listener make sense of it. Bixler-Zavala's lyrics are cryptic as ever, digging the exact same surreal trench as the one he had dug as the At The Drive-In frontman, and his crystal-clear, energetic vocals are reaching new heights, even though he never forgets to also bring emotion and subtle nuance when needed.
It's a little unfortunate, however, that the Mars Volta could not apply the same self-editing principles and direly needed restraint for a bunch of tracks across the middle of the record. See for instance "Eriatarka" and "Cicatriz Esp", where mastermind Rodriguez López desperately--and often vainly--tries to reach a full-on psychedelic scope the band would only really attain for their second LP, the criminally underestimated *Frances The Mute* (which is probably the best homage to seventies prog-rock madness ever penned this side of the 21st century, and a piece of work far more sweeping and ambitious than their first effort). In comparison to its successor, some of the tracks in *Deloused In The Comatorium* are either too short or too long, or maybe even *both*, oddly enough--too short for the ambient meandering interludes inside them to really stick and go somewhere--and too long for the *exact same reason*, mainly that those aimless interludes should have probably been better left off on the cutting room floor so as to give a little muscle to the overall songs
If *Frances The Mute* avoided those pitfalls by giving its most experimental moments much-needed conceptual and atmospheric points, such miracles only too rarely happened in the rest of the band's career. After their second album, The Mars Volta even quickly got lost into their own free-jazz proclivities (read "ass"), spawning a handful of albums that did not add anything genuinely meaningful to the initial formula. And when that string of records ended, Rodriguez López and Bixler-Zaval even resorted to a reformation of At The Drive-In which turned out to be a half-baked stylistic avowal of defeat instead of the glorious reunion everyone had hoped for. Heroes fall hard sometimes. In *Deloused In The Comatorium*, the phoenix was still on the rise at least.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 995
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 0
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 3 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 3 ]
Eurythmics
4/5
The eighties were a very, very strange period for music. In only a very few years whole paradigms were turned upside down, and this under a twofold influence: technology and business. Overreliance on the first and obsession about the second created overall aesthetics and atmospheres so representative of that period that, apart from the sixties, no other decade can boast being so instantly recognizable on the merits of its *sounds* alone. And this for better or for worse. During those early eighties, just as Eurythmics was conquering charts worldwide, it's for instance worth noting that even someone like Neil Young was busy using synths and vocoders (see the much maligned and frankly misunderstood *Trans*), and this mere anecdotal footnote here speaks volumes. The times they had-a *really* changed in those years. But probably not in the ways good ol' Bob had expected.
Contrary to Neil Young, Eurythmics were typically "eighties" from the get-go, and that's a *huge* difference between the two, of course (one among many). By the time of their second album *Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)*, the duo had indeed fully embraced the schlock, glossy world of fatty synth bass lines and other electronic-driven pulses and would never fully depart from it, even during the nineties. But *there* was also a peculiar twist, a paradox of sorts, because Eurythmics had actually only embraced the clichés of their day and age so as to better reinvent songwriting tropes from far earlier periods, namely the ones of the good old rhythm 'n blues of days yonder. At least, that was the plan. To counterbalance the increasing power of the machines, the solution Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart found out was to inject *soul* into the 'popular mechanics" of their time, even though such "soul" could turn up being totally unrecognizable in those brand new, icy whereabouts. When replicants in *Blade Runner* claim they have their own 'souls', and that they are therefore as 'human' as you and me, there's more than a few eyebrows raised in response. It's the sort of eyebrows that Lennox and Stewart's band are still raising today, especially now that the eighties are far off into the rearview mirror.
They were certainly not the only ones to step on that tightrope line in those days. In the U.K. dance scene, Soft Cell's legendary cover of "Tainted Love" had used the same mash-up of electronics and African-American, tried-and-true, melodic lines. But Eurythmics's version of that formula was a whole other level of complexity. Annie Lennox's diaphanous timbre and androgynous presence were not just masks or disguises in plain sight, only *pretending* to hide the obvious rhythm'n' blues influences of her voice inflexions. They were also an ambiguous statement about cultural appropriation and simulacrum. Music once considered "warm" or even "hot" was turning into its own *cold* self-conscious copy. It was *whitened*, in all senses of the word. And it seems audiences just took a lot of pleasure out of this without asking too many questions. In a way, Lennox's almost superhuman abilities on a technical point of view, like when she adlibs soulful pleas and performs other risky voice tremolos, only reinforces that initial ambiguity between (wo)man and machine. What do we have here? A genuine soul singer with flesh and bone? Or a robot only pretending to be one? Do androids dream of cybernetic Aretha Franklins? Not even Philip K. Dick or William Gibson had answered those queries before...
Let's just address the electric elephant in the room, once and for all. As overplayed as it is, "Sweet Dreams"--that bouncy title track everyone has hummed under the shower at least once--still sounds superb today. But the apparent simplicity of that hit belies the fact that the song is first and foremost the epitome of the paradoxes spotted up there. And that at its core, it's part of that "Tainted Love" tradition of expressing doubt or heartbreak in such a lively manner (while not plagiarizing the full on minor-key vocal line of the old Gloria Jones hit, there's definitely a similarity in its "Sweet Dreams" equivalent). So if f the track works so well, it's because of those rhythm 'n blues influences first, as is the case in most of the less famous cuts in the album. The great synths sounds, drum-machines, and overall "programming" are just cream on the cake. Excellent cream, but cream nonetheless.
The only problem with this track and its place on the album is that it is like a large tree hiding a whole forest. Indeed, if Eurythmics's second effort still holds up relatively well decades after it was released, it's for one reason only: the songwriting. Strip *The Walk* of all its trimmings, for example, electronic or otherwise--yes, even the horn section and that mellifluous trumpet solo at the end--and what you have here is basically a good PJ Harvey song circa *Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea*. Just imagine a different "rock" instrumentation on its verses, and the ressemblance is simply striking. Likewise (but conversely in a chronological point of view), final track "This City Never Sleeps" is nothing but a barely-veiled homage to Marvin Gaye's "Inner City Blues", with its hypnotic bassline supporting lyrical snapshots of urban melancholy and destitution. What links those two very different reference points (PJ Harvey and Marvin Gaye) is inspiration from the blues and nothing else. And it's an inspiration that a synth-driven act like Depeche Mode will use only quite a few years later compared to Eurythmics. So they knew what they were doing here.
Other strands of black music run throughout the course of the album. The use of echoes and reverb in "I've Got An Angel" is drawing its inspiration from dub, and it's a move that feels like a weird, off-kilter way to explore the same paths Massive Attack would step on fifteen years later, musing about other sorts of 'angels'. And in "Somebody Told Me", Lennox even... raps (!), and the outcome of this experimentation is definitely not as ridiculoius as it may sound on paper. Add other decent tracks like that, plus a fantastic Kraftwerk-like, minimalistic opener ("Love Is A Stranger"), and the whole proposition holds the proverbial water like no other Eurythmics record. Speaking of water, don't miss that mesmerizing dark reverie about a drowned girl veering towards This Mortal Coil's goth territory. The girl is named "Jennifer", but she could as well have been named 'Ophelia'.
There are only two duds in the album: first another Kraftwerk-inspired track, a cyberpunk cover of Sam And Dave's "Wrap It Up", which might read like an interesting or even daring idea on paper, except that it's not when you're hearing the final clunky results. And there's also "This Is The House", which sounds like a reject from The Talking Heads post-*Remain In Light*. it actually says a lot about the 'Heads that the line between success and failure when it comes to such "white funk" forays is so... thin. But the study of this thin line will surely come in its own time... The point is that if a band like the Talking Heads is enjoying such a raving critical status today, I don't see why another act like Eurythmics couldn't be redeemed as well, at least partly.
So the *ideas* behind those failed experiments in the album might have been worth it and you can't blame the band for trying a little too hard. Unfortunately, they are the sorts of ideas that will increasingly come to Lennox and Stewart's minds after *Sweet Dreams...", and there again, the execution will produce many mixed results, actually far more than on this second LP. There will always be a couple of great, catchy tracks and singles to redeem those failures, but nothing that will *wholly* save any of the subsequent records. Replicants always have an expiration date, and for some non-fans, 1983 was maybe the date Eurythmics should have been "retired" by a disgruntled Rick Deckard policing good music out there. Given that it's the exact same year our endearing Roy and Pris of eighties pop broke out with *Sweet Dreams...* (and also *Touch*, released the same year), it seems that, creatively speaking at least, 'replicants' appear to have an even shorter life in reality than the ones they are enjoying in Sci-Fi flicks. You just can't always 'replicate' souls, Annie and Dave, you need to have ones of your own, too. Skills, influence or production values won't necessarily give you one. There are things that all the money in the world can't buy, even during the eighties.
Janis Joplin
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review here, because others have already written wonderful stuff about this record and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. This album is just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 994
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 1 (starting with this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 4
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 3 ]
Jacques Brel
5/5
Being a native French speaker, I've always been aware of the cultural importance of Jacques Brel, even though as a young and hip amateur of mostly *anglo-saxon* music, I was merely relegating him to a singer for older generations, someone who did not have anything relevant to teach the careless youngster that I was. But now that I've gotten older myself, comfortably lying on the couch of my cozy living-room as I'm writing this feature on my phone, I might obviously know a little better. The question is: why did I *really* change my mind about Jacques Brel? Is it because of my current, somewhat comfortable surroundings that I can fully appreciate *chansons* now? Have I turned into an unapolegetic *bourgeois* in the space of only two decades? Or is all of that irrelevant?
If it's because I've turned into a *bourgeois*, the irony is priceless here. Indeed, Brel's wit, sharp eye and acerbic tongue were almost never better channeled than when he used those assets to paint vitriolic portraits of the elder generations of his own time--all those sad, well-off, self-righteous sods never able to admit they cornered themselves into lives ultimately devoid of any meaning. Truth be told, in Brel's songs are *also* other sorts of lessons, though, and ones I could have started learning as a young man. When the Belgian singer depicts younger characters, for instance, his powers of observation are still very much on point, both conveying the humanity and pathetic shortcomings of those characters through the same jeering-yet-elegant wink to his audience. Flawed dunces and endearing dollards can be found in all age groups. And Brel never missed a chance to remind us of this.
Of course, there's a third, more elegiac streak running throughout his catalogue of tunes, which gave out all those signature songs most French speakers still remember today. And for those, Brel was as 'emo' as any tortured young rock act can get. Just listen to those tracks. Even if you're not speaking French, you might still sense the emotion seeping through the perfomance itself, if not through the words used (the man was also a fine actor who had learned this secondary trade exclusively through his experience as a performer giving it all onstage). If anything, English-speaking artists with a keen eye for details and an overall flair for the dramatic--artists such as Scott Walker, Nina Simone, David Bowie, Judy Collins or Nick Cave--certainly sensed this emotion we've just mentioned here. Hence their wonderful covers of Brel's *repertoire*.
Recorded live in 1964 at the legendary Parisian venue *L'Olympia*, this record, as short as its original version was, does a very fine job displaying the three different streaks of songcraft we've spotted up there. Subsequent CD versions later included parts of the show left out from the original 30-minute album, with Brel staples such as "Les bonbons", "Mathilde", " Les bigotes", "Les bourgeois", "Jef" and "Au suivant". But even without those popular extraneous cuts, this live album is essentially Jacques Brel at his best. "Les vieux" (*Old Folks*), about old-timers waiting for death, is for example one of his cruellest songs, because as heartwrenching and detailed as the lyrics are, they can also elicit many mocking snarls in response. Dark comedy and tragedy go hand in hand throughout the tune, whose chorus revolves about a clock relentlessly counting the seconds left before the final demise, nicely supported by a piano motif insisting on each of those fateful seconds. Musicality is rarely forgotten in Brel's *oeuvre*, as shown in most of those cuts here, even though such oeuvre is first and foremost narrative-driven in nature.
Death is also central in two other songs, "Le dernier repas" and "Tango funèbre". The first track pictures the narrator's "last meal" with his entourage, the second depicts his burial, and both are unforgettable lessons in songwriting, ones that Nick Cave, as a connoisseur of Brel's body of work, probably remembered when he penned the similarly-themed "Lay Me Low" for *Let Love In*. Freeloaders and sycophants shedding crocodile tears unavoidably find their way into the afflicted crowd in those songs, closely watched by Brel's ghost. This makes the titular 'tango' in the second track, already a wonderful piece of music, even more gripping, chilling and wry.
Old parasites in funerals aside, younger people are also mocked during the gig, as in "Les Timides" (*Shy people*), where inapt wannabe lovers make fools of themselves under Brel's unforgiving eye ("they just blush and *crawfish*", the singer tells us--yes, "crawfish" is used as a verb here, which is just as grammatically wrong or off-kilter in French as it is in English). And both age groups seem to be derided in "Les jardins du casino" ("In The Casino's Gardens"), a precise study of bourgeois pettiness that goes from micro to macro in its ironic breadth.
As great as those tracks are, however, this live album wouldn't be the historical document it is today without two songs counting among the most famous Brel ever penned whenever he decided to dive headlong into full epic scope. The first of those songs, "Amsterdam", was actually never recorded in a studio, so what we have here is the definitive version, and it does not take a seer to understand why this sweeping tale of sailors and whores rubbing shoulders (and more) in the midst of a drunken, lascivious haze didn't need a studio recording after this live capture at the Olympia venue. Brel's voice is incredible here, each and every one of its inflexions adding weight and meaning to the words sung or yelled. And the orchestra supporting that voice is the *coup de grâce*, its head-spinning instrumentation placing you right in the middle of this grotesque waltz of beautiful losers. You can almost see the lights and lanterns of the harbour behind the dancers. In three minutes, you've been to the Netherlands and back, and it's a trip you will never forget. As for the second legendary track, "Le plat pays" (*The Flat Country*), a very personal ode to Belgium--slow, grim and yet quite tender--there *is* a studio version of it, contrary to "Amsterdam". But this live rendition, backed up by strings circling above the desolate land like so many flocks of crows, equals it, if it doesn't actually surpass any other version available today.
*Olympia 64* is therefore one of the best entry points into Brel's whole body of work, and as such, deserves to be remembered as the timeless classic that it is. One could argue that studio albums *Ces gens-là*, *N*4 (La valse à mille temps)* or the later rerecording of old songs *Ne me quitte pas* could be equally relevant if you wish to get acquainted with the inspired and inspiring Belgian singer. Either those, or any of the comprehensive compilations sold out there. But if first, you want to sense the powerhouse that Brel was as a live performer, *this* is the record to start with. It is by no means a rock 'n roll album. Actually, it's almost the opposite in every way. But for anyone interested in the French language, or international novelty curios, the emotions such a record provides are not so far off the mark compared to more "modern" strands of music. Ask David Bowie, Nick Cave or Nina Simone if you're still having doubts about the whole thing.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 993
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 2 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 4
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 3 ]
Fugazi
5/5
FIVE STARS
A personal favorite of mine.
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 991
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 3 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 4
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 3]
Prince
3/5
Oh well. *1999*. Released in 1982. If through this title, Prince wanted to predict music as it would sound seventeen years later, that's not exactly how everything turned out, is it? That minor grudge aside, it's hard to miss the carpe diem *concept* behind the album. *1999* is a record that wants you to have sex, because, hey, that's one of the best thing our short lives have to offer, is it not? It is also speaking from a cold war vantage point, hence the criticism of "politicians" found in some lyrics here and there, even if such quick statements might just be useful pretexts for more fucking (up, around, and well, just good old straight-up fucking itself). If the end of the world is coming soon, whether at the turn of the millenium or earlier, we'd better enjoy what's left of our lives and party *hard*, after all. This here is the bulk of Prince's *D.M.S.R* program (a track from the album that reads *Dance, Music, Sex, Romance*), an overall theme also nicely introduced in opener and legendary single "1999", where the Minneapolis sex-crazed, short-statured genius reminds us that anyone is "carrying a bomb' these days, nuclear or not, and that as a result, anyone can die in the next hour or the next minute. When U say it this way, Mr. Nelson, it indeed sounds like a good idea to take your sweet time and wallow in all those hedonistic long tracks celebrating love, lust, sex, romance and everything in between.
The thing is, *long* does not necessarily equate *good*. At least when it comes to music, if you take my meaning. Wink, wink. And *this* here is exactly where *1999* falls short, ironically. Because as groundbreaking as the record was, both for Prince and for pop music at large (with all those dry synth-driven hits, Afrika-Bambatta-inspired dirges, lustful torch songs, rock digressions and moist-yet-minimalistic hard-funk forays), yes, in spite (or because) of all of *that*, there's a also a streak of self-indulgence running through *1999* which might possibly make it a difficult listen in 2022, no matter what critics or hardcore fans are raving about when they're mentionning the album today. "Let's Pretend We're Married" is a nice track, with a soundtrack it's easy to picture St Vincent writing a few decades later. But did it need to last for 7 minutes or so, no matter what crazy antics Prince is doing during the performance? Besides, cuts like "Automatic", "DMSR", "Lady Cab Driver", or "All the Critics Love U In New York" are not *that* good musically speaking in the first place. And most of them still run even far longer than 7 minutes. Or if they don't, they sound *as if they do*. Never a good sign when you're watching the clock while "doing it".
The only exceptions to that overall issue are the first two tracks, and the fact that they are opening the album is not so much a blessing in disguise as it is a curse for the record's overall balance. "1999" is a bouncy masterpiece, and if you can't shake your rump to it, it means you're probably dead already. And "Little Red Corvette", Prince's first crossover hit to rock and mainstream charts in a long list of many, has *that* stellar chorus going for it. But after that early point, in terms of obvious hits and nudges to a casual listener's ears, zilch, zero, nada. For certain genres, this is not necessarily a problem. But when you claim to be writing and playing grand pop statements, it kind of becomes one. The jump from "Little Red Corvette" to "Delirious" is just jarring, for example. What is that ridiculous happy-go-lucky pseudo-mock-rockabilly synth riff? And, er... wait... What? Was that *thing* a single, too? Really???
There are indeed a few "endearing" curios in *1999*, which probably triggered Prince's fans to unabashadly label it as a masterpiece because they thought those intriguing yet somewhat half-baked compositions had something "different" in them compared to other more famous cuts. Chiefly among those weird songs is the interestingly ambient and ambiguous "Something In The Water (Does Not Compute)", sounding as if Kraftwerk mated with Otis Redding under Devo's voyeuristic leer, not so bad if you like such kinky set-ups in your sex life. To which you might also add "Free", a Motown-like ballad with a nice piano part but not much else in terms of memorable stuff. A change of pace, a missionary-position sort of statement, if you will.
Of course, those flaws are sometimes amplified by appalling lyrics here and there. Prince, being the piece of work that he was, often considers his romantic conquests (real or fantasized) as so many inerchangeable objects for his own narcissitic lust. No, women are not "beautifully complex", they're just different one from the other, just as men are. And if they don't always cater to your every need, it's not because of "something in their water", you prick. They're not bonzai trees, for chrissake. However, as ludicrous as those immature ditherings are, such paranoid rants can sometimes spawn striking poetic images once in a while. In "Lady Cab Driver", for instance, just as the singer is fantasizing about 'doing it' with the titular character, he starts to *dedicate* each thrust of his hips to everything life has for us (yes, you read that correctly), both the good and the not-so-good. The list goes from politicians dooming our world to greedy billionaires, from God to nature, and finally, from his lover to himself and his own shortcomings (with a surprisingly candid admission he wishes he was "as tall and handsome" as his brother on one particular thrust--quite the precious psychological nugget for all wannabe shrinks out there). Sublimation of our instinctual death drives through sex has never been better depicted. Too bad the music (all that lazy funk set on "automatic' mode behind) is just... so-so.
This is not exactly the case of finale "International Lover", where Prince pictures himself as a pilot of his own private Sex Airlines company. The singer won a Grammy for his impressive performance on this slow extravaganza, as tongue-in-cheek corny as it is tongue-in-your-mouth exhilarating. Honestly, Prince deserved that trophy, so good he is when he whispers and taunts his lady prey to get on board with him, moaning, howling and orgasming at the very end, just as their plane is reaching its pleasurable destination at last. A place called "Satisfaction", by the way--yeah, that same tropical island Mick Jagger kept yearning and yelling after, to no avail... Yet, as good as that destination is, once you've just spinned that track, you don't necessarily want to come back to it for your next holidays. It's a fun listen the first time around, we'll grant you that. But it's also *another* long-winded proposition coming at the end of an album almost exclusively filled with other such long jams and whatnot. As you and I know, promising trysts often end up being nothing but one-night-stands, even when the sex was good on that night. That's where hedonism soon starts to lose its edge, as is the case here.
Fortunately, Prince was too eager to please to repeat the same mistakes twice, no matter how commercially successful *1999* turned out to be. "Sign 'O" The Times" had a similar concept, but it was so varied, so adventurous stylistically speaking, that its also admittedly long songs fare better today in comparison. "Parade" was a mixed affair, but it proved the funky midget was able to pen far shorter tracks that could still be impressive, whether in their sonic experimentations or their display of pop instincts. And *Purple Rain* was the best those two worlds had to offer, the exact balance Prince needed to reach right after *1999*. We won't go further after this eighties period, though. Even when a music review forces you to elaborate on sex and other earthly pleasures, there's still some minimum decency to preserve. It's not how long and how often you're doing it that counts. It's how much you can genuinely enjoy the whole thing.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 990
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 3
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 5 (including this one for its "historical" importance, even if I doubt it will make the final cut...)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 3]
Björk
5/5
For those who weren't there at the time, it's a little difficult describing how fresh and simply "out there" Björk's *Debut* felt when it came out in 1993. The difficulty is twofold: first, even though the former Sugarcube member drew heavily on the budding UK dance and electro scene for her early sonic explorations, that idiosyncratic voice of hers and its oh-so-Icelandic mannerisms were so powerful, so unique, that they could transcend any of the clichés picked out of her toy box to build the different soundscapes of her first solo effort. It's a voice everyone is familiar with now, whether you're a fan or not. But *at the time*, it was just something unheard of, even if you were a little aware of the Sugarcubes somehow. And it didn't even matter if some discrete parts of this first album already sounded somewhat *dated*, perhaps willingly, as with those tongue-in-cheek UK-club-scene inspired titles such as "Crying", "Big Time Sensuality" or "Violently Happy"--not to mention that naked cover of the cheesy Broadway novelty standard "Like Someone In Love", with only a simple harp to support Björk's extravagant ad-libs recorded in one take (small blunders included). The sheer originality of that voice, its harmonic instincts, along with its crystal-clear, youthful, Lolitaesque timbre--all of this could break through any wall, champagne glass or heart in the close vicinity. And just as importantly, that voice could sell any sort of music it chose as a backdrop, as long as the latter was decently written.
So, in a way, it didn't really matter who Björk made this album with, even though Nellee Hooper did an excellent job co-writing half of the tunes and arranging all of them--his production chops here fortunately drawing more from an overall Massive Attack-level of quality than any of that hackneyed stuff he was responsible for in Soul II Soul. The Sugarcubes had just been a training run for Björk. Now she was embracing a promising future, being free to choose her collaborators as she saw fit for whatever was on her mind. Speaking of the future... The *other* difficulty when it comes to a retrospective take of *Debut* is to try to ignore everything that came after so as to assess it on its own terms. It's a near-impossible task. *Post*, *Homogenic* and *Vespertine* were genres of their own, the moments Björk burned her ships behind her for good so as to never turn back (if one of those albums is missing in this list of 1001 albums, it's just a crime). Those records are so striking and wonderful that *Debut* is a litlle pale in comparison, as flashy and eccentric as it first looked when it came out.
Still, a large taste of the good things to come is still present in this record, and, unsurprisingly, those songs are the ones holding out better today. "Human Behaviour" is a quirky existential hit, as if Björk was a toddler playing with a Swiss clock, winding and rewinding it until the right joyful noise comes out. And I could listen to that bouncy timbal-sort-of-sound pattern for years, just as I could listen to Talvin Singh's lush, strings-and-tabla arrangements in "Venus As A Boy" for decades. This deceptively simple and tender song about an androgynous lover, one of Björk's greatest tunes, indeed marks a turning point where, for the first time ever, maybe, so-called "world music" was not used as a conceptual gimmick, but as a fresh, spontaneous impulse to fully embrace the sounds of this small blue planet, as varied as those sounds are. Björk is truly the first "global" artist to ever become a superstar. And more than any PR plan or conceptual blurb attached to what she was doing, this philosophy was translated into the music first and foremost.
For all its minor shortcomings, *Debut* is actually a very rare case in music history, one where an artist manages to push the enveloppe while still retaining their spontanity. The results of this rare combination are both playful and organic. "One Day", for instance, expertly uses a William Orbit style of ambient techno to paint the picture of an elated, wide-eyed messiah dreaming about a hopeful future. The song *is* naive, there's no arguing about that. And yet, it never makes you want to snarl or smirk, so enticing it is. Utopia is in our hands, you just need to believe in it. As for "Aeroplanes" and "The Anchor Song", they channel decades of jazz flourishes into their fabric and turn them into mere children's games, as easy on the ear as they are evocative on the mind. "The Anchor Song", in particular, is a miniature masterpiece, its barebones horn section displaying a minimalistic poetry that is all more fitting given the subject matter: Björk can only feel at home while bathing in an ocean, a paradox for many, but not for the romantic she is at heart. Maybe for certain cynical types out there, this sounds a trifle like a Sublime101 course. But it's a lesson the Icelandic songwriter will refine again and again in the future, starting with "Hyperballad" on the next record. It all starts there, with this track. And even before that, *Debut* remains a fountain of youth and potentialities, even today. *Here* is the deep lesson that makes the album an essential listen for both young and old souls of this world. Births, beginnings, eclosions, take-offs--you name them--have rarely felt any better than on this one.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 989
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 4 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 5
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 3]
Tricky
5/5
When listening to *Maxinquaye*, Tricky's historical first solo LP, it quickly dawns upon you that Adrian Thaws could not have chosen a better stage name. Almost thirty years after this feat of an album, it indeed remains *tricky* to qualify what makes the latter one-of-a-kind. Freshly out of Massive Attack, where he had previously honed his soft, surreal, passive-aggressive style of rapping, and having found a rare pearl to counterbalance his raspy vocals with the clear-voiced, wispy singer Martina Topley-Bird, Thaws took the trip-hop formula he's never been at ease with, and soured it with massive doses of his own obsessions and paranoia, here taking the shape of altered-state-fueled rants filled with striking turns of phrases. In an astonishing twist, this postmodern rendition of voodoo blues enacted through samplers and sequencers makes for a stifling yet also often oneiric experience, both musically and lyrically. We won't delve too much into the lyrics here, as other reviews have made an excellent job explaining why they were so interesting and personal, but from Thaws' gravelly grunts complaining that "MTV goes too fast" for his own bodily rhythms, up to the many allusions to drugs, sexual dysfunctions and the sad state of England during the nineties, *Maxinquaye* indeed caught the zeitgeist of those disillusioned years like almost no other record at the time. Tricky here gave birth to a LP that is timeless in many different ways--as a loose post-apocalyptic narrative, as an organic feast unafraid of its own little dark corners, and as a groove record pointing the way for several subsequent acts playing "black" music (in all senses of the word, from soul to rap to industrial to post-punk). The bulk of Thaws' DIY message was: do not follow the usual guidelines, and it is one that is still resonating today with acts such as King Krule or Young Fathers, long after 'trip hop' itself is dead and gone.
Minus one minor misfire--to which we'll come back later on--the A-side of the album is certainly worthy of its overall legend. Opener "Overcome"--a reinterpretation of Thaws' memorable lyrics in Massive Attack's "Karmacoma"--is a floor-tom-propelled marvel soaked in lush, mysterious synth rivulets and eddies sounding like so many pagan flutes. Tricky himself is nowhere to be heard on the track, there's just Topley-Bird's acid-tinged vocals to lighten the dark proceedings. For anyone remembering Thaws' original verse on Massive Attack's track, it was as if his female collaborator was here playing the role of a graceful sybill possessed by a devilish, fuming spirit speaking incantations through her mouth. And even if you were not familiar with "Karmacoma", the contents of those incantations against the "west" and its lack of spirituality hit the mark from the get-go. Next in line, "Ponderosa" displayed a monsoon of moist and relatively agitated tropical percussions celebrating a hedonism all too suspect not to betray the existential malaise that lies underneath it all. "I'll drink 'til I'm drunk, and I'll fuck 'til I'm senseless", Topley-Bird singspeaks. Both erotic and claustrophobic, the track is an admirable showcase for *Maxinquaye*'s many ambiguities and suspended/suspenseful moments. A little further down the line, "Hell Is Round The Corner" is another reinterpretation of Thaws' lines found in Massive's *Protection* album. It is worth noting here that this cut spins the same Isaac Hayes sample as the one used by Portishead for their hit single "Glory Box", a borrowing of "Ike's Rap II"'s organ riff played over a descending bass line (it was a coincidence that both projects used the same sample, apparently). But *Maxinquaye*'s use of Isaac Hayes is so smart, so well-arranged, and so perfectly in tune with Thaws and Topley-Bird's vocals about public and private hells, that the results are actually as good as "Glory Box" while managing to sound *way* different from it. If both cuts thus retain the same basic ingredient at their core, none of them can be deemed as superior to the other, and it's almost a miracle the two songs can exist side by side without one intruding on the other in your memory. Right after, the lascivious "Pumpkin"--featuring Alison Goldfrapp--both namechecks and samples The Smashing Pumpkins, infusing much welcomed twangy guitar digressions to the laid-back formula (a rock influence that sounds far different from the one on "Black Steel", but more on that later). As for "Aftermath", it is another killer track, taking its sweet time to mesmerize the listener with its flute solos over a promiscuously slooooow funk backdrop.
And so on... Many other songs in the record have those sorts of incredible ideas, even the less impressive ones crammed towards its end. Because, yes, as much as *Maxinquaye* is groundbreaking, it admittedly still drags a little in its second part, to put things rather bluntly. We won't name the tracks responsible for this overall lessening of quality, because they're not *that* bad. It's just that shorter versions of them would have done the job right without killing the overall flow. Moist, claustrophobic ambiences, scratchy samples, and dreamy solipsistic delusions are still very much to the fore on those later developments, but one can't help thinking Thaws would have made *even more* of an impression if he had applied a little self-editing for those specific forays. We also take issue with the third track of the album, "Black Steel", a clunky, repetitive, alt-rock cover of Public Enemy that overstays its welcome, going far too long for no discernible reasons. The concept was good, maybe--suddenly, here come all-out rock guitars and drums for a rap cover, and this in the middle of so-called 'trip-hop'--but the inclusion of this somewhat hackneyed track so soon, right in the third slot, could have killed *Maxinquaye*'s momentum if the rest had not been so convincing as a whole.
To his defense, Tricky has always been a very instinctual artist, not bothering too much about rhyme or reason in his sylistic inclusions and digressions. Just like for his lyrics, you either take it or leave it, so to speak, and this might just be as good as it is, to be honest. Because, for all our little complaints up there, you can't really blame Thaws for taking risks. Indeed, that uncompromising stance of his is also the reason the album ends with offerings as impressive and uncompromising as the droney, psychotic "Strugglin'", followed by that unexpected last-minute balm "Feed Me", whose soothing yet still uneasy music-box-like chimes echo throughout the mist long after the album is over. For all the minor drawbacks in *Maxinquaye*, there are still many treasures of this kind to dig out of the rainy, desolate beach at the end of the world that this legendary record is at heart. You may uncover a few secondary trinkets half-buried in the sand here and there, but they won't tarnish the gold you're still able to find out of the place. That's why gold-diggers keep on returning to that beach after all these years, and rightly so. Soul-searching is an endless quest, and as such, *Maxinquaye* is as endless a statement as it should be.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 988
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 5 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 5
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 3]
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
2/5
Sorry, I tried. I really, really tried. But Elvis Costello does nothing for me, and this album as a whole did not even interest me enough to make me want to write a complete review. It's not even that it's bad (sometimes it's interesting to explain *why* you think a record is not for you). It's just that, apart from very, very rare highlights towards the end ("Lipstick Vogue", "Night Rally" ), the music on *This Year's Model* is neither groundbreaking nor particularly well written.
For an album with such a reputation, I found the whole thing a bit tame, honestly (God, how downright *cheesy* those organ's 7th chords trimmings are sounding now). One quickly suspects that the critical sucess of this rockabilly rehash was just a fluke, Costello being just lucky enough to profit from the convenient coincidence of playing so-called "unpretentious" music at the exact same time punk surged. The problem is that, as unpretentions as the music is, it is neither powerful, nor sophisticated, nor subtle, nor anything else, to be frank (part from "Lipstick Vogue"'s conclusion maybe). And Costello's voice can be annoying at times, even though I admit it may become an acquired taste for some listeners.
As for the lyrics, they're fine overall, with some striking one-liners here and there (a lot of them about Elvis' jealous obsessions, which got me worried for his partner, to be honest). Yet most of the compositions are just too linear and predictable to seal the deal for me. They simply don't make me feel anything, and "lip service" won't be something you'll ever get for me here.
I always try to keep an open mind, but clearly, I don't see what the fuss was all about. What we have is more than competent musicianship, of course, even talent. But if you want to select a list of 1001 albums you should absolutely listen to, there are probably twice as many albums worthier of your time out there. Life's too short to waste it on stuff you consider bland. My loss, maybe. But that's the way it is for me.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 987
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 5
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 5
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 4 (including this one)]
Tom Waits
3/5
You see those low-life drunkards having their habits in your favorite bar downtown? Once in a while, you may happen to stumble upon one who is actually interesting, funny, and even surprisingly witty--all in all, a nice guy, if not a *totally* articulate one. With such good company, you can talk about anything without ever feeling any judgemental posture from the other side. Besides, the man is lucid enough to know he's anything but a role model, and he's not one to shy away from his own life mistakes. Which is refreshing. So if you're available, and in the right mood for this, you may elect to have a wild night out with the alcoholic daredevil, having all sorts of mishaps and adventures together as you crawl from one dive to the next. It's quite fun. The thing is, in the morning you probably won't remember much of what transpired the night before--and you might even regret having painted the whole town red, if only for that goddamn hangover you're having to put up with now. Oddly enough, this might not be the case with your new friend. Bump into him a few days later, and he'll remember everything that went down that night with a knowing smile. But the thing is, can you believe the guy? Can you?
If *this* was the effect intended by Tom Waits for *Nighthawks At The Diner*, it is an unmitigated success. Recorded in a studio, but with a live audience of friends and acquaintances Waits had invited for the occasion, the album's fundamental conceit nicely sums up its author's main paradox: loose and unhinged and uncensored on the surface, but--if you dig just a little deeper--far more in control than what he first lets on. This release has the *feel* of a genuine live album recorded in a smoky jazz club--with a real audience hooting, clapping and laughing at Waits' wisecracks between the numbers. But to a certain extent, the whole thing is only a simulacrum, the auditory equivalent of a WWF tournament. It's hard to *believe* in it, just as it's hard to believe Waits was *genuinely* drunk during the performance, all actor-studio-level rants and inebriated stammerings aside. And even if Waits *was* under the influence, it's quite easy to tell how every slip of the tongue, every slur, ever mumble, were actually nothing but calculated moves, parts of an overall script Waits had in his head from the get-go. It's a great script, with chunks of it maybe improvised on the spot. But it's a script nonetheless.
All of this ties in with general assessments many have made about Waits. According to his unofficial biographer Barney Hoskyns, \"Tom Waits is as much of a character created for his fans as it is a real man\", his \"persona of the skid-row boho/hobo\" being an \"ongoing experiment in performance art\". Admittedly, the line between performance and authenticity might be a little thinner than this somewhat simplistic explanation. Mick Brown, a music journalist from Sounds who interviewed Waits in the mid-1970s, noted that Waits \"had immersed himself in this character to the point where it wasn't an act and had become an identity\". But whatever the case may be, such a fundamental amibiguity is discernible in *Nighthawks At The Diner*.
On the double album's first two sides, this trick, this illusion--if indeed there is one--holds up with some great effects overall. It's easy to suspend your disbelief while listening to Waits making an \"Emotional Weather Report\" about his sad mental state (and his appartment's state of disarray, too!). As it's easy enjoying his performance when he narrates a drunken road trip \"On A Foggy Night\". Those early cuts are more spoken than sung, yet the words are so good, the Bukowskian writing so rich and detailed, that it's easy to feel as exhilarated as the audience heard on tape. Funny lines abound, in and between the songs (the rant about masturbation is priceless, and so is the one about the suspicious food found in the nightly LA joints making up the scenery of most of the songs). After those singspeak cuts, \"Eggs And Sausage\" and \"Better Off Without A Wife\" show a slightly different side of Waits, one where he actually *sings*, and his vocals are just perfect, both raucous and melodic. The parts where he skats even prove he could have been just as impressive as a singer performing with a clear voice, even though it's an avenue he never really explored during his career. \"Eggs And Sausages\" is also very endearing as a composition, with its chorus made of the different food orders overheard by the narrator as he sits alone in the titular diner, having passing thoughts about the lover who left him. Of course, all of this--album title included--is a wink to Edward Hopper's painting *Nighthawks*, a wink also obvious in the album's centerpiece \"Nighthawks Postcards (From Easy Street)\", a long hard-bop dirge filled with memorable snippets and wasted bravura moments. The only difference is that the legendary mystery displayed by the painting is here replaced with a sense of ironic burlesque. The whole project is a parody in that sense, too, even without the fake concert affair.
Unfortunately, by the second record in the lot, the whole thing blurs into a formless ensemble of less striking cuts, just like those memories of yesterday's wild night that don't make a shred of sense on the next day. The turns of phrase that you thought were so witty on the first songs start to wear a little thin. Waits' puns about the \"cracks of dawn\" shedding some unflattery light on the titular nighthawks are hilarious at first, but when you hear two or three variations of them on side 3 or 4, they becomes a little too familiar--as is the man's weird drunken obsession for \"swizzle sticks\" and \"naugahyde\" covering stools and armchairs. Make no mistake, the writing is still stellar on many moments. But it's hard to decide whether its obfuscating obliqueness on a whole is the result of it having drunkard narrators, or it just being penned by a lazy author who didn't even bother to organize the admittedly beautiful mess in his mind. Likewise, the jazz band behind is a more-than-competent crew. But nothing that they're playing is really standing out. Everything is flattened; piano, saxophone and upright bass solos come and go without leaving much of an impression; and if the groove sounds good, it still remains performative, unoriginal and safe throughout. There's one notable exception when the sax player expertly imitates the sound of a car whizzing by the narrator on a highway at some point. But such moments are too short, too far, and too few.
The real last track stands out, though. It's a cover of country singer Tommy Faile's ghost story \"Big Joe And Phantom 309\", the sort of spooky tale drunks will tell to each other at the very end of the night, just as their inebriation has turned them all to easily-swayed children. As such, it's a nice capper for the album, right before Waits gives credits to his musicians over an utimate instrumental piece. Yet as focused as this last effort is, musically and thematically speaking, this track comes too late to make up for all the meandering moments right before it. *Nighthawks At the Diner* remains an interesting listen overall. But as an *essential one*, or as an entry point into Tom Waits' oeuvre, it is probably far from being the most obvious choice. That being said, very few things are *obvious* when it comes to Waits. There are layers over layers in his body of work, and some might look a little too opaque or quizzical for certain listeners. Sometimes, you don't really have a choice deciding who you are going to have fun with at the bar. You take the first tipsy guy or gal standing in front of the counter, and roll with it.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 986
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 5
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 6 (including this one, even though chances are that a *different* Tom Waits release will make the final cut)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 4]
Suede
3/5
Can't really write a decent review about this one. During the early nineties, I was into American indie/grunge acts, but I was also interested in former eras, such as the punk movement and sixties pop. And I could also enjoy some britpop acts. But not *this one*. The first time I listened to Suede, I found their mannerisms pompous, and I did so not only for *Dog Man Star*, but starting from this band's debut album, actually (when the second one was panned, it was as if everyone was stating what was obvious to me from the get-go).
Of course, at the time, I didn't know a lot about Bowie and The Smiths, who were *huge* influences on Suede. Since those days, I have learnt to appreciate those very influences (especially Bowie). But the irony is that, because of what I know now, it's *all the more difficult for me* to enjoy Suede these days. When I listen to them *now*, I just can't help thinking they're still a somewhat bland variation of earlier, far more impressive acts. With very awkward and dated production values, to boot (some of the effects on the vocals and guitars are just plain horrible). And I'm *still* a little annoyed by the overall mannerisms, mostly because I find a lot of them stale, shallow and irritating (Anderson's overkill *outré* voice is grating to the extreme sometimes, even on one of the few decently written songs from the album, such as Animal Nitrate for instance). Suede are just not as fresh and exciting as the models they are desperately imitating. And because of all this, I can't manage to find any *substance* in the songs of this record, as hard as I've tried.
Oh, I know that Bowie himself once praised them. But it won't even make me change my mind. When Bowie praised Suede, he wasn't exactly in the best creative spot of his career anyway. Maybe it was just a way for him to send all those winks Suede had made to him back to them. At the time I didn't care. Now, I do, somehow. But even Bowie could make blunders (he actually made a lot of them in the later parts of his career). And this brings me back to the original influences informing this album. Sorry, but I'm always gonna prefer the originals...
How ironic. It seems that Suede were never there in the right time for me. I know they've been critically reevaluated, and they probably at least deserve some of the *current* praise for going against the grain during their heyday. But it's still impossible for me to genuinely appreciate their music. Sometimes, it's as simple as that.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 985
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 5
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 6
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 4
Albums on which I feel my judgment is muddled by my past forays into specific genres instead of others: 1 (including this one)
Technically, I shouldn't even be grading those records. But *some* might end up on my final list for their somewhat *objective* cultural importance, who knows?]
Bob Dylan
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 984
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 6 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 6
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 4
Albums on which I feel my judgment is muddled by my past forays into specific genres instead of others (some might end up on my final list if they're culturally important): 1]
Van Morrison
4/5
Not much to say about this one. After *Astral Weeks* proved itself too complex for the charts and general audience of his time, Van Morrison chose a far more direct approach, adding a *huge* chunk of rhythm'n'blues to the formula. And to help him attain his goals, he found a stellar backing band in the Catskills, after following Dylan's steps over there (for a relatively small town, Woodstock seemed to have quite an impressive scene, which did not wait for that famous festival to thrive). Such a backing band behind Van Morrisson brings *a lot* to *Moondance*. The saxophone section--tenor, alto and soprano--is just doing an extraordinary job, all lush and sinuous, especially on the most memorable songs ("And It Stoned Me", "Caravan" , "Into The Mystic", "Glad Tidings", "Brand New Day"). Great performances overall. As for Van Morrison's voice, recorded in live takes throughout, it is technically perfect. You really believe he is a genuine American r'n'b singer. Well, except maybe on the title track, but it's probably because that cut is a little underwhelming compared to the rest, sounding more like a jazz parody executed in a second-tier club than a genuinely interesting cut (putting this song in slot number 2 was not the brightest idea in my honest opinion).
That being said, even some of the least immediately striking cuts have something going for them. Case in point: "Everyone", with its clavinette and flutes heavily drawing on Irish folk influences. And lyrically, the songs are very interesting and personal, displaying a sort of down-to-earth mysticism about love, nature and mundane experiences. Such a thing doesn't even seem possible on paper. Yet Van Morrisson pulls it off effortlessly.
The only reason I'm not giving this album five stars is because as far as I like albums with a single intent in mind, this one is just a little too one-note for me. After *Astral Weeks*' commercial failure, and from this point onwards, Van Morrisson would only take calculated risks, for better or for worse. And here, it shows. But even with that minor grudge in mind, this is definitely an album to listen to before you die.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 983
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 7 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 6
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 4
Albums on which I feel my judgment is muddled by my past forays into specific genres instead of others (some might end up on my final list if they're culturally important): 1]
The Streets
4/5
As far as concept albums go, this one's a keeper. And it's a U.K. rap/grime concept album, to boot! My only minor reproach is that there are a few underwhelming tracks where the overall narrative takes over the music itself in terms of priority, especially towards the middle. But fortunately, this is not the case on the records' highlights. "It Was Supposed To Be Easy" is a striking opener, Mike Skinner's heavily accented yet clear-as-a-bell lad's voice doing wonders to set up the table and introduce the story *in media res*, as in most great short stories or novels. "Blinded By The Lights" is one of the best depictions of a drunken night ever penned this side of the pond--it's slow pace swaying you into the narrator's hallucinory state of mind as if you were there in that sleazy club with him. Far more straightforward, "Fit But You Know It" is a snarly hit with a catchy rock guitar sample. And "Dry Your Eyes" and "Empty Cans" end the yarn with the right amount of emotions, the latter even serving as a morality tale of sorts about free will and redemption. The strings arrangements on those two last tracks are very subtle, too. They're not strings for Hollywood stuff, they're strings for Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. Which is fitting here.
As usual for those five or four-star reviews, I won't add much to what has already been written out there about this particular album. I even fear that I've spoiled the story a little with what I've written so far. But beyond that spoiler alert, what I found really interesting about this sophomore effort is that it was a different way for Skinner to depict that working class world he had already brilliantly explored in *Original Pirate Material*. Here this world of lads, lasses and geezers is viewed through the lens of a particular narrative, and such storytelling ambition often feels earned. Because Skinner keeps it sharp and simple, right as it should be given the topics he chose to deal with. It's a story about characters having mundane challenges in their social and love lives--characters having money issues, passing deluded thoughts and self-denial phases, not to mention addictions that might turn from a minor problem to a major one if left unchecked. But mostly, it's a story about simple folks. It's a rap opera, yes. But it's a rap opera about us as a people.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 982
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 8 (including this one--but only on the condition there's room for *Original Pirate Material*, too)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 6
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 4
Albums on which I feel my judgment is muddled by my past forays into specific genres instead of others (some might end up on my final list if they're culturally important): 1]
Brian Eno
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic.
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 981
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 9 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 6
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 4
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list if they're culturally important): 1]
The Verve
1/5
Sorry, I tried. I really, really tried. But The Verve does nothing for me, and this album is no exception. Nothing in *A Northern Soul* is groundbreaking or particularly well written, and the songs are just too linear and predictable to seal the deal for me. This... stuff simply doesn't make me feel anything. "How long will I run for?," Ashcroft complains during the opener. Too long, probably. And this here is only a first self-indulgent, lengthy dirge among many other ones on the album (all of them, actually?). That some people in here dare compare this excruciatingly boring record to Radiohead's *OK Computer* is baffling to me. Are people this tone-deaf??? I get that listeners have different tastes when it comes to harmony, composition and song structures. But c'mon, you gotta be kidding me here, nothing in this album is lively or truly dynamic. Nothing stands out. It's just a big blurry cloud throughout. Chords don't have a shred of originality in them, neither do most of the hackneyed dad-rock arrangements,. Lyrics have no substance, and vocal melodic lines are not interesting at all--they meander without anything catching your ear (and their delivery is a bit ridiculous sometimes, even though I have nothing against Ashcroft's voice per se). "This Is Music", The Verve tells us. Uh, OK. But is this *good* music? No. It's just very lame, pop-wise. And neither is it original production-wise. I'd rather listen to a drone from one of Sunn O)))'s lesser records for the rest of my life instead of having to listen to this again. At least a long guitar drone would provide an interesting atmosphere in the room...
I'm pretty sure The Verve were themselves aware of their lack of skills as songwriters from the get-go. It's no surprise they used a sample from an orchestral version of an old Rolling Stones staple song on their next record to pen their only real hit, "Bittersweet Symphony". They *knew* they didn't have enough inspiration in them to create a song that would be both catchy and genuinely moving. So they had to steal a good idea somewhere to make it happen.
I very rarely say that a band is overrated, because I know music is first and foremost a subjective thing. Yet here, I'm tempted to say so, to be honest. I always try to keep an open mind, but clearly, I don't see what the fuss is all about with The Verve. What we have with them is more than competent musicianship, of course. As in 'they can play instruments'. But if you want to select a list of 1001 albums you should absolutely listen to, surely there are twice as many albums worthier of your time out there. Life's too short to waste it on stuff you consider bland.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 980
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 9
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 6
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 5 (including this one)
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list if they're culturally important): 1]
George Michael
2/5
"Listen Without Prejudice"
Well, I just did. But apart from two songs, "Freedom! '90"--a soulful hit displaying as many catchy vocal hooks in a single track as ones found in Tame Impala's whole discography--and "Cowboy And Angels"--a lush synth-jazz cut about unrequited love with Bladerunner-like atmospherics--yes, apart from those two singles, this album can't hold your attention the way great albums do. Admittedly, its general sound holds out surprisingly well given the genre and era that spawned it: as a characteristically late 80s/early 90s production, the whole thing is relatively subtle at least. Yet apart from the two singles quoted up there, the rest--mostly comprised of ballads--doesn't have much to offer in terms of thrills or interesting emotions to go through. It's well-produced "elevator music". But it's elevator music nonetheless.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 979
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 9
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 6
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 6 (including this one)
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list if they're culturally important): 1]
Elvis Presley
3/5
Sure, this first stereo album by Presley is exquisitely recorded, especially for the year it was released. And Elvis has never sung better than on this one, apparently, adding range and nuance to his performance, hereby displaying vocal chops that were nowhere to be found in his earlier mono records. But the problem lies elsewhere: does anyone really think the songs on this record are superior to the all-time hits Elvis Presley had released during the fifties? Weren't the rougher vocals and more barebone instrumentation dating from those first singles and albums far more compelling than this mellow stuff here? Sure, it's OK to broaden your horizons... But even the cover of "Fever" feels lackluster compared to the earlier versions of that classic gem of a song. No wonder John Lennon said that Elvis symbolically died when he went to the army. Lennon was no deaf idiot, he knew that technically, there was nothing wrong with this album. But the spirit of early rock'n' roll was gone, and you couldn't fool sincere fans of the genre like him.
Admittedly, there are a few bluesy cuts towards the end of that record that still make it an interesting listen for folks interested in that period. But there's also too much pop/doo-wop stuff watering down that early rock'n'roll dimension kids like Lennon longed for in the first place. Besides, the album is also somewhat obnoxious for being partly a PR plan from manager Colonel Parker so as to artificially (and successfully) revive the Elvis craze. After spending two years in the U.S. Army in Germany, Presley sure worked his ass off on that one to make sure his comeback would be worthwhile. But does that mean that the result should be a mandatory listen? Hard work is not always fruitful. And more worryingly, it seems that Dimery and the writers from "1001 Albums..." are often under the spell of promotional plans dating from way back when in their selections of so-called "important" records. And those PR plans shouldn't have a bearing on their critical assessment today. For chrissake, this stint here is the mother of all the PR shenanigans that followed, and it's a sixty-plus-year-old stint, to boot. Good music (or even "bad' music, for that matter) has nothing to do with this. This here is marketing, first and foremost. That people fell for it sixty years ago is understandable. But today???
There's another issue die-hard Elvis fans never consider when they put forward albums like these. Nobody ever thinks of the younger generations who might wonder why Elvis was such a phenomenon for their grandparents or great-grandparents. If you exposed them first to this album, they wouldn't get the picture at all. There are at least two or three records before it, during the fifties, that make a finer job explaining the brush strokes of the phenomenon that Presley was. And some of those records also have hidden gems that are far more intriguing or evocative than any of the stuff in *Elvis Is Back!*. Take "Blue Moon", on the very first LP, for instance.
Finally, no one should forget that Presley also represented the "white" face of a black culture largely left in the margins of the "mainstream" at the time. And that, as such, his inclusion on this list should *at least* be complemented by the inclusion of lesser-known African-American artists. In a way, I'm delighted that this album has been suggested to me, because it's given me the occasion to discover who the first performer of "Fever" was. His name was Little Willie John, he's a half-forgotten figure, and yet his performance of the song was just brilliant, as brilliant as the one by Peggy Lee (and far more brilliant than the one on *Elvis Is Back!*). And the most important point comes now: anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating things when I (along many others) state that Elvis is still a symptom of the plundering of black culture should consider the following nugget: when you type "Fever" on Spotify, many versions of the song appear, by Peggy Lee, Elvis Presley, Michael Bublé and the likes... Yet Little Willie John's original version does not, at least not before dozens of other suggestions. If *this* is not a symbol of cultural appropriation, I don't know what is.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 978
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 9
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 6
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 7 (including this one--unless I have room for it, but it'd be for its historical importance only, and it will be at the very bottom of my list).
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list if they're culturally important): 1]
Underworld
3/5
Nice progressive house/techno from the nineties. Not sure I have much to say about this, though. The thing is, I can't help feeling the writers of this 1001 albums list are a little misguided when it comes to niche genres or anything outside the realm of mainstream pop/rock. It's not that Underworld was an act unworthy of notice. It's just that, if you take into consideration the IDM scene of the last three decades, stuff from the Warp roster--to take one precise example--is criminally underrepresented by Dimery and the likes. I've seen the whole list of those 1001 albums. Where are the great records by Boards Of Canada, LFO, Aphex Twin or Oneohtrix Point Never? And even if you go beyond the realm of dance music for a broader take on electronica, there's still bands like Broadcast, PVT or Flying Lotus to take into account. And this is just from one label here. In my view, some of the earliest acts I've just quoted are sounding less dated than Underworld, and I'm pretty sure they were far more influent.
The problem with forward-looking genres such as techno or house music is that, ironically, they quickly become a thing of the past. It takes a very indiosyncratic vision and a keen sense of originality to escape such a trap. Not everyone can be as prophetic as Kraftwerk, with their layers of self-irony, gracious minimalistic arrangements, and songwriting chops infused here and there. As I said, Underworld was a very decent act. "Pearl's Gate", for example, is a well-crafted drum'n'bass cut. "Blueski" is interesting as an ambient experimental loop. "Stagger", with its pop inclinations, is a nice closer. And in expanded editions, you have the iconic keyboard-riff-meets-boom-boom-extravaganza of "Born Slippy" (of *Trainspotting* fame).
But where would I listen to any of these songs now? In a club? Nah, not groovy enough. In a dance music festival or a rave party? Nope, those "steady beats"--as one reviewer named them to describe half of those tracks--sound *way too steady* for both today. And here's the most important question: would you listen to this in your living room? No way for me, and I'm pretty sure that's the same answer for 90% of y'all. I can listen to groundbreaking electronic acts from 808 State to Jlin from an armchair and not feel ridiculous at all. But I'd feel a little daft having my speakers blare Underworld in my living room to be honest. Maybe in 1996 I wouldn't have. But in 2022?
On a sidenote: Karl Hyde's daughter is playing in the amazing Black Country New Road these days. It's nice to see that one of the Underworld founders has passed the torch of his passion for music to his offspring, even if said daughter is using such passion for a radically different genre. The British scene has always been a great place for talented musicians, and since the last five years or so, it's been incredibly lively (especially now that we're finally out of that awful "landfill indie" era). But the last edition of *1001 Albums To Listen To Before You Die* was published in 2017 and it direly needs to be updated now, in my humble opinion. If I had a say, I guess I would take out Underworld to make room for the next generation. And I'm pretty sure Karl Hyde himself wouldn't hold too much of a grudge against me considering *some* of my choices. :)
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 977
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 9
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 6
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 8 (including this one).
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list if they're culturally important): 1]
Frank Zappa
4/5
Apart from his reputation as an extravagant, sometimes difficult rock artist with free-jazz and musique concrète proclivities, I didn't know the first thing about Frank Zappa. This record was a surprisingly pleasant listen. I've browsed through other Zappa album deemed important by certain critics and fans, and now I know that immediate pleasure is not the first thing that comes to my mind with these high-conceptual and/or tongue-in-cheek recordings. *Freak Out*, by the Mothers of Invention, is the only one of those records I found genuinely enjoyable on first listens. The rest is really, *really* for the fans, I think.
Two things stand out in *Hot Rats*, though. As in *Freak Out*, the lush arrangements provided by horn and reed sections is a huge plus. But in *Hot Rats*, there's something that not even *Freak Out* can boast about, and it's the hard grooves. Some drums are in a funky mode that's particularly lively, almost krautrock in their intent. And when they don't, they swing in a slower yet as efficient fashion, hereby supporting jazzier cuts that are equally satisfying. I barely noticed all the tracks were all instrumental except one sung by Captain Beefheart. I was too much taken in the soundscapes.
Obviously, I'm a rookie when it comes to Zappa, so I can't really judge this effort in a broader context. But I understand he's an acquired taste anyway, and you can't rush things with an artist as productive and unhinged as him. Let's just say that *Hot Rats* does sound like a promising entry point, at least, just like *Freak Out* was on a more classic-rock, partly parodic, mode.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 975
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 9
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 7 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 8
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list but it's because I recognize how culturally important they are): 1]
Deep Purple
4/5
Four stars
An all-time classic, and an album which still holds its own many years after it was released. As is usually the case with those classic albums, I won't write a full-blown review here given that others have already written wonderful stuff about them and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. *Deep Purple In Rock* is just a timeless gem for anyone who has even a remote interest in hard rock. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 974
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 10 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 7
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 8
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list but it's because I recognize how culturally important they are): 1]
Dr. Dre
3/5
Pass on this one. I know it's a landmark album for gangsta rap, and that it has a *huge* cultural importance for hip hop at large, and that its influence turning P-Funk into G-funk was enormous. Without this album, there's no *Doggystyle* by Snoop or the best Cypress Hill records, and that would be a damn shame. But somehow I always thought that *2001* was a far more pleasant and bouncier listen overall (the hits on that next record are a huge plus, too, and I can't see any of those catchy hits on *The Chronic*, honestly). Purists will probably tell me I'm a fool here, but I don't care. As a reply, I could argue that "conscious" rap from before that album did suffer a lot from the advent of that sort of sound, and that it was not necessarily good news for everyone at the time. In a way, I'd be be *more of a purist* than any of those contradictors would be then or now. And remember: nobody here would necessarily be right or wrong in their different stances, as it is most often the case with music anyway.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 973
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 10
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 7
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 8
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list but it's because I recognize how culturally important they are): 2 (including this one)]
Genesis
2/5
"The lyrics have since been praised [...], but the band later said they did not gel well with the music and made the piece complicated for the sake of being so". This quote is from Wikipedia's page on the album. It is only about one song, but it could as well be applied to the record. Heck, it could probably be applied to Peter-Gabriel-era Genesis as a whole. But to stick to *Sell England By The Pound*, it's interesting to know that, by their own admission, the majority of the band members consider this album as a failure of sorts (a point confirmed many times on the Wikipedia page). And this is probably because, apart from very, very rare highlights here and there (most of them in "Firth Of Forth"), the music on *Selling England By The Pound* is not particularly well-written. Sure, it sounds complex and convoluted, but a single listen is enough to tell that the band actually just pasted different parts or jams together so as to create their overlong songs. This here is the very definition of bad writing and logically, the end result is horrendous in its lack of cohesion. As for the recording itself, it has aged very, very poorly. The flute solos sound a little cheesy, but they're not the worst part, the worst part being those terrible synth solos sticking out like sore thumbs in some of the most boring passages ever written in the prog-rock genre. Stupendous how so many people had such bad taste when they made this album a commercial success at the time.
When it comes to vocals on the album, they are more than decent overall. However Gabriel's melodic lines are often not catchy or memorable enough to bring that cohesive fabric that's so direly needed here. Lyrics are fine, with many striking one-liners here and there (the last line of The Battle Of Epping Forest is indeed an interesting anti-climax). Yet most of the songs are too clunky to seal the deal for me. They simply don't make me feel anything. I always try to keep an open mind, but clearly, I don't see what the fuss is all about here. What we have is more than competent musicianship, of course, even talent. But if you want to select a list of 1001 albums you should absolutely listen to, there are probably twice as many albums worthier of your time out there. Life's too short to waste it on stuff you consider a little ridiculous. My loss, maybe. But that's the way it is for me.
[Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 972
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 10
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 7
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 9 (including this one)
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list but it's because I recognize how culturally important they are): 2]
The Byrds
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic and a personal favorite of mine.
Up to 1966, The Byrds had enough assets in their game to consider they had already established the perfect formula in their very first LP, *Hey Mr Tambourine Man*, and that there was no reason for them to veer off-course three albums in after the success they had. That formula is that cliché most listeners still associate The Byrds with today: use Dylan's shortest, catchiest tunes, cover them by adding melifluous vocal harmonies that are complete u-turns from Bob's rough, nasal timbre and inflexions, wait for those covers to hit the charts, and then cash in. Of course, you could still replace Dylan with Pete Seeger and The Bible (see "Turn, Turn, Turn"), traditional tunes or everything in between. But in its core, the formula didn't change a bit. Not that individual members of the band were frauds and impostors as they performed those skilled transformations. Coming themselves from the US folk scene, they had learned how to translate those folk staples into a more pop-oriented language, but thanks to their original background, they could also instill those rendition with a much-needed sense of authenticity. Both serious and commercial, folk and rock, The Byrds were at the crossroads of everything the sixties were all about. With Gene Clark, The Byrds also had a main songwriter in their ranks, admittedly, and the covers were interspersed with originals, too. But even if Clark seemed like a competent songwriter in his own right, this didn't fool audiences. As influential as The Byrds were on the overall sound of the mid-sixties, they were first and foremost seen as performers. And it was never a problem.
The sixties going as fast as they did, it soon became one, however. Especially when Gene Clark left the boat at the exact moment when true authorship started to become a huge plus for pop audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. After Clark's departure, Jim McGuinn and David Crosby had no choice but to step in and increase their songwriting output. That some reviewers have considered that the two guitarists were still in the process of learning the ropes of that trade in 1966 is a little baffling given how the originals on this album could easily be deemed superior to most of Clark's endeavors. The original songs shine throughout the whole LP, leaving many earworms in their trail, from enticing opener "5D" to the John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar-inspired "Eight Miles High", a cryptic track (partly written by Clark before he left) about soft drugs--a tune logically banned on the radio--often quoted as the the first psychedelic rock song ever penned.
*Psychedelic*. The word is like that magic carpet on which most of the band members sit Ali-Baba style on the album's front visual. It is a promise to fly to outer worlds of the mind, a promise that's also in keeping with the Sci-Fi themes in some of the songs. "Mr Spaceman" is for instance a tongue-in-cheek country-rock pastiche of sorts referring alien abductions. And the fifth dimension of "5D" is one inspired by Einstein's foray into theoretical physics, not lysergic drugs, contrary to audience's expectations at the time. But such misunderstanding is not necessarily a betrayal of what the song--and the album to which it inspired the name--is all about. Open your mind. Feel that awe (and possible terror, too) when the gates of perceptions are blown far wide. As hackneyed and cliché that philosophy may read today, what's impressive about the album is how fresh, effortless and spontaneous the results of that preliminary foray into a new world appear today.
That pop freshness is partly explained by the fact that the Byrds were instigators of that psychedelic trend, and not mere followers of it (the rougher and more garage-oriented version of that trend exemplified by The 13th Floor Elevators came out in the exact same year, for instance). And like many other instigators they were not necessarily understood as they should have been. Short yet insistent bridges and breaks with reverse-tape-recorded guitars, raga-like flourishes and other sitar-inspired riffs abound during the record. The move was challenging for general audiences, yet The Byrds took their chances, catching some fans and even music critics off-guard. The covers were also more interesting and riskier than anything that the band had ever attempted (no Dylan anthem to be heard there). It's a risk that paid off, generally speaking, and nowhere did it pay off more brightly than on that mysterious musical rendition of a poem by Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet, a quite obscure reference for western audiences. "I Come And Stand At Every Door" is indeed as hypnotic as it is slowly powerful, yet never does it come off as a pretention dirge, so beautiful its intricate harmonies are. At its core, it is a miniature lesson in patience and meditation, one that Crosby would use to great effects again in his own song "Everybody's Been Burned" on the next album. But it's mostly one of many tracks on the album that manages to transcend tts sixties psychedelic context to become something a little more timeless than that, and one can only regret Crosby didn't *really* explore this trend further later on.
Obviously, opening your mind also encourages a spaghetti-at-the-wall approach. Even as recently as the last ten years or so, some critics have indeed complained of the topsy-turvy nature of this record marking the Byrds' transition from folk-pop translators of Dylan's repertoire into psychedelic adventurers. But complaining about any lack of cohesiveness here might be missing the point, since the twists and turns in the tracklisitng are part of the appeal here devised for receptive souls tired by standardized listening (and thinking). It's the sort of standard The Byrds had actually set upon themselves during the earliest part of their career, and one can guess they were tired, too. Fortunately, it didn't take them long to find a way out. After *Fifth Dimension*, The Byrds would even use what they had learned from the recording of this preliminary masterpiece to great effects on their two next records, often heralded as their very best. I sometimes wonder why those records, which are a bit of a mess themselves, are never judged as harshly as *Fifth Dimension*. Maybe it's because it takes *more* time for certain minds to open, and that contemporary critical reaction only caught up with The Byrds once Crosby was out of the picture, namely with *The Notorious Byrd Brothers*, leaving the two previous LPs with a more "difficult" critical reputation. But the magic carpet started flying here, with this very album. And to this mind also tired of standardized thinking, it has never flown more beautifully than when it soared like this to the lysergic skies, and beyond them.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 971
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 11 (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 7
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 9
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list but it's because I recognize how culturally important they are): 2]
The Who
5/5
Four stars and a half.
An all-time classic, and an album which still holds its own many years after it was released. Highlights abound throughout this record, from that iconic opening played on synths on "Baba O'Riley" to the poignant, immediately gripping and memorable "Behind Blue Eyes", followed by epic closer "Won't Get Fooled Again". Like many classic albums by The Who, the whole might be just *a little* too grandiose and "over the top" to be digested in one single take, but this here is a very minor complaint. Just press pause once in a while to catch your breath, and then head right back into it. There are enough wonders and treasures inside this record to make it a worthwhile experience.
As is usually the case with those classic albums, I won't write a full-blown review here given that others have already written wonderful stuff about them and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. *Who's Next* is just a timeless gem for anyone who has even a remote interest in The Who. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p. if you haven't already.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 970
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 12 (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 7
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 9
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list but it's because I recognize how culturally important they are): 2
Wild Beasts
1/5
What. A. Bore. Fest.
A lot of things from the naughts won't age gracefully, you can bet your boots on it. And this very minor band (who happened to be at the right place in the right time, Mercury Prize or not) perfectly exemplify why this period was so far up its own ass that a lot of folks couldn't even *get* how good music actually worked. Fortunately, things have gotten far better now (and it's exactly *why* this list of 1001 albums needs to be updated a.s.a.p.)
As many other reviewers here, I found the falsetto voice quite annoying or grating, but it's not even the main issue I'm having with Wild Beast. The real problem with this very pretentious band--whose intended sound should supposedly draw a little on "pop music" formulas to make any sort of sense--is that they can't write choruses. CHORUSES, guys! Something human, energetic or simply a little inviting to grab your attention, so as to bear with your all-too-precious cabaret-like dirges and over-the-top theatrical bullshit in between. Even blokes like Morrissey from The Smiths, or Matthew Bellamy from Muse (whose comparatively "wimpy" melodic lines could somehow be linked to what Wild Beasts' singer is attempting to do here) understood the sheer importance of that pivotal ingredient. C.H.O.R.U.S.E.S. Bear in mind that I mentioned Bellamy and Morrissey, and not Bowie, whose memory shouldn't even be associated with such a lame band, contrary to what I've read somewhere here. And please, oh please, don't tell me Wild Beasts avoided good choruses so as to not compromise their "artistic vision" or something. No, clearly, they couldn't write anything catchy melody-wise, it's so obvious when you're listening to this terrible, terrible album.
The rhythm section is telling a different story, though. Drums and bass interactions are quite brilliant throughout this album, helped by decent guitar licks. But unless you're in certain genres (electronic music, jazz, really *experimental* rock or post-rock), you can't build good songs when only *this* is decent in your compositions. And you certainly can't build any good albums. This here is a lesson in *bad songwriting*. May it be a cautionary tale in the foreseeable future for any young band wishing to play in that late-naughts genre of dreampop/indie pop, if ever it comes back in style. But to be honest, I'm just hoping this day actually never ever happens. It's always a good idea to err on the safe side, kiddos. You've been warned!
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 969
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 12
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 7
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 10 (including this one, especially this one!!!!!)
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list but it's because I recognize how culturally important they are): 2
Fleetwood Mac
5/5
Four stars and a half.
An all-time classic, and an album which still holds its own many years after it was released. Of course, it's a double album, so it's sprawling and lacking cohesion somehow. But the association of Lindsey Buckingham's sonic experimentations with Stevie Nicks or Christine McVie's pop stunners is an irresistible ticket, and one of Fleetwood Mac's most interesting records, right after the incredible artistic and commercial success that *Rumours* was. It's a little odd to think this album was released in the same years punk was proving its influence would have to be taken into account from now on (even as they were a hit machine, Fleetwood Mac was also a little anachronistic in their heyday). But in a way, it *also* makes sense that *Tusk* should be released in the same year as The Clash's *London Calling*, for instance. The relationships between the band members had become notoriously chaotic and strained, drugs and booze were a significant part of the album's budget, and Buckingham's songs proved he wanted to explore a more *abrasive* side of things. As a result of this particular "energy", this record goes over all the place, like the needle of a compass maniacally turning on itself. *Tusk* might not be a punk album sonically speaking. But its "spirit" is not so far off that mark.
As is usually the case with those classic albums, I won't write a full-blown review here given that others have already written wonderful stuff about them and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. *Tusk* is just a timeless gem for anyone who has even a remote interest in Fleetwood Mac. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p. if you haven't already.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 968
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 13 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 7
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 10
Living Colour
2/5
God, this didn't age well at all. The overall sound (gated drums, clean distortion on guitars, reverbed vocals...) is everything you can criticize about the eighties, and the crossover fusion compositions are hackneyed and cliché. That's too bad, because the socially conscious lyrics are very interesting. But the music is just awful.
During those years, hip hop was starting to become what Public Enemy's Chuck D named as the "Black CNN". Of course, Living Colour were not so far from that objective themselves when it comes to their lyrics. But If you want to feel the true power of political messages uttered during those days, coupled with powerful sounds of Black America looking for true emancipation (even if some of those hip hop sounds also admittedly sound a little dated today), go to Public Enemy, BDP, the Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy, The Goats and other bands like this instead.
And if really you want to delve further into rock-funk-rap crossover landmark albums with a political agenda, maybe go a few years later, when the genre was finally out of its awkward infancy with stuff like Rage Against the Machine or Body Count. You can't blame Living Colour from trying to open doors that had not been opened before (apart by Parliament/Funkadelic, maybe) But sometimes, beginnings are not the most interesting moments of an overall story...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 967
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 13
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 7
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 11 (including this one)
Faust
4/5
Four stars
An album which still holds its own many years after it was released, as bizarre (and wonderful) as it is, and an essential listen for anyone interested in experimental or groundbreaking music from the seventies. The only problem is that, contrary to other important names in that genre and era (Can obviously comes to mind here), it's not always an easy listen when you're going through this record in one take. One can even argue that some tracks are just weird just for the sake of being weird.
That being said, it would be unfair to dismiss the *whole* of Faust IV, since there are also many moments on it that are mesmerizing, groovy, fun, mysterious, and even strangely addictive after several listens. The variety of surprising textures and arrangements displayed is a huge plus, navigating between rock, jazz, proto-techno and proto-punk still sounding as fresh and original as it did in 1973, as many other reviewers here pointed out ("proto" means part of the record is oddly prophetic of sounds to come). If only for this, it's a worthwhile listen, even if you'll never come back to it again.
There's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. Faust IV is for anyone who has even a remote interest in krautrock. Heck, it even seems they invented the term themselves with the name of the first track. A sure sign it's an essential listen.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 966
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 14 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 7
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 11
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list but it's because I recognize how culturally important they are): 2
Mylo
4/5
Part RJD2, part Daft Punk, Part 2ManyDJs, part Boards of Canada, Mylo's sole album is solid entry overall in the IDM/house/electronica genre. The first two tracks are enticing and mellow, the ones that follow ("Muscle Cars", "Drop the Pressure" and "In My Arms") are absolute dancefloor bangers, and the rest of the album flows neatly from one song to the next. A special mention should go out to the title track, with its hilarious sample of a Christian fundamentalist's rant here turned on its head to become a celebration of everything that gathers us all here on this very app. That some music fans in this group can't understand that *Destroy Rock & Roll* is first and foremost an ironic title--or pretend not to understand it--is baffling to me (see some of those 1/5 reviews at the bottom of the page). Some people *do* have a very short attention span, don't they? Well... Listening to one album a day is an arduous process, i'll give them that... :)
That being said, that *one* review claiming this music is the sort of of stuff you hear while you're on hold on the phone might *also* have a point, and it made me laugh, I admit it. It's indeed probable that the album's beats and grooves sound a little dated to some ears today. Yet one could argue that there are still enough little touches here and there to make such sound timeless in its own special way (vocal samples, funky basslines, vocoder-tinged vocals, ambient layers, etc.). On a side note, it must also be pointed out that *Destroy Rock & Roll* foretold the mash-up craze of the mid-aughts. I don't know if we can *really* thank Mylo for that (that craze deflated pretty quickly, and this for good reasons), but there's no arguing he was ahead of the curve when he released that first album of his. *Destroy Rock & Roll*, might not be an essential listen for some, but to me it still deserves its four stars, if only for this--not to mention the fact that the record displays richness, inventivity and, most of all, a very solid list of tracks.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 966
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 14
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 8 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 11
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list but it's because I recognize how culturally important they are): 2
The Cramps
4/5
Their work, Lux once said, was “a rallying point for certain kinds of people to come together and for certain kinds of people to stay out.” The Cramps' singer take on what they do is as clear as it can get, and *Songs The Lord Taught Us* probably exemplifies this philosophy the best. With this first LP, they established the 'psychobilly' genre: an outré, deranged take on rockabilly attracting misfits, outcasts and other weirdoes gathering around tales of teenage werewolves, zombies and alien daddies abandoning their traumatized offspring on earth. Punk twisted those old 50s references into a pure carnival. And it's one many rock fans might be inclined to return to for years to come.
Musically, you can't expect anything more than barebones touches to honor the lyrical program: Poison Ivy's simple yet evocative guitar lines are earworms ready to suck on your brain like so many extraterrestrial leeches, Lux Interior's demented screeches and howls can have a mesmerizing effect on what's left of it, and the overall sound is just a messy mudpit. Is it *good* or interesting music? Maybe not. But sometimes atmosphere and moods are more important than compositions (and a lot of covers are here anyway, with "Fever" once again attracting most of the spotlight). As for the lyrics, they are outrageously funny. Just imagine that "Zombie Dance" mocking the so-called "normality" of self-righteous people, and you'll get the idea of how Ivy and Interior the rest of society at large. Maybe through their tales of the undead and other monsters, The Cramps just wanted to point out they were more alive than most people in their lives. If that's the case, it's a job well-done.
3 or 3.5 for the music. 5 for the lyrics and the overall artictic intent. Which rounds up to a 4 and an album you must listen to at least once in your life, even if you won't come back to it later one.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 965
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 15 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 8 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 11
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list but it's because I recognize how culturally important they are): 2
Adele
2/5
You and me baby
Baby me and you.
You and me together
Nothing is better
You and me baby
Baby me and you
You and me together
That was an error
Lalalalalala...
Admittedly, "Rolling In The Deep", the track opening this record, is an all-time masterpiece. And of course, Adele's got techinical chops when it comes to vocals, plus that warm deep voice. But almost everything that follows that hit single misses the point of what interesting music and lyrics should be about.
The music is often made of bland, unimaginative, generic pop ballads that get on you nerves as they follow one another. This album lasts 48 minutes but it feels like an hour and a half.
As for the lyrics... well, what more can I say than what I wrote at the start of this review? It's often quite embarrassing, to be honest.
I've also read in one review in here that this album is not part of the latest editions of *1001 Albums...*, that it was dropped. If that's the case, it's a damn shame it's still here on *this* list. And not because I don't like it, but because I signed for this thing thinking there would only be the albums from the last edition. (I only have the names of every album *once* part of that list, not the last edition, so I can't check if *21* is there or not myself).
Tally: I've temporarily lost count about the number of albums I've listened to up to now, but I've taken notes and it's there somewhere. And of course *21* will NOT make my final list. I mean, seriously, gals and guys... *This* can't be an "essential" listen, right?
Baby, me and you,
You and me baby
La la la la laaaaaaaaaa....
The Kinks
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic and a personal favorite of mine.
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 963
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 16 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 8
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 12
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list but it's because I recognize how culturally important they are): 2
Boston
2/5
If this album is on this list, why not include Journey or Europe in it while you're at it? I mean... "Don't Stop Believin'" and "The Final Countdown" are catchier than anything on Boston's first LP, aren't they? Oh, no, cheesy dad rock fans might argue, no, no, noooooooo, Boston wrote and performed better songs. Well, did they? Let's break this mothership down track by track :
More Than A Feeling: yep, OK, it's got a nice chorus, cool T-Rex-like handclappings and great guitar parts (rhythm and solo) going for it. I can't help feeling that what's good in the song was already a little dated in 1976, but who cares about that now? A convincing opener overall. 4/5
Peace Of Mind : I like the lyrics on this one, something about a dude stuck in a company on a lowlevel position knowing there's more to life than corporate competition (Tom Scholz worked for Polaroid on such a job before his rock dream came true). Yet harmonically speaking the whole thing's a little bland. Only the end is really worth it, with that guitar riff followed by those fifth (or third?) harmony overdubbed solos. But that moment is way too short. 2.5/5
Foreplay / Long Time : Maybe I was too hard when I gave that Genesis album a 2. That baroque, annoying rococo organ solo on the introduction of this song might have required some technical chops, yet it's still *very* embarrassing to listen to today. Not every prog-rock flourish from the 70s has aged gracefully, and here's a good example. What's also a bit daft is that when the song proper starts, it's a little too pedestrian melody and rhythm-wise to justify such delusions of grandeur before. By this point, the albums starts to feel very performative. "Takin' your time" doesn't mean *we* have to get lulled into sleep. The impressive vocal harmonies keep us awake, fortunately, and so do another instance of those T-Rex-like handclaps. Besides, the guitar solo at the end shreds hard, once again. But apart from that... 2, maybe 2.5/5
Rock and Roll: Excruciatingly boring song. As unoriginal as its title. Well, let me correct that: with a similar topic and title, Led Zeppelin knew how to create a visceral atmosphere, at least. Boston just can't: it's all very performative and there's nothing else to it. Fittingly, lyrics are uninteresting clichés, too. A dud. 0/5
Smokin': copy and paste the text up above and replace "rock'n'roll" with "rhythm'n blues" (quoted in the lyrics). 0/5
Hitch a Ride : Some Kinks-like flavours (circa Village Green Society) at the start of this one had raised my hopes a little... but no, false alarm, the same performative stuff occurs again and again after. And then, it becomes even worse than that! While I found them charming on the first side of this record, the T-Rex-like handclappings are now grating my ears as a cheap trick, I want to smash that organ into a thousand pieces (organ solos should be banned by the Geneva convention as weapons of mass destruction) and even the guitar solos make me want to roll my eyes right to the back of my head now. Jesus, this is SO cheesy!!!! 1/5
Something About You: A *very* "power pop" track. Which would be fine if the chords were just way more original. But maybe I'm too worn out by the barrage of bad taste before to care now... 1/5
Let Me Take You Home Tonight: Eagles territory. *yawn* 1/5
I can hear some folks going at me now: "but... but look at the technical wizardry! Scholz actually recorded most of this stuff in his basement!". Yeah, and? If it's to sound like something that was *not* recorded in a basement, why should I care if it was? "Lo-fi" recordings made decades later proved that they could have a charm on their own, far from any big studios artificial shenanigans. Maybe Scholz just missed the opportunity to be creative and fully ahead of the curve here, as good as he was technically speaking. In the end, imitating a big studio sound from a basement is nothing but this, a technical feat. It's not necessarily an *artistic* one.
But look guys, the *real* problem here is not the sound, it's the songs: *all of them* on side 2 are just freaking AWFUL. And you *know it*, for chrissake! Some of those five-stars reviews up there even sneakily admit it. Well, why did you give this album five stars, then??? An album is not an E.P. It's not a single either. And a good one might have weaker spots here and there, yet it still needs to be cohesively good overall.
I'm amazed at how many "perfect" reviews this record got on this app. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure the nostalgia factor came into play. Here's the thing, however: sometimes oldies are NOT goldies. So, c'mon, guys, get a grip on yourself. I can understand and even respect 3 or 4-star assessments. But 5 is way too high! Maybe it's time for some dad rock fans to let go of their bad faith. Music is subjective and all, I know that. But it's no reason for some to be in denial. At least to this point.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 962
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 16
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 8
Albums from the list I will *not* include in mine (as I think many others are more important): 13 (including this one)
Albums I might not be able to judge (some might end up on my final list but it's because I recognize how culturally important they are): 2
Gillian Welch
5/5
The Modern Lovers
4/5
Four stars
An all-time classic, and an album which still holds its own many years after it was released. As is usually the case with those classic albums, I won't write a full-blown review here given that others have already written wonderful stuff about them and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. "The Modern Lovers" is just a timeless gem for anyone who has even a remote interest in post Velvet-Underground rock, not to mention proto-punk, here recorded more than five years before the word " punk" reached our collective consciousness. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a third so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: another third
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last third
Albums I might not be the best person to judge, but that I will probably include in my final list: 2. That, I remember.
Yes
3/5
OK, this one is bookended by two nice tracks, "Roundabout", and "Heart Of The Sunrise", which somehow reminded me of The Mars Volta without the hard rock and post-hardcore influence, obviously. But just like with The Mars Volta, the line between genuinely propulsive or epic moments and technical self-indulgence for the sake of it is sometimes very thin. I can go "wow" and "meh" in the space of a few seconds. A very odd experience.
Besides, the rest of the album is *very* uneven, even by the usual seventies prog-rock standards naturally allowing a lot of space for digressions. Half of those tracks actually sound like interludes. And even the ones that don't seem to lead nowhere, except for the next track, which in its turn leads nowhere. I was amazed at the lack of *substance* displayed by this record. I've then read the band put it together in a quick way, with some members doing their stuff on the side before patching things together. Which explains a lot of what I'm feeling here.
I remember giving Genesis a 2/5 recently. Should I rate this record with the same number, or a 3? 2.5? Beats me. The cut-and-paste approach slightly works better on this one, because some of the jams are really impressive and lively (and the whole thing is not weighed down by the laughable pretentiousness of Peter Gabriel and co.). Yet I can't help feeling Yes is slightly overrated, even today.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 959
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 18
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 8
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 13
Albums I might not be the best person to judge, but that I *might* include in my final list: 3 (including this one)
The Band
4/5
Four stars
An all-time classic, and an album which still holds its own many years after it was released. Beyond the great songs this record can boast about, what's really interesting is how The Band's second effort also works like a subtle concept album about America's Civil War, here seen from the vantage point of ordinary folks. They should have called it *Across The Great Divide*, after the opener. But then again, The Band were never really good to find names, were they?
As is usually the case with those classic albums, I won't write a full-blown review here given that others have already written wonderful stuff about them and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. *The Band* is just a timeless gem for anyone who has even a remote interest in sixties and seventies music. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a third so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: another third
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last third
Albums I might not be the best person to judge, but that I will probably include in my final list: 3. That, I remember.
Quicksilver Messenger Service
3/5
A little less known today than other pivotal acts from the San Francisco Bay Area (Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead and the likes), Quicksilver Messenger Service sure had an idiosyncratc way of performing the sort of psychedelic folk rock those more famous acts were known for. And nowhere was it more idiosyncratic than on this live album, whose first side is devoted to a long trippy jam based on a Bo Diddley song. Good extended jams are always a question of dynamics and textures, and it is true that, in that area at least, QMS pulls it off quite gracefully. Some very short moments of the "How Do You Love" and "Which Do You Love" sections even inadvertently foretell the great experimentations on rhythm and harmonies that Can would only attempt a few years later from their side of the pond. And some of those great moments can also be found on the second side. See the ending of "Maiden Of The Cancer Moon", or the sepulchral background vocal harmonies lending an unmistakably mystical atmosphere to "Calvary"...
Is *this* an essential listen, though? I'm inclined to say it isn't. The problem with extended jams and the album format has always been that one only rarely fits the other--at least in the field of rock'n'roll (jazz is another story, since improvisation is central to its core tenets, contrary to other song-based genres). At best, the album sounds like an interesting archive documenting the progress and skills demonstrated by great musicians at some early points of their careers. But it's nothing more than this, really. "Happy Trails" has no story to tell. It only rarely evokes vivid imagery. Those peaks are there--see my first paragraph--but overall, they are too far and between. And the plains between those peaks are a little too samey, with guitar licks that neither break new grounds nor give some decipherable structure to the whole thing.
It's not to say that Quicksilver Messenger Service have exactly been *self-indulgent* when they released this live record (a reproach one can throw at many jam albums). Indeed, there's some form of musical generosity to be found there, and one can sense QMS's gigs have been memorable experiences for their audience at the time--see that part on side one where the audience clap their hands in a way that feels as if they are participating in the performance itself, and not merely enjoying it as outsiders. And yet, today, more than 50 years later, the aesthetics displayed here are just a little too quaint given everything that has since transpired. In other words, the offerings we have here are way too obscure in their true intents to make any sort of sense. Maybe you needed to be there to understand what this thing was all about. Which generally marks the line between "interesting" and "essential". After all, 1969 was a year of many transitions. Prog-rock and krautrock woud soon take free-form experimentation to more promising levels. And decades later, post-rock would show how electric guitars can convey newfound mystical mindsets to its audiences. But you can't blame QSM for trying at least.
"Happy Trails" is maybe a lost opportunity in rock history. If more musicians had followed those strange trails winding their way between between early r'n'r and psychedelia, maybe genres in the seventies and beyond would have sounded a little different than they actually did. But no one really ventured there. Those trails are long gone. All that remains now is thickets of wild weeds, dry grass and dust bowls...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 957
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 19
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 8
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 14 (including this one)
Albums I might not be the best person to judge, but that I *might* include in my final list: 3.
The Strokes
5/5
Four stars and half
An all-time classic, and an album which still holds its own two decades after it was released. As is usually the case with those classic albums, I won't write a full-blown review here given that others have already written wonderful stuff about them and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. *Is This It* is just a timeless gem aimed at anyone who's into rock at large. Go and listen to this record a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 956
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 20 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 8
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 14
Albums I might not be the best person to judge, but that I *might* include in my final list: 3.
Sigur Rós
5/5
Five stars.
An all-time classic, and a personal favorite of mine. As is usually the case with those classic albums, I won't write a full-blown review here given that others have already written wonderful stuff about them and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. Àgaetis Byrjun is just a timeless gem aimed at anyone who's into Sigur Rós or even post rock at large. Go and listen to this record a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 955
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 21 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 8
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 14
Albums I might not be the best person to judge, but that I *might* include in my final list: 3.
Aerosmith
3/5
Hey ! I got this CD at home. It's nice somehow, probably one of Aerosmith's best albums. It's got the original version of "Rock This Way" in it.
The thing is, should Aerosmith be included in a list of 1001 essential albums to listen to? No. And this here is why I won't say anything further about this record. Please, Dimery and associates, check your priorities a little. You need room for genuinely great or moving or grounsbreaking albums. You can't waste it like this.
Number of albums left to review or listen to : more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of essential listens: more than a third so far.
Number of albums I *might* include as essential listens: a quarter so far.
Number of albums I *won't* consider as essential listen: more than a third so far (including this one)
Al Green
3/5
Nice. Obviously *Pulp Fiction* has done a great job getting audiences acquainted with the 70s soul gem that gives this album its title. And I can't say the rest of the record was an unpleasant listen (half of those tracks are nicely done, there's no arguing about that).
On the other hand, I'm a bit skeptical whether this album as a whole can be classified as an "essential listen", especially compared with masterworks from Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding or Stevie Wonder. Maybe this was a bad day for me to dive into a soul album, but frankly, I'm not sure what separates those tracks from Barry White stuff sometimes (apart from their diametrically opposed voices, that goes without saying). I leave this as a question mark here. Maybe with a little more time on my hands, I'll get more attuned to the subtleties of this album, who knows?
Number of essential listens : more than a third so far, I've temporarily lost count here...
Albums I *might* include in my final list: a quarter so far (including this one)
Albums I certainly won't include in my final list: more than a third so far.
Raekwon
4/5
Four stars
An all-time classic, and an album which still holds its own many years after it was released. The only grudge I have against this album is that it's too long compared to other early Wu-Tang solo outputs such as Genius/GZA's *Liquid Swords* or Method Man's *Tical*, which are straight to the point and offer a more rewarding experience on the whole.
As is usually the case with those classic albums, I won't write a full-blown review here given that others have already written wonderful stuff about them and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. *Only Built For Cuban Linx* is just a timeless gem for anyone who has even a remote interest in rap and hip hop. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 952
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 22 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 12
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 15
Stevie Wonder
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 951
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 23 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 12
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 15
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
4/5
Three stars, maybe? Four stars ?
A landmark album for many but I'm not sure I'm totally sold on this one. I'm quite a fan of Nick Cave's middle period, and I remember that everyone was struck by this delicate record at the time it came out. But I think Cave has since "refined" his game when it comes to melancholic songs or performances on the piano. For the first, listen to *No More Shall We Part* (a longer and more meandering record, but far more satisfying overall). Or listen to the more recent *Skeleton Trees* and *Ghosteen*. And if you want to enjoy Cave as a piano performer, you can always spin that last solo live album of his.
*The Boatman's Call* is still a nice record, though, with some very memorable tracks here and there ("Into My Arms" is a small gem, for instance). And it's well-produced and well-performed, of course. But I can't help feeling that the whole thing is a little too tame and rigid, and that not much is happening in a large chunk of these songs. Maybe this bareness is what draws people to the album (both Cave's admirers and more casual fans). It's just that, in my opinion, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds are always better when they're using "treatrical" tricks to explore emotional moods. Those moods can be anger, lust, fear or infinite grief, it doesn't matter. What matters is that Cave and his pals have enough space to let their histrionic instincts guide them through such emotions. *The Boatman's Call* doesn't use those theatrical tricks at all, save for a few rare exceptions. It's more like watching Cave working those songs at his desk. A gorgeous desk, with all sorts of nice objects on it. But a desk nonetheless.
Albums that will end up on my list of favorites: more than a third so far, I've temporarily lost count here.
Album that I *might* include on my list: approximately a quarter (including this one)
Album I won't include on my list: less than a quarter so far.
Todd Rundgren
3/5
Three stars, maybe?
A landmark album for many but I'm not sure I'm sold on this one. It's sure impressive that Todd Rundgren played almost all the instruments on this album. And there are some choice cuts in it, from "I Saw The Light" to "Wolfmann Jack", not to mention the atmospheric waltz "The Night The Carousel Burned Down" or the awfully good power pop hit "Couldn't I Just Tell You"--here foretelling many later great tracks of a genre that was still in its infancy in 1972 (say hi to The Cars, Weezer and The Posies from me, please). The thing is, those cuts are here mixed with many tracks that often border on muzak or elevator music. And when I say "many", I really mean it, since it's a double LP.
Of course, I *do* realize that double albums such as these should be unafraid to explore stylistic u-turns and take risks of some kind to justify their sheer length. But can the human mind stand *so many* meandering laneways that rarely have a proper destination point here? And this in *one single take*, to boot. Case in point: "I Went To The Mirror". After a long pointless dirge, the track starts to get interesting with a bluesy Led-Zeppelin-like riff that gets things a little more animated and lively. But almost immediately, the song fades out, just as we were getting to something. This feeling of an unfinished business pertains to many other parts of this double album. And even when things get a little more interesting, like in the track that follows, "Black Maria", one often can't refrain from comparing the proceedings to other staple acts from the sixties and seventies. Yes, Todd Rundgren can remind you of the Beatles, Queen, Led Zeppelin or even the Rolling Stones (see also the nice closer "Slut"). But can he be as memorable, charming and evocative as the Fab Four? Can he be as deliriously histrionic and "over the top" as Queen? Can he rock as hard as Jagger and Richards, or Plant, Page, Bonham and Jones? No, he can't, and this for all the examples we've just quoted. As a result, he's stuck in a sort of limbo: he's an excellent and imaginative musician, but he's not a perfect songwriter or performer (his voice is a bit dull at times). And as such, he's doomed to stand below all those rock legends we've just mentioned. Conversely, he's not leftfield or abrasive enough to offer something that would counter this overall "mixed bag" narrative either. He sure tries to be more daring sonically speaking in later tracks such as "Little Red Lights". But it's too little and too late, especially at this point of the second record...
Some fans might argue that the chords change are often off-kilter or unexpected. Maybe, but it's the same question as the one we've asked before, is it not? Are those chord changes leading somewhere? Nope, they definitely aren't. Take "Torch Song", for instance. Sure, it's nice and delicate, and it offers thoughtful instrumentation and arrangements. But basically, it's just another interlude. The emotions it tries to convey at first do not feel earned at the end, if only because the latter comes too soon, once again. To put it in a nutshell, I feel like this is a record where technical prowess doesn't always lead to truly *compelling* songwriting. And just like the flowery wallpaper aesthetics of its cover, most of the sounds and melodies displayed in *Something/Anything* appear slightly quaint today, if not downright cheesy sometimes.
So I can understand listening to this album once because of its cultural importance, and overall it's been an interesting listen, if not always a pleasant one. But I'm not sure I ever want to play that album again now that I've listened to it. Life's too short to waste it on stuff that doesn't convey genuine emotions to you.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 949
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 23
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 14 (including this one?)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 15
Nick Drake
4/5
Of the three albums released by Nick Drake during his all-too-short lifetime, this slightly quaint exercise is the one that probably veers a little too close to a novelty performance. Drake himself pointed this out. But that doesn't mean this record should be ignored, given how many great tracks with luscious arrangements make the bulk of it, from "Northern Sky" to "Hazey Jane II" or "One Of These Things First". Once you're owning *Five Leaves Left* and *Pink Moon*, it's hard to resist *Bryter Layter*, if only from a completist perspective. Nick Drake was gone too soon, everyone who once got interested in him knows that. Even though it was written and played in the early seventies, his music is timeless, and it will be for many other decades to come...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 948
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 24 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 14.
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 15
Lambchop
2/5
Here's the thing: during the early naughts, a bunch of British critics on the lookout for the next Mercury Rev gave raving reviews on this album made by an American alt-country/indie-rock act from Nashville, leaving other critics from the other side of the pond a little nonplussed as to what their honorable colleagues from the U.K. really saw in that band.
Here's what one of those more skeptical American critics wrote at the time ;
"*Nixon* serves as a reminder that expertly executed stylistic hybrids and ironic juxtapositions-- great though they may be-- don't replace memorable songwriting. Sure, it's a novel concept, but while some of us may still be patient enough to "get it" five albums into the band's career, Wagner's talent and unique vision should demand a more challenging album."
This somewhat skeptical reception, here taken from a Pitchfork review, perfectly trancribes my own feelings about *Nixon*. In spite of the lush arrangements drawing on Philly soul, nothing much special happens in terms of melody, discernable intensities or sense of dynamics in the course of this long record. When Kurt Wagner goes into that strange falsetto mode, conveniently buried in the mix, it just feels cringeworthy instead of fragile or graceful or charming. The whole thing sounds so... remote, like generic background music droning in some hipsters'café. Even "Up With People", the supposed centerpiece of the album, would actually be a very minor cut in most of the records from the nineties and early naughts that made Dimery's list. If only for this, I'm also deeply confused at what some people really see in *Nixon*, just like most American critics at the time. Maybe it's that incredible artwork setting them into some sort of mood beforehand. Such cover is indeed incredible, and it made me want to love this record so much. Except that I didn't...
Should I continue here? Does this foppish thing deserve so many words to describe it ? Some people think it does, apparently. Pitchfork made amends later on for instance, probably still under the lasting influence of those slightly deluded British critics we've mentioned earlier. Just in case that first honest reviewer of theirs might have missed out on something truly earth-shattering, they called a true fan to write a second review about the album's reissue. And here's what this new reviewer wrote in passing:
"Even as a fan, I understand the ways in which Lambchop can seem standoffish and cold."
It seems that second reviewer was as honest as the first at least. However, the *real* problem with Lambchop might not be about *temperature* or so-called "sophistication". I actually don't feel as if Lambchop are looking down upon us poor mortals. I feel like they're looking at nowhere in particular, that their stare are totally blank. This is not shoegaze here. This is *nothinggaze*. And this empty feeling can even be explained in purely *musical* terms. To this listener, the real problem is indeed that Kurt Wagner never tried hard to write proper hooks, or choruses, or even simple endearing moments, anything substantial that could make you relate to the proceedings. It seems that what *Nixon* is really all about is style. And style is sometimes not conducive to good writing.
So, is this an album you must *absolutely* listen to? Not to me. Lambchop are excellent musicians and arrangers, no doubt about that. But the spark is missing here--that sort of spark you can find in acts that are not so far away from the territory supposedly explored here: stuff like Deerhunter, Vic Chesnutt or even Kevin Morby. In all those examples, you can often find two pivotal ingredients that seal the deal for most listeners of likewise genres: memorable melodies and recognizable emotions. And sadly, *Nixon* only very rarely uses those two pivotal ingredients. Of course, in a list a 5001 albums instead of 1001, such album would be noteworthy, if only for its overall stylistic intent (and artwork). But fans got to understand *some* acquired tastes are often harder to acquire than others...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 947
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 24 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 14.
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 16
Solange
3/5
I spent my last review mentioning Pitchfork, and now here comes their critical darling Solange. Once again, I can't quite picture what the fuss with this laidback modern r'n'b album is all about, at least musically speaking. It's not that the music is bad: some arrangements are subtle and pleasantly intricate. And in a way, I can get *why* the whole aesthetics of this record are quite subdued throughout its course (more on that later). It's just that those aesthetics are a little too unobtrusive for my tastes. *A Seat At The Table* is no trip hop, that's for sure--it's not mesmerizing or repetitive enough. I wonder how it would have sounded if it had included more influences like that...
I guess the whole idea behind this album was that the music should fit with the confessional atmosphere of the vocals while also retaining an alurring canvas on which Solange can brush very socially-conscious lyrics. So what we have here is *smooth* protest music, with very idiosyncratic ways to cover the grounds on which African-Americans view where they come from and who they are today. But even if it's *smooth*, it's protest music nonetheless. Which means that the lyrics are worth it, no doubt about that. And so is Solange's mellifluous performance, of course (I'm less convinced by the guest vocals, but they're a minor presence anyway). Some very clear emotions seep through such a performance, Solange perfectly understanding how to convey her views in a manner that's quite diginified and graceful. As Old Bob said, the times, they are-a changing, they did change in the past, and they are changing now. Such bridges between past and present are the ones Solange wants to build here. So, yes, *A Seat At The Table* is a record with that sort of ambition, and it should be commended as such.
But to return to the music, I'd be lying if I said nothing rubs me the wrong way in it. On the paper, I still think the intent is marvellous. But I'm not so sure about the execution, though. Oddly enough, I wish Solange had taken a page from her elder (and more famous) sister's book when it comes to hooks and choruses. I don't mean she should necessarily have gone to the sort of pop extremes Beyonce Knowles is known for. Yet I feel like some middle ground would have made a stronger impression on me, and probably on many other listeners too, beyond music critic circles.
In the meantime, I will leave this album the benefit of the doubt with a three-star grading, just because the lyrical contents are really personal AND interesting AND relevant when it comes to current topics. Maybe I just need more time to understand its music. This situation reminds me of Beyonce's *Lemonade*, actually, another critics' choice that left me a little nonplussed during the last decade... Yet even if I'm nonplussed, I get the picture somehow. After its heyday in the nineties and the naughts, "modern" r'n'b seems to go through an existential crisis of some kind, and as a result, It would be tempting to apply the prefix "post-" to it while listening to *Lemonade*, *A Seat At The Table*, or records such as Frank Ocean's *Blonde*, for instance. The only problem for me here is that such prefix wouldn't fully explain why artists and producers of such ilk are *also* having quite a hard time penning a melody that's memorable. Concept isn't everything in music. If it was, records would be... books.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 946
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 24
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 15 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 16
Keith Jarrett
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic. This record encapsulates a moment that's just simply magical. Among other things, Keith Jarrett is known for his piano improvisations drifting between jazz and classical, and this one here is a keeper that will entrance you with its melodies and intense ostinatos. Some experts will probably tell you this is *not* Jarrett's best live album, yet maybe it's just snobbery on their part. This thing here is definitely one of the best entry points into his universe (one I wish I had taken the time to know a little better--maybe in the years to come, who knows?).
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 945
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 25 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 15
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me):
Deerhunter
5/5
Four stars and a half
An all-time classic, and an album which still holds its own years after it was released. As is usually the case with those classic albums, I won't write a full-blown review here given that others have already written wonderful stuff about them and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. Halcyon Digest is just a timeless gem for anyone who has even a remote interest in indie-rock. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 944
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 26 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 15
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 16
Bob Marley & The Wailers
4/5
Three and a half stars.
I've checked out Dimery's list. *Catch A Fire* and *Exodus* are on it. But not *Burnin'*.
How can *Burnin'* NOT be on that list???
Obviously, *Natty Dread* is a likely contender for the fourth slot in the list of the best Bob Marley albums ever. But does that make it an *essential* listen for general audiences who would want to know more about Bob and his Wailers? I'm not so sure. Everybody obviously mentions that original version of *No Woman, No Cry*, and how clunky it sounds compared to that legendary live rendition. That being said, opener "Lively Up Yourself", along with "Them Belly Full", "Rebel Music" and "Natty Dread" are choice cuts. The late entrance of the horns section in the first of these tracks is incredibly effective, transcending the whole piece into another level, one that somehow foretells the epic mysticism of *Exodus*. "Them Belly Full" is a hymn as topical (tropical?) as it is enticing to the ear. And the instrumentation on "Rebel Music" is smart and intricate, guitar licks, harmonica and organ adding layers to a six-minute lush experience that seem to last half as much.
The end of the record is notoriously weaker, though, except "Revolution", maybe--nice high-pitched vocals from Marley at the very end, quite uncharacteristic from him. But apart from those sorts of moments, I'm still of two minds about the whole thing. Maybe Jah should teach me to let it go on that listing thing, about what's supposedly essential or not. Mystical music doesn't work like that, does it? So, I'm gonna light up a spliff, probably add this record to my small personal reggae collection, and say that in the end, *everything's gonna be alright*...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 943
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 26
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 16 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 16
The B-52's
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic and a personal favorite of mine.
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 942
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 27 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 16
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 16
Dizzee Rascal
3/5
David Holmes
3/5
I have nothing against this particular David Holmes album. It's decent big beat / electronica overall. But as I've already said elsewhere, I have Dimery's full list, and I'm quite infuriated by his (and his contributors') shorsightedness when it comes to many other important genres, with glaring ommissions in them. Just look at jazz, for instance. No "Mingus, Ah, Um", no "Blue Train" or "Giant Steps" for Coltrane, no Shabaka Hutchings album from one of his many projects, not to mention some very important Miles Davis records missing here and there. And I'm mostly talking about legendary names here, not even *true* obscure stuff. So a decent but minor big beat album compared to those absent records doesn't weigh much in terms of cultural importance. Which is *why* I can't include it on my own list.
Sometimes it's whole genres that are criminally overlooked. Apart from two releases by Slint and Sigur Rós, "post-rock" albums are nowhere to be seen. Where are those all-time masterpieces by Mogwai, Tortoise, Godspeed You! Black Emperor or A Silver Mount Zion? Seriously, guys, "trippy" music didn't stop with the sixties or the seventies. Those later masterpieces should be part of the so-called "canon", more than stuff by Quicksilver Messenger Service, for example. Such post-rock records have been here for a long time now, even for a few decades for some of them, and new generations are going back to those records as we speak. Who's rediscovering "Happy Trails" today, apart us music nerds through this app? Nobody.
Likewise, post-hardcore, and emo are probably niche genres, but they should have some decent representatives in the list. And the same goes with the admittedly quite recent post-punk revival in the UK. "Hookworms" is only a very minor example of that recent revival selected by Dimery and co, and the problem is that it won't be remembered the way Idles, Fontaines D.C., Shame, Squid, Yard Act, black midi or Black Country New Road are going to be for sure. And we should also cross the pond and mention the outrageous absence of many current key American artists of all stripes and styles, from Billie Eilish to Big Thief, from Low to Weyes Blood, from Sharon Van Etten to Parquet Courts, or from Turnstile to Women / Vietcong / Preoccupations. Dimery and friends are sure ticking a few important boxes culturally speaking with records by Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Lana Del Rey and Fiona Apple. But it's not nearly enough. And it's still very "mainstream". Make room for more important stuff now. Please...
Album left to review of just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here.
Essential listens I'll keep on my list: Half so far.
Albums I *might* include: a quarter.
Albums I consider not essential at all: a quarter, including this one.
Bruce Springsteen
4/5
Four stars
An all-time classic, and an album which still holds its own many years after it was released. As is usually the case with those classic albums, I won't write a full-blown review here given that others have already written wonderful stuff about them and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. Nebraska is just a timeless gem for anyone who has even a remote interest in Bruce Springsteen before he blew everything with that awful, generally cheesy-sounding *Born In The USA* album.
Number of records left to review or just listen to: 939
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 28 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 17
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 17
Fiona Apple
4/5
Four stars
An all-time classic, and an album which still holds its own many years after it was released. As is usually the case with those classic albums, I won't write a full-blown review here given that others have already written wonderful stuff about them and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. *Tidal* is just a timeless gem for anyone who has even a remote interest in Fiona Apple. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a third so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
John Grant
5/5
FIVE STARS
This is exactly the sort of stuff I signed for. Discovering great stuff I had never hear or even heard of before. Because even if you haven't heard anything about John Grant before, chances are that his first solo album is that type of record that is bound to stay with you when you've finished listening to it--granted that the artist ticks all those proverbial idiosyncratic boxes of yours. And John Grant does for this writer here. Already a great piano player blessed with a tenor voice that does wonders throughout this first album, Grant is also an arresting songwriter who has quite a precise story to tell here, transcending his assets as a musician and delivering a gem that didn't receive enough praise at the time of its release. The former leader of the Czars (who took a four-year break from music after the demise of his band) is indeed *not* your usual seventies-type folk-rock balladeer, even though he mostly draws on this codified tradition. And this very creative paradox is only one among many.
A gay man raised in a conservative home in Michigan and Colorado, Grant had certainly gone through hard times when *Queen Of Demmark* was released in 2010: alcoholism, childhood trauma, troubles to deal with his sexual orientation, and most of all, a difficult separation with an anonymous lover. So the bulk of *Queen Of Denmark* is a break-up album, sure, but one that comes with *huge* twists when compared with other examples in this genre. And the biggest twist is that the self-deprecating Grant often comes off as a very personal lyricist here, either penning hilarious one-liners or dropping mordant observations about himself or his characters. Rarely have break-up albums been this lively. Part-Stephen Merritt, part-Gene Clark, part-Elton John, part-Nick Cave and part-Nick Drake, John's vocabulary can only be his nonetheless, rendering those tentative comparisons moot once you delve further into his art. On the lighter side of things, this knack for off-kilter, yet *killer* words allowed him to record instant hits such as the novelty parody "On A Silver Platter" or "Sigourney Weaver"--a track fooling around with the song narrator's identification to female Hollywood figures such as Weaver's Ellen Ripley or Winona Ryder, helping him deal with his feelings of being an outcast for eternity. Grant's talent is even more impressive on devastating tracks such as "JC Hates Faggots", where a gay man roasts his father's toxic and traumatic influence on him. And the harshness of the title-track, concluding this record, is just plain unforgettable. Grant sure passes off as a piece of work on this one. But those flaws are also what allow him to write great songs. And they absolve him of unfair accusations of cynicism (some reviewers at the time certainly *didn't* get the themes of the album at all).
This particular talent as a lyricist wouldn't be as effective as it is if Grant had not also taken painstaking care in creating a musical canvas that is equally luminous and heartbreaking thoughout the record. The piano riff and chorus of "Marz", as deceptively simple as they sound, are instantly catchy. Grant often modulates harmonies from minor to major modes and back, weaving heratwrenching, bittersweet atmospheres. Apart from piano and guitars, some weird yet often very melodic synth lines and arrangements also bring a color at key moments of many songs, bringing a welcome respite from the overall intensity displayed in some of those tracks. Kudos for the Midlake band for serving as a backing band for Grant and helping him shape those awesome songs--legend has it that without Midlake, Grant wouldn't have returned to music, and we can all be thankful to them for being so supportive.
After John Grant released *The Queen Of Denmark*, the artist moved back to Europe (where he had lived before), was diagnosed HIV-positive, ended up in Iceland, settled with a new guy there, and, more importantly for us as listeners, dabbled into some even *weirdest* music languages, some sort of synth pop with a bend for high concepts and elaborate layerings (some enlightening, others a little too obscure for this writer maybe--interestingly, this subsequent high-brow-yet-campy direction is foretold in the bonus tracks in some editions of *The Queen of Denmark*, less remarkable, but still a good fun). It seems that as bizarre and eccentric those albums are, John looks like a happy middle-aged man now. We can all be happy for him. And no matter what happens now or next, he's still left us an incredible first album. This album stemmed from clear pain, no doubt about that. But the pleasure it can still give you today makes such pain 100% worthwhile now.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Pavement
5/5
FIVE STARS
One of the coolest albums ever made in the long history of rock. Revisiting it today was a pleasure I didn't *fully* expect, since I've probably listened to it a thousand times already. But it's still working, after all these years. At first, the thin lo-fi sound caught me off-guard, after so many glossy, so called "well-produced" records on the list. But quickly, I remembered why I love this record (and this band) so much. It's smart, melodic, rough, lively, cute, wry, funny, sad, bittersweet, nonsensical, dumb and bright all at the same time. "Summer Babe", " In The Mouth A Desert", "Loretta's Scars", and "Here" are instant indie classic. Funny how, now that I know music history a little better, I can spot a few winks towards other legendary rock bands from the past. "Conduit For Sale!" draws on the Velvet's "The Murder Mystery" for instance, as someone rightly stated here in this group. But those influences don't take away Pavement's own very specific talent. Slacker genius at its best here. Harder to pull off than most people think...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
But who caaaaaaares... even those rejects are somehow redeemed by Pavement's take on "success". In the end, what we all are is being like lame stand-up comedians on the stage of life, both grotesque and sublime. See the legendary opening lines of "here":
"I was dressed for success / but success it never comes / And I'm the only one who laughs / at your jokes when they are so bad / And the jokes are always bad / But they're not as bad as this / Come join me in the sun..." and so on...
Behind that thin layer of cynicism and the absurd, Pavement are most of all romantics, in the tradition of the Kinks and, once again, The Velvet Underground. So they deserve to be "here" with them.
Miriam Makeba
3/5
I can't say that I was familiar with Miriam Makeba before I used this app. I might grumble about Dimery and co.'s choices sometimes, but we can still be grateful for most of them, especially when they allow you to discover great or important arists, as Makeba surely is. This album should probably be counted as an essential listen if only for two tracks-"The Click Song" and "Mbube", sort of a preliminary sketch of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", here in one of its best versions.
That being said, now that I've browsed though Makeba's impressive list of releases (and it will take some time for me to find my way around it), it also seems that this first international solo release by the South-African singer might not be the best entry point into that sweeping discography of hers. Sure, *Miriam Makeba* probably sounds more "authentic" than some of "Mama Africa"'s subsequent albums recorded and produced in the US... But once you've listened to *Pata Pata*, for instance, it's hard to dismiss that later (and admittedly more famous) record. And not only because of its killer title, one that I *did* know before, actually--who can forget that sweet and oh-so-catchy melody?--indeed, "Ring Bell, Ring Bell" and "West Wind" are absolute gems too, and the rest is great, making *Pata Pata* another essential purchase. Makeba's performance on "West Wind" is even reaching levels of emotion that are worthy of Nina Simone herself. And don't get me started on that incredible string arrangement in the background...
So if *Miriam Makeba* is an essential listen, you might also need to add *Pata Pata* to the list. That other album even has a new version of "The Click Song" (even though that new version is not nearly as good as the original here). And then, how many other great tracks has Makeba recorded during her long career? Wish I could listen to everything in a split-second. Music *is* a rabbit hole, is it not?
Number of records left to review or just listen to: 935
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 31
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 18 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 17
Iron Maiden
3/5
Well, sometimes you need to give in. Most chord successions are lame and hackneyed, so are those 5th harmony guitar solos, and the aggressive factor have since been neutered by tons of better metal or hardcore metal releases since the early eighties.
But I guess that, well, this album needs to be included in a list of 1001 essential albums to listen to, even once in your life, if only for its "cultural" importance. Legions of metalheads have banged their skulls to this. "Run To The Hill" is an instant hit, so is the title track, "Children Of The Damned" is not so bad, and "Hallowed Be Thy Name" is an epic closer. Sure, the whole thing sounds quite ridiculous. But sometimes, life is. You can't blame Iron Maiden fans for this. This album certainly had something idiosyncratic and new to deliver to that audience at the time. Guess that, for once, you gotta respect that sort of off-kilter commercial success.
I've read here that there's another Iron Maiden album on the list. I'll listen to it too when the time comes. But unless it's *way* different (and I already know it won't be, given who we're talking about here), I probably won't add it to my list. Overlong jokes are rarely good, right?
You won't find me including more albums
Number of records left to review or just listen to: 934
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 32 (including this one, begrudgingly, I guess)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 18
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 17
King Crimson
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic and a personal favorite of mine.
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of records left to review or just listen to: 933
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 33 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 18
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 17
Bad Company
2/5
Sorry, I tried. I really, really tried. But Bad Company does nothing for me, and this album as a whole did not even interest me enough to make me want to write a full-blown review. It's not even that it's bad (sometimes it's interesting to explain *why* you think a record is not for you). It's just that, apart from very, very rare highlights here and there, the music on "Bad Company" is neither groundbreaking nor particularly well written. Lyrics are fine, with some striking one-liners here and there. Yet most of the compositions are just too linear and predictable to seal the deal for me. They simply don't make me feel anything. I always try to keep an open mind, but clearly, I don't see what the fuss is all about here. What we have is more than competent musicianship, of course, even talent. But if you want to select a list of 1001 albums you should absolutely listen to, there are probably twice as many albums worthier of your time out there. Life's too short to waste it on stuff you consider bland. My loss, maybe. But that's the way it is for me.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
David Bowie
5/5
FIVE (black) STARS
An all-time classic, given *who* it was from, *when* it was given to us, and *how* Bowie managed to here create a last album with very topical, "à propos" lines, incredibly dark and intricate jazzy or experimental arrangements serving a deeply mysterious yet also quite emotional songwriting overall. A treat from start to finish.
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Heaven 17
4/5
Wow.
How. Interesting.
80s synth pop with very weird yet deeply topical lyrics. And some deftly executed experimental moments that make this record worthwhile musicaly speaking, too.
Someone in this group pointed out with a snarl how the first track could have been used for Trump's campaign (I had not realized this song was the one covered by LCD Soundsystem, too). What more can i say? And what a great, sardonic artwork, to boot.
I thought only Devo could pull off weird stuff like this. I was wrong. Thanks Dimery and co.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic and a personal favorite of mine.
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Portishead
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic and a personal favorite of mine.
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Jefferson Airplane
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic and a personal favorite of mine.
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Can
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic and a personal favorite of mine.
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Carole King
3/5
Three stars and a half
An all-time classic for many
A landmark album for many but I'm not sure I'm totally sold on this one. We can all be grateful that Carole King, a prolific writer for other artists before *Tapestry* came out, took this opportunity to write this album for herself. But would this record have been so praised or heavily promoted at the time if someone else, unknown to the "business", had released it instead ? Some sneaking suspicion in me says no.
It's not that this album is lacking in terms of highlights, tough. "It's Too Late" (and its groovy guitar riff), "You've Got A Friend", "Beautiful" and the title track are killer songs, craftily arranged and recorded. The stereo effects on this album are well tought-out, for instance, like that glockenspiel chiming on the chorus of "It's Too Late", probably one of the first use of the instrument in the rock and pop idiom. And it's also quite moving to hear King performing in a far more subdued manner that old hit she once gave to Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman".
But truth be told, most of the other songs feel just a little too generic 50 years later, with very predictable parts involving linear pop progression that could even border on muzak for today's ears. Admittedly, the line is very thin, and historical contextualization might help you hear those songs with more forgiving ears. Not every listener in 2022 is able to get the "feel" of those sorts of dated canvases. Carole King is an admirable weaver, no doubt about that. It's just that those old works of hers might just look a little quaint overall today. Even if the charm is still there if you pay attention to the details.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
The Replacements
4/5
I'm not a *huge* fan of this band, but *Let It Be* is the perfect midway point in their story, between their early hardcore punk shenanigans and their more pop-sounding rockers (without too much cheese here). And like someone else pointed out in the group, a song like Androgynous has lyrics that are still on point decades later (not to mention its atmosphere).
A great example of what sorts of wonders adolescent angst can do in music. I would also add the punk band... Adolescents to that category, with their eponymous album. That one is *criminally* overlooked in this list (and many other ones like that !)...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
The Byrds
4/5
Four stars
An all-time classic, and an album which still holds its own many years after it was released. As is usually the case with those classic albums, I won't write a full-blown review here given that others have already written wonderful stuff about them and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. Mr. Tambourine Man is just a timeless gem for anyone who has even a remote interest in The Byrds. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
DJ Shadow
5/5
FIVE STARS
An all-time classic and a personal favorite of mine.
This is the seminal album of the "Jimmy Page of the sampler". Put your earbuds on and play this wonder as you're walking or driving through a big city at night. Urban heaven. Sublime and enticing. A feeling of eternity. It's *this* good.
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Primal Scream
2/5
I'm not inclined to say a band or an artist is "overrated", music obviously being an objective thing, but oh boy am I tempted to say that Primal Scream fits into such a category. I could personally tolerate the inclusion of *Screamadelica* in a list of so-called "mandatory listens, mostly because this particular album has something to say about the time and place it was realeased, with those UK club breakbeats and whatnot. But c'mon, let's be serious here for one second, fellas: even for that "historical" album, the writing is subpar at best, not to say totally lazy. Worse; some "songs' are just glorified instrumentals with a few vocal snippets here and there--and you'd have to take a shitload of MDMA to hear something substantial or even just fun in those tracks, something that's won't be there at all when you use more sober ears.
What about this particular album then? Well, just like many other Primal Scream albums it just drones on in the background, a mixed bag with a few hooks here and there, but without any cohesion at all, and with moments of intensity that are too far and between. As usual, the main influence when it comes to the melodic lines come from the Rolling Stones, at least if you pay some attention. But it's a somewhat sanitized version of the Stones, mixed with the current trends of that year. Which amounts to say that in the end, there's not much to be found there in term of substance. At least Jagger, Richards and their pals knew a thing or two about how they could make a song feel "dirty"--in all senses of the word. Whereras in here, it's just a pale imitation, barely veiled by the supposed "high value" of its production shenanigans. The result is just boring to these particular set of ears here. And reading a lot of the other reviews in here, to many other ones as well...
Number of records left to review or just listen to: 921
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 42
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 19
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 19 (including this one)
The Auteurs
4/5
Three stars and a half ? Four stars ?
The Auteurs is a band I've only been vaguely aware of before, and this app gave me the opportunity to delve further into that first record of theirs, *New Wave*. I'm not sure I'm totally sold about it being an *essential* listen, but it's been a pleasant ride nonetheless. Like many other reviewers in here, I think it has a strong start ("Show Girls", that instantly catchy "Bailed Out", and "American Guitars") and a nice end line, between "Early Years" and "Home Again" (which sounds a little like Elvis Costello's "Complicated Shadows", oddly enough). Maybe the middle of the album is too much of a notch under those particular songs, generally speaking. Well, except for that cello-enhanced "How Could I Be Wrong" (in comparison, a track such as "Don't Trust the Stars" is a little too linear and *middle-of-the-road* rock/britpop, for instance). But I'm all too aware those sorts of songs often grow on you as you keep on listening to them, so I'll give those somewhat less striking cuts the benefit of the doubt. I could actually see myself returning to this album, depending on my mood. I also feel like the lyrics make it worth it too--I spotted some very interesting and/or funny lines about quite picturesque scenes, but I have to admit I didn't pay a lot of attention to them this time.
Speaking of other people's comments, I was quite intrigued by the fact that a few reviewers heard a little bit of Arctic Monkeys in The Auteurs' sound. I would have never thought of that by myself. But I have to admit that for certain subtle moments, the comparison made more than a little sense... Luke Haines seems to have a knack for snarls delivered in a laidback fashion. He might not exactly be a Alex Turner, but this particular arrow is maybe not so far off the mark, come to think of it...
As a consequence, this may have a bearing on my own geeky list of 1001 albums. When the time comes for this app to suggest a minor Arctic Monkey album, as it will probably do, (say "Humbug" or "Suck It And See"), I might be inclined to just replace it with this "New Wave" here (and so have a broader scope on British pop/rock--and more importantly, leave some room for other sorts of records). That list won't be infinite. You can't have them all, can you?
Number of records left to review or just listen to: 920
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 42
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 20 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 19
Count Basie & His Orchestra
3/5
Three stars, maybe?
The swan song of Big Band Jazz and an all-time classic for many (plus, what an album cover!).
Obviously, this is a landmark record for many but I'm not sure I'm sold on this one. Besides, there are so many *huge* gaps when it comes to jazz in Dimery's list that I think you'd first need to fill those gaps with all the wonderful albums in the genre that are still missing in the list, and then see if there's room left for "The Atomic Mr Basie". And I don't even think I'm an expert in jazz (it's just that all the important masterpieces from the post-bop period of the sixties *need* to be included, period).
So, to put it in a nutshell, I can understand listening to *The Atomic Mr. Basie* once because of its cultural importance, and overall it's been an interesting or fun listen, if not a pleasant one. But I'm not sure I ever want to play that album again now I've listened to it once.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Garbage
3/5
Three stars ? Three stars and a half maybe ?
As someone wrote elsewhere in this group, the whole project seems *a little* too calculated by sound masterminds trying to profit from the nineties' indie explosion to be considered as a *spontaneously* relevant masterpiece. Producer and band member Butch Vig, of *Nevermind* fame, certainly knew the state of the music business at that particular moment of history. Listening to the album, you can even hear the grind of the charts and graphs in his mind as he and his colleagues try to please very different sections of the audience all at the same time (from trip hop enthusiasts to "alt-rock" explorers, from (n)eurodance and/or UK clubs night owls to dad-rock interlopers--and so on, just take your pick...). Truth be told, if a "corporate grunge" band ever existed, Garbage is probably the one. Too bad their "something for everyone" selling points did not always exactly reach their intended goals, some of them even landing quite flat on the ear today (see "As Heaven Is Wide" or "Not My Idea").
That being said, *other* parts of this first album are still holding out quite well 25+ years later, as dated as the production shenanigans are on the more minor cuts. Yes, sure, even back then you could sense that not everything in this catalogue of angst-ridden-yet-glossy rockers would age gracefully, but in spite of those shortcomings, the songwriting behind a lot of those tracks still redeems a large chunk of the record's flaws when it comes to its sound and overall direction. Many melodies are catchy, evocative and/or instantly memorable, often in a good way. Take "Vow" 's layers of guitar riffs, for example (some of them seemingly recorded backwards): not only are they terrifically efficient earworms, both intense and expansive, but they also prove that Garbage's studio wizardry could lead to truly compelling moments when channelled properly. Likewise, it's not difficult to gather why dancefloor-friendly tracks such as "Queer", "Only Happy When It Rains" or "Stupid Girl" had become such huge hits in the months that followed the release of this record. As calculated as those moves are, there's still an urgency in those songs that make them a worthwhile listen.
And it's not as if this record didn't have its lot of darker or less obvious corners to explore, though. Trip hop arrangements, for instance, are conveying a welcome dark atmosphere to the proceedings from time to time ("A Stroke Of Luck", "Milk" ), one that's still working in 2022. As for Shirley Manson, she often has a commanding presence, from "Supervixen"'s stop-and-go dynamics to a "Fix Me Now" that's aiming for the skies and beyond, at least vocally speaking. In the forefront of those Alternative / Industrial Pop landscapes, she brings a goth-yet-melodic spark that fuels the necessary fire to make the whole thing satisfying, at least on an emotional level. Think Siouxsie with a lower voice and a knack for seductive or dangerously sensual choruses. I guess "alternative rock" fans can still thank Vig and his weathered American pals for putting their younger Scottish protégée into the spotlight here. Without this album (and band), chances are that Manson would never have reached this type of instant fame--and frankly, it would have been a shame *not* to get acquainted with her talent as a singer...
On a sidenote: check out the bonus tracks recorded during that early stage of the band's career. Some of them are even better than certain songs on the album--replace the three or four clunkers from the original record with cuts like "Subhuman", "Sleep" and "#1 Crush" and maybe you would have had a 4 or 4.5-star album instead. Never got why those great tracks had been discarded in favor of less compelling ones. But maybe this poor choice has something to do with all those charts and graphs in Butch Vig's mind. Whenever you're in doubt about who's reponsible for partially bad results, always blame the board first.
Number of records left to review or just listen to: 918
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 42
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 22 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important to me): 19
Neu!
5/5
Four stars and a half
An all-time classic of krautrock / komische
As is usually the case with those five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 917 (including this one)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 43
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 22
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 19
Stereolab
3/5
On the paper, I can get that many people find this Stereolab album charming. On the paper, that is. Because as adventurous as this record can be in its best moments, I however can't help feeling that the overall listening experience it has to offer is just a little too disjointed and pointless to this particular set of ears. Bleeps and bloops are always fun. But you need more than those sorts of playful sonic asides to build an album that goes beyond the usual "exercice de style". "Metronomic Underground" is a nice opener, for instance. But essentially, it is only Can's "You Doo Right" with scratches and a few tweaks here and there, instead of a true build-up to ecstasy. When does a piece of music end up being a smart hommage to the past and when does it start becoming a quite stale reproduction of it instead? It's a tricky question. Besides, many tracks in this collection seem a little too *nice* and innocuous to me anyway. I sometimes wonder if being French plays a part in this partial reluctance of mine here. It's not that Laetitia Sadier's lyrics in that language are bad (they're at least not worse than the ones in English). But it's as if understanding those words right away somehow kills a bit of the mystery some non-native French speakers see in them. Or at least that's the way I'm trying to explain the rave reviews for *Emperor Ketchup Tomato* in the English press at the time.
Make no mistake, the subtly grinding motorik rythms of "Les Yper Sound" are somehow addictive, the lush layers of "OLV 26" are weaving a quite evocative soundscape, and the way "Tomorrow Is Already Here"'s guitars are bouncing and complementing each other from one headphone to the next is just fascinating and hypnotic (not to mention those marimbas !). Same with the voices in "Cybele's Reverie". Or the mesmerizing (and darker) qualities of closer "Anonymous Collective" (ending all too soon, unfortunately). But as successful as those oneiric forays are, other cuts clearly overstay their initial welcome, like the *Time Out* 5-beats trope--overplayed to death--in "Percolator". Or the mock-garage-indie-whateverness of "The Noise Of Carpet". Or the endless circles of the electro loops in the title track, leading to nowhere in particular. Not to mention quite a few others here and there...
The thing is, when it comes to tongue-in-cheek pop experimentation fronted by a female yéyé mock-ingénue singing over a soundtrack filled with retro-future winks to the sixties, I think I'll always have a soft spot for Broadcast instead of Stereolab. Maybe in comparison the latter are just missing out on the necessary tension and/or melancholy to make the whole thing emotionally rewarding. But maybe that's just me and how I like my ketchup: with more acidic pickles, bittersweet ginger, and a far more *obvious* and substantial slice of spleen, right in the middle of my dish. Sugar ain't enough sometimes, even when sprinkled over a big juicy sonic tomato.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 917
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 43
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 23 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 19
M.I.A.
4/5
Four stars.
The one with "Paper Planes", M.I.A.'s signature song famously sampling The Clash's " Straight To Hell". *insert gunshots sounds followed by a cash register tinkle*
But is the rest worth a detour, especially so many years later?
I think it is. True, it's a bit silly at times, both musically and lyrically. And yet, rarely has the clash between so-called "third world" and western countries has been so nicely exemplified by an album. That clash is sometimes violent (with those sarcastic call to arms mostly mocking flawed western perceptions of immigrants), other times it's just a tongue-in-cheek party, but the whole thing is never heavy on the ear, and always serving a general genuinely uplifting mood. Percussions and vocal touches are often hectic or enticing, and most tracks are both swampy and bouncing from start to finish, as if Tricky had taken amphetamine instead of smoking crack.
Special mention should be made of Timbaland-produced closer "Come Around" and its Bollywood-inspired vocal hooks, the mock-disco of "Jimmy" with its cliched-yet-exhilarating strings, or "Mango Pickle Down River"'s use of The Wilacannia Boys, that weird band of cute aboriginal kids from Australia, here celebrating nature and the "didge" (didgeridoo). Some songs are even conceptually ambitious in *Kala*. Take the grinding-yet-expansive "20 Dollars" and its vocoder-enhanced backdrop. Interestingly, that latter track has first been noticed because it used a vocal interpolation of Pixies' "Where Is My Mind" (M.I.A is a true indie fan, she quotes Pixies and other similar bands elsewhere on the record). But the real, unsaid influence on the song's mesmerizing bassline is actually none but New Order's "Blue Monday" here. Maya Arulpragasam and her producer Swith are cunning thieves, hiding one theft with another, therefore blurring their own tracks through a subtle multi-layering of references and pastiche. All they wanna do is "take your money", maybe. But sometimes, crime can also be interesting or relevant art, as in here. Just like immigrants, what they supposedly "take" or "steal" from other artists ultimately gives back a potential wealth of riches to music. *insert cash register sound*
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 917
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 43
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 23 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 19
The Sonics
5/5
It's still incredible to think this album was recorded in the middle of the sixties. I've read unconvinced reviewers in this group saying you don't necessarily need to go back to the hidden origins of a genre, but I strongly disagree here. The genre at stake is punk, here, of course--or should I say, rockabilly played in such a intense fashion that it barely sounds like it. And this thing is *wild*, even 57 years later. To me, it seems that Washington State, with its lumberjacks and geographically remote location on the US map, knows a thing or two about authenticity and intensity. It took almost 30 years to make it a landmark place for that sort of music, with Nirvana and the other great bands of that area. But things did start then. And it's just a riot being able to listen to it.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 918
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 44
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 23
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 19
Iggy Pop
5/5
There's "Lust For Life" and "The Passenger", those two tracks only making it worthwhile to buy your ticket for this ride. But there's also lewd "Sixteen", loud "Some Weird Sin" or lanky "Neighborhood Threat" (what a great 'proto-post punk' guitar arpeggio, slithering in the background from start to end...). There's "Success" and "Tonight". There's David Bowie and Ricky Gardiner in top form behind the scenes. And of course, there's Iggy, his voice, his presence. Still wild, roaring and intense a few years after the Stooges' demise. He snarls, he hoots, he hollers. If he's the "modern man", as he says he is in "Lust For Life", I'm all up for giving up drugs too, getting my shit together, and join him in Berlin to celebrate the ironies of consumer society. Danny Boyle had one of the greatest ideas of his life to use this track for Trainspotting (or was it the book's author, Irvine Welsh?). But the album is worth it, too, folks. So dive in.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Mudhoney
4/5
This record by fuzz-propelled garage grunge anti-stars from the Washington State area doesn't have the all-time hits the band are still known for today (such as "Touch Me, I'm Sick" or "Suck You Dry"). But overall, it's the most cohesive and convincing entry from their early output. Buy either this or a compilation from them (or better, buy both--there's only *one* compilation out there anyway).
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Muddy Waters
4/5
Can't really judge blues, whether from the Chicago school or any other school. I understand that the way those sorts of songs are performed is pivotal for someone to dig them, but those nuances are simply not graspable to me. So I yes, I can't really judge, at least subjectively. One of the only blues records I have in my collection is the Complete Recordings of Robert Johnson. I guess that doesn't really make me an expert.
But in this live album, Muddy Waters still sounds like the real thing to my admittedly ignorant ears. So I'm gonna trust the real experts when they're saying this particular record just changed the lives of thousands and thousands of youths at the time (including The Stones, Clapton, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and countless others), first in the States and then in the UK. This record was released in 1960, and it's one of the very first blues live album ever recorded. I've also noticed lots of Willie Dixon-penned tracks in there too, so I imagine he's worth checking out as well. And of course, I imagine you'd need to add "Mannish Boy" to all this (or Bo Diddley's "I'm A Man", which is basically the same song), to get a broader picture of the powers of that Chicago School. You gotta start somewhere, right?
I can also understand the mystique around this album, given the circumstances in which it was recorded, i.e. during a festival that got almost cancelled because of the rioting that had occured there. There are lots of interesting anecdotes about all that online, but I won't delve into them right now, just do the research yourself if you're interested. The bottom line is that this gig (and recording) could have never existed, and popular music during the sixties and beyond would have been slightly different than what it turned out to be. So the words "culturally relevant" don't even do justice to how important this record is (and for once, this clearly goes beyond personal tastes).
Those sorts of stakes are best exemplified through the last despondent track, "Goodbye Newport Blues", written right before the gig, with lyrics by none other than poet Langston Hughes--here sung by pianist Otis Spann (given that Muddy was too exhausted from his overall performance before, a performance which included classics such as "Hoochie Coochie Man", "I Got My Brand On You", "Tiger In Your Tank" and two hectic renditions of "I've Got My Mojo Workin'"). Probably referring to the climate of violence around the festival (partly sparked by the police repression), pianist Spann mourns about what a "gloomy day" it is as he sings goodbye to Newport. And yet, as sad as it sounds, something poignant and truly magical is happening here, as magical as the sudden whisps of wind that can be heard in many parts of this quite "barebones" recording (The show occured in the open, by the way, hence those sounds of wind. This can be seen in the photograph for the cover, for example, even though Waters used a different guitar for the gig than the one he's holding for that picture--and there's even an interesting tidbit to learn about that semi-acoustic guitar on the cover, but that's for you to find out as well...).
So, why am I focusing on this tiny moment of the recording? Why is it *magical*? The reason is this: during "Goodbye Newport Blues", Spann indeed laments: "What's gonna happen to my music? What's gonna happen to this song?". What's truly magical here is that the answer to that desperate query came in the many waves of great US and UK acts who would feel inspired by this record (and other ones like that) in the years that followed 1960. Those inspired youths all heard Spann's call, as if carried away by that wind which breezes through the speakers as you're spinning this very record. And they answered it, through the great divides of race, class and even an ocean sometimes.
"What's gonna happen to my music? What's gonna happen to this song?"
Well, what happened is that it changed the world.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Black Sabbath
5/5
It starts with the "diabolus in musica" tritone. It's the first heavy metal album. It's a sweeping roller coaster mixing blues-inspired evil riffs and haunted vocals. Toni Iommi makes the best of his guitar playing abilities, favoring evocative suspensions and sudden maniacal bursts. Ozzy Osbourne howls (unintentionally) funny lyrics once in a while, but most of the times what he howls about is on point to suggest the necessary ambiance. And this impulsive studio performance of all four members is the first of a handful that left their stamp on the history of rock. To put it in a nutshell, it's a stone-clod classic.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
The War On Drugs
3/5
Generally, The War On Drugs does nothing for me, yet I can see why this album is recognized as Granduciel's biggest achievement yet. It's just that, apart from some highlights here and there in those looooong tracks (see "Red Eyes" or "The Ocean Between The Waves", for instance), the music on *Lost In The Dream* is just too 'one-note' compared to things I usually like (okay, two-notes, as in "the same two chords" repeated and then transposed all over a song, ha ha). Lyrics are fine, with some striking one-liners here and there. Yet most of the compositions and arrangements are just too linear to seal the deal for me. Granduciel does his best Dylan impression on opener "Under The Pressure", then channels his inner Springsteen on " Red Eyes", often to great effects. But as much as I can appreciate those references, and as nice as this album *sounds* overall, its second part tends to fade away into the background as it drones on, one track blurring into the next without making much of a difference. I always try to keep an open mind, but clearly, I don't see what the fuss is all about with this borderline "bland"- band.
I might reconsider that take, though, and so leave the door open for other listens. In the realm of acts inspired by Springsteen and the likes, I guess you can still consider "Lost In the Dream" as better than anything The Killers ever recorded, for instance. That's gotta count for something, right? :D
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one).
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter.
The Stooges
5/5
Four Stars And A Half
All of the three Stooges album should be essential listens, if only for their historical importance. They foretell the explosion of punk music like no other records from the late sixties / early seventies. This one here (the second) is the most challenging of the lot on first listens. So wild. So noisy. But trust me, keep on trying, and you'll quickly sense the intensity of what The Stooges must have sounded live like none of their other albums.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Kanye West
5/5
Ego = Genius. At least here. This is the record where Ye started to lose it on a personal level, and yet what a gain for music. Yeezus is leaner, crispier and strikes harder than MBDTF, but the latter is certainly the richest, catchiest and most sprawling of the two propositions Tracks such as "Runaway", with that simple yet insanely efficient piano part, "Power", with its soulful African vocals, "All Of The Night", with its maddeningly sinuous horns, or "Monster", that mean psychotic banger with that killer featuring by Nicki Minaj, are the stuff of legend.
Kanye West is, simply put, the Gertrude Stein of hip hop. What he does sometimes doesn't make a lot of sense at first, like with those weird lyrics, or that strange flow--besides, who can sample *both* Mike Oldfield and Gil Scott-Heron in the same frigging album? But the more you pay attention to those sorts of details and how they intricately woven into the whole, the more they can affect you, at least during that run of classic albums from the early 10s. And just like Stein, that old modernist writer of days yonder, Ye had a keen, very *American*, sense of how to promote his weird stuff to the wider world. This is how he will be remembered in the decades to come. As an American oddity. Because, let's face it, right? Americans are all a little crazy, aren't they?
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 911
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 49 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 25
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 19
Kanye West
3/5
*Not* one of the best Ye albums (for that early "college trilogy", *Late Registration* is certainly the strongest effort of the three), but this is how Kanye West came to be known for the wider world, and it's easy to understand why hip hop fans all over the world are still holding this album close to their heart. This record is mostly notable for two things: first, it broke the domination of gangster rap in the rap genre, and secondly, it promoted that "chipmunk soul" sound whose ripple effects can still be sensed today in the realm of "urban music". Too bad some of the songs and intentions are not fully formed yet. That being said, there are a few killer tracks on this record that are still holding out very well today, including that wonderful "Jesus Walks", with its unmistakable gospel stomp. It's not Ye-as-an-insane-genius yet. But it's still a worthwhile proposition.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 910
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 49
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 26 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 19
Pulp
5/5
For now, this app says I don't like britpop. Wrong. I love it when it's well-written, topical as f*ck, smart and irreverent, nor to mention rich on a musical standpoint. Exactly what Pulp's magnum opus provides here.
Oh, I almost forgot. And you can shake your rump on a dancefloor to a large chunk of those tracks, too. A huge plus that very few other britpop masterpieces can boast about. What more can you ask, really, eh?
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 909
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 50 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 26
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 19
Iron Maiden
2/5
Seriously? With all the great albums in the overall metal genre, you'd have to include *two* Iron Maiden records on the list? This one (the first one) is not even the fully-formed version of this band Maidenheads and other old fans are so crazy about, but it's still kitschy enough to be mocked by mostly everyone else (save a few songs that are strangely slower than usual). Not exactly a win-win situation here...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Pink Floyd
5/5
What else can be said about this one? It's the epitome of commercial Floyd, and yet it's first and foremost a timeless gem. Countless hi-fi systems are said to have been tested with this record during the seventies. But this album is not only great because of its sound. It's great because of the overall artistic intent, its *songs*, its pop instincts, its topical lyrics about madness, time and capitalism, not to mention its incredible (and trippy) sense of balance between experimentation and melancholic melodies. One for the ages.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 908
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 51
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 26
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 20
LCD Soundsystem
5/5
I didn't like LCD Soundsystem at the time they released their first three albums. I guess I was still a little too nostalgic for the nineties indie rock sound, and I found their party-driven, four-on-the-floor hits too shallow at first glance. But since those days, I've completely come around on what James Murphy set out to do with this band. Now I understand. Now I can shake my butt on those tracks AND appreciate the overall artistic intent, not to mention the often witty lyrics. Since those days, I've also learned to enjoy many classic albums by David Bowie and Talking Heads, and it's now clear to me why so many people at the time saw Murphy as the heir apparent of those legendary acts.
So yeah, that string of three records LCD Soundsystem released during the aughts is part of my current CD collection and I often return to it. And this particular record here is probably the tighter, most effective of the lot. The first five tracks are absolute bangers, a relentless assault of clever sounds, mesmerizing rhythms and hooks, very much of their time, but still timeless. The simple, yet artfully thought-out arrangements on a track such as "Someone Great"--including that charming glockenspiel doubling up the main vocals--are showing how you can be both minimal *and* expansive for that sort of song (its runtime says 6 minutes, but they feel like three, honestly). Side B is more subtle, but it keeps you on your toes for its whole run. Those synth-processed backing vocals in the title track are nothing short of amazing, for example. And formidable closer "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down" is both ironic AND moving, which is a combination rarely reached in modern music.
So it's easily five stars for me now. As the French say, only fools never change their minds...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 907
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 52
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 26
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 20
Sabu
2/5
An interesting listen, and an important "historical" document for fans of the genre (and conga players, I imagine). But I doubt even them will select this as the sort of album out of whom they take the most pleasure overall. But what do I know about those things, eh?
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Marilyn Manson
1/5
I'm pretty sure Trent Reznor now bitterly regrets ever having associated his name with this pathetic clown. But even before the accusations of psychological and sexual abuse, even before all those unsavory extramusical events surrounding the story of this psycho parading as an "artist", it was so obvious how poorly this music would age in a very short amount of time. Behind the shock glock shtick, behind the lame posturing and the make-up barely concealing the lack of any relevant ideas on a musical standpoint, everything in this record overblown to the extreme actually sounds... bland. To go back to Reznor, what we have here is a third-rate version of Nine Inch Nails at best (knowing the original is not necessarily for everyone anyway). Like horror films that fail to scare their viewers, and are not even fun to watch if you just want to have a good laugh with friends, it's just an embarassing moment. A waste of time.
In the age of Korn and Nu-metal, I guess sone teenagers desperately trying to look edgy could fall for this ridiculous circus. I'm also pretty damn sure that 99% of those teenagers now grown to adults never return to this album. Or *any* album by Marilyn Manson--I do seem to remember a few stronger melodies on *Mechanical Animals*, so I might feel generous enough to give that one two stars if it ever pops up here. But no more than that.
The only thing that seemed to redeem MM at the time was that it was the target of those Christian fundamentalist lunatics obssessed with dogma and self-repression. Those fanatics obviously can't understand art. But since MM himself doesn't understand what *good* art is, why should we bother trying to redeem him now? Especially today, with all the news... ?
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 900
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 52
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 27
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 22 (including this one)
Pixies
5/5
One of my acquaintances in high school would give me the nickname 'Pixies' because of my love of this band at the time. So you can easily imagine how close to my heart this legendary record is. Probably in my top five list of all-time favorites...
But reading the reviews from this group, it seems I'm far from being the only one to find this album so frigging good. Black Francis' muscled-yet-sugary pop chops, his geeky pot-pourri of surrealism conniving with references going from the bible to sci-fi, both of them mating with teenage angst--not to forget his stellar choruses and his mock-hardcore punk growls--along with Kim Deal's velvety background vocals or plucky basslines, Joey Santiago's forays into surf rock or jangle indie, and David Lovering's gated drums with a very retro (?) sound, (thanks to producer Gil Norton)--all of this makes it one for the ages, a record that's both adventurous and terrifically cohesive overall, both totally indiosyncratic and immediately catchy and hummable. A masterpiece.
But what struck me the most reading all those reviews here, is the sheer number of *first-timers* telling how hard this record slapped them in the face, so to speak. Some of those first-timers already knew a few indie hits like "Wave Of Mutilation" or "Monkey Gone To Heaven" , but they couldn't anticipate how good everything else would be, from "Debaser"'s soaring introductory bassline to "Gouge Away'"s alternate use of minor and major chords to conclude the album on an ominous and surprisingly somber note.
Commentators and reviewers have also rightly pointed out how important this album was for rock in general, with its quiet-loud-quiet dynamics foretelling the "alternative" explosion of the nineties of years later. But as Kurt Cobain knew himself--and this, probably at the very same time he confessed having 'ripped off' Pixies for "Smells Like Teen Spirit"--all of this wouldn't be worth a rat'a ass if the *songs* had not been so good. And personal. And hummable and weird and strange and funny and dark and twisted and light-hearted and wonderful. It takes a genius songwriter to recognize the genius of one of his peers. And this is what Doolittle is: pure genius.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Super Furry Animals
2/5
Well, oh well. It's decently crafted, at least, and if I try aiming for objectivity (an impossible task, admittedly), maybe that's three stars. But to be honest, the overall feeling I get from this band (and album) is that it's a subpar version of Blur trying to imitate the Kinks with a few glam or psychedelic sprinklings here and there (nice arragements but rather inconsequential for me given the nature of the songs). Super Furry Animals admittedly got right a lot of ingredients from one of those oh-so-effective britpop formulas. Except from one *key* element: truly *dynamic* melodies and harmonies.
So, I'm a little sorry to say this, but overall, this record is way too bland for my rock tastes. And consequently, this "Fuzzy Logic" is gonna get two stars only. Because I can't feel anything listening to this band. The artistic intent and overall sense of pop melody is a little too... fuzzy for me.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 898
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 53
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 27
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 23 (including this one)
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
Springsteen's magnum opus. *Darkness In The Edge Of Town*, *Nebraska*, and *Greetings Form Asbury Park, NJ* are also quite nice, by the way. The rest is not worth your attention if you're not a fan already, especially *The River*, too long and self-indulgent, or *Born In The USA*, too damn cheesy overall (and I'm not even talking of the records after that).
What about this one? It's nice, really, really nice. Catchy piano riffs and intricate guitar solos abound. The title track is both immediatly gripping AND sophisticated (that incredibly complex bridge towards the end), but each of the other cuts have something specific and moving to say (special mention to opener "Thunder Road", "She's The One", "Night" and epic closer "Jungleland"--rarely have blue-collar stories of love, work and everything in between been depicted in such a grand and precise scope). Awesome lyrics overall, which justify the Boss being so chatty during those songs--a problem if you like vocals that allow you to grasp some fresh air once in a while, but the lyrical outpouring is still (mostly) justified in here. Urban romanticism at its best. And the fact that the sound is a little dated actually brings another layer of charm to the whole thing.
Oh, and for once in a rock album, the sax solos are a great addition here. RIP, Mr. Clemons.
Bruce Springsteen put New Jersey in the map of rock'n'roll for eternity. And it's the world that can thank him for it.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 897
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 54
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 27
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 23
Sepultura
4/5
Damn, how the first five tracks of this one SLAP! The inclusion of Latin American rhythms within some of the most uncompromising metal of those years is just seamless. From "Roots Bloody Roots" to "Breed Apart", not a second is wasted to make this fusion works. Special mention to "Ratamahatta" and its incredible featuring of percussionist Carlinhos Brown. And Ross Robinson did a hell of a job on production (better than Andy Wallace for the former Sepultura classic *Chaos A.D.*). The later inclusion of field recordings of Amazonian tribes is also very nice. Sonically and topically relevant.
I just wish that seamless inclusion of Brazilian influences has worked *until the end*. The second part of the album is indeed a little more hit or miss, and loses some of its momentum through its many u-turns (there's still that somewhat atmospheric track with Mike Pattton and Jonathan Davis--but such moments are too far and between). As a result, this record might just be a little too long.
So, to put it in a nutshell, *Roots* is based on an awesome concept, one that somehow renews the whole metal genre. But the second half of this album *might* just be a little lacking in terms of sheer execution.
That being said, even with those minor shortcomings, it should still be included in a list of 1001 most important albums. If only because there are not many crossover albums like this in the whole metal genre, ones that can bring curious listeners from the outside without alienating its hardcore fanbase.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 896
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 55 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 27
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 23
Michael Jackson
5/5
Four Stars And A Half.
Why not five stars? Let's be *a little* serious for a second: an album with a cheesefest such as "The Girl Be Mine" can't possibly boast deserving a five-star review. Especially when such cheesefest is on the third slot of said album. McCartney is to blame on this one too, but mostly, the real culprit is probably producer Quincy Jones here. He should just have put his foot down and *at least* change the ordering of the tracks. In a way, this dud also foretells everything that went wrong with Michael Jackson afterwards (it's part of "Hisstory" ha ha). So I guess you'd better listen to it *once*, and then just skip it everytime you spin this album again. Just a friendly piece of advice here...
This minor debacle being out of the way now, the fact that everything else on *Thriller* is spot on, even with such an early misstep in the tracklisting, tells a lot about how important this record is overall. Production values AND songwriting here go hand in hand to give an avid amateur of groove the time of their life. Rarely have pop, funk, rock, disco and r'n'b been so intricately and artfully mixed together. This album is just the stuff of legend--not only for those eternal hits that made Michael Jackson as a solo artist enter music history through luxurious front gates (the title-track, "Billie Jean", "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" or "Beat It"), but also for all those incredibly flawless arrangements driving the whole shebang to the max. This here is the best *blockbuster* album the eighties have ever given to the world, for which Jones can now be thanked a thousand times. Each rumbling bassline, each guitar lick, each beat, each comma--each raspy breath from Michael, even--is like a sonic dream come true. The care for details just leaves you speechless. And yet, just like many of those blockbuster movies from the same decade (by Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard or John Landis, who actually directed "Thriller"'s unforgettable video), the overall story this record offers you is also filled with a lot of charm and soul, as ludicrously grand and insanely ambitious as its settings are.
The first record I had to review for this app was Jackson's aptly-named *Bad*. One of the very rare one-star reviews I have ever written for this project (please feel free to read it for yourself, for what it's worth). *Of course* I also had "Thriller" in mind as I wrote it, wishing I had had that one to review instead, if only to set the record straight about what I really thought about Michael Jackson as an artist. The circle is now complete. Now I can go on on this thing with a lighter mind (and with very open ears, that goes without saying... :) ...). In the meantime, I'll keep on trying to practice my moonwalk steps in my living room as I play this album again and again and again...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 895
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 56 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 27
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 23
The Flaming Lips
4/5
The Flaming Lips are a band you must listen to at least once in your life. And "The Soft Bulletin" is the album most fans will probably tell you you must start with. It's a nice album overall. I'm just wondering about one little thing. My oh my, why hasn't anyone (other band members, producer Jonathan Friedmann--*anyone*) told the singer he was decidedly singing OFF-KEY during the takes???
I'm all for "rough" or "fragile" vocals in certain genres (like with Flaming Lips' models Mercury Rev, for instance). Emotion is sometimes more primordial than perfect notes as to how the human voice can affect listeners. It can bring a sense of authenticity that makes up for a singer's technical limitations. But there's a limit. And *The Soft Bulletin" clearly blows that limit away to pieces. This is how an album that could have been a legendary one, ends up being a good one instead. This is how you lose one star, folks.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 894
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 57 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 27
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 23
Queens of the Stone Age
4/5
The mere fact that this list includes the eponymous first album by Queens Of The Stone Age and NOT *Songs For The Deaf* speaks TONS about Dimery and his collaborators' shortsightedness sometimes. This one here is a good record, no doubt about that. But everything in *Songs For The Deaf*--the sound, the songwriting, the performances--is at least TWICE better in that later, far more legendary album. And even for a second slot in a ranking of the band's discography, *Rated R* is actually probably more convincing overall than *Queens of The Stone Age*.
It thus seems that stoner rock here joins the other genres where this list is quite wrong (jazz, post rock, punk hardcore, post-hardcore, metal hardcore...), either leaving out key albums of said genres or just lazily quoting first efforts by a few famous acts without ever trying to dig further into the close future to highlight the real true gems in those acts' discography. Dimery and friends only really do so for indie rock and britpop, sometimes with a few bizarre choices that don't necessarily make sense in the light of those other blatant omissions elsewhere. I blame some sort of shortsightedness that's clearly British in its origin--the *1001 Albums...* book's writers are all British, aren't they? It's not that American critics are right all the time either. But being French, and from this particular point of view, I think that a middle ground could be reached so as to find a more balanced view of recent music history in a (mostly) anglo-saxon context.
Of course, all those considerations couldn't be further removed from the contents of this album (and its kinky cover). This record here is a nice entry point into the Stoner Rock/ Desert Rock sound of QOTSA (or even other bands like that). Go listen to it if you don't know that sort of sound yet, and if you're interested in motorik highways, heavy guitar riffs, tales of desert desperados, and mellifluous vocals mixed with a few howling and yellings here and there...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 893
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 57
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 28 (including this one--*Songs For The Deaf* should be included *first*)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 23
Paul McCartney and Wings
3/5
Let's all be a little honest for a second. None of the tracks from this album can compare with Paul's usual output in The Beatles. Now that this quite obvious statement is out of the way, is *Band On The Run* a good album? Well, it's not so bad all things considered, especially its two first and two last tracks. "Band On The Run" and "Jet" are nice hits, catchy yet both with original non-linear song structures that allow Wings to explore and experiment stuff a little. As for the last two tracks, they often call back to the (few) highlights of the album, giving a sense of closure to the whole thing.
The problem is, almost everything between those two bookends drags A LOT, with very few obvious hooks or dynamic changes. Apart from a "ho-hey-ho" gimmick on the fourth track--one of the elements repeated in the very experimental "Picasso's Last Words before the closing title--there's not much that can worm its way inside your brain--which is quite disappointing coming from an ex-Beatles. And even this comes off as a letdown: we're here closer to the "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" sort of innocuous nonsense than to anything resembling "Eleanor Rigby", "Yesterday", "Back In The USSR", " Let It be" or "Hey Jude".
For this particular writer and listener, *McCartney II* is the most satisfying post-Beatles album Macca ever released anyway. It's not a perfect album either, but at least this one is *truly* dynamic, in spite of the fact that it was primarily recorded at home. From one track to the next, this other record goes from synth experimentation with a proto post-punk edge to delicate balladery, and from unabashed cynicism to blue-eyed lyricism, with naive yet touching lyrics. Here is the Paul McCartney you can fondly remember, even though "II" is far less known than his records with Wings...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 892
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 57
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 28
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 24 (including this one)
The Adverts
4/5
I might grumble about the book this app is based on, but I have to admit this project also allows you to discover great stuff. I thought I knew the most important names in original British punk rock. I was dead wrong. This album is great (and the one after that is not bad either, as misunderstood as it was at the time). I still have to find my way as to what choice words I could use to convey how original this band was while still retaining the basic ingredients of punk. In the meantime, I'll
merely highlight "One Chord Wonders", "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" (originally a single) or "Safety In Numbers" as the true punk gems they are. But mostly, I will finish this very short review by praising how f*cking epic closer "Great British Mistake" sounds, even today. Thanks, Dimery and co.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 891
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 57
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 29 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 24
Can
5/5
"50 years later and it still sounds like the future," as someone wise said in this group. It's no coincidence Can has been quoted, praised or embraced by the likes of Radiohead, Portishead or LCD Soundsystem. This German answer to seventies prog-rock understood how one could convey the same hypnotic canvas without resorting to shtick or unnecessary campy solos. A wide variety of styles, from punk to techno, can thank those kraut prophets for their groundbreaking work.
This particular album, the last one fronted by singer/howler Damo Suzuki is remarkable for many things, but what's probably most striking is the mesmerizing intricacies of the rhythm section and the very chilled, laidback instrumentation. Think of avant-garde brainy music students being suddenly stranded on a tropical desert island. The end result is lean, devoid of fat, and it's both tense and dreamy all at the same time. This is the last album in the legendary trilogy *Tago Mago*, *Ege Bayasim* and *Future Days* (to which one could easily add precursor *Monster Movie*--Malcolm Mooney was a spectacular frontman, too). As such, it should be owned by every fan of inventive, evocative, groovy, moody, leftfield, forward-sounding music.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 890
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 58 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 29
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 24
Talking Heads
5/5
"Psycho Killer, qu'est-ce que c'est ? Pa pa pa paaa pa pa pa paaaa pa pa !"
No band ever sounded like the Talking Heads. Originally I was not a *huge* fan--I only knew them through the compilation "Popular Favorites", and also their 1980 masterpiece, "Remain In Light". But since those days, I understood two things:
a) Minus stuff on the level of " Once In A Lifetime" or "Psycho Killer", I finally understood that their so-called "popular favorites" are *mostly* NOT among my favorite tracks of theirs. Case in point here, the two first songs of this record, which I absolutely love (and yet were absent from this compilation I mentioned earlier...)
b) No compilation, even one as comprehensive as it can reasonably be, can do justice to what the Heads do so brilliantly in their individual records (especially the first four of them). Some tracks take on a different meaning overall during the flow of these individual albums. ALL the songs are adventurous affairs with bold arrangements. And David Byrne can be an impressive storyteller sometimes...
Consequently, I now get how this first record of theirs must have been a shock for rock (and punk) fans. This one here is interesting because it predates Brian Eno's involvement with the band. The overall sound is more direct, rawer, which brings a charm that's different from their later output. There's still that influence from protopunk bands such as The Modern Lovers (logical since the two bands had the same second guitarist). To put this in a nutshell, this record is worthy of its legendary status,
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 889
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 59 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 29
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 24
Crowded House
2/5
This starts off quite poorly. Like Steely Dan without the intricate jazzy arrangements. Like Billy Joel struggling to get an "indie" sound right (but to what ends would he do that, really?). It's just cheesy pop, competently written and decently played, but nothing that forces you to raise your head and want to pay more attention to the proceedings. In my opinion, reviewers who compared this band to REM should have their ears (or their brains) checked. There's none of the intensity found in most 80s output from Stipe, Berry, Buck and Mills. It's very generic, nothing that deserves to be included in a list of mandatory listens. At least on first glance.
After the first two tracks, things fortunately pick up a little though. There are the two undeniable hits from the record, first "Fall At Your Feet", still admittedly a little cheesy in the way the singer is here wearing his heart on his sleeve, and yet boasting a memorable and even timeless chorus. And the same goes for "Weather With You", with its catchy singalong group vocal hook and its mesmerizing jangling guitar line worming its way to your mind. In between, the more lively "Tall Trees" *does* passingly deserve those earlier REM comparisons. At this point, one may hope that *Woodface* is one of those records with a slow build, keeping its best cuts on the second side, with only a few worthwhile appetizers on the first. That sort of tracklisting is rare, but it's pleasurable when it works out on the whole...
Unfortunately, 90% of what follows those three songs sets us back to that *thick* snorefest mode felt at the start of the album, with very *boring* ballads, mostly... Only worthy of notice are "Four Seasons In One Day", where Finn channels his inner Paul McCartney to give a delicate, subtly composed cut. And the lush strings of "All I Ask" color things a little at least, even if the song itself sounds like a bad parody of "third stream" vocal jazz...
As for the rest, every slow track fades into the next without leaving much of an impression. The Finn brothers can be strong songwriters when they want to (see the examples above), yet one can't help feeling they were somewhat lazy when it came to the music they wrote for this record, with all those textbook chord progressions and vocal lines (lyrics are a different animal, but they can't save the day either--not with so many long moments where nothing really happens on the musical level).
Curiously, a very short hidden track at the end of this record finds the band in a totally different mood, jamming and yelling together in what is obviously a live take. A messy one, admittedly, but something *alive* at last... It's as if the band suddenly realized how bland everything was before, and wished to spice things up a little at the last minute. But it's too little and too late. They can yell "I'm still here" all they want. The problem is that, as a listener, *I'm* not, and only wish to go on to the next record, hoping to find something at least relatively *exciting*. So... Next, please.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 888
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 59
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 29
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 25 (including this one)
Linkin Park
1/5
Give me rap-rock or rap-metal crossover albums anytime. Give me a *bit* of nu-metal, even. Give me heavy guitar riffs, true rebellion, sharp politically-minded lyrics. Or, on the contrary, give me brutally sincere descriptions of personal malaise. Anything that finds an artistically relevant way to scream: "I'm alive, this world is fucked up, I suffer, but I'm alive!". Give me Rage Against The Machine, System Of A Down, Deftones, the "Judgment Night" motion picture soundtrack... Even the early Korn albums can work out...
But don't give me this overbloated, overproduced turd of a record. Heck, turds have taste at least, or so I hear. :) As you can, I won't mince words about this band (and first album). But I've got my reasons. To me, *Hybrid Theory* is indeed the epitome of blandness--nothing in it *feels* honest or authentic. You might tell me Chester Bennington's lyrics drew from his difficult childhood experience, I just can't find a way to *care* about them. Because the end results here are just plain corny--there's none of the strong imagery delivered by his pal Chino Moreno, for instance, or the latter's intense, dynamic performance throughout Deftones' discography. The so-called "rebellion" or "malaise" in Linkin' Park's lyrics actually amount to pointing at nothing in particular, with vague references about "bad memories" and the likes. And those lyrics are just *one* ingredient among others in a mechanical formula. They just have nothing to say. And they even manage to say it badly.
The same goes for the cheesy, dated rapping, or the vocal lines for the choruses and singing parts, which are *always* predictable--unimaginative melodies copied-and-pasted over unimaginative guitar riffs, so slick and clean they actually sound like synths. Because no, the instrumentation is not good either, as competent the performers (or production tools) are. The band does the same thing all over again, mostly, with the same sort of lazy, overdone tricks being applied from start to finish. Guitar saturation is here used to raze everything to the same orderly level, devoid of any true *life*. A paradox of sorts, which owes more to protools shenanigans than any thought-out concept behind the music. Which makes sense, given that saturation is also used here to hide the lack of any shred of meaningful idea. That's probably what's "Hybrid" in the "Theory" here--this thing being *both* lifeless AND brainless. Even the electronic/abstract hip hop asides suck, minus the very short "Cure For The Itch", maybe--but to be fair, this minor track towards the end is nothing but a secondhand attempt at a DJ Shadow-like instrumental... And just as everything in the album--that awful cover, for instance--its inclusion in the tracklisting looks like a decision made by a corporate committee, not one made by a real, genuine band showing personality. And just like everything else, it's a stylistic dead end. *Hybrid Theory* made millions, admittedly (not necessarily a sure sign of quality, but OK). It sold a hold a huge lot. Yet it's a dead-end nonetheless. Void. Sterile. We can just all be glad and grateful that teens or kids these days are not listening to such crap anymore. At least, they'll make *fresh* mistakes of their own...
In the light of Bennington's still recent suicide, this personal judgment about what is merely a piece of art here might sound harsh, of course, even exaggerated. May the man rest in peace, God bless his soul, and so on... May people who go through what he had to go through, just like Chris Cornell or Kurt Cobain, or anybody else, find the help they need to survive. To be honest, I wish that this band had at least provided Bennington that catharsis he so direly needed to get better. And this aside obviously goes beyond any personal tastes about music. One could have hoped that years after their first commercial success, Linkin' Park's singer might have found some meaning in his life. But things don't always work out that way, even when you manage to "make it". Friends who knew Bennington seem to say he was a good person. I don't know, I didn't know him. But I just hope that fans who are reading this understand I have nothing against the man. I simply didn't like the artist, and the band he was part in. These things happen... As for the rest, be aware that hope comes in many forms, and that if music, good or bad, can't save you, you can *still* find other ways out--through reaching out to friends or a family genuinely caring for you, or through mental health professionals. Anything that can help you get better.
But I'd rather hear about who Chester Bennington was as a person rather than having to listen to his music again. It's not for me. In a way, critics' accusations that the band had "sold out" for 2017's pop-oriented *One More Light*--that they now suddenly sounded "as if they were selected by committee", to be more precise--were totally and absolutely nonsensical to my ears. Because to me, they've *always* been this way. A few yellings and heavy guitar riffs here and there couldn't hide the fact that they've never been the sharpest knife in the drawer, musically speaking. And Bennington's offensive public replies to those misguided critics did not only show how fragile his mental state was, but also how lost he was as to the sort of audience his band had entertained for all these years. And there's probably a good reason for that. Because a) that audience had never been picky for sure. And b) it was dwindling album after album anyway. In all honesty, it's a bit of a mystery *who* this music is aimed at today, in 2022 (both for what it was in 2017 AND what it had been in 2000). And this, also, makes me kinda sad... Not for Bennington, this time, but for the standards generally followed by this list of records.
So next, please...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 887
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 59
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 29
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 26 (including this one)
Radiohead
5/5
"Creep" saved Radiohead. This single came from a half-baked album, *Pablo Honey*, clumsily mixing britpop with some more "American" influences. But "Creep" was a hit and showed Radiohead they had it in them to make a record for the ages. And since the Oxford quintet was not afraid to take a long, hard look at what they had just done with their first LP (a mindset they would mostly keep for their whole career, up until today), they knew what needed to be done. A perfect balance between self-confidence and self-criticism was the key. And it opened a door that led to one of the most brilliant discographies ever put to tape.
In the course of this discography, *The Bends* is therefore Radiohead's first masterpiece (there's been five of them by my count, but first times always have their peculiar charm, don't they?). To say it shortly, this first masterpiece was mostly remarkable in the manner it aptly mixed twisted rockers and heartwrenching ballads. Everything is stellar in it--the songwriting, the lyrics, the vocal performances, the intricate bass-and-guitar arrangements, John Leckie's clean yet no-nonsense production. Tracks segue into one another in a totally dynamic way. The dystopian atmosphere that will further be explored in *OK Computer* and *Kid A* can already be felt (but this time through generally more streamlined compositions than what would come next). And the songs, the songs... Between the intense title-track, the melancholic "High And Dry", the devastatingly beautiful "Fake Plastic Trees", the tight and angular "Just", the sinister guitar hook of the messy and sardonic "My Iron Lung", not to mention the epic and poignant closer "Fade Out", with its elegiac arpeggio and truly *haunted* chorus, there's a little bit for everyone. And yet this record still sounds cohesive and ambitious, as adventurous as it is--every britpop or US alt-rock influence being properly digested to mingle into a wide-sounding sonic landscape, every vocal intention and guitar lick serving a discourse that transcends style or genres. This here is one of those very rare albums where there's absolutely no fillers (just like *OK Computer*, actually)--each track has something unique going on for it, even the ones I didn't mention up there. I can't but envy the people who are discovering it today, 25 years or so later. And given what most reviewers are saying in this group, they are certainly not disappointed...
But this is no surprise (and no alarm, to quote a later song). Just as opener "Planet Telex" states it, Radiohead are never sounding better than when they lament that "everything is broken", only to pick up those disparate pieces and shape them into a single body of work that's unique, moving and relevant. They're THE postmodernist rock band of the late nineties / early aughts. And as such, they deserve to have their seats at the table of the greatest acts ever...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 886
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 60 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 29
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 26
Tom Waits
4/5
It's either hit or miss with Tom Waits, as far as I'm concerned, and this at whatever point of his long and productive career. But I gotta admit I undertstand why this abum in particular is often quoted by his more casual fans. It's part of that string of albums in the 80s where Waits dived into weirder territory, not that his mock-jazz, mock-blues, mock-cabaret act has ever been a normcore affair anyway...
Listening to *Rain Dogs* with a little more attention, I sense that I could very well become one of those casual fans in time. The writing (the lyrics first, but the music, instrumentation, and arrangements, too--see those poetic-yet-often-ominous marimbas) is top-notch on this record (starting with 'Singapore' and 'Clap Hands', but also for many other tracks here). What's working out quite well in this particular album is that it's well-balanced, between weird experimental interludes, moody pieces where Waits is as much an actor as he is a singer, and more straightforward love songs, where his voice is a little less 'outré' and even suggests a very *slightly' inebriated Springsteen (so someone with whom you could have a normal conversation, which is not the case cuts that are out of this category here). A quite dynamic entry overall, where you don't *necessarily* need the lyrics sheet to get into the songs (reading those words is a plus, but it's not mandatiry), contrary to less accessible records of his.
Maybe I'm slowly becoming a casual fan, who knows? Since this app suggested me to spin it, I've even found a secondhand copy of this record online. Given that I've never found any Tom Waits compilation that fully satisfied me (it's always missing tracks that i wish i had), "Rain Dogs" will happily be my key Tom Waits album. Until the next suggestion, maybe...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 900, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter, approximately
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Jane's Addiction
3/5
Whoever in here said there wouldn't have been a *Nevermind* without this record didn't understand where Kurt Cobain drew inspiration from at all--replace Nirvana with Red Hot Chili Pepper, and now we're talking... This minor quibble aside, what can I say about this album? It's not so bad. But it's not so good either. The second side, with its long borderline-psychedelic ballads, has certainly aged better than the first displaying those happy-go-lucky cuts reeking of rock clichés from the late 80s, ones that would soon be wiped out by the nineties indie-rock / slacker rock / noise rock/ grunge / post-hardcore explosion (take your favorite pick). I'm all for a little exhilatrated tracks with a sunny disposition here and there, but given the conspicuous absence of certain genres that can also boast of such exhilaration in Dimery's list (melodic hardcore punk, for instance--far more powerful in its directness compared to those hackneyed clichés displayed on the first side of this record), I find it quite unfair that this album should be singled out instead of others. You want to get rockers with a slightly funky subtext, led by a clear and direct voice? Go to Turnstile's last two LPs (the last one was out last year). Or go to the other melodic hardcore punk bands they kinda ripped off...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 884
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 61
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 29
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 27 (including this one)
The Yardbirds
5/5
Without Dimery's list (which I was able to find online), I would never have discovered this wonderful record, one of those rare kinds of albums that transcends its day and age while fully sounding *from them*. Like mostly everyone interested in sixties music, I knew (and liked) famous Yardbirds stuff such as the Graham Gouldman-penned "For Your Love" and "Evil Hearted You". But "Roger The Engineer (The Yardbirds)" is so much more than that...
Contrary to what a few reviewers with a short attention span have written here, Clapton was already out of the picture when the band recorded this album--and it was a good thing: Clapton was then way too "conservative" at the time with his blues orthodoxy to let "Roger"'s adventures happen (the man also proved how obnoxious he could be on many occasions during his later career--but that's a story for another time...). The end result here is that the band then used Jeff Beck to replace him, and this to great effects if you're a fan of good guitar playing--see for instance the technically impressive "Jeff's Boogie". Yet all of this wouldn't be worth a rat's ass if the birds hadn't embraced the psychedelic shenanigans of those days in such an orginal and varied way. From the bizarre yet mellifluous fuzz riffs of hit "Over, Under, Sideways, Down" to the groovy basslines of "Lost Women" and "Hot House Of Omagarashid", the mood is definitely "shaggadelic, babe!" at an Austin Powers-on-LSD level of intensity. Yet as fun as those tracks are, they never fully forget that Chicago blues inspiration either. "Roger The Engineer" just allows you to hear that sound evolving to become... something else.
And that something else is the future of rock'n'roll. You can obviously smell whiffs of Led Zeppelin here and there (Jimmy Page is indeed the young guitarist who will replace Jeff Beck not long after this record). You can even behold the seed that would be soon sowed in Iommi and Osbourne's twisted minds not long before they created Black Sabbath in the mystical "Turn Into Earth" and "Ever Since The World Began" (especially in the latter's long introduction). This closer actually sums up the scope of moods embraced by the album, from a droning lament to a lively booter shaker to cap things neatly and nicely.
For this album, I highly recommend the 1987 Impact Record edition, because it includes the killer single "Happening Ten Years Time Ago" *within* the tracklisting (and not in the end, as a bonus, as in the online links provided here). That single is simply a masterpiece and deserved to be part of the feast anyway. French alternative rock fans will find its riff, quickly descending half tone after half tone, familiar. That riff was actually ripped off by Noir Désir for their hit "Tostaky" (directly or indirectly), their stroke of genius being that thay also gave it an *ascending* counterpart. But apart for this riff, the single has many other assets to boast about, so don't forget to give it a spin too...
So here it is: "Roger The Enginner". More than a psychedelic doodle, it is a fully realized vision--adventurous, fun yet ambitious in its scope and moods. A hidden gem that deserves each and everyone of its five stars.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 883
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 62 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 29
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 27
Pixies
5/5
It's surf rock meets punk meets indie rock meets pop meets sci-fi obsession meets teenage lust. Or, should I say, it's Dick Dale meets Hüsker Dü meets REM meets Ed Wood meets The Shangri-Las. It's those explosive chord changes and barks by Black Francis. It's those spacey solos by Joey Santiago. It's those straightfaced background vocals and straightforward basslines by Kim Deal. It's those metronomic gated drums by David Lowering. It's Gil Norton's streamlined production. It's that stellar songwriting all around, minus a very few patchy songs here and there (4.5/5 would be my exact score for this particular record, but let's not split hairs, there's enough great stuff in it to justify its presence on the list). It's a good memory, but not only that: I must have listened to the first four albums from this legendary band a thousand times, but everytime this app points me to one of them, I bob my head to it just like I did during the nineties. It's cinematic AND musical. It's wild AND melodic. It's definitely from the nineties as I said, but it also has that late fifties/early sixties mood and atmosphere to it. It's like no other band. It's the apex of early indie rock, one that would reshuffle all cards in the decade to come. It's lively. It's catchy. It's terrific. It's the frigging Pixies in their heyday. Enough said.
Oh, I almost forgot. As I'm spinning "Bossanova" in my living room right now, my 16-year old stepson just told me how much he loves this band too. He definitely comes from another day and age, musically speaking. But he can recognize truly awesome stuff when he stumbles upon it. A timeless record. One of the very few you can find out there. Keep them coming, Dimery and co.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 882
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 63 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 29
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 27
Joy Division
5/5
The template of post-punk. Or, should I rather say, the first temple, given the peculiar 'space' felt throughout this record, which is wide-sounding and yet claustrophobic at the same time. Martin Hannet's production ideas were one of a kind, for better (most of the time) or for worse. Yet the band also had a very dark vision of how late-20th century music should sound after punk, no matter how many times Hannet pulled the rug from under their feet with his off-kilter ideas (like putting that simple, propulsive yet very melodic bass forward in the mix, instead of the guitar--with great effects on tracks such as "Disorder", "Insight", "She's Lost Control"). From this battle of minds, some essential spark came forth. And this spark fully transcended the bum notes here and there, a few clumsy rhythm transitions and some off-key instruments in short yet clearly discernible moments. Ian Curtis had such a powerful presence anyway, such a sepulchral aura, both vocally and as a lyricist (not to mention his persona onstage), that all those minor flaws up there didn't matter anymore. And they still don't today. This record (with admittedly a very few others down the line, by Wire, The Cure, Gang of Four, or Siouxsie and the Banshees) gave birth to a whole genre. Of course, it's got to be a mandatory listen...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 881
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 64 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 29
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 27
Kate Bush
5/5
I'm writing this right after the Netflix series Stranger Things made "Running Up That Hill" a hit in the charts again. But then again, I didn't really need a TV series to be at least aware of Kate Bush's magnum opus, from which this song is the opener. And on a closer listen, I can finally understand the myriad ways in which this record is a treasure trove, and why it is so loved by fans.
Its first side ("Hounds Of Love" proper) is not only filled with hits but also with incredible arrangements transcending often off-kilter songwriting skills. In the realm of pop, I'm usually a sucker for verse-chorus-verse structures, but this is not really how Bush proceeds, is it? Her pop songs are more driven by very careful progressions starting from one single idea, and this is where her devilish arrangements--a lot of them handled by herself through synths and whatnot--are playing a key part. Whether they enter the scene as bass drums ("Running Up That Hill"), strings staccatos ("Hounds Of Love" and "Cloudbusting" ), or infectious, frantically slapped basslines ("The Big Sky"), such arrangements are always bringing a peculiar atmosphere that makes such pop songs one-of-a-kind, almost "goth" in their intent. *Some* of those flourishes sound admittedly a little dated today (I still dream of a version of "Cloudbusting" without that oversimplistic binary drum part, with just the strings, for instance), but even those have their quaint charms now. And Kate's vocal work is rich enough to make up for those somewhat dated flaws anyway. Such work is often mellifluous, expansive and mystical--with even Bulgarian chants overtones sometimes, not up to a Meredith Monk-level of craziness, but quirky enough to keep you on your toes. Yet this voice that muses and yodels and grunts and coaxes can also be restrained from time to time, as in the delicate "Mother Stands For Comfort", whose synths, basslines and ambiguous lyrics about the mother of a possible murderer haven't aged a day...
In the second part of the record, The Ninth Wave suite, Bush then goes to a full experimental mode, and this where her genius shines the most. Even more than on the first, more "normal" side, she uses her kaleidoscopic voice the way a painter uses a color palette, adding spots and dots and streaks throughout the suite, dizzying the listener into a sonic whirlwind (I'm pretty sure Björk or Tori Amos took a lot of notes here). This second side places the listener in media res inside a loose tale about death and rebirth, something apparently disconnected from the first part of the record.... But more than this vague narrative conceit, it is the sounds and notes that are the true narrators of the tale here. Chilly synths evoke a frozen lake ("Under Ice"), voice collages of all sorts suggesting posession and curses and witchcraft bring a postmodern, Laurie Anderson-like flavor to the middle of the yarn ("Waking the Witch", "Watching You Without Me"), while uilleann pipes, fiddles and bouzouki trigger a celtic tornado that suddenly resets all expectations (thus creating a frantic "Jig Of Life" whose clever harmonies can send you to an exhilarated state, and this even if, just like me, you're not a fan of celtic music)... As for "Hello Earth" and its slow-motion clash between sinister Hollywood-style strings (arranged by film composer Michael Kamen) and eerie choirs interpolating a traditional Georgian lament, it just simply takes you to... space. There you can admire our fragile blue planet just the way that gigantic baby does ominously at the end of Kubrick's *2001* ("Hello, Earth... Peek-a-boo, peek-a-boo..."). After such a cosmic trip, Kate seems to wake up, as if from a feverish dream, and offers us a very short coda in the shape of a miniature track, "The Morning Fog", a very lively pop song totally at odds with everything before, led by John Williams's licks on acoutic guitar. Here it sounds as if Bush is ready to start the day and join her loved ones, her long dream becoming just a distant memory in the space of seconds... Rarely have closers sounded so *both* out of place and yet so effective, in a way...
But this should come as no surprise after so many twists and turns. Kate Bush is indeed an enigma, a true sorceress whose cauldron teems with sounds and colors and ideas. She's admittedly an acquired taste for many music fans. Yet legions of them will eventually come (back) to her, again and again. And "Hounds Of Love" being her most ambitious record, *both* in its experimental leanings and its pop instincts, it is obviously *the* one place where you must start if you want to know more about the damn witch. If said witch floats instead of sinking into you--namely, if this album goes over your head on the first listen--send her back to the river, and spin the record again. At some point, its spell will work on you, at least if you're open enough to sorcery. *This* is a wizard's promise...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 880
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 65 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 29
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 27
Billie Holiday
3/5
This one often comes up in lists of best records ever (or just best *jazz* records, but given the gaping holes in Dimery's list in that specific genre, you can't expect it to be fully taken seriously anyway...). Towards the end of her life, Billie had the idea to record her own "In The Wee Small Hours", and when you listen to the lush strings orchestration around her gracile, fragile voice, it sure seemed like a great idea on paper. Holiday was no Sinatra, especially at this point of her broken life, so the overall effect is altogether different from Frank's crooning. But whatever huge fans of Lady Day's might first think of *Lady In Satin*'s overall concept, they must absolutely listen to this album at least once in their lives, that's for sure...
Yet can the same be said for fans of music in general? For me there are at least two records from Holiday's fifties period that should be listened to first, *before this one*, if only for the timeless jazz standards that can be found in them. The first is *Stay With Me*, a generally lively, big band record which can boast of great versions of "Ain't Misbehaving", "Everything Happens To Me" and "Say It Isn't So". And the second is the very melancholic *Lady Sings The Blues*, with wondrous cuts such as the title track, "Love Me Or Leave Me", "Too Marvelous For Words", but most especially a poignant and very melodramatic take on her legendary "Strange Fruit", one of the best protest songs ever written throughout history. Compared to those timeless standards, the compositions of *Lady In Satin* sound a bit lackluster and samey, in spite (or maybe actually *because*) of their classy " third stream" orchestration. The writer of these lines prefers to hear a "rawer", back-to-blues-basic, version of Lady Day, no matter how raw her vocal performance actually is on this record. Which implies a tracklising a little more focused and dynamic than the one found in *Lady In Satin*, even if "dynamic" will never ne the right word for Billie Holiday's nonchalant art...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 879
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 65
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 30 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 27
PJ Harvey
5/5
The mere fact that two decades in since the start of her musical career, and after all the great albums she put out, PJ Harvey managed to conceptualize, write, and record one of the top three LPs she's ever released justifies the presence of "Let England Shake" in this list. What we have here is a very rare animal. It's a loose concept album about war and its weight on the English collective consciousness, but this admittedly ambitious conceit never goes in the way of the overall musicality and individual strength of the songs gathered for said record's tracklist. Those songs are indeed some of the most memorable she ever penned, between the lively numbers "Let England Shake", "The Words That Maketh Murder" (and its infectious male background vocals by Mick Harvey and longtime producer John Parish), and the cavalry horn-propelled "In The Glorious Lands", not to mention all the poignant ballads interspersed in the middle of thdm ("The Last Living Rose" and "All And Everyone" come to mind here, even if none of those already great cuts can can match with "In The Dark Places" and its epic finale--hear those moving voices lamenting about a world born out of WW1 trenches and weep, dear listener). Parish's production of those admirable compositions is balanced, dynamic and subtle--rarely has auto-harp in a "rock" album sounded so good before--and Polly Jean's vocal performance is one-of-a-kind--each inflexion of her voice, from shrill and eccentric adlibs to lower and more grounded moments, clearly telling the listener that she is inhabited by many different characters in the course of her musical yarn. Add lush brass to the mix as a colorful conterpoint, and the end result is one of the best albums of the 2010s, and certainly the best record of 2011.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 878
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 66 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 30
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 27
Abdullah Ibrahim
5/5
I've often grumbled against the glaring omissions in the jazz selections of this list, but with this particular album, I'm forced to admit that Dimery and co. simply dug gold. I'm not a jazz specialist, just an open-minded amateur, so I didn't know who Abdullah Ibrahim/Dollar Brand was at all. Therefore, I've listened to this record with absolutely zero expectations, and I must say I'm totally enthralled by it now. It started off in quite a subdued way, though. At first, "Mandela" sounded a little too big band-like, almost too quaint to my ears, in spite of the obviously important theme suggested by its name, especially coming from a South African musician. But then each track that followed grasped my attention in a different way, from the gentleness of "Song For Sathima" and the driven focus of "Marenberg Revisited" (a variation on an important musical milestone written by Ibrahim more than a decade earlier--and a significant instrumental statement against Apartheid), and this continuing up to the arabic flavors of "Tuang Guru" and the heartwrenching finale of the short ballad "The Wedding". Closer "Sameena" was also a huge surprise in the way its minimalistic, nearly atonal introduction on brass and winds steadily grew into a meditative piece that ensnared my ear up until the very last Just like for pianist Ibrahim, I didn't know the other performers on this record either, but they're all doing an excellent job conveying the myriad emotions and colors gathered in this tight, tight package. *Water From An Ancient Well*'s scope is so impressive, and its tracklisting is so dynamic--so varied yet so cohesive too--that it instantly got a 5-star mark from me. This sort of thing doesn't often happen, so you can be sure I'll return to that proverbial well from time to time...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 877
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 67 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 30
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 27
Supertramp
2/5
Had this suggestion been *Breakfast In America*, which is obviously part of Dimery's list with its string of timeless hits, I might have considered including this particular record in my own list of 1001 albums to listen to. But here, in the case of *Crime Of The Century*, and apart from "Dreamer" in it, there are no timeless hits to speak of. Good records can't only be build on them, admittedly, otherwise they would be "best of" albums... But the snag for *Crime Of the Century* is that more than half of the cuts in it are not particularly compelling: their overall production and a lot of the instrumentation and arrangements have aged poorly, to be honest, leaving a somewhat bland taste on the tongue.
Besides, other reference points to describe this record are always detrimental to it. Supertramp are sort of prog rock, but they can't instill a truly evocative and ambient atmosphere the way Pink Floyd did. Or they can't play with time shifts and rock out like Yes, for instance. Plus, they're kinda soft-rock, but there are none of the melodic twists and turns or off-kilter chord changes that made Steely Dan the somewhat enigmatic band they were. There are a few lively moments in this tracklisting (apart for "Dreamer", mostly the end sections of "School", "Rudy" and the title track). But those peaks can't make up for the overall snorefest plains running all the way to the horizon elsewhere. At times, listening to this album feels like being that guy locked behind interdimensional bars on its cover. You think something interesting or exciting might be about to start. But it very rarely does, actually. And so you're stuck in limbo. That doesn't make this album the *musical* "crime of the century", I'll grant you that. But that doesn't make it a mandatory listen either.
The only thing that can save Supertramp is when their songwriting is direct enough to mark your memory--which was the case for the four hits of *Breakfast In America*, plus a few other cuts in it, making it a more consequential album. At least they managed to leave their imprint on pop culture thanks to their singles, which very few acts can do, at least to this extent. By the way, and on this subject precisely, there's also "The Very Best Of Supertramp" available out there. Listen to it first, *and then*, if you're really digging it, see for yourself if the rest is right up your alley...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 876
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 67
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 30
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 28 (including this one)
The Byrds
5/5
From the British Wave parody "So You Want To Be A Rock'n'Roll Star" (with frenzy screams of fans and all) to the genuine hits "Have You Seen Her Face", "The Girl With No Name" and "Why", from the lively "C.T.A.-102" continuing previous album's "Mr Spaceman" sci-fi streak (including space alien gibberish at the end), to the mystical heights of "Mind Gardens", and from California to the rest of the world, this record is quite the wild ride into an exhilarating sixties theme park. There's a even one mandatory Bob Dylan cover ("My Back Pages"), but this time the Byrds didn't even need those sorts of cover to flesh out the tracklisting. Probably because contrary to other LPs in the past, they now had everything at hand as in-house songwriters.
*5th Dimension* had already set the psychedelic tone of an era. *Younger Than Yesterday* could now capitalize on that tone, and take things further. As far as I'm concerned, said things went downhill from that point on. *The Notorious Byrd Brothers* still had great moments, and was reputedly groundbreaking in terms of production. But the individual songs in it were hit-or-miss for me. And I'm not even talking of that weird full-on country mode of that other famous album that followed after...
But to come back to this particular record, which I still find very endearing (including for its minor misfires), it is also one to listen to on the strength of only *one* of its songs, i.e. the mesmerizing and melancholic "Everybody's Been Burned", probably one of the best compositions David Crosby ever penned (and also one of his most moving performances as a singer). This song best exemplifies what's great about the whole opus: it's cinematic *and* heartfelt, firmly set in a time and place but also timeless. Listen to it and weep. This is the epitome of The Byrds' early career, and as such, it should be part of this list, obviously.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 875
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 68 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 30
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 28
Todd Rundgren
4/5
Last time I reviewed Todd Rundgren, it was for *Something/Anything*, and I complained that even with his brilliant production chops, Todd's music was not "abrasive" or "leftfield" enough to make up for his *relatively* lackluster talent as a writer of memorable tunes and as a performer. This double album displayed a lot of imagination, sure. But that imagination still gave birth to a somewhat by-the-numbers result, in spite of the vast array of genres tackled. Apart from a very few choice cuts here and there, most of those tracks indeed bordered on muzak or elevator music, unfortunately. And it was a chore to go through them honestly.
Well, it now sounds as if Rundgren heard *some* of my complaints as I uttered them from the future. If there's one clear asset to *A Wizard / A True Star* (which followed *Something / Anything*), it is that, this time, its production and sonic signature can't be blamed for NOT being "leftfield" or "abrasive" enough. Those sounds are nothing short of astounding, even today--the record is designed to be a purveyor of many classic hip hop or electro beats (proof that it has aged very well), and one can thus easily picture Animal Collective or MGMT doing the exact same sort of music during the 21st century. The first side is almost entirely comprised of short crazy musical psychedelic interludes segueing one into the next, so no one can accuse Rundgren of going the safe way here when it comes to compositions at least. In other words, those 'shrooms must have been particularly potent, that's for sure...
On the whole this record is therefore a far more consistent effort than the previous (double) LP, as lopsided and zany as its individual tracks sound. Of course, beyond the multilayered instrumentation and production, there's still the songwriter issue. Going for moods and sonic landscapes, Rundgren doesn't have to worry a lot about that this time, but a few more *real* songs sprinkled in the middle of that wild ride would have *also* been a welcome respite, and made the whole thing far more accessible. Side 2 still has a few of them, even if a third of those more classic cuts are actually covers of soul staples assembled in a medley that comes a little out of nowhere (but in a way, that's keeping with the generally crazy tone and intent of the album, obviously). The most impressive "song", "Zen Archer", is towards the end of side 1 anyway, and it can at least boast of a grand finale that's quite important to make sense of the collage mess that came before. "Is It My Name?" is also a nice rocker, reminiscent of The Who. If only Rundgren had added something that had the level of "Couldn't I Just Tell You" in terms of intensity to those proceedings, the whole thing would hold up far better today that it does now. But that awesome power pop track stayed buried in the middle of the long-winded nonsense of *Something/Anything* instead (rather than *shining* in the middle of THAT shorter sort of nonsense). Another missed opportunity...
So it's often a glorious mess, but it's a mess nonetheless. One can easily see how Rundgren became an endearing name for many, and besides, the man was groundbreaking, there's no denying about that. So this is *probably* a record everyone should listen to at least once. But is it *aimed* at everyone? And can enough listeners really dig into all that crazy stuff and not turn mad (at it, or just plain mad)? This remains to be seen, honestly...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 874
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 68
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 31 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 28
Herbie Hancock
5/5
You can always trust Herbie Hancock for finding a new groove, and dig gold out of it.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 873
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 69 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 31
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 28
Little Richard
4/5
*To those it may concern: all parents should be very careful not to let their offspring be exposed to this lewd and loud individual making this mind-numbing racket that passes off as music these days. Our (white) children must absolutely be kept away as far away as possible from such degenerate and obscene self-appointed 'artists'. The future of our society is at stake...*
This up here, is probably what most conservatives thought during the fifties. Of course, now, it's just good old rock n' roll. Yet let's not be mistaken... Such close-mindedness and ignorance still exists today. It's just that conservatives should not be listened to when it comes to art anyway. History always proves them wrong.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 872
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 70 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 31
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 28
Frank Sinatra
4/5
Browsing through the reviews in here, it's striking to see that almost no participant bothered to write a long one this time. I take it as a sign that most listeners decided to show respect for this historical relic in one way or another (hence its nice 3-point-something overall score), but that not all of them were personally enthused. And now that I have listened to this album from start to end, I think I'm gonna do the same and make it short. Not every song in here is as memorable as "I've Got You Under My Skin". But it's still an iconic sort of record, and some of the orchestral arrangements slap very hard, actually more than in the drowsier *In The Wee Small Hours*.
Overall, swinging Sinatra holds out better than balladeer Sinatra today. Oh, except for *one* later song, "It Was A Very Good Year", one of my favorite ballads of all time, far from all those christmas-sort-of-standards Frank *also* specialized in. But that song is gonna come up later in Old Blue Eyes' career if I'm not mistaken... In the meantime, and as far as albums are concerned, *Songs For Swingin' Lovers* deserves its reputation as a record filled with the best of what the big-band-propelled genre has to offer. Way to go, Frankie!
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 871
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 71 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 31
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 28
Beach House
4/5
It took me a long time to "get" Beach House. Just like the ineffable cover of this album, their songs (and the way they're produced) look very samey at first glance, but the more you actively delve into them, the more some of their charms become visible. That being said, the overall effect of such strand of dream pop is still hit-or-miss for me, just like that zebra pattern, once again. Even if a song like "Zebra", to stay on that very idea, proves that duo knows what they are doing, at least. Chord changes alternate between minor and major modes in ways that can make the whole thing mysterious and addictive, keeping with the fluctuating pattern of said artwork. And with the right set of ears (not too bothered by the overabundance of high-end frequencies), the unobtrusive, polished production of *Teen Dream* then soon becomes a lesson in subtlety and restraint. Quite remarkable, even if not *downright* remarkable.
For what it's worth, this record is probably the band's masterpiece, thanks to standout tracks such as the one mentioned before, "Norway", "10 Mile Stereo" and "Take Care". The rest passes by quite nicely as background music. And when it comes to Beach House's whole discography, add *7* to *Teen Dream*, and maybe *Bloom* or even this year's *Once Twice Melody*, and you'll have a good idea of what Beach House can do when they are at the peak of their powers. After that, it's only for hardcore fans, really... Some dreams can't go on forever, can they?
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 870
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 72 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 31
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 28
Green Day
5/5
In its 90s pop-punk genre, *Dookie* is simply put, THE quintessential album. Offering earworms after earworms (such as obvious examples "Longview", "Basket Case" or "Welcome To Paradise"), and far more subtle in their tunes and arrangements than other so-called household names of said genre (from The Offspring to Blink 41/Sum 182 nonsense), Green Day just simply released a perfect record, one that also aged far better than the half-baked "operatic" pretensions of *American Idiot* a few albums later.
Of course, behind Green Day and the likes, there's a large constellation of other, less famous melodic punk acts that are worth a detour as you and your skate are rolling from one spot to the next throughout the city. NOFX especially comes to mind, thanks to their brilliant and sardonic songwriting. Green Day is not as fast and furious as the latter, admittedly, yet both bands still share many skills when it comes to memorable melodies and snarling words. And since NOFX will never be part of such lists for some reason, you gotta give a 5-star award to the closest thing to them, at least. It's finally done. Hope others do too, here.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 869
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 73 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 31
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 28
Leonard Cohen
4/5
Leonard Cohen's debut album was a masterpiece that came out of nowhere, announcing the arrival of a new singular wordsmith to the wider world--as well as a skilled crafter of timeless tunes. After such an unmitigated success, it was obviously harder for the Canadian songwriter to catch the same lightning in a bottle twice. While a fine LP, 1969's *Songs from a Room* ultimately feels less assured than *Songs of Leonard Cohen*. Compared to John Simon's illuminating production on the latter, the one Bob Johnston crafted for the debut is filled with quirkier choices--that jaw harp marking the beat on several tracks, those off-kilter synth sounds grinding their way in the background of "A Bunch Of Lonesome Heroes", or that bizarre recorder flute drunkenly supporting Leonard's whistling in the last 30 seconds of closer "Tonight Will Be Fine"... With such weird details around them, Cohen's characters sound even more like the true misfits they are.
The intent is therefore topically interesting, but unfortunately music suffers from it. Depending on their mileage on such things, listeners might find those instrumentation choices we've just mentioned up there either charming or annoying, and the same goes for some of the vocal performances here. Cohen's singing and meter are more tentative and uncertain than on his other work from that period, especially the debut, and especially when he struggles to reach notes on the higher end of his naturally deep, low register. As for the overall quality of those *Songs from a Room*, surely it is a little more uneven than the ones on *Songs of Leonard Cohen* or *Songs Of Love And Hate*. "Seems Like So Long Ago, Nancy", "You Know Who I Am," and "The Story of Isaac" are for instance very nice, but "The Butcher" and "Tonight Will Be Fine" simply aren't up to his usual standards.
Said standards are however aptly represented through two cuts that are now part of Cohen's classic repertoire, "Bird On The Wire" and "The Partisan". "Bird On The Wire" is, simply put, another quintessential Leonard Cohen song, as frail as the singer's voice is on this one--even if such flaws may also have their charms, as we suggested earlier... In keeping with the performance, the tune is moving, sardonic, touching, evocative and witty all at the same time. And speaking of performance, that minimalistic and yet heartwrenching cover of the war song "Le Chant Des Partisans"--including that coda Cohen is singing in the original French language, supported by female background vocals--proves the "less is more" philosophy can actually yield truly epic results. Despite the album's flaws, such iconic moments convey a naked intimacy and fearless emotional honesty that's every bit as powerful as the debut, and left no doubt that Cohen was a major creative force in contemporary songwriting in the early seventies.
I stole those last words from someone else in this group, but it was so rightly put that I couldn't refrain from doing so. If I had to rephrase this idea my way, I'd say that as far as albums go, *Songs From A Room* isn't the most obvious entry point onto Cohen's oeuvre, but if we had to pick individual songs so as to prove the immensity of his talent, you and I can find gold there, too. I'm pretty sure the reviewer whose words I borrowed here would agree, at least...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 868
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 73
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 32 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 28
Ramones
4/5
"Ah-one, two, three, four!"
Four stars, then. If only for this.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 867
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 74
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 32
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 28
Spacemen 3
3/5
An interesting listen, especially since it's the first band of Sonic Boom and the founder of Spiritualized, whose appeal to many listeners I have never been able to understand. Consequently, I thought I would hate this album too... but against all odds, I did *not*. Most of the minimalistic, ambient tracks can hypnotize you quite well if you are in the right mood or mindset for this, and the rockier cuts such as "Revolution" or "Suicide" are doing a nice job quoting or mimicking stuff by The Stooges, The Jesus And Mary Chain, MC5 and... Suicide, obviously! Just like the latter, Spaceman 3 are here using only one single chord and haunted howlings for five minutes, but those 5 minutes still manage to fly by, miraculously. So sure, "Playing With Fire" might come off as an easy thing to do, but doing those sorts of record is actually riskier than it seems. At least if you don't want to get burned. :)
Is this record an *essential* listen, though? As of now, the jury's still out on that. As much as one can appreciate the barebones atmosphere and witty references to past acts, there's still the sneaking suspicion that the project was a little too derivative to be positively compared to its models. Music fans might opt to go directly to the sources that so clearly inspired Spaceman 3 here. Especially today...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 866
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 74
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 33 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 28
Supergrass
3/5
"Richard III", its punk impetus and its sly theremin; "Tonight" and its addictive chorus: "Sun Hits The Sky" and its relentless drive propelling you to rock heavens--those tracks are among the best Supergrass ever penned and played, which explains why some listeners might think *In It For The Money* should be on this list. I guess I'm happy to see it here, too, if only for its sardonic cover, which perfectly encapsulates what's fun about this band...
That being said, I can still understand how sone other listeners less versed in britpop could question such inclusion. Most of the other tracks are not as striking as the ones we've quoted before, in spite of Supergrass's skills as composers and performers. Some songs even veer dangerously close to a sort of dad-rock that, even in the nineties, already sounded a little derivative compared to other stuff that was happening in the indie world at that time. Besides, well-versed craft does not always lead to memorable tunes. Those songs are alright of course... But they're not "Alright". Not by a long shot.
What saves Supergrass is obviously their unpretentious posture, here combined with imaginative chords, obvious winks to the past, and sudden heartfelt intents. It's an alliance between left brain and right brain that is rarely witnessed in the rock world at large. The whole thing might be slightly ironic, or maybe it isn't ironic at all, who knows? Read the title of this record again, and you'll get the idea.
Logically enough, the jury's still out that one. At least for now... Maybe a few more spins will help me decide if there's still room for Gaz Coombes and co. in my little pantheon of keepers, In the meantime, it was a fun record to revisit. That's gotta count for something, I guess...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 865
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 74
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 34 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 28
Taylor Swift
1/5
Why go to Taylor Swift painfully trying to build some sort of indie folk cred for herself? (the strategy is clear here: she's got to cater for her aging target audience) And more importantly, why go to her when you can go for the real thing, i.e. Other Lives, Weyes Blood, Aldous Harding or Big Thief? My take is that 80% of the audience falling for this sort of album does not know the first thing about what's going on on the margins of the mainstream music industry these days... And yes, that *does* include the writers of this list, who clearly lost most of the plot when it comes to recent stuff. You can bet your cowboy boots the acts I've quoted up there (especially Big Thief) will leave a far more memorable trace in music history than Swift's half-baked attempt to sound, well, "authentic".
And it's not *all* about being a gatekeeper for certain genres, I'm also speaking in musical terms here. When Swift's voice is not bland, it tries too hard to inject feelings to her lame vocal lines. Everything is glossy--way too polished for an indie record--the songwriting looks as if it was done through corporate commitees (guess what, it was, contrary to what the official credits are saying--just listen out to those who are in the known on such things), and so, logically enough, the overall result is just boring as hell. I'd rather go to her pop albums of the early 10s. At least, I would find something that makes sense there, even if it's not exactly to my liking.
And for those who might argue that her collaborators do have that indie cred I can't see anywhere in here, maybe they should start to reconsider their knowledge in the indie folk genre (to me, The National and post-*For Emma Forever Ago* Bon Iver are overrated anyway, so they can't really save Taylor from this debacle desperately trying to sound like an artistic breakthrough). Awesome PR work on the part of her agents if you're thinking of using this argument here.
To each their own and the likes, so I guess you can like this thing, of course. But to me, trying to defend *evermore*'s artistic merits falls in either one of these two categories: a. your knowledge of current music is lacking. b. you're mostly focusing on the lyrics (nothing wrong about them of first listens), and consequently, you're not too bothered by unsurprising, linear melodies and all-too-safe production choices that don't have a shred of personality in them. Your call.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 864
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 74
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 34
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 29 (including this one)
Alexander 'Skip' Spence
4/5
And here I was complaining about Taylor Swift's inclusion on this list. As much as the 1001 albums book is lost when it comes to *recent* masterpieces, its writers know their stuff about the past, at least when it comes the rock genre. Alexander "Skip" Pence's *Oar* is indeed a hidden treasure--a bold, raw, often visionary statement from an artist on the brink of madness. Moby Grape being a rock band I find horribly bland and unoriginal compared to its more famous peers from the sixties, I would never have thought of checking out this solo effort from one of their most deranged members without this 1001 album project. And because of haunting songs such as "Little Hands", "Diana" and "Book Of Moses", I'm so glad I did now. Some of Spence's cuts here even pave the way towards the future, from the proto-krautrock-tinged "Gray/Afro" to the pre-Radiohead-like "War In Peace" and its awe-inducing chord changes and guitar flourishes. Interspersed between those highlights are a number of songs going from the eccentric to the downright sinister, with a voice that's unpredictable from one track to the next. The whole is thus an uncompromising picture of the psychological hardships this American Syd Barrett went through. His life story is a very sad one, but at least we can rejoice he was able to leave this recording, a very unique one, in all senses of the word.
Madness being a part of the human experience, all of this makes *Oar* a compelling album, both musically and artistically. So I'm happy I can now place this one next to other misunderstood folk misfits or psychedelic oucasts such as Barrett, Nick Drake, Mark Fry, and The Incredible String Band. Thanks, Dimery and co.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 863
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 75 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 34
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 29
Elvis Presley
5/5
"Blue Suede Shoes", the covers of "I Got A Woman" and "Tutti Frutti", that incredibly moody "Blue Moon" ballad... Here are a few of the highlights from Elvis' historical first LP. Everything here points to a landmark album, contrary to that "Elvis Is Back" record that's also part of this list for reasons that have more to do with marketing than genuine influence. This one is the soundtrack *par excellence* for every American diner out there, from Memphis to Tokyo.
Of course, Elvis is not the originator of true rock n' roll, African Americans were. But it's hard to deny the appeal and cultural imprint this seminal record left on... well, almost *everything* that came right after it! And even far later than that (see the lettering on the cover of The Clash's *London Calling*, for instance...)
So 5 stars, if only for that.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 862
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 76 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 34
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 29
Blur
5/5
Yes, this record is the utimate summation of Britishness during the nineties--with a lot of it still relevant today, from cynicism about everyday life in England to sudden bursts of romanticism and hope. Iconic AND lively. And essential for fans of British rock at large.
But beyond its topical contents, *Parklife* is first and foremost an incredibly adventurous album transcending its original britpop genre like no other record before. What a ride it is, from the exhilarating disco parody of "Girls And Boys" up to epic closer "This Is A Low" (I swear I can sense the wind blowing across the white cliffs of Dover or Brighton when I'm listening to this one). And this counting everything in between, of course, including all those wonderful earworms along the way ("Tracy Jacks", " End of A Century", "To The End", or that insanely cinematic title track and its hilarious unreliable narrator--foretelling stuff like Yard Act in 2022). A great, great album that honors that old Kinks tradition in ways that can make Albarn, Coxon, James and Rowntree proud today. And the best LP Blur has ever released, period (with the eponymous one in tow right behind it).
On a sidenote: I'm also a huge fan of Mogwai, and so felt quite saddened when the latter tried to ignite a war of words with Blur at the end of the nineties (as if those two bands were from the same sort of league anyway...). I've just read today that Stuart Braithwaite kind of admitted all of this was a little immature on his part, that he actually met Grahan Coxon quite a few times since the time of that quickly-aborted public feud, and that Coxon has been nothing but awfully nice to him, even with that story between them... At least *one* member of Blur is a high-class act, or so it seems...
I'm only telling this story to raise one little question: how come there's no album by Mogwai to be seen anywhere on this list? What do Dimery and co. have against post-rock and other similar genres like that? Beats me, really... Maybe they were such fans of Blur that they decided to boycott a whole genre as a retaliatory measure, ha ha. If that's the case, well, come on, guys, please reconsider. It's all water under the bridge now, is it not?
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 861
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 77 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 34
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 29
Moby
3/5
The very definition of "wallpaper music", in ways that even Brian Eno couldn't have envisioned when he coined that term 25 years earlier. Too bad that...
a) The beats and synth licks behind those blues samples have aged so poorly.
b) Those tracks have been so ubiquitous in ads and You Tube videos that nobody in their right mind should want to play them in their living rooms now.
A more positive assessment would say that Moby's talent is undeniable when it came to the way he selected those blues samples so as to create so many earworms. Side A is very impressive in that regard. Each and every track has imprinted its mark on the audience's consciousness, thanks to all those ads and videos using them. And all things considered, side B's less known tracks are still cohesively conceived and edited compared to A.
My mood is generous today, so I'm gonna give a neutral grade. Because that wallpaper is well-crafted. Even if it's still wallpaper, at the end of the day.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 860
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 77
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 35 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 29
Alanis Morissette
2/5
I'm gonna copy and paste an excerpt of the wikipedia article, which perfectly encapsulates what I'm thinking about this one:
"Other critics were less favorable. David Browne of Entertainment Weekly was intrigued by "You Oughta Know" but found the rest of Jagged Little Pill "much harder to swallow", continuing, "What sounds arresting on a single grows wearing over a full album. Producer-co-songwriter Glen Ballard's arrangements are clunky mixtures of alternative mood music and hammy arena rock, and the 21-year-old Morissette tends to wildly oversing every other line." Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune wrote that Morissette "strives for catharsis but often merely sounds histrionic".
When listing the album at 45 on the "100 Best Albums of the Nineties", Rolling Stone commented: "Jagged Little Pill is like a Nineties version of Carole King's Tapestry: a woman using her plain soft-rock voice to sift through the emotional wreckage of her youth, with enough heart and songcraft to make countless listeners feel the earth move"."
In other words, nice topical lyrics but generally awful music.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 859
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 77
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 35
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 30 (including this one)
Black Sabbath
5/5
I only went as far as the first six albums of Black Sabbath, but the first four of those are already stone-cold masterpieces for me. The thing is, out of those four masterpieces, *Paranoid* is probably my least favorite as a whole album, in spite of its reputation. Because apart from "Planet Caravan" and its hazy atmosphere, this record is maybe a little too one-note and "basic-sounding" for me. *Masters Of The Universe* and *Vol.4* have far more dynamic tracklistings, which makes them an even more enjoyable experience for my specific ears.
That being said, *Paranoid* is also a historical record, marking the true birth of the whole metal genre. I love the eponymous debut, but the latter is still hard rock, basically, i.e. blues played and processed though overdriven guitar. In comparison, it's clear that *Paranoid* goes beyond all that. And inside that historical album, "War Pigs", "Iron Man" and the title track are rightly considered as timeless anthems. So I guess I can't give this one anything less than 5 stars.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 858
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 78 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 35
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 30
AC/DC
3/5
Well, I'm in two minds about this one. It's got the iconic title track. But *Back In Black* is obviously the better album out of the two, and I personally don't see the point of including *more* than one AC/DC album in a list of 1001 essential records. Yes, I know those two LPs don't have the same singer (rest in peace, Bon Scott). But AC/DC sounds like such a well-trodden formula by now, with a band that never ever deviated from it, that I feel that room should be given for other sorts of styles and genres...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 857
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 78
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 36 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 30
Joni Mitchell
5/5
There is a deep mystery to this album. Everything in it is so personal--the lyrics, Joni Mitchell's idiosyncratic chord changes, her high-pitched voice, never grating, but still insanely eccentric in their own way to express the "blues", her insanely good guitar playing, displaying a sense of rhythm most players would kill for--and yet, for all those subtle flourishes, the record also spoke directly to the hearts of millions of souls in the ways only a straightforward pop album could, and it continues to do so these days. I'm not even sure this is my favorite Joni Mitchell LP--sometimes, I favor *Ladies of The Canyon* when it comes to her "Reprise" years, and after that, I have an even softer spot for the lush pop overtones of *Court And Spark", or for the jazzy digressions of *Hejira*. But *Blue* is definitely an essential album everyone should listen to at least once in their lives. It was *not* my entry point to Joni's universe, curiously enough. But it's been the one of so many fans of her that you just gotta consider it for the historical album it is.
And please, don't get fooled by the melodically unobtrusive and lyrically naive "All I Want" that opens this record. Because once you pass this sort of back entrance to it, you're in for a treat, and this for each and every one of those tracks. A few examples here: the subject matter of *Little Green*--Joni's lament to the child she gave up for adoption--slaps HARD. "California" and "Carey" are just perfect pop songs about Bohemian lifestyles of the seventies, and yet they're anything but *easy* compositions. The plane trip of "This Flight Tonight" is as experimental as anything she later wrote, and yet it's also *fun* to listen to. As for "River" and "A Case Of You", they're the quintessential Christmas song and love ballad, respectively, and yet they're not following any old formula. Only Joni could have written those tunes. After all these years, it's still a true mystery how she could do this. As is the overall effect of this "slow burner" on me today. Indeed, the more you fall in love with this record, the more that blue haze on the cover thickens... One for the ages, in all senses of the word.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 856
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 79 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 36
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 30
Radiohead
5/5
Before this project, I've once established a list of my 100 favorite albums of all time. Radiohead's *Kid A* was album number one. This record is so ingrained inside my musical consciousness that it is difficult for me to find words to express my relationship to it now. Which takes the cake, since friends and I have discussed this album for hours on end in the past, trying to use the right words to convey what makes this genius work about alienation in the postmodern world insanely great. Yet in the end, words are useless to explain the goosebumps this music can trigger when addressed to the right lonely soul. You'd have to be there with me, inside my brains, to fully understand.
What do you mean, "it's impossible"? Am I not here with you right now? And aren't you with me? Is anybody else out there?
This record is a paradox. *Kid A* indeed conveys a sort of emotion that is one-of-a-kind, because this emotion comes from the sheer impossibility to properly feel or express emotions themselves. And this here is not merely an intellectual take on the album. It's first a purely sensory one. Once you understand on a *gut level* that it's what this record is all about, you'll feel those goosebumps too. It may not be the greatest album of all time (some say it is), but it's certainly the greatest *frigid* album of all time.
So I am now writing a music review on a phone app. It's about *Kid A*, by Radiohead. I want this review I'm about to write to be sincere and heartfelt. I want it to feel right, even if that review will only be read by people I've nor even met. Who knows, maybe that review will *never* be read anyway. Whatever the case may be, I am here confiding my feelings to a technological device. I don't feel alone, but I am. Or maybe it's the other way around. And all of this is, actually, the very subject of *Kid A*, by Radiohead. The circle is now complete.
*The Bends* was the best britpop album ever, made by a band that, for all intents and purposes, were more inspired by American acts than their British peers; then came the elated and melancholic tracks of the groundbreaking *OK Computer*, a truly epic statement that opened all prog rock and electronic gates out there, not only for the band, but for most of their audiences, too. *Kid A* was the next step, but it took you to the future this time. A scary one thematically speaking, but so enticing on the musical level. The mere fact that this record about alienation in the digital world sounds as if it was mostly recorded through electronic instruments whereas 95% of it is actually analog stuff tells a lot about Radiohead's bravura and ambition here. *Kid A* deserves its reputation on all counts. Everything good that has ever been said about it is just right. Maybe you can't feel it, and in that case, I'm sorry for you. But know that it's right, somehow.
I'm losing it, I have a review in mind but it doesn't make sense anymore. I'd need to cut some stuff out. I wish all those voices in my head would shut up now. Nobody's gonna send me a "thumbs up" for this one. I am a complete failure. I wish I could disappear...
*Kid A* - Radiohead - 2000
Restrained and yet incredibly intense album that saw the British rock band changing gears in quite an unpredictable way, with influence going from Aphex Twin-like electronica ("Kid A") to Charles Mingus-inspired brass extravaganza on a bass-and-drum killer rythm pattern ("The National Anthem"). "Everything In Its Right Place" is just the perfect album opener, in keeping with its title and lyrics. Ballad "How To Disappear Completely" is drawing on Schönberg types of atonal glissandos on strings to tell its yarn of trauma and oblivion as a way to cope with the latter, and it is overwhelming, to say the least. "Optimistic" is the rare rock cut in the tracklisting and it's as good as anything on *OK Computer*. As for "Idiotheque" and "Morning Bell", the first is an abrasive, sardonic and yet incredibly catchy piece of electronica, and the second builds up to a climax that actually never comes, clearly emphasizing the themes of loss and disconnection the whole album points to. "Motion Picture Soundtrack"'s voice-and-orchestra-and-theremin anoints the end of the record like a soothing balm after all the crazy shenanigans before, and it is the stuff dreams are made of. A stunning album by all counts.
Favorite tracks: everything, even " Treefingers" and "Limbo", even if I consider them more like interludes.
Gosh, what is this crap? Why can't Radiohead just play stuff like "Creep" anymore? Pretentious posers...
The A in "Kid A" is A for Adorno. Radiohead just applied the German philosopher's negative metaphysics to their nineties rock formula, and this is what came out of it. They *are* indeed pretentious posers. But being quite a negative sort of person myself, I can't help loving them for having the balls to do this.
Oh my god, this album is soooooo cool. Reminds me of that 2000 summer holiday with Mark, Alex and Ruddy. We would smoke joints in the afternoon and drink bottles of wine in the evening, and get lost in those hypnotic sonic landscapes until the wee small hours of the morning. Good times. 5 stars.
I'm not here, this isn't happening...
18/07/2022. I'm in the south of France, near Avignon, for two weeks of camping there. There are not enough trees in this campsite to protect us from the sun. Fortunately, this cold, cold record is a breath of fresh air to my soul. 5 stars. For the album that is, not the camping site.
Slow apocalypse in the manner of TS Eliot ("not with a bang, but with a whimper"), and it has never sounded any better than here. One for the ages. Or what's left of them.
I'm having a panic attack just listening to this thing. Whoever praised this record is just a masochistic nutcase. 1 star.
You can try the best you can, you can try the best you can, the best you can ain't good enough.
Does that mean I should try harder for this album. Or maybe this review?
Un album magnifique, qui a donné lieu à une des plus fameuses batailles d'Hernani de l'histoire du rock. Deux décennies ont passé, et les fans ont gagné. Brilliant.
I now understand why Frank Ocean loves Radiohead. Those girlfriends of his should just shut up and let him chill out.
I had never listened to a full Radiohead album before. They're a cool electronic act. Oddly enough, I always confused them with another band that had a similar name. What was it again? Talking Heads? Weird that I can't remember. 4 stars.
Mais um ótimo disco do Radiohead. produção impecável. Sem tantos hits, mas demonstra bem o caminho musical deles.
Braucht man eigentlich nicht viel dazu zu sagen. Über-Album.
"Kid A"--the title track--is the best depiction of the ramblings of a depressive IA ever put to tape. Come to think of it, it's the ONLY depiction of the ramblings of a depressive IA ever put to tape. From that early point on the album, after the iconic "Everything In Its right Place", you just know everything after is gonna be fantastic. Surely an essential listen if there is one.
Seguramente es que no estoy capacitado para entender esta música. Incluso la canción que se titula optimismo, me da ganas de encerrarme en casa tras la ventana para ver cómo llueve y pensar en el asco que me da todo el mundo.
One of the best albums of all times. Enough said.
Here I'm alive
Everything all of the time
Here I'm alive
Everything all of the time
I feel like I'm in the eye of a cyclone listening to this record. Everything is "in its right place" and yet the winds of hell are blowing outside of hypnotic auditory 10 kilometers radius I'm in right now. I can sense them coming. Oh lord, help me.
I'm lost at sea
Don't bother me
I've lost my way
I've lost my way
The static of our modern lives has never been so beautifully represented than in this album. The cover says it all. Is this a chain of majestuous moutains looming on the horizon, or a pixellated simulacrum of them? Whatever the case may be, here you are, floating towards them?
What the hell is this? There must something wrong in my headphones, this just can't be a Radiohead album. It doesn't rock, and the ballads are insipid. 0 stars.
Ice Age coming, Ice Age coming
Let me hear both sides
Let me hear both sides, let me hear both
The first time I listened to this recording, I was like, "what?". The second time I had shudders down my spine for the whole time. I And subsequent listens have *never" worn out this album for me. Five stars.
We're not scaremongering
This is really happening, happening
We're not scaremongering
This is really happening, happening
Yes, I do "think you're crazy", Thom. But madness has never sounded so beautiful and heartfelt.
*Kid A* can go to hell. Heck, this is what hell sounds like for me, so I guess said kid never left it anyway. Next!
Another message I can't read
Another message I can't read
Another message I can't read
Another message I can't read
Can someone in here contact me? I'm afraid the review I have in mind for this record will be too long for this app to memorize it anyway. Ooops, I'm out of battery on my phone right now, could you at least tell me if I can downl
Mobiles skwerking, mobiles chirping
Take the money and run
Take our money and run, take our money
When I'm so tired that I can't sleep, this is what all music sounds like to my ears.
This album led the way to everything that came after it. Yet nothing that came after it was *this* good.
I don't like this. What the hell is wrong with me?
Nice background music. Three stars.
A stone-cold masterpiece. Well, "stone-freezing" would be more like it.
What's this with this strange drone a few silent moments after "Motion Picture Soundtrack"? I think I must have dreamed it before. But was that dream mine of yours? Hello? Are you still reading this? Hello?
Same here. But I don't know *when* this last review was posted. Is there someone still alive here in this group? They said the world ended on the radio yesterday. I didn't see any of their heads though. And I'm all alone now. This network is still on. Or so it seems. Can anyone read me? Hello?
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*This was fun to write. I hope some of you out there had at least a little fun too as you read all my nonsense up here. Good night.*
And now the usual closing credits:
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 855
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 80 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 36
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 30
As a bonus, here's the review I *really* wanted to post about "The Bends", also by Radiohead. The one I posted here was botched, clearly. I think its revision here might be slightly better:
"Radiohead - The Bends
"Creep" saved Radiohead. This single came from a half-baked album, *Pablo Honey*, clumsily mixing britpop with some more "American" influences. But "Creep" was a hit and showed Radiohead they had it in them to make a record for the ages. And since the Oxford quintet was not afraid to take a long, hard look at what they had just done with their first LP (a mindset they would mostly keep for their whole career, up until today), they knew what needed to be done. A perfect balance between self-confidence and self-criticism was the key. And it opened a door that led to one of the most brilliant discographies ever put to tape.
In the course of this discography, *The Bends* is therefore Radiohead's first masterpiece (there's been five of them by my count, but first times always have their peculiar charm, don't they?), here aptly mixing twisted rockers and heartwrenching ballads. Everything is stellar in it--the songwriting, the lyrics, the vocal performances, the intricate bass-and-guitar arrangements, John Leckie's clean yet no-nonsense production. To say the tracklisting is "dynamic" doesn't even start to explain how songs segue into one another, starting with the gooovy "Planet Telex", followed by the intense title-track with its thick wall of guitars, and then going to all the gems of this record--the melancholic "High And Dry", the devastatingly beautiful "Fake Plastic Trees", the tight and angular "Just", the sinister and sardonic "My Iron Lung" (and its guitar hook spun on you as if it were a cobweb), not to mention the epic and poignant closer "Fade Out", with its elegiac arpeggio and truly *haunted* chorus. Thom Yorke and friends tick all the boxes that need to be ticked when you want to record a legendary album : they know when to get topical, with whiffs of a dystopian atmosphere that will further be explored in *OK Computer* and *Kid A*, and they sweep through a large array of (indie) rock styles, from brit pop to US alt-rock, from grunge to torch songs. And more importantly, they know how to make the whole thing sound cohesive, every vocal intention and guitar lick serving a discourse that transcends style or genres.
So just like OK Computer, there's no filler, no malfunctioning ride in this ominous and melancholic theme park about alienated souls stranded in the middle of late capitalism--each track has something unique going on for it, even the ones not mentionned up there. But this is no surprise (and no alarm, to quote a later song). Just as opener "Planet Telex" states it, Radiohead are never sounding better than when they lament that "everything is broken", only to pick up those disparate pieces and shape them into a single body of work that's unique, moving and relevant. They're THE postmodernist rock band of the late nineties / early aughts. And as such, they deserve to have their seats at the table of the greatest acts ever... "
Steve Winwood
1/5
Hold on. Is this list actually based on the book "1001 *Elevator Music Albums* You Must Hear Before You Die", edited by Robert Schmuck and Associates at the Cheesefest Corporation, Inc.? 1980 is just three years after the 1977 punk explosion. I can't imagine how many fans of truly vital music (or just simply decent one) must have rolled on to the floor with laughter while listening to this ridiculous stuff. I'm rolling right now as I'm writing these words. It' s nOt easy to whrite by the waY, butt its becuz of the unconttttrolabble fits of laughTer I'm Xperincin rite noW.
Now that I've stopped laughing and regained my spirits, I can maybe admit I was unfair in my first assessment up here. *Elevator Music* might be too narrow as an umbrella genre to describe the sounds and performance on this record. This thing can also work for the phone, actually. As in "Your call is very important to us. Please hold the line". Yeah right... You know they actually don't give a rat's ass about you and your problems when they choose this sort of music and make you go through those long minutes of ordeal as you're waiting for someone--anyone--to pick up the line.
Guess the only correct tag for this sort of thing is "Music For People Who Have Bad Taste". And for once, I'm ready to fight tooth and nail to prove that such a supposedly harsh assessment is actually nothing but objective here. Let's just be a little serious for one second.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 854
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 80
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 36
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 31 (including this one)
Adam & The Ants
5/5
Behind the idiosyncratic sounds of early 80s post punk/new wave--which have aged quite well given the revival surge of these sounds occuring in the British scene these days--, behind the experimental drive borrowing a lot of disparate elements here and there, from Glam Rock and Surf Rock to traditional Burundi rythms and Tex Mex / Western Country twangs, behind all those endearing and/or hypnotic details, there's one thing that this record displays that's cruelly missing in a lot of the more obscure cuts sometimes suggested by Dimery's list among well-known landmarks: infectious pop melodies. They're here played with an undeniable sense of fun, and the end result is here a record which is anything but pretentious, and yet manages to impress you from the get-go with its manifold stylistic twists and turns.
I was barely aware of who Adam Ant was before his name popped up on this app. From what I hear, his overall discography will be quite hit or miss for me. But it only took one exhilarated spin of this particluar record to make the latter a new late-70s/early-80s favorite of mine, along with the greatest albums of Siouxsie And The Banshees, Wire, The Cure, Bauhaus, Gang Of Four, The Clash, The Damned, This Heat and the likes. An awesome discovery. Whoever in Dimery's team was in charge of that specific scene has great taste. I will thank him forever, along with the creator of this app.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 853
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 81 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 36
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 31
3/5
Never quite understood the appeal X had on the early LA punk scene (along with the one it had on rock critics such as Christgau and the likes). Guess you had to be there at the time to get what's special about them. They're a more-than-decent act *objectively speaking*, but to me their overall sound and aesthetics are still too tame for bona fide punk--and not nearly intense enough compared to what was done in that genre at the time--while their melodies and unimaginative chord changes often lack the inventivity and/or catchiness that's required for more regular (indie-)rock bands. It's sort of a lose-lose situation for me. I suspect those 50s rockabilly influences, so endearing to X's fans, are also to blame here. They make the whole thing sound as a very derivative exercise, even though you never feel that the latter was at least *fun* to play (like it was for The Cramps or The B-52s). Or maybe Ray Manzarek's somewhat bland and linear production is at fault here. An ex-Door producing punk albums is an idea that has always sounded a little suspicious to my ears. I swear that I didn't know about that when I explored X's back catalogue and listened to that string of records he produced for them, always finding the whole thing a little too generic for me. But I have a sneaking suspicion he was not the best choice for the band...
I have to say that X is far from being a ridiculous band, however. And browsing through their early discography, it's easy to see why singling out this particular record (along with the debut released before it) is a no-brainer. There are some nice cuts on "Wild Gift" ("White Girl", "We're Desperate", "In This House That I Call Home", "When our Love Passed Out on The Couch"), even if there's nothing in it that relatively similar acts such as The B-52s and The Violent Femmes haven't said more convincingly. One of the assets of this album is clearly the charming vocal harmonies between Exene and John Doe--"perfectly imperfect", as someone *perfectly* stated in this group. For some listeners, 80% of what makes an album good is related to the vocal performances (and they *are* very good here). My own percentage is certainly lower than that. Conversely, it might be higher than other listeners when it comes to songwriting, catchy melodies, instrumentation, arrangements, production and intensity. Those "gifts" can be "wild", too. Even for punk rock.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 852
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 81
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 37 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 31
Queen
4/5
"Larger-than-life British arena-glam rockers who mastered the art of the pop single, led by the incomparable Freddie Mercury." This is what Allmusic has to say about Queen, even if all those pop singles were also coming from LPs, at least as far as I know. Note that this overall description doesn't mention albums at all. And there might be a reason for that, which could possibly be that Queen's extravagant antics were far less suitable for the length of a whole album, to the point when they could turn from extravagant to simply exhausting in the course of such longer plays...
That being said, it would be ridiculous to *fully* exclude such a legendary band for a list of 1001 essential records, and *A Night At The Opera* is probably the best candidate for it out there, thanks to "Bohemian Rhapsody", of course, but also to the far less known and yet absolutely marvellous cuts in it, expecially the equally extravagant but also mystical "The Prophet" and its incredible vocal bridge in the middle of the song, the heavy blues-rock of "Sweet Lady", or the psychedelic folk ballad about space explorers "39", all of them penned by future astronomer Brian May (!). Add a large chunk of rockers (mean and wicked opener "Death On Two Legs" or Roger Daltrey's hilarious "I'm In Love With My Car" ) along with a few mock-novelty numbers here and there, and you have a great album whose main strength actually lies in its 180 degrees twists and turns, keeping you on your toes the whole time. Such a record proves that Queen can be interesting and even relevant for stuff that has nothing to do with their most obvious and famous hits, still sounding fresh today. You may think you know everything there is to know about this band, and yet you might be wrong about this.
So who knows? Maybe *A Night At The Opera* will be an entry point for me so that I can later discover wonders in their other seventies albums (my superficial listening sessions for them strongly point towards "Queen II" , "Sheer Heart Attack" or "Jazz", maybe even "News of The World", even though I feel everything important about the latter can be summed up in its first two tracks, "We Will Rock You" and "We Are The Champions", that I obviously already have in a compilation at home). Whatever the case may be, and in the meantime, I'm happy to include *A Night At The Opera* in my own list. I feel that for a casual listener to this band, there are worse ways to start a full-blown exploration of their back catalogue, at least.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 851
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 82 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 37
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 31
TV On The Radio
4/5
As in the album before this one, *Return To Cookie Mountain*, the best and most effective tracks on *Dear Science* are the ones written and sung by Tunde Adebimpe (lively opener "Halfway Home", for example, or the string of tunes he penned that are lined up on side B--far better than the first--, especially the moving ballad "Family Tree" and the mellifluous "Love Dog" and "DLZ"). In comparison, Kyp Malone's funkier tracks are OK, but they're less intense or enticing, except for the great single "Golden Age", where Malone nicely channels "Golden Years"-era Bowie in both his songwriting and performance. Dave Sitek's production chops are highly skilled too (the Eno influence on "Halfway Home" is a very nice touch), but to me, the real soul of TV On The Radio is neither him nor Malone, it's Adebimpe.
Given the relatively uneven nature of those two records, and in spite of the hype that was associated to them--which made me own them at the time--I would still hesitate putting those records in a list of 1001 essential albums, however. I would love to because of the Adimbepe cuts, but not at the expense of other great LPs missing in this list. When I'm "Halfway Home", maybe I will see things a little clearer as to what I can keep, and what I can put aside. It's not *real* science anyway, is it?
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 850
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 82
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 38 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 31
Deep Purple
2/5
Just like many other listeners here, I feel like the bar should be considerably higher for a live album to make this list. Outside of Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison, I'd also be hard pressed to think of one that has the significance to be on here. Someone suggested the Quintet's Jazz At Massey Hall, for instance. In jazz you could also add Coltrane's Live At The Village Vanguard. But you could also go to other genres, from the Woodstock album or Yessongs to Mötörhead's No Sleep 'til Hammersmith. Yet unless I'm mistaken, none of the latter can be found on the original list. So *this* instead? No way.
Besides, out of *Made In Japan*'s seven tracks, four we already heard on Machine Head. I feel like it's giving Deep Purple far too much space in this list for no good reason, especially when you're listening to those overlong solos--an exercise that in its most self-indulgent extremities didn't age particularly well within the rock idiom.
So even though *Made In Japan* is not a bad record by all means, it's still an unnecessary redundancy in this list, and this should clearly be visible in the global ratings. Therefore I'm giving it a 2. Harsh, I know. But fair if you consider the difficulty of including *only* 1001 great albums in a list.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 849
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 82
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 38
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 32 (including this one)
Fugees
5/5
Ooo la la la! Classic hip hop album. What's not to love in it? Plus, someone like me, who loves to keep the *score*, is bound give this one a five, isn't he? Inventive rap flows, Lauryn Hill's mellifluous voice, an all-around pristine production, interesting covers, great originals... This record is killing me softly with its songs every time I play it.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 848
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 83 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 38
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 32
The Mamas & The Papas
4/5
Iconic album from an iconic band of the sixties, with the iconic "California Dreamin'" hit in the middle of it all, but also other wonderful cuts such as "Monday, Monday", "Straight Shooter", "Go Where You Wanna Go" or "Do You Wanna Dance". Those four-part vocal harmonies sure suggest California sixties ambience like no other band of the time, except maybe the Beach Boys, Jefferson Airplane or the Byrds. Nice balance of originals and covers on the first side. Unfortunately after the "Spanish Harlem" one, the songs are less striking or catchy. Obviously part of a list of 1001 essential albums, but not at the top of it.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 847
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 84 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 38
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 32
ZZ Top
4/5
Why hasn't anyone told me a 1973 blues-rock album by MTV pop rock mainstays during the eighties could *somehow* remind me of early naughts desert rock such as Queens Of The Stone Ages? Music and its convoluted history are wonderful things, aren't they?
I was obviously familiar with the John Lee Hooker rip off for "La Grange" before, but I had not heard the first side of *Tres Hombres* yet. And to be honest that first half sounds pretty great, at least from "Waitin' For The Bus" to "Master Of Sparks". I've just read here that "Beer Drinkers And Hell Raisers" was covered by Mötörhead. Frankly, I can see why Lemmy would single out this song. You can say a lot of things about who Lemmy was as a person or even a band leader, but one thing's for sure: he had great taste as a music fan.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 846
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 83 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 38
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 32
Jazmine Sullivan
3/5
I knew this one was on the list, and frankly, I dreaded the day it would pop up on this app. Not because it is a bad album by any means. As a matter of fact, the music in it can be pretty good at times, especially on its last half, with the groovy, A-Tribe-Called-Quest-flavored "Price Tags" (featuring Anderson Paak), or the minimalistic-yet-moving, acoustic-guitar-driven "Lost Ones" and "The Other Side". But the problem is, can this record be seriously considered as 2021's album of the year, just as Pitchfork, Entertaiment Weekly or NPR said? I mean, really? If you take a look at all the other records released that year, I can at least see twenty other that could win that trophy instead of Heaux Tales, and this in a wide variety of genres. So what did those critics see in this record that I couldn't see? Or, should I rather say, what did they *fail to see* that makes this album quite *corny* sometimes (and even problematic on some of its songs)?
First let me elaborate on that issue of critics conveniently NOT drawing attention to the obvious flaws of this record. Seems to me they singled out this loose concept album about African American women's agency because they couldn't agree on a less "topical" record, where music would be at least as important as the lyrics. So they chose a record that looked like it made a strong overall topical statement instead. I'm not too bothered by this, but that default consensus also implies they didn't know where to look to find good stuff. To be honest, I fear that retrospective looks on the year 2021 will be harsh on such critics' choice. But maybe I'm wrong, who knows?
Now about the flaws themselves, at least as I see them:
First the music. As I said before I quite like the songs on the second side. I also admit that Sullivan's strand of modern r'n'b / nu soul has a wide stylistic range, just as her very nice voice has. The thing is, as wide as that stylistic range is, it seems to me that tracks such as "Put It Down" or "On It" of the first side are way too generic musically speaking. There are probably dozens of other female r'n'b singers out there doing that sort of stuff better than those borderline-clunky tunes here. And since the album is *very* short, that couple of clunky tunes takes its toll on the whole thing.
Now comes the moment I truly dreaded, which is explaining why I think the "message" of this album is terribly awkward at times. What starts as a record defending women (especially African American ones)'s right to own their sexualities and bodies against patriarchal prejudice too often ends up being muddled by the *other* important theme of this record, clearly emerging in tracks such as "Price Tags" and "The Other Side": and that theme, just as in many other hip hop / r'n'b records of the last twenty years, is good old Capitalism. Sullivan here naïvely rehashes tired and worn-out clichés about "success" in America, suggesting that true emancipation from mysogynistic prejudice against the liberation of women can't be accomplished without having access to money and material goods. True, you can also interpret all of this as a realistic commentary about said capitalism and its sway on us all. But frankly, if there is self-irony in Jazmine's takes on the issue, it needs to be more clearly stated.
Before anyone tells me that *as a male*, I'm not well positioned to address such criticisms about how ambitious women can navigate through the challenges of the world of success and money, let me just point out that I would express the exact same reproach about a whole chunk of Jay-Z's songs, that is to say songs expressing a similar idea from a male point of view. OK, I'm also *white*, so I understand if someone takes my skepticism with a huge grain of salt. But I won't pretend that skepticism of mine isn't there. If the "message" here is that individuals should just get rich to be "free" (obviously at the expense of those who *can't* get rich), I can't possibly *fully* condone it. It doesn't matter what my gender or my skin color are. It's a matter of principle, as far as I'm concerned.
On a more positive note, and to go back to Sullivan, I readily admit that she does pepper her *Heaux Tales* with very funny one-liners once in a while. But even there, I find there's something lacking in the execution and overall presentation of that humorous side of things. One striking example is when she mentions her "pussy is wetter than water" in one song to then say it is "wetter than Chesapeake Bay" on the NEXT one. Objectively, the second joke is funnier. But by the time you get there, having heard the first one takes off the edge of the second one-liner. Repetition here makes the whole idea sound tired and lazy instead. Just as some of the music, actually.
As a conclusion, I can see many missed opportunities in this record. The whole thing is not so bad, but it's not brilliant either. Admittedly, I've only properly listened to it three times by now. Maybe there are intents and subtleties I didn't properly perceive during those few spins, so I'm ready to give Jazmine Sullivan the benefit of the doubt here. But not much more than this. There are things that all the money in the world *can't* buy.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 845
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 83
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 39 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 32
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
5/5
Essential Neil Young album, one of the five best records of his lengthy career by almost all (different) counts out there (and the first one of them, chronologically speaking). *Cinnamon Girl*, the title track, and the long "Down By The River" and "Cowgirl In The Sand", with their epic guitar soloing and hypnotic repetitions, are just the stuff of legend. But even a less known cut such as the borderline-psychedelic post-apocalyptic country number "Running Dry", with its evocative and ominous fiddle in the background, is worth the detour here. Five stars, obviously.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 844
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 84 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 39
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 32
Mott The Hoople
4/5
I've always had a soft spot for Mott The Hoople. Yes, as far as legendary glam-rock outfits go, Ian Hunter is not as good a singer as his mentor Bowie, and the band is mostly known because the latter was kind enough to give one of his greatest songs to them. But Hunter is still an endearing presence, very eccentric yet efficient at times, even with his limitations, both vocally and lyrically. And even when Ian was out of the picture, the band could still do great stuff. I've always thought that it was unfair that their last album with replacement Nigel Benjamin has been so unfairly panned by critics. *Shouting and Pointing* was no masterpiece, but it was very fun and lively, musically speaking. It just had the misfortune to be released too late, when glam-rock was already a thing of the past...
To return to the subject of *this* album, when Ian Hunter was still leading the band, what strikes me the most in *Mott* is how carefully constructed it is. Had that Bowie song, "All The Young Dudes" been included in this record, rather than in that lackluster eponymous one right before it, this album would be a stone-cold masterpiece. There are so many great details in it, from the tricky piano modulations of "All The Way From Memphis" to the synth bridge on "Whizz Kids", from the roaring and unruly chorus of catchy"Honaloochie Boogie" to the downright vocal and lyrical insanity that "Violence" is.
What also strikes me on "Mott" is that the more you go deep into the album, the more Bowie's symbolic tutelage fades into the background, to soon become replaced by the one of Bob Dylan, not exactly a glam-rock reference to say the least. Hunter's frail voice might explain all this, especially on ballads very much under the influence of the American bard ("Hymn For The Dudes", "Ballad of Mott The Hoople", "I Wish I Was Your Mother"). As a result, the album is probably richer and more interesting than any other one in the band's career. And yes, this, even without *All The Young Dudes" in the tracklisting...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 843
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 85 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 39
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 32
Hüsker Dü
4/5
"Had it been pared back to a single record it might have had more impact, but we were already loggerheads at that point." You're right about that, Bob. That being said, you're also right when you say you're still proud of this one, just as Grant was, I hope.
*Warehouse...* is Hüsker Dü's swan song, and also their second double-album. For the first one, they were still emerging from their first phase as a take-no-quarter hardcore-punk act, and yet also slowly transitioning to some more melodic songs here and there. *Zen Arcade* was therefore not an easy listen for everyone... And yet it was not merely long, it was also inventive, rich, unpredictable. This one here is the end result of that transition to more pop melodies started with that first double-album, after three other LPs, and it highlights the band as a sort of REM rolling on all overdriven cylinders, as most reviewers noted here. Most of the songs on the first two sides are great, even if at first, you might worry that Mould, Hart and Norton might not be able to keep the pace 20 tracks in given the somewhat one-note aspect of that first part. Fortunately, the second side proves those misgivings wrong. There are nice touches in a lot of the tracks (a synth here, some off-kilter rhythms there, a sea shanty..). The last tune, "You Can Live At Home" is one of the best farewell song a band has given to their fans since the one the Beatles did on *Abbey Road*. Of course, it's far weirder than that, with its stragely hypnotic quasi-dance rhythm. But it's fitting for a band that could never be fully cornered in one box.
Now is that the *one* album from Hüsker Dü you'd need to select for a list aimed at general audiences? It's a little tricky to say... It's still a long one to digest if you're not keen on punk rock aesthetics (and even if you are, parts of side 3 are a bit lengthy, it's true). On the other hand, *Warehouse...* is far less abrasive than *Zen Arcade*. What about the other records?, you might ask.... Well, *Flip Your Wig* is probably their most cohesive LP, but if some of the songs in it are all-time indie-pop-punk classics, there are still even *bigger* classics on *Zen Arcade* or *Candy Apple Grey*. Whereas *Warehouse* is the most comprehensive and ambitious album of their whole discography, showing the full scope of what Hüsker Dü could accomplish...
My oh my, why can't we have a list of *2001* albums instead?
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 842
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 86 (including this one--maybe with *Zen Arcade* and/or *Flip your Wig*, if the latter doesn't simply replace it)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 39
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 32
Elbow
3/5
Rarely have I been so undecided about an album. On paper, I should at least *like* this thing, but it seems like many things in these songs are rubbing me the wrong way. Yes, a lot of the arrangements are lush and carefully constructed, and some of the lyrics are fantastic. BUT, and this even after several repeats, I can't manage really *caring* for these tunes. Maybe it's the torpid, sluggish, borderline-bland aspect of the rhythm section, not lively enough for alt-pop-rock, but not slow and expansive enough for post-rock either (I never *first* turn my attention to the rhythm section for indie-pop... But here, I feel like I want to kick the asses of that drummer and that bass player--get things going, please!). Maybe it's also the all-too-polished and overtly polite production, with all those late naughts trademarks that didn't age that well in that genre, up to the point where I start to stifle a little when listening to this stuff. For too many moments, *The Seldom Seen Kid* makes me feel like an elephant in a china shop being asked to wear slippers on. I'm gonna break something, I'm pretty sure of it now... Can I breathe a little, at least? Or maybe it's the peculiarities of the band's singer, a little expressive sometimes, but not too much either, and a very chatty vocalist at times, like he barely has room to cram all his lyrics ideas in within his tunes (even some of the very slow ones). As a result, some of the vocal lines sound a little too affected to my ears. Too bad, since the lyrics are generally very good, as I said before...
Who knows, maybe this one will be a "slow-grower" for me? Yet after several spins, I'm starting to have my doubts about this ever happening... But maybe it's me. Maybe I've listened to too much stuff lately, and I feel *a little* burnt out. I don't know... To me, the very nature of this record is encapsulated in one of its minor songs in the middle, the one about the loneliness of a crane driver as a metaphor for a break-up. For once the lyrics are short, and yet nicely evocative. And the music sort of drones on in the background, giving you the impression of watching a set of cranes from afar, slowly moving on the horizon. If conveying that image was the intent of the band, it's an unmitigated success. But the thing is, is that sort of mundane urban landscape, slightly grating to the eye, the type of landscape I want to dive my mind into? Not really. Or, at least, not as often as to suddenly have the immediate urge to return to this record one day.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 841
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 86
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 39
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 33 - it's not a bad record, objectively. But I feel like in the last twenty years, there's been dozens of other ones Dimery's list is still ignoring, even if they were yet ten times more striking to me. And I need room for them on my own list. Sorry, Elbow fans :)
Madonna
4/5
Oh well... Madonna. Guess it would be ridiculous not to include at least *one* of her albums in this list given her impact on popular culture, and after checking out most of her records, it seems to me that *Like A Prayer* is the best choice, because it's maybe the only album of hers which is not invaded by an overlong string of clunkers that have aged poorly, apart from the obvious timeless hits. Here it needs to be pointed out that her records from the nineties and naughts surprisingly sound *even more dated* today than the ones from the eighties, if not more. But to be honest, it's an overall problem in her discography. Madonna was so bent on commercial success that her instincts (and producers) always led her to favor styles that would go out of fashion in a year or two--if they were not already dated by the time the record came out. So when the songwriting was not top-notch (and it wasn't in many cases), the whole thing sounded ludicrous to listeners with less blatantly commercial tastes. And this even back then.
To be honest, I first expected *Like A Prayer* to be pestered by that same sort of problem given my knowledge of the second and third singles, "Express Yourself" and "Cherish". The first one is still bearable in an eighties nostalgic kind of way, but the second just sounds plain cheesy to me. But the thing is, those two singles are actually among the less compelling cuts in this album, and most of everything else is surprisingly very good.
Of course, there's the title track opening this record. Everybody knows it, so I don't need to describe in details its gorgeous gospel arrangements, off-kilter chord changes, unnexpected rhythm drops and overall soulfull atmosphere. It's one of those timeless hits Madonna will always be remembered for.
About the other good stuff now:
The sensual duet with Prince, "Love Song", provides the kind of kinky kicks you can expect from the association of those two household names. It croons and moans and writhes just the right way.
"Till Death Do Us Part" is a lively and catchy mid-tempo song displaying one of the rare instances Madonna could do rockier stuff without sounding too insincere or overaffected. Its lyrics are also an uncompromising take on domestic psychological abuse, which doesn't hurt.
"Promise To Try" is a touching ballad, unpretentious but still effective. Its minimalistic piano-driven struture makes sure it can stay fresh after all these years.
Compared to it, the strings-laden baroque pop chops of "Dear Jessie" are nothing short of astonishing: the music sounds like the love child of *Around the World In A day*-era Prince and Kate Bush. Sorry for the horrid mental picture I'm suggesting here, but believe me, musically it still works out very well.
The next track, "Oh Daddy", is probably the centerpiece of the record, and certainly its emotional heart. It's all in the title. Heavy strings support a very personal song where Louise Ciccone settles scores with her father, and if you feel like someone eavesdropping on something you shouldn't hear while listening to it, the heartrending arrangements, the irresistible chorus, and the somewhat cold, detached way Madonna sings the latter make for a fascinating listen.
After this feat, the bland pop-dance number "Keep It Together" is underwhelming to say the least, but the record fortunately ends on another high note, the acoustic-guitar and latin-trumpet-driven torch song "Pray for Spanish Eyes" ("Act Of Contrition" after it is nothing but a goofy experimental bonus track for me--so experimental that you feel like you're listening to Sonic Youth's parody album *Ciccone Youth* instead).
So that's it: 10 real songs. Two clunkers and one half-clunker against seven keepers, including one timeless hit. Of course, only *one* timeless hit may sound a little stingy compared to the usual three you could find on *Madonna*, *Like A Virgin* and *True Blue*, to just mention her eighties albums. I suggest owning a compilation if you really enjoy those more famous songs (like *The Immaculate Collection* or the most complete *Celebration*) and just forget about those LPs. Unless you're a huge fan, or obsessed with eighties' cheesy sounds, they're not really worth it.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 840
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 87 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 39
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 33
Peter Tosh
4/5
I'm a very casual reggae fan, only owning 10+ essential albums at home (by Bob Marley, Toots And The Maytals, Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff, Lee "Scratch" Perry/The Upsetters or the Congos...), plus a few Trojan and Studio One compilations. If I had a little more room and money to spare, this one would be part of my collection for sure... But since I already have the historical title track on CD somewhere, I didn't go for it.
Don't get me wrong, *Legalize It* is still a fine album. The songwriting can be very good sometimes, and some of the arrangements are top-notch. Take "Igziabeher", for instance: its dreamy piano flourishes, to which Tosh adds enigmatic wind sounds at the end, make for a trippy listening experience. Nice way to praise Jah, Peter. Here are the sort of nice touches that can take the genre up to the next level.
Admittedly, some of the tunes are still a little light on the ear, especially compared to Tosh's former band, The Wailers. That comparison may seem unfair to a certain extent--Tosh is a more than decent songwriter--yet one can still sense this record sometimes lacks the mystical intensity of Marley's vocal performances, or the full-on inventive quirkiness of Lee Perry's productions, or the sheer soulfulness of Toots And the Maytals. But I can still get why *Legalize It* should be an album you must listen to at least once in your life. And this even if you're only a *casual* reggae fan, with not enough shelves in his living room.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 839
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 88 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 39
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 33
Robert Wyatt
5/5
Wave after wave, Robert Wyatt takes us on an astonishing and marvellous trip to the sea. His frail voice is the auditory equivalent of spindrifts: it has an automatic effect on you, and can even repel you at first given its somewhat flimsy grasp of pitch sometimes, but once you get used to it, it becomes close to a mischievous, evocative friend tickling your senses. Soon, you don't notice Robert's quaver is relatively vulnerable anymore, because you're already under the surface with it, bathing in the middle of strange and poetic sonic landscapes.
Everything about this record is liquid--the voice, of course, but also the synth and organ layers, the oozy basslines, and the many jazzy brass flourishes. It would be a mistake to only address the sonic textures, though: repeated listens indeed soon reveal how the tracks are carefully constructed too, their different parts and intricate arrangements phasing in and out of the foreground, weaving their seaweed fabric as their tides ebb and flow all around your ears.
Water is enticing, but it's also treacherous. Take the short intro of wonderful opener "Sea Song", for example. You might believe that those relatively by-the-number piano chords announce a somewhat mundane ballad, yet the emotional turmoil right after those first seconds sounds far more intense than what you could have expected at first, and this until the deliverance of the transcendant final part, filled with hope and longing. Wyatt is also unreliable in the ways that he sometimes winks at the audience, especially when he makes goofy non-sequiturs in his lyrics or uses a lower grotesque timbre to create unexpected lighter moments compared to the rest of the tortured proceedings. In that realm, see also the backwards-recorded voice in the middle of "Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road", rewinding everything that was sung up to that point in the song, a playful move that suggests the sort of tricks a child could play on you. If the key word to "get" this record is catharsis, it's still one taken with a huge grain of salt, in keeping with the oceanic mood. Everything is nicely summed up in the last track, "Little Red *Robin Hood* Hit The Road": yes, its first part does amp up the intense longing to embrace an ocean of experience and emotions already diplayed in the rest of the album, supported by mellifluous electric guitar licks, unmistakably played by Mike Oldfield. Yet as grand as this first part sounds, the song (and album)'s conclusion returns to the quicksands of that surrealistic grotesque mode we talked about earlier, mocking transcendence through Wyatt's voice, here set once more to a gruffy, near-comical mode. This earthy coda suggests we finally returned to the shores of mankind, welcomed by a wrinkled mariner gently admonishing us through his inane and uncomprehensible babble. Our odyssey is over. The end.
What a trip. What a strange voyage. Far less groovy and free-formed than Wyatt's original band Soft Machine, but far more poetic and evocative, *Rock Bottom* is a seventies prog-rock masterpiece which could not be further distanced from all the virtuosistic clichés of the genre. As such, it's bound to be discovered again and again by future fans of experimental music, undettered by the nonplussed reactions of shallower minds around them rejecting all this as utter nonsense. The tides, they come and go. Robert Wyatt knew it, and we can all be glad he went with the flow here.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 838
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 89 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 39
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 33
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
2/5
Yeah Yeah Yeahs' *Fever To Tell* was my second favorite album of 2003, a year that was admittedly short on great albums by my count: apart from The White Stripes breaking out into the mainstream, and The Strokes, Mogwai, Grandaddy or Broadcast doing their thing, there was not much going on in terms of *truly* exciting stuff. Oh, 50 Cents hit the charts, too--I guess *this* was fun, even though everyone with half a brain at the time knew that sort of thing would age poorly, as fun as it was to hear on the spot. Those dreadful naughts... It all went down to the drain for a lot of music starting from that year. At least, Yeah Yeah Yeahs sounded *fresh*, unruly and untamed with their NYC garage aesthetics. *That* was a breath of fresh air, before going to the long apnea of the decade that ensued (not that folks with decent music tastes knew such decade would be *that* dreadful at the time--for one, I would have taken a *larger* breath had I known).
Fast forward to 2009. After a half-baked sophomore effort, Yeah Yeah Yeahs attempt a grand comeback, with the help of usually great producer Nick Launay and TV On The Radio's Dave Sitek. You can't really blame the intentions of all those nice, usually talented people (including the band themselves): they wanted the band to be relevant again, which meant that the sound of this record *had to* move forward compared to previous ones. But there's a snag: as this team gathered all their forces to do so, they totally *neutered* what made Yeah Yeah Yeahs great in the first place. We could go on with the details here, but we'll just stick to *one* symptomatic issue: Karen O's voice. In too many places of this *other* half-baked record, she sounds literally short of breath, which takes the cake knowing what she can do as a singer. Yes, there are a few thoughtful arrangements in those songs, some of whom are decently written, I guess, in spite of some predictable shenanigans in them. But such benefits come with a price, and the price is extremely high here. Those production values are indeed nothing but a gilded cage for Yeah Yeah Yeahs, they sound as if they're wild exotic birds imprisoned in it, and frankly, it makes me feel very sad for them. The cover sure seems to suggest you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. But when it comes to this band, I prefer my eggs sunny side up, and NOT that messy, shapeless blob of a record, Grammy nomination notwithstanding.
On the positive side of things, there are two ballads on the record, "Skeletons" and "Runaway" that might be worth taking a detour to. But anyone who loved "Maps" on the first album knows those nice tunes can't compete with their obvious model here. As those fans know none of the livelier cuts on *It's Blitz* can either compete with the ones on the first LP. It's especially clear when you listen to the overtly *terrible* three last tracks, displaying everything that's hackneyed about textbook late naughts production (faux-groovy, disco-like rhythm sections, overtly polite synth and guitar licks, bland vocal parts--the list could go on...). This sort of thing can still give some dated charm to Phoenix or Gossip, I imagine. But for Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it just doesn't work at all.
But I imagine that I shouldn't sound so surprised by this debacle taking way too much attention to the fashionable sounds of those days... 2009 was indeed another dreadful year for music fans. Apart from Animal Collective breaking into the mainstream--er... let me correct that: "finding critical consensus by default"--well, apart from that, what was going on in terms of exciting stuff? Not much, it seems. Fortunately, things slowly got a little better once we entered the 2010s. But that's a story for another time, kiddies...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 839
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 89
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 39
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important: 34 (including this one)
Killing Joke
4/5
As much a post-punk band as a proto-industrial one, Killing Joke have a somewhat important place in the history of those two genres, even though what they accomplished during the eighties was later refined by very different bands going from Big Black to Nine Inch Nails, bringing more interesting rhythms and sounds to the barebones formula displayed by the band's first LP.
With this mind, it's still nice to hear that highlights "Requiem", "Wardance" and "The Wait" still set a pretty high bar from the get-go, in spite of the early years in which they were recorded. And apart from the extremely clunky white-funk instrumental (?) "Bloodsports"--clearly out of place here--everything else on this record is more than decent, if not absolutely mindblowing.
Check out the later album *Night Time*, too, if you're intrested in the band. Not for "Love Like Blood", a poppier experiment that hit the charts and yet didn't age that well, but at least for two other tracks: mesmerizing "Darkness Before Dawn" and catchy "Eighties". The latter is famous because Kurt Cobain probably nicked its intro for the one on "Come As You Are", but it's not the only reason the song should be listened to given its prophetic lyrics about how said competition-driven "eighties" would be perceived in later decades. Because, hey, Killing Joke could get pretty topical too, even if it was in a goofy, somewhat low brow way. And this topicality is *also* an asset of their first record for those who are into that sort of thing, by the way...
I need to know if I have enough room on my list to include this one, to be honest. But I *do* wish I have room for it, even though I'm not a *huge* fan of the industrial genre. Time will tell. Hope "the wait" doesn't seem too long for me, at least...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 838
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 89
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 40 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important: 34 (including this one)
Milton Nascimento
4/5
What's good with this project is that I can broaden my horizons thanks to choices I would not necessarily make all by myself. I don't know enough about Brazilian music, but I know that I enjoy a lot what I'm hearing right now, and it's enough for me in certain genres. Some of the songs' finales are especially impressive. I was only vaguely aware of who arranger Eumir Deudato was before (through Björk), and it's nice to finally hear how fabulous he can be. As it's nice to discover Milton Nascimento and Ló Borges, two great songwriters with endearing voices and presence.
I could go on and give details on the unmistakable seventies feel I sense out of this record. I could even try to compare it to the one of American and British rock classics of that same era (it seems the "international" influence is definitely there). But I won't. It's nice to stop the fake TED Talks once in a while and just smell the roses. Because they smell the same, whether in Brazil or Britain and the US.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 837
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 90 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 40
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important: 34 (including this one)
Green Day
2/5
Hey punk rock fans! Listen to NOFX's EP The Decline. I'm serious, listen to it. Then only after that, you''ll be able to judge whether Green Day pulled it off writing a punk opera. I leave the link down here for those who don't know what I'm talking about:
https://open.spotify.com/track/2Wm84PF0DHyRQx79Lj9NwI?si=PUPhtW_UTOCvw3tgbfLlKg&utm_source=copy-link
To me, NOFX certainly managed to write a punk opera five years *before* American Idiot came out, and they only needed 18 minutes of runtime to convince me. The exhilarating twists and turns of the music, the hardcore accelerations, the trippy, almost proggy interlude, the grand parade of the finale, sarcastic and desperate with its ironic trombone, and the pointed lyrics, saying what *American Idiot* tries to say with far more wit than any song on the latter--everything in *The Decline* surpasses Green Day's seventh album, and this without the financial means and production tools said album profited from.
The huge difference lies in the songwriting--both for the music and the lyrics. Case in point for *American Idiot*'s overall shortcomings: 9-minute centerpiece "Jesus Of Suburbia", which soon wears out its welcome, if only because its own musical twists and turns sound lazy, torpid, and quite predictable (once again compared to the ones of "The Decline", for instance). Plus, stealing Johnny Cash's "Ring Of Fire" melody for the main guitar riff at the end of the song--and this for no discernible reason in the song itself--doesn't help me take Green Day very seriously here anyway. As for the lyrics, they are pestered by the same problem found in the rest of the LP--their supposed denunciation of American hypocrisy, as related to specific issues such as the gulf wars, the media or Bush's lies, is all too vague, not just to say virtually non-existent. Actually you'd be hard-pressed to find more than a few passing indirect allusions to those things in the lyrics of this record--PR agents from the label sure had you believe there was something politically substantial in *American idiot* at the time. Turns out there's not.
As a consequence, this here sounds and feels like an all-too polished, fully-"corporate", fantasy version of so-called "rebellion". And this critique also concerns the music--those copied-and-pasted "heys" of the background vocals, those very bland, uniform chord successions, the pristine lead vocals drenched in effects that have nothing to do with punk's ethos and aesthetics. The awful truth about *American Idiot* is probably this: at the time, Green Day didn't have it in them to write enough true pop-punk anthems that would be as good and catchy and visceral as the ones on *Dookie*. So instead of admitting this and move on (or just call it a day, "green" or not), they used expensive production values, marketing, costumes, and so-called "high-brow" topical ambitions to cover their lack of inspiration. What a shame.
The only true punk pop anthem that could be compared to what they did before is the nice title-track opening the LP. And if "Holiday" is already going to some other places than punk, it's still a catchy song, more than decently written. But that's it. And in the end, that's probably the only thing that's gonna save this album from a 1/5 grade on my part.
Everything else is indeed either a huge letdown or a fuck-up of major proportions. The other two "hits", "Boulevard Of Broken Dreams" and "Wake Me Up When September Ends" are cheesy attempts to sell out and reproduce dad-rock ballads that didn't suit the band well anyway (those attempts worked out in the charts, unfortunately--people have bad taste sometimes). What's worse, those tunes are not even the most ridiculous thing that this record has to offer. Because even if you don't take into account Green Day's 180-degree turn when it comes to what punk should sound like and just consider the whole thing as a general mainstream rock album, *American Idiot* still doesn't work for most serious music fans out there. And the songwriting and production is to blame, once again. Those tunes can't compare with older rock operas: they are just void and calculated reenactments of their aesthetics, but without the lively inventiveness and quaint charm you could find in them.
In other words, *American Idiot* is no *Tommy*. And it doesn't end with a bang, just like the latter does, but with a whimper. Worse, that long boring end actually starts *before* the middle of the record, with "Boulevard Of Broken Dreams", and drags on forever. Of course, one could argue that this anti-climactic ending is sort of the point of the story told by *American Idiot*, at least from what the songs are able to convey about the overall yarn--it's always been hard understanding the precise tales of rock operas, admittedly, so we won't blame Green Day for *that* at least. From what we can perceive about the story, everyone's in for some disappointing outcomes in the story. The "Jesus" character ends up pushing paper in a cubicle. "Whatsername" marries "Whatsisface", a soulless nobody. You can't get too excited about those final story developments, I guess. As I imagine those are actually nothing but another cynical and somewaht futile way to repeat the old "No Future" punk motto to the masses.
So yes, maybe the anticlimactic end is all part of the design, and this might be another reason we won't go as low as 1/5 for this one. BUT that intellectual argument still doesn't save the album for me. Because:
a. Being aware of all this still can't excuse the dour music on the second half (and remember that I wasn't even convinced by everything on the first). Ideally, you can speak about boredom without being boring yourself.
b. When it comes to having anti-climactic ends for your rock opera that yet still has some emotional effect on you, maybe Green Day should have taken notes from The Pretty Things' *S.F. Sorrow* on how to pull it off.
c. You can't just improvise being a rock opera writer. Apart from all the necessary conceptual pretensions and delusions of grandeur, your heart must *also* be in it somehow.
Not sure where Green Day's heart was on this one. Maybe it exploded way too soon, just like that grenade on the cover, and all they could do after that was trying to pick up the pieces, and try not to look too cynical about the whole thing. Yet some music fans saw through them at the time. I sure did, and I still do now. Hence the fact that, to me, including this record in a list of essential listens somehow misses the point of what "essential" really means, in spite of a couple of decent singles. Not everyone is an "American Idiot", Billie Joe. Pass the word to Robert Dimery, please.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 836
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 90
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 40
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important: 35 (including this one)
a-ha
3/5
Has anyone heard this "unplugged" version of "Take On Me"? Shows how good the song is, even without its lush synth arrangements and Morton Harket having to go to the famous falsetto highs at the end of its chorus.
https://open.spotify.com/track/7htt7UuxHL5wneOcMWJP5E?si=K-aG8WMmS5qCORpI0R96sg&utm_source=copy-link
To return to the original album from which this timeless hit is taken from, not all of those eighties arrangements and vocal feats have aged as well as "Take On Me", unfortunately. As a matter of fact, and under closer scrutiny, a lot of the songs in this record are somewhat disappointing, and this only in the compositional level. For example, there's "Train of Thought" and its awkward faux post-punk grunts on verses, followed by incomplete choruses, leaving you dangling in the air--a bit of a problem that can also be found with "Here I Stand And Face The Rain". And speaking of chorus, there's much to complain about the ones of "The Blue Sky" and "Love And Reason", but this time for opposite reasons, as they confuse catchiness with bland, pointless repetition...
Fortunately, two exceptions are saving this record from a 2/5 grade (which is a tribute to their inherent greatness, given how hackneyed and cheesy-sounding a lot of the other tunes are sounding today). There's the title track, whose epic chorus and incredible orchestral flourishes could have been recorded yesterday, and "The Sun Always Shine On T.V." that somehow transcends its dated sound through the sheer force of its vocal melodic lines, pretty much in the same way "Take On Me" does.
Now I have two questions: can three great tracks against seven tedious ones make an essential album? But more importantly, where can I find those tracks without the clunkers and add them to my record collection?
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 835
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 90
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 40
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important: 36 (including this one)
Cypress Hill
3/5
This is obviously a landmark album for the whole hip hop genre, even if with this debut, DJ Muggs had not yet reached the full-bodied, weed-scented sounds Cypress Hill would later become famous for. Admittedly, he was getting to such hypnotic impact with hits (from the bong) "How I could Just Kill A Man", "Hand On The Pump" or "Stoned Is the Way of The Walk"... But as groundbreaking as those tracks were, most of everything else was still under the sway of late eighties production habits. And those might fare a little less well for certain rap fans, depending on where their mileage on old-school instrumentals is...
That being said, "Pigs" is a terrific opener, whose cartoonish yet pointed lyrics about the police haven't aged a day--minus one or two passing details we won't delve into right now. With an opener like that, you instantly know what to expect from this record. Too bad its second half doesn't have enough musical or lyrical highlights in that vein, though. So if you want to listen to a Cypress Hill album that doesn't peter out on its midway point, I suggest you give a try to *Black Sunday* or *Temples Of Boom*. I will certainly add the first on my own list of 1001 albums you should absolutely listen to. Not that this one here is so bad--it's just not the best, is all.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 834
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 90
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 41 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 36
Mike Oldfield
5/5
Make no mistake, *Tubular Bells* is the tree that hides the weird and sometimes wonderful forest that Mike Oldfield planted for us in first decade of his long career, from the long suites of the seventies to his catchy pop hits sung by the pristine Maggie Reilly during the early eighties (just don't bother explore anything from later periods, it's quite pointless). But like all forests, that one can be confusing at times. True, there are treasures to dig out in each and every one of those early albums. Yet there are *also* jarring moments in them, stuff so cheesy you can't believe someone able to write and play so many sublime melodies and arrangements can also stumble and fall for such stupid-sounding ideas. But as perplexing as Oldfield's music can be, it seems like the man always spontaneously follows his instincts, and this wherever they lead him. And this is exactly what makes those early records of his endearing and one-of-a-kind, even with their many flaws. At least to me.
There are two exceptions to this rule of thumb that Mike Oldfield's records are always flawed to an extent, which prove the man was able to write genuine masterpieces when rightly inspired. The second exception is *Ommadawn* (1975), and if you loved *Tubular Bells*, I advise you to check it out a.s.a.p.. But the very first exception is Oldfield's debut, obviously, from its famous introduction on grand piano and sped-up glockenspiel and farfisa organ (following an off-kilter, hypnotic rhythm pattern) to the layers of instruments piling up over a catchy bassline concluding Part One. In comparison, Part Two is both dreamier (those celtic folk interludes ; that utopian, "new age" atmosphere elsewhere) and more eccentric (that mock-hard rock thing with grunting vocals coming out of nowhere), going from one extreme to the next, exploring both burlesque and breathtaking sonic landscapes. Part 2 is indeed notoriously more "difficult" than Part 1. But as disjointed as it sounds, you could still find such contrasts in the *relatively* streamlined structure of the first part. One thing's for sure, the 180-degrees turns on this LP, from heavenly female choirs to heavy guitar riffs, will have your head spinning...
Yet we're not talking about Emerson, Lake and Palmer here either. *Tubular Bells* is not merely demonstrative or performative. It has a heart, too--maybe a clunky one, in keeping with the pre-DIY manner in which it was conceptualized on tape shenanigans and other sort of try-and-error measures, but a heart nonetheless. In a way, Oldfield's magnum opus sure gives another sense to the word "ridiculous", both as a negative and a positive term. This album shouldn't work, and yet, minus very short WTF moments, it does. And even the WTF moments are actually playing a key part in all this, preventing this record to fall into all the usual pitfalls of prog-rock by using an out-of-the-box philosophy about what instrumentation should do. Case in point: the electric guitar. Oldfield had found from the get-go one of the most distinct and idiosyncratic sound in the long history of that instrument, a sound that he would refine again and again in later albums. As a result, his guitar playing in not only *dumbly* virtuositic ; it is also rich, hugely harmonic, evocative, playful, both strident and lush. Another paradox many rock fans can't quite put their fingers on. Even for some coming from the usual prog-rock ilk.
To put it in a nutshell, you may love *Tubular Bells* or you may hate it, but it's hard to deny its originality and importance. This record *is* indeed an essential listen, both as an example and a *counterexample* of what made people tick during the early seventies. Such paradoxes are rare, but when they become such a popular cultural artefact, the end result becomes precious. Avant-garde has never sounded so easy on the ear... or maybe novelty pieces have never sounded so avant-garde, who knows? And all it took to accomplish that trick was a 19-year-old kid following a very personal vision--not exactly a genius, but at least a wizard when it came to sound and moods. Virgin Records founder Richard Branson can be thanked a thousand times over for giving a chance to such a young man with very few credentials going for him. Later on, Branson thought he would reach the heavens with Virgin Airlines or Virgin Galactic. But maybe the only time he *really* did so, was when he greenlighted *Tubular Bells*, all things considered...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 833
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 91
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 41 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 36
The Isley Brothers
3/5
So that's where that electric guitar sample on Beastie Boys' "B Boy Bouillabaisse" and Kendrick Lamar's "I" came from! Nice. Such a distinctive sound. But it's not the only ingredient that makes this recipe of "That Lady" right, since the five minutes of this groovy opener fly by without you noticing the song was that long. The sixties Isley Brothers are long gone by now, here comes a funkier version of them, and that version makes sparks on this first track.
Too bad this was not the case with the useless James Taylor cover that follows that great opener. Gosh, is he a bland songwriter at times--my best guess is that the inclusion of this boring ballad was a way for the Isley Brothers to make a commercial point and reassure their label after the change of sound implied by the inclusion of three new family members into the band. But maybe they did genuinely like this dud of a song, who knows? Eh, nobody's perfect, I guess.
Fortunately, things pick up nicely with the next two tracks, "If You Were There" and "You Walk Your Way". The first is especially impressive with its rolling rumble upon the bass toms, nicely contrasting with the sweet and longing feelings displayed in the rest of the vocals and instrumentation--including that ARP synthesizer already used to great effects by Stevie Wonder in "Superstition" the year before. Apparently, The Isley Brothers shared the same studio with Stevie for this record (he was recording the seminal *Innervision* while they were working on *3+3*). All those accomplished musicians must have had very interesting conversations while they were there.
Closing side one is a cover of the Doobie Brothers' "Listen To the Music". Odd that the bass line on the original slaps harder than in here (but Tiran Porter was indeed a killer bass player, so I guess it's hard to reach his level anyway). It's still a great cover, though, thanks to those ARP synth flourishes.
Opening side two is "What It Comes Down To", a rather convincing track, in the vein of Al Green and Stevie Wonder, once again. The drums are still doing that sort of rollicking thing they did on "If You Were There", and their rumble is good enough that you're happy to hear the band use that trick again.
Next is another cover, "Sunshine (Go Away Today)", this time from an obscure folk-rock singer named Jonathan Edwards. By all means, listen to the original, because The Isley Brother had a lot of fun completely turning it on its head. Their version is far more adventurous and enticing than Edward's one--the vocals are especially effective--and there's even that weird synth glissando west coast gangta rap would pillage two decades later.
And after this is... another cover, " Summer Breeze", once again by another fashionable soft rock act from those days, Seals And Crofts, admittedly far more more obscure in 2022. Unfortunately, and contrary to "Sunshine", the original is in this case the superior version, The Isley Brothers finding themselves unable to bring anything interesting or worth noticing in their own rendition. Besides, it's a little too easy to cover so many hits from the year before in an album, a habit that was not frowned upon yet during the sixties, but that quickly looked suspicious in the decade that followed.
If by this point, you're starting to lose interest in this overlong review, this might not be so bad, because I also lost interest in the record myself in the middle of side two. I therefore don't have much to say about closer "The Highways Of My Life", this short ballad being an original composition by the band that doesn't say much either, whether it is musically or lyrically.
All in all not a bad album, even if it's quite patchy, hit-or-miss for me. I can see why it had such an influence on other musicians--the already famous Isley Brother following the footsteps of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder when the latter gave up mellow stuff in favor of harder grooves. But I'd rather go to those household names first when it comes to that overall genre...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 832
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 91
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 42 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 36
The Temptations
4/5
I guess the inclusion of this album on the list is almost exclusively due to its legendary third track, "Papa Was A Rolling Stone". But it *is* such a fantastic track that I won't argue with Dimery and co about their decision to include the LP the song was actually taken from. Besides, it was nice listening to its longer original version for the first time here--those 11+ minutes just flew by, exactly like the single version repeatedly did for me before...
As for the rest of the record, it is generally excellent. Opener "Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On" (played live here, I think) rides a mean groove, and "Run Charley Run" is a topical cut that's quite powerful as a statement about the housing issues faced by the African-American community at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement--the songs is a snarling statement for sure, yet one not totally devoid of hope and empathy either.
Side two is admittedly less striking than side one, since it only uses slower ballads or far less funky tunes compared to the first half of the album. Some of those laidback or plaintive tunes are nonetheless impressive in their own rights--cuts such as Isaac Hayes' "Do Your Thing", or "I Ain't Got Nothin'" a few tracks before--I could swear that at least one later hip hop act sampled that "shoo-wop, doo wop" vocal hook on it (maybe from a different version of the song), but I can't remember which act it was, unfortunately. The information is probably two clicks away on the internet, so I'll let you do your own research, OK? 😉
Two songs kinda stick out like sore thumbs on that second half, unfortunately: there's the saccharine "Love Woke Me Up This Morning", a solo number for Harris--the youngest member of the vocal band at the time--here relying on his falsetto timbre in an attempt to make a durable impression, but only enhancing the cheesiness of the original composition as he does so. And there's also the quite pointless rendition of Ewan McColl's folk standard "The First Time Ever (I Saw Your Face)"...
Because of those two irritating tracks, I can't give the maximum grade to this record. Besides, The Temptations didn't write their own tunes (plus, they extensively used covers for their repertoire), and apart from incredible or groundbreaking performers such as Nina Simone or Johnny Cash, it is something that I will always consider as a significant flaw when it comes to select my own list of all-time greats. But still, this record is a keeper for sure, and not only for the most famous track on it...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 831
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 92 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 42
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 36
Buffalo Springfield
4/5
Neil Young's compositions ("Mr Soul", "Expecting To Fly" and "Broken Arrow" ) shine out the most on this one. "Mr Soul" is one of the Canadian songwriter's most distinctive tunes, and it's as great an opener as Stills' "For What It's Worth" was for the debut. By the way, Neil Young's other two renditions of the song (one for the unfairly maligned *Trans* album, and the other for his MTV Unplugged session) are both worth your time if you enjoy the original. As for the dreamy "Expecting To Fly", it surprisingly sounds like an outtake from *Harvest*, whereas the latter would only recorded a few years later--this familiarity probably stems from Jack Nitzsche's spatial production chops, that he would use again to great effects for Young's most famous LP. Amazing stuff. To conclude on Young's cuts, it must be pointed out that "Broken Arrow"'s off-kilter structure, with all its unpredictable interruptions, is certainly one-of-a-kind (what a great "meta" title for a tune, huh?). And yet as weird as the song's structure is, it's fascinating to hear how emotions seep through Young's performance, in spite of the stop-and-go nature of the song.
So yeah, Neil Young's fans are in for a treat here. But as great as the tracks helmed by him are, everything else is pretty good too (especially Stills' "Bluebird" and "Hung Upside Down"). Richie Furay's tunes are less immediately striking, admittedly, but they remain interesting--and it's nice that Stills and Young left some room to his songs at least. This topsy-turvy nature of the record obviously resulted in a couple of shortcomings and other dead-ends (as far as Buffalo Springfield's album go, I always thought the debut was a more cohesive offering), but it's only a minor gripe from your humble servant here. Classic stuff.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 830
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 93 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 42
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 36
Prince
5/5
I've probably been a little too harsh for my review of the purple dwarf's *1999* (and my grade, 3/5, was harsh too). It was a fun rant, so I have no regrets. But still...
So to get the karmic balance about Prince right, and given that I don't have anything original or interesting to add about this classic record from the eighties, I'm just gonna add one point to my initial estimation of *Purple Rain* (which was around 4 to 4.5) and therefore make its cover appear on my personal gallery of all-time stunners when you click on my profile. Those covers are starting to look good now, even if there are so many other personal favorites of mine I want to add to them right now.
I also have to admit that it's fun to go from hall of fame to hall of shame, and smirk at the lowest-graded numbers. There too, I badly want to add a few stinkers to the list. I know some of them are coming up--not from Prince, though, even if his later stuff dangerously added that extra layer of cheese no one needed in the first place. But, hey, I know there's even worse than Prince's later carreer when it comes to ridiculous stuff--I've checked Dimery's list, and it's there, hiding among the gems. It'll be great singling those horrors out too.
What a fun app, really.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 829
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 94 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 42
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 36
AC/DC
5/5
I've probably been a little too harsh for my review of the band's previous album, *Highway To Hell* (and my grade, 3/5, was harsh too). What was I thinking? I've listened to it a few more times since, and even if it's no masterpiece, it's still a *fun* record. 4/5 would have been more like it.
So to get the karmic balance about AC/DC right, and given that I don't have anything original or interesting to add about this classic record, I'm just gonna give a 5/5 grade to *Back In Black* right away. I already intended to do so anyway, even when I only gave *Highway To Hell* a 3. Because this record is a small miracle. The change of lead singer after Bon Scott's death was a very risky affair, and yet it fully paid out. So many stellar tracks on this one. Four all-time hits: "Hells Bells", "Shoot To Thrill", " Back In Black" and "You Shook Me All Night Long". But every other track is awesome, really. I'm not a *huge* AC/DC fan, but you gotta hand it down to them: they made a perfect record here. It's as simple as that.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 828
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 93 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 42
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 36
Dusty Springfield
3/5
Guess this was an important record for the Brits, bringing fashionable sounds of the day from America over their side of the pond. A few tracks stand out among the usual lovelorn ditties, and early sixties pop rock / r'n'b always makes nice background music anyway, doesn't it? Dusty's voice is very good, too, even though she really goes over the top for that Ray Charles cover closing the proceedings. Try as hard as you can Dusty, you're still looking a little pale for that sort of thing, aren't you? This here is the sort of detail that can make you smirk a little about the way bubblegum pop in those years unabashedly 'whitewashed' African-American musical heritage. That being said, two other nice covers from Dionne Warwick's early repertoire (stellar "Anyone Who Had A Heart", and cutesy "Wishin' And Hopin'", both penned by the Burt Bacharach/Hal David writing duo) brought to my attention how classy the first couple of Warwick albums are. So I guess I can thank *A Girl Called Dusty*'s inclusion on this list for that, at least.
So, yeah, all of this is quite interesting, but it didn't fully convince me this record should be listened to *at all cost*--except perhaps if you're a nostalgic fan of that more innocent-sounding, early swinging-sixties era. Springfield was admittedly an important figure, but maybe not for the album format...
Worthy of note, the US version of this record, just called "Dusty" (appropriately enough) has a very different tracklisting that includes another Bacharach/David signature song, "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" (remember The White Stripes' version, by the way?). Had this track been included in the original version, my interest in the latter might have been a little more stronger, who knows?
Waiting now to properly listen to the *Dusty In Memphis* one to see if there's more to Springfield's core repertoire than this latter tune and, of course, "Son Of A Preacher Man". I know *that* LP is coming up, too, and if there are enough gems in it, I might add another name to my own personal album hall of fame. But not before.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 827
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 95
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 42
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 37 (including this one)
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3/5
This is what The Atlantic has to say about the American tour that followed this record:
"Live recordings included in the box set give a good sense of what an Armed Forces–era Attractions concert was like: Every song seems about 15 percent faster and 30 percent more punk than the album version. To an unsympathetic listener, Costello can sound twee in studio, especially surrounded by Nieve’s filigrees. These tapes show that the concerts were rougher affairs."
Man, oh man, I wish Elvis Costello had used a producer who could understand the point of making these very formated songs rock HARDER than they do here, just like the live versions. You can't believe Nick Lowe produced the Damned debut when you're listening to *Armed Forces*. Don't get me wrong: the Attractions were a great backing band for Costello, and all of the songs are at least interesting. "Accidents Will Happen", " Senior Service" or "Goon Squad" all have amazing chord progressions and lively performances going for them ("Oliver's Army" is a more famous cut, admittedly, but its rococo piano flourishes are quite annoying and predictable in comparison). I also understand that what Costello fans like about this record is the contrast between the mellow sounds (even poppier than the ones of the previous LP "This Year's Model") and the snarling lyrics... But if you start listening to Costello fans, they'll tell you that seven or eight of his most cheesy-sounding records deserve to be on this list anyway (and I think Dimery listened, unfortunately--if he is not one of those guys himself). So maybe we should all remain cautious here...
Besides, and this is something that already rubbed me the wrong way for *This Year's Model* (as smartly-written as its lyrics were--just like the ones here, generally speaking), I think there is something deeply flawed in the borderline-incel energy Costello displays in some of his lyrics. That strange congruence between takes on personal relationships and political references is indeed very awkward stuff (that congruence can be mostly found on "Chemistry Class" and "Two Little Hitlers"--the latter clearly inspired by another tune with a very close title written by producer Nick Lowe for his own *Jesus Of Cool*). Here I disagree with The Atlantic, whose writer sees those lyrics as prophetic genius. Nah, it's not. They just prove Costello was way over his head and didn't really know what he was talking about, and this whether it's about the personal and the political. When you're only equating love and dysfunctional romantic relationships with the dynamics of fascism or unmitigated capitalism, I think you're missing many important points about all of those things... And in any case, it shows how lost and cynical you are as a person. Therefore, I'm not surprised Costello then somewhat ruined said American tour with those awful drunken racist "jokes" about James Brown and Ray Charles, ones that went from private to public to everyone's outrage (thanks to Stephen Stills and his entourage--by the way, check out Ray Charles' high class reaction to the news, the man just saved Costello's sorry ass, and this without pandering to his slurs either). The question is: was Costello's passing confusion such a big surprise after all? In a way, it could already be sensed in some of *Armed Forces*' lyrics. Maybe that "new wave Bob Dylan" thing hurled at the British singer thing made him lost all sense of perspective and restraint...
What really matters is that Costello apologized for the racist slurs right away and said there was no excuse or cohesive explanation for them. Astonishingly, he had played a Rock Against Racism concert right before the tour--so he *really* looked stupid, to boot. I guess he was lucky that this incident occured during pre-internet times, otherwise *more* than the tour and his charts ascent in the US would have been compromised.
Costello now seems to consider the whole situation as a case of hubris, a case of ambition-going-dead-wrong. He says that he had it coming somehow, and that the setback such a public revelation triggered was actually beneficial to him in the end, both as a person and an artist. But one can sense this strange "hubris" of his was already doing weird things in this particular record, both musically and lyrically speaking. And for one, *I* could sense it before I even knew about this particular incident. It's like an elephant in the room, clearly.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 826
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 95
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 44 (see explanation below)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 37
Note to myself -- I remember giving a harsh 2/5 grade on *This Year's Model*. Or was it a 3? In any case, I've taken some time to reconsider the overall artistic and mostly *musical* intents of this other Costello record, and I get them a little better now, in spite of my early reservations (some of whom I still agree with). So I can bump up that grade to a 3 or a 4 now, and include the album in my own list of potential contenders. Costello is weird in many ways to me. My personal experience of his songs is that they are *always* slow growers, even if a lot of them are worth it in the end. That's why I'm gonna stay cautious with *Armed Forces* too, and give it a neutral grade for now. I still think the man's whole career is *way* overrated. But I can be reasonable, contrary to some of his most hardcore fans...
Taylor Swift
2/5
Probably Taylor Swift's best album. Which amounts to a 2/5 grade on this app. Pop music has seen far more interesting and talented female singers in the past (Dusty Springfield, ABBA, Madonna...). It also has more interesting and talented pop singers in the present moment (Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa...). And it will also have others in the future...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 800 , I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one--I mean... seriously, guys...)
Cocteau Twins
3/5
OK, maybe *Heaven Or Las Vegas* should be included in an ideal list of 1001 albums, even if some of its instrumentations have aged quite poorly--it's a bane that many eighties LPs have after all, and three decades later, one could argue that such dated instrumentations are also adding a layer of quaint charm to the whole thing. Not so sure about *Treasure*, though, which is plagued by similar problems--even if its own gated drums are here closer to goth shenanigans than the more overproduced affair that *Heaven Or Las Vegas* is. Yep, hardcore Cocteau Twins fans will tell you the contrary, thay will certify that those goth shenanigans are what makes this one closer to a purer version of the band. But when two thirds of said band have disowned your favorite album by them, it seems that there is some of misunderstanding at play between artists' intents and their target audience. In a way, I'm tempted to side with the band here, given that the two albums that followed, the far less famous *Victorialand* and *Blue Bell Knoll*, have at least aged more gracefully production-wise. Besides, I'm not so sure about how Liz Fraser herself feels about this one. Maybe 100% of the band members actually hate *Treasure*, who knows?
All those considerations aside, I guess that what the fans fell in love with on that record are the impressive vocal feats performed by Fraser. One gets the sense that there are no bounds she is reluctant to tackle and even explode on *Treasure*. But this blessing might also come with a curse given that Liz's voice admittedly risks becoming grating on some tunes. Yes, she is a gifted and adventurous vocalist. But "adventurous" often becomes *overkill* on *Treasure*. At some point she even goes to a yodelling mode, and it's easy to see why such Meredith Monk-like vocal feats won't sit well with each and every listener out there. You could even suspect they might even serve a hidden purpose: to convey how insubtantial and/or purely mechanical Cocteau Twins' music sounds at times...
So my overall take is that *Treasure* is a mixed bag. Too bad, it kicked off with two catchy tunes, *Ivo* and *Lorelei*... But unless your mind and ears are stuck in 1984, what might have been new and exciting back then may now sound awkward or clunky. So next, please.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 824
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 95
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 45 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 38
Nightmares On Wax
2/5
I usually like stuff from the Warp roster. I think some of the earlier releases from that label have aged gracefully (even if they *do* age). But not this, though. What seemed leftfield or edgy at the time, and supposedly recorded during late-hours, weed-fuelled creative sessions (see that cover) now just sounds like boring background lounge music. Trends catch up with you so quickly for electronic styles, don't they? But even with that in mind, there's here none ot that quirky spirit animating J Dilla or Flying Lotus a decade later (I hear Nightmares On Wax is sometimes compared to them). Heck, even ultra-minimalistic DJ Krush, who operated at the same time for Ninja Tunes in a very close genre, sounds quirkier than that.
Besides, and as far as that dubious "trip hop" label is concerned, there's none of the multi-layered melodic fest of Massive Attack or DJ Shadow's early records here, and neither the noir or vintage charm of deeply atmospheric projects such as Portishead or Broadcast. It's a bit bland, really. And overlong. And repetitive just for the sake of it. With or without smoking dope to it.
So if you want to trip out to repetitive stuff, dub reggae probably works better thanks to its echoey nature and sense of space and time (there's *more* than a bit of dub in the basslines here, to be fair, but it sounds misplaced, even neutered, in the middle of those other dated sounds...) To put it in a nutshell, this record is more like smokers' *waiting room* than smokers' delight to me. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 823
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 95
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 45 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 39 (including this one).
Nick Drake
5/5
It took three decades for the audience to catch up on what Nick Drake was doing on his debut. And what he was doing was simply penning one of the most beautiful folk albums that ever came out of the UK (along with his own *Pink Moon* not so long later). Stellar guitar playing, stellar singing, stellar arrangements... And stellar songwriting all around: "Time Has Told Me", "Day Is Done", "'Cello Song", "Saturday Sun"... So many of those melancholic tunes are just classics now, along with all those that can be found on *Pink Moon* and a good half of *Bryter Layter*. In retrospect, it's just mindboggling that Drake was ignored at the time. But his light shines even more now that he has been rediscovered. At least, we can all be grateful for that.
A few words of praise about Joe Boyd's gracious and timeless production also need to be added here, because the latter adds a lot to the songs' sense of sincerity and authenticity. No unnecessary frills here, just a few nice touches drawing from classical or jazz fields so as to enhance the songs' inner power in ways that can resonate directly into your soul. Take Robert Kirby's many illuminating arrangements for strings, for instance: their Haendel-like nobility on *Way To Blue* does not merely sound baroque, it also conveys how fleeting and vulnerable happiness is, in keeping with the theme of the song. And let's not forget Harry Robinson's own strings arrangements on "River Man". Combined with the 5/4 rhythm of the song, their ambiguous minor mode / major mode switches are the perfect bed over which Drake's mysterious river of questions can flow out of his sensitive heart.
As for the lyrics, it's hard to convey how enigmatic and yet totally wonderful they sound over the music... "Fruit Tree" gives you the feeling Nick Drake was somehow aware of his fate to come--that he would be more famous dead than alive, even though it's not something he really seemed to care about anyway. What he cared about was the "Saturday Sun", happiness in the present moment, and once again, he knew more than anyone else how fleeting such happiness was, hence the melancholy of those songs. This too, brings a lot of beauty to his life's work. And the fact that it was such a short life makes this very album all the more precious today.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 822
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 96 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 45
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 39
Kraftwerk
5/5
The future has never sounded so interesting, fun, melodic and hypnotic. And ironically, you have to dig way into the past to find a version of it that can fuel your imagination like no other electronic record out there. Maybe because this very album is one of the first to fully go to that direction and never turn back. Beginnings have rarely sounded any better, frankly.
Besides, everyone said it, but I'm gonna repeat it now: the influence Kraftwerk had on modern music wasn't circumscribed on this particular electronic genre. The band also gave ideas had to a vast array of other styles, from post-punk to hip hop. But even if you don't give a damn about all that, this particular album stands on its own. Because this here is Kraftwerk's true masterpiece. Earworms after earworms, *The Man Machine* takes you into Metropolis' world, both dystopian and utopian, so cold and robotic, and yet so frail and so human, in a way. Beyond the mechanical rhythms, there's a lot of subtle emotions to be found in those tracks. It's a lesson that the best electronic acts learned from this album. And it's one they should never forget.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 821
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 97 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 45
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 39
Elton John
3/5
So OK, "Tiny Dancer" and "Levon" are amazing songs... But most of the other tracks on this record drag on until you feel all those flourishes in them are quite unnecessary, honestly. And this as good as they are sounding at first...
So give me *Goodbye Yellow Brick Road* any time, it's a nearly flawless album. But for the rest of Elton John's career, I think a nice compilation will nicely do the job of getting you acquainted to his overall talent (there are at least *two* of those compilations that can do that job right, by the way--don't miss them). Some artists are just more fit to the singles format. And Elton John is one of them, I think.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 820
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 97
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 46 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 39
Sonic Youth
5/5
Not *exactly* my favorite album by Sonic Youth, even though it's part of of my top-five records under their name. My only real, admittedly minor gripe is its overall sound, somewhat flat and one-dimensional compared to a lot of other Sonic Youth LPs--one can see that producer Nick Sansano was more an expert for hip hop than for guitar-based bands at the time... That being said, this double LP is still a landmark album for US indie music, and its scope was unprecedented when it came out. The first two tracks--"Teenage Riot" and "Silver Rocket"--are absolute gems, and almost everyone other song on it is pitch-perfect, justifying the length of this historical masterpiece. So yes, light a candle and celebrate the riotous impact of this one, indie fans. American music has rarely sounded as essential as this particular album.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 819
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 98 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 46
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 39
Van Halen
2/5
Overall this record is slightly less ridiculous than I thought it would be. "Jump" and "Panama" are cheesy hits, but given the right context, their punchiness can trigger smiles and even ironic exhilaration. Everything after is just a pretext to make Eddie Van Halen shine, and I guess you have to admit his guitar playing is impressive. Oh, and those synths come back for a track on side two... But at this point, who cares?
Does all of this make *1984* an essential album? Not for me. I can be open-minded for dumb stuff sometimes, but you need a music that doesn't sound totally artificial and tasteless, as is the case here. "Daft" doesn't necessarily mean pointless. That's the lesson punk music taught us all.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Queen
2/5
Too many of those songs are gratuitously meandering. In other words, they're a little self-indulgent, either because of the guitars or the vocals. And yes, I'm including "Killer Queen" here.
Sure, you can't deny how inventive the music is, it never stays in one place for long. But "inventive" doesn't necessarily mean "interesting" or "well-thought out". And you can't also deny the reason why Queen's later hits were more effective and direct than any tune on this record, as cheesy as some of those later hits were. It has to do with one little thing: good, catchy choruses. They're conspicuously absent on this particular LP, and without them, the whole thing doesn't hold water, really.
Apart from one or two exceptions, maybe, this band was a singles band anyway (as well as a killer live act). There was a good reason rock critics panned all their albums. Sometimes it's the audience who get it right, and the critics who get it all wrong. But I think that here, for once, it's the opposite. Queen can be both boring AND irritating in the long run, which is hard to pull off, in a way. Many people felt it at the time, and all nostalgia aside, a lot of people are still feeling it today.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
My Bloody Valentine
5/5
Hazy, enticing, melancholic, heartfelt barriers of noise that take you into their warm cocoon. Simultaneously weird yet inviting. My favorite album from 1991, beating Massive Attack's *Blue Lines* and Nirvana's *Nevermind*, That's evidence enough for me that's it's a masterpiece, given who had the second and third slot.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 816
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 99 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 46
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 41
Pixies
5/5
Iconic now, but so off-kilter back then. And yet, this record literally changed the course of rock history, thanks to its angular dynamics, its surreal ambience, the power it had evocating lust and madness and everything in between, not to mention Steve Albini's heavy drum sound (that will then be used to great effects for so many other rock acts). Black Francis' songwriting was also one-of-a-kind--and it seems that even Francis himself has now lost the precious formula behind the creation of those incredible songs...
But the real miracle here is that had a different musician replaced one of the four in Pixies, nothing would have worked as well as it does here. Of course, there's Francis' crazed yelps and hectic rhythm guitar chords, unmistakably his ; but there's also David Lovering's oddball rhythms, unmistakably his, too ; or Joey Santiago's surf-flavored solos and hooks drenched in hot sauce, unmistakably his as well ; and Kim Deal's hypnotic basslines and husky background vocals, unmistakably hers. And the songs... "Break My Body", " Bone Machine", "River Euphrates", "Gigantic" (one of the best Kim Deal compositions ever), " Where Is My Mind", "Vamos" ... All stone-cold classics now.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 815
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 100 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 46
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 41
FKA twigs
2/5
Sure, this album was sonically innovative at the time, but it also lacks substance when it comes to interesting vocal melodies. As a result each and every song blends into one another--once you've heard that very cool track "Two Weeks", it seems like a lot of the tunes after it are trying to repeat the same template, but with far less success most of the times. And when the songs are not trying to do this, they're just shapeless blurs supported by weird bloops and bleeps (see "Pendulum"). Sometimes innovation, weird sounds and full-blown eccentricity are not enough. You also need real songcraft to make all those things cohere into a stable whole.
Fortunately, the tunes on FKA twigs' second LP, 2019's *Magdalene*, were a little more moving, effective and dynamic, while retaining the off-kilter, eccentric nature of those displayed on LP1. So it's a 'no' to *LP1* for me here. But maybe I could say 'yes' to *Magadalene* later on...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 814
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 100
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 46
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 41 (including this one)
Steely Dan
4/5
It's a quick shot, barely ten seconds. "I'm a fool-to-dooo your-dir-ty work, oh yeaaaaah! I don't want-to-dooo your dirty-work, no mo-o-ore." It's nighttime, the radio plays an old Steely Dan hit, and Tony Soprano is singing at the wheel as he drives somewhere. The endearing yet sociopathic mob boss has the same bored, weary eyes as ever, but that scene is probably the closest thing in the whole series to a moment showing him having the time of his life. Tony knows them oldies-but-goldies standards. And he knows it's always deeply pleasurable to sing along to one of those as they pop up between Journey and Cream on the car's radio.
Such are the simple kicks most of the great tracks of this album can give any listener interested in early-seventies rock music--even though the Dan had tried to go against the grain from the get-go. Sure, the whole thing may sound a little trite or quaint today, in 2022, but there also lie some of its charms. For those who are not in the known, Steely Dan then went on to create far more intricate songs, at least when it comes to their chord successions and other jazz-inspired shenanigans. Hardcore fans of the band will surely tell you that's when they put out their best albums--with haughty *Aja* reigning above all of them from its high throne. Frankly, I'm not always convinced by this take... Because when it comes to Steely Dan, the line between sophistication and convoluted overthinking has always seemed very thin, in my opinion, and this starting with everything that followed *Countdown To Ecstasy*. Comparatively, what *Can Buy A Thrill* can offer you is the best of both worlds: catchy songs such as "Reelin' In The Years" or "Do It Again" AND incredibly effective arrangements. I fear that after *Pretzel Logic*, catchiness just gave way to something far less dynamic, enhancing the quaint nature of the band's ideas until the latter became totally cheesy or strangely remote. In other words, arrangements and musical prowess can't do everything on their own in that sort of soft-rock genre. You need the tunes you can whistle under the shower, man.
But maybe my ears are faulty here. And what I've said up ere is not even a claim I would make for other sorts of rock, indie-rock, or electronic acts. So who knows what I got right or wrong, huh? Another way to say I dread the day I will have to review *Aja*...
In the meantime, it's *Can't Buy A Thrill* I have to review, and it's all fine, man. I can pretend I am Tony Soprano singing along to it at the wheel, and everything is peachy.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 813
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 101 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 46
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 41
Sonic Youth
5/5
If you've never listened to EVOL before, start with those lyrics excerpts:
"My violence is the number
Coming out of prayer
Find it in the father
Find it in a girl
There's a thing in my memory
Holding on for dear life
With a feeling of secrets
Beating up under my flesh
My tongue is tied
I'm sleeping nights awake
Tom Violence is a dream
Coming out of a girl"
"Kiss me
Kiss me In the shadow of
Kiss me in the shadow of a doubt"
"Close my eyes and think of you
Everything turns black to blue
Starpower, starpower
Starpower over me"
"We're gonna kill the California girls
We're gonna fire the exploding load
In the milkmaid maidenhead
We're gonna find the meaning of feeling good
And we're going to stay there
As long as we think we should
Mystery train
Three way plane
Expressway... to your skull"
Now imagine the sort of music that could go with all those weird-yet-evocative lyrics. You'd need something that can convey all the conflicts and sexual tension and innocent arrogance and arrogant innocence and sheer elatedness and muted rage of your teenage years. You'd need a perfect mix of dream pop and indie-rock and terror noise and goth and bubblegum pop. You'd need an LP that literally never ends, with the last groove on the record being a locked one, circling and circling all over again on itself with its low rumbling maelstrom gurgling all the way to eternity. Teenagers always think they're immortal, don't they?
You'd need Sonic Youth's first masterpiece.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 812
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 102 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 46
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 41
Dead Kennedys
5/5
Masterpiece of hardcore punk rock. Sharp lyrics and vocals, over a music that's no less sharp. The best of both worlds, really. The biting sense of satire is everywhere, from "Kill The Poor" to that absurd "Viva Las Vegas" cover closing the album. And the instrumentation is often smart and inventive, with many infectious guitar-and-bass lines that are both angular and highly melodic, thus going beyond what the usual small fry in the genre can deliver. "Holiday In Cambodia" and "California Über Alles" are instant classics, and if their subject matters deal with news events from another era, their impact hasn't aged a day. Maybe because the times have only gotten worse. The Dead Kennedys had Pol Pot and Jerry Brown. Now we have Kim Jung-un and Donald Trump. One can't help wishing more folks had listened to Jello Biafra's politically charged vitriol at the time. But if general audiences listened to good songwriters instead of crooked politicians, maybe the world would be slightly less hellish as a result.
On a sidenote, I also highly recommend the *Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death" compilation. It has the single versions of the two last songs I've just mentioned here, and the sound and performance in those different recordings is superior to the album versions. Besides, this compilation also harbors other pivotal singles such as "Too Drunk To Fuck", along with incredible live documents showing how insane that band was onstage. If you're a fan of *Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables*, you can't go wrong with this one, really...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 811
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 103 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 46
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 41
The Youngbloods
3/5
Quite nice in the sense that this record draws from both country/bluegrass and soul music, two styles that are clearly apart, and yet often bridge the gap in quite elegant ways. Jazzy interludes and arrangement keep things lively and lighthearted, and the three singles and " are excellent. "Darkness, Darkness" 's fiddle or violin is close to hypnotic, "Sunlight" 's delicate ballade is interesting. and "Quicksand" reaches the level of emotions displayed in the best Otis Redding songs.
Too bad that the rest is a little predictable, drawing from the meat-and-potatoes level of songwriting Creedence Clearwater Revival would use when they were not busy writing memorable singles themselves as well. One exception, though, is that "Rain Song" opening side 2 with its playful chords played on the higher part of the guitar frets. But such nice touches are too far apart in the album to make it an ultimate and downright memorable success, as good as it sounds on first listens. But with more time, who knows what may heppen? Go ask the mountain...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 812
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 103
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 47 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 41
Rush
2/5
I've been very harsh with each and every Genesis album this app suggested to me to now say something positive about... Rush. That would be in poor taste. So either I change my gradings for Genesis albums, or I just judge Rush accordingly.
It will be the latter--even though I readily admit this record still makes Genesis shine in contrast. As chatty as he is, Peter Gabriel is a genius with words compared to Geddy Lee or whoever wrote this dumb stuff. Anyone impressed by an Ayn Rand story is just a moron anyway.
And the thing is, the music is not so good either. Many times, Rush tries to imitate Led Zeppelin, but they only come off sounding thin and derivative as a result. Their instrumentation is often clichés after clichés after clichés. *Physical Graffiti* was released a year before this, goddamnit, and it's not so hard to hear the difference.
Rush also steals a lot of stuff from The Who (that riff towards the end of the conceptual title-track), but musically, they don't have the sort of imagination Pete Townshend had for his own grand opera-rock statements. You can just sense they only copied tried-and-true formulas made by *others* to have a go at the charts. Unfortunately, it worked.
So it's cheesy, it's derivative, it's probably conservative, and it's stupid. In 1976, the heyday of progrock was already long gone, and thanks to this record, it's easy to see why. Here, it needs to be pointed out that modern critics trying to rehabilitate this thing are just a joke. That 20-minute title track is just awful, everyone who's a little serious about rock music knows it...
As a consequence, only "A Passage To Bangkok" (in spite of its daft lyrics, once again), "Tears" and *parts* of the clunky "The Twilight Zone" on side 2 can save this one from a 1/5 grade, and this thanks to few nice guitar, vocal or mellotron harmonies. It's still something to be happy about, but clearly, it's not enough to make this record an essential listen.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 811
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 103
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 47
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 42 (including this one)
David Bowie
5/5
Weird yet rich and wonderful, this is the record that led Bowie closer to "the European canon", i.e. the " Berlin trilogy". The title track opening the album is a wealth of lush sounds and deep themes with dark overtones, and it's never too late to be grateful Bowie just followed his most off-kilter instincts here. I've just read that the phrase "station to station" is not only about a train of decadence crossing Europe--aptly imitated through pedals by guitarist Carlos Alomar--, but that it was also a subtle reference to the stations of the Cross. High class double entendre, innit? Following this expansive two-part song (foretelling "Blackstar" 's structure), "Golden Years" is an enticing and lively invitation to shake your rump over the story of the singer meeting an angel, a scene which then segues to the beautiful prayer that "Word On A Wing" is (that bridge in it is one of the most precious things Bowie ever wrote). "TVC 15" is no less elated, even though the song is dramatically different in its intents, both lyrically and musically. It's a drug-addled tale about having hallucinations about a TV set swallowing your girl, and the thing suggests that the world projected through the screen might be as wonderful or dreary as the kingdom of Oz. And it doesn't hurt that the four-on-the-floor chorus in it is so damn catchy. "Stay" is a complex yet fluid funk-rock extravaganza about a call for redemption uttered by an impassioned lover, and the cover of Nina Simone's standard "Wild Is The Wind" closing the proceedings is one of the most beautiful covers ever made.
Bowie was famously coked-out to the max when he recorded this jewel, claiming that afterwards, he barely even remembered what had occured during the sessions. Oh, and he also had the swimming pool of his Hollywood mansion exorcised in those days--he and his friends were convinced an ancient demon was dwelling there. Spooky, eh? Seems that out of the gallery of "characters" Bowie created throughout his life and career, the "Thin White Duke" was the scariest one indeed. By the point *Station To Station* was recorded, it was probably high time for him he shook off that persona (along with those drugs habits) and went to Berlin for a change of scenery...
But that's the thing with geniuses... They can be in the lowest point of their lives on a personal level and still churn out masterpieces after masterpieces. And to borrow Mr David Jones' words, "it's not the side-effects of the cocaine. I'm thinking it must be love". *Station To Station* is exactly that: a labour of love.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Ravi Shankar
3/5
Here's a blind spot for me. I understand why this record was important for so many western musicians, as it was a glimpse into the traditions of a whole subcontinent. But even with Ravi Shankar's pedagogical cues interspersed throughout the album, my ear is still untrained for this type of 'scholarly' music. Maybe I'm being too left-brained today to just let myself go and take those sounds as more than a continuous drone. The last track kind of accomplishes that sometimes, but it's still very fleeting... Hard to be anything but a left-brained listener anyway when you're being asked to grade a record you've never listened to through this app. Hence the reason why that grade will be perfectly neutral for now.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 809
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 104
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 48 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 42
Randy Newman
3/5
A biting sense of satire on many tracks ("Rednecks"). Some amazing string arrangements on others ("Guilty"). Randy Newman sure has a way with music *and* words. But for now, the whole thing is still a little too one-note for me.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
David Bowie
3/5
Dimery's list is heavy on Bowie albums, and generally speaking, I'm perfectly fine with this idea. Yet to be honest, I wish he had swapped *The Man Who Sold The World* (not included in his book) with *Young Americans*. Bowie himself has had mixed feelings about that particular blue-eyed soul transitional phase, depending on when you asked him about it. There are indeed two or three nice tracks on this record, especially groovy closer "Fame", co-penned with John Lennon. But as a whole statement, this album is probably a little too shallow and/or artificial to really be convincing to most of his fans out there...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
The Smiths
5/5
So the app asks me to rate this legendary record the day after Queen Elizabeth II passed away--and on this very day out of all the possible days The Smiths' aptly-titled magnum opus could have popped up in a span of three years or so...
What can I say? I didn't need this coincidence to give this album five stars, especially with stellar songs such as "Bigmouth Strikes Again", "There's A Light That Never Goes Out" or "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others". Johnny Marr's guitar lines are incredible, and if Morrissey's voice is an acquired taste, it sure does wonders on this one (you can hate the Moz for a lot of reasons, but not for what he does on this particular record).
So yep, it's an essential album. And now that I have witnessed the app mentioning it right after the event foretold by its title, I have another reason to love it. But maybe what just happened is not a coincidence at all and someone is pulling the strings behind the scenes. I wonder what sort of songs the Marr/Morrissey duo could have written about this situation...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Paul Simon
3/5
I am quite a fan of Simon And Garfunkel and I own each of their albums at home. But when it comes to Paul Simon's solo output, I've never really witnessed the same sort of magic in it. And it's not only because Art Garfunkel was not there to harmonize those vocal parts with him.
Case in point: this album. Some of the arrangements are great (hear the ones on "Duncan" or "Armistice Day", for example). But generally speaking, the songwriting lacks the emotional heights of Simon's heyday with his former partner, and this for both the music and the very vague lyrics (some of those lines are pretty shallow and self-indulgent, aren't they? Even Simon himself seemed to concur when interviewers asked him about them later on...) It's still a nice record to listen to on a quiet saturday morning, when the weather outside is downcast. But it's clearly not an essential album.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 805
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 105
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 49 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 44 (including this one)
James Brown
4/5
Probably the James Brown LP all fans of soul and funk should own, along with *Sex Machine*. I personally only own a James Brown compilation, and I plan to get those two one day. I wish I had had the time to revisit this live album today, but unfortunately, I didn't. Gosh, the pace this app gets you to pick up is as relentless as anything the Godfather of Soul himself ever put in his songs, lol. Where can I go on the app and ask for a break for weekends again?
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: around 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
1/5
As far as I can remember, Patrick Bateman never ranted about this album in the novel *American Psycho*. I'm quite surprised by that, it's right up his alley. To be perfectly honest, I'm glad producer Trevor Horn could try his hand on all those 80s synth shenanigans on this one. He would put that training to good use on that other truly extravagant Frankie Goes To Hollywood opus later on (you can actually spot those sorts of production shenanigans on the short intro of "Date Stamp", for instance...). The orchestral touches are also quite effective, giving a little depth to the whole cheesefest ABC is so keen on building with this strange record...
The thing is, as sophisticated as those arrangements are, they are still a little too overblown just for the sake if it to have aged as well as in other Trevor Horn's productions. And the songs are themselves not convincing enough. Where are the truly beautiful melodies? Where are the catchy hooks? Where are the moments that can tell you those songs could actually work on an acoustic guitar as well? Well... They're... nowhere in sight. So what's the point, really?
I guess that in that electronic pop realm, ABC just can't compete with Eurythmics and their white-soul-meets-new-wave flavors, or with Depeche Mode and their dark elegance conveyed through subtle harmonies, or with Heaven 17 and their snarling, biting irony, or circa-*Dare* The Human League and their...well, *humanity*. Even electronic novelty pop needs something a little more profound and personal than the formatted elevator muzak *The Lexicon Of Love* has to offer.
To return to *American Psycho*, here's a lesson that Patrick Bateman has never understood. But because humanity was his nightmare--and possibly Bret Easton Ellis' one as well--it doesn't mean that such nightmare has to become ours, too. There was still hope for mankind, even during the 80s. It's just that such hope won't be found in ABC's stifled and stifling... musical lexicon. So next, please.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 800
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 106
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 49
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 45 (including this one)
Tears For Fears
3/5
Rick Beato's videos explaining what's great about Tears For Fears are very interesting watches. To be honest, I didn't need him to convince me "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" is a great song sporting awesome arrangements and instrumentation. Because, hey, I thought so before. And yet I have to admit Beato's admirable passion for "Head Over Heels" didn't fully won over my own estimation that this latter track is not exactly up to the level of the first. Arrangements, knowledge about chords succession and sophisticated instrumentation are not enough sometimes, especially with 80s pop. You need that extra melodic spark that fully transcended the artificial sounds of that particular time period in popular music history.
You've probably guessed it already, everything is indeed a little hit or miss for me when it comes to *Songs From The Big Chair*. "Shout", the second timeless hit from this record, is an incredible track, dark and relentless in its obsessive drive. Comparatively, "The Working Hour" soon overstays its welcome--that by-the-number sax solo can't hide the way this song actually turns in circles for way too long. "Mothers Talk" is more focused, but even with its grand chorus (erring a little too much on the side of 80s cheesiness), it can't compete with the band's best tunes from some of their other albums ("Mad World", "Changes" or "Sowing The Seeds Of Love", to name only a few...). As for "I Believe", "Broken" and "Listen", they're nice atmospheric tracks, but they still sound more like interesting footnotes, and not what makes the meat of a truly excellent record.
In spite of my reservations, I would still grade this one with a 3.5/5 mark. As far as I know, it's still one of the 15 or 20 best LPs ever released in 1985 (the eighties were a problematic time for the album format--so one can't be too *picky*). But does that make *Songs From the Big Chair* an *essential* listen, even with the two undeniable hits in it?
For everyone still interested in Tears For Fears who might yet have similar doubts, I suggest the compilation *Rule The World*. Minus two or three missteps, this compilation has all the major songs the British pop band has ever written--and this on a single disc. Those shelves harvesting all your favorite records can't extend forever, can they?
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 799
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 106
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 50 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 45
Metallica
1/5
Metallica is an iconic band in the overall metal style, there's no arguing about that. But let's try to be honest for a second: generally speaking, James Hetfield's delivery of his bland vocal lines is totally dull and unimaginative. Another guy actually *really* screaming his lungs out would have taken those songs up to another level. As for the music itself, it sounds way too paper-thin on this particular record compared to a lot of stuff that was later done in said genre, including Metallica's own "black album" (yep, a lot of critics were right: where's the goddamn bass?). So I guess that as far as albums go, you can keep *Master Of Puppets* and *Metallica* in your list of potentially essential LPs, if only for their cultural importance, and throw everything else into the "thrash" can.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 798
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 106
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 50
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 46 (including this one)
The Saints
5/5
Another punk masterpiece. This one is hailing from Australia. The lyrics are good, too. And if the music's not exactly up to the level of The Clash and The Damned, it's still far better than the tracks usually played by punk bands such as The Undertones or The Jam.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Willie Nelson
2/5
I feel like I'm utterly lost when it comes to country music. I can't tell what makes an average album to a so-called masterpiece. And this one sounds very average to me, contrary to what many critics have said. Guess it's probably the "concept album" that *Red Headed Stranger* is that appeals to them. And maybe the barebones way it was recorded, too.
The thing is, even in concept albums, individual songs should shine. And I feel like none of them do on this one. I remember giving Marty Robbins a 3/5 grade and excluding him from my own list. Yet in the realm of outlaw country music, Marty was a bit of fun at least. Maybe I was unfair, you tell me... Yes, maybe I'll even my judgment on him--because some of my final grades will certainly be different than those I gave on the spot for each album. It's another interesting thing when you're spending three years or so with this app on your phone...
That being said, and compared to that Marty Robbins album in Dimery's list, *Red Headed Stranger* currently sounds dull and dreary to me. So I have no choice but to give Willie Nelson an even lower grade than that 3/5 mark I gave Robbins. At least for this particular LP...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 796
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 107
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 50
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 47
Steely Dan
4/5
As usual with Steely Dan, surface cheesiness is quickly redeemed by top-notch songwriting, high-class jazzy instrumentation and pristine vocal harmonies. The first two songs, namely the Horace Silver-inspired "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" and the reggae-infused "Night By Night", are catchy cuts that are propelling the whole thing like in no other album of theirs (except maybe *Can't Buy A Thrill*). And after that, the other songs are generally very good. Lush brass arrangements and epic guitar solos abound, and if Becker and Fagen' surgeon-like precision might sound a little stifling at first, it can soon become a joy to get your head into it if you give the whole thing enough time to breathe.
It's not always easy, I'll grant you that, because Steely Dan's jazzy shenanigans are indeed an acquired taste. But even if you're still feeling skeptical about them, two tracks in this album may help you understand that the band had a palette that was clearly broader than the usual cliché that goes around about their craft anyway. One of these two tracks is the short but impactful "Through With Buzz", transcended by its "Eleanor Rigby"-like string section. And the other is the quite intense "Charlie Freak", with its hectic piano part and final elated vocals for the chorus.
Conversely, "Barrytown" and "Monkey In Your Soul" are undeniable clunkers--but the latter is probably only a tongue-in-cheek wink to close the album. That's the other difficult thing about the Dan. You're never too sure when they're ironic and when they are acting in an earnest way. But that ambiguity is *also* part of their overall appeal. So it would be a shame not to give this particular album a chance...
A quick note to end this review: without Robert Dimery, I wouldn't have given said chance to the band, so I guess I can be grateful to him (and to this app). But I also need to add that the tabs are officially closed in my own list when it comes to Steely Dan. I'll keep *Can't Buy A Thrill*, * Countdown To Ecstasy*, *Pretzel Logic* and *Aja*, but I'll say no to all the other LPs. I know the 1001 albums list is heavy on them, but you gotta draw a line somewhere. I need elevators for my own "tower of songs", sure (wink to Leonard Cohen). And if I had to choose "elevator music" for those lifts, Steely Dan is the best choice by far. But there are other types of spaces in that tower of mine that need to be properly furnished first. Hope fans of the band won't hold too much of a grudge against me when they come to visit...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 795
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 108 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 50
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 47
George Jones
2/5
Dimery and co. still haven't found a country album that would suit my needs. The best candidate so far is Marty Robbins. At the time I wasn't fully sold by that album of his suggested by this app. But since then, it's been a downward spiral when it comes to the overall country genre.
To be perfectly candid, I feel like we're hitting rock bottom with this George Jones fellow. The title track is sort of OK for an opener, I guess, but apart from "She Told Me So" (a snarling number nicely letting on that its narrator is actually a fool being cuckolded by his girl, with a funny chorus to boot), everything here is a snoozefest for me. Boy does Jones sound like an entitled fellow when he cries about being dumped by his love interests (almost as many as there are songs here). An interesting concept album would be to have the ladies mentioned in this record tell *their sides* of the story and reveal how those men actually lost their respect. But I digress here...
Musically speaking, there's also a lot that gets on my nerves in this particular record. One striking example: I can't stand when songs just switch to a higher key towards their conclusions. It's just a lazy AND cheesy way to write your tunes, and this in any genre. And finally, Jones didn't even write any of the songs here (minus *one* co-write, I guess). It's not a mandatory thing for each and every album I like. But when you add this to everything else, we are clearly verging towards 2/5 territory here, even 1/5, maybe...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 794
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 108
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 50
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 48 (including this one)
John Lennon
4/5
This is no *Plastic Ono Band*. Of course it's got the legendary title track, "Jealous Guy" and "Gimme Some Truth. Oh, and that track dissing Paul, "How Can You Sleep?", whose instrumentation is as lush as the song itself is bitter. But hey, I agree with John that up to 1971, Paul's solo output was dumb muzak indeed.
So all of this is striking, but as I said, what we have here is no *Plastic One Band*. Because, apart from the four highlights I've singled out in my first paragraph, much on what can be found on "Imagine" is not up to the level of that true masterpiece. Even if it's good to very good, generally speaking, and remains an essential listen to me...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Gil Scott-Heron
4/5
A nice album, culturally and topically important. I find the music a little elusive on this one, though, even with "The Bottle" in the tracklisting. And I agree with a few reviewers in the comments saying that *Pieces Of A Man* should have had priority on this list, because this other Gil Scott-Heron album was as impressive cuturally speaking as it was music-wise.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 792
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 109
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 51 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 48
Public Image Ltd.
3/5
Given how much of an arse John Lydon has become as a public figure, it's a little difficult to assess the *very* experimental record that the first PiL album is on its own merits and flaws... But let's try.
"Theme" is utter nonsense musically speaking, but it's quite an artistic statement as an opener. Gives you an inkling of that particular time when punks wondered where to go now that the "no future" mantra had shaken the world of music. Most people will turn their head away at first, but if you give it your full attention, the track has an uneasy-yet-hypnotic drive that can send you in quite an interesting mood. It's the conflict between the dub-inspired bassline and the pre-no wave sound of those meandering noisy guitars circling around you like vultures...
"Religion I and II" is similar in a drier, less expansive way, so it's less effective. This is where artistic intent can't really hide the lazy writing. Post-punk has its own shortcomings sometimes, here exemplified by this track.
"Annalisa" accelerates the pace to more recognizable shapes for the first time. Still lazy writing, but a nice energy here.
"Public Image" is one of Pil's best songs. Closer to the Sex Pistols than everything Lydon has ever done on his own after the demise of his first band. Melodic and catchy, yet cold and menacing thanks to its drum sound. Lydon's voice does wonders on this one.
"Low Life" is in the same vein. Nice chord changes on it. Oddly enough, this song could have been longer where other ones go on for a little too long.
"Attack" is a more by-the-number punk cut in comparison. Yawn.
"Fodderstompf" goes back to the nonsense mode that opened the album, but this time such nonsense is amped up to the max. The only good thing about this track is that it's quite impossible to describe. Give it a spin for yourself. Being totally obnoxious is the effect Lydon looked for here, and it's a complete success. Interestingly, PiL here opens a box with all sorts of trippy electronic toys inside it, but it's one they would use with far better results later on.
End assessment: trimmed of half of its contents, *First Issue* would have made a fine E.P.. But as an LP, it doesn't stand the test of time. And there are a couple of later PiL albums that would have maybe deserved to be in this list, instead of this one...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
The Allman Brothers Band
4/5
Wow, I didn't expect to like this live album as much as I did. I'm not a fan of "jam bands", generally speaking. To give you a reference point, I find the supposed milestone that *Live/Dead* is extremely drowsy and quite boring, honestly (and don't get me started on the snorefest that Grateful Dead's studio albums are...).
*At Fillmore East* sounds like a very different animal. Maybe it's because the guitars have such variety of intents, styles and sounds--Duane Allman and Dicket Betts were killer guitar players, drawing from jazz, blues and even country in ways that are both technically impressive and heartfelt. Or maybe it's because Greg Allman does such a great vocal performance channeling the inner bluesman in him, anchoring those jams in something everyone can relate to...
All of this up there contributes to the pleasure I've had listening to this thing. But I feel that the main reason I could enjoy this record is that you can also sense how great the songs are (covers for the first part, originals for the second). And this even in the lengthier versions displayed here. I've read somewhere that the Allman Brothers didn't like that "jam band" moniker, and I'm starting to understand why. Yes, they preferred expansive live versions to what they accomplished in studios. But I think they never forgot solos and instrumental flourishes should be as important as servicing the overall compositions (and with tracks such as "You Don't Love Me", "In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed" or "Whipping Post", you have great material to add to). If the original version of this record had included a definitive version of the all-time classic "Midnight Rider", I would have probably gone as far as a 5/5 grade. I know this song appears on the Deluxe Version, but to be perfectly candid, I still prefer the studio version of this one. So I bought a "Greatest Hits" record with *At Fillmore East* to have everything I really need on my shelves.
Gosh, this app is turning me to a dad rock fan quick, is it not? Who could have seen this coming when I started to explore this list? I, for one, certainly didn't...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 790
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 110 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 51
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 49
Pink Floyd
5/5
This record was such a shock when I was a teenager. Spent hours listening to it, not only for the concept album that it is, but also for the very dark songs, here taken as individual numbers. Simply put, it was the soundtrack of my teenage angst.
Growing up and discovering punk, I kinda repudiated it. But now that I'm middle-aged, I finally went back to it. "Comfortably Numb" is such a great track, and Gilmour's solo at its end is the very definition of epic. "Run Like Hell", "Empty Spaces", " One Of My Turns" or "Is there Anybody Out There?" are menacing, ominous cuts. They can tighten your throat and cut your breath short. As for "Another Brick On the Wall", it sure has been played to death, but the two other versions of the song make up for it. And let's not forget the slowest, ballad-like numbers, like "Mother", "Hey You" or "Goodbye Blue Sky". They are delicate, upsetting and heartbreaking all at the same time.
So yes, *The Wall* owes a lot to Roger Waters' own neuroses, paranoia and delusions of grandeur, and as such, it is the very caricature of what a rock opera is. Hence why some listeners had a somewhat sarcastic take on it, and this, as soon as the album was released... But since those topics are actually addressed in the story itself, it's pretty fitting to find all those all-too-grand moments in this record. This is where the potential flaws of Pink Floyd's last great LP became assets in the long run. Because, as far as rock opera go, you can't do any better than this. And since this legendary album was released, no one even bothered trying to top it in said genre. Evidence enough that it's an essential listen, even if you end up disliking it...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 789
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 111 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 51
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 49
Fairport Convention
3/5
It's quite beautiful, and nicely performed. But are the songs on this album striking enough to make the latter an *essential* listen? As of now, the jury's still out on this one.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Alice Cooper
2/5
Interesting production by Bob Ezrin, of *Berlin* and *The Wall* fame. Funny how children were also involved in those Lou Reed and Pink Floyd LPs at some point. I wonder if that's a coincidence or if it is the influence the producer had on the artists as he was producing them...
Unfortunately, apart from "My Stars" and "Luney Tunes" (nice main riff on this one), the songs are not striking enough musically speaking. Even the famous title track seems a little overrated now. I understand some rock fans were in awe with Alice Cooper's persona, hence his place in the rock pantheon. Honestly, his voice can be a little grating--even annoying on some tracks--but I imagine its *outré* theatrics are actually the very thing that his fans have found endearing, so I'm ready to suspend my judgment here. Yet one can't help feeling all of this feels a little insubtantial, in spite of a few funny or memorable lyrics in some spots...
Besides, there's something very weird about *what* this record is about as a whole. You have whiffs of a rock opera or concept album coming from it, but it's as if it was left unfinished, as if the band couldn't be arsed writing its ending at some point. It's not sprawling enough. And since most of the individual songs are nothing but somewhat derivative drivel, there's not much that can satisfy you there.
Best (or worst) example: the "Grand Finale" instrumental closing this LP. Ezrin does a little of his usual magic here, bringing a vast array of synths, orchestral arrangements and nice guitar effects to the table. But take away those baroque trimmings and rococo flourishes, what we have left is just by-the-number rock'n'roll played and written without much invention in mind, ironically. It's a little as if you took out the make-up of a diva or a glam-rocker, and suddenly realize there's no one but a old hag or an old fart under all that paint. And here, in *School's Out*, you can easily see through those thin layers, as theatrical and outrageous as the lead vocalist thought he was. Sometimes theatrics won't fill the hole inside you. And the more you use them, the more that hole becomes visible to others.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Amy Winehouse
3/5
Yes to *Back To Black* being included in the list, no to *Frank*. Its melodies are less striking, and its production--drawing from lounge jazz with a muzak flavor, not to mention relatively stale recycled 90s hip hop beats--hasn't aged well. Over that somewhat hackneyed instrumentation, Amy has nice bursts of energy, but unfortunately, such bursts sound a little off the mark sometimes--not that it was any fault of her own. Her voice deserved better music than that. *Back To Black* offered her that chance.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Beatles
5/5
The fact that the "White Album" has one of my least favorite songs ever made *by any band* on it ("Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da") and that it is yet my *favorite Beatles album* (not to mention one of my 20 favorite albums of all time), just speaks VOLUMES about how pitch-perfect everything else in it sounds for the writer of those lines. Even the most whimsical or supposedly self-indulgent few cuts in it have something going on for them. And don't get me started on the dozen of jewels you can find on those two discs. When it comes to the Fab Four's album discography, *Abbey Road* and *Revolver* are in the number 2 and number 3 spots, as far as I'm concerned. But *The Beatles* will always have a special place in my heart. It's such a joy and an adventure to get lost in that maze of melodies and tones and colours and 180-degrees turns. Rarely has an album deserved its reputation so much. Both a postmodernist "tour de force" and a gallery of heartfelt, inventive songs, this double-LP is one for the ages--the sort of record those "best of lists" just can't exclude or dismiss.
It's also been a joy reading all those 5-star reviews on this app. A lot of us seem to be going through the same sort of exhilaratd experience as they're diving into this legendary album. An essential listen if there is one to be found.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 785
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 112 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 52
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 51
Radiohead
4/5
I'm in two minds about this one.
As a Radiohead fan, I absolutely love "There, There", "Myxomatosis" and "2+2=5". " Where I Amd You Begin" is pretty good too, and I like how the lyrics on this LP naviagte between pointed political criticism and heartfelt moments of optimism (you sure that map on the cover to do that sort of thing, right?).
On the other hand, *Hail To The Thief* is also the rare *good* Radiohead album that contains clear filler--half baked songs or rather effectless experimentation that could have easily been edited out to streamline the tracklisting on *both* "sides". *A Moon-Shaped Pool* is the other one of those good records overall where this happens too (*Pablo Honey* and *The King Of Limbs* are not convincing enough as a whole anyway to be labelled as a "good Radiohead album").
So what am I gonna do? I hesitate between a 4/5 and 4.5/5 grade. Now that you're reading this, you already know which sort of grade I have chosen. It's quite funny that I have not yet.
What's for sure is that I will probably not include that record in my own list of essential listens even though I still think it's a good one. That will leave some room for other artists. Pretty sure that other Radiohead fans will agree with me that it's the right thing to do here. We're cool guys and gals, generally speaking.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
The The
3/5
Interesting... stuff. Some nice and quite varied arrangements (using everything from melancholic accordions and pizzicato strings to steel drums and hectic piano solos), and a general sound that has aged very well overall. The nine minutes of original closer "Giant" just fly by for instance. This synth-pop/post-punk album could have been recorded yesterday and no one would have really noticed the difference with other similar releases today. The The sometimes reminds me of current artists such as Future Islands, Cate Le Bon, Destroyer or Amen Dunes. With that in mind, it's honestly quite a feat that *Soul Mining* was actually released in 1983.
Is is an *essential* listen, though? The jury's still out on this one. Just like the current artists I've quoted, maybe the affectations and odd mannerisms heard and felt throughout this LP will wear you out after a while. And maybe it lacks a few straightforward highlights to make it more impactful as a whole.
But maybe I'm a little too picky here, so take with a grain of salt the 3.5/5 grade I'm giving to this thing right now. Because, to be honest, I feel I'm gonna revisit this curious yet well-crafted album in the near future. In the meantime...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: 783
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 112
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 54 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 51
John Coltrane
5/5
I was moved just reading all those 5-star reviews about this masterpiece, transcendent in so many ways. It transcends the genre it's in, it transcends the ears, and it transcends the soul. I don't think I can do any better than this other reviewer who jested about God having this album on rotation on his personal I-pod. God, or whatever higher power there might be out there... So I'll just stop there and let the music speak for itself.
Number of albums left to review: 782
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory: 113 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 54
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 51
Fela Kuti
3/5
Quite nice. I probably need to listen to it more to get the hang of all these rhythms and arragements. Fela Kuti is still blind spot for me, as is much of music from the African continent. Maybe someone should write a similar 1001 albums book about music from other continents--one for Africa, one for Asia, and one for South America, that you could add to Dimery's book, mostly about music from the "western world". And then you'd keep the 250 best records from each book to give a global version of it. That would yield quite a surprising mix, wouldn't it?
Number of albums left to review: less than 800.
Number of albums I'll keep on my own list: half so far.
Number of albums I might keep: a quarter (including this one).
Number of albums I won't keep: another quarter.
Simple Minds
2/5
Oh, well, Simple Minds. I remember liking *Street Fighting Years* when I was a teenager. And also *Life In A Year*, from their early, more post-punk phase (was it the name of the album, or the name of one of its songs?--can't honestly remember, and I have betterthings to do now than to check out those things).
Sadly, whenever I tried to revisit this band, I found most of everything they've done cheesy and quite cringeworthy. Which is very ironic given that I have warmed up to a lot of other British eighties pop bands since my younger years. This album is no exception. A few decent songs here and there, but the whole has definitely not aged well compared to similar acts of that area.
Now, I've noticed that this list singles out a lot of records that hit the charts when they were released. Hey, Robert, just because a record meets commercial success at some point in time, helping the band that recorded it to "break out", doesn't always mean that what they've spawned is... essential.
Number of records I've reviewed: less than 800
Number of records I'll keep on my own list: half so far, approximately.
Number of records I might keep: a quarter.
Number of records I won't keep: another quarter (including this one).
N.W.A.
4/5
The record is a historical landmark because it almost singlehandedly spawned a whole subgenre of hip hop, gangsta rap, for better (sometimes), and for worse (a lot of other times). In spite of the obviously dated sound, nice energy throughout, and plenty of killer rhymes and music.
Now I didn't have the time to check the wikipedia page, but was this one selected by the Library of Congress for its "cultural importance"? Given the topics addressed by this album and the language used in it, I would roll on the floor with laughter knowing it's on those shelves... 🤣
Number of albums left to review: less than 800 approximately, I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll keep on my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I might keep: a quarter
Number of albums I won't keep: another quarter.
Brian Eno
5/5
I feel like I can understand the influence/importance
Love this. There's ambition, a kind of cinematic aspect to much of the
thing I don't understand
there would probably be no radio head without this
sawtooth wave
the sound of this crab committing suicide
and then I pump it all out through this shoe,
to give it that oaky timbre
would probably be no a-lot-of-modern-music without
that oaky timbre
that oaky timbre
I'll tell you how it works, right? I took a note,
I'll tell you how it works, right?
this one sticks out above the others
globetrotting rhythms
globetrotting rhythms
right off this pantomime four,
a degree of nervousness that lets the wider world in,
and an exorcist
and an exorcist
especially good for driving at night
I'll tell you how it works, right? I took a note,
I took a note
a giant mess of sounds. I can understand its significance
I took a note
a vital funk injection
что это очень интересный для меня материал. Ранее полагал
a giant mess of sounds
and an exorcist
the sound of this crab commiting suicide
that oaky timbre
Bom simploriedade um dos malucos fez música com o Caetano.
pretty OK, bit repetitive.
bit repetitive
bit bit bit bit bit
bit repetitive
repetitive
bit repetitive
ran it back here, re-jammed it through itself, looped it back, mixed it with
Ранее полагал
and let it stew in its own reverb for about three hours, right?
bit repetitive
there
there
I took a note
a vital funk injection
Bom simploriedade
Globetrotting rhythms
I'll tell you how it works, right?
there there there
bit repetitive
sawtooth wave
especially good for driving at night
I'll tell you how it works
would probably be no a-lot-of-modern-music without
that okay timbre
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Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Creedence Clearwater Revival
5/5
I thought I had every Creedence track I need on that *Chronicles vol 1* compilation. Including a very large part of the tracklisting of this particular record. At least half of it, actually.
And then I heard "Ramble Tamble".
Jesus Christ, what an album!
----
Number of albums left to review: 77
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 116 (icluding this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 55
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 52
Screaming Trees
3/5
Decent nineties grunge-pop. Nice instrumentation and arrangements sometimes, like the Indian/oriental psychedelic flavours of the opener or "Dime Western". Or the church organ of "Sworn And Broken", and that mellotron (?) on "Traveler". Plus Mark Lanegan's presence, even though he was not at the top of his game yet.
Is it an essential listen, though? Too many of these songs sound like each other for that, and the rhythmic patterns overuse a kind of dated rock groove that didn't age that well in that overall genre, all things considered.
Number of albums left to review: less than 780.
Number of albums I'll keep on my own list: half so far, approximately.
Number of albums I might keep: a quarter.
Number of albums I won't keep: another quarter (including this one)
David Bowie
5/5
It's the centerpiece of Bowie's "Berlin Trilogy". Of course, it's an essential listen, even though it's also a very peculiar album, side one and side two being very different things--pop songs and crooner's ballads mixed with some sort of krautrock funk for the first, and dark or meditative ambient pieces--most of them totally instrumental--created with the incredible Brian Eno for the second.
Obviously I will give 5 stars for this one. Yet the fact that this album is often considered by certain subsets of fans as being Bowie's best has always sounded a little weird to me. Very close to the overall sound of the "Berlin Trilogy", I've always found *Station To Station* superior to any of those three LPs--and before that, *Ziggy Stardust*, *Hunky Dory*, and *The Man Who Sold The World* (and maybe even *Aladdin Sane*) will always be rated higher for me. At least if you go to detailed decimals.
But I'm probably only nitpicking here. Don't pay too much attention to the ramblings of a relatively *recent* Bowie fan. Because there are all sorts of fans of his work out there, in keeping with this artist's amazing ability to shapeshift from one persona to the next. That's what's great about loving such a legendary artist.
Number of albums left to review: 775
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 117 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 55
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 53
Badly Drawn Boy
2/5
Badly Drawn Boy? More like Barely Sketched Attempts At Writing Decent Songs. Or Badly Conceived Album. That Mercury Prize jury sure had poor taste in music, it's not the first time I've noticed this...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
One of the most overrated albums of all time. Some of the songs are decent, sometimes even *more* than that (example: "I'm On Fire" )... But boy oh boy, how *poorly* the cheesy instrumentation and hackneyed arrangements on this one have aged. It's everything you could hate the eighties for, at least if you have even a little bit of taste left on your tongue.
One day, *maybe* I will buy a secondhand copy of this one to complete my Springsteen collection, currently stopping at *Nebraska*. But it will probably be nothing but a completist consumer's compulsion, nothing more...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one, only for "historical" reasons and its popular appeal at the time)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
CHIC
2/5
Disco. Chic. Niles Rodgers. "Le Freak". And seven *far less* striking titles with it.
Guess you would need to include at least one decent disco LP in a list of 1001 essential albums. But somehow, I can't bring myself to take that record seriously, not to mention that overall genre. Prejudice on my part? You tell me.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Fun Lovin' Criminals
3/5
I once had that album on CD. A rather fun listen, as far as I can remember. Then I lost this CD. But contrary to other lost ones, I never bothered buying it again. I think I'm starting to see why now...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 780, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
k.d. lang
3/5
Didn't have the time to listen to the album. I'm already late for the one that popped up on the day after.
I did listen to k.d. lang before though, and my recollection was that she has a nice voice, but that her songs are not so compelling, generally speaking.
I wish this app could allow me to go back to the few records I've missed and tweak the grades or reviews. But I understand this would be way too complex to manage for the person who conceived the app, so I don't hold any grudge against them. It's still a great app.
Number of albums left to review: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I will keep on my own list: half so far, approximately.
Number of albums I might keep: a quarter (including this one)
Number of albums I won't keep: another quarter.
Suede
2/5
I know *some* Suede fans love this one, but I still think most of the songs on this record are overblown and dreary (like its ugly cover, actually). When the debut album popped up, I only gave it three stars (I'm not a *huge* Suede fan, as you can see). Now I'm thinking my review of it at the time might have been a little harsh. *Suede* is still a very decent LP, and it actually deserved a four-star grade. I even bought a secondhand copy of it since.
But this is probably as far as I will go to defend that band. I've tried digging *Dog Man Star* but it did absolutely nothing for me. I guess that this Suede guitar player must have felt something quite similar about it, since he left the band quickly after it. Or maybe it was the band that felt ill-at-ease about the music he wrote, beyond any of the personal problems they might have gone through as a band.
One thing's for sure: the songs on the album after that one are way better. But are all those records that followed the band's debut *essential* listens? I highly doubt it.
Number of albums left to review: less than 800, I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I will keep on my own list: half so far, approximately.
Number of albums I might keep: a quarter
Number of albums I won't keep: another quarter (including this one)
Spiritualized
3/5
Never understood the hype about this band/project, even though they have nice cover artwork saying something about modern music consumption being like medication to the masses. Maybe that explains part of their appeal, ironically speaking. But when your *subsequent* album covers use the same frigging idea all over again, it's not merely lack of imagination that expresses itself. It's a sign you're becoming the very thing you were smirking about in the first place.
As for the music, there is a lot of skill and nice instrumentation throughout, saving this record from a two-star grade. Said instrumentation goes from string laments and old seventies-like rock to noisy dirges and groovy moments--the latter somewhat foretelling what LCD Soundsystem would do in the next decade, but without the fun club pulse or drive. Most of the melodies and vocal lines are pretty unmemorable or unremarkable, however. Some of them are even *excruciatingly* boring. It's as if the sophisticated, multi-layered instrumentation was trying hard to make up for the lack of inspiration plaguing the songwriting. And it often shows.
So I guess I won't drink that kool-aid everyone else seems to be drinking now. Nevermind if it's my loss. I'm pretty sure I can find more potent drugs elsewhere anyway.
Number of albums left to review: 768
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 117
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 57
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 58 (including this one)
Ryan Adams
3/5
I dived in expecting to hate it. Turns out I don't, but I'm not entirely sold either.
It all started well, though. The first three tracks, "To Be Young", "My Winding Wheel" and "Amy" are stellar songs. The latter especially. It's not easy to write a Paul McCartney song when your name is not Paul McCartney. Even Paul McCartney himself can't do it sometimes. 😁
Unfortunately, everything after that great start soon lost me. You have melodies that are somewhat nice once in a while. Other times, you have more than decent lyrics, and funny one-liners, too (as in "Don't Ask for The Water"). The problem is that you rarely have *both* good music and good lyrics at the same moment during the course of this very drowsy and slow-moving alt-folk-country record. "Shakedown on 9th Street" woke me up a little from that snorefest in the middle of side 2. But then, it was business as usual.
Worse, some of the hillbilly twang affectations sound fake on several tracks, whether on side one or on side two. And you have the uneasy feeling Ryan Adams thinks he's the next Bob Dylan, except that the songs are not good enough for that. It's a skilled simulacrum, though. For this, and for those first three songs, I'll give *Heartbreaker* three stars.
Number of albums left to review: 767
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 117
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 57
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 59 (including this one)
Air
3/5
Air is a nice band, generally speaking. And this soundtrack displays some of their skills in quite effective ways. Then again, two decades later, this work is maybe a little too anecdoctical to be included in a list of 1001 *essential* albums.
I wonder if *Moon Safari* is on Dimery's list. Now that's a somewhat groundbreaking album that had some relevant impact at the time. *Maybe* this one could be included in my own list...
Number of albums left to review: 766
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 117
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 57
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 60 (including this one)
Joni Mitchell
5/5
Joni Mitchell is an acquired taste, generally speaking, but I'm sure glad I acquired said taste for such extraordinary music. I think *Hejira* is probably my favorite record of hers, along with the poppier *Court And Speak*. I even prefer those two records to her earlier classic albums on the Reprise label, including the all-time great *Blue*.
*Hejira* is the one record where she burned all her ships behind her so as to fully embrace that jazzy, sophisticated sound she would never completely forget in the rest of her carreer. Jaco Pastorius' fretless bass does wonders on it, but the guitar parts are insane too. Yet what seals the deal in it is what Joni's voice is accomplishing here. Her vocal lines are incredible, and the lyrics exploring that theme of finding yourself while on the road are driven and focused, as many other reviewers already pointed here. Brilliant literary writing all around.
What struck me as I read some of those reviews is how laudatory the four-star ones were--actually suggesting a 5/5 grade instead. I'm pretty sure those Joni fans couldn't bring themselves to bring that higher grade because of the "experimental" nature of this record, and the fact that it is not *Blue*. But the two should *at least* be considered as equal in their overall quality. Both are masterpieces exploring the American psyche, and this in moving and sensitive ways no other record had attempted to reach before.
To sum it up, *Hejira* is not merely an "experimental" album, it's an album with a lot of heart and intelligence in it. 5 stars is the least I can give for it.
Number of albums left to review: 765
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 118
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 57
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 60
Creedence Clearwater Revival
3/5
Out of the *three* Creedence albums that went out in 1969 (what a productive output that year, right?), my favorite will always be *Willie And The Poor Boys*, paving the way to their next LP (and masterpiece) *Cosmo's Factory*. *Green River* is surely a better record than the one before, *Bayou Country*. But even with its charts performance and upgrade in terms of recording and execution, it lacks some of the striking melodies that actually graced that earlier 1969 album--"Proud Mary" being the most famous demonstration of such melodic flair. In comparison to its two direct predecessors, *Willie And the Poor Boys* will have the best of both worlds here, with both "hits" and less straightforward cuts allowing the band to hone their skills in terms of songwriting and arrangements.
To put it in a nutshell, I can't shake the feeling that *Green River* is very much a *transitory* record--an interesting one for casual fans like me, but not the stuff of legend that made Creedence Clearwater Revival such a legendary act later on. And as such, I prefer not to include it in my own list of 1001 essential records.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 780, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Missy Elliott
2/5
Being a fan of nineties hip hop in general (from A Tribe Called Queat to Mos Def, with everything Wu-Tang in between), I was expecting good things from this record. Sadly, it turned out most of the music on those tracks bored me to tears. I won't judge what Missy Elliot is doing on it--she's obviously a talented vocalist and lyricist. But a lot of the production work here sounds half-finished. Whoever put this one on the Rolling Stone top 100 albums of all time must be deluded out of their mind.
Maybe if the music album had been grittier somehow, the whole thing could have been interesting. But instead, you have a crisp, clean envelope added to it that makes it worse, flattening everything out. Quite a huge letdown, because I like female rappers in general--but those in the business today just sound better to me, from Nicki Minaj to Cardi B, Little Simz, or even Megan Thee Stallion...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 780, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Nas
5/5
A stone-cold classic. So many stellar hip hop tracks on this one, "N.Y. State Of Mind", " Life's A Bitch", "The World Is Yours", "One Love", "Represent", "It Ain't hard To Tell"... The stars just aligned for *Illmatic*, one of the strongest album debuts of all time.
Yet chance was not the only factor that can explain such a hip hop miracle. What you have here is an incredible team of producers at the top of their game (DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Large Professor, Q-Tip and L.E.S.) providing the best cuts ever so that an incredibly talented lyricist and wordsmith can shine under the eyes of the world for the first time ever. Said world seemed to be his indeed. Nas was so young, and for someone his age to accomplish such a feat on his very first record is just the stuff of legend.
Per Wikipedia, this is what Prefix Mag's Matthew Gasteier re-examining Illmatic and its musical significance stated in 2002:
"*Illmatic* is the best hip-hop record ever made. Not because it has ten great tracks with perfect beats and flawless rhymes, but because it encompasses everything great about hip-hop that makes the genre worthy of its place in music history. Stylistically, if every other hip-hop record were destroyed, the entire genre could be reconstructed from this one album. But in spirit, *Illmatic* can just as easily be compared to *Ready to Die*, *It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back*, and *Enter the Wu-Tang* as it can to *Rites of Spring*, *A Hard Day's Night*, *Innervisions*, and *Never Mind the Bollocks*. In *Illmatic*, you find the meaning not just of hip-hop, but of music itself: the struggle of youth to retain its freedom, which is ultimately the struggle of man to retain his own essence."
5 stars, of course. The Source barely hesitated to break their "no-5-mics policy" back then. And you know what? History proved them right.
Number of albums left to review: 762
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 119 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 57
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 62
Yes
4/5
Like Rush but tasteful AND lively.
And to whoever wrote that review that said '"Like Rush but boring", I'd say that Rush's hackneyed and cheesy instrumentation actually sound very boring to *me*. Funny how music tastes work, huh?
To come back to Yes, I remember being a little harsh in my review of their *Fragile* album, the one that was released right after *The Yes Album*. I still think *Fragile* lacks substantial content in some of its tracks, but three of them are just instant classics, worthy of their legend. My grade for it goes from 3 to 4 now.
*The Yes Album* is a little more cohesive than *Fragile* in comparison, even though it has less striking cuts in its tracklisting. Some moments are incredibly brilliant though, foretelling the great things they were about to accomplish (including *Close To the Edge*)
Whatever the case may be, Yes are still a band that is far more dynamic than many of their seventies or even eighties prog-rock counterparts, from virtuosistic yet empty pedants to self-indulgent hacks with a knack for artificial, kitschy arrangements (from ELO to Rush, basically speaking). Yes played hard yet never forgot melodies and emotions. In other words, they *rocked*.
Number of albums left to review: 761
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 120
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 58 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 62
Bee Gees
2/5
Only *nine* reviewers in here gave a 5/5 grade to this. Including a 80-year old lady who stopped giving reviews in 2021 after a few of them. I hope she's doing fine and just got bored with the app. It was lovely reading her impressions. Nice call adding the dates to the reviews, by the way.
About *Odessa* now... Knowing this double album's "reputation", I expected to hate its guts. Turns out that out of those four sides, I really enjoyed side two. Everything from "Marley Put Drive" to "Whisper Whisper" was nicely done, with Beatles-like undertones (in the latter's mock-novelty-cuts guise) and/or catchy melodic moments (see "Marley Put Drive" and "Edison"'s choruses).
Unfortunately, everything else is just schmaltzy drivel plagued with saccharine layers of nothingness. Those added strings sound as if you're stuck in a mental institution--I can imagine the album being played through speakers in a scene right out of *One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest*. Such music is so ridiculous it sounds like a perverted parody of itself. The songs have no build-up, no sense of direction and no focus (and this concerns the lyrics as well, by the way). Questionable production choices make some moments incredibly awkward. And don't get me started on the Gibbs brothers' leaning to overindulge in those horrid vibrato-laden vocal parts. So grating.
Disco would later save the Bee Gees' asses. Who didn't shake a leg on *Saturday's Night Fever*'s soundtrack? But when it comes to *Odessa*, c'mon guys, let's be a little serious for one second. An essential listen this album is *not*.
Number of albums left to review: 760
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 120
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 58
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 63 (including this one)
Tom Waits
3/5
The title track, along with the two gorgeous ballads "Jersey Girl" and "Ruby's Arms" are worth your time. About the latter, rarely has Tom Waits sounded this moving, either before or after 1980. Unfortunately, everything else is very, *very* secondary compared to those three highlights. All the other songs are decently crafted so as to channel the American singer's usual persona as a poetic drunkard / beautiful loser / raucous film noir protagonist, but the jazz / blues / cabaret-like music is far from being spectacular here. There are indeed far better cuts to be found elsewhere in Waits' long and convoluted discography, from the early seventies to the late naughts. And when it comes to albums (a format where Waits can in turn be either extremely tiring or, conversely, struck by sudden genius), *Heartattack And Vine* is certainly one or two notches under *Closing Time*, *Swordfishtrombones*, *Rain Dogs* or *Bone Machine*.
Number of albums left to review: 759
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 120
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 58
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 64 (including this one)
The Stooges
5/5
Another stone-cold classic. It's been 1969 okay for a long time now, all across the USA, but also inside the head of so many obsessed rockers, there and elsewhere. Likewise, fans have wanted to be Iggy's dog for decades due to those three insanely simple yet ravenous guitar chords every *loud* band has at least once practiced in their rehearsal space. And from that other cut that sneered about having "no fun", a whole genre spewed forth: punk rock. It's as if you're witnessing its lurid conception here, Iggy's lascivious howls and yells teasing with Ron Asheton's erect guitar riffs--sharp as a blade, driven like the pistons pumping in those Detroit factories, unrelentless.
And this until *your* brain melts.
With three cuts like that on your very first album, how can you lose? Of course, said album must not only be summed up by those three monsters, as sly "Ann" and that dark psychedelic, slowly entrancing, heroin-laden number, "We Will Fall", can prove it. John Cale's production is spot-on--meaning that you have the feeling that he didn't really intervene to change any part of that gorgeous sonic chaos, and just got the tape rolling to catch lightning as it struck inside the Stooges' bottle. This, folks, is how you're giving birth to an incredibly influential record.
Such lightning would strike two more times, with *Funhouse* and *Raw Power*. I can't wait to give a 5/5 grade to those other two masterpieces. Good luck to the album that's gonna pop up tomorrow, ha ha.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 780, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
PJ Harvey
5/5
This one has a special place in PJ Harvey's discography, thanks to Steve Albini recording it. He hates the term "producing", you know, and for fans of his unmistakable drum sound, it's one of his best work ever, iconic in its own right. But all that would be useless if this record wasn't *also* one of the greatest collections of tunes PJ Harvey has ever assembled for an album, and, even more importantly, one of her best studio performances ever. Raw, pure, unburdened by studio production shenanigans (the ones Albini hates so much). You can't beat the emotion that comes out of albums like that when they're good.
And this one is very, *very* good. Part succubus, part hysterical wench, Polly Jean teases you with opener "Rid of Me", displaying those nineties quiet-loud-quiet dynamics in quite an extreme understanding of them, and relentless in its obsessive, clearly sexual thump. Then, after that terrific introduction, she piles on inspired swampy blues riffs like it's only a second nature to her, shredding them one after the other until her hands bleed. It's as if the great African American bluesmen of the past were possessing the spirit of a white middle-class British girl, her body shaking with the tremors and emotional scars they left inside her innocent soul. Don't call the exorcist, please, because it's a treat listening to this young woman moaning, yelling, grumbling, hushing, shrieking, or just simply lulling or singing those admirable tunes--that some people complained that the voice was buried in the mix has always seemed mind-boggling to me: actually, given what PJ Harvey sometimes does with said *outré* voice, it would probably have been very awkward to listen to had it been louder. Here, it's just perfect, especially if you add the fact that the lyrics are one of a kind too, filled with suggestive innuendoes, more graphic details, and Freudian slips of the tongue. Check out "Man-Size", "15 ft. Queenie", "Dry", " Legs", "Snake" or "Yuri G" for examples of that. There's an understated S&M / bondage mood hanging over those lyrics and music. But even if you don't get kinky that way, it's a treat, lyrically and musically speaking.
To put it in a nutshell, Polly Jean puts on a hell of a freak show here, and yet she is so inspired, and sounds so entranced, that the results are actually nothing short of blissful (see closer "Ecstasy", for instance). Through mud, she digs gold. Through a sense of the grotesque, she reaches sublime skies. This here is the mark of the true Romantic. And it doesn't hurt that said Romantic is also such an insanely great singer and guitar player. One that's raw, pure, unburdened--except by that delta devil whispering devilish things in her ears. You still haven't called that exorcist, I hope.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 780, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
The Police
3/5
The Police was a great band for singles, but as far as LPs went, all of their albums were quite uneven, with filler that didn't age well at all. This one here is no exception, even though it has a few iconic tracks. Now the question is, if because of those singles you had to save *one* album by The Police, which one would you save? Not an easy one to crack out, believe me.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 780, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one, *maybe*)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Sonic Youth
5/5
"I went away to see an old friend of mine
His sister came over, she was out of her mind..."
"Schizophrenia", the track that opens this album, is the birth of Sonic Youth as a legendary, iconic New York act. Everything that happened before during the band's early "no wave" trajectory converges to that melancholic guitar riff supported by Steve Shelley's bouncy toms, along with Thurston Moore's dreamy voice humming that David Lynch-like yarn over them. And everything that occured after that minute or so, for the band themselves, but also for the indie scene at large--years and even decades into the future--is a consequence of that incredible introduction where the band merged its abrasive, dissonant, unapologetically arty vocabulary with the most blatantly poppish instincts out there. From that moment I heard that introduction then dissolve into a maelstrom of intense, gripping sounds, I knew I would love this band forever. They were pointing the way into the future, to the nineties and beyond. Sadly, not a lot of folks realized this in 1987. I wish I had been there to tell everyone to *listen*, to *really*, *really* listen. They would have dismissed me as a deluded fan, I imagine. How wrong they would have been. You just need to *properly* hear the first minutes of that album to know.
*Sister* is filled to the brim with transcendent moments like that, from the sheer aggression of "Catholic Block" to the oneiric, foggy atmosphere of "Kotton Krown", from the jangling, twisted guitar lines of "Tuff Gnarl" to the relentless, obsessive compulsive pulse of "Pacific Coast Highway". Moore hums, croons or shrieks. Gordon singspeaks and snarls as if she was sneering at death itself. Ranaldo utters apocalyptic preaches to an invisible congregration, *us*. Guitars wail, wince, drill and tinkle. The lyrics immerse you into a Philip K. Dick's alternate universe where industries of the heart and factories of the flesh mingle as if they were driven by the same mechanical pistons. Teenage lust, romantic impulses and cerebral digressions conflate. The air itself is buzzing with electricity around the schizoid characters populating those songs. Even silence, or what's left of it, seems to buzz.
*Daydream Nation*, the album that followed *Sister*, is said to be Sonic Youth's magnum opus, thanks to some of its iconic cuts, its length, and its topical ambition--not to mention its overall sound, one more streamlined than in here (read: "more flat"). But make no mistake, *Sister* is iconic in its own right, and it is as much a masterpiece as *Daydream Nation* is, maybe even more so. A lot of Sonic Youth fans know this already. And they can't keep this a secret. I certainly can't.
Now go on, call me a deluded fan. I'll only reply with one word. *Listen*.
Number of albums left to review: 755
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 123 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 59
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 64
The Roots
4/5
I've had this album at home since it came out, I don't remember how I got it exactly (a gift from someone?). Somehow, I've always found it well-crafted, and yet the whole thing never gelled for me the way other ambitious hip hop records from my collection have. Before 2022, you'd have east coast hip hop that sounded "fresh" and spontaneous with A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul or Mos Def, and after that you have other rap albums that are actually far more eccentric and daring in their experimental impulses than *Phrenology* was--as daring and experimental as the latter is itself. Heck, the early naughts also saw Outkast reach their creative apex, and they were already breaking a lot of rules in the genre--much more than the Roots did, actually, in spite of their good intentions. Compared to all those other references, it's as if this album was a little too stuck in its "transitory" sound. As if it was a little *tame*, somehow, awkwardly moving from the past without exactly pointing the way towards the future either. And this relatively lackluster aspect of the album is especially clear towards its end, clearly failing to inject some significant momentum to the proceedings (you don't have that sort of problem with the masterpieces made by Mos Def, Nas, The Goats or Kendrick Lamar)...
Some tracks are quite memorable, though. "Rock You", "Rolling With Heat", "Thought @ Work", " The Seed (2.0)" and "Break You Off" are all great. "Water" is, too, even though its experimental coda is some weird, weird shit (and this comes from a fan of krautrock/komische music here). Oh, and obviously, Black Thought is an amazing lyricist and vocalist. I've had the luck to see The Roots onstage at a festival once to hear him live, and it was a great rap show--especially with all the live instruments around him.
Yet as talented as this band is, and as nice as this record is generally speaking, I can't bring myself to give it the highest grade or even *instantly* include it in a list of essential listens. The Roots' hearts and brains were in the right place, they had all the right intentions, and, on paper at least, it seems I should love this record. Yet I only *like* it. So I'll give them a 4/5 grade, and for once I'm gonna break my sacrosanct rule that all 4+/5 records should be included in my own list. I know some very important rap albums have not been included in Dimery's book and I want to give them a chance to be a part of my own selection of 1001 albums. Call my picky if you want. At least it's just awesome that this app brought me back to this record. I have too many of them at home, and it's always nice to have sudden incentives to revisit stuff from those shelves.
Number of albums left to review: 755
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 122
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 60 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 64
LCD Soundsystem
3/5
A warning for the faint of heart: at some point towards the end of track number 9, and this without any preliminary precautions or foretelling signs, LCD Soundsystem decided to use a *different* chord from the one they'd been using since the start of the 5-minute song (or is it since the start the whole album? Or maybe their whole discography?). It's, for all intents or purposes, a devastating twist. The history of modern music might never recover from such a bold move. Consider yourselves warned here.
All sarcasm aside, this is *not* a bad album. The overall tone is pretty dark, which is a good thing, actually (and justifies its "monotone" nature harmonically speaking). James Murphy channels his inner David Bowie and inner David Byrne in quite effective ways, and if some of the lyrics are a bit on the nose, they are still painting a compelling picture of what growing old means for all of us. Some of the flaws soon become endearing here, they are part of the entropic nature of the subject matter, and as such, they make sense somehow.
That being said, this is definitely not the best entry point into LCD Soundsystem, because the line between endearing flaws and ones that can break the charm in a second is still very thin overall in *American Dream*. And to be honest, the whole context around this record makes it somewhat suspicious. Always found it weird that James Murphy publicly announced the end of the band during the early 2010s, to then suddenly change his mind about it only five or six years later. Murphy has obviously never been a "reliable" storyteller, as his art proves now and again. But just like the music on this record, there's something a little superficial and hollow in such a last-minute decision. If you're in the right despondent mood, the blatant sense of desperation Murphy might have felt when he changed his mind again may talk to you. But there are other ways to appreciate music than wallowing in complacency or self-indulgence. And this, even for the darkest sorts of it out there...
Number of albums left to review: 754
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 122
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 61 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 64
Stevie Wonder
3/5
Caught between *Innervisions* and *Songs In The Key Of Life*, it's always been hard for this one to have its own little place under the sun. In a way, this is understandable since not all the tracks on it are up to the level generally found in those two legendary albums--the first three songs, especially, rely a little too much on that sort of cheesy schmaltz Stevie Wonder will be associated with during the eighties. It's as if he stepped the wrong foot forward when starting this album, hence my own reluctance to list it in my own *essential* listens.
Yet half of those tunes are still worth your time if you enjoy Stevie Wonder's "classic" years. "Boogie On Reggae Woman" slaps quite hard, displaying one of the best synth basslines Wonder ever wrote. "You Haven't Done Nothin'" succesfully continues that streak of songs following the "Superstition" template (after "Higher Ground " in *Innervision* and before "Black Man" in *Songs In The Key Of Life*). The lyrics on this one, denouncing the complacency of elites and governments, haven't aged a day. Unfortunately, I would add... Next highlight is one of the most precious and heartbreaking ballads Wonder has ever penned: "They Won't Go When I Go". Meditations about faith and death have rarely felt this soulful. What ensues after that deeply emotional moment goes to a totally different direction, with the bossa-nova/samba/Brazilian carnival-inspired "Bird Of Beauty". There's a great groove running throughout the track, plus a verse sung in Portuguese--I can swear the temperature in my living room just went a couple of degrees higher when I played that one. And finally, right after "Bird of Beauty", you have closer "Please Don't Go": just like the album itself, the song starts a little meek, but then builds up to a shining conclusion--nothing up to the bar "As" and "Another Star" will raise for the ending of *Songs In The Key Of Life*. But nice stuff nonetheless.
Reading myself here, I understand my initial statement of this album as a whole might be a little harsh given the number of gems on it. Who knows, maybe I'll warm up to the other tracks later on? In the meantime...
Number of albums left to review: 752
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 123
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 62 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 64
Wu-Tang Clan
5/5
Can't beat that review that said this "might be the Platonic ideal of hip hop". That reviewer is right on so many counts. If only because this album sounds as if it was recorded in a cave dug in the middle of projects, and yet is never ashamed of what it is, even developing a whole mystique around its lo-fi beats and minimalistic piano loops, or around its soul samples and rough rapping about destitute parts of New York. Shadows and light create a mesmerizing spectacle on the walls of this dark, dark cave. Each rapper in the collective effectively displays a specific personality or an idiosyncratic style (nicely expanded in each one's first solo forays) and RZA has a flair for catchy hooks drawing on a very *idealized* vision of eastern culture--mostly through kung-fu movie samples, but also through its ascetic ethos and borderline-zen aesthetics.
The end result is as pure as it gets. Distinctively from its day and age and yet timeless--which is where you recognize a true masterpiece, whether it is in rap, rock or any other style of music. Even the overlong skits are bringing something that's actually relevant to the table--being part of what makes this record a quintessential one in the whole hip hop genre. A Platonic ideal indeed. Word.
Number of albums left to review: 751
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 124 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 62
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 64
Elvis Costello
3/5
One of the nicest outcomes using this app has had on me is that it helped me revise my judgment on Elvis Costello. Don't pay too much attention on the reviews I've left here about *This Year's Model* and *Armed Forces*--I just needed a little more time to digest Costello's peculiar aesthetics in those early records of his. In spite of my initial reluctance, I actually went back to those LPs to finally understand what's great about them. So I guess you can add one point to the grades I've left at the end of those reviews. Sometimes, a day is not enough to understand somewhat convoluted sorts of songwriting that are actually stellar once you get the hang of them (see also: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Vampire Weekend or Lana Del Rey).
That being said, and this time I'm dead set I'm not making a mistake here, I don't think *Brutal Youth* should be included in a list of 1001 essential listens. This record is decent and generally well-crafted, of course (because, hey, it's Elvis Costello here), and the first four tracks are lively and witty enough to give you the idea that you're in for a great ride. Yet, unfortunately, and apart from "20% Amnesia", everything after soon becomes a little too drowsy and self-indulgent. Costello does what he usually does, i.e. penning sophisticated lyrics that are sometimes too obtuse and smart for their own good, along with composing middle-of-the-road pop rock tracks that are as much a showcase for his harmonic skills as they are easy on the ear. The problem is that in more than the two thirds of this LP, you can't help feeling that none of those songs are really memorable, at least not in the way its counterparts were in Costello's more famous LPs. Besides, the vocals sound a little off sometimes, as if Elvis's intentions as a singer were not that clearly defined during the recording. It's a problem that also plagued an album such as *Blood & Chocolate* before, but at least you had a highlight like "I Want You" in it to make up for those shortcomings. There are a couple of highlights in *Brutal Youth*, I'll grant you that. But they aren't as good as the song I've just quoted here, and they're certainly not up to the level of *most* tracks on Costello's early records.
To put it in a nutshell, it's hard for me to imagine many casual and even not-so-casual fans of this artist actually singling out this album. So, next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 750
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 124
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 62
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 65 (including this one)
Bonnie Raitt
1/5
Elevator music. The sort that's only bearable if you're going to the second floor. Very corny lyrics as well. *This* won three Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year? Seriously? Seems to only show one thing: the late eighties were a very bad time for *good* pop music. Bland songwriting all around (with nine covers out of eleven tracks, you could at least choose songs that are better than this), cheesy or hackneyed instrumentation, professional but soulless performances... There's nothing to save this utter debacle, not even Bonnie Raitt's more than competent singing. Oh, the fake reggae shenanigans of "Have A Heart" are somewhat refreshing at some point, at least compared to the blandness that's before and after it (and probably helped a lot in the album's commercial success thanks to the song's promotion on MTV). But that's the only positive thing I can say about *any* of those lame songs.
About the larger context about this record, the whole story about Raitt going through a rough patch, both personally and professionally, before finding unexpected success with this album, doesn't change anything about my assessment up there. I'm happy for Raitt, she looks like a nice person, and probably deserved to be cut some slack as an competent artist who had already worked long in the business. But that sort of "storytelling" has nothing to do with the music itself. When you read that raving retrospective review Pitchfork gave about the album, it's just appalling. 80% of it is about that story, not the music itself. This is *not* how you should assess the quality or flaws of a record. Context is important, but never to that point.
Between 2012 and 2020, this album went from number 230 to 492 in Rolling Stones' list of 500 greatest albums of all time. You can bet your cowboy boots it will be out of that list in subsequent versions of it, probably the next one if its editors have a shred of good sense left in their minds. And I hope it goes out of Dimery's list soon as well. You just *can't* have so many glaring omisions in the 1001 albums book to make room for such a bad record instead.
Number of albums left to review: 749
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 124
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 62
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 66 (including this one)
Curtis Mayfield
3/5
Musically, this is nice and smooth background music. Lyrically, this is obviously a very topical album, in keeping with its title and cover art. I've known the original photography for years, by the way, but I didn't know Curtis Mayfield had used it for one of his records. That's quite interesting...
That being said, let's address the elephant in the room here: this is no *Superfly* soundtrack. Actually, it's probably two ot three notches under it in terms of sheer impact. And you know what? Even as soundtrack music for a blaxploitation b-movie, *Superfly* could still be pretty topical itself, yet never forgot to slap *hard* in terms of groove or sheer musicality.
I understand the intention is obviously different here, and I can still respect it a lot. But if I want to go for smooth and not-so-smooth songs that are addressing topical issues, I'd rather go to Stevie Wonder first. With only ONE track from *Songs In the Key Of Life*, "Village Ghetto Land", or ONE track from *Innervisions*, "Living For The City", Stevie hits a nerve this whole record can't totally hit. At least for me. See also Marvin Gaye's *What's Going On* or Gil Scott-Heron's *Pieces Of A Man* for other musical masterpieces dissecting those "American" themes through laidback instrumentation and songwriting...
Number of albums left to review: 748
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 124
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 62
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 67 (including this one)
Lorde
3/5
I thought I hated Lorde's songs. Turns out I don't, at least on this particular record. Guess I just needed to spend a little more time with those tunes to actually appreciate them for what they are. By the way, I've also tried doing that with *Pure Heroine* and *Solar Power*, the two records bookending this one, but it's still not working for me. The first was way too amateurish in its production (a clear flaw for such blatantly "commercial" records), and even though it pointed towards the future when it comes to gritty teenange female pop singers, it didn't have anything that Billie Eilish didn't do ten times better almost ten years later. Sometimes too soon is too soon, even if your heart is in the right place. As for *Solar Power*, it was clearly lackluster in terms of hooks and overall energy. And just like her very first record, it didn't have nearly enough good songs in it to justify being included on that sort of list..
And yet, oddly enough, I quite like *Melodrama*. Maybe it's Jack Antonoff's input as a producer and co-writer that's doing wonders here. Admittedly said input doesn't work all the time, as *Solar Power* proves it. Yet the man is still able to dig gold when he guides or counsels all those hip female pop singers, from Lana Del Rey to St Vincent (to which you can add Taylor Swift depending on the project at hand). Or maybe the *real* charm here is Lorde's self-deprecating personality seeping through those songs, and the way the latter's choruses consequently sound both earnest, strong even, while retaining something very fragile in them, paradoxically. I'm not surprised some listeners compared her work on this album to the one of Kate Bush. Both artists seem to have the same sort of ambiguity here, even if Bush is obviously the most talented artist of the two.
In a similar line of thought, the Kiwi singer's very original delivery of certain key moments is another strong asset on those tracks. No one can sing like Lorde, with that strange drawl that seems to let her play around the beat as if she was half-drunk yet still very energetic and awake. Somehow, I feel such voice thwarts pop conventions a little, even with the pristine production shenanigans that Antonoff applies to it. Add to this a devastating piano ballad about facing yourself in the mirror such as *Liability* (foretelling Taylor Swift's *Anti-Hero*, just released as those lines are written), among many other similar examples of effective personal confessions, and you have quite a satisfying and even *complete* mainstream pop album.
Oh, and one shouldn't forget a few endearing, borderline-comical moments sprinkled throughout this record. Like when Lorde announces things are "really gonna blow" in *Homemade Dynamite*, only for the music to suddenly stop so that she can let out a ridiculous and childish imitation of a wet firecracker going off. Or when she half-confidently states about her and her lover : "We're the greatest / They'll hang us in the Louvre / Down the back, but who cares--still the Louvre", and this in sudden singspeak *nicely* taking you out of the song for one second.
To be honest, I quite agree with Lorde's meta-assesment of her own worth here. And so, consequently...
Number of albums left to review: 747
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 124
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 63 (including this one--down the back, probably, but still in *my* list of the best 1001 albums ever) 😉
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 67
Led Zeppelin
5/5
What a genius idea Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham had when they decided to complete their sessions for this album with outtakes from *III*, *IV* and *Houses Of The Holy*. This idea resulted in one of the best double albums of all time. Because apart from two obvious "fillers" on side D, everything else is just pitch perfect, resulting in a tracklisting that naturally flows from one gem to the next, in spite of its versatile contents and some subtle differences in sound between the different sessions. And those two fillers I've just mentioned still manage to do their moody job right--in modern times, unburdened by the constraints of duration for vinyl records, those two tracks would be what is now known as "bonus tracks". Take them out, and you'd have a stellar double album anyway.
All of this is already a good reason to have *Physical Graffiti* on your shelf, but even if you dismiss everything I've just said in my first paragraph here, this record would still get a 5/5 grade from me (and obviously be part of my most essential albums of all time). And this thanks to four absolute bangers: " In My Time Of Dying", "Trampled Underfoot", "Kashmir" and most especially "Ten Years After", the best ballad Led Zep have ever penned and recorded. Yeah, yeah, I know, "Stairway To Heaven" is not so bad, as overplayed as it is. But it is still a notch under "Ten Years After". And this, my fellow music nerds, is worth the ticket of admission here...
Number of albums left to review: 746
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 125 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 63
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 67
5/5
The only problem with this record is that it doesn't include "Strawberry Fields Forver", recorded during the same sessions. Had the Beatles found a way to add it to the tracklisting of *Sgt. Pepper*, instead of releasing it as a single or putting it in the *Magical Mystery Tour* compilation, this legendary album would have become my number one entry in their discography.
But hey, it's still *Sgt. Pepper*, right? Between the title track, "With A Little Help From Friends", "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds", "Getting Better" "She's Leaving Home", "When I'm 64" and "Life In A Day"--the most formidable mystical/metaphysical closer ever penned this side of the English Channel--there are enough wonders for everyone here. As is the case with some other five-stars albums, I won't write a full-blown review about this particular record, because others have already written wonderful stuff about it and there's not much I can add that I feel could be relevant and interesting. It's just a gem. Go and listen to it a.s.a.p. if you haven't already.
Number of albums left to review: 745
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 126 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 63
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 67
Alice Cooper
3/5
Another shock rock LP from the infamous Alice Cooper. Just like *School's Out*, there are a couple of really good tunes in it, but it's not enough to make the album an clear contestant to become an essential listen, especially so many decades later and with all the great music in all genres that have come to be made since... It's a bit sad, but you probably need room now for more *serious* stuff, especially in a list of 1001 albums you need to listen to before you die. Stage pyrotechnics and gruesome theatricals don't count when you're only assessing good or not-so-good music in albums (although I hear that Alice Cooper's gigs were very fun to *watch*, at least...). Ask yourself this question: would you see those tracks being used in a movie today, even if it's only to give a "vintage" mood to a scene? I think most of those tracks wouldn't work here. Especially compared to other great songs made in 1973, or around that time.
It's not that *Billion Dollar Babies* is not worth a little detour though, at least for fans of 70s hard rock and/or fans of, let's say, parodic, er... "topical", ahem, songs. "Elected" is a great track about American political spectacle that hasn't aged a day for instance, both musically and lyrically--actually, while I listened to it, I daydreamed about Trump choosing it for his 2024 (re)election campaign. At this point, I wouldn't even be surprised if the crook and liar actually chose it for real (what's sarcastic and ironical about the tune's lyrics is exactly what the damn fool thinks in earnest about himself). Alice Cooper were clearly prophetic here. Unfortunately, I might add.
Apart from that, the most interesting tracks on this record are probably on side two. There you have "No More Mister Nice Guy", a classic rocker with hilarious one-liners. But most of all you have "Generation Landslide", "Sick Things" and "I Love The Dead" (count the goofy interlude "Mary Ann" out). I say "interesting" because those latter cuts are not exactly *easy* listens, but at least they are as "shocking" lyrically speaking as they are off-kilter, expansive and surprising when it comes to the music (producer Bob Ezrin is here honing his operatic skills again after *School's Out", and a few years before Pink Floyd's *The Wall*). By the way, the lyrics in "Generation Landslide" and "Sick Things" are even quite bright and sophisticated. It seems that when you enter Alice Cooper's circus, you might be in for a little unexpected surprises along the way, at least.
The thing is, even it it's less "consistent" and rich as a whole, *School's Out* remains an easier, more accessible listen today than *Billion Dollar Babies*. Somehow, early-70s Alice Cooper always seemed to miss the mark--either giving too little on your plate (memorable melodies and performances--the vocals sound pretty thin sometimes, surprisingly) and then giving way too much in terms of, er... "meaty" contents (mock-outrageous posturing and WTF instrumentation). And I can't say for later periods since I haven't listened to them, but I have a "natural" feeling it doesn't get any better from there. If only because there's no other Alice Cooper records on Dimery's list after that anyway.
But maybe that's unfair to want more from this act than what they could actually give. You don't ask the clown in your local circus to address transcendent thruths or perform heartbreaking or groundbreaking works of art. You ask that clown to give you a good laugh, along with a few cheap thrills through his slapstick comedy antics. And then you move on with your life. If some members of the audience want to see "high art" in all this, good for them. Maybe "low brow" and "high brow" don't mean anything in popular culture indeed. I have an inkling *some* forms of "low brow art" age better than others. But who am I to say, really?
Number of albums left to review: 744
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 126
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 64 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 67
Jane's Addiction
3/5
They were surely ahead of their times, foretelling how alt-rock would take over the mainstream in the next decade. But being ahead of your time doesn't necessarily mean your music will age well, ironically. The fault here mostly lies in the songwriting. I've just liked a 5/5 well-written review about this record because of the admirable passion a Jane's Addiction fan expressed in it. But as much as I can *get* what that fan is saying, I'm certainly not feeling the same thing as I listen to this record myself.
Interestingly, that fan explains in precise musical terms why they love the track "Jane Says", even giving the precise harmonies and chords used (near-dissonant ones). Yet it's mind-boggling to me that this fan is unable to *hear* what's obvious about this song: there is absolutely no "resolution" in the chord sequence. The same chords go on and on with no sense of direction, and the rhythms behind them don't make them hypnotic either. It's just pretty mundane, even if all of this was done *on purpose*. Given what the lyrics are all about--junkie's promises--it makes sense that there's no "musical" resolution in that song, somehow. But the biggest problem for me is that this track, just like any other one on the album, is too much constricted by Farrell's lack of imagination in his vocal lines, too mundane as well to truly be memorable. It's one thing to sound *discordant*. It's another to make it really *matter* somehow. Add to this the most clichéed hard rock guitar solos found this side of 1990, and you have... a dated thing. Just listen to the lame hackneyed funk-rock laden with those cheesy solo antics at the beginning of "Idiots Rule"--quite idiotic indeed--and maybe you'll get the idea...
That being said, I can still sense why some of those tracks would be iconic for some listeners ("Jane Says" and its lyrics about, well, addiction, "Ocean Size" and its maritime scope, "Ted, Just Admit It..." and its sheer violence, "Summertime Rolls" and its sweeping moods... The list goes on). But because of the flaws I still can't help seeing in Jane's Addiction, and as original, groundbreaking and interesting as their proposal was at the time, this very subjective jury is still out on this one...
Number of albums left to review: 743
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 126
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 67
Adele
1/5
Aw c'mon. *21* was not for me yet I could still respect folks who loved it. But it's way harder for me to do with this other record. What's the next step? Céline f*cking Dion?
Removed from the list in 2018, apparently.
Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 742
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 126
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 68 (including this one)
Eagles
4/5
Of course, the title track is one for the ages, as overplayed as it is. It's just epic how the two guitars soloing at the end of this stellar song finally join for a common climax.
But when it comes to the album itself, it's the very definition of a *flawed* concept album. A significant chunk of those tracks sound a little ridiculous today, and the obvious ambition of this thing doesn't mesh well with its clear failures in execution, both musically and lyrically.
Yet oddly enough, this is also a concept album about *failure* itself (mostly the failure of the American Dream). And in that sense, the overall cheesiness does bring an extra layer that makes the album a very interesting one to listen to, at least on an "intellectual" level. Whether all of that was intended or not is another story, but maybe it doesn't matter so much.
It's only a little disappointing that the music is almost never as dark and intense as in closer "The Last Resort". The concept behind this record justified going to darker territories. One can't help regretting this missed opportunity here.
But maybe for once, the legendary opener and its negative counterpart at the very end are enough to justify including this album on a list of 1001 essential albums to listen to. What's in between might be cheesy, but it's part of the unapolegetically despondent equation that *Hotel California* really is.
Anyway, it would be a shame dying without at least having given a fair try to the fucking Eagles, man. If only because it's the only way to then state how much you hate them, just like the Dude did.
Number of albums left to review: 741
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 127 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 68
Buena Vista Social Club
4/5
Objectively, there's not enough music from outside the Europe / United States area in my own list. This wonderful postcard from Cuba can't make up for my overall lack of knowledge in said *other* places, obviously. But beyond its historical importance and ubiquitous success when it came out, it's a pretty neat listen, filled with smooth and evocative moods. Without knowing the first thing about the history of *son cubano*, it's still accessible and enticing. Consequently, I'll keep it as an essential album.
Number of albums left to review: 740
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 128 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 68
Kanye West
5/5
Even more than *My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy*, this record is the ultimate postmodern masterpiece Kanye West left us. *Yeezus* is eerie, weird, gritty, inventive, layered, dadaist, hilarious (sometimes unwittingly, but does it matter?), angst-ridden, dark, manic, megalomaniac, self-deprecatory, ironic, earnest, dumb, bright, noisy, melodic, mellifluous, groundbreaking, flavored, tasteful, distasteful, mysterious, nocturnal and unpredictable. This album is *absurd*, in all the senses of the word--absurdly good and absurdly nonsensical all at the same time. The scope of different emotions it can make you go through (some of them unsettling) is potentially infinite. It's a definitive artistic statement, blurring the lines between genius and madness.
Obviously, it's quite difficult to enjoy listening to this album today. Given what Kanye has become in the ten years that separate us from the release of *Yeezus*, it's near-impossible not to think about the freak the man is in 2022, even as you listen to that gem he recorded in 2013. If only because some of the seeds of his current downfall were actually sown during that period... At the time, artistry still had the upper hand, not delirious episodes fuelled by paranoid takes about world politics (at least that we know of). But the equation is reversed today, sadly. Kanye should take his prescription pills, and steer away from despicable far-right rhetorics and conspiracy theories. The "genius" is very much the ultimate fool here, a pawn in a larger shameful game in which crooked politicians and shameless business interests have used him to unsavory ends. A tale of hubris if there is one.
That being said, and in a somewhat strange way, close to schadenfreude, I actually hope West keeps on self-sabotaging his career, one that's quite meaningless *now* anyway, and that he goes bankrupt as a result. He needs to pay for the negative and even potentially dangerous impact his actions and sickening public statements have made in America. Ironically, him being the sacrificial scapegoat of a rotten society that direly needs to cleanse its political sins would unwittingly be akin to an artsy gesture--some sort of real-time "happening" that would at least tell everyone a lot about the dangers of putting money, fame and ego first, instead of ethics, decency or empathy. I think this here is the heart of the "Tragedy Of Kanye". I just pray he doesn't seriously hurt anyone in the course of his demise, just as he keeps on hurting himself. I can't listen to *Yeezus* this year, not with what the man has become. But once we're rid of his disgusting public persona, maybe we'll be able to later return to the many stellar hip hop albums he gave us in the past, and enjoy them for what they are. At least if nobody else suffers as he goes down in flames...
I think I'm worried, though. Does anyone else feel that way in here?
Number of albums left to review: 739
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 129 (including this one--unless something *really* bad happens)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 68
Rocket From The Crypt
4/5
Nice ride down memory lane. I remember when this album came out. It was like a punk version of the Blues Brothers. I absolutely loved the first three tracks, "Middle", "Born in '69", and "On a Rope" (and I still love them today). Unfortunately, after such a great start, everything after sounded quite underwhelming, to be honest. And it's still the case now for me, even though my music tastes have quite broadened since i was a teenager...
That being said, I find the average grading of the participants in here extremely harsh. This is no essential listen, obviously, but it's still decent punk rock. So for once, I'm gonna give a 4/5 grade to an album I actually won't include in my own list. Trying to tip the karmic balance a little here, even if this won't change anything to the average grading...
Number of albums left to review: 738
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 129
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 69 (including this one)
Stevie Wonder
5/5
Part of Stevie Wonder's classic years. Obviously, legendary "Superstition" is the centerpiece here, but the rest of the album is excellent as well, with other stellar groovy cuts such as "Maybe Your Baby". And please, oh please, don't get fooled by the apparent sugar first displayed in the many ballads of this record. Cheesiness is a problem Wonder often had in his less successful records, but not in here. A second or third listen of those ballads will probably reveal how richly textured and smartly written the music is in most of them (see "Blame It On The Sun" or "I Believe". Besides, Wonder even explored a darker vein for those slower cuts from time to time, as "Big Brother" proves it. The chords on that one are sleazy and ominous, and the lyrica topical as hell. "I live in the ghetto / You just come visit 'round election time". This might be a somewhat naive way to address those topical issues, admittedly. Yet, just like any sort of emotion Stevie Wonder deals with, that doesn't make the feeling and intention any less relevant...
Number of albums left to review: 737
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 130 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 69
Supergrass
5/5
So imperial, and at such a young age. One of the most impressive and energetic debuts you can hear out there, especially if you're interested in brit-pop--savvy yet fresh and unpretentious, sophisticated yet rolling on all cylinders. Classy.
Number of albums left to review: 736
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 131 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 69
Electric Light Orchestra
3/5
I'm in two minds about this one. This here is an important record from one of the favorite bands of Grandaddy's Jason Lytle, and given that I'm quite a big fan of him, this plays a part in my assessment. The influence ELO had on Lytle is pretty obvious--to a certain extent, Grandaddy could be considered as a lo-fi (and as far as I'm concerned, more charming and moving) version of that older band from the seventies. So, even with the tons of cheese involved, Jeff Lynne gets my sympathy here, just for having inspired one of my musical heroes...
That being said, said tons of cheese are a little hard to swallow sometimes, especially on a double-album like this. Lynne has never hidden that Paul McCartney is his *own* huge influence, but it speaks volumes that Macca himself sounds like a hard-rocker compared to his "disciple" and his long succession of ditties and other novelty-like grand pieces. Sophisticated chord changes and rococo arrangements involving strings and synths can be fine in the right hands. But you also need *some* form of rock energy to make them palatable, and honestly, that sort of energy is pretty lackluster in most of those tracks. So I guess I can easily put myself in the shoes of 1977 punks, who hated Electric Light Orchestra for quite obvious reasons, and just like them, roll my eyes at all this...
Interestingly, it seems that even *some* ELO fans are having second thoughts about this particular album and its commercial success. A lot of them actually prefer the normal-length *A New World Record*, out the year before, for instance. And checking out that other (*tighter* and most of all, far *better*) LP, I can concur. Too many of the tracks on *Out Of The Blue* sound secondary, flat or average compared to their counterparts on that previous record.
Admittedly, *Out Of The Blue* has *one* undeniable redeeming feature: it's the presence of the all-time great "Mr. Blue Sky" in it (plus the extravagant and off-kilter "weather suite" that song is a part of, taking up the whole third side here). But to be honest, it's as if I wished that track and the suite were part of *A New World Record* to make the latter the fully essential release it deserves to be...
PS: By the way, I've checked, and Grandaddy is conspicuously absent from Dimery's list. Now that's one of the most criminal mistakes this 1001 albums book has ever made (especially when you realize Lambchop's extremely bland *Nixon* has been included instead--to stay within the confines of that sort of sound and in the early-naughts era). Somebody needs to fix this a.s.a.p.
Number of albums left to review: 735
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 131
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 70 (including this one)
The Pogues
4/5
Essential if only as a cultural milestone. Whether originals or covers made famous by them, the Pogues performed too many highlights on this one to be excluded from a list like this... "Dirty Old Town", "...Waltzing Mathilda", "The Old Main Drag", "Sally MacLennane" (and "Body Of An American" on the CD bonus tracks)...
Number of albums left to review: 734
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 132
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 70
Tracy Chapman
2/5
OK, landmark folk song "Talkin' 'Bout The Revolution", "Fast Cars" and "Mountain O' Things" have aged quite well. Unfortunately, that's not the case with everything else. I agree with the reviewers using the word "beige" and "secretary rock" to explain what this record sounds like to listeners in search of an atmosphere that could be a wee bit more *thrilling* at least. Gosh, the mainstream eighties were so bland sometimes.
Don't get me wrong, Tracy Chapman's heart was in the right place when it came to her topical lyrics. The thing is, the execution of these ideas is quite boring at times. And the same can be said about her music. Add the dull production values, and you have a half-baked album. In other words, Tracy deserves to be remembered for those songs I've quoted up there. But you need more than a couple of good tunes to make a fine LP.
Number of albums left to review: 733
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 132
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 71 (including thisbone)
The Young Rascals
3/5
Assets: variety of styles, a certain quaint charm decades after the fact, and a second side with far better songs than on the first. (including subtle "I Don't Love You Anymore", stellar and energetic "You Better Run" and groovy "It's Love"--far more groovy than "Grooving", actually...)
Flaws: a large chunk of cheese ("quaint charm" is a little too nice sometimes), a lot of inconsequential choruses, quite a few subpar vocal and instrumental performances compared to the household names of 1967, mostly on the first side, and the idea that in a year like that, filled with twenty or thirty daring masterpieces, those Young Rascals were rascals by name only.
The end result: a record that's three notches under the best Beatles and Stones albums, and at least two notches under the best of what The Animals, Byrds, The Yardbirds, The Kinks, The Zombies or the Motown/Stax performers had to offer during the sixties. In other words, *not* an essential one.
Number of albums left to review: 732
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 132
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 72 (including this one)
New Order
2/5
Assets:
"The Perfect Kiss" is a very nice eighties dance track, even though its 12'' extended mix is a far superior version of it--mostly because of the added guitars in its finale, drawing the whole thing to post-punk at the last minute or so. In this "album version", we fortunately still have that crazy bridge with.. frogs. Yes, *frogs*. But frogs can't beat a proper post-rock finale. At least in my book.
Speaking of post-punk, that other cut "Sunrise" has everything in it that can make you fall in love with New Order (Peter Hook's incredible basslines being 50% of it, as usual). It's, simply put, one of the best "rock" tracks, Sumner and company have ever written and performed.
As for "Elegia", it is very touching and evocative. This delicate and melancholic instrumental almost sounds like a post-rock composition, even though proper post-rock would only be invented 5 years later...
Flaws:
As good as they are, "Sunrise" and "Elegia" actually stick out like sore thumbs compared to everything else. Which brings me to the problem of this record, which is actually not merely about cohesiveness. No, the problem is that, sonically speaking, everything else is just so damn CHEESY (apart from "The Perfect Kiss", maybe...). *Low-Life* is indeed filled with the worst clichés ever associated to the eighties--you know the ones, those that didn't age well at all: gated drums, overmixed tom parts, hackneyed and/or dated club beats, fake horns on synths, lame fake-funky parts on guitars, and overly predictable and naive chord progressions played on grating keyboards... Shall I continue the list?
Such a record suggests that New Order went from sounding like goth freaks to playing stuff that would fit in supermarkets and malls a little too fast. Besaides, you must add two other issues to this lamentable equation: first, their "linear" sort of songwriting--chorus and verses mostly sung over the same chords, which can be perfectly fine elsewhere--critically needs better arrangements than this hackneyed... stuff, as intricate and professionally recorded as the latter is. And secondly--and more importantly--Sumner is not a good enough vocalist (and lyricist) to make up for the overall bad taste that oozes from this overrated album. His voice is especially tentative and weak on this particular LP. If the music is decent, he doesn't need to be particularly impressive, as *Power, Corruption & Lies* or the "Blue Monday" single can prove it. Whereas in here, he just can't *sell* the whole thing to folks that are not already dead into that sort of dated sound.
New Order would later find a *better* balance between post-punk tracks and dance cuts on the sadly underrated *Brotherhood*. Then, very unfortunately, they would find an even *worse* balance on the OVERrated *Technique* (BOTH sorts of tracks actually sound weak or even awful today in this one). But that's a story for another time, kiddies, probably when I give a 5/5 grade to *Power, Corruption & Lies*. In the meantime...
Number of albums left to review: 731
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 132
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 73 (including this one)
Faith No More
2/5
It's not that the Faith No More members have no talent or even don't have any great musical ideas once in a while... Every time I happen to listen to a Mike Patton side-project, I'm usually amazed by the artistry that's involved in it (special mention for Fantomas and Tomahawk). No, the problem is that, as energetic, original and forward-sounding as Faith No More was when they broke out, they are now actually, literally *painful* to listen to. Where should we start, the hard-rock-by-number parts, the awfully dated rapping, or the extravagant and theatrical vocals on choruses? It's odd to think that with a relatively similar formula, Red Hot Chili Peppers actually aged far better, at least from *Blood Sugar Sex Magic* onwards... Maybe this difference could be explained by the dynamics of Kiedis and co.'s instrumentation, a more subdued restraint sometimes, and the choice of melodies. Anyway, *The Real Thing* is probably NOT an essential album in 2022, contrary to what a certain aging fanbase considers today...
Number of albums left to review: 730
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 132
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 74 (including this one)
Black Flag
4/5
Hardcore punk classic. Prettty essential, if only for "historical" reasons. There are not many albums in that overall genre in Dimery's list anyway (Minor Threat's *Out Of Step* is included, and I think Bad Brains are, too). So it would be a crime to take *Damaged* out of it.
Number of albums left to review: 729
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 133
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 74
The Rolling Stones
5/5
I have always enjoyed their famous singles, but it took me a loooooooong time to appreciate the classic Stones albums for what they are (from *Beggars Banquet* to *Exile On Main Street*) Things finally clicked when I stopped looking for obvious hit melodies and paid a little attention to all the wonderful sleazy details. Things like Richard's almost off-hand sense of rhythm putting its own perverse twist of the already perverse blues cuts infesting this this record. Jagger's many lurid inflexions and endearing little flaws adding their own sense of perversion. The meticulously crafted build-ups the more fleshed out tracks often go to. There are great moody, moody stuff like this everywhere in *Let It Bleed*. A few years before, I could only hear a bunch of British guys trying to mimick their own American blues and country idols. What I didn't get is that this partial travesty is what actually makes this record (and the one before, *Beggar's Banquet*) so enticing. And it's all conveyed through those sort of artful and yet very *human* key details.
So yeah, of course, there are fantastic opener and closer "Gimme Shelter" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (the irony of that fake angelic choir on that one gets me every time). If only for those two songs, you could give this record a 4/5 or 5/5 grade. But then you also have slow scorchers "Midnight Rambler", "Let It Bleed" and "Monkey Man". And boy do they scorch, if someone gets my obfuscated meaning here--the latter, especially, with its terrific combination of Bill Wyman's groovy bassline and vibraphones flourishes--phasing in and out of major and minor chords as if an ominous veil were covering the full moon...
If I had to be picky, I could say that I would have preffered the original single version of "Honky Tonk Women" to have appeared in the tracklisting, instead of the country parody of it here taking its place on the first side. But that barebones version is still a lot of fun, I have to admit... And maybe including its later "rock" version so soon would have messed up the sense of gradual build-up this LP is actually built on...
To put it in a nutshell, this is a legendary album made by a legendary band--both fun and aptly thought-out. What more can you ask for, really?
Number of albums left to review: 728
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 134 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 74
Iggy Pop
5/5
Welcome to Iggy and David's perverse nightclub cabaret, filled with freaks, ghouls, industrial automatons and other sorts of monsters of all stripes. It's a fun place, where you can have... a "Funtime". At least if your idea of fun is to get spooked by a twisted Iguana whispering bizarre stuff in your ears. Instruments here do not so much "play" as they grind, croak and wince (Bowie indeed had a great turf to play in here so as to prepare for his infamous "Berlin Trilogy"--a.k.a. *Low*, *"Heroes"* and *Lodger*). A clear outlier, "China Girl" rises high above the other tracks in terms of melody and sheer emotions (what a finale on this one--as good as Bowie's later version is overall, the latter's ending is not as intense as in this original version). As for the rest, heartfelt emotions are not in Pop's agenda anyway, so we can't blame him for painting his imaginary venue in all shades of black instead.
In terms of relative flaws, maybe the middle of side 2 is *a little* underwhelming ("Dum Dum Boys" is probably too long, and "Tiny Girls" and its saxophone are quite inconsequential, as moody as they are). But everything else radiates with a dark, ultra-violet light. Especially "Nightclubbing" and the insanely tense and brooding closer "Mass Production", aptly named when you get lost in its proto-industrial waves of noise.
To put it in a nutshell, it's easy to understand how this record influenced the likes of Joy Division, Killing Joke or Nine Inch Nails. 4.5/5 for this one, rounded up to a perfect grade.
Number of albums left to review: 727
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 135 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 74
Rod Stewart
2/5
*Yawn*...
Assets:
Classy and multilayered instrumentation going from the usual guitar solos to mandolin, steel guitar and fiddle. Plus, Rod Stewart is a more than decent vocal performer, I guess...
Flaws:
Most of those songs, whether covers or originals, are middle-of-the-road rock numbers, including *Maggie May* (I don't get what some listeners heard when they made this song a hit--it's pretty middling in my book). And those compositions are *all* too fucking long anyway, except "Tomorrow Is A Long Time" which sounded far less grating than the rest. At first, I wondered why this one stood out... Surprise, it's a cover of an old and quite obscure Bob Dylan cut. Thanks, Rod, for letting me know this song exists, at least (everyone else, please listen to the original or Nick Drake's version).
To return to the bulk of *Every Picture Tells A Story*, and to put it in a nutshell, the overall energy that's displayed in this clearly overrated record seems to be squandered. Besides, everytime the music could go to an interesting chord or harmony, it chooses a bland, boring, or predictable one instead. Energy and jam shenanigans can't just sell *everything*.
Conclusion: to be honest, as downright cheesy as it is, I think "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" is a lot more *fun* than anything in this earlier, supposedly better album. Rod Stewart seems to be a nice bloke, though. Him boycotting the Qatar World Cup's opening ceremony probably helps him avoiding a 1/5 grade from me. Not that he cares about what I think, obviously. Good for him if others want to include *Every Picture Tells A Story* in their list of essential records. Personally, I'm out.
Number of albums left to review: 726
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 135
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 75 (including this one)
Janelle Monáe
2/5
Modern R'n'B is not really my turf, apart from obvious hit singles aimed at making you shake your ass on a dancefloor. So I feel like judging albums in that style released after the nineties onwards is a little difficult for me. That being said, I can respect the artistry involved in such a record. There's tons of it, to be honest, especially with all the different styles outside said R'n'B that are infused in those songs, from roaring 20s charleston in "Faster" to punk rock in "Come Alive", not to mention the well-crafted orchestral arrangements in between.
The thing is, there are TWO huge problems plaguing this sort of album: the first is that as nice and stylish as its different components are, I can't help but feeling that the flourishes on those songs are way to "functional" to make this a record one for the ages, even with my lack of knowledge or appetite for that sort of music. Case in point, the scratches at the start of "Faster", or the guitar solos and the dated rapping parts there and everywhere else. Those ingredients seem to serve a decorating "purpose" rather than being tought-out as part of the compositions from the get-go. As a consequence, everything sounds way too "calculated", there's no sincerity in that type of production, even if you take into account its mainstream pop context. And therefore, everything has aged terribly fast in this record, and this in only 12 years, to boot. Listen to what is done in this overall genre *today*, and the difference will strike you hard.
The second problem is easier to explain: the songs are not catchy enough. Their choruses, particularly. The tunes in Monáe's later LP "Dirty Computer" will show vast improvement in that realm (maybe because the production team is different?). There are songs that remind you of the catchiest Prince, Madonna or Beyoncé/Destiny's Child songs there. So maybe that's the album that should have been included in this list, instead of *The ArchAndroid*, as "original" as the latter is.
Number of albums left to review: 725
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 135
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 65
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 76 (including this one)
Flamin' Groovies
4/5
Mick Jagger was awfully nice and gracious when he praised *Teenage Head* as an album that was actually better than the Rolling Stones' own *Sticky Finger*, out in the same year. But as good as that Flamin' Groovies album is, it's still a notch under the Stones' magnum opus. Side 1 is almost perfect, but three tracks in the middle of side 2 make the album lose its momentum somehow. Those cuts are not horrible, but they are a little too derivative just as they go to older types of rockabilly and bluesy numbers. Fortunately, the record ends on a very high note with Whiskey Women.
As already noted elsewhere, this album is also very interesting for Cramps fans: the title track and "High Flyin' Baby" have clearly inspired Lux Interior and Poison Ivy for their own twisted take on good ole rock'n'roll. Does all this make *Teenage Head* an *essential* album, though? The jury's still out on this one.
Number of albums left to review: 724
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 135
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 66 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 76
The Band
3/5
"The Weight" is a classic. But the album it's from is not The Band's best LP. That subsequent eponymous one is.
Number of albums left to review: 723
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 135
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 67 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 76
Stevie Wonder
5/5
One of the three stone-cold classics that Stevie Wonder wrote and performed during the sixties (the two other being *Songs In The Key Of Life* and *Talking Book*, naturally...). A large chunk of the modern strands of music still heard today actually stem from Stevie and those albums. "Too High"'s bassline and vocal bridge, " Visions"'s folk-like and dreamy guitar parts, "Living For The City"''s relentless groove, catchy synth bridge and socially aware lyrics, "Higher Ground"'s mysticism over funky "Superstition"-like accents, "All In Love Is Fair"'s tender build-ups... These are only the main highlights in this record where everything actually shines with a radiance rarely seen in the history of modern music *Innervisions* is a gem. So geniously inventive that it leaves you in a state of... wonder.
Er... OK. I'll see myself out. ---->
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 700 I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
T. Rex
5/5
Personal opinion: *The Slider* is T. Rex's best LP.
*Another* personal opinion: *Electric Warrior* also deserves to be included in a list of essential listens, and not only because it's this band's most famous album. The varied moods and textures explored on this one mark a milestone in Bolan's trajectory. Plus, it's got "Get It On", the proverbial cream of the cake that makes this record *another* masterpiece.
Number of albums left to review: 722
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 136 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 67
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 76
The Beach Boys
5/5
It's interesting that *Pet Sounds* is not part of the twenty most praised albums on this app. Heck, its overall score reveals that it's actually pretty far behind those twenty LPs. This suggests what I have always suspected: maybe this record has always been slightly overrated, as influential as it was. Were it not for the British critics that singled out that Beach Boys release when it came out on their side of the pond, would we talk so much about it? And in such laudatory terms?
That being said, *Pet Sounds* is still a masterpiece that deserves its 5/5 grade, just like Brian Wilson intended when he and the rest of the Beach Boys recorded it. When you write and arrange heavenly music such as the one found on "God Only Knows", "Wouldn't It be Nice", "Don't Talk" or "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times", you're a genius, period. Your peers are acts like The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana... In other words, you're in very good company, whether or not you made one of the twenty best albums of all time. Podiums are not everything anyway, especially when you're creating original, moving and groundbreaking art such as this. Maybe Wilson indeed wasn't made for those times he lived in. But he sure changed the latter so that it would fit with *his* vision. That takes a lot of skills, a lot of talent. Hence the rightful inclusion of *Pet Sounds* in a list such as this.
Number of albums left to review: 720
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 138 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 67
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 76
Cocteau Twins
4/5
A dream pop classic, or so I hear. It lays on the 80s sound a little thick, with its gated drums and other sorts of production shenanigans from the earlier decade. Wish there were a few more stand-out tracks, too. To me, Cocteau Twins have always been lackluster songwriters, and I'm not talking about the so-called '"unintelligible" lyrics--I don't care about that, to be honest--I'm talking about truly memorable or *dynamic* melodies in individual songs.
That being said, as dated as the sound is, and as limited as Cocteau Twins were in their songwriting, this band were ahead of their time when it comes to sonic intentions in the realm of dream pop--they used textures like others used recognizable melodies, or *suggestions* of lyrics where others would obsesss about the meaning and purpose of every word. That's what the "dream" in dream pop is all about, innit? To evoke, entice and suggest. And with Liz Fraser's incredible voice, they had such a wild card in their sleeve to accomplish all this.
Besides, the opener and closer are both extremely *strong*, which adds a star to my grade. With an opener such as "Cherry-Coloured Funk", you have no choice but to pay attention to what follows. It's just *a little* disappointing that apart from "Frou-Frou In Midsummer", everything else is very nice, but never *stellar*.
Number of albums left to review: 720
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 139
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 68 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 76
Boards of Canada
5/5
Interesting how the responses in most 2/5 and 1/5 reviews actually tell you this is an important album. Some people can't handle the "uncanny"--and *Music Has The Right To Children* is all about the latter: you don't know if you're in the future or the past; you don't know if you're an adult or a child; you don't know if you're in a dream or awake in the real world, and you don't know what it is exactly you're supposed to be feeling. You're floating in purgatory. You're "in limbo", to use the name of a Radiohead track from another album that probably owes a lot to Boards Of Canada...
One *great* 4/5 review tells it better than I would ever write it myself. This is the sound of robots slowly learning how to "emote". In this day and age where AIs now create art and are having meaningful (yet slightly unnerving) conversations with you, *Music Has The Right To Children* is like a prophetic statement. That album cover could as well have been created by one of those AIs. There's the same twisted, slightly off-kilter logic in that artwork as the ones found in those utterly "artificial" creations seen online today. The fact that humans from the nineties actually created said artwork blurs the line between humanity and technology, about the animate and the "inanimate". Just look at this cover: it can trigger the same feeling of alienation and "displacement" in your human brains as those weird AI creations today. And the music does the same.
So the album is not only about fictional robots, as great as that line from that 4/5 review was. It's about us humans and our relationship to time, technology, and "art in the age of mechanical reproduction" (say hello to Uncle W. Benjamin here). It's very "mundane", but that's the point, because nothing is sacred anymore in the digital age. Time is diluted, expanded. Lengthy dirges abound, and they can send you in one of those intermediate "states". Retro-futuristic sonic landscapes give you a sense of nostalgia for a future that hasn't happened *yet*. Objectively, a lot of those trip hop and chill-out club beats are clearly dated, but more than twenty years later, that "dated" thing ironically adds to the overall experience. This album aged extremely well partly because some of its components *have* aged. You can't write a sentence like that about a lot of albums. Which proves it is one-of-a-kind.
To conclude, *Music Has The Right To Children* works like a Rorschach blot. It is a canvas with apparently "unclear" intents emotionally speaking, and where you can therefore project your own feelings, whether they're anxieties, dreams, pessimism, optimism, or even boredom with yourself. And this is exactly where those 1/5 and 2/5 reviews were so interesting to read. In a few lines, you can sense the sort of person who wrote how displeased they were about the experience, understandably so in some cases--you need to be in the right mindset to enjoy weird stuff like this anyway. And if you read between those lines, if you pick up certain words and turns of phrases, it becomes abundantly clear that the experience actually affected some of those reviewers in a somewhat positive way. They may not like *Music Has The Right To Children*, at least right now, but they took the time to try something different, admitted how nonplussed they're feeling about it, and then gave their own feelings the benefit of the doubt (and sometimes, they did the same thing with the music, in a somewhat fascinating mirror effect). In a world where algorithms "break down" and decide what you're *supposed* to enjoy or not as if we ourselves were a string of ones and zeros, such "undecided", ambivalent experience is a precious glitch in the machine. And the fact that such welcome subversion comes in the form of electronic music from another era is itself a very ambivalent, "undecided" plus. That's how "meta" that album can get. And if you're in the right state of mind, this will repeatedly slap you hard in the face. Until the point where you don't have one anymore, maybe.
Number of albums left to review: 721
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 140
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 68
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 76
Doves
3/5
Does the world need a *second* Coldplay, even if this one is a little more imaginative in its atmospheric arrangements? Isn't *one* Coldplay more than enough already? Just like Chris Martin, and minus two or three good moments, the singer from this band is often stuck in a maudlin mode through the course of this record. Some of the vocal lines are a little dull, almost none of them are catchy, and the performance is a little lackluster as well. And why, oh why, are the songs so f*cking long? You could cut most of them in half, and it would basically be the same thing. How about a little self-editing, Doves? Some of the build-ups justify the length used for certain tunes, true (case in point: "There Goes the Fear" and its nicely surprising samba outro, expertly carried out without you even noticing where the thing was actually going for all along--clap clap clap, a very skilled move here). But not *all* the tracks deserve to last for six minutes or so, c'mon!
Admittedly, this album is still a little better than the pack of post-brit-pop LPs this list subjects us to on a regular basis (by the borderline-boring Elbow, for instance, or by the criminally overrated Wild Beasts). Yet by 2002, Radiohead had already shown a way out of that innocuous-indie-by-the-numbers-sort of record, and this through bolder electronic experimentation and the use of more extreme, abrasive dynamics--both during the songwriting process and the recording of the songs. Unfortunately, not many acts had the skills or the ressources to follow the Oxford quintet. What we got instead from Britain during the naughts was a bunch of Coldplays, for better or, quite often, for worse (heavy sigh). And maybe it would be better to forget most of them twenty years later, and leave room for truly *exciting* or *groundbreaking* music, at least.
Number of albums left to review: 720
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 140
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 68
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 77 (including this one)
PS: Listening to Doves' first album right now, *Lost Souls*. The arrangements are even more impressive and pleasurable on this one, but the "songs" still sound like overlong jams or dirges as well, just as in "The Last Broadcast". Doves' musicians are good I'm not arguing about that. But as "songwriters", they're not exactly among the top-tier of those tunesmiths everyone remembers about today. And in a genre like the one practised by this band, it is a flaw that is quite unforgiving, especially for a list of 1001 "essential" albums. Sorry, Dove fans.
*One* exception, though: "Catch the Sun". Is it because there was the word "catch" in the title that Doves suddenly remembered they could also try to be... catchy?
Sister Sledge
3/5
Just like that Chic album, I don't feel like I'm the right person to judge an old disco LP (like many others in this group). The first three singles taken out of that album are great (including the hit "We Are Family", obviously). The fourth single is a little lackluster in comparison. And everything else sounds like "anecdotes in music history" to me.
I can't help feeling that the album format is not kind to such sorts of old genres originally designed for the dancefloor. Maybe someone should write a book named "1001 *12-Inch Records* You Should Listen To Before You Die". I'm pretty sure Niles Rodgers would be quoted quite a few times in that *other* book...
Number of albums left to review: 719
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 140
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 69 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 77
Beatles
5/5
#1 rating on this app. A whooping 4.45/5 grade. You don't need my review here. You just need to listen to this historical gem-of-a-record if you haven't already. "Come Together", "Something", "Here Comes The Sun", "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", the 'medley' at the end... So many great tracks.
Plus, the Beatles basically invented the "modern" album, with this one and the white one, plus *Rubber Soul*, *Sgt. Pepper* and *Revolver*. How can one *not* include those on a list like this?
Number of albums left to review: 718
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 141 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 69
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 77
Def Leppard
1/5
Going from the Beatles' *Abbey Road* to Def Leppard's *Hysteria* tells you everything you need to know about this app. The background vocals and chord changes between the verses and choruses are quite smart in a number of cuts ("Rocket" or "Love Bites" come to mind here), making this band an iconic one in this eighties hard-rock/pop metal subgenre. Too bad such subgenre is too damn cheesy and has aged horribly... if it wasn't *already* horrible when this album came out, that is.
Number of albums left to review: 717
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 141
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 69
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 78 (including this one)
The Stone Roses
4/5
Highly inluential album with a string of stone-cold classics in it. Maybe it is slightly overrated, but you can't deny there's something iconic in such a sound, which looked into the past to better embrace the future...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: more than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Blondie
5/5
Iconic album and the best one ever released by Blondie. It takes a lot of talent to use styles as different as classic rock, punk and disco, and still create such a cohesive LP. And Debbie harry has sung a string of choruses for the ages here (Call Me, One Way Or Another, that Hanging By The Telephone cover...). Maybe not a 5/5, but a solid 4.5/5, at least.
Number of albums left to review: more than 700. Temporarily lost count here.
Keepers: half so far (including this one)
Maybe I'll keep them: a quarter
Stinkers: one last quarter
1/5
Lol. This is a joke the app pulled on us all, right?
So, lemme just get it straight... The album starts with two tracks ripping off choruses by Nine Inch Nails and The Who over horribly *dated* nu-metal sounds, and you're supposed to think this is a "creative" proposal here? Fred Durst's so-called "rapping" is grating to the extreme, aptly and faithfully evoking the sound of fingernails on a chalk board, the guitar hooks are competently played but miserable or bland, and when the band is seemingly out of stupid ideas, they rake the undersized glands that serve as brains for them to pull off an even stupidest idea: "Hey guys, let's use the Mission Impossible theme for our next hit single!" "Duuuuude, that's a *great* idea! But I'ma take one last hit from that bong first, OK?"
Oh. I almost forgot. This album cover is *also* the ugliest cover *of all time*. Not "artistic-ugly" or "ironic-ugly". Just plain, I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing-here-with-my-computer-yet-I'm-doing-it-nonetheless ugly. Jesus H. Christ.
I've counted: there are only *three* reviews that are giving a "5" to this turd. Three. But a 2.55/5 overall rating is still *way* too generous. And there are not so many reviews written yet. I hope that grade will go even lower with time. I've spotted a few records on the list that actually have an even lower score, and conversely deserve far better appreciation from music fans (records such as Robert Wyatt's *Rock Bottom* or even the last one ever in the global stats, Einsturzende Neubaten's *Kollaps*).
No wonder someone in Dimery's team later put their foot down and decided to place "Chocolate Fish And Whatever Your Fried Brain Is Having A Thought About" right where it deserved to go: down to the toilets flush.
Number of albums left to review: 714
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 143
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 69
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 79 (including this one)
Minutemen
4/5
A very rare offering, because it combines two things that are not often gathered in the same album: a sprawling, adventurous tracklisting, here combined with individual songs that are concise, "economical", unpretentious and yet affecting to a level you wouldn't suspect of on the very first listens. You just need to pay attention to the details. If you do so, you'll eventually realize that Minutemen were not your usual run-of-the-mill punk rockers, but skilled musicians and songwriters who had a surprising ability for nuance and subtlety when they wanted to (and refrained from digressing a little too much). Plus, most of the absurd lyrics, as cryptic as they are, are either funny or intriguing. "Corona", "Vietnam", "History Lesson part 2", "Cohesion", "Two Beads At The End" or "Jesus And Tequila" are the highlights here, but this double-album is best experienced as a whole, as long and meandering as it is. Minutemen were the missing link between Captain Beefheart and Black Flag, or the one between Frank Zappa and Fugazi. As such, they deserve to be remembered today. It's a tragedy that D. Boon died so young in that van accident, or that Mike Watt never became more famous afterwards. If Minutemen had kept going, who knows what sort of original, idiosyncratic, fully personal music they would have played next? Their end was a sad loss for punk rock, and maybe even for other genres. Fortunately, we still have this record today.
Number of albums left to review: 713
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 144 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 69
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 79
Guns N' Roses
3/5
The one with "Welcome To The Jungle" and "Sweet Child O' Mine", and the album that "put the metal back into hair metal", as one other reviewer said...
I'm a little confused, though... Is Guns N' Roses still "hair metal", then? Or just "metal metal"?
Nah, they can't be "metal", they're just cheesy eighties hard rock. And that's still the definition of... "hair metal" to me.
But maybe I'm splitting hairs here...
Yeah, I know... Rimshot! 😁
What's *really* funny though, is the way that a lot of those 5/5 and 4/5 reviews point out that *Appetite For Destruction* actually has many fillers, especially on side two. My radar senses bad faith fueled by nostalgia, here expressed by that sort of 40-ish, 50-ish white male who would just shrug every time you would report stories to them about Axl Rose indulging in borderline-racist tirades or expressing his spite towards women. There's a good reason Kurt Cobain hated this band. Don't forget that, kiddies...
I'm gonna drop the mic now, enough said. Well, I won't exactly do that the way Axl Rose drops the mic after a show, mind you. I don't want any of you to end up with a shiner on their face right after reading my review''. I imagine that when *Use Your Illusion I and II* pops up on the app, I'm gonna select those two as LPs that are at least "historically" important in terms of cultural impact. But honestly, it may seem preposterous to waste any more room on Guns N' Roses beyond that. I'm pretty sure there's a good "metal metal" band somewhere that Dimery and co forgot in their list. So maybe it would be a good idea to use that slot here given to *Appetite For Destruction* for them, don't you think?
Number of albums left to review: 712
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 144
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 70 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important):79
Fleetwood Mac
5/5
So many great songs... Such a striking album, so catchy, timeless, heartfelt and moving... Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham were at the apex of their abilities as a songwriting team in 1977. *Tusk*, released a few years later, was great, too, by the way. But that story is for another time, kiddies...
Now who can be surprised that *Rumours* is number two in the app's global stats? Honestly, I would have been, a decade earlier. But I'm still way too young to remember this albums's commercial success when it was released, so I needed to discover it on my own terms first, just like a lot of other people. I'm glad that I did now, obviously...
So each track is a small masterpiece, but the one tune that actually convinced me *Rumours*'s reputation was deserved is "The Chain". It chords changes get me every time. Learning that the song actually depicted all the drama and personal stuff going on behind the scenes is just cream on the cake here.
Since I'm evoking biographical elements here... Rest In peace, Christine McVie. Recent news in 2022 have been a hard blow for music fans all over the world. And let me use the occasion to *also* pay homage to Mimi Parker from Low, criminally absent from Dimery's book. Here was another insanely talented musician who deceased this year, and she deserves as much a tribute as Christine McVie does. Those two women had so much talent, and their voices could send you to heaven. Now that Parker and McVie are in the latter, angels there will probably take some notes for their own choirs, at least...
Album left to review: more than 700.
Keepers: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Potential keepers: a quarter.
Stinkers: another quarter.
Belle & Sebastian
3/5
Aw, Belle And Sebastian... I've always really *wanted* to like this band. Badly. On paper, it's as if I should be charmed by their timeless, unobtrusive style and witty one-liners. But the truth is, I get bored pretty quickly when I try listening to their albums. All those airy vocal lines and happy-go-lucky trumpet parts sound a little too hackneyed and/or naive to my ears. Maybe the fault lies with me, I don't know...
That said, I still feel like if really you had to select one or even two important records from this band, *The Boy With The Arab Strap* or *If You're Feeling Sinister* should come first. My overall boredom is less noticeable when I try listening to those LPs. So, it's gonna be "no" for *"Tigermilk"*.
Number of albums left to review: 711
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 145
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 70
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 80 (including this one)
The Avalanches
1/5
In the realm of albums exclusively built with other musicians' samples, *this* just can't compete with the first DJ Shadow releases. DJ Shadow had it all: mystery, breadth, scope, dynamics, groove, melodies, evocative nocturnal moods, a varied tracklisting... In comparison, The Avalanches sound like a one-trick pony. They're meek, one-note, even bland sometimes (sure, they're messy as well, but it's a mess that flattens everything out to the same sort of mundane, ordinary level). Pretty ironical when you beat the world's record of the number of samples used for a single album (or you're close to beat it anyway).
It's not a surprise even the creators of this album had a lot of trouble selecting a track from it that would be a decent single. They say it's because you couldn't extract one out of the original sequence it's from somehow. But maybe the truth is simpler than that. Maybe it's because *nothing* actually stands out in this record...
Number of albums left to review: 710
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 145
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 70
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 81 (including this one)
The White Stripes
5/5
When The White Stripes were at their apex, I couldn't see their appeal. I thought their "retro-rock" was a regression, nothing more. Seeing them live made me understand a little better what they were all about. Now, decades later, I *do* get how important they were. Rock kept moving forward, no matter what. It's just that looking into the past is *also* actually important if you want to move forward.
This band represents the best of that transition the early aughts needed to go through. Some of the acts representing that transition were not as skilled as the White Stripes were when it came to leave an imprint in listeners' minds, that's all. Those lesser bands are the ones that just signified a fad, nothing more. In comparison, Jack and Meg White had a distinct sound, as well as timeless songs. You just can't beat that. That's why they deserve their place in this list...
Number of albums left to review: 709
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 146 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 70
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 81
The Shamen
1/5
An "elevator music" version of house/techno that's only bearable if you're going up one floor. Only seven people in here gave a 5/5 grade to this turd (and twenty-six gave it a 4/5 mark). Everyone else went to 3/5 or lower. And this clear lack in popularity is not because The Shamen made challenging or "difficult" music. On the contrary, it's because most listeners rightly assessed that this album was blatantly cheesy and commercial at the time--and that it has now aged horribly.
I thus count thirty-three users of this app who just have appalling tastes in music, and so badly need to "educate" their ears a little. Interestingly, given the dates of their reviews and the number of records they went through, most of those listeners seem to have given up using the app pretty quick anyway. Good riddance, I'd say.
Number of albums left to review: 708
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 146
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 70
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 82 (including this one, obviously)
The Undertones
4/5
"Teenage Kicks" and a couple of other cuts are instant classics. A great early pop-punk album. Its only problem is that, even for this genre and particular time period, some of the songs are a little samey. But they're all good nonetheless.
Truth be told, the Undertones never pretended to be more than a decent punk band with catchy tunes. This key album from them is refreshing enough to make you forget about its obvious limitations. Understated, but also slightly underrated, maybe...
Number of albums left to review: 707
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 147
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 70
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 82
Bill Evans Trio
5/5
It's incredible how many essential jazz albums are missing from this list (I've found the latter online). Key releases by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and many others *should* be there... So I guess when one of those records miraculously finds its way in said list, I can't complain, for once.
What sounds good in *Sunday At The Village Vanguard* on first listens is how each member of the trio seems to have a telepathic sense of what the two others are about to do. Vivid shapes materialize in front of your eyes if you're paying attention to this. There are moments when you're thinking: "Damn! What is this musician doing now? He's going so far away from the other two, that's not gonna work, everything's gonna crum... Oh. It works. The others just adapted. And now he's back in line." Simply incredible.
Just discovered that bassist Scott LaFaro died a few days after this session in a car accident. That's so sad. Clearly, he was at the top of his game here, and so are Evans and Motian.
To conclude, here are few words about the moody closer "Jade Visions", so slow, mysterious and melancholic. Here it's not a solo that shines like the moon, but the whole piece. Spotless ending, here, perfect for a film noir scene...
Number of albums left to review: 706
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 148
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 70
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 82
Eric Clapton
3/5
That's all very middle of the road. It's not horrible, it's not great, it's just enough.
I'm so bored by this record that I here actually copied-and-pasted one of the best reviews about it I could find on the app. I'm pretty sure its author can understand why I did this, and so won't blame me for it. This record mostly comprises blues covers mixed with a few originals, and among the latter, only the "Let It Grow" ballad towards the end is worth it--it"s quite a moving song to be honest and helps the album reach a 3/5 grade here. Of course, there's also the famous "I Shot The Sheriff" cover, which didn't bring much personal input to Bob Marley's original version, as "efficient" as it is. Clapton always "played it safe" when he plundered black music, didn't he? That's one of the perks of being a conservative coward, whether musically (Clapton's "blues orthodoxy" during the sixties was a clear sign of the problems to come), or politically (should I really list the number of times the man just simply *got it wrong*, to use a polite understatement?)...
So obviously, my assessment of *461 Ocean Boulevard* can't ignore the fact that its author is a twat today (and has often been one in the past as well). Maybe folks will stop wasting their time on his minor releases now, at least--minor releases such as this particular LP, which only has two or three highlights in it, and only one of them is a Clapton composition, to boot.
If *really* you want to know about Clapton's impact on music history, only listen to the key albums he took part in where his name *does NOT appear on the cover* (or only in small characters). Projects such as Cream, Derek And The Dominos, Yardbirds or the one with John Mayall. Don't bother with the rest. It's not really worth it.
Number of albums left to review: 701
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 148
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 70
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 82 (including this one)
Drive-By Truckers
1/5
I get what the topical lyrics are all about. I get that they try to make sense out of the complex legacy the southern US states have had to deal with, between segregation and the old George Wallace supporters among poor white folks... Under that light, I can somehow appreciate the band's intent as they try to reconcile Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd's different takes on such issues.
To those it may interest, Neil Young has always been pretty candid about how his song "Alabama" had actually been unfair to the subtleties people who lived there went through--interestingly he never recanted about the overall message of "Southern Man", which might mean he still had a point about southerners' cowardice, at least broadly speaking...
But anyway, yes, I "get" what this record is all about.
But I *also* get that the music on this album is just damn awful, even with all those topical issues weighing in the balance. Vocals are hackneyed, the music is unoriginal, and the lyrics are on the nose, or heavy like a thesis statement. And ironically. invoking the memory of both Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynird in the first songs only proves one thing: that Drive-By Truckers had none of the latter's skills as songwriters. What a strange way to unite the two, really...
Number of albums left to review: 700
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 148
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 70
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 83 (including this one)
The Velvet Underground
5/5
All four Velvet Underground albums deserve to be in this list. This one is the most "intimate" release of the four, and yet such intimacy is complemented by the religious and/or transcendent overtones that made "Beginning To See The Light" or "Pale Blue Eyes" breathtaking cuts in the VU repertoire. Add to this the groove of "What Goes On", the off-kilter experimental drive of "The Murder Mystery" (which aptly foretells no wave stuff à la Sonic Youth), plus the irony of "After Hours" or the melancholy of "Candy Says", and you have... a stone-cold classic.
Number of albums left to review: 699
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 149 (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 70
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 83
George Michael
3/5
Er... I guess this is the George Michael album to potentially include in a list such as this one given that it contains his most timeless hits "Faith", "I Want Your Sex" or "Monkey". The cheesy eighties sounds of the rest have aged a lot, obviously, but I guess you can find some relative charms to the different styles used throughout this LP, at least, even though it's not my thing.
Number of albums left to review: 698
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 149
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 71 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 83
Devendra Banhart
3/5
So OK, I "get" the feeling of grassroots-folk authenticity this sort of record can provide to listeners who might have a knack for moody, melancholic pieces. But the price to pay here, the unshakable feeling that *all* those droning songs sound very samey in the end, is a little too high, maybe.
I don't hold a grudge against the artist, just doing his thing here. But the critics who raved about him during the early naughts seemed to have turned a blind eye to the obvious limitations of what it was that he was *actually* doing: mostly a sort of barebones psychedelic folk thing not harmonious enough to serve as decent background music, and, very unfortunately, churning out tunes that are not layered and memorable enough to catch your attention for more than three songs in a row either. A lose-lose situation, if you can get my meaning here...
Only 15 persons or so on the app thought this record was an absolute keeper and gave it a 5/5 grade. That doesn't *necessarily* mean they're wrong (this music is *not* horrible). The thing is, if you want to select an example of outlier, off-kilter folk tunes, The Incredible String Band were probably more interesting and adventurous than Devendra Banhart ever was, even though that earlier band received an even lower grade than him. Sometimes you need to pick a side. The Incredible Strings Band were too original to be labelled as "background music". Devendra Banhart's intent is not so clear, comparatively speaking...
Number of albums left to review: 697
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 149
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 71
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 84 (including this one)
Various Artists
3/5
Just like I do for some of the presents loved ones or family members give you for Christmas every year, I politely thank the 1001 Albums app for this nice gesture. December 25th is the right time to receive gifts, is it not?
But to be fair, and all politeness aside, every year *some* of the gifts I receive stay untouched, or they are put in the back of cupboard shelves, never to be seen again. A Phil-Spector-curated compilation from the early sixties featuring The Ronettes, Darlene Love and other similar acts is still miles better than anything Mariah Carey ever pulled off afterwards to ruin your ears every late December (I won't be polite at all if I receive *that* gift next year). The thing is, if really I wanted to have a great example of the Wall-Of-Sound aesthetics in my record collection, I'd rather go to a *regular* album by The Ronettes or by any other act that Spector produced around the same time (long before he became the troubled criminal he is today--but that's a christmas yarn for another time, kiddies...).
Besides, being stuck with the same cheesy theme for the course of a whole album is just exhausting, even when it's the right time of the year. If really I had to play a X-mas record to set everyone around me in the right mood on that very day, I think Frank Sinatra's similarly-themed LPs would be more efficient and less obnoxious choices than this, as clichéed and potententially tiring as the latter are themselves...
Number of albums left to review: 696
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 149
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 71
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 85 (including this one)
The Cure
5/5
harrowing
/ˈharəʊɪŋ/
adjective
acutely distressing.
"a harrowing album about doomed love, addiction and death"
downcast
/ˈdaʊnkɑːst/
adjective
(of a person) feeling despondent.
"Robert Smith is quite a downcast character, is he not?"
depressive
/dɪˈprɛsɪv/
adjective
causing feelings of severe despondency and dejection
"How depressive the mood is on *Disintegration*!"
Goth
/ɡɒθ/
noun
a style of rock music derived from punk, typically with apocalyptic or mystical lyrics.
"The Cure has produced many records that fans of Goth music love, but *Disintegration* is the rare one where said label can be used for the album in full."
dreamy
/ˈdriːmi/
adjective
having a magical or pleasantly unreal quality; dreamlike.
"The dreamy atmosphere on The Cure's eighth studio album makes the latter particularly stand out for shoegaze fans."
long
/lɒŋ/
adjective
lasting or taking a great amount of time.
"The Cure loved to play long tracks with repetitive patterns at the end of the eighties, thereby providing many hypnotic cuts for their fans."
disintegration
/dɪsˌɪntɪˈɡreɪʃn/
noun
the process of losing cohesion or strength.
"As rambling and shapeless as The Cure' *Disintegration* may seem on first listens, with its lengthy cuts and ever-circling vocal lines, its entopic music actually mirrors the album's artistic point (and lyrical intent): taking a series of snapshots of a soul slowly dissolving."
Number of albums left to review: 695
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 148 (including this one, with a 4.5/5 grade, here rounded up to 5/5)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 71
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 85
Kacey Musgraves
1/5
So bland. Cheesy, naive and/or innocuous. Maybe you can salvage the first track somehow, but everything else is too dumb, musically or lyrically speaking. The one with all the clichéed metaphors about Kacey's unreliable love interest being like a horse got me laughing out loud, I admit. The thing is, I'm pretty sure that was not her intent to be comical here. Duh. 🙄I'm not wasting any more time on this review, I've already wasted to much of it trying to listen to this artist. Musgraves is criminally overrated by prominent music websites these days, but she's not the only one... Don't *fully* trust Dimery's list after 2010, by the way: half of it is filled with albums made by such overrated artists. Which is a crime given the insane amount of great music that's been recorded in the last ten years or so...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Van Morrison
5/5
Being a music-first, lyrics-later kind of guy, I've always had troucle understanding the impact this iconic album made on people over time. It's not that the music is not good, it *is*. But the tracks on this album are more like *exquisite* extended jams than songs proper. *Exquisite* because the performances are amazing, and they manage to draw from *very* different genres (soul, traditional folk music, jazz, rock...), gathering them into a cohesive, quite personal whole. But as hard as I tried getting the nuances in those performances, the lack of chord variations has always been an impediment on my appreciation of what Van Morrison attempted to do here.I've just realized that if I follow the (partly improvised?) lyrics while listening to those tracks, *Astral Weeks* takes on a whole different dimension. It's probably the 'stream-of-consciousness' feel of those lyrics, mirroring a vocal performance where Van Morrisson literally uses his voice the way a jazz sax player would use his instrument. This record is one-of-a-kind, there's no doubt about that. In spite of my previous problems with it, I'll give it a 4/5 or 4,5/ grade, rounded up to 5/5 here because of its originality and cultural impact. I might not *fully* get *Astral Weeks* yet. But for once, I'm pretty sure it's because of my own mindset whenever I listen to it, and not because of any intrinsic artistic *flaws*. Sometimes mystery makes you return to LPs you still cannot fully grasp. This is rare, but when it happens, you just *know* they're actually "essential" albums...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Fiona Apple
5/5
Kick me under the table all you want, I won't shut up about this album. It's sprawling, adventurous, playful, and expertly produced, with a domestic feeling that's miles away from the all-too-neat sounds of mainstream pop these days. It's experimental yet extremely catchy at the same time (See "Cosmonaut"'s chorus for one example of such "catchiness"). The lyrics are very "topical" most of the time but they're never on the nose, an asset that is mirrored in the performances themselves. Fiona Apple is a virtuoso on the piano and an incredible singer. But she also left many supposed "flaws" apparent during the recording process, along with off-kilter moments that make the whole thing sound sincere and very endearing.
My only (minor) complaint is that the album is maybe *a little* too long. A more reasonable amount of self-editing, like taking out a couple of songs out of the record's tracklisting, would have created an even stronger *whole* overall (that's where Pitchfork's perfect 10 grade might be somewhat exaggerated imho). But as I've already suggested at the start of this paragraph, this is only a "minor" complaint. My own assessment can be summed up through a 4.5/5 grade here, rounded up to 5 for the usual purposes of this app. It's not often than a *recent* record in this list actually deserves all the praise. Shameika said Fiona had "potential", after all. Damn was she right about that!
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
The Kinks
5/5
Out of the string of classic albums Ray Davies and co. released from *The Kink Kontroversy* to *Lola Versus The Moneygoround*, this is my least favorite, for reasons I can't quite fathom myself. All the key ingredients of the Kinks' second period are there, though. Here are the witty, sarcastic cuts about the British middle class (opener "Party Line", for instance, or the upbeat ditties "Dandy" and "A House In the Country"--another clear inspiration for later britpop stalwarts Blur). We can also find tongue-in-cheek, quite "meta" callbacks to their rockier beginnings ("Session Man"). Plus moody setpieces such as the wonderful "A Rainy Day In June", the droning, quasi-psychedelic "Fancy", and obviously that timeless hit that "Sunny Afternoon" is.
Reading myself again, I realize *Face To Face* deserves to be considered among the band's finest records. It's just that the whole doesn't gel the way their other classic albums do--maybe because the album's tracklisting is a little too topsy-turvy, even compared to the band's usually eccentric and "messy" standards when it comes to 180-degrees turns. So I will switch my initial 4/5 grade to a 4.5 - 5 one nonetheless. Face to face with Davies' songwriting genius, it's the least that i can do.
Number of albums left to review: 691
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 151
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 71
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 86
Rush
1/5
Once upon a time, there was a very nice style called Prog Rock, that just looooooved to have little musical adventures, going to the jazzy woods one day, sailing over the experimental lakes on another one, or climbing on the back of their friend Hard Rock, the gentle giant of the East, on yet another one of those innocent years from the early seventies. Some mean, mean children mocked Prog Rock sometimes, but Prog Rock didn't care. First because *other* children still liked Prog Rock well enough. But most of all, because Prog Rock was a good-natured, spontaneous sort of style. And in the land of music, as long as all styles were sincere, creative and artful, they were liked well-enough.
Once in a while, Prog Rock took herself a little too seriously, that's true. But her heart was always in the right place: all she ever wanted to do was to create a world of musical wonders for other children to enjoy (wonders named King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt, Procol Harum...). Who could blame Prog Rock for all that, really?
Little did Prog Rock know that the Eighties were looming on the horizon, and that they had sent to the land of music a band of ruffians known as Rush, led by Geddy Lee, the wicked witch of the west.
Geddy Lee had a voice like nails on a chalkboard and a brain the size of a pea. But if he couldn't sing gracefully, or write interesting lyrics, he was still shrewd enough to find ways to get what he wanted from the lands of music.
He went to Prog Rock and said:
"Look at our trinkets, child, and listen to our nice "modern" sounds--do you like them?"
"I'm not sure," Prog Rock answered. "But people say I have an adventurous spirit. Maybe I could try them, as weird as they seem to me now. Maybe I could turn them into something good."
"Yes, maybe," Geddy Lee replied. "But please, don't overthink it--make the same weird sort of time-signatures you usually enjoy, sure. But don't ever make anything that would be too mesmerizing or graceful in terms of melody. Fill your creations with *stuff*: soulless technical prowess, dumb heavy-metal guitar solos, flashy shenanigans... *That's* the most important thing to do for our masters the Eighties."
"The... Eighties?" Prog Rock asked.
Out of the corners of her eyes, Prog Rock saw that one of the Rush members was trying to ride on the back of Hard Rock, the gentle giant of the east. Hard Rock was shaking and fiercely resisting.
Prog Rock felt a lump in her throat. Something was going awfully wrong here...
"What... What are you here for?" Prog Rock asked Geddy Lee.
"We're here to make music with you," Geddy Lee answered with a sly pout on his lips. "How about giving me a little kiss, for starters? I'm sure this will make the most beautiful sound ever."
"I'm... I'm not sure I want to," Prog Rock stammered with fear in her heart.
"C'mon... Just one little kiss"
"No."
But Geddy Lee had already grasped his hands around Prog Rock's waist:
"C'MON YOU FUCKING BITCH, GIVE ME THAT FUCKING KISS NOW, OR I'M GONNA KILL YA"
All around him, the Rush members suddenly produced machine guns and started to shoot everything around them. Horrid sounds started to be heard throughout the lands of music. Most of the children were horrified--but *a few* of them liked those tragic sounds, oddly enough. Some of those kids were dumb and mean, as suggested earlier. And among them, a few actually liked shallow and soulless creations.
Geddy Lee looked at Prog Rock in the eye:
"Give me what I want, or I swear to you, I'm gonna make you squeal..."
But Prog Rock resisted, just like Hard Rock did. Mad with anger and frustration, Geddy Lee took out a knife. For one second, it flashed under Prog Rock's eyes.
It is said that when Geddy Lee stabbed Prog Rock, a horrid and hackneyed synth sound resonated all around the lands, the same sound that can be heard in the first seconds of "Tom Sawyer":
"Tcccccchhhhhhiiioooooooooonk..."
And so Rush plundered and pillaged the lands of music. But they were only the *first* harbingers of doom. Marillion came not long after, for instance. And *other* styles in the lands would quickly be violated and emptied of their true meaning, just like Prog Rock after her lifeblood left her when Geddy Lee stabbed her to death.
And that, kiddies, is how the Eighties took over the lands of music and murdered several important styles. Other survived and thrived after the Eighties' demise, fortunately. But that's a story for another time, I guess...
The end. At least, the end of Prog Rock, sadly.
Number of albums left to review: 690
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 151
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 71
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 87 (including this one)
Tangerine Dream
5/5
Layers and layers of mesmerizing sounds from legendary pioneers. Very much of its time, when everything about electronic music still needed to be discovered. And yet also nothing like what came after in that overall genre or umbrella style. Plus, one can still potentially trip or chill out to this today, just as hippies did in 1974.
Tangerine Dream's early output is a little like good wine. It ages well. In a way, the retro-sci-fi mood *Phaedra* can trigger in you is even more impactful today, because it is now infused with the sort of "future nostalgia" very rare acts have been able to reach since (I'm talking about Boards Of Canada here, *not* about Dua Lipa, obviously 😉).
The two other gems Tangerine Dream released after this one (*Rubycon* and *Stratosfear*) were admittedly lmore melodic and less "abstract", comparatively speaking. But none had *Phaedra*'s sheer conceptual power and unique atmosphere. Hence its direct inclusion in my own list.
Number of albums left to review: 689
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 152 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 71
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): 87
Earth, Wind & Fire
3/5
Why do I feel that a compilation from this band (ideally including *both* their famous cuts and lesser known, more stylistically varied endeavors) will always be more pleasurable than any single LP they ever released? Maybe it's a lack of knowledge about disco or funk history on my part, admittedly. But listening to *That's The Way of The World*, I can't help shake that feeling (while shaking my ass and legs on the dancefloor as well--I'm not saying this record fails in that area, by the way: all I'm saying is that it is just *one* little piece from a far larger puzzle).
At least, *That's The Way Of The World* is a nice tribute to the band's spotless musicianship. But, as I've just suggested, it's not a tribute to Earth Wind And Fire as timeless hitmakers. Let's be honest for one second--those "September", "Let's Groove", and "Boogie Wonderland" singles are what popular consciousness automatically associates the Earth Wind And Fire name with. And none of them are in this LP.
Of course, that doesn't mean the latter is bad on its own. The two tracks closing the proceedings, "Africano" and "See The Light" have mean fusion grooves, with exciting solos in them (on a saxophone for the first of those tracks, and on synths for the second). But everything else is a little too predictable, maybe, especially the somewhat cheesy ballads (the title track, "All About Love" and "Reasons"). And if the whole offering is fun overall, it's far from sounding "essential" to me.
Last-minute update: I've just learned that the Earth Wind And Fire drummer passed away today, of all days. I suspect it was actually not a coincidence this record popped up in the app this morning (it wouldn't be the first time such fake 'coincidences' happen in here). I'm not changing a word from my review, though. I have already praised both the band's musicianship and their timeless hits in it, even if the album itself wasn't really my thing. Podiums and best-of-lists are not so important anyway. What's important is to use those opportunities to celebrate good music of all kinds. Rest in peace (or in power), Fred White.
Number of albums left to review: 688
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 152
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 71
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 88 (including this one)
Siouxsie And The Banshees
5/5
My favorite Siouxsie And The Banshees album, a band I didn't know I needed so badly before undertaking this project and consulting Dimery's list online (the man should be thanked a thousand times for this, in spite of all the "wrong" albums he or his team singled out). *Juju* is not so much gothic "post-punk" as *pop-punk as it should actually be defined in popular consciousness*. Budgie's drumming is dynamic and powerful, John McGeogh's jagged guitar lines vibrate with an intensity rarely heard in this overall genre, and Siouxsie's voice is haunting. This is, for me, their strongest set of songs. *The Scream* and *Kaleidoscope* also have great moments, but none of those records are as cohesive and impressive as *Juju*. No dud to be found in here: "Arabian Nights", "Monitor", "Spellbound' and "Into the Light", especially, can get stuck in your head for hours after listening to the LP.
Have I already used the word "haunting" in this short review? I hope I did, because *Juju* is the perfect illustration of it, in all its many senses. 5 stars, nothing less.
Number of albums left to review: 687
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 153 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 71
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 88
Destiny's Child
2/5
Here's the exact example of what a *good* album should NOT be, and this in any genre out there. To put it in a nutshell, Destiny's Child was essentially an amazing act when it cames to their singles, but they *never* released any masterpiece in the album format. According to many fans of "Queen Bey", it's a problem lead singer Beyoncé would fix later on during her solo career, starting with her eponymous fifth full-length effort in the early 2010s, (followed by *Lemonade* and the very recent *Renaissance*, released last year). But that's a story for another time, I imagine...
To return to *Survivor*, the album admittedly starts strong and self-assured with "Independent Women Part 1" and the title track (two insanely catchy cuts that are part of the four or maybe five most famous songs ever performed by the iconic r'n'b girl group during their short career). Those two cuts sure trigger a roaring start--and *yes*, the three next songs after them still hold their own pretty well, all things considered (especially the kinky and lively "Bootylicious" ).
Unfortunately, everything following the fifth song peters out, and it peters out incredibly *fast*, whether in the US or the longer, "international" edition of the album. Very quickly indeed, this record loses focus and momentum through a series of very questionable choices: meandering, pointless production lacking any sense of build-up and sprinkled with weird and useless sound effects seemingly taken from Super Mario Kart; technically spotless vocal performances that yet meander very much as well, due to predictable lines with no real "soul" in them (in spite of a very "performative" bravado here displayed to hide the lack of any original content or idea); interspersed between the faster cuts, a few cheesy ballads that seem to have been heard a thousand times before--both types of tracks being filler and no killer; and finally, a conclusion that is basically a gigantic question mark: what's the real point of that accapella cut "Gospel Medley"--going through all the clichés of a Harlem mass withouth any really *personal* input added to them--here followed by the awkward and dated "rapping" of the "outro" "Thank You"? Can someone explain?
So what we *really* have to deal with here is only five tracks going from decent to great. Everything else is totally irrelevant. Most other reviewers using this app seem to agree with me by the way; up to now, there's only been *5* reviews that gave a 5/5 mark to this record (including a review in French that is mostly off-topic). That's an incredibly *low* number for such a "mainstream" album. Maybe someone could write a book called "The 1001 *EPs* You Should Listen To Before you Die" and place *Survivor* in it? You tell me.
Number of albums left to review: 686
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 153
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 71
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 89 (including this one)
LL Cool J
3/5
I have this CD at home. The title track packs a punch, along with a few others ones (like "The Boomin' System" or "Eat Them Up L Chill"). Yet when it comes to timeless rap music, I'm not so sure this clearly dated example of hip hop can be said to be as relevant today as it seemed to be in the early nineties, and this either lyrically/vocally or musically. Producer Marley Marl still does a more-than-decent job, I guess. For instance, he nicely mimicks the layers of apocalyptic sounds favored by Public Enemy's The Bomb Squad production team on "Murdergram". But without PE's topical or political sense of urgency, the track seems to run nowhere fast, really. As for the smoother, more "seductive" side of LL Cool J's music, it cruelly lacks the jazzy subtlety of the Native Tongues crew (bands such as A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Jungle Brothers). Hip hop amateurs already know what I'm talking about here...
That said, *Mama Said Knock You Out* can still be a pleasant nostalgic listen for fans of old hip hop. Does that make the album an "essential" one, though? The jury's still out on this one...
Number of albums left to review: 685
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 153
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 72 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 89
Beatles
5/5
Can't beat that review saying that *Rubber Soul* and *Revolver* are two sides of the same extraordinary coin. Unsurprisingly, *Sgt. Pepper*, the White Album and *Abbey Road* are my favorites in the Beatles's discography, but those two earlier records are also the two grand gates that lead you to those lands. And as such, they are as essential as the three I've just quoted here.
About *Rubber Soul* in particular, what I'm about to write won't surprise anyone. First, there's the most famous songs that make that album the legend that it is today (the groovy and lively "Drive My Car", the trippy "Norwegian Wood", that insanely catchy "Nowhere Man", "Michelle" and its naive lyrics in French, or that miraculous feat of economical songwriting that the moving and melancholic "In My Life" is). But there are also the less-known cuts that are actually as good as those famous hits ("You Won't See Me", "Think For Yourself", "The Word" and "Wait"). To put in in a nutshell, almost everything in *Rubber Soul* is well worth your time--minus one or two ditties that can't really hurt the whole thing. It is nothing less than a blueprint of what makes us all use this app: the album as a modern art form. How can this one *not be* in the list?
A few words about controversial closer "Run For Your Life" now... That song has very disturbing lyrics, obviously. But honestly, it would be hypocritical for me to condemn it as a piece of art given that I can also enjoy Eminem's most disturbing raps as examples of the sort of narrative leeway and poetic license great musicians and songwriters can get away with. If anything, that contrast between the threatening lyrics and the happy-go-lucky catchiness of the music creates an interesting, off-kilter experience. Yes, Lennon did hit women at least once or twice during the course of his life, adding to the uneasy feeling this song can trigger in you. Him publicly regretting those acts later on doesn't *fully* redeem him as a person, by the way--he has been an asshole with women in more ways than one, most evidently, and that's something no one should forget. Yet I'm still buying Lennon's claim that his subsequent will to naively praise peace, love and understanding *also* stemmed from those personal experiences as a man. The words he used during those later interviews were anything but ambiguous or hypocritical: it was *all* his fault, and that was another reason for him to try to "imagine" a world were such heinous acts would never happen. Please note that I'm trying hard NOT to separate the man from the artist here. I guess there are just different ways to do it, and that some of them can still take into account somewhat "grey" areas...
Who in his right mind would *seriously* try to "cancel" the Beatles now anyway? You may not like their songs, and you may not like who they were as individuals. But it would be vain or foolish to try to deny the gigantic influence those individuals have had on popular culture. Those four young men, *still in their twenties when this album came out*, were incredibly gifted musicians and songwriters. And that's another thing that makes *Rubber Soul* the monument it still is today, along with at least five or six other LPs from the band. Good luck for the record that pops up after this one.
Number of albums left to review: 686
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 154 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 72
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 89
Method Man
5/5
Out of all the first solo outputs of the Wu-Tang Clan members, this is the one that too many critics and listeners have always criminally *underrated* in my humble opinion. And it's happening again, on this app: OK, there are very few 5/5 grades, but if you pay attention to the 4/5 and even 3/5 reviews, the vast majority of those reviewers seem to have really, *really* enjoyed listening to this record (3/5 reviews are usually not that positive overall). Not taking into account the 2/5 and 1/5 marks here, where it's obvious that those other reviewers can't enjoy or even understand good hip hop. Since most of those complainers were quite candid about this lack of understanding on their part, I can still respect their honesty at least. Always better than the few bad faith takes here and there, like that one reviewer trying to explain how late nineties "gangster rap" was better, and then putting east coast Wu-Tang (as a whole unit) and west coast Dré, Snoop Dog or 2Pac under that *same* umbrella genre. As if those two groups of rappers were creating the same sort of music... Buy yourself some ears before giving us your "impressions", please.
Anyway, and in spite of my own complaints about some of the reviews and grades, I'm so happy this record found its way to this list. Its overall mood is dark yet lively, RZA goes from one catchy loop to the next, and Method Man's husky voice and lyrical aggressivity do wonders. His voice is a little buried in the mix sometimes, but I actually like that choice, it adds to the hazy ambience of the whole thing. Listen to "Biscuits" or "Bring The Pain" for stellar examples of the sort of moodpiece RZA and Method Man can create here, one that's not so far from what the kind of murky trip-hop that someone like Tricky would play not so long after, right on the other side of the pond. Contrasting with those more atmospheric cuts, you have boom bap bangers such as "Release Yo' Delf"--with its blaring warlike horns and interpolations taken from "I Will Survive"--or "Mr Sandman" and its eerie and haunting opera-like soprano voice lurking in the background like a spooky ghost.
Funny how those bangers are actually closer to the end of the album than the more atmospheric cuts. *Tical* kinda starts with low-key stakes, but it then builds up from one track to the next, and I can't praise that sort of tracklisting enough (and this in any genre). It's when everything goes out with a bang at the end that you fully realize the scope of this record. See the other boom bap miracle that "Stimulation" is (that goddamn sample of uneasy strings!) and the unavoidable remix of "Method Man" concluding the proceedings--a callback to *Enter The Wu-Tang* that obviously needed to be included here, in this first solo output from one of the most prominent member of the Staten Island crew.
Speaking of the LP's "architecture", I also love the fact that this record is quite short for a hip hop album, and that the individual tracks never overstay their welcome themselves, encouraging repeated listens rather than meandering through too many filler cuts for 60 or 70 minutes (a flaw that even the greatest rap albums out there have often displayed).
My overall grade for this thing would be 4.5/5, just to differentiate it from the masterpiece that GZA's *Liquid Swords* is when it comes to legendary Wu Tang solo outputs. Had *Tical* included the insanely good "All I Need' remix featuring Mary J. Blige (only released as a single), maybe it would have been up there with *Liquid Sword*, to be honest. But given the injustice I still sense in this album's reception, whether it was then or now, I'm gonna round up that grade to a perfect 5/5 here. Wu-Tang Forever!
Number of albums left to review: 685
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 155 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 72
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 89
Violent Femmes
5/5
One of the best LPs of 1982, if not THE best of that year. The amount of earworms in that album is simply incredible, and its unpretentious production values (in an era that was literally *plagued* by them) makes this debut a timeless masterpiece. It's hilarious how many listeners in the reviews thought this thing was released in the early *nineties*. 5 stars, no hesitation here.
Number of albums left to review: 684
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 156 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 72
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 89
Miles Davis
4/5
Miles's first game changer (and the first in quite an impressive list: see *Milestones*/*Kind Of Blue*, *Sketches Of Spain*, *In A Silent Way*/*Bitches Brew*, *On The Corner*...). Not as striking today as those later masterpieces, but still an essential listen for sure...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Buck Owens
3/5
If *really* I had to include a country album in my own list, this might be one of the most obvious choices here. Of course, knowing some of those songs through the covers made by other famous acts does help a lot here (see for instance the Beatles' version of "Act Naturally).
I remember that when I started this project, I was a little harsh with Marty Robbins' *Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs*. Come to think of it, that was one of the best records in that genre included in Dimery's list. So it will probably be in my own list as well, along with the masterpiece that Johnny Cash's *At Folsom Prison* is. To me Cash sounds different: the tunes he performed had that mix of emotion and humor, along with an underlying sense of danger or transgression, that made him sound like a true rock star. And of course, there's that incredible gravelly voice. Everyone and their mothers sound like wimps next to this giant. Including (and especially) Buck Owens, ha ha.
Now the question remains: is *three country albums only* a prejudice on my part? You tell me. I'm still expecting this app to make me understand what's so great about this genre overall. Yes, you do have catchy tunes in that style. But you also often have predictable chord progressions and arrangements and a very linear sort of "energy" (except for Cash or Robbins, once again).
And I've tried. I really tried. I even listened to country-like LPs closer to the rock idiom (The Byrds' *Sweetheart Of The Rodeo*, Gram Parsons, John Prine...), and they sound even worse to my ears. I wish someone could explain how to "handle" such albums...
The *only* act that made me understand what can truly be great when you venture in that genre is Big Thief. By all means, listen to the few country cuts from *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You", they are simply extraordinary songs and performances. But apart from those few exceptions, *all* listed in that review, the spark is missing...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Love
4/5
Ahead of its time in its protopunk leanings, *Da Capo* is also a good example of early psychedelic rock, with a few great tracks on side A. I'm glad I have this album at home, along with *Forever Changes*. But if the latter obviously needs to be in this list, I'm not so sure about that other record. That long overlong jam on side B has its moments, but it sounds more like an interesting curio than a masterpiece today.
On a sidenote: I have always felt that "critcs" did unfairly malign the record following *Forever Changes*, released right after the band's line-up dramatically... changed. To me, *Four Sails* was at least as good as *Da Capo* when it came to point towards the future. And it had incredible openers and closers.
Maybe someone should write a book named "1001 *Underrated* Albums That Deserve To Be ListenedTo". Some records in Dimery's orignal list could find their way into it. And others he snubbed could either go into that 'B' list OR in a brand new 'A' list.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Astrud Gilberto
3/5
Nice for background music, but I have to admit that I got bored pretty quickly here, even on a closer listen. Arrangements are top-notch, of course, courtesy of Eumir Deodato (known for many sixties staple recordings in that overall genre, and also for his later collabs or (re)mixes with Roberta Flack, Björk, Christohe and others)... But the songs, well, they... they just happen. I probably don't have the best ear for samba, to be honest. But given that Astrud's vocal performance sounds quite average to me, this certainly didn't help me warm up to those tunes anyway.
Just so you know, I have absolutely nothing with singers with limited skills or range--some of my favorite singers of all time *do* have very limited skills sometimes. But in that case, the music itself needs to be a little more consistent and moving than what I hear on this record. Given the sheer amount of *important* records released in 1967 (and also in the four or five years after), I think *Beach Samba* risks eclipsing some far more important releases down the line. And that's a risk I'm not willing to take for my own list.
So that's a no-go for me, even though this album could indeed be the perfect soundtrack for that imaginary video game depicted in that 3/5 assessment currently displayed in the second slot of the reviews gallery. I think I could play that video game about restaurants and food, actually. It sounds like a very relaxing one, ha ha.
By the way, that reviewer wrote only fourteen reviews in 2021 and then gave up. That's a shame, this person seemed quite funny... Actually, I wonder how many other ones gave up. And, also, how many are still *currently* writing reviews, still keeping up the pace... Has anyone ever managed to review *all* the 1001 albums? Has someone ever finished this thing?
Hope the answers will come soon. In the meantime...
Number of albums left to review: 680
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 157
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 74
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 90 (including this one)
Lou Reed
5/5
Recorded and released right after the success of the David Bowie-produced *Transformer*, Lou Reed's *Berlin* couldn't have been *more* of a 180-turn for those who had appreciated his former album. Not only is this a bleak tale about a couple going through the throes of physical abuse, drug addiction, prostitution and child neglect, but also, it's narrated from the point of view of the main abuser, which makes it a difficult and harrowing concept album to say the least. Obviously, the narrator is very unreliable here, so the hints he gives about his suicidal partner actually using him by proxy to destroy herself should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Cynicism and ambiguity abound throughout those dark lyrics, yet the latter also create a mesmerizing thread to help you go from one track to the next. Starting from a minor cut in one of his former recordings, Lou Reed here imagines the tragic fate of its cursed characters with a lot of vivid and striking details. *Berlin* is thus a very "literary" album, which probably triggered all those early criticisms about its depressing and "pretentious" nature. But in retrospect, a "Transformer, vol. 2" would have been far less interesting than what Reed offered us instead, even with such admittedly harsh lyrical contents.
What early critics of *Berlin* also seemed to have missed is the fact that the record is actually worth your time if only for the music itself. Reed's wild card here was his producer, Bob Ezrin, mostly known at the time for his grandiose orchestral arrangements for Alice Cooper--ones he would refine a few years later with his legendary handling of production duties for Pink Floyd's *The Wall*. Listening to *Berlin*'s extraordinary closer "Sad Song", everyone who's ever enjoyed "Comfortably Numb" will be automatically be struck by the obvious connection between the two, with the string arpeggio in Lou Reed's song sounding very much like a wonderful draft of the one Ezrin would later pen for the Floyd. And what the producer brings to *Berlin*'s table is not only about orchestral strings: there's also a very dynamic feast of horns, woods and flutes throughout the record, along with soul-stirring guitar solos, slapping drum parts, and haunting background vocals (either gospel-inspired, as in "Caroline Says I", or drawing from the atonal and metaphysical experiments of György Ligeti for "The Bed"'s conclusion). Add to this a few delicate parts played on mellotron and piano by Ezrin himself, along with an impressive list of seasoned performers for all the other instruments (check it on wikipedia), and you certainly have an A+ production team to do justice to Lou Reed's usual melodic flair in those days...
All the songs we've quoted up to now are the obvious highlights of this album, to which glorious music hall number "Lady Day" and rocker "How Do You Think It Feels" should be added as well. The first part of side 2 is a little less convincing, admittedly--and the absence of any genuine moment of levity in that LP probably adds to most listeners' fatigue by this point. But the two last tracks of the album--the slow, incredibly dark and despondent "The Bed", also particularly poignant and atmospheric, followed by the cynical yet totally epic closer that "Sad Song" is--easily make up for these potential flaws.
Decades after its release, it is thus obvious that *Berlin* is not the debacle that rock critics said it was at the time. Sure, it's dragged by its own heavy weight once in a while, from the dark subject matter of its lyrics to its layered production displaying so many sophisticated arrangements, just like a pusher takes out different drugs from his coat to tempt an addict. Yet as "heavy" as this album is, rarely have trips to hell and back sounded so lush and enticing. It's probably because the devil usually lies in all the little details--and this whether that devil happens to live in Berlin, "Alaska", or anywhere else in the world...
4,5/5 then, here rounded up to 5/5.
Number of albums left to review: 679
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 158 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 74
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 90
Miles Davis
5/5
Kind of a masterpiece, right? There's not much that I can say about this record that hasn't been said a thousand times before. What a legendary ensemble of musicians. What a game changer (even though Davis' previous LP, *Milestones*, had already opened the gates that led towards 'modal jazz'). And what an amazing collection of tracks. I could listen to the waves "All Blues" so aptly evoke for hours. Those waves are waves of bliss, and *Kind of Blue* is the sort of record you can never get tired of. Five stars, obviously.
Dimery's list when it comes to jazz albums is far from perfect, by the way (key LPs usually singled out by jazz fans are missing from it--LPs by Mingus, Coltrane, Blakey, Adderley, Silver, Monk, Roach, Coleman, Chambers, Dolphy, Nina Simone and even Davis himself...). But *Kind of Blue* is in there, at least (as is Coltrane's *A Love Supreme*). Had it not, *no one* would have taken this list very seriously, and this *for any music genre*. That's how important this record is.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
The Who
5/5
So, OK, there's the grand pretensions of Pete Townshend writing a rock opera, that sprawling tracklisting, and the fact that the obviously surreal narrative drive of said opera is so heavy that it can distract you from time to time... But the thing is, the music on this album is *so* good, whether it is the one of the timeless songs this amazing record harbours ("Pinball Wizard", "We're Not gonna Take It/Se Me, Feel Me" ,"The Acid Queen", "I Feel Free"), or the one of the less famous cuts ("Cousin Kevin", or that long incredible instrumental that "Underture" is), that it's bound to be included in such a list.
Ironically, I find this record more easily *digestible* than *Who's Next*, even if it has all the characteristics of a concept album. Evidence for me that it's an all-time great, in spite of its all-too-grand and frankly delirious ambitions on paper...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
The Prodigy
3/5
This has not aged very well, to be honest. Yet beyond the obviously *dated* big beat / drum'n'bass rhythm patterns, there are also many interesting harmonies--along with catchy loops and punchy licks from time to time. So I wouldn't throw *all of it* into the dust bin of music history.
The thing is, who is that music aimed at *today*? Middle-aged folks like me would look like eccentric old-timers playing this in their living room. And younger people would dismiss it as music that's out of touch with current electronic sounds. Time is not kind with forward-looking genres such as EDM. What was futuristic once quickly sounds like a relic of the past, very ironically. You need some kind of special touch or off-kilter charm to make such relics of the past sound truly relevant or original decades later.
I hear that the album after that one is also in Dimery's list. At least, all the famous electro-punk hits of the band are in there--and it seems to me they fare a little better today. They're shorter, catchier, and even if everything in that subsequent LP was not up to that level, at least you'd have more interesting dynamics throughout. So *maybe* it's better to save some room in my own list for that *other* Prodigy album...
But to return to *this* record, that "jilted generation" mentioned in its title now mostly evokes pictures of old people going to a rave party, which is quite a bizarre thought in itself, isn't it? Not that I would have any problem with it happening--it's just that I would think twice before going to such a weird sort of rave party myself. My personal experience is that if you played this sort of record to, let's say, the teens in my house, they would just roll their eyes and dismiss the whole thing as a quirky impulse on my part. This sort of thing rarely happens when you play Neil Young, Talking Head, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Tears For Fears, The Cure, Pixies, Nirvana, Elliot Smith, Jeff Buckley, A Tribe Called Quest, Beastie Boys, Björk, DJ Shadow, Queens of The Stone Age, The Strokes or The White Stripes. Most of the time, those teens will like what they hear, and even if they don't, they're often intrigued by those older sounds, at least. Play stuff like The Prodigy, and they will just tell you it doesn't resonate with them at all. It won't elicit any meaningful reaction from them. It will just be categorized as "out of fashion" stuff. When in doubt about old music, *always* trust youth's reactions. They'll tell you if something has aged well or not.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
The Smiths
4/5
So OK, *The Queen Is Dead* is in my list of essential albums as well, there are so many great songs in it. But do we *really* need another record from The Smiths in said list? All the other LPs are clearly at least a notch under in term of overall quality: it's that sometimes annoying "affected" way that Morrissey sings those tunes. And the man has become such an egregious character today that, frankly, one wishes mentions of him should not exceed what is strictly necessary for the general purposes of such a list. Maybe we should leave some room for amazing artists that are also bright enough so as to *not* turn into complete twats as they get older.
In that line of thought, I suddenly realize that I should now apply the exact same thing for Kanye West. Ouch, that's hard. I still feel *MBDTF* and *Yeezus* (along with one of the two first "Registration" albums, maybe) should be included in my list...
So OK--given that The Smith have only released four "real" albums, I should at least include a second one by them. So let's dive into those 'Strangeways'... "I Started Something I Could Not Finish" is a nice tune, with a great chord progression and witty lyrics: "Death Of A Disco Dancer" is a mesmerizing atmospheric piece with an effective build-up; "Girl In A Coma" is nice little sardonic pop cut (amazing strings arrangements on this one): "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" is catchy as hell: "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me" has another one of those terrific chord progressions (everyone raves about Johnny Marr's guitar playing, but he was great composer as well)... As for "Paint A Vulgar Picture", its ironic lyrics comparing a love affair to the shenanigans of the music industry haven't aged a day...
Jeeze. I think I *really like* this record, actually. My first impulse was to say I wouldn't select *Strangeways, Here We Come* for my list and take the eponymous debut album instead. But I admit it, I'm hesitating now. And if I take this one as well, why leaving *Meat Is Murder* on the wayside? It's the patchiest affair in The Smiths' discography, but it still has some impressive cuts in it...
Damn, I wish Morrissey wasn't such a a-hole today. I guess being a great artist doesn't necessarily prevent you from becoming a poor sod. And yet, I really *tried* not to "separate the man from the artist" here...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Shack
2/5
Like The Flying Dutchman never able to make it to the shore, some trajectories in music history seemed to fall under some sort of curse. Those trajectories are the ones of generally talented protagonists who seem programmed for unmitigated success, and yet somehow never manage to leave their mark the way everyone initially expected them to. Michael Head seems to be one of those characters. Jinx, missed opportunities, personal addictions and even tragic deaths around him were the rubs he had to face, and one can only sympathize when you read the details about the latter online.
In that context, the story behind *H.M.S Fable* is one that deals with a resurrection that's been a long time coming for Head, and given all that he went through to reach that point, one can only feel happy for him. As if it mirrored that optimistic state of affairs, the first two tracks of Shack's third album start on a very promisory note: "Natalie's Party" is an effective opener where the mix of lively strings and fragile vocals actually add a lot of emotions to the proceeding. And if the quite long "Comedy" overstays its welcome a little, it's an instantly catchy cut that can linger in your memory for quite some time... With such a nice way to leave the harbor and set out to the indie nineties seas, it seems that we're on board to spend some great moments with Shack during our voyage with them...
Well, the thing is, not exactly. Contrary currents and hostile weather soon play tricks with our sails: the next two tracks "Pull Together" and "Beautiful" indeed bear the marks of utter disaster, and this for several reasons. First, what were the producer and mixing engineers thinking on those ones? The vocal mix in "Pull Together" is indeed terrible, and some other details are just laughable (what the hell is that cowbell doing, so loud in the mix at some point? Why are the levels of the different instruments so unstable?). Yet those flaws wouldn't be so critical if the songs themselves were a little more interesting. And for this latter point, your mileage may greatly vary, unfortunately.
Released a few years after Britpop had its most timeless successes, *HMS Fable* indeed sounds like an afterthought. To be perfectly fair, and beyond any production issues that plagued them, the two songs we lamented about up there are mostly insignificant because they sound as if they were composed by your local band playing in the pub around the corner--that band desperately trying to imitate Oasis's hits at a time where the latter were already out of fashion, saccharine layers and fake epic choruses included. The result is more *Be There Yesterday* than *Be Here Now*--and this without even taking into account the already involuntary irony of the latter's title.
Next, "Lend's Some Dough* uses another (and actually *older*) influence to better effects. The Kinks' long shadow indeed looms over this cut, which also takes its sweet time exploring chiaruscoro modulations and surprising chord progressions. At this point, one can hope tracks 3 and 4 were only early missteps... Alas, the album's titular ship then turns in circle in "Captain's Table", and the "Streets Of Kenny" lead to nowhere--or at least, not to any truly *memorable* destinations. Shacks alternates between different styles and moods in a very competent way, from mariners' tunes to folk to britpop again, but it all seems pretty pointless melody-wise.
Besides, one can't help feeling that there's something a little tired in the vocal perfomances on the LP's second side, as if Head was himself a little unconvinced by his own songs. It takes the barebones final track drawing almost exclusively on his voice and acoustic guitar--with quite an amazing picking work and a poignant chord progression in it--to reconcile us *a little* with this record, at the eleventh hour. But it's not enough to let our sails pick up some needed wind, and it's far too late in the game. At this point, one wonders if the production choices for all the other tracks didn't distract Head from infusing enough *moving* elements into his songs. The last one clearly shows what could have happened if he had and his band had done so. Another missed opportunity, unfortunately. Some ships never return from their trip. All we can hope for them is that they're in a better place than ours. But mostly everyone knows that Flying Dutchmen stories or Bermuda Triangle legends usually cover up a far sadder truth: those ships are at the bottom of the oceans now.
2/5, for the four cuts actually still making this record worth the effort it takes to explore it. But of course, this can't be enough for a list of stellar, truly *essential* albums. What a cruel game this app triggers us to play...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Queen
2/5
Er... No, thank you. I respect Queen's hardcore fans and their obsessions for their early, more proggy albums. But honestly, not much stands out in the tracklisting of *Queen II*. It's a lot of technical prowess (the harmony of background vocals, those guitar solos...), but *all* songs quickly end up sounding samey. It's like a pointless puzzle where all those elements are assembled in different ways ad nauseam, bringing no discernible dynamics to the whole thing. "Father to Son" has some nice moments. But everything after is quite a borefest, in spit of all the effort put into it.
If really I had to include a Queen record in my list, *A Night At The Opera" would be the most likely candidate. There you have those catchy tunes (in a vast array of different styles), along with interesting 180-degrees turns in it. And *maybe* i would add *News Of The World* for its timeless hits, or *Jazz* and its similar stylistic endeavors. But that's about it.
Number of albums left to review: 673
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 160
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 75
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 92 (including this one)
Paul Simon
3/5
"You Can Call Me Al" is a nice earworm, but I've always thought this album is a bit overrated. I can understand the intent which made Paul Simon try to infuse "global' sounds into his songs. The problem for me is just that the end result is plagued by usual 80s mainstream production shenanigans. The latter don't even have some sort of "retro" charm today. It's just a cheesefest hiding whatever merits some of the tunes may have. When you compare *Graceland* to the sixties output of Simon with Garfunkel, the difference is telling. Simon and Garfunkel were style AND substance. To me, *Graceland* is all about style mostly (at least production-wise).
I'll give it a 3/5 grade, though. Once a year or so, I try to listen to so-called "important" albums I didn't really like at first to see if my taste has evolved. *Graceland* is one of them. Peter Gabriel's *So* is another. Very rarely, I can change my mind, and honestly, I hope I can do the same for those records one day (hence my middling grade, giving them the benefit of the doubt). Interestingly, both Simon and Gabriels have used so-called "world" music to try to renew their sound. The thing is, I can't help feeling they mostly use those influences as a gimmick to cover for their meandering songwriting. There was a very opportunistic mindset in mainstream music during the eighties. To me, here's another example of it...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
The Cure
4/5
This is the one eighties record where The Cure maybe went a little too far in the gloom 'n' doom, freakish goth ambiences, sucking out any breathable air out of this collection of mournful songs--"air" both in the sense of "room to breathe" and "memorable or hummable melody". Then again, *Pornography* is the favorite record of a significant subset of fans for *these exact same reasons*. And as such, and given how important The Cure is in the history of popular music, it is still one of the five or six essential LPs the band has released in the first decade of their career.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Aphex Twin
3/5
The 1001 albums app made a mistake: the album's title should here read: "Selected Ambient Works *Volume II*". That's the one that's a keeper, even if the first volume is quite an interesting release in itself for all fans of EDM/IDM (especially because of its three highlights "Xtal", "Tha" and "Heliosphan"). So, yes, *85-92* is fine. But out of the two volumes, the second one fares better as an integral and complete artistic statement. In fact, its dark and mesmerizing experimental sounds haven't aged a day. That's where you recognize a true masterpiece in the electronic genre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected_Ambient_Works_Volume_II
Number of albums left to review: 670
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 161
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 76 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 93
Elliott Smith
3/5
Listening to *Figure 8* again, I can't quite shake the feeling that this is the least striking album Elliott Smith has ever released. Thank goodness, Dimery has also included *Either / Or* in his list. Here, at least, no one can accuse him to have missed or forgotten the best album by an artist. But when it comes to the question of Smith's *second best* album, the self-titled debut and *X.O.* have far better credentials than his last record, to be honest. Hence why the inclusion of that *other* record in here puzzles me a little...
Of course, we're still talking about Ellioot Smith here. The man still had that special touch for sensitive and effective songwriting in quite a few parts of this LP. In fact, the main issue one can have with *Figure 8* is its arrangements and instrumentation. They go a little too far from the minimalistic production of Smith's earlier output, which was a perfect home for his fragile and graceful songs. Here, useless layering is instead stifling the natural charm those new tunes could have had had they been recorded differently. Less is more, especially with Elliott. This is how his precious craft shines the best. And boy did it shine brightly for a short while...
No one can blame Smith for wanting his sound to evolve, though. In a better world than ours, *Figure 8* would thus be a transitional record helping Smith achieve greatness later on--this could have occured on a subsequent LP displaying a new sound that would ideally balance sophistication and more straightforward intents. Sadly, we'll never listen to this album now...
Rest in peace, Elliott. Music history would have been a tiny bit more interesting than it is if you had stuck around just a little longer. But thanks for all those gems you still managed to leave us in such a short time. A lot of folks still cherish them, you know. As the cherish your memory...
Number of albums left to review: 669
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 161
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 78 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 92
The Flying Burrito Brothers
2/5
"Everything I love about the Eagles but with way more substance" says another review. Maybe... but with far less striking melodies and less catchy tunes as well. I have to be honest with myself here: if those middle-of-the-road country sounds are what people call "substance", it means I'm not interested in the latter then (sarcasm).
The comparison made in that review is a little ludicrous in my honest opinion. I'm not a *huge* Eagles fan, but there's probably a reason their songs stayed in people's heads. And it seems to me the ones of Gram Parsons are not up to that level. Sure, you can find genuine melodic inspiration in cuts such as "Dark End Of The Street" or "Hot Burrito #2", but there's not nearly enough of it to make this album worth my time. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 668
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 161
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 78
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 93 (including this one)
John Martyn
4/5
Nice. Ahead of its time sonically speaking, with a few catchy hooks and a lot of interesting moodpieces. Besides, I can't help feeling *One World* fares slightly better than *Solid Air* today. Oddly enough, it's songs from that latter record that have the largest number of streams on Spotify--they are indeed very nice cuts, but as far as whole albums go, *Solid Air* still sounds like a patchy affair to my (limited?) ears. Conversely, *One World* offers something that's both adventurous and cohesive in terms of sound and songwriting.
I did a quick search online to see if I could buy this album. It seems it is extremely hard to find today, and this in any format. Bummer. Chances are that I'll be less inclined to revisit it if I don't own a physical copy of it. Still, I'm including it in my list of essential records. This is where this app is pretty useful. It can help you single out albums that deserve to be a little more popular than they already are.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
The Cars
4/5
I own this record at home. It's nice power pop, yet I've always wondered what made it so "essential" for some other fans of the genre than me. Some of the songs are catchy for sure. The thing is, they're also a little innocuous, and even a bit ridiculous from time to time.
Ric Ocasek went on to produce the first Weezer album. Funny how the two first LPs of the latter band took that whole power pop formula to the next level. In comparison, *The Cars* sounds a little tame today.
That said, it's still a milestone in that style, just like the first Big Star album is. In that sense, it deserves to be on this list.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
R.E.M.
5/5
One of the most striking debut albums of all time. REM here assert themselves with a fully fledged vision of what their "college rock" was already able to accomplish in the early eighties. Peter Buck's guitars jangle, Mike Mills and Bill Berry's rhythm section hop along, and Michael Stipe's vocals often reach sublime heights only him could reach. Mitch Easter and Don Dixon's production is pristine, with a lot a very special touches (a tibetan bell here, a melancholic cello there, a vintage saloon piano elsewhere...), but those special touches still manage to preserve a natural live feel to the recording, giving it its timeless atmosphere. There are so many highlights on *Murmur*: iconic opener "Radio Free Europe"; entranced "Pilgrimage": mystical "Talk About The Passion"--both lively and romantic--; that bouncing "Moral Kiosk" leading the way to the stellar ballad that "Perfect Circle" is--whose title perfectly encapsulates the haunting effect this dreamy tune can have on you. Opening side two, "Catapult" sends you to the sky with its straightforward hooks. A few tracks later, "9-9" channels Gang of Four's percussive use of guitars to create a cut that can even remind you of today's American post-punk acts... And so on... You'd be hard-pressed to find a 1983 release that has aged as well as this one (Violent Femmes' eponymous debut, maybe?). Under the light, one can easily forgive the few slightly less effective songs in this LP ("Sitting Still", "Shaking Through" and "We Walk"), here scattered on a second side that still ends on a triumphant high note with "West of The Fields". But even if some songs on the second part of *Murmur* are somewhat less catchy, there is absolutely no bum note in this LP. No wonder REM's idiosyncratic sound, somewhere between post-punk and folk music, became so influential during the eighties. With such a great headstart, it would have been very unfair if listeners looking for heartfelt and authetic songwriting had not taken the bait.
REM later wrote other highlights that can be found in many of their great releases of the eighties and early nineties. But *Murmur* is the one album where their music sounds the most effortless and spontaneous. It has that special charm only perfect or near-perfect debuts can have. No hesitation: at least 4.5 stars for me, here rounded up to a perfect grade.
Number of albums left to review: 666
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 163 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 78
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 93
Dinosaur Jr.
5/5
Can't beat that review that says that this LP is "like the Rosetta Stone for MBV and Nirvana in some ways". Of course, Jay Mascis' voice is downright terrible at times (his singing got better in subsequent releases, fortunately). But the guitar work is just so fascinating and extreme, and both are part of that formula that pointed the way towards the spontaneity of "alternative" nineties as a welcome reaction to the all-too glossy aesthetics of eighties. And this, three years before said nineties even started.
Besides, I feel that there are not too many albums from 1987 that truly deserve a 5-star grade for their artistic accomplishments. There are Sonic Youth's *Sister*, Depeche Mode' *Music For The Masses*, Prince's *Sign 'O The Times* or The Cure's *Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me*. Therefore, I'm happy to add *Your Living All Over Me* to that short list.
Number of albums left to review: 664
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 164 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 78
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 93
Ice T
3/5
Funny how everything related to rap music went so *fast* between 1988 and 1993. When this record came out in 1991, there was something in Ice-T's brand of west coast gangta rap that still sounded fresh and somewhat exciting. Now, decades after the release of *O.G. Original Gangster*, it seems the latter aged a lot less well than other hip hop releases from that specific period. And this compared to either west coast or east coast rap--two sides of that late eighties/early nineties hip hop coin that actually equally inspired the producers of this record if you're paying close attention to it.
Admittedly, and even at the time, everyone with half a brain could already smirk at some of the clichés sprinkled on many tracks here. Yet, to be perfectly fair, there were also enough drive, energy and highlights in this album to make it worthwhile to listen to. Those highlights--the title track, "Mind Over Matter", "New Jack Hustler", along with the confessional-yet-acerbic "Lifestyles Of The Rich And Infamous", or closer "The Tower", with its striking depictions of prison life and its *Halloween* theme sample...--still hold their own today, either musically or lyrically. So in a sense, it's still nice to see that Dimery's team didn't forget Ice-T and his contributions to the rap world. And it's nice to see they still had room left for him.
Unfortunately, everything else in *O.G. Original Gangster* is at least a notch or two under the level of those five highlights. So, even for ears attuned to old school hip hop sounds, the discrepancy between the hits and the misses--between highlights and obvious fillers--might be a little too large here. Ice-T is sure an interesting figure that deserves respect--someone whose persona and lyrical craft could do wonders at time, and someone who could open doors that needed to be opened. See his whole rap-metal crossover side-project *Body Count*, whose origins can be pinpointed in *this* record, in the track bearing that same name--unfortunately a quite awkward cut, especially compared to the more fully-realized songs this project would soon release in their debut LP. And see also his knack for straightforward storytelling--one that could paint quite vivid pictures about gangland life--either real or imaginary.
The thing is, was Ice-T as "essential" for rap as Public Enemy, NWA, A Tribe Called Quest, Dr. Dré, Snoop Dogg, Wu Tang Clan or Outkast were? Was his impact as important? Were his skills as impressive? The jury's still out on this one.
Of course, Ice-T would probably retort that said jury can suck his d... all the same, no matter what they decide on his case. You can't change a leopard his spots. And when you're Ice-T, you don't need podiums anyway. Anyone who says "f*ck the Grammys" knows what he's *really* here for anyway. And maybe that is all that matters if you decide to be that sort of artist...
Number of albums left to review: 663
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 164
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 79 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 93
Depeche Mode
5/5
I remember being invited by a girl named Elise in her parents' house in the middle of the woods one night, along with a bunch of other teenage friends. Her parents were away, and the only tangible memory I have of that evening was that we played that record many, many times. The night outside was pitch-dark. Some of our friends stayed in the living room with us. Others disappeared God knows where. I was young, and this was the first time I was listening to Depeche Mode's *Violator* from start to end. But it certainly wasn't the last...
No review of mine can properly describe how downright incredible this album is for me. Martin Gore's inspired chord successions, always surprising you at a pitch-perfect moment... Dave Gahan's haunting vocal performance infusing much needed soul into the synthpop proceedings... Fletcher and Wilder's intricate clockwork-like arrangements, filled with rich, evocative soundscapes, almost cinematic in their scope... So many details to fall in love with.
This here is the apex of Depeche Mode's discography--pop music to dwarf all other *serious* attempts at it (either then or now), with a dark, twisted undercurrent to make this album a perfect gem. A gem made out of obsidian, as some other review seems to imply here... 'Obsidian'. What an apt word for this record, really. *Violator* proves that under the right set of circumstances, darkness can shine as bright as sunrays through clear glass.
So many catchy and illuminating melodies indeed roam throughout this LP. But those melodies are nothing like the usual synthpop routinely spewed forth by other small fry in this overall genre. Because, as catchy as they are, some of those melodies are also heavy with a muted sense of danger. And others subtly suggest a deep, melancholic mood that can leave you speechless. The band also had such a large palette to play with. Blues, r'n'b and rock undertones here clash with glacial timbres and digital sounds that are both as cold as steel--a contrast that brings dynamics rarely explored within the realm of popular music.
Of course, here, in this list of songs, are also some of the most famous hits Depeche Mode will always be remembered for (the romantic-yet-lively "Enjoy The Silence" or the quintessentially bluesy "Personal Jesus"...). And the fact that those hits also display lyrics that are iconic all by themselves is just cream on the cake at this point. To be fair, most of the other tracks in *Violator* would have deserved being hit singles in their own right as well, giving a "best of" feel to this LP. As for the couple of cuts that weren't exactly single material ("Halo" and "Blue Dress"), they still have something meaningful to add to the rest of those stellar songs--either because of their nightly mood or the way they echo with the other tracks.
Speaking of echoes, I'm currently listening to "Waiting For The Night". A few years ago, I wrote the blueprint of an imaginary sci-fi TV series about young telepaths living in the future. In my mind, this song here was the soundtrack played during the closing titles of that series' first 'season finale', right after a suspenseful cliffhanger. There is indeed both mysterious and breathtaking about this song. Just as there's something equally mysterious and breathtaking about the whole album. In that sense, it makes sense that such music could be used for dark adventures involving youngsters. Waiting for a TV series that would bring this sort of idea to fruition now...
I'll probably never write the complete version of that story I had in mind. But the song is still available for me if I want to daydream about it. And all the other cuts from this amazing record can suggest similar visions for me. Visions of a house lost in the woods. Visions of grey mountains and black oceans. Visions of a dancefloor populated by misfits and other drug-addled freaks. Visions of neon signs flickering in the rain. Visions of life and death.
I'll never get tired of those visions. And since "words are very unneccessary" to embrace them or fully convey my love for them, I'm going to stop talking now. 5 stars, nothing else. Good luck for the next album that pops up through this app.
Number of albums left to review: 662
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 165 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 79
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 93
Gang Of Four
5/5
Seminal, influential, thrilling through and through... A post-punk stone-cold classic, which hasn't aged a day when you take a quick look at the indie musical landscape these days. On that note, I found the review that said that this record reminded its author of Parquet Courts a little cute, to be honest. Without Gang Of Four, there wouldn't be any Parquet Courts to speak of. That said, I wanna thank this reviewer for dropping that name, just as I want to double down on those reviews mentioning acts such as Shame and Squid. Starting from the mid-naughts, Dimery's list is totally out of touch when it comes to rock, post-punk or indie sounds. Glad to see that a few reviewers in here at least know where the good stuff is these days...
Apart form that, I don't have anything original to add to all the other reviews praising *Entertainment*. Jon King's politically charged lyrics, with wry situationist overtones? Check. Andy Gill's "angular" guitar playing? Check (funny how one reviewer let on that some clichés like this one are sometimes unavoidable to describe iconic bands such as GOF). Dave Allen and Hugo bouncing and surgically precise rhythm section? Check. What I found a little strange in some of those reviews is the number of people giving high praise to this record and yet only giving it a 4/5 grade. C'mon, guys, you gotta try a little harder than that. This here is an incredibly important album, and it's also one where the devil lies in all the little details, in spite of the instant catchiness of many songs in it. It's that sort of idiosyncratic peculiarity which gives *Entertainment* a potentially infinite replay value. 5 stars for me, then.
Number of albums left to review: 661
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 166 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 79
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 93
Hugh Masekela
4/5
A quite enjoyable jazz album, or so it seems. I haven't fully explored it, but given how uselessly "selective" Dimery and co. are for that overall genre, I'm placing it as a potential candidate for my own list. Hope to revisit this record soon...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here...
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Anita Baker
1/5
The sort of elevator music that's only bearable if you're going from one floor to the next. Yes, Baker is a very competent singer, blah blah blah. Yes this album received Grammy awards, blah, blah, blah. So what? Machine Gun Kelly had one last year if my memory serves. But at least the bloated piece of crap he dares call "music" can be, well, *fun to hate*. In comparison, Anita Baker's songs are boring, bland and even more formulaic than what this moron does. Sometimes the worst crime there is is not to have bad taste: it's to have no taste at all.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Marvin Gaye
3/5
There are parts of this double album where one track nicely flows into the next ("When Did You Stop Loving Me" - "Anger" - "Is That Enough" on the first side. Or, on the last one, "A Funky Space Reincarnation", "You Can Leave, But It's Going To Cost You" and "Falling In Love Again"). "Time To Get It Together" is an enticing, quite groovy cut as well.
Unfortunately, everything else sounds like aimless filler to me. I get that huge fans of Marvin Gaye can feel moved by his somewhat vulnerable vocal performance, here inspired by the painful subject matter driving this whole project along. But frankly, those other songs definitely sound subpar compared to Gaye's more striking songs in his repertoire.
To put it in a nutshell, here is a blatant case of a double LP that would have been far more convincing if its performer/musician had stuck to a single disc instead. And I don't think such missed opportunities can be considered as "essential".
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Willie Colón & Rubén Blades
4/5
I guess the best-selling salsa album of all time should find its place in such a list, although I admit I know absolutely nothing about this genre. That said, I can still say two things about *Siembra*: first, you don't need to know the history of Salsa very well to appreciate its lush arrangements and instrumentation ; and then, there are many moments in this record where Blades and Colón aptly use other influences, if only for a few seconds ("Plastico"'s disco intro, the nod to *West Side Story* in "Pedro Navaja", that insane Ennio Morricone-like drop in "María Lionza", or the music-hall strings in the title track). All in all, it was a quite leasant first listen. Plus, even though I'm not fluent in Spanish, I feel like the songs are also telling interesting stories. So I hope I have time to revisit this record later on to delve deeper on that other subject and learn what those storie are all about...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
5/5
I bought this album a few weeks ago. It's funny because for years, I avoided Captain Beefheart like the plague, just because of the hoax/scam/swindle that Trout Mask Replica is (at least to my ears). I think I'm an open-minded person, but there's a limit to the sort of musical nonsense one should be exposed to. And affecting some sort of conceptual pretension to justify the barrage of sheer crap that this other record is is NOT an acceptable solution for me. I'd rather plug my ears with toilet paper, thank you. In other words, Thelonious Monk, my ass (to refer to a stupid comparison I've often read to describe Beefheart's hoax here). Trout Mask Replica is just an interesting footnote in the pages of music history, not an essential album you must absolutely listen to. I'll fight tooth and nail anyone who says the contrary. Even a genius like David Lynch (who once said he loves this record).
The thing is, it was a stupid mistake on my part to start my exploration of Beefheart's repertoire with this particular album. As it turns out, I really like what Beefheart and his "magic band" did before TMR (*Safe As Milk*) and after it (*The Spotlight Kid*). The grassroots yet twisted tunes of *Safe As Milk*, especially, have something quite addictive to them. Beefheart's growl on this collection of blues songs serves them right--as in opener "Sure 'Nuff 'N Yes I Do"--just as said growl nicely contrasts with the stellar musicianship of the band (including a young Ry Cooder, or so I hear). I also enjoy the stylistic asides this record go through, especially the more psychedelic cuts or that mock doo wop soul ballad that "I'm Glad" is.
And my oh my! "Electricity". What an incredible track! Here is the sort of experimentation that can be both haunting and mesmerizing. I know David Lynch has been listening to this song as well (there's a literal quote of Von Vliet's delivery of the song's chorus in the Twin Peaks movie, for instance). And here I certainly won't contend with man's genius. This song and its incredible instrumentation is the cherry on the cake here. And its inclusion in *Safe As Milk* finally reconciled me with anything Beefheart. Except Trout Mask Replica, of course. Maybe with more *real* groove and a theremin, as in "Electricity", I would have liked that other album. Too bad Von Vliet never thought of that.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
MGMT
4/5
Oh, I remember when this project took over the "indie" airwaves. The hits seem to be a little too easy on the ear for truly "indie" stuff, to be honest, but I guess that duo knew how to write great pop songs, there's no doubt about that. And the rest of the neo-psychedelic tunes on this record are pretty good too, so I guess I can't give MGMT anything less than four stars for such a successful debut album, either commercially or artistically speaking.
Checking on the Wikipedia notes for this record, I learned that the first versions of "Time To Pretend" and "Kids" were actually released in their first EP in 2005. Listening to the latter on Spotify, it's quite interesting to see how MGMT then polished their sound to make it more palatable and "radio-friendly". That EP sounded almost lo-fi in its production, which tells you a lot of the long process those two youngster went through to finally achieve success. Not that lo-fi is necessarily a bad thing. "Kids"' original bridge before the final chorus (or middle-four, I never know how to call those things) is also very different, far more adventurous harmonically and melodically speaking than the simple four-on-the-floor, linear section displayed in the more famous second version. I think i prefer the original recording now...
Oh, by the way, I also need to point out that MGMT's second LP, *Congratulations*, actually sounds even more memorable to my ears than their debut album. Check it out if you like convoluted sorts of earworms, as I do sometimes. It's more sophisticated than *Oracular Spectacular*, but it's also more playful, lively and impulsive somehow. I could actually give 5 stars to this other record without any hesitation.
Everything MGMT did after those first two LPs sounded far less striking or valuable to me. But I guess *two* contenders for being part of limited list of essential albums of all time is not so bad for two kids mostly seen as one-string-of-hits-wonders when they started to get famous. I mean, there are not many musicians who can boast of reaching that very high level, are they?
Number of albums left to review: 661
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 169 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 80
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 95
Soul II Soul
2/5
How can someone like Nellee Hooper produce wonders such as Massive Attack's *Blue Lines* or Björk's *Post* and then have the same role for such a bland record? Beats me. Obviously this album has not aged well at all, minus one or two... well, "moments"--like the acappella version of "Back To Life", for instance, far more elegant than the single version. Plus, that male singer's vocals are jarring, especially compared to the women on the record, "technically" flawless, and saving those "Club Classics Vol, One" from a minimum grade
To put it in a nutshell, it's a very, very MIXED bag. I don't think I've heard of "Club Classics *Vol. TWO*". Probably good news for all of us.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Fatboy Slim
3/5
I remember when big beat sounds from Britain were hip. The singles, "Right Here Right Now", "The Rockafeller Skank", "Gangster Tripping" and "Praise You" are still cool tracks, even if they obviously sound dated now. Unfortunately, the rest is far less pleasant, often too linear, and even borderline obnoxious in some spots--not *every* repetitive vocal samples out there can work to great effects--even shrewd opportunistic foxes such as Moby or the Chemical Brothers, who used those too, know that (which is why they often shifted gear and went to other places as well if needed).
Of course there's a way to compare Fat Boy Slim with those latter artists I've just mentioned to make it work in his favor. One can consider he offered a crazier, tastier meal than them somehow. But he was also much more of a one-trick pony than those other artists were. Besides, you also need to take into account the fact that there's that huge discrepancy between highlights and fillers within his debut album--the sort of awkward discrepancy that makes "You've Come A Long Way, Baby" a somewhat awkward candidate for a list of essential albums imho.
Number of albums left to review: 659
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 169
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 81 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 96
Ray Charles
3/5
I'm not denying the historical importance of this LP. Ray Charles' vocal performance is here technically spotless, and it's nice to witness him pillage the "country and western" repertoire to give it his own African-American spin in it. This albums is a little like an inverted image of what Elvis and his producers had done a few years before, when they appropriated a large chunk of African-American culture and sounds. And if only for that, it should be remembered today.
The thing is, I'm still really NOT convinced the end result is for everyone, especially so many decades later. Maybe it's my own tastes influencing me too much (I can't really get rid of them, can I?), bur bar a few exceptions here and there, sugar-coated orchestral strings set to such a fully Disneyfied mode always remind me of what comes out of PA systems in lunatic asylums to calm the crazies. Quite an uneasy experience, to be honest, never intended by this record's production team. Likewise, those Big Band shenanigans for the supposedly livelier cuts quickly bore me to death. It's as if they lost all of their impact with everything that came after 1962.
So if I'm being fully candid here, the "emotions" this record provide for me feel like an EEG flatline. In other words, it's not for me. Had "Hit The Road Jack" or other Ray Charles signature songs been included to such a project, maybe I would have woken up a little. But here, maybe it's better to let me sleep until the next LP that will pop up tomorrow. Good night!
Number of albums left to review: 658
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 169
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 82 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 96
Daft Punk
4/5
A historical record for the "French Touch", and for electronic music in general. Less flashy and impressive than their subsequent album, "Discovery", but probably more endearing and/or fascinating. Four stars.
Number of albums left to review: 658
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 170 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 82
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 96
Siouxsie And The Banshees
5/5
Not as impressive as *Juju* but still a historically important and seminal record in the post-punk genre (and one of the earliest of its kind). No one on Earth can sing like Siouxsie, with her instantly recognizable haunting voice. As for the instrumentation, Steve Severin's bouncing basslines bring a breath of fresh air to the claustrophobic mood of those tunes, and John McKay literally invented a playing style--if there was a patent for "angular" guitar lines, he should be its rightful owner. "Jigsaw Feeling" and "Mirage", along with the atmospheric and mysterious "Switch" are landmarks of the genre. And if it's too bad the band didn't include their all-time classic "Hong Kong Garden" in the original album tracklisting (a non-album single), I'm pretty sure most CD copies available out there now include it as a bonus track.
So 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5. A couple of songs are indeed a little difficult for non-fans of the genre, but given how ridiculously *low* the overall score of this seminal album is, I can't give it any less than that.
Number of albums left to review: 657
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 171 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 82
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 96
Dennis Wilson
4/5
I was aware of this record before, but I had not taken the necessary amount of time to delve into it. That stretch of songs between "Friday Night" to "Pacific Ocean Blues' is just perfect. It's arresting in the way Gene Clark's *No Other* is. So many evocative moods, sweeping through a vast array of styles. And the bonus CD displaying the unfortunately aborted sessions for "Banbu" has gems too. 4 stars.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
A Tribe Called Quest
5/5
One of the greatest hip hop albums of all time. From the first subdued seconds of "Excursions", with its iconic basslines, to the blast of "Scenario", here's a record that ages like fine wine--the sort of jazzy rap album that even foretells Kendrick Lamar's forays into similar subgenres decades after the fact.
Other reviews in here just perfectly encapsulated how essential this album is. Just to give you one example, "(We've got) Jazz" is proof that this record looks into the past while being of its time, and yet can still be considered timeless. And almost each track from this masterpiece shows those sorts of assets. As I'm writing this short assessment on my phone, a friend of mine just looked over my shoulder and said: "Oh this is *The Low End Theory*, by A Tribe Called Quest, right?". It just took him two seconds to recognize the cover. This is how iconic this album is for a whole generation (and hopefully, for many others to come).
Number of albums left to review: 655
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 173 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 82
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 96
Sufjan Stevens
5/5
Revisiting this record was a treat. I remember feeling a bit confused by its length and overall concept at the time of its release, along with the sprawling details of its orchestration. Turns out *Illinois* aged like fine wine, actually, and that what's most important in it are the heartbreaking melodies and sheer poetry of the lyrics.
Not that the concept behind this album is not aptly conveyed as well if you pay a little attention. What struck me the most in that regard is the influence of Steve Reich and Philip Glass over many arrangements here, and how fitting such influences are when you want to write an elegy about American popular culture.
Yet, I repeat, the album doesn't only work in "intellectual" ways. In spite of their lush arrangements, many songs in this record actually foretell the pure emotions of the pared-down masterpiece *Carrie And Lowell* (released 10 years after this one). And without such emotions, this sort of grand project would be pointless.
If you delve into Stevens' discography, it's quite obvious that he is not always consistent in the way he channels his instincts and incredible skills as a musician and a songwriter. But the two LPs we're talking about here are essential for sure. And it's not the opinion of Bon Jovi fans (such as the one responsible for the "review" currently heading the responses to *Illinois*) that will convince anyone they're not.
Once again, this is not a matter of "low-brow" or "high-brow" tastes (that sort of dichotomy is broadly the only point that this Sufjan Stevens hater is expressing in that review of his--and honestly, it's a little misleading.). What matters the most is discerning what good songwriting is. There's a lot of good straightforward songwriting in albums that are supposedly "low-brow", of course. But that doesn't objectively mean you can't find any similar straightforward qualities in works that are far more complex or intricate at first glance. And *Illinois* is a perfect illustration for this sort of situation.
Number of albums left to review: 654
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 174 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 82
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 96
Oasis
4/5
Am I including this historical album filled with iconic cuts in my own list, as flawed as said album is sometimes? *Shall* I include it, in spite of a guitar wall of sound that didn't age that well, and a couple of annoying fillers in its tracklisitiing?
Definitely Maybe.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 700, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one, most probably)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Magazine
5/5
A milestone for post-punk, with an adventurous spirit that goes way beyond the punk/"new wave" template of those times. The song topics, the melodies, the arrangements... Everything is terrific here. Some parts of those tunes are a little off-kilter, of course, but that's unavailable when you go wild like that. And most of them are instantly memorable anyway, as weird as they are. If only for "Shot By Both Sides" and its soaring guitar hook or "Definitive Gaze" and its bizarre synth line, along with "Motorcade" and the epic anthem "The Light Pours Out Of Me", this record deserves to be on this list.
A quick aside: some key Radiohead members have repeatedly stated how this band had been a pivotal one for their musical upbringing. And if you delve a little into certain details, you can quickly understand why... *Magazine* was one of the very first productions by John Leckie, by the way. Yep, the same guy who would aptly produce *The Bends* later. It's always fun to point out connections between the albums in this list, is it not?
Number of albums left to review: 652
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 175 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 83
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 96
Santana
3/5
Guess it's the most popular album in Santana's discocgraphy, and it's probably one of his most important releases as well. It's got insanely famous cuts: "Black Magic Woman" (a cover), "Oye Como Va" (another cover) and "Samba Pa Ti" (a... Carlos Santana original here!!! Phew, for a second I thought what made this album what it is was only... covers). That latter track sort of sounds like a rough draft for later "Europa" at times, by the way... Hmm... Given that all those three cuts, *plus* Europa, are in most of the band's compilations available out there in 2023, maybe a "best of" makes a little more sense if you want buy Santana music today...
Well, OK, this album also has a nice seventies rock cut written by the band's then singer ("Hope You're Feeling Better"), unfortunately absent in most compilations... So, maybe for this one song as well, I could include *Abraxas* on my list...
The thing is, the rest of this record is nice jammin', but I can't help feeling such jamming is easily interchageable from one Santana LP to the next. Maybe experts will tell me I'm dead wrong here. In the meantime...
Number of albums left to review: 651
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 175
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 84 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 96
Elliott Smith
5/5
A perfect record from the nineties. And one that aged extremely well, thanks to Smith's stellar songwriting, not to mention barebones production choices that were both unobtrusive and graceful, especially for the times.
By the way, if you enjoyed this album, you must also listen to Elliott Smith's eponymous LP, it's basically a sibling to this one. And *XO* and *Figure 8* also had their moments too, that's true. But none can beat *Either/Or* when the time comes to play the perfect soundtrack for urban melancholy.
Didn't I use the word *perfect* before for this review? What, only twice?
Rest in peace, Elliott. Music history would have been a tiny bit more interesting than it is if you had stuck around just a little longer. Thank you for all those gems you still managed to leave us in such a short time, though. A lot of folks still cherish them, you know...
Number of albums left to review: 650
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 176
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 84
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 96
The Slits
4/5
This one won't get many 5/5 reviews, obviously. Which is a bit of a shame. *Cut* is a very *weird* record, especially compared to what "normies", for lack of a better word, usually expect from music. But it's exactly where its many charms lie, at least once you manage to let go of said expectations.
The only serious issue I have with The Slits' music is that it's very hard to describe to newcomers. Said music is actually brilliantly written and performed--with many borrowings from reggae dub that allow the band to implement arrangements that are precise, intricate and fully original (hence the choice of a reggae producer for this one). If you don't pay attention you may dismiss the end result of that encounter between punk and dub as sheer nonsense (this is definitely not "background music" we're dealing with here). But if you *do* pay attention, most of those tracks' instumentations are pretty rewarding on subsequent listens.
Likewise, Ari Up's vocals will probably sound too "out there" during your first encounter with those songs. You may even consider she's off-key most of the time. But that might only be some sort of myopic effect: Ari is actually not really "off-key", she's just extremely theatrical, expressive, "hysterical", you name it... And this is just a perfect way for her to fully inhabit her subversive and sardonic lyrics (won't go through the details here, it's pretty much what you would expect from a witty feminist punk, making those lyrics as relevant today as they were in 1979). Oh, and some of the backing vocals, sometimes popping out in surprising places, are quite impressive as well. A fun anecdote, by the way: a very young Neneh Cherry is among those background vocalists.
Of course, not every "cut" (ahem) works perfectly in this record. "Adventures Close To Home" sounds a little too linear and far-fetched, and therefore tried my patience a little. Likewise, "Love And Romance" is still too indebted to the early punk beginnings of the band to fully mutate into a convincing art-rock/dub/experimental tune, just like most of the other tracks manage to do in this record...
Yet those missteps do not outweigh the many successful moments in *Cut*. There is a stretch of songs in this album that is absolutely fantastic, the one starting with the hilarious "Shoplifting" , and then going on to "FM" and, finally, "Newtown", a pretty evocative description of urban idleness, "where everybody goes around sniffing televisina or taking footballina". The dub rhythm on that track, helped by the addition of extremely subtle organ and piano touches, is simply infectious.
And of course, later on, you have two perfect gems, underground hits in their own right: first "Typical Girls", a feminist anthem for the ages, and the deliriously groovy cover of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" (a version that's radically different from the cover Creedence Clearwater Revival once did, and yet that can be considered as its perfect match). I know that this cover was only released as a single originally. But damn it, the original album was not that long in the first place anyway, so you might as well consider it's part of it now.
To put it in a nutshell, this is definitely not a record for everyone here, hence why I'll be reasonable and refrain from giving it a perfect score. But it fully deserves to be on this list, if only for its groundbreaking nature and the influence the Slits had on countless acts later on.
Besides, you still have blokes (mostly blokes, right?) considering Beefheart's *Trout Mask Replica* as a masterpiece. Well, *Trout Mask Replica*'s "historical" importance is not to be denied, sure. But compared to other famously "off-kilter" albums such as *Cut*, it's just a sinister experience. At least The Slits are fun to listen to, while having something relevant to say. And *Trout Mask Replica* is neither of those things. Which is why The Slits' debut album will here get a far higher mark than Captain Beefheart's supposed "masterpiece". It won't help a lot for its overall score, but what are you gonna do? 🤷♂️
Number of albums left to review: 649
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 177 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 84
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 96
The Go-Go's
2/5
I'm all for girls rock band sounding fresh, even naïve at times. It's a nice change of pace compared to the usual rock male circus. That said, and exactly like I expect this for bands only having guys in their ranks, I need a minimum of, well... *substance* in an album--either lyrically or melodically. And if not, at least I want something that's intense, even if only a little. Or something genuinely fun and/or thrilling.
Alas, apart from a couple of tracks like "This Town", *Beauty And The Beat* is none of those things. Every time you think a song is gonna reach a certain level of genuine excitement, it actually lets you down. Some of those songs sound like a subpar version of REM, without the stellar arrangements or the romantic choruses. Others, like "The Beat", clearly foretell Bikini Kill/Kathleen Hannah's riot grrrrrl odyssey (The Go-Go's were clearly an inspiration for her). But without a healthy amount of true punk rock in the proceedings, *Beauty And The Beat* mostly sounds cheesy and shallow now--like a cheesier version of Blondie, if you will. Hannah would probably disagree here, but hell, where's the true energy in all this? Make no mistake, the record is competently played and produced, and it has a few nice guitar licks (as in "Skidmarks On My Heart" or "Can't Stop The World"). But most of the *songs* are oh-so boring...
There's been many essential albums made by girl rock bands since the eighties--bands such as The Breeders, Bikini Kill, Elastica, L7, Sleater-Kinney, Wet Leg, Porridge Radio... Unfortunately, most of them are overlooked in Dimery's list. And this is not the inclusion of this old and clearly dated LP that's gonna make up for such blatant mistakes here...
Number of albums left to review: 648
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 177
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on:
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 97 (including this one)
Paul Weller
1/5
The sort of of elevator music that's less annoying and obnoxious that many other examples of this, well, "umbrella genre" in Dimery's list. I can readily admit that the songs are very competently performed, and that their production is fortunately not too extravagant--that it's "neuter" enough to age well, at least. Of course, the downside of that situation is that said production has no "taste' at all: Weller's band sound like a lounge act in many places--nice if you want to dine and wine in a fancy restaurant during your holidays on the seaside, but no "essential material" at all. Reminds me of Arctic Monkeys's recent forays into the same sort of unobtrusive lounge music somehow. Yawn. As for the songs per se (and their melodies), let's just be honest for one second here, they're a borefest as well, are they not?
I would have given this record a 2/5 mark for "competency", initially, but the recent ditherings and rants of Paul Weller against Robert Smith and The Cure instantly lower that grade to a 1/5. Yep, The Jam had had some impact on music history a decade before *Wild Wood*, even though it's a tad bit overrated now... Yet Weller quickly going so far up his own *ss right after the band's heyday is evidence enough that his discography will never be celebrated the way the *many* records of The Cure still are today. He's just a bitter old sod. So, f*ck him.
Number of albums left to review: 647
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 177
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on:
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 98 including this one)
Ute Lemper
2/5
Now here's an interesting story. Ute Lemper, a German singer and actress known for her performances of Kurt Weill's "avant-garde" compositions, suddenly decided she could also perform something that would be more akin to "indie-pop", and called The Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon to help her reach that goal. It's the sort of story that could be used for a nice indie film about a "fish-out-the-water" main character, with a lot of endearing little scenes and situations... No erase that: obviously with a title such as *Punishing Kiss*, and knowing Lemper's usual trade, you may expect a result that would feel closer to a "film noir" than a comedy, with many dark or even "out-there" moments. But on the page, that's a proposition that sounds worthwhile, at least. So let's take a seat in the "1001 albums" theater, and watch how the whole flick pans out...
The first two tracks, "Little Water Song" and "The Case Continues", are great, with impressive orchestral instrumentation backing Ute Lemper's theatrical voice as intensely as for ones written for a James Bond theme song (a comparison often made in the reviews here, even though said comparison doesn't fit with the rest of this *long* album--more on that later). It's also fascinating that you can *instantly* recognize those two songs were respectively written by Nick Cave and Neil Hannon. Lemper does awesome work here, effortlessly turning each of those unmistakable writers/performers' inflexions and stylistic traits into her own. And the songs per se are thrilling, as you can expect from those two insanely talented songwriters. Two impressive scenes at the very start of the film, then.
Unfortunately, most of the other ones quickly disrupt our suspension of disbelief. And without it, how can we be "transported" by an album, then, just as a good film does? To put it in a nutshell, *Punishing Kiss*'s main fault is going into an overkill mode that soon turns out to be, well... quite *punishing* in the first sense of the word for the average listener. And this in one way or another.
Sometimes the fault lies in Ute's "forced" performance--fitting for a Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht number like those she usually specializes in, but sounding pretty awkward for more "regular" pop songs such as the other ones Hannon contributed for this record (along with other tracks penned by Cave, Tom Waits, and Elvis Costello). And even the single Brecht/Weill cut performed in here sounds overbaked and awkward, actually--which means there might be ways to be a little more subtle for those type of avant-garde cabaret songs to convey what's great about them nonetheless--as "difficult" as they are. This here is a minor complaint, however. If the rest of the songs had been properly thought out in their execution, I wouldn't blame a Brecht/Weill number to predictably go "over the top"...
Other times, the blame lies in the choice of songs and arrangements (some of whose didn't age that well, especially for those late-nineties rhythm patterns). Such choices turn the whole tracklisting into a sort of hodge-podge, to be honest. Tom Waits is a fine songwriter, but I'm not sure Lemper translates his songs that well here, contrary to what she does with those Cave and Hannon cuts heading the first side of the LP. It's as if Ute and Tom's respective theatrical antics do not match, surprisingly enough...
And well, when it comes to Elvis Costello's contributions--and just as for mostly everything the British "rocker" has written starting in the middle eighties--his songs are predictably too meandering and chatty for their own good to seal the deal. The witty lyrics pile on, the rhythm patterns go through unexpected changes, Lemper sings them as "expertly" as she can... And yet one can't help thinking a lot of energy is here spent for quite pointless ends--with Lemper unwittingly adding a layer to Costello's usual information overload, an extra layer that might elicit yawns on most listeners' part. Overkill often leads to "ultimately boring", after all. Especially when there is *not one* striking melody to speak of in the songs you're playing.
A third cut from the LP still makes a strong impression, however: Philip Glass's composition "Streets Of Berlin" (and it's a very rarely recorded one, if I'm not mistaken). The typically repetitive Glass strings only turn up at the end of the tune, but they do create an impressive finale for this one. Unfortunately, the LP also suffers from a lack of self-editing that drowns those potential good moments into a whole indeterminate ocean devoid of any real stakes. And putting a late-career 10-minute Scott Walker composition at the very end of the album doesn't help at all. Make no mistake, that composition *is* impressive for listeners with a knack for off-kilter and/or moody experimentation. And it's unrelentless in its darkness. But after so many pointless tracks, it merely sounds like an über-pretentious afterthought to add "substance" to the whole thing.
Ironically, as "avant-garde" or "original" as *Punishing Kiss" tries to be at times, its main flaw is thus more akin to the ones seen in Hollywood blockbuter movies than those displayed in independent films. The cast is impressive (Lemper, Hannon, Cave, Waits, Costello, Glass, Walker...), and a vast array of equally impressive logistical means have been used for the project (many musicians, a full orchestra behind them...), along with a lot of ambitious thoughts to fuel said project beforehand. And yet, the end result sounds way too "calculated", and devoid of meaningful dynamics and energy. Worse, it could even look a little cynical and opportunistic at times--not a "money-grab" exactly, but something without any clear "artistic vision" behind it.
So much for our initial expectations then. What could have turned into a "kiss of death", promised during the first two tracks of this record, thus merely ends up sounding like a tease with no genuine intentions behind it. But maybe that's the sort of expectation we should have dismissed from the get-go here. Sometimes, in "film noir", the "femme fatale" is just a lost babe in the woods, after all.
Number of albums left to review: 646
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 177
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on:
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 99 (including this one)
The Style Council
1/5
I've just given a 1/5 grade to that Paul Weller solo album on the list. So what can I do now? Go *negative*? Can I revise my gradings? I know they're very different beasts, but assigning the same grade to Def Leppard and The Style Council is pretty unfair to Def Leppard, I believe. Which tells you a lot about The Style Council.
To be clear, I don't give a damn about Weller and his pals' "musicianship". Side 1 of *Cafe Bleu* is just derivative muzak--anyone trying to say the contrary is in full denial mode, period. Worse, anyone denying this *in here* is actually insulting the very concept of "essential" music. As for side 2, it is... well, I can't even begin to describe what side 2 is. The best lead I have is with the back-to-back tracks "A Gospel" and "Strength Of Your Nature", since they best exemplify what's dead wrong with the whole LP. They're the lowest point in a record made out of a series of low points. In that sense, those tracks are so bad that they unwittingly become endearing at times.
They deserve a full paragraph devoted to them. Let's start with "A Gospel", probably one of the most embarrassing attempt at rapping I have ever heard from a white boy. "Awkward" is not a word strong enough to convey how f*cking dumb its lyrics are : "Ghetto's, gateaux, and eating it too." Seriously Paul? And, please, please, don't you guys give me an excuse such as "well, all rap made in 1984, or around that year, has aged poorly". Have you ever listened to Afrika Bambataa? As for "Strength Of Your Nature", I won't say much about the true nature of this synth-blue-eyed-soul number with far less class, impact and meaningful energy than what Eurythmics was doing at the time.
Except that it sounds like shit, obviously.
Conversely, and as I've just suggested before, you could argue that bad taste is still taste somehow. The thing with those two tracks I've just mentioned is that you can remember them at least. Everything else is indeed so bland, so instantly forgettable, that I won't even bother going through the motions here.
Oh, there's only one notable exception, the only bearable track on the whole LP: it's a jazz instrumental named "Dropping Bombs On The Whitehouse"--a cut that could fool you for being the real thing from the sixties. But ironically, this gives me the opportunity to vent my anger at Dimery and co. this time. How many *important* jazz LPs were sacrificed to make room for The Style Council, Robert? How freaking many? Jesus H. Christ...
In case you haven't heard... Decades after the release of *Cafe Bleu*, Paul Weller now pretends his career and discography are better than the ones of The Cure. Sure Paul, sure. Just don't forget your morning pills, and everything's gonna be alright...
How ironic to mouth off Robert Smith given that even a relative letdown in The Cure's discography such as *The Top* (also out in 1984) is still ten times better and more adventurous than this album here was. You see Paul, you're an excellent musician, I'm not denying this. But when you're a good musician, browsing through "styles" without applying any personal touch, or using your imagination to make those styles truly your own, is NOT adventurous. It's just being lazy.
Turns out "The Style Council" is aptly named as a band. They're all style, no susbstance.
Plus, Paul Weller is a moron. And I guess that certainly can't help us be nice now, can it?
Number of albums left to review: 645
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 177
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 84
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 100 (including this one)
Arrested Development
5/5
I had so many good memories about this one. But I listened to it again to make sure. And apart for one or two weaker tracks on side two, it's a keeper.
I imagine that for a few younger ears out there, some of the sounds or lyrics could feel dated. But, as far as I'm concerned, revisiting this "alternative" hip hop gem *decades later* (jeeze, I'm *old*) brought back most of what I originally loved about it. I haven't lost track of what is going on in the genre now, so I know this LP sounds as if it came from another century (actually it does). But sometimes old means aging like a fine wine. And when it's the case in hip hop, it's particularly endearing.
Some people here have pointed out that the "positivity" of certain lyrics could pass off as "corny" at times. I don't know... I've heard far worse lyrical content in rap albums before. Plus the topicality of most of these songs hasn't aged a day, and I feel like Speech's attitude and words about those issues still sound "fresh" and sincere enough to help me turn a blind eye to a couple of potential minor flaws here and there.
And whatever the case may be with the lyrics, the music is fantastic most of the time. Vocal parts often soar into soulful singing and hooks are as catchy as you can hope them to be. And most of the tracks are great anyway. "Tennessee"'s groove is infectious, of course, but so are the ones of "Mama's Always on Stage", " Fishing For Religion", "Give A Man A Fish", or (obviously) that nice cover version of Sly Stone's "Every People" (without Arrested Development, I would have discovered the Family Stone far later than I actually did, I'm not ashamed to say it). Oh, and there are also a few mellower cuts that I actually really like as well ("Raining Revolution" or closer "Washed Away")
For a while (mostly during the naughts), I felt like hip hop as a whole genre got lost in uninteresting turfs of land--ones that were as far away from *3 Years...* as they could possibly be. Early 21st century gangsta rap brought us a couple of masterpieces, but also many ridiculous records everybody has forgotten about now, fortunately. That said, the situation of rap and hip hop is better today: you have all sorts of subgenres going from trap to old-school boom bap thriving, and in each genre, you have good stuff to find out. I feel that in that sort of musical landscape, a vintage album such as this one, exploring *other* ways to develop a rap vocabulary, has its place.
"Objectively", this record is probably a 4/5. But given the sort of mindset it can offer younger generations these days, I'm gonna push for a 5. Arrested Development deserves to become a sort of legacy act for rap fans trying to think out of the usual boxes. That's how we've had the best hip hop albums lately. And that's how we're gonna have other ones in the future.
Number of albums left to review: 644
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 178
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 84
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 100
Q-Tip
5/5
Side one is pitch-perfect, and side two is still very good, even though I had high hopes Q-Tip would preserve the momentum until the end, (which is not exactly what happened here). Overall, *The Renaissance* doesn't exactly have that insanely *high* level of quality the first three A Tribe Called Quest albums had. But it's still often brilliant and groovy. I should have listened to that one earlier. Thanks to this app, I just did.
4,5/5, rounded up to 5 here. Because this thing deserves to have a higher overall score. And also, I'm pushing for the maximum grade because I'm sick and tired of weirdoes in here who go to the bottom of the reviews, where the 1/5 assessments are, so as to select unoriginal ones, going "It looks OK for fans of the genre, but I don't like rap" (a perfectly valid opinion per se), and then "like" those short uninteresting assessments so as to put them in the forefront of the review section. Tell me you have a problem with rap merely *existing* without telling me you have a problem with rap existing. Jeeze, I wonder why you can't see that happening with other genres like country or rock, huh? 🤔
Number of albums left to review: 643
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 179 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 84
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 100
David Gray
2/5
Here's Gray talking about that breakthrough album of his...
"When I started out, a man with a guitar baring his soul wasn't in vogue at all. Suddenly, it's everywhere! [The album's] success came from nowhere, and it changed how the business thought about what music should be. Since then, there have been lots of artists who've taken it on and done their own thing."
Er... Elliott Smith, anyone? Like, he had gone to a breakthrough of his own a couple of years earlier, and even playing during the oscar ceremony, right? And if not him, maybe countless other singer-songwriters from the sixties to the nineties, some of them famous, others less so, but all of them still managing to sound anything but vanilla when they're indeed "baring their souls".
There's a NME review which perfectly encapsulates my feelings here. It was written at the time of *White Ladder*'s re-release through a bigger label, following its commercial success:
" 'This Years Love' is Beverley Craven on a testosterone drip; the dilute dance rhythms of 'Please Forgive Me' and 'Babylon' offer a hand-knitted, festival-stall melancholy, while the title track might be Fleetwood Mac if they'd gone into organic farming. Think of the American singer-songwriter reinvention however, and 'White Ladder' seems as quaint as a wireless set."
Boom.
Oh, a fun anecdote now, taken out of a Guardian article. Well, "fun" isn't the best term for music used as a torture device in compounds such as Guantanamo, but you'll soon get what I mean here:
' Gray's music became associated with the torture debate after Haj Ali, the hooded man in the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs, told of being stripped, handcuffed and forced to listen to a looped sample of Babylon, at a volume so high he feared that his head would burst.
"It's an issue that no one in the music industry wants to deal with," says David Gray, one of the few artists willing to speak about the subject. "It's shocking that there isn't more of an outcry. I'd gladly sign up to a petition that says don't use my music, but it seems to be missing the point a bit."
"The moral niceties of whether they're using my song or not are totally irrelevant," says Gray. "We are thinking below the level of the people we're supposed to oppose, and it goes against our entire history and everything we claim to represent. It's disgusting, really. Anything that draws attention to the scale of the horror and how low we've sunk is a good thing."
The singer wonders whether governments who use music as a torture technique without asking permission from the artists involved could face legal action. "In order to play something publicly, you have to have legal permission and you have to apply for that. I wonder if the US government bothered, but I very much doubt it. Perhaps you could sue, but let's face it, they're outside the law on the whole thing anyway." '
Well, given that Gray was almost the only artist unwittingly involved in those despicuous and inhumane actions willing to discuss the issue and somehow protest about the whole thing, I'll give him an extra point in my review. He's a decent, perceptive and articulate person, there's no doubt about that. Under that light, maybe I'll be able to spot reedeeming details about his music later on. We're all subjective beings, after all.
That said, and to indeed return to the music itself, my personal opinion is that *White Ladder* is anything but "essential". The chord progressions are mostly bland and predictable, the vocal melodies are as well, and Gray's voice is often grating--with a performance that's either undercooked or overcooked (it depends on his inflexions). Oh, and the chill-out-type club arrangements for the rythmic patterns have aged quite horribly, very often diverting to what these songs really are or really should sound like. Folktronica can sound good. But not in here.
Of course, I imagine those cheesy arrangements made Gray's songs likely candidates for ads soundtracks or "wedding dances" at the time, helping him reach commercial success. But even with that in mind it's hard to conceptualize how one out of four Irish households ended up having a copy of this record. Are Irish folks that permeable to snorefests? I didn't think so.
It's also funny how recent *positive* articles about this LP actually tip-toe their way around the fact that their author actually *know* the whole thing is embarrassing to a degree. Take this piece from Pitchfork, written by a reviewer who inexplicably gave a 7.9 grade to it:
' “Please Forgive Me” was also included in the pilot of Scrubs, more indicative than its club cameos of the album’s future in meet-cute media. Half of its 10 songs were released as singles, so White Ladder clearly worked as a collection of episodes that could be experienced discretely and repeatedly. There’s no linguistic subtext to any song on White Ladder: Recall that Gray’s sincerity and plainspokenness are his main selling points, but the lack of specificity leaves space for emotional interpretation. (...) It all ends with an unfathomably sad, nine-minute cover of Soft Cell’s “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” that interpolates Van Morrison’s “Madame George” and “Into the Mystic.” (...)
*White Ladder* might not exist without Dave Matthews; Gray promoted the album while opening for Matthews, a close friend and a notable influence on White Ladder’s more grating vocal tics—on the title track, when Gray wheezes, “There’s no rhyme or reeeeeason,” a John Popper harmonica solo wouldn’t be entirely unexpected. (...)
While *White Ladder* was virtually inescapable in public spaces during the early 2000s, its influence has dissipated in the time since, though it is audible in the crystalline, cosmic folk of Amen Dunes’ 2018 album Freedom. Gray himself suggested that he had paved the way for folk-pop idols like Ed Sheeran and James Blunt."
OK. Amen Dunes' *Freedom*, Ed Sheeran, James Blunt... That's why I don't like this album. Makes sense.
Number of albums left to review: 643
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 179
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 84
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 101 (including this one)
David Bowie
5/5
Given how many nice reviews in here perfectly encapsulate what I think (and like) about this album, I'm gonna do something else and rank David Bowie's best albums from his legendary discography (leaving the less impressive ones and a couple of clunkers aside). Ranking albums has always been a bit obsessive-compulsive, but it's another way to express your subjectivity. Which I think is pretty fitting here: with an idol such as Bowie, being obsessed and subjective almost feels like a tribute to the amazing artist and personality that he was...
So here's the ranking. Needless to say, the vast majority of the first ten albums are all 5 stars to me, including *Aladdin Sane*:
1. Ziggy Stardust And the Spiders From Mars
2. Hunky Dory
3. Low
4. Station To Station
5. Blackstar
6. The Man Who Sold The World
7. Aladdin Sane
8. 1. Outside
9. "Heroes"
10. David Bowie (Space Oddity)
11. Diamond Dogs
12. Earthling
13, Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)
14. Let's Dance
15. Young Americans
16. Lodger
Number of albums left to review: 642
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 180 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 84
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 101
Fela Kuti
5/5
Well, I'm no expert about Fela but I did know this album already, and it is nothing short of transcendent. Such an infectious energy here.
I felt a nonplussed by that one review complaining about the "call-and-response" at the end of the title-track. Well, that's part of that infectious energy I was just talking about, is it not?
"Zombie" seemed like a good place to start exploring Fela Kuti's discography. It's now high time I digged further. Thanks to all the reviewers who left suggestions about other albums here.
Number of albums left to review: 641
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 181 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 84
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 101
Shivkumar Sharma
3/5
Heralded as a "world music classic", *Call Of The Valley* is actually so obscure for Western pedestrian audiences that even the folks responsible for this app got confused. The links they put up here indeed point to different recordings. The Spotify link is a "modern" reenactment with all sorts of new age shenanigans going on in the background. And the You Tube version is the 1967 original version played on vinyl, complete with charming crackling sounds.
As for Ravi Shankar, I'd say that my ears are not trained enough to properly "judge" this sort of (admittedly influential) work. It would still do as nice background music if I suddenly had the strange idea to perfume my home with patchouli and incense, I imagine. But to be honest, I would feel a tad bit hypocritical if I raved and ranted about this album. No matter how many so-called "objective" rankings and podiums you can establish out there, listening to music is still a subjective affair after all. And cultural "blind spots" play their parts there, too, obviously...
Number of albums left to review: 640
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 181
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 84
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 102 (including this one)
Orange Juice
2/5
I can see why some listeners could relate a couple of those tracks to the way Talking Heads used some funk or afrobeat influences on their own records around the same time, but I don't think Orange Juice hit the mark the way the 'Heads did. It's not bad, instrumentation-wise. But maybe the songs, hooks and choruses are still a little too lackluster to seal the deal. And, consequently, the end result comes off as cheesy, instead of arty.
Besides, you need a lead singer with charisma and idiosyncratic skills to make it work. And whoever this lead singer is on such and such song, he is not exactly David Byrne. There are a lot of commonalities, with an emphasis on overaffected tricks. But Collins (and Ross) lack(s) the spark of genius and sheer craziness Byrne had.
Number of albums left to review: 639
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 181
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 84
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 103 (including this one)
The Temptations
3/5
What, *another* cover of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine", after Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Slits??? And this without even counting Marvin Gaye's classic version ("In The Groove", the LP it's taken from, being excluded from Dimery's list, if I remember correctly). Well... This version is *alright*, I imagine, especially when the drum patterns suddenly stop and go (as in the great title track opening this Temptations LP right before "...Grapevine"). The thing is, as nice as this particular cover is, it's certainly less impressive than the three other versions listed here. So it's not worth the price of admission on its own. We need to look further here...
What's left, then? Well, the centerpiece is definitely "Runaway Child, Running Wild", an incredible nine-minute example of what "psychedelic soul" should sound like. Lush instrumentation, epic build-up, soulful dirges... We're not in "Papa Was A Rolling Stone"-territory yet (this song is far less catchy), but we're certainly heading there. And this stuff is also worthy of Sly And The Family Stone, except that it's softer around the edges, and a little more seductive somehow...
Those three songs (the title track, " I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and "Runaway Child, Running Wild") are half of the album, and I can understand why that first part of the record felt like a milestone at the time, especially when you realize where the band was coming from (this sort of thing couldn't be further apart from "My Girl"). Yet as interesting as that first side of the LP is, I have doubts that the second one can be listed as *essential* stuff. There we have more by-the-numbers ballads, which gives the feeling that we are dealing with yet another "transitional" album from The Temptations...
The problem is that I'm a little confused about which album from that technically stellar vocal group should be considered as "transitional" and which should heralded as mainstays or "essential" ones--at least as far as I know about them (I'm certainly no expert, and they have a sprawling discography). My gut feeling tells me that The Temptations will always sound like a hodge-podge thing to me. They sing songs written by others (legendary Motown songwriting teams, covers of all sorts...). Their "identity" is flexible according to the times and current fashion, exemplified by key tracks that don't always fit with other tunes on their albums. And as far as LPs go, their propositions are a little daunting, not to say "messy", as expertly played, sung and produced as those albums are...
I can't remember if I included *All Directions* in my group of potential candidates for my own 1001 list ("All Directions": what an apt title for a Temptations LP, by the way). I've listened to it again, and maybe it deserves to be included in my "ideal" list, and not only because of *Papa Was A Rolling Stone" and "I Ain't Got Nothin'". That said, I'm afraid I won't include more than *one* Temptations record This act made great tracks all along their lengthy and complex career. But I think they (or their producers) didn't have an identity and/or an artistic vision strong enough to make all their influences gather into a cohesive, meaningful whole. So, in that overall genre, I'd rather stick to Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Sly And The Family Stone, etc. Sorry, Temptations fans...
Number of albums left to review: 638
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 181
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 84
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 104 (including this one)
Louis Prima
3/5
Of course, "Just A Gigolo". If only for this first track, *The Wildest* deserves at least a passing mention. The rest, made out of other jazz swing / "jump blues" cuts, make for nice background music. Funny how "Jump, Jive An' Wail" and "You Rascal You" are so energetic thay almost sound like early rock'n'roll. And it's nice to hear a far older version of "You Rascal You", by the way (my favorite is still the one performed by Serge Gainbourg, but it's at least interesting to discover other ones).
Oh, I almost forgot: Keely Smith has a great voice. Which takes nothing away from Louis Prima's impressive performance, both on lead vocals and trumpet.
Now will I include *The Wildest* in my list? Well, it's hard to say. That LP is culturally relevant, I'm not arguing about that. But its overall style is definitely quaint. Everyone will have a different mileage on such *old* albums today. Besides, and I've said it many times before, Dimery's list is quite unfair when it comes to jazz, leaving aside many other key LPs in that genre. And it's a mistake I don't want to make with my own list. Hence why I won't *directly* include *The Wildest* in my own list, so as to leave room for other albums by Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Horace Silver or Max Roach...
Number of albums left to review: 637
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 181
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 104
Laura Nyro
3/5
An interesting listen. Laura Nyro had a very peculiar voice, which had its rough charm at the start of the album, reminding me of a Polly Jean Harvey that would play show tunes and rhythm'n'blues instead of indie rock (her sort of indie rock was admittedly infused with a lot of blues as well, at least on her first albums--but PJ Harvey fans probably understand what I mean here). That being said, this comparison doesn't *fully* do justice to Nyro's one-of-a-kind performance--drawing on a lot of the expected "techniques" heard at the time, and yet using them in her own idiosyncratic way.
The thing is, the end result can get a little tiring the more you advance into *Eli And The Thirteenth Confession*: That constant vibrato thing sounds as if it's out of control: once you start noticing it, you can't help hearing it everywhere. And, good lord, Laura was so... *chatty*. It's not as if I wanted her to shut up... but maybe her vocal lines should be lower in the overall mix, at least.
Is it wrong for me to say so? Am I disturbed by a "chatty" female performer because I am a man who can be bothered with the (many) words of a woman? I'll let you be the judge of that. To my defense, I don't have this problem with Janis Joplin, also very demonstrative and "chatty". To me, the problem with Laura Nyro as a performer does not lie with the "intent" but with the execution. There's a very fine line between "impressive" and "overkill". And *Eli And The Thirteenth Confession* straddles it constantly.
Likewise, Nyro's songwriting and arrangements aptly mirror that recurrent "overkill" mode felt in her vocal performance. Time signatures and tempi constantly change and morph and switch. Sometimes it's as if those changes are gratuitously demonstrative--as if Nyro desperately felt like she had something to prove. She was obviously talented enough to create memorable songs without resorting to those demonstrative shenanigans. And yet she couldn't help doing it. Or maybe, just maybe, her songwriting "instincts" do not sit well with my own tastes when it comes to sophisticated and off-kilter structures and arrangements. To each their own, I imagine...
In spite of my rather harsh assessment up there, I want to single out three tracks that work perfectly well for me: "Poverty Train" has a terrific introduction, very ahead of its day and age, and the rest of the song doesn't disappoint. "Eli's Coming" is a striking cut, proving that if Nyro stuck to a simple idea (for most of the song, at least), she could actually be more impressive than when she went through different modes and styles in the space of a single track. And "The Confession" is an admirable, heartfelt closer.
The only problem is that the rest of this record quickly gives me a headache. I'm happy I discovered it through this app. But I can't "feel" this as an "essential" album. It's more like an interesting curio for me. Sorry, Laura Nyro fans...
Number of albums left to review: 636
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 181
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 105 (including this one)
John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers
3/5
A seminal and historical album, which is pivotal to understand why young brits drawn to blues and electric guitar saw Clapton as "God". That said, Clapton's conservatism and orthodoxy is more a flaw than an asset here (and this without even mentioning how his "conservatism" later extended to extra-musical concerns). Not long before this record was released, The Yardbirds decided to embrace psychedelic "progress", something that Clapton couldn't stand, hence why he left them to join Mayall's band. And it seems to me that music history proved him wrong, for the most part.
So, decades later, *Bluesbreaker* is still a nice listen, I imagine. But it doesn't have the intensity or power of The Yardbirds around the same time (plus Jeff Beck's solo output a couple of years later). *Bluesbreakers*'s reliance on guitar prowess and blues' formatted writing misses a key aspect that can help create a truly great albums: penning memorable melodies and tunes.
*Bluesbreakers* is good, don't get me wrong. But whether its songs are covers or originals, they always use the same three damn chords, which is tiring in ways original American blues wasn't, even if the latter was using the exact same formula, ironically. Maybe this paradox can be explained by the fact that you can "feel" the British musicians' "copycatting" the original thing here--the sound and instrumentation are pretty neat, maybe even a little too clean and predictable. And on its own, technical prowess can't make up for those heavily standardized proceedings. You need *something else*--something direly lacking in this album. It's a lesson Clapton would learn later on with Cream and Derek And The Dominos, when he will finally write stuff to get out of such a stylistic dead-end. But that's a story for another time, I guess...
I'm tempted to leave a 4/5 grade for "historical importance", but my gut feeling tells me a 3 would be more sincere. If you're reading those lines now, you already know what my final choice was.
Number of albums left to review: 635
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 182 (for " historical importance", mostly).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 105
Creedence Clearwater Revival
3/5
I need to revisit, but I think the overwhelming consensus about this one is that it's the weakest release from CCR's incredible streak of albums during the tail end of the sixties. And from what I can remember about the LP, I fully concur with the masses here. *Bayou Country* was the record that started that streak, and as such, is a harbinger of the great things to come. And of course, "Proud Mary" and "Born On The Bayou" are instant classics. But then, there's the rest, still sounding like a middle-of-the-road blues/rock revival for modern ears, without much interesting input into it. So if we're talking about essential *albums*, this one should probably not make the cut.
Update after a closer listen: nope, my overall judgment doesn't change a bit. The vast majority of those seven tracks heavily rely on a single chord, including "Born On the Bayou", actually. So I would lie if I said that I find a lot of those tracks exciting (apart from "Proud Mary", once again). "Bootleg" could have been better if that small bridge after the second chorus had been repeated and expanded, "Graveyard Train" is a bit of snorefest, and if the Little Richard cover that follows is kinda fun, it's too derivative to seal the deal at the end the first side. As for the second side, it still sounds like a rough draft of what Creedence Clearwater Revival would later be appreciated for (and there are no memorable ballads--part of CCR's appeal today). I get that the live version of "Keep On Chooglin'" must have been fun at the end of a gig, but as far as the album version goes, it's still a little too predictable and by-the-numbers to transcend its humble origins. One can wonder if the real appeal of the song is that no one really knows what "chooglin'" means. A little bit of mystery never hurts, I guess...
Of course, in most of the songs performed in this album there's still a nice interplay between the lead guitar and John Fogerty's vocals, and the latter are obviously soulful and impressive from start to finish. But you can still enjoy Fogerty's great voice on much more thrilling cuts taken out of subsequent LPs. So with that in mind, I'm keeping some room for *Cosmo's Factory* and maybe even *Green River* and *Willie And The Poor Boys*. You can't be too cautious when you only have a list of 1001 albums...
Number of albums left to review: 634
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 182
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 106 (including this one)
Röyksopp
2/5
Elevator music it's OK to like, and this even if you're going from the ground floor to the top of a skyscraper. But elevator music nonetheless!
Don't get me wrong, Röyksopp are talented beatmakers and composers, and they're sometimes quirky enough to be interesting, at least once in a while. Yet the overall "feeling" I have from listening to *Melody A.M.* is that it's a little too bland and/or unobtrusive to elicit a strong response from me. In a close genre, an act like Boards Of Canada makes a far stronger impression. They're more poetic, more conceptual, more evocative, more off-kilter, more surprising... Eeerier and weirder, in a good way. That's how they hit the mark. And Röyksopp are definitely not up to that level.
Now let me use this review to point something out when it comes to the general philosophy of my personal "grading" here: 95% of the artists and bands that managed to be included in Dimery's book actually deserve to be noticed--whatever your tastes are, and whatever your personal feelings about their music is. Making it to this list proves you're not an "average" musician. It shows that you did a good thing for you and others when you chose a career in music. And that you were right to persevere.
So in that sense, you probably need to add 5 points to the grades given in here. It's not because you didn't make an essential album most people "should" listen to that you're a bad musician. Take Röyksopp, for instance. I'm giving them a 2/5 grade. But "objectively", given the amount of work, skills and imagination they put into this record, they probably deserve a 7/10 grade (2 + 5 for being talented artists nonetheless). It's just that for the purpose of this list of "essential" records, you can't do such benevolent gradings--otherwise the end picture would be quite unclear, even confusing. And I feel like most people using this app have the same philosophy, whether they consciously realize it or not. You have no choice but to be quite severe.
That said, there are two or three exceptions to this rule of thumb. Examples: those horrid turds pooped by Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock, inexplicably listed in this app. To be clear: those turds can't deserve more than a 3/10 mark. Personally, I would even give them a 1/5. Being "subjective" is OK, and trying to be "objective" is fine as well. But then there's just common sense. And when you combine being an absolute moron with an obvious lack of talent, and add the bad taste factor to the equation, all that you deserve is contempt.
Hope fans of those two acts are offended, because they need to wake the f*ck up. I can be nice and tolerant, but there's a limit to the sheer amount of idiocy I can put up with.
About Röyksopp's *Melody A.M.*:
Number of albums left to review: 633
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 182
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 107 (including this one)
Bee Gees
2/5
OK, schmaltzy Bee Gees, long before they went insanely successful with disco and *Saturday Night Fever*. I gotta admit that parts of this record, along with other moments from *Odessa*, were a little less annoying than what I expected them to be. Look further into those two LPs and you may even find a couple of tracks that are actually quite good. The thing is, those good tracks can't save you from the utter debacle that many other songs on those albums are.
To go to specifics as related to *Trafalgar*, I'm not sure what the lyrical point of *Israël* is, but that tune sure has a nice melody in it. Likewise, *I Don't Wanna Live Inside Myself* reminds me a little of what Grandaddy's Jason Little can pull off when he wants to write a heartfelt ballad for the ages about lonely, melancholic souls. Which is quite encouraging.
Oh by the way, let me just digress for a second here, and use this occasion to remind everybody how unfair it is that no Grandaddy album made it to this list. You'd just need to replace the pre-disco Bee Gees with their albums, and *voilà*: the list would instantly "feel" a little better than what it currently is.
And the thing is, folks, Grandaddy also knew how to *rock* once in a while, which is another reason to include them. Conversely, The Bee Gees clearly didn't, especially in *Trafalgar*. That 1971 album even has less variety than *Odessa*. Literally *all* the songs are sentimental ballads, and you quickly risk going through a sugar overdose--and mess with your levels of insulin--as you inflict such grotesque and laughable displaying of sentimentality to yourself for so long. And then, one shouldn't forget all the syrupy string arrangements suggesting the PA system of a lunatic asylum. Not to mention the ridiculously performative vocals going to all the wrong over-the-top places in most of these tunes.
Evidently, those lame vocal parts are the crux of the issue here. Each and every one of the three Gibb brothers are culprits, of course, but none is as guilty as f*cking Robin, especially noticeable on side two. Yes, that's it, that's where the real crime is. Literally every time Robin Gibb opens his mouth, overindulging in that constant annoying vibrato routine, it feels like nails on a chalkboard. Except that those nails belong to Vishnu. Or to an octopus. Or even to a centipede, given the end result. To be perfectly honest, I just want to strangle someone when I hear that voice. Or, if I can be civil and contain my murderous impulses, I want to plead the man responsible for it to just leave me the f*ck alone. Please. Oh, please. Robin, I'll do whatever you want me to. Just... Don't sing, OK? Please.
So thanks, 1001 albums. Now, by the grace of your application, I know exactly why I *can't* include any Bee Gees albums in my list (*Saturday Night Fever* being officially a "various artists" soundtrack). And it's because of Robin Gibb. Well, for the most part, at least. I didn't know I needed that sort of information before I die. Well, to be perfectly honest, I'm still not sure today that I *did* need such info before. But here we go, I guess.
To conclude, I also noted that only five reviewers in this group gave a 5/5 grade to *Trafalgar*. I'm not the sort of reviewer to say "The People have spoken". The majority is *not* always right. But let me make an exception here. Because my mind still needs some sense of justice and closure after the Robin Gibb abuse it's been exposed to, and this in spite of a few reedeeming moments found elsewhere in this album (helping *Trafalgar* reach a miraculous 2/5 grade). So... Well... The People have spoken. Right?
Number of albums left to review: 632
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 182
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 108 (including this one)
The Rolling Stones
3/5
I can understand how pivotal that record is for the Stones' career (and for British rock in general). But even with that in mind, you won't see me include an album mostly made out of covers in my own list (except for Nina Simone--but Nina's artistry, knack for stellar arrangements, and vital performance easily explain this rare exception here).
These are the Rolling Stones albums I *will* include in my list:
Aftermath
Beggars Banquet
Let It Bleed
Sticky Fingers
Exile On Main Street
I think that with those five albums, I pay enough attention to such a legendary band. So let's give some room to other artists, shall we?
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: less than 650, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Culture Club
1/5
Elevator music that's only bearable if you're going from one floor to the next. In other words, everything that's dead wrong about the eighties in one album. And the tunes are not even memorable (apart from "Karma Chameleon"). Which might be a good thing, come to think of it, because they fortunately don't get stuck in your head for hours, at least.
I have a lot of sympathy and respect for Boy George's character, by the way. He's not always had an easy life, and I can only praise him for reaching the sort of success he reached at a time when prejudice was still everywhere. But I don't care at all for the artist that he is, or for that band he was part in. If really Culture Club wanted to reenact the schmaltzy vocabulary of the fifties and sixties in a more contemporary frame, the least they could do was to take a page from Eurythmics or Soft Cell--to mention somewhat close acts who had their faire share of the spotlight around 1983. Those acts knew how to make their mix of influences sound *vital*, at least in their great singles. In comparison, Culture Club's tunes sounds thin, stale, and hackneyed. Next! Please...
Number of albums left to review: 631
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 182
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 109 (including this one)
The Crusaders
2/5
Elavator music. A pretty intricate version of it, drawing from both jazz and disco. But elevator music nonetheless.
A rhodes keyboard always sounds great, by the way, whatever you play on it. And given that the Crusaders are stellar musicians, their instruments are bound to sound good.
I think that "My Lady" has been sampled in one of the hip hop albums I have, but I can't remember which. I need to do some research...
Funny how the last track, "Night Faces", going back to the band's pure jazz roots from the sixties, sounds so good as well. As a matter of fact, that track has aged infinitely better than the mindless disco beats The Crusaders onverindulged in for the rest of the album. Disco can be fun, once in a while. But a whole album of it is often quite ridiculous. Especially if you don't dance to the latter. Because let's be a little honest for a second. Who would dance to this stuff *today*?
I've written four paragraphs about this album, *Street Life* (five, now, counting this one). I think it's more than said album deserves if you're doing a list of 1001 "essential" ones.
Next.
Number of albums left to review: 630
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 182
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 110 (including this one)
ABBA
4/5
ABBA are mostly known for their singles and the stellar songwriting, production, and arrangements that was displayed in them... Yet if there is only *one* album from the Swedish band you should own, this would be the one--along with the pitch perfect *Gold* compilation, that goes without saying.
For starters, *Arrival*'s got three hits that you can also find in said compilation (*four* in its CD edition or Australian/New Zealand version: "Knowing Me, Knowing You", "Dancing Queen", "Money, Money, Money" and "Fernando"). That's already an amount of hits most bands would only dream of producing for one LP. But now you need to add the other stellar cuts in it, which actually sound as good as the more famous tunes from the band--cuts such as the opener "When I Kissed The Teacher", or "Dum Dum Diddle" or the exhilarated and exhilarating "Tiger". And the instrumental title track closing the original proceedings is a short yet quite emotional apex for the whole thing.
There are a couple of fillers here and there, but with eight or nine great tracks out of eleven, what you have here is still a very good album. Benny and Björn had so many great melodies in them, and Agnetha and Anni-Frid such powerful voices--it doesn't really matter if the lyrics are a little cheesy sometimes: as every fan of good pop music knows, such lyrics are part of their timeless charm. My overall feeling it that you just gotta pay ABBA at least *one* tribute in a list such as this one. And *Arrival* is the best candidate for this.
Oh, speaking of ABBA albums: *The Visitors* is an interesting experiment in more mature songs, by the way, even though its melodic contents might not be striking enough for it to be included here. But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies...
Number of albums left to review: 629
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 183 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 110
Astor Piazzolla
4/5
It takes two to tango. Unfortunately, I can't say I'm *fully* receptive to this album, as brilliant as the performers are on this one. Maybe there are other records released by Piazzolla that deserve to be on this list. After all, the man once released *Libertango* (whose title track was later made famous by Grace Jones). So I think that exploring that artist's discography would be wise before deciding only a late-career live album should be the one quoted by us.
In the meantime, four points for the performance in this (the global score is way too low given the obvious virtuosity and artistry that is actually displayed in *The New Tango*). But this record won't be in my own list (a rare exception for a four-star record). My philosophy is that barring one or two very specific LPs, live albums should be set apart from the rest anyway. 1001 sounds like a huge number, but it's actually very small if you want to include all the essential "studio ones" out there...
Number of albums left to review: 628
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 183
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 111 (including this one)
The Blue Nile
3/5
Part elevator music, part a welcome exercise in *restraint* when it comes to eighties aesthetics, this record has aged miraculously well, all things considered. The title track opening the album has subtle instrumentation, "Heatwave" has interesting and addictive percussions, and "Stay" is a heartfelt cut. I also have the feeling Kate Bush most probably took a page out of "Tinseltown In the Rain" to create her legendary songs "Running Up That Hill" and "Cloudbursting", relelased in the next year (you certainly have common synth sounds and vocal ideas here and there).
So does that mean I will include this album by the Blue Nile? Er... Nope, sorry. As interesting as this curio from the past is, the vocal parts are decidedly too whiny and/or bland in too many places, and most of the songs sound only half-formed to my ears. You'd need a few more "dynamic" tracks in that LP to give it the impetus it cruelly lacks as it is.
Yet I'm feeling generous and will even give this one a 3/5 grade. Not enough to make it to my list. But that doesn't mean the thing is utterly bad either.
Number of albums left to review: 627
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 183
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 112 (including this one)
T. Rex
5/5
More than *Cosmic Warrior*, this is the definitive T.Rex album. Or maybe they had two of them. You have a lot of talented tunesmiths in this list, but it takes someone named Marc to... hit the mark twice.
Number of albums left to review: 626
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 183
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 112
Sex Pistols
5/5
John Lydon/Johnny Rotten has turned into a *massive* wanker these days (maybe he always was), but even this sad turn of events can't demean the very nature of this frankly exhilarating LP. *Never Mind The Bollocks...* is not only an amazing collection of biting, angry songs--emphasized by spot-on production values perfectly fitting its gritty-yet-catchy contents. It's also a pivotal record to understand the evolution of rock music in the last 45 years. Because, yep, the influence of this one goes way beyond its punk origins. As a result, what can you do but to give 5 stars to it?
Number of albums left to review: 625
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 184
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 112
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
2/5
"Spare us the theatrics and the verbal gymnastics," goes one of Elvis Costello's characters on the second song from this album. Oh, the irony. Such wording is a nice way to say "shut up", that's for sure. But it's also I want to tell Costello when I listen to "Imperial Bedroom". Just... stop talking. The music is already meandering too much. We don't need the constant barrage of oblique ditherings on top of it.
I've been pretty unfair to other records by Elvis Costello mentioned in this list, I know it now. But here, I think I'll stand by my early *negative* feeling. "Imperial Bedroom" is just too damn chatty and too cute for its own good. Yes, there are lush instrumentations and arrangements in many of those tunes. But as sophisticated as those arrangements are, you won't convince me they don't sound incredibly awkward when paired with Costello's whiny voice. The whole thing makes you think of an odd couple. Which brings another involuntary layer of irony here, given that 'odd couples' is the theme of some of these songs...
To put it in a nutshell, this record sounds über-pretentious as a whole. At least, Costello's first three LPs had a few lively rockers to make the whole thing dynamic enough. Here, all that you got is... melodic and verbal gymnastics, with no frigging *end point* in sight. 2/5.
Number of albums left to review: 624
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 184
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 113 (including this one)
The Lemonheads
4/5
Didn't understand the appeal of that album at the time. I found it little too predictable and "middle-of-the-road". But decades later, here I am revising my former harsh judgement, thanks to this app.
I still think The Lemonheads were treading on old ground once covered by REM or Husker Dü with this album. But in 2023 such a minor flaw doesn't matter a lot. A lot of the songs are effective, and prove that Evan Dando's craft was respectable and even stellar at times, even if the production values vary from "anachronic charming" to "anachronic quaint" .
By the way, the barebones acoustic versions of those tunes, put in the bonus tracks of the "collector's version", dont have those dated production issues I've just evoked. Here is where you can truly appreciate those songs for what they truly are, and I advise everyone curious about this album to listen to them as well. 4/5
Number of albums left to review: 624
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 185 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 113
The Damned
5/5
This album should be *far more famous*. Released only two years after the punk explosion, it predicted everything from post-punk to goth and melodic hardcore punk--not to mention that later craze about killer clowns, lol ("These Hands").
But it's not the only reason *Machine Gun Etiquette* should be remembered today. Its melodies and energy are infectious, its instrumentation is far more sophisticated than it seems at first glance (the organ flourishes are particularly effective and original), and the tunes are catchy as fuck.
So it's not so much how ahead of the curve this amazing LP was that makes it a great listen today. It's how damn good it is, period. Each song has something different to offer, even if the overall picture stays cohesive. *Machine Gun Etiquette" is a very *driven* record, to say the least: I tried to find a weak track in it but I couldn't. Hence why I give this one a 5. "Love Song" sounds like The Pogues on steroids, "I Just Can't Be Happy Today" is both weird and wonderful, and the long version of "Smash It Up" at the end of the album crowns everything like the definitive Damned statement that it is. And then, there are all the other cuts, some of them short and biting, others longer and mesmerizing. This record is a gem, enough said.
Number of albums left to review: 623
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 186 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 113
The Beau Brummels
3/5
As far as psychedelia-infused country folk go, this is a quite interesting curio from the past. The overall mood of *Triangle* recalls other stuff going from Donovan to the Incredible String Band (only in an American version that's pretty close to The Byrds' own psychedelic period). Opener "Are You Happy?" is also very Dylanesque, as other reviewers noticed here (even if some of them often forgot to point out that the rest of the album isn't). And closer "The Wolf Of Velvet Fortune" (a closer because I'm not really counting that Randy Newman cover that follows it) is just incredible: the song sounds like the sort of mystical experience that could only occur during the sixties, and its chorus is simply infectious and mesmerizing.
Unfortunately, what's between those two highlights is not exactly up to that level. Some of the tunes are nice and evocative (such as "Only Dreaming Now", with its oneiric strings and quaint accordion, or that Merle Travis cover "Nine Pound Hammer", or the very Tolkienesque "Magic Hollow", not to mention the title track's epic conclusion). But there's also something a little awkward in the way those tunes pan out. The most probable culprits are the lead vocals, I believe--often reaching the same high note through a somewhat wearisome vibrato, especially on side one. I've used the word "quaint" before in this review, but I can't say it's a compliment now to describe that voice. Whoever that lead singer was, he wasn't Gene Clark, contrary to what some benevolent reviewers suggested in this group. Besides, the songs are often too short to leave a lasting impression in your mind--even if, quite ironically, I imagine some of those tunes might have outlasted their welcome if they had been longer...
I was tempted to include this one into my list *potential* candidates at first. But after a few more listens, I've changed my mind. Still, I'm glad I discovered this record I knew absolutely nothing about (and especially "The Wolf Of Velvet Fortune"). As I said elsewhere, a 3/5 grade in here equals a 8/10 one in more general terms. It's just that 1001 is a finite number after all...
Number of albums left to review: 622
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 186
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 85
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 114 (including this one)
Robbie Williams
2/5
When a mainstream pop artist (and former member of a cheesy boys band) takes a page out of the book of Britpop to sing his way to a more respected position. The thing is, the overall result is patchy, with some good moments in it and others that are, well, not so good. You can't be Oasis or Blur if it's not in your blood from the get-go.
The two first tracks slap, I'm not gonna lie. Indeed, "Lazy Days" and "Life Through A Lens" display effective songwriting, epic melodic lines, and smart chord changes. After them, "Ego Agogo" is catchy, I guess, even if it's also a little annoying. The next track, "Angels", is a saccharine cut that left quite a huge impression in the UK (I know, I lived there for a while not too long after this record came out). And as far as reenactments of Elton John-styled ballads go, you could find far worse out there.
So, the first four tracks are solid. Too bad that everything after soon peters out into indistinctive tunes following the same template of those early songs without having their strength. Oh, "Let Me Entertain You" is another catchy one for sure (that's another track that was huge in Britain at the time). But just like "Ego Agogo", it can turn into an annoying gimmicky showcase about William's mischievous public persona. Which means "all surface, no substance", a critique that can actually be addressed to the album itself. And I'd even say that listening to such a shallow record decades after its release mostly emphasizes this major flaw here.
I hesitate between 2/5 and 3/5 here (2.5?). But even with this hesitation still in mind, you don't need a dozen photographers to get the picture, I guess...
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: a little more than 600, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Sparks
4/5
Just like Roxy Music on the other side of the pond, I never could understand the appeal of this band that also played synth-enhanced glam/glitter rock (at least originally). Maybe Spark's music was too eccentric and complex for me. I sort of doubt this, however: I usually *like* pop rock when it's eccentric and complex... So...
That said, this here is the perfect occasion to discover what's so good in this band: the lyrics. Opener "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both Of Us" is a hilarious opener about a love story turning into a surreal western-like duel, "Amateur Hour" is one the funniest song about sex I've ever heard, with snarly oblique lyrics that get me every time: "It's a lot like playing the violin / You cannot start off to be Yehudi Menuhin / Amateur hour goes on and on / And when you turn pro you know / She tells you so" . Lively "Talent Is An Asset" is about Albert Einstein as a child, with a fun pun on "relative(s)" at some point. And "Up Here In Heaven"'s whole 'what if' concept is a riot (what if Juliet betrayed Romeo at the eleventh hour and chose *not* to die--wouldn't Romeo's heaven in the sky turn into hell?). Fittingly, there's also a *biting* aspect to the music that perfectly illustrates this tale of woe and ironic despair, and it makes this banger going haywire a keeper, both lyrically and musically. Finally, to give one last example of what's so fun in Sparks' lyrics, there's that line in "Hasta Mañana Monsieur": "You mentioned Kant and I was shocked / You know, where I come from / None of the girls have such foul tongues". 🤣
All of those tunes are obvious highlights, but there are other relevant tracks as well: take "Thank God It's Not Christmas" for instance. This one has nice melodies and an effective chorus. "Barbecutie" is pretty fun as well, with its loud bassline and heavy guitar riff on the chorus. And the next track, "Lost and Found" is a cool capper for the whole thing. Odd that those three tracks are rarely the ones that are singled out by fans of this album, at least as far as I can tell.
As for the rest of the songs, I can't say that they're bad, but I first need to get more acquainted with the rest of Sparks' very *long* discography to decide if *Kimono My House* can truly become a favorite of mine (which will take a little bit of time). I'm a little wary of Dimery's list when it focuses on "commercial breakthrough" LPs. For the bands or artists that I know well, it often means that truly significant records are left aside, and since I'm only warming up to Sparks now, I don't want to miss something good in that long list of albums...
Number of albums left to review: 620
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 186
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 86 (including this one, most probably)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 115
Jerry Lee Lewis
3/5
Even if I'm taking into account the runtimes of albums during the fifties and sixties, a 22-minute record sounds more like an E.P. to me. Plus, this is a live album, and I get the odd feeling that the writers of this list used it to sneak in a "best of" of sorts. Jerry Lee Lewis was an important figure in rock'n'roll, obviously, but for me, he was not an "album artist". Finally, this record came out in 1964, when Lewis was soon about to made irrelevant anyway. So I don't even need to point out the sort of deranged creep that he was to "cancel" him from my own list. I've got enough *other* reasons to do so.
Still giving this record a 3/5 grade, though. As far as *essential* albums go, this one can't make the cut. But the performance in it sure was crazy as hell, I'm not denying anything about that.
Number of albums left to review: 619
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 186
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 86
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 116 (including this one)
The Boo Radleys
2/5
Puzzling how Dimery's list singled out an album whose title was borrowed from a jazz masterpiece by another artist without including said masterpiece in the selection. Add to this the fact that The Boo Radleys are such a *strange* band, and it feels like the "1001 albums..." book got its priorities all wrong, once again...
"Strange" is not necessarily a flaw in the case of The Boo Radleys, by the way. You can't blame them for constantly trying to think out of the box so as to offer something truly *original*. There are not many notable records from music history that mix shoegaze, psychedelic rock and britpop with reaggae/dub in any relatively cohesive way, and I imagine that this mix of genres, along with the ambition displayed in *Giant Steps*, is what impressed music critics at the time.
Yet this record is far from being *flawless*. First, it's too long. A little self-editing would have probably been welcomed here. At more than an hour of running time, ambition becomes sheer hubris in many parts of this LP. Secondly, Martin Carr sometimes has nice ideas when it comes to pure songwriting shenanigans (at least in terms of concept--see the My Bloody Valentine-inspired "Spun Around", for instance, or closer "The White Noise Revisited"). But unfortunately Carr is no Brian Wilson, contrary to what his PR agents would have you believe when this record came out. As a consequence, memorable hooks, choruses and melodies are not numerous enough, and I can't help shake the feeling that sophisticated arrangements were mostly used to hide such an obvious flaw. And all of this gives the impression that The Boo Radleys were a little pretentious at the time, maybe... Finally, Sice's lead vocals are too timid and understated to seal the deal for me. When your band is bent on making such a grand statement, you need a little more conviction, even if said band is partly self-deluded about the whole thing... Ironically, the vocals would improve a lot on the next album, *Wake Up Boo!*. Too bad the latter reconciled with simpler, more straighforward ideas mostly through a derivative, major-chord and horn-section driven cheesefest. The timing is always wrong with this act. Or is it with me? 🙃
Speaking of other Boo Radleys albums, it seems to me that the band sounded far more "natural" for their debut LP than in anything that followed it. Yes, *Everything's Alright Forever* was more "classic" shoegaze. But at least Carr's reach didn't exceed his grasp there. As a matter of fact, it is a very nice listen, and I'm even tempted to buy it. In a similar genre, that debut album might even beat Ride's *Nowhere* out of the park for me--and yes I know the latter is considered as a "masterpiece". But sometimes, "professional critics" get it all wrong, don't they?
Number of albums left to review: 618
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 186
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 86
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 117 (including this one)
Marvin Gaye
4/5
Let's get it on... and on and on. What I find very weird about this classic Marvin Gaye LP is that it can either be played as background music where each track sounds basically the same, OR be played as an album you really need to pay attention to--which means that it's sort of an intellectual exercise, far from its avowed goal to be music "to make love to your old lady by". As other folks pointed out here, the sensuality displayed in those very similar tunes is a little too on-the-nose for today's standards anyway. What's left is the spotless execution, production and performance. 4/4, if only for this.
Number of albums left to review: 617
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 187 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 86
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 117
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
5/5
I could *swear* I have already seen this masterpiece pop up on this app. It's what they call a bad case of... déjà vu, is it not? Guess it's because this document about a turning point in American music history *had to* be in this list. And I knew it already. Whoever couldn't see it coming needs to dig further into the past. It's one of the ways you can better understand the present moment.
Number of albums left to review: 616
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 188 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 86
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 117
Sarah Vaughan
3/5
Sarah Vaughan had a wonderful voice, it's undeniable. But as sweet and warm as it was, the performances recorded for this album didn't have the painful emotion of Billie Holiday's frail timbre, nor did they have the sheer genius of Nina Simone's arrangements. I like female jazz singers when they have a strong flair for the dramatic, what are you gonna do?🤷♂️
Besides, here is another instance of this list singling out a live album so as to put the spotlight on an "important" artist, instead of choosing a studio recording. Which, to me, tends to signify that said artist didn't make any significant strides in the LP format, contrary to most acts popping up in this app on a daily basis.
Number of albums left to review: 615
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 188
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 86
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 118 (including this one)
The xx
4/5
Talking about Croft and Simn, that New York Times critic said it better than anyone else in the rock criticism business: "Though they're singing to each other, it rarely feels intimate", he wrote, "more like two shy teenagers, eyes cast downward, awkwardly talking to the ground". But even though this take was intended as snarly criticism, this is exactly what many people found appealing about this act at that time, very ironically.
Did such minimalist act age well? The jury's still out on this one. But 2009 was such a poor year for music anyway (one of the poorest years ever, to be honest) that I guess the xx's unobtrusive minimalism was a breath of fresh air at least.
Number of albums left to review: 614
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 189 (including this one?)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 86
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 118
Morrissey
3/5
I'm bummed. Not that this album doesn't have a few highlights that make it worthwhile to listen to (opener "You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side" and closer "Tomorrow" easily come to mind here). That being said, I just can't bring myself to forgive the Moz for pandering to the far-right parties of his country these days (all those UKIP and Brexiter morons of all stripes can eat shit, as far as I'm concerned...). Besides, one should never forget his unsavory public statements about immigrants "threatening" pure Englishness, or his incredibly dumb take about the slaughter of those Norwegian youngsters by a crazy far-right lunatic. And all those rancid "ideas" now polluting his mind (along with our eyes and ears) started here, with "The National Front Disco", the fourth track of this LP...
Make no mistake, " The National Front Disco" is still a nice track, at least musically speaking. Yet it's quite a problematic one when it comes to its lyrics. And *now*, a few decades later, it's pretty clear that Morrissey's subsequent allegations that those admittedly ambiguous lyrics didn't mean he condoned fascist ideas were just a goddamn *act*. The man's downward spiral into despicable political stances started here, enough said.
To be clear, my point is not to "cancel" the artist, whatever that word means. Nothing can erase the impact Morrissey has had on modern music, thanks to his tenure with the Smiths. But just like Kanye West, another "problematic" artist whose albums I really, really loved once, you can't take the stupid stuff that now comes out of his mouth lightly. So I would be lying if I said that listening to his solo albums doesn't make me feel queasy and ill-at-ease (that very same feeling I have with Kanye's records now).
"Tomorrow,
Will It really come?
And if it does come?
Will I still be human"
Not in the full meaning of the word, Steven Patrick Morrisey, not in the full meaning of the word. But maybe becoming a sad caricature of who you once were is only "human" after all...
Now add to this the fact that *Your Arsenal* is not a perfect record anyway, and here's how you can use his spot in this list for an artist that would deserve it much more than him. It's not easy to step in Johnny Marr's shoes anyway--not that the Moz's collaborators didn't try hard to do a good enough job on this one.
Still giving an incredibly generous 3/5 grade to this album because of the music and songwriting, which is good overall, even if not always stellar. And as for half of those 3/5 albums, I won't include this LP in my own list of keepers. Let the hardcore fans talk about it on their own. As far as I'm concerned, I'm moving on.
Number of albums left to review: 600
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 190
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 90
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 120 (including this one)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
5/5
Messy and yet often wonderfully melodic, this album paved the way for a lot of new popular "indie" stuff in the 2000s, for better or for worse. This record, produced by TV On The Radio"s Dave Sitek, is indeed one of the few in that period that can still hold its own today. The New York scene of that day and age is often remembered for The Strokes and Interpol, but surely, early Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the third "trendy" band in the city that had something truly special at the time. Instant hits such as "Y Control", " Maps", "Date With The Night" and "Pins" prove it. Too bad Yeah Yeah Yeahs quickly lost their rough edges after this great debut, when they elected for a cleaner sound that doesn't suit them that well. Not that this ulterior development takes anything away from *Fever To Tell*, mind you. 4,5/5, rounded up to 5.
Number of albums left to review: 599
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 191 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 90
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 120
The Doors
4/5
"Waiting For The Sun" is one of my favorite songs by The Door. And the fact that this track is *not* on the album that bears its name has always confused me somehow. The *Waiting For The Sun* LP is a lesser album, by the way--only this one here, the self-titled debut and *LA Women* should be considered for such a list (with maybe *Strange Days* as well, at least if there's enough room for it at the end).
The rest of the tunes in *Morrisson Hotel* is very good too, even if not as stellar as this psychedelic, catchy romp I've just mentioned. Oh, and that photograph on the album cover is iconic as well, which doesn't hurt. 4/5 stars.
Number of albums left to review: 598
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 192 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 90
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 120
Talking Heads
5/5
The 'Heads were just an album away from penning and recording their magnum opus when they released the already wonderful *Fear Of Music*. And you can feel it. Byrne was at the peak of his game during that period, and helped by Eno's production ideas, his band were firing on all cylinders.
Only three tracks are *a little* underwhelming in this LP, first "Life During Wartime", to a certain extent (never understood why they picked that one as a single--it's very "linear", melodically speaking), but more specifically "Animals" and "Electric Guitars", very weird even for the band's usual standards. Fortunately, those latter two tracks are sandwiched between the perfect ballad "Heaven" and the evocative and moody "Drugs", two of my absolute favorite Talking Heads tracks. So the peaks are more significant than the valleys on side two. And the album is insanely great overall.
4,5/5, rounded up to 5 here.
Number of albums left to review: 597
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 193 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 90
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 120
The Offspring
2/5
The mere fact that The Offspring is in this list and NOFX isn't perfectly encapsulates what's so goddamn wrong with Dimery's book sometimes. Commercial success is definitely favored over artistic merits once in a while. Usually, punk rock isn't too plagued with that sort of 'commercial concern', which makes a lot of punk albums in the list relevant. But here, it's pretty much the opposite that's going on... And it's quite frustrating.
Just so you know, I really tried to listen to the album with fresh new ears, but this didn't really change my initial assessment of this record (and band) when it came out: because that thing's not so good, is it? To be clear, the problem is not merely that the band's music was way overrated by my generation. The problem was that as a songwriter, Dexter Holland was just a shrewd, cynical, opportunistic fox, and it shows.
Never bought that pretense that the band didn't see their success coming, by the way. Everything in *Smash*'s singles is formatted so that said success could happen. And by "formatted", I mean *ripped off* from other 'trendy' bands at the time. Which gives an interesting subtext to some of Holland's lyrics. Are his claim that he's not a "trendy asshole" on the song "Smash" to be taken ironically, for instance? You tell me.
I mean, how can you listen to *Self-Esteem* and *Gotta Get Away* and NOT see that it's a soulless attempt to replicate's Nirvana's formula? 'Soulless' being the key word to remember here. I know Kurt Cobain himself ripped off a few bands to create his timeless songs--so I guess there's still that to take into account--but at least he ripped off arcane stuff released by Killing Joke or Boston a decade or more before *Nevermind*. He didn't rip off a band that had a massive breakout success a couple of years ago. Well, Holland and his band did.
OK, Cobain readily admitted that he also ripped off Pixies, not a breakout success into the mainstream at the time, but still a very important band. But at least Kurt brought his own subtle and elegant vocal harmonies to the whole thing. That's the reason most Nirvana songs sound great on an acoustic guitar and ones by The Offspring don't. What did Holland bring to that template, in comparison? To me, he brought a few simplistic, hackneyed melodies signalling his thing was all about style, not *substance*. And how much more cynical and opportunistic than that can you get, huh?
About Dexter Holland's "opportunistic" tendencies, a quick sidenote: when the Nirvana tap petered out, The Offspring had to find other sources of inspiration, obviously. For a subsequent hit single a few years after *Smash*, Holland thus elected to rip off The Beatles' "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da"! How can you rip off The Beatles and choose one of their WORST SONGS EVER??? (instead of their many marvels)... Oh I have the answer: because it annoyingly lingers in people's heads, just like most of the famous songs recorded by The Offspring. Checks out. If enough people remember said tune--even if it's annoying to an extent--a lot of folks in general audiences will buy the damn thing anyway. Simple, eh?
To return to *Smash*, it's got a couple of other memorable tracks at the start of the record, "Nitro' and "Bad Habit", and they're more in line with what the Epitaph roster was doing at the time. So I guess those two tracks are less opportunistic than the singles, at least. Speaking of singles, cheek-in-tongue "Come Out And Play" is not so bad, to be honest, but it got overplayed on the radio at the time the album was released, so I can't listen to it anymore. And apart from those few highlights I've listed here, everything else is pretty lame. There's even a mandatory ska-punk track on side two. Just in case that other trend might be useful to sell a few more unit shifters to a few more 'alternative' kids out there, I imagine. Ugh. 🙄
One last thing: Dexter's voice is quite grating in many parts of the record, even in the few good tracks in it. 'Punk' means raw or rough, I get that. Yet, there's also a whiny quality to his vocals that actually goes against the intended energy he displays while singing those songs. Maybe that whiny grain made the whole thing palatable for young mainstream audiences at the time, I don't know. To be fair, those sorts of 'flat', whiny vocals were to be found in many other skate-punk albums released around those years, so this is probably only a matter of personal taste here. But mine says such vocals didn't age well anyway.
Holland is still a very talented man, don't get me wrong. It takes a lot of skills to manage the sort of shrewd success he's had with The Offspring. Besides, I've just read on Wikipedia that the man has many other assets I would never have imagined from a guy like him. He's a plane pilot, an entrepreneur, a charity fundraiser, a cook, and a science researcher. The last area is the most impressive endeavor, by the way. Working in molecular biology to potentially help find a vaccine against AIDS is worthy of all the praise you can give someone. So who cares if you never wrote a *truly* essential album when you were younger (and yet had a lot of success with it)?
Trying hard to end on a *positive* note here. But it's not enough to make me include this LP in my own list. 2/5 for the purposes of such a list (which means 7/10 for a more general assessment: 5+2). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 596
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 193
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 90
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 121 (including this one)
The Afghan Whigs
2/5
Still ten times more interesting than Pearl Jam, in a somewhat close nineties "alternative" genre. Yet still awkward and/or hackneyed in many places. A lot of the vocal melodies in the livelier tracks sound the same, Greg Dulli's attempts to infuse soul/r'n'b inflexions in his performance sometimes miss the mark, and the lyrics are, well, an acquired taste. I won't make the mistake many listeners did in this group when they confused author and narrator so as to label Dulli as an "incel"--*Gentlemen* is close to a concept album after all, and it's not because the story it tells has disturbing moments that Dulli should automatically be considered as a problematic figure.
A few words about the artwork: I really like it. It tells the exact same story this album does with a picture that's beautifully shot and staged. People who find it "gross" lack subtlety. The point of the picture is NOT to place children in "adult" situations. The point is to express how immature, fragile and lost many adults are when it comes to sound relationship. And how their inner children get hurt as a result.
Interestingly, I've also listened to Afghan Whigs' last LP, *How Do You Burn?*, released in 2022, and I thought it was far better than this supposed landmark of theirs. The thing is, this is not the nineties anymore, so very few people noticed that other record. Context and zeitgeist are often important to understand the artistic success that an album is. But sometimes, I wonder if those things are not blurring the picture somehow, at least when you want to assess a band's discography.
As a conclusion, *Gentlemen* is not utterly bad, but I don't really see why it should be considered as an "essential' album. 2/5 for the purposes of this list (which means 7/5 for more general purposes: 5+2). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 595
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 193
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 90
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 122 (including this one)
Leonard Cohen
4/5
There's one of the 5 stars reviews in here that perfectly explains how this album of Leonard Cohen, released only 17 days before his passing, is the "lyrical" summation of all the grand themes he dealt with during his life. And I don't really see what I could add to that great review that would be meaningful. God, love, lust, death... The sheer magic of the title track says it all. A *dark* sort of magic, yes indeed. But magic nonetheless. Cohen's deep gravelly voice over those half-scary, half-angelic backgroud vocals is simply incredible by the way. If this doesn't send shudders down your spine, I don't know what will.
There's just one thing, though. The music in this album is very good, but on average, it's less stellar than what Leonard had composed decades earlier. Half of said music was composed by others, by the way, but I guess you can't blame a frail old man about to die for asking collaborators to complete the task at hand...
This situation allows me to address one common misunderstanding when it comes to Leonard Cohen: indeed, people often focus on his wonderful lyrics, but they also forget to mention how his arrangements and chord changes are as moving and effective as his words in his songs. Cohen proves it again here, with two absolute gems he penned all by himself for *You Want It Darker*; "Treaty" and "Steer The Way". The terrific chord progression and minor-major modulations on the latter, enhanced by a mischievous violin, should be studied in every songwriting schools out there.
Most of the music Cohen didn't write for this album was composed by Patrick Leonard, who, believe or not, once co-wrote some of Madonna's most famous hit singles during the eighties (the mere fact that there is now a direct connection between Madonna and Leonard Cohen is mind-boggling to say the least). And fortunately Patrick brought his A-game on two songs in this LP: the admirable title-track, that we mentioned earlier, but also "Travelling Light". When in this one Cohen wrily whispers "I used to play one mean guitar"--while looking back on his life--there's a rush of memories and emotions that will surely flood you, at least if you know a little about the man's long career.
So all in all, what we have here is four tracks that can easily rival with anything Cohen wrote and perfomed from the late sixties to the early nineties. Which is quite a feat given how legendary some of those earlier songs are. Of course, it's very hard to compete with such a brilliant past. Under that light, *You Want It Darker* will have to wait a little before being fully included in my own list of essential albums, contrary to *Songs Of Leonard Cohen*, *Songs Of Love And Hate*, or *I'm Your Man* (I'll first need to check if there's enough room for it at the end).
But waiting right in front of the gates of heaven is, after all, the sort of situation that would have made the Canadian poet smirk a little. And I know he went through those gates, eventually. So I imagine he won't hold too much of a grudge against me, if ever we meet up there one day...
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums. Which means 8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 594
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 193
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 91 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 122
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
5/5
Has some of the most moving folk songs Neil Young has ever ever written--"Thrasher", "Pocahontas", "Ride My Llama" and "Sail Away", all gathered on the first side.
Plus, the symmetrical structure of the album--folk numbers on side one, rock'n'roll tracks on side two, with the stellar cut "Powderfinger" transitioning between the two--makes this LP a very interesting listen. Of course, said "rockers" on side two might sound a little awkward to more modern ears today. Yet I guess that sort of clumsiness is now part of the charm of Crazy Horse anyway. As many reviewers have already pointed out, Young's bandmates have never been the best musicians in the world, but their straightforward, no-nonsense way to perform his livelier songs bring out what's so idiosyncratic about them. Those rock tracks wear their hearts on their sleeve, in a way. And that's a quality that many supposedly more accomplished musicians sometimes never reach during their careers.
Finally, the two versions of "My My, Hey Hey" /"Hey Hey, My My" opening and closing the proceedings on this LP effortlessly display stuff that only rock legends are capable of. It's an infectious earworm, here transcended by the subject matter of its lyrics: it's possible to get old and show empathy for the next generation--all you need is to put yourself in their shoes. Plus, the guitar riff on the electrical version is just *huge*, paving the way for many other indie and "alternative" wonders to come.
Released right after punk rock took over the world, *Rust Never Sleeps* is also a historical document to understand the cultural conversation that was going on at the time--one that could actually be translated to more subsequent generations and their own concerns. By itself, it's not a punk album. But it gives an external point of view on the whole thing. It's a point of view that's a little naive, I'll grant you that. Yet it's one that's beautiful, sensitive and a little provocative as well.
Speaking of other generations... Yeah, fuck Joe Rogan. The latter only represents a sad pack of reactionary mindfucks that clearly are in the minority in younger populations, as "vocal" as those poor sods supposedly are online. History will not judge those goons well, you can bet your cowboys boots on that. Obviously, Neil Young has become a cantakerous grumbler himself in his old age (many old folks do, after all), and the way he opposed Rogan during that whole Spotify showdown thing was relatively naive as well (not to mention *limited* in its assessment of the whole debate around streaming apps every serious music fan should have right now). Yet I can only applaud Neil for bringing to the fore how greedy and cynical the Spotify executives were, and trying to do something about it at least. It was a matter of "principle". And I'm glad he stood by it until the end.
Going back to *Rust Never Sleeps*, it's not the "best" solo record Young has ever released (this title should go to either *Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere*, *After The Gold Rush* or *Harvest*). But it still ticks all the boxes of what a truly "essential" album is Artistic concept, execution/performance, songwriting, melodies, lyrics, cultural impact... It's an unmitigated success in each of those areas. 4.5/5, here rounded up to 5.
Number of albums left to review: 593
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 194
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 91
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 122
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
Given that I have given five stars to *Born To Run*, I can only give five stars for this one as well: *Darkness In The Edge Of Town*, released three years after Springsteen's magnum opus, is a welcome evolution of the man's artistry and overall sound after all, and the stellar "Badlands", "The Promised Land", "Streets Of Fire", "Prove It All Night" and the title track are enough evidence that you can't seriously talk about the Boss without mentioning this LP. Other cuts on the record are pretty impressive too, by the way: "Candy's Room" is for instance a criminally underrated gem, its infectious glockenspiel riff being one of the top best arrangements ever penned by the Boss in my book, and its overall instrumentation being also grittier and harder than your usual Springsteen song. And so is the instrumentation and performance on "Abel Raised A Cain"... You can sense that in 1978 the advent of punk rock did have a relative influence on the sort of epic blue-collar songcraft displayed by Bruce. Which makes total sense. Here is the sort of subtle ingredient that made this record age like fine wine, contrary to other LPs with Springsteen's name on it. And it's what makes it an "essential" album, along with *Born To Run* and *Nebraska*.
Number of albums left to review: 592
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 195
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 91
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 122
B.B. King
3/5
I'm in two minds about that one. On the one hand, I tend to think that inclusing live albums on such a list is "cheating* a little. The next step would be to include compilation albums, and then the meaning of this list would go down the drain (even if it would allow me to include The Buzzcocks' *Singles Going Steady*, lol).
On the other hand, " Live At The Regal" sounds like a perfect example of what BB King could do as a performer. I'm not a huge blues fan, you see--it's hard for me to forget that the genre uses the same chords over and over again, and I have a better attention span for arrangements and overall harmonies than I have for noodling guitar solos. But for someone like me, who is not a big fan of the blues, this sort of live album is actually the perfect entry point into it (just as Albert King's *Born Under A Bad Sign* is, even if that other legendary record is closer to *rhythm*'n' blues than this one is).
To put it in a nutshell, what makes *Live At Regal* such a good entry point into blues is how "driven" this whole recording is (to the point where I found the crowd noises a little annoying sometimes--you don't need them so loud in the mix to get excited, really). I was for instance suprised by the high octane energy of the opener on this LP. I was moved by the sheer emotion of its closer. And everything in between sounded nice, even if it was a bit repetitive sometimes. BB King's voice is as devilishly suave as his guitar playing is suavely devilish. And this transcends the many constraints blues usually imposes on its performers...
So I guess I'm gonna give this live album the benefit of the doubt... 3/5 for the purposes of this list. Which means 8/10 for more general purposes (3+8).
Number of albums left to review: 591
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 195
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 92 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 122
The Smashing Pumpkins
5/5
If only for "Today" (instantly catchy), "Cherub Rock" (loud, heavy and menacing) and "Disarm" (one of the most heartfelt ballads ever penned this side of the nineties), *Siamese Dreams* deserves to be on this list. And the rest is great as well. Tortured and tender and terrific. Teenage angst at its finest, very different from Nirvana's version of it, but effective in its own right.
The only issue with this LP is that Billy Corgan and co. could have used a little self-editing to reduce its length and make it even more striking. That sort of issue will have larger consequences on their next full-length release *Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness*, a double-CD/triple-LP extravaganza that will stretch the boundaries of what you can expect from double-albums, for better or for worse. Here, this is merely the case of a couple of songs being a little too long.
Such admittedly minor flaws have an obvious point of origin. Billy Corgan is a great musician, and he was a talented songwriter during the nineties, but his Achilles' Heel is his overinflated ego, and this always has had consequences on the way his albums are constructed/designed/conceptualized (the last--and frankly ridiculous--example of this is that triple release he is currently going through...). Fortunately, the side-effects of Corgan's ego were not this *dire* on *Siamese Dreams*. Mostly because his songs were great at the time, no matter how long they were...
Corgan also has a very distinctive, peculiar voice. I'm pretty fine with it, by the way, and if I understand how said voice can be grating for some ears, I still think it is one of the key ingredients that helped put the Smashing Pumpkins in the nineties 'alternative' map. So it's a good thing. As self-indulgent as the two albums I've quoted in this review are, The Smashing Pumpkins actually deserved to be noticed, thanks to the timeless rockers and ballads on those records. So it's no wonder both LPs appear on this list (and mine). Because they are inseperable "siamese" albums themselves, are they not?
How unwittingly "meta" is that, huh?
My grade for *Siamese Dreams*: 4.5/5, rounded up.
Number of albums left to review: 590
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 196 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 92
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 122
The Rolling Stones
5/5
Is this one Rolling Stones record *slightly* overrated? Sure it is. But like all *good* double albums, it takes its sweet time exploring different moods and atmospheres, and offers a unique listening experience, as many bigger fans of the Stones than I am have already pointed out, and this for decades. So I'd say the assets displayed by this one can easily make you dismiss its flaws and "soft spots" (i.e. an handful of blues jam sessions and a couple of covers that are more a tribute to Jagger, Richards and co. as performers than they are a tribute to them as songwriters...)
Besides, there are enough highlights in *Exile...* to get any rock fan excited: " Rocks Off" and its blaring and joyous horns, "Tumbling Dice" and its exhilarated backing vocals, "Happy" and its sleazy guitar riff, "Shine A Light" and its elated performance... Or closer "Soul Survivor" and its classic Rolling Stones feel...
It's also interesting to see how this double LP is craftfully and smartly designed, behind the first-glance impression of a work where the let's-throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-lands-where ethos supposedly prevailed. Each one of those four sides has a distinct overall sound and thematic groundwork, actually. Beyond the highlights scattered on all sides here and there, my favorite part is side two, thanks to its moving ballads going from country "Sweet Virginia" and rhythm'n'blues-influenced "Torn And Frayed" to the instantly catchy and topically relevant "Sweet Black Angel", not to forget "Loving Cup"'s eventual return to rhythm and blues.
So yep, *Exile On Main Streets* is probably one notch under *Beggars Banquet*, *Let It Bleed* or *Sticky Fingers* (well, it has a less striking collection of songs than the latter album, that's for sure!). But it's still a 5/5 record if we stick to the avowed goals of such a list (like... maybe it's a 4.7 or a 4.8 album... But who cares about the decimals at this point, huh?). Not everything in an album is about individual songs anyway, the overall mood and artistic intent matters too. And the ones The Rolling Stones had in mind for this double LP can rock your socks off for ages!
Number of albums left to review: 589
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 197 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 92
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 122
The Velvet Underground
5/5
I think this banana is gonna get peeled until the end of human history. Is there anything that can be said about this masterpiece that hasn't been said a thousand times before? First, it's an incredibly influential record, whose ripple effects can still be felt on a lot of the music released today, more than 50 years after the fact (when it was indeed *underground*, and ignored by most music listeners). But most of all, it's an incredibly *versatile* record, that can adapt to settings and environments that are totally at odds with each other. You can play this legendary debut album on a "Sunday morning" as you drink a cup of hot chocolate and watch the rain fall outside from your living room--wearing a comfy old sweater and daydreaming until the album stops playing... And you can play this record on a Saturday night while "waiting for your man" in a drug-fuelled/booze-propelled party taking place in the flat rented by some of your wildest friends. And the craziest thing is that, as this album goes on, a bit of the "opposite" atmosphere will surreptitiously seep into the locale and circumstances of the place you are in. Odd feelings will disrupt your sunday routine. A sense of calm and peacefulness will be experienced as the rest of your friends keep on getting drunk or high. It's not so much that the record adapt to its settings. It's the *settings* that can adapt to the record. Such is the sheer genius of this LP, and one of the many reasons for its timeless appeal.
5/5, obviously. And a mandatory listen whenever you travel to NYC. When time, place, cultural history and music can be condensed into a single artefact, you know you're dealing with an "essential" work of art.
Number of albums left to review: 588
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 198 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 92
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 122
Spiritualized
1/5
If ever there was a contest to pick the most self-indulgent, "overrated" act in music history, Spiritualized would have a great opportunity to win the cup. And the first three quarters of this debut album prove it time and again. Self-indulgence is not even a passing flaw here, it's the whole "raison d'être" behind the band's existence. Which makes such claims that they produced so-called "essential" albums quite dubious, if you wanna know about my personal opinion.
Let's go into specifics: in *Lazer Guided Melodies*, Spiritualized played neo-psychedelia without the bite or sense of fun of a Brian Johnston Massacre. They wrote middle-of-the-road rock songwriting without the live energy of The Stone Roses. They aped "motorik" kraut without the relentless drive of a Neu!. And they designed electronic-oriented rock without the groove of a Primal Scream... In other words, they didn't do much, in spite of all the energy they spent.
Do you think I'm harsh here? OK, answer this question first: what has Jason Pierce to offer, really--apart from using his bland, timid voice to mumble shapeless syllables and tasteless, unoriginal melodies *over the same three frigging chords from one track to the next*??? Is the title of that debut LP supposed to be ironic? If that's the case, the joke is unfunny. Those melodies are not "lazer-guided", they are on automatic pilot mode. And consequently, almost none of them are memorable.
Sure, most of the time, the music itself sounds extremely "spacey".. But there's no clear intent in it, no clear throughline that could send you to the stars and beyond. The fuel on Pierce's rocket goes "pop" and then stays stuck on the ground. And as he and his band trip out in the sterile, artificial soundscapes they're so keen on creating around themselves, all you can do is watch them from the ground with a dumfounded look on your face. I can't see "outer space" in the backdrop of their drug-addled routine, only a damn Hollywood green screen.
By the way, and speaking of "drugs", I don't need to take heroin or LSD to turn this album into a "good" one. The album should make me *feel* like I'm on heroin or LSD *without me having to take the damn drugs*. There lies the *huge* difference...
I can sense devil's advocates already preparing their arguments here. Something in the likes of: "You're tone-deaf: listen to all the gorgeous arrangements Pierce wrote and performed!" Well, I'm not denying the man has a keen ear for sonic details, in spite of his laziness and lack of imagination when it comes to pure songwriting. The thing is, Pierces piles up those arrangements on top of one another without ever considering which ones should be emphasized so that his music succeeds in leaving a lasting impression for most audiences. You might retort that it's my fault, that I should pay more attention to the layers and layers of sounds he and his bandmates recorded. But, to me, it's *their* fault. It's their godamn job to select the best elements in a piece of music so as to make them stand out. If everything is buried in the mix--every little guitar inflexion, every synth drone, every tabla and echo and effect and whatnot--should I be blamed for not letting myself go? If no real epiphany, no real climax gives meaning your repeated melodic lines overstuffed by so many details around them, should I blame my own expectations? Or conversely, is the "product" at fault here? You tell me. In the meantime, here's a quick reminder: less is more, very often. And very often, this record forgets that. It's the drugs Pierce is selling that are the problem, not the drug-addict that I am (read: "music-addict").
Everything I've said so far is about the "three first quarters" of the album, remember? Well, here's what I'm thinking about the last quarter: in the middle of "Shine A Light", something clicked at last, and it was a welcome surprise. The climax of this track is excellent, and it's as if the LP came alive at the eleventh hour. Right after this climax, "Angel Sigh" was also a pretty convincing cut. The walls of noisy guitars on those two songs woke me up, I imagine... But they're not the main reasons those two tracks work out and the other ones don't for me...
Sure, those two songs display the sort of noisy-yet-melodic shoegazy stuff that a later post-rock act such as Mogwai--criminally left aside in Dimery's list--will later accomplish (and this even if Mogwai performed such "walls of noise" ten times better than Spiritualized). Yet, as welcome as those electric guitar shenanigans are, those two tracks are actually good mostly because Pierce finally decided which arrangements in them should be their *true* backbone (remember what I said earlier abou "arrangements"?). In "Shine A Light", it's the horn section, and in "Angel Sigh" it's the cellos. Both are hypnotic, intense, and great. And they serve the songs right, thus saving this record from a 0/5 grade, as far as I'm concerned.
Unfortunately, a couple of good tracks towards the end can't *fully* redeem this album for me. The last cut, *200 Bars* even emphasizes what is generally wrong with Spiritualized's music in my book. Yep, this piece is too goddamn long (100 bars too long, by my count), and it seems that its writer/composer knows it. Which why the whole thing is even mentioned in the lyrics...
I can appreciate the self-deprecatory, tongue-in-cheek irony here, don't get me wrong. But when the line between earnestness and self-parody is so thin, as it is the case here, it's no surprise that a lot of folks in an audience start raising their eyebrows. Maybe it means that you're not exactly mastering what it is you want your music to say. Maybe it means you're favoring "style" over "substance", and start to lose the thread that could tell you which is which. And maybe--just maybe--it means that you're an excellent musician and creator, but that when it comes to this list, you should leave room for even more stellar creators. 1001 is a finite number after all.
Number of albums left to review: 588
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 198
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 92
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 123 (including this one)
Gorillaz
3/5
Back when Gorillaz was fun and fresh, as patchy and a little uneven this debut album is sometimes. Damon Albarn, here helped by Dan The Automator, sure had a great "concept" with this idea of a virtual band. And some of the tracks slap, "Clint Eastwood" being for instance an all-time great.
The thing is, other cuts on this record sound a little too gimmicky, and some of the electronic elements or rappings displayed haven't aged that well. Tempted to include the album nonetheless, since it documents the zeigeist of the early naughts in ways most other LPs then released don't. Maybe the naughts don't deserve to be so well documented anyway. You tell me... It was a time when music went through such a constant "Re-hash" (wink-wink) that you sometimes had the feeling the best of it was behind. Fortunately, it wasn't, because things then got better--listen to a lot of the great albums released these days... But that's a story for another time, kiddies. Maybe I'll draw a cartoon to tell it as well, one of these days...
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list (which means 8.5 for more general purposes: 5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: a little less than 600, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
4/5
*The Joshua Tree* is the perfect example of a good album that just missed being great by a hairline. It opens with three legendary tracks suggesting this is the band's magnum opus. To be fair, many hardcore fans of U2 believed it was indeed a magnum opus at the time it came out, but go only a couple of years ahead, and it quickly dawned upon you the album didn't age that well, at least with everything that was happening in the music world at the turn of the nineties...
The thing is, everything after the first three "hits" in *The Joshua Tree* sounds like a *relative* letdown today. Good songwriting overall, but the dynamics of the album never make you reach the heights you started with again. What you have instead is Bono literally preaching to his flocks, inspired by Americana and its grand, self-serious themes. And depending on my mood, I can grow a little weary of such a routine...
U2 made two other very good albums during their long career: *War* and *Achtung Baby* (plus *Zoopropa*, a weird outlier not worthy of this list, yet still containing some interesting "experiments" in it). And each of those records pretty much have the same relative flaws and undeniable assets: they can boast of legendary tracks that will remembered for a long time, but those tunes are also mixed with cuts that are only *good*, and not truly stellar. Just like for *The Joshua Tree*, those albums are 4/5 LPs for me (they're 9/10 records in a way, but I want to focus on the truly "essential" albums for my own selection, hence why I'm so harsh in my current grading). So I will include the three albums in my list, because we're still talking about an iconic band here. But they'll probably at the bottom of it.
In other words, I'm glad those records were made, and I'm happy for the fans. But I can live *with or without them*, in a way. 😉
Number of albums left to review: 587
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 199 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 93
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 123
Booker T. & The MG's
3/5
One cannot overstate how iconic and peasant to the ear the title track is. But, to be honest, and as open as I can be about sixties music and the cultural milestones they left us with, I'm still having a hard time finding the rest of this album as compelling as its opener. I've tried before, and I will probably try again. But in the meantime, I'm putting this on my "maybe" list...
Number of albums left to review: 586
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 199
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 94 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 123
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
4/5
The Spotify link actually leads to the double-release *Love Song* and *Devotional Songs*, called *Love & Devotion* for that reissue. But given Nustrat Fateh Ali Khan's protean discography, it's not a problem to spend a little more time with him anyway...
I don't know much about the Qawwali school of music Khan was the grand master of, to be honest (I have another NFAK album at home, *Mustt Mustt*--one of his crossover collaborations with Michael Brook--but it's literally been *decades* since I listened to it). And obviously I can't understand the words Nusrat sang. Yet it's funny how "love songs" sounded like genuine "devotional songs" to me (and vice-versa). After I've listened to those two records, I've read some stuff online suggesting the two formats are actually deeply related to each other, so I wasn't that far off the mark, I guess. In a way, "love" and "devotion" are interchangeable here, even if the religious or romantic contexts behind them are not (and Khan would most certainly frown upon me for doing so).
Oddly enough, I tend to prefer the instrumentation and harmonies displayed on *Love Songs*, even if critics more specialized and knowledgeable that I will ever be on the subject singled out *Devotional Songs* as the slightly superior album between the two. Whatever the case may be, it's a great experience to go through them one after the next...
It's always odd to select a little bit of "global" music in a list clearly centered on the Western World. Maybe each continent could have its own 1001 albums list to enhance and praise different musical traditions from all around the world. I don't know if that's a good idea, but that could at least make up for the cultural bias of this particular list. No judging here, it's a bias that I personally share with Dimery and co., even if I know it's a flaw (admittedly an unavoidable one, wherever you come from).
That being said, and to return to this particular double-release, I like this man's voice. And his music is rich, entrancing and far more varied in its harmonies (along with the different emotions it triggers) than the codified tradition it draws from lets on...
4/5. It's the sort of record that makes me eager to learn more, and there are not so many of them, are they? Since I've listened to that double-album, I've dug further, and found many gems by NFAK. Listening to them, I've come to realize that the lush orchestration and the edited versions of *Love And Devotion* have their charms and serve the songs right, but that some of the other live versions of those compositions out there are *way more* intense, just as they are longer and more adventurous. Feeling like I'm falling into a wonderful rabbit hole here. Thanks, Dimery and co. :)
Number of albums left to review: 585
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 199
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 95 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 123
The Who
4/5
This album is a mess, but it's a *beautiful* mess. The overall concept is hilarious and often well-executed, from that iconic cover down to the tongue-in-cheek radio interludes. Admittedly, it's not always an easy listen when you take the whole thing in one sitting: some of the 180-turns are jarring, and a couple of tunes are a little lackluster, especially compared to the highlights scattered throughout the album. Yet this thing is still very interesting and fun to listen to, both as a historical document about the sixties, and as a work of art dealing with consumption society--a topic that's still very relevant 55 years after *The Who Sell Out* came out.
To put it in nutshell, this record is maybe a notch under *My Generation*, *Tommy*, *Who's Next* or even *Quadrophenia*. Yet it's still an "essential" album.
Who's next now? (Sorry, couldn't resist) 😁
Number of albums left to review: 584
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 200 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 95
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 123
Peter Gabriel
3/5
Darting through the technology-driven optimism of the eighties, Peter Gabriel finally reached pop stardom with *So*, his fifth solo album. While his prog-rock chops as a former singer and leader of Genesis could still be felt in various parts of his first four LPs, *So* is the record where Gabriel burnt all the boats behind him so as to fully embrace the commercial aesthetics of his day and age, and this for better or for worse.
The better is obviously the hard-hitting, bass-heavy, rhythm'n'blues-via-Otis Redding-inspired cut "Sledgehammer", a legendary first single that was "horny" in all the senses of the word, and whose infectious melodies and arrangements, aided by an iconic video, blasted the doors of MTV wide open--giving Gabriel access to most American homes at the time. The "better" is also the touching duet with long-time accomplice Kate Bush, "Don't Give Up", and the equally touching "In Your Eyes", with Youssou N'Dour's backing vocals at its end--another stepping stone in the long-standing tryst between Gabriel and "global" music (best exemplified through his later Realworld label). The heartfelt and wide-eyed opening track "Red Rain", propelled by an interesting drum section, is also pretty good (in spite of a dated "gated" sound probably half-ruining said drums for today's ears--more on that later...). In all those songs, Gabriel's vocal performance displays this mix of strength and frailty that makes him such an effective pop singer. Somehow, and in spite of the 80s "cleanliness" of the mix, you can still sense sincere emotions bubbling through the surface. It's in those subliminal cracks in his voice--necessary breaths of fresh air piercing through all the gloss around them.
Also worthy of note is the other duet in the album, "This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds)"--this time with the eccentric, avant-garde singer/spoken-word artist Laurie Anderson. You can find another version of this off-kilter experimental song in Anderson's second LP, *Mister Heartbreak*, by the way. Both mixes and renditions are haunting and evocative--with the *So* version being a little more straightforward, maybe, in keeping with the record's overall aesthetics.
All of this is fine and dandy, but the album is not without a few borderline-unforgiving flaws. First, and we've just touched upon that, even for the good songs there's indeed a typically eighties aseptic sound that takes away all of the potential edges Gabriel could have retained to give more genuine flavors to the whole shebang--and none of that is more direly experienced than on the unashamed cheesefest "Big Time". Even when taking into account the song's sarcastic lyrics about a naive man moving to a city so as to "make it" there, the hackneyed, cliché-laden instrumentation on this one is jarring and, frankly, quite unnecessary. Besides, given how "commercial" Peter Gabriel wanted to sound back in 1986, it's hard to pinpoint the exact level of self-awareness behind those ironic lyrics about the capitalist zeitgeist of the middle eighties. One actually wonders if the line between self-deprecatory impulses and sheer cynicism was all that clear for the British singer at the time. If you go "meta", you should at least make your intentions clearer than any of the ones found there. Otherwise, it's just a silly joke you make on your audience.
Secondly, some of the other tracks pale in comparison to the highlights of the album. Those cuts are admittedly not as horrible as "Big Time", but they still take their toll on the larger picture (this LP only has nine tracks, after all). "That Voice Again" is for instance a meat-and-potatoes eighties pop cut, enhanced by big-production ideas, but not striking enough as a barebones song to leave a lasting impression. "Mercy Street" is supposed to be as moving as "Don't Give Up" and "In Your Eyes", but its lack of clear dynamics and its unobtrusive instrumentation make it rather bland--a flaw that's quite ironical here given that the rest of the album is *not* subdued enough to age that well. And eerie "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)" sounds fine, but it's mostly an instrumental, so it doesn't bring the necessary contents to make up for the album's shortcomings. Besides, one wishes that Gabriel taking the subject of Milgram's dreadful experiments as inspiration for a piece of music could have produced something more substantial, at least. The British singer had already used such "topical issues" for some of his most stellar songwriting in the past (see "Biko", "San Jacinto" or "Family Snapshot"). And under that light, "We Do What We're Told" is a disappointment.
*So*, no pun intended there, what's the real deal with this album, beyond all the official critical praise? Well, let's just say that as far as "magnum opuses" go, Peter Gabriel's fifth LP is far from being a spotless affair. It seems like this album can be best appreciated if you put it back to the context of the middle years of the eighties, which makes it far less "timeless" than a large part of the records singled out in Dimery's list. 1986 did not leave us many lasting masterpieces compared to most other years of the 20th century, by the way--which might have helped *So* become a landmark of sorts, both for its creator and for 80s pop in general. Here is how a generally talented, part-zany, part-ambitious singer/songwriter managed to secure his place under the sun, along with his legacy. Peter Gabriel had what it takes to become a pop star. But did he have what it takes to pen and perform one of the 1001 most "essential" albums of all time? The jury's still out on this one.
3/5 for the purposes of this list (which means 8/10 for more general purposes: 5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 583
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 200
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 96 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 123
Weather Report
3/5
Ever fallen asleep on the couch in front of the telly, to then later wake up to a puzzling or quaint sort of program broadcast in the middle of the night? Usually I would watch the end of that thing in a drowsy state, and then turned off the TV during the... weather report. Just saying.
I've tried listening to that album before, and this is what it made me feel like. At least so far. Funny how I prefer the most renowned musicians of this project (Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter and Jaco Pastorius) when they collaborated with other household names, rether than together. Fretless bass player Jaco Pastoris, expecially, shone bright in Joni Mitchell's *Hejira*, and Zawinul and Shorter's stays with Miles Davis for a couple of significant albums were not forgotten. In comparison, Weather Report (or at least this album, supposed to be their magnum opus) is a far less stellar affair than the collabs evoked up there. Remember that Dimery's list forgot key albums by Charles Mingus, among other jazz staples. So when it comes to this genre, you should take said list with a grain of salt.
That said, you often need time and several listens to give a jazz album a fair chance, and that's exactly what I'm gonna do now. And for once, I will detail the thing track by track, maybe that will help me make up my mind...
"Birdland", a Zawinul composition, relies a little too much on major chords at first. The keyboards sounds favored by Zawinul are cheesy, of course (more on that later, but to sum it up, they're characteristic of the fusion jazz of that time, I guess). Yet at some point there's a mean bridge on those keys that woke me up. And the ending with the clapping hands was a nice and effective touch to take that piece to an unexpected place. Not so bad overall.
"A Remark You Made", another composition by Zawinul, proves that cheesefests are not always created by the sounds used, but mostly through the notes you play. Shorter's solo is supposed to be mellow, but it's mostly boring as hell, going to all the syrupy nooks and crannies this "sugary" piece prompts him to go. But once again, the cut unexpectedly comes alive at the end, and gels around some more complex harmonies. I'm not sure this saves the whole track this time, but I'll take that moment as a positive sign the overall record has somethig meaningful to say.
"Teen Town". Love it. It's tense and tight. This is a Pastorius composition and his playing is pure fire on this one. Love the subtle touches brought by Zawinul and Shorter as well. And I appreciate the track's brevity. Sometimes jazz musicians were too self-indulgent in their build-ups. Here they're not, because there's no build-up per se. Which is suprising, because this is the band's main asset so far.
Speaking of which, I didn't know what to think about the Wayne Shorter-penned "Harlequin" at first, but in keeping with the first two tracks' structures, it's the final climax, triggered by Zawinul's ambiguous chords, that gives its meaning to the whole endeavor. Not so bad, once again.
"Rumba Mamà" is mostly persussion, played live, and this very short track seems to have been included in the record to give writing credits to the drummers/percussionists, Alex Acuña and Manolo Badrena. They're awesome musicians as well, by the way, and not only in this cut dedicated to them.
As a consequence, I started paying more attention to the percussions on the Shorter number that followed, "Palladium". But then the tense interaction between Shorter and Zawinual caught my ear, and I couldn't let go. Wow, what a climax, once again!
Zawinul's "The Juggler" starts out very gently, its keyboard's hooks even reminding me of the sort of instrumentation found in prog-rock ballad. Yet there's no build-up or final crescendo this time--very quietly, the track goes to sleep. I was a little disappointed at first, but you can't say that Weather Report relies on the same exact formula, at least. Should we write their name "Wether" Report?
Closer "Havonius" was composed by Pastorius, and since the latter was far away in the background of the second side tracks, it seems logical that the man takes center stage for the album's finale. I expected a grand climax at the end, and I had one, but somehow, I'm a little disappointed. It all went a little too fast, as if the track only served a "functional" purpose for the album. Then again. it was not that bad a closer.
So, to put it in a nutshell, once you go past the clearly *dated* keyboard sounds, here emphasized by the peculiar effects of the fretless bass, you can find some good moments on the album. The musicianship is amazing, of course, but when it comes to the music itself, there also aesthetic flaws in this 1977 album that have nothing to do with the "sound" that is favored here (the main culprit is "A Remark You Made", and its critical place on the second spot of an eight-track LP takes its toll, honestly). 3/5 for the general purposes of this list, which means 8/5 for more general purposes (musicianship, performance, engineering and other technical aspects, contemporary reception...). Next please.
Number of albums left to review: 582
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 200
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 97 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 123
Prefab Sprout
2/5
"Faron Young", " Appetite", "When Love Breaks Down", "Desire As" and "Blueberry Pies" are essentially good songs, in spite of their dated sophisti-pop instrumentation (some of it aged well, and other parts did not). Yet the trouble is that the rest, more than half of the tracks, actually, is a borefest. And the production values are not the only thing to blame here. The middle part of the record, especially, is a slog. The only thing I can remember well from it is that "Goodbye Lucille/Oh Johnny, Johnny" nonsense, but frankly I wish I could have forgotten that.
An interesting anecdote: just like for Lemonheads' *It's A Shame About Ray*, recent reissues of this album come with an acoustic, "Unplugged-like" session with the band playing the most memorable tunes of this record. *It's A Shame About Ray* was pestered with a clicheed nineties sound, and *Steve McQueen* is plagued by the same sort of thing, but this time from the eighties. I take those types of addition as a confession: "Hey, now we know the production of our supposed 'magnum opus' sucks balls... So here's what it could have felt like in a better world".
Interestingly, the acoustic versions only confirmed what I thought of each of the individual songs. And believe me: even played on an acoustic guitar, "Goodbye Lucille #1" still sucks. 2/5.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: a little less than 600, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
To be perfectly honest with you all, I don't see what I can say about this historical debut that would add anything meaningful about its sheer impact. Using the overall presentation on this app, I'd rather let Reuben Jackson of the Smithsonian Institution speak: "It altered the syntax of the music ... in a way I compare to James Joyce's Ulysses." Then Reuben dropped the mike, I believe.
Oh, just one thing: the CD version (either the US or the UK one), complete with all the singles and bonus tracks recorded during that period, is obviously the edition to own. 5/5
Number of albums left to review: 580
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 201
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 97
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 124
Malcolm McLaren
2/5
It's one of those albums where the story behind the scenes seems more interesting than the music itself. And I reckon that's why all those retrospective reviews keep on singling this one out, in spite of common sense. Rock critics love it when they have a story to tell for a review, don't they? But that doesn't necessarily mean the contents of the record they praise are *that* important.
Here's the thing about Malcom McLaren: there's probably a good reason explaining why his first foray into the music business was being a manager and not being an actual musician. The man had good instincts, don't get me wrong, and this both in the business/promotion area and in the manner he chose his collaborators for this album. Yet as good as the future Art Of Noise collective Trevor Horn, Anne Dudley and J. J. Jeczalik are as producers/music writers, they can't save this record from the hodgepodge that it is at heart.
There are two main issues preventing this LP to be an "essential" one. First, on a couple of pivotal tracks, there's the cheesy, dated imitations of a rap style that was in its infancy at the time--an imitation that has none of the cultural importance and social urgency you can still assign to those early attempts today (See Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster flash, etc.). And then, there's the lack of cohesion of this whole thing: fusing different "global" sounds into a single offering is a valuable idea. But when the execution sounds awkward overall decades later, it means that the concept was not enough. You need a real vision, cruelly lacking in this LP. If at least McLaren had brought something truly personal to that mix, maybe his project would have been worthwhile. But the point is that this project has no identity. Hence why it sounds a little shallow today.
Under that light, accusations of cultural appropriation against what is only a very obscure release today make me smirk. If you say "Malcolm McLaren" to anyone interested in music history, 99% of them will reply: "Oh, yeah. The Sex Pistols manager". They won't reply: " Oh yeah. *Duck Rock*". So if ever McLaren appropriated other people's music for this... *thing*, it didn't bring him very far as an artist anyway. Well, sure, it *did* bring him money, especially since he "forgot" to give credits to some of the other artists he pillaged. But I guess that beef is settled for now. Or is it? Do we only have access to the tip of the iceberg here? Yep, that's a question that looms over the way you can "feel" about this record as well, even if that doesn't necessarily mean the music itself is bad...
Speaking of which, I have to say that "Obatala" was an interesting ambient introduction for the LP, very dreamy, and that "Soweto" sounded quite uplifting, along with a few afro-beat or latin tracks here and there. Those good moments save this record from a 1/5 grade. Not so bad, all things considered: as I see it, a 2/5 grade for the purposes of this list means a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2).
Number of albums left to review: 579
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 201
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 97
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 125 (including this one)
Aerosmith
3/5
Nice artwork. Gives you the idea that you're in for a nice hard rock ride--one that's gonna push all your buttons if you're up to that sort of thing. But does that cover hold all of its promises?
"Back In The Saddle" and "Last Child" have slick main riffs and a mean groove, I'm not gonna lie. "Rats In The Cellar" then accelerates the pace, but to no great effect, unfortunately, this track being a meat-and-potatoes hard boogie rocker that doesn't sound very fresh or original. Besides, Steven Tyler's vocals sound weird on this one, buried in the mix as they are...
"Combination" then heads back to the sleazy rhythms of the first two tracks, yet it doesn't really add anything relevant to the whole picture. "Sick Of The Dog", the track that follows, is far more memorable, though. It's the third highlight of the album, with an effective and lively outro section.
"Nobody's Fault" then attempts to imitate Led Zeppelin--with various results depending on which moment of the song you're talking about, but still quite successfully overall. Next, the boogie routine returns with "Get The Lead Out"--the word "boogie" being even quoted in the lyrics. Said routine can wear your patience a little thin at this point, at least depending on the mileage you have on those types of hard rock shenanigans. However, the outro section, with its long droning sound, is interesting--it's as if Aerosmith chose the option radically opposite to your usual solo-driven conclusion, and it's a choice that aged well, I think.
"Get the Lead Out" is not a highlight, sure, but it's still ten times better than the stinker that pops up right after it, "Lick And A Promise", a cheesy, hackneyed cut going "na na na na" at the end. Quite annoying. And how many times are you gonna repeat the word "boogie", Steven? Finally, "Home Tonight" ticks the necessary hard-rock-ballad box, but the song is unfortunately far less moving and far more mundane and "functional' than stellar "Dream On" on Aerosmith's debut.
Speaking of other Aerosmith recordings, I noticed that *Rocks* is not even among the most popular albums the band released on Spotify. If casual fans don't go to that one that much, does that mean that contemporary rock critics were actually right to point out this record was still some sort of post-breakthrough slump?
Let's see... Four highlights, pretty good but not the stuff legendary rockers are made of, five middling tracks, and one clear stinker... This, out of nine songs, doesn't scream "essential" to me. And side two is quite a slog to go through, even if this LP is short. I'd rather listen to a greatest hits album, to be honest. 3/5. (8/10 for purposes more general than the ones this aims at: 5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: 578
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 201
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 97
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126 (including this one)
Nina Simone
5/5
A gem. "Four Women", " Lilac Wine", "Break Down And Let it All Out", " Wild Is The Wind", "Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair"... And all the other songs... Nina's performance, her arrangements, the range of emotions displayed... 5 stars, obviously.
There is no coincidence here. When stellar performers and songwriters such as David Bowie or Jeff Buckley make legendary covers out of songs taken from the *same* LP, it means that this LP is a keeper. And this doesn't even take into account the way Simone influenced so many other artists through her *other* records...
By the way... The mere fact that there is only *one* Nina Simone album in Dimery's list speaks volumes about its shortcomings. I get that no list like that can satisfy every listener out there, and I still think the *1001 Albums...* is a great tool to discover artists from the past. But when you manage to cram at least three frigging Aerosmith LPs in your list (the band I actually had to review right before *Wild Is The Wind*), the least you can do is get your sh*t together and include *Little Girl Blue*, *I Put A Spell On You* and *Pastel Blues* as well. I mean, seriously...
It would be nice if new editors could refresh and/or update that list. Some of the choices made for the 21st century are already arguable, even if I understand a consensus is always harder to find for more recent albums. But when there are such huge gaps for the sixties, said flaws become unforgivable.
Number of albums left to review: 577
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 202 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 97
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
Black Sabbath
5/5
A little anecdote found in the "Vol. 4" Wikipedia page:
"In the studio, the band regularly had speaker boxes full of cocaine delivered."
I can't think of a better metaphor to describe the sound of this early heavy metal masterpiece. In the end, all the drama and substance abuse behind the scenes was worth it. "Supernaut" has not one but *two* of the best guitar riffs of all time, "Changes" is an incredibly effective and surprisingly tender ballad, nicely supported by a tactful mellotron-and-piano arrangement, and the rest is generally excellent, from "Wheels Of Confusion"'s epic finale to closer "Under The Sun". "Tomorrow's Dream" and "Snowblind" (an ode to that white powder the band loved so much, almost giving its name to this fourth album) are also among the best songs Black Sabbath ever wrote. And "Laguna Sunrise" is one of those evocative ambient instrumentals giving interesting dynamics to their LPs, proving once again that there was more than meets the eye in them.
The first four Black Sabbath albums will be in my final list ("Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" and "Sabotage" won't, but they're still very good records). And, you see, I'm not even a huge metal fan. It's just that sometimes, bands go through a string of three or four subsequent releases that are spotless, leaving an imprint that is as culturally relevant as it is a blast to listen to, even decades after. See also: Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Kraftwerk, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Pavement, PJ Harvey, Radiohead, Deftones, Rage Against the Machine, A Tribe Called Quest, Kendrick Lamar, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai and Low, among others...
Early Black Sabbath is *obviously* in that league. The genre you're into never matters as much as the quality of the music. And when what you're doing sets a template for the decades to come, you're one of the greatest, period. 5/5.
Number of albums left to review: 576
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 203 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 97
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
3/5
Interesting... I usually don't like country music, but I want my own list to include a few examples of it at least. And so far, this record is one of the best candidates in the genre I've heard. Its "two-generations-meet" concept is pretty neat, its atmosphere is enticing--thanks to the spoken word interludes between the songs, showing the players prepping before a lot of those cuts--and well... some of the tracks are great! I know they're covers or standards, but oddly enough that doesn't bother me at all given that this is a collaborative record, with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band merely being the vessel that got all those old C&W stars gathered in one place.
I love many of the arrangements as well: like the final section of "Keep On The Sunny Side"; or the instrumental "Nashville Blues", with its fiddle and banjo fingerpicking going to weird minor-major transitions; or the backing vocals of "Dark As A Dungeon"; or that incredible guitar solo sliding and, well, literally *wailing* about "The End Of The World" in the instrumental bearing the same name... And I'm only talking about the highlights of the first CD here. Obviously, this release is a LOT to take in in one single sitting, but other stuff on the latter part of the record sound promising as well. The fiddle so aptly imitating a train on that "Orange Blossom Special" instrumental makes it a version that I already find as endearing as the one played by Johnny Cash. I was not paying attention to the names of the songs anymore at this point, and it put me... right on track, ha ha.
Speaking of the attention span you need for such a long record... I've noticed that the "pure" bluegrass cuts providing the bulk of the music offer the liveliest and most effective moments here. To me, bluegrass is when "country" becomes a little more interesting, rhythmically and harmonically speaking. Reminds me of when I attended a bluegrass gig when I lived in Indiana for a while, and the blast it was to watch that band play. Wish I could remember those guys' names now...
A few words about the overall "country" umbrella style now... Johnny Cash's deep voice and dark persona will always make him a favorite of mine, and I've got to say that I've changed my mind about Marty Robbins' *Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs*, as I will maybe include it in my own list now. The thing is, I still don't sense anything even remotely interesting is happening in most country albums music-wise. Artists like Buck Owens, for instance, also wrote famous songs in the honky-tonk genre, but apart from those well-known cuts, everything from him (and other artists of that caliber) sounds the same to me.
Yet I'm trying hard to keep an open mind. I guess Dimery's list helps me a lot doing so, at least. Because that Nitty Gritty Dirt Band record popped up today, I have now explored other ones by Willie Nelson, and I must say I was pretty impressed by *Shotgun Willie* and *Phases And Stages*--far more, actually, than Nelson's return from "outlaw country" to the more mainstream, "vanilla" moods of *Stardust*, along with its strings of pop and jazz covers--a record that's also included in the 1001 albums list, by the way... Maybe a sign that I should dig into less "obvious" releases so as to truly enjoy C&W...
But all of this is a story for another time. To return to *Will The Circle Be Unbroken*, I'll give it a somewhat nice score, just because it opened a few gates for me. And for purposes others than the ones of this list, it's at least an 8/10. Being a double-album (triple, actually?) that invites a dozen of other artists to record with the band, said album is a hodgepodge, of course. Yet it's the sort of hodgepodge that makes sense in the end, especially when you want to get acquainted with a whole new genre.
Number of albums left to review: 577
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 203
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 98 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
Depeche Mode
5/5
Even though its title was intended to be ironic, this is the album where Depeche Mode went from being a dark dancefloor-aimed synthpop act to a whole other level. *Music For The Masses* sees Gore, Gahan, Wilder and Fletcher honing their skills to create an LP where the overall mood and dynamics are as important as the individual songs--a lesson they will use to even greater effects in their magnum opus *Violator*, released right after this LP. Gore's evocative songwriting had never been this subtle before, mixing innuendoes about debauchery with religious overtones, all of this above surprising-yet-pristine chord sequences complemented by a wealth of addictive keyboards hooks. And Gahan's performance reaches the soulfullness required to transcend such stellar writing. Highlights abound: epic opener "Never Let Me Down Again", lively "Strangelove", the ambiguous yet poignant synth ballad "Little 15", the driven and aptly-named "Behind The Wheel" or the angsty, existential "Nothing"... And between them, none of the other tracks disappoints, each one of them tying the whole thing into a neat package. It's like watching the rays of the sun piercing through an overcast sky: you can go through a sense of foreboding while still clinging for hope as you listen to those tunes. It's as if lust, impulse, stoicism and melancholy were all fighting for your soul, none of them ever having the final say or the upper hand. It's both dreadful and incredibly beautiful. Gothic yet naive. "Pop" while still being uncompromising most of the time. When the hectic arpeggios of "Pimpf" conclude the album you're still trying to make sense of it all, even if you never quite manage to put your finger of what this music does to you. This is the sort of mystery that nags you when you open your heart to said music. And this is what makes it timeless, as clearly from its day and age as it is.
I've just read someone in here writing in their review that Tears For Fears was to them a better "electronic" band than Depeche Mode... Which, obviously, is a very *weird* take for me. Don't get me wrong: TFF released excellent singles in an admittedly close genre, and they had good tunes on the side, too. But if you compare the so-called "deep cuts" of *The Hurting* and *Songs From The Big Chair* to the ones of *Music For The Masses* or *Violator*, will you find the same spotless layering, or the same level of intensity and/or entranced elatedness? Tell me, friend, what would you write to praise Tears For Fears' secondary ditties as they explore a far less sweeping landscape ? What sorts of words would you use? Would you use that metaphor of sunrays piercing through dark clouds? And if you do, will you be truly faithful to the music?
This here is exactly why I think Depeche Mode turned to better "album artists" than TFF ever were, as gifted as the latter were. And it all boils down to the "flow" and overall feel of Gore, Gahan, Fletcher and Wilder's best LPs. Here's an "electronic" ambient tradition that DM took from the forefathers of the genre, Kraftwerk, as different as the British lads were from their elder German peers. Tears For Fears is not so far from this picture, I'll grant you that. But when it comes to essential *albums* they're a notch under Depeche Mode. At least to me.
And don't get me started on the disappointing hodgepodge that *Seeds Of Love* is, okay?
4,5/5 for this Depeche Mode LP, rounded up to 5 here. A perfect grade will then grace the masterpiece that *Violator* is. So next, please...
Number of albums left to review: 576
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 204 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 98
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
Gene Clark
5/5
A stone-cold masterpiece. Much has been said about how Gene Clark never got the recognition he deserved for this stellar work, how his label thought the money and ressources spent on it were wasted, and how the album was a commercial failure. The thing is, now that Ivo Watts-Russel, Beach House and other important figures from the music business did what they had to do to give this gem the credit it deserved, we can all go to the next step and herald it as the seventies classic that it is. In a somewhat close genre, this record should have been as big as Neil Young's *Harvest*. Well, now we can all consider it *is* actually as big as Neil Young's most famous album. It's the best way to celebrate Clark's memory, after all.
Each track shines in this LP, but I am particularly fond of the four that follow. First, there's the title track, whose sounds and overall mood are incredibly ahead of their time, with its slick synth bassline, its sly groove, and its soulful vocals. This song slaps, even decades after it was released. Equally soulful is the more subtle and yet terrific "Strength Of Strings"--gosh, aren't those backing vocals gorgeous. A little while later, "Some Misunderstanding" provides the emotional climax of the album--a country tune that has properly *cosmic* effects on me. The end of the song just feels like flying over the clouds. I'm shuddering just listening to it now. Closer "Lady Of The North" is my last favorite, with another entranced chorus, nicely supported by the lush instrumentation behind it. Its final wah wah guitar riff is an earworm I could play all day, and I don't think I would ever get bored doing so.
5 stars, of course. Good luck for the album that comes next.
Number of albums left to review: 575
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 205 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 98
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
The Police
3/5
For each album by The Police, it's more or less the same drill. The major singles are legendary, but the deep cuts are... well... very very *deep* sometimes. This one is no exception, even though I readily admit that "Bring On The Night", " On Any Other Day" and "This Bed's Too Big Without You" are good songs. Conversely, the instrumental title track, "Deathwish" or the last tunes closing the proceedings are sort of a borefest to me. And in between you have "It's Alright For You", not so bad but very derivative of former rhythm'n'blues hits, oddly enough.
I'm not familiar with *everything* the Police has released, yet I feel like this album is indeed the one to select for those sorts of lists compared to the others, even though it only has two super-famous singles, "Message In A Bottle" and "Walking On The Moon". The debut *Outlandos D'Amour* has three of them, it's true: "Roxanne", "So Lonely" and "Can't Stand Losing You". Unfortunately it also has very awkward stuff such as "Hole In My Life", " Born In The 50s", "Be My Girl" or "Masoko Tanga", so I guess it's not an "ideal" candidate either. And no, don't get me started on *Synchronicity*. As much as I like "Every Breath You Take", that last album, often quoted in best-of lists, leers too much towards the sort of eighties pop Sting would soon release for his solo career. And here another story begins, I guess...
To be honest with you, I have a "greatest hits" collection from The Police at home, and I'm perfectly happy with it. With their mixing of post-punk and reggae, coupled with great performances and Sting's songwriting at its best, The Police had every card in their game to help them become a legendary band. But sometimes, legendary bands are better for the singles format than they are for the one of albums. That's life.
Number of albums left to review: 574
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 205
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 99 (including this one--it's a 8/10 LP for purposes that are more general than the ones of this list--but when it comes to "essential" albums, it's only a 3/5 one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
GZA
5/5
Another stone cold masterpiece and probably one of my five favorite hip hop albums of all time. Everything in *Liquid Swords* is pitch-perfect. GZA's lyricism and his deadpan delivery--here coupled with RZA's hypnotic instrumentals--are legendary. The words hit hard, the music is cinematic... To put it in a nutshell, what you have here is hip hop heaven--even if the world it conveys sounds like hell on earth, itching, teasing and even tormenting you like few releases in the genre do. Those evocative *Shogun Assassin* samples are transporting you into another universe from the very first seconds, and what follows never disappoint.
To me, this is the best Wu-Tang solo output by a very wide margin, as awesome as Raekwon and Method Man's first solo LPs were. Only the Wu-Tang Clan debut can beat that one, thanks the latter's iconic anthems. And yet *Liquid Swords* is actually more satisfying if you take into accounts the particular dynamics of going through an album in one sitting. The title track, "Duel Of The Iron Mic", "Living In The World Today", "Gold", "Shadowboxing"... They're all gems. "B.I.B.L.E--Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth" is also an exhilarating closer aptly conveying the sort of twisted mysticism only the Wu-Tang collective is capable of. And 'Swordsman" is a slap in the face, with its heavy, HEAVY beats, and its moody orchestral samples.
5/5. "The G.O.D., the G.O.D," GZA repeats. But what he meant is the *G.O.A.T.*.
Number of albums left to review: 573
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 206 (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 99
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
Emmylou Harris
3/5
Even though I generally concur with the review currently topping this section (stating that Dimery's list sometimes focuses on late-career releases from artists who were probably way more iconic when they were younger, therefore taking a spot that could have been used by new blood), I have to admit there were some touching or heartfelt moments in this album. I don't know much about Emylou Harris' output before this 2000 release, but taken out of that context, a lot of those songs still have something endearing and/or memorable to them. Besides, the mere fact that this is the first LP where Harris wrote most of the tunes in it makes it interesting to listen to...
Too bad a lot of those ballads are a little too long, however, and that their production values are somewhat unobtrusive and safe. This here is far from the bold statements "late" abums by Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen or Johnny Cash were. In comparison, the sound of *Red Dirt Girl* follows the sort of MOR template that was typical of the early naughts: a little drum programming here, some clean, echo-laden guitars there.. And consequently, some parts of this work didn't age that well...
I'll probably revisit this one later on, though, just to get a better hang of the compositions (but *when*? Gosh, it's hard to keep the pace with this thing sometimes, lol).
In the meantime...
Number of albums left to review: 572
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 206
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 100 (including this one, even though I doubt there will be enough room left for it)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
Sleater-Kinney
5/5
My musical education started in the nineties, and of course I've been aware of who Sleater-Kinney are since that time, and their importance for the riot grrrrl movement taken in its larger understanding. An old friend of mine is a huge fan of this album, for instance, and I've always loved the reference to the Kinks on its cover and artwork. But oddly enough, before *Dig Me Out* popped on this app, I had never given it the attention it fully deserved. And boy oh boy (or should I say, *girl oh girl*), how excited I am to finally discover it properly. The energy on this LP is just fantastic, earworms abound (whether they come from the melodic guitars or the impassioned vocals), and the tracklisting has the sorts of dynamics I usually love in rock albums. A quick listen might give you the wrong impression that the songs are quite the same, but their respective moods are actually pretty different from each other, Sleater-Kinney always picking up the ball to send it in an unexpected melodic direction from song to song.
To be a little more specific... The title track opening the album is as tense as it should be, thanks to its minor chords, "One More Hour"'s vocals are as catchy as its quavers on guitar are enticing, "Heart Factory" is the band's version of a blues cut using nineties quiet-loud-quiet shenanigans to great effects (nice percussion sounds in the background, by the way), "It's Enough" is short and sharp, "Things You Say" has an elated chorus, while groovy and organ-laden "Dance Song '97" foretells what Le Tigre would do a few years later--here referring to another important riot grrrl figure, Kathleen Hannah (more about that later on). As for the last track "Jenny", it aptly closes the proceedings on a moody note that leaves you wanting for more. And these here are just highlights among many others. I don't think there's a single dud in this fantastic record. I rarely give 5 stars for albums I didn't already know by heart on this app. And here I am giving such mark now.
So I'm buying this LP right away. And speaking about riot grrrrls, it also gives me the occasion to buy another record by Bikini Kill on the side. Bikini Kill is the first band of Kathleen Hannah, another pivotal figure of that "girl indie punk-rock" movement who would later found Le Tigre, as I said earlier. I've had my eye on that Bikini Kill release for quite some time now, and I can't resist taking it as a companion piece for *Dig Me Out* (at least if I can find a version of it that's cheap enough). So thanks, Dimery and co.
Number of albums left to review: 571
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 207 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 100
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
D'Angelo
3/5
A little lost as to what the term "neo-soul" really entails, compared to usual nineties r'n'b. Maybe it's my uneducated ear, but does the difference between digital/electronic *bland* music and the same type of music recorded with real instruments *actually* matter? Whatever the answer to this question is, "neo soul" feels far less vital than hip hop anyway. Case in point: Lauryn Hill. I love her work with the Fugees, but her *Miseducation* solo album bores me to death, in spite of whatever it was that the critics raved about when she released that solo debut.
It's more or less the same drill with D'Angelo and his music. After what I've just said up there about hip hop having the upper hand compared to "neo soul", it is absolutely not a surprise that my favorite track on this LP is the opener--because it was co-written with A Tribe Called Quest's Ali Shaheed Muhammed. Everything else sounds... remote and without any real stakes to me. I don't know how to explain it better. I don't even *care* explaining it--which is probably a first for me. And not a good sign.
To put it in a nutshell, this LP is certainly not "horrible" to listen to. But it doesn't scream "essential" to me.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: a little less than 600, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one: I sometimes leave a door open for albums from subgenres I'm not overtly familiar with--I'm only tougher with "middling" listens when said subgenre is more familiar to me, for better or for worse).
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Elton John
5/5
In every legendary double-album, you seem to have an ugly little duckling, and it's part of their idiosyncratic charm today. It's usually a quaint, foolish cut that borders on being offensive, so "out there" and mindless as it is. In the Beatles' White Album, it's "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da". In *Goodbye Yellow Brick Road*, it's "Jamaica Jerk-Off".
Ok, I've just written about the one and *only* truly negative thing about this LP. Because, let's face it, everything else is pop-rock/glam-rock heaven. Seventies Elton John usually slapped, both as a performer and as a hit machine. But this here reaches a whole other level. This double-LP is so good that it feels like a "best of" collection. And it's not only because of its megafamous songs. Of course, there's the "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" title-track, where Elton is so elated that it seems he's flying high over most of his peers. Of course, there's the ecstatic jam of "Benny And The Jets", the poignant tribute to Marilyn Monroe "Candle In the Wind", or the cult rockabilly/boogie number "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)". But those hits are just just the tip of the iceberg here. You also have that epic 11-minute opener "Funeral For A Friend...", the wry and quite topical "Social Disease" and "Sweet Painted Lady", along with the incredible melodies and lush instrumentations of "This Song Has No Title", "I've Seen That Movie Too", "Harmony", "Grey Seal" or "All The Girls Love Alice"...That road Elton mentions for the title of his magnum opus is paved with gold indeed. Once you take it, you never want to leave, wherever it goes.
5 stars, what else? OK, maybe 4.8 because of "Jamaica Jerk-Off". But that odd ditty/oddity makes me laugh now. So 5 stars anyway.
Number of albums left to review: 569
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 208 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 101
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
Belle & Sebastian
4/5
For a very long time, Belle And Sebastian were my definition of "twee". And consequently, I couldn't really bring myself to give their records the attention they fully deserved. Maybe old age has turned me into a mellower listener, but it's easier for me to immerse in their music now. As "twee" as the latter still sounds to me sometimes.
This record is probably one of the two or three "must-have" in their discography (with *The Boy With The Arab Strap* and maybe *Tigermilk* as well). 2006's *The Life Pursuit* is also pretty good, in a more streamlined, "professional" way.
The gems on *If You're Feeling Sinister* are "The Stars of Track And Field", "Seeing Other People", "Like Dylan In The Movies", and "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying". And if you like or love them, you'll probably appreciate other cuts from the band, even the deeper ones. 4 stars.
Number of albums left to review: 568
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 209 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 101
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
Donald Fagen
3/5
If that album had to be summarized into one little thing, it would be the chorus of the title-track, a parody of the sort of jingle you often hear in soft-rock / lounge pop radio stations. The effect of such a trick is unmistakably evocative for the listener. Yet at the same time, the line between earnestness and postmodernist irony is somewhat blurred: it all comes from the *pitch-perfect* manner the recreation of that sort of jingle sounds, as if Fagen was here patenting the template of all the other cheesy jingles of soft-rock radio stations that would grace the airwaves for many years to come. The thing is, where is the line between "functional" and sincere music when you do something like that?
Donald Fagen, having just decided with Walter Becker to call it quits regarding Steely Dan, was in a decidedly strange place in 1982. The neurotic perfectionism that had mired the sessions for *Gaucho* had taken its toll on him, and yet here he was, being *even more* perfectionist for his first solo LP (see that Wikipedia article about how complex those sessions recorded through nascent digital technology were). The end result of this neurosis would be a long-lasting depression that would see Fagen sit out the rest of the eighties. Quite ironical given how Steely Dan had anticipated some of that decade's most striking musical aesthetics, for better or for worse.
Likewise, the intent behind the songs' themes and lyrics on *The Nightfly* is rather ambiguous. Fagen said he used as little irony as he could for the lyrics of this record. But the former Steely Dan just can't help blurring that other line, it's a second nature for him. When the lonesome protagonist of the title-track, so aptly represented through the record's wonderful cover, takes calls from lunatics in the middle of the night, the irony of the situation quickly catches up with him: "Thanks for calling / I wait all night for calls like this". Tell me that's not *irony* about the modern means of communication, Donald, even if said irony is not used for cynicism's sake, and only to depict a very personal take on the looniest examples of the "American" mindset, which actually hearkens back as far as to the singer-songwriter's childhood, when he felt as isolated as that grown-up, titular "Nightfly". Those themes may be loosely considered as "autobiographical", it's true (Donald listened to those sorts of radio shows as a teenager). Yet the way they're handled here does not suggest the mood of a *confessional* record. It's first and foremost "biting", to use the effect that Fagen wanted to avoid when writing those songs.
Speaking of that thin line between confession and the irony that might prevent it from happening, the true heart of the title-track is not its chorus, by the way: it's its bridge, where Fagen enters the mind of the titular "nightfly" the tune is about, delving into that late night radio host's dejected thoughts about how lonely and depressed he feels. A lot of the album is actually about that: loneliness and feelings of alienation. At first glance, the opener "I.G.Y." may sound like an optimistic prediction of what the future would look like from the fifties' vantage point, but the fact that this dreamland future filled with space stations and express shuttles under the Atlantic never came to pass brings another layer to those lyrics. The song references '76 as the year all those things should have happened happen--but by 1982 you knew there was no way that future could occur in the short-term run. As a result of this discrepancy between dream and reality, it's the alienation and self-delusion of the song's narrator, here feeling way too optimistic, that ends up striking the listener. And just as other reviewers pointed out, such discrepancy is cruelly underlined by how crisp and glossy the digitally-recorded music sounds. That track, just like the rest of the album, sounds nothing like the fifties. And as a consequence, the nostalgia that is diplayed here sounds like a simulacrum of sorts. Rarely elevator music has been so "weighted" by so many contradictory affects. Except in a Steely Dan record, of course.
Alienation is also a theme that runs throughout "New Frontier", whose protagonist attempts to seduce a girl in a fallout shelter, of all places. See also "The Goodbye Look", about an American expatriate living in a foreign seaside resort who realizes he's not relevant there anymore. And irony is strong in "Walk Between Raindrops", Fagen's version of "We'll Meet Again". When you're done listening to the album, the conflation of those picturesque vignettes is nothing short of bitter. This would not neccesarily be a problem had it been Fagen's original plan. But when you read that said plan was to record an album that would be both more "innocent" and straightforward than the LPs Steely Dan had released so far, one wonders if Fagen didn't botch the whole thing somehow. And if this is the reason why "The Nightfly" sounds so unsure in its overall intentions...
What about the music, then? Well, just like for most Steely Dan albums, it took me a few listens to go beyond the layers of cheese, and so appreciate how affecting some of the vocal parts, arrangements, instrumentations and jazzy chord successions can be sometimes. Not that those flourishes always work for the best, though. As a matter of fact, and apart from opener "I.G.Y.", the first side of this record still sounds like a huge borefest to me, and I don't even really have the energy to quote the names of those duds--I just know there's an inconsequential cover of a Leiber/Stoller-penned song, plus that oh-so-terribly lethargic ballad, "Maxine", whose jazzy modulations sound so forced and "calculated" that the whole thing comes up as a void and uninteresting *exercice de style* (a threat that looms over all Steely Dan's albums, to be honest--but here exacerbated to the umpteenth degree). Side two, with all those other tracks I've already mentioned in my review, fares musically better in comparison--from the New Wave-influenced (?) synth rhythm patterns of "New Frontier" to the enticing marimbas of "The Goodbye Look"-- even if the record's glossy production values and pristine multi-tracked performances have a potentially "stifling" effect as well, even on the good songs (once again, a potential drawback for all Steely Dan LPs).
So here we go. I like the overall "concept" of this record, as ambiguous as it is. I love the cover. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the album works, and that everything in it is "essential", far from it. I'm not gonna echo Steve Albini's harsh words against Steely Dan. But I can understand why someone like him, with very different requisistes when it comes to musical aesthetics, can feel so much contempt for this type of music. My position towards the Dan and Fagen is far more benevolent, I imagine. But it's not because I try to keep an open mind that I'm gonna be sold on *everything* those guys ever did.
Thanks for listening to me here. I know you don't necessarily "wait all night" to hear stuff like this. But I appreciate you took the time to listen, though. 😉 We're all "alienated" to some sort of degree. Yet even when you're tackling those topics, the best you can do is to say something that can feel honest, lively or interesting about it. I don't know if I succeeded here. All I know is that, *to me* Fagen only succeeded doing this in *discrete* part of this LP, and not during the whole thing.
3/5 for the purposes of this list (8/10 for more general and "objective" purposes: 5 + 3).
Number of albums left to review: 567
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 209
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 102 (including this one--even though I doubt there will be any room left for it at the end).
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
Marianne Faithfull
5/5
This is a beautiful album. Marianne Faithful's frail voice is moving, you can sense she went to hell and back just by the emotional strength of her performance. The cold-yet-determined synth-driven title-track is the main highlight here, of course, along with two fabulous covers, Shel Siverstein's "The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan" and John Lennon's "Working Class Hero". "Guilt", sounding like a lethargic disco track under valium is also pretty hypnotic.
Is the instrumentation in parts of this record dated? It sure is, but such "objective" flaws now add to the vintage feel of those songs. They help conveying what this LP is really about, tunes about old age and disillusion, played under the guise of white, "new-wave" blues.
I sort of hesitated between a 4/5 and a 5/5 grade for a minute, but fuck it: *Broken English* is Faithfull's magnum opus, she says it herself. Let her reap the rewards that had been denied to her for too long before this moving album finally came out. 5/5, then.
Number of albums left to review: 566
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 210 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 102
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 126
Afrika Bambaataa
2/5
Quick notes on this one:
- I'm not denying the historical and cultural importance of the "Planet Rock" single, with its interpolations taken from Kraftwerk and its socially conscious lyrics.
-The same goes for "Renegades of Funk", even if Rage Against The Machine did a far better version of it in their *Renegades* album (the one made out of covers). Listening to both tracks again, I was surprised at the way that RATM version and the original actually sound so distinctly *different*, musically speaking.
-Turns out Bambaataa has been accused of using his position as community leader to sexually assault a bunch of teenage boys. Those allegations, which came out during the mid-2010s, are pretty serious and believable. And it seems the abuse started as far back as the early eighties. I guess there could NOT be *worse* ways to tarnish the man's legacy, along with the one of the Zulu Nation. I was also appalled at the way some people in that community kept on defending Bambaataa/Lance Taylor some time after those allegations came out. Or the way a couple of bastards even exerted pressure on the victims so that they kept their mouths shut.
- Fortunately, it seems that Taylor was then quickly expelled from that group he had founded, and I just hope its current leaders won't make the same sorts of mistake again, at the very least. The Zulu Nation had rather admirable goals, culturally and community-wise. It would be a shame to see *everything* it established go down the drain because of that very sad story.
Under that light, I don't really have the heart to explore the deep cuts of this album any further. To be honest, I've only listened to a few tracks from it... Knowing the singles and how hip hop generally sounded back in 1986, I have a pretty good idea of how the thing pans out. Besides, there are only ten reviews in here rating this LP with a 5/5 grade. Seems like I'm not really missing anything here...
Hip hop was in its infancy back then anyway. Maturity allowing the creation of more "timeless" full-length releases would only appear with Public Enemy, and then, even more, through the Native Tongues and Wu-Tang collectives. Oh, and there was also that thing called *Gangsta Rap* on the west coast, but that's a story for another time, kiddies...
Hard to rate this album. 2/5, mostly for cultural importance?
Number of albums left to review: 565
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 210
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 102
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 127 (including this one)
Bob Marley & The Wailers
5/5
The second half of this gem has all the hits that are already in the *Legend* compilation: \"Exodus\" \"Jamming\", \" Waiting In Vain\", \"Three Little Birds\", \"One Love\" (that latter track showing Marley actually covering himself from a time where the Wailers were a ska band, a decade ago). Yet the first part of this record is as important as the second. Topical tracks such as \"Natural Mystic\" or \"Guiltiness\" redefine the meaning of the term \"deep cuts\". That sh*t is indeed... *deep*. And the evocative mood suggested by the sparse instrumentation aptly emphasizes that deepness.
I'm not a huge reggae fan, I admit it. But what set Bob Marley apart from his peers was his genius songwriting. It's hard to argue here. You just need to listen to the first verse of \"Natural Mystic\" to feel it, man!
Of course, this LP must be on the list. I would also add *Catch A Fire*, the Wailers' first international release (which has subtle and interesting rock crossover details in its arrangements). And I know *Burnin'* is not always deemed equal to those two, but I love the songs on it as well.
Going back to *Exodus*, I obviously give it a 5/5 grade. Listening to the title track again right now. That epic jam is... relentless, and it really feels like a modern-day Moses is singing on it. That *Legend* compilation could not have had a better title...
Number of albums left to review: 564
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 211
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 102
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 127
Klaxons
5/5
Being drawn to sci-fi postmodernist literature at the time this one came out, *Myths Of The Near Future* was bound to tick a lot of boxes for me. With a track named "Gravity's Rainbow", how could I *not* spot that debut album? It's a great and lively track by the way, whose lyrics are only vaguely indebted to Thomas Pynchon's magnum opus, thematically speaking. Yet the song would provide great opening titles if a director or a showrunner was bold enough to adapt this crazy mammoth of a novel for a TV series (or for a *dozen* theatrical films, lol).
Apart from that track, many other dance-punk songs slap on this LP: "Two Receivers", "Golden Skans", "As Above So Below", "Magick", "It's Not Over Yet"... I was surprised to find out that the latter was actually a cover version of an older dance track after all these years (those liner notes on my own copy of the album are too messy, which probably explains why I couldn't read them properly). Listening to the original was a decidedly *weird* experience, ha ha. Sometimes dated and cheesy arrangements can hide great songs, I guess...
Speaking of "dated arrangements", *Myths Of The Near Future* is admittedly very much of its time as well. Yet Klaxons' music was eccentric and original enough to set them apart from the other dance-rock / landfill indie bands of the late naughts. It all boils down to the melodic earworms the band keeps piling up through their elated pop vocals, along with their bizarre synth hooks, rumbling distorted basslines and drilling, noisy guitars. And there are all the literary references sprinkled throughout the album, too. Such literate eccentricity is a plus that makes this record far more relatable than other forays into that overall dance-punk genre. Too bad a lot of people are unable to feel that in the reviews here.
To put it in a nutshell, *Myths Of The near Future* is one of the best releases of 2007 (a year where a lot of bland stuff was singled out by the music press, unfortunately). My overall grade for it is 4.5/5, but given how criminally low their score currently is, I'm gonna round that grade up to a perfect 5. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 563
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 212 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 102
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 127
Public Enemy
5/5
Probably Public Enemy's second best album. But given how damn important that rap band was for hip hop at the time--helping it grow out of its infancy stage for good--said album just *has* to be on this list, c'mon! To be fair, *Fear Of A Black Planet*'s back half is maybe a little overlong and patchy, but its first half is as solid as their previous LP. Plus, with all the highlights that you can find throughout its tracklisting, it would be a crime *not* to mention it. Those highlights are raging numbers of course, both sonically and politically. They are "Brothers Are Gonna Work It Out", "911 Is A Joke", "Welcome To The Terrordome", "Burn Hollywood Burn", "Who Stole The Soul?", and closer "Fight The Power" (the latter of Spike Lee's *Do The Right Thing* fame). Oh, and did I mention how iconic and topical that album's artwork is?
I don't remember if Dimery's list also included *It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back* and *Apocalpse '91...*. Under that light, I'd give *Fear Of A Black Planet* a perfect 5/5 grade just to make sure Public Enemy appears in my summary, even though it's probably closer to a 4,5 or a 4. Next, please...
Number of albums left to review: 562
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 213 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 102
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 127
5/5
What can I say? This is my favorite album released in 1978, beating other incredible LPs such as Kraftwerk' *The Man Machine*, Wire's *Chairs Missing*, Brian Eno' *Music For Airports* or Talking Heads' *More Songs About Buildings And Food". Of course it's gonna be in my own list.
Just like those great 1978 albums, *Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo* is one of a kind. It's totally weird and yet incredibly catchy. Tracks like "Incontrollable Urge" and the legendary "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" cover make for a great start, and later on, you have "Mongoloid" and its bouncy bassline, infectious guitar riff and wry lyrics, "Jock Homo" and its crazy vocals, "Shrivel-Up" and its off-kilter synths, or "Gut Feeling", with its enticing arpeggios and insane build-up. Oh, can someone explain to me why this track is not available on Spotify?--without it you don't have a full picture of the dynamics side two go through!
Those cuts, along with the rest, suggest a self-contained universe. A nonsensical one, sure. But one that's relatable once you understand what the band is all about: making fun of the whole human race, and have a blast about it!
In a way, this record is a mix of all the other albums I've quoted up there--except *Music For Airports*, but since Brian Eno produced this debut, there's still a direct connection to him here (Eno also produced Talking Heads LPs around that time, which shows how important he was for both New Wave and *No* Wave around those years...)
Devolution is also a funny concept that hasn't aged a day, if only because of our current "idiotic" time. Early post-punk has many treasures like that, and his here is one of the most precious one.
I wish I had more time to talk about this record today. But I only have time left to give a dumb "grading". 5/5, then. Good luck for the album that comes next!
Number of albums left to review: 561
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 214 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 102
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 127
Parliament
5/5
Magnum opus with afrofuturist overtones from funk legends who had such an impact that their music was pillaged 15 years later by Dr Dre when he patented the sound he needed for gangster rap. *Mothership Connection* is often silly, but its sleazy grooves are infectious, its instrumentation unpredictable, and its fun factor undeniable.
I have neither the time nor the heart to write a very serious review about this record. During the nineties, there was a joke that can sum up my feelings about it: "Who's your favorite sex-crazed leader playing sax? Bill Clinton or *George* Clinton?" I'm team George Clinton all the way, baby!
5/5. May the funk be with you.
Number of albums left to review: 560
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 215 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 102
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 127
Jane Weaver
3/5
I've noticed something with the 1001 albums app. Every morning, right after I wake up, I check on the app to see today's album, and if it's an artist I don't know or I'm not very familiar with, I listen to the first tracks of said album right away. More often than not, I really like what I'm discovering. But then, when I listen to the album again later in the day, part of the charm's gone.
My explanation for this is that when you wake up, your "defenses" are lower, which means it's easier to appreciate music when it's good. You're in a state where you're not overthinking about what you know or what "good taste" or "originality" is. You just go with the flow. Funny how knowledge about music sometimes impairs your ability to truly enjoy it for what it is.
Not that I wasn't immediately catching a wealth of references this morning when I listened to the first songs of *Modern Kosmology*: This LP made me think of Can, Neu!, Silver Apples, Stereolab, The Velvet Underground, Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, St Vincent, Beach House, Broadcast... That latter influence moved me by the way: Jane Weaver sounds a lot like Trish Keenan on some of those tracks, and given that we lost her far too soon, it's as if a gentle ghost was looming over this record.
Listening to *Modern Kosmology* again now, I have to say a lot of its charms are preserved, even later in the day. The motorik rhythm of its first track is insane (as overplayed as that rhythm is today, it sounds great here), "Slow Motion" is a nice little earworm, and "Loops In the Secret Society" is an interesting vintage psychedelic cut. Honestly, it's weird to think Weaver is not as famous as Beach House and St Vincent (some of the "modern" references I've quoted up here) given that her overall output is on par with the best records from those two acts. Admittedly, there's a slight slump on the second side of *Modern Kosmology* (including that track featuring former Can singer Malcolm Mooney, which is maybe a little too self-indulgent...). But it's not anything that veers off-course too much, and so nothing that can ruin this pretty neat record overall.
The thing is, can I include said record in my list? Do I even have *enough room* for it? Just for 2017, here is a list of albums I find either *as good* or even *better* than Jane Weaver's album (and most of them are not quoted in the 1001 albums book, obviously):
Big Thief - Capacity
Idles - Brutalism
Kendrick Lamar - Damn.
King Krule - The Ooz
Slowdive - Slowdive
Pissed Jeans - Why Love Now
Aldous Harding - Party
King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard - Polygondwanaland
St Vincent - Masseduction
King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana
Mount Kimbie - Love What Survives
Björk - Utopia
OMNI - Multi-Task
Broken Social Scene - Hug Of Thunder
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Luciferian Towers
Thurston Moore - Rock'n Roll Consciousness
Fleet Foxes - The Crack-Up
Lana Del Rey - Lust For Life
Lorde - Melodrama
Thee Oh Sees - Orc
Mogwai - Every Country's Sun
Do Make Say Think - Stubborn Persistent Illusions
Cloud Nothings - Life Without Sound
Wolf Alice - Visions Of A Life
Kamasi Washington - Harmony of Difference
LCD Soundsystem - American Dream
(Sandy) Alex G - Rocket
William Basinski - A Shadow In Time
The Psychotic Monks - Silence Slowly And Madly Shines
Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked At Me
You see the problem I have here? In my own "modern kosmology", you need more than 1001 star positions to fit them all...
Giving a 3/5 grade to Jane Weaver here (grading her LP according to the purposes of this list of "essential albums" -- which means 8/10 for more general purposes: 5 + 3). I really do hope I can have room for her. Even though I highly doubt it.
Number of albums left to review: 559
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 215
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 103 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 127
Kraftwerk
5/5
These are the sounds one of the most important bands of the seventies has very patiently crafted for this masterpiece:
"Vroom, vroom" ... "Honk honk" ... "Tick, tock, tick, tock..." ... "Beep beep" ... "Shhhhhhhhh" ... "Vroom, vroom, vrooooooom" ... "Beep, beep, bee-eeeeeeeeeep..." ... "phhhwwtphhhwwt" ... "Click, click, click" ... "Honk, hooooooonk!"
And you know what? The proto-electronic music supporting those sounds is so evocative, dreamy and poetic that you really feel like you're riding a car on a highway with Florian, Ralf and their dear, dear friends, driving towards a German sun setting on the horizon. 5/5.
Number of albums left to review: 558
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 216 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 103
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 127
The Electric Prunes
3/5
This is pretty cool, but to be honest I already have a lot of sixties psychedelic rock in my own list, and so I'm not sure The Electric Prunes can make it now. I've seen their name before, and it was nice exploring this quite adventurous album, even if the gap between its highlights and its far less interesting cuts was quite wide in this case.
Among the highlights, there is obviously the opener "I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)". Three observations about this one:
First, that tune is also the opening track of the legendary *Nuggets* compilation, about that overall "seedy" US psychedelic scene (wink, wink). And I have a sneaking suspicion the person who selected this debut for Dimery's list partly did it because they couldn't select that "Nuggets" record, as it is a compilation and not a studio album made by a single act.
Secondly, funny how the melody in the first seconds of that track, before all hell breaks loose, reminded me of the one of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra's "Summer Wine", which was released at the exact same time. Something was in the air, I guess. Unless one of the two writing teams got "inspired" by the other here...
Thirdly, I can't help feeling that the working title of this song was "I Had Too Much To *Drink* Last Night", and that impression is so strong that it is even the word I'm hearing sometimes. Seems like the couple of writers who wrote most of the songs for this band had quite strange ideas. See "Try Me On For Size", which has a nice melody, but also potentially eye-roll-inducing lyrics. The line between cute and awkward (or even unwittingly gross) is easily blurred here, I think. These two women could write great stuff (yep, they were women), such as "Get Me To The World On Time"... But it seems a little strange that the Electric Prunes guys were being deemed as inferior songwriters by their record label, to the point that they were hampered in their own songwriting efforts, and that the main task was given to outsiders. Some of the tunes the guys from the band penned for this one are far from being ridiculous, especially "Luvin'".
To talk about the album overall now, it's all over the place, and if that sort of thing can work in the favor of certain records, this is not exactly the case here. See the novelty ditties at the start of side B, and, more especially, the obnoxious album closer "The Toonerville Trolley".
The other problem is that when it comes to sixties deep cuts (either psychedelic or not), I have the feeling there's better elsewhere. There are for instance the two following albums, already in Dimery's list:
The 13th Floor Elevators - The Psychedelic Sounds Of The 13th Floor Elevators (1966)
Country Joe And the Fish - Electric Music For The Mind And Body (1967)
But those are not really *deep cuts*, I'll grant you that. Yet there's also relatively more arcane stuff that's probably as good or even better than the Electric Prunes:
The Seeds - The Seeds (1966) / A Web of Sounds (1966) / Future (1967) -- that latter record being the more obscure of the three, and yet quite an interesting one.
The Music Machine - (Turn On) The Music Machine (1966) -- That pre-punk, heavy "Talk Talk" single that was taken out of it is extraordinary.
Pink Fairies - Never Never Land (1971) -- Another heavy prepunk LP with obvious psychedelic overtones, this time hailing from Britain.
Count Five - Psychotic Reaction (1966) -- this one sounds less "psychedelic" to me, maybe, yet there's something a little sly and unpredictable in it that makes it an interesting listen nonetheless.
And of course, if you want to find more psychedelic stuff, you can explore many other avenues, from weird disturbing acts such as Red Krayola to famous rock stars giving a more streamlined version of it, such as The Byrds...
Under that light, I'd rather err on the side of caution before including that Electric Prunes debut in my own list. 3/5 following that list's specific purposes of singling out "essential" albums (and 8/10 for more general purposes: 5 + 3). Next please...
Number of albums left to review: 557
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 216
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 104 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 127
Roni Size
2/5
Here's a little personal story that took place during the nineties, at the time this album was released. In those years, I knew a guy who had ditched or sold all his indie-rock records (that he had bought at the start of that decade) so that he could buy all those expensive drum'n'bass vinyls (most of them "white label", as people said in those years). To give you the overall context, both of us were radio hosts at the local radio. I was listening to all sorts of music back then. He, on the other side, was only listening to "jungle stuff and the likes, and wouldn't discuss any other music styles anymore. He was pretty active: hosting a drum'n'bass show on said radio, DJing in the local bars and clubs. He was a nice guy, but I couldn't help noticing that he sort of looked down upon people attracted to different music styles. You could tell that he was thinking drum'n'bass was the music of the future, and that us proles were out of touch with what was really going on in the world.
Oh, the irony. That bloke left town after a few years. I wonder where he is now, and what sort of music he's listening to... Does he still have all those expensive vinyls at home? Did he ditch those to follow yet another "trend", electronic or otherwise? I'll probably never know. To be fair with him, he was not the only one who fell for this drum'n'bass craze in such a extreme manner. David Bowie fell for it as well, for example (there are some good songs on his drum'n'bass-laden *Earthling* album, but there's just no way you can say that record has aged very gracefully). The Mercury Prize jury also fell for it (hence why they gave their 1997 prize to *New Forms*). Forward-thinking people easily embrace new modes of artistic expression, which is a good reflex in itself. The thing is, barring a few exceptions (such as German 'Kosmische' Music in the seventies), one should always be cautious when proponents of a new style label the latter as the "music of the future". It's often a sure sign that very quickly, said music will look incredibly dated...
Don't get me wrong, I *like* drum'n'bass, generally speaking. I like this idea of an accelerated breakbeat pattern being the foundation of a dance record. I even own Goldie's *Timeless* and *Saturn Returnz* at home, and if I would never listen to those double albums in a single sitting now, I can still enjoy playing a few tracks from them here and there.
I have the same overall feeling about Roni Size's *Reprazent*: The first three tracks are great, and they even go to very contrasted directions, which helps you finding them fresh and interesting. And the iconic upright bass sound in "Brown Paper Bag" is pretty iconic, I remember it from back then. That upright bass thing is a trick that Roni Size uses to nice effects in many parts of his own double album here, along with some sparse (but also subtle) shiny jazzy arrangements. So the album gets off on a great start at least.
That being said, let's face it, folks: that record is also long, VERY long. I've just read there's even another LONGER version of it available on CD (and not on streaming services if I'm correct). But honestly, I don't have the heart to look any further. Blame the borefests that a lot of those lengthy tracks turn out to be after two minutes or so (minus an occasional exception here and there). Also, blame those absolutely corny, overaffected female vocals right in the middle of the tracklisting. Those two or three cuts were singles, I hear, and honestly, they're pretty embarrassing. Goldie's *Timeless* had its share of awkward moments as well, including through its use of female vocals, but there was also an epic ambition to his sonic constructions that could help you swallow such a pill. And this is the sort of ambition that is cruelly lacking in the case of the jazzier Roni Size. I understand he's going to a smoother direction here, compared to Goldie. But the outcome of this is that most of his music sounds bland as a result, instead of "groovier".
Speaking of "directions", the two last tracks of *New Forms* fare better than the corny stuff found elsewhere on the album. One of them, actually named "Directions", even adds latin/tropical colours to the proceedings, capping this lengthy thing in a satisfying way at least. But at this point, it's too little and too late...
Drum'n'bass is (was?) an interesting music style. But I can't help feeling that it's the way it influenced *other* genres, from big beat to rock and jazz, that makes it something to write home about. Maybe it's unfair. But hey, there are tons of non-western traditional styles that are not represented in this list either. Even with 1001 references, you just can't cram in all the music in the world.
Number of albums left to review: 556
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 216
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 104
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 128
Pantera
1/5
Pantera got the name of their album right at least. More about that in the conclusion of my review...
I kinda appreciated the first two tracks, and honestly I can see why those two highlights were impressive for a lot of metal fans. When it comes to those sorts of dry guitar riffs, I'm much more of a Helmet fan myself, but the fact that I'm making this comparison here shows that I tried *very hard* to keep an open mind. And I can dig bands in the overall metal tag once in a while (Converge, Mastodon, Korn, Deftones--the latter also produced by Terry Date, by the way). So maybe it was time for me to properly reassess Pantera, decades after their heyday...
But then, after those first two good cuts, came "Walk". Which, inexplicably, is Pantera's most played song on Spotify...
🤨
Er... What? Can someone explain to me how a so-called "groove-metal" band can have such a half-assed, lethargic rhythm section, one that's actually so devoid of said... *groove*? Worse, I feel like I have become dumber now that I have gone through Phil Anselmo's inept vocals and lyrics:
"RE!!! SPECT!!!! ARE YOU TALKING TO ME???!!!"
Er... I don't know...
MAY!!! BE!!! PHIL!!!!
The mere fact that "Walk" is Pantera's most popular song on a major streaming service shows that Pantera fans and I have nothing in common.
What follows this (inexplicably popular) low point can be decent sometimes. There's the sort of Tool rip-off that "This Love" is (minus the interesting time patterns) ; or the nicely upfront and aggressive "Rise". But those decent cuts are mixed with stuff that's often as obnoxious as "Walk" is. See "Fucking Hostile", or, most especially, "Hollow", with its cheesy hair-metal-ballad lengthy intro. That song about a comatose friend ironically manages to be as brain-dead as its subject matter. I don't know if the lyrics of this song refer to real events, so I should probably err on the side of caution here. Yet I would be lying if I said I thought the *music* on it was any good.
But there's worse, and that is the incredibly awkward "No Good (Attack The Radical)", right at the center of the tracklisting, and making this album lose a whole point all by itself. I'm not even attempting to describe how ridiculously bad the music is here (see what I wrote about "Walk"). The *real* problem is that Anselmo is unable to articulate any cohesive point about race relations in the US, a subject he wants to tackle here without having anything to say that's interesting or relevant on the matter. After all, no one *asked* him to sing about such a heavy topic in the first place. And reading those lyrics, what I mostly understand is that Anselmo actually had very muddled thoughts on this subject. Which may or may not explain how he sometimes had, well... *moments* on stage that still seem quite suspicious to me. Add the man's dumb public stances about rap music, which were equally suspicious, and you have quite an ugly picture here.
Oh, and guitarist Dimebag Darrell was a George Bush enthusiast, I hear... No wonder a lot of listeners, reviewers and even fans felt some Lynyrd Skynyrd overtones in Pantera's music. Those were mostly conveyed through Anselmo's drawl, and I guess that's another aspect that worked in favor of the band, because it gave them a "distinct" identity. But let's face it, such identity didn't age very well, did it?
Aaaaah, the South...It's a "different culture", if you take my meaning... About Anselmo and his problematic stances and words--onstage and elsewehere--go online to find out about all that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not necessarily saying that Anselmo is a full-blown racist. What I'm merely suggesting here is that he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, as they say. See also the debacle of his relations with the Abbott brothers towards the end of the band's career. That guy never learned to shut his mouth for his own good, that's for sure.
Both brothers are dead today, may they rest in peace. One was awfully murdered onstage by a lunatic with a legally purchased gun--another sad layer of irony about the right-wing ideas that Pantera is often associated with. And what's also pretty disturbing about this situation is that Anselmo can now cynically use the Pantera brand to tour with the band's bass player and two other musicians--something that Dimebag Darrell and his brother were dead-set against when they were still alive. So does Anselmo have any shred of decency left in his bones? It's up to you to decide on this.
All of this happened decades after *Vulgar Display Of Power* came out, I'll grant you that. But as I have pointed out earlier, what an apt name for this record! And dare I say, one that was also extremely prophetic, foretelling many sad events to come.
Sorry, but I can't have any benevolent feelings about this band. There are too many things in their music and history that sound pretty bad. Or just sad. So next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 555
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 216
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 104
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 129 (including this one - with a 1/5 grade for the purposes of this list, which means a 6/10 grade for more general purposes: 5 + 1)
Van Halen
2/5
Arguably the best sounding guitar-rock album if you enjoy silly songs and killer musicians going into a full "performative", self-indulging mode.
Let me elaborate on that, starting with the "performative mode". Because let's face it folks: what's the real point of "Eruption", apart from telling the audience: "Look how good, how *godly* I am with those six strings"? Yeah man, well, Jimi Hendrix was godly too. The main difference, a *pivotal* one, is that Hendrix's solos, as complex and rich and technically difficult as they were, also told a musical story that meant something in the *overall context* of his songs or live performances. In contrast, "Eruption"' solo is a masturbatory feat that, very tellingly, is placed as an aside, and so, in its own little box. And the fact that this short track is the second of the album only reinforces this sense of containment, oddly enough. Obviously, the "volcanic" overtones of "Eruption" tell the story of an ejaculation, so when I say "masturbatory", I do realize that Eddie Van Halen, God rest his soul, had all that in mind as well. But where a guy like Hendrix stroked and pleasured himself as part of his "lovemaking" to the audience, Van Halen sounds on his own, as if he was locked in the restroom so as to relieve himself from that technical feat that burdens his mind.
Maybe this alienated, onanistic overtone stems from the fact that the little story that "Eruption" tells you has no real point. Or maybe it's because the whole intent is very naive, come to think of it. What this solo mostly tells you is this: here's a gifted kid playing with his tool, look how good he is! There's nothing else, no other layer to this thing. Which might have its own sort of immature charm, I'll grant you that. "Immature" still being the word to remember nonetheless.
As for the "silly" songs, there's the same sort of line that the band constantly straddles throughout this record, aptly summarized by the ambiguity of the word "silly" in its modern usage. Because those songs are indeed both fun AND ridiculous, both catchy AND obnoxious, both smartly done AND dumb. Gosh, that doo-wop bridge at the end of "I'm the One". Is it genius or slapstick comedy? Can it be both as well? And, OK, I get it guys, "Ain't Talking About Love" has a killer riff, and in itself, it's a great tune. But even that one can make you smirk at times. I mean those "hey! hey! hey!" background vocals are a little dumb, are they not? "Jamie's Crying" and "Runnin' With The Devil" are not too bad either. Unfortunately, once you switch to side B, stinkers abound. I'm not even bothering quoting names of the latter, they don't deserve it, honestly.
So Side A could have been a great one, at least, had it not been for that stupid and awkward cover of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me". It's a song I normally love, and the mere fact that some ill-informed, misguided reviewer on this app thought (or pretended) that the song was a Van Halen original makes me want to puke.
In a sense, that cover version also tells you that the band was aware that the quality of their own songwriting was not up *always* to the task of equalling their crazy ambition, at least at the time. In that regard, *1984*, the other landmark album from Van Halen, which followed this debut, is both an improvement and an exacerbation of Van Halen's faults oddly enough. Because the songs of this other record are both funnier AND even more ridiculous, both catchier AND more obnoxious, both more sophisticate AND, in the end, ultimately... dumber. You get the idea here, I'm sure. But that's a story for another time, kiddies, at least if Dimery and co. dared including that other Van Halen LP in their list.
So in other words, and to put it in a nutshell, *Van Halen* will be the best band for you if you love cheese. And given the number of positive reactions in the reviews here, it's crazy how many people just *love* cheese.
I myself usually love it, you know. By "cheese", I mean the real deal here, the food. But I'm French, so that probably doesn't count. :)
"Oh, he's a French guy, that explains everything," I hear some of you thinking out loud. Well, if you think my review is a little too *arrogant*, just remember this. Eddie Van Halen started it. You have to be very arrogant to record something like "Eruption". Or maybe, as I've already suggested, you have to be very sincere. And naive.
I'm not comparing myself to a properly divine musician such as Eddie VH, obviously. But if there's one tiny little thing I may share with him, it's that what I've just said in this review comes from a very sincere place, as arrogant as it may sound to some. And all I ask, is that you guys can give me the benefit of the doubt, just as I did for Van Halen here. There is indeed something a little *ridiculous* about this LP (another very ambiguous word these days, huh?). And pretending that elephant is not in the room will never be the best way to "defend" it.
I dunno, maybe you need to embrace the sheer foolishness of this record to fully enjoy it. You tell me. But as hard as I try to let go, it's not exactly working for me. Maybe I'll buy a Van Halen greatest hits album one day, if it's not pestered by the presence of too many duds, and that's gonna be the extent of my involvement with this band. No big deal. And more power to you if you *can* let go, folks!
Now, next, please.
Buddy Holly & The Crickets
3/5
A little rundown about each track from this 1957 album, along with individual ratings:
"Oh Boy" is a nice opener. To be honest, I love how the 1950s mindset made it impossible for the audience to perceive how there could be different ways to interpret its lyrics. Pretty sure Buddy Holly himself never understood how said lyrics (and the way they are phrased) could provide the content of a gay anthem today. Am I the only one who could see it, perverted as I am??? A queer band should cover that song, lol. Rating: ****
"Not Fade Away" is a gem. Love the barebones production values, and the discreet and charming mood that results out of them. Background vocals are great as well, and the instrumentation is so cool. That double bass... And what is the drummer hitting on to make that nicely subdued sound? His own lap? Cardboard boxes? I wish this album had more tracks like that--animated, yet also subtle and very relaxed somehow. Rating: *****
Conversely, "You've Got Love" is a textbook mid-tempo 50s number that has nothing interesting to it, except that it was partly written by Roy Orbison. Hard pass. Rating: *
As other shrewd reviewers noted in here, Buddy Holly sounds like a prototype of John Lennon in "Maybe Baby". Well, everyone knows that's not exactly the right way of explaining how things went... But I get what those reviewers are meaning here (and I'm pretty sure you do too, reader). A very cool track. Rating: *****
"It's Too Late" is a nice ballad that holds its own pretty well, thanks to its acoustic guitars and the reverb on its chorus vocals. This could be played in the soundtrack of David Lynch film, and be background music for a tender-yet-pretty-weird scene taking place in his loony, paranormal universe...Rating: ****
"Tell Me How" is another borefest, however. Buddy Holly didn't have songwriting duties on this one. And you know what? The songs he didn't contribute to as a writer are the least interesting ones, generally speaking. I wish those producers of his had not given him so many songs written by others. This LP would probably have been more striking as a result. Rating: *
It's nice to listen to the ultra-famous "That Will Be The Day" in context, even though people usually didn't care a lot for the album format during the fifties, and were more interested in singles. One can see why this song was singled out in Buddy Holly's repertoire. Those background vocals are the key detail that struck me this time around. They're doing some pretty weird stuff in the background if you pay a little attention. And the drums are pretty neat, too. Rating: *****
I like the vocal parts of "I'm Looking For Someone To Love", especially towards the end, when it bounces against the rhythm section. Apart from that, this track is just a decent early r'n'r number. Rating: ***
"An Empty Cup..." bored me to tears. Predictable 50s ballad, with predictable doo wop background vocals, this time. Another Roy Orbison-penned number, by the way. But I prefer other songs he wrote (for himself). Rating: *
Interesting chord progression on "Send me Some Lovin'" at some point, but pretty much the same criticism as for "An Empty Cup...". This one is also on Little Richard's second album. Rating: **
And, once again, I have the same sort of complaint against "Last Night". I like the picturesque image of Buddy dreaming about his lover at the window of his house, though, as he looks upon the stars. It evokes the more "innocent" times of the 50s like no other lyrics on the album. Yet the music itself is pretty bland. Rating: **
Insanely great guitar hook on "Rock Me My Baby", foretelling Beatles-like harmonies, along with future jangle pop acts such as the Byrds. And the *weird*, off-kilter type of background vocals are back as well, which is another asset. This album needed more lively tracks like that, instead of all those lovelorn ballads. Especially on the second side. There's a misssed opportunity here, I have to say. But at least the album closes on a high note. Rating: ****
Conclusion: I love half of the tracks, but overall, this "historical" LP is a little hit-or-miss for me, even if you take it back into a 50s context. Speaking of which, here is a dozen 1957 albums I find more important than *The Chirping Crickets* (or at least, *as* important):
John Coltrane - Blue Train
Little Richards - Here's Little Richard
Johnny Cash - With His Hot And Blue Guitar
Thelonious Monk - Brilliant Corners
Miles Davis - Birth Of The Cool
Paul Chambers - Bass On Top
Sun Ra - Jazz By Sun Ra
Miles Davis - Round About Midnight
Billie Holiday - Songs For Distingué Lovers
Sun Ra - Supersonic Jazz
Miles Davis - Miles Ahead
Chuck Berry - After School Sessions
So am I gonna include Buddy Holly And The Crickets in my own list? "Maybe baby, maybe baby...". I just need to make sure there's enough room for them at the end, as small as those little critters are...
Number of albums left to review: 553
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 216
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 105 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 128
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
5/5
I'm ten percent gayer whenever I listen to this synth-pop masterpiece. That's how good it is!
All jokes aside, this is an album that should probably be taken far more seriously than its current "critical reputation" lets on. First, this is producer Trevor Horn's Sistine Chapel: the 13-minute+ cinematic extravaganza of the title track is here to prove it. Secondly, fillers are pretty rare here, which is a feat given that *Welcome To The Pleasure Dome* is a double-album: that string of covers in the middle of the record (standards once sung by Bruce Springsteen, Edwin Starr, Gerry Marsden or Dionne Warwick) are always fresh and interesting, and the vast majority of the FGTH compositions stand out as well. There's the steamy hit "Relax", of course, and getting you ten percent gayer is the very minimum said hedonistic anthem can do. There are also "Two Tribes" and that touching-yet-fully-epic ballad "The Power of Love", aptly concluding the proceedings.
Yet as good as those highlights are, they should not *fully* divert attention away from the lesser-known "Wish The Lads Were Here", "Krisco Kisses", and "Black Night White Light" towards the end of this record, along with the instrumental "The Ballad Of 32". Those tracks are pretty catchy as well. As a matter of fact, I find those deep cuts catchier and more satisfying in terms of melodies and hooks than 90% of the other synth-pop acts of the time. And I'm including the overrated Duran Duran here, or even Tears For Fears (ar least as far as their non-singles are concerned).
So yep, Frankie Goes To Hollywood released an all-time classic in the synth-pop genre, period. And to be clear, punks, anyone who disagrees with me on this can get on his knees and suck my d... Well, only if said oral activity gives you pleasure, *of course*. And if you're nice and gentle enough, I may even return the favor at some point...
Jeeze, did I say this album made me "ten percent gayer"? Maybe it's more like 25. 😎
One last thing, the topical overtones of this double-LP also make it an essential listen, and here I promise I'm not kidding you. Tackling the themes of gay liberation, the horrors of war, and the joy and love that communities must try to reach in times of hardship--all of this during the dreadful era of Thatcherism and the AIDS epidemic--is a pretty serious thing. And managing to tackle those themes while conveying the feeling you're having a blast at the same time is a rather admirable achievement, all things considered. 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 here.
Number of albums left to review: 552
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 217 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 105
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 128
Skepta
2/5
There are plenty of rappers from Britain with a lot of talent, and I'm not denying Skepta is one of them and that he made a huge impact there. That said, why on earth would I label this album as an "essential" one?
Musically, it has rather "barebones" production values, which I get it, was done on purpose to make the whole thing sound raw and authentic. This works out fine on a few tracks here and there, such as "Numbers", or "Crime Riddim (which has a nice... riddim). Nonetheless, and in spite of their rather weird beeps and bloops, a lot of those tracks don't have anything particularly striking to them. Worse, some of the cuts sound incomplete or unfinished, which is quite ironical when you learn how many delays this release went through. To be honest, I predict most of the music on this LP will not age very well anyway. As a matter of fact, the record already sounds older than it really is.
And lyrically, well... Skepta has an interesting flow sometimes, but c'mon, some of the rhyming is pretty poor in key parts of this record. Case in point, the title track, where a quarter of the rhymes end with the same little word, "me" (a flaw that also occurs in "That's Not Me", for instance). Ugh. Ego-tripping is an exercise where you need to be sharper and smarter than that. And as far as lyrical hooks, nothing really stands out as well. This thing needs stronger choruses. Without those, the whole experience this grime album offers is a little underwhelming.
2/5 for the purposes of this list gathering "essential" albums, which translates to a 7/10 overall grade (5 + 2). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 551
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 217
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 105
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 129 (including this one)
Aerosmith
1/5
Can't believe I am writing a review for a *second* Aerosmith album. This would be fine for a 5000 albums list, not a 1001 one.
The first couple of tracks, \"Young Lust\" and \"F.I.N.E\", show the band displaying a lot of impressive energy for a studio performance, I'll give them that. As a matter of fact, most of the other tracks could be given the same sort of compliment: Steven Tyler was in a particularly fine form as a vocalist, for instance, between the sex-crazed inflexions and the daunting two-part harmonies ge goes through. BUT c'mon, as good as Tyler was, and as nicely performed as this album is, this LP is downright *cheesy*. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. I can hear some benevolent listeners telling me that this record was still better than the hair metal albums released around that time. Jeeze, I'm not even sure about that. I mean, \"The Other Side\" has all the bad things a hair metal band has, except for its overall \"sound\", *maybe* (those horns do sound a little fake, though, à la Van Halen's \"Jump\"). Most of the other cuts are closer to a rootsier hard rock, so they fare *slightly* better. But it's a version of hard rock that's so laden with clichés that it quickly becomes insufferable as well.
Interestingly, Aerosmith goes for a mock-Steely Dan mode at the start of \"Janie's Got A Gun\" (without their trademark jazzy chords) Yet this direction doesn't help either. Nice crunchy guitar solo in this one, I guess, and a bridge section that's harmonically and vocally pretty tight. The rest is ridiculous, however. And by \"the rest\", I don't only mean the rest of the song, I mean mostly *everything* in the album. On that note, \"What It Takes\", the lengthy ballad concluding the proceedings, is particularly awful. All those cringey \"oo-oohs\" and \"a-aaaahs\", not to mention the stupid scats on it... The band has never been able to beat \"Dream On\" in this ballad mode anyway. I'd rather go back to that, if you asked me to quote an Aerosmith tune.
There's no proper end to this review because there is no proper end to this cheesefest either. 1/5 for the purposes of this list , which means 6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1), mostly because of the performative aspect of this thing. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 550
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 217
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 105
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 130 (including this one)
Janet Jackson
1/5
Oh, well, some eighties r'n'b / commercial pop now. Michael's little sister... Those stylistic acrobacies this app makes us all go through...
Hmmm, actually, this doesn't sound so bad, at least on the first proper song, the title-track "Rhythm Nation". There are some cold undertones to this hard funk instrumentation that, indeed, could almost be labelled as "industrial", as Wikipedia points out. And interestingly, the end result is closer to Michael Jackson's archenemy Prince than what the "king of pop" was doing around those years. On that note, I've just read that Janet recorded this thing in Minneapolis... Coincidence? And there are also P-funk overtones in that chorus that are pretty effective. Nice opener, at least in that overall genre...
OK, more of the same with "State Of the World". I try to pay more attention to the vocal hooks this time, and I have to say I can't memorize anything. Which, basically, goes against the very definition of what a 'hook' is. I still like some of the instrumentation tough, as dated as it is...
"The Knowledge" 's introduction is copied and pasted from the previous track, right? And that song then quickly explores Prince's turf, once again. But I have to say that in the realm of spoken-word shenanigans over funk, I've heard much more impressive elsewhere.
Horrible gated drums at the very start of "Miss You Much". Trying to repeat to myself: "This comes from the eighties, put all that back into context... This comes from the eighties, put all that back into context... ". But it's not really working. And as much as I can appreciate the Prince influence (blatantly felt through the rhythms and the "Kiss"-like vocals inflexions), I think I'd rather listen to the real thing, instead of this second-tier version. Trying to focus on those atmospheric synth lines in the background (a trick the production team already used on other tracks). I like that sort of thing at least...
"Love Will Never Do (Without You)". This is the point where the Prince imitation becomes grating and hackneyed. Layers and layers of cheese. And gosh, this track goes on and on... Hard pass.
I can appreciate the good intentions behind "Livin' In The World (They Didn't Make) and its overall message, as naive as the latter is. But the music here looms closer to brother Michael than to Prince. And unfortunately, it also looms closer to Micheal's *worst* musical habits. I thought "Heal the World" was the most insufferable ballad-with-a-message of all time. I was wrong: Michael's sister did even worse than her brother. So I've changed my mind, Janet: could you go back to your previous stride and imitate Prince again? Thanks in advance.
"Alright" proves that Janet can't hear me. I thought "Black Or White" was the most insufferable family-friendly-funk-dance-rock-number of all time. I was wrong: Michael's sister did even worse than her brother in this realm as well.
Finally, Janet heard my previous request. "Escapade" has the same synth shenanigans Prince loved to sprinkle on his own hits. As a matter of fact, I think I've heard this Janet Jackson hit before. Is it because of this that I find it less obnoxious than the rest? And this even if the major chords of the short bridge section are STILL very obnoxious in my book?
About "Black Cat": I thought "Billie Jean" and "Dirty Diana" were stellar examples of the way hard rock could be mixed with eighties funk/r'n'b, and that nothing could beat those legendary tracks. And this time I was right. Janet's attempt to copy that formula is just plain silly.
"Lonely" and "Come Back To Me"= fillers. I mean that in the sense that a lot of stuff from this album is pretty bad, but I can still recognize some sort of ambition was displayed for those other cuts, as misplaced as said ambition is. Here, you don't even have that. I thought Micheal Jackson wrote the most insufferable "romantic ballads" of all time. I was wrong: Janet did.
For a second, I was under the impression that something different would happen at the start of closer "Someday Is Tonight". Nope: it's more of the same, at least as far as the mood of the two previous tracks is concerned. Nice muted trumpet at the end of this one, along with a few interesting chords. But apart from that, layers and layers of cheese.
Can't believe I managed to get through this album. Forgive me for the copied-and-pasted sections in this review. But given how much this record uses the same trick, whether "externally" (with all those Prince and/or Michael Jackson influences) or "internally" (all those songs sounding the same), blaming me for this would take the cake, I believe.
Besides, browsing through *Janet* and *The Velvet Rope*, it seems to me that those later albums hold their own a little better than *Rhythm Nation 1814* anyway. At least they're the ones that are still remembered today if you take streaming numbers into account. When it comes to older "commercial" pop artists such as this one here, I generally tend to follow today's target audience, and not the "critics" who gave their opinions long ago, influenced by the trends of their time and/or PR shenanigans. 1.5/5.
Number of albums left to review: 549
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 217
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 105
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 131 (including this one)
The Soft Boys
5/5
An extraordinary feat and a criminally underrated album that sounds like an all-time classic today. I didn't know who Robyn Hitchcock was before I used this app. Now I stand corrected.
I have a pretty busy day today, and unfortunately, I can't write a proper review (I hope the creators of this great app could give us a way to amend or revise our reviews once we're done with the 1001 albums). But here are the words or phrases that would have appeared in said review from me:
thrilling / melodic / "I Wanna Destroy You" is a powerful opener / incredible vocal harmonies / feels like an insant classic / the album starts on a very hight note, yet what's great about it is that its many other high notes are very different from that initial one / nonetheless, the whole thing stays cohesive / jangle pop / college rock / post-punk / hearkens back to great moments from the sixties / use of post-punk energy / foretells indie-rock from the nineties and later / perfect guitar lines, angular and yet strongly harmonic / sardonic-yet-often-tender lyrics / lots of specific references to past bands, yet their influence never feels "forced", it is totally "digested" by Hitchcock and co. Examples: Buffalo Springfield-Neil Young for "Kingdom Of Love" / The Beach Boys for "Positive Vibrations / The Cramps (or the early off-kilter rock that inspired them) for "I Got The Hots" / The Velvet Underground for "Insanely jealous Of You" (That viola and the tribute that it is to John Cale! That crazy vocal performance and its tribute to Lou Reed!) / Todd Rundgren or Big Star for "Tonight" / The Feelies or Television for "You'll Have To Go Sideways / Gang Of Four or Wire for "Old Pervert" / The Byrds for "Queen Of Eyes" / Closer "Underwater Moonlight" is a perfect gem / The best anthem about getting older ever written / Perfect, perfect LP / 5 stars
Number of albums left to review: 548
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 218 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 105
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 131
Oh, by the way: I love how some people in here just can't read (or just click on one link): it's called BONUS TRACKS, you fools! Of course they're NOT gonna be up to the level of the proper album. That's why they weren't included in the first place!
But what really takes the cake here is the reviewers who did notice that all those last cuts were bonus tracks, and yet still complain about them, and so give The Soft Boys less than a 4/5 grade as a result. I sometimes think there should be some some sort of "listener's licence" exam that should be taken before using this app... Naw, I'm just kidding, ha ha. But *still*. Guys (or gals). Get a grip. Please.
Def Leppard
1/5
Def Leppard at the time they were still trying to imitate AC/DC, and coming up short as a result. Some of the vocal lines are incredibly grating. And the guitar solos are hackneyed and trite, obviously. Bland, sterile, low-brow, unimaginative, you take your pick. As for production values, they're on their way to the synth-enhanced hair-metal cheesiness of *Hysteria* here.
I gave a 1/5 grade to the latter, but it was honestly a bit tough on my part. Some of the silly tracks on it can be endearing in a tongue-in-cheek way. Which is not even really the case for *Pyromania*.
For general musicianship I'll give 5 points to this album, to which I will add one point for the "professional" production values, typical of the eighties. A 6/10 grade, then. Which, obviously translates to a 1/5 mark for the quite *different* purposes of this list of "essential" albums. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 547
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 218
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 105
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 132 (including this one)
Lynyrd Skynyrd
4/5
No review in here can beat the one saying "I kept asking for them to play 'Free Bird' and then they did". Except that contrary to this review, I would give Lynyrd Skynyrd four stars instead of two. Or maybe even four-stars-and-a-half. You have serious classics on that first side. Plus, obviously, that flying critter and its incredibe solo, closing the proceedings at the end of side B.
Five stars is out of the question though. Side B is *a little* patchy (except for its closer). And that thing with the confederate flag often shown in the band's iconography (fortunately absent for the cover of this LP), along with some of the lyrics overtones, didn't exactly age well, to say the least. Southern folklore, some boomers might say. Well, when you have the full picture, you just can't fool around with certain things anymore.
Fortunately, in 2023, there are ways to address "southern identity" that are not offensive anymore. Or at least not offensive in the sense of "insensitive to the plight of African-Americans". See up-and-coming bands such as Chat Pile or Wednesday, for instance, who love to show the underside of the US South, and yet still display some sort of empathy for the white trash protagonists who live there. But that's a story for another time, kiddies.
Number of albums left to review: 546
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 219 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 105
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 132
5/5
I've always wondered about the contents of Polly Jean Harvey's handbag on this album cover. First because she twirls it like a sling on the video for "Good Fortune", which was pretty hilarious--not necessarily in a good way, but still... good memories. And then, because NYC can be a rough place, and the Bri'ish lass might have felt the need to place some objects that would allow to fend for herself in the city. Maybe even a weapon of some sort. "A pistol", as she says herself. Her mind in all about love, but violence is never far from the picture. They're two sides of the same coin, like the titular "city" and "sea" (the latter never to be seen in the artwork, interestingly).
Songwriting-wise, Polly Jean sure breaks out the big guns with the first four tracks at the very start of this LP. But as excellent as they are, "Big Exit", "Good Fortune", "One Line" and "A Place Called Home" are not the only gems in this record. You also need to mention the perfect rocker "The Whores Hustle and The Hustles Whore", "This Mess We're In"--a touching duet with Thom Yorke--, manic "Kamikaze"--which hearkens back to the bluesy riffs of *Rid Of Me*--and, finally, the atmospheric-yet-climactic closer "We Float".
Sound-wise, the album is a 180-degree turn from the far more abrasive LPs PJ Harvey had recorded up to that point. There were four of those LPs already: the raw, demo-like debut *Dry*, a *rough* diamond, but a diamond nonetheless; the Steve-Albini-produced--ahem, I mean "recorded"--*Rid Of Me*; and the part quieter, part noisier (and even industrial-tinged, sometimes) *To Bring You My Love* and *Is This Desire?*. Compared to all these records, *Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea" is a more "streamlined" affair, with a production that is very calibrated. No funny business anywhere.
At the time I remember being disappointed by those more "mainstream" sonic aethetics (foretelling most of what would occur in "indie" music in general during the naughts, unfortunately). Today, I'm at peace with those production values, however, and I can even understand why Polly Jean needed them at this point of her career: she had just written material that had potential to become instant classics in a certain rock tradition, so Polly and her bandmates Rob Ellis and Mick Harvey (co-producing the album with her) probably felt like they needed to put out a very cohesive LP to give justice to said material.
And given how strong the songs are, it works. Plus, the vocal perfomance on this album is spotless, and also helps creating an "instant classic" feel to the whole thing. Harvey had often been compared to Patti Smith in the past, but on tracks like "Good Fortune", her voice naturally reaches the same iconic presence that Smith had for her own classics.. And the constant references to New York in the songs (and artwork) can remind the listener of this connection as well. It all checks out. In *Stories From the City..*, Polly Jean both looks backwards, to the past, *and* forward, to the future. And she draws on a most prestigious rock tradition to cement her status of an artist who's here for the long run, who's here to stay. Hence why that record needed to be here, on this list.
I'm giving this album a perfect 5/5 grade. I have also done that for *Rid Of Me* and *Let England Shake*, and if it had been in Dimery's list, I would have done the same for *To Bring You My Love*. Please, Robert, take out one of those convoluted, half-baked late LPs by Elvis Costello or Paul Weller/Style Council, and give one more spot to Polly Jean. I know that *you know* she deserves it. Beware, because if you don't comply, I'll grab that handbag of hers and hurl it in your direction to smash some sense back into your head. Pretty sure she keeps some very dangerous objects in that thing. So be warned... 😀
Number of albums left to review: 545
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 220 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 105
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 132
Eminem
5/5
The "relevant reviews" section on the app is pretty long for this album. Loads of other reviewers cliked on that "like" button, either for 1/5 reviews or for 5/5 reviews. Eminem still get people "reacting", more than 20 years after his heyday and commercial breakthrough...
And here I am giving this record four-stars-and-a-half, in spite of the dumb homophobia and 8th-grade "jokes" on it. First, speaking merely in terms of "essental" albums, you just can't NOT have this record in the list. Its cultural impact matches its selling numbers, and you can still sense the ripple effects of what Eminem has done here today. And secondly, this record is a hell of a (hellish) ride, musically and lyrically.
Musically, this is the apex of Dr. Dré's typical productions from the early naughts, and the Jeff Bass contributions are equally good overall. "Criminal", " The Way I Am", "The Real Sliom Shady" are absolute bangers, but the deeper cuts are all ear candies as well. And lyrically, well... Other reviews in the "relevant ones" section wonderfully explain the whole concept of *The Marshall Mathers LP", its whole "Is he serious? / Is he not?" ambiguity, (some of those reviews even pointing out how said ambiguity tells a lot about the state of 'Merica in those years).
I'm not even gonna attempt to add anything about all this, just read those great takes out there. You'll soon understand which reviews are the bright ones. And listen to the album. For me it's just an awesome cinematic experience. And even if it wasn't, Eminem's technical abilities as a rapper is like constant fireworks for me. His hectic pace, his delivery, his outrageous wit at times, his impersonations... Love him or not, he changed the course of rap music with this LP. Hence why he had to be in this list.
Number of albums left to review: 544
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 221 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 105
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 132
Dexys Midnight Runners
3/5
I was already familiar with "Come On Eileen" , of course... But discovering what this band--mixing blue-eyed soul and traditional folk sounds--had under their belt was interesting. I'm not gonna lie, though: as of now, I'm not head over heels about what Kevin Rowland and co. accomplished in their first couple of albums--as striking as said albums might have sounded to some listeners at the time. I understand the Van Morrison filiation (in case you missed it, there's a cover of the Irish songwriter in *Too Rye Ay*'s tracklist), and I think I "get" the overall artistic intent behind this whole thing. But I still have a hard time finding Dexys Midnight Runner endearing. It's a matter of personal taste when it comes to hooks, chords and vocal lines, probably...
Not that the band is "bad", by any means. The horn section in Dexys debut *Searching For The Young Soul Rebels* already gave a somewhat ska-like atmosphere to the whole thing, and made this act sound sincere and authentic--even though I didn't think everything in that debut was *that* memorable. In comparison, this sophomore effort is a slicker affair, and the addition of strings in it was also a welcome development. But then again, beyond "Come On Eileen", I didn't find the songs terrific either, as nicely performed as they are. The first two tracks were pretty good, especially during their harmonic climaxes when the time came to warp things up. Yet I still wish Rowland had spent more time on those harmonic flourishes and other last-minute catchy hooks, instead of wasting his energy on less interesting chord progressions during the bulk of the songs. Most of the tunes meander a little too much in those underwhelming waters, relying on the talented singer's voice and a few short solos here and there (horns or violins). As a result, this record remains stingy as far as "wow" moments are concerned. At least to me. To be honest, I'd rather listen to Madness if I want that kind of overall "ballroom-party-mood-enhanced-by-horns-and-whatnot" (even if the British ska band are far from being my all-time favorites either).
There are two different mixes of this album, by the way. Rowland had it mixed again in 2022, because he was unsatisfied with the original version (here on that Spotify link). I kinda agree with him. If ever I return to this LP in the future, that's the version I'm gonna go to.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums (which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes--5 + 3). Next, please...
Number of albums left to review: 543
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 221
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 106 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 132
Beck
3/5
Notwithstanding *Rolling Stones*'s raving review at the time, this here is NOT Beck's best album. Which does not mean that *Sea Change* does not have its share of brilliant moments. "Paper Tiger" winks at Serge Gainsbourg and the string section in his groovy and bass-heavy *Histoire de Melody Nelson*--too bad the song itself is less memorable than its lush production values ; "The Golden Age" and "Guess I'm Doing Fine" are cool country-tinged, steel-guitar-enhanced numbers, but musically speaking, they're almost the same tune (apart from a few different chords here and there)--which is a little annoying given that they almost follow one another at the start of this LP ; "Lonesome Tears" and "Sunday Sun" can boast harboring the most intense choruses in the album, thanks to their angsty minor harmonies (performed on strings for the first and on a piano for the second)--I wish more cuts displayed harmonies like that in the LP ; "Lost Cause" is a very simple break-up song. *Simple* being an asset and not a flaw here--even if it seems there is something lacking at the end of this one ; "It's All In Your Mind" sees Mr. Hansen successfully revisit an emotional outtake from his earlier grassroots LP *One Foot In The Grave* ; "Round The Bend", another cut with a pivotal string section, sounds so much like a Nick Drake song circa *Five Leaves Left* (à la "River Man" or "Way To Blue") that it is even a little embarassing to listen to, as nice as the track is ; as for the faraway acoustic guitars of "Already Dead", they bring an interesting mood to the table--nice but not "essential".
The thing is, this record is also a very "glossy" affair, probably thanks to the spacy, reverb-drenched production of Nigel Godrich, of *OK Computer* and *Kid A* fame. I'm pretty sure that for a lot of initial Beck fans, the association between the two men is a pretty good match, but to me, it's not necessarily one made in heaven. See "Little One", a great song in itself, but way too clean-sounding here, stifling its potentially " biting" ingredients. To most fans out there, Beck will always be more endearing through his earlier lo-fi, "patchy-on-purpose", surreal and sarcastic masterpieces *Mellow Gold* and *Odelay* anyway. The "classic", seventies-sounding, *Harvest*-like feel he aims at for this record doesn't exactly fit the postmodernist troubadour that he is at heart (see "End Of the Day", for instance--probably the most boring song in this collection, and the lowest point of the album). And even in that "introspective" mood such as the one displayed in *Sea Change*, Beck Hansen has proven that he can craft tunes that are far more effective overall. Listen to the the DIY, Calvin Johnson-recorded *One Foot In The Grave*, or even *Mutations* (marking Beck and Godrich's first collaboration, incidentally). As intimate and low-key as those earlier records were, they were not "one-note" at all: they had their share of little suprises and welcomed 180-degree turns, which kept them lively for most of their runtime.
In comparison, *Sea Change* is very much a one-note affair. And this sort of one-note mode is NOT the one in which Beck shines the best, even though I admit that *some* of the songs in this album have grown on me, finally. So I'll leave the door open for this LP in my own list, and will probably revisit it again. But I doubt there will be any room left for it by the time I finish my list.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" records, translating to a 8/10 mark for more "general" purposes (5 + 3). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 542
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 221
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 107 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 132
Sinead O'Connor
2/5
Nothing compares to that all-time famous cover of Prince in this sophomore album. The first track, "Feel So Different", has aged pretty well, thanks to its barebones string instrumentation. Yet it's too damn long, like a lot of other cuts from this LP. By the time you finally get to an interesting hook at the end of that opener, you just want the damn thing to be over.
Equally long is "I Am Stretched On Your Grave", and this time, the instrumentation is pretty dated. O'Connor and her producers thought that using a classic hip hop loop (borrowed from James Brown's "Funky Drummer"--how original...) as background for a 17th century poem put to music by an Irish folk revivalist... would be a pretty neat idea. Newsflash: the end result is quite awkward--probably because the recipe is lacking key ingredients, such as interesting arrangements and other instrumental flourishes. Anything that could help the tune get out of the self-indulgent zone. Mixing things up--mingling different styles and atmospheres--requires some thought. But it's nowhere to be seen here.
Speaking of "awkward", there's usually something wrong with the lyrics as well in this record. Sinead's heart is in the right place when she wants to tackle topical issues between the expected romantic tunes. The thing is, her conversational sort of songwriting often falls flat--there's no breadth, few striking images, and almost no "soul" to speak of. Being "conversational" can yield nice results sometimes, but not in here. You often end up wondering what it is that O'Connor really means to say. Once again, such accomplishments require some thought.
Apart from that, "Jump In The River" is a pretty decent rock track, and, well, "Nothing Compares 2 U" slaps, of course. But the rest is either awfully dated when it comes to sounds and moods ("The Emperor's New Clothes", "Black Boys On Mopeds"), or it just drones and slumbers (the three last tracks, for instance, whose titles I'm not even bother quoting...).
2/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general artistry and musicianship overall. Next, please...
Number of albums left to review: 541
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 221
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 107
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 133 (including this one)
Jethro Tull
4/5
This record is as weird as endearing. The title track and "Cross-Eyed Mary" set the for quite an original ride for sure, but beyond any "concept-album" pretensions, they're just good pieces of seventies music. The rest of the first side is OK, with a lot of acoustic tracks also evocating a vague narrative displaying different characters' voices. And just when you think that things get a little drowsy come the big guns--best represented by Ian Anderson's flute, oddly enough (what an incredible way to make this instrument shine in a rock act!). "Up To Me", "My God" and its crazy vocal bridge, "Hymn 43" and its infectious groove, "Locomotive Breath" and its heavier riifs, "Wind Up" and its guitar solos... At this point, I do not necessary need to follow the somewhat muddle narrative or wonder what the "difference between God and religion" really means (the supposed "theme" of that second side). The music is good enough. I don't know any other Jethro Tull album, and I'm not a *huge* fan of Prog Rock. But I understand why *Aqualung* was liked by so many people in 1971 and later. 4/5.
Number of albums left to review: 540
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 222 (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 107
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 133
Buzzcocks
4/5
A quick note about Buzzcocks: given that the compilation *Singles Going Steady*, originally released in the UK, was also the first record Pete Shelley and his band released in the US, I consider it as a full-blown album that should definitely be on this list.
I understand why Dimery and co. used a different rationale, and so needed to include their debut album there instead, for example (I wonder if they included *Love Bites* as well--you know, the one with "Ever Fallen In Love..." ). But to me, the case of Buzzcocks is more simply dealt with if you use that legendary collection of singles to show how pivotal this band was.
Not that "Another Music In A Different Kitchen" is bad, it's still excellent punk rock with sardonic pop sensibilities. It's just that it's a notch under the incredible tracklisting of *Singles Going Steady*.
Number of albums left to review: 539
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 221
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 108 (including this one--but you can be sure "Singles Going Steady" will be there!)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 133
2/5
Today, the 1001 albums app made some welcome changes. The font for the numbers in our summary sections is both larger and thinner. I'm no expert in fonts, so I don't know the name of that one, but I like it ( I'm fond of "calibri" and "verdana", for example). And it's not the only thing that's new on the app: if you go to your summaries, once again, we now have the names of our favorite and worst artists at the top of all those wonderful album covers. Yeah, good idea. I wonder why David Bowie doesn't appear there for my own favorite arists, though. Black Sabbath does, but I've rated less album from them than ones by Bowie. Is it because I've rated *Let's Dance* less than four stars? You tell me... But no worries: Pixies, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey and the Beatles are there, that's all that matters. And I hope Neil Young, The Cure, A Tribe Called Quest and Kendrick Lamar will soon join them.
Apart from that, nothing much happened today.
Oh, yeah, there was an album popping up on the app this morning, I almost forgot.
🤔
Do I *really* need to speak my mind about this record? Today is Sunday, after all. Maybe I can take a break...
Alright, alright, let's do this (heavy sigh).
I would start with the understatement of the year: Maybe the production on this LP is a little overblown, don't you think? 🙃 There, I've said it. I hope Muse fans are not too shocked by this hot, hot take. 😜
Let's be fair, half of the tracks on this LP are catchy--albeit with quite a few laughable moments in them, both musically and lyrically. And I can appreciate the wide range of influences inspiring those songs: Philip Glass for "Take A Bow", wide-eyed pop for "Starlight", modern r'nb for "Supermassive Black Hole", Ennio Morricone for "Knights Of Cydonia" (except that Other Lives have since used that latter influence for far better results), plus a little bit of Queen here and there... In other words, it's a bit ridiculous, as nice as those influences are on their own. I know Muse have publicly stated that some of those tunes are tongue-in-cheek "exercises", but still...
And the other half of those tracks is just a terrible borefest anyway, not even worth a good laugh. When you listen to the whole thing in one sitting, you're just left wondering if the band is totally naive or incredibly pretentious. But maybe they're *both*.
I've just read this LP is not even in the latest editions of the 1001 albums book. It didn't take long for Dimery and co. to realize the sort of shmaltzy blokes Muse had become by the time of *Black Holes And Revelations*. Hence why they needed to go to leave some room to other, more worthwhile artists.
And it's exactly why I'm gonna exclude them as well. After all, Bellamy and co. have had their share of the spotlight for a long time. They're incredible musicians and performers, and sold millions and millions of units, I hear. But that sort of thing never meant that a band was really *good* or relevant artistically speaking...
So next please...
Number of albums left to review: 538
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 221
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 108
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 134 (including this one)
Maxwell
1/5
An album so smooth that its front cover slips away from the CD case as soon as you buy it, and all you have left to show on Spotify, Wikipedia and the 1001 album app is the back cover.
Also, an album so *square* that in 1996 it was named one of the year's 10 best albums in lists published by Rolling Stone, Time, and USA Today.
Number of albums left to review: 537
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 221
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 108
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 135 (including this one)
Funkadelic
5/5
The title track opening this album is one-of-a-kind, that's for sure. This atmospheric plea to save Mother Earth is a very current topic, and the latter is mostly conveyed through a tearful 10-minute guitar solo. One for the ages.
When you get to the band's funk-rock routine right after this impressive opener, the transition (or lack thereof) is a bit jarring, to be honest. But fortunately, "Can You Get To That", "Hit It And Quit It" and "You And Your Folks, Me And My Folks" are excellent cuts. Their vocals are fun and soulful, and the rough edges of the instrumentation bring a lot of life to the proceedings. This LP loses steam a little on the second side, though. And that rather self-indulgent jam at the very end (ten minutes that are less stellar than the ones of the opener) prevents me from giving Funkadelic a perfect grade
4,5/5 stars, mostly for the record's first side and its historical importance for African-American music. Feeling generous today, so I'm gonna round up that mark to five. If you asked to me choose between team Bill Clinton and team George Clinton, I know for sure which horny sax player I would pick. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 536
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 223 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 108
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 135
Sly & The Family Stone
5/5
"It's a family affaaai-iiir... It's a family affa-ai-ir..."
Damn. What a moody album. The first time I lstened to it, a few years ago, I didn't know what to make of it. With its drum machines, subdued grooves and quite despondent atmosphere, *There's A Riot Going On* is so different from *Stand*...
Yet this LP grew on me after several listens. It has a bold mix of sleaze, tenderness and paranoia that makes it one-of-a-kind, and listening to the end result today is probably as intriguing and fascinating as it was in 1971.
31. This here is not my grade for the album, it's me counting the "suns" on that flag. (what an iconic cover). But hey, you already know how many stars I gave to this thing... Next please.
Number of albums left to review: 535
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 224 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 108
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 135
Bobby Womack
1/5
"Girl, you know how to make my cookie crumble, my cookie crumble
When you hold me close and do all the things you do to me
Ooh-wee, baby
Just like some good old Kentucky Fried Chicken
And all of it was good enough to be finger lickin′"
Poetry. It rhymes. Sort of.
"Secrets" is so bad that it's probably the reason Spotify refuses to play it, just in case users unsubscribe from their premium accounts in protest. And the obnoxious music that's played behind those lyrics is even *worse*. Everything in this song is a dumpster fire.
The same goes for "Stand Up", a subpar version of Parliament/Funkadelic shenanigans. It's, like, a "clean" version of them. Which is quite a nonsensical idea. You can feel Womack grabbing at everything at hand around him so as to sell unit shifters. His label must have been pleased. But decades later, I'm not.
Conversely, "So Many Sides Of You" and "If You Think You're Lonely Now" are OK. The bass on the first sounded familiar, as did the vocals on the second. Maybe those songs inspired others that i know (or the other way around). Whatever the case may be, the overall mood for those cuts sounded *right*.
Unfortunately, you can't say that for the other tracks.The other songs are just boring (except for the two dumpster fires I mentioned earlier, lol). And the production values have not aged very well. Another example of the artistic dead-ends the eighties led so many great musicians to. So next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 535
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 224 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 108
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 135
The Vines
1/5
Take a slice of Nirvana, cook it in a Britpop sauce (part Blur, part Oasis), sprinkle with abundant portions of psychedelia and early 2000s garage rock (à la The Strokes), and what you get is a predictable "indie" success at the time this one came out.
The thing is, none of those great ingredients gel or interact in any sort of cohesive or satisfactory manner in *Highly Evolved*. I felt it at the time, and I feel it even more now. Worse, there are quite a few embarassing moments in this LP. The verses of "Factory" sound like Paul McCartney circa 1975 playing a ska song. Should I really need to say more? I mean *really*???
Two things ruin this record overall: first the transitions between the different sorts of songs are absolutely jarring. Sometimes topsy-turvy albums have their charms. Here, unfortunately, the stylistic 180-degree turns are just awkward. Yet the *real* problem is that the songs are themselves pretty lame, even taken on their own. The chord successions are unoriginal and predictable. The compositions are boring. Long tracks have grating vocal lines that meander aimlesly, and short tracks feel half-cooked. Only the rockers "Get Free" and "Highly Evolved" are fully enjoyable--mostly through the energy that's displayed in those Nirvana and The Strokes rip-offs...
Too bad those two decent cuts are not enough to save this record from disaster. On their strength, I could have been led to believe the album was somewhat even remotely interesting. Glad I didn't fall into that trap at the time. And also glad that I could listen to that thing again. Sometimes, as you get older and broaden your tastes, you end up changing your mind about some acts. But not in here, and not me.
1/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums. Which translates to something between a 4/10 and a 6/10 grade for more general purposes, such as assessing the hard work made a professional band. Hey, it's still better than the 1 or 2/10 mark I would give to Limp Bizkit, at least.
Next please. 😏
Number of albums left to review: 533
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 224
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 108
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 136 (including this one)
Elvis Costello
1/5
Robert Dimery probably dreams about this at night sometimes. He wants to write a new book. His editor and him agreed on a project, Robert has received a nice sum as an advance, so he turns his computer on and starts writing the title of his new project:
*1001 ELVIS COSTELLO Albums You Need To Listen To Before You Die*.
A nagging feeling of suspicion suddenly grabs Robert. He checks his notes again and again. Something's terribly wrong. He checks again, a horrified expression on his face. It seems like Elvis Costello has recorded a respectable number of records, it's true, but they're still far less that 1001!
That's when Robert jumps and sits up in his bed, his breath cut short. What a horrible nightmare.
---------
Changed my mind on *This Year's Model* and *Armed Forces* and will now include them in my own list (one of the very, very rare cases where I don't stand by a review I wrote since I've started to use this app). But it's as far as I'll go to follow Dimery and co.'s literal *obsession* with Elvis Costello (a running gag that has been noticed by a lot of reviewers in here, eliciting quite a few smirks in reponse). *Blood And Chocolate* has some very good moments (example: "I Want You"), but it's too patchy to be included in my own list. "Imperial Bedroom" is too damn chatty. I don't remember the name of that later album from the nineties, but I do remember it was a borefest. And this debut album here sounds very much like an early rock'n'roll pastiche, making it very hard to take it seriously.
"Watching The Detectives" is a nice single, though, a reggae track with punky overtones pretty close to what The Police was playing around those years--even if Costello brings his own spin in that formula. But that good song is not enough to mitigate the overall feeling of boredom the rest of this LP inspired me. It's certainly not the worst record ever selected in Dimery's book, so maybe my grade is a bit harsh here--keep in mind that it translates to a 6/10 grade for an assessment that's not related to the purposes of selecting "essential" album (5+1). Let's just say that my 1/5 grading is also a way for me to protest about the fact that at least three slots in the original list could have been given to other artists.
Have I forgotten an Elvis Costello album mentioned in the 1001 albums book, by the way? I probably have.
Maybe it's my turn to have nightmares about the man with glasses...
In the meantime... next please.
Number of albums left to review: 532
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 224
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 108
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 137 (including this one)
SAULT
4/5
Love most of Inflo's work as a producer for Little Simz or Michael Kiwanuka. He's a very prolific artist, so it's hard to keep track of everything he does, especially with SAULT, his most personal project. Out of his many albums under that moniker, *(Black Is)*--along with its twin brother *(God)*--is probably the most striking thing the man has released so far, and this during a very pivotal moment of the BLM movement--whose necessary agenda is evoked or hinted at in quite a few moments of this topical record.
Musically, Inflo keeps everything smooth and restrained by only adding as few layers as he can in the songs' instrumentation. A funky drum pattern here. A rhodes keyboard there. A few simple synth lines. A groovy bassline. Dignified and inhabited vocals from Cleo Sol... The end result is a very *moody* album, whose barebones production values always hit the intended mark--at least of you ignore a couple of short missteps that never detract you from the whole picture.
Among the highlights, there are "Stop Dem" and "Hard Life", cuts that hearken back to 60s and 70s soul music, plus "Wildfires", whose music is as moving as its lyrics--lyrics that are clearly referencing George Floyd's murder, but also all the similar tragedies that occured before it. As for "Bow", it is an exciting example of what Inflo can do when he explores territories inspired by afro-beat (Kiwanuka's help on this one is a plus, of course). And there's also the mesmerizing "Black", basically an instrumental with a few vocals here and there, alternating between a repetitive loop over a trap pattern, a bridge sounding as if it had been borrowed from a Stevie Wonder song, and a jazzy and angular guitar solo...
After a few middling tracks at the center of the album, SAULT finds greatness again with the incredible "Monsters", a track as poetic and topical as it is catchy. After that, "Miracles" references sixties soul again, with enticing doo-wop background vocals. "Hold Me" sounds a little more modern, but "Stay Up, Pray Up" closer the proceeding on a vintage note again, and this to great effects.
All in all, a good record. I just wish Inflo had only used all the best cuts out of *(Black Is)* and added the few highlights of the (unfortunately) less restrained *(God)* so as to create a truly stellar album. Self-editing is not his strong suit, I've already noticed that for his work with Little Simz. But maybe I'm splitting hairs here. 4/5. Next please.
Number of albums left to review: 531
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 224
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 109 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 137
The Zombies
5/5
This one was a hidden gem for a long time. Now it's universally recognized as the masterpiece it always was--well, except for a few reviewers in here, evidently tone-deaf whenever essential records from the sixities pop up in this app. I have a feeling those folks are more interested in sound than in good songwriting... But maybe I'm wrong. That said, a 3.47 score is not too bad, especially compared to the ones of the smaller fry often mentioned in Dimery's book...
Don't get fooled by this psychedelic cover, by the way. *Odessey And Oracle* is indeed best understood and appreciated if you put it where it truly belongs: in the realm of a *chamber pop* that's not too far from the second stage of The Kinks discography. Except that The Kinks never released such an impressive LP, as excellent as their own foray into that genre were overall.
Telling the tale of an prison inmate soon to be released, "Care Of Cell 44" is an amazing opener, whose rousing chorus is one of the best ever penned by an act from the so-called "British Invasion". Rod Argent and Chris White had a thing for sophisticated modulations in their choice of chords sequences, also exemplified in the tender "A Rose For Emily" and "Maybe After He's Gone" after that first track. Yet such choices never feel "forced", on the contary, they always feel earned and "natural". Plus, the instrumentation is pristine, between the subtle touches of Mellotron and the Beach Boys-like backing vocals.
Next is "Beechwood Park" a very atmospheric piece that could remind you of a Moody Blues outtake--it would sound great as a soundtrack for a flick taking place between 1965 and 1670, for instance. Nice Hammond organ on that one, too. "Brief Candles" starts like an innocuous ditty displaying novelty overtones. But once again, The Zombies' flair for off-kilter chord sequences takes the whole thing to another level.
Speaking of great chord sequences, "Hung Up On A Dream" is an instant classic, between its incredibly moving vocal lines, its adventurous bridges and its wealth of hooks on both guitars. Not to mention those Mellotron sounds, once again. This song is probably one of my top-ten favorite tunes from the sixties, and to be honest, I'm surprised by the small number of reviewers singling this one out in the reviews section. C'mon guys and gals, give this earworm another chance, I'm sure you'll thank me later!
"Changes" opens side two on a quite different note, mostly relying on an elated-yet-oddly-distant group singing and a flute sound probably played on the Mellotron as well. Not as impressive as the other songs, but its place in the tracklisting, right after the wonders of "Hung Up On A Dream" makes sense: it's as if you were slowly waking up from said dream.
"I Want Her She Wants Me" hearkens back to the Zombies' previous recordings, with a more upbeat sound that fits the early years of the British Invasion. A nice tune, even if it's far from being the best of the bunch. Fortunately, "This Will Be Our Year" follows, and even if its style is a little quaint and unobtrusive, this one has another memorable vocal line that makes it a miniature classic.
"Butcher's Tale" is probably the most "psychedelic" song here, albeit one crossed with a traditional sort of tune, mostly played on an accordion (!). What a weird choice for a single. Yet at this point of the LP's tracklist, the mystical undertones of its chorus brings a lot of unbridled energy to the album. Some parts of the vocals are off-key, by the way, but that is actually an asset here--giving a spontaneous, lively and emotive air to a cut that could have passed as weird-for-its-own-sake had it been performed differently.
And here we are at the end of this album. "Friends Of Mine" is very *flower power* and naive, and is probably one of the least interesting cuts. But who cares, because it's merely a transition leading to the only official "hit" in this record, "Time Of The Season", whose rhythm section using breathing sounds and handclaps is one of the grooviest and sexiest thing I've ever heard in my life. And there's also a Stax/Motown undertone to the song's lead vocals that brings the last ingredient this space-cake-of-an-album surely needed: some "soul" influences. Sure, said ingredient comes at the eleventh hour. But the mere fact that it doesn't sound out of place after all the other tracks shows how cohesive this record actually is. Cohesive and yet one-of-a-kind.
5/5, of course. Next please.
Number of albums left to review: 530
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 225
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 109
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 137
Joni Mitchell
5/5
A key Joni Mitchell album (along with *Blue*, *Hejira* and *Ladies Of The Canyon*). This one here is the record where Mitchell starts to dive into jazz territories via pop music (a jazzier direction she will then refine again for *The Hissing Of Summer Lawns* and *Hejira*). But most of all, this album harbours some of the very best tunes Mitchell ever wrote and performed (like "Help Me", "Free Man In Paris" or "Car On A Hill"...).
Some transitional albums are not "essential" but this one truly is--if only because the tunes are as catchy as their instrumentation and arrangements are sophisticated. But it's not because Joni's craft is unique that she can't have fun along the way. Case in point, "Raised On Robbery", a refreshing rocker. But there's also that cover of a skat standard at the end, "Twisted". Lots of reviewers on this app complained about this one. C'mon, gals and guys, this here is just a little joke to close the proceedings. Where's your sense of humor, damn it?
Number of albums left to review: 529
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 226 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 109
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 137
Hanoi Rocks
1/5
All style, no substance. Mediocre songs played by a mediocre band. And they're not even cool in a tongue-in-cheek way.
Found on the Wikipedia page about the band: "Although musically closer to traditional rock n' roll and punk, Hanoi Rocks has been cited as a major influence in the glam metal genre for bands such as Guns N' Roses, Skid Row and Poison."
That sure explains a few things. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 528
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 226
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 109
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 138 (including this one)
The Jam
4/5
An essential album for all fans of The Jam. For everyone else, the stakes are rather low-key during the first two very similar-sounding tracks. But Paul Weller and co. nicely build up things from there: "Mr. Clean" is an effective pop-punk cut, "David Watts" is a lively cover of a Kinks classic, and "English Rose" is a elegiac, starry-eyed love song whose delicate acoustic guitar and hushed vocals give you the feeling you're lying in the grass at night, watching the milky way next to your better half. And "In The Crowd" is convincing as well, especially its surprisingly psychedelic guitar solo at the end. This record is the one in which The Jam broadened their palette, and as it can be heard on its first side, it was mostly for good effects at the time (or good "sound affects", I might say).
The first part of side two is less impressive, though. "Billy Hunt" returns to more expected punk-rock territories, but feels rather functional after all the adventures on side one. And "It's Too Bad" and "Fly" are naive pop numbers that are a little bland, even though the guitar hooks in the latter are good.
Peaks are to be seen again after that short valley, fortunately. "The Place I Love" and "A-Bomb On Wardour Street" are punky cuts that fare slightly better than the ones before. And "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight" is a closer that fares exceptionally well, thanks to its enticing background vocals and lush guitar needlework during its conclusion (is that a synth that I hear as well there?)
*Setting Sons* and *Sound Affects*, the LPs that will follow that one, are pretty good albums as well, by the way--even if the latter is where Paul Weller's blue-eyed soul phase started, with increasingly patchy results as his career went on. But I guess that's a story for other times, kiddies.
Number of albums left to review: 527
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 227 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 109
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 138
Terence Trent D'Arby
1/5
Found on Wikipedia:
'In 2012, journalist Daryl Easlea said the album was crystallized as Trent's moment, "a soundtrack to the turning point when the 80s turned from austerity to prosperity. It's as central to that decade as the much-seen image of the city trader waving his wad of banknotes to the camera. It remains one big, infectiously glorious record."'
If this is the sort of thing this album evokes to "music experts" decades later after its release, then it fully deserves the one-star grade I would have given it even if I had not read that ridiculous comment. Wave your wad of banknotes someplace else. The production values of this LP have aged horribly, even if you follow the standards of commercial music during the eighties. Worse, Terence Trent D'Arby are extrememly grating for the most part. So, next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 526
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 227
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 109
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 139 (including this one)
Queen Latifah
4/5
An important figure for early hip hop, Queen Latifah is a skilled artist who can bring a lot of power and emotion to her flow (as objectively "dated" as said flow is on this debut album). So I'm not surprised to see her in this list. Plus, the feminist themes in most of these cuts can't hurt. When I was a teenager, in the early nineties, I was exposed to a lot of rap albums, but not to this one. I suspect misogyny played a part in this. And I'm glad this mistake is corrected now.
Lyrically, Latifah's assets lie more in her earnestness and sincerity than in her witticisms (although there are some of them here and there). But it's her strong delivery that sells the whole deal. Her tremulous vocal inflexion on the word "dance" in "Dance For Me", for instance, deserves a whole paragraph by itself. It suggests a rage that's channeled to convey positive energy, oddly enough, and rarely has a single syllable been so moving and effective in a song. Being a queen, Latifah is a commanding presence for her audience. And this is the story this perfect opener tells us.
Musically, "All Hail The Queen" has all the earmarks of the late eighties, though. And as a consequence, the line between greatness and clear missteps that don't hold their own today is rather clear in it. The pun in the title of "Come Into My House" is as bad as said House music displayed throughout this overlong track, for example. Likewise, the lengthy "The Pros" and "Princess Of The Possee", are basically bad reggae/ragga. And there's the amorphous "Inside Out", a weird closer with a strangely atonal vocal hook for its chorus...
Everything else goes from good to great, fortunately. "Ladies First" (featuring Monie Love) is a nice hit, but it's not even the best of the bunch. Knowing a little about hip hop history, I had certain expectations about how the music from this LP would sound, and I have to say that a lot of those productions by DJ Mark, Prince Paul and others actually *exceeded* my expectations. So I was pleasantly surprised. A lot of the jazzy samples of horn sections are one-of-a-kind, with original flourishes here and there ("Latifah's Law", "A King And Queen Creation"...), and some of the rhythm patterns bring their lot of surprises that make them still sound fresh decades after they were produced (see "Dance With Me", once again). "Wrath Of My Madness" is also pretty good--with a short ragga hook that makes sense this time.
But the absolute gem in this LP is found in the middle of the patchier side two. It's "Evil That Men Do", a track produced by KRS One (with a short vocal cameo from him). Sampling are kept to a strict minimum in this one, and most of the power of that awesome cut comes from the addition of Latifah's voice to a drum pattern whose snare is so distorted that it sounds like a far more recent production. Interesting and visionary.
3.5/5 is my overall grade for this LP, but I'm gonna push it to a 4/5 mark. Not sure I'll have enough room in my own list to include this hip hop record clearly indebted to its original time and place. But I would sure be happy if I have said room for it. As another reviewer rightly said here, it's not because something is "dated" that it can't bring interesting perspectives about current issues--and the empowerment of women is still a very current issue indeed! Besides, and even more than this, it's not because something is dated that it can't bring you fresh emotions. What's acceptable for rock should also be acceptable for rap.
Number of albums left to review: 525
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 227
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 110 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 139
The Stooges
5/5
So, what's your choice? Bowie's mix at the time this album came out? Or Iggy's during the nineties?
As far as I'm concerned my preference goes to Iggy's mix overall, even though I prefer Bowie's work for the slow-burner "I Need Somebody" and the devilish boogie of "Shake Appeal". Yet as great as those two cuts are, they're not exactly not the one that made this record legendary anyway. The legendary cuts are "Search And Destroy", "Gimme Danger", "Penetration", the title-track and "Death Trip". And only Iggy's mix can enhance how wild those songs (and The Stooges' performance for them) are. The mere fact that some "audiophiles" complained about the levels of distortion triggered by that new mix tells you everything you need to know about the people who don't really get what "punk" means. And, in this case at least, what it all means is that good art must be f*cking *unreasonable* to make an effect sometimes. If you're not getting that, why should you be interested in the Stooges in the first place? I mean, *seriously*?!!
True, the Asheton brothers also said that they prefered David Bowie's original mix over Iggy's rework (and given that Ron Asheton hated Bowie's guts, you can't blame him from letting personal feelings get in the way). I would tend to think that years of substance abuse might have damaged the two brothers' minds, but what do I know?
Not that it matters much. This incredible third LP by "Iggy And The Stooges" is the magnum opus of James Williamson anyway, at least musically speaking. The man had followed Iggy to England, and stolen the guitarist position from Ron (who took over bass himself following David Alexander's demise). So you just can't expect said Ron to have a clear view about this LP given the circumstances.
Whatever happened behind the scenes, nothing changes the fact that this record is fantastic. The Stooges' debut was great garage rock harbouring a string of timeless songs ("I Wanna Be Your Dog", "1969", "No Fun"...), and *Funhouse* was a hectic exercise in channelling free form and chaotic impulses to create relevant art. Nevertheless, "Raw Power" is even better than those two gems. Its proto-punk/hard rock sound, the catchiness of its varied tracklisting, and the sexual angst it conveys make it a essential album if there is one, period. And once again, Iggy's mix enhances such aggressive qualities to make it pack a punch across the ages.
In the case of "Gimme Danger", it's not even a mere remix of the same original tape tracks. The song's climax--along with Iggy's crooning between two yelps--are actually different from one version to the next. And it took me this app to pay attention to such details, as I compared the two versions. Not that the original mix was bad per se, it was just a little "thin". Bowie's heart was in the right place, he wanted to streamline the whole thing to make it fit with the commercial success of that glam-rock scene he was a part of. But only Iggy could truly understand what those songs really meant, and this beyond past and future trends. Hence why he found and used other vocal tracks, probably dismissed at the time (along with some other guitar tracks?), so that the song soars just as it was supposed to when it was originally recorded. Rarely has hard rock or punk felt so... traumatic. And also *romantic*, in the original sense of the word. Rarely has an acoustic guitar (the one opening this tune) sounded so much like a damn barbed wire. And rarely has a plea to your lover felt so orgasmic...
And this is just one cut from this terrific record I'm talking about here. You also have "Search And Destroy"'s iconic and thunderous guitar riff, "Penetration"'s sleaze (plus its sly celesta emphasizing Iggy's lurid words with a sonic wink to the audience, just as the latter states that he's the one being symbolically penetrated here, and not the other way around), along with "Raw Power"'s violent urges and "Death Trip"'s apocalypse.
With such gems, this record is probably as important as The Velvet Underground's debut or anything by that punk scene the band inspired years later. I'm short on time to properly finish this review (more on that later on), so for once I'm gonna copy-and-paste something found online: the "Legacy" chapter from the album's wikipedia page...
' Raw Power has been credited by many sources for pioneering punk rock, although Paste magazine's Lizzie Manno adds that it has "also been cited as a major influence on heavy metal and hard rock". According to Ted Maider of Consequence of Sound, Raw Power is "by far the most important punk record ever", while Diffuser.fm writer James Stafford said, "One can make a reasonable argument for whether Raw Power or its predecessor, Fun House, lays claim to 'first punk record' status." DIY's Jonathan Hatchman wrote, "Above all, the reason that Raw Power should be regarded as, at least, one of the greatest punk albums of all time, is the influence it has provided. Without it, punk may have never even happened."
Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols once claimed that he learned to play guitar by taking speed and playing along to Raw Power. Johnny Marr of The Smiths cited it as his all-time favorite record: "It gave me a path to follow as a guitar player. It was an opening into a world of rock & roll, sleaze, sexuality, drugs, violence and danger. That's a hard combination to beat". He has also commented on James Williamson's guitar playing on the album: "I'm his biggest fan. He has the technical ability of Jimmy Page without being as studious, and the swagger of Keith Richards without being sloppy. He's both demonic and intellectual, almost how you would imagine Darth Vader to sound if he was in a band." Talking more about the album, Marr considered Iggy Pop "as the greatest rock'n'roll singer of all time". Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth said that it was one of the albums that shaped his life and music: "that record sliced my head off. The aggression and psychosexual imagery were really mysterious and alluring. In a way, it brought me into all those other aspects of music and literature that were really intriguing, like William S. Burroughs and the Beat Generation."
Singer and guitarist Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana wrote in his Journals numerous times that Raw Power was his favorite album of all time. In his list of the top 50 albums he thought were most influential to Nirvana's sound entered in his journal in 1993, Raw Power appears in the number one slot. Henry Rollins of Black Flag has "Search & Destroy" tattooed across his shoulder blades. He has said that Raw Power is his second favorite Stooges album (after Fun House), calling it "America's greatest contribution to the hard rock scene", to compete with the "Stones, Zeppelins and the Deep Purples". Former Smiths frontman Morrissey once described "Search and Destroy" as "great" and "a very LA song". Mötley Crüe founder Nikki Sixx has cited it as a major influence: "When I was fifteen years old, I remember Iggy and the Stooges' song 'Search and Destroy' reaching out from my speakers to me like my own personal anthem." "I got into the heavier guitar stuff I was going through that adolescent anger thing. It’s a common story but mine was also fuelled by a father and a mother that were gone, and not really knowing where I fit into society. That song really connected with me". Guitarist John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Peppers also praised the record: “when you think about all the ways bands these days try and expand rock and roll, most of them look pretty silly next to Raw Power. That is a definitive statement". CeeLo Green cited Raw Power as one of his favorite albums, stating that it "seems like it's all done in one take. 'Let's do that one, leave it, just try something else'. With his energy on stage, it seems as if the studio was just destroyed after that album – or at least you'd like to believe that". '
As I said before, I'm short on time and must call it quits now. Believe it or not, just as I was listening to *Raw Power*, a huge storm occurred and lightning struck, triggering a power failure. The blackout has lasted for hours now, so I had to switch from a hi-fi system to my phone so as to finish listening to the album. And now I'm almost out of battery...
This is what this album does to me. It's as intense as lightning and it can drain me until I can't go on anymore. Call it a sign. I'm out now.
5/5, of course.
Number of albums left to review: 524
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 228 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 110
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 139
Sebadoh
5/5
Oddly enough, I was more team Sebadoh than team Dinosaur Jr. during the "alternative" nineties (Sebadoh's Lou Barlow played bass and sang in Dinosaur Jr. before he was fired from the band). Jay Mascis's songs had too many guitar solos for my snobbish tastes at the time, even if I now recognize Dinosaur Jr.' importance, especially since Barlow reintegrated the band. But to be honest, I've always prefered Sebadoh's organized chaos, emphasizing fully democratic values within the band. And because the music was good too, as strange as those albums by the American band were...
There were indeed three songwriters in Sebadoh at the time of *Bubble And Scrape*, and one third of said tracklist was devoted to each songwriter. And this, even if everyone (the audience, the critics, the band itself) knew the best tunesmith was Lou Barlow among those three, thanks to a rare compositional talent that helped him convey deeply melancholic feelings in his own songs. Up to that album, the only melodies really worthy of interest are his, and there are enough of them in it to sell the whole deal. Besides, the songs those melodies are part of are among the most magnificient songs Barlow ever penned in his career: "Soul And Fire", " Two Years Two Days", "Cliche", "Homemade", " Forced Love"... Plus there is the livelier " Sacred Attention", where Barlow mixes his romantic sadcore leanings with an apocalyptic wall of lo-fi guitars. Not to mention "Think (Let Tomorrow Bee)", an absolute tearjerker right before the end, where his hushed pleading voice, Seana Carmody's delicate backing vocals, and three simple chords on an acoustic guitar are enough to make you cry. "Let tomorrow be / I can't be so impatient / Pushing every answer / When there isn't any question". Wow. Rarely have songs about a couple in crisis have felt so lived-in.
All of that doesn't mean that the two other band members can't bring their own (sour) cream on the melancholic cake. Jason Loewenstein still has to hone his own heavier and grungier-via-hardcore-punk skills at that point, it's true. That said, "Sister" is a great cut, and Jason even visits Lou's angsty and emotional turf with a certain flair on "Happily Divided". As for Eric Gaffney, his dissonant and experimental noisy ventures can admittedly be a breath of fresh air for fans of Syd Barrett (albeit one who would have used a time machine to listen to Hüsker Dü' early hardcore releases). Listen to "Bouquet For A Siren" or "Fantastic Disaster" to get an idea of the sort of crazy shit he could pull off. Not to everyone's tastes, obviously. Yet Gaffney's experiments bring dynamics to the whole thing that keep you constantly on your toes, as bizarre as his compositions are. If there were only Barlow's songs, this lo-fi record wouldn't work in the way it does. Sometimes the sum is worth more than the (discrete) parts.
Starting with the next album, *Bakesale*, Gaffney would be out of the picture, making Sebadoh's LPs more easily digestible and/or legible. Which is why I'm surprised this later record is not in Dimery's list, instead of this one. Lou's tunes also shine on *Bakesale*, by the way (as they do in "Harmacy", the one right after), and Loewenstein's upped his game pretty well too. But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies.
4.5/5, rounded up to 5/5, mostly because I feel that reviewers on this app are a bit lost as to the exact way the very topsy-turvy art of Sebadoh should be apprehended. Always check out Lou's songs first. Then you'll be surprised as to how far you can actually go to eventually appreciate the whole thing. Early Sebadoh is weird because it sort of needs a user's guide. But that doesn't mean they were a "bad" band by any means.
Number of albums left to review: 523
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 229 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 110
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 139
Pere Ubu
3/5
"Ubuesque" is a French word coined after Alfred Jarry's aburdist/surrealistic plays about his crazy character "Ubu-Roi" (King Ubu). The word basically means "grotesque", "absurd" or "unnecessarily complex". And when you listen to *Dub Housing*, you get the picture alright. Especially on its extraordinary opener "Navvy". David Thomas's voice sounds like the one of a demented bat imitating David Byrne right after biting his throat. Bleeps and bloops cover screeching saws all around you. Guitars wince and basslines get lost up their own arses for a few seconds. Short melodic lines surge out of nowhere, only to immediately disappear. It's a disquieting, unsettling experience, and it's intended that way. "Boy, that sounds swell!". It's so easy to picture Thomas waving his "flip-flop" arms like a maniac, even without any film of it to prove it.
I'm delighted that Dimery's list has weird art-rock records like this. It's important that all sorts of music are represented, in spite of all the reviewers in here grumbling about it and giving it such a low global grade (I'm talking about music from the "western" world and using the album format, at least). Besides, Pere Ubu is an act so bizarre that it literally can't age. Lots of those reviewers (some of whom loved this record, but also others who actually hated it) referred to recent groundbreaking bands like Squid or black midi so as to give their opinions and try to explain what this LP is all about. And I'm also glad about this. There's definitely an affinity between Pere Ubu's own off-kilter sound in 1978 and the one played by quite important rock bands that don't want to fully rehash the past these days. So you can't deny *Dub Housing* is at least *relatively* essential, if only because of this.
That said, it seems there are *two* Pere Ubu records in Dimery's list, if I'm not mistaken... Well, that's probably one too many for such a strange band. I'm all for "acquired tastes" and "slow growers", but using two slots for them might be wasting some valuable room for other wonderful weirdos. Think Sun Ra, Red Krayola or Captain Beefheart. Sure, there's *Trout Mask Replica* in the list (the only record that I fully hate and yet feel like it should be in there for its historical importance). Yet there are other Beefheart albums that should be there too, maybe. And if not, one of those recent British post-punk and/or art-rock acts I've just mentioned could also use the same slot. The more names, the merrier. Food for thought, eh?
To be clear, my main gripe with *Dub Housing* is not how weird or "out there" it is. It's just that even if you keep an open mind and try as hard as you can to follow its millions twists and turns, the LP very quickly loses any sense of momentum--and this basically in the middle of the first side. "Free-form" is alright. "Experimental" is alright. But "spineless" is not. And this lack of backbone is especially gruelling on side two.
Before that you still have a few bizarre fireworks here and there, like that impersonation of a horrific worm gnawing its way inside your brain on "Thriller!" (I shit you not, listen to this one with headphones, and you'll see what I'm talking about!). But as disturbing as those sorts of shenanigans are, they can't make up for how drowsy the whole thing sounds by that point, especially when it comes to the rhythms used. King Krule, black midi and Squid sometimes have problems to keep things relevant and/or catchy throughout a whole album as well, I can concede that point. But at least the rhythms and patterns used in most of their songs still *mean* something on a rhythmic viewpoint. Not in here, though, unfortunately.
Worse, the start of *Dub Housing* suggests it could go to some lively places it actually never really goes to. That's what I call "losing momentum" in my book. And I would give the same sort of criticism for a mainstream pop album if I felt like it didn't fulfill its initial promises in such a blatant way. The problem is not the "style" of the music. It's the way there's no real build-up from track to track.
I need to listen to *The Modern Dance* again (Pere Ubu's debut--released in the same year, right before this one). As far as I can remember, it is not fully plagued by this sort of critical issue I'm having with *Dub Housing*. And that's why I will probably select it for my own list of 1001 essential albums, and leave this one aside. So next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 522
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 229
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 110
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 140 (including this one)
Elastica
5/5
Sure, it's "derivative"... Sure, they ripped off Wire... Sure, it's the sort of album that will not be remembered for being groundbreaking or taking any significant risks with its audience...
But hell do those songs SLAP you in the face from start to finish. In a year filled with wonders (1995, counting at least *40* essential or absolutely gripping full-length records in my book), this debut manages to end up very high in my own personal ranking. And that is a feat all by itself.
Speaking of "years", British post-punk has had a few great ones recently... But I'm pretty sure this poppish version of it here has contributed to keep the flame alive since the subgenre's inception. And even if it didn't, this LP is still a small wonder anyway. Sometimes "essential" doesn't mean "relevant" or "deep" or "sophisticated". Sometimes "essential" means "*Hell, yeah!*" 5/5.
Number of albums left to review: 521
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 230 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 110
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 140
Mj Cole
1/5
I didn't know this app had ads now.
Number of albums left to review: 519
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 230
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 110
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 141 - including this music for ads.
Jeff Buckley
5/5
With a voice like that, and with such guitar skills, Jeff Buckley could play the classified section of a newspaper and turn it into a transcendent experience. But what he played was terrific original compositions, plus a string of stellar covers. When you take a Leonard Cohen song and your version of it erases the original one in public consciousness, it means you're a genius up to the level of Nina Simone. Add to this the iconic impact of a talented artist gone too soon (and the son of another one to boot, also gone too soon!) and you get an album that obviously deserves to be in a rather high slot in such a list. 5/5, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 518
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 231 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 110
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 141
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5/5
Well, I've counted. And unless I've lost count, at least 65 people are brutally murdered during the course of this album. Plus maybe a whole lot more, whose exact demise is not directly specified...
Oh! And there was one dog, too. Crucified on a door.
What a crazy album. I do remember feeling a little queasy during my first listen though. I knew what the record was all about beforehanded, and started counting the deaths on that very first listen. But I didn't expect the tally to be *this* high, to be honest...
It's hard to get an accurate death count anyway, because there are no precise numbers for how many people died in the fire Lottie set in the Bella Vista slums. And speaking of unreliable narrators, there's also the doctor in "Song of Joy". It is never clear whether he is telling the truth or whether he is the killer, making up this story to gain access to people's homes (and a third possibility is that the story is true, but that his grief has turned him into a copycat killer). But whatever the "truth" really is here, this concern about the reliability of storytelling makes "Song Of Joy" a very apt opener for a record named *Murder Ballads*, and it's one of my favorite songs on this album filled with so many horrific wonders.
As you go to the next tracks, subtle menace indeed quickly turns into full-blown terror. Which doesn't mean some things are not kept ambiguous. The other fate that's left hanging in the air in the record is the one of Nellie Brown in "Stagger Lee" for instance. Stagger Lee never directly describes her murder after he shoots Billy Dilly in the head. But the female screams you can hear at the end of the song make it pretty obvious she doesn't survive the night either.
Slaughters abound in this record, and the most memorable of them is to be found in "O'Malley's Bar". Devoid of any free will, and describing himself the way an author would describe a fictional character, the unnamed protagonist of this song is impossible to forget, as is his murderous rampage in said bar, described with all sorts of graphic details and psychologically harrowing comments about the victims. I think there's almost a "meta" aspect to this song, by the way. Somehow, the story we have here--the longest and final one on the album--presents a character who's related to Cave's position as an artist in the sense that he wishes to accomplish something extraordinary. But given the gruesome topic he addresses here, said artist/storyteller knows his work will never be universally recognized anyway, and that *he*'ll be the one ending up being labeled as a "piece of work", instead of his made-up character. This here is a very personal interpretation of the meaning of the song, I'll grant you that. But whatever the (nut)case may be, a shiver went down my spine during its conclusion, when the police takes the killer away in their car. The last thing you hear Cave doing between moans and rasps and growls is... him counting. Just as I had been doing since the start of the album.
I'm not surprised Cave loves stuff like Flannery O'Connor after listening to it, by the way. Because somehow, as gratuitous and violent as the concept of this record sounds and looks, Cave never loses the human angle here. You *feel* for these characters. Empathy, pity, sadness, contempt, terror, disgust, awe... Just as in any good piece of fiction. What makes us feel empathy for the victims is that they all have such colourful memorable names and details about them, for instance. It is superb lyric-writing to identify the characters. Particularly in "O'Malleys Bar", where each victim has a description of their personality or physical appearance given to the listener. They're a sample of humanity at large. Normal, simple, humble, innocent folks leading normal simple lives, here gathered in the wrong place at the wrong time... It's all in the details, like in the great novels or short stories of old.
And those details are conveyed by the greatness of the writing, with a few very memorable one-liners here and there, up there with best (and most shocking) lines Eminem could come up with. One example:
"Rorschach & Prozac now everything is groovy"
Cave sure has a knack to convey the "voice" of his doomed characters in a very striking manner, doesn't he?
And let's not forget the music: of course, this being a narrative-driven album, the music is mostly used as background for Nick's menacing voice, but it also does a great job emphasizing all the key moments in the stories that it deserves high praise as well. It's lush, it's moody, it's evocative, it's theatrical. It's all it needs to be for such an original project.
Besides, with "Henry Lee" and "Where The Wild Roses Grow", Cave wrote perfect duets giving welcome respite during the LP's tracklist--even if they're still about tragedy and murder. The first of those duets was sung with his old flame PJ Harvey, and it's a delicate performance through and through. As for "Where the Wild Roses Grow, everyone knows this stunner was performed with fellow aussie pop star Kylie Minogue, and most will remember that the tune was quite a surprising indie hit back in the day. It cracks me up every time I think of unassuming listeners liking that latter single on the radio and buying the LP because of it. They were certainly in for a wild ride--one they probably didn't expect in the first place.
This album was made for such a list. It is indeed "essential" in the sense that it uses the album format and turns it into something else altogether. And you don't have many records like that in the world. So even if *Murder Ballads* is the sort of LP you would NOT play for a family function, a christmas dinner party or a casual evening with friends--therefore limiting the occasions you would listen to it--it still fully deserves its 5/5 grade here. Great concept, great songwriting, awesome execution... And when I say "execution", you probably get what I'm saying here. Right?
Number of albums left to review: 517
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 232 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 110
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 141
The Dictators
4/5
Is this witty or is this dumb? Are the songs catchy or predictable? Is it an important record from the prehistory of punk, or a mere footnote in modern music history?
Mileages seem to vary according to people when it comes to this one. As far as I'm concerned I find this record well done, quite funny (if not hilarious), and lively. Yet its global score on the app seems outrageously low. I agree that it's not the album of the century, but still...
Now I need to revisit said album to see of those songs will stay with me in the long run. I already have a feeling that side two is better than the first one, and that it's there that the best cuts are. And maybe unconvinced reviewers should listen to those again, without dismissing the whole thing as irrelevant. In the meantime... 4/5.
Number of albums left to review: 515
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 232
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 111 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 141
Dinosaur Jr.
4/5
Still a great follow-up to *You're Living All Over Me*. It has the exact same earmarks as in that goundbreaking album: good songwriting, J Mascis's guitar solos and plaintive voice, layers and layers of high frequency noise and slacker-rock messiness... It just lacked the elements of surprise found in their 1987 breakthrough record. But "objectively", *Bug* was equally good.
When it comes to other vintage Dinosaur Jr. LPs, you could also single out *Hand It Over*, *Green Mind* or *Where You Been*. And I'm fully aware that their later period--when Lou Barlow went back into the fold--is excellent as well... The thing is, you can't cram all those good records from *one* single band in, can you?
Number of albums left to review: 514
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 232
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 112 (including *Bug* - and it's one of those rare cases where a 4/5 LP risks not making it to the list: I want to leave room for at least one other Dinosaur Jr. album apart from *You're Living All Over Me*, but the competition is fierce, I gotta say...)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 141
Lupe Fiasco
3/5
It's good rap, quite indebted to its time and place but that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can feel the indirect (and sometimes direct, given the credits) influence of Kanye and Jay-Z all over this. And the socially conscious lyrics here and there can't hurt.
I've browsed through the rest of Lupe Fiasco's discography, by the way, and it was interesting. It seems like there are two threads alternating during his close-to-twenty years career. One where he panders to the rap trends of the day, with a few good results overall, but also others that won't age very well, you can bet your boots on that! And one that's more experimental and leftfield, which sounds far more promising in the long run.
In a way, you can find the origin point of those two trends in this debut album. Older boom bap alternates with soul-flavored Kanye shenanigans and other lush, glossy Jay-Z stylings typical of the naughts. It's the sort of "either/or" dynamic that is to be found in the rest of the rapper's discography. These days, Lupe goes from a jazzy and electronica-tinged style to a trap sound that sounds a little opportunistic, and probably less relevant that what the true originators of this subgenre have released over the recent years.
Once again this situation can produce results that can either hold water or tread it, no matter what style is used on a given moment. And this sort of dynamic points to the only real issue I have with the American rapper: a relative lack of *identity*, often preventing the listener to fully invest in his music. It's only *one* issue, yet it's still a major one when it comes to "essential" music. And this issue can already be felt in Lupe's debut here. Which is why I will put the latter in my "waiting list". Besides, who knows? Maybe some later album of his can come up sounding more "relevant" if I dig further into them?
As a consequence, my grade for *Food And Liquor* is 3/5 for the purposes of this app. Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 513
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 232
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 113 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 141
Goldfrapp
2/5
What a strange suggestion. Given that I'm not even sure to include *Felt Mountain*, Goldfrapp's debut, in my own list, I have a lot of trouble considering this later album of theirs seriously. *Felt Mountain* was already a patchy effort, some great moments mixed with quite a few snoozefests, especially those dreary instrumentals on side two. *Seventh Tree* is more cohesive in comparison, it's true. But replacing valleys and peaks with flatlands does not necessarily mean your band has improved overall.
Besides, I've always found this project quite opportunistic, as great a vocalist as Alisson Godfrapp is. *Felt Mountain* was already like an afterthought of the trip-hop wave, never really reaching the heights of a Portishead in its neo-noir aesthetics. It was too late AND not enough. The 180-degree turn towards dance music in the following LPs also looked suspicious, like a money grab. And the quieter, smoother *Seventh Tree* released after this dance music period tried a little too hard to capitalize on a glossy version of the psychedelic wave that was surging again by the late naughts. A lot of acoustic textures, especially on the first side, allowed the band to do so while keeping their cool. But those textures, as nice as they are, can't make up for what's missing in this record...
And what's missing in it? Well, memorable songs, for starters--or at least more than a couple of them. Striking melodies and unforgettable harmonies... And along with that: clear intents, a strong identity, genuine risks, heartfelt or witty lyrics... Pandering to the trends of the day doesn't necessarily give you those types of assets. I have nothing against "followers" (some of them did write essential albums once in a while), but for those, the songwriting needs to be top-notch.
And well, said songwriting is just *OK* here. "Clowns" is the understated opening statement that's to be expected in that sort of *quote-unquote*, "more-authentic-album-aimed-at-a-more-mature-audience". "Little Bird" is the missing link between the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" and Beach House's "Zebra" or "Silver Soul"... but sadly, it is doomed to remain a passing footnote whenever someone has to mention those other legendary songs. "Happiness" seems to recycle the lessons of Feist's hits "My Moon, My Man" and "1234", released the year before, but without anything approaching (or even approximating) the soaring hooks and emotional choruses of the latter, unfortunately. Less lively but equally tedious--in spite of an interesting lo-fi guitar sound and the Billie Holiday overtones in its introduction--"Road to Somewhere" leads to nowhere fast. And "Eat Yourself" applies its piece of advice so well that the song instantly fades out of your memory as soon as it is over. Up to this point, only "Some People" does have anything ressembling a proper chorus, even though it's still lacking something that would bring the song to yet another level.
Don't get me wrong, Goldfrapp doesn't write and perform bad music per se, and more power to you if you can appreciate what they do. It's just that "decent" is not the sort of thing that can keep you awake at night, is it? A couple of more straightforward songs towards the very end of this album--incidentally leaving aside the acoustic-psychedelic flourishes so prevalent in the rest of the tracks--show that Goldfrapp could still be a little more convincing when their heart was into it. The problem is that before those two tracks, the pop-rock diamond-in-the-rough "Caravan Girl", and the part-angsty, part-dreamy "Monster Love" (sounding like a proto-Lana Del Rey torch song about Hollywood and its many dangers), you also have the chatty MOR FM borefest "A&E", along with that very awkward "Cologne Cerrone Houdini". In those two other unfortunate cuts, Godfrapp even commits the crime of confusing style with substance, either through their excessive reliance in pop's hackneyed formulae for the first example, or through their heavy-handed borrowing of Serge Gainsbourg/Andrew Loog Oldham-like strings to painstakingly try to disguise how vacuous the second song actually is.
To put it in a nutshell, successes and duds even things out at the end of this LP. And before that, there's nothing too lively happening anyway, in one direction or another. So if you wish to single out genuinely *essential records*, I'm not sure this innocuous LP filled with a lot of forcibly understated / *actually very naive* cuts--well-suited to be played as background music in a Starbucks--is what you're really looking for. Your call.
2/5 for the purposes of this list. Which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 512
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 232
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 113
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 142 (including this one)
The Sugarcubes
2/5
It's very hard to take Dimery's list seriously when it comes to Björk. *Debut* is listed, along with *Medúlla* and *Vulnicura*, but as nice as those two latter experimental records from the Icelandic diva's later career are, they can't beat the musical and cultural impact of the marvels found in *Post*, *Homogenic* and *Vespertine*, inexplicably absent from the 1001 albums book.
Likewise, listing this LP from the band that helped the Icelandic singer rise to international fame is a clear misstep, especially under the light of those inexplicable omissions. This nordic version of B52s and Talking Heads shenanigans could perform some fun stuff once in a while. But in terms of memorable tunes, only "Birthday" stands out, mostly because Björk's elated vocals are given enough room to breathe there, contrary to a lot of the other tracks in this weird album--she was not the only singer in the band, unfortunately, and even when she was the only one to sing, the heavy-handed rock instrumentation took away a lot of her powers anyway.
So I'll be damned if *Life's Too Good* was universally considered as "essential". It's still an interesting listen for hardcore fans of Björk's voice. But it can't go any further than that. 2/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 2). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 511
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 232
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 113
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 143 (including this one)
PJ Harvey
5/5
The way her breath is cut short when she moans "Oh my lover / You can love her / You can love me at the same time" tells you everything you need to know about PJ Harvey. From the very first second of this *raw* debut, this particular moment tells you everything about the sort of disturbing-yet-oddly-enticing world Polly Jean wants to convey to her audience. It tells you she's a unique talent with a unique voice, both seductive and scorching, and that when *Dry* came out, she was about to become one of the most important artists working in the rock idiom for many decades to come (and she did become exactly that, did she not?).
I don't even really feel the need to list all the gems in this record. There are too many of them anyway: swampy rockers such as "O Stella", "Dress" or "Sheela-Na-Gig" ; slower menacing bluesy cuts like "Oh My Lover", "Victory" or "Happy And Bleeding" ; hypnotic odes to love and lust such as "Fountains" and "Water"... And so on. They're all great. 5/5, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 510
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 233 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 113
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 143
Ray Charles
3/5
I have always had mixed feelings about *Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music*, Ray Charles' supposed masterpiece released a few years after this one. It does have great tunes, and I fully respect its "agenda" that saw Charles covering songs from "white" repertoires so as to break unfair race barriers in America. Yet I feel like the charms of this type of this subsequent lush record can't beat the ones of his more grassroots eponymous 1957 debut, which will always sound more "authentic" to me. Plus, neither "Modern Sounds..." nor "The Genius of Ray Charles" have the many timeless hits Charles performed over the first years of his career (mostly for single issues or less relevant albums--hits such as "Hit The Road Jack", "What I'd Say", " Georgia On My Mind" and so on...). So it's a little hard for me to see such albums as "essential" either,
Apart from the race-barrier-breaking agenda, "The Genius Of Ray Charles" is indeed very similar to "Modern Sounds...". So much that I wonder why this one is not considered as Ray's magnum opus by all the "critics", given that it was released before it. The only real difference is that this time the brass band and syrupy strings orchestrations are neatly sorted out between side 1 and 2, contrary to the way they mingles in *Modern Sounds*'s tracklisting.
Side 1 starts with a bang, with "Let The Good Times Roll", "It Had To be You" and "Alexander's Ragtime Band". But then it's more of the same and my patience wears thin very quickly. Once the slow ballads supported by strings on side 2 come up, the transition feels a little jarring, and for a couple of tunes, the whole thing sounds quite derivative as well. Fortunately, the best ballads start with "Tell Me You'll Wait For Me" in the middle of the second side (what an incredible intro for this one, thanks to that mysterious string section), and that last bunch of tracks right after it saves the day (especially "Am I Blue").
I'm still having mixed feelings, however, at least regarding the status of this album as a so-called "essential" one. This LP offers good music overall, but it never gets me excited enough for me to buy the whole thing (just like I can't get excited enough for *Modern Sounds...* either). Bought a Ray Charles "best of" anthology, however (which incidentally habors both his timeless hits AND the key tracks from those two specific albums highlighted by the "critics" here). And I also purchased that great eponymous debut. All of this is more than enough for my needs, to be honest.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 508
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 233
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 114 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 143
3/5
Yee--and fans of women having a message to convey should really pay attention to this--haw.
Yes, Loretta Lynn was quite a fascinating figure from the C&W world. I even own a best of album from her: *Coal Miner's Daughter"*, and I recommend it if you want to know a little more about her music and the way she used it to call the bullshit of men and all the shitty ways they could treat their wives (including her own husband / manager!).
That being said, why selecting this particular album when there were many others from her that had the same structure and impact? Each of these LPs included a very "topical" and personal single (example "The Pill", about married women's contraception), a few other cuts also written by Loretta, and then far less striking tracks written by others, unfortunately. In other words, it was always the same thing. Which tends to suggest that Lynn was more a "singles" artist than an "albums" artist.
Heck, when it comes to essential LPs by Loretta Lynn, that later comeback album Jack White produced for her is even a better candidate. All the songs were written by her there, and as a consequence, the whole thing was far better, even if it was decades after her heyday.
So about *Don't Come Home A Drinkin'*, my overall grade for the purposes of this list of essential records is 3/5. Which translated to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: a little more than 500, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter (including this one).
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter (including this one)
Public Enemy
5/5
Going from Loretta Lynn to Public Enemy is one of the many joys of this ap, ha ha. Unfortunately, today I'm a little short on time to describe how great *Apovalypse '91... The Enemy Strikes Back* is. So it's gonna be a quick one.
The only little issue I have with this record is that it suffers a bit from how *perfect* its first side is, paradoxically.The second part of this album still harbors some excellent hip hop. But you just can't beat tracks like tight "Can't Truss It", or the deeply menacing yet groovier "By The Time I get To Arizona" (with its crunchy bassline and its soulful backgound vocals). There's also that lively "Nighttrain" or the more laidback "I Don't Want To be Called Yo Nigga", and all those tracks are as iconic as anything found in "It Takes A Nation Of Millions..." or "Fear Of A Black Planet". The alnpbum also goes out with a final bang, sonce there's the "Anthrax" version of "Bring The Noize" as a bonus at the end. That collaboration with the metal band sure is iconic as well...
*Apocalypse '91...* is therefore a great bookend to P.E.'s "classic" period. Chuck D was the best rapper in the world during those early hip hop years: his punchlines *burn* everything on their way, and his political analysis is still as relevant in 2023 as it was back in the day. And Flavor Flav is a master at creating a sardonic atmosphere when he takes the center stage, as always. So the *relative* dip in quality during side 2 explains why my initial grade is 4.5/5, it's nothing that can prevent me from rounding it up to 5.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: a little more than 500, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter.
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
The Hives
5/5
Technically, this is a compilation of tracks from the first two albums of the Swedish garage rock band (named *Barely Legal* and *Veni Vidi Vicious*), here aimed at the international market. And since those two albums are already pretty neat, said compilation is just phenomenal, very logically. I've never bought it since I already had those first two albums at home, brilliantly mixing retro-garage aesthetics with a modern punk energy that makes the whole thing irresistible and far more efficient than 80% of that early-naughts rock revival thing. For a second I was just wondering if the cover shown in here was the one of a later record from The Hives. Glad to see I have nothing to explore that I didn't already know today, given that I'm a little short on time...
The other good news is that I can now include the Buzzcock's compilation *Singles Going Steady* in my list (conspicuously absent from the 1001 albums book), given that it was a very similar situation--it was a compilation that was aimed at the American market this time, more than a decade earlier. But everyone a little serious about punk rock knows it's one that became more iconic than the albums somehow.
Pretty sure that a lot of people feel that way about The Hives' *Your New Favorite Band*, even if I don't. And just because this other compilation allows me to use only one slot for The Hives (and save some space for other acts), I'm glad to include it in my own list--and this even if I'm a little saddened that some of the other great cuts of the first two albums are missing from the collection suggested here. Those three amazing hits "A.K.A. I.D.I.O.T", "Main Offender" and "Hate To Say I Told You So" are just the tip of the iceberg here. Now you know, at least. :)
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: a little more than 500, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter.
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Dire Straits
5/5
The very definition of "guilty pleasure". At least for me. Sonically, esthetically, *Brothers In Arms* is schmaltzy as fuck, with eighties production values so slick that it feels like the chrome of a vintage car as seen through the pages of a brand new glossy magazine. You can even whiff those production values through the artwork. You just need to replace "vintage car" with Mark Knopfler's 1937 14-fret National Style "O" Resonator guitar, and you literally get the picture.
To be clear, old-school twist "Walk Of Life" and MOR cheesefest "Your Latest Trick" (complete with a long sax solo that make the track a perfect companion for extended rides on the highway) are only "dated" in the sense that they were always intended to be so. Such is the genius of Mark Knowfler, who knew enough music history to understand his most commercial impulses at the time would actually age well on an artistic viewpoint if he kept everything as clear and on point as he could. And the not-so-latest trick to accomplish such a feat was to balance catchiness and subtlety in ways that only someone like Knowfler could do.
The best example of this is his iconic guitar riff on the timeless "Money For Nothing", but there's also the laidback opener "So Far Away From Me" to prove it. And since the songwriting and other guitar soloing is consistently good or interesting from start to finish, the whole album is a home run. The deeper cuts about the tragedy of war on the second side ("Ride Across The River", "The Man's Too Strong" and the melancholic title track closing the prodeedings) are especially poignant, and they add a cohesive thematic throughline that also brings a lot of resonance to the second part of this record. In comparison, "Why Worry" and "One World" are more like meat-and-potatoes numbers, each in their own genre, but they can't hurt the whole thing.
Terms like "meat-and-potatoes", "derivative" and "commercial" can't really apply to this album anyway. If only because significant parts of it give enough winks to the audience about its own "plastic", pastiche aspects. In "Money For Nothing", Knowfler, along with Sting (!), does not merely aim jabs at consumerism, including the music business; the players also seem to make fun of themselves here, just as they make fun of MTV. MTV heard them alright, by the way: they went along with the joke, and turned the track into an instant hit through its heavy rotation on the music channel. All of this might be a little cynical for some, but it does add a cutural impact to this record that, very clearly, make it a 5/5 essential listen.
Number of albums left to review or just listen to: a little more than 500, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: approximately a half so far (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: a quarter.
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more important): the last quarter
Slipknot
1/5
All hope is gone that I take this list seriously now.
A personal memory: I saw Slipknot headlining one night of the Furyfest / Hellfest metal festival in France back in the naughts, and it was one night to remember. The festival audience had learned that the band had turned up late for the soundcheck in the early afternoon, and that they had used most of the soundcheck slots of the other smaller bands playing that day to rehearse their show. Which prevented those other bands to do the same, obviously.
Apart from Slipknot's young and naive fans, the slightly more mature general audience of that festival was not pleased by that rumour, as you can imagine. And so Slipknot got the welcome they supposedly deserved when they started to play. Angry metalheads and hardcore punk kids put their hands on everything they could find at the festival locale--stones, cans, even bottles of piss!--and threw them on the stage while Slipknot was playing. An acquaintance working at the festival later told us that among the rubbish littering the stage right after the band left it, someone even found a f*cking dead rabbit. A dead rabbit! Pretty fitting for the band's aesthetics, I'd say.
I gotta give it to Slipknot, though, they still gave a great show, objectively speaking. Even with their masks on, you could sense the band didn't care about the dangerous situation, and they even took advantage of it, adding their own craziness to the whole disaster. Whenever he could, their frontman kept giving middle fingers to the pissed-off festival members, clearly enjoying the whole thing while avoiding the projectiles as he played--therefore proving Slipknot were solid performers through and through, even under those pretty adverse circumstances. This can't make up for the rock-star bullshit, but that justifies the admiration of some other fans, I guess...
To return to *All Hope Is Gone*, it's more satisfying for me to share that little anecdote than to describe this album painstakingly trying to renew Slipknot's sound almost a decade after that nu-metal thing took over the world (and then faded into oblivion). The band tries to play as many different cards as they can to move their sound further--classic trash metal / death metal on "Gematria" ; System Of A Down-related dynamics on "Sulfur" ; cheesy pop choruses on "Psychosocial" ; a metal version of Depeche Mode for "Dead Memories" (via Mike Shinoda/Linkin' Park, maybe?) ; or a classic metal ballad à la "Nothing Else Matters" with "Snuff" ; not to mention the band's already aging nu-metal routine for most of the other cuts... But literally everything falls flat, because there's nothing that Slipknot offers here that hasn't been done better ten times before. Including by them sometimes, very ironically. Those musicians are very skilled players and performers, of course. But that's not enough to consider *All Hope Is Gone* as "essential". If anything, this album looks a little like that stage I talked about earlier, at least once the show was over. It's a topsy-turvy arrangement of rubbish that neither makes sense nor suggests a truly visceral experience. Because everything important was said and done *before* that moment. A *dead* rabbit for sure. :)
To put it in a nutshell, maybe it would make more sense to include Slipknot's 1999 eponymous album in the list, thanks to its more iconic tracks on the first side ("sic", "Eyeless", "Wait And Bleed"...). That choice would at least be more preferable than this later overdone and rather laborious LP. As some reviewers rightly said here (including initial fans of the band), the 1001 Albums book's strange "compromise" that saw its authors select this later full-length release won't satisfy a lot of people anyway, whether they are sincere fans of the band or not. And the global score is here to prove it.
1/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 6/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 1). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 508
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 236
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 114
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 145 (including this one)
Bill Callahan
5/5
I love Smog, and I'm pretty sure Bill Callahan has written and performed many gems during his subsequent career under his real name--I've been checking him out once in a while, just like you get news from a former good friend you don't see so much anymore, just to make sure he's alright. But I'd be lying if I said I knew the contents of his "solo" records by heart. So I guess it's nice that this app reminds me of him now...
I'll stop beating about the bush, this album is excellent. "Jim Cain" is a perfect Callhanesque melancholic opener. "Eid Ma Clack Shaw" is the sort of surprising groovy cut Bill dabbles with sometimes, bringing welcome energy to the early part of the tracklist. "The Wind And The Dove" is a chiaruscuro wonder where the oriental flourishes and minor chords of the verses provide a stark contrast to the sudden major illuminations gracing the rest of the song. "Rococo Zephyr" is a subtle and touching love song. "Too Many Birds"'s finale provides a sort of gentle epiphany only Callahan is capable (the way the final line of the song is built up from one word from the next over that enticing piano hook at the end of each measure is a stroke of genius). "My Friend" is a mid-tempo oddity that's both tense and joyful, oddly enough (love the female wordless minimalistic backing vocals on that !). "All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast" is the experimental centerpiece of the album, a long dirge that uses the metaphor of birds on trees to go inside Callahan's psyche. And after a short instrumental interlude comes the baroque 10-minute closer of the album, the Nietzschean, yet paradoxically soulful, "Faith/Void". In this track, as in many other ones in this LP, the strings section and other lush instrumentation backing Callahan do wonders (that weird melodica at the end!). What's so surprising, in this song as well as other long ones Bill wrote elsewhere, is how time fly by while you listen to them. The American songwriter knows how to put his audience in a meditative state like few of his colleagues can.
The only issue that could prevent me from giving five stars to this record is that as great as Bill Callahan is, I have a feeling his records (and some of his songs) are often interchangeable. Which is a problem for a list of "essential" LPs. Which one do you choose, in the end? Maybe 2022's "REALITY" could apply as well? But you can't cram everything in, can you?
Wise and world-weary Callahan would probably laugh those vacuous concerns about a "best albums" list away, though. He's too much into the immanent moment to care about such neurotic endeavors. And he's right. So in that spirit, I guess my final grade doesn't matter that much...
Number of albums left to listen to: approximately 500 (I've temporarely lost count here).
Number of albums I'll include on my list: a half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include; a quarter approximately.
Number of albums I will never include (many others are more important): another quarter.
Ozomatli
3/5
If this album was a street sign. it would be a "dead end" one for me. That sign would lead to a great place, objectively speaking--filled to the brim with ideas drawing from a vast array of genres going from latin funk-rock to rap, with a clear emphasis on so-called "world music" (like the gnawa/qawwali-inspired opener "Believe"). But as great as that place is on the paper, that early-naughts version of Santana still feels like a dead end for me. Because the whole thing is a little too safe and devoid of personality, as skilled the players and composers in that band were. And because this album didn't necessarily age very well, like a lot of stuff from the naughts. So unless I knew someone living in that dead end street, there would be no reason for me to return there after my first visit.
Oh, another thing. I fully concur with the author currently topping the reviews section of this app: there's an awful lot of divergence between different versions of the 1001 Albums book, with a lot of more contemporary releases added and then quickly removed depending on the reissues of the original book. And indeed, it's almost like the people who curate this don't know how to evaluate music form the 21st century for its lasting impact.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 501
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 237
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 114
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 149 (including this one)
Kate Bush
3/5
Kate Bush is a key artist of the late seventies and eighties, that's for sure. So a big yes for the inclusion of *Hounds Of Love*, *Never For Ever* or *The Kick Inside* in a list of 1001 essential albums. I know the first is mentioned in the book this app is based on (it has to, that record just aged like fine wine). Can't remember about the other two, though. But when you have striking hits like "Wuthering Heights" or "Babooshka" in your tracklist WHILE ALSO harboring many deeper cuts that are as equally weird as they are wonderful, it means that you wrote an album that people are gonna remember for a long time.
You won't hear such enthusiasm coming out from me about *The Dreaming* or *The Sensual World*, though (both are included in Dimery's list, I remember it very clearly). Sure, *The Dreaming* was meant and designed to be, well, "original". Or even "experimental". But what it does instead is mostly sounding weird (and dated). And it does this in such a solipsistic way that it's probably better to leave it aside and let the British singer's hardcore fans enjoy the whole thing on their own. When the line between "off-kilter" and "grating" is crossed so many times in the space of a few tracks, it probably means your little extravanganza could have "calibered" in far more effective ways than it currently is.
As for *The Sensual World*, it is a far better work than *The Dreaming* overall, but I'd say its own faults lie in a diametrically opposed direction: the whole thing indeed sounds a little too tame, a little too safe--especially in comparison to the enticing yet strong flavors that its predecessor *Hounds Of Love* had. Not that it's *totally* safe, though. You still have that special Kate Bush touch on the title track, ripe with all its Irish instrumentation. You have the Bulgarian choir for backing vocals on a few songs. You have that mix of sensibility and womanly strength on the touching-yet-stellar ballad "This Woman's Work". Unfortunately, you also have cheesy guitar solos and those oh-so-eighties gated drums (which didn't harm *Hounds Of Love* the way they harmed *The Sensual World*). So it's still a mixed bag for me.
Interestingly, Kate Bush re-recorded the key cuts from this album and the one after (*The Red Shoes*) for her *Director's Cut* project. And she changed most of those problematic instrumentations when she revisited all those songs. I take this as some form of awareness on her part that her tunes had been harmed by those exagerated eighties trends. Glad that she "repaired" them, at least.
Of course, the other "crime" *The Dreaming* and *The Sensual World* are guilty of is that there's no *real* hit in their tracklisting--no popular song everyone remembers, such as "Wuthering Heights", "Babooshka", "Running Up That Hill" or "Cloudbursting". When your league is the one of pop music--even an artsy form of it--you need to include a legendary track like that in your records if you really you want them to be deemed essential. Otherwise, what's the point of writing pop music, eh?
3/5 for the purposes of this list. Which translates to a 8/5 for more general puposes (5+3). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: less than 500 (I've temporarily lost count)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately.
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
Baaba Maal
3/5
"Yela" is a beautiful opener, expansive and heartfelt. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the mix of afro-islamic tunes and early-nineties western influences on other tracks hasn't aged very well. More barebones tracks such as "Gidelam" and "Sy Sawande" hold their own pretty well, though. I don't know... Being unfamiliar with this style of music overall, I think I need more time to revisit this record (and maybe others by Baaba Maal). In the meantime...
Number of albums left to review: less than 500 (I've temporarily lost count)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately.
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
Temporary grade: 3/5 for the purposes of this list (and 8/10 for more general pusposes: 5+3)
OutKast
5/5
It seems like Outkast fans fall into two categories: those who think *Aquemini* is their magnum opus, and those who would rather vote for *Stankonia*. The first was surely the most groundbreaking one, but the famous hits are on the second. With stellar tracks such as "So Fresh, So Clean", " Ms.Jackson" and "Bombs Over Baghdad", the album is worth your time, aven with lengthier deep cuts and interludes (a flaw many rap albums--including masterpieces--shared at the time). And if "Hey Ya" had been on that record, instead of the weird double-solo album that saw the duet officially part ways later on, you can bet your boots that *Stankonia* would have been the magnum opus.
Well, why choose? I think there's enough room in my own list for *both* LPs...
Number of albums left to review: 498
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 238 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 114
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 147
Death In Vegas
5/5
There's a thing to be said about repetition. Handled nicely, it can lead to a state of mind that makes you let go at last. It can lull you to sleep, but it can also break the barriers you routinely erect around you, and take you to higher level of awareness. And it's when repetition it has this hypnotic quality that it can transcend genres and trends.
This album couldn't be further from a Steve Reich masterpiece, I'll grant you that. And yet I truly believe transcendence-via-repetition is *also* what it accomplishes here, and this as "dated" as said album sounds today. It's another sort of repetition--one you can come upon throughout decades of modern music, from The 13th Floor Elevators and The Velvet Underground to Jaimie xx, Porridge Radio or Crack Cloud. And this is why I don't care so much about the "nineties electronic rock" style displayed in this particular LP as I care about what it *does* within those confines.
I remember listening to *The Contino Sessions* when it came out, mostly because of "Dirge"'s success among indie crowds (that simple "la-la-laaaaa" vocal line is just infectious). And if I wasn't enthralled to the point of buying the album then, I was still pretty enthusiastic about it...
But what strikes me *now* is that I remember almost all the tracks in this LP, even though it's been ages since I listened to it: "Soul Auctioneer", with Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie sounding like a stoned bum on it ; the menace of *Death Threat" ; the elated "Flying", a more interesting and more abrasive version of an Archive cut ; weird big-beat rocker "Aisha" allowing Iggy Pop to let his iconic persona shine through (plus that oriental-sounding solo on a wind instrument in its midway point, as the chords modulate and up the ante--a touch of genius for sure!) ; "Lever Street" is moving like few instrumental interludes can be ; as for "Alladin's Story", this laidback-yet-surprising cover of an obscure Rolling Stones composition brings a welcome vintage atmosphere to the proceedings; "Broken Little Sister" then goes back to the band's more sinister side, like a version of Spiritualized with balls instead of the latter's harmless sing-song meanderings (and one can't thank The Jesus And Mary Chain's Jim Reid enough for his vocal performance here) ; and finally, closer "Neptune City", which goes full-psychedelic on the listener, using its guitar (or sitar?) loops to great effects.
There's not a single dud in this album, actually, and I didn't expect to like it as much as I just did. So I'm buying it right now. I should have bought it decades ago, come to think of it. I'm also buying *Scorpio Rising*, the full-length record Death In Vegas released after this one, in 2023. Contrary to *The Contino Sessions*, there are a couple of duds in it. But the highlights are even more spectacular, with "Girls" of *Lost In Translation* fame, rocker "Scorpio Rising" (featuring Liam Gallagher--I can't resist adding "of Oasis fame" here, ha ha), plus Paul Weller (of *The Jam* fame) performing the vocals of that Gene Clark cover. Not to mention "Killing Smiles" and its lush string section, (featuring Hope Sandoval), and yet another great psychedelic closer, "Help Yourself"--also with Hope Sandoval, and this one ten minutes long. Now with those two records, I can say I have all Death In Vegas' essential albums. Or at least, that's how I feel...
On a sidenote, and before ending this short review with the usual closing credits, I've just read the scalding review Pitchfork published about *The Contino Sessions* at the time Death In Vegas released it. Amazing how you can be wrong on so many levels. Mark my words, there's no problem expressing personal (dis)tastes, and mileages can vary when it comes to repetitive, "hypnotic" music. But when you're complaining about the so-called "bad" basslines in the album, or when you keep on comparing Death In Vegas with Primal Scream--even if they're very different animals (Primal Scream never used *repetition* in the way that Death In Vegas does)--it means you're either deaf or intellectually lazy. Or maybe both. Plus, apart from very few *bons mots* here and there, that review is terribly written. *The most trusted voice in music*. Yeah, right. Waiting for the moment when Pitchfork will give a non-"canon" retrospective grading to this LP, as they have already done in the recent past. In the meantime...
Number of albums left to review: 497
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 239 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 114
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 147
Coldplay
3/5
You got the lovers and the haters of this band, and if you heed either of them, they're both talking as if their opinion represented the one of 90% of the listeners. Don't know the percentage of the audience who fall into those two extremes, but I'm sure part of that latter category.
My first reaction was to hate this band, I admit it. Well, apart from "Don't Panic", the simple yet illuminating opener of this debut album (also having some ironic overtones in its stellar chorus, if you pay a little attention). But yes, I was part of the haters, and I genuinely thought I couldn't stand the rest of this album after I browsed though it. Yet it was more because of the stupid comparisons with Radiohead from reviewers and other listeners than anything the band was doing themselves. Oranges and apples, you see.
The *real* problem, however, was that I had not really listened to Coldplay albums at the time. At least while paying attention to them. Now I have, at least the first four--I'm not going to address their later career, which saw them turn into a shameful and cheesy pop act doing collabs with dumb K-pop bands, just because, well... streaming numbers! But if I go back to the early LPs, I can say that Coldplay deserved neither the raving praise nor the piled heaps of hatred and ignominy routinely thrown their way. They were just a decent band doing their thing. A little too bland at times (or many times, depending on the album). But they also had their moments.
Case in point, "Shiver", the second track of *Parachutes*, which goes from lively to innocuous in the space of mere seconds. What about the rest, then? "Spies" is a good pop rock cut, a little safe, but still pleasant. Which is not the case of the borefest "Sparks", lacking any of them titular sparks to light any fire in your heart, ironically. "Yellow" and "Trouble" are signature songs of the band, which means there's something to them. They're certainly among the most inspired cuts in the album, thanks to their catchy guitar licks. The title-track that follows those two highlights, "Parachutes", is an interesting miniature cut, only lasting 45 seconds. Far from essential given its nature, yet smartly placed in the tracklisting to elicit curiosity. Then comes "High Speed", whose title betrays its slower languid contents. "We Never Change" goes back to the sort of acoustic moodpiece "Sparks" already displayed, with no better luck. Fortunately, Closer "Everything's Not Lost" explores more soulful territory, and I think the band made a great find with the chords they're using here. It's another VERY languid torch song, mark my words, but there's a timelessness to this composition that makes it endearing, all things considered. Finally, there's a short nameless hidden track after that official closer, but it adds nothing relevant to the whole thing, in spite of its instrumentation apparently using an accordion (or "bandoleon").
That's it folks. A striking flaw in this record is that it lacks bite overall, obviously. But I would lie if I said the music that's played here is "bad". Feeling benevolent today, *Parachutes* will therefore go to my "waiting room". Maybe *A Rush Of Blood To The Head* and *Viva La Vida* will join it later on. I doubt there's gonna be room left for any of them in my final list. But you never know. After all, "we live in a beautiful world", where miracles happen sometimes. Or do they?
3/5 for the purposes of this list. Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 496
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 239
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 147
Randy Newman
2/5
Apart from "Lonely At The Top", the extraordinary "Political Science", and closer "God's Song", the satire quickly wears thin on all the other tracks. Or it sounds very *thick* instead, depending on the subject matter at hand and the way Randy Newman laughs about it.
Musically, there are a handful of good songs ("Last Night I Had A Dream", the delicate "Burn On" , "You Can Leave Your Hat On"--of Joe Cocker fame--and maybe the title track opening the proceedings). But that group of tunes is not necessarily the one that can boast having the best lyrics though. In other words, it seems like something is always missing in this full-length release...
Under that light I'm not including this record in my own list. I'm glad it helped Brian Wilson to get through one of his infamous bouts with depression. I tend to interpret this interesting anecdote as ultimately showing how fragile Wilson's mental state was--given that many parts of this album are actually pretty f*cking hopeless and sinister.
But this here isn't why I'm rejecting this LP as an "essential" one. I'm only rejecting it because Randy Newman's usual little tricks already sounded a bit tired by 1972. Later *Good Old Boys* was a bit more mordant. And that eponymous album a couple of years before *Sail Away* had a clearer focus at least. So maybe they're better entry points into Newman's oeuvre, as different as they are...
Besides, who in 2023 really thinks there should be *three* frigging Randy Newman LPs in a list of the best albums of all time? Who? Especially when you need room for the likes of Coltrane or Mingus, as another reviewer has aptly pointed out on this app? Or room for relatively newer stuff that already has all the earmarks of a masterpiece? There's not even a single Big Thief album in Dimery's updated list! Jeeze, if you want to understand how you can combine stellar songwriting with terrific musical compositions, that's the way to go. I'm sorry, but as "smart" and "pert" as he is, Randy Newman doesn't have the stellar chops of an Adrienne Lenker. "Quaint" and "trite" can find their way into such a list. But they can't let one single artist take up three slots all by himself. Not by a long shot.
2/5 for the purposes of this list. Which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2). Next please.
Number of albums left to review: 495
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 239
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 148 (including this one)
5/5
An iconic album from an iconic band. What sets Yes apart from all those other legendary prog rock acts from the seventies (Genesis, Jethro Tull, ELP, Gong, Gentle Giant and the likes...) is their groove and energy. Only King Crimson could rock that hard--well, depending on which "period" from their very long career is concerned, at least...
*Close To The Edge* was a reputedly difficult album to record, but Yes managed to convey said live energy throughout the complex instrumental interplay in it. Jon Anderson's moving falsetto voice also brings a lot of soul to the proceedings. I admit I've always prefered his live performances, because they were "less perfect", and therefore sounded a little less "distant" to my ears... But this is admitteldy a very minor gripe of mine.
And there are enough stellar moments in this magnum opus to make up for Anderson's mannerisms anyway. The melodies are catchy as f*ck, for instance, just as they were in many parts of *The Yes Album* and *Fragile*--patchier affairs for sure, yet ones that are still worth visiting today as well. I remember my review for *Fragile* a year ago being a little severe, by the way. I would probably add another star to my grading of it if I could have a say about it now...
Speaking of the band's discography, the very first Yes release I owned was an excellent compilation (*Yesstory*), spanning the band's whole career. Of course, it included the epic title track taking up the first side of *Close To The Edge*. But "Siberian Khatru" was *not* in this compilation, which was a bummer for sure. That's how I ended up buying *Close To The Edge* as well. I don't have much room left in my small prog rock shelf, but I'll probably acquire *Fragile* or *The Yes Album* soon. And I'm pretty sure other seventies albums released by this band harbor many treasures I haven't listened to yet... One of the problems of so-called "progressive rock" is that you need to find the time and mindset to discover its gems (a common point it has with jazz). And it's a dynamic that's increasingly hard to reach in this day and age, sadly...
4,5/5, rounded up to a 5/5. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 494
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 240 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 148
Rufus Wainwright
3/5
No one can say that Rufus Wainwright is a bad writer and performer. His songs are ripe with melodic ideas and interesting one-liners, generally speaking. The thing is, as good as Rufus's skills are, there's not much rhyme or reason in the way the double-feature *Want* was contructed. Maybe a great *single album* lies there somewhere, if Wainwright had been better at self-editing himself. But frankly, I'm not interested enough to recreate said single LP. Because, as decent and lushly produced as the music is in those twin albums, most of their cuts still come off as derivative at the end of the day. And a lot of them even sound pretty quaint, trite, chatty or oversentimental. Which is a huge problem in my book.
Some reviewers in here compared Wainwright's voice with the one of Thom Yorke, and I can see why they did so. But if Radiohead dabbled in mock-novelty cuts once in a while, the latter were always mixed up with many different styles. And the whole yet managed to be part of the same connective tissue. *Want One* and *Want Two* are actually far less adventurous when it comes to the genres they use or refer to. And yet they never manage to create such cohesiveness. It's like a catalogue of exercises in styles, with very few songs being instantly memorable, unfortunately.
Exceptions in *Want Two* are "Peach Trees", "Waiting For A Dream" and "The Art Teacher", whose fantastic chord sequence--both off-kilter yet immensely poignant and pleasurable--is a great backdrop for this sarcastic but ultimately tender song about a former art student who married her way into big money instead of pursuing love interests in an artistic environment. Opener "Agnus Dei" is also impressive, but it's mostly a moody orchestral introduction.
Ambitions are very misplaced in this second volume anyway. Case in point, closer "Old Whore's Diet", a duet with Anhoni from Anthony And The Johnson whose baroque and epic climax can't make up from how ridiculous the first part of the song is--it's basically a reggae track played with all the wrong intents and arrangements. A poorly though-out cut, and also, a poorly executed one. Yuck!
It's hard to review *Want Two* without reviewing *Want One*, which has been given a separate slot in the 1001 albums book (one slot for Rufus Wainwright is already arguable, but *two*???!). The highlights there are the rococo opener "What A World"--lush with orchestral quotes form Ravel's Bolero--, more experimental and subdued "Vicious World" and "Want", and the climactic, heartfelt ballads "Go Or Go Ahead" and "Beautiful Child".
Oh, and there's the incredibly sour closer "Dinner At Eight", where Rufus narrates a dinner evening with his dad--the folk singer Loudon Wainwright III--going very fucking *wrong*. It's a true story, by the way, and a quick search online shows that Rufus follows an old tradition of the Wainwright extended clan here--one that allows each family member to give jabs at their close relatives through their songs--be they father, son, daughter or exes. Best case scenario, those cuts settle the score, and the whole dysfunctional routine starts again some time after a temporary reconciliation. Quite an endearing family of neurotic artists! Loudon especially, often comes off as an insensitive and stubborn patriarch, as talented as he was as an artist. Waiting for the HBO series that would take inspiration from this weird clan of musicians for its next big hit onscreen...
All of this is nice and well, and it sure is interesting. But as I said, and all biographical anecdotes apart, the problem is that there are not enough truly memorable moments in *Want* (one AND two) to justify adding it to this list. The songs I have not quoted in this review (and there are a lot of them!) go from Robbie Williams-like innocuous bland rock-pop cuts to more extravagant cabaret shenanigans, where Wainwright go through his histrionic routine without imprinting it on the listener's mind, very sadly. And I guess in the middle of those two extremities, you can find a bit of Elton John. But without the hits. And without the hits, you can't call a pop-rock album a keeper, be it part of an ambitious double-feature. So next, please.
Following the specific purposes of this list of essential albums, I'm giving a 3/5 grade for both *Want One* and *Want Two* (the first still sounds slightly more convincing than the second to me, but the difference is not big enough to bother giving distinct gradings to those two LPs). A grading which translates to a 8/10 for more objective and general purposes (5 + 3)...
Number of albums left to review: 493
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 240
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 149 (including this one)
Throbbing Gristle
1/5
The global score for this one sure prepares you for a wild ride into weird noisy experimental stuff. Only the score of Einsturdenze Neubaten's *Kolaps* (another early "industrial" landmark) is currently lower than the one of *D.O.A.*--a situation that I think is particularly unfair in my book, given that *Kolaps* is far more "musical" (or at least "rhythmical" ) than Throbbing Gristle's unsettling soundscapes. Still, that's quite a feat to be remembered for something that automatically elicits rejection on most listeners' part decades after your release. As the lyrics candidly go on "Hit By A Rock": "Makes me think you don't like my records". Indeed.
That said, I'm still glad I've listened to this album, even if I could have lived without doing so. I might have my gripes with this list sometimes, but as I said elsewhere, I think it's important that said weird noisy experimental stuff can find its way in it. The thing is, should *this* particular experimental stuff be deemed as more essential than other examples of it? On which ground can one be selected and the other rejected? This is a difficult question and the jury's still out on this one...
The answer may or may mot lie in the way Throbbing Gristle give hints here and there about their awareness that they're writing a future cult classic for a certain sub-type of listeners. Some of those hints are more subtle than the lyrics I've quoted up there (or say, the hilarious parody of the artwork in their other album *20 Jazz Funk Greats*). It's hidden in all the static. But it's there. And it gives the whole endeavor an aura of mystery, as dull as the music is most of the time.
Maybe with the right drug, I could get immersed in those soundscapes a little more, however. And even sober, I can recognize the few merits of Throbbing Gristle's "music" once in a while: "Dead On Arrival" could be the soundtrack of a vintage sci-fi flick. "Weeping" (unwittingly?) uses a weird tuning for its different strings that sends you close to a meditative state of mind--yet it's a state of mind at odds with the miserable feelings expressed in the lyrics of this "song" about loneliness within couples or partnerships. I admit the whole thing can... strike a chord indeed. Even if the latter sounds out of tune.
"Hamburger Lady" is yet another difficult cut, but sonically speaking, it's rather timeless. Don't get me wrong, it's still dull music, but it's the fact that said dull music was recorded in 1978 that makes it extraordinary: if you said it was an Arca track, no one would notice the difference, for instance. Conversely, "AB/7A" is regressive in the sense that it hearkens back to what Tangerine Dream were doing a few years before this album came out. The track is strangely soothing though. And accessible, which is a rare accurence in this LP. Finally, to end this list of compliments, "E-Coli" reminds me of droning interludes or transitory moments within compositions post-rock bands such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Mogwai create once in a while--those recorded talking voices over it create a distinct mood like that...
As you can see, I tried very hard to be positive here. But apart from this track sequence right in the middle of *D.O.A...*, the rest sounds utterly meaningless to me, though. Probably because, well, it just *is* meaningless--rationalisations of a couple of bad-faith "rock-critics" notwithstanding. Worse, the whole thing is rather unmemorable--apart from "Weeping" and "AB/7A", maybe--and when you try to shock your audience with how daring and uncompromising you are as an artist, that's a sign that you actually miserably failed at what you were doing. This here is the *worst* crime, and it has nothing to do with your noisy aesthetics.
To be perfewctly candid, I really hope this LP can reach the bottom of this list again (it did so in the past), and thus replace Ensturdenze Neubatten's *Kolaps*, which is ten times better (some would say that doesn't make it a great album either given how bad *D.O.A... is, lol... yet I still think a one-star assessment is way too harsh for the German band). Speaking of the "unpopular" section of this app's global stats, there are two or three other acts unfairly stuck in it, by the way--Robert Wyatt and That Incredible String Band come to mind here. Yet generally speaking, when the people speak and express such a clearly *negative* consensus, it's because they have a point. And the fact that they can both reject Limp Bizkit and Throbbing Gristle is a reassuring thought, I have to say.
If one day a found a very cheap copy of *D.O.A...* in a record store (strange miracles happen sometimes), maybe I would buy it to listen to it for a second time. Or maybe I would just do it to add a rare curio to my album collection. Just as I could do it for Captain Beefheart's *Trout Mask Replica*. Those sorts of record could have their own section: "the most hated albums of all time"... But let's be honest here, I would NEVER go out of my way to buy those records. And *that* is my own final report on how bad *D.O.A.* is.
Number of albums left to review: 492
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 240
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 150 (including *D.O.A.*--and if *really* you want to select a Throbbing Gristle record, I feel like *20 Jazz-Funk Greats* is slightly more accessible, thanks to its more parodic intents. But that's as far as I'll ever go to "defend" this band...)
Sade
1/5
Going from Throbbing Gristle to Sade, ha ha. I love this app, lol...
"Smooth Operator" is an iconic track. So eighties. Feels like I'm in a taxi in New York or Chicago at night, going down an avenue lined with skyscrapers lighted like so many christmas trees. The cab driver is listening to news about Ronald Reagan on the radio, and then this hit single turns up. I'm looking through the window, and I watch all the people going in and out of buildings and subway entrances. It's beautiful...
All trips down memory lane aside, let's just be honest for one second, though. What Sade performed was the worst kind of elevator music, was it not? And yes, this even includes "Smooth Operator", which I *like*. As fine as that single is, after so many clones of it in the tracklisting, I feel like it is just impossible for Sade's music to be taken seriously.
Because *Diamond Life* did not age well, to say the least. All the sounds are conventional (apart from a discreet synth in "I Will Be Your Friend"), the melodies, chords and harmonies are rather unremarkable, and the rhythm section ticks all the boxes of what a band playing in a hotel lobby is supposed to do. Having a competent band and a beautiful voice is not enough: you need some sort of creative spark somewhere. And this LP doesn't have it.
I also want to strangle that sax player, by the way. If I ever hear another one of those bland cheesy solos, I'm gonna go positively insane, lol. *Cherry Pie*'s groove was quite OK--one of the rare tracks that was so--and I couldn't help noticing that no saxophone was involved in it. So when said saxophone reappeared in the very first seconds of the next track, I burst out laughing. Listening to this album is like playing hide and seek with that lethal saxophone, hoping it never catches you again in your scariest nightmares.
*Diamond Life* will now join that Throbbing Gristle album in my list of one-star albums, very ironically. Mark my words, such a low grading is only done for the purposes of this list of so-called "essential" albums. It equals a 6/10 grade for more general purposes: 5 for the competent songwriting, the skilled performance, and the professional production values, to which I would add 1 point for the inspiration and memorable results that are mandatory for an "essential" record. Maybe without that damn saxophone I would have added two points instead of one. Sadly, we'll never know...
Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 491
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 240
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 151 (including this one)
Isaac Hayes
3/5
All funny obsessions about Saturday Night Fever aside, I fully agree with the review currently topping this section. As iconic as *Shaft*'s main theme is, there are plenty of better movie soundtrack albums out there. And this even if you stick to the ones with music specifically composed for a film, instead of a compilation of previously recorded stuff, à la "Pulp Fiction" or "Guardians of The Galaxy".
Said music can be orchestral, obviously ("Star Wars", "The Lord Of The Rings" and "The Godfather"'s different soundtrack albums; the ones of Ennio Morricone for Sergio Leone's iconic spaghetti westerns ; Philip Glass's "Koyaanisqatsi", "Kundun" and "The Hours", Danny Elfman's long list of scores for Tim Burton). They can go from older stuff related to Hollywood's golden age ("The Night Of The Hunter", "The Wizard Of Oz", "Casablanca", Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story".. Bernard Hermann's work for Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" and "Vertigo"...) to very recent films (Hans Zimmer's soundtracks for Christopher Nolan, for instance). Such scores can also be synthetic (Vangelis' "Blade Runner"--but also his less famous "Apocalypse Des Animaux", "Opéra Sauvage" and "The Chariots Of Fire" ; plus Giorgio Moroder's "Midnight Express", Brian Eno's "Appolo" soundtrack, Zimmer's work for Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" and John Carpenter's compositions for his own films...) or jazzy (Miles Davis' "Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud" ; Bernard Hermann's "Taxi Driver"). Sometimes they can even be *both* synthetic and jazzy--see Angelo Badalamenti's stellar oeuvre for David Lynch, mostly "Blue Velvet", "Mulholland Drive" and both the "Twin Peaks" TV series and film soundtracks. They can also be related to traditional music (Goran Bregovic's scores for Emir Kusturica, Geinoh Yamashirogumi's "Akira"), or moodpieces defying categories altogether (Ry Cooder's "Paris Texas" ; Neil Young's "Dead Man"). And, last but not least, they can be collections of original songs ("West Side Story", once again, but also "Grease", "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", Björk's poignant musical for Lars Von Trier's "Dancer In The Dark", the rap-rock mash-up "Judgment Night", Elton John's "The Lion King", the Kendrick Lamar-produced "Black Panther"--and, well, yes, good old "Saturday Night Fever"!). I could even include "The Blues Brothers" in this category, since it was mostly *new* recordings of older songs...
So why not start there, instead of this frankly uneven double album by Isaac Hayes? IDon't get me wrong, I'm not saying each one of my references up there should be included in a list of 1001 "essential" albums--I understand that the purpose of Dimery's list is first and foremost to select stellar examples of the album format, and this independently of any other art form such as movies or TV series. But you should at least take into account the long and rich history of film scoring before selecting a movie soundtrack. Especially when said soundtrack is a rather patchy affair, with many unmemorable instrumental cuts that seem to be caught in their own "illustrative" agenda, instead of fully evoking the events they supposedly illustrate. Among those instrumental cuts, only the two referencing "Cafe Regio" manage to create a little tension, thanks to the obsessive one-note guitar licks displayed there. But honestly, the rest sounds like elevator music to my ears. And that's where you can draw the line between effective and less effective work, and this in *both* film scoring and music played for its own sake.
Speaking of better soundtracks out there, I almost forgot to mention the one of another famous blaxploitation flick, *Superfly*, which allowed Curtis Mayfield to write one of his best LPs. Good *albums* is what you and I are here for, after all, and that's where the difference between the two examples gets crucial. *Superfly* is enjoyable through and through. You don't need to have watched the movie to get into it (I haven't, actually), there's more than one memorable theme song in its awesome tracklisting, and you *fully* understand the thematic groundwork of the film as you go through it. It's like listening to a regular "essential" album, plus it goes way beyond its "illustrative" function. All sorts of assets that *Shaft* doesn't really have, except in the song "Soulville" and the 20-minute jam "Do Your Thing", maybe. Isaac Hayes's work was influential when it set a template for other blaxploitation films. And the main theme song he composed was memorable and funky for sure. But as far as "essential" albums go, I think *Shaft* fails to hit the mark, really.
Number of albums left to review: 490
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 240
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 152 (including this one)
The Specials
5/5
UK ska/two-tone masterpiece (RIP, Terry Hall). Lots and lots of lively or endearing tunes. Ideal for a holiday soundtrack. Which is why, this time, I won't bother writing a damn review, and just fully enjoy the music instead.
Number of albums left to review: less than 500 (I've temporarily lost count)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one).
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
Bonnie "Prince" Billy
5/5
One of the most heartbreaking albums in my record collection. The first time I listened to a Will Oldham song, it was the version of this LP's title track he performed with Johnny Cash on the latter's swan album *American IV: The Man Comes Around*. I instantly fell in love with this very emotional tune about friends getting old and disillusioned, and yet being loyal to each other until the very end...
The only (small) problem with this Bonnie "Prince" Billy record is that it doesn't include this version with Johnny Cash (his gravelly voice, coupled with Will's fragile harmonies, does wonders in this reenactment). But no worries, the original version is still a terrific tear-inducing gem, like many other songs in this record...
2.98 is a global score that's way too low for it by the way. What's wrong with people? Can't they handle sadness in music? Or do they have issues with grassroots aesthetics where the instrumentation and vocals are deliberately out of place--therefore adding a subsequent layer of fragility that makes the whole thing so poignant? This record is all about entropy and death, folks! Of course, it can't be "neat" and "clear-cut". Form and contents are artfully (and touchingly) echoing each other here, as they should be.
I thought about this unfair global score, and rather than reviewing the songs of this album, I'm gonna 'review the reviews', so to speak--at least the ones currently topping this section. I want to make it clear that the people who take part in making this album so low in the global score have the right to express their subjective tastes, of course... And yet their reviews often prove that they are ill-equipped to do so in a convincing manner--at least for this sort of lo-fi, anti-folk record.
Excerpt of review A (currently topping the section). Grade given to *I See A Darkness*: 1/5
"After listening to the album “I See a Darkness”, I don’t see a darkness. I hear a silence. Sorry to have wasted your time, dear reader."
No you havent wasted my time at all. Because some of the ways you've described this album before that conclusion are actually the very reasons I love it. "Sometimes, legitimate poetic expressions seem to sit high on a throne of non-referential, non-allusive obscurity, holding a scepter of grammar-be-damned nonsense and crowned with a greater than ordinary vocabulary. But that doesn’t make them good as lyrics". Well, actually it does sometimes. As in here. Oldham's poetry is both oblique and direct and that's why it's so effective. "A lyricist has one shot at grabbing the listener by the passions, and on this album, Bonnie “Prince” Billy has missed wildly". A weird way to say that the passions in question were so overwhelming that this particular listener couldn't handle them. As for the rest of the review and the supposedly "poor" qualities of the instrumentation and vocal performances, see what I wrote up there about the "entropic" qualities of this record and how they match the theme of death...
My grading for this review: 2.5/5. It's still a cohesive argumentation, even if reading between the lines of said argumentation reveals potential contradictions or self-blinding aesthetical prejudices...
The worst is to come, though. Fortunately, review B (5/5 for the album) is simple, direct and extremely positive:
"Fantastic. Hauntingly beautiful from start to finish."
Well, here's a concise way to phrase your opinion. I should probably take a page out of this reviewer's book, lol. My grading for this review: 4.5/5. With another short sentence or a punchline at the end, this would be perfect.
Next review, review C (4/5 for the album) is an absolute gem. I'm so jealous of the person who wrote it. Which is why its entire contents deserve to be copied here:
"You have to be on a little bit of a sad streak for this album to hit right. Luckily for me, I picked this one up in the late afternoon on the second shortest day of the year, after my girlfriend had just left to go home. So, as the late afternoon crept into a very dark Vermont evening, I put this album on, and it was perfect. A world unto its own."
My grading of this review: 5/5. Perfect, honest, personal, heartfelt, evocative. I would love to be in Vermont and listen to this record with this person right now.
Review D (3/5 for the album):
"Meh. Kinda boring"
Just like what you've just written, pal. See how a positive review up there just added a simple adverb to actually describe the damn thing ("*hauntingly* beautiful). You can do that in a negative review, you know. 0.5/5.
Review E (5/5 for the album):
"a depressing and optimistic ode to survival".
Change "and" with "yet", and you have a properly expressed take. But I fully concur with the sentiment expressed here. There's a beautiful duality to what Will Oldham crafts in *I See A Darkness*. 4/5 for this one.
Review D is another very positive review (5/5 for the album) and it's a "classic" exploration of the LP track by track. Just read it. Love how its description of opener "A Minor Place" unwittingly points to the fact that the song is one of the few actually relying on *major* chords, ironically. That opener is surely a "soft" way to start this very dark journey.
I do couldn't better in this "classic" mode, so 5/5 for this particular example...
Now here comes the ridiculous stuff. Review G gave 1/5 to the album, and it's dumb takes after dumb takes. So dumb that it becomes hilarious:
"It sounded like an elementary school lunch room when the kids were getting too rowdy. I kept begging for that 1 teacher who could stick their fingers in their mouth and make that ear piercing whistle to create SILENCE!"
That person surely never had to handle or manage of group of kids. This is NOT how you create silence in a lunchroom filled with them, ha ha. At least in the long run. So much for your weird metaphor here. Learn that metaphor are as unpredictable as children: unproperly handled, they can escape your grasp and undermine your supposed "authority". And that's where you start to look foolish. Believe me, I've been there as well. But you can learn. You can always learn.
"Then the rest of the album was just shit. If I wanted to hear a shitty story by a boring guy with his guitar I'd join a commune. Literally fuck this album."
So graciously put. I'm glad no commune will have to bear with your bad manners, at least. As for the album being "shit", how am I supposed to trust the tastes of a person who rates The Stooges, Pixies, Television and Kendrick Lamar with 1/5 grades??? How? And by " I ", I mean 80-90% of the people in this group, most probably...
0/5 for this dumb assessment. Thanks for nothing.
Going a little further to another 1/5 review (exhibit L). It starts with a restaurant metaphor that's not too bad to express your dissatisfaction with the album's "menu". Unfortunately, it ends with one of the most ridiculous things I have ever read on this app:
"Just glad this isn't on Spotify."
Oh, because being on Spotify is the 100% reliable sign that you're playing good music now??? Well, I have a lot of counterexamples to offer. And you probably have some too, no matter what your tastes are.
A lot of music lovers (old AND young) are still buying physical copies of albums, by the way. You probably already know this, right? As you probably know that not being on a certain platform has nothing to do with the supposed quality of your music.
I'm afraid you are confusing the message with the "pipes" and other broadcasting means that are bringing said message to you... Here's how algorithms are turning certain folks into sheep. Mark my words, I'm not against the technology itself. But I'm appalled by the way some folks are so under its sway that they become unable to reach critical thinking that would make a shred of sense. Which takes the cake when you're using this app. 1/5 for this reviewer's lack of articulate thought here.
I'm gonna end this strange experiment, and I promise I won't attempt to do this again. I'm afraid some readers might take this the wrong way... The point is not to say who's *right* or who's *wrong*. The point is to state which reviews of this album are the most articulate and convincing.
Under that light, let me conclude with a quote from another reviewer who was actually rather unconvinced by *I See A Darkness* (giving a 3/5 grading to it). What's great about this quote is that this particular reviewer found a beautiful way to express a detail that I absolute love in the album:
"Oldham’s overlayed vocals don’t harmonize so much as skitter like moths bashing randomly into each other."
Now that's a GREAT metaphor if I've never read one. And a 5/5 way to sum things up. I think that whenever I listen to *I See A Darkness*, I also see those moths flying around the feeble light of a forlorn bulb at night. That's the sort of "darkness" I can contemplate. And this other reviewer has seen it too, even if they didn't like that spectacle as much as I did. Their review is the sorts of sincere, sensitive, personal and aptly-phrased takes I'll always be drawn to. Just as I'm drawn to the similarly sincere, sensitive, personal and aptly-phrased offerings of Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. Like moths to a flame, I would even say...
Number of albums left to review: 488
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 242 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 152
The Mothers Of Invention
5/5
It's too bad Frank Zappa never wrote and performed soundtracks for early Thomas Pynchon novels, also celebrating / gently mocking freaks, misfits and their "counter-culture". The Mothers' carnivalesque sound would have been a great match for those novels. Not to mention those gorgeous, gorgeous kazoos, also an obsession of the author of *V*, *The Crying Of Lot 49* and *Gravity's Rainbow* (among many others).
A little more seriously, what I like about this record is that some of its pastiche or experimental aspects are subtle enough to go unnoticed on certain tracks--even if they're pretty obvious towards the end of this double album. Pretty sure Tom Wilson had a blast recording them, given that he initially thought the Mothers were just another white blues band after he has only listened to "Trouble Every Day" (a pastiche of Bob Dylan himself mimicking older blues cuts). Of course, they were so much more than that. This initial verstality of Zappa and his band (between spoofing dada impulses and genuine songwriting qualities) is why this mock-"conceptual" record remains easily digestible, even today. Because the music remains pretty catchy a lot of the time. And it's always nice when there are several ways understand or appreciate an LP. As in here or Captain Beefheart's *Safe As Milk*, for instance--another record displaying similar aesthetics.
Zappa fans will probably tell you that their idol made far better albums after this famous debut. As of now I find that claim dubious, but I haven't listened to every major LP released by the mustachioed troublemaker, it's true. And I remember giving 4 stars to *Hot Rats*, an album I also like a lot. Let's just say that I find Dimery's "selection" of Zappa's key albums pretty convincing so far...
In that spirit I should probably give 4 stars to *Freak Out* as well, then. Even if I now realize I could have gone higher than that for both records. Maybe it's time to reassess them both now...
Number of albums left to review: 487
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 243 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 152
Mudhoney
4/5
It sure is an influential record for the whole grunge wave, but *Superfuzz Bigmuff* is technically an EP (later expanded into a compilation). If Dimery betrayed his own rules for his list, I can't see why he didn't include other pivotal EPs (say, Beck's *Loser* or Godspeed You! Black Emperor's *Slow Riot For New Zero Canada*). And if you consider this record as a compilation instead, you must then include far more important ones (like The Buzzcocks' *Singles Going Steady*, The Beatles' red and blue albums, or even Bob Marley's *Legend*).
I'm giving four stars to this EP, but it's the very rare case where I won't include it in my own list. Rules matter sometimes, don't they? Even for unruly bands such as Mudhoney. So next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 486
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 243
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 153, including this one.
Simon & Garfunkel
5/5
Can't tell you how surprised I was by that weird deep synth sound blasting through my speakers the first time I listened to the first seconds of "Save The Life Of My Child". Funny to think that not so far from that New York studio, where this LP was recorded, young misfits named Silver Apples also experimented with synthesizers at the time--even if they did way, way MORE experimentation with this new instrument, ha ha.
Trying very hard (too hard?) to find a connection between two acts no one has ever made before, apart from their common home in the Big Apple. Probably because everyone else in here has already explained how this album pans out, and I feel I have nothing else original to add.
To be honest, I was never fully sold on the supposed "concept" behind said album, but who cares? As topsy-turvy as the tracklisting is, a lot of those tracks are still iconic songs ("America", "Mrs. Robinson" , "A Hazy Shade Of Winter", " At The Zoo"...), just like the ones in *Sounds Of Silence* or *Bridge Over Troubled Water*. And those three LPs I've just mentioned sure deserve to be in this list. Life's simple sometimes. Even if it's short and bittersweet, as this LP suggests once in a while. 4,5 stars, rounded up to 5.
Number of albums left to review: 486
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 244 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 153.
The Rolling Stones
5/5
Feel like I'm not going to reconcile the two *very* differing views about this album currently topping this section. So be it. The first aptly expresses what's great about this record--with that guitar "weaving" thing for instance. Too bad that same review only evoked the potential "problems" with the lyrical contents of certain songs without offering anything ressembling much of a solution or resolution.
But maybe there isn't any satisfactory solution to this conundrum anyway, which is why *Sticky Fingers* is also a document about the age when it was released. Said record indeed irresponsibly tackled with misogynistic and borderline racist takes once in a while, I'm not gonna deny that. But I'll be damned if the way the Stones used those tricky topics to write their stellar songs ain't effective and evocative as fuck.
As for the second review, I don't see the point it's trying to make, beyond a subjective "I don't like the music". Comparing the Stones to Led Zeppelin is like comparing apples and oranges anyway. Everyone "liking" this review probably misses the point as well. It's OK to *not* like the Stones. But if you want to offer as much as a convincing explanation for your hot take, you need to be a little more articulate than that. Many fans are around the corner, aren't they?
Not that anyone's opinion matters, be it positive or negative. Keith Richards is gonna bury us all anyway, lol. So why bother?
What can I add? *Sticky Fingers* is one of the best Rolling Stones ever, period. And among their other masterpieces (*Aftermath*, *Beggars Banquet*, *Let It Bleed* and *Exile On Main Street*), it's certainly the most *cohesive* of the bunch. The many grassroots blues cuts scattered on those other LPs are surely endearing, and they bring interesting moods and flavors. But let's be realistic, they're also fillers between the hits. Whereas in *Sticker Fingers*, there's almost no filler to speak of: the grassroots blues interludes are kept at a very strict minimum, and the vast majority of the tracks packs a punch, be it a rocker ("Brown Sugar", "Bitch"), a rhythm'n'blues-induced demonic jam ("Can't You Hear Me Knocking"), a drug-addled tale of sorrow ("Sister Morphine", co-written with Marianne Faithfull), a country cut ("Dead Flowers"), or a poignant ballad ("Wild Horses" and "Moonlight Mile", up there with "You Can't Always Get What You Want", "Salt Of The Earth" and "Angie" in that pantheon of the best Stones ballads ever).
Oh, and the Andy Warhol artwork sure is iconic. Only his own Velvet Underground banana can beat it.
5 stars, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 485
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 245 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 153.
The Cardigans
3/5
That one is tricky to explain. I'm gonna start with the positive stuff. The Cardigans are awesome composers and performers, and this album displays productions values that all-around nice and effective. Those chord changes are quite brilliant, anyone with an ear for those sorts of details can tell you this. And this, even if--like me--your ear is badly educated or trained...
That being said, the songs use so many of those spectacular chord modulations that the results make me feel queasy after a while. I know it's just a matter of personal taste here, but sometimes a good ol' E - G - A - C chord sequence can do the trick. It all depends on the vocal melody and its harmonies over said sequence (or subsequent flourishes *after* those basic chords). You can write great vocal lines over quite banal chords. Actually, that's probably one of the trickiest thing to accomplish when you're tackling pop aesthetics. But here The Cardigans constantly up the ante. They won't stick to anything banal for sure. Which sometimes works *against* the songs and what they're supposed to be. Off-kilter chord modulations can often suggest bittersweet feelings, which is the aim of most of the tracks here. But if you're too cute about the whole thing, you end up erasing the "bitter" part of that adjective, and merely sound sweet instead. As in *sugarcoated*. I guess that's probably where my queasiness comes from when I listen to this record.
In spite of all those modal shenanigans, many tunes in this album admittedly remain catchy enough. "Heartbreaker" and "Happy Meals" first come to mind as examples of how The Cardigans can shine in that regard. Yet it's as if their usual harmonic sophistication--worthy of a musicologist's early studies--hampered genuine emotions to be expressed. Take those funny winks to Black Sabbath, for instance. They're found in three separate moments, including an admittedly great cover of "Iron Man"... Sure, those moments are fun. But they also keep hammering home the idea that this band might be too smart for their own good to convey feelings that would sound 100% sincere. Sprinkle too many references in your tunes, even subliminal ones, and you might end up sounding like a pompous fop. Which takes the cake when you're quoting Black (bloody) Sabbath, among other things...
I don't really know how to put all this into words. The whole thing is a little too... *studied*? *Scholarly*? And then again, the first track, "Your New Cuckoo", still manages to sound trite and tired. And speaking of trite, "Lovefool" (of *Romeo + Juliet* fame) can be quite annoying, depending on the mood you're in. Sure, that track has been overplayed to death on radios all over the western world and beyond... But overplayed or not, this LP still manages to sound *both* sugary and cynical as a consequence of the composers' peculiar choices. It's that distinctive pastiche aspect found in a lot of the tunes--both the good and the not-so-good ones--and it can get on my nerves sometimes. As far as musicianship goes, there's a solid backbone to this thing, from Nina Persson's enticing voice to the musicians performing with her. I just wish there was a similarly solid backbone in terms of "spirit" and emotions, instead of all the simpering and other affected posturing I'm sensing in this band. Am I the only person feeling this here?
So in spite of all the talents involved, I'd say *First Band On the Moon* still verges on being a mixed-bag thing--at least as far as "essential" albums go in my own book...
3/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3). Next, please...
Number of albums left to review: 484
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 245
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 154 (including this one)
Chicago
1/5
I remember hating this record when I first listened to it. Always thought that songs from this debut album could be used as soundtrack for that ridiculously campy "Love Boat" TV series. Brings a big stupid grin to my face. That funky bartender was a cool dude, was he not? Too bad I can't remember his name, or the ones of the other characters. That's how high my cheese-o-meter actually is when I think about Chicago.
I make a point listening to whichever record is popping out in this app, at least if I'm not deeply familiar with it. I've been doing this everyday for a year and a half now. And this implies checking on records I thought I hated. There's been a few cases when I actually changed my mind about a musician or artist. And I always keep that in mind...
So I was about to listen to that Chicago album again, after browsing through the top of the review section. Until I found this conclusion in one of the reviews:
"If you can’t fall in love with this album, there’s something wrong with you."
Seriously? I know that when people are enthusisastic about an album, they can get carried away. But there's a limit. This conclusion gives you the (probably wrong) impression that all fans of Chicago are twats. Which is a bit of a problem.
Thing is, I don't want to end up like a twat. So I'll stick to my first impression that this Chicago debut is a cheesefest of epic proportion that has nothing interesting to bring musically except overblown jazzy horn parts and pyrotechnic (read *self-indulgent*) guitar solos. And I'll also stick to my initial impression that those many flourishes can't hide how frigging naive, dumb, trite and derivative the songwriting and basic compositions actually are. So I think I'll take the day off, for a change, and listen to 2023 albums instead. Maybe Geese's *3D Country*, or that latest Lana Del Rey LP. Or Shame's *Food For Worms*. Or *Mid-Air*, by Paris Texas. Well, anything *but* Chicago.
Call that a protest of sorts. If really loving this record makes you utter that sort of line I've just quoted as a result, I'd rather not take that risk. In other words, you can't bully anyone to love an album.
Oh and if that reviewer is reading me now, hear this out :
If you can’t fall in love with Pixies's *Doolittle*, there’s something wrong with you. *Deeply* wrong.
So tell me, pal: how does it feel taking your own medicine? The real issue is not that we are disagreeing about an album. It's the *way* you're expressing your opinion. Even that review you wrote about the Rolling Stones' *Sticky Fingers* (a record I actually love) had wrong moments, amid takes about it that were admittedly great. So don't expect to sound convincing for another record made by a band that has been overrated for decades. Especially when said album is clearly fifty notches under that Stones classic.
1.5/5 for the purposes of this list (I'm grading the album here, not that person's review, lol). Which translates to a 6.5/10 grade for more general purpose (5 + 1.5). The final build-ups of "Beginnings" and "Poem 50" are quite good, to be honest, and "I'm A Man" has a catchy chorus. Too bad that track is actually a cover. Didn't realize that before listening to the song again, by the way. But I guess it makes sense that the only tune worthy of interest comes from outside the band. Because, yes, I did listen to this record again, eventually--and this in spite of my earlier protest. I love music too much to let a reviewer with badly-phrased takes ruin my passion for it.
Number of albums left to review: 483
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 245
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 115
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 155 (including this one)
Stan Getz
4/5
Nice samba-bossa-jazz soundtrack. File next to that famous Getz/Gilberto LP (both display a different version of "Desafinado", by the way).
With a cool, airy soundtrack such as this one, I don't feel like writing a review today. Sometimes it's nice to stop and smell the roses...
Number of albums left to review: 482
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 245
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 116 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 155
Django Django
3/5
This very short review of the album is spot on:
"Begins like a John Carpenter soundtrack - very exciting. Then some catchy indie-dance reminding me of Hot Chip collaborating with Beta Band. Good music."
Couldn't phrase it better. So I'm not gonna add anything.
I somehow missed this band when they released this debut. But I've since caught up with them. Their 2021 LP (Glowing In The Dark) was pretty good. But their 2023 release (Off Planet) is just awful. A cheesefest of epic magnitude. Even worse than The 1975. Which is quite a feat, I gotta say. 🙃
To return to this debut, I'm gonna put this in my "waiting list" to see if it grows on me. I enjoyed quite a lot of this record. But somehow, I'm not so sure it's gonna stay with me in the long run. Wait and see.
Number of albums left to review: 481
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 245
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 117 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 155
Joy Division
5/5
Just talked about this album with a friend last night. For him it's the best Joy Division studio album out of the two classic LPs they released, because he prefers the overall sound, aesthetics and *mood* of this one, even though his favorite songs are in *Unknown Pleasures*. And for me it's the exact opposite! Funny how those things go...
That's it. I manage to write the word "funny" in a review about a Joy Division album.
Needless to say, *both* albums by them are 5-stars ones for me and my friend. For me *Closer* offers a "peaks-and-valleys" experience, but the peaks ("Isolation", "A Means To An End" "Heart And Soul", "Twenty Four Hours"...) are so frigging high and the valleys none too deep, so it's still the equal of that iconic debut. I also noticed that many of the very best moments of *Closer* are on the second side (it was rather the opposite in *Unknown Pleasures*). So it has a different dynamic, one that uses build-up and slow-burn. I've always had a tender spot for LPs that manage to work this way...
Not that opener "Atrocity Exhibition" isn't effective, mind you. Like its title implies, it is psychologically and sonically atrocious, and yet that's where its deranged beauty lies. The way Ian Curtis invites the listener into the terrors of his suffering mind always makes me shudder. "This is the way, step inside!". I've always been curious to hear how Peter originally envisioned his experimental guitar noise in the background before producer Martin Hannett tampered with it through delay effects. I have a feeling the album opener would have been even greater--event though I'm aware Hannett also often had great ideas for the band's sound.
As for closer "Decades", it is a perfect gem whose synth-laden harmonies, just like the ones of 'Isolation", foretell the "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and then the whole New Order era following Curtis' tragic death. A poignant capper for the album (and for the band itself, sadly).
To sum things up, the cover says it all. *Closer* is not a mere album. It's a tomb and an epitaph. That's where its sad and timeless beauty lies.
Number of albums left to review: 480
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 246 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 117
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 155
Robert Wyatt
4/5
Instead of having two albums by Robert Wyatt in this list, I'd rather have *Rock Bottom* exclusively enhanced, and try to find a goddamn way to make most people open their minds (and ears) so that they can finally understand it. I still can't swallow that criminally low global score for that prog rock masterpiece on this app--maybe because it's not exactly "prog rock": it's a thing of its own kind, and that's where its beauty lies.
In comparison, *Shleep* has nothing to be *absolutely* ashamed of. Yet it's only a late career highlight for Wyatt--which is good per se, but doesn't necessarily justify its he album opens with the wonderful "Heap Of Sheeps", and it's funny how that track sounds like a classic Brian Eno song from the seventies. Since Eno is co-producing this thing, it shouldn't come as a surprise, I imagine. As for the rest of the album, it goes from excellent compositons ("Maryan", "Sunday In Madrid") to very secondary dirges that are weighted by a free jazz horn section sounding a little too mundane, paradoxically ("The Duchess", "September The Ninth").
Fortunately, tracks such as "Was A Friend" and "Alien" manage to catch that *Rock Bottom* spark. And the last real song in the album, "Blues In Bob Minor" is extraordinary. Believe it or not, Wyatt *raps* on this one, and as you can imagine if you know who Robert is, this sounds very different from your run-of-the-mill rapping. And the music on this extraordinary closer is lively and enticing. That sole track is worth the price of admission here.
What made *Rock Bottom* unique is the whole journey it had to offer and *Shleep* is different in the sense that it's only a collection of tracks going from one mood / idea to the next. I understand that its concept is the one of dreams, yet maybe there could have been ways to make the transitions between the songs remind you of the strange connctions dreams have. In a way, *Rock Bottom* did manage to do that better. But it managed to be so many things at once... *Shleep* is more like an afterthought compared to it, as good as some of its songs are. It does linger in your memory. But it doesn't *haunt* you the way *Rock Bottom* does. What can little ponds and brooks, as nice and beautiful as they are, do against an ocean?
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3.5). I'm rounding up to four stars to protest against the low global score of this record. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: less than 500 (I've temporarily lost count)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately.
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
Johnny Cash
5/5
Like David Bowie's *Blackstar* or Leonard Cohen's *You Want It Darker*, this is as much an album as it is a musical last will of sorts. And just like those other very late masterpieces, it's a devastating experience to go through. In the case of *American IV: The Man Comes Around", 90% of the LP is made out of covers, which is what Johnny Cash had performed for most of his life anyway. But the selection of songs is so pristine and *à propos*, and it resonates so much with who Johnny was at the time, that it's hard to imagine how you can't repond to it in an emotional manner once you've dug into those tunes...
Interestingly, it's the sort of emotional response that Trent Reznor--one of the songwriters behind the tracks covered here-- expressed when this album came out. Reznor said that the song "Hurt" doesn't belong to him anymore when he first heard Cash's version of it, and that was so gracious of him to say so. Because, hell yeah, as good as the original was, Johnny's version indeed turns this sadcore junkie anthem to another sort of transcendent experience about old age and death, driven by acoustic guitars, the man's famous deep voice--here turned gravelly--and a relentless note played on the piano. Devastating, as I already said.
Likewise, the use of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" is another brilliant move. Here Johnny's version turns the synth-blues anthem into a tender moment that's as lighthearted as it can be under the circumstances. The musicians playing with the old country singer are all top-notch--those piano flourishes are lively and even tongue-in-cheek. But somehow the irony of the original version becomes something different here, more akin to a sort of straightforward statement about Cash's faith at the twilight of his life.
And it's like that for many other tracks--they are (or feel) "appropriated" by Cash--they become as "personal" as the Jesus in that song, and sometimes go a long way from their original universe to seamless integrate the one of this record. The world of music can't thank producer Rick Rubin enough for initiating this "American" series with Johnny, of which *American IV...* is the crowning achievement. Highlights abound everywhere: the artists covered go from countey luminaries such as Hank Williams and Marty Robbins to The Beatles, Simon And Garfunkel, The Eagles--plus, as stated earlier, quite recent artists at the time the record came out (Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails). Cash and Rubin even manage to make Sting look good: their version of "I Hung My Head" is a gem, and sounds as if it had been written by an outlaw cowboy a century ago. And then there are Cash's original compositions--his old "Give My Love To Rose" and "Tear-Stained Letter", plus a great new song opening the LP: the apocalyptic "The Man Comes Around", about the devil and our devilish times.
Add the stellar guests--a (very young at the time) Fiona Apple for a touching duet to perform "Bridge Over Troubled Water", or Nick Cave, or The Eagles' Don Henley--and you get not only an essential album from Cash's looooooong discography, but also an essential album for music per se--and even a historical document, along with a personal retrospective on 20th century music. Now, you can't get more "essential" than that, can you?
Number of albums left to review: less than 500 (I've temporarily lost count)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one, of course)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
The Pretty Things
4/5
It's a rather marvellous LP that I've always found endearing. The Pretty Things picked up the thread already spun by the Beatles' *Sgt. Pepper* to create the first "rock opera" of sorts--and almost nobody listened to it at the time, apparently. Jeeze, what a waste!
The first side of the album is extraordinary, and justifies this record being filed next to a masterpiece such as The Zombies' *Odessey and Oracle*. "SF Sorrow Is Born" is a catchy opener. "Bracelet of Fingers" a dreamy experimental gem. "Private Sorrow" and its musings about war has many weird but infectious hooks. And "Balloon Burning" is a scorching psychedelic rocker.
Unfortunately, The Pretty Things--literally--lose the plot AND momentum they had on the second part of their story. The tale becomes unfocused through lengthy "dream sections". And appropriately enough, the music meanders once in a while, as good as many moments in it still are. When "Loneliest Person" surges out of the speakers--a sour, short melancholic capper played on an acoustic guitar--you realize that the album is actually over, and it's as if something was missing from the second half of the tale. Maybe that's the point, though, since "SF Sorrow"'s story is about an alienated character with no real purpose in life, dying in an ultimate state of regret about his whole existence. Not sure this "meta" aspect was fully intended by the band, though...
At the end of this Spotify version, you can find the singles The Pretty Things recorded around the same time, and among those cuts, "Talkin' About The Good Times" and "Walking Through My Dreams" are absolute gems, worthy of the best Kinks and Beatles songs. Had the band managed to include those stellar tunes in the album's tracklisting (let's say for a double-album), *SF Sorrow* could have become a 5-star LP. This is not what happened, sadly. And so all we have left are "what ifs?", once again aptly resonating with the contents of the record's "story".
At least this album is now recognized for the groundbreaking endeavor that it was. And even at the time, it seems that the right people paid attention to it. You can bet your boots that Pete Townshend drew inspiration from *SF Sorrow* for The Who's *Tommy*. And I also have a sneaking suspicion that the description of a "Balloon Burning" in the song of the same name--a striking image for sure, inspired by a famous historical event--was not lost on Jimmy Page and Robert Plant when they decided to find a new moniker for their "New Yardbirds" project. It's all there, in the top-right corner of that album cover, look! A "prophetic" album for sure.
4/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 4).
Number of albums left to review: 477
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 248 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 118
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 155
4/5
English being a second langauge to me, some of its subtleties may go over my head once in a while, or get me confused. A very good example of this is the title of the Oasis *magnum opus*: *(What's The Story) Morning Glory?*, whose exact meaning has eluded me for decades now... Does that title refer to... a morning erection? I know the Gallagher brothers are boneheads about certain things in life. But does that mean they should talk about their boners?
As you can probably understand by now, I have absolutely zero interesting take to add about this LP. It's a milestone for Britpop, and so for British rock in general. And this, in spite of a bunch of fillers and questionable production values in the record. The rest of what's good is too damn iconic to be forgotten anyway.
If really you insisted and asked me to say a few more words about this album, I could just talk about my 17-year-old stepson. He's into all sorts of music for people his age, but somehow, I don't know why, he fell in love with those songs, among other Oasis "classics". And it was not because of me. I have the CD at home, but it's not as if I played it that much. No, it was through Spotify, and this stepson of mine would never forgive me if I excluded Oasis from a list like this one. If only because of "Wonderwall".
Even though, as it's the case for the title of this LP, no one's sure what a "wonderwall" really is all these years after. If we ever *did* know. at some point...
Number of albums left to review: 476
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 249 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 118
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 155
Love
5/5
Did I give 5 stars to the Doors' debut? Has it popped up on the app yet? Can't remember, and I'm too busy to check today. But it seems to me I might have just given four stars to this legendary LP (lots of iconic cuts, but also a couple of fillers, I have to point out...)
The reason I'm wondering about all this is because I want to give 5 stars to Love's magnum opus *Forever Changes* (out the same year as that Doors album), but it would be illogical to do so if I only gave four stars to Jim Morrison and co.
Aw fuck it. It's gonna be five stars. I gave 5 stars to Captain Beefheart's *Safe As Milk* anyway (*also* out in 1967). This rating thing sometimes turns the use of this app into a an exercise involving all sorts of charts and graphs in your head. Not very "flower power", I have to say.
There's always been something a little "elusive" to this clearly essential album, which might explain why it flew under the radar for many years after its sixties heyday--at least until the advent of the internet, which helped put it right where it belonged. Yet it's one of the very rare cases where such elusiveness is actually an asset: you might forget *Forever Changes* melodies and hooks and different moods for a while, but when you spin it, it's as if you discovered a treasure trove all over again.
Speaking of flying under the radar, I also love Love's LP that followed that one (the sentence I just wrote is damn weird, ha ha, say it out loud!). It was recorded with a different line-up, still with singer Arthur Lee at the helm. Its name is *Four Sail*, and it's a underrated gem--quite different from *Forever Changes*, because some of its cuts rock harder, but almost equally as good to my ears. It's obvious Dimery's list didn't mention that one. So check it out, folks.
Number of albums left to review: less than 500 (I've temporarily lost count)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one, of course)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
Merle Haggard
2/5
Yee--and I won't stress it very energetically---haaaaaaaaw... aaaawww... aaww...
*yawn*.
(Had to pay tribute to the best review on this app--and also one of the shortest. It was for Marty Robbins, if my memory serves...).
Yeah, Merle Haggard is a pivotal figure for the whole outlaw counrty subgenre, blah blah blah... Yet I will always prefer Robbins, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in this category. And also Johnny Cash's deep booming voice, it goes without saying. Merle Haggard might have been the real thing as a San Quentin inmate, OK, I get that. But when Johnny Cash played there (and Folsom!), you can feel a real sense of danger and urgency in those live records. And I'm sorry to say that even with the topics addressed in Haggard's lyrics, there's none of that sense of danger and adventure in the man's frigging *music*. There are some cool guitar licks here and there, I'm gonna give it that. But a lot of it is so damn predictable...
All the figures I've mentioned up there have taken some musical risks at some point or another in their long career. And it's a risk I'm not feeling at all in this album. It's an all-too generic example of what Country and Western usually does.
Here is the problem I have with many fans of this overall genre, by the way. They always discuss the lyrics (see some examples of that in the reviews)... but they rarely address the music. Because, well, let's be honest for a second : most of the tunes here are objectively interchangeable. Their chord changes are boring as hell. It's flat, VERY flat. Like those endless midwest plains...
Then, if I go to more subjective reasons to hate the genre, those tunes provide many example of that for me. Their energy is placid, even totally inert, and unfortunately, it's also devoid of any hypnotic qualities that would redeem those flaws. Being energetic or hypnotic is something other "simple" styles such as punk and reggae do, for instance. But it's very rare for country to go there. Or in that case it becomes... bluegrass. And "I'm a Lonesome Fugitive* is definitely NOT a bluegrass album.
Pretty sure many country fans will be angered by this review. But even though I always try to keep an open mind (hence my interest for Nelson and Cash), I'd rather be honest here. It's a little brutal, I admit it. But I hear that's how outlaws act sometimes, don't they?
2/5 for the purposes of this list. Which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general (and less biased?) purposes (5+2). Next please.
Number of albums left to review: 474
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 250
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 119 (maybe for Haggard's historical importance for C&W, in spite of my low grading)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 155
Caetano Veloso
3/5
Rather charming example of "Tropicalía". The opener with that name has impressive arrangements and instrumentation for instance...
Am I *fully* charmed by this whole LP though? The jury's still out on this one... I might first need to get acquainted a little more to this sound and its peculiar wonders. Call it a cultural blind spot... And I might also need little more time to do this.
As a consequence, this is going to my "waiting" list...
Number of albums left to review: 473
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 250
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 120 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 155
Cyndi Lauper
4/5
1983 was such a horrid year for music. There's only 8 or 9 albums that I know of who deserved 5 stars that year. Quite low compared to most other years...
Under that light, *She's So Unusual* was a needed breath of fresh air at the time. Typical new-wave-inspired mainstream pop, but what singles it out is Cindy Lauper's stellar vocal performance. And honestly, the songs are good, whether they are originals (the heartfelt ballad "Time After Time", hard-driven yet deliciously campy "She Bop"), or covers (the legendary "Girls Just Want To Have Fun", a tune that literally know one had heard of before Cindy's timeless rendition of it ; or "All Through The Night", beating it out of the park compared to Jules Shears' initial version ; or Prince's "When You Were Mine"...)
There's also a couple of fillers on side two that I won't bother mentioning here. But all in all, it's a pretty solid pop album that aged particularly well, in spite of aesthetics fully anchored into the eighties. 4/5.
Number of albums left to review: 472
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 251 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 120
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 155
Motörhead
3/5
I've read that the live album *No Sleep 'til Hammersmith* is also in Dimery's list. In that case, I'll keep that live album and reject this one studio LP to save some room in my own list. Both records contain great version of "Ace Of Spades", but the live album has many other essential by the band. Trying hard to save some space on the shelves here...
3/5 for the purposes of this list. Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 471
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 251
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 120
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 156 (including this one--nothing wrong with it, though... Just want to save some space).
Fred Neil
5/5
An unsung masterpiece. Got to know Fred Neil through two things: Nilsson's version of "Everybody's Talking" for *Midnight Cowboy*, of course, but also the use of "Dolphins" for a quite memorable scene in the arguably best TV series of all time *The Sopranos*--during which Christopher Moltisanti is high on heroin and tripping in a funfair at night. Those two tracks are the two highlights of the album for sure. But "Badi-Da", " Everything Happens" and "Sweet Cocaine" stellar as well. Such a huge talent, and such a perfect crooning voice. 5/5.
Number of albums left to review: 470
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 252 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 120
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 156
Sugar
3/5
Mad respect for Bob Mould, but I think the NME were way over their heads when they selected this first outing of his new act post-Hüsker Dü as the best album of 1992. Especially when you count all the better releases of that year (ones from Pavement, Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, The Pharcyde, Rage Against the Machine, The Goats, REM... Not to forget Tom Waits, The Cure, Neil Young, Swans, Gang Starr or Tori Amos...).
1992 is one year after Nirvana's *Nevermind*. I can picture a bunch of British rock critics desperately trying to link all those new "alternative" rock bands to some other artist they were more familiar with. Heck, even Mould himself does a pretty convincing imitation of Pixies in the second track of this album. "Convincing", I said... Which does not necessarily mean "thrilling" as well. The times, they were a-changing fast in 1992. It was hard for everyone (the music press AND the musicians) to catch up...
The thing is, even in that field of "alternative" leftovers from the eighties--with a clear bridge to the past "indie" aesthetics and sound of that former decade--you had acts such as The Lemonheads that year, with a more striking album compared to that one here.
*Copper Blue* is still a very decent record, don't get me wrong. Yet Sugar didn't add much to Hüsker Dü's legendary legacy when they released it. Besides, some of the tracks are too long (they often hit the 5-minute mark for no discernible reason). And others a little too predictable in their pop developments. Sorry, Bob Mould fans.
Number of albums left to review: 470
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 252.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 120
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 157 (including this one)
Mekons
3/5
Wish I could *fully* agree with that review favourably comparing Mekons with Viagra Boys. I can see the relation here, musically, lyrically and conceptually. So, all in all, it sure is an apt comparison. Yet for now, it seems to me that Viagra Boys' music is a tad bit more propulsive and textured (not to mention jazzier and funkier) than this mix of punk, folk and country from the eighties. Both acts are weird, sure. But I prefer my "weird" with funnier and catchier hooks.
At least this record doesn't have all the usual new wave or mainstream production pitfalls of that dreadful decade. Which makes it endearing, I guess...
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3). Putting this LP on my "waiting list". We'll see if I bump into it again, and if it grows on me...
Number of albums left to review: 469
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 252.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 121 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 157
50 Cent
3/5
Not exactly a hip hop masterpiece, but certainly THE rap blockbuster album of 2005. Some fillers, but mostly a long string of cuts that slap hard, thank to Dre's production and 50 Cent's distinct flow. I will always prefer more conscious strands of hip hop rather than this gangsta rap thing (and oddly, enough, also favor *some* of the sonic explorations of the recent trap subgenre, even if the lyrics are mostly dumb). That said, this album is culturally relevant as a whole. 3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 470
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 252.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 122 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 157
Gotan Project
3/5
I'm on my annual biking trip, and there was neither wifi nor available cellphone network where slept last night. Sitting this one out. Will listen to it later. Have enough memories of Gotan Project to know it's not my thing though... Neutral 3/5 grade.
Number of albums left to review: less than half.
This one goes to my "waiting list" (neither nor...). Next please.
Guided By Voices
3/5
Endearing LP with a cult status for many fans of indie rock. There's a bunch of cuts that are phenomenal. *Alien Lanes* also has its share of fillers, though, and its atmospheric qualities don't fully make up for them. Guided By Voices have never been interested in self-editing, that's for sure. Which is why I put this album on hold when it comes to give it the "essential" tag. Hope there will be room left for it in my own selection. Not sure there will be though.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: less than 500
Number of essential album: half so far.
Number of albums I *might* select as such later on: a quarter (including this one)
Number of album I won't select: another quarter.
Cee Lo Green
1/5
Never knew the Gnarls Barkley singer had a solo career on the side. Wish I never knew, though. His high-pitched voice is grating, at least in this particular LP, his flow is annoying as hell, and the music is lackluster and devoid of anything remotely endearing (Timbaland and Neptunes/Pharell Williams contributions notwithsatnding). It's MOR neo-soul, which aged pretty horribly, to boot.
Plus, the man himself seems to be kind of an ass. See the "controversies" part of his wikipedia page. Next please
Number of albums left to review: 467
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 252.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 124
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 158 (including this one)
Pet Shop Boys
3/5
Even in my wildest dreams, I never imagined I would one day appreciate a Pet Shop Boys song, not to mention *several ones of them*. To be clear, the first two tracks are pretty dreadful, all cheese and no real substance. But after them, I actually enjoyed *each and every one* of the songs!!! "Shopping" is a snarly, topical cut picking up the ball right where Kraftwerk had left it a few years earlier. Cynical yet bittersweet "Rent" is a small wonder, lyrically, musically and arrangements-wide. And "I Want To Wake Up" is an infectious earworm. Those three stellar tracks slap, there's no doubt about that. And the rest is very good. Apart from the two duds opening the album, that is.
As a consequence, *Actually* still sounds like a mixed bag for me (openers are usually essential to *fully* enjoy a record). But I'm putting this album in my waiting list nonethelles. And that's a surprise for me, probably one of the biggest surprises I've had since I started using this app.
Number of albums left to review: 466
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 252.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 125 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 158
Butthole Surfers
1/5
Was supposed to interview King Gizzard And the Lizard Wizard for a webzine at a festival today. But the band cancelled all interviews at the last minute to shoot a video by the seaside. So what I'm doing instead is sit idly for the concerts to begin near the artists' lodges. Not because the artists are there, but because I need wifi to listen to today's... well... to listen to today's "album".
Sometimes life serves you milk and honey. And sometimes it's just a platter of smelling turds. I feel like "L" is written on my forehead right now. In a way, this record is fitting given the circumstances I'm find myself in at the moment. Things will get better when the gigs start in a couple of hours, hopefully...
As much as I respect and understand most of Kurt Cobain's provocative / drugged out impulses when he wrote that "50 favorites albums list" (including *Locust Abortion technician*), it"s obvious that he was more enamoured of the "fuck you" concept behind this LP than the music actually displayed in it. The best "music" in this album is actually a long sample of Thai musicians with a few sparse effects added to it ("Kuntz"). "Human Cannonball", "Graveyard part 2", and "22 Going On 23" are also interesting experimental noise rock. But that's as far as I'll go to "defend" this LP. File next to Throbbing Gristle. As I said before, I'm glad that Dimery's list also picked weird shit to subvert the whole concept of what an "essential" album should be. In this case it's just not the sort of weird shit I would choose myself. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 465
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 252.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 125
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 159 (including this one)
Red Snapper
3/5
The Guardian called it a "reved-up" version of Massive Attack. Not sure the world *direly* needed it, though. Alright, that double bass sure slaps hard! But it seems to me that this act from the Warp roster had had their shining hour *before* this particular album, mostly through the compilation of their first EPs and the *Making Bones* LP, incidentally both sharing different versions of their iconic "Snapper" theme. "Image Of You", on *Making Bones*, is also a trip hop gem. In comparison, *Our Aim is To Satisfy* sounds a little as an afterthought, as tight as the production values are on this one (the drums sound generally better on it compared to the earlier releases, for instance). And it's true that some parts of this mix of acoustic and electronic instrumentation hailing from the drum'n'bass / big beat / trip hop era has aged surprisingly well given its origin point. But is that enough to make it an "essential" album? I don't think so...
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/10 grade for mor general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 464
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 252.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 125
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 160 (including this one)
A Tribe Called Quest
5/5
"Fresh Prince rap," goes one reviewer. Count me as one of the many people you're "pissing off" with that dumb take, just as you rightly predicted. The aim of this app is NOT to piss off people, though. It's to truly *listen* to the albums for what they are, no matter what your mileage of the genre and era it stems from is. Of course, you need a set of good ears in order to do that. Should we set up a GoFundMe page to provide them for ya?
To be clear, my gripe with that review is NOT about expressing "opinions" and "tastes": everyone has different aesthetic leanings and biases, so I do get that someone can give less than four stars to this record. It's just that if you want your opinion to be taken seriously, you need to avoid starting your review with something you already *know* is pretty unfair to describe the thing at hand.
And it's not about the battle between so-called "modernity" and the previous generations, as this particular reviewer also seems to suggest. There are current trap artists that I love these days, for instance... But just like every era of rap and hip hop, you have the good acts and the lame ones. And to differentiate between the two, you need a good set of ears, once again...
So can I kick this review in the proverbial ass? Yes, I can!
Now about *People Instinctive Travels...*, it is a game changer, enough said. Fun and lively and subtle and original. Opening doors to a golden age where rap would reach a much needed "mature" stage. Admittedly, this ATCQ debut is not the masterpiece that *The Low End Theory* will then be. And it doesn't exactly have the string of stellar hits from the first side of *Midnight Marauders* either. But, yet, nonetheless, however, and that being said, it's still a hip hop classic. 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.
Number of albums left to review: 464
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 253 (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 125
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 160
The Rolling Stones
5/5
So... Which version should be rated here? The US album, with the iconic "Paint It Black"? Or the UK L.P., which doesn't have that hit single, yet harbors the equally iconic "Mother's Little Helper" and "Out Of Time"?
Fortunately, both versions include the bittersweet melody of "Lady Jane", the long yet fascinating blues dirge of "Goin' Home" and the stellar hooks of "Under My Thumb". I guess I should probably take a star away from the LP because of the misogynistic lyrics of that latter song. Yet I always take the contentsof those lyrics content as the self-delusion of the immature male protagonist singing them. And so I refuse to take those words very seriously. Maybe I'm in the wrong here. And maybe it's because the album is so good musically speaking that I can't face the truth. In that case, I'm probably as self-deluded as the young man in that song. 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5, then.
Number of albums left to review: 463
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 254 (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 125
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 160
Madness
4/5
Always found the concept at the heart of this album--something about lower middle-class Britannia--endearing or at least interesting. And I think such concept is very well-executed for the most part. Plus, "Our House" is an infectious earworm, c'mon!
Following the purposes of this list I would give a 3.5/5 grade to this one (rounded up to 4), but that would translate to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 462
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 254.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 126 (including this one--just erring on the side of caution here, now that I do realize how many albums might end up on my own list--potentially far more than 1001, which is the number I intended to follow at first)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 160
Rufus Wainwright
3/5
No one can say that Rufus Wainwright is a bad writer and performer. His songs are ripe with melodic ideas and interesting one-liners, generally speaking. The thing is, as good as Rufus's skills are, there's not much rhyme or reason in the way the double-feature *Want* was contructed. Maybe a great *single album* lies there somewhere, if Wainwright had been better at self-editing himself. But frankly, I'm not interested enough to recreate said single LP. Because, as decent and lushly produced as the music is in those twin albums, most of their cuts still come off as derivative at the end of the day. And a lot of them even sound pretty quaint, trite, chatty or oversentimental. Which is a huge problem in my book.
Some reviewers in here compared Wainwright's voice with the one of Thom Yorke, and I can see why they did so. But if Radiohead dabbled in mock-novelty cuts once in a while, the latter were always mixed up with many different styles. And the whole yet managed to be part of the same connective tissue. *Want One* and *Want Two* are actually far less adventurous when it comes to the genres they use or refer to. And yet they never manage to create such cohesiveness. It's like a catalogue of exercises in styles, with very few songs being instantly memorable, unfortunately.
Exceptions in *Want One" are the rococo opener "What A World"--lush with orchestral quotes from Ravel's Bolero--, more experimental and subdued "Vicious World" and "Want", along with the climactic, heartfelt ballads "Go Or Go Ahead" and "Beautiful Child".
Oh, and there's the incredibly sour closer "Dinner At Eight", where Rufus narrates a dinner evening with his dad--the folk singer Loudon Wainwright III--going very fucking *wrong*. It's a true story, by the way, and a quick search online shows that Rufus follows an old tradition of the Wainwright extended clan here--one that allows each family member to give jabs at their close relatives through their songs--be they father, son, daughter or exes. Best case scenario, those cuts settle the score, and the whole dysfunctional routine starts again some time after a temporary reconciliation. Quite an endearing family of neurotic artists! Loudon especially, often comes off as an insensitive and stubborn patriarch, as talented as he was as an artist. Waiting for the HBO series that would take inspiration from this weird clan of musicians for its next big hit onscreen...
All of this is nice and well, and it sure is interesting. But as I said, and all biographical anecdotes apart, the problem is that there are not enough truly memorable moments in *Want* (one AND two) to justify adding it to this list. The songs I have not quoted in this review (and there are a lot of them!) go from Robbie Williams-like innocuous bland rock-pop cuts to more extravagant cabaret shenanigans, where Wainwright go through his histrionic routine without imprinting it on the listener's mind, very sadly. And I guess in the middle of those two extremities, you can find a bit of Elton John. But without the hits. And without the hits, you can't call a pop-rock album a keeper, be it part of an ambitious double-feature.
Following the specific purposes of this list of essential albums, I'm giving a 3/5 grade for both *Want One* and *Want Two* (I'm not gonna describe the latter here--let me just say that the first volume still sounds slightly more convincing than the second album, but the difference is not big enough to bother giving distinct gradings to those two LPs). This overall grading translates to a 8/10 mark for more objective and general purposes (5 + 3)... Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 461
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 254.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 126
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 161 (including this one)
4/5
"Kick out the jams, motherfucker!!!" When I was a teenager during the nineties, a lot of music journalists praised that album as an iconic one, a musically and topically relevant milestone in the history of rock'n'roll. I still agree this LP is topically relevant, and therefore understand its iconic nature in that regard. The thing is, it's a bit of a mess muisically speaking, is it not? The title track sure slaps hard, but I've always had trouble remembering anything else after listening to the album. It's not *dull* music at all, it's even filled to the brim with ideas. But is it *essential* music ? Well, the jury's still out on this one.
Funny how MC5's second LP has all the opposite flaws, being far too tame to age well--especially after punk broke out. Those music journalists always referred to MC5 as the equals of the Stooges. But c'mon... Any of the three Stooges LPs is at least ten times more thrilling than those MC5 records. Funny how fads can even be "retrospective"--as in not about present albums, but about ones from the distant past.
Number of albums left to review: 460
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 254.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 127 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 161
Kings of Leon
1/5
"Sex On Fire":
Hum, really? To paraphrase Tony Soprano: "Cunnilingus and cheesy dad-rock played by pseudo-alternate rocker boys brought us to this."
Unless the song is about blowjobs. At least if it's your thing. But I think lines such as "Soft lips are open" and "I could just taste it" make Mr. Followill's sexual preferences clear for the listener. As is that Rorschach blot of an album cover. Good for him. And good for his partner that night.
"Use Somebody" is about hitting on girls in bars, it seems. Another universal theme, and another huge commercial hit by the band. Too bad the music is so damn bland and unimaginative. As it is is in *each and every* track of this record.
Fittingly, Kings Of Leon's story is as boring and predictable as their songs and studio performances usually are. They went from a festival act playing the sort of soft garage rock that would be appreciated in bars in the American South, to then embrace their destiny as an arena-rock band following the footsteps of Bruce Springsteen, U2 and the Killers. Call that an upgrade if you will.
Good for them as well. But not for listeners who wish to discover something more than by-the-numbers arrangements and easily-digestible--yet-totally-unmemorable--songwriting. You can sense in *Only By The Night* that the very competent Kings Of Leon go through the motions so that they could have their hits without taking any risks or following any sort of worthwhile creative spark.
But can they have those, really? All of this feels very safe--lyrics alluding to oral sex and lewd attraction to 17-year-old girls notwithstanding. Honestly, I feel a little pity about the teary-eyed reviewers in here reminiscing about the good ol' days they had in high school or college dorms listening to this album (most of the positive reviews say that exact same thing). I'm probably 15 or 20 years older than they are, and yet I haven't fully embraced this dad-rock phase yet. And even if I had, it wouldn't be about bands painfully reenacting the more glorious times of past mainstream rock luminaries who were at least doing something fresh from their own vantage point. It seems fitting that the name of those brothers in the band is "Followill", since all they're happy to do is to follow a formula without adding anything personal that would be even remotely interesting. The fact that their fans can't come to terms with that idea is a tad bit frustrating, to be perfectly honest. If only they had listened to similar-sounding bands from that particular point in time that are at least displaying *real substance* in their music. I get that from their point of view, the songs of *Only By The Night* make a good soundtrack for road trips. But those rides would sound so much better with songs by The Walkmen, for instance.
You see, I like my rock'n'roll with a minimum amount of danger, or at least urgency. I can't sense those connotations in the writing here, and I certainly can't sense them in Matthew Followill's over-affected whining. So I'm gonna file Kings Of Leon next to the Killers and The War On Drugs. Except that it's gonna be on an even lower shelf than those two acts. My overall take about the presence of *Only By The Night* in such a list is that something was dead wrong about mainstream pop-rock tastes from the middle-naughts to the middle-2010s. Fortunately, that time is over now. Now I can smirk at the new dad-rockers with kids that are half their age (and even far younger than I am myself).
Oh, and you might tell me that other old and very predictable story that the real problem is that Kings Of Leon had sold out on commercialism with this album, yet that the ones before it are good... Well, I'm also very sorry: I've browsed to those records and they sound as bland and unexceptional and boring as the band's arena-rock era. Except for a strange number like "Milk" maybe... Thanks to Lana Del Rey for talking about that tune during an interview (I can see how the strange pace of its vocals inspired the one of "White Dress", where she even name-dropped Kings Of Leon in the lyrics). Yet it seems to me that this sort of spark is a rare case in the band's discography. And it's nowhere to be found in the disposable artefact that *Only By The Night* is anyway.
1/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 5/10 grading for more general purposes (5/5 for the musicianship + 0/5 for the artistry). Next, please. Please, oh please.
Number of albums left to review: 459
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 254.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 127
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 162 (including this one)
3/5
Extremely interesting. Like DJ Shadow's *Endtroducing*, except that *Sâo Paulo Confessions* uses its own "abstract" and nocturnal vocabulary to explore the many sides of Brazilian / Latin music, instead of the ones of hip hop.
On another (sad) note, Suba's fate is simply tragic. So heartbreaking that someone so talented died so young (and trying to save tapes he had recorded to boot). Heartbreaking.
I don't have a lot of time for a proper review today, unfortunately. 8/10 for general purposes (5+3), which translates to a 3/5 for the ones of this list.
Number of albums left to review: 458
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 254.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 128 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 162
Derek & The Dominos
3/5
I'm gonna start with my grading for once. It's 3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums, and it translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes.
Let me elaborate a little about the peculiar rationale behind those grades. That 8/10 one actually amounts to the following equation: 6 + 3. It's 6/5 for the virtuosistic musicianship (yep, you read that correctly), and 2/5 for the artistry (yep, you read that correctly as well).
I'm harsh about the artistry for a very specific reason: it's because Clapton and his bandmates' tiresome constant soloing is so damn self-indulgent. Even the Allman Brothers (including Duane Allman, invited to play with the Dominos here) knew how to make their overlong blues rock dirges fucking *breathe* once in a while. In comparison, most of *Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs* is stifling. So stifling that it's very easy to lose its thread after a couple of tracks or so. And since it's a loooooong album, the whole exercise of listening to it quickly becomes a chore. There's absolutely no sense of dynamics or overall build-up in the album's tracklisting. After the first three song (and apart from the title track--more on that later), it's basically just one jam after the next, with almost nothing in them to transcend or justify such self-indulgence. If I wanted to listen to musicians soloing on their instrument for long stretches of time, I would rather go to the lush textures of jazz, or to the angular, artful and hypnotic flourishes of King Crimson. Anything a little more leftfield or at least cinematic. Especially if it aged better than that white man's version of the blues--skillful, but often quite sterile and unimaginative as well.
I still give two points out of five to Clapton's artistry because of a small bunch of tunes with actual *melodies* that managed to pass through this over-affected, overblown displaying of guitar chops. "Layla" is among those tunes, of course, its arrangements being one of the rares cases where the instrumentation is 100% effective (what a thrilling outro section by the way, as thrilling as the riff and orignal chord sequence in the rest of the song...). And I've suggested it earlier, but I would also add "I Looked Away", "Bell-Bottom Blues" and "Keep On Growing" in the list of keepers. The record starts on pretty great notes at least, I'll give that to Clapton and co.
Yet four or five good songs can't fully save an album that long. Especially when it's filled to the brim with so many bad ideas as well. Take that cover of Hendrix's "Little Wing" for example. It is here butchered, and barely recognizable--and this, not in a good or artful way. The original says everything that needs to be said for 2+ minutes. Its instrumentation is subtle, groovy, and most importantly *dynamic*. The whole thing *breathes* life, lust, love and everything in between in a very short amount of time... In comparison, Derek & The Dominos' hamfisted version lasts for 5 minutes that don't add anything meaningful to the song, apart from a clumsy heavy riff that goes nowhere fast. A symptomatic example of what I consider wrong in a lot of other tracks in this clearly overrated album. Listen to the two versions and compare them for yourself.
About Clapton as a person now... Did I mention that the man has been an ass quite a few times during his career, from that drunken racist tirade during the seventies up to that "old-man-yells-at-clouds" conspiracy-theory bullshit a couple of years ago? Nope, I didn't mention it up to now. It's better to let the music speak for the man anyway. Coincidence or not, said music all too often repeated other artists' takes without fully understanding what gave genuine soul to those. Sometimes, once in a while, such method allowed Clapton to write and perform good stuff nonetheless (some tracks in this LP, and a few others with Cream, for instance). But most of the time, the music just rambled on.
Just like me, miffed hardcore fans might argue? Well, just like Clapton himself, then. It takes one to know one, I imagine. 😉
If Clapton is "God", I guess I'm an atheist. Or maybe an agnostic. So next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 457
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 254.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 129 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 162
TLC
3/5
Oh well... I'm not gonna deny it, I was about to dismiss this album as something that probably aged horribly before listening to it. But it turns out some aspects of said album are considerably fresher than what I had envisioned at first. What I liked the most is how the production and instrumentation on this thing were subtle and understated enough to elicit genuine interest from folks that are not necessarily part of TLC's target demographic. I thought the production values would have all the self-aggrandizing elements of 90s r'n'b that could have turned such pre-neosoul endeavors into a cheesefest from our current vantage point. Turns out the album didn't have those flaws at all. Actually, *CrazySexyCool* is prophetic in the way it mixed pure hip-hop elements into its mix (I wasn't bothered by the many interludes, for instance).
If only its second side had been as effective as the first, it would clearly be an LP that would need to be included in a list of "essential" albums. Unfortunately, if you take the list of highlights from this thing, they're all crammed in its first part: "Creep", "Kick Your Game", "Diggin' On You", "Red Light Special"... And of course, there's smooth and catchy "Waterfalls". I like the tune well enough, even if there's something a bit odd in its chorus : the first lines soar like not many other r'n'b hits, but I think its conclusion is a little abrupt and even falls flat on its face. It's how the melody ends, for one thing. But it's also because that "moving too fast" line doesn't rhyme with anything else before, which is quite bizarre in my book. Do people notice these things? I do. And it's relatively grating to my ears.
Maybe I'm splitting hair here--"Waterfalls" still deserves to be remembered--but I'm bringing this out because this particular flaw, suggesting last minute-changes, or "writing-in-comitees" shenanigans, is found in quite a few other tunes from the LP--ones less catchy that "Waterfalls" to boot. Other vocal lines *do* end up clumsily in *CrazySexyCool*. And lyrically, the mindset of an "emancipated" girl is explored well enough, but it's sometimes conveyed through obvious clichés and tired turns of phrases: "Let's make love all night, *yaddi yadda*". You probably know the drill by now.
Not that there couldn't have been ways to explore those topics in a straightforward
manner that could still be interesting on a lyrical viewpoint. Contrary to other reviewers in here, I have absolutely zero complaints about the topics addressed in the songs. Women expressing their lustful desires should not elicit any more eyebrow raising movements than if men express such topics, period. Funny how tons of albums where the latter case happens rarely trigger any negative mention from reviewers (here and elsewhere), and then when women do it, it becomes a problem. And kudos to that one reviewer saying he has a problem with TLC's lyrics, but that it's the same for men tackling those sex topics. At least that person has a cohesive take about the whole issue.
But... yeah, well, all of this is interesting to an extent, but as I said before, I think the second part of the LP is pretty lackluster anyway, first in terms of catchiness, and also in its production values--clearly less stellar than on the first side. "Switch" is pretty good, even if it won't keep me up at night. But closer "Sumthing Wicked This Way Comes", with its fake alt-rock guitar riffs, is awkward as f*ck--and no amount of Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced" apparent samples on top of it will make me change my mind about how clumsy the whole thing sounds--nor would an early featuring of a very young Andre 3000 (of Outkast fame) as endearing as that detail is.
As for the rest of the second side's tracks (a bland sugary ballad here, a dancefloor cut going through the motions there), it's not even worth discussing about. And yes, that probably includes the Prince-penned "If I Was A Girlfriend". It's an extraordinary song for sure, but here it's turned into a pretty unimaginative cover version that adds absolutely nothing to the original. Plus, TLC's trio have wonderful vocal skills, that goes without saying (you're not in that type of band through mere luck), yet even such skills can't make you forget a vocal performance by "The Artist/Love Symbol a.k.aThe Minneapolis Purple Diminutive Genius". And what a performance. By all means, listen to the original version if you haven't already.
So yeah, CrazySexyCool is a mixed bag overall. I have some sympathy for part of what it does, but it probably won't be in my own list of keepers. Unless, miraculously, I find some use for it at the very last minute... 3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums, translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3). Next please.
Number of albums left to review: 456
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 254.
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 130 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 162
Wilco
5/5
There are, in my estimation, only a couple of sins related to *opinions about music* that are entirely unforgivable, and chief amongst them is to display bad faith. When you have Willie Nelson' *Red Handed Stranger* and Brian Eno's *Ambient 1: Music For Airports* on your "wall" of favorite albums, complaining about Wilco's *YHF* for being a "monotone-sounding collection, unvarying in tempo, tone or ambition" takes the cake a little. I get that *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot* can be "boring" for some ears not attuned to its admittedly understated, peculiar dynamics. But maybe you can express your subjective distate for those dynamics in ways that would at least not resort to vague generalizations, while also not contradicting your takes about other essential albums. Food for thought for folks highlighting that one-star review currently topping this section, maybe?
I do agree that Tweedy's voice is indeed "monotone" in *some* parts of *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot* (*some*, I insist). But that supposed "flaw" is actually part of the melancholic sepia aesthetics displayed on the album cover (more on that later). So it's more an asset than a flaw. And the music in that LP is anything but "monotone" or "unvarying in tempo, tone or ambition" anyway. Actually, it goes to an incredible amount of different directions, either through the off-kilter-yet-enticing chord progressions, or through a treasure trove of rowdy/noisy experiments with instrumentation, smearing things with the right number of messy brushstrokes in the background of those tunes. Very often, Wilco use *both* admirable tricks at the same time, which takes the listener to a fascinating chiaroscuro world, filled with delicate fall lights, bittersweet moods, and compositions that are in turns lively or meditative. It's a world where ghosts from the past gently whisper inside your soul as you contemplate overcast late-afternoon skies. After all, with the right mindset, large grey clouds looming on the horizon can turn into a gorgeous spectacle.
Given their respective artistry, Brian Eno and Willie Nelson probably know about this themselves. I love those two musicians by the way, and I'm glad that the unhappy reviewer I mentioned earlier unwittingly provided such an interesting spectrum to explain what Wilco does in *YHF*. In a way, Tweedy, Bennett and co. took a regular indie-country-folk landscape and painted abstract hues and "ambient" colors over it. It's a palette that's admittedly very different from the one Brian Eno would have drawn from, sure. But you get the idea, I hope. There's a very postmodernist sort of layering in this LP, with blink-and-you'll-miss-it leftfield flourishes that turn those songs into fascinating "trompe-l'oeil" canvases. On one level, the tunes are a reenactment of more innocent times, with nostalgic lyrics about lost/unrequited loves, or ones about adolescent memories (see "Heavy Metal Drummer", for instance). But on another level, the impressionistic layering messing up with those tunes, along with the collage-like surrealism used by Tweedy in his lyrics (the drunken ramblings of "I Am Trying To Break You Heart", for example), suggests that Wilco were deeply aware that the good ol' days might either be an illusion that needs to be deconstructed, or that it was just something that you simply need to move on from. "Every moment's a little bit later," as Tweedy muses in "Pot Kettle Black".
Incidentally, it's a philosophy that was also very fitting to the time where *YHF* was released, i.e. a week after 9/11. Tweedy "salutes the ashes of American flags" at one point of this album. In the pastoral earworm "Jesus, etc.", "tall buildings shake" and "voices escape, singing sad sad songs". Those lyrics probably helped some listeners coming to terms with the tragedy that had just taken place, even if the record never consciously intended to catch this particular zeitgeist in the first place. Strangely soothing, with a touch of the uncanny in its meandering soundscapes, *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" thus reflected the strange concerns of its day and age. That's also how it captured imaginations. And at the time, you couldn't fail to notice the eerie coincidence of that artwork showing two ghostly towers, of course.
Those towers are not in New York, by the way, they're in Chicago: I remember bumping into that vista from another age as I visited the Windy City ten years ago, and how said vista stopped me on my tracks for ten or fifteen minutes. I'm not even sure I knew who Wilco were in 2012, and I had certainly not listened to *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot* back then. Yet observing those part-brutalist/modernist, part-usonian/organic corncobs sticking out like two sore thumbs in the middle of the city's skyline, I remember that I couldn't help thinking about utopias of the past and how the signs of their demise said a lot about our perception of history, both personal and communal. How you always mourn or grieve about your past in one way or another--whatever that past is--build interior monuments and memorials to celebrate it, and yet have to learn about the best ways to keep on going and live the rest of your life. As Tweedy sings in "War On War"--whose title also had peculiar involuntary connotations post-9/11--, "You have to lose / You have to learn how to die / If you want to be alive". I may not have *exactly* thought along those lines as I beheld Chicago's Marina City Complex ten years ago. But the thought was there, somewhere. And it still is today.
Number of albums left to review: 455
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 255 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 130
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 162
Everything But The Girl
1/5
Love Tracey Thorn's featurings on Massive Attack's *Protection*. That title-track from the Bristol trip-hop collective is a wonder (equalling later masterpice "Teardrops" with Liz Fraser). And Thorn has a lot to do with how good that song is.
That's the only truly positive thing I'll ever say about Everything But The Girl. This act is too damn bland for chrissake, whatever their style du jour is (jazzy sophistipop--as in here--or eurodance, or electropop, etc.). I've recently given three stars to a Pet Shop Boys album, so I can still keep an open mind, I guess. But there's a limit. Pretty sure the music critics who have consistently and inexplicably praised Everything But The Girl for decades once received free blowjobs paid through the A&R department of the band's label. I'm a music critic as well now, for crying out loud! Why can't I receive free blowjobs???
OK, gross and puerile, I admit it. A *little* more seriously, now: I'm *not* saying that the songwriting, performances and arrangements on this record are not "competent". They are, generally speaking (even if Tracey Thorn's intonations are a little weird or forced on a couple of those tracks). The real issue is this, though: bad taste is just bad taste sometimes, period. And it's always hard to forgive bad taste, even when you hail from the dreadful eighties--where you were admittedly surrounded by it everywhere, and it was almost as if you had no choice but to surrend your soul to at least *some* of it.
In other words, trying to be "objective", open-minded and benevolent about certain music styles would be a blatant lie from me. Everyone sincere enough about music who's worth their salt knows you can't fully change a leopard's spots. Just as you can't turn pumpkins into golden carriages, except in fairy tales. Or except in labels' A&R departments, selling their "products" and pretending they're so relevant on a purely artistic level. It's those free blowjobs again, remember? They're as potent as magic spells.
In all seriousness now, though, I *swear*: current popular opinion is *not* always right, but you can still take it into account to separate the whiff from the chaff once in a while. And here popular opinion is quite clear. Only 15 people or so wrote a 5-star review about this record on this app. Worse, those short and very general reviews do not suggest that any of those supposedly happy reviewers were yet dead-set on defending this album to save it from the sea of negativity it's currently drowning in. I would personally do that to try to save Robert Wyatt's *Rock Bottom*, as far as I'm concerned--even to the extent of making a fool of myself. But that's definitely not how far those folks would go. You just *feel* it in their reviews. They simply liked the record, they don't care about the rest. Good for them. But they should know how bad the global score for this thing is, at least.
Not that such shenanigans matter all that much, I'm gonna concede that as well. For instance, the fact that *Idlewild* has such a low score compared to the 3.29 one of Sade's *Diamond Life*--every bit its equal when it comes to cheesefest fodder--remains a total mystery to me... It's true that what makes an album popular or unpopular is a very elusive thing sometimes. And your personal definitions of "good taste" and "bad taste" will rarely explain such mysteries away. I'll grant that to the few fans of Everything But The Girl who might bump into this review one day. In the meantime...
1/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums, which translates to a 6/10 grade for more general purposes (5+1). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 454
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 255
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 130
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 163 (including this one)
The Divine Comedy
3/5
Always felt that 2004's *Absent Friends* was the best Divine Comedy album. Its only problem was maybe that it was released quite a few years after Neil Hannon first attracted the spotlights with his snarky, witty-yet-impossibly-gorgeous chamber-pop act. Check out song "Our Mutual Friend" to hear him at the top of his game during this second stage of his career.
1996's *Casanova* is not so bad though, even it partly catered to a britpop sound that was far more standardized than Hannon's endearing usual chamber-pop shtick. Britpop was already a bit dated by 1996, ironically. But it didn't hurt The Divine Comedy's sales to go that way after two albums in the same understated vein, I imagine. Plus this LP features the iconic hit "Something For the Weekend", which can't hurt. I lived in England around 1999, and I remember hearing it all the time on the telly, even three years after its release. Good memories...
The lyrics of "Becoming More Like Alfie" have not aged well, though: "Everyone knows no means yes / Just like free glasses come free on the NHS". It's a funny rhyme, I'll grant it to Hannon. And I know this here is mostly literary license in keeping with the album's theme of "Casanovas", including the bullies harrassing girls who think they're that titular character. But taken out of context, some folks might take this tune the wrong way today, understandably.
In spite of its questionable chorus, the song yet remains pretty good, like many others on this generally endearing record. Musically speaking, there's the occasional overlong filler, sure. But ones like "Charge", for instance, are still welcome, as they serve the narrative conceit behind this concept album, with a battle scene for the ages in this particular case. I guess Hannon can be forgiven for many of his musical self-indulgences here.They're mostly used for the greater good that the album as a whole is.
In the list of keepers, *Father Ted* surely made "Songs Of Love" famous, but that tender, mostly acoustic gem probably didn't need that to be remembered anyway. The same goes "The Frog Princess": being French, that "Marseillaise" interpolation in it cracks me up everytime, and the track is also one the best and catchiest compositions in this LP. And I love closer "The Dogs And The Horses", narrating the acceptance of upcoming death through a dusky, "pathetic" orchestration that's particularly fitting with the contents of the lyrics. What a bold way to end an album.
So yep, good stuff. Yet as much as I like this record, I'm not so sure it's a *clear* candidate for a list like this. From 2023's standpoint, The Divine Comedy might be a bit of a niche act--one that could scare regular listeners with its many mannerisms and flourishes (*Absent Friends* would be a better entry point for them, I think). 1001 is a finite number, after all, so I'd rather err on the side of caution for my own list.
Giving a 3/5 grade to *Casanova* for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes. (5+3) Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 453
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 255
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 131(including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 163
Big Brother & The Holding Company
4/5
"Piece Of My Heart", "Ball And Chain", "Combination Of The Two", one raucous cover version of "Summertime"... Classics, just like that iconic artwork by Robert Crumb.
I remember once reading that most rock critics initially panned *Cheap Thrills* when it was released, and that it was the audience of the time that elected this record as the hailmark it is today, contrary to their views. I can't really remember why the critics found this LP distasteful, though. Probably for reasons that were quite different from the ones that make me take out one star to my current grading of it. But why am I doing so, then?
Well, my overall feeling about *Cheap Thrills* is that it can be a little tiring at times--in the sense that everything is super duper intense in it (the instrumentation, that jamming blues-rock style, Janis' gravelly voice...). Most of my favorite albums always have certain "dynamics" in their tracklisting, and I can't sense those in this collection of what is essentially long jams (admittedly based on a solid repertoire of tunes). So as good or great as the album is, that's where it still sounds a bit "dated" to me.
Obviously, everyone's mileage on what is "dated" or not will always vastly differ from one person to the next, as it can often be seen when you read people's reviews on this app. Yet I feel like this particular album could actually make folks of all stripes agree that it is indeed of its time in a way that makes it sound a little weird or unnecessarily convoluted these days. Maybe the attention spans of rock audiences dwindled for the next generations... I don't know, just my two cents, here, I guess...
The thing is, if you take each track individually, you have to acknowledge how stellar they are, either because of the virtuosistic-yet-heartfelt shenanigans in them, or because of the sheer amount of emotions and *soul* Janis pours into her vocal performance. Such spectacular performance can be tiring, sure. But if you're in the right mindset, it's also fascinating. And if not in the long run, at least in small amounts, one song at a time.
To put it in a nutshell, beyond its iconic status and the many cultural undertones attached to it, *Cheap Thrills* still feels like an "essential" album to me. Its excessive leanings are a minor flaw at times. But for the most part, they're still a major asset. Two sides of the same coin.
Number of albums left to review: 453
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 256 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 131
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 163
fIREHOSE
2/5
I really like the first two tracks, but the rest is a bit hit-or-miss. Mike Watt played bass in this act, and likewise, I was never sold on Minutemen's patchy aesthetics. On paper, I should enjoy them (I usually love unpredictable "post-punk" records). But something in their music rubs me the wrong way, I don't know what it is. And even though fIREHOSE offers something different, the same thing happens here for me, sadly.
2/5 for the purposes of this list, translated to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: 452
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 256
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 131
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 164 (including this one)
Run-D.M.C.
3/5
An essential band for rap, even if this debut is no *Raising Hell*. As much as I am a fan of old hip hop, and as historically important tracks such as \"It's Like That\", \"Hard Times\" or \"Sucker MC's\" are, this record still sounds dated and pretty hokey in 2023, as other reviewers pointed out.
Let's face it, 90s hip hop aged better. See A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul or Wu Tang Clan, for instance. And if earlier acts such as Public Enemy or NWA now also sound a little dated as well when it comes to the flows, their music and lyrics is still rich and sophisticated enough so as to elicit genuine interest, even from today's vantage point. Not sure you can honestly say the same miracle happens overall with Run-DMC, as well thought-out and crafted their legendary debut was.
In other words, if hip hop was Michaelangelo or Da Vinci, a doodle drawn during its infancy would still remain a doodle compared to the Sistine Chapel's ceiling or Mona Lisa. Mad respect for the innovators that Run DMC were. But if this debut is a potential essential album, it will only be one found at the bottom of the final selection.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translated to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: 451
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 256
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 132 (including this one, mostly for \"historical\" reasons)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 164
CHIC
2/5
As much as I respect the subjective rationale behind the review currently topping this section, I have to argue that listening to *Risqué* without legendary opener "Good Times", even to better judge the other less familiar cuts, can't provide a clear picture of this album's dynamics. And this for one simple thing: "Good Times" might be a tower of a song, but the album version drags on and on and on (compared to the single version, I presume). And in a way, this initial self-indulgence foretells everything in that record that makes Chic a great 'singles band', but also an awkward act when it comes to albums and their very different needs and requirements.
My main gripe with that record is not about its overall "disco" style, by the way--that beef between rock and disco is a battle from a long distant past no one in their right mind cares about now, fortunately. For one thing, I think there are not enough "pure", four-on-the-floor disco tracks on this thing: I only consider "Good Times" and "My Feet Keep Dancing" as being representatives of that style, really. Take very recent *Future Nostagia*, by Dua Lipa, and listen to how an album filled to the brim with four-on-the-floor galore can be exhilarating, by the way. This here is the sort of album dynamics that are cruelly lacking in this Chic LP.
So no, my main gripe with *Risqué* is not about disco, my gripe is that the tunes in this album are so damn linear. Some of them seem to go on and on--just like "Good Times", but with less assets when it comes to instant catchiness and rhythmical power. And it doesn't matter what style the songs are displaying. When Chic tackles the torch songs, soul, rythm'n'blues and funk that were always on the margins of disco at the times, they're not fully convincing to say the least. If tracks such as "Can't Stand To Love You" and "Will You Cry"--obviously very decent compositions--had been performed by Sly And The Family Stone a few years earlier, they would be raucous, lively, hearbreaking, *outré*, unpredictable. In other words, they would be *alive*. The same if a similar ground had been covered by Outkast decades later. But in *Risqué*, those cuts sound innocuous, even aspectic, with a few hackneyed or hokey solo vocal performances on top of them to try to bring life into the proceedings--to no avail, unfortunately. As hard as Chic can try, there's nothing... *risqué* about those recordings. It's too goddamn safe.
Much has been said about the powerhouse that Niles Rodgers and co. were, and how their many skills made them essential acts for black music. But there's a downside to those stellar skills: most of the times, Chic turn everything into an all-too-clean simulacrum. And this is why, album-wise, they sound so stale for many ears. Add to this a couple of obvious fillers inside what is only a seven-song album--fillers coming up as early as tracks number 2 and 4 ("A Warm Summer Night" and "My Forbidden Lover"), and what you get is a mixed bag. An endearing one at times, for sure. But nothing as "essential" as critics usually say it is.
In other words, I would love to own a greatest hits album by Chic one day (possibly one not too expensive, granted I have room left on my shelves). But when it comes to their studio albums, I can live without them, clearly.
2/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: 450
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 256
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 132
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 165 (including this one)
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
1/5
For those who might have stumbled upon it on this app, remember that tale I told you about a style named Prog Rock, and how she got murdered by the Rush ruffians? Whether you've read my little story taking place in the lands of music or not (and whether you remember it or not), towards the start of the tale, I pointed out that even though her heart was in the right place, Prog Rock took herself a little too seriously once in a while. This is one of those cases.
The main issue I have with ELP is with their pretensions--and all that technical virtuosity leading to pompous meIodical verbiage, rococo flourishes and overaffected twists and turns. Because those misplaced ambitions can't ironically warrant such seriousness in the first place, given that the end result of ELP's *many* efforts is just dreadful.
I thus fully agree with that reviewer incidentally noting how Can's *Tago Mago*, released the same year, still sounds fresh today, and how ELP's Tarkus does not. Let me take this idea a notch further now. Here is a list of LPs released in 1971 that are way better or at least far more memorable than this overblown mess of an album:
Led Zeppelin - IV
David Bowie - Hunky Dory
The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
Joni Mitchell - Blue
Can - Tago Mago
Pink Floyd - Meddle
Leonard Cohen - Songs Of Love And Hate
Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
Sly And The Family Stone - There's A Riot Going On
The Who - Who's Next
Black Sabbath - Masters Of Reality
T Rex - Electric Warrior
John Lennon - Imagine
Yes - Fragile
David Crosby - If Only I Could Remember My Name
Carole King - Tapestry
Janis Joplin - Pearl
Yes - The Yes Album
The Beach Boys - Surf's Up
Mahavishnu Orchestra - the Inner Mounting Flame
The Allman Brothers Band - At Fillmore East
Jethro Tull - Aqualung
Flamin' Groovies - Teenage Head
Serge Gainsbourg - Histoire De Melody Nelson
Harry Nilsson - Nilsson Schmilsson
Graham Nash - Songs For Beginners
The Doors - L.A. Woman
Gil Scott Heron - Pieces Of A Man
Funkadelic - Maggot Brain
Gong - Camembert Electrique
Nick Drake - Bryter Later
Rodriguez - Coming From Reality
Ten Years After - A Space In Time
Procol Harum - Broken Barricades
Genesis - Nursery Crymes
Elton John - Madman Across The Water
Alice Cooper - Killer
Faust - Faust
Traffic - The High Spark Of High-Heeled Boys
Kingdom Come - Galactic Zoo Dossier
I'm afraid that giant armoured armadillo or not, there's no room left for *Tarkus* here. And if there was, I'm not even sure I would consider it a good thing.
1/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 6/10 grade for more general purposes (5 for the vistuosistic musicianship + 1 for the artistry).
Number of albums left to review: 449
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 256
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 132
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 166 (including this one)
Jurassic 5
3/5
As a fan of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul or The Roots, I have always been aware of who Jurassic 5 were, since they picked the ball those first two acts had dropped at the end of the nineties, and this around the same time The Roots dropped its own masterpieces. Jurassic 5's thing is all about positivity, lyrics devoid of any unnecessary aggro bullsh*t, and the lush soul and jazz samples that are the most fitting for those themes. Native Tongues 2.0.
The thing is, as respectable and nicely done as *Power In Numbers* is, it's still one or two notches under most albums made by all those bands I've just mentioned here. How come? Well, I've always thought that the only thing that prevented Jurassic 5 to become an "essential" band was their lack of identity somehow. The music of ATCQ, De La Soul and The Roots had very idiosyncratic traits that made those acts unambiguously endearing--and the same went for the very recognizable rapping styles within each one of those legendary oufits. In comparison, Jurassic 5 sounds a little, well... *indistinct* in its intentions, both vocally and musically. The tones and inflexions of those admittedly very skilled rappers are a little linear: only their contrasting voice registers allow you to truly differentiate between them. And that aspect is a little underwhelming, as good as the rapping is on the album.
As a consequence nothing really stands out in *Power In Numbers*. For starters, it kicks off with quite average cuts, a sort of understated move that's probably a mistake here. The Roots sometimes made similar moves, but what came next always justified starting things nice and slow (because the build-up after that was often insane!). This is not what happens here. If I make a bit of an effort, I could single out "A Day At The Races" and "Remember His Name", with its mesmerizing, echo-laden flute sample--along with the easy-on-the-ear single "What's Golden", maybe. The acoustic guitar sample on "Thin Line" is quite pretty at first glance, but it sorts of wears out its welcome once this track about a man being "friend-zoned" by a love-interest ends after nearly five minutes (that could probably have been cut short before that ultimate time stamp)
I don't think I need to elaborate any further, because everything on the second side of the record has the sort of linear dynamics already found in "Thin Line". The songs are not bad by any means. But it's not like they're gonna revolutionize the hip hop playbook either. Plus, this record doesn't have "Concrete Schoolyard" in its tracklisting (it's in their first LP, originally an EP that was later expanded). So why would I bother adding *Power In Numbers* to my shelves if it doesn't even have what is maybe the band's best track ever?
On a more positive note, there's one last cut that's worthy of your attention here: closer "Acetate Prophets", whose fast bongo-laden and koto-enhanced (!) rhythms seem to hearken back to the experimentations of a highly respectable member of the original Native Tongues crew, i.e. the Jungle Brothers. But the idiosyncratic touches are too few and too late by that point. And my oh my, why is this track an instrumental only??! Another missed occasion where Jurassic 5 could have really shone, instead of only twinkling!
So that's it. *Power In Numbers* is a good album, but it's not *stellar*. Therefore, including it in the list probably uses a slot that could be given to a better record. 3/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3).
Number of albums left to review: 448
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 256
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 132
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 167 (including this one)
Leonard Cohen
5/5
Amused by some of the reviews in this section--weird takes such as "How do people even pretend to like this? He's the music version of Shakespeare: people only say they like him because it makes them feel smart," bla bla bla... Are some folks so insecure in their lives that they let their inferiority complex ruin all sense of measure and caution in their judgments? Can't they just explain what they personally don't like in Cohen's songs and music, and then move on? No, they can't, and that's interesting. Pretty sure such a bitter stance would have amused the misanthropic-yet-tender "dissectionist" of human passions that Cohen was himself. Oh, the irony.
I could also take a page out of those disgruntled listeners' book and venture to say that they are the ones at fault here, *objectively* speaking. One can indeed wonder if they're not a little disturbed by the somewhat radical nature of Cohen's debut album--ascetic and dry for sure, yet also hypnotic on a musical level ; a treasure trove when it comes to the lyrics ; and, most of all, a record that leaves you no choice but to actively give your time and attention to it. This record has very few "spectacular" elements in its contents (a voice and an acoustic guitar, basically), and yet in spite of that, it dares you to stop and listen. Which is always a little disturbing at first, and maybe explains why quite a few reviewers are "disturbed" by it. In the end, some of those naysayers just can't help themselves: if they don't get it, that only means that people who do are *lying*. How amusing, as I said.
The irony is that it takes no effort to love this record if you're a Leonard Cohen fan. Because loving this album has nothing do with intellectual shenanigans or the utterance of thesis statements, contrary to what those misguided takes say. Loving this album is a matter of emotion--of how you can respond to the traditional-folk-like purity of the music, here set against the lyrics' modern sophistication (and sometimes wry undertones), along with Cohen's sullen voice being a mock-neutral referee between the two. A perfect balance for many, and one you don't necessarily need to overanalyze, in spite of what I've just written (words are always feeble to describe such masterpieces. aren't they?). After all, some people with a very flimsy grasp of the English language have "gotten" Leonard Cohen for decades (I know that for sure, I don't llive in an English-speaking country), and he's not exclusively popular in 'intellectual" circles either. Which kinda proves all the naysayers wrong all by itself, no matter what it is that they subjectively "feel". No harm in disliking Cohen if it's not your thing--just don't overplay your hand by yucking on other people's yum through the bad faith stance of judging fans' character or their honesty, instead of telling us about your own impressions. It's not graceful at all, to say the least.
Not that those naysayers are anything new. A lot of people are unaware of this today, but when *Songs Of Leonard Cohen* was released, its reception by critics was a bit lukewarm, actually. The partly-hidden rationale was mostly that Cohen came from literary and poetry circles: he was an outsider and no "real" musician--and most specifically, he was no real "singer" (odd how snubbery can take many forms!). Yet those critics were at fault too, because they didn't "feel" the most important aspects to take away from *Songs Of Leonard Cohen*: its earnestness ; its blunt honesty ; its raw nature.
Because whatever technical abilities Cohen lacked as a vocal performer, he made up for them tenfold through the authenticity, earnestness, and unassuming manners in his performance. Fortunately, general audiences were quick to understand the gem that he was, and you can bet your boots that next generations will, too, just as the ones before.
Another layer of irony is that those suspicious critics actually did a huge favour for the Canadian folkster. Rejecting him, they unwittingly underlined his status as a constant underdog--a status he would keep on drawing inspiration from during his long career. The typical Leonard Cohen stance is that he watches the world--and even his own romantic escapades!--from the sidelines with a unassuming, stoic air. And his music gracefully underlines this stance, whether it is wisdom or self-delusion.
Such hardcore stoicism is still what makes Leonard Cohen unpalatable for some listeners today, I guess... Those more recent naysayers should at least be aware that things could have turned out worse for them. Had Cohen fully had his way with this debut, there would for instance be far less orchestral arrangements in it, and even less female background vocals. We can all be glad that producer John Simon stood his ground, because the compromise the two men eventually found works beautifully here. Later, for other albums, Cohen would oscillate from a "less is more" philosophy for his subsequent LPs during the seventies, to some sort of maximalist layering in the eighties--one that was maybe partly ironic. But it's here, for this debut, that the perfect matrix has been set for the Canadian songwriter. Those women singing background vocals would for instance never really leave him--it's a marital "arrangement" between lush voices and Cohen's own somber timber that started with this album, and made a lasting impression to the world of music at large. See the sheer amount of cover versions of Cohen's songs if you ever doubt about that.
As for the orchestral arrangements, listen carefully to "Master Song" and tell me that its minimalistic production values are not one of the most insanely subtle and yet most gorgeous things that has ever graced human ears--each short inflexion of the small orchestra underlining the lyrical proceedings in the exact way it should--whether through strings or a trumpet--and also enhancing the wonderful chords Cohen found for his tune. So called "deep cuts" like that ("Master Song", "The Stranger Song", "Stories Of The Streets", "Teachers"...) all have those sorts of endearing or enlightening details, and as a consequence, they becone immensely pleasurable if you take the time to sit down and listen. And if you add that string of iconic songs to those less famous tunes--"Suzanne", "So Long, Marianne", "Sisters of Mercy"--of which I don't have much to say given how they have seeped through popular consciousness for decades now--what you get is a perfect, perfect record, without a single dud in it.
Running out of time to finish this review, so I'm gonna end it here. If you don't know the wonderful works of Leonard Cohen, don't listen to the naysayers. Have an honest go at it. Maybe you are like "Joseph looking for a manger", and you don't know it yet. Rest assured that once you heart finds shelter in those songs, it is just impossible to forget them.
Five stars, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 447
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 257 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 132
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 167
Nitin Sawhney
1/5
Now I am become elevator music, the destroyer of interesting concept, lush hindi/qawwali interpolations, coffee-table trip-hop, and dated drum'n'bass patterns.
Love the "Indian" vocals and orchestrations. Hate most of the English vocal parts. 1/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 6/10 grade for more general purposes (5+1).
Number of albums left to review: 446
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 257
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 132
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 168 (including this one)
Beastie Boys
5/5
When Public Enemy's Chuck D--of all people--is quoted as saying that the "dirty secret" among the black hip-hop community at the time *Paul's Boutique* was released was that the latter "had the best beats", it speaks TONS about the quality of the music here. Chuck D takes "white" appropriation of Black culture *very* seriously, and he can have very harsh words about it. So him saying such things is the best tribute that could ever be given to the hip hop masterpiece Beastie Boys and their producers The Dust Brothers provided for us in 1989.
About the rapping now: well, it is simply, utterly, incredible--a constant display of b-boy fireworks: inventive, imaginative, hilarious, surreal, energetic and cinematic... Summing it up as mere "shouting", as the review currently topping this section does, is pretty unfair--even though I like the funny "concept" of that review, and so can somehow respect this hot take, I guess, as incomplete as it is. I dunno... Maybe that reviewer should take herbal tea and relax a little before trying to listen to the record again...
As some critic once put it: "Paul’s Boutique sat at a finish line waiting for the rest of the world to catch up." Without this album, there's no fully-formed A Tribe Called Quest (the encyclopedic nature of the samples, their sweeping between genres...), probably no Wu-Tang Clan as we know it (the fast-pace rapping, the movie soundtrack overtones...), and there certainly wouldn't be any Eminem either. 5 stars.
Number of albums left to review: 445
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 258 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 132
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 168
Lou Reed
5/5
What on Earth can I say about this masterpiece that hasn't been said before, here or elsewhere? Nothing. I'm gonna review the reviews then. That will give us an inkling of what makes this album so popular for genuine music fans--after all, 3.75 *is* a pretty good score, is it not?
Funny how a significant number of reviewers confessed they had a "bias" for *Transformer*. As if it was a dirty little secret they were only sharing now, decades after this record was released. My take about that word and its "guilty" undertones (because it's often that exact same word that's used, "bias") is that it fits with the sleazy, sexually promiscuous world depicted by some of *Transformer*'s songs. Like a kink of some sort.
Other reviewers were quick to prone another aspect of that sexual world Lou Reed presents to us, i.e. all those innuendoes about the variety of gender and sexual orientations displayed in those songs (with direct references to all that in "Walk On The Wild Side"--oh my god, what a song, by the way!)."Forward-thinking", I believe one of the reviewers called those songs. Popular cuture is often the best way to open minds. And with *Transformer*, you *also* have great music to do that, which can't hurt.
Which leads me to the impressive number of reviewers commenting on David Bowie and Mick Ronson's production. Of course the sonic flair of the two Brits is a *huge* part of the charm here, turning " Satellite Of Love" into a cousin of "Life On Mars?" (what an outro section, my god!) or a bunch of Velvet-Underground-flavoured, hard-rock-like compositions into glam-rock gems ("Vicious". "I'm So Free" , "Wagon Wheel" "Hangin' 'Round" ). Yet, make no mistake, large chunkss of *Transformer* are still very much American as well. That jazz double-bass and gospel-like choir on "Walk On The Wild Side". Or the Broadway accents on " Perfect Day" and the ones from New Orleans on "Goodnight Ladies"...
Glam-rock and the world of the Velvet Underground had much in common, but they were also very different (rock'n'roll) animals. As such, they were not necessarily supposed to collide the way they did here. So it's nice that they did collide, and thet we can still catch the sparks that came out of that collision today. Right after *Transformer*, Lou Reed went to diametrically opposed aesthetics with Bob-Ezrin-produced "Berlin" (I haven't read a single reviewer mentioning that album, oddly enough, even though later *New York* has been mentioned a couple of times)."Berlin" surely is an acquired taste (I've grown to love it over the years), yet there's one thing most Lou Reed and Velvet Underground fans can agree about: It's nice that Lou Reed never attempted to record *Transformer 2*. Let robots and AIs do that, lol. *Transformer* was a commercial breakthrough for Lou, sure. But this wonderful record is also unique for more than commercial reasons, and for that bridge between London and NYC Reed, Bowie and Ronson built to make it happen. 5 stars, what else?
Number of albums left to review: less than 500 (I've temporarily lost count)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one, of course)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
The Human League
5/5
It took quite a long time for this album to click for me, but boy, when it did, it was a minor revelation for sure.
Before listening to that record I thought that none of those synth pop acts form the early eighties had been able to create full-length masterpieces, contrary to the skills and flair they often displayed for singles (still hate that ABC LP from this list, for instance...). So when I first listened to *Dare* I was highly skeptical--I thought I was in for another instance of Duran-Duran-like overrated drivel. Turned out I was wrong.
If you have the right amount of mellifluous earworms, it doesn't matter if your style is dated or not. This what happens in *Dare*. You won't find a single dud in this record, because there is the sort of combination that usually makes an album great, and this in any style. And the equation is this: instant catchiness + imagination + layering + dynamics. The slow songs always have something intense to them, and the livelier numbers remain classy and enticing--avoiding the sort of vulgar flourishes that often turned synth-pop hits into a cheesefest.
Not that this class-act nature prevented The Human League to find memorable melodies, as I said earlier--the sort of melodies a recent act like The 1975, painfully trying to harness similar eighties aesthetics, is notoriously unable to write, for instance. Choruses and hooks are stellar in *Dare*: "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of", "The Sound Of The Crowd", and--of course--"Don't You Want Me", first come to mind here. But each and every song has its own share of wonderful moments. And the instrumental parts between those choruses are also great, with catchy arrangements that are often surprisingly subtle (see that minor chord-major chord modulation in "Darkness", for example). With this LP, The Human League also used interesting textures that still sound fresh today, against all odds. Take those "flute" sounds in "Open You Hear" or "Get Carter". As for the drums sound, it is actually quite restrained, mostly avoiding that gated reverb that pestered most pop acts during that decade. Synth basslines owe a lot to Kraftwerk of course, but The Human League also bring their own pop drive to the whole thing, making this music unmistakably theirs.
Add the evocative lyrics to this recipe--drawing from eighties concerns about jobs and fame and love and money and travelling, with some empathic angles about the whole thing, yet still keeping the gently sardonic touches of The Human League's previous LPs--and what you have here is an essetial album, no doubt about that.
In a way, the productive compromise that gave birth to those lyrics is the same sort of compriomise that gave birth to the music itself. Digging further into The Human League's discography, now I know that their first two full-length records, before the line-up change, had been slightly more experimental--and that records after *Dare* would be far more "commercial". But with this particular LP, you just have a perfect middle ground between those two extremities. So it's no wonder you can find it in many music anthologies and lists similar to this one. 5/5.
Number of albums left to review: 443
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 260 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 132
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 168
Pere Ubu
3/5
I'm delighted that Dimery's list has weird art-rock records like this. It's important that all sorts of music are represented, in spite of all the reviewers in here grumbling about this one and giving it low grades (I'm talking about music from the "western" world and using the album format, at least).
Besides, Pere Ubu is an act so bizarre that it literally can't age. Some reviewers talking about the two Pere Ubu albums selected by Dimery referred to recent groundbreaking bands like Squid or black midi so as to give their opinions and try to explain what those LPs are all about. And I'm also glad about this. There's definitely an affinity between Pere Ubu's own off-kilter sound in 1978 and the one played by quite important rock bands that don't want to fully rehash the past these days.
The good news is also that, contrary to *Dub Housing*, *The Modern Dance* more or less manages to keep momentum for the duration of its ten tracks. "Non-Alignment Pact" and the title-track offer great moments right off the bat. David Thomas' frantic voice, somewhere between Jello Biafra and David Byrne, is an acquired taste, of course. But once you find your footing with it, it becomes quite fascinating.
After that great start, "Laughing"'s deconstructed, sax-enhanced shenanigans are a bit of a letdown, yet Thomas's voice does a good enough job getting you hooked in spite of the overaffected free-jazz surroundings. And then "Street Waves" quickly surges anyway--with one bridge containing a classic guitar solo that will easily rock your socks off, and another bridge where eerie wind sounds will suddenly keep you on your bare toes as you force them to walk on ice. Funny how those two bridges actually epitomize the two sides of the word *art-rock* all by themselves.
Following "Street Waves", you have "Chinese Radiations", another "deconstructed" cut going from a slow ambient mood to a more lively conclusion. Yet this time, said "decontructed cut" is fortunately far more efficient and evocative. Thomas then goes totally bezerk on bonkers "Life Stinks"--the rhythm section is on a full punk mode here--before centerpiece " Real World" ensues--some sort of dub track that goes off the rails to become far more at the end: a mesmerizing-yet-hectic plea and a proto-Talking Heads gem all at the same time. After that, calm "Over My Head" and its haunted background vocals provide a welcome respite--with another lovely guitar solo for its bridge.
Concluding the album, you have "Sentimental Journey", a self-indulgent, seemingly improvised number where the most recognizable pattern comes for the sound of breaking glass (the studio's floor was notoriously littered with broken bottles after they recorded that cut). And then, you have the mock-reggae of "Humour Me", with fun clapping hands helping you digest all the guitar and synth harmonies around them--weird ones for sure, yet also poignant, oddly enough. That last guitar solo, short but epic, is a major plus to turn that closer into a highlight.
Voilà, to put it in a nutshell. *The Modern Dance* is a mid-western, no-wave version of Roxy Music. As such, it's "out there" and sort of a mixed bag, but it's still a fun listen if you open your mind and try to forget the usual expectations of run-of-the-mill rock and punk-rock. It sure won't send you to the highs that Wire or Gang Of Four can aim at (two bands that Spotify's algorithm played after *The Modern Dance* ended--which was highly predictable, lol). But it's still a success in its own (admittedly bizarre) terms. After all, you can find other admirable players in second leagues sometimes.
Number of albums left to review: 442
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 260
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 133 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 168
Cream
5/5
If Clapton is "God", I guess I'm an atheist. That being said, if one album in his discography could turn me into an agnostic, it's this one.
4.5/5 stars for the purposes of this list (rounded up to 5 here). Which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 442
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 261 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 133
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 168
Led Zeppelin
5/5
Spent a lot of time trying to make the heads of Robert, Jimmy, John Paul, and John appear all at the same time through the small punched holes of that cover (never succeeded, tough). Those of you who have the original design for said cover--either on vinyl or on deluxe CD editions--know of what I'm talking about here. As they know how frigging good Led Zeppelin's first real explorations into English folk and quieter-yet-somber moods are.
As adventurous as *III* is, the unmistakable blues/hard-rock feel is still there on the first side of this record--with a bunch of intense bangers on side one, the most incredible of them being of course opener "Immigrant Song" and its relentless groove. Yet Led Zeppelin then quickly makes a great 180-degree turn with "Friends", an acoustic cut whose minor string section/mellotron/ synth arrangement brings strong cinematic flavours to the whole thing. Back to a rock banger with "Celebration Day", and then to an iconic power blues highlight with "Since I've Been Loving You". That emotional middle section/bridge towards the end of the song is the stuff of legend. And then "Out On The Tiles" closes side one with a strong cut as well--catchy chorus and frantic guitar riffing included.
As suggested earlier, side two is a more pastoral affair, but it has its share of highlights as well, including country-tinged, pre-"Stairway To Heaven" number "Tangerine", and *Astral Weeks*-like meditative and melancholic cut "That's the Way". Jimmy Page's "borrowing" of riffs and melodies now extended from ripping off bluesmen to reproducing traditional folk harmonies as well--never forget how much of a cunning thieving fox Page was during Led Zeppelin's heyday. But what a brilliant fox he was! And no matter where *III*'s music really came from, everything sounds super duper tight in it anyway. As tight as a "volvelle" inside an album cover can be. 5/5.
Number of albums left to review: 441
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 262 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 133
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 168
The Rolling Stones
5/5
The psychedelic fad (a fad for them, at least) didn't suit the Rolling Stones very well. *Between The Buttons* and *Their Satanic Majesties Request* respectively had couples of nice tracks, but those records were half-baked endeavors nonetheless. It was time for the band to return to their roots. Hence *Beggars Banquet*.
Three highlights in this classic LP. Let's start with the closer, "Salt Of The Earth", which is a genre into its own. That elegiac ode to paupers, misfits and freaks is a sardonic ballad for sure--and sardonic or not, carnivalesque or not, it's one of the most beautiful ones ever written. File next to "You Can't Always Get What You Want", "Moonlight Mile" and "Angie".
Then, there are "Sympathy For The Devil" and "Street Fighting Man", among the top-5 most iconic Rolling Stones songs (and never forget that Jagger and Richards have written far more than five iconic tunes overall). Competing that top 5 list, I would probably add "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", "Jumping Jack Flash", "Paint It Black" or "Brown Sugar"--yeah, I know, that's six songs in total, but don't complain: I could have added " Brown Sugar" and "Under My Thumb" as well...
The thing is, when a single album gathers *two* of these iconic tunes, you just can't dismiss it that easily. Under that light, it doesn't really matter of the rest of this album is mostly made of amiable blues fillers--they have their charm too anyway, and make the whole collection an immensely pleasurable collection once you get to know them.
The Rolling Stones would get better at crafting more cohesive LPs right after this one (first with *Let It Bleed*, but mostly with *Sticky Fingers*, before returning to topsy-turvy aesthetics with double-feature *Exile On Main Streets*). But it's with *Beggars Banquet* that this lucky streak of classic Rolling Stones albums started.
5/5, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 440
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 263 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 133
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 168
Lana Del Rey
5/5
As much as I like or even love *Chemtrails Over the Country Club*, Dimery and co. including the latter in their list and ignoring 2019's *Norman Fucking Rockwell* doesn't make a SHRED OF SENSE. Sorry for the capital letters, I know they're annoying, but here is one of the rare cases where I'm 100% sure I'm being "objective". Mad respect for Little Simz and Michael Kiwanuka (representing 2019 in the 1001 albums book), but it's obvious that Lana Del Rey's magnum opus is one or two notches over their own LPs. So you know what needs to be done here.
Now that all of this is out of my system, a few words about *this* album, which followed that already "classic" record that *NFR* is. *Chemtrails...* is very good, even brilliant at time, especially on the first side. That weird pace or flow Lana uses for the chorus of opener "White Dress" is bold as fuck, for instance: "Downatah-menamusic-BIZ-ness conference". Jesus, what a trip, and what an evocative way to convey the hopes and awkward self-delusions of an anonymous waitress dreaming about breaking out in show-business--exactly who Lana was a few years before breaking out herself. Unless it's the "character" *Liz Grant invented to do so. Not that it takes anything to the song.
After such a stellar introduction, the other tunes need to be good, and most of them are, fortunately, even if they're even more "one-note" overall compared to previous albums (a reproach folks who don't *really* listen to Del Rey's songs often throw at her--I should know: I was one of them before... And then i saw the light). The title track is enticing, seductive, and even a little eerie, for example. "Tulsa Jesus Freak" is somewhat cold and insensitive, in spite of the lush arrangements. "Wild At Heart" sounds like another instant classic (maybe referring to David Lynch's own pastiche in cinematic terms). And "Dark But Just A Game" uses off-kilter harmonic modulations to take its indolent groove to a whole other level. Producer and co-songwriter Jack Antonoff sure is a sly fox, just as he was for *NFR*, and his work is a perfect background for those stories and moods and tunes.
It's because of those sort of details that Del Rey and Antonoff manage to transcend the seemingly unobtrusive nature of those songs. The result of of their common effort is a little less stellar on the second side, I admit it. Yet there's more than meets the eye on tracks like "Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost" or the surprisingly straightforward blues-rock of "Dance 'Til We Die". And that cover of Joni Mitchell's "For Free" with Weyes Blood, concluding the proceedings, is gracious and touching.
The only problem with including Del Rey's *Chemtrails Over The Country Club* in my own list is that if I do so, I have no choice but to also include *Ultraviolence*, *NFR* and probably 2023's *Did You Know There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard* as well. Now do I want *four* Lana Del Rey's LPs in my list? Isn't that overkill, especially for such a recent (and controversial) artist? Only time will tell. But *Norman Fucking Rockwell* should be there for sure. That much I know.
I give a 4.5 grade to this record, rounded up to 5, because I want at least *one* Lana Del Rey LP to appear on my "wall" of albums (and I can't do that with any other LP given that they're not in Dimery's list). But it's the first (and potentially *only*) time a 5/5 record ends up on my "waiting list". Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 439
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 263
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 134 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 168
Korn
1/5
Another example of Dimery and co. selecting a lackluster record from a band that was once viewed as innovative in their genre, before breaking out with an album that's not so bold compared to their first LPs. Commercial success is often a misleading factor on the 1001 albums book. And here is one of the most ridiculous examples of this particular mindset when it comes to specific subgenres (here, *nu-metal*).
Oddly enough, and apart from "Freak On A Leash" (more on that later), the only *truly* memorable moment on this record is that rap battle / "let's-play-the-dozens"-track "All In The Family", with Fred Durst. It's a track whose concept is fun, as immature as it is, but whose execution is a little disappointing, retrospectively--even if Fieldy's bass slapping is impressive in its own right on this one. Some of the insults going back and forth between Durst and Jonathan Davis are funny.
But others fall very flat...
This is far from being the only missed opportunity in this record. And you could argue that it speaks volumes when one of the two memorable moments on an album features dumb jock Fred Durst. Didn't remember Ice Cube was also on this LP, by the way... but given how much of a mess "Children Of The Corn" is, it's no surprise I had forgotten about it.
So the other truly memorable track from *Follow The Leader* is single "Freak On A Leash", as said earlier, with its perfect instrumental imitation of gangster rap samples, its soaring chorus, and its typical "scat" grunting by Jonathan Davis--that he put for better use on previous records, admittedly, but which is still a spectacular gimmick.
And... that's it. Nearly everything else is just terrible, plain and simple! "It's On" is a boring opener ; the involutary disco rhythm pattern of "Got The Life" is cheesy and hackneyed (plus, the song is badly mixed) ; and "Dead Bodies Everywhere" starts with creepy glockenspiel shenanigans that are interesting, but thenthe song quickly returns to the usual Korn formula--a particularly soulless one in this occasion. "B.B.K." fares slightly better than most of what occured before, and its short bridge à la The Cure is interesting. More skat grunts from Davis towards the end of this cut. Too bad that, by this point of the LP, this little trick--already heard before--sounds like an option Davies goes to when he doesn't have any better ideas for his vocals. "Pretty" attempts to use subtle Cure influences again, but the result is far more awkward this time around. "Reclaim My Place", "Justin" and "Seed" go through the motions witout much real passion in them. Interesting funk hip hop dynamics on "Cameltosis"--too bad the lyrics are so dumb, even by nu-metal standards.
Closing the proceedings, 6-minutes-or-so "My Gift To You" is an exploration of more "classic" metal aesthetics during its first part, before going back to Korn's usual shenanigans... and neither part of the song is convincing enough. Long gone is the neurotic intensity of the first two albums. And long gone is also producer Ross Robinson' trademark sound, so effective in them. Not even bothering to quote the names of the two new producers for "Follow The Leader"...
I should not even mention the hidden track at the end of this record either, so stupid it is. Countless teenagers discovered Korn through this album and made it a success. But you can bet your boots that most of the middle-aged men and women they are right now would be embarassed to admit they ever embraced Korn's music when they were younger. Too bad, some of the stuff in the first two albums is still interesting or even thrilling today. But *Follow The Leader*'s interesting moments are scarce compared to *Korn* and *Life Is Peachy*.
1/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 6/10 grade for more general purposes (5+1).
Number of albums left to review: 438
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 263
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 134
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 169 (including this one)
3/5
Interesting for sure. But *essential*? I'm not even certain that *Skylarking* and *English Settlement* will be included in my own list (*Drums And Wire* will be in it, of course). So selecting this late-career album by XTC sounds a little dubious on paper.
On paper at least, I'll grant that to Dimery and co. The orchestral arrangements are top-notch on quite a few tracks, for instance. It was surprising to read that those arrangements were all recorded in Abbey Road in a single day, and that the original sessions were somewhat botched. That protools software can work wonders, can't it? Pretty useful when you don't have the ressources to record an orchestra for a whole week. At times, there are strings arrangements that reminded me of Dead Can Dance or Michael Nyman. Gorgeous, gorgeous work.
Thanks to those orchestrations, great compositions such as "River of Orchids", "Easter Theatre", "I Can't Own Her" and "Harvest Festival" shine on this record--to which you could maybe add single "I'd Like That" and closer "The Last Balloon". To be honest, I find those highlights even more endearing than the ones of *Skylarking*, that mid-eighties LP that saw XTC take a radical left turn towards more artsy landscapes. Maybe one of the issues pestering *Apple Venus Volume 1* is that it was released long after that initial left-turn-into-art-rock-thing, and even longer after the band's commercial peak. Which might be an unfair way to dismiss *Apple Venus...*, once again. If those songs had appeared on *Skylarking*, chances are that they would have been praised just like the tunes on that album were. Maybe even more so.
That being said, I think that all the other cuts in this record are far less effective, and even annoying to an extent. As often with this band, said cuts go from unobtrusive to twee--a trend that often rubs me the wrong way during XTC's later albums. That reliance on lush layerings, soft textures, and an overabundance of major chords started with *Skylarking*, once again. The thing is, as talented as he is, Alan Partridge is no John Lennon, no Paul McCartney, and no 60s-era Brian Wilson. His tunes always *sound* nice, I agree. But some of them are way too naive. And most of them are not that memorable compared to the ones routinely written by the genius songwriters XTC fans often compare Partridge with.
On top of that, there's the issue of overall dynamics. If you take away the post-punk energy of the band's early career, you actually end up taking away a lot of the stuff that made their compositions so remarkable in the first place. I agree that when they age, composers and songwriters should find ways to make the sound of their youth evolve with them. But doing so doesn't necessarily mean you have to lose a sense of youthful enthusiasm, so to speak. And early-XTC had *a lot* of those thrilling, enthusiastic moments. I'm OK with the idea of intellectualizing things a little. It's just that there are ways to do so and still remain straightforward once in a while. You can do this through a soaring chorus, basic chords at key points of a song, or anything that would make it a little catchier, Abbey-Road-recording-sessions-of-a full-blown-orchestra notwithstanding. Because, let's face it, this LP is a little stingy when it comes to catchy moments, isn't it? And this, even for its highlights.
I haven't yet listened to *Apple Venus Volume 2* (not in Dimery's list, if my memory serves), but it sounds reasonable to assume that if Partridge and Moulding had at least gathered the highlights from both volumes into a single package--and dismissed the rest for B-sides and whatnot--you would have a stronger entry here. It's a story everyone has heard before. The talented leader of a band is such a victim of his own hubris that he botches his own desire for success when he becomes unable to self-edit so as to separate the whiff from the chaff--and this even when his entourage advised him to do so. Reading stories about Alan Partridge and his occasional temper tantrums with other band members, it seems that he is a character that could fit those shoes. Human makes mistake, I imagine.
Number of albums left to review: 437
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 263
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 134
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 170 (including this one)
Suzanne Vega
2/5
Overall, a collection of nice songs, unfortunately hampered by cheesy eighties production values once in a while. It's those horrid synth sounds painstakingly imitating real instruments--flute or strings--and miserably failing to bring adequate dynamics to the whole thing. Logically, most of the real highlights are where those eighties flourishes are kept at a strict minimum--opener "Cracking", sad and melancholic "Small Blue Thing", cautionary tale "The Queen And The Soldier", along with "Marlene On The Wall"--somehow a fortunate exception because the composition is so good you quickly forget it was recorded in 1985. That being said, there are also a bunch of duds in this debut. "Undertow" and its somewhat forced vocal performance come to mind here. And the last two tracks of this LP are somewhat underwhelming.
It seems to me that Vega's three subsequent albums *Solitude Standing*, *Days Of Open Hands* and *99.9 F•" are far stronger efforts, and that they have Suzanne's most iconic tunes and performances ("Luka","Tom's Diner", "Book Of Dreams", "Blood Makes Noise", "In Liverpool", "Bad Wisdom", "When Heroes Go Down"... It's those three records that should be in this list, not her debut (pretty sure that the artist would agree herself). *99.9 F•* is especially impressive--and also criminally underrated today. It goes from abrasive soundscapes and post-industrial chamber pop (!) to stellar sad-girl anthems and acoustic initmate numbers in a split-second. Yes, "post-industrial chamber pop" is a thing--and it took Suzanne's adventurous spirit to craft such a style. Yet as wild a ride as *99.9F•* is, it manages to stay cohesive, artful and sensitive from start to end. Brains and heart reach a rare perfect balance in the course of that record. And in comparison, such a potential is only hinted at during Vega's debut.
2/5 for the purposes of this list, here translated to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 437
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 263
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 134
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 170 (including this one)
The Only Ones
3/5
Album *The Only Ones* is not "the only one" I hesitate to include in my own ranking of 1001 essential LPs--there's not enough room for all sorts or good to great records in said ranking, unfortunately. But this album sure is at the top of my list of potential candidates.
There are only a couple of tiny things that make me hesitate to directly include this debut in my own list, but at the end of the day, those small issues have their weight. First, there's nothing as catchy as wonderful single "Another Girl, Another Planet" in it. Which doesn't mean that the other tunes are fillers or duds--just that the album's dynamics somewhat suffers from that contrast between this legendary single and the rest. Secondly, Peter Perret is a great performer and vocalist, with an unmistakable style--a lazy drawl that certainly has its charms for many--yet maybe such a style is a little too one-note in the long run, which can be tiring for some listeners. Finally, had single "Lovers Of Today" been included in the original record, there would have been a way to create an overall stronger tracklisting for it.
I'm probably splitting hairs here, but I have no choice. I'm in the middle of that run of 1001 albums, and I know I can't cram everything in my own ranking. In that realm of late-seventies, early-eighties rock bands using the lessons of punk and post-punk to rejuvenate older styles such as glam and pub-rock, I will always prefer the Soft Boys and their stellar songs to The Only Ones, as objectively great as they were. I need room for *Underwater Moonlight* in my personal ranking--a far more varied and dynamic LP compared to *The Only Ones*. And if taking that Soft Boys LP into account means I have to sacrifice The Only Ones' debut, so be it. Ain't life cruel?
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/5 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 436
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 263
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 135 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 170
Drive Like Jehu
5/5
Including Drive Like Jehu's *Yank Crime* in this list and ignoring Fugazi's *13 Songs*, *In On The Kill Taker*, *Red Medecine* and *The Argument* is a crime all by itself (*Repeater* is a great album, but I would place these other Fugazi LPs before it imho). That (major) gripe aside, I cannot thank Dimery and co. enough for selecting this other seminal post-hardcore gem in their book. I was aware of who John Reis is because of all the nice acts he was a part of after Drive Like Jehu (Rocket From The Crypt, Hot Snakes, Plosivs...), but somehow I had not listened to Drive Like Jehu yet. And boy oh boy, how was I missing out! Browsing through Wikipedia to learn more about this band, I was saddened to learn that the band's singer and guitarist Rick Froberg (also the frontman of Hot Snakes) passed away from "natural causes" two months ago. I had not heard of those tragic news, oddly enough. In a better world, more people would have talked about his sudden death.
I'm not gonna beat about the bush any longer: *Yank Crime* is up there with the best representatives of the post-hardcore / emocore genre. And with a track such as "New Maths", you could amost say Drive Like Jehu initiated mathcore / math rock, and this in a very tongue-in-cheek manner (get your inner calculators ready to count the different time signatures there, lol). Apart from " New Maths", *Yank Crime*'s highlights are "Do You Compute", " Luau" and "Golden Brown". The first two are admittedly long compositions, but they're totally worth your time if you're a fan of the genre, thanks to their breathtaking, harmonically tense climaxes. And if you're a post-hardcore newbie, don't get too overwhelmed by the intricate and "difficult" sonic architecture of the album's opener. "Here Come The Rome Plows" is mostly here to set the tone, actually. Everything that comes after may turn out to be extremely rewarding if you want to get acquainted with post-hardcore or similar "punk" subgenres.
Normally, I would give a 4/5 - 4.5/5 grade to this record. But given how unfairly low the global score for it is in this app, I'm gonna push that grade to a perfect 5/5 mark. People in here complaining that they "don't like being yelled at" should be a little more humble, I think. They're confusing their own personal limits with an "objective" stance. It's as if I complained about "being yelled at" when I'm being exposed to a bland Adele record: it's not because you're using all the clichés of what a singer is "supposed" to do on a purely technical level that the results can't be extremely grating to your subjective ears. Good art is not necessarily meant to be "beautiful" all the time anyway. And it does not necessarily need to be so in any conventional manner. Good art can also be dark, messy and blunt. Because that's a way for it to reflect our short and messy lives.
Number of albums left to review: 435
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 263
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 135
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 170
Gary Numan
3/5
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HTTP Status 204 (all style no substance?)
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Trying hard to reboot this review through failure-safe mode. But bugs keep coming up. It's always annoying when machines resist you. You end up believing they're doing it on purpose against you.
The thing is, machines don't have any volition on their own--at least as far as I know. And when you finally admit it, that's also when you realize projecting your own emotions onto them was a pretty pointless affair--not to mention an all-too-human reflex. "What was I thinking? Why did I get all riled-up? It's just a dumb machine...". This is how those confrontations between man and its faulty mechanical tools always end: with a "why bother?" attitude.
*The Pleasure Principle* suggests those lines of thought to me. There lie both its success and its failure. I can project all sorts of strong emotions onto Kraftwerk's own robotic music, for example--fascination, joy, sadness, anxiety, excitement, pleasure... But I can't do this with this album, even if it owes much to the German krautrock/kosmische legends itself. And maybe it's because, at the end of the day, there's not much to the music played in it. HTTP Status Code 204? All style, no substance?
Kraftwerk is not the only reference point that belittles *The Pleasure Principle*. Likewise, synthpop pioneers who had their heyday a few years after Gary Numan can provide a lot of different emotions for me. Most of the songs released by Depeche Mode between 1984 and 1990 do that for instance. And quite a few other key tracks by Human League, Heaven 17 or even Pet Shop Boys do it as well. Heck, even Pete Shelley's synth-heavy *Homosapien* sounds more interesting to me--an underrated album in the Buzzcocks frontman's solo discography if ever there is one. Should I mention Joy Division and New Order, finally? Nah. I think most of you people get the picture now...
Beyond those admittedly very subjective leanings, here is the main point I want to underline here: behind the robotic facade, all those acts wrote tunes with a LOT of harmonically enticing flavours. Of course, Gary Numan came before all of those acts, at least--so there's that pioneering aspect to take into account, I guess. Under that light, maybe I shouldn't care if he was a far less skilled composer and songwriter. But in that case, well... Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk will always have the upper hand when it comes to decide who were the real pioneers. They were there when this whole matrix-thing started. Heck, they ARE this matrix.
Other reference points that make *The Pleasure Principle* sound a little secondary in retrospect are later "industrial" acts such as Killing Joke or Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor is a huge fan of Numan, I hear. Yet Reznor also harnessed a "punk" energy to take his mechanical anthems to a whole other level... In comparison, *The Pleasure Principle* only rarely succeeds in offerring such added dynamics to its MS-DOS aesthetics. It's basically a "program" followed to the letter. Chords and harmonies don't matter that much, only the sonic landscapes do. And since the energy is lacking, what do we have left, really?
On an intellectual level, I understand all of this is probably the point of this album, ironically: it's so ascetic, harmonically speaking, so repetitive, and so "radical"--in a way--that some listeners surely can't help being drawn to those "songs". To me, they're more *snippets* of tunes than full-blown ones--vague sketches that rarely go somewhere interesting beyond a couple of hooks here and there. But I get the idea. My gut feeling tells me that those enamoured listeners are more interested in textures than in compositions, and more power to them if they find those sorts of textures in this album. But that's a "power button" I don't feel like I need to push myself. Fans always rant about how "groundbreaking" this record is, but once again, when you enjoy acts such as Kraftwerk or Silver Apples, that adjective sounds a little exaggerated at best. What *really* happened here is that Numan hit the charts with "Cars", and popularized those cold, mechanistic aesthetics for a lot of folks that had never been exposed to them before. Maybe even "rock critics". Which is a very different thing.
That very subject of "Cars" 's commercial success brings me to the main issue I'm having when the time comes to consider this LP as an "essential" one. "Cars" follows "Conversation" in this record, and if you listen to those two tracks one after the other, it soon becomes abundantly clear that they use...
a) The same instrumentation.
b) The same sort of "melody" on synths.
c) The same sort of drowsing pace.
d) The same sort of high-pitched, somewhat grating vocals.
e) And that they can trigger the same sort of boredom, especially since ingredients a) to d) are to be found *everywhere* in the album (save for Bowie-indebted "Complex", with its violins and violas). By the point those two *very* similar track appeared on side 2, I had already given up all hope of getting excited. I was going through the motions, just like Numan does.
The question is: where's the line between radical conceptual drives and pure *laziness*? Musically speaking, *The Pleasure Principle* sounds very lazy, and the need for mechanistic repetition can't fully justify such laziness. Besides, that's a flaw that does not convey the idea of a mechanical force to reckon with anyway. It's a very *human* flaw. Oh, the irony. Understand me: robotic music *must* be repetitive, I get that. But there are ways to be repetitive and yet hypnotize the listeners, instead of lulling them to a muddled sort of slumber. Hypnosis brings you to heightened awareness. Drowsing slumber does not.
By the way, machines are also pistons and turning cogs and spinning wheels. This is how they can get sexy in their very own way. But this machine here doesn't have any of those contraptions. It's basically inert. Sure, that's where a more conscious sort of irony lies--the one conveyed by the album's title, here associated with such wonderfully evocative artwork. I *also* get that this juxtaposition is no coincidence here--that it's part of Numan's thematic "program" and how it relates to tecnological advance and what it does to the human body and soul--how it can actually threaten them. But it's so easy to turn off the screen, stop this album from playing, and get on with your real life. It would be much more interesting--and perverse!--if something in this LP prevented you to do that. Because of stronger hooks. Because of a mesmerizing harmony. Because of a sudden chorus that blurs the limits between man and machine--even if it only does that ephemerally. Lost of other acts pulled it off, even if their sounds are a little "dated" now. So why not Gary Numan?
Mark my words, it's not only the sound or the music that are awfully dated in this record. It's also the whole concept itself. Now we know how much of our lives is deeply intricated with technology. Numan's music actually hearkens back to a time when such deep interaction didn't exist. And by refusing to engage a lot of his listeners through more imaginative music, Numan's efforts look a little pointless and void today. Plus, there's nothing uncanny about his robotic caricature--none of the anthropomorphic features that can make you reflect and ponder about our own mechanistic drives, and none of the emotions we project onto technological tools on a daily basis now. And as a result, the whole endeavor risks turning into an innocuous roleplay--one that isn't really fun, to boot. Listen to Kraftwerk's "The Robots", and you'll probably understand the sort of fun I'm talking about here. In comparison, *The Pleasure Principle* suggests nothing--neither fun nor death drive, nor... real pleasure. It puts you at a distance, just like this cover suggests. But it's too much. And all that's left is an idea. Another reason why Numan's music sounds so neutered and *quaint* to this listener's ears today.
Including this LP in my list of potential candidates for my own ranking, because it's still a cultural milestone (mostly thanks to its commercial success at the time). But I doubt this album will make the final cut. CCleaner will probably have deleted it as a useless file in my Temp folders by then.
2.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 3, and translating to 7.5/10 grade for more general purposes. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 434
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 263
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 136 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 170
Pretenders
4/5
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" LPs, rounded up to 4, and translating to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
Always dismissed that Pretenders' debut as an overrated album, but listening to it one more time, one thing hit suddenly me on the head, and it hit me hard. As dated as it is now, their sound was actuallly the forerunner of a specific strand of the current post-punk revival best represented by a band such as Dry Cleaning, especially on the first side (second side has more "classic rock" charms). Chrissie Hynde doesn't exactly uses the sort of singspeak Florence Shaw uses, but it comes very close. Likewise, the guitars' dry, chorus-heavy textures remind me of Tom Dowse's own six-strings flourishes. And it's like a key finally unlocked that album for me.
Not saying this *fully* sells that debut for me yet, but it's a start, at least. I need to mull over all this. In the meantime...
Number of albums left to review: 433
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 263
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 137 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 170
Otis Redding
4/5
Classic soul record. "My Girl", "Respect" and that cover of the Stones' "Satisfaction" are among Otis Redding's most famous cuts, even though they're not my favourite songs performed by him (plus, Aretha Franklin's version of "Respect" totally erased the original version in popular consciousness). Conversely, "I've Been Loving You Too Long" is a gem I will always cherish.
The rest plays out smoothly--some of the tracks sound a little samey, but maybe my ears are at fault here. I guess four stars is the minimum I can give to such a classic. Yet I would be lying if I said I was overly enthusiastic about *Otis Blue* as a full-length release. It has peaks, but it also has a few valleys...
1965 is also the year Nina Simone released *I Put A Spell On You* and *Pastel Blues*. I know Simone and Redding didn't exactly play in the same league, yet I can't help compare the two here, probably because my obsession about Nina Simone worsened during the last few weeks (listening to "Sinnerman" right now). And I have to say that as nicely done as *Otis Blue* is, it can't bring me to the heavens Nina sends me to. Another reason to only give four stars to Otis' record. It's probably unfair. But it's not more unfair than Dimery and co. ignoring Simone's *Little Girl Blue*, *In Concert*, *I Put A Spell On You* and *Pastel Blues* in their own list.
Number of albums left to review: 432
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 264 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 137
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 170
3/5
A fun listen. The artwork perfectly encapsulates what this LP is all about, part-topical exploration of African-American psyche, part-innocent and childlike groovefest--not exactly firing up on all cylinders, but rather taking its sweet time to evoke the melancholy of urban landscapes through lush instrumentation and generally well-crafted jazzy dirges. As a result, this LP is a treasure trove for any old school hip hop producer looking for samples. Was this album heavily sampled? I don't know, but it should be. I can picture acts such as the Beastie Boys, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul or DJ Shadow having a blast using all those choice cuts...
Two highlights in this record: "The Cisco Kid" and the title-track. The first is built on a enticing vocal hook, complemented by short sequences of four notes that punctuate the whole thing like a contraption stamping bus tickets or metrocards. And the title track is a moving plea sung by clear vocals and enhanced by wonderful harmonies--an indolent description of ghetto life not only conveyed through the lyrics, but through the music as well. Short funky cut "Where Was You At" and slow, bluesy "Four Cornered Room" are also worthy of note--the latter's ambience sounding even fantastical to an extent, as if you were watching the city from a rooftop at night and a UFO suddenly appeared out of nowhere...
Unfortunately, both sides of this LP end with lackluster tracks. For side one, very long instrumental "City, Country, City" doesn't do anything that the title-track won't do ten times better later on--compare the saxophone solos in both songs, for instance: the one on "The World Is A Ghetto" sounds haunted thanks to its film noir overtones, whereas that sax in "City, Country, City" just seems to go through the motions, borrowing a few free-jazz tropes instead, but without using any of the harmonically daring outbursts of that genre. As for closer "Beetles In The Bog", it is an attempt to end proceedings with a rousing chorus, but... to be honest, those "la la la" shenanigans sound a little half-baked compared to similar endeavors by, say, Sly And The Family Stone.
Using Sly Stone as a reference point for this other soul-funk-rock act that War was might be a little unfair to the latter, I'll grant you that. It's like comparing a second-tier sixties rock band with The Beatles: there's no way you can win that round. But *The World Is A Ghetto* is only six tracks long, and when two of them are clear misses (including one that takes up half of one album's side), it takes a heavy toll on the whole thing. You won't see that happening with masterworks performed by The Family Stone. There lies the huge difference.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 431
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 264
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 138 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 170
The Louvin Brothers
2/5
Pay attention, historians. Dimery and co. ignored "early modern" artists as pivotal as Robert Johnson, Lead Belly, Hank Williams or Woody Guthrie to then include this curio, admittedly interesting, but far from sounding as relevant as those names today. I get that using the album fornat to select recordings from the artists I've just quoted can be a little tricky (compilations would be a more apt word). Yet it's a "rule" that Dimery bent a couple of time anyway. So this can't be the only excuse he had here...
On a more "subjective" note, there's a bit of bluegrass in those tunes, but I wish there was *more* of it to make the proceedings a little more lively. Nice harmonies there for sure, and some striking lyrics here and there. Yet I still get bored most of the time. Next please.
Number of albums left to review: 430
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 264
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 138
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 171 (including this one)
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
Was about to dismiss that later Bruce Springsteen album as the sort of delusion hardcore fans of the "boss" usually have about him--read all those five-star reviews: reviewers admit the album is a bit hit-or-miss at times, and yet they can't refrain from giving a perfect grade to it. Even as a hardcore fan of Sonic Youth, Neil Young or Radiohead, I can show restraint when the time comes to evaluate those acts' later releases. So why can't they? Everything post-*Nebraska* can't match Springsteen's early highlights, enough said.
That being said, I gotta admit some of the fans have a point: the first seven tracks of this record are really, really neat affairs. You have soaring choruses, high-class songwriting and production values, plus interesting instrumentation here and there. Inviting the spiritual son of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to perform qawwali arrangements on a track only a few months after 9/11 speaks volumes about the thematic groundwork Springsteen covers here. Those songs are about love, social justice *everywhere*, and healing. And that's another aspect of this record that makes it worth a listen.
I only wish the second part of this LP wasn't so lengthy, with far stellar songs most of the times. There were ways to turn this double-album into a perfect single disc given how things start and end here. Too bad self-editing wasn't in the boss's mind in those days (I have the same issue with supposed "classic" *The River*, by the way...).
I expect this record to grow on me, though. Hence why I put it in my "waiting list". 3/5 for the purposes of this selection of "essential albums", translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3).
Number of albums left to review: 430
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 264
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 139 (including this one)
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 171
Moby Grape
3/5
Moby Grape's debut is not bad per se, but I think there's a good reason only 15 or 16 5-star reviews have been written about it on this app. Plus, the vast majority of the other reviewers gave a 3-star mark to it--and it's a trend towards a precise grading that is actually clearer than for most of the other albums in the list.
To me, this kinda-"meh" global score ties in with something that's always rubbed me the wrong way in this record, as much of a fan of the sixties as I am: it's this debut's cruel lack of catchy hooks and memorable vocal lines. There's nothing in *Moby Grape* that acts such as The Byrds or Buffalo Springfield didn't do better at the time. Heck, there's nothing in this debut that Creedence Clearwater Revival or Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young didn't do *ten times better* no so long after.
Ironically, the next releases by this Californian band were patchy affairs as well, but their highlights were a little more striking at least. It's those sorts of highlights that manage to transcend the times and specific styles in which they were written. But you can find none of them this band's debut--whereas you can find those treasures in so many other acts of the sixties, from the Zombies and the Kinks to the psychedelic "nuggets" found in the famous compilation bearing this name...
There's a yarn going on about Moby Grape and the fact that they had "management issues", and that this situation partly explains why they've been quickly forgotten. I readily believe that story, yet if somebody told me that they were also somewhat *overhyped* around the time of their debut, I would also believe it. They were probably an awesome live act. But when it comes to songwriting and compositions, it seems to me their efforts can't compare with the names I've mentioned up there.
Using this app, I sometimes feel like I'm condoning an unfair competition between thousands of awfully skilled musicians, here artificially gathered to receive harsh blows, mean takes and hair-splitting arguments ad infinitum. But as harsh as my own take about Moby Grape may sound for some ears, I think there's a clear consensus about this band today. As seen from 2023's vantage point, they're an interesting curio. But they don't pack the weight they supposedly once packed. It's when the hype is long gone that scales finally fall from your eyes.
2.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 3. Which translates to a 7.5 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 429
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 264
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 139
Albums from the list I will certainly *not* include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 172 (including this one)
M.I.A.
3/5
2005 is such a strange year for music. There's no overall consensus on the best allbums of that year, really. My personal favorites are records by Broadcast, Mars Volta, Sufjan Stevens, Bloc Party, Why?, Kanye West, LCD Soundsystem and Sigur Rós... Yet as much as I love those albums, I can readily understand why they would not be considered "essential" by a lot of other people--even if I *do* consider them essential.
Apart from that small list of personal favourites, you had some cool stuff by acts such as Animal Collective or Bright Eyes in 2005. But is that stuff "essential" in the long run? The jury's still out on this one. And then you have overrated borefests by Gorillaz, The National or Coldplay (a few interesting tracks here and there, but as whole albums, they're clearly hit-or-miss affairs, in spite of the somewhat delirious "critical reception" of those particular records).
So yeah, it feels that the mid-naughts were a transitional period, as if music itself didn't know where to go next, mulling over its options: go back to the past, just like that recent roots-rock revival? Embrace technology? Reject technology? Slumber your way through that endless string of "landfill indie" acts (most of them British)? This hesitation seemed to affect every style up there, from rap to rock to electronica... In the meantime, listeners with a knack for adventure and groundbreaking proposals had to wait for something truly *new* to come up.
This is the context in which M.I.A. released her debut, and I can understand why it was such a breath of fresh air at the time, given those many "problems" popular music had as a whole in those days. Maya Arulpragasam and her producers were pointing the way forward in a manner that could be equally relevant for hip hop, electronica or indie. A lot of tracks shine in this record--too many to mention them all. And most of those productions were already trying very hard to break the mold of past habits so as to offer something new at last.
That being said, M.I.A. would only *really* up the ante with her next album *Kala*, of "Paper Planes" fame, which is probably the one essential record she ever released. Not that the rest of her discography is not good. It's just that if you take this debut, for instance, it is only a first sketch before the greater picture. Besides, a few tracks in *Arular* are clearly fillers or awkward "experimental" attempts at crafting off-kilter bangers. Horrid "U.R.A.Q.T." comes to mind here, for example. It's those sorts of missteps she avoided for her next release, and the bangers in the latter were even catchier and more memorable than the ones in this debut.
So, well... Don't get me wrong, I still like or even love most tracks in *Arular*. But I'm gonna save some room for more "essential" albums in my own list. There's only eight 5-star reviews about M.I.A.'s debut on this app after all. Sure, there are not many reviews written about it yet, so maybe the album's global score can go higher than this meagre 2.88/5 overall rating.
Yet as much as I wish that global score to go up, I'm not gonna change my own rule of thumb: albums rejected from my own list can't have more than a 3/5 grade. It's a cruel world. I'll boost *Kala* to a perfect 5-star grade instead when it appears on this app (I know it's also in that 1001 albums book). Even though there's not so much that separates the two records, to be honest, apart from a clear upgrade in overall quality...
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 428
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 264
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 139
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 173 (including this one)
Carpenters
1/5
The ultimate tweefest. Not much losing sleep over, really. Or weight.
Sorry, this looks mean, but there's a discrepancy between the lack of intensity I feel about the music on this record and Kate Carpenter's tragic fate as a tortured soul plagued with grave eating disorders for most of her adult life. I know it's quite a dumb take, but that was my instinctual reaction when this album and band popped up today. Not that it justifies such subjective and insensitive reaction. I just can't find any other way to articulate my thoughts for now. But I'm gonna try a little harder for the rest of this humble review.
"Crescent Noon" and "Mr. Guder" are charming deep cuts towards the end, I admit it at least. Appreciated the minor-major modulations of the first, and loved the Bach-inspired flourishes on the second. As for the jazzy tropicalia conclusion in "Another Song" at the very end of the tracklisting, it's too little and too late in terms of genuine flavours by that point, unfortunately. Worse, such a late left-turn doesn't make any shred of sense in the context of the album.
It seems like Carpenters managed to turn the few assets they had into flaws on this one. And apart from a few moments here and there, such as the ones I've evoked up there, this LP goes from corny to downright ridiculous. There are so many syrupy, sacharine tunes in it that I'm starting to get concerned about the sugar level in my blood this morning. And sucking life out of a lively, energetic song such as "Help" speaks volumes about the way you can destroy even the best compositions out there. Terrible, terrible work on an artistic level (even if the performance and production values are admittedly decent).
Rest in peace, Karen. Thanks Richard for giving ABBA an effective starting point so that they could hone their own craft later on. And please, oh please, Robert, take out that LP out of everyone's sight and give us something with real character.
1/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 6/10 grade for more general purposes (5 for musical skills, technical proficiency, competent performances and professional production values + ... 1 for the overall lack of taste!). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 427
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 264
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 139
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 174 (including this one)
Duke Ellington
3/5
This is a classic performance by a jazz giant. But Robert, please answer this: where are Mingus' *Mingus Ah Um*, Miles Davis' *Milestones*, Art Blakey's *Moaning*, Horace Silver's *Song For My Father*, Nina Simone's *Little Girl Blue* and John Coltrane's *Blue Train*, *Giant Steps*, *My Favorite Things* or *Africa Brass*??? Where are they, Robert?
Don't you ever think the *1001 Albums You Must Listen To Before You Die* book has the final word about jazz. Ever.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 427
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 264
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 140 (including this one, at least if I manage to include all the records I've quoted up there in my own list).
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 174
Leftfield
3/5
House music. Well, not the "pure" kind of it that can be found in LFO's "Frequencies" or some of theose earlier Detroit acts. More like a "big beat" version of it.
The Prodigy specialized in "punk" aggro energy, while The Chemical Brothers favored pyrotechnic psychedelics (or psychedelic pyrotechnics, I don't know...). Leftism's own trick was to sprinkle a lot of dub or reggae influences here and there. And it works out. Mostly. Even if that fomula didn't yield tracks that were as successful or memorable as the hits released by the two aforementioned acts.
This album is what it is, I guess. Some of it aged surprisingly well, some of it didn't. I'm rather indifferent to the whole thing, to be honest. It's hard to invest emotions into a style originally meant to point towards the future (see the name of the cut closing the proceedings), which, ironically, sounds so dated now. Yet I can still sense that a lot of imagination has been put into most of those compositions, and that its tracklisting is pretty dynamic, building up to an interesting John Lydon featuring on the penultimate song.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purpose (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 426
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 264
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 141 (including this one, waiting to see of it grows on me later on).
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 174
The Mothers Of Invention
1/5
What's the ugliest part of this album? Some say it's the goofy vocal interpolations. Some say it's the mean-spirited jabs at hippie culture. But I think it's the music. I think it's the music.
Sometimes Frank Zappa was too smart for his own good. Don't get me wrong, quite often, this record is a great parody. I only wish some of the jokes about both "phony hippies" and their square counterparts didn't repeat themselves so much. But I guess such a wearisome repetition is part of the dada-inspired endeavor suggested in the album's title. So, OK.
You see, kiddies, the cultural war that's currently going on in the US isn't anything new, and if this record has one merit, it's that it documents that sixties version of it. Also appreciated the jabs at the music industry, by the way. The line between blatant cynicism and shrewd opportunism has never been all that clear when it comes to Zappa's ethos, so maybe one shouldn't take those jabs at face value. That's still an interesting ambiguity here, one among many others. If you add all those ambiguities up, Zappa's lyrical program might even remind you of a Thomas Pynchon novel, where the author mindfucks with you on one page only to give in to slapstick comedy on another--both acts being actually part of the same program, of course.
All of this is fine and well, but the problem is that if the music in this LP was as interesting as its concept, I would *really* have my fun. Newflash: apart from a couple of moments on the second side, the music in *We"re Only In It For The Money* is dull and ridiculous. Yeah, I know, it's ridiculous *on purpose*. Doesn't change the fact that it's dull.
Of course, a record bearing such a provocative name needs to have "stupid" music in it. But did it need to be stupid *to such an extent*? What works so well in *Freak Out* or *Hot Rats* is that most of the compositions in them are great. Only later, when you finish counting all the layers of irony--slyly sprinkled at first, then bellowed through a bullhorn at the end--that's when you finally understand where Zappa is really coming from. This is how you execute a dada concept well in my book. By giving to your audience different ways to look at it. And incidentally, it's also how you can make your work go through the years better. I mean, who really cares about the structural hypocrisy of American flower power today, apart from us music geeks and historians? That's right, nobody.
So in comparison to other Zappa records that I know of and can appreciate, I think *We"re Only In It For The Money* ultimately falls victim of its own titular program. The album is an important one in terms of "concept", sure. But it's mostly an excruciating listen. And jeeze louise, Zappa can call me "square" from his grave all he wants, god rest his soul, I'm still taking that album business seriously. At least seriously enough to call the man's bluff. For all intents and purpose, *We"re Only In It For The Money* is a dud. At the end of the day, a self-conscious dud is still a dud no matter what.
1/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 6/10 grade for more general purpose, mostly for "historical" importance (5+1).
Number of albums left to review: 425
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 264
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 141
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 175 (including this one)
Radiohead
5/5
Kid A was a dream. A frigid, postmodernist dream experienced by a soul unable to process its own emotions, and holding back any clear feelings it goes through--doubting them, even. It's a dream about modern alienation--a weird dream that might or might not be linked to the influence hypertechnology has upon us all, disconnecting us to ourselves instead of connecting us to others. Underlining this state of affairs at the turn of the millenium, the pardoxical miracle that this record operates is unique. The more feelings in it are repressed--the more their expression is muddled by static, oversaturation and informational entropy--, the more kindred souls can be moved by the failed attempts of Kid A's protagonist to convey their emotions in any recognizable or expected manner. Some of this thematic groundwork is covered by the lyrics, but most of it is expressed through the music itself. And contrary to what happens in Radiohead's other masterpiece *OK Computer*, emotions in *Kid A* surge out of a lack of emphasis, and not through a wealth of it. This is where the oneiric character of the record is pivotal. Disconnection and alienation are so prominent in its aesthetics, everything looks and sounds like a dream. It's not even clear if it's a good one or a bad one.
*Amnesiac* is the companion piece to *Kid A*, recorded during the same sessions. And it feels like waking up from the dream that *Kid A* was. You try to pick the pieces in the morning and solve the puzzle. What was this strange dream about? What is wrong with me? Is there a way out of the labyrinth? You ask those questions to yourself as you're taking the tube to work, you and other commuters "packed like sardines in crushed tin box". Whiffs of the dream come back to haunt you in those waking hours (that other version of "Morning Bell"). You look tired and despondent and worried. And after a while, as you start contemplating the "real" world--real but kafkaesque, dystopian--you wonder if the dream is not actually going on. Except that this time, any sense of elatedness is gone. Only melancholy and frustration remain.
*Amnesiac* is therefore less cohesive, more disjointed than *Kid A* is, but such disjointed aesthetics also serve a purpose in this record. And the album's got highlights every genuine Radiohead already knows about and love. It's got "Pyramid Song", a song for the ages with its strange meter, Escher-like chord progression and tortured wails in the dark. It's got the paranoid, dry and hieratic "You And Whose Army". It's got "Knives Out" and the cyberpunk, Bladerunner-like moodpiece "Like Spinning Plates", with its inverted vocal parts sounding like telepathic brain waves reaching your skull from afar. It's got cyclic "I Might be Wrong" and the brass-band-enhanced cri du coeur "Life In A Glasshouse". It's got soul and anxiety and so many questions for you. And just like *Kid A*, those question marks can resonate in you long after you've listened to the album.
4,5/5 for the purposes of this app, rounded up to 5 here.
Number of albums left to review: 424
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 265 (including this one)
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 141
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 175
Red Hot Chili Peppers
5/5
I gotta admit it, I dismissed this album as an unfairly popular one when it came out. I had loved *Blood Sugar Sex Magic* a few years before, but I had gone on to other genres in 1999. And what I heard from Red Hot Chili Peppers in that year didn't seem aimed at me anymore.
Now, almost 24 years later, I know that it was me who had changed, not the band. And I know I was wrong to dismiss this LP. The first side is one of the most mind-blowing collection of hits that had ever graced a rock album. And the second side is not bad either.
You can still hear songs from this album in many "rock revival" radio stations today. Once again, this could lead a listener to have a bad opinion of *Californication*. But the reviewers claiming that this LP didn't age well don't know anything about young folks in 2023. My 17-year old stepson doesn't buy *everything* from that rock revival thing (mostly aimed at the generation of his parents). But he bought this album. Like, he literally bought it. It was the first vinyl he ever paid money for, and the first one he owned--even before he had anything to play the record on. And he's gonna remember that for the rest of his days. Not so bad for a first buy, eh?
Under that light how can I not give five stars to this record? Beyond my little personal anecdote, it seems obvious that if you select at least two RHCP albums in a list of essential albums, you need this one and *Blood Sugar Sex Magic*, enough said.
Everything else that Anthony Kiedis, Flea and company released is probably less relevant than those two records--even though *One Hot Minute* has also grown on me a little with the years. But I guess that's a story for another day, kiddies. In the meantime...
Number of albums left to review: 423
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 266 (including this one)
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 141
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 175
The Psychedelic Furs
2/5
"Pretty In Pink": it starts with an interesting verse, with some nice instrumentation supprporting a raucous vocal performance. Then a promising pre-chorus surges. And then... No chorus. Then nothing much, really. We're back to the verse, played by a band that basically goes through the motions. The song cycles on itself--a little hypnotic, but not enough to justify all the repetitive patterns in it.
Being a single, "Pretty In Pink" is supposedly one of the most striking tracks on the album. But to be honest, it's a bit of a letdown, as is everything else in this record--especially compared to other post-punk acts around 1981 (Wire, Gang Of Four, Siouxsie And the Banshees, Joy Division, The Cure, Magazine...). As for the supposedly "psychedelic" and proto-punk influences on this LP, they might give some whiffs of originality to the whole thing, but sadly, *Talk Talk Talk*' compositions are nothing compared to the ones of, say, The Soft Boys' *Underwater Moonlight*. Now here was a record owing to prepunk times that could leave an imprint on your mind from the very first listen. Pretty sure that ten listens in, it's still impossible to hum or whistle Psychedelic Furs songs in your shower.
Not that all "essential" albums need to be whistled or hummed. Post-punk / new wave was not *all* about that, considering you could relate The Psychedelic Furs to that early eighties subgenre. But if you can't hum or whistle a band's output, what you need from them is some real groove (Gang Of Four), some cinematic atmosphere (Wire, The Cure), some real tension (Joy Division), or some strong gothic flavours coupled with truly memorable harmonies and a vocal performance for the ages (Siouxsie And The Banshees). And *Talk Talk Talk* has none of those.
To put it in a nutshell, the music in this album is not inherently bad. It's just that it's not "essential".
2/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes. Next, please...
Number of albums left to review: 423
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 266
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 141
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 176 (including this one)
Circle Jerks
3/5
Minor Threat, Black Flag and Bad Brains must be included in such a list as stellar representatives of early hardcore. Can Circle Jerks be added, aside of their similar status? I could say yes, because they were very good as well. But I could say no because 15 minutes is the length of an EP and not the one of an L.P.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translatingto a 8/10 grade for more general pusposes (5 + 3)
Albums left to review: more than 400, I've temporarily lost count here.
Will I include this one in my own list? Maybe.
Nirvana
5/5
Hey 1001 Albums App people! Could we take out the short (and poorly written) one-star "reviews" currently wasting useful space at the top of this section? Please? Apart from the very first example currently heading said sectiob (more on that later), it looks like those reviews were written by lazy ignoramuses, who have only listened to around 60 albums from this app to boot. Click on "view authors", you'll see. Besides, given the dates when such "hot takes" were written, it's obvious that those reviewers never finished this project anyway. Which means I'm not even directly offending anyone here when I call them "ignoramuses".
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for free speech, it's just that there are ways to say you don't like a record without sounding too obnoxious about it. At the risk of sounding a little like an "elitist", I think that you would ideally need some sort of license to get access to a more mature version of this 1001 albums app thing. It would at least prevent licensed users from wasting their time with so-called " reviews" written by folks venting their rage because they can't like what most other people seem to like (see that 4.2 global score). Which, if you pay attention to my exact phrasing here, is the *exact contrary of elitism*.
Not that this phenomenon of edgelords venting their rage against almost-universally- loved music is anything new. You can see the same sort of extremely marginal, hysterically negative reactions for the Beatles' melodies, for instance. Given how much Kurt Cobain was a fan of the latter, he would probably have been flattered by the limited negative attention. Ain't that funny?
Likewise, I have a sneaking suspicion Cobain would have found that *first* one-star review in this section amusing--the one I mentioned in passing earlier. Yeah, it's that "Unplug me, I can't bear this album" thing. You can keep that one, 1001 albums app managers. Because that review has been written by someone taking the project seriously, at least (300 reviews, and still writing them). And also because that one reviewer found a sarcastic and objectively smart way to express their subjective distaste of *MTV Unplugged In New York*.
"Unplug me". It wouldn"t be that surprising to learn that Kurt Cobain once used the same expression when Nirvana prepared for the album--in keeping with the man's dark sense of humour and the disillusioned sort of banter actually heard between the songs on the album. Cobain used the opportunity MTV gave him to create this live folk masterpiece. But he was also wary of the commodification of his music, even if he actively took advantage of it. So "unplug me" would be an apt way to express his misgivings in a self-deprecatory manner.
Obviously, the phrase "unplug me" also suggests Cobain's tragic fate, a ghost that can be sensed everywhere in this record, looming over the proceedings. See that extraordinary version of "Penny Royal Tea" played solo by Kurt, with its barebones instrumentation (guitar + voice), and the maxxed out intensity that comes out of it. Not to mention that eerie modulation from minor to major on the "tonic" A-chord starting each verse. It's a modulation that's absent in *In Utero*'s amplified studio version, by the way.
Turns out this acoustic live album is filled with endearing little details like that. Some of them are small changes to the original compositions, just like the example I've just given. Others are small blunders, like that short bum note at the start of "The Man Who Sold The World"'s solo. But *all* of those details, whether the were "planned" or not, give character to what was mostly a promotional exercise at first. The stars aligned for this recording. It sounds authentic, sincere, serious, restrained--even a little austere at times, and yet lush with a beautiful sonic palette. And it took a genius act like Nirvana to associate those words with the MTV brand.
The setlist also helps a lot. Naturally, Nirvana chose the most logical songs you could play acoustic versions of from their repertoire. In that realm, the highlights are "About A Girl", "Come As You Are", "Pennyroyal Tea", and that incredibly moving version of "All Apologies" right before the last track (more on it later). Yet what *also* struck minds at the time is the good taste Cobain had for the list of bands he chose to cover: The Vaselines, David Bowie, Meat Puppets (with two of them playing with the band here!) and of course Lead Belly. And those acts provide compositions that are easily transcended by the occasion and Kurt's hearfelt performance. Not a lot people remembered or even knew Bowie's "The Man Who Sold The World" before the show. It was a shame, and we can all thank Nirvana they changed that state of affairs, just as they did for each tune they covered for this project.
Closer "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", especially, comes off as a definitive statement from the band. Cobain's raspy vocals are haunting from start to finish in this LP, but here, for that take on Lead Belly's rendition of an old traditional blues, said vocals go to a whole other level of pouring-your-heart-out-to-the-world-and-see-everyone-break-into-tears-in-result. I remember reading that Cobain chose this song to finish the set because he didn't want to do an encore, and that the New York studio audience would quickly understand that, after that last performance, there was no use calling back the band on stage. Mission accomplished, boys. And girl--don't forget Lori Goldston on cello!
My partner often plays this record at home on sundays. It's the sound of us relaxing, but also, I suspect, the sound of her and I reminiscing about our youths (even if we never really talk about it when we play the album). It's very bittersweet. So I would lie if I said nostalgia wasn't involved there somewhere. It's odd, because I'm always pretty defensive about the part played by nostalgia in music, I want to avoid such complacency in my listening habits. But here is a notable exception, I guess.
I know this record stood the test of time anyway, that it's objectively good. So why not go nostalgic, just for this one? Nirvana recorded a folk masterpiece for the ages with *Unplugged In New York. And, well... melancholy, heartbreak and nostalgia are always fitting emotions for such a genre, aren't they?
Number of albums left to review: 421
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 267 (including this one).
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 142
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 176
Red Hot Chili Peppers
4/5
*Californication* popped up a few days ago, and long story short, I wrote that it aged far better that I would have expected it to. So much better that I gave it a perfect grade.
Today, it's the turn of Red Hot Chili Peppers' *other* major work within its discography. Now the question is: did *Blood Sugar Sex Magik* age as well as its younger sibling?
Let's do a track-by-track survey: opener "The Power of Equality" is a prefect rendition-through-live-instruments of the sort of track Public Enemy--quoted in the lyrics--could have written around 1991. The only difference is that Kiedis raps about his "white ass" at some point, emphasizing the importance of black music on him and his band, yet taking into account the risks of cultural appropriation. Nice touch, Anthony. Then, "If You Have To Ask" draws from Parliament/Funkadelic, furthering that visible influence of black culture on the proceedings. Too bad that track is a more meat-and-potatoes affair compared to the opener, as fun as its mock-female-background-vocals are. Fortunately, 3/4-metered "Breaking The Girl" quickly follows, and that waltzy, dreamy-yet-lively cut is still a gem more than thirty years later (with those wonderful flutes sound being a huge part of its timeless flavor). "Funky Monks" then returns to less intense, more conventional funky shenanigans. Bonus points for the way that funk riff is played in such a laidback and sleazy mannner, though, giving it an almost "delta blues" air that's particularly evocative. The song is about groupies, continuing a batch of tunes about Kiedis's sexual obsessions. Which leads us to instantly memorable *Suck My Kiss*. Frusciante's guitar playing is electric in all senses of the word there, as in all the tracks before.
I like sudden 180-degree-turns in my favorite albums, and great ballad "I Could Have Lied" offers me that--even though, in retrospect, the song is just a draft for later hit "Under The Bridge" (more on that later). "Mellowship Slinky..." and "The Righteous &The Wicked" then return to RHCP's usual funk-rock antics, but they only feel like fillers before "Give It Away", as if the listener had to bide their time in a waiting room before the real deal. I agree with most reviewers here, by the way--and I already felt that at the time of this album's release: this CD is too long, and producer Rick Rubin, as great as his influence was on all the wonders of this album, should have pushed for *more* self-editing so as to give birth to a shorter, neater affair.
And so here comes "Give It Away", a devilish jam for the ages. Flea's bassline is obviously insane in it, as is the backwards-played guitar part (?) on the bridges. What a hit! The title track then follows, and it's a slow, sly, devious number, with quiet-loud-quiet dynamics that make it a great heavy track, owing as much to funk as to hard-rock classics. Ballad "Under The Bridge" then concludes that perfect trilogy right in the middle of the album. I don't need to say more about that song, there's a good reason everyone and their mothers know it. And that good reason can be summed up in four words: perfect verse, perfect chorus.
I should probably stop that track-by-track listing now, because nothing after those three back-to-back songs I've mentioned in my last paragraph reaches their incredible heights. Take out Flea's slapped bassline, "Naked In The Rain" would still make a nice lead single for Stone Temple Pilots or even Pearl Jam, though. The mere fact that it's only a deep cut in this record is a testament to RHCP's abilities. And then, after that, there are still very good moments in the tracks "Apache Rose Peacock", "The Greeting Song" and "My Lovely Man"--even though those good moments are interspersed with less memorable ones. As for "Sir Psycho Sexy" the real closer of this album (before that one-minute wink to both Robert Johnson and the band's name), let's be fair: that other homage to the band's former producer George Clinton is obviously a jam that goes on for far too long--even though its psychedelic conclusion, courtesy of that mellotron (?), here coupled with Frusciante's neat guitar riffing, is well worth your time.
I haven't really talked about Kiedis's lyrics in this review. I understand why a lot of reviewers in here complained about its supposed dumb / awkward / hackneyed moments. Yet I think it's pretty unfair to judge Kiedis with the standards you would use to judge Bob Dylan or Kendrick Lamar, instead of the ones needed for Funkadelic's jams and funky moodpieces, for instance. There's a general sense of fun and hedonism in those lyrics that could lead youto dismiss them as shallow banter, sure. But there's also some sudden surges of anxiety or even existential self-questioning. Plus, there are some socially-conscious lines of thought once in a while, in keeping with the large old-school hip hop influence on those songs. And in that context, Kiedis' lyrics still sound diverse, rich and interesting, as "funny" as they look on the page, without the music to support them.
So let me do the maths here: out of the 16 real tracks (not counting outro "They're Red Hot"), you have:
- Five *stellar* numbers
- Around six good to excellent songs
- Around five filler tracks that could have easily been left off on the cutting floor (with the eight other songs from the session Rubin and the band left aside, according to sources--two of which are included in the spotify link, if ever you're interested about them).
So if you take into account the weight of the stellar songs and add a *small* bonus point because of them (plus the fact that a double album can't harbor only highlights anyway), you'd have a 12/16 grade here, translating to a 3.75/5 one for the purposes of this list of essential records. Now add the cultural importance of this commercially successful rock-rap LP, as well as its influence for the rest of the nineties, and I think it's reasonable to round things up to a solid four-star mark (or a 9/10 grade for more general purposes). *Blood Sugar Sex Magik* aged less well than *Californication*, and is therefore one notch under it. But I still think it's an "essential" record.
It's odd to do something as supposedly rigorous as maths for such a jammy and sensual LP. But when you can't think whether a record is "a king or a pauper", maybe you need to channel your subjectivity (and potential nostalgia) through something like maths to be a little more convincing. I very well understand why some folks--especially younger millenials and zoomers--would find *Blood Sugar Sex Magik* quite dated at first glance, and so why they would feel like its inclusion in this list is unwarranted. I'm just trying to suggest one thing to those younger listeners: go beyond this album's excessive length and topsy-turvy tracklist. If you manage to do that, chances are that you'll find out there's still a very good record there somewhere.
Number of albums left to review: 420
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 268 (including this one).
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 142
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 176
The KLF
4/5
Probably one of those instances of "you had to be there at the time to understand". That said, if really you need just *one* example of what a early nineties eurodance version of a rave party should sound like in this list of essential albums, *The White Room* is your best bet here--even if, more than eurodance, what we have here has layers of opportunistic cultural recycling that were actually very British, and so contrasting a lot with those other Italian or German cheesy dance acts around 1990. See the wealth of samples used here, with or without permission: so many winks to popular music of all stripes that it's easy to lose count, from that sample of MCS's "Kick Out The Jams" to this bassline nicked from the Twin Peaks title theme on trip-hop-like "Build A Fire". Here is a concern for richness, invention and callbacks to music history that low-brow outfits such as Technotronic, 2Unlimited or Snap! would never reach for even one second of their equally short career.
So if you stick to what is usually expected from that often maligned genre of popular dance music from thirty years ago, there's no denying that The KLF were masters of their game. Every track on the first side may have all the clichés of that UK Dance Club thing, sure, yet they are so effective that you may feel inclined to bob your head to them, as "dated" as some of those shenanigans are. "What Time Is Love" and "3AM Eternal" are the most striking examples of such an effective way to rob the charts in 1991 and yet still manage to win hearts in 2023 (in a genre that supposedly never ages well, i.e. EDM). Too bad that the version of "Last Train To Trancentral" on the same first side is a more subdued remix compared to the equally slapping single version--as good as this remix is. Had this single version, filled with an orgy of vocoder-laden vocal parts, been included on this side, you'd have a perfect first part for this record.
What will probably go over the head of most listeners is that Bill Drummond and James Cauty were also very sly foxes as artists and "high concept" creators. They first wrote a book about how to hit the charts from the underground *before* managing to do so for real with the singles from this album. Quite a feat that they held their promises against all odds...but it's not even the most interesting part of the picture. See for example what they did with all the money they earned after they hit those charts--it might be a huge surprise for you, either a pleasant or an unpleasant one, depending on your mileage.
But before they burnt all those piles of dough to the ground--yes, you read that correctly--they also managed to:
- create many fake bands to broadcast their music.
- instill a very "situationist" brand of irony to "dance" music that acts like Gang Of Four could only dream of when they injected funk basslines to their post-punk agenda ten years before.
- Record a classic electronic "chill-out" LP named... well, *Chill Out*--which actually inspired a lot of melodies and arrangements in *The White Room*.
- Erase the lines between high art and blatant commercialism, or the ones between "good taste" and "bad taste".
That last point is the most prophetic of their endeavors, foretelling the success of many later acts going from Daft Punk and LCD Soundsystem to more recent strands of hyperpop such as Charli XCX, Sophie, 100 gecs or crazy pop-post-hardcore outfit The Armed. I have a feeling that this recent hyperpop craze, as weird and probably promised to failure as it is, is not so far from rehabilitating The KLF. Only time will tell. But if such rehabilitation happens, I reckon it's gonna happen very soon at least--before the wheel turns again, which is always sooner than later.
All this is fine, but what really saves this album from all those tired tropes about music cycles and "turning wheels" is its far more ambient second side, with all its groovy, cinematic-yet-lvery-aidback cuts such as the title track or "No More Tears". Those songs are stellar, enough said. Subtly layered and subdued and sounding like nothing else, whether at the time or today.
Concluding the proceedings, the mock-Las-Vegas-novelty cut "Justified and Ancient" returns to the layers of irony of the first side, but this time with an extra grain of salt. What if Drummond and Caulty were actually serious here? Us poor sheep will probably never know. All that"s left for us to do is to take that Trancentral Train to the promises of a future of dance music that never really occured--at least not in that exact shape--but one that could still occur yet, if you listen to this the right way. *The White Room* has always had a somewhat nostalgic feel to its rave party antics--a clearly melancholic subtext if you listen to its arrangements an flourishes--and such subtext made it age far better then many other supposed EDM highlights of the same day and age. Not so bad for a record whose sound is supposedly "dated", at least on first sight.
4/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4).
Number of albums left to review: 419
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 269 (including this one).
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 142
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 176
Frank Sinatra
2/5
There are two reasons all those "classic" records featuring Antônio Carlos Jobim (the Getz / Gilberto ones, or this record with Frankie "Old Blue Eyes") all have different versions of "The Girl From Ipanema" and "Corcovado", placing them in a prominent position (either sung by Gil, Astrud or Frank, or played as an instrumental). And those two reasons are:
A) They are great tunes.
B) The other tunes are nice and make for bittersweet-yet-airy soundtrack in your living room... yet let's be honest, they all sound the same, don't they? Same types of chords, same sorts of string arrangements, same laidback or close-to-inert energy--depending on your personal taste for bossa-nova.
One exception for me is "How Insensitive". The orchestral strings there can remind you of the lush melancholy of Sinatra's own "It Was A Very Good Year". But you might elect to single out a different tune, of course. None of them are bad. But it's quite hard to decide which ones stand out. Because most of the songs on this album are still, well, samey.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that one single person in Dimery's team selected all those LPs by Getz/Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto, or Frank Sinatra. And since most of those LPs feel like copycat versions of another album selected by this same person, it gives you the weird feeling that this contributor is an old geezer having a very *narrow* comfort zone--always returning to the same songs featured in one way or another in those albums. Honestly, that way to enjoy music sounds very *boring* after yet another umpteenth version of those tropicalía or music-hall standards. There are so many great songs and so many interesting music genres out there, as Dimery's overall list proves it to us daily. So why always go back to the same old stuff?
I've just read that this LP lost a Grammy to the Beatles' *Sgt. Pepper...*. Yep, the times they were changing fast during the late sixties. So maybe you can include early highlights by Sinatra, Gil, Getz and Jobim in a list of the most essential albums of all time. But including later releases by those admittedly legendary artists is most probably overkill, in my honest and humble opinion. So next, please.
2/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5+7).
Number of albums left to review: 418
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 269
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 142
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 177 (including this one).
3/5
Not as "extreme" as I thought it would be, honestly. This record having one of the lowest global scores on this app, I was already aware of its "reputation" through some of the reviews left here. I was expecting utter chaos. Well, chaos is there, there's no arguing about that. But good music is there too, as "tiring" as said music may be for some virgin ears.
Oh, by the way: wikipedia rants about the supposed "grindcore" and "thrashcore" influences on those Ornette Coleman covers, but I gotta say that those influences sound quite superficial to me. Maybe I'm deaf to them, I don't know, but I'm relatively familiar with those genres, so I don't think I'm talking though my hat here... Indeed, it seems to me that the so-called "punk influences" on *Spy vs Spy* mostly came from the fact that John Zorn was hanging out with members of that scene at the time. But essentially, what we have here is more like an amped-up and sped-up version of free-jazz, which doesn't owe a lot to hardcore punk, except for a few quick, subliminal rhythm patterns once in a while. As a matter of fact, and for the first four or five tracks at least, you can easily link this work to the free-jazz giants of the preceding decades. You just need to add more amphetamines or cocaine to the mix. Symbolically speaking, of course...
Things get even more hectic in the middle of the LP though, somewhere between "Enfant" and "Ecars". Zorn and company are making a mean and wonderful racket there, and aspirin is highly recommended by that point. Yet starting with "Feet Music", Zorn and his musicians let things breathe a little again. The proceedings are not exactly "mellow" there, mark my words--but there's a film-noir dimension to some of those cuts that's, well... interesting. Those last cuts would rather illustrate frantic action scenes, instead of melancholic ones, obviously. But once again, we're not so far from certain other jazz traditions that also hailed form NYC.
Now the real problem with the presence of this record in Dimery's list does not come from the record itself, very ironically. As "weird" as *Spy vs Spy* is, it is what it is--not worse than plenty of other "experimental" recordings out there, and probably even better than many others. No, the real issue stems from the following situation:
a) There's no Ornette Coleman album in the 1001 Albums book. Yet every jazz fan knows how much of a pivotal (and controversial) figure he was at the turn of the sixties. It's a little as if the book had selected an album made out of covers of Bob Dylan without selecting any of Bob's original albums. Including *The Shape Of Jazz To Come* in the book would probably have been enough. Yet, like so many jazz masterpieces--especially in the subcategory of free jazz--said album is conspicuously absent from Dimery's work.
b) I'm no more of an expert about John Zorn than I am one of Ornette Coleman, but I happen to have a couple of friends who know him quite well. I can't say that I've dug any further after the evenings we spent together when they played some of Zorn's works to me (it was a long time ago, and I only have a blurry memory of what the music sounded like). Yet I'm adamant they never told me about *Spy vs Spy*'s existence. When it comes to Zorn's hardcore-free-jazz and film-noir-oriented work, they probably played *Naked City*, with its reference points going from Ennio Morricone's soundtracks to the Cramps and B52s gothic strands of 50s rock. And they surely played excerpts from the "world-music-oriented" collection of "Masada" albums--summing up a lot of the man's overall sense of sonic adventure. Those albums (*Naked City* and the *Masada" collection) have even been the starting point of two of Zorn's most famous side-projects as a group member--side-priojects actually named after those LPs. Which probably proves how important those records are in his discography.
To put it in a nutshell, it appears that Dimmery's inclusion of *Spy vs Spy* is a disservice not only to *one* artist whose name is associated with the project, but to *two* of them, both Coleman and Zorn. Besides, it doesn't take an expert to quickly get that this record is a very poor entry point to know more about those two legendary musicians. It's too "niche", and not much more than an anecdote compared to the greater picture I'm sensing here--once again, both for Ornette Coleman and John Zorn. So I'm gonna have to do my own research elsewhere, I'm afraid...
I'm still giving a 3/5 grade to *Spy vs Spy* according to the purposes of this list of "essential" albums (translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes--5+3). Because I feel like the record's global score is unfairly low, given what it really is and the sort of audience it aims at. Yet I can't argue with the innocent listeners who have been confronted to the album without having the slightest contextual elements in hand to understand the global works of the artists who originated this music, in one way or another. Which is why I don't feel like it's necessary to include this LP is a general list of "essential" albums. Let potentially interested people come to it through other (and longer) paths. Exposing it like this, without any preliminary caution or explanation, is only exposing it to ridicule from the masses. Which is pretty unfair.
Number of albums left to review: 417
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 269
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 142
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 178 (including this one).
2Pac
3/5
What's equally fascinating and unsettling with rivals Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur is how much aware they were if their upcoming, early violent deaths. A lot of rappers brag about that--even though there's no *valuable* reason to brag about such a thing. But the way 2PAC and B.I.G.'s lyrics keep on returning to their own deaths can give you so many cold shudders, retrospectively.
About 2PAC's magnum opus now: the rapper's flow and voice are very often as neat as his lyrics are well-crafted, generally speaking. There's even a close-to-stifling aspect to that tight flow that perfectly conveys Tupac's paranoid persona. Listening to the album, you can sense why a young Kendrick Lamar would be so impressed by this master lyricist.
When it comes to the music and production values, the album is much more of a mixed bag, however. It starts strong, there's no arguing about that, between the effective boom bap of "If I Die Tonight" and "Temptations" to those samples of a wailing blues harmonica on "So Many Tears". Yet after the first four tracks, productions revert to an excess of cliché-laden P-funk gangster rap arrangements and R'n'B background vocals that were already aging very fast by 1995. And if even if you consider those sorts of shenanigans still had clear artistic values at that time, there's nothing in those filler cuts that Dre's productions didn't do better during the nineties, just to take a very famous reference point in that specific subgenre.
One notable exception is "Dear Mama", the platonic ideal of a track where a rapper pays tribute to his mother going through so many hardships to raise her children alone, with an electric guitar sample that's nothing short of iconic. It's the sort of track that other rappers who did the same sort of tribute to their mum--going from Kanye West to Jay-Z--had no choice but to take into account before doing their own spin on it.
Another notable exception is "Old School". another cool boom bap banger with a quite laidback atmosphere to its beats, enhanced by mesmerizing flute samples. There's also a live energy to "Fuck The World" (are those drums *real drums*?--I think they are!), which easily redeems the P-funk clichés in that admittedly second-tier track. And finally, "Outlaw"'s electric piano loops also give an ominous mood to the album closer.
To put it in a nutshell, musically there's a batch of underwhelming cuts in the middle of this LP, but if you have to include *one* 2PAC album in the list, it's probably the one (*All Eyez On Me*'s length makes it a far more difficult entry point to Tupac's oeuvre, but I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies).
In all fairness, it would be a shame not to include at least one album by a rap legend such as 2PAC in such a list.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/5 for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 416
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 270 (including this one)
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 142
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 178.
Judas Priest
1/5
The first track sounds like a neutered version of Mötörhead, without the spark that can make the latter thrilling.
The second track sounds like a neutered version of Black Sabbath, without the spark that can make the latter thrilling.
The third track is a famous single, admittedly catchy.
The fourth track sounds like a neutered version of Van Halen, without the spark that can make the latter thrilling. Or is it a neutered version of AC/DC? Or some proto-Guns'n'Roses? Anyway...
I can't decide if the fifth track is as moving as an old union song, or just plain ridiculous.
The sixth track is yet another dumb compositon by Judas Priest, the ultimate cheesefest hairmetal band. And the seventh. And the eighth. And so on... You get the picture now, I believe.
The stats in this app say I don't like "metal" and "hard rock". Nope, I *can* like those genres. It's just that I hate a lot of albums in that style that the so-called "specialist" within Dimery's team selected. Whoever he is, that guy (he's probably a bloke, right?) just has an awful taste in music.
1/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 4/10 grade for more general purposes (4 + 0).
Number of albums left to review: more than 500 (I've temporarily lost count)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (including this one--many others are more important to me)
Beck
5/5
The review currently topping this section, mentionning Beck's "thrift store hodgepodge aesthetic', is just pitch-perfect. I have nothing meaningful to add to it, except for one thing: that sample of Them' version of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" on "Jack-Ass" is one of the most brilliant ideas the nineties has ever had. And it speaks volumes that, even without that wonderful electric guitar loop, Beck's song is still one of the best folk-rock tracks to be found in a repertoire already filled with so many wonders. 5/5
Number of albums left to review: 414
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 271 (including this one)
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 142
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 179.
Ali Farka Touré
3/5
I'm confused. There's a traditional song called "Diarabi" whose melody I'm head over heels about, and I just *know* for sure that Ali Farka Touré is part of an array of African artists who play it in their repertoire. Yet it's not the "Diaraby" (with a 'y' at the end?) that closes this album, which has a totally different music and overall melody. Can someone explain?
Reading the reviews I hear there's another Ali Farka Touré record in the list, and I hope that:
a) It's got the "Diarabi" song I'm looking for.
b) It's as varied and adventurous as this album with Ry Cooder is, and has as many charming or enticing moments. Mixing American blues and Malian music makes so much sense. But you got tracks on this album that are far more *African*, and they sound good too
Malian music is still a genre I'm not fully acquainted with, though, so I would lie if i said that I found *everything* in *Talking Timbuktu* to be striking, though. But reading the "user's reviews" on All Music (written by listeners who obviously appreciated this LP), it seems that this record is a "slow burner". So I'm gonna give it the full benefit of the doubt here and elect for a neutral grade for the purposes of his list, translating to a 8 grade for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 413
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 271
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 143 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 179.
Nico
5/5
I knew Nico was quite the tortured soul, but it's through this app that I've learned that she allegedly indulged in racist tirades in private sometimes (and probably even did worse than that at one point!). It's a damn shame, because I have always loved her voice, whether with the Velvet Underground or without. But I understand why some folks would rate her one star because of that. Call that karmic balance.
That said, I'm not gonna deny the pleasure I've had listening to Nico's voice for years, even though said pleasure is tinted now. Because that would make me a hypocrite. Few artists can sing out of tune, and in such an idiosyncratic way, while actually *adding* to the songs, and not ruining them. People complaining about her performances in this section should learn that good art doesn't necessarily mean perfection. Frailty and flaws can actually provide a lot of precious emotions to a certain subset of listeners. And dismissing that mere fact as "pretentious snobbery" is quite a paradoxical stance. Snobbery usually pays attention to what's perfect and pristine. And *Chelsea Girl* can't be judged by the usual standards anyway. That's where its peculiar quaint charms lie for some.
Also, I can't help but notice that the vast majority of reviewers who gave this album one star never finished this project anyway. A lot of them used quite hateful words to boot--and, karmic balance or not, those accusations had nothing to do with Nico's intermitent racism in the first place. So, in this case, why all the hate? Well, it seems to me that this app was probably a bit of an ordeal for those casual listeners. Because, yeah, the 1001 album app routinely takes you out of your comfort zone. And unfortunately, you have close-minded individuals everywhere, both in the so-called "plebe" and in the elite. That's life. If you keep the debate in purely artistic terms, who are the close-minded, elitist reviewers, really?
To be perfectly fair, and if it amounts to be accused of being an "elitist' whatever album by Nico you choose for such a list, I would rather have the 1001 albums book choosing *The Marble Index* and *Desertshore* instead of *Chelsea Girl* while I'm at it. Obviously, that would test the limits of those close-minded listeners even further--those two LPs are such *striking* records, far more personal than *Chelsea Girl*, but also more *prophetic*. Like, Nico was the *OG* in those two seminal LPs, the "Original Goth". A missing link between the first "medieval" meaning of the word and its post-punk reenactment a decade later. And this makes her one-of-a-kind as well, as "difficult" as her persona was.
To be clear, I'm not saying that you should "separate the person from the artist" here. You just can't. It's just that sometimes, there's a grey area, especially with relevant performers with a history of mental disorders, and especially when those performers passed away some time ago. I can't listen to Kanye West these days, for instance, it's too much, and probably too soon after the unforgivable horrific words he has repeatedly uttered in public for too long now. But denying the man's impact on popular music in the last twenty years would be nonsensical. Hell, NO, I'm not condoning the dreadful things Ye said, even under the pretext of his supposed mental imbalance. But I'm also stating the facts: if Kanye had never had the impact he has had before, far less people would have noticed the dumb, dangerous "concepts" that spurt forth from his foamy mouth later on. Which means that the man's past artistic accomplishments are part of the sad equation, whether you like it or not.
Nico's impact on popular culture as a creator and a perfomer was far more limited than Kanye, in comparison. But it's there. It's undeniable for people with some knowledge of 20th century music history--so-called "elitism" be damned. You can't "unknow" what you know.
As a consequence, I"m still giving 5 stars for what this album is, that is to say an incredibly original recording, either for the times it was released or for now--and one that ties in with later important developments for both the artist and for "modern" music in general. That being said, it's highly probable that I won't include *Chelsea Girls* in my own list of "essential albums", in spite of that 5-star grading (a very rare exception to the way I use that rating to select my albums). My grade just represents my personal assessments of this record's merits. It won't change its low "global score" a bit anyway. But more importantly, it's important to undertand that I don't want to force my personal assessment on individuals shocked by some of the things found online about Nico. I respect such individuals' sensibility too much for that. And of course, I'm not gonna die on a hill that no one should ever fight for. Ever. Even if Nico's problematic words and acts were not "public", it seems that most witnesses are clear about what they heard or saw. And music, mental heath issues and possible traumatic experiences aside, those reported events make Christa Pāffgen look like quite a despicable figure.
Number of albums left to review: 400
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 271
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 144 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 186
Kings of Leon
2/5
What, Kings Of Leon AGAIN?
Apparently, this LP is not even included in the latest editions of the 1001 album book. Which speaks volumes all by itself.
This one is supposedly the album you must listen to if you prefer a more "authentic" Kings Of Leon, at least compared to their later silly arena-rock era. I'm far from being convinced, though. Apart from the lead singer's peculiar voice (more on that later), there's nothing that's really original or memorable in this record (except from one track--more on that later as well). Some people like to rant about mid-naughts British "landfill indie", and I agree with them that a lot of those rock acts heavily promoted in Britain at that time were underwhelming. Yet few people are talking about US "landfill retro-rock" around the same years. Even if that thing existed as well.
About Caleb Followill's singing, it sure is an acquired taste, yet I have to admit it doesn't irk or grate my ears the way it does for many other reviewers in here. At least his strange drawl and mannerisms give a bit of character to what are otherwise quite bland compositions, without much in terms of harmonic and melodic inventiveness. The energy in this record is decent, but the musical dynamics, either for individual songs or the overall tracklisting, are somewhat botched. And some tracks even seem poorly mixed to my admittedly subjective ears. Maybe it's because it was quite an impossible task for a mixer to know what to do with that peculiar voice. Sometimes a technical flaw can turn into an artistic asset. But things can happen the other way around, unfortunately.
One track stands out, however. It's "Milk", a moody cut with a very original song structure, instrumentation and vocal performance. If only more leftfield tracks like that had been interspersed with the bland riffs and jams plaguing the rest of this record, maybe you would have an LP worth your time. Interesting tidbit: when Lana Del Rey explained in an interview why she quoted Kings Of Leon's name in her own "White Dress", she mentioned that song and how it was related to her memories of the first small apartment she lived in during herearly adult years. If you listen closely to the two tracks, you can even see how "Milk" actually inspired the chord progression and particularly extravagant vocal parts of "White Dress". Another reason to find this tune endearing. And a way to state that I only have benevolent feelings for early fans of the band--it's just that two decades after the release of this record, I honestly can't see the appeal it can have for new listeners these days. You had to be there in those "landfill retro-rock" years, I guess.
Two stars instead of one, then, mostly because of "Milk" and the missed opportunity for a greater album Kings Of Leon had at the time. Which translates to a 7/10 grade for purposes that are more genral than the ones you need to select "essential" albums. Next please.
Number of albums left to review: 399
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 271
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 187
Simply Red
2/5
To paraphrase the best review written about this album on this app:
ATTENTION K-MART SHOPPERS: SPECIAL PROMOTION ON DETERGENTS IN AISLE 4. BUY 2 GET 1 FREE!
Gosh, I can see those horrid eighties haircuts just listening to the many sophistipop songs plaguing this album. I think the radio-friendly "highlights" of this record are the worst for me. All those "Come To My Aid", "Look At Me Now", along with that overplayed signature song "Holding Back The Years". Those tracks are more than decently produced, but the results still sound terribly hackneyed, with overkill-mode synth licks, bland funk guitar riffs, and syrupy, smoochie singing from Hucknall--each of these tasteless elements relentlessly screaming "eighties square" at my poor ears. Speaking of singles from this album, the rapped chorus of "Jericho" is also a cheesefest of unprecedented magnitude. That's a damn shame, because the vocal performance at the end of this track was inventive, layered and technically impressive. But when that finale surged, it was already too late. My cheesometer was already too high. Just as it was high from the very first seconds of "No Direction", an aptly-named song that goes nowhere as it rehashes all the clichés available in the "blue-eyed soul book".
The thing is, as terrible as some of this music is for me, I was *also* often pleasantly surprised by the supposed "deep cuts' of *Picture Book*. And I have to say that I can still appreciate the various styles Simply Red went through, without making any jump between those different styles too jarring overall. This suggests that a lot of thought has been put into the way this record should flow from one track to the next at least. I usually like this sort of dynamics in LPs. And even if most of the music on this one is not for me, I can still appreciate the effort.
One of those redeemable deep cuts is the jazz lounge tune "Sad Old Red", quite a predictable and not overly original track, but at least a welcome change of pace after the stinky opener that "Come To My Aid" is. On a sidenote, I can also respect Mick Hucknall's concern for socially relevant topics. His heart is in the right place, and coupling those lyrics with those sophistipop shenanigans is, against all odds, surprisingly effective.
Yet it's only a couple of songs after "Sad Old Red" that Simply Red *almost* becomes great. First, there's that cover of Talking Heads' "Heaven"--so different from the original version, with its Stax and Motown overtones, that I didn't immediately recognize it. Nice touch, I'd say. I still liked that track even when I didn't recognize which song it was: it sounded like a far older standard, and so the idea Hucknall and bandmates had with this one makes sense, I guess.
Speaking of Talking Heads, "Open The Red Box" is the sort of rigid blues rock / hard funk track could have been written by David Byrne and co at a later stage of their band's career. Those sudden interruptions of the rhythm section bring a tension unfortunately lacking elsewhere on this LP. Which is another nice touch.
Finally, the title track is a very subtle and deeply atmospheric closer that was well worth my time, thanks to its ambient synths and proto-trip-hop sonic landscapes. Wish there had been more leftfield compositions like that in this album, even with an eighties slant.
So all in all, not as downright terrible as I thought it would be, at least *from time to time*. I reckon this app is the most useful when it takes you out of your comfort zone and counters your prejudiced opinions about such and such act. So even if I won't include Simply Red in my own selection, now I can honestly say I gave them a fair try, and that I have nothing but benevolent feelings for old fans of this band. It's not because they have very different tastes from mine that I cannot picture why this record would catch their attention.
2 stars for the purposes of this subjective list of "essential albums", which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general and "objective" purposes (5 + 2). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 398
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 271
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 188 (including this one)
The Icarus Line
2/5
This is what a mix between early naughts retro-rock, Stooges Funhouse-era proto-punk, and nineties post-hardcore should probably sound like. Not that a lot of people really aked for such a mix to exist. Not inherently bad, with quite a few intense moments performance-wise, yet a bit lackluster in terms of hooks and truly memorable moments. Not everyone can have the scenic presence and/or the catchy vocal lines of a Iggy Pop or a Cedric Bixler-Zavala.
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, translating to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 2).
Number of albums left to review: 398
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 271
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 189 (including this one)
New Order
1/5
Never understood the appeal of this one for some listeners, even among hardcore New Order fans (seems to me previous LP "Brotherhood" aged far better, in retrospect). It seemed logical for the band to embrace the club sounds of the late eighties, sure. Unfortunately, the results are underwhelming to say the least.
Two sorts of tracks occur in *Technique*. First there are cheesy discotheque tracks displaying far too many dumb dance rhythms, noodling and repeating themselves with no clear goal in mind. And then there are the more "post-punk" songs, yet they have little or none of the depth that could redeem the self-indulgence of the other so-called "experimental" electronic tracks. This "depth" I'm talking about is the sort of depth New Order had used to great effects for *Power, Corruption And Lies* and parts of *Low Life*, and which allowed them to create genuine moments of grace. And if remnants of this previous creative spark can be found in "Love Less", "Round & Round", and "Guily Partner", they are still conspicuously absent fron the rest, sadly. All that is left is a shallow displaying of sounds and melodies that had either been conveyed better in other New Order Lps, or that are clearly sounding quite ridiculous today, as "hip" and "modern" as those sounds seemed to be at the time.
To put it in a nutshell, *Technique* reminds me of the soundtrack of a dumb TV cop show from the eighties, when the police come to a dive bar (the post-punk cuts) or a night club (the dance cuts) to interrogate a suspect. It's filled with clichés and stereotypical situations. And after the umpteenth rerun of the show, such a scene becomes tiring to say the least.
1/5 fo the purposes of this app, translating to a 6/10 grade for more general purposes (5+1). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 397
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 271
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 190 (including this one)
Bon Jovi
1/5
Can people appreciate the hackneyed music and stupid lyrics of this band *unironically*? Can they? Really???
A 3.28 global grade suggests a lot of them can. Unless it's a joke that went on for too long. The "contributor" to this app, who tried to mock "hipsters" through their review of this album, seems to be in on that joke, for instance. Maybe you've seen that review towards the top of this section? What's your take on it? Are you so easily categorized as that reviewer thinks all of us are? For one, I don't think I am.
The thing is, you don't need to be a hipster to dislike the lame so-called "rock music" that big labels tried to shove down everyone's throat during the eighties, thanks to MTV and heavy radio rotations. At the exact same time, you had truly *great* bands in the underground trying to survive, goddamnit. Calling fans of those underground acts mere "hipsters", especially when it comes to that dreadful decade, is missing the point about who had the real economic power in the music industry at the time. And to put it bluntly, it was not the good guys who had such power--granted that you can find "good guys" in the music industry anyhow, of course. :D
The tables have since been turned, starting from the nineties: the underground acts became prophetic and commercially viable, and hairmetal died a quick painless death, quite fortunately. Once again, one didn't need to be a "hipster" to draw a heavy sigh of relief back then. That's where--all "subjective" feelings about Bon Jovi aside--this reviewer I've mentioned earlier got it wrong: being unable to appreciate hairmetal unironically has nothing to do with being an elitist (otherwise I wouldn't have appreciated the "alternative" nineties as much as I did--after all, most of those indie bands exploding at the time sold a lot of units, didn't they?). No, all empty binary posturing aside, it's only that Bon Jovi's music had a very clear peremption date, as that *other* reviewer aptly puts it elsewhere. Many acts with clichéd reflexes such as this one--hailing from *any* decade--usually don't make it to such a list. And it's because they also had those peremption dates written on their foreheads. And this in capital letters. I can't see why Bon Jovi shouldn't be considered as one of them, their one-time commercial success be damned!
I've given *Slippery When Wet* a fair try, just as I do for every album in here. I have to say, "Livin' On A Prayer" is probably not the most popular song by Bon Jovi *for nothing*: it's got an infectious chorus, propelling guitar parts and arrangements in the verses, and an overall energy that is contagious and fun. I readily admit that this single is good, and that Bon Jovi had a great calling card in their hands with this one. Yet *one* effective single doesn't necessarily mean the album it's from is good or even listenable.
About the other few "highlights" from this LP: even if Sergio Leone, John Ford, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood had been locked in a room for hours, chances are that they wouldn't have been able to create a song with more laugh-out-loud clichés about the wild west than the ones found in "Wanted Dead Or Alive". Speaking of the strange "highlights" in this LP, "I'd Die For You" is also an interesting cut. It's got a nice intro section, as some other tracks have in the album (see the Bach-inspired organ at the start of the album"s opener). Yet in spite of the Bruce Springsteen influence, the main melody of "I'd Die For You" is a little flat. It seems that, contrary to "Livin' On A Prayer", the composition suffers from a lack of contrast between the verses and the choruses. Too bad, I almost thought I could file that tune under the "quite good" tag.
Those two songs are somewhat bearable, at least. Especially compared to the other downright *horrible* tracks plaguing this record from start to finish. By the way, it's quite a feat that those horrible tracks are both famous singles ("You Give Love A Bad Name") and deep, deep cuts that should have stayed buried deep if I had had my say about it (that terrible, terrible "Social Disease", for example--I wish I could erase all memories I have about that dreadful thing RIGHT NOW!).
To put it in a nutshell, it's all very dumb. Dumb hairmetal guitar riffing, dumb hairmetal guitar solos, dumb synths, dumb vocals... Dumb, dumb, dumb. And don't get me started on the lyrics. The meter of those lines is often awful, but it's not even the worst: to wax poetical about such things in the most appropriate fashion, the contents of those lyrics... suck balls. Pardon my French, here. You can't change a leopard's spots, I guess. ;)
I needed just one example of those terrible, terrible lyrics for this review--which I'm writing as I'm listening to the album again. And it seems that closer "Wild In the Streets" has just provided that perfect example for me. Funny how you don't need to look for long to find bad lyrics in this LP, since they are everywhere:
"Joey comes from a sacred part of town /
Where sometimes you talk so tough that your feet don't touch the ground".
What the HECK is that even supposed to mean??? And it's not even the worst example of how bad most of those lyrics are, I can guarantee that.
I've spent two hours of my life listening to this album and writing a review about it. That's two hours from my life that are never gonna come back. Maybe that's the true meaning of the "Slippery When Wet" title. Once you've tread on such mediocre grounds, you're bound to slip on them as you desperately try to find redeeming features that could save the album, to no avail. Sooner or later, you end up falling, and find out that it was all a waste of time.
Hope I didn't waste yours with this lengthy review. Thank you for your attention, and have a good day.
Number of albums left to review: 396
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 271
Albums from the list might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 191 (including this one)
David Bowie
3/5
I'm as much a fan of Bowie as everyone else, yet I feel Dimery's list missed albums in his discography that are far more striking than this one. *The Man Who Sold The World* immediately comes to mind here, but I'm sure there's a couple of other LPs missing in the 1001 Albums book--even if the "classic" ones, such as *Ziggy Stardust*, *Low* or *blackstar*, are obviously there.
About this peniltumate album, it's a very nice throwback to a lot of different phases of Bowie's legendary career. It's just that *truly* memorable moments in it are scant. Besides, the real genius of Bowie never resided in him looking back, but in him looking towards the future so as to craft genuinely groundbreaking art. And this is exactly what he did with *blackstar*, right after this one. The fact that David left us a few days after the release of that incredible record--so leftfield and uncompromising, and yet so moving at the same time--is the ultimate piece of evidence he will never be forgotten. But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3).
Number of albums left to review: 395
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 271
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 192 (including this one)
Sepultura
2/5
Per Wikipedia: "Arise is considered Sepultura's finest hour among longtime fans." Guess I'm not one of those hardcore fans, then, even though I love *Roots*. There are music genres whose true impact can mostly be measured through albums that manage to go beyond their target audience. In doing so, those albums do not only popularize said genres for the general public, they also inject outside energy stemming from other styles into an act's repertoire, thus widening that act's scope and sound palette. In the metal overall "umbrella" genre, such albums are Sepultura's *Roots*, Metallica's black album, System Of A Down's eponymous debut and/or *Toxicity*, Gojira's *From Mars To Sirius* or Mastodon's *Leviathan*. Even Van Halen's debut can count. Unfortunately *Arise* is not in that league. In retrospect, it's only a rough draft or an early sketch of the increasingly greater LPs Sepultura would release after this one. Namely *Chaos AD* and *Roots*.
To be a little more specific, the reasons *Arise* is not really an "essential" album--at least for the whole metal genre--are manifold. There's some effective guitar riffing in this record, yet the latter is still a by-the-number crossover effort between trash and death metal. The outside influences that would make Sepultura great after this LP (latin rhythms and "industrial" sonic landscapes) are not yet fully digested here, since they're mostly present through those short dark ambient interludes between the cuts. Don't get me wrong, those interludes are interesting for sure. Yet they're still the equivalent of passing footnotes compared to the main "text" of this album.
All of this has already been covered by many other reviewers in this section, so I'm not gonna dwell on those potential shortcomings. Yet there's one complaint about *Arise* I haven't read in the reviews when I browsed though them: indeed, no one seemed to take issue with Max Cavalera's vocals, which surprised me quite a lot (not counting the reviewers acknowledging they're allergic to trash or death metal anyway--they can't understand those sorts of vocals *at all*, and readily say so). Honestly, and as open-minded as I can try to be, for me Cavalera's short growls sound like constipated out-of-breath rants in *Arise*, at least compared to the sheer force and brute energy his voice would then acquire in Sepultura's subsequent albums. What we have here sounds too much like trash-metal 101-run-of-the-mill grunts instead, often awkwardly uttered and placed compared to the rhythm section (maybe a sign that Cavalera had not yet mastered English accentuation back then). Underwhelming to say the least. And since neither the intended idea for the vocal lines nor the lyrics are very sophisticated, the overall effect is quite tiring as far as those grunts are concerned.
Not that I necessarily expect "sophistication" from the different subgenres Sepultura is tackling with... But if your performance doesn't sell the whole deal vocally speaking, there's not much left to get excited about with such overall lackluster results. So-called "hardcore fans" can say I'm splitting hair here, or that I "can't understand metal" as well, I don't care. I'm pretty sure that most of them are still very aware that *Chaos AD* and *Roots* are "objectively" better records than *Arise* anyway. Heck, a lot of those fans using this app already say so in their reviews, don't they?
2/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 394
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 271
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 193 (including this one)
Shuggie Otis
5/5
It's been a long time since this app has turned me, head over heels, into a fan of an artist I had barely heard of before. And it had to happen with Shuggie Otis. I only knew that Shuggie was the son of impresario, songwriter and musician Johnny Otis, of "Hound Dog" fame, but I didn't expect to immediately fall in love with this very, very special album. "Inspiration Information" is indeed a one-of-a-kind mix between progressive soul, enticing jazz dirges, psychedelic flourishes and proto-acid jazz instrumentals with cheap electronic rhythm patterns, all of this in 1974! "Aht Uh Mi Hed" is a ballad for the ages, which sees Shuggie using the hypnotic early drum machines once used in *There's A Riot Going On* so as to here create something smoother and far more delicate than what Sly Stone had created on his side. Those strings in the bridge section sent shudders down my spine right away. It's a shame this gem is not as well-known as it should be.
The second side mostly comprising instrumental cuts is quite hypnotic as well. I would even dare to say that through this second side, Otis crafted the sort of timeless experimental split album that Bowie released not so long after. Under that light, *Inspiration Information* would be like a soul/funk version of *Low* or *"Heroes"* somehow--it's just that here the template is African American music instead of Glam Rock/Krautrock.
At 30 minutes, this album is very short, but if you buy the 2001 reissue, you have four extra tracks from Otis' previous LP *Freedom Flight*, and they are gems as well--especially the 12-minute jazz odyssey that its title track was. But even without those four extra tracks, chances are that *Inspiration Information* is well worth your time if you're
at least a little interested in progressive soul. Adding this great, great album to my list of essential keepers. And buying it right away.
Number of albums left to review: 393
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 272 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 193
Sonic Youth
5/5
Sonic Youth's mix of no-wave, post-punk, noise-rock and bubblegum pop was one of the best things that has ever come out of the otherwise tasteless and overproduced music released during the eighties (generally speaking). And Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo's guitar work melding harsh dissonance with sudden transcendent melodic surges has been influential for decades to come. Contrary to what deniers would have you believe, Moore and Ranaldo's off-kilter tuning and idiosyncratic interplay never stemmed from an art-for-art-sake empty posturing. It was aimed at creating the best songs they could be written in the overall genre they had elected to play. This is probably why Sonic Youth left such an immense imprint, and how they popularized a vocabulary that is still vastly used throughout many strands of "rock music" played today. You can't beat that sort of legacy--itself drawing on older seminal NYC acts such as The Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls, Richard Hell And The Voivoids or Television. Anyone refusing to give Sonic Youth this status doesn't know their music history, period. That doesn't necessarily mean you should enjoy their music at all cost. But you got to take it into account, at least.
*Goo* was released after their breakthrough album *Daydream Nation* (not my absolute favorite record of theirs--that would be *Sister*--yet a seminal one in its own right). It was the LP that saw Sonic Youth jumping from the independent label SST to the major label Geffen (influencing none other than Nirvana to make the same jump from Sub Pop to Geffen). At first glance, it seems that this jump had softened some of the band's rough edges--with more hazy, almost shoegazy soundscapes resulting from that transition into the mainstream. Yet make no mistake: artistically speaking, the band had not "sold out". They had only refined their aesthetics here, just enough to make it palatable for a new generation of kids hungry for "alternative" adventures, but never losing the plot they had started writing ten years before.
Highlights abound in *Goo*: "Dirty Boots" and "Tunic" are enticing motorik cuts giving a great start to the album, for instance--drummer Steve Shelley's drive is infectious in both of them, Thurston Moore's vocal performance on the first is equally menacing and seductive, and Kim Gordon's singspeak on the second brings a hypnotic and iconic flavor to the proceedings. Those two songs are fuzzy and welcoming for sure, yet they fully retain the essence of the band Sonic Youth had become during their last three full-length releases: an art-rock powerhouse subverting pop songwriting to turn it into something greater. See also the effortless cool of "Kool Thing", the tongue-in-cheek frenzy of the title-track where Gordon winks at teenage girl-groups, the existential malaise of Ranaldo's "Disappearer"--ending in a frightening cyberpunk drone maelstrom--or the near-hardcore-punk mayhem of closer "Titanium Exposé".
With *Goo*, Sonic Youth stepped in the second phase of their career, finally reaping what they sowed for so long before. The nineties were ready for them. But truth be told, it was only because they had paved the way for said nineties, being already part of a small bunch of acts (Dinosaur Jr., Pixies, Hüsker Dü, Mission Of Burma...) that had basically *created* that next decade all by themselves. That's how important this band was, and still is today for music at large. And this more than ten years after Moore and Gordon parted ways...
By the way, here are the Sonic Youth albums I would select my own version of the "1001 Albums You Need To Listen To Before You Die", along with the grades I would give them if I had to establish a list of "essential" LPs:
EVOL (1986): 4.6/5 rounded up to 5
Sister (1987): 5/5
Daydream Nation (1988): 4.6 rounded up to 5
Goo (1990): 4.5 rounded up to 5
Dirty (1992): 4.7 rounded up to 5
Washing Machine (1994): 4.8 rounded up to 5
After all, when in the original book, you got five or six albums by Elvis Costello (half of which were clearly underwhelming affairs), I can't see why I wouldn't please myself for my own ideal book. Costello is obviously a talented musician and songwriter. But no one in his right mind can say he anticipated the future through his music. Not even the writers of the original 1001 Albums book.
Number of albums left to review: 392
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 273 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 193
Metallica
5/5
Classic thrash metal album by the originators and masters of the genre. The assets of this one are too numerous to be all taken into account in a short review: off-kilter time signatures, dark subject matter for the lyrics, some "progressive" moments mixed with full-blown agressive sequences, a very dynamic tracklisting... James Hetfield's vocals are an acquired taste, yet they're here noticeably better than on Metallica's other classic LP *Ride The Lightening* (and they're not yet burdened with the man's hicupping vocal tics on subsequent releases). As for "Orion", it is the cream on the cake: an extraordinary ambient twofold instrumental sending this legendary thrasher band to the stratosphere and beyond.
The stats of this app say I don't like metal. Nope, I've warmed up to it a lot in the last decade. It's just that I don't exactly see eye to eye with the metal selections in the 1001 Albums book. There are not enough recent bands, and too many cheesy examples of the genre during the eighties--either lame acts such as Judas Priest, or clearly underwhelming records by musicians that had otherwise mastered that style elsewhere, like Metallica's own *... And Justice For All*. But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies... In the meantime, it's great that most people can agree about *Master of Puppets* at least.
Number of albums left to review: 392
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 274 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 193
Animal Collective
5/5
The contrast between the first two reviews currently topping this section is hilarious. Personally, I feel like eating an apple this morning, instead of digging my brain so as to find a clever line. Sure sign that I will give this album a 5/5 grade--truth be told, I've loved it for a long time now, even if I remember how dumfounded I was by it at first, when it came out in 2009.
Not that the other review panning this record isn't smart in its own way. Yet I feel like using your intellect to judge *Merriweather Post Pavilion* will never do it justice anyway. This a communal, instinctive, trance-like party album. You need to let go to "get" its peculiar dynamics, hence why so many folks talk about drugs and being high in their reviews. Not so many records work like that in the 21st century. You usually need to return to the 60s and the 70s to find such brilliant experimental pop records, sonically daring, yet also paving the way for promising popular developments in the future. I know AC themselves would probably fret a little about the obvious references (they went down into rabbit holes far more obscure than the names I'm about to drop), but think Beach Boys, the 13th Floor Elevators or The Seeds with 21st century sounds (most specifically electronic when it comes to *Merriweather Post Pavilion*).
There are too many highlights in this LP to mention them all. "In The Flowers" is a gem--a telluric opener whose rumbling rhythm evokes ancient deep forces of the earth ; "My Girls" is obviously one of the catchiest, most endearing tracks Animal Collective has ever written--one where it's easy to relate to the feelings of its narrator wishing to settle with his family at last ; the final vocal climax in "Also Frightened is a magical moment--it feels personal and heartfelt, and yet in keeping with the psychedelic mysteries gracing this LP from start to finish ; and "Brother Sport" is a riotous closer that leaves a lasting impression long after the album is over
Funny coincidence: last week, I have interviewed Animal Collective's Deakins and Geologist for a music website I write for. Their latest album *Isn't It Now?* has just been released, by the way, and if you enjoyed *Merriweather Post Pavillion*, check it out, it's one of their best LPs in their twenty-year+ discography. We didn't really discuss this 2009 breakthrough record the 1001 Albums app has selected for me today--Deakins didn't play on it, he was on a sort of amicable hiatus with the band at the time (all the band members have done this at some point or another during AC's career, an open-door philosophy that is quite rare in the music business). So I didn't feel it was appropriate to mention said record during the interview. And we didn't have a lot of time on our hands for the interview anyway...
That said, what I took away from this moment I shared with two of the band members is that they're never been the trendy hipsters some of the reviewers see in them when you browse through this section's reviews. Today's trends being very different from the band's adventurous knack for noise, hectic surges, and goofy moments, I'm not so surprised by the current low global score they received in this app. But I'm confident the wheel will turn again and that they'll find fans in the next generations.
So yeah, past trends can't fully explain Animal Collective's appeal, whether back in 2009 or now. The topics and moods conveyed through each of their records indeed follow their progression from young adult artists to middle-aged ones--it all seems very sincere, and devoid of any calculated thoughts about hypes and fashionable sounds (Pitchfork's usual raves about them be damned). They're just doing their thing, and since their brains are wired in a very idiosyncratic manner, the results have always been off-kilter for a lot of casual listeners. Yet once you dig a little further, beyond all the unexpected layerings and weird arrangements, you can sense a real heart beating in most of the band's songs. It just takes a little time to "get" it somehow. But once you get it, this never gets old, believe me.
Number of albums left to review: 393
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 275 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 193
Pink Floyd
5/5
A classic album by a classic band, and the musical equivalent of a Salvador Dali or a Giorgio De Chirico painting. Oneiric sonic landscapes, plus the anthemic folk ballad that the title-track is. The four guitar notes of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" are of course iconic, and they lead to a world that's part-wonderful-dream, part-anxious-nightmare.
I remember discovering this album in my uncle's record collection thirty years ago. I was not the same kid after that. At the time, I didn't understand that this album had a very precise--if slightly obfuscated--thematic / autobiographical intent. I had not heard of Syd Barrett yet, you see. But I could sense that a ghost was looming over those songs all the same.
Little did I know that some ghosts could still roam this earth as officially 'alive' human beings, and that the one haunting this LP even had a name. Yet this didn't matter, because the music had already whispered said name into my ears. It sounded like gushes of wintery wind blowing over the plains of madness, both desolate and breathtaking in their surreal beauty. It sounded like watches melting on the branches of forlorn trees, or like a radio station picking up AM waves from the last radio station on Earth after the apocalypse--whether a personal or a global one. In other words, it sounded like Pink Floyd writing their prog-rock legend inside their listeners' mind, once again.
5/5, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 392
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 276 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 193
Curtis Mayfield
4/5
Groovy, sensuous, topical and... cinematic of course. It's not often that a movie soundtrack is one of the most defining statements left by a singer-songwriter during his carreer. But it's the case for *Superfly*, by Curtis Mayfield.
4/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4)
Number of albums left to review: 391
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 277 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 144
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 193
Don McLean
3/5
I was expecting a cheesefest, yet some of the songs on this LP are surprisingly good. Of course the insanely famous title track--a nostalgic epic about rock'n'roll pioneers--is deservedly iconic and catchy. Yet it's songs like "'Till Tomorrow", "Vincent" or "Sister Fatima" that just might make the album a worthy addition to this list. Even more impressive (and highly unexpected) is the very dark tone of the last two tracks: McLean's vocal performance is still a little hackneyed on "The Grave", sure... but gosh, what an effective and moving song about the horrors of war ; and that short cover of the biblical anthem "Babylon" is a mesmerizing mystical capper for this LP...
Obviously, there's still a lot of trite or quaint moments in this record that could be taken quite derisively by this listener (all of them in the middle of the album). Yet I have to admit that the dynamic way McLean went from one mood to the next surprised me here. 3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 391
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 277
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 145 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 193
Thelonious Monk
5/5
From the disonnant hook of the title track to the vibraphones-enhanced lush textures of the sensual "Pannonica", this album is indeed brilliant. Dimery's list missed many jazz masterpieces. I'm glad it didn't miss this one.
Number of albums left to review: 390
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 278 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 145
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 193
Marvin Gaye
5/5
What's going on?" There's a masterpiece going on.
Of its time, sure, yet also ahead of it on so many counts. When you listen to this record, you can sense strands of future music genres--trip hop, neo soul, and even hip hop, at least through the lyrical "program" displayed in the album. And the ecological message aged particularly well. Unfortunately, I would even add.
The only (small) issue I could have with this album is that it's quite "one-note" (a flaw that many Marvin Gaye releases from the seventies have). But if you take it as a single topical "suite", instead of a batch of songs, it's easy to understand why Marvin was right to never veer off course.4.5/5, rounded up to a perfect 5 grade.
Number of albums left to review: less than 400 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me)
Fats Domino
3/5
You can't really hate this. After all, the man is a legend, and "Blueberry Hill" alone should justify a slot for Fats in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame.
That said, as much of a rock pioneer Fats Domino was, there's nothing in the five other songs from this record available on Spotify that can really surprise you (maybe I should dig further to find the others, but honestly, I've got enough music on my plate right now). Good soundtrack for a night out at the diner, sure. But playing this in your living room?
To be clear, I know you also need to put those songs into historical context. But even if I do so, I still doubt they can beat the fierce competition of the ones played by subsequent key artists who flourished in that early rock'n'roll genre. Little Richards was far more extravagant and riotous, paving the way to later stars such as James Brown and Prince ; Chuck Berry was a killer guitar player and amazing songwriter, and he left us with far more than *one* all-time classic ; and as white as a linen as he was, Elvis' performances and vocals made him the stuff of legend--see also the strings of staples he left us with, just as Chuck did. Speaking of "whities", I also find Buddy Holly's tunes catchier, more memorable, and more original in the long run. And if Bill Haley was not exactly the real deal, the production values on his hits was far more dynamic and effective.
So... slot number 6 for Fats? You tell me. 🤷♂️ After all, number 6 is still ahead of Gene Vincent, Bo Diddley, Eddie Cochrane and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Those songs are quite endearing, don't get me wrong. But as far as *albums* go, well, Fats wouldn't be the only legendary artist to shine more through single tracks than through LPs. 3/5, translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 388
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 279
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 146 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 193
Hole
5/5
Anthemic powerhouse of an alternative rock album, in a year (1994) where there was *a lot* of competition. Don't have much to add to the other positive reviews in this section--some of them perfectly explaining why the record is great. Melody-wise, performance-wise, theme-wise, *Live Through This* is just pitch-perfect---from the vicious, viscuous chords of lively opener "Violet" to the equally telluric and sardonic closer "Rock Star". 5/5.
A quick note here: it's just simply mindboggling when you read the reviews about this album on this app and you realize that a lot of reviewers admitted they didn't get interested in Hole before for some sort of prejudiced reason they had against Courtney Love--a divisive figure for sure, but not always for the good reasons. I'm glad most of those reviewers changed their mind (lots of 5 and 4 stars from them), but still--seems like the feminist topics this album deals with are still relevant in 2023. Sadly.
Number of albums left to review: 387
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 280 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 146
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 193
John Lee Hooker
3/5
Take out the eighties cheesefest with Santana that that the title track is, and then that rather hackeneyed version of "I'm In The Mood For Love" sung with Bonnie Raitt (never was a fan of the by-the-number nature of the song anyway), and what you have is a nice later album by a legendray blues artists, which sounds increasingly authentic the more you dig further. Can't personally select it as an "essential" album given the two misfires that open it, though. An essential album can't be introduced by stinkers, I'm afraid. 🤷♂️
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purpose. (10 minus 2--the first two tracks always weigh heavier when you take into account a tracklising).
Number of albums left to review: 386
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 280
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 146
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 194 (including this one)
The Divine Comedy
2/5
I love many albums by The Divine Comedy. On my shelves, I have the debut *Liberation* and the sophomore LP *Promenade*--with its gorgeous minimalist string orchestrations inspired by Philip Glass and Michael Nyman. I also own their commercial breakthrough *Casanova*, the indie-rock, Radiohead-inspired *Regeneration*, and their real true masterpiece *Absent Friends*. My partner also owns *Bang Goes The Knighthood*, because she's much more of a fan than I am, even though she doesn't collect albums. Yet I would lie if I said I know that later very well...
So I'd say I'm more than "open-minded" when it comes to Neil Hannon's *oeuvre*. Yet I don't have *A Short Album About Love*. I've always considered that "rock critics" overrated that one, expecially compared to later, more consistent albums. You can bet your boots that if Hannon had released that project *after* *Absent Friends*, most people would have forgotten it by now. It's one of those records where Hannon crosses the line and becomes quaint, boring and hackneyed, musically speaking. The blame doesn't lie in the concept and the wonderful production but in the overlong compositions, clearly lacking the lively dynamics of the best The Divine Comedy songs. Therefore, and as "short" as it is, that album feels like it goes on for an hour. So, nope, not this one.
2/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5 +2). Next, please...
Number of albums left to review: 385
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 280
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 146
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 195 (including this one)
Pet Shop Boys
3/5
Very gay for sure. And very cheesy.
Yet very memorable lyrics. And very witty one-liners.
Also, very sophisticated chord progressions.
Yet very unnecessary inclusion in the original list when there's already *actually* in it (and also, I think, *Behaviour*).
Very bummed to say so.
3/5 for the purposes of this very list. Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more very general puuposes (5 + 3).
Number of albums left to review: 384
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 280
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 146
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 196 (including this one)
Pentangle
1/5
I think I like Fairport Convention better. Far better, actually.
What else do you want me to say? It's skillfully played and sounds decent at first, generally speaking. But when that humourless mimicry of a medieval/gregorian chant turned up by track four, I couldn't help rolling my eyes up to the back of my head. Same with the overaffected tones of that lead singer. Who can listen to that shit seriously in 2023??? At least with Fairport Convention / Sandy Denny, you had many moments filled with genuine, tangible emotions. Likewise, the much-maligned The Incredible String Band (much-maligned on this app, at least) could display off-kilter psychedelic moods going beyond the occasional mandatory late-sixties sitar--giving some of their tunes a potential fresh flavor today. In comparison, most of *Basket Of Light* sounds like aimless noodling and empty exercises in style. It's biteless, tasteless, and harmless. Utterly boring record.
Nice glockenspiel arrangements, though. I wish I could erase everything else, and only keep those. :D
So, just like that other reviewer's wife, I roll my eyes and turn away. I'm aware that Bert Jansch is supposed to be a legendary British folk artist, but I'll try my luck with him on a solo album, I guess...
1/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 6/10 grade for more general purposes. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 383
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 280
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 146
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 197 (including this one)
Christina Aguilera
1/5
Christina Aguilera's performance goes through two modes for the supposed "bangers" found in this release: loud, and EVEN LOUDER. And her half-assed attempts to go to any other mode on less showy cuts often fall flat.
Apart from that, you're subjected to the usual mid-naughts r'n'b shenanigans that made Beyoncé famous. Hilarious how many songs on the first disc (more on the second list later) are trying to copy the formula of "Crazy In Love" without ever managing to leave a somewhat similar imprint in the listener's mind. The formulaic songwriting is not solely to blame here: even in her less artsy pre-*Beyoncé* and *Lemonade* era, Beyoncé could sometimes offer performances that were way more dynamic than the exhausting "screaming-your-lungs-out" routine Aguilera goes through here. Here you just want the singer to buckle up, so gratuitously over-the-top her vocals are. Black Eyed Peas are masters in subtlety and humility compared to her. Which speaks volumes. Unnecessary LOUD volumes, of course.
Going back to Beyoncé, *Back To Basics* is also some sort of early precursor to *Renaissance* in the sense that it supposedly aims at paying homage to older music styles. *Supposedly* because, here, contrary to *Renaissance*, such suggested aim is only a promotional rant that was learned by heart by PR sycophants at the time of the album's release--and this so as to artificially give identity to a project that was cruelly lacking one. There's absolutely no real musical substance to such a claim apart from a few discreet, hackneyed arrangements that poorly aged on certain songs. Some interesting artists, like DJ Premier, come to collect a check once in a while (the man has to pay taxes, like most other people), and if such contributions are decent, they're never mind-blowing. Those few features never affect the 100% commercial intent enough anyway. This thing stinks of money badly spent from start to finish.
The overall effect of Aguilera's music is therefore massively *generic* on the first disc. Pre-*Renaissance* equals "medieval" here (see what I did?). Everything sounds dated without having any chance of even acquiring some quaint charm decades later. *Who* remembers this album overblown to ridiculous proportions today, really??? Who really feels like they have to go out of their way to point out how important this record is for music history at large??? That's right, nobody--except maybe the 1001 Albums book! Back in 2006, *Back To Basics* had a clear peremption date written in capital letters on its forehead. Once an album cycle was over, it was on to another commercial one. It's simply, utterly risible.
Did I mention that this album is also f*cking long? Yeah, I told you there's a second disc earlier, didn't I? And somehow, that second disc manages to be even worse. The supposed intent for this one is to hearken back to a 20s, 30s cabaret / jazz era, yet the result is only a horrid simulacrum--nothing showing true artistic flair in it. That so many people with obvious musical skills and technical abilities could be involved in this record and fail to see how its contents could be so grating and misguided is just mind-boggling. Unless, as I said, they came to collect a check.
One last thing: the *title* of this album. It's just hilarious that people in Aguilera's entourage (producers, assistants, label executives, syncophants...) failed to suggest to her how stupid that title was when you consider the *bloated* thing that the final product is. That so many people seemed to have missed such a cruel irony can only trigger snarls and smirks from anyone serious enough about music and how it's supposed to uplift souls through anything other than hypocritical PR plans. *Back To Basics" is not even "basic". It's an overlong, punishing experience that manages to be both dumb AND pretentious. It's a rare combination, and maybe a reason to remember it in 2023. But only as a cautionary tale for pop music. It might be OK to have commercial intents at times. But please, oh please: when your avowed reach exceeds your grasp in such blatant manners, it's maybe time to shift gears and do something else. Or maybe even consider another career. All the money in the world can't buy taste and a little honesty with yourself. *Back To Basics* should mean that first, and everything else later.
1/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 4/10 grade for more general purposes (3 + 1). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 382
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 280
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 146
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 198 (including this one)
Ray Price
2/5
The first concept-album of Country and Western music, Wikipedia says. The soft, subtle slow-rock overtones of the title track and "The Wild Side Of Life" are a nice touch. Great work on the pedal steel guitar as well, with a pristine sound to it. And a nice and smooooooooth vocal performance by Ray Price.
Apart from that, well, the picturesque lyrics laden with clichés about life in the sticks--heard a million times elsewhere--are tiring to say the least. And so are the honky tonk aesthetics, here polished to a fault. You need to infuse way more different influences to this mix to make it sound interesting today. Willie Nelson did it. Johnny Cash did it. Comparatively, Ray Price just followed a template that was well-established by 1963.
So this record is decent, but there's no real thrill in it. Maybe as a soundtrack for a scene in a movie taking place in the Deep South or in the Rockies, some of those tunes could become endearing. Yet for now, my screen is as black as those nights Ray Price celebrates within this album, unfortunately.
2/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 2). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 381
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 280
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 146
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 199 (including this one)
Beyoncé
5/5
"Music made by committee for hairdressing salons" says that other review. There's some truth to that hilarious negative take, I'm not gonna deny it. Yet if that's the case, that means that Beyoncé's salon is the most extraordinary hairdressing salon that has ever been built on the surface of this earth--with inviting nooks and crannies where all sorts of fun and kinky stuff may happen ; with lush decorations and night club lights that can elicit the most relaxing bliss in your mind or conversely thrill you enough to dance all night long ; with endearing memorabilia hung on the walls relating to Beyoncé's life course from Houston to New York; and with time-travelling portals transporting you to the most fascinating hip places, from NYC to Paris--all of this run by young nymphs and ephebes doing all they can to make you feel comfortable. This sort of salon is worth visiting, at least once. And if you can get a fresh haircut around your elated ears in the process, it's a win-win situation, clearly.
More specifically, and all metaphors about hairdressing salons aside, this album is a playful exploration into groovy styles of all stripes : R'n'B, electronica, soul, hard funk, hip hop... The first three tracks create a perfect first act: opener "Pretty Hurts" displays effective soul-infused earworms from get-go, with quite interesting turns of phrase lambasting "perfection-at-all-cost" ; the Timbaland-produced "Haunted" is a nocturnal gem, with a simple melody that eventually turns into epic proportions, with many sonic details suggesting a cyberpunk, Bladerunner-like landscape found in the most expensive sci-fi flicks ; and "Drunk In Love", produced by the same Timbaland and Pharrell Williams, and propelled by a weird, Eastern-flavored sampled vocal hook, offers a shameless and immodest peep into Queen Bey and Jay-Z's intimacy--which could have turned out ridiculous if the music wasn't so sexy.
After those three tracks, Mrs. Carter shifts gears several times, loses the thread at some other points (a flaw that's found in all of her last three blockbuster LPs--indeed written by committees and therefore a little haphazard as a result)... and yet she always gets back on her feet somehow. "Blow/Cherry"--with that striking one-liner about "turning cherries out"--foretells the post-disco endeavours of *Renaissance* ten years later or so. "Partition/Yoncé" is a two-part snapshot about lust and celebrity whose narcissitic impulses are redeemed by its dark yet pristine EDM flourishes--amazing how the digital basslines slap in this record, by the way : my hi-fi system is not high class, and yet those bass frequencies rumble like in almost no other record in my collection. As for "Jealous" and "XO", they are pop jewels that could have actually been expanded way beyond their short time count.
In between those highlights, there's a couple of more meandering or demonstrative-for-their-own sake compositions (including one with a featuring by Drake where he somehow manages not sounding *too* ridiculous, lol). Yet fortunately, the last act is as strong as the first. *Flawless* is an trap-inspired, bombastic partytime dirge boasting about "perfection" with opera-like vocals in the background (maybe in a part-ironic fashion, just as in "Pretty Hurts"--given the snippet concluding it). "Superpower" is a subdued, "doo-wop 2.0" ballad that goes to interesting minimalistic places. And "Heaven" and "Blue" are other heartfelt cuts whose straightforward simplicity (foretelling the more intimate moods of Bey's next LP *Lemonade*) make them both memorable and endearing.
Everything after "Blue" on Spotify are bonus tracks that are part of the record's "Platinum Edition" (mostly remixes and some extra featurings by Nicki Minaj and Kanye West). Nothing essential there, except from "Ring Off", a lively yet quite subtle number dedicated to Beyoncé's mother after the latter decided to part ways with her husband.
So how should I grade this? 4/5? 4.5/5? The "writing-as-a-commitee" nature of this album often yields great results, but it's also probably the root cause of the few underwhelming moments in its middle section. Yet if you took away those underwhelming cuts, you'd still have a great album with a pretty satisfying length. My best guess is that the only problem Beyoncé has as an insanely rich artist curating and partly writing all these songs is that no one in her entourages dares question some of her choices, hence the "all-in-the-pot" nature of her LPs. But honestly, it's a very minor flaw for anyone interested enough in modern African-American music. I'm gonna round up my 4.5/5 grade to a perfect 5, then.
Number of albums left to review: 381
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 281 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 146
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 199
Echo And The Bunnymen
3/5
This one starts strong with "The Cutter" and a couple of nice cuts after that. Unfortunately, the rest of the album is hit-or-miss, with only "Heads Will Roll" and "Higher Hell" truly standing out. Nice violin work by Shankar on a lot of tracks, by the way. Yet this won't save some of those songs from utter oblivion, since too many of them are meandering for no apparent reason.
Had *Porcupine* included tracks as strong as "Over The Wall", from *Heaven Up Here*, or "The Killing Moon", from *Ocean Rain*, it could have been a masterpiece. Alas, it doesn't have such highlights, even if it's probably Echo And The Bunnymen's *second* best LP overall. The thing is, this ranking is not enough to make the album "essential" in my book. Only *Ocean Rain* can reach that level for me.
Speaking of *Ocean Rain*, the latter is also a topsy-turvy affair at times. Nonetheless, its second side is near-perfect, and there are enough gems on the first to make it the magnum opus it is. And I don't expect to warm up to *Porcupine* the way I've warmed up to that other album. Drawing from this subjective feeling, I'd even say that anything else in Echo And the Bunnymen's LP discography is probably only aimed at nostalgic fans now, Pitchfork's delirious retrospective raves about *Porcupine* be damned.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/10 for more general purposes. (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 380
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 281
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 146
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 200 (including this one)
Dire Straits
3/5
I have always loved the twin hits "Sultan Of Swings" and "Down To The Waterline", but I have to admit I tried appreciating this whole debut album many times, and yet I still feel it a little lackluster overall. Of course, Knopfler's guitar playing is inspired and even technically impressive... yet I think too many tracks in this record are 'by-the-numbers' blues rock / pub rock cuts. There's none of the pop dynamism of *Brothers In Arms* or the ambient dirges of *Love Over Gold*. Make no mistake, this debut is still very decent--and as far as debuts go, it's even great at times--but I think subsequent Dire Straits records are far more imaginative. Guess they had to start somewhere to eventually get there.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 379
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 281
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 147 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 200
Minor Threat
5/5
Classic foundational release for hardcore punk, here in its DC area denomination. Any true punk fan should have this on their shelves, along with the 7' singles. Everything's available in the *Complete Discography* CD by the way. Buy this--or the vinyls--on Dischord, one of the last genuinely independent labels still running to this day, founded by Ian McKaye himself.
Technically, *Out Of Step* is more like an EP, but I'm gonna give it five stars nonetheless. This is gonna make up for the outrageous absence of many key albums by Fugazi in Dimery's list, as foundational for post-hardcore / emo / "alternative" rock / "crossover" rock as this one was for hardcore. At least four of those Fugazi LPs should be added to *Repeater* in the 1001 albums book, namely *13 Songs*, *In On The Kill Taker*, *Red Medecine* and *The Argument*.
For those who might not know: Fugazi was a band that Ian MacKaye, the frontman of Minor Threat, founded a few years after 1983 with Brendan Canty and Joe Lally, quickly joined by Rites Of Spring's Guy Piccioto to share vocal and guitar duties with MacKaye. Retrospective lists about the supposed greatest albums of all of time often fail to quote them, which is a damn shame. But those lists don't really matter. Anyone who knows a little about music history in the Western world is aware of the band's importance and how their work was influential to so many "rock" subcategories.
Going back to *Out Of Step*, what's also thrilling about it is how Minor Threat developped the initial "basic" formula of their first recordings in it so as to infuse some subtle melodicism and a few more variations in their new songs. It's still very much hardcore punk, yet you can sense the direction a lot of bands from the Dischord roster would then follow as they picked up the ball from there (bands such as Dag Nasty, Embrace, Rites Of Spring and Fugazi themselves, eventually). I know I've already used the word "foundational" a couple of times in this review, lol, so I'm gonna say it differently: whole music genres branched out of this particular release, including some where listeners might fail to notice the connection at first. *Out Of Step* is THAT important.
Number of albums left to review: 379
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 282 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 147
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 200
Johnny Cash
3/5
It's a historical recording that's worth listening to of course. Yet I can't help feeling that having *Folsom Prison* AND *San Quentin* in such a list is a little overkill, as much of a fan of Cash's booming voice as I am. And if you had to select only ONE of his "prison concerts", *Folsom* is the one to choose, obviously.
I also sense that Johnny's natural swagger sometimes becomes a little "forced" for that particular prison gig (Am I the only listener to sense this? I'd be curious to know...). I understand that he was wary of that English TV crew shooting the performance--to the point that he feels the need to mention them during the proceedings (and also flip the bird at them--at least according to that famous picture!). Somehow, my feelers tell me that Cash was a little ill-at-ease that day--as if the whole thing was much more of a burden to him compared to his previous similar experience. Maybe some listeners appreciate those confrontational undertones... But as far as I'm concerned, I think I prefer his more elated mood for the Folsom gig.
Then again, the presence of June Carter and the other guests is admittedly a huge plus that *Folsom* can't boast about. So I'm still in two minds over all this--at least when it comes to *San Quentin*'s mention in a list of essential albums.
But maybe i'm just in a bad mood as well today, who knows? Waiting to see if this record grows on me in the future...
3/5 for the purposes of this list (at least for now). Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 379
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 282
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 148 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 200
Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart
3/5
Apart from track 4 (a dud) and 5 (a filler track), pretty interesting and even often elating foray into "global" sounds. A lot of people noticed Sinead O'Connor's featuring on the single "Visions Of You", but the real star of the show is Natacha Atlas, at least on the many cuts where she appears. Yet some of the tracks where she is not invited are still quite good as well.
Is it material for " essential albums", tough? Well, the jury's still out on this one. You could argue that the penultimate track is almost ruined by that (fortunately short) bridge filled with horrid synth horns, also found on track 4. A way to point out how some of this music sounds dated now, even though other parts of it still aged surprisingly well. 1991 is also filled to the brim with far more striking LPs, as interesting as this Mercury Prize nomination is (wonder if an old member of the jury for the prize didn't work with Dimery for that book--heck maybe even Dimery himself is a member of that jury!).
So wait and see...
Number of albums left to review: 376
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 282
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 149 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 200
The Associates
2/5
I have a sneaking suspicion that this app has already suggested this record to me before. I remember writing that I was surprised that Björk liked it so much because, as far as I was concerned, I rather disliked it. My understanding is that she found the free-flowing, meandering, over-the-top vocals "liberating", which sure makes sense in a way. But personally, a large part of those vocals still sound as if the singer was attempting a pitiful, painful imitation of David Bowie at a karaoke. Especially on the first side (at least the one of the UK version--more on that later). Maybe I can't access Björk's level of genius when it comes to listening to certain details. But if most listeners can't grasp those details either, why should we call this record "essential".
OK, this might be a bad faith take, I readily admit it. I can sense Robery Wyatt's genius in *Rock Bottom*, contrary to most people in here. Funny how subjectivity always ruins your best attempts to be fair. The thing is, comparing The Associates to Sparks, This Heat, The Cure, or I don't know which other groundbreaking band at the time might be a bit of a stretch. "It's Better This Way" and "Party Fears Two" are *somewhat* listenable, with effective melodic earworms. "No" is an interesting mock-gothic dirge, yet it's awkwardly placed towards the start of this LP (a flaw that the US version tried to correct by switchig most of side one with side two). "Bab De La Bap" has daunting industrial undertones that make it still worthwhile to go through today. But the rest is mostly a cheesefest of gigantic proportions, starting with the horrid "Gloom Spoon", "Nude Spoons" and "Skipping". This is also where the comparison with Sparks doesn't hold water in my opinion. In their best moments the Mael brothers managed to transcend whatever "popular" genre they had elected to play and turn the potential cheese in it into much more perverse and exciting aesthetics. And into far better hooks as well. I believe the comparison stems from Billy Mackenzie's extravagant performance on cuts such as "Country Club". Once again, it makes sense on a a certain level. But I'd rather go back to the original inspiration here.
Finally, "nothingsomethingparticular" is a cute instrumental closer, yet it's nothing but a footnote to the whole proceedings. Still feeling nonplussed by this album overall. Going back to what I said at the start of this review, I hope I'm wrong and it's the first time this app has suggested The Associates to me. I intend to *finish* this project, and if really I have to review the same album twice, I'd rather have one truly *essential* one. Next, please.
Still giving 2/5 to this record (the recollection of the grade I originally gave to this LP). Which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 375
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 282
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 149
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 201 (including this one)
Scott Walker
3/5
I prefer *Scott 3* and *Scott 4*. Any other questions? I can move on, then. It's raining again, I don't have the right record to listen to, and I'm in a bad mood. So next, please.
Essential albums list grade: 3/5
More general grade: 8/10 (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 374
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 282
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 149
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 202 (including this one)
Bob Dylan
5/5
There's a review in here that starts like this:
"The genre is raggedy-ass beatnik blues rock, so progressive it’s being invented as it’s recorded. The only thing under full control is Dylan's voice. Outside that, the band careens around like a motorbike with a dodgy ticker, which is why everyone seems to think they’re playing lead. One second the drums are in charge, then the organ, then rhythm guitar, then someone hooks the harmonica up to the bike’s exhaust and gives it maximum revs. All while Dylan’s on stage with a stack of library books, ripping pages out at random and holding them up to a giant fan to send them flying over his audience at random. That's how we get Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting on the captain’s tower of a sinking Titanic. Jack the Ripper sitting at the head of the chamber of commerce. God pow-wowing with Abraham. It’s the ultimate high school reunion. Held together by glue that’s one part mystery and two parts the most voracious appetite for language in the history of recorded music, everything here is an outlaw song..."
Wow. What do you want me to add to that, seriously? Mr. Zimmerman sure inspires a lot of talented people. But it's only because he's insanely talented himself.
About *Highway 61 Revisited*, more specifically, I've always felt that it is not the *best* album that Bob Dylan has ever released (Is it *Blonde On Blonde*? *Bringing It All Back Home?* *The Freewheeling Bob Dylan*?). But I know some fans say it is. Whereas my personal enjoyment of it would probably point to a 9.5/10 grade *only*, if you take my meaning.
The 0.5 penalty comes from a lack of catchy musical hooks on the first side--ones that Dylan is so good at, normally (and returns to for side 2, fortunately). Sure, there's *Like A Rolling Stone*. But it's like Bob said; "OK, I've written a massive hook here. Now I can forget a little about that and focus on the lyrics." Lazy-ass genius. 🙃
Besides, if this record points to the sweeping, expansive experience that *Blonde On Blonde* will be right after, it's not *it* yet. Even if some individual songs are already goddamn sweeping in this particular tracklist, *of course*.
At the end of the day, all of this is splitting hair, I know it. The influential nature of *Highway 61 Revisited*, along with the historical artefact that it is--as the first LP where Dylan dropped the folk idiom altogether (still present on one side of *Bringing It All Back Home*), makes it belong to this list 100%. And some of the cuts in here--from "Like A Rolling Stone" to "Ballad of A Thin Man", "Queen Jane Approximately" and "Desolation Row"--are so damn representative of who Dylan is as an artist, and also tell so much about mankind at large, that they should be sent to space to introduce the Earth to alien sentient species.
Number of albums left to review: 373
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 283 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 149
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 202
Joni Mitchell
4/5
Before I dug into Joni Mitchell's discography, I always felt a bit nonplussed by the intricacies of her songwriting and her acrobatic, emotive voice. I didn't "get" it. I read how people loved *Blue*, *Ladies Of The Canyon* or *Court And Spark* and I didn't fully understand.
Then I listened to "The Jungle Line" and something clicked. I still remember where I was. I was at a winter holiday resort. Everything around me was dark and snowy. And yet it's as if a universe filled with colors and lush tones opened up for me. It's true what they say: Joni Mitchell writes songs the way she paints all those watercolors. It was not only the groundbreaking elements of that track--all those loops and samples, done during the seventies to boot!--that drew me into that universe. It was the sheer emotions that the song triggered in me.
Since that day, I have loved *Blue*, *Ladies Of The Canyon* or *Court And Spark*. *The Hiss Of Summer Lawns* is the record that started Joni's Jazz period, but it's probably not the best album from that "Jazz age"--that would be *Hejira*, that I love as much as the records I've quoted up there. Yet it's still a wonderful adventure.
4/5 for the purposes of this list. Which translates to a 9/5 grade for more general purposes (5+4)
Number of albums left to review: less than 400 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
Dwight Yoakam
1/5
What's next now? Garth-f*cking-Brooks?
All too often, C&W ends up being a self-indulgent genre, both musically and lyrically. And if you add bland eighties production values to it, the result becomes a cringe-worthy listening experience.
Hard pass. I'll stick to Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson and not bother about the rest. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 371
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 284
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 149
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 203 (including this one)
Slint
5/5
The 1001 Albums book was incredibly and outrageously *unfair* to post-rock. No mention of Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Do Make Say Think, or Labradford. And only one mention of a Sigur Rós album (and maybe Tortoise, I think?). At least, they got the early initiators of that whole umbrella genre included with Slint's *Spiderland*. Heavy sigh nonetheless.
Mysterious yet also abrasive, off-kilter, dark and menacing, yet also seductive at times, *Spiderland* is a treasure trove you can return to so as to find gems you don't necessarily notice the other times around. You have to enjoy charcoal-like tones and moods that are both melancholic and unnerving to appreciate it. But if you do, it's basically a timeless record.
Number of albums left to review: 370
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 285 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 149
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 203
Manic Street Preachers
4/5
I lived in England for a year, at the tail end of the nineties. I remember pubs, vinegar crisps, errands at Sainsburys, buses that were never on time, Channel 4, pupils wearing uniforms, tea breaks, lasses wearing VERY short skirts when it was damn chilly out there, pub quizz nights, pints, and even more pints... Good memories overall. And I remember how every young people interested in music was a fan of the Manic Street Preachers.
Except that the album everyone was listening to was *This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours*, the one AFTER *Everything Must Go*. And even decades later it's still the one that Brits seem to return to the most, according to Spotify. So retrospectively, that earlier album feels very much like a first step towards the band's real pop hits, and not like the hits themselves. It is a transitory record after Richard Hawley's disappearance, and the beginning of MSP mark II. As such it feels very much like a debut LP, even if it's not.
Not that *Everythin Must Go* is a bad album per se. It might even be better than the overlong "This Is My Truth Tell me Yours*, actually. A more energetic rock sound, lots of earworms, a distinctive taste for interesting melodies and chord progressions, clean, simple and yet dynamic production values that aged pretty well, and a nice studio performance overall. Just like many Manic Street Preachers albums, a couple of songs sound a little samey on side 2. But apart from that, it's quite great.
Erring on the side of caution, I won't include *Everything Must Go* *right away* in my own selection, just in case it takes the place of an album that's even greater. But I hope there's room for it in the end. Because well, *everything* can't go in, I guess.
Number of albums left to review: 369
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 285
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 150 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 203
Jeff Beck
4/5
What's moving in *Truth* is that, stylistically speaking, you can feel in it the first steps that would lead to Led Zeppelin, a band founded by another Yardbird alumni, Jimmy Page. You have the same sort of *moody* flourishes and evocative arrangements inserted into the blues-rock formula, transcending the latter and sending it to a whole other level. Oh, and Page wrote the wonderful "Beck's Bolero", a cut that has quite a misleading title--even if Jeff Beck's rich guitar playing in it has a "feel" that makes the track truly his, just like in every song on the record.
To be perfectly honest, I could live without a couple of more meats-and-potatoes, perfunctory cuts in "Truth". But the many highlights easily make up for them. And those particular highlights explain why I prefer *Truth* to *Beck-Ola*. That said, you can bet your boots that both albums are "essential" anyway, even if you don't take into account the presence of Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood (a future Rolling Stone) in Jeff Beck' s band.
4/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 4).
Number of albums left to review: 368
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 286
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 150
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 203
Happy Mondays
1/5
I enjoyed watching *24-Hour Party People* a lot. It was a film that was both hilarious and well-documented. But OK, once you had that good laugh at the movie version of the band, are you supposed to automatically become a fan of them? Some characters in the Sopranos make me laugh as well. Does that mean I should try to join the mafia?
Let's just say that if I can appreciate the Happy Mondays "saga"--filled with drugs, stupid moves, and picturesque characters--that doesn't necessarily mean I'm a fan of their music. I even think that this band is probably one of the most overrated acts that has ever come out of Britain during the eighties. And I'm gonna tell you why now.
I don't know if *Bummed* is their worst or "best" album, but frankly, why should I care? Everything supposedly "important" the Happy Mondays released is just a cheesefest sonically speaking anyway, not to mention a total bore songwriting-wise. Ecstasy-induced vocal meanderings over terribly linear tracks is not my idea of what a good song should sound like. And it's not my idea of a good time either, even if I'm in a quote-unquote "party mood". Worse, the nonsensical "arrangements" in those tracks make everything sound even *more* grating. And don't get me started on those horrid eighties gated drums...
Now about the supposed critical status of this album, a little bit of translation for ya:
Writing for The Guardian, Alexis Petridis said "almost 20 years on, Bummed sounds extraordinary, but wildly abstruse". Petridis has good taste, generally speaking, but here he's being overly polite. What he really means by "extraordinary" is that the album doesn't make a shred of sense. And what he means by "abstruse" is just that : "abstruse".
Priya Elan of NME felt the album "actually dated best" out of all of the band's releases, despite Hannett's "raw production show[ing] the Madchester sound in its infancy" Translation: *Bummed* is not as *downright horrible* as other HM albums but it's still horrid nonetheless. "Dating best" within a discography doesn't necessarily mean "dating WELL".
All Music's Stephen Thomas Erlewine praised Hannett's production as "all smeared colors and harsh edges". Translation : it's a formless blob. He wrote that "decadence has rarely sounded as dangerous as it did in the hands of the Mondays". Er... Stephen, ever heard of a band called The Stooges? Or The Velvet Underground, maybe? It's probably a bit "niche" for you, i'll grant you that... Then Stephen describes the sound of the album as "stiff psychedelic funk". Is "stiff" your idea of a good time, Steve? And does such adjective go along well with the words "psychedelic" and "funk"? Later, Erlewine mentions Ryder "spitting out rhymes", and then expanded on this, calling the album the "result of [a] copious intake of ecstasy". Okaaaay, then. Stephen's idea of a good time is to be bothered by a random drunk on X spitting on him at a dive bar. But to each their own, I guess. 🤷♂️
In other words, the critics know it's a pile of shit, but they sugarcoat it the best they can. In response, I can only show scorn at their obvious hypocrisy. 1 star for the purposes if this list, which translates to something around 3/10 or s/10 for more gneral purposes. (1+ whatever...). Next, *please*.
Number of albums left to review: less than 400 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (including this one - many others are more important to me).
The Magnetic Fields
5/5
Not an album in the classic sense of the word, *69 Love Songs* is more like a gigantic catalogue of exercices in style, filled with off-kilter left-turns, promising potentialities and incredible moments. It's also a *quote-unquote* "mixed bag". Yet it's fully intended that way, of course. Once you find your path into it, you'll realize that the overall "concept" behind this project actually brings a lot of charm to the whole endeavor, instead of weighing it down. Such tongue-in-cheek "scope" is paradoxically what saves the project from becoming a full-blown parody, as quaint as some of those "exercises in styles" are.
A piece of advice, though: you must not go through this triple (?) record in one sitting, but rather explore it through shorter sessions. At first you'll single out the obvious standouts, and dismiss the rest as fillers. But then, a doubt will surge: is that random one-minute tune in a mock-gay disco style *actually* a filler? Or is it a hidden gem--one that you dismissed too early before?
In a way, The Magnetic Fields are here flipping the bird at this very app, and also at the book the latter draws inspiration from. In the end, podiums and rankings and "good taste" don't really matter. Because music is a subjective art first and foremost. Which means that *any style* can yield to a potential gem of a song for your very subjective ears.
It's the exact reason why Merritt and co. chose the subject of love for the project: because this subject is universal. From that starting point, they can translate said universal subject into 69 different subjective interpretations of it. 69 different ways to be humoured and bothered and thrilled and moved. And this sheer accumulation is not only "conceptually" dizzying. It's also emotionally effective. What's great about this record is its "excess", along with its treasure trove nature. Sometimes you find trinkets in it, sometimes you find jewels. And sometimes trinkets turn into jewels, depending on your current mood. it's rarely the other way around, fortunately.
As a result, you can potentially spend hours rediscovering wonders as you listen to this record, again and again--wonders such as "All My Little Words", "Nothing Matters When We're Dancing", "Papa Was A Rodeo", "No One Will Ever Love You", " I Think I Need A New Heart", "My Only Friend", "Underwear", "Grand Canyon" or "The Death Of Ferdinand De Saussure'. Flipping the bird at the 1001 Albums book or not, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people using this app could be ready for such an adventure if only they could let go of their expectations about what an "album" should be and sound like. If you manage to do that, you may realize how nice it is to get lost in this maze, just as all of us are getting lost sorting out the whiff from the chaff through this app, day in, day out. All you need is time, which is not available for everyone, obviously--but then again, if you can find some time for this app, I think it's not a stretch to postulate that you can also find some for this very long album if you feel like it.
It also doesn't hurt that Stephin Merritt is such a brilliant songwriter, generally speaking--with a keen ear for details, both lyrical and musical. In the hands of anyone else, this project would have been doomed from the get-go, crushed by its own weight. But the playful undertones and the understated yet lively nature of most of these songs save them from any suspicion of misplaced pretensions. And all of this fully stems from the bizarre character that Merritt is. *69 Love Songs* needed a leading figure who was extravagant, and yet very much "in control" as well. It needed someone who could be either serious or ironical depending on the song--who could go from a cynical tone to a naive one, or from having shallow intents to stances having a certain depth... And to pull it off, it needed a songwriter who had a set of skills that were as formidable as they were understated, once again. Merritt fits those shoes perfectly.
Finally, *69 Love Songs* is not an album in the classic sense of the word for another reason: everyone could select one third of its tracklisting and create their own "perfect" subjective version of it--one that would have a "normal" length, instead of the overblown release that it is. Very ironically, no two subjectively "ideal" shorter versions of the project would look alike--even though you can bet your boots that its heart and centerpiece, the sarcastic yet also very touching ballad "The Book Of Love", would be in 99% of the versions thus created. *This*, also, is part of the project's "playful" DNA. One could even dare to say that the album is an "interactive" experience in the best sense of the word. And you don't even need an app or a computer to make it work. All you need is a record player.
Under that light, maybe *69 Love Songs* shouldn't even be in such a list, come to think of it. Because it's not *really* an album. It's a recording aimed at suggesting what the *platonic ideal* of an album could be. An album about love, yes. But also an album about life as a whole itself.
Number of albums left to review: 366
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 287 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 150
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 204
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
1/5
One thing's for sure, those synth/organ sounds have not aged very well!
Apart from that, the idea of adapting a classical masterpiece was great on paper, but the overall result is awkward at best. ELP are the caricature of a prog-rock act. All the clichés about this genre you can think of (very cheesy sound palettes, vituosisitic mania that has no real artistic point, hermetic lengthy interludes, hackneyed faux-jazz overtones, misplaced intellectual pretensions...), they fit right with it. I wonder if you would have had the same clichés about grindcore if Napalm Death had adapted Ravel's "Bolero", or the ones of Country and Western if Dolly Parton had adapted Bizet's "Carmen". I have a sneaking suspicion that from the vantage point of 2023, the results of those imaginary adaptations would still be more listenable than what ELP had attempted with today's record. But sadly, we'll never know.
1/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums, which translates to a 6/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 1).
Number of albums left to review: less than 400 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (including this one, many other albums are more important to me).
Cowboy Junkies
3/5
Worth checking out if only for that "Sweet Jane" cover. As for the rest, your mileage on unobtrusive shoegaze having country inflection will decide if you join the ranks of listeners ascribing a cult status to this record. If you're a fan of Mazzy Star, chances are that *will* join that cult!
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums. Which translates to a 8/5 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: less than 400 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately (including this one, most probably)
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
Germs
3/5
Not sure that as a very early example of the hardcore punk genre, *G.I* exactly has the sheer power that recordings by Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Black Flag or Dead Kennedys had. Then again, Germ's only LP can still boast of few tracks that are mean, snarling, iconic and musically worthwhile--tracks such as "Land Of Treason", "Lexicon Devil", "We Must Bleed", "Media Blitz", "Dragon Lady", " The Slave" or "The Other Newest One"... Yet I'm afraid there's nothing in this album that has the level of *Out Of Step*, *Banned In D.C.*, *Damaged* or *Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables*.
Performance-wise, I guess the weak spot is the basslines, often out of pace. And production-wise, the sound of the record is pretty "thin", as other listeners have noted before--not that those "technical' flaws are so important in punk albums anyway... More importantly, you can sense the phenomenal, dangerous, formidable presence Darby Crash had onstage throughout the album--a feat which is not so easy to pull off in a studio recording. That's where *G.I.* hits the mark for many fans of the genre, I guess.
Wish I could have attended a gig by this act, probably the chaotic experience of a lifetime. Alas, I was only 2-years old in 1979, and living one ocean away. All I can do now is to put this "historical" recording of the punk genre in my waiting list and see if it grows on me...
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential album". Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 363
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 287
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 152 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 205
Teenage Fanclub
5/5
So Oasis didn't event nineties britpop after all. It was this Scottish band, apparently. And they got inspiration from an... American band. Funny how things work, right?
I first listened to Teenage fanclub a few years after this particular album came out. I found them good, but a little trite and poppy compared to a lot of the other indie bands I was listening to at the time. Now, decades later, I have to admit that my ears are far more finely attuned to this particular sound, if that makes any sense.
*Star Sign* is a great song, for instance. Yet about this one song, and about the other ones in this album, most of them stellar, I gotta say that on the other side of the pond, a US band named The Posies would soon do even better in this Big Star-indebted stylistic realm--also helped by producer Don Fleming--and this, with half of the music-press hype surrounding Teenage Fanclub. Yeah, Big Star is the American band I was referring to at the start of this short review. In a way there's a line that goes from Big Star to Oasis, and this almost directly. Didn't see that coming myself.
So, yeah, today's album is really great, even if it's not the absolute best in the genre. Of course, saying so could sound as if I was trying to demean or take something out of *Bandwagonesque*. But I'm not. All by itself, this record is pretty iconic, and I understand why it should be on this list today, enough said.
But still, don't forget to check out The Posies as well (*Frosting On the Beater* and *Amazing Disgrace*). OK?
4,5/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 9,5/10 grade for more general purposes. I'm rounding up to a perfect 5/5 and 10/10, though.
Number of albums left to review: 362
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 288 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 152
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 205
Youssou N'Dour
4/5
Overwhelmed with work today, and too exhausted to give *Immigrés* a proper listen. Browsing through those tracks that have quite a long time stamp, it feels like the album is somewhat different from the more "commercial" and "streamlined" output Youssou N'Dour had during the nineties. And it seems it has a more "authentic" feel, reminding me of Fela Kuti.
I'm lacking refererence points to address this music correctly, so I won't say much more right now. But I have nothing but benevolent thoughts when it comes to what I've browsed through. *Immigrés* does "feel" like a nice entry point into a larger universe. Adding it to my "waiting list".
Number of albums left to review: 361
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 288
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 153 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 205
Silver Jews
3/5
Not the album that fans of Silver Jews remember the most according to Spotify, but also to most "critics". It's still the sort of endearing songwriting performed in a indie-rock/alt-country mode exemplified by *Starlite Walker* and *American Water*. But it's probably not enough to justify the inclusion in a list of "essential" albums.
Rest in peace, David Berman.3/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: less than 400 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (including this one, many others are more important - *Starlite Walker* and *American Water* for instance).
Big Star
5/5
Big Star fully deserve their reputation as a key progenitor of power pop. The first four tracks of this debut alone justify the inclusion of the whole album in such a list, from Alex Chilton's ballads "Thirteen" and "El Goodo", heartfelt and evocative, to Chris Bell's edgier "Feel" and livelier "In The Streets" -- of *That 70's Show* fame.
So the songwriting is good, but one of the assets of this album, not praised enough in my sense, is its pristine, dynamic production, with a lot of sonic details that go over your head on first listens, but then shine on the next ones. John Fry (and Chris Bell) can be praised for that.
The only (minor) issue I have with this record is that there are too many ballads on the second side. They're good, some of them are even excellent, but the succession of songs in a similar mode hurts the album's momentum. I would have taken one of those slower cuts out, and added one more straightforward rock number such as "When My Baby's Beside Me" to this second side.
I guess I could even have taken out a point to this debut because of this, yet I didn't, because of the thematic cohesiveness of those songs. You really feel like this record is the soundtrack of a movie about teenagers living in "Smalltown, America" during the early seventies. That line about "Paint It Black" and how the father of the singer's girlfriend is always on his back cracks me up every time. Simple, at times almost *simplistic*, lyrics. Yet lyrics that are so effective in conveying the mood of a time and place. A dozen of albums released in 1973 were probably better than this one. Yet this debut was "#number 1" when it comes to how "evocative" a record can be.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums (rounded up to 5), which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: less than 400 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
Femi Kuti
3/5
Overwhelmed with work today, and late for my daily reviews. Anthologies and other "best of albums" suggest that the first two tracks of this early album by Femi Kuti are notable career highlights. They have pretty good afrobeat grooves, and give you a good inkling of what Fela's son was capable of at the time. For more details, I'll need to revisit later on. Wish I had had the time to do it right now.
3/5 for the purposes of this list ("neutral" grade because I couldn't listen to the whole album).
Number of albums left to review: less than 400 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
Neil Young
5/5
Found this recent review about *Harvest* on this app:
"If you don't like this album then you don't like Neil Young. If you like Neil Young this is about as good as it gets. 5/5."
Yep. Let me double down on that...
I love *many* albums by the loner: "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere", "After the Gold Rush", "Tonight's The Night", "Rust Never Sleeps", "Chrome Dreams", "Le Noise"... Some of Neil Young's fans will have you believe that only ONE of these records is his true masterpieces. Well, they don't say that about "Le Noise", but it's certainly my favorite *underrated* album by him--with *Trans* not so far behind, oddly enough...
Everytime those fans say something like this, I kinda agree. Or I *want to agree*, in a way. Because *each one* of those records are moving or trippy or evocative or heartfelt or moody as f*ck. Each one is... one-of-a-kind. If you can appreciate the emotions in Neil's frail voice, if you can sense his genius as a songwriter and tunesmith, there are strong clues that will lead you to believe that ONE of those records is the loner's "magnum opus".
Yet the secret is that *none of those albums* can be considered as his magnum opus, really. Because *Harvest* is the one.
Yes, as far as sales and mainstream reputation go, it's Neil's most "succesful" release. This always rubs a lot of of the so-called "true" fans the wrong way. And this can even rub grumpy old Neil the wrong way sometimes. Which makes me smile, somehow...
The "truth" (*my* truth?) is that *Harvest*'s tracklisting is just... perfect. It's not only the hits ("Old Man", "Heart of Gold" or "Alabama"...). It's also how each song segues into the next. It's how Jack Nietzsche's tense orchestral arrangements on a few tracks provides another dimension to Young's songwriting, and brings welcome dynamics to the whole shebang. It's how "Words" concludes the proceedings in such a heartwrenching fashion. And it's how *each one* of those tunes can leave an eternal imprint in your soul.
Because this record will live on forever. And "forever" means long after Spotify, and people remembering who Joe Rogan was, are both gone, lol. So 5/5, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 357
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 290 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 154
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 206
Massive Attack
5/5
Blue Lines, like the mysterious haze that oozes from this seminal album. Like the waves of pleasures one can feel roaming this nocturnal, urban maze--soul, dub and hip hop all merging to create all those lush sound-system-inspired skylines. Listen to "Five Man Army", and you'll see those evocative nightly shapes in front of your very eyes. You might even smell the scent of burnt engines.
Younger listeners may not understand how groundbreaking this record was at the time of its release--and how it still informs many genres today, far beyond the "trip hop" moniker that was ascribed to it at the time (more on that in the conclusion of this review). Truth be told, this sort of "fusion" had never been encountered before. Even if, in a way, said fusion hearkened back to the spirit that had for instance guided musicians of The Mahavishnu Orchestra, here sampled at least twice during the course of this LP, or the ones of Love, whose "Be Thankful (For What You've Got)" is wonderfully covered during the proceedings.
Add the singular vocal performances of soul singer Sara Nelson and reggae legend Horace Andy, and what you have as a result is a jewel. From the ominous, obsessive "Safe From Harm" to the wide-eyed, almost naive "Hymn Of The Big Wheel"--from the heartbreak of "Unfinished Sympathy"'s tense strings to the sensual groove of "Daydreaming"--each and every track of this masterpiece is a gem. *Blue Lines* was not a simple debut, you see. It was already a crowning achievement.
So it doesn't matter if the "groundbreaking elements" of this LP get lost in the mix today. There's still enough urban poetry in this album to make up for how supposedly "dated" it sounds in 2023. A couple of records later, for *Mezzanine*, 3D, Daddy G, and Mushroom would incorporate post-punk in their formula to further their ambitions and make everything sound more (in)tense. Yet what we get here is equally precious. It's a *smoother* version of the Massive Attack project, and this mix of juvenile seduction and more menacing undertones is an asset the collective would never *fully* profit from ever after.
Some say that *Blue Lines* is one of the best debuts of all time, and they're damn right about that. Others say this record is the birth of trip hop, its whole starting point, and they're right as well. Yet this album is far more important that trip hop--which was just an ephemeral phase during the history of modern music, a transition within the great mix of the times. This album is a tone poem, first and foremost--and it's one of the most impressive tone poem ever put to tape. No other record will ever sound like it again, as influential as it was from 1991 onwards. Massive caught lightning in a bottle that year. "Inflammable" indeed.
Number of albums left to review: 356
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 291 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 154
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 206
Radiohead
5/5
I once imagined a sci-fi saga about telepaths, it took place in the future, in the 24th century. I even wrote a novel telling the first events of the sweeping story I had in mind. And as I did so, I took notes to envision what the perfect soundtrack for that long yarn would sound like...
I will probably never write the rest of my story, sadly. But if I had done so, "All I Need" would be the very last song heard in the saga. A perfect capper for a tale filled with troubled characters caught in the stir of history, longing for each other, and yet--in spite of their psychic powers--unable to communicate their true feelings to one another. At the very end, there's only the promise of an afterlife to give those characters some frail hope that they could start it all over again--and thus, finally merge their souls with the ones they truly loved during their short lives.
I don't remember wanting to use another song from *In Rainbows" to illustrate my story. But in a way, each and every track of this perfect LP could match with my melancholic musings about alienation and unrequited love--whether expressed through my story idea or elsewhere, in other sorts of tales. *Videotape*, for instance, could provide precious inspiration for a scene about grief and nostalgia. When I saw Radiohead live, Thom Yorke gave a memorable performance from start to finish, but it's the memory of that particular song that stuck with me.
A few words about how the song works might be useful to describe that fond memory. On the surface, *Videotape*'s rhythm pattern sounds simple, but it's actually incredibly complex (check out the You Tube videos about it). So I remember Thom sitting in front of his upright piano, starting the very first chords of the song, and then slamming the keys, mad with with sudden anger and frustration. The band stopped playing at once. Thom didn't have the right tempo in mind. Then, he collected his thoughts, started afresh, and finally gave a perfect rendition of the composition. I was in tears.
I was not only in tears because this piece of music was great and it was the first time I had ever listened to it. It was during a tour that took place *before* *In Rainbow*'s release, you see, hence why I didn't know the song yet. I was also in tears because of the small fuck-up that started it. To me, it's the sort of event that perfectly encapsulates who Radiohead are. They're *not only* about ambition and grand epic gestures. They can also focus on human frailty, absurd little moments, all sorts of routine moments as experienced by us all in our modern lives. Radiohead's music, as groundbreaking or sweeping as it can be, is still in touch with our human condition--and all the conflicting emotions that go with it.
Maybe I will write my story after all... Now I know that a scene about a piano player will be in it. He will make blunders as he plays the first chords of the song, and then start again, and then make everyone cry in the room. Thanks a bunch, Thom.
Number of albums left to review: 355
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 292 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 154
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 206
Echo And The Bunnymen
4/5
*Ocean Rain* is a topsy-turvy affair at times. Nonetheless, its second side is near-perfect, and there are enough gems on the first side to make it the magnum opus it is for Echo And The Bunnymen. The centerpiece of the album alone, "The Killing Moon", makes it "essential". And even for less stellar tracks, a lot of the pristine, sophisticated arrangements bring a charm that the well-mannered secondary compositions didn't have as "barebones songs". Impressive work overall.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential records", which translates to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4)
Number of albums left to review: 354
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 293 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 154
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 206
Brian Eno
5/5
Blue skies behind panes,
A soul longing for relief
In an empty hall.
The first "ambient" masterpiece. No haiku ever uttered in any human language can do it full justice.
Number of albums left to review: 353
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 294 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 154
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 206
Goldfrapp
3/5
The consensus was pretty clear when this album was released, and I believe it's the same decades after: *Felt Mountain* is a nice album overall, but it's not up to the league of the other trip hop luminaries of its era--luminaries such as Portishead or Massive Attack. True, parts of the record were breaking new grounds, foretelling important acts such as Beach House or Lana Del Rey. Yet it's a little too patchy in terms of memorable melodies, especially on the second side.
"Human", with its serpentine string section, is a stellar track though. And I didn't need Kanye West's sample of it to remember it in 2023.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 352
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 294
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 155 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 206
Beastie Boys
5/5
Back in the day, I already knew "Girls" was probably one of the most stupid songs ever penned in the history of music. And it still is today, by all counts. Enough to make the album it's from "essential", in an ironic sort of way???
Well, dumb, tongue-in-cheek (?) fratboy humour notwithstanding, this record is a treat for the ears of anyone interested in hip hop history, both for its music and its wordplay--as "juvenile" as this worplay is sometimes. Or maybe *because* the lyrics are so juvenile somehow... Teenage angst and young adult lust can provide so much sheer energy to an artist, and this in any genre. You'd have to be an old cranky, cantakerous bore NOT to feel that while listening to the album.
Of course, being a middle-aged dude in 2023, I also have to be cautious about the ways nostalgia can meddle with your better judgment. So, before listening to this record, I prepped myself to be harsh and uncompromising whenever I would feel like the Beastie Boys were plain ridiculous, just as they were for "Girls". Revisiting *Licensed To Ill*, I indeed expected it to feel so dated and hackneyed to be borderline unlistenable. But on the contrary, this debut still manages to sound fresh somehow, even decades after its release. Most of the little sonic details Rick Rubin provided for the samples and beats are endearing, and the hard rock-inspired hits are the stuff of legend, obviously. There's that iconic drum part sampled from Led Zeppelin in the very first seconds of the album. And the one-two punch of "Fight For Your Right To Party" followed by "No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn" right in the middle of the record is an unforgettable moment in the history of popular music. It's one that the charts of 1986 didn't miss, by the way. Not that the charts are always right... But for an up-and-coming style such as eighties hip hop, you have to take into account such watershed moments.
Oh, there's one last elephant in the room we need to address here. Being three white jews originally playing in a Brooklyn hardcore-punk outfit, the Beastie Boys couldn't be *automatically* exempt from accusations of "cultural appropriation" when they used rap to hit those same charts. But their example is actually a great one to prove that exaggerated stances on such issues should be taken with a grain of salt. We're dealing with a grey area here, of course, but I'd say it's mostly light grey. a) MCA, Adrock and Mike D popularized hip hop for young white audiences at the time, and so helped countless black artists make a living afterwards (far more than Elvis's success helped black rockers sell records). b) On a purely "artistic" viewpoint, Rick Rubin and the Beasties did not only steal from African American culture, they also gave back their own ideas to it. "Slow And Low" is a groundbreaking cut, for instance--foretelling the many ways in which the bpms in rap instrumentals would slow down for many hits in said genre in the years to come.
To put it in a nutshell, *Licensed To Ill* is not a "perfect" album by any means, yet it's still a cultural milestone. The Beastie Boys would actually release a true hip hop masterpiece with *Paul's Boutique* a few years later, plus two more albums set in a full-blown crossover mode that are for the ages as well (*Check Your Head* and *Ill Communications*). Even *Hello Nasty* is probably a superior effort than this debut. Yet without the latter, music history could have turned out radically different than the way it did. And that's enough to make *Licensed To Ill* an "essential" addition to this list.
4.5/5 for the purposes of said list (rounded up to 5). Which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 353
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 295 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 155
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 206
Madonna
2/5
Hey, I found this CD for two euros in a secondhand shop! The title track, "'Don't Tell Me" and that cover of Don McLean's 'American Pie" are famous Madonna songs, aren't they?
Is the album "essential" though? Nope. When I brought that CD home, my partner looked at me as if I was a hoarder. And she LIKES Madonna, generally speaking.
To put it in a nutshell, Louise Ciccone just hired trendy producers at the time (Mirwais, plus William Orbit, also used for *Ray Of Light*), recorded songs following the trends those producers were experts of, and just thought doing this was enough to make her relevant again. The problem is that for three or four memorable songs in the record, there are twice or three times as many deep cuts failing to leave an imprint on the listener. All style, not much substance. Besides, some of the "trends" inspiring the production of this album have not aged that well. "French Touch" can be nice, as dated as it is. Yet three or four earworms are not enough to transcend the whole shebang. Especially when a lot of synthetic arrangements are streamlined to a fault, and when the vocal performance often feels quite bland and impersonal. Madonna could infuse a lot of her personality within her eighties hits. Where had it gone in 2000?
So I'll keep humming the singles, and forget about the rest. About Madonna's presence in list of "essential" albums such as this one, there's been indeed a couple of previous LPs by her where producers helped her make far more memorable songs overall--*including* the deep cuts. *Like A Prayer* is one of them. The more introspective *Ray Of Light* might be one of them as well. But everything else is secondary, in spite of the legendary singles.
2/5 for the purposes of said list. Which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes, mostly thanks to the three famous songs in it.
Number of albums left to review: 352
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 295
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 155
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 207 (including this one)
Lightning Bolt
4/5
So extreme that it's strangely soothing at times. At a lower volume, Lightning Bolt remind me of trance-inducing traditional folklores--such as Balinese music for instance, oddly enough. There's the same sort of layering mixed with instinctual impulses, with everything driven by the power of sheer repetition, and how the latter contrasts with subtle variations.
Of course, this album was first intended to be played LOUD. This band must be a hypnotic treat to watch live. Especially in a basement show. Some of the best gigs of my life were in dive bars and basements. You don't necessarily need to go to a festival or an arena to have a transcendent experience.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3). To which I add an extra point just to piss off Bonnie Raitt and Adèle fans. I feel mean and confrontational today. Maybe because I ended up playing this album LOUD, ha ha.
Number of albums left to review: less than 400 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
Common
3/5
On paper, I should like this album a lot. A groovy, moody, "authentic" hip hop effort at a time when the rest of the rap world got lost in bling and gangsta b*llshit. And I have nothing but respect for the musicians of the "Soulquarians" playing on this record (including The Roots' ?estlove).
The thing is, some of the tracks don't click for me, I'm not sure why, especially on the first side (mostly "Dooin It" and the odd west-coast undertones in "The Light"--undertones that are quite surprising given where Common hails from and how he seems uncompromising about that elsewhere). And if it's nice to have an introductory cut paying homage to Fela, the effects on the voice there are just plain horrible, dated and useless.
On the positive side of things, I still like a few moments from the first half of this LP, especially the intricate jazz layers of "Cold-Blooded", the "classic" feel of DJ Premier's boom bap contributions for "The 6th Sense" (not to mention Common's shout-out to Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" at the very start), and I also enjoyed "The Questions", with Mos Def. Speaking of Mos Def, it seems to me that the latter's *Black On Both Sides* is the very example of an album in that particular subgenre that's musically stellar from start to finish--holding your attention or making bob your head without interruption. Even if it may sound unfair to some, I think we're still a notch under that quality level with "Like Water For Chocolate", as sophisticated as some of the arrangements are, and as interesting as Common's topical lyrics are as well (in keeping with the historical picture on its cover). And when the rapper indulges in a quick homophobic line during the course of "Dooin It", he totally loses me, that goes without saying.
Fortunately, most of the "conscious" lyrics are beyond reproach elsewhere. On that note, "A Film Called (PIMP)", a hilarious battle between the rapper and MC Lyte, is worth your attention, thanks to lyrical contents that are hilarious in the way they mock the gangster world while saying something about the battle of the sexes AND music industry--the metaphors used by both rappers on that one are quite impressive. "Nag Champa" is rather good too, and "Thelonius" reminded me of important A Tribe Called Quest cuts (mostly thanks to Slum Village's contributions?). "Payback Is A Grandmother" has a superb instrumental hook at its very center. There's some Outkast psychedelic shenanigans going on in "Geto Heaven Part Two", and "A Song For Assata" is a moving tribute, as controversial as Tupac Shakur's godmother is. So the second side is superior to the first, clearly. This is what garnered an extra point from my initial assessment.
Yet, let me repeat that: Mos Def's *Black On Both Sides* is the album from that specific era to go first to if you like that sort of "conscious" hip hop. And it better be in your list, Mr. Dimery. Now I'm looking forward to listening to Common's *Be*. That one's on the list, that's for sure.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 350
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 295
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 156 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 208
The Flaming Lips
5/5
Not so long ago, I thought *The Soft Bulletin* was the "magnum opus" of the Flaming Lips. Something in that idea rubbed me the wrong way, though. I found the record a little too patchy sometimes. Plus, Wayne Coyne's vocals are *distinctively* off-key on that album. And this ways that didn't sit well with me (I sometimes have no problem with that "flaw" if it adds to the artistry--but in that case, it was an unnecessary... distraction)
Then, I discovered *Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots*, which I had not listened to when it was released (evidence enough that I was not a real fan of the band). And I fell in love with this record in ways I could not have expected myself. Not only are the vocals *great* on this other album, but the songs are also instantly endearing and memorable. And by "songs", I mean *every one of them*--minus a couple of interludes that are never obnoxious and serve a "narrative" purpose.
About the latter, I've read somewhere that the real "story" behind the surrealistic and naive "scenes" within the album is the one of a woman battling cancer. I haven't overanalyzed the lyrics yet, so I'm not 100% sure this was indeed the main intent of The Flaming Lips to tell that story, but I do know that "Do You Realize" is probably one of the most touching and tender songs ever written about death (almost up to the league of Big Thief's "Change").
So I'm glad this record is on this list. And I readily and spontaneously give it a perfect grade here. Anything to help Yoshimi win against those damn robots!
Number of albums left to review: less than 400 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me).
Barry Adamson
2/5
Video game music says another review. I concur. Except that some video game music can be memorable at times, and this one isn't, generally speaking (except for a rare cut here and there, such as "Intensive Care", for example). Maybe this failure stems from the fact that there is no real film to go with this score (I hear there's some sort of script, but why should I care about it?). The problem is that the "cinematic" goals of such music often falls flat. I *see nothing* while listening to the wishy washy meanderings within that album--except from vague blurs related to film noir aesthetics. Er... Okay. I don't think "illustrative" music is a very exciting genre anyway. Especially when there's nothing tangible to illustrate.
By the way, I really like Barry Adamson's contributions for Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, or the music he's composed for *real* film scores. David Lynch's *Lost Highway* comes to mind here, even though it was just for a couple of tracks and most of the original score was written by Angelo Badalamenti... But come on, let's be honest for one frigging second! This particular project is just a footnote written in microscopic letters compared to 90% of the other records in this list (including some I actually don't like that much myself).
Feeling generous and giving a 2/5 grade to this album, because it's not as if listening to it was some sort of torture either. In a list having more general purposes than this one, *Moss Side Story* could maybe reach a 7/10 grade (5+2). But for a list of "essential albums"...? Nope.
Number of albums left to review: 348
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 296
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 156
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 209 (including this one)
Rod Stewart
3/5
I'm not even sure there will be enough room for *Every Picture Tells A Story* in my list. So, *more* room for this other LP out the year before? I highly doubt it.
Musically, both albums are pretty derivative, as sweet as some of the cuts in it are. In *Gasoline Alley*, I like the title-track and the Bob Dylan cover played in a very *Astral Weeks* fashion ("Only A Hobo"). This sort of Van Morrisson-inspired instrumentation is also found in "Lady Day", but Rod Stewart's composition is not as good, as can be expected. "Cut Across Shorty* lively drive and lush violin sound good, though. And some other tracks have nice vocal hooks, but they're often... "cut short" indeed, at least before they can build up to something truly memorable.
Honestly, it seems to me what we mostly have here is a great singer having fun recording "stuff". A lot of individual cuts are endearing, but it rarely goes beyond than that. There's no clear "vision" in this album. Not that all albums need to have one. But for "essential" records, it's different. Their tracklisting most often tell a very precise story. And it seems to me that the "pictures" in this Rod Stewart LP, and also the one after, are not telling a "story" that is that clear.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: less than 400 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (including this one, many others are more important to me)
Girls Against Boys
5/5
A near-perfect "post-hardcore" album. So underrated it's a crime against the whole genre itself. The saturated basses played by Eli Janney and Johnny Temple (that right, "basses" in "plural") give this band a very distinct sound, and so do Scott McCloud's obsessive guitar riffs, husky vocals and part-sardonic, part-surreal lyrics. Plus, Ted Niceley's production is dynamic as f*ck.
Dark atmospherics, menacing slow-growers, and propulsive rockers unite in this LP like in no other record. That's where *Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby* impresses the most: in its merging of different aesthetics that rarely mingle--therefore going far beyond the post-hardcore playbook as it was known in 1993. Also, every track is excellent, especially "In Like Flynn", "Learned It" and "Bulletproof Cupid", which are absolute gems. Once you hear those haunted vocals on the first, that heavy guitar riff on the second, or that hypnotic bass pattern on the third, it's basically impossible to forget them.
So don't listen to the naysayers on this app. If you like your post-hardcore moody, with subtle pop inflexions that are both off-kilter AND catchy, this LP is for you. If you don't like such things, it's OK. But please, don't pass off judgement on musical styles you're just unable to comprehend anyway. Fawn over cheesy, "vanilla" stuff such as Bonnie Raitt, Adèle and Terence Trent D'Arby, and just say you're out of your league for anything that's a bit more exciting, original and "underground". And if you usually like that type of music but are still confused by the many idiosyncracies of Girls Against Boys, please give this album another chance later on. The global score for this record on this app is just a shame, enough said. Glad that Dimery's team put ot in this list, at least!
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums", rounded up to 5. Which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 346
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 297 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 156
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 210
The Doors
3/5
Hot take: without "Riders On The Storm", a song I have cherished for decades now, this Doors album wouldn't be in such a list-- and yes, even as ultimate recordings by Jim Morrisson, not long before his early death.
The reason this album is a partial letdown is simple enough: too many of the cuts in it are just derivative blues dirges--appearing as a return to grassroots form at the time, yet souding quaint and quite self-indulgent decades later. I understand there's some "mystique" fitting with Morrisson's persona and fate in the lyrics of "The Changeling" or "Been Down So Long". But the music on those cuts is so... predictable. Even hackneyed at times. Not to say this is "hackneyed" as in the horrid album "The Soft Parade" (those tracks in *L.A. Woman* still "rock" somehow). But still... We're far from the peaks of the debut album here.
Some tracks other than "Riders On the Storm" stand out, fortunately. With its epic undertones, the title-track is one of them. As are the delicate "Hyacinth House" and the wild, almost proto-sludge "L'America". " Love Her Madly" is also a memorable earworm, I'm gonna give it that--even though it sounds rather trite today.
So yep. 3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums" . Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (as much for the "historical document" that the album is as for the few highlights in it)
Albums I have left to review: more than 300, I've temporarily lost count here.
Albums I'm sure to include in my own list: a half, approximately.
Albums I *might* include: a quarter (including this one, even though I doubt there will be room left for it)
Albums I certainly won't include: another quarter.
John Cale
4/5
The title-track of this LP is a hidden gem, coupling a lively and wonderful string section with a pure vocal earworm. Just a perfect song.
The rest of the album is pretty good--moody like the "transitional" albums of Brian Eno as he went from glam-rock to more cerebral landscapes. Maybe a notch under them, but good nonetheless.
I'm glad I have this album in my collection. It's interesting to see John Cale exploring the idea of "decadence" in fashions that are radically different from the ones of his legendary former band, the Velvet Underground (very much under the helm of Lou Reed anyway). Here we have a classy, literary, European version of said "decadence", hearkening back to the "modernist" period mentioned in the title (as "rock" as John Cale's music is).
The title-track is the cut you must not miss to understand this whole record, though. Don't forget to give it a spin.
Number of albums left to review: 344
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 298 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 157
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 210
Soundgarden
4/5
Overwhelmed with work so I won't wrote a long review about Soundgarden's most famous album. They're not my favorite rock band hailing from the Seattle area during the nineties, but this record (along with its pristine-yet-fully dynamic production) more than holds its own, and this decades after its release. To be honest, you can't say the same thing about most Pearl Jam recordings from that period, plagued by useless performative jam shenanigans and dated soundscapes. There's a "jam" aspect to Soundgarden as well, but the heavt riffs, melodic inclinations and skills for memorable vocal lines and impressive vocal performances perfectly complement the muddy, melancholic, dark subtext of those songs. We're leagues away from Nirvana here. Yet Soundgarden still had something very interesting to say about angst--and this in a way that was both catchy and artistically worthwhile.
Of course, the twisted, "heavy" ballad "Black Hole Sun* and the hectic "Spoonman" are the more obvious highlights here. But most other cuts are very nice as well (cuts like the title track, "Fell On Black Days" or "Mailman"...). Some songs are just a little too long, and the total runtime is ia bit bloated as a consequence. But it's still a record that's nice to revisit today...
So if I had room in my own list, I would be glad to include this LP. The thing is, I will maybe consider there's a whole bunch of other albums that need to go first before I hit my own 1001 mark. Abums with a 4/5 grade or close (translating to a 9/10 grade for general purposes) are usually part of my A-list. But LPs from 1994 might be an exception. There are too many great albums in that year (as in the 1967-1973 period, or from 1977 to 1979). And I can't have forty of them from one year in a list of 1001 essential records, going from 1956 to 2024... Other years need to be fully represented as well.
Number of albums left to review: 343
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 298
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 158 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 210
Pulp
3/5
I can't add much to the review currently topping this section. It's just a *perfect* review, and it encapsulates everything I think or "feel" about this particular album (which I have on my shelves, along with a couple other Pulp albums, plus two compilations). Awesome job to whoever wrote this one.
The title-track, "This Is Hardcore", is indeed a dark masterpiece, and the rest of the LP is indeed "difficult" on several levels (lyrical, musical, topical...). So only... *hardcore* fans of Pulp would have you believe this one is an "essential record". I am a huge fan of *Different Class*. But a *hardcore* fan of Pulp I am not. I just merely like this particular album for what it is, i.e. an experimental way out of the dead end that britpop had become.
A quick note about the death of britpop to wrap things up: with their eponymous album, Blur had managed to find their own way out of this "style" while retaining their sense of fun and excitement. Pulp, being older than Blur, chose to embrace some sort of cynical, nihilistic posturing instead. And the results of this stance can only be alienating to large swaths of a general audience. Consciously or unconsciously, this is probably the endpoint Jarvis Cocker wanted to reach with this one. *This Is Hardcore* is therefore a success on its own terms. But those terms can't really apply to a list only comprising "essential albums", can they?
3/5 for the purposes of said list. Which translates to a 8/5 grade for assessing albums in more general terms (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 342
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 298
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 158
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 211 (including this one)
The xx
3/5
Probably less relevant than the band's debut, this records still profits a lot from Jaimie xx's stellar solo adventure two years before--which saw him exploring electronic and EDM soundscapes in a successful way (*In Colours* is surely an "essential album", there's no arguing about that!). As a result, The xx manages to create a rather strong tracklist that also grooves quite a lot, even if it's a subdued fashion more in keeping with the band's initial aesthetics. Yet is this result, as "nice" as it is, the stuff of legendary albums? I don't think so. You have nice vocal and instrumental hooks everywhere, sure. Yet you also have unobtrusive songwriting, with some (wittingly?) frail moments, lyrically and vocally speaking. Such frailty may charm quite a few listeners. But I still think it will very rarely truly *impress* the bulk of them.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to a 8/10 grade for assessing albums in more general terms (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 341
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 298
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 158
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 212 (including this one)
Tom Waits
4/5
Mix of stellar ballads and weird mindfuckery which always sends me to the most peculiar mood. All of them sung in a gravelly voice sounding like no other voice on Earth, and crafted through Brechtian, "distanciated" hodge-podge aesthetics that often hit a soft spot in me.
Second-period Tom Waits is always quite fascinating, minus one rare album where the man goes too far (looking at you, *The Black Rider*). I understand this sort of music is not for everyone. Yet highlights such as "Dirt In The Ground", " All Stripped Down", "Who Are You", " A Little Rain", "Going Out West", "Black Wings", " Whistle Down The Wind", "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" and moving closer "That Feel" (with Keif, from the Stones) are as good as any other highlights from Waits' eighties repertoire (the decade right before the one where *Bone Machine* was released). And that's not even counting the other tracks in that record, which are at least interesting in their own right. Four stars, then.
Number of albums left to review: 340
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 299 (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 158
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 212
The United States Of America
3/5
Whether you "like" this record or not, you have to recognize how original, groundbreaking and extraordinary it is on a purely stylistic "level". It's a psychedelic feat--filled to the brim with elextronic textures and lush vocals foretelling far later acts such as Broadcast--a far-left "situationist" manifesto, and a sixties rock LP all rolled into one single offering. A quite striking association.
Is it "good", though? Let's see....
"The American Metaphysical Circus" is a moody opener Trish Keenan or Beth Gibbons could have sung on later on--those sonic collages sounded like no other music during the sixties, and I think the rhythm section here has been sampled or borrowed by none other than Portishead for "Half Day Closing", if I'm not mistaken--a sure sign that The United States Of America were indeed ahead of their time with such an opener.
"Hard Coming Love" sounds as if Pierre Henry was covering a Jefferson Airplane song (those crazy electronic flourishes!), and the result are pretty effective.
With its eastern-inspired arrangements on violin, "Cloud Song" is a timeless delight--an ambient track that could have illustrated a scene from a sci-fi blockbuster or a historical epic.
In "The Garden Of Earthly Delights", the Broadcast impression is stronger than ever, here propelled by a lively compositions that quickly hits the right marks. And what a chorus!
"I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife For You, Sugar" is a goofy novelty act recalling similar experiments in *Sgt Pepper* but lacking their charm. It's even pretty horrid and hackneyed at times. Too bad.
"Where Is Yesterday" is a dreamy cut carried by entranced vocal harmonies reminiscent of a religious oratorio. Nice way to open the second side of the LP, but more an interlude than a proper song, even if the atonal glissandi on strings create a perfect transition with what comes next.
"Coming Down" is a hectic psychedelic gem--its guitar arrangements perfectly complement Dorothy Moskowitz's vocal performance. The starts of the verses, where the guitar goes haywire, are a thing of joy, as short as those moments are.
"Love Song For The Dead Che" is a delicate cut, with subtle latin inflexions in keeping with its subject matter.
Short "Stranded In Time" starts like an American reply to the Kinks, then quickly goes to more exotic places, and finishes on a sort of question mark--leaving things very unfinished. What the hell happenend here?
And the same bum notes affect the three parts of experimental closer "The American Way Of Love". It's just a hot mess--and without the right drug and/or the right melodic touches, such endeavor never goes beyond its "curio" status. The Beatles had "Revolution 9", sure. But there were all the other stellar tunes in the White Album along with that other self-indulgent experiment to make the latter "acceptable" and even "fun" to go through. This is not exactly what happens here.
So is thsi record *good*? Not always, unfortunately. The album starts very well but ends with quite dull or even grating moments. Being ahead of your day and age doesn't necessarily mean you're "great"--even if two thirds of those tracks are very close to being so. It's just that the album as a whole doesn't quite exactly gel--its last couple of tracks being somewhat of a letdown. And I won't discuss the bonus tracks, which don't really affect the brush strokes I've painted here (a mix of great tracks and disappointing ones).
I'm glad this record is in the list, though. Even if I'm not sure there will be room for it in mine. 3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to an 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3 ; a large part of those points stemming from the groundbreaking nature of this LP).
Number of albums left to review: 339
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 299
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 159 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 212
Country Joe & The Fish
3/5
I already knew of this act through their legendary sardonic, anti-Vietnam war protest song " I Fell Like I'm Reading To Die Rag" as they played it at the Woodstock festival. The studio version of this song would only be recorded for the eponymous album after *Electric Music For The Mind And Body*, even though the tune had already been written by 1967 -- cowardly label executives were too scared of the shitstorm that could have ensued if said protest song had been included in the band's debut. Too bad it's not in this particular record. This would have given it an extra point for sure.
Reading the reviews, I mostly expected a second-tier, self-indulgent sort of early psychedelic / white blues record. But I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised by some of the cuts in this album, as messy and/or sloppy as the songwriting and performances can be at times. I found most of the the slower, moodier cuts endearing for instance--cuts such as "Section 43" and "Bass Strings"--the latter being almost a caricature of a hippy song, from its first line mentioning a reefer passing around, to its last whispers praising "LSD". Laughable, probably. Yet I can live with this auditory version of patchouli scents in my living room once in a while. Feels like being in a period movie if you don't take any of this too seriously. And it's still more fun and more interesting than most of the Grateful Dead tracks I know of.
Most of the lively cuts are fine as well, from opener "Flying High" (with its infectious chorus), to "Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine" and 'shaggadelic' "Love". Instrumental "The Masked Marauder" sums up what's both good and not-so-good in this record. It starts off just great, with an intricate guitar part filled with rich harmonies, but then segues into a novelty-inspired, ternary waltz-like bridge section that turns everything into parody, once again. Maybe without that cheesy organ--fine elsewhere--I could have taken the end of that track seriously, who knows?
Not giving any conclusion to this review because this album has none to speak of ("Grace" just... goes along). Call that a marijuana-induced memory lapse.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: more than 300 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (including this one, many others are more important to me)
ZZ Top
3/5
That one's so easy to crack. Southern blues-rock / boogie-rock legends go eighties synthetic pop while retaining the basic aspects of their intial sound. And as they do so, they cash in huge checks, thanks to MTV and the likes.
On paper at least, the concept of infusing synth-pop sounds into ZZ Top's DNA was promising. And it works for half of this album, with around 5 or 6 tracks that still sound "essential" today (including the stellar four singles, always a great fun to listen to).
Unfortunately, the rest of this LP is made out of fillers that are either following that new formula with far less convincing results for those, or rehashing the old blues-rock template for a couple of other tracks, without much conviction compared to ZZ Top's previous efforts in that area...
So looking on the bright side, *Eliminator* still marks one of the most commercially sucessful reinventions of a musical act in the last 50 years or so. Which not an easy feat to pull off. Yet artistically speaking, the album is still quite a mixed bag. Too bad.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to an 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3 ; a large part of those three points stemming from the creativity behind the band's reinvention, even if it's not fully convincing in the long run).
Number of albums left to review: 337
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 299
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 161 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 212
Venom
1/5
So...
When Miles Davis released *Milestones* and *Kind Of Blue* he did not only release great albums a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. He also created a whole new music genre, known as "modal jazz", and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when Bob Dylan released *Bringing It All Back Home*, he did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. He also created a whole new music genre, known as "folk-rock", and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when The Who released *My Generation*, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new trend for "mod-rockers", and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when The Beatles released *Sgt Pepper*, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created modern pop music, along with a whole new template for albums as a serious art form, and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when The Velvet Underground released their eponymous debut with Nico, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, known as "art-rock", and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when Fairport Convention released *Unhalfbricking*, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, known as modern "British folk" at the time, and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when Marvin Gaye released *There's A Riot Going On*, he did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. He also created a whole new music genre, known as "socially-conscious modern soul", and this almost singlehandedly
Likewise, when The Byrds released *Sweetheart Of The Rodeo*, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, known as "country-rock", and this almost singlehandedly (personally, I don't even really like this record, but I know that many fans of this subgenre still enjoy it today, so I'm not gonna argue against its relevance here).
Likewise, when The Stooges released their eponymous debut, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, known as "proto-punk" today, and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when David Bowie released *Ziggy Stardust...*, he did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. He also created a whole new music genre, known as "glam-rock", and this almost singlehandedly
Likewise, when Black Sabbath released their eponymous debut, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, "metal", and this singlehandedly.
Likewise, when Bob Marley And The Wailers released *Catch A Fire*, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, known as modern "reggae" at the time, and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when Brian Eno released *Ambient, vol 1*, he did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. He also created a whole new music genre, "ambient", and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when Kraftwerk released *Radioactivity* and *Trans-Europe-Express*, they did not only release great albums a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, known as "electronic music", and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when Patti Smith, The Ramones, The Damned and The Clash released their respective debuts, they did not only release great albums a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, "punk", and this almost singlehandedly (at least for each incremental steps leading to that style as it is known for and enjoyed today).
Likewise, when Wire released their debut *Pink Flag*, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, known as "post-punk", and this almost singlehandedly
Likewise, when Minor Threat and Bad Brains released their first EP, they did not only release great records a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, "hardcore punk", and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when Kate Bush released her debut "*The Kick Inside*, she did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. She also created a whole new music genre, known as "baroque pop" (that she later brilliantly furthered in *Hounds Of Love*). And she did all this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when The Human League released *Dare*, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, known as "synth-pop", and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when Talk Talk and Slint respectively released *Laughing Stock* and *Spiderland* on each side of the pond around the start of the nineties, they did not only release great albums a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, known as "post-rock", and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when NWA released *Straight Outta Compton*, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, known as "gangster rap", and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when A Tribe Called Quest released their debut LP, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, known as "new school hip hop" at the time, and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when Massive Attack released their debut *Blue Lines*, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, known as "trip hop", and this almost singlehandedly
Likewise, when Daft Punk released *Homework*, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also created a whole new music genre, "French Touch", and this almost singlehandedly.
Likewise, when The Strokes released their debut *Is This It*, they did not only release a great album a lot of people still hold dear to their heart in 2023. They also triggered the whole *rock-revival* wave, and this almost singlehandedly.
And so on. There's probably a dozen of other similar examples left, and of course, there will be many other ones in the future.
What about Venom's *Black Metal*, then? Surely, with an album title like that, it has spawned new generations of long-haired lovers of heavy riffs and extreme-sounding vocal !
Well, parts of the album's horror Z-movie-level Satanist imagery, clearly parodic here, might indeed have been influential for a few Scandinavian bands, most of them filled with naive teenagers who didn't have a clue all of this was mostly in jest. And yes indeed, parts of the objectively *terrible* music might have have been listened to by those same teenagers. So yes on both counts.
The thing is, said music is so badly composed, so badly performed, and so badly recorded that it's just impossible to take it seriously in 2023. And more importantly, *most metal fans out there* don't take this music seriously either today!!! At least that's what my usual impressions about this band tell me, and the reviews in here mostly confirm them. You have literally dozens and dozens and dozens of album categorized in the same subgenres as Venom that have been recorded since 1982, and you can bet your boots they sound better than this pile of hot garbage. Plus, musically speaking, *Black Metal* isn't really "black metal". It's very much trash metal / speed metal and the likes. There's no high-pitched shrieking and the riffs are too slow. It's only the Satan thing that can make you tie this act with later ones using that same "brand'. And well... that Satan thing wasn't even invented by Venom. The Bible invented it, did it not? 😉
So even as a first example of a precise subgenre--no matter how good or bad that example is--this album doesn't hold water. Very few people enjoy it now, it has no "objective" merits, and the influence it might have had--stemming on a misunderstanding anyway--has little to no relevance in the long run. So next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 336
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 299
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 161
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many others are more essential to me): 213
Eels
2/5
Released a few years after Beck broke out, *Beautiful Freak* is very much of its time--and this *not* in a very good way. Why go for a *partial copy* of Mr. Hansen's mix of self-deprecatory folk, tongue-in-cheek indie rock, groovy hip-hop-inspired rhythms and melancholic ballads, when the original version is so convincing on its own? I felt this in 1996--remember, this was the first full-length release of Steven Spielberg and David Geffen' brand new joint label *Dreamworks*, and the promotion for this band--that almost no one had heard of before--was so huge for such an "indie" act that it was hard to avoid it at the time. Yet, as I said, I didn't take the bait back then. And I don't take it either today, even though I really tried hard to keep an open mind as I went back to this debut album...
So why don't you take that bait, you might ask me? Well, for starters, the "dated" aspect of *Beautiful Freak*'s production is not to be underestimated here, even if it's not the only issue I have with this record (more on that later). To be more specific on that aspect, I'd say those outdated aspects are mostly striking in the first third of the LP, maybe because of the involvement of Michael Simpson, one half of the production duo The Dust Brothers, who produced... Beck's *Odelay*. Professional work here, I guess... Yet what felt fresh in the Beck album feels very much like a formulaic approach for the Eels debut. Opener *Novocaine For the Soul* sure is a perfect earworm, as "dated" as it sounds, there's no arguing about that! But after that, the album is very much a mixed bag--with a couple of great songs here and there (*Your Lucky Day In Hell*, *Flower*), and in between, either fillers almost feeling like interludes (example: the title-track) and/or more of the same formula (example: "Rag To Rags"), whose results are rarely memorable in those other cases. Plus there's quite a large share of hackneyed, awkward lyrics in this record!--lyrics about feeling... awkward (exemple: " Mental"). Quite awkward indeed. And very often, not even awkward in an "endearing" sense, to be honest.
Not going to discuss *My Beloved Monster* for very long, by the way. If that clumsy indie-rock track had not been featured in *Shrek* (a movie produced by... *Dreamworks* Studios!), you can bet your boots no one would give a rat's ass about such a weird little tune today!
So the dated soundscapes are not the only element to be blamed here. Compare "E" with Beck, once again: through his songwriting chops and his natural versatilty, Beck did manage to transcend nineties aesthetics so as to turn them into something that could often feel "timeless", fun and, also, emotionally relevant, quite often. As for "E", well... It's not that Mark Everett lacks such talents (he can write amazing songs as well). It's just that he has less spades of those enviable skills in him, and therefore often comes short of truly stellar moments for full-length releases. In other words, I'm not saying Everett shouldn't be a songwriter and a musician. He deserves the job 100%. But we're talking about "essential albums" here, are we not?
Which leads me to me the *overall* issue I have with Mark Everett's music as I went back to three or four more albums of his today, just to see what I might have been missing out after all these years. Turns out I didn't miss that much in terms of *albums* (individual songs are a different story). The problems plaguing *Beautiful Freak* as a whole indeed seem to be everywhere in Eels's discography: the disjointed aesthetics rarely gel into a convincing track sequence, a large share of self-indulgence is to be found in the writing (both the music and the lyrics), and the LPs have problematic "dynamics" overall. You have a lot of decent arrangements and forays nto different music styles that are interesting on paper. But they very rarely cohere into a stimulating statement.
The only exception I *could* make is *Electro-Shock Blues*, a album about grief and mourning, where--given its heavy subject matter--such "disjointed aesthetics" become assets. Especially at the end where a string of shattering-yet-life-affirming ballads create one rare effective sequence of songs that is truly affecting. This context also explains how the topsy-turvy sequencing in the first half of the record makes sense this time around, because the album is really about someone trying to reconstruct his soul after not one but *two* tragedies. One can only commend Everett for his bravery as he dealt with those heavy losses in his family. And, for me at least, that bravery and honesty paid off on an artistic level here, no doubt. Podiums and rankings about "essential albums" are unimportant compared to all that.
Yet apart from that album (and maybe a string of great singles in the very middle of *Daisies Of The Galaxy*--namely, "I Like Birds", "Flyswatter", and "It's A Motherfucker"), I guess I can only appreciate Mark Everett's talents as a writer of individual songs, and not as someone who crafts great albums. Which, really, is nothing shameful. After all, there are not so many songwriters who wrote more than 10 absolutely great songs in this world (at least that you've heard of). And Mark Everett is one of them for sure. Buying Eels' compilation "Meet the EELS" right now to remind me of that later...
I give *Beautiful Freak* a 2/5 grade for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 335
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 299
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 161
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 214 (including this one, many others are more essential to me).
OutKast
4/5
I get that as they were about to go their separate ways, Big Boi and André 3000 felt like they should "unite" their efforts one last time with this double-feature (the use of the word "unite" being partly ironic here). It sure was a great idea on paper to celebrate "the end" this way, and it helped both rappers get noticed one last time after so many other great LPs. The thing is, I can't help thinking that a single CD filled to its maximum 80-minute capacity, displaying the very best of those two separate albums, could have been the stuff of yet another legendary record (that would still be a double album on vinyl versions). Of course, selecting the very best cuts and creating a cohesive tracklisting out of the latter--so as to "unite" the increasingly differing aesthetics harnessed by both rappers/producers--would also have been the stuff of legendary headaches, going on for weeks on end. So this is what we got instead. Two very good albums, often achieving greatness. The only problem is that they're both clearly a notch under *Aquemini* and *Stankonia*.
Not really trying to solve that puzzle here, but still highlighting the stellar cuts in each "album":
Big Boi's *Speakerboxx*:
Not counting the "Intro", you have its first five real tracks "Ghetto Musick", "Unhappy", " Bowtie", "The Way You Move", "The Rooster", a lot of them displaying latin-inspired horn sections that make the whole start of the record feel both cohesive and adventurous. The six cuts after are pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the first five. "Knowing" then achieves greatness again, thanks to its melancholic guitar loop, its lively clave-enhanced beat, and its moving vocal hook. Fast-paced "Flip Flop Rock", featuring Killer Mike and Jay-Z, is quite spectacular as well with its other guitar loop and its old school, "golden age" flourishes (the entrance of the bass as Jay Z starts rapping is an extraordinary moment). The penultimate song "Reset", a lush laidback number is pretty good too, but maybe it could be left out for an ideal "single CD release" of this project. Finally "Last Call" is an apt closer for *Speakerboxx*. It has a curiously quite "west-coast" gangsta rap instrumentation, but throughout his album, Big Boi is clearly indebted to the P-Funk roots of the genre, so this closer is still at home with the rest of the great songs.
So that's seven or eight "keepers" for *Speakerboxx*.
André 3000's much more extravagant and disjointed *The Love Below* now:
after three "funny" short tracks/interludes, the album hits its real stride with funky "Happy Valentine's Day", maybe not the stuff of true greatness, but a cute statement from André-the-loverman. "Spread" goes to the same territory with slightly more interesting, subtle and leftfield instrumentations. Let's keep that one. After yet another "funny" spoken-word interlude about "mornings after", you have the sloooooow and gentle laidback funk of "Prototype". Its dreamy synth finale might make it a keeper as well. After that, "She Lives In My Lap" (featuring Rosario Dawson!) is smooth and sensual in the way that the best Prince songs circa-*Sign O'The Times" are, with extra groove added to its hypnotic beat at the end. And this one's a keeper for sure! Next, I don't think I need to say anything about "Hey Ya". It's an absolute banger, as everyone knows! And after that is a less famous single taken out of the album, "Roses". I think it could also be selected, which is not the case of the following interlude and proper track "Behold A Lady", both totally useless! Fortunately, "Pink And Blue" and "Love In War" up the ante after those duds--the latter once again reminding of the best moments of *Sign O' The Times". Next, "She's Alive" is a misfire, but "Dracula's Wedding" Is not--it's a fun mock-gothic exercise. The interlude and the drum'n'bass cover of "My Favorite Things" that follow are just dumbfounding ideas, however, once again totally useless. The last three tracks are far better, though. "Take Off Your Cool" (feat. Norah Jones) is a cool ballad sung over a delicate, moving acoustic guitar, and "Vibrate" and "A Life In The Day Of Benjamin André" are appropriately moody atmospheric tracks to close the proceedings.
You get the picture now, *The Love Below" is a surely a mixed bag. Yet it has more interesting tracks than I remembered it having at the time (going from eight to eleven depending on how benevolent I might feel about the whole project). I think the real issue of this record is about how low the stakes are for the first three or four songs and interludes--with very self-indulgent moments there conveying a bad impression of what this album intends to do. But things are not so bad after that, all things considered. Take out five extra useless tracks/interludes, and the rest even holds water like in the best albums out there.
Could the best cuts of each record be joined for a single CD, though? No, I don't think they could. Or it would taking a genius in the subtle art of tracklisting (you know there have been books written about that "art", don't you?).
Global grade for the purposes of this list of "essential albums": 3.5/5, rounded up to a 4/5 mark. Which translates to a 8.5 grade for more general purposes. Really hesitating between directly keeping this double-feature in my own list or placing it in my "waiting room". Whatever I decide down there, there are chances I change my mind later on, to be honest...
Number of albums left to review: 334
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 300 (including this one, probably)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 161
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 214
The Zutons
2/5
Can't see what's really so striking in this umpteenth "rock revival" band from the naughts. Maybe some off-kilter or cutesy arrangements in quite a few moments. But as of now, the barebones songs don't seem so memorable to me. Such songwriting is probably endearing to certain types of listeners, still remembering this act today. But to me, all of this was already a little self-indulgent in 2004, and time has not been kind to the "style" of a lot of those songs. Not a "bad" band by any means, yet a lot of "style" and not much exciting substance.
Listen to Geese's very recent *3D Country* to see how rock revivalism can be done right--i.e. in a manner that gives the clear feeling your band can paradoxically gain a whole distinct identity through the use of past references, and with a knack for leftfield, energetic flourishes from start to finish. In comparison, The Zutons sond a bit bland, and justifying their inclusion in this list might therefore be a bit of a stretch...
2/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums", translating to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 333
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 300
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 161
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 215 (including this one, many other full-length releases are more important to me).
The Stranglers
3/5
PROS:
- A "punk" band that had its own identity from the get-go, setting them apart from the '77 'explosion' of acts in that style. Besides, The Stranglers were neither "pub-rock" nor "post-punk" at the time. Clearly, they were doing their own thing, and that's always commendable. Funny how many reviewers in here state that they don't like punk and yet appreciated this record (nor necessarily a good sign for me, since I love many other punk albums, but you gotta give credit to the band for this feat nonetheless).
- Impressive musicianship on many tracks here (that terrifically complex bassline on "Goodbye Toulouse" is a thing of wonder!). I understand why some good folks writing reviews in this app compared The Stranglers to recent stellar bands such as Shame or Squid--even though I wouldn't necesarily go that far in my personal praise (see my later CONS section).
- The lyrics and vocal lines often convey a very distinct worldview that gives "dangerous" undertones to many of the songs. "Sometimes", "Peaches" and "Grip" are borderline-offensive be today's standards, but you gotta admit how memorable and "fun" they are for some ears.
CONS:
- That hammond organ quickly gets on my nerves for a lot of those tracks. I don't feel that I'm at a punk gig when listening to the record. I feel like I'm at the fair, and there are not enough "gothic" vibes to make it an evocative experience either. Punk can have "romantic" vibes in the literary meaning of the word, as "offensive" as that music genre is. That's how it becomes both grotesque AND "sublime". In contrast, I mostly get "vulgar" vibes here.
- That goddam organ also enhances the *major* harmonies of those songs. And there are already too many of them for my personal taste. Punk or not, I like rock'n'roll to bring some tension. Major chords rarely bring the latter to the table. So I'm not surprised that when the Stranglers later embraced pop aesthetics, they often sounded so cheesy. Textures and sounds were not the only elements to blame. Compositions played a part in this.
- In spite of what I said about the "dangerous' aspects of this record, a lot of the lyrics didn't age really well. The metrics AND the "optics" in some of those cuts sound awkward, hackneyed and, to be honest, a little dumb. I have nothing against sex-crazed "narrators" in songs for instance, but you gotta make that topic interesting, just like for any other one.
Conclusion:
If really you had to keep ONE Stranglers record in this list, I guess "Rattus Norvegicus" would be the best candidate. Their next album, *No More Heroes*, is a decent sequel, but it's *vastly* ovverrated. The one after, *Black And White*, might ironically be slightly *under*rated, but it's certainly no masterpiece either. And, as far as I've explored the British band's discography, let's face it: each of their LPs after *Balck And White* comes off as utterly... terrible. Those albums are either some sort of weird conceptual statement involving bizarre, half-baked "songs"--partly pretentious, partly ridiculous (that *Gospel According To MenInBlack* nonsense, for instance)--or some cheesefest of an unprecedented magnitude (*Dreamtime*). Or even BOTH (*La Féline*). For one rare good or even great single (the wonderful "Golden Brown", the lively rocker "Duchess", the lush "Skin Deep", the catchy pop masterpiece "Always The Sun"...), there are ten times more irrelevant songs, and almost as many frankly *horrible* cuts. *Rattus Novergicus could have been the first step of an artistically promising career. Turns out it's one of their very rare albums whose bulk is still listenable today.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums", translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 332
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 300
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 162 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine, as many other ones are more importnat to me: 215.
Michael Kiwanuka
4/5
Hey, I have this one at home! Mostly bought it on the strength of the "Rolling" single, a stellar track with a killer groove and killer vocal line, but I would lie if I said I spent much time with the whole album since 2019.
So I was about to dismiss this record as maybe slightly overrated for such a list--even if it's pretty good. But then I saw its global score on this app, 3.78! That's really a good one for such a recent record. People using the app really seem to enjoy this LP, and a lot of them point out they only have discovered Michael Kiwanuka thanks to this 1001 albums project. Made me reconsider the whole thing a little, I have to say.
Revisiting this LP was therefore pretty nice. It's got that "seventies" feel I really like. Actually such sounds and types of songwriting are basically timeless. The first three tracks are great, but most of the ballads on side two are also quite impressive...
So yeah, why shouldn't I include this record in my list of keepers? The thing is, there are around 50 albums released in 2019 that I find at least equally interesting or even *better* than this album. And there are at least seven albums not mentioned in the 1001 albums book, released in that same year, that absolutely deserve the spot currently taken by Michael Kiwanuka--albums by Lana Del Rey, Fontaines D.C, Billie Eilish, Big Thief (not for one, but for *two* albums), Tyler The Creator and Weyes Blood. Plus *Ghosteen*, by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, already mentioned in the book, if I'm not mistaken (as is Little Simz' *Grey Area*, whose production team was also involved to *Kiwanuka*). All those records are excellent, and it is my staunch belief that most of them will be fondly remembered in the decades to come--because the fanbase of those artists has grown exponentially in the last years or so. 2019 was such a good year for music, and it saw the rise of so many phenomenal artists. You'd have to go back to late sixties, the late seventies, or the early nineties to witness similar sudden surges in the quality level of the music released through albums...
Under that light, I think it's better to err on the side of caution and place this LP in my "waiting list". I'll probably revisit it again. But chances are that will revisit it *less* than all the albums I've just mentioned, as good as it is...
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums" (rounded up to 4). Which translates to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 331
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 300
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 163 (including this one, in spite of a grade that generally puts an album in the list of direct "keepers"--we might need a little time to see how this record holds up in the future)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other ones are more important to me): 215.
Steve Earle
2/5
Eighties country is such a bore. Can anyone ever *seriously* suggest a track like "Hillbilly Highway" is in earnest and not a parody? Can someone really tell the difference? WHO, goddamnit???! It's so... predictable. And hackneyed. And bland.
I'll give one extra point to my initial 1/5 grade, though (translating to a 6/10 grade for more "general" purposes than the one of this list of "essential album"). And this for four reasons:
1) Nice instrumentation sometimes make up for the eighties cheesefest that the production of this album is: that tremolo guitar on the first two tracks, some banjo on another... You get the honky tonk picture now, I guess.
2) Steve Earle looks like a nice dude, and he didn't have an easy life...
3) He was part of the cast of one of the best TV series of all time (and you can hear his voice on a couple of cuts from its soundtrack). That TV series is *The Wire*. He played the part of a recovering drug addict "sponsoring" another one who was knee deep into the throes of addiction. It's a part where he was convincing to say the least.
4) Apart from a couple of artists such as Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, I'm not a country music aficionado anyway, so I can readily admit that I'm not the best judge in this overall genre anyway. And Earle looks like an "authentic" player of this genre. That makes him convincing somehow, even if I'm not convinced by his music (at least on this record).
But that's only one extra point, alright? You can't change a leopard its spots. So next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 330
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 300
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 163
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (including this one, many other records are more important to me): 216
My Bloody Valentine
4/5
All groundbreaking monuments require some prior training by its architect. *Isn't Anything* obviously foretells some of the noisy sonic pleasures of MBV's own *Loveless*, but it also anticipates the ones of many later acts, from Teenage Fanclub to Sebadoh, from Blonde Redhead to Beach House, up to the latest strands of shoegaze still heard in 2024. You can perceive whiffs from all those subsequent acts in quite a few moments in the album, and it's amazing how a lot of those songs could have been released yesterday, how they haven't aged a day. There are also subtle callbacks to earlier cutting-edge artists such as Cocteau Twins or even Nico. Yet everything in unmistakably marked by Kevin Shields' stamp--that trembling, fuzz-drenched, explosive guitar sound, for instance.
If really I had to be picky, I perceive a dip in overall quality towards the start of side 2, with a few less convincing tracks that don't necessarily segue gracefully into one another. But the last two songs, "Nothing Much To Lose", and "I Can See It (But I Can't Feel It)" are a stellar way to cap things off, with a promise for later abrasive-yet-tender developments that My Bloody Valentine surely held--as everyone knows.
1988 was not a stellar year for music anyway. Too many acts and solo artists were still imprisoned in those dreadful eighties aesthetics, and if the underground was teeming with acts that would soon pave the way for the nineties, the important full-length releases made by some of those acts in that year were still far and between. There's Pixies' *Surfer Rosa*, Sonic Youth's *Daydream Nation*, maybe Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds's *Tender Prey*... and... that's it basically! At least if you don't count a fistful of other great albums in rap and a couple of other genres...
Under that light, and given how groundbreaking *Isn't Anything* already was, I think it's not too risky to directly include it in a list of "keepers", in spite of a couple of lackluster moments in its tracklisting. 3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums" (rounded up to four). Which translates to a 8.5/grade for more general purposes (5+3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 329
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 301 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 163
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 216
Super Furry Animals
3/5
Oh well. Being one of the most interesting bands of the "Cool Cymru" wave (with Manic Street Preachers, *maybe*) doesn't automatically make you an "essential" act to absolutely remember when assessing music from the last seven decades or so. Besides, "Cool Britannia" was already filled with overrated artists, as this list proves then and again. To be clear, I have nothing against Welsh rock bands. It's just that it's the same British critics that have here overblown this offshoot of the Britpop craze to ridiculous proportions. And those critics are not to be trusted, at least in my somewhat humble opinion.
To be more specific about this album: it's not bad at all, with a lot of thought given to key songwriting elements, production and arrangements. Yet what is so "original" here, after dozens of other Britpop bands? A fistful of songs, sure: the title track is among them, with its enormous winks to ELO and the Beach Boys. "Rings Around The World" is an earworm for sure, even if it's the sort of happy-go-lucky earworm that can get on your nerves after too many listens--and this in spite of its witty lyrical contents lamenting pollution in space (more in line with the innocuous aspects of The Beach Boys' *I Love You* than with any gem from *Pet Sounds* or *Smile*). Among the highlights, and yet also a very strange cut, "Sidewalk Serfer Girl" sounds as if folk weirdo Kevin Ayers had decided to have a baby with neo-metal rockers Linkin Park. Not sure I needed that sort of coupling in my music world, but now I know this feat can be accomplished at least. Finally, the vocoder-laden verses of "Juxtapozed With U" are certainly prophetic of sounds we got used to since 2001 (from Daft Punk's neo-disco shenanigans to Kanye West's crazy antics and Frank Ocean's neo-neo soul). This composition also hearkens back to the "plastic soul" of *Young Americans*, and it's true that Super Furry Animals were always convincing when they took a page from David Bowie's biblical book (as when they wrote "Demons", a clear homage to *Ziggy Stardust* found in their former LP *Radiator*).
Apart from that, there's not much that's *truly* memorable in this record. Just as for most SFA albums from the late nineties / early noughts, you have EDM interpolations that may or may not have aged well depending on your mileage about those sorts of electronic productions twenty years ago. And, let's face it, you mostly have Blur-inspired songs. A LOT of Blur-inspired songs (sometimes mixed with ELO, sometimes with Bowie). Except that it's a second-rate Blur at best, whether for the lively cuts or for the slower ones.
So not bad overall. But not "essential". And beyond the relative merits of *Rings Around The World*'s individual tracks, another issue one may have with this record is how sloppy and topsy-turvy its tracklisting looks. Case in point: the jarring transition between "Sidewalk Serfer Girl" and "Rings Around The World", in spite of the highlights that they are. Seems to me that *Radiator* is more "cohesive" than this later record, and so *slightly* more enjoyable than the two Super Furry Animals albums selected in the 1001 Albums Book. But even there, I don't think that *Radiator* is an essential LP either. All the SFA full-length releases I've heard are "cool" albums, in spite of their many shortcomings. But the latter prevent them from being worthy of a list gathering the best records of all time. Ain't life hard?
One last thing: browsing through the Wikipedia page, I've just learnt that Paul McCartney plays "carrot and celery" on one of those tracks ("Receptacle For The Respectable"). What the heck??! I'm glad Gruff Rhys and company had a fun time with an ex-Beatle in the studio, but decidedly, this won't save this song from its useless meanderings in its second half. If anything, such anecdote proves how Super Furry Animals could be self-indulgent at times, in spite of their connection to British rock regalia.
2.5/5 for the purpose of this list of "essential albums" (rounded up to 3). Which translates to a 7.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2.5).
Number of albums left to review: 328
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 301
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 163
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (including this one, many other records are more important to me): 217
PS: And what an ugly-ass artwork, for chrissake!
Julian Cope
2/5
I remember reading interviews of Julian Cope in magazines during the nineties. It looked like he was a totally bonkers shamanic figure, and it made him... endearing, in a way. I didn't have the opportunity to listen to his music until now. So I have to thank this app and the 1001 Albums book for this occasion.
What I didn't know was that Julian Cope was also a TV host of sorts, hosting a game show named "Spot The Influence" (the secret name of *Peggy Suicide*).
"Welcome to the show ! Today we have Cyril, a player hosting from France ! How do you do?"
"Fine, Julian. Thanks for having me here!"
"Sure, Cyril! Now let's play the game. Spot the influence! What's the influence on track 1 of my album?"
"... Er... Let Me Think... Velvet Underground? Except that the production values are stemming from the late eighties. Which is... I don't know. A little weird for that type of song."
"Ah, but you can still feel the nineties coming, can't you?"
"Yeah, well, a little..."
"Anyway... That's one point of view and that's one point FOR you! You can applaud Cyril, ladies and gentlemen (*The live audience applauds*) Track 2, now..."
(*A very cheesy song is now heard on the PA*.)
"Simple Minds!"
"Ah, quite good. Two points! And quite a jarring jump between the two cuts, right?"
"Er... Right. Guess the eighties aesthetics are the only common denominator here..."
"Track 3, now!"
(*A formless jam on a very dated *Screamedelica*-like type of rythm section ensues*).
" ... Beats me. The Stone Roses and Primal Scream on *more* drugs?"
"Well, I won't give you the correct answer now, Cyril. But you're not so far off the mark. About the drugs, I mean. Track 4!"
"This one's not so bad. Pre-Brian Jonestown Massacre and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club by way of 60's psychedelia!"
"And that's one more point! Yeah, you can reverse the influence thing, I guess. Track 5, now..."
"Lame attempt to imitate Iggy Pop circa-*Lust for Life*?"
"Oh, that's just very mean! What's so wrong about my voice?"
"I don't know... The overaffected pretense, maybe. And the lack of conviction in the middle of it all..."
(*The crowd boos the unhappy candidate after his jab at the TV host*)
"Er, Okay... Now let's go to track 6. Maybe Cyril will gain the points he just lost when he said that inappropia..."
"Excuse me? Julian?"
"Yes?"
"The thing is, I've listened to *Peggy Suicide*, as long as it is in its "deluxe version"... And it was quite a drag, to tell you the truth! The thing is, I could name all sorts of other influences I haven't quoted yet, from Nick Cave to The Doors, from John Cale to David Bowie, and from folk to funk and kraut, or new wave/post-punk. Yet I don't see the *fucking point* of this piling of influences. Especially when *nothing* in this record is up to the level of its obvious models and inspirators. I get that your lyrics are topical and/or metaphorical, which is fine. But the overall mood of this LP is so *dreary* and sloggish and dated. At least musically speaking. No offense, OK? I just tell it like I feel it. Besides, Julian, there's one thing you didn't tell me... What will I win if I give the maximum of correct answers in this game?"
"Well, there's nothing to win. Apart from listening to my fine, fine album, said to be the start of my *more mature* period by prominent critics of the early nineties." (*The crowd cheers and bursts into a riotous applause, prompted by the TV host's assistant.*)
"Ah OK. Goodbye, then."
(*And on this, without any other word, the unhappy candidate gets out of the studio*)
--
What? What do you want me to say? From my memory of those interviews, I thought Julian Cope's music would be as wild as the public figure he seemed to be. Turns out this record is both tame and overlong, filled with "exercises in style" that don't even have the charm such endeavors usually have. There are *some* good moments in this record, (and maybe even one *great* moment, the mantra that's repeated in the middle of "Safesurfer"), but they're drowned by the vapid meanderings found everywhere else. I just can't believe one of the reviewers in here compared this album to The Soft Boys's *Underwater Moonlight*. *Underwater Moonlight* is a neat, catchy, vital affair from start to finish. That's how you make very *different* influences coalesce, folks! The very contrary of what happens in *Peggy Suicide*.
Since starting this equally meadering review, I've read stuff about Julian Cope's life online, and believe me, I have nothing but sympathy for the political activist, wild philosopher, and music erudite that he is (that book he wrote about krautrock would certainly interest me, even with those "factual errors" in it--his humble words, not mine--ones that made him refuse to publish it again). If only for this, because Cope's heart seems to be in the right place--just as it seemed to be for *Peggy Suicide*--I won't give him a 1/5 grade.
Yet if we're talking about "essential" albums here, I honestly can't see this record being part of them. Maybe the problem with music erudites is that they know so much--or at least, are open-minded to so many different influences--that it becomes impossible for them to make all those influences cohere into a single pot. Maybe another album by Cope could convince me in the future. But as of now, I feel quite dumbfounded by what I've heard here.
2/5 for the purposes of this necessarily subjective list of "essential albums, translating to a 7/10 grade for more general and "objective" purposes. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 327
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 301
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 163
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (including this one, many other records are more important to me): 218
Little Simz
4/5
Little Simz is a skillful and impressive rapper, anyone who's into hip hop a little can recognize it right away. And the music on this album is excellent. I have minor gripes with a couple of more "middle of the road" neo-soul tracks in *Grey Area* (looking at you, "Selfish"), but there are no "fillers" to speak of in this tight, tight record, as many other reviewers in this app already pointed out. Please also check out her following album *Sometimes I Might Be An Introvert*, by the way. You do have a few "fillers" in this longer release, but the highlights are even MORE impressive. UK now has nothing to envy the US when it comes to good hip hop, that's for sure.
Not that there are no stellar highlights in *Grey Area*, mind you, like its opener "Offence" and its spiky bass synth and hectic bridge section, or like the lush and smoooooth guitar-driven "Wounds", or like the Tamla Motown-inspired background vocal hooks of "Sherbet Sunset". And at the center of this record you have a perfect string of bangers. First there's the intense, dry-yet-voluble "Venom", using the best of the US trap scene without the clichés that will make the latter unavoidably age like poor wine. Little Simz' faster-than-lightining-rapping in the middle of that cut is a thing of wonder-- "pussy in power" indeed. And the serpentine, atonal *Psycho*-like string section on the track is a thing of wonder as well, scary as fuck. Then you have the fun oriental flourishes or *101FM* and the more introspective and soulful mode of *Pressure*. Inflo's production chops shine a lot in this record, just like they do in other Little Simz albums or songs by Michael Kiwanuka (performing in *Grey Area*'s closer "Flowers" and its mournful-yet-jazzy, saxophone-enhanced soundscape).
It's nice to have recent albums like this on this app. I wish there were more of them, ideally, and in more varied styles that the ones represented in this list. There were *a lot* of stellar records released in 2019 for instance, and some of them were even better than this one.
That said, I understand that you need to wait a little before deciding whether such or such album has grown to an "essential" status. So it feels to me those sorts of lists should either refrain from including albums from the last decade OR conversely, take a *real* chance and include FAR MANY MORE recent records. In that case, you'd just have to erase cheesy stuff by Dwight Yoakam, Bonnie Raitt, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock and the likes, lol -- this list has too many piles of turd like that, plus a few overall "OK" records from the distant past that are just weird curios today (like stuff by Carpenters or early Bee Gees).
Anyway, Dimery's "solution" to just include a couple of records a year since 2010 is just a half-assed one to solve the problem of respecting the 1001 finite number for his "updated" project. Honestly, it feels like Dimery doesn't have a "team" of music experts with him these days, and that the recent additions in his latest book editions are just his personal, "subjective" choices. Nice that those choices include one Little Simz album. But a shame that there are no other recent important records by Big Thief, Fontaines DC, Idles, Billie Eilish, Lana Del Rey, Tyler The Creator, Low, Parquet Courts or Daughter, to only take a few 2019 examples.
End of my rant about Robert Dimery's list. Giving a 4/5 grade to this Little Simz record, even if I'm gonna wait a little to decide whether I include it in my own ranking. I almost *never* do that for my own 4/5 albums. But I'd rather err on the side of caution for certain recent LPs.
Number of albums left to review: 326
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 301
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 164 (including this one, OR *Sometimes I Might Be An Introvert--TWO Little Simz record might be overkill)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 218
Scissor Sisters
5/5
Wow. I knew who Scissor Sisters were -- I even ended up in their small rehearsal space one night when I was visiting NYC: an acquaintance of the band had the key to that place, located under a bar in the Lower East Side, where I was partying with a friend of mine (and no, there was no poppers or kinky sex involved in that small space if that's what you're thinking of! - It was all very respectable, just sipping a few beers there and having a nice chat, lol). But in spite of that personal experience, I had never properly listened to any Scissor Sisters record, and I have to say I'm *very* impressed by that one. It's got just the right mix of seventies and eighties references I love, from glam-rock (seventies Elton John, of course--whose shadow looms over half those brilliantly composed cuts--but also Bowie, Bolan, Mott The Hopple...) up to eighties synth-pop understood in its most elegant definition (that whole Human League and Heaven 17 connection--plus stuff I don't enjoy as much but that's certainly iconic for gay subcultures, like The Communards, Pet Shop Boys or George Michael). You also have groovy flourishes worthy of Stevie Wonder, and, obviously, the huge and mandatory disco influence that's found in the drag queen scene, where this project originated from. Yet there's still an unmistakable "rock" energy to the whole thing, which transcends the potential overload of cheese into a truly exhilarating experience.
The incredible disco cover of Pink Floyd's *Comfortably Numb* in this debut nicely sums up all those assets, with its obvious winks to Frankie Goes To Hollywood (even if the word "relax" was already in the original lyrics written by Roger Waters), or with its hilarious rëenactment of the falsetto vocal hooks of Bee Gees circa "Saturday Night Fever". It's fun. It's fresh. It's witty. With a calling card like that, Scissor Sisters was sure to leave a favorable impression to early naught audiences looking for the next big thing. Too bad I missed that train at the time...
Yet as cool and humourous as all those reference points are, they wouldn't amount to much if the band didn't have such a knack for infectious earworms. And it's not only "style", folks, it's also *substance*. There's not a single filler in this record, so I'm not gonna bother quoting a lot of songs from it. Seventies-era Elton John didn't merely influence Scissor Sisters in a "pastiche" or postmodern sense of the word, you see (even if "pastiche" and "camp" are unavoidable in gay / drag queen circles, for better of for worse). He also deeply influenced the band's chord progressions, the harmonies, the care for instrumental detail, the lyrical eye, and the overall "energy" of this thing. So much that if you placed some of those songs inside *Goodbye Yellow Brick Road*'s tracklisting, you wouldn't even blink an eye. And the same can be said for the other influences guiding the Sisters.
Another track thus sums up those other sorts of assets Scissor Sisters had in 2004. It's the poignant closer "Return To Oz", in a way more faithful to "Comfortably Numb"'s original epic spirit than the cover of the same name found towards the start of the album, very ironically. Scissor Sisters come full circle with that intense closer, and it's only one piece of evidence among many showing how carefully constructed the internal callbacks and other 180-degree-turn of this eponymous debut are. It's the sort of thing that allows a record filled to the brim with various music genres to become personal, sincere, and, at times, very touching. Because, well, to put it as simply as I can, the songs are excellent. So excellent that you quickly forget their "pastiche" aspects and end up enjoying them without any sense of irony in mind.
I've only browsed through the next three Scissor Sisters albums, but it seemed to me they are not as spectacular as this debut. The two last ones even sound overproduced, which only brings out their "camp" aspects to far less tolerable levels (the exact opposite of the many qualities I've just spotted in the band's debut). The first side of *Ta-dah* contains a string of immediate highlights, though, proving that Scissor Sisters still had those stellar skills you will always need if you want to create memorable earworms, catchy instrumentation, and witty lyrics. Yet if we're talking about "essential albums", the eponymous debut seems to be the *one*. Glad that this app made me know it. And glad that Scissor Sisters were there to open all those doors for a lot of people during the first decade of this century. Whether front doors or back doors I might risk adding. 🙃
5/5 if you round up. (9.5/10 on a scale of 10).
Number of albums left to review: 325
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 302
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 164
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 218
Lauryn Hill
3/5
I won't write a long review 'cos I was late checking out today's album. Just like Ms. Hill is late for half of her shows, I might be tempted to add rather unkindly. ;)
I pushed the "like" button for both the 5/5 and 1/5 reviews currently topping this section. Honestly, the first one is a beautiful, vivid memory of a personal connection with the album, and I "felt" what fans of it could feel if it's played at the right moment for them. And the second encapsulates in one harsh sentence my own personal gripes with the record: not enough memorable earworms for an album with such a "reputation", and mostly demonstrative vocal shenanigans that rarely build up into a truly exciting experience.
I love Fugees' *The Score*, it's one of my favourite rap albums of all time. But *The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill" doesn't work for me. I don't know if it's because Ms. Hill's reach as a soul singer exceeds her real grasp (she certainly has wonderful skills overall... but are those up to the task of what the singer aims at doing here, i.e. crafting a "classic" soul record worthy of her peers in the past?). Or if it's because my inability to fully appreciate the record stems from the quality of the compositions per se. Those have a lot of interchangeable moments, which only seem to serve as a pretext for the extreme "performative" aspect of Lauryn's Hill's vocal contributions in that "neo-soul" mode. And it reaaaaaally feels like I would at leasy like the album a little if Ms. Hill rapped more on it, instead of singing.
One thing struck me that hasn't struck me before as I tried listening to this album again, though. Those catchy quavers played on piano in "Doo Wop"' sound *very* close to the ones used by Dr. Dré in his hit "Still D.R.E.", out *a year* AFTER Lauryn Hill's single was released. A way to state that the production on this record was still "on point" and even sometimes relevant for the times, and that I'm not gonna deny its groundbreaking aspects for hip hop at large. I only wish the whole thing was not as "self-indlugent" and lengthy as it is. I understand the need for Hill to look at herself in the mirror as she probes her soul. But if you do it for too long, you risk coming off as vain and disconnected from real life. It's a tricky balance for sure. Hence why I still respect what the artist attempts to do here, even if it's clearly not for me.
3/5 for the purposes of what my subjective version of this list of "essential albums" might be. Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more "objective" and general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 324
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 302
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 166 (including this one, even if I doubt there will be room left for it)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 218
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
3/5
Iconic title track, plus a few very *weird* yet also very interesting deep cuts I had never listened to before ("Scorpio", plus "Message II" on the expanded edition). The admittedly cheesy "Dreamin'" and "You Are" places right before the album's centerpiece and closer--lounge soul ballads heavily inspired by Stevie Wonder--stick out like sore thumbs in the middle of the rap tracks. Yet they also prove Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five were not the one-trick pony everyone thought they were.
"The Message" is an essential single for the history of early hip hop, of course. But is the album bearing the same name an "essential album"? The jury's still out on this one.
Number of albums left to review: 323
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 302
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 167
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 218
Traffic
3/5
Nothing inherently wrong with this record, the first and *probably* the best of Traffic's discography post-Dave Mason's departure. With their modal jazz flourishes foretelling Steely Dan's later explorations during the seventies, "Glad" and "Freedom Riders" are great cuts. Steve Winwood's piano improvisation (?) at the end of the first track is surely a dreamy moment, thanks its use of eastern-sounding scales. And the title-track (a cover of a traditional tune) is very evocative as well.
Not sure this rock record is material for an "essential albums" list, though. I don't really understand why "Empty Pages" was picked as as a single for the album, for instance--even if said single seemed to have helped Traffic reach a certain success across the pond. Maybe the more "middle of the road" nature of that song can explain such success. But it's not one that aged specifically well, in my humble and honest opinion.
Besides--and speaking of singles--selecting a Traffic record that has none of their wonderful staple songs "Mr. Fantasy" (from the album of the same name) and "Feelin' Alright?" (from *Traffic*), seems like overkill a little. *John Barleycorn Must Die* is just a nice "little" record--certainly more *cohesive* than the relatively topsy-turvy affairs that the two first Traffic LPs were--hence why it ends up on a list like this--and yet also devoid of the striking pop highlights also found in *Mr. Fantasy* and *Traffic*, unfortunately. Formal perfection is not *always* the key that opens the door of an essential album. Sometimes, a little imperfections here and there can be forgotten when a bunch of poignant hits surge from a tracklist.
To conclude, *John Barleycorn Must Die* suffers from being mostly a "transitional record". And since this is a transition which ultimately lead to a phase of Steve Winwood's career that became increasingly *cheesy* as the years went by, it might be as easy to single it out as it is easy to dismiss it. And this for very similar reasons, ironically. Indeed, Winwood's music slowly became ridiculous from 1970 onwards, up to the point when his cheesy antics became utterly *unbearable* during the late seventies / early eighties. Had his (and Traffic's) next steps been as memorable as Steely Dan's *Pretzel Logic* or *Aja*, people might have remembered it the way some olks still remember *Countdown To Ecstasy* today.
By the way, terrible Winwood solo album *Arc Of A Diver* is in Dimery's list as well, astonishingly. And as said, things got even worse than that in the following years. Evidence enough that anything related to Steve Winwood in the 1001 Albums book must be taken with a grain of salt. At least *John Barleycorn Must Die* still clearly avoided such later horrors, and I'm glad about that. But that's not a sufficient reason to include the album in my own finite list, very sadly.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
LTJ Bukem
2/5
So let me get this straight, Mr. Dimery . Compilations are authorized in your list, or are they NOT? If it's the first, then discard that one and place Buzzcocks' *Singles Going Steady* instead. And if it's the second, then just discard that one.
The tracks by LTJ Bukem are nice drum'n'bass cuts with quite subtle and lush flourishes. And they aged pretty well considering how that particular electronic genre sounds dated overall in 2023. But minus a couple of exceptions here and there, the tracks produced by all the other artists are just a footnote written in tiny-ass letters in the book of electronic music. And once again, this double record is a compilation, not a proper album. I shouldn't even have to grade this thing. So next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 321
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 302
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 167
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 220 (including this one)
The Doors
5/5
"Break On Through", "Light My Fire" and "The End" alone warrants the inclusion of this extraordinary debut album in such a list. It would be insane not to mention The Doors at some point. And here's your best bet to do it, no question.
By the way, the three gems I've just quoted shouldn't lessen the impact of the other slightly-less-iconic-yet-equally-stellar cuts in this debut. Cuts such as "The Crystal Ship", "End Of the Night", or that mock-gothic yet genuinely haunted cover of Brecht and Weill's "Alabama Song"... And "Soul Kitchen", "Twentieth Century Fox" and "Take It As It Comes" are excellent blues-infused psychedelic songs as well. There's maybe a couple of very short fillers at the center of the record, but nothing that hurts its momentum. And even those lesser tracks bring some welcome mood swings on the table, in a way.
So contrary to the mixed bags that all the other Doors LPs are to an extent, this one's a no-brainer. 5 stars, then.
Number of albums left to review: 320
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 303 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 167
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 220
John Lennon
5/5
Stone-cold masterpiece. Of all the solo albums recorded by ex-Beatles after their dissolution, this is certainly the most important and moving one. "Mother", "Love", "Working Class Hero", "Isolation", and "God" are absolute gems--recorded in an understated fashion that make them timeless--and the rest is excellent as well, from start to finish. Primal therapy didn't help John Lennon solve the childhood-trauma-related issues he had. But it helped him record another stellar debut album, at least. Somehow, I have an inkling he knew this new hippie fad of his would mostly help him on an artistic level...
If you add singles "Give Peace A Chance", "Cold Turkey" and "Instant Karma" to the songs I've just singled out (found in the latest CD editions), plus "Imagine", "Jealous Guy" and "Give Me Some Truth" from the next album *Imagine* (and maybe also "Mind Games"), you basically have a greatest hits compilation by Lennon. And the mere fact that more than *half* of those songs come from the era of this debut album testifies how important the latter is for the history of rock music. 5 stars.
Number of albums left to review: 319
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 304 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 167
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 220
Justin Timberlake
2/5
There's only been *three* reviewers giving a 5/5 grade to this LP. Not because *Justified* is an "artistic" failure for the sort of commercial music it attempted to sell to the masses during the early naughts. The album *isn't* an artistic failure, it does exactly what it intends to do, and this in every "objective", reasonable way you can assess the music on it. Justin's voice is excellent, even if it doesn't reach the Michael-Jackson-level heights it tries to reach in many songs. And the production values are state-of-the-art for the time period, thanks to experts such as Pharell Williams / The Neptunes, or Timbaland--experts whose imprint is unmistakable on certain tracks. Take those funk-rock rhythms played on acoustic guitar for The Neptunes, or those lush, bass-heavy r'n'b shenanigans for Timbaland. Besides, there are a lot of arrangements that make listening to the album at least once worthwhile. And finally, "Cry Me A River" is a stellar earworm worthy of the best torch songs / break-up songs out there...
THAT SAID, let's repeat it: there's only been *three* reviewers giving a 5/5 grade to this LP. And there's a good reason for this. This is the sort of album that was never aimed at people interested in the *big picture* when it comes to modern music genres ("modern" taken in the largest sense of the word here). And this as open-minded as a lot of the people on this app try to be sometimes (me included). Because "Justified" is first and foremost a mass consumption product, and a "music album" later. Everything else is secondary. The fact that, overall, said album holds out far better today than, say, Britney Spears LPs, doesn't make it less dated or more artistically relevant than the latter. If only because Britney left a more impactful cultural imprint than Timberlake through her *singles*, at least--as lame and cheesy as her albums were as a whole...
Let's face it: the vast majority of people who bought *Justified* in 2002 will never have a phase where they will try to find what the 1001 most essential albums of all time are. They just go from one trendy pop craze to the next. They're just consumers, not music buffs. "...music buffs like most of us on this app", I'm tempted to add. We all have very different tastes in here, obviously. But I believe that what unites us is that we take the album format very seriously. It can't just be a "product". It has to speak to our "soul" somehow.
To be clear, saying this does not come from an elitist stance. I'm certainly not judging Justin Timberlake fans--all of us here are also consumers to an extent, it's part of the music business overall. I'm only trying to be realistic. As a consequence, I consider it's just plain weird or ridiculous to include *Justified* in a list like this. Because this inclusion doesn't really mean anything to *most* of those Timberlake fans, who would never use this app for instance (or probably give up after 20 or 30 albums...).
This realism I'm trying to apply here is the one that music sites such as Pitchfork have consistently failed to apply since the mid-naughts, because of their readymady "poptimist" philosophy--a quite artificial, shallow posture *fully* pandering to the worst parts of the music industry (PR shenanigans, label business plans, the heavy and quick "formatting" of up-and-coming artists and performers not lucky enough to have the means or entourage to defend their initial artistic integrity--at least if they had one from the get-go). I'm 100% sure that the way such poptimist stance has led "the most trusted voice in music" to condone so many cheesefest records has already returned to bite them in the ass today. Absolutely no one believes Pitchfork is "the most trusted voice in music" today, lol.
Of course, business is part of our music habits, as it is part of the life of *any* "professional" musician and artist. Even the staunchest fan of "independent music" and niche genres should be aware of this. But business also "pollutes" everything it touches. Just like it does for nature. Good music is an ecosystem, you see. And including *Justified* in this ecosystem does it more harm than good. I like "pop music", I really do. But good pop music in the album format has to elevate or challenge you, even if it does it very subtly or discreetly. And in retrospect, it's clear that *Justified* does none of that. It's just a goddamn product, as well-manufactured as it is.
Just bought a Britney Spears greatest hits compilation for three euros online after listening to this Justin Timberlake record. If I have to be a consumer and a "manufactured product buyer", I'd rather give up the pretense of an interest for "genuine artistry" altogether, and bob my head quite mindlessly to the more memorable Britney singles with a half-ironic smile on my face. It won't prevent me to enjoy off-kilter-yet-100%-sincere-and-"authentic" acts such as Robert Wyatt, Daniel Blumberg, Big Thief or Crack Cloud on the side. I can enjoy a burger once in a while, even if I prefer more soulful food. But I will never pretend that a Burger King product is akin to the best "cuisine" out there. Everything in its right place, please.
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential records. Which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2 - not so bad after all, huh?). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 319
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 304
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 167
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 221 (including this one)
Stephen Stills
4/5
The only problem of this double album is its length. But at the same time, said length is an intricate part of the record's overall concept, going to a wide array of different genres: southern rock, country and country-rock, bluegrass, blues, latin-infused grooves and the usual CSN(Y) hippie stuff. And each of the four sides is dedicated to an overall theme, helping you find your way into those 21 songs. Stephen Stills and his friends shine as performer and instrumentalists from start to finish here. Now the question is: are the *songs* worth it?
The best sides are side 1 and 4. On side 1 you have "Song of Love" and its catchy bassline and vocal hooks, lively "Rock & Roll Crazies / Cuban Bluegrass", followed by equally lively "Jet Set (Sigh)", plus moving "Anyway" or the Santana-inspired "Both of Us". And on side 4, there are "What To Do", "Right Now" and "The Treasure". By all means, don't miss side 4, it's got the best rockers in the whole LP, with some incredible build-ups -- it's just that this apex takes a while to come up after sides 2 and and 3.
Indeed, side 2 is mostly displaying country / bluegrass tunes, which is a change of pace that might not be to the liking of a lot of listeners: three of them are quite boring extraneous cuts, yet it's also got the stellar "Colorado" fortunately, whose infectious chorus might linger long in your soul, along with the nice torch song "Anyway". Don't miss those as well. And the same criticism pointing out second-rate tunes goes to the mellow-rock soundscapes of side 3, with only smooth and elegant "Johnny's Garden" and early Moog-synthesizer-enhanced (!) "Moving Around" being worth a visit.
I was tempted to give this LP a 5/5 grade, in spite of its relative share of fillers: since I count around 12 or 13 essential songs in this album (including atmospheric barebones closer "Blues Man"), it didn't seem like a stretch. There was obviously enough material in Stills for this one to write an "essential" single album, even if he chose to use the admirable personnel in this record for something much more sprawling (and consequently less cohesive) than that.
The thing is, I've given a 4/5 mark to Curtis Mayfield's *Superfly*, also out in 1972 (maybe I was a little harsh on this one, come to think of it). So I got to preserve some sort of consistency somehow. 4 stars, then. But 4 star *+*, as this double album is still a keeper, particularly essential for anyone interested enough in the extended Buffalo Springfield / CSNY "family".
Liz Phair
5/5
"Fuck and run, fuck and run, even when I was 17 / Fuck and run, fuck and run, even when I was 12".
*Exile In Guyville* is filled with shocker lines like that, but it shouldn't divert your attention from how *elegant* Liz Phair's songwriting can also be at times. Phair knows how to craft a memorable song, both lyrically and melodically (see "Fuck And Run", "Glory", "Flower", and especially the stellar hooks of "Stradford-On-Guy" towards the end). Musically speaking, the tracklisting is a little patchy and indolent once in a while--especially in the first part of this record--and I'm always surprised reviewers rarely comment upon that "flaw". But keep on listening, by all means. Soon, you'll find your way into the bedroom-aesthetics displayed here, evoking a sense of intimacy very few records can pull off (sometimes disturbing, sometimes charming, sometimes both in the same tune).
I never bought that selling point stating that this LP was a song-by-song response to "Exile On Main Street", by the way. To me, it's clearly an afterthought justifying the strange twists and turns in this album, going from MOR-so-called-"alternative" cuts to more leftfield or minimalistic ones. That selling point sure placed Liz Phair as a complex artist who had something extremely relevant to say about how sexist and prejudiced male rock musicians can be--a message that has lost none of its potency in 2024. Still, a lot of her songs, exploring her own contradictions, sheer impulses, and somewhat confusing aspirations, speak for themselves. No need to invoke the ghosts that the Rolling Stones had already become in 1993 to enjoy said tunes, even ironically.
It sounds as if I'm partly criticizing Phair here, but I'm only underlining how fresh and "original" and personal and pertinent *Exile In Guyville* still sounds today. Its "lesser" tracks are not exactly "fillers", for instance, they're just part of a poetic patchwork-like structure that few artists can create. Oddly enough, sophomore LP *Whip-Smart* is much more cohesive AND dynamic, at least musically speaking. And yet it wasn't as praised as Phair's debut. I always found that quite unfair (un-PHair?). But I guess this situation says something about the particular impact this debut had for so many listeners. *Exile In Guyville* is a record where the whole is clearly more than sum of its discrete parts. And those are the albums you will always return to with a lot of pleasure, even decades after. If only because you will never fully solve their mystery.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums" (rounded up to 5). Which translates to a 9.5 grade for more general purposes (5 + 4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 317
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 306 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 167
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 221
Talvin Singh
2/5
This record starts off on a great note with its two first tracks, "Traveller" and "Butterfly". They're an enticing and flavored mix of Indian classical music and drum'n'bass displaying a lot of killer moments, with impressive and evocative performances from the sitar and flute players (not to mention Singh himself on tablas). The orchestral conclusion of "Traveller" is particularly worthy of note for anyone interested in said Indian music. Because said conclusion is tight, moving and cinematic in a way that transcends the somewhat "dated" electronic flourishes found elsewhere in this LP. A few years before the release of *OK*, Björk famously used Singh's stellar skills for orchestration on *Venus As A Boy*. Seems like Singh could still pull off something marvelous years later, at least when he had something clear to say, as "Traveller" and "Butterfly" can prove. Too bad he rarely knew what to say *under his own name* towards the end of the nineties.
Because, yes, as great as those first two cuts are, I feel like the Anglo-Indian producer makes a bunch of weird choices when he attempts to apply the same formula during the rest of this record. In terms of relatively "striking" cuts "Monbastic" displays as a lead instrument the sort of muted trumpet that made Miles Davis famous. And "Eclipse" uses Qawwali vocals, which the rest of the world discovered thanks to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The problem is that the conflation of those "noble" elements with EDM arrangements and production doesn't work so well, especially decades later. Some of the bleeps / bloops sounds even come off as a little grating on "Eclipse", distracting so much from the stellar vocal performance on this track. If really you want to discover Qawwali, start with the *real* thing, please.
Another striking (and quite lively and charming) cut is the title-track, "OK", indebted to Bollywood-inspired vocal chants this time, and fortunately this *fun* track gels a bit better as it mixes said chants to bouncing jungle beats. But everything else (which means two thirds of this album at least) is clearly secondary, with attemtps that go from borderline-muzak-sounding, "illustrative" works ("Light") to ambient soundscapes ("Soni") and hard-electro meanderings ("Decca" and "Vikram The Vampire")--*all of them* leading to nowhere in particular.
Closer "Vikram The Empire" is quite a symptomatic instance of this problem: Singh displays admirable production skills there (as elsewhere) but those skills are betrayed by a blatant lack of direction. And as a consequence, the instrumental comes off as a sort of bonus track instead of a proper all-encompassing capper for such an album--aiming at mixing sounds from very different parts of the world, but never in a fashion convincing enough to make you sense *why* it should be so vital to do so. To put it mildly, *OK* doesn't tell a cohesive story. It just throws disparate elements on the wall and hopes they will stick the landing. I can relate to the intents Singh had for this LP. But clearly, and minus two or three nice cuts here and there, I don't care for the actual results. "Global" sounds, even performed with a lot of talents in the room, shouldn't prevent you from conveying something truly personal and enlightning form start to finish. It's probably easier to say this than to pull it off for real. Yet one can't help feeling this record could have been far more than "OK" with a few different choices in mind.
2/5 for the purposes of this list of supposedly "essential" albums. Which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2). I feel like I have *already* reviewed this album by the way. Hope I'm wrong and the 1001 albums generator isn't stuck on a loop for me--just like Talvin Singh sometimes is, lol. Because I intend to *end* this project.
Number of albums left to review: 317
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 306
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 167
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 222 (including this one)
Air
4/5
The first side of this LP alone warrants a place for Air in this list. Smooth and retro-sounding instrumentals "La Femme d'Argent" and "Talisman" take the best of the flavors once explored by the likes of Burt Bacharach, Serge Gainsbourg and seventies Italian movie soundtracks. "All I Need" (featuring Beth Hirsch on vocals) is admittedly an understated ballad, but its central hook can illuminate the grimmest heart. And "Sexy Boy" and "Kelly Watch The Stars" are timeless bangers drawing from disco, 70s soft-rock and 90s 'French Touch' electro in a particularly catchy and idiosyncratic fashion, with hypnotic-yet-lively basslines, and equally hypnotic vocal lines on vocoder.
The second side is also quite good, even if a little hit-or-miss sometimes: "Remember" goes to the same soundscapes explored in side one, but comes off a little short in comparison--both because of its tiny length and predictable contents. The acid-jazz/lounge undertones of ballad "You Make It Easy" (also featuring Beth Hirsch) sound "dated" in a way that's less elegant than in other parts of the LP, in spite of some impressive arragements towards its conclusion. "Ce matin-là" fares far better, as if it was a classic cut once composed by Ennio Morricone for a police procedural during his seventies heyday (what a memorable melody on the trumpet!). And so does "New Star In The Sky", even if's a touch too long and drowsy at times. Excellent piano-and-vocoder bridge, though, and nice subtle orchestral flourishes in its second part. As for "Le voyage de Pénélope", it's an apt closer displaying a fascinating jazzy synth line à la Vangelis, and it sums up all the different moods in the record. It's another short track, but it manages to be both relaxing and enticing, both "funky" and oneiric. Not so easy to pull off, all things considered.
*Moon Safari* is a textbook 4/5-star album for this app (translating to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes). It never tries to impress you *a lot*, because it's too busy having fun first. And those records are often the most endearing ones for a lot of listeners. So it's nice that *some of them* find their way in such a list.
Number of albums left to review: 316
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 307 (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 167
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 222
Ali Farka Touré
2/5
Call it a cultural blind spot, but I find it a little hard to focus on this record, even though it kind of works as "background music". Seems to me that the Ali Farka Touré LP recorded and co-signed with Ry Cooder--also in Dimery's book--is more accessible to my admittedly untrained ear than *Savane*. Untrained ear for traditional Malian music, at least... I can spot a lot of arrangements inspired by North American blues, for instance, just as I spotted them in that other album. But I would lie if I said those arrangements bring me closer to the emotions Touré probably conveys to his usual listeners. If anything, I think they even muddle the picture this time around...
I've said it before, but maybe including full-length releases coming from outside of the American-European-Australian sphere does a disservice to everyone. Fans of "global sounds" (and their modern pop offshoots) will always think there's not enough room for their favorite recordings. And rock, rap and electronic music buffs might consider that this fistful of "world music" records are taking up critical spots for other favorite albums of theirs.
So aside from such a list, you could have a 1001 best recordings list dedicated to the African continent, South and Central Americas, and Asia and Oceania. Plus, maybe, several shorter lists one for "classical" and traditional music from each continent. Of course doing this could attract its own share of criticism. But there would be a far more "equal" representation of music from all over the world. Because the maths are unavoidable here: after all, 1001 is a finite number, is it not?
Hard to grade this record, as a consequence. I will give it a tentative 2/5 mark, translating to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes. (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: 316
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 307
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 167
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 223 (oncluding this one)
Nine Inch Nails
5/5
Pop-industrial masterpiece. One starting with what sounds like an S/M "séance". Do I need to say more at this point?
Yes, I do, because rarely have depression, perversion and self-hatred produced so many intense, aggressive, and, most of all, *catchy* moments, The first five or six tracks of this album are a perfect string of songs, with all sorts of uneasy electronic details and rhythmical flourishes finding their way into your brains like so many infected earworms (Those spiky sunth basslines! Those drilling sounds in the background! That time signature on "March of The Pigs"!). Over this hellish but highly seductive program, Trent Reznor sets no filters for his lyrics, for better or for worse. "Closer"'s chorus still sounds as gratuitous and offensive today as it was in 1994, but it's the overall energy and musicality of the music carrying this sick chorus which sells the whole thing. Drawing as much from Ministry and The Killing Joke as he does from Prince or that recent so-called "grunge" wave, Trent Reznor applies a musical program that is not also violent, haunted and anxiety-ridden, but also rich and highly flavored.
After such a raucous start, the first half of the second side is even more stifling and claustrophobic--maybe even a little too much at times, admittedly. Yet you soon realise this claustrophobic dead-end of sorts was all on purpose when heartrending ambient instrumental "A Warm Place" surges to terminate that particular "downward spiral". Then, you start hoping that the sick, psychotic, drug-addled protagonist at the center of this record is going to find redemption at last. Alas, the last batch of songs slowly but surely place you into the boiling water again, with some of the best build-ups in the whole record--sometimes suggesting a little optimism in their first seconds, but then increasingly invaded by all sorts of unsetlling noises. Up until the finale "Hurt" (famously covered by Johnny Cash) ends the proceeding on one last desperate, but highly moving note.
No wonder Trent Reznor became a film composer. *The Downward Spiral* might not fit with every listener's taste, but it's an impressive narrative, with the sorts of dynamic twists and turns that bear the mark of the best concept albums in the history of modern music. And it's a narrative mostly conveyed through effective soundscapes, memorable melodies, and a care for detail which easily place Reznor as a genius of the nineties.
5 stars, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 315
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 308 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 167
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 223
Morrissey
3/5
I have already listened to this album, and the main takeaway I have about it is that Morrissey without the jangly guitar lines of Stephen Marr is not necessarily worth most listeners' time. I understand that it might be a little unfair to say so for a certain subset of British pop rock fans given that Morrissey had indubitably honed his singing skills by the time he reached his solo career phase. But if Morrisey *technically* sang better here than during his tenure as the frontman of The Smiths, you still have to deal with his quaint, stilted, overaffected phrasing in many songs from this LP, doing a disservice to his witty one-liners here and there. And let's face it, the music is, well, often *more* than competent, but not always as striking as the one that was played in *The Queen Is Dead*, *Meat Is Murder*, or *Strangeways, Here We Come*.
Which does not mean that the Moz's new partners-in-crime Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer did not know what they were doing on a musical standpoint. Some of their drowsing, automatic-mode-written MOR pop rock compositions aged like milk, unfortunately, and the lyrics on those cuts aren't even sharp enough to save the day ("Spring-Heeled Jim", "Billy Budd"--very unfortunately placed in slots 2 and 3--but also nicely-arranged-but ultimately-empty borefests "Used To Be
A Sweet Boy" and "Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning", the latter mostly memorable through its witty title and overall concept). Yet a majority of highlights with interesting chord changes and/or killer guitar arrangements keep the record listenable overall (opener "Now My Heart is Full", "Hold On To Your Friends", "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get", the very pretty "I Am Hated For Loving", the "classic' homoeroticism of sardonic-yet-tender "The "Lazy Sunbathers", and the killer banger closer "Speedway", with its heavy drums and amplified guitar work hearkening back to the wonders of "How Soon Is Now"...). So the good still clearly outweighs the bad here. That said, does it do so to the point you would need to place *Vauxhall And I* in an "essential albums list"? The jury's still out on this one...
Oh, and of course, Morrissey has always been an insufferable twat, that goes without saying--whether in his political opinions or in the much-documented ways in which he treats people around him during festivals and gigs. Which is why having his name written in full letters in such a list is also annoying to an extent. Yet I swear I tried very hard to judge this record for what it is. And the verdict is that yes, *Vauxhall And I* is a good album, in spite of its few shortcomings here and there.
The thing is, 1994 had *so many* excellent albums that deserve to be in such a list (around 45 by my own personal count--yes, *45*!). Which is why adding someone so obnoxious to that list of talents might be ill-advised here, lol. I hope Morrissey fans can understand. But if they don't, chances are that they are a little blinded as to who their "idol" really is. Not to the point they share some of his stupid views, I hope. But I'm not so naive about it, some of Morrissey's *current* fans do share those views, unfortunately...
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3). Because it's still a good album, and probably the only decent contender for this list among Morrissey's solo LPs.
Number of albums left to review: 314
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 308
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 168 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 223
The Who
3/5
Personal rule of thumb: I'm not inclined to include any live album, as good as it is, in my own list of 1001 "essential" albums. There are already too many stellar and important LPs missing in Robert Dimery's list, so I think you should leave some precious room for those instead. Besides, more than half of the songs in the original version of *Life At Leeds* are covers, and covers are certainly not the sort of thing The Who are remembered for today, as hectic as the performance for those covers is.
That said, I *might* break my own rule of thumb for a couple of "particular" and unmistakably iconic live albums such as Nirvana's *Unplugged In New York* or Johnny Cash's *At Folsom Prison*. As hard as you try to follow rules, in the end, music appreciation will always be a subjective business, right? 😉
8/10 for this live album (5 + *3*).
Number of albums left to review: 313
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 308
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 168
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 224 (including this one)
Metallica
1/5
And here I was complaining about the overabundance of live albums in this list just because The Who's *Live At Leeds* popped up yesterday--taking up slots that could have better uses--when *this* surges today! I'm sure some fans of Metallica love this live "symphonic" version of their favorite guitar heroes' staple songs. And I'm sure doing this sort of "work" requires some flawless "technical" skills from everyone involved in this particular concert and recording.
The thing is, *artistically" speaking, this project is just inept and overblown to ridiculous proportions (gosh, the sheer *length* of that album!). Worse, everything in this record is so damn predictable, artificial and ultimately *soulless*: those stadium-like crowd chants! The *performative* aspect of it all! The bland and heavy-handed symphonic orchestration reminding you of so many dumb Hollywood blockbusters! All due respect for the memory of the talented Michael Kamen, but he wasn't exactly a subtle film composer writing memorable themes anyway. No wonder he accepted the job and condoned this whole project.
Plus, how many *recent* great acts in the metal genre have been ignored to leave some room for *this*? If only for this reason, true fans of this genre should be angered by the inclusion of this LP in the list.
1/5 grade for the purposes of this list of "essential" records. Call that a "protest grade". Which translates to a 6/10 grade for more general purposes (5+1). Because *S&M* so often straddles the line between merely "listenable" and cheesy that it's easy to lost count.
Number of albums left to review: 312
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 308
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 168
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 225 (including this one)
Gang Starr
4/5
You need at least *one* album by Gang Starr in such a list. The union of DJ Premier's legendary boom-bap prodution chops and Guru's "conscious" lyrics, uttered in a deep, precise voice with a high-class flow rarely matched in the hip hop world, is too good to go unnoticed. Trouble is, if only *one* Gang Starr album could be selected in such a list--because of a lack of "room"--which one would it be?
Let's cut the suspense, here, sophomore album *Step In The Arena* is indeed one of the strongest contenders. Even its less "noticeable" cuts (less noticeable during a first, superficial listen, that is) are admirably well crafted, thought out and performed. And the highlights are simply stellar, enough said: there's the title track "Step In the Arena", but also "Check the Technique", "Take A Rest", "Just To Get A Rep". The last three tracks ("As I Read My S.A.", "Precisely The Right Rhyme" , and "The Meaning Of The Name") are even one of the most beautiful strings of songs ever ending a hip hop album. Creating a good build-up in a rap record, up until the very last minutes, is not so easy to pull off. DJ Premier and Guru make it sound as if it's only a child's game for them.
Being very fond of Gang Starr's next album *Daily Operation* (where Premier sprinkles even jazzier moods than in *Step In The Arena*--still very much indebted to seventies funk and classic rock samples instead), I could be tempted to select that other LP and leave *Step In The Arena* aside. But no, I won't. Worst case scenario, I would personally select *both* records and leave it at that. Boom (bap)! Problem solved.
4/5 for the purposes of this list. Which translates to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 311
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 308
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 168
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 225
Digital Underground
2/5
I remember having a tape of this rap band as a teenager and quite liking it. The first track of *Sex Packets* sure displays a very distinct and enticing "sound". Unfortunately, everything else after it can be filed as "more of the same, but less good". Plus, that particular recycling of P-Funk moods quickly became outdated by the one Dr. Dré applied for his own productions. So if *Sex Packets* remains an interesting record to listen to today, it's far from being "essential" in the overall history of hip hop. Not to mention in the history of music in the last seven decades or so.
2/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2).
Number of albums left to review: approximately 300 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (including this one, many others are more important to me)
Giant Sand
3/5
This one starts off with two absolutely great tracks, "(Well)-Dusted" and "Punishing Sun", subdued and subtle, but with stellar chord changes and a few gems on a lyrical standpoint. A little bit later, the sequence of songs "Shiver" (with its wink to "Walk On The Wild Side"), heartrending ballad "Dirty From The Rain" and atmospheric country-folk cut "Astonished (In Memphis)" is pretty convincing as well. Howe Gelb doesn't have a "spectacular" voice, but what he does with his lower timber serves those compositions right, even with some (endearing) frailties here and there on a technical standpoint.
Unfortunately, a lot of the songs on the album, conveying the same exact sort of melancholic "confessional" mode, are somewhat "interchangeable". Moody and well-crafted for sure. But quite unobtrusive and generic as well. With its slow-yet-raucous distorted guitars, Nick-Cave-and-Lou-Reed-indebted "Satellite" attempts to wake the listener up in the middle of side two. Yet if that composition is decent, it's not exciting enough to elicit more than a passing interest in the song.
Having this album popping on the app today reminded me I should also dig into Calexico's discography, since they're also from Tucson (and Burns and Convertino once played with Gelb). Giant Sand will have to wait until I reach that point. And I'm afraid that by the time I do so, there won't be any "room" left for them in my list.
3/5 for the purposes of this ranking, which translates to an 8/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: approximately 300 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (including this one, many others are more important to me)
Charles Mingus
5/5
Dinery's list missed *Mingus, Ah, Um", inexplicably, but at least it contains the post-bop / progressive big band masterpiece *The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady", thank goodness. Jazz has rarely sounded as wild and lively as in here, with so many crazy build-ups duriing the evocative dance pieces and atonal experiments found in this memorable record. The mere fact that Mingus' shrink wrote part of the album's liner notes speaks volumes (even if those notes are more a tongue-in-cheek joke than anything else). Not for the faint of heart, obviously, but 5 stars nonetheless.
Number of albums left to review: approximately 300 (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me)
Calexico
4/5
Suprised that Dimery's list doesn't contain Calexico's *The Black Light* or *Hot Rail* instead, but it is true that some of the gems found in *Feast Of Wire* also make the latter a very important release within the Tucsonian band's discography. In 2003, Calexico had already acquired a good reputation in French music buffs circles, thanks to their connection to relatively popular indie acts hailing from France (where I also come from). This might explain why *Feast Of Wire* feels like a "bigger" album statesides compared to France: because a lot of American people actually discovered the band because of *that* particular album.
Truth be told, all three LPs from that trilogy of albums display the same assets, and also the same "endearing" flaws. The assets are that charming and well-crafted mix of indie-rock and tex-mex mariachi influences most of the other reviewers praised in this app. And the flaws are that the tracklisting of those records always seem a little topsy-turvy and disjointed to an extent, with a few instrumental interludes that don't necessarily go to any *precise* destination. Calexico's "pueblo" aesthetics imply that they rarely care about cohesiveness anyway, favoring loosely-shaped ephemeral pleasures instead. There's a French turn of phrase for said aesthetics, by the way: "auberge espagnole" ('Spanish inn'). You throw whatever you have in your hands onto the wall and then hope that the landing sticks somehow.
In *Feast of Wire*, some of the things thrown onto the wall are worthy of a Michaelangelo fresco, fortunately. With its gripping and heartrending string section inspired by Arvo Pärt and Penderecki (!), "Black Heart" is one of those wonders, and it would be a crime not to listen to this song at least once in your life. The jury's still out as to whether the rest is "essential" within the confines of a 1001-best-albums-of-all-time list. But I do hope there will be room left for the album when I establish my own ranking at the end of this project. If only for that one jewel.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 4. Which translates to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 298
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 309
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 169 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 227
Eagles
4/5
When I was younger, I thought I hated the fuckin' Eagles, man, just like the proverbial Dude. Turns out I just didn't know them well. They've *never* made a perfect album, but there might be a couple of LPs in their discography where the good clearly outweighs the bad--namely this debut and *Hotel California*. The question is, do those two records deserve to be in such a list, as benevolent and accepting as one might be inclined to think of them today?
For 1972's *Eagles*, there's not a *huge* iconic song in it like the title track giving its name to the other album I've mentioned in my introduction up there. Yet there's an overall, wide-eyed, youthful energy *Hotel California* doesn't have in spades in comparison. A lot of reviewers in here have praised the three singles taken out of this debut album, "Take It Easy", "Witchy Woman", and "Peaceful Easy Feeling", and it's true that those three famous cuts have a special kind of quaint charm that makes them endearing today--plus, "Take It Easy"'s chorus is so memorable that it makes the song a perfect opener. But it's when Eagles's sense of adventure takes them to less "obvious" roads that the band becomes one that somehow masters the full-length format, at least when they succeed in alternating happy-go-lucky hits with more off-kilter pleasures...
Case in point: Frey's rocker "Chug All Night". With its tense, minor harmonies on the verses, unexpectedly "solved" during the solar chorus that follows them, this song epitomizes a care for dynamics and effective "twists" the Californian band rarely forgot about when recording this LP. At this point, it doesn't even matter if the song's lyrics are a little hackneyed or trite. Sometimes clichés can be served with a nice chaser, and just like tequila, they become a treat instead of a chore. And when Eagles "rocked out", they had an energy that had little to do with their country-indebted tunes, as can be witnessed with "Chug All Night"'s cousins in the album, the great "Take The Devil" and "Tryin'"--aptly evoking the desert landscapes shown on the album's artwork. Funny how a lot of listeners often quickly forget such positive things to say about this band. But maybe the Dude smokes too much pot to remember any of it...
Introduced by chirps and warbles, "Earlybird" is also a very lively moment, even if it's too mild to be a "rocker" per se. Written by Leadon and Meisner, this song proves that when every single member of the band took part in compositions, they had many trump cards in their hands--because it made the whole thing sound "varied" and all over the place, somehow, if you can mean such things in a good way.
Last but not least, two of the more "country" cuts are particularly effective in this record. There's "Nightingale" closing the proceedings on side one. And most especially, there's the side two opener "Train Leaves Here This Morning", co-penned by Leadon with none other than ex-Byrds Gene Clark. Check the latter's own version of the song in the LP... *No Other*, by the way. If only because this album is a truly *stellar* one.
To return to Eagles' debut, it seems that the *only* borefest in it is Frey's "Most Of Us Are Sad". "Textbook"-country rock is a large part of this record. Yet it comes as a surprise that only *one* song is boring because of this, and that the rest is still pretty convincing and even thrilling to an extent. Call it a miracle. Some people can go to Death Valley and live to tell the tale, after all.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 297
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 310 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 169
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 227
The Cult
1/5
This is the story of how a second-rate gothic-rock, "postpunk" band became a *third-rate* hair-metal band. Which, obviously, is anything but an upgrade. Yes, of course, *Electric* sold a lot of unit shifters in 1987. But it only took three or four years for this hackneyed and heavy-handed album to become irremediably outdated. And thank goodness for that: it's good that general audiences did not linger in such bland and/or ridiculous territories for years on end, at least. Producer Rick Rubin has been a rather positive force for many acts of all stripes (from Beastie Boys to Johnny Cash). But here, one wishes he had abstained from taking part in such a wreck. Opener "Wild Flower" is still a *listenable* hard rock cut, admittedly. Yet everything after depends on your own personal mileage on "cornball, retro-moronic" stuff, to use the words of fanzine *Trouser Press*...
Was about to give a quite benevolent 2/5 grade to this *thing*, if only because I didn't want to judge something *willingly* designed to be shallow and *mind-numbing-fun* (a-hem) in unneccesary harsh terms. But then I heard that cover of Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild"... Turns out that it's so BAD that its mere inclusion in the tracklisting took out a whole point from my initial grade for this LP. It's one thing to play corny or vulgar stuff in a somewhat competent fashion, just because it's supposedly "funny" or unpretentious to do so. But it's another thing to be insulting to large parts of your intended audience just by playing particularly unmusical arrangements, or pretending that your dumb groans and rattles could be considered as "singing" by anyone having a shred of good taste left in their soul.
1/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which, quite frankly, translates to a 3/10 or 4/10 grade for more general purposes (5 *minus* 1 or 2). Next, please....
Number of albums left to review: 296
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 310
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 169
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 228 (including this one)
Bob Dylan
5/5
*Blonde On Blonde* is not only a work of genius. It's also an album filled with surprises. Oddly enough, this *long* record opens with what are probably the relatively "weakest" cuts in it ("Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" and "Pledging My Time" ). Guess Robert Zimmerman here personifies the jester that makes a sly joke on you right before offering a masterpiece whose scope is potentially infinite. Postmodernist, "carnival-like" art rarely gets better than this--intended "flaws" included.
Besides, as "weak" as "Rainy Day Women" is compared to the myriads of stunning gems following it, it's still an instantly iconic opener for this double album, with its tongue-in-cheek, abrasive, free-flowing-harmonica-enhanced marching band shenanigans and its biblical/druggy double-entendre "Everybody must get stoned!", bellowed during the chorus. I wonder if this is where Cypress Hill got the idea for their song of the same name, by the way. Associating Bob Dylan and Cypress Hill in the same sentence gives me giggles, but with Dylan, unexpected connections will unavoidably surge, so vast is the scope of references and striking turns of phrase used in his songwriting, leaving an imprint in collective consciousness like very few artists ever did.
I've only adressed the first song of this record as I'm writing this tentative review, and I've already penned two paragraphs. Quite odd when "Rainy Day Women" is not even my favorite song in the album, I have to say... No wonder so many authors produced mammoth essays, articles and books about Dylan. No wonder some university teachers can spend a year-long syllabus just talking about the man and artist. You see, the genius of Bob Dylan does not only lie in his stellar songwriting and performances--it also lies in the way he inspires others to write striking turns of phrase in their turn, and how his songwriting elicits so many interesting interpretations and memories.
Take some of the 5-star reviews written for this app: "It's like a folk-rock *Ulysses* or something" says one reviewer. Also referencing James Joyce, and addressing Dylan's notoriously "difficult" and "unprofessional" singing, another reviewer wrote: "I really want to give this record 4 stars to punish it for having the vocals of an out of service oscilloscope, but fuck, it is too damn good. It would be like marking down a James Joyce novel because of his punctuation style." And concluding this comparison between *Blonde On Blonde* and Joyce's literary skills, one last reviewer tagged the record as a "poetic odyssey". Those comparisons involving Joyce are not only brilliant--they also sound legit, deserved, and totally heartfelt. The best homage you can give to the winner of a Nobel Literature Prize.
Yet those raving reviews are not only about literary references, they also movigly evoke their writers' deep relationship with Dylan's body of work. As when this reviewer described a mystical, transcendent experience he went through as he listened to *Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands* while bed-ridden with the flu... Or when that other reviewer reminisced about once listening to the whole LP on a jukebox in New York and how such a mundane act might change your whole life... So rich is this album, so fecund, that it soon becomes a hall of mirrors where each and every listener can recognize their own soul being reflected in them. Truly "universal", in the first meaning of the word.
Rather than "muttering small talk at the wall", I will abstain from attempting to describe how good *all* of those tunes are, and most especially *why* they're so good. Many reviewers using this app have already done so. You would have to pick one particular line, and say why it's so witty / hilarious / moving / interesting / mysterious / ominous / poetic / wonderful for another lengthy parargraph. You would have to compliment each excellent and effective guitar or organ or piano fill as played by Robbie Robertson, Al Kooper, Paul Griffin and all the other wonderful players in the album. You would have to praise the way in which Dylan uses certain arragements and smart chord changes in a large chunk of those compositions to make them go beyond their initial bues-rock / folk-rock templates, and this in a way that always enhances his vocals and lyrics.
But as I said, other reviewers did this better than I could ever do it myself. All I can do is list the most legendary songs in this double-album (the first one ever in the histroy of "rock") and leave it for others to elaborate on them. It's true that the record only hits its *real* stride with the third track musing between the differences between impossible, ideal perfection and the all-too-human yet also "humane" frailty of life experiences--it's that simply terrific song "Visions of Johanna", with its incredible narrative arc (how striking are those lines from it singled out by another reviewer, by the way: "The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face / Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place"). But if the *first* real gem comes up on track number three only, it's neverending fireworks after it: there's "One of Us Must Know"--probably one of my favorites Dylan tunes ever--, but also "I Want You", "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again", "Just Like a Woman", "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine", "4th Time Around" and "Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowland"... And the songs I haven't quoted here are excellent as well anyway. Even "Rainy Day Women".
As I said earlier, this review is tentative at best. It's hard to put into words what this record does, and this with *both* words and music. You can return to *Blonde On Blonde* for years and find new things to admire in it each time. Others have pointed this out elsewhere, but the cover of this LP nicely sums up how you can only approach this behemoth of an album through the most "oblique" ways. Just like that picture of Bob, sightly unfocused, everytime you think you're nailing what makes the record great, something else turns up, and the picture becomes slightly muddled again. Yet you can't help look at it, as mundane as the picture is--just like some of the music on it may seem mundane at first glance, only to reveal its treasures during the hundreds of subsequent listens that will inevitably follow.
5/5, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 295
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 311 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 169
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 228
Paul Simon
2/5
Interesting listen since I only knew Simon's 1972 solo debut and 1986's *Graceland*. A couple of moments in this LP foretell the "global sounds" of the latter, but *Hearts And Bones* is still very much a transitional effort. Worse, its "lively" cuts are plagued by the usual shameful eighties production shenanigans (gated drums, weird synths, disgraceful overproduced arrangements...) Fortunately, the intimate ballads mostly enhanced by Simon's delicate playing on his acoustic guitar (ballads such as the title track, "Train In The Distance" or "René And Georgette Magritte...") aged far better. No surprise here.
That being said, the overall construction of this LP is utterly strange and pretty unconvincing, even with these good cuts in mind. The second half of the first side is a huge letdown, for instance, with its emphasis on the two-part song "Think Too Much": by the time you reach the synth-heavy "a)" section of this composition (inexplicably placed *after* "b)" AND another short track between the two), you feel like Simon is hammering some sort of obfuscated point home without ever justifying why said point should be so important for the listener. And the repetition of the mantra giving its title to the two songs even becomes grating. Don't think too much? Yeah, I've heard you the first times, Paul. Apply your own advice and don't overthink it, please! Don't get me wrong, I understand the "thematic" concerns about the opposition between heart and mind Simon feels so concerned about... Yet musically speaking, the whole thing is sort of a cheesy borefest, to be honest.
I've just read that Art Garfunkel was supposed to sing with Simon on those tunes, initially, thus marking an umpteenth attempt to reunite the cantakerous old couple again. Seems like the two men's deep-seated resentment (and even hatred) for each other ruined everything before Simon ever had a chance to set his original plans into motion. Yet one can't help feeling that maybe Garfunkel was right not to associate his singing skills to this project. Compared to the two boys' heyday in the sixties, this thing would have probably sounded ridiculous if it had been released as a "Simon and Garfunkel" record.
An interestion curio closes this LP, "The Late Great Johhny Ace". This song is interesting for lyrical reasons, because Simon here weaves a tapestry starting with Kennedy's assassination and ending with the one of John Lennon, turning the songwriter into a chronicler of the demise of the sixties' utopias (just like Bob Dylan recently was when he released his own "Murder Most Foul" epic). And it's interesting for musical reasons since Philip Glass composed the orchestral piece ending this song (and album), with his unmistakable flourishes--sweeping, repetitve and hypnotic for sure.
Yet that's it. This record is never thrilling, only "interesting". And its flaws are too obvious today to make it an essential one anyway. As of now, it seems to me that only the 1972 solo album and *Graceland* can apply for that much-coveted position. So, next please...
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 294
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 311
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 169
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 229 (including this one)
Lloyd Cole And The Commotions
1/5
"I might come to a conclusion other than that which is absolutely necessary" and yet it's one that I want to utter in the same annoying, hackneyed and ultimately boring 'conversational' tone as the one Lloyd Cole uses in the opener of this record, and this conclusion is that blabbering each and every thought that pops out of your mind in an overaffected and histrionic drawl just because you are aroused by some girl who is herself "sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan" doesn't automatically make said thoughts interesting or revelatory for most listeners--especially when the music over which you sing those banal thoughts is so bland, predictable and "middle-of-the-road" itself, not to mention produced with a blatant disregard for dynamics that could at least make up for how unoriginal the same music is, i.e. never as interesting as the one Johnny Marr wrote for the Smiths for instance, a good reference point to state how Lloyd Cole himself piles up misfires after misfires as a frontman, vocalist and lyricist compared to, say, Morrissey, another "histrionic" singer for sure, yet one whose eighties recordings can still mesmerize listeners today--contrary to Lloyd Cole, whose own "overkill" mode sounds like a total act and not something that comes out of his heart--and that's not even taking into account the frequent odd meters in his lyrics, as established earlier, suggesting that the man was so pretentious and full of himself that he thought each and every word he wrote should be uttered on a bar not fit to receive all of them, whereas just changing the phrasing or the choice of words could have been a more elegant solution, especially when said words often don't express anything precise or cohesive anyway, and when the way they are sung doesn't save them either--when the mannerisms and the pretense just ruin the few things that could have been salvaged on a musical standpoint--and if you feel like it's exhausting to read this long-ass paragraph complaining about *Rattlesnakes*, just imagine how utterly exhausting it was for me to listen to this dated and flat music for 50 minutes straight, which felt like two hours, honestly: all of this explains why Lloyd Cole doesn't "need my sympathy", and why "I wont read [his] poetry", to use the man's own words in "Charlotte Street", one of the rare cuts in this record that's *slightly* memorable, but which, very ironically, might just betray the fact that Lloyd Cole And The Commotions were themselves aware they could easily pass off as total bores for a lot of listeners not necessarily inclined to put up with the self-indulgence of their "sophistipop", an overall style from the dreadful eighties that was so awkward AND pretentious that it should probably be left in the dustbins of music history today, a few decades later, as competent and even "skilled" as the players are on this record (like that string section in the title-track, or in "Down On Mission Street", for instance--songs that are still listenable I guess, but more for their lush arrangements but for the compositions per se), because--let's face it--at the end of the day, bad taste is bad taste, no matter how good you are as a musician and a composer ; and sophistipop, often favoring style over substance, often made things worse in that regard, and if you add those odd meters and cruelly self-conscious lyrics, the whole thing becomes unbearable, once again, which is why with their jangle-pop energy played in the same early years of the eighties, the Smiths or REM could still improve such an initial "histrionic" formula at least, and this in ways Lloyd Cole And The Commotions never even seemed to consider for one second (except from that frankly awesome amplified guitar solo at the end of *Forest Fire*, admittedly, but once again it's another case of a great last-minute flourish in a song that doesn't show much in terms of hrilling elements elsewhere), and so all those missed occasions to write and perform something genuinely *good* probably explains why the record drags on and on with no precise destination in mind, just like this review, but also like a lot of the individual songs in the album, which often end on an unresolved note, especially on its second side--unresolved notes not even giving a somewhat mysterious undertone to the proceeding, only an "indifferent" one, just like a dead-eyed stare worthy of the one a dead-brained zombie could send you back right before you shoot its face off just to come out of this unfortunate encounter alive, and then forget about the whole thing just for the sake of mental self-preservation.
Blah. Hated this record. Hope you can picture the reasons why I did by now. But if not, it's not even an issue for me, very honestly. And I rarely say that. So, next, please.
1/5 for the goals of this list, i.e. listing 1001 "essential albums" for me. Which translates to a 6/10 grade for more general (and maybe more "objective") reasons. (5 for competent playing + 1 for a couple of memorable moments pestered by an utter lack of taste and/or compelling dynamics).
Number of albums left to review: 293
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 311
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 169
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 230 (including this one)
Sly & The Family Stone
5/5
Lots of great reviews for this undoubtedly "essential" record, and the best one is *this*, here copied in full:
"If the drum breaks, bass lines, and in-your-face horn sections couldn't push the revolution to victory, nothing was going to do it."
Amen. Please press the "like" button for that one. If you're reading this, you've probably seen this other review before.
Where shall I start myself? Well, at the beginning of the album, of course: title track and opener "Stand" is an anthem for the ages, yet one must also point out how "sly" and "stoned" that chord progression on its verses sounds for anyone rooting for off-kilter harmonies. Sorry, couldn't resist this bad pun. But seriously, when his heart was into it, Sylvester Stone could pull off very sophisticated-yet-"catchy" stuff out of his brains and hands. And I feel like music fans don't underline this enough.
After "Stand" comes a track whose offensive title says so much about the demise of the utopias that had previously been embraced by the majority of the US population at the tail end of the sixties. Coming from a unisex, interracial band, such a concept for a song is edifying. And frankly (but also unfortunately), the lessons of that swampy bluesy cut about tensions between "races" have still not been fully learned in 2023. Get educated by the street-savvy wisdom of Sylvester Stewart, kiddies. It's "simple' wisdom, but the latter should always be in our minds.
Next comes the insanely groovy jam of "I Want To Take You Higher", another cut for the ages, whose length could have been doubled, so terrific the result is. Man, that bass slaps, and so do the drums parts, the horn solo and the vocals! And that main hook on the guitar and bass between the jams! *Everything* slaps *hard* actually. Higher and higher and higher, you don't want that song to end. Probably one of the studio performances of the band that best represent how good they were live (see also the Woodstock recordings for that!). Boom-shakalaka-boom! That iconic mantra has been stamped in public consciousness for the decades that came after! Sure you must file it under "essential", right?
"Somebody's Watching You" is probably a lesser, "lighter" track compared to the rest of the album, but its subdued tones and paranoid lyrics also foretell the darker moods of next album (and other masterpiece) *There's A Riot Going On*. And it allows you to catch your breath a little after "I Want To Take You Higher", at least.
Next comes the one-two punch of "Sing A Simple Song" and "Everyday People" (closing side one and opening side two, if I'm not mistaken). "Sing A Simple Song"'s titular program is somewhat belied by how sophisticated the composition is, once again--it's actually a very "meta" song suggesting the listener should get his easy pleasures where he can in a world faced with some many "complex", systemic dysfunctions of society. Which is why where the major-chord climax "do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do" surges at the end of each chorus, it's nothing short of revelatory.
I don't feel like I have to say much about "Everyday People", it's one of Sly And The Family Stone's most famous signature songs, and listening to it for the hundredth time doesn't take away how elating the vocals on its stellar chorus are. This is the song that best exemplifies how powerful Sly and The Family's rallying cries to unite folks of all stripes, races and creed could be. But it's also a smoooooooth and sweet tune, as powerful as its chorus is. And yet its lyrics are nothing but naff or naive if you pay attention to them--the woes of class struggles and unchecked capitalism are taken into account in the picture Sly Stewart is here painting for us. So "Everyday People" is not only iconic. It's also a cut that aptly sums up what Sly And The Family were all about.
Anyone knowing this album a little knows that "Sex Machine", the moody and funky instrumental track that follows "Everyday People", is probably a little too loooooooong for its own good, as "evocative" as its build-up is (a-hem). Had this somewhat self-indulgent jam been replaced by the handful of singles released right after *Stand* (legendary "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)", but also "Everybody Is A Star" and "Hot Fun In The Summertime"), this album would have been *perfect*, enough said.
After this relative misstep, *Stand* ends with yet another iconic track, fortunately: "You Can Make It If You Try" is part of that vein of optimistic hits that Sly And The Family Stones will always be remembered for. As pointed out earlier, next album *There's A Riot Going On* will explore the other, darker, coke-fuelled and paranoid side of that elated coin. But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies.
4.5/5 for the goals of this list selecting the best LPs of all time, here rounded up to 5. Which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 292
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 312 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 169
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 230
Iron Butterfly
3/5
Whether it is acid-rock, psychedelic rock, or proto-hard-rock, one thing's for sure, the title-track taking up one side of this LP (side B) is surely a "historical" document, thanks to its instantly recognizable minor-key riff. I have a sneaking suspicion that said bluesy riff was nicked from other artists in the past, but I can't ascertain it as of now, and have neither the time nor the interest to dig any further to prove my words. Yet other rock musicians stole it from Iron Butterfly in their turn, with only a few changes in the notes here and there, that much is sure.
What's hilarious is the initial meaning of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (in the garden of Eden). Pot-smoking and enunciation issues can thus unite to create iconic pop-cultural moments. I doubt 17 minutes and an overlong drum solo right in the middle of those 17 minutes provide anything that this barebones song initially needed, though.
And then, there's the other side of this record (side A), with its quite banal sixties rock dirges displaying rather disgracious vocals and pointless noodling on the organ, with its player desperately trying to ape The Doors' Ray Manzarek to boot! Note how this organ solo uses the first notes of "Light My Fire" *several times* at the end of "Most Anything You Want*, by the way--c'mon, weren't there other *less famous tunes* to plagiarize in 1968??? I mean, seriously???
Oh by the way, Wikipedia points *this* out: "[*In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida*] was the biggest selling album for the year 1969 in the US, although Billboard does not give any exact sales figures. For a number of years it was the biggest selling item in Atlantic Records' catalogue." For any "boomer" out there complaining about the heavy marketing of "bad music" these days, a friendly reminder: heavy marketing of bad albums has existed *since the beginning of "pop music"*. Many testimonies tell of the heavy rotation of Iron Butterfly on the radio during the sixties. Turns out they were the tree hidng a far more interesting forest when it comes to "psychedelic music". Because honestly, and apart from the overlong title track, this album is quite "meh". I get that a lot of folks who were teenagers during the sixties have some fond memories attached to this record. But as someone younger who yet loves this era, I think this album didn't age well at all, let's be a little honest for one second...
3/5 for the purposes of this list gathering "essential albums". Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general puposes (5 for competent playing + 2.5 for the title-track + 0.5 for the rest of the album).
Number of albums left to review: 291
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 312
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 170 (including this one for "historical" reasons, but I highly doubt there will be room for it at the end)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 230
XTC
4/5
Didn't understand the Beatles comparisons routinely associated with *Skylarking* when I first got aware of the latter's "reputation", but I have to admit that I had only browsed through this album before, and now that I gave it a proper listen, I can see where so many people (and critics) drew that comparison from. With their lush string sections, sophisticated-yet-airy myxoldian chord sequences, and catchy vocal harmonies, "Ballet For A Rainy Day", "1000 Umbrellas", "Season Cycle", "Big Day" or "Dear God" sure have a Lennon/McCartney flavor to them. Just as I wrote it for my previous review of later half-succesful XTC LP *Apple Venus vol.1*, that doesn't mean Partridge and Moulding are exactly in the same league as the Beatles' legendary songwriters. Yet you would have to be tone-deaf not to hear the connection here.
Apart from that, you have an interesting string of songs opening the album, namely "Summer's Cauldron", "Grass" and "The Meeting Place" (the two latter being singles for the album)--with a few moments in them rather recalling Brian Eno's pre-ambient-era pop rock experiments than anything Beatles (and maybe also reminding of album producer Todd Rundgren's own off-kilter endeavors in a somewhat similar pop experimental mode). Weird-yet-hypnotic short cut "Another Satellite" also made me think of circa-*I Love You* Beach Boys, when Brian Wilson's late seventies insanity brought him to unwittingly foretell synthpop shenanigans that didn't really exist before the eighties. And somehow, that endearing cut reminded me of Animal Collective as well. Evidence enough that there is something truly timeless in some of the songs displayed in this LP.
Unfortunately, you also have a fistful of naff songs in it that are heavily indebted to far more overblown eighties aesthetics, such as "That's Really Super, Supergirl" or "Earn Enough For Us", in spite of rather groundbreaking production values elsewhere which conversely aged quite well. Worse, those sorts of tracks are just a pretext for XTC to exert their muscle memory and rehash their earlier pop-rock-by-way-of-post-punk highlights. Except that this particular rehash is nowhere as good as most of the tunes from *Drums And Wire* or *English Settlement*. And they don't really fit with the rest anyway. Add a couple of fillers into the mix, and that's one point taken away from the whole thing. Because beyond the letdown that those individual songs are, they also hurt the album's momentum in several crucial points of the tracklisting.
That said, I admit I was still pleasantly surprised by this record overall, contrary to the earlier admittedly superficial listens I had given it. Turns out I pushed the "like button" for some of the 2-star and 3-star reviews on this app before I got the chance to revisit the album myself. It's something I shouldn't have done. Hence why I won't hesitate to give at least four stars to this thing, to make up for that blunder. So if you want to help me repair my mistake, please push the "like" button as well for my own review, ha ha. 😉
A few words about "Dear God" to end my tentative blurb now: once again, this complaint about organized religions is not really up to the level of John Lennon's own gem about the same topic from *Plastic Ono Band*, as another reviewer estimated in here. But c'mon, it's still a great song, both lyrically and musically (that final climax!). I've just read on Wikipedia that this tune--missing from the first version of this LP, and then quickly added to it thanks to its success as a single stateside--has been placed between "The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul" and "Dying" for the 2016 release. And honestly, it's right where it should go, instead of the last slot, as on the Spotify link given in this app (and also in the previous releases). Having it at the very end made it look like a last-minute addition that stuck out like a sore thumb. Now you feel like "Dear God" is truly part of the overall "program" offered by this loosely conceptual album. Not sure if such a concept about "cycles" is that deep or enlightening in the long run. But as long as the music supporting it goes from decent to excellent, I see no reason to complain here.
4/5 for the purposes of this list, translating to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4).
Number of albums left to review: 290
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 312
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 171 (including this one, and I swear I will try hard to place it in a high position in my own sublist)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 230
Lucinda Williams
5/5
I've often said in my reviews that I'm not too much into country or country-rock, but it seems *Car Wheels On The Gravel Road* is one of the (stellar) exceptions to this rule of thumb, which proves the reputation of this record is well-deserved (at least for me). Maybe it's because of the overall "sound" of the album, very much indebted to nineties alt-rock as well, or because of William's voice--rough around the edges in ways that I usually love, and reminding me of other "alternative" artists such as Lisa Germano. Or maybe it's just because of the great songs and instrumentations--catchy on the surface, but also displaying some interesting textures for the genre once in a while--accordion and/or quite noisy electric guitar riffs played by expert musicians around Lucinda.
And the lyrics are so damn evocative: you really feel like you're sharing the routines of distraught young or middle-aged women living in the deep south, stuck in old houses with a quaint charm sprouting out of fields in the sticks, going from boyfriends / husbands doing time in jail to other deadbeat alcoholic boyfriends met in seedy dive bars, or visiting piss-poor friends and their families in the neighboorhood. "Leaning against the railing of a Lake Charles bridge / Overlooking the river, leaning over the edge / He asked me; "Would you jump into the water with me?" / I told him: "No way baby, it's your own death, you see". Those lines ending " 2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten" are just one example of how evocative those lyrics can be.
There's not a single dud in this LP, at least if you take it as a panorama of all that country-rock has to offer when it's aptly written and performed. Sure, you have some unavoidable musical and lyrical clichés here and there, but the latter are always served with some tasty gravy on the side. Some isolated diners found on the road can sometimes serve you meals as memorable as the ones of fancy restaurants, as "simple" as those meals can look on the menu. Because *all* those songs have something valuable to bring to the table, and the dynamics of the tracklisting, the way those cuts displaying so many different moods are following each other, create one of those records that are always a "joy" to return to. The lively jam of the penultimate song bearing that name is one of the highlights of the album by the way, and so is the simple-yet-heartfelt acoustic ballad "Jackson" closing the proceedings. And speaking of highlights, opener "Right In Time", the title-track, " 2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten", along with that other acoustic ballad "Concrete And Barbed Wire" and that killer cover of Randy Weeks' "Can't Let Go" are not to be missed as well.
So I'm delighted to add Lucinda Williams to my list of "exceptions" when it comes to country and country-rock (Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, The Flying Burrito Brothers, along with some strings of songs by Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton or Marty Robbins). And I'm ready to leave a huge tip on the table. 5 stars then.
Number of albums left to review: 291
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 313
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 171
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 230
Ice Cube
3/5
I'm in two minds about the inclusion of this album into the list. On the one hand, it's well-crafted hip hop from the golden age of the genre, with a lot of topical points mixed with the expected braggadocio, and the whole is still relevant or at least interesting to hear today. The DJ Muggs-produced cuts are unmistakable, and they provide a fun listen. On the other hand, I feel like there's not much in the record that hasn't been heard elsewhere, and often in an even more striking fashion. Musically speaking, what DJ Mugg produced for Cypress Hill or House Of Pain is surely more memorable than his work for Ice Cube, for instance--as good as said work is. And lyrically speaking, you had rappers who went further and better when they explored the topics Ice Cube is exploring here.
Maybe it's my *relative* bias against west-coast rappers influencing me too much in this case. And maybe it's because the rich history of hip hop is not limited to this "golden age" and particular place in the US, which means that other times and geographical areas "represented" in the genre should be included in this sort of list. Singles "It Was A Good Day* and "Check Yo Self" are admittedly nicely done. But the whole shebang is surely "dated" for younger ears, and it's not as if the record was truly groundbreaking in any sense at the time (contrary to NWA's *Straight Outta Compton* or some Dr. Dré-produced records--closely related to Ice Cube, of course, and featuring him in many instances).
The thing is, hip hop evolved extremely *fast* in those years. Wu Tang Clan released their debut the year after, and it wouldn't be long before acts such as Outkast, Snoop Dog or Eminem changed the game, once again. When facing such formidable competition, I'm not sure there will be room left for any Ice Cube records when I reach the end of my own list.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums. Which translates to an 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: 290
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 313
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 172 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 230
Jamiroquai
3/5
Funny that I had to read the reviews on this app to now realize how much of an influence Stevie Wonder was on Jamiroquai. The latter's hits were unavoidable on European radios during the nineties, you see (American friends in this group might not have been aware of the ubiquitous popularity of Jay Kay and his musicians across the pond at the time). Yet to me, what that band was doing was just cheesy commercial ditties with obvious earworm characteristics, never eliciting more than an ironic snarl on my part. Now that I've discovered Stevie Wonder's stellar seventies discography, I admit that I've started to wonder if I could take Jamiroquai a little more seriously. It seems so obvious now that this act was just following a soul-funk tradition I didn't know much about at the time. And since I've recently warmed up to said tradition, maybe it was for me to reassess what I originally thought about that act.
The thing is, there will always be a huge difference between skillful imitators aping geniuses and the geniuses themselves. Stevie Wonder had a knack for incredible chord sequences and wonderful textures, at least in his run of gems starting with *Talking Book* and ending with *Songs In The Key of Life*. To be candid about what I think Jamiroquai were doing one decade and a half later, it's the sort of knack their musicians and composers rarely display, I'm afraid. What's missing is a truly creative spark going beyond the formula that was used for the two hit singles opening the album.
The latter are still catchy jewels today, I'm not gonna lie, and there it does feel like Stevie Wonder could have written them (most singles from Jamiroquai's next two LPs also convey this sort of miracle, by the way--evidence enough that this formula was well-thought out at least). And the title track and "Revolution 1993" convey very intense and contagious energy at times--suggesting that Jay Kay and his mates might have been a treat to see live on a purely "technical" and performative standpoint.
The rest is quite "meh", however. A lot of the compositions sound lazy to me, and so do a lot of the lyrics, as "conscious" and topical some of them try really *hard* to be. Worse, the instrumentation is often all over the place, with all sorts of innocuous and awkward funky licks on guitar, synths, horns and whatnot, all of which soon start to cancel each other, as if thrown onto the wall in a haphazard fashion, and therefore giving no rhyme nor reason to their presence in the mix. As a result, a lot of those jams sound interchangeable to me, and the vocals rarely elevate them to a genuinely exciting proposition. Stevie Wonder's seventies "deep cuts" very often had something thrilling or endearing or interesting in them. Here it's the contrary, up to the point where Jay Kay and Co.'s own deep cuts often borders on muzak (or elevator music).
Finally, what I also found a little grating as I listened to this album was its relative lack of "identity", both on a sonic and a songwriting level. A lot of style, and not much real substance. You can't take Jay Kay's calls for "revolution" seriously, for instance. His music is too "happy-go-lucky" for that--and too formulaic, also, in spite of the topsy-turvy arrangements on it, very ironically. There's no real "tensions". No real stakes. No real... soul. Interestingly, this album starts and ends with a didgeridoo sound, in a somewhat vain attempt to create a distinctive "mood" that would go beyond the expected soul-funk-mellow-pop proceedings found everywhere else in the record. But as such, this colorful addition is merely a gimmick, and not an element making a lot of sense or leaving a memorable imprint in your mind. And this as supposedly "fun" and lively as the last track displaying that didgeridoo sound is. Like all the other gimmicks in the album, it's one that suggests the going-ons of a mind-numbing party pillaging "cool" ideas from the past without ever giving back something relevant in return. You can even end up doubting that real flesh-and-blood partygoers are enjoying this party, if you see what I mean. The album is *too slick* for that. And conversely, it's also too gratuitous and confusing at times. And those characteristics only add to the overall stifling effects of the music, unfortunately. Flesh-and-blood characters also need to *breathe*, you see...
Really hoped to discover something I had missed for no valuable reason when I was younger (reasons going from snubbery to lack of openmindedness or sheer ignorance...). Maybe I still have those flaws and I'm lying to myself. Or maybe those flaws are *within* this record, and it's the old fans of the latter who just fail to see them for what they are. In the end, all I have is my subjective reckoning to solve this equation. And what my own reckoning tells me is that *Emergency On Planet Earth* is *not* an essential album--"cultural appropriation" or not, and as "professional" and "competent" as this record is overall.
2.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 3. Which translates to a 7.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 2.5).
Number of albums left to review: 289
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 313
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 172
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 231 (including this one)
Cheap Trick
3/5
I don't know what to say... This live hard rock record is quite dumb and cheesy, but also fun, in a way. As it is fun to finally discover where the Beastie Boys stole the "This next one is the first song on our new album!" vocal snippet opening their album *Check Your Head*. Always thought one of the Beasties did that vocal skit. And never realized that the *original* "first song" was actually Cheap Trick's "Surrender", a power pop tune for the ages if ever there is one.
Yet this doesn't necessarily mean this record should be automatically deemed as "essential". To be fair, I can't fathom why the songs on this live album were such a huge success compared to their studio versions, whose overall sound is still better than the one on this particular LP. Maybe it's because the latter has been marketed as a kind of "greatest hits" at the time, in spite of the convenient legend saying that it was not seriously promoted by the band's label at first. Or maybe it's because of the performance of this specific concert, even if what was supposedly memorable in said performance completely went over my head, if I'm honest about it all.
One thing's for sure, "Surrender" is still a great track, whether played live or in a studio. And so are "Big Eyes" and "Need Your Love", as hackneyed and naff as their lyrics are. Yet, once again, should their live versions be favored just because *At Budokan* was Cheap Trick's commercial breakthrough in a year now mostly remembered for plenty of classic rock, prog rock, punk, and post-punk artists that had nothing to do with Cheap Trick's self-indulgent, shallow pleasures. And those neverending screams of Japanese girls in the audience now sound quite grating on a purely sonic level, and even a little embarrassing--especially juxtaposed to the boyish concerns of the lyrics written for most of these songs. Finally, the artwork is ugly as f*ck.
Yeah, I'm gonna leave the benefit of the doubt to this one, but as of now, I'm far from being fully sold. So what's next now? Peter fr*gging Frampton?
3/5 for the purposes of this list. Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes. (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 288
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 313
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 173 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 231
David Bowie
5/5
Here I was looking up why there were quotation marks surrounding the title of this record on Wikipedia, and before I could even realize what I was happening, I fell into an endless rabitt hole filled with interesting tidbits from all over the world--tidbits about the history of Germany, the Berlin wall, about the nazis, the soviets and the cold war, but also information about Krautrock, or about the painter Heckel (whose "Roquairol" inspired the artwork), or about what sort of instrument the Japanese koto is, since Bowie plays it on the wonderful ambient instrumental "Moss Garden, and also how you can play said instrument. Those online adventures sum up why David Bowie is such a monument. Everything he did was at the crossroads of so many important traditions or legacies. I'm still not fully sure about why there were quotations marks around the "Heroes" title (the explanation Bowie gave--that it was some sort of irony on the concept of heroism--is flimsy at best). But it doesn't matter. Like so many Bowie LPs from the seventies, "Heroes" is "special". Hence the quote-unquote thing.
What makes the album so special is also the epic title-track, obviously, and how its gradual 5-minute build-up reaches the sky like a V2 rocket. Eno and Robert Fripp's contributions on the song are stellar, and so is Bowie's performance. Its vocal melody, and intricate instrumentation make it a composition or the ages, literally speaking. And its lyrics tell a timeless yarn of hope and resilience in the face of adversity, perfectly summarized by this image of a young couple kissing at the foot of the Berlin wall, which famously inspired Bowie to write the song. It's just mind-boggling learning the single was not an immediate success at the time. But when you think about it, it makes sense: Bowie was sometimes so ahead of the game that it often took years for general audiences to catch up.
Speaking of "ages", moody "Sons Of The Silent Age" is another great song in this LP, with many catchy moments in it. Conversely, the two tracks opening the album, "Beauty And The Beast" and "Joe The Lion" are admittedly a little linear, messy and rough around the ages, and so is "Blackout" at times--explaining why I would take a half-point to the perfect grade I usually give to Bowie albums from the seventies. Within the "Berlin Trilogy", *Low* is admittedly the most successful endeavor, and *"Heroes"* will always suffer from this comparison. Even if Bowie's passionate vocal histrionics ultimately save those less striking cuts from being left aside, very fortunately.
And then, there are the ambient instrumentals written and recorded under the guidance of Brian Eno for the second side--following the exact same template found on *Low*. "Sense Of Doubt", "Garden" and "Neukoln" go from groovy to ominous, and from nicely pensive and meditative to heartrending and tense (that saxophone free-jazz-indebted solo Bowie plays on "Neukoln"! So tense and cinematic!). Some critics argued that *"Heroes"*'s intrumental side is less "cohesive" than the one on *Low* as a result of this broader scope. But I think the fact this second side explores more varied moods compared to its *Low* counterpart is actually an asset. Especially since Bowie, Eno, and producer Tony Visconti had the brilliant idea to end said second side (and album) with a proper song this time--catchy "The Secret Life Of Arabia", probably the second best tune in the whole album, right after the title-track.
Therefore, and even with its minor flaws, *"Heroes"* is still a "classic" David Bowie album. Its few valleys are forgivable, and its peaks are as legendary as the ones found on the previous LPs released by the British rock star. 4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded to a perfect 5. Which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more genral purposes (5+4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 287
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 314 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 173
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 231
Slayer
3/5
Gonna start with a neutral 2.5/5 grade because of how supposedly groundbreaking for the genre of thrash metal this album was in 1986. Then I'm gonna add bonus or penalty points depending on the flaws and assets I perceive when I listen to this record. We'll see where that leads me in the end (I honestly have no idea of the final grade as I'm writing those words):
Incredibly virtuosistic guitar solos: +1. I'm not keen on gratuitous virtuosity, but I have to admit those solos are impressive and even pretty fun to "follow". One critic even compared them to Jackson Pollock's "drippings". An apt comparison. Current score: 3.5.
Rick Rubin's *dry* production values: +1. A welcome corrective to the awful overblown production values in this genre during the eighties. It would take years for similar acts to catch up. This allowed *Reign In Blood*'s *sound* to age quite well (as "dated" and "cliché" as the *music* on it is today, admittedly). Current score: 4.5.
The lyrics of *Angel Of Death*: -1. The real issue here is not to say that Slayers are "nazis". They collaborated with Ice-T's Body Count, for instance, and I don't think that collab would have gone on well if they were indeed admirers of the swastika. As Wikipedia points out, the band's members stated that they did not condone Nazism and were merely "interested" in the subject. Here is the sort of fascination for "evil" you can find in Joy Division and Motörhead, and I have no real problem with it, as limited and immature as that behaviour is. But it's the "way" that Slayer tackle that particular subject that is pretty stupid and, let's face it, totally irresponsible. Current score: 3.5
(A quick aside on that subject: "Angel Of Death" being a *first-person account* of Dr. Mengele's atrocious acts in Auschwitz, Jeff Hanneman's lyrics did not need to establish that Mengele was a monster, as Hanneman himself remarked. Everyone with a shred of intelligence and decency left in their souls knows it, of course. But just going for cheap thrills with a detailled account of Mengele's infamous tortures of his "patients", without anything in said lyrics conveying the bigger picture that the Holocaust is, is turning this heavy subject into a scary joy ride at Six Flags, or into an entertaining spectacle found in a cheap horror/gore B-movie. Worse, it can allow *genuine* nazi scums with brains the size of a pea to have fun and celebrate the memory of Mengele. Which is dumb as a bell. I'm not saying music should always be "moralist" or fully "responsible". But there should have been something in the lyrics preventing real nazis to enjoy the song. Like, I don't know, presenting Mengele as an inadequate character for a normal job, and who had no real "power" apart from the pain and death he inflicted on his victims. A couple of lines about that would have been enough, and they wouldn't have veered the initial "provocative" tone of the song off-course.
This is not something Hanneman had given a lot of thought about, unfortunately. I know *some* metalheads are not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but jeeze, connect you brain cells a little. Unless you have no problem being associated with nazism. But in that case, you have no brain cells left in your skull anyway. So don't complain if outsiders of the genre call you out with a few unpleasant monikers, please. You reap what you sow).
Back to my bonus points / penalty points now...
The odd meter of the lyrics, not fit for the bars that welcome them (and the resulting lack of enticing or merely effective rhythm in the vocal parts): -1.
In all honesty, this is an issue pestering a lot of "classic" thrash metal albums (see the early Sepultura LPs, for instance). But it's not because fans of the genre are notoriously deaf to that aspect that I'm gonna refrain from giving that penalty point. Please, Slayer fans, understand that this is probably one of the features of thrash metal that are always gonna be off-putting for most listeners, even those interested in "extreme", aggressive genres. It's a problem that has been solved by other sub-strands of metal, fortunately... Current score: 2.5.
The lack of variation in the compositions: -1. Always the same tonic for the chords, aside from a few lazy modulations, always the same fast-paced pattern on the drums and the muted-palm thing on the guitar... And most chords are interchangeable anyway. It's annoying as f*ck. Other "repetitive" styles can be redeemed by other elements in the songs (example: the energy of the vocals for punk and hardcore-punk). But as said earlier, the vocals are just meh here. Nothing to save most cuts between "Angel Of Death" and the title-track from oblivion. What you have here is basically the same song *times ten*. Current score: 1.5.
The evocative, expressionistic artwork of the cover: +0.5. Can't give a full point for that, because it doesn't change anything to the music... but metal albums covers showing *genuine* artistic flair are quite rare. So I had to take that artwork into acount somehow. Current score: 2.
Can't see any other redeeming elements in this album, though. Is 2/5 my final score?
Maybe not, because I found this on Wikipedia:
"When asked why *Reign in Blood* has retained its popularity, [Slayer's Kerry] King replied: "today, no one would give a shit. It was timing; it was a change in sound. In thrash metal at that time, no one had ever heard good production on a record like that. It was just a bunch of things that came together at once."
We're going back full circle to my first bonus point about the album's production values, and I could almost give a 0.5 point to King (and by extension, to Slayer) for being so lucid and even humble about the whole situation. Indeed, no one would give a shit if this album came out today. And this avowal also suggests that *Reign In Blood* sounds pretty dated by today's metal standards, which is a little problematic for genres supposed to thrill or even "shock" their audiences--as if the edge of your knife wasn't so sharp anymore, to use a metaphor I've already used before, albeit for different reasons...
Adding that 0.5 point, actually. Just to state that I understand that this record is "objectively" important, even if I wll probably never listen to it again..
Do I round up to 3, now? I will, only to underline how fitting the current global score of this thing is, as "important" as *Reing In Blood* is to some ears. Because this record's existence doesn't elicit anything to me beyond giving it bonus and penalty points. It makes me "feel" nothing. Which is why, in the end, a "neutral grade" is perfectly suited for it. To paraphrase "Piece By Piece", "No emotions, *maths* are all I see".
Number of albums left to review: 288
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 314
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 174 (mostly for "historical" importance, but I doubt there will be rrom left for it ine the end).
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 231
The Jesus And Mary Chain
4/5
A significant act foretelling many later developments of the "rock" idiom taken in its largest sense, which is why it is still remembered today, I guess. Compared to debut *Psychocandy*, this one is more restrained and less noisy, obviously. Oddly enough, you don't really feel like the first album had a real drummer (Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie), and this one had a drum machine, ha ha. Those horrid eighties "gated drums" aesthetics are to be blamed here, that goes without saying. Apart from that, a cool LP, drawing as much from the Velvet Underground as it draws from the Beach Boys. The best of both worlds for me (and probably the *worst* of both worlds for some other listeners, lol). 4/5.
Number of albums left to review: 288
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 315
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 174
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 231
808 State
4/5
Got aware of Graham Massey and his electronic band 808 State through Björk, since the man co-wrote the music of "Army Of Me" and "The Modern Things" on *Post*. *90* was released six years before that, and listening to it, it's not hard to understand how groundbreaking this record was for the whole acid-house genre. Lush textures and adventurous forays abound, and 808 State rarely dig the same groove twice. Which, in this particular genre based on *repetition* is rather commendable. So just like what LFO (another act harbouring a Björk collaborator) did to darker, more minimalistic strands of "house music" when they released their debut *Frequencies*, Graham Massey and co. accomplished something extremely valuable in the field of electronic music. They made it sound vital AND digestible in an album format at the same time. And that's quite a feat when you're playinng those styles.
The highlights on 808 State's subsequent albums (*ex:el*, *Gorgeous* and the criminally underrated *Don Solaris*) are even *more* impressive, by the way. Unfortunately, the tracklisting on those later records is also admittedly bumpy--always with a few outlier cuts that are far from matching said highlights. In comparison, *90* is a much more cohesive and *tight* listen. Each track perfectly flows into the next, even if *all of them* explore very different moods--you're never quite sure of what you can expect, and yet the left turns still make a lot of sense.
So yeah, why shouldn't we select this one? I still think that compared to *90*, the first half of *Don Solaris* is near-perfect, though. Give it a listen if you're interested in electronic music in the broadest sense of the term. For that last LP 808 State released during the nineties (not counting B-Sides and remixes compilations), the band went far beyond acid-house--they also successfully tampered with abstract hip-hop, pop-rock, drum'n'bass, big beat, steel drums and steel guitar samples, among many other things. The second half of that 1996 album loses the stellar momentum built up in the first, hence why you can't call this other LP *cohesive*. Yet the sounds on it aged a little better than the ones on *90*, I think. *90* still had one foot in the eighties, you see (it's sort of implied in the title, right?--this record references the decade to come, yet it was still released in *1989*, mind you). It's nice that 808 State pointed the way forward, yet they couldn't *fully* get rid of a few "clichés" here and there.
At least, the album sounds less "dated" than New Order's *Technique* or Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner's *Electronic* project. When referencing that particular British "genre" (and the years said genre thrived), anthology lists always quote those two albums. *90* is rarely quoted, though, and honestly, it is clearly a notch above both of those records. Which is why I'm glad Björk made me know this album and the band that released it. You can always count on her and her insatiable quench for interesting collaborators to discover other great artists.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential album, rounded up to 4. Which translates to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 287
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 315
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 175 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 231
Leonard Cohen
5/5
An "avalanche" of stellar compositions, striking moods and darkly poetic lyrics. That album opener, bearing the name I've just put between quotation marks, is probably one of the most dramatic things Leonard Cohen has ever played, thanks to its obsessive acoustic guitar arpeggios and minor-key-yet-majorly-cinematic string orchestrations. No wonder Nick Cave covered it by the way (in a quite disturbing "punk" fashion).
On the "literal" other side of this great record, "Famous Blue Raincoat" is certainly one of the most heartbreaking melodies the Canadian songwriter has ever written, which is saying *a lot*. And in between (or after) those two cuts, "Avalanche" and "Famous Blue Raincoat", a string of gems: "Last Year's Man", "Dress Rehearsal Rag", "Love Calls You By Your Name" and "Sing Another Song, Boys".
In the middle of the dark, dark beads making up that necklace, the ephemeral moment of levity the mock-reggae and out-of-tune lead vocals of "Diamonds In The Mine" supposedly bring to the whole affair sticks out like a sore thumb at first. But listen closely to the lyrics and the raucous voice of Leonard, here in a rare exaggeratedly expressive mode, and soon you'll understand that there's as much passion in this cut as there is on the other ones. The apparent self-deprecatory façade is here so aptly translated to the music itself, you could easily blink and take the whole thing as face value. But the lyrical and musical posture found here also betrays an awareness of the deeper pains that lie behind such a "play". And make no mistake, that pain is the same as the one found in the seven other songs. An avalanche of high art indeed.
Number of albums left to review: 286
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 316
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 175
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 231
The Byrds
4/5
I own all the Byrds albums from *Mr. Tambourine Man* to this one (in a CD format). But as fate dictated, there was no room left for *Sweetheart Of The Rodeo* on my shelves. Given that this record is secretly a "Gram Parsons And The Byrds" record, I took this as a sign from the gods of music and placed the CD on my smaller "country / country-rock" shelf.
Admittedly not as meticulous AND charming as Gram Parsons' next adventure with The Flying Burrito Brothers, this record is still an endearing historical document as one of the very first examples of "country-rock". What's interesting is that if you focus your attention away from all those pedal steel guitars parts (so ubiquitous in this album that they verge on being annoying at times), you soon realize that the songs are far more diverse than they sound on first listens. Moments where you can recognize the previous version of The Byrds are nice, for instance--thanks to their flower-power vocal parts, partly hidden by all the C&W twangs and wizz.
Apart from the two Bob Dylan covers bookending this record, and the two Gram Parsons compositions on side B, everything else is covers of mostly country stuff I don't know much about. The Bob Dylan and Gram Parsons tunes are the clear highlights of *Sweetheart Of The Rodeo* tough. Dylan's original versions of " You Ain't Going Nowhere" and "Nothing Was Delivered" would only be revealed with the eventual release of *The Basement Tapes* in 1975. But "A Hundred Years From Now" was a song specifically written for this album, even if Parson's vocals were "erased" from it--officially for contractual reasons. And it's a country tune for the ages.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums. Which translates to a 9/10 grade, partly for "historical" reasons (5 + 4).
Number of albums left to review: 285
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 317 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 175
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 231
Cornershop
2/5
Reading the "Reception" section of the Wikipedia page for this album, my jaw went all the way down to the floor. It's not that this album is utterly bad, apart from one truly awful cut (more on that later)--it's just that it's so... innocuous overall. The heaps and heaps of praise given to it sound unwarranted today, very honestly.
The record starts with a lethargic 'British indie" cut, whose name I have already forgotten. Hit "Brimful Of Asha" follows, but likewise, its overall energy pales to the Fat Boy Slim remix made out of it, as other reviewers suggested. Two uninteresting dated hip hop instrumentals with pointless DJ scratches are then delivered--not '"dated" in 2024, I mean, but already far beyond their peremption date in *1997*, the year *When I Was Born The 7th Time* was actually released. Dan The Automator produced far more enticing and effective tracks in the same genre. Why the hell did he help produce this thing?
So it's a very inauspicious beginning for this album, to say the least. Sitar-enhanced "We're In Your Corner" fares far better than any of the four first tracks, fortunately--the instrumental bridge is even incredibly pretty, a piece of evidence that if Cornershop had given a little more thought to their plans when writing this album, they could have pulled off more interesting compositions like this, at least.
Too bad that the track after, "Funky Days Are Back Again" sounds like a parody and nothing else. I know a lot of pot was smoked during the making of this LP (one sound engineer even ended up at the hospital because of it!). But for chrissake, the pile of turd that this "song" is is so self-indulgent, and its lyrics are so horrible, that normally, even the most potheaded freak out there should more or less quickly realize on the next day that this track was better off being erased for the dignity of all concerned parties. Alas, it was not erased.
More pointless scratches ensue, and then comes a spoken-word interlude over field recordings of oriental traditional music. By the way, the guy talking to us on that interlude is... Allen Ginsberg. Er... OK. Doesn't save the track from being a footnote written in tiny-ass letters on both the books of music AND poetry. Bummer.
Tablas and sitars are sampled for the next one-minute instrumental cut. Uh-huh. What's the point, once again? Some sort of big-beat-meets-indie-rock follows thanks to "Big Ships". Thanks but no thanks. I like most styles from the nineties, but here is simply the *worst* example of what this decade offered from time to time. All style no substance.
At that point, you pretty much know this record is either a one-star or a two-star album. "Good to Be on the Road Back Home", featuring alt-country singer Paula Frazer, gives you a little hope this is at gonna be a two-star album, given that it's a *proper song* at last (and quite a good one at that)... Except that everything after is, for the most part, minor or rather banal hip hop doodles, once again. Plus a grating cover of a once great Beatles song.
If really I had to follow the initial requirements of Dimery's original list, I would give a rare 1.5/5 grade to this thing (rounded up to 2). Which translates to a 6.5/10 grade for more general purposes. There are only *three* tracks on this thing that are worth listening to (one famous hit, plus two good tunes). Clearly, an "essential album", this doesn't have the makings of.
Number of albums left to review: 284
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 317
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 175
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 232 (including this one)
Television
5/5
Stone-cold masterpiece. Spiralling between the early punk spirit of the New York CBGB scene and the more intricate ornementations of classic and psychedelic rock--or even the ones of more leftfield genres such as jazz and prog-rock (fortunately translated into a very dry, "direct" fashion)--*Marquee Moon* slaps you in the face with its (literal) brilliance. It's also a showcase of how Fender guitars can dazzle the listeners when they're into the right hands. And it foretells the post-punk era that would take over a couple of years later--a splash whose ripples can still be routinely heard today in current "rock" bands.
The title-track is a composition for the ages, of course. On its own, it warrants a place for the album it gives its name to into such a list. From the repetition of the two signature quavers opening the song--acting upon Television fans like that bell Pavlov used to make his dogs drool--to that legendary Tom Verlaine guitar solo building up into the track's climax--before one last round of that memorable verse-chorus sequence--"Marquee Moon" is probably one of the most important songs of all time. 10 minutes of absolute wonder. That solo is not only a "technical" feat, you see, it's also an exhilarating, gripping piece of music--going against all the clichés associated with said exercise at the time, and proving that virtuosity could be used to express taste, sensibility and inspiration instead of a void "macho" posturing.
*Marquee Moon* is not only an essential listen because of its title-track, however. Actually there's not a single dud among those eight songs. Personal favorites can vary from fan to fan, but opener "See No Evil", with its gnarly main riff, " Venus", with its snarling-yet-seductive vocals, "Elevation", with its guitar "scales" intruding on Verlaine's scansions, "Prove It" with its early rock flavours and stop-and-go shenanigans, and closer "Torn Curtain" with its heartbreaking chorus (nicely modulating away from the deadpan mood of the verses), are cuts that you can't forget once you've heard them. And so are menacing "Friction" and delicate "Guiding Lights".
Influential, groundbreaking, technical, heartfelt, subtly textured, *Marquee Moon* also offers very straightforward pleasures. It's both a simple record and one that's actually quite complex if you choose to get lost in its many intricacies. The best of *both* worlds. And even more than that, the best of almost all the relevant music worlds you could get exposed to in 1977 (a stellar year for music, to boot). 5/5, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 283
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 318 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 175
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 232
Björk
4/5
Like all records by Björk, this heartrending "break-up album" (chronicling the dissolution of the Icelandic singer's marriage with conceptual artist Matthew Barney, and how to pick up the pieces from there for her and their daughter) is something you can advise most people with an open mind (and a taste for the dramatic) to listen to. Driven vocals, apocalyptic beats, tragic strings and long tunnels of despair abound in this beautiful record, along with faint glimmers of hope at the ends of said tunnels. Surely, you could find ways to add this striking LP into your own rankings.
Except for one little detail... Robert Dimery "forgot" to include other seminal and pivotal Björk albums in his original list--albums whose impact and groundbreaking nature is agreed upon by most professional "critics" out there, but also by music fans of all stripes. Those albums are 1995's *Post* and 1997's *Homogenic*. And you could also probably include 2001's *Vespertine* if there was a little room left for it.
Of all the omissions inside the 1001 Albums book--usually about other genres such as jazz, post-rock and (post)-hardcore--the absence of those records is one of the most glaring examples you can find, unfortunately. Indeed, and oddly enough, Dimery and co. only selected first album *Debut* within Björk's discography, and then they included the far later *Vulnicura*, but also *Medullá*, a more experimental LP using human voices as its main conceptual thrust--an impressive effort, but with results that are also a little topsy-turvy at times. I have nothing but benevolent feelings and even sheer love for those later albums, but c'mon--if you can't identify an artist's *true* magnum opus, how can you hope convincing newcomers of those artists' greatness with other records that are obviously a *tiny notch* under them. It's as if Bob Dylan was quoted only for *Blood On The Tracks* or *Time Out Of Mind*. Which would mean that *Bringing It All Back Home*, *Highway 61 Revisited* and *Blonde On Blonde* had been left aside. Quite ridiculous.
To be fair, all of this is not the sole reason I'm taking out a point out of a perfect 5/5 grade for *Vulnicura*. That point is also taken away because the heavy subject matter this rather admirable record deals with makes it an arduous listen at times. The thing is, if Björk had found ways to transcend her personal pain into something less solipsistic and a little more universal, those songs would have been even more impressive. But I readily admit that I might be nitpicking here. Whatever the case may be, give this one a listen. Because whether she's in pain or not, Björk's music is always one-of-a-kind, that much is for sure.
4/5 for the purposes of this list gathering "essential albums". Which translates to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 281
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 318 (including this one, at least if *Post* and *Homogenic* are also in my own list--and make no mistake, they *will* be quoted!)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 175
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 232
Tito Puente
3/5
As the Allmusic review points out, *Dance Mania*, Tito Puente's best-known and best-selling album, "came ten years into his career, but at a time (1958) when the craze for mambo and Latin music was beginning to crest". This mostly explains why this album would be in Dimery's list, but I guess another reason is the tight, explosive-and-yet-glossy big band *sound* of this release, clearly transcending such son cubano / son moteno style into an offering that a lot of American audiences could fall in love with at the time.
Cuban music is a universe I know very little of, but browsing through Tito Puente's gargantuan discography, you feel like the man covered a lot of different genres related to this part of the world--genres such as afro-cuban percussions, cha-cha-chá, jazzier adaptations, later rock-inspired polyrhythmic shenanigans, and a vast array of more traditional styles whose names and rhythmical features I would be at pain to remember, not to mention *identify* or even *describe*. Being born and raised in New York, and studying at the Julliard School of Music, Puente was certainly the right talented fellow to make this type music popular in the US during the fifties and the sixties. And as a skilled player of timbales (a basic Cuban drumset) and marimba, he sure knew how to slap!
As far as general audiences go, Puente's most celebrated composition, "1963's "Oye Como Va", was famously covered by Santana in *Abraxas* a few years later. Listening to *Dance Mania*, you can't help thinking that this is a *clearly* popular track that's missing in this record, even though a lot of the cuts actually foretell that later hit's infectious rhythms and flavoured arrangements (the album it's from, *El Rey Bravo* is actually less tight than this one, but also more adventurous sonically speaking, which is interesting...).
Guess I understand the rationale that made Dimery's team think *Dance Mania* is a must-have, given its former popularity and inclusion in the US' National Recording Registry. I would lie if I said I was 100% blown away listening to it--some of the tunes sound a little alike to me--but my ears are probably at fault here. That said, there are a lot of various arrangements and individual performances that hit the mark, that much is for sure. And the production values are stellar for 1958.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums" (might bump it up to a 4 later, because I readily admit that I need to get acquainted with that overall genre--one that such list needs to spend some time on). Which, for now at least, translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes. (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 280
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 318
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 175 (including this one, most probably).
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 232
Elvis Presley
5/5
By the end of the sixties, a decade that went so fast that it's even hard to keep track of it *today*, Elvis was already outdated, out of touch, and even a little ridiculous. Only a miracle could have made him relevant again. This album is that miracle. Drawing from a southern soul / country-soul genre that was as enticing and vital as the best rhythm and blues still hitting the charts in 1969, using warm soul background singers to support Elvis' stellar vocal performance, and displaying a near-spotless catalogue of tunes from great songwriters (some of them unsung or unknown at the time), *From Elvis In Memphis* marks a great come back for Elvis Presley--more so than the one formerly orchestrated by impresario / agent Colonel Parker when Presley returned from the army around 1960: here it was mostly a marketing ploy. But with that other "return", you also have a real, pivotal album to celebrate. And since it's one of the best LPs ever recorded by the "King", it comes as no surprise that it's still fondly remembered today.
I'm gonna be honest, the first time I *really* listened to this album, I expected to react derisively to it. 1969 seemed so far from Presley's heyday that I thought it would be impossible for me *not* to compare it to what was going on elsewhere in that year. But the quaint yet decisive charm of *From Elvis In Memphis* is actually that it's both of its time somehow, and yet also timeless. If there's admittedly a minor share of filler songs to be found in the record's tracklist, most of the cuts are still irresistible. Cuts such as "Wearin' That Loved On Look", "Only The Strong Survive" or "Long Black Limousine" (whose only flaw stems from the lyrics--it would have been much more impactful if the fact that the song is about a funeral had been revealed *at the end*, instead of spilling the beans at the very start). Plus "I'm Moving On" (the lively groove on that one is infectious!), "Any Day Now", and of course "In The Ghetto", a surprisingly socially-aware tune, but most of all, a moving--even a *devastating*--capper for the original LP.
Please don't miss the bonus tracks added to the CD / digital version of this LP (singles and leftover cuts recorded for the same sessions), as each one of them is worth the price of admission here. Among them is the memorable "Suspicious Minds", made famous again when Fine Young Cannibals released their own cover version of it, and also the incredible "Kentucky Rain" with its lush orchestral flourishes, unexpected chord and rhythm changes, and catchy three-note staccato pattern--played on an hammond organ, I think, and then echoed by the string section. Like the songs from the original album, those tracks are cinematic and evocative. They could be played in the background of a scene of a film taking place in the deep south, and be a perfect musical illustration for whatever drama was occuring onscreen. 4.5/5, rounded up to 5.
Number of albums left to review: 279
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 319 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 175
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 232
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
4/5
I own this record at home, and obviously, its main selling point is the song *I Want You*, one of the best tunes Elvis Costello has ever written: it's raw but melodic, it's disturbingly blunt and disarmingly honest... yet it's also catchy, simple, and frankly endearing--and this, as painful and even *ugly* as the feelings expressed in the song are. It's quite refreshing that Costello, always mired in all sorts of sophisticated, borderline-"literary" posturing, could find it in him to pen something so direct instead in 1986. In the album reissue's liner notes, Costello claims that the melody in the verse of the song was inspired by a Japanese folk tune, which is kind of hard to believe. But whatever the case may be, there is something truly universal in this tale about jealousy and unrequited love. Which is why it hits the intended mark.
About the rest of the album, I'm not gonna lie, it's pretty good. A bit rough around the edges, a bit messy--but that's actually an asset after the stifling dynamics and hackneyed production values of the records that preceded it. Not to mention the annoying verbose mannerisms of *Imperial Bedroom*--where you simply want Costello to buckle up after the third song. Costello fans would probably cry foul play after reading my words, but most people and their mothers outside that circle of fans know that including *This Year's Model* and *Armed Forces* in such a list is more than enough to give Elvis Costello the place he deserves there. Robert Dimery thought very differently, unfortunately--how many Elvis Costello albums are in his damn list? 6? 7? Honestly, I've lost count...
Now does that mean there's no room for *Blood And Chocolate* in my *own* list? Well, the jury's still out on this one... On the "Pros" section, there's Nick Lowe's "loud" and very "live" production, which honestly aged better than the one on the albums before, as I said earlier. Hiring Lowe, the man responsible for the aesthetics of *This Year's Model* and *Armed Forces*, was all that the Attractions needed to sound good again. And there are still some interesting studio tidbits sprinkled here and there (some reversed tapes, some *subtle* echoes, some quick off-kilter effects adding to those already "noisy" sessions). Yet as off-kilter as those tidbits are, they never ruin the overall dynamics. Even better, those details even give a sixties near-psychedelic subtext to those tracks. Which is good. Especially for a record released in 1986.
Another thing for the "Pros" section is the sheer quaity of most of the songs. Opener "Uncomplicated" is exactly what its title suggests, "I Hope You're Happy Now" is textbook Costello (in a good way), but the album really hits its stride with the long postmodern epic "Tokyo Storm Warning", near-Dylanesque in both its musical and lyrical flourishes. Closing side A, there's "I Want You", but I don't need to say more about it than what I have already stated at the start of this tentative review. And closing side B (along with the album), you have four great cuts that go in interesting, less forceful directions: there is the strange-yet-fascinating "Old Battered Bird", quite hard to describe, but very ominous and evocative, as when Costello lets out those chill-inducing yelps over a rather atmospheric bakckground. You also have the sardonic-yet-subdued "ballad" "Crimes Of Paris", the more textured "Poor Napoleon", and the merseybeat-inspired last track and catchy earworm "Next Time Round".
In the "Cons" section, however, all the tracks I haven't quoted are more akin to the "automatic mode" version of Elvis Costello and the Attractions after the release of *Armed Forces*, with a lot of words sung by the man, and a lot of chords played as well. And consequently, those other songs don't have much in them that could make them memorable. Costello, as often, is too damn *chatty* on those cuts. Truth be told, he's chatty in the good songs as well, but if the music doesn't have the right hooks to make that aspect bearable, it becomes a bit of a chore to go through those other tunes.
Reading what I've just written, I reallize my "Pros" section is bigger that the one for my "Cons". This record is also the last one of the "classic" tenure of Costello's collaboration with The Attractions (in 1986, his relationship with the band had soured to the point that it was better for everyone involved to go their own way for a while). So in a sense, *Blood And Chocolate* is also a "historical" album. Giving it the benefit of the doubt, then. 3.5 for the purposes of this list gathering "essential" LPs (rounded up to 4). Which translates to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
A quick note about my ranking of Elvis Costello's albums in Dimery's list. To this day, the man is still far from being my favourite artist of all time, but since I've started this project, I've warmed up to his music somehow. My grades (and reviews) for *This Year's Model* and *Armed Forces* were quite harsh, I know it now. Today, I would rate both those albums with a 4/5 grade. Which, coincidentally or not, is the grade I will also give to this later album. Won't change my 1/5 "protest" grade for debut *My Aim Is True", though, *That* record was dull, no question, and you can bet your boots that if Costello had not had the career he had afterwards, everyone would have forgotten about it...
Number of albums left to review: 278
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 319
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 176 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 232
Bauhaus
4/5
I have the stellar first two tracks of this album available on a physical release at home, energetic "Hair Of The Dog" and insanely catchy "The Passion Of Lovers" (that goddamn short screeching guitar hook! Or is it a synth?). Plus the incredibly moody and mesmerizing title-track closing the proceedings. Indeed, all three of them are included in the Bauhaus "Volume 1" compilation, that I can't praise enough for anyone interested in the first years of the legendary British band. Those three cuts are as good as goth-leaning post-punk can get, enough said.
But what about the other songs in *Mask*, then? Like *some* of the compositions found in previous Bauhaus albums, those other tracks sometimes can't avoid a few hackneyed clichés typical of this genre, with unfocused ditherings and pointless minimalistic dirges that can leave a bad taste in your mouth--that bad taste is probably left *on purpose*, know, but still... Fortunately, three other songs from the original tracklisting of this LP are well worth your time (I'm not bothering about the CD bonus tracks, here). There's "Kick In The Eye", a weird-yet-lively funk-inspired song that draws from Bowie circa-*Lodger* or *Scary Monsters...*, dark and hopeless "Hollow Hills" and its haunting guitar shrills that can remind you of the most ominous instrumentals by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and "The Man With The X-Ray Eyes", an infectious earworm that should have found its place in the "Volume 1" / "Volume 2" compilations, but inexplicably did *not*. So that's three stellar songs and three other very good ones over ten tracks. Not so bad after all.
Please also check subsequent album *The Sky's Gone Out*, one of Bauhaus' most adventurous LPs, which also explores soundscapes related to krautrock and also--I shit you not!--*dub and reggae*. And this in ways that are often as fascinating as the ones they use for their more expected post-punk output.
Going back to *Mask*, I feel like this album should have a 3.5/5 grade for the specific purposes of this list of "essential albums" (here rounded up to 4). Which translates to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 277
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 319
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 177 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 232
Fatboy Slim
2/5
*Better Living Through Chemistry*. Given the innuendo pointing to drug use in the title of this record, I'm gonna assess the latter the way a drug dealer measures the content of his "product":
Big Beat formula = 3 points. It's lively and you can dance to it (4/5?), but it's not a genre that aims for "substance", very ironically. It's all about *style*. (No, 3/5!)
Peremption date : - 1 point. This thing already sounded pretty dated only a few years after its release. Electronic music always points towards the future, yet the future is often unkind to it. You need a few specific addition to examples of this umbrella genre to make them hold water one or two decades later. Can't pinpoint this specific additions in the album.
No instantly recognizable and memorable hits : - 1 point. "Going Out Of My Head" points towards the bangers that would make Fatboy Slim famous with album *You've Come A Long Way, Baby* (this one's a keeper!), but the man wasn't quite there yet with this track. You have the "fake rock", copied-and-pasted guitar riffs, but not the infectious vocal samples that could allow you to file this cut with the best Chemical Brothers and Prodigy hits. Worse, the rest is a little "meat-and-potatoes" when it comes to electronic forays. See the next paragraph.
A few groundbreaking arrangements that hit the mark : +1 Some of those arrangements are still too much indebted to older examples to house music and techno to allow me to give more than one bonus point to this thing (which only emphasizes the "dated" aspect of this record). But you gotta recognize that *Better Living Through Chemistry* was at least groundbreaking because it helped spawn new sounds now associated with that Big Beat thing. Too bad that this subgenre had a very quick peremption date itself.
End score: 2/5 for the purpose of this list gathering "essential albums". Which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: less than 300, approximately (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me, including this one)
The White Stripes
5/5
2003 was the year fake siblings and real divorced couple Jack and Meg White were crowned as the most important act currently performing by rock fans all over the world. *Elephant* is not even my favourite album of that year--that would be Grandaddy's *Sumday*, closely followed by Yeah Yeah Yeah's *Fever To Tell*--but it sure had the necessary material to reach that much coveted status for a lot of listeners in 2003--even in front of the excellent *You Are Free* by Catpower, or The Strokes' *Room On Fire*. This album is a devilish hit machine, enough said--recycling blues tropes into miraculously fresh reënactments, one track after the other, with some other suprises added to the mix.
Obviously, opener *Seven Nation Army* is one of the most impactful and most memorable rock songs ever released this side of the year 2000, an earworm whose bassline has conquered every sports arena out there--quite an hilarious feat given that the instrument playing that bassline is actually... no bass at all! After that now-legendary opener, "Black Maths" and "There's No Home For You Here" dig that same garage blues-rock trench further to great effects (that short repeated break with haunting vocals on the latter is a moment of pure wonder). Then comes Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself", in an iconic cover version if there has ever been one in The White Stripes's discography. I still remember the first time I listened to the song as played by Jack and Meg. It was during a festival in Paris where The White Stripes were performing--I wasn't really a fan of the band back then. But dicovering the band onstage *before* I properly listened to their albums was a privilege I will always be grateful for. And I remember how awestruck I instantly was when I heard that cover. To me, that was the key that unlocked their world.
Since we're talking about The White Stripes as performers, a quick aside about its members' musicianship here. Jack White is obviously a great guitar player--not so much a virtuoso, but rather a careful craftsman using every skill in his book and pedal in his pedalboard to make his instrument shine. But the true enigma when it comes to musicianship within the band is Meg White's minimalistic drumming style. Drums are usually a pretty "formatted" instrument. Either you have a good sense of rhythm as a drummer or you don't. Usually, drummers just *can't* have the sorts of weird idiosyncracies that can be found in a guitar player, for instance--where a lack of technical skills can be mitigated by an instantly recognizable, very personal playing style. Drums are way too pivotal for the structure of a song to allow an overabundance of those, well, "irregularites". But the way Meg White plays those drums authorizes that, miraculously. For instance, her kick on the bass drum on fast tracks is actually quite... irregular, to use the exact same word I used before. But here, instead of ruining the songs, said irregularity actually adds to them--because it brings a welcome ambiguity and *literal* timelessness to those tunes already drawing from all sorts of American grassroots traditions. The whole White Stripes guitar-and-drums dynamic sounds legit, authentic. And so do the technical "flaws". And when you factor in the relentless "drive" that Meg emphasizes in most of the cuts on this record, her style becomes a pure treat for the ears.
Going back to the tracklist, I'm gonna play the fast-forward button and leave aside the three cuts after "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself". Not that those cuts are bad--they even add intimate, folk textures to an album that's far more varied that The White Stripes' reputation lets on. But we need to move to the real "meat" of this record quick, which is the *whole second half of the album*--proving that *Elephant* is not merely the "one with *Seven Nation Army* on it", but also the probable equal of *White Blood Cells* in terms of overall quality.
For example, as obvious as it is that *Ball And Biscuit* rips off countless blues acts from the past, the result (and that iconic guitar riff), is simply, utterly, irresisitible. And so is "The Hardest Button to Button" with one of the catchiest guitar and drum interactions ever penned by the band (which says something!). Truly one of the five most memorable songs ever written by Jack White. "Little Acorns" explores darker territories with its borderline-hard rock/heavy metal mood and its parody of self-help advice in the lyrics. "Hypnotize" then goes full-blown "lo-fi", with welcomed punkier outcomes when it comes to both sound and performances. Following that short cut, "The Air Near My Fingers" offers a wealth of other iconic riffs and vocal parts. Plus having that rhodes piano double-tracking the guitar riffs was a stellar idea to push the enveloppe just a little sonically speaking, just the way the sound of this record needed to be "pushed" towards its end. Finally, "Girl, You have No Faith In Medecine", the last rocker in the album, gives you the feeling that it has existed for the last four or five decades, just like 80% of the other songs on *Elephant*. One little meta-joke-of-a-song after, with a guest singer named Holly Golightly suggesting the possibility of love triangle rock fans shoudn't fantasize about *too seriously*, and the album is over. Revisiting it, I thought I would nitpick about a few things and give it a 4.5/5. But nitpick, I will not. The *Elephant* is out of the room from the get-go when you start spinning this LP. Because the "deep cuts" have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of, and the highlights are just incredible. 5/5, then.
Number of albums left to review: 275
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 321 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 177
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 233
Ian Dury
4/5
As a brilliant reviewer on this app (unfortunately gone away before finishing this project) stated in one of the reviews you already browsed through by now...
"[Listening to this record,] I thought somebody recorded Randy Newman trying to do an impression of the Clash".
Yep that about sums Ian Dury up for me. You just need to add a thick London / Essex accent and some more loony lyrics to the "punk / pub rock" recipe. Plus off-kilter forays in all sorts of side-styles going from disco-funk to polka (?). Got it, *mate*?
Speaking of "accents", being a non-native English speaker, I've always had trouble grasping Cockney rhyming slang *on the spot*, which is why I guess most of the saucy details told by Ian Dury on "Bilericay Dickie" will always elude me unless I spend some time on them. No biggie, since it's still obvious the protagonist of this tune is only boasting about his sexual encounters (or lack thereof, lol). And given that said composition and its instrumentation is just a big joke as well, I'm not losing much anyway. Wonder if, forty years from now, Sleaford Mods will be considered as bizarre, unprofessional and "ridiculous" as Ian Dury sounds for most ears today (see the sheer amount of reviewers bitching about him in this app!). In many ways, Dury is a precursor to Sleaford Mods' own angrier take on "pisspoor, *uncool* Britannia"--if not musically or lyrically, at least "spiritually" speaking.
All complaints about "Bilericay Dickie"'s music aside, and apart from a couple of moments like that in Dury's debut, I have to say that I ended up pleasantly surprised by the music played for this record. The first time I listened to this album, I didn't get it at all, you see. And contrary to a lot of reviewers in here, I had no problem with Dury's "amateur" voice--I understood right away what the man was aiming at, i.e. recording some moody snapshots about working class people around him, and including himself in that cast of pathetic / colourful character. In a way, Dury also foretold Mike Skinner's The Streets in that respect. And as far as I was concerned, an older, non-rapped, more clownish version of that did not rub me the wrong way. But the music did at first (maybe because I browsed through the songs one at a time, out of the album's context). Yet a few months later, as I'm properly listening to this record, I realize I was mostly wrong. The basslines often slaps, the mock-funk tracks on the first side are actually quite effective, the piano arrangements are far more sophisticated than a casual listen might suggest at first, and the chord changes on "I'm Partial To Your Acadabra" take the song and its memorable chorus to a whole other level. There are even two synth solos in this recordn and it's a sheer miracle that don't sound out of place at all!
Besides, when Dury's lyrics match the unpredictable nature of this music (or vice -versa), some sparks may fly. Case in point: "Old Man", a very moving tribute to Dury's father (wonder if Ian's son Baxter wrote something similar about his own dad--I have to admit I don't know the first thing about Baxter's own music career, except that he once collaborated with... Sleaford Mods' Jason Williamson!). Likewise, Dury's lyrics hit the (far more offensive) mark on the three punkier cuts closing *New Boots And Panties*. If those three tracks didn't exactly reinvent the wheel, they're still decent--and most of all, they need to be listened with the 1977 context in mind, when the "new wave" explosion had barely started. Add the kinky album opener "Wake Up And Make Love To Me"--"catchy" in all the sense of the word, ha ha--plus non-album single "Sex And Drugs And Rock'n'Roll"--included in most recent CD editions of the album--and you have quite an endearing record. Ironic yet tender, rude yet somehow sensible as well, *New Boots And Painties* probably deserves to be quoted in list such as this one, even if it's damn *weird at times.
Browsing through the mixed bag that the rest of Ian Dury's discography is, you can spot quite a few other jewels as well--and not necessarily those that general British audiences were aware of through the memorable singles the man released. To find my way into this hot, beautiful mess, I've just bought myself a nice comprehensive compilation, *Hit Me! The Best of Ian Dury* (all the tracks from this debut are included in it, by the way--so that was a bargain compared to the price in which this debut is sold now). Time will tell if I'm gonna fall into a deep rabbit hole from there...
In the *mean*time...
Number of albums left to review: 274
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 321
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 178 (including this one, most probably)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 233
Paul McCartney
1/5
When it comes to McCartney's solo debut, the cover artwork is as wonderful and precise as the music is unfocused and irrelevant. Compare this to John Lennon's own solo debut *Plastic Ono Band* and weep, Beatles fans! Heck, you can even compare this to *McCartney II*, released ten years later, and weep all the same. *II*--not selected by Dimery--was filled with all sorts of amazing ideas between off-kilter tracks and more naive ditties. In comparison, *90%* of *McCartney I* is just made out of naive ditties, and all of them sound *unfinished* to boot! The former Beatles famously confused "simplicity" with hollowness and self-indulgence with this one. Worse, the promotion of this thing--and its timing just as the Fab Four were breaking up--was just awful. And even today, that ridiculous retrospective assessment claiming that it was the first "lo-fi LP"--just because it was supposedly a "homemade recording"--is one of the most grating statements ever pronounced about an album. *McCartney* has a sound way too clear and pristine (one of its rare merits, actually) to be considered as such. You really feel like Dimery hasn't thought it through when he used a slot for this debut--a slot that could have been put for far better use! Should I list the names of all the slighted artists here?
The only thing contradicting this overall assessment is obviously the stellar composition "Maybe I'm Amazed", whose careful build-up and emotional soaring vocal parts pay off right away. But one sole good song a good album doesn't make. Especially when it's the penultimate track on an otherwise particularly dull and boring record.
Objectively, I could give a 1.5/5 grade to this thing, translating to a 6.5/10 mark for purposes that would be more general than the ones used of this list (5 + 1.5). Because the music's too f*cking bland to even be considered as "offensive", which is what most 1/5 records on this list are to be blamed for. But for once, I'm gonna round up my final grade *negatively*. Call that a protest of sorts against this particularly useless selection in the 1001 Albums book.
Number of albums left to review: 273
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 321
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 178.
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 234 (including this one)
The La's
5/5
The human mind is an eternal mystery. It's just mind-boggling to think of how Lee Mavers, in his many attempts to capture the "sound" he had envisioned in his head for The La's, has exhausted an army of producers--some of them high-profile, such as John Leckie or Steve Lillywhite--to then just disown the band's first album once it was finally released. Especially when said debut (mostly produced by Lillywhite) is such a gem, convincing both critics and the audience at the time that it was a masterwork of a debut, and still convincing listeners who only discovered it recently (like me). What is it that Mavers heard in that final record that couldn't sustain his high hopes--to the point that he left the music business and has never recorded any other album, nor even reappeared since (except for a few reunion concerts once in a while)? There lies the biggest mystery, suggesting that there's a very thin line separating perfectionism from neurosis--or genius from unrealistic expectations.
Oddly enough, the lyrics of old-school sixties rock stomper "Failure", about a character going through the throes of depression, unwittingly shed some light on the sort of issues Mavers probably faced at the time : "No you can't throw failure over your shoulders / If you don't look after - you gonna look back / No, you can't hurry forward...". How many times has Mavers "looked back", instead of looking forward? At the end of this tune, the depressed protagonist elects to leave his self-imposed isolation to return to the world (here symbolized by his family). "And you go downstairs and you sit in your place". Sad to think that Mavers has not returned yet to the seat he deserves to have among the family of important rock figures. More than thrity five years later, there are still some great tunes by him we only have a demo version of (example: " I Am The Key"). And this, mostly because he erroneously thought--and apparently still thinks--that there is something wrong in the sound of his band's first album. Like any sort of depression, it seems like long-time *creative* depressions can be triggered by the most innocuous events. And like all depressions, their real starting point probably lies elsewhere...
Sure, if really you had to *nitpick*, you could argue that a *slightly* grittier production would have served this record right. But c'mon, even with that very minor grudge in mind, *The La's* has aged like fine wine. Especially when you consider the sheer number of "rock albums" from that particular period whose horrible eighties sound still mark them as hackneyed and/or irremediably dated... And the songs in this debut are just incredibly beautiful or effective. There's the instantly recognizable hit "There She Goes", of course, but also "Timeless Melody" and its epic, breathtaking harmonies, the dizzying 3/4-timed "Way Out", the lively "IOU", or the moving acoustic ballad "Looking Glass"--closing the proceedings on a wonderful and unexpected climactic racket. Half of those tunes give you the feeling they have been around since "mature" rock surged at the tail end of the sixties, so immediately catchy as they are. And the other half is still pretty impressive-going to all sorts of interesting directions that bring welcome dynamics to the whole tracklist.
Indeed, what unites all those magnificent tracks is the scope of influences Mavers draws from to create distinctive and immediately likable aesthetics for his own band. Those influences go from jangle pop and psychedelic folk-rock to Big Star and The Velvet Underground, up to the best of what The Soft Boys and The Replacements had to offer during the eighites. And they also foretell the Britpop wave about to engulf the UK (and the world) in the following years. Yet this album is also very much its *own thing*. Which is why it will always have a special place in the hearts of many rock fans.
The human mind is a mystery, I said. I found one reviewer in this section complaining that the name *Timeless Melody* couldn't apply to the song it refers to. Excuse me? That vocal line is one of the most beautiful melodies that has ever surged from the pop-rock idiom in the last sixty years or so. What more do you want, seriously? And equally striking is the other "timeless melody" that graces "There She Goes". Please, give five stars to *them*, at least. Because those two tracks alone warrants a place for the whole album in a list such as this one. 5/5, of course.
Number of albums left to review: 272
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 322 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 178.
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 234
Echo And The Bunnymen
4/5
Echo And The Bunnymen before they became *Ocean Rain*-famous. Reading the wikipedia page about this nice post-punk debut--mixing the worlds of Joy Division and Jim Morrisson--I discovered that it actually reached number 17 on the UK album chart in the year of its release. Not so bad. About the album cover, love that future KLF member Bill Drummond (who took part in the album release as a Zoo Records funder) saw the giant head of a spooky pre-Donnie-Darko rabbit in the shape suggested by the most prominent tree trunk on it. That's fitting to this hallucinatory album. Actually, now I see *two* spooky bunny heads as I'm looking at those tree trunks... (a note as I'm reading this paragraph again after having written most of my review--it's also quite spooky that this "double-vision" actually foretells what I *didn't know* I would write in my second paragraph--but more on that very soon...).
So I don't have much else to say about this record--most of the tracks are great, and they all go in interesting directions. I was thus about to directly include this Echo And The Bunnymen debut in my own list of keepers when something very strange happened... Indeed, once *Crocodiles* was over, Spotify played a very nice track by another English post-punk band named The Sound--also released by the Korova label--and a band that I had never heard about before. And following the lead that this track gave me, I fell into another sort of "rabbit hole" (not related to Echo's "bunnymen" this time). Currently listening to *All Fall Down*, a supposedly "bad" album by the Sound that critics had cruelly panned at the time, and yet filled with gems. Seems like the critics were just not ready for this mix of pop and extremely dark post-punk aesthetics. And don't get me started on the (this time) critically-praised albums that were released before such a supposed artistic failure. The names of those two wonders are *Jeopardy* and *From The Lion's Mouth*. And of course, they have their share of absolute jewels as well...
So now I'm kind of embarrassed. How come Ian McCullough's band reached success and Adrian Borland's did not? Not to take anything away from Echo And The Bunnymen, but at the end of the day, such *huge* difference between two equally good acts all seems so... random. And so unfair, in a way. Maybe lists such as this one should be used to make you discover even *more* obscure acts. Because world-famous bands always hide other far less famous artists, just like a bunny-head-shaped tree hides the whole forest behind it. Plus, this situation is all the more heartbreaking when you consider Borland's tragic fate, and the fact that when his band didn't manage to break out after many, many attempts, his psychological condition actually worsened. Not saying this is the root cause--you never really know about the inner workings of such diseseases. But probably an amplifying factor.
Under that light, it suddenly becomes hard for me to give a 5/5 or even a 4/5 grade to *Crocodiles*. It's a nice record for sure, but even as an example of the first years of post-punk, it's certainly not as striking as early stuff by Wire, Gang of Four or... The Sound, for that matter! Rest assured that my 3.5/5 grade--given for the purposes of this list of "essential albums" and here rounded up to 4--still equals an 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3). Another way to say that I still consider this record as a fine example of the genre, and that it has all my respect. That said, Echo And The Bunnymen's fans should probably be well-advised to listen to The Sound's *Jeopardy*, released the exact same year as *Crocodiles*. Just to make sure they're not missing out on something actually *better*.
Number of albums left to review: 271
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 322
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 179 (including this one, most probably--except if a The Sound album takes its place!)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 234
Hawkwind
4/5
Never knew where to start with Hawkwind. As seminal as this band was for the whole stoner-rock umbrella genre, it's such a strange outfit--ambiguously placed somewhere between prog rock and krautrock, or between motorik psychedelic hard rock and proto-punk. Amazingly, Hawkwind can interest either fans of Steven Wilson or fans of punk rock--or, to put it back into the context of the seventies, either fans of Yes and fans of Mötörhead-- the latter because it was Lemmy Kilmister's first notable band as a bass player, of course. Yet as original as that band was, I always found there was something lacking in the plodding rhythms and somewhat linear vocal melodies of their *quote-unquote* "space rock". Something didn't click for me...
But thanks to this app (and the 1001 Albums book), I can now say that the long-awaited click happened. The problem was that I had never really listened to Hawkwind play live, like on this gorgeous double-album, where their sonic aesthetics receive a better treatment compared to what usually occured in a studio, before, very ironically. Everything is more, well, atmospheric when those songs are recorded live--there's an "envelope" of sorts, something that's both warm and enticing. Here you really feel that "space" the band was aiming at, just as one hard jam ties into the next...
Even more than the sound, it's the very organic performances on *Space Ritual*--surpassing most studio versions of those tracks--that finally convinced me Hawkwind could be pretty good. When Lemmy and drummer Simon King first took charge of the rhythm section of the band, on the supposedly cult-favourite studio album *Doremi Fasol Latido*, the performances were still a bit stiff. Lemmy Kilmister and Simon King were certainly bringing something more hard-edged that was missing from the first two Hawkwind LPs--LPs that were great in places, especially *In Search Of Space*, but never really finding their own "voice" compared to similar "progressive" acts. But if the new rhythm section was the trump card that could theoretically allow Hawkwind to find that voice at last, neither the sound nor the performances in their third studio LP did justice to the full abilities of the new version of the band. Thankfully, *Space Ritual* comprises all the songs of *Doremi Fasol Latido* bar one. And as said earlier, those live renditions (most of them longer than the originals) make the compositions breathe and bloom at last. Case in point: "Time We Left This World Today", which finally *grooves* as it should have in the studio. Plus, and unless I'm mistaken, *Space Rituals* harbours fan-favorites that are only available in it, such as "Orgone Accumulator" or "Born To Go". As such, it's like a "best of" album of that second version of the band.
It's a little funny that in this record, as in others by Hawkwind, Dave Brock--a more than competent frontman, singer and main composer--is often shadowed by the extravagant personalities of his collaborators. Lemmy's power chords and simple-yet-effective tricks on his bass (played like a guitar!) often steal the show, even when he is somewhat behind the drums (which is actually pleasant on the ear--as it gives even more dynamics to the whole performance). And Del Dettmar's synth and Nik Turner's saxophone and flute steal the show as well when they take center stage. Add the spoken word interludes by poet Robert Calvert, and you even forget about Brock altogether!
What matters is that this record is *alive*, in all the senses of the word, as topsy-turvy as it may sound at first. More alive than any of the virtuosistic--and ultumately void and pretentious--shenanigans played by Emerson Lake and Palmer around the same time. To be honest, I pity that ELP fan deriding Hawkwind towards the start of this reviews section, hoping that no one on this app will listen to *Space Ritual* just because he's the one who said it was "not good", "badly played" and "poor". How pretentious is that, huh? What's the problem with other listeners making up their minds on their own? That guy--probably a guy, right?--either has delusions of grandeur, or deeply hidden insecure feelings about his own tastes. Too bad he can't recognize where "modern" music becomes stifling and when it becomes exhilarating. That bloke should probably try to relax and watch "Stacia" dance to Hawkwind's "space music" on the stage...
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list gathering "essential albums", rounded up to 4. Which translates to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 270
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 322
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 180 (including this one, most probably)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 234
N.E.R.D
2/5
D.U.M.B.
I heard that Tyler The Creator and Frank Ocean love N.E.R.D., the funk-rock-rap brainchild of production duo The Neptunes, i.e. Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams. Guess that...
a) Pharrell is probably a friend of Tyler and Frank by now. And since, outside of this particular project, he's still a gifted producer with gold in hands, it's tempting to find the same sort of genius in an album such as this one. Except that nothing's really "genius" about it. It's more like: "let's throw everything we have onto the wall and hope most of it will stick the landing". Newsflash, boys: a lot of it didn't.
b) Given the number of genres or subgenres that are tackled in *Fly Or Die*, you could forgive Tyler and Frank for thinking this is the sort of album that opens minds and break barriers for many listeners. Heck, good for them if this record played that specific part in their respective musical upbringing. But the sad truth of the matter is that large chunks of this record are borderline unlistenable today.
Actually, N.E.R.D. were already borderline unlistenable in 2004. But thanks to the "power" of catchy single "She Wants To Move", target demographics among general audiences gave Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo--plus whoever that third guy in the band was--the benefit of the doubt. At the time, N.E.R.D. were also helped by critical pundits, who sent tons of unwarranted praise their way--confusing creativity, dynamic production and open-mindedness with derivative endeavors, sloppiness, and lack of meaningful inspiration. Just like its horrible cover, *Fly Or Die* is filled with copied-and-pasted ideas that don't match each other very well. With sometimes a copied-and-pasted attitude *within* the album, which adds to its grating aspect. For instance, one track towards the end of the album, "The Way She Dances", is basically "She Wants To Moves 2", with callbacks to that single so obvious that you might want to roll your eyes at your hi-fi speakers. "She Wants To Move" is not that interesting as a single anyway--it was supposed to age badly, I guess, but it actually aged even worse. It's a hot mess. It's always been so.
Not that each and every track in the album sucks, mind you. Right before "The Way She Dances", there is a string of cuts that fare far better, already saving this record from a 1-star grade. They are the Britpop-inspired (!) "Drill Sergeant" (along with its more hectic coda), the Naughty-By-Nature-indebted rap banger "Thrasher", and the moving ballad "Maybe". Lenny Kravitz and The Roots' Questlove helped Williams and Hugo on some happy moments within those particular songs, which might or might not explain why they're tighter on both compositions and performances level. And if you go back to side one, the fast-paced hypnotic and jazzy stomp of "Jump" is also quite good!
Unfortunately, everything else is dumb. The faux-Prince meanderings of opener "Don't Worry About It" is dumb. The faux-rock of the title-track is dumb. The faux-blues-rock of the Jimi-Hendrix parody "Backseat Love" is dumb. And whatever the endlessly plodding tracks "Breakout", "Wonderful Place" and "Waiting For You" really are--"faux" or not--they're just dumb as well anyway. Worse, the performances on those cuts sound forced. And just as in most other songs, the lyrics are unfocused and/or hackneyed. Shall I continue up until the very last minutes of this interminable record? Or do you get the picture?
By the way, I went to the Wikipedia article related to *Fly Or Die*, and to me, its "reception" section looked like propaganda. How come Pitchfork's scathing 3.something-out-of-10 review for this album is NOT mentioned in the article? How many other negative reviews of the record are thus kept in the dark there?
I've never been a *huge* fan of Pitchfork, yet this review is quite hilarious, so I've copied and pasted a link to it under this paragraph. If you don't like this record, and have five extra minutes on your hands, give it a shot.
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5749-fly-or-die/
Not giving a grade as terrible as the one Pitchfork gave, though: It's gonna be 1.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums"--rounded up to 2. It's not as bad as the one given by Pitchfork, because said grade translates differently for more general purposes. You add that 1.5 mark to a 5 point score signifying that, if you made it to this list, you already have a certain modicum of talent and inspiration (not to mention luck)...
So my end grade for *Fly Or Die* is 6.5/10. With only 10 reviewers giving a 5/5 mark to this thing on this app, and only 10 or 15 reviews "liked" by the users--whatever the grades in the reviews are--it's obvious that folks are not wild about this record anyway--even to *hate* it. So objectively speaking, there's nothing essential in *Fly Or Die*.
Heck, I even wonder how I could write so many words about such a tedious record. Probably because I'm a *real* nerd. A music *nerd*, that is. That's something I could share with fans of this record if they were a little more demanding in their tastes. But I'll leave the door open to them and their own takes. Another reason why I won't give the minimum grade to those other "nerds" here breaking out of their American egg.
Number of albums left to review: 269
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 322
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 180
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 234p5 (including this one)
Tim Buckley
2/5
Miscellaneous things to take away from this record:
- I'm as much a fan as anyone else of "Song To The Siren", found on previous Tim Buckley's record *Starsailor* (and famously covered by This Mortal Coil). And I absolutely love his second LP *Goodbye And Hello* (also in Dimery's list, and in mine if I ever find a way to finish my own version of this list of 1001 essential albums). Yet it's not because some artists can have genius bout of inspiration that they cannot fall very low on subsequent efforts. Case in point: this record. You can't seriously think those meandering bluesy jams--pointless to the point where there's no point pointing out how pointless they are--are anything but self-indulgent music. Most of those cuts are not "compositions"--something Buckley had proven he could be very good at elsewhere, but not in here. They're just derivative rock drivel, even by 1972's standards--with only a few "funky" flourishes here and there to give it some sort of "originality", as weird-sounding as those flourishes are.
- Man was Tim Buckley in constant heat during his last couple of years on this earth. I'm wondering if watching saucy porn videos online, instead of wasting my time listening to this album, would not be time better spent, actually. You really want to throw a bucket of icy cold water on Buckley's head so that he could get a grip on hisself at last. We get it, Tim. You want to f*ck your way all around the L.A. metropolitan area. But do we really need to be updated on your every lustful thought? And more importantly, were any of those thoughts good song material? The jury's still out on this one.
- Tim Buckley was often a spectacular singer, but there are points in this album were his antics clearly become grating. Blame that on his obvious sexual frustration--the latter can inspire some other singers to greatness. But with Buckley, the effects are somewhat vulgar or even disturbing. The only exception among his most memorable vocal "moments" in the album being his performance on the more subdued acoustic-guitar-driven jammy cut "Hong Kong Bar" and the lush extravaganza of "Sweet Surrender" (more on that one in a second).
- Harmonically speaking, there are thus three songs saving the album from the self-indulgent borefest it mostly is at heart. There's "Sweet Surrender", as stated earlier, whose dreamy string section and haunted vocal performance instantly erases from your memory the two dull cuts opening the record right before this particular song jumps to your ears. Closer "Make It Right" later digs the exact same trench, to even more effective and heartfelt effects. And as "improvisational" as "Hong Kong Bar" sounds at first glance, some of the notes hit by that guitar are actually pretty subtle and interesting. But three decent cuts a good album don't make. Especially when the rest is so uninspired and unoriginal.
1.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums (rounded up to 2). Which translates to a 6.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+1.5). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 268
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 322
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 180
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 236 (including this one)
Frank Sinatra
3/5
Famous and iconic. But utimately, not for me. Waiting for the album that has "It Was A Very Good Year" in its tracklisting. In the meantime...
Personal grade: 3/5
Pseudo-"objective" grade: 8/10
Number of albums left to review: 267
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 322
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 181 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 236
Pet Shop Boys
3/5
Among "classic" Pet Shop Boys albums, I actually prefer... *actually*. 🙃 Never really understood why *Behaviour* was held in higher regard by the "critics". Probably because of the lyrics. But when it comes to the music, I've always thought that *actually* was a wee bit more interesting.
Pet Shop Boys have always been an "acquired taste" for me anyway. I can only indulge in such "cheesy" dance music tunes in microdoses, as witty and sophisticated as those tunes might be. Giving this record the benefit of the doubt, though, and waiting to see if it grows on me later.
Personal grade: 3/5
Pseudo-"objective" grade: 8/10 (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 266
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 322
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 182 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 236
Roxy Music
5/5
Art rock / glam rock classic, with songs about undefinable dances, blow-up dolls and weird stalkers. Bryan Ferry's histrionic vocals are an acquired taste, but once you *do* acquire it, it becomes easy to see its merits. And the same goes for some goofy chord successions here and there and the intricate instrumentation everywhere (with quie a lot of saxophone!). "Do The Strand", " Edition Of You", "Grey Lagoons" slap in their own idiosyncratic ways--leaving some classic glam rock moments in their trail--but it's when Roxy Music fully embrace their art-rock DNA that they make this record the "legend" that is is (eerie "In Every Dream Home A Heartache", Krautrock-adjacent "The Bogus Man", "For Your Pleasure" and its proto-"ambient" conclusion). Those track probably owe a lot to synth whizz Brian Eno, about to leave for a stellar solo career, here foretold in many salient points of those "experimental" tracks. For our pleasure indeed.
Number of albums left to review: less than 300, approximately (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me)
MC Solaar
2/5
Being born and raised in France, I *obviously* know who that rapper is. *Everyone* in France knows him. "Bouge de là" is a seminal track for French hip hop (anything *famous* labelled as "rap" that had been issued before was just pure garbage). Just so you English-speaking friends know, that single was a *huge* commercial success, and as gimmicky as it was, it's still kinda cool to listen to today. "Bouge de là" was actually the track that opened the door to the whole universe of hip hop for many French middle-school kids at the time--and, just like the three or four highlights of this record, it was still a *legit* attempt to translate the genre into our own language. Other notable French pioneers in said genre were NTM, IAM, Assassin, Ministère AMER, but as notable as those acts were, few of them had the potential of MC Solaar's music when it comes to international success (minus a couple of records by IAM and NTM, maybe...).
That said, Solaar (also known as Claude M'Barali) was not only a whizz kid because of the music he rapped on--he also had a very distinct style, actually quite soft-spoken compared to the acts I've quoted up there, but equally impressive when it comes to flow and word play. The latter is actually a trademark aspect of Solaar's lyrics--the man uses so many puns it becomes dizzying to track them all, to the point where he was sometimes derided because of this--but fortunately, also lauded by everyone who was less obsessed with a supposed "hardcore" posturing in the genre (including old-timers who came from the "chansons" *milieu*).
Released not long after single "Bouge de là" (and including it), *Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo* was thus the confirmation that MC Solaar and his producers had the right references to emulate important US hip hop acts in a way that would make sense in France. In its best moments, you can hear obvious whiffs of the Native Tongues collective (De La Soul, Jungle Brothers, ATCQ...) or Public Enemy's Bomb Squad production team. Those important moments are for instance the *stellar* and lively title-track, using the best that De La Soul and the Pharcyde had to offer at the time, or hit singles "Caroline" and "Victime de la mode"--the first about one unrequited love interest, very much a ditty, and yet transcended by its lush, emotive strings loops ; and the second, about a shallow female character only caring about external appearances, much more tongue-in-cheek in nature. And there's also the ominous "Armand est mort", using an effective sample of Marvin Gaye's *What's Going On* to narrate the death of a bum and how he ended up in such dire straits.
The rest is a little hit or miss, though, and not every track has aged gracefully here. Sophomore album *Prose Combat* was actually a far stronger and more cohesive effort than this debut. And it had gems such as "Obsolète" "La concubine de l'hémoglobine" and "Western Moderne"--famous for its killer sample of Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot's "Bonnie And Clyde". So I'm not including MC Solaar's debut in my own list, because it was certainly not the *best* album the man has ever released--even if it struck French minds at the time. But for the second album *Prose Combat*, let's just say that the jury's still out on this one.
2.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 3. Which translates to a 7.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2.5).
Number of albums left to review: 264
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 323
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 182
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 237 (including this one)
Ghostface Killah
4/5
A very good rap album. I'm as much a fan of the Wu-Tang as every other old school hip hop head out there, so I can't give this record anything less than a 3.5/5 grade (here rounded up to 4). That said, I have to admit that when it comes to Ghostface Killah's solo albums, I'm more familiar with his debut *Ironman* (which I don't *love*, actually), and also sophomore effort *Supreme Clientele* (that I *do* love this time).
Pretty busy today, so I don't have enough time for repeated, proper listens, unfortunately. Seems to me that on average, one track in two is a banger, most of them in a nice boom-bap formula. Not to say that the non-bangers are not worth your time as well if you like hip hop, but we're not here to the *perfect* level of Wu-Tang Clan's *36 Chambers* or GZA's *Liquid Swords*. Which, in a list like this, might take its toll.
Hope I'll have time to revisit this well-crafted record though. Who knows? Maybe after a few more listens, the (fish)scale might tip the other way? One thing's for sure, with an absolute gem such as the MF DOOM-produced "Underwater" towards the end of this album's tracklisting, it will never feel like a chore to return to *Fishscale*, and have it play out until the very last seconds.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (different than the ones given for this list of "essential album". (5+3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 263
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 323
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 183 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 237
The Good, The Bad & The Queen
4/5
Not exactly meaty compared to Blur, but generally meatier than Damon Albarn's more famous side-project Gorillaz. With sidekick Simon Tong, Albarn managed to gather a hell of a supergroup line-up, with The Clash's Paul Simonon on bass, and Fela Kuti's drummer and musical director Tony Allen (RIP). The end result is rather soft on the ear, poppish and stylish. No bad song on this record (even if most of those found on side B are a little understated). The best string of tracks logically turns up towards the end of side A, with "Northern Whale", "Kingdom Of Doom" and "Herculean". And album closer "The Good, The Bad, and The Queen" also slaps, thanks to its extended noisy build-up at the very end.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums (rounded up to 4). Which translayes to a 8.5 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 262
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 323
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 184 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 237
Hookworms
3/5
Oh well. Take one third of Neu!, one third of Hot Chip, and one third of Arcade Fire, and you get this album. Not so bad, thanks to the ingredients. But quality-wise and intensity-wise, the whole things leans harder towards Hot Chip territory than to Neu! soundscapes, quite unfortunately. Motorik is quite a tricky genre to handle : if you do not develop your songs long enough, they may come off as half-baked and not mesmerizing enough ; but if they go on for too long without the properly controlled, "less-is-more" dynamics, they will wear out their hypnotic welcome quicker than intended. Hookworms chose the second option. Wish they could have found a more convincing middle-ground here.
To focus on the positive side of things, the first five tracks are pretty good overall, in spite of how unnecessary long three of them are. The synth bass *hooks* (ha ha) and other digital tidbits are what sustains your attention, and the vocal parts, harmonies and chord changes are somewhat enticing, even if they don't always gel well with the relentless grooves behind them. Maybe taking out and then re-adding some of the instrumental layers at some critical points of the recording / mixing process might have made those tunes sound way better. Because, as they are now, the daunting "blocks" those songs are made of *never* build up to any clear, impressive climax. Which is, obviously, a missed opportunity.
Besides, the second part of the album is quite a borefest. It explores ideas that may remind you of other, more famous acts (good ones like Animal Collective, or slightly overrated ones such as Tame Impala). Yet those ideas are never transcended into something that would feel personal or heartfelt. "Cold" music can be invigorating sometimes. But Hookworms's music was more akin to "medium-temperature". And this not in the sense of "cool" or "warm", mind you.
Browsing through the web, I've learned more about the band's incredibly harsh "curse" during its short life, which prevented them to reach the ambitions they probably aimed at on a commercial and artistic viewpoint (apart from a few glowing reviews in prominent British music sites and magazines at the time, plus this slot on the 1001 Albums project). There were not one but *two* flooded studios owned by people from the band, loss of gear and recordings, deaths in the their entourage, long depressive phases for their singer... Under that light, it feels like the sexual and psychological abuse allegations against Hookworms' frontman, which effectively ended the band's trajectory--allegations stated by a third party, and never investigated by a court of law anyway--come off as one of those rare cases where such events could have stemmed from "grey areas", involving protagonists who were both ill-equiped to deal with each other. Of course, no one will really know for sure. That third party recanted her initial accusations, wishing good luck to "MJ" for the rest of his career as a musician (good luck with that indeed, lol!). And in return, the singer ended his legal action to ask reparations for libel and defamation. Out of court, out of sight. Case closed, if not solved.
One of the band members, Sam Shjipstone, found a way to bounce back, however. Indeed he is now a member of Yard Act, and they're surely at the top of the hype machine these days, somewhere in between post-punk / indie-"rock" and post-disco. And the man also plays with other former Hookworms alumni in Holodrum--this time more disco than post-punk or motorik, and surely less interesting than the band they're all from. Wherever "MJ" is now, one can surely imagine how bitter he must feel about all this...
All of this might be instructing to a degree, but we're getting away from what to do with *Microshift*'s inclusion in this list. Yet this whole music-business-related soap opera could actually bring us to other considerations that are far more relevant for this 1001 Albums project. Maybe indeed the lesson to learn here is that selecting this recent, decent-yet-not-"stellar" record--which will most probably be "erased" in subsequent editions of the book anyway--was not such a good idea after all. And this even before that whole abuse allegation thing.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I feel like including albums from the last ten years or so is a little vain. I didn't think this at all when I started this project two years ago. But now I think you need time to accomplish its good work on those potential candidates for "essential" records--you need to wait a little to see if they age that well, both for their music, or for the circumstances that surround them, or for what they mean for "culture" overall. And you need time to separate the whiff from the chaff.
Don't get me wrong, there are albums from the last ten years or so I *do* feel strongly about. But everyone using this app does, and given that "monoculture" is a dead and buried thing, no "immediate" consensus can be found when it comes to *today*'s essential albums. When I see the records from 2018 singled out by a couple of reviewers here, it makes me want to laugh. But if they saw my own selection, they would prabably roll on the floor with laughter as well. That death of the "monoculture" might be a sad state of affair for some, and a good news for others. But it is what it is.
Still giving *Microshift* a grade, though: 2.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 3. It may sound severe, but bear in mind that if I translate this grade for more "general" purposes, following my usual method automatically adding 5 points to that first grade, the end result for this record is 7.5/10 (2.5 + 5). Not so bad, huh?
Number of albums left to review: 261
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 323
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 184
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 238 (including this one)
End note (a long one):
I thought about what I said about the end of *monoculture" in my review. To give you a precise example of what I meant, here is a list of my 50 favourite albums from 2018, right after this end note. Surely some of my choices could look "weird" for different stripes of listeners out there. But maybe indeed, some of those choices make more sense than *Microshift* to some of you
Whatever the case may be, don't hesitate to click on the "like" button if that list speaks to your soul. But you can also click that "like" button if it doesn't, actually. 😆 By doing this, you would signal to me that you agree with my overall point--that there is no such thing as a "monoculture" now, and that all of us are little Robert Dimerys desperately trying to make sense out of the information overload out there. Hope I haven't added too much to that overload in my lengthy review, and that at least parts of the latter were interesting or instructive for you.
So here's the list (number 1 to 50). Take care, y'all.
Low - Double Negative
Shame - Songs Of Praise
IDLES - Joy As An Act Of Resistance
Young Fathers - Cocoa Sugar
Daughters - You Won't Get What You Want
The Armed - Only Love
Parquet Courts - Wide Awaaaaake!
Ty Segall - Freedom's Goblin
The Breeders - All Nerve
Beak> - >>>
Say Sue Me - Where We Were Together
Suuns - Felt
Tropical Fuck Storm - A Laughing Death In Meatspace
Beach House - 7
Kids See Ghosts - Kids See Ghosts
Amen Dunes - Freedom
No Age - Snares Like A Haircut
Adrianne Lenker - Abysskiss
Superchunk - What A Time To Be Alive
Stephen Malkmus And The Jicks - Sparkle Hard
Ty Segall - Ty Segall
21Savage / Metro Boomin - Without Warning.
Caroline Rose - LONER
Litovsk - Dispossessed
Nils Frahm - All Melody
Car Seat Headrest - Twin Fantasy (Face To Face)
Cardi B - Invasion Of Privacy
SOPHIE - Oil Of Every Pearl's Un-Inside
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever - Hopes Down
Denzel Curry - TA1300
Beechwood - Songs From The Land Of Nod
Pusha T - Daytona
Mac Miller - Swimming
Travis Scott - Astroworld
xxx tentacion - ?
JPEGMAFIA - Veteran
Preoccupations - New Material
Hot Snakes - Jericho Sirens
The Soft Moon - Criminal
J Cole - KOD
Birds in Row - We Already Lost the World
Cloud Nothings - Last Building Burning
Deeper - Deeper
Nas - Nasir
Superorganism - Superorganism
Mount Eerie - Now Only
Navy Gangs - Poach
Yo La Tengo - There's A Riot Going On
Anna Von Hausswolf - Dead Magic
Mitski - Be the Cowboy
Kraftwerk
5/5
"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our Trans Europe Express. Our train will stop at the following stations: *Electro-Kosmische Stadte*, *Weimar Nostalgia Park*, *Schubert Pastische Burg*, *David and Iggy-Straße*, *Proto-Techno-Hub*, *Hip Hop Sample-landër and *Planet Rock Allee*. Our inspectors will check your music history tickets in few minutes. In the meantime, feel the rhythm of our pistons and let yourself go. We hope you'll have a pleasant journey. Mind the automatic doors, and bon voyage..."
Not as "driven", mesmerizing and wide-eyed as *Autobähn*, not as catchy, cinematic and melodic as the Metropolis-inspired " bauhaus" extravaganza *The Man Machine*, and not as delightfully ominous as the post-apocalyptic, geiger-counters-infested *Radioactivity* (a record that has always been criminally underrated by the "critics"), *Trans Europe Express* is nonetheless a masterpiece. Truly one of the four Kraftwerk records everyone interested in the origin of the "electronic" umbrella genre should own. Its poetry and its harmonic lines--clear and simple, and yet so "rich" at the same time--are what makes this album sound so fresh, even today. Not many techno and electronica records, even those released decades later, can boast about such assets... 5 stars, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 260
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 324 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 184
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 238
Duran Duran
3/5
I have always found this album uninspiring. Which is why that I've started this review by copying-and-pasting excerpts from two existing reviews, plus writing a somewhat more elaborate comment on a third.
1. "It’s hard to believe I used to love this band, I must have listened to this record a thousand times when it first released. I even had a nice Patrick Nagel print hanging in my bedroom. But now I find Simon Lebon’s voice annoying AF and the arrangements very cheesy, esp that 80’s sax, ugh. (...) The other new wave pop groups of the era did better work and don’t sound nearly as dated now, eg OMD, The Cure, Tears for Fears, The The etc."
Yep. I could have added The Human League, Heaven 17, Eurythmics... Heck, I could even have added A-Ha and Alphaville for that matter. Because all those bands had that thing, what was its name again...? Jeeze I had said name at the tip of the tongue... Er... Oh yeah, I remember now! They had *truly epic choruses*. In comparison, it *first* seemed to me that Duran Duran only had holes in its swiss cheese. Hackneyed repeated vocal lines, mostly driven by annoying major keys.
Also, it's extremely rare to find a reviewer who says he used to love an album, and that he now hates its guts. Evidence enough for me that trying to love this overrated and obviously *dated* record once again would probably be another complete waste of time for me. At least at first.
2 "Almost want this on my best albums just for the cover."
Indeed a reason why I *did* try to love this record in the past. Yet that didn't work. You can't judge a book (or an album) by its cover?
3. Not starting with a quote this time. It's just that, in a couple of positive reviews, I've noticed that unsound obsession with MTV in its very early days underlying all that queasy nostalgia (at least two positive reviews in mention it). When the album came out, there were families that indeed had MTV and families that did not. That person mentioning how their own family did not have MTV, and how this created a particular kind of desperation in the reviewer, had me smirk with disgust. The latter indeed reminisced on when their family visited the home of one of their dad's work colleagues, and "when the kids all shuffled into the living room, where the host's kids were watching TV". The oldest daughter was controlling the remote, amd clicked on MTV where the video for Rio was starting. But she said, "oh, I've seen this" and clicked away and the future reviewer "died a little inside" and still remembers it a full 40 years later.
Well... That's a personal memory that's evocative of a certain day and age, I'm gonna give it that. Yet maybe what really happened here was that this elder daughter had... taste? Maybe that was something to feel jealous about, instead of the fact that this other family had MTV, probably because it was more loaded (or the parents were somewhat...superficial?). It's a litlte laughable that this reviewer expresses no "distance" with their feelings at the time. Gives you the impression that they were interested in Duran Duran for all the *wrong* reasons--there are no "objectively" right or wrong reasons to like a band (or not), it's all subjective. But there are *wrong* ways to convey your love for a band, and this is one example here. Even if the memory itself is interesting and evocative.
Endnote: I don't know how or why, but when I've listened to *Rio* this time, something *kinda* clicked. It's probably because I felt more attuned to its peculiar instrumentations and arrangements (especially for the last, more "atmospheric" tracks). And maybe to some of its pop choruses on side A. I don't know why... And I don't have much more time to express my suddenly ambiguous feelings. It's been a long day and I feel quite queasy, right now. With its barrage of daily records, is the 1001 Albums app turning me into some sort of cheesy pop slob? Do others users feel like that sometimes? Only time will tell...
In the meantime, 3/5 for the purposes of this list. And 8/10 for a more "objective" assessment (5+3)???
Number of albums left to review: 259
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 324
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 185 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 238
Arcade Fire
5/5
Arcade Fire's masterwork of a debut and magnum opus. Wide-eyes, elated, emotional--you name it. 100% deserved the success it met at the time. I've actually discovered most of this album live, during the band's European tour, right after this record came out. It was a joyful riot onstage, and an excellent show.
Too bad the band's reputation has recently been tarnished by some allegations regarding Win Butler's private life--at odds with the man's quite self-righteous public image so far. To be fair, if you take into account the testimonies about what had occured between Butler and those "love interests" he has had different sorts of interactions with, it clearly transpires that Butler is a not a full-blown "sex offender". Sure, those testimonies differ in some key moments between what his version of the events was, and what the other involved persons said about them--and yet the whole picture is still cohesive enough to convey the brush strokes of said events. And if what they suggest is mostly pathetic on a personal level, it's not necessarily "malicious". The word "sexual assault" was admittedly mentioned for one case, but it seems that said interaction didn't last for very long and didn't go very far, "technically" speaking. Emotionally speaking, it's a very different animal of course, and I understand if anyone strongly disagreed with me in the interpretation of said "private" events, whose exact nature we will probably never fully understand from the outside. What becomes abundantly clear when you connect the dots, though, is that Butler was at least a self-centered hog at some point--and quite an immature one at that, especially for someone his age.
Besides, if you add the "power dynamics" that are inherent to the differences between who Win was and who those "love interests" were, the whole thing does paint him as quite insensitive, and also astonishingly reckless to boot. *Aggressively* sexting with women who are between 18 and 23 is for instance not the brightest move a famous 36 or 39-year-old rock star can make these days. And asking for "secrecy" about his exchanges with those women ("sexual" exchanges or not) sounds a little suspicious as well. It's almost as if Butler had used his celebrity to actually "cover" for the grey areas in those interactions. Where said celebrity could have led him to err on the side of caution for everyone involved instead--if only he had thought a little more about accountability, responsibility, and if he had acted somewhat selflessly of course. In other words if he had truly "cared" about those young women he was supposedly enamoured with...
Butler's public response, "explanations" and "apologies" haven't fully dispelled the whole unsavory picture, by the way. The man feels sincere when he states he didn't fully understand what was going on, and when he says he now regrets what he has done. Yet for most of this public response, he spends a lot of time talking bout himself, his marriage, his depression, his sufferings at the time, yadi, yada. But it's not about *you*, damn it! Even there, for his "apology", Butler doesn't process the point of those women calling him out is to let other voices be heard every time they feel pressurized to act contrary to their feelings or better interest, just because a famous male gaze is in the vicinity. Not to mention male gazes that are not famous at all, and yet bring with them their own power dynamics as well. The "objective' description of such an unfortunate situation hits too close to home for Butler, I guess. Even now.
So here I am, spending three paragraphs about those recent revelations, instead of talking about Arcade Fire's debut album. The thing is, I needed to precisely address all of this to *also* express why I still CAN "separate the art from the artist" for this particular album, in spite of the importance of those matters. Because...
a) Everybody can make mistakes in their lives, have serious lapses of judgment, or act like a selfish fool. I'm certainly taking this subject seriously, and I hope that what I've written up there demonstrates that to en extent. Yet, at the same time, I'm certainly not saying artists *should* be "role models". As long as certain lines are not crossed, at least...
b) Those sad events happened LONG after the legendary debut that *Funeral* is was released. So it's still possible for me to listen to it without thinking too much about them. What *Funeral* evokes to me these days, is when I visited my friend Théo on his French island two summers ago; and when, on the first morning I spent at his place, he woke me up by having his stereo blast... "Wake Up". Him all smiles at his little joke, me still confused and sleepy and yet internally laughing as well. Good times. You see, *Funeral* has been ingrained in the consciousness of indie-heads for so long now--far more than lesser album *The Suburbs*, which is where the Grammies and the rest of the mainstream world caught up with AF--that nothing can tarnish the gems in it. Those songs can be played at any moment, and they will lighten up the mood or the room instantly.
c) Speaking of the Grammy Awards, I sometimes wonder if reaching that sort of mainstream success is not what made Butler lose his way, on both a personal and an artistic level. And if you only focus on the music in Arcade Fire's latest albums, you can feel like something was "broken". For instance, many moments in *Reflektor* were already quite boring, to be honest. But that couldn't be worse than next album *Everything Now*, a cheesefest of unprecedented magnitude within the Canadian band's discography. And don't get me started on the supposed "return to authenticity" that *WE* was. Sound-wise and songwriting-wise, it felt like a PR ploy, a somewhat artificial attempt to return to the glory of *Funeral*. Yet there's no way to return. Except when you spin that first album again...
d) I wish I had more space or time to properly describe the joys of *Funeral*. Alas, this tentative "review" is already too long at it is. I could have ranted on how "Neigborhood #1 (Tunnels) is a perfect emotional opener for the album, on how " Neighborhood #2 (Laïka)" is such a propulsive banger displaying an equally perfect chorus, and on how "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)" is so insanely tight, intense and driven--thanks to its massive and relentless rhythm section--that you feel that the walls around might just crumble whenever you play it on a high-fi system. I could also have stated that "Crown Of Love" is a torch song for the ages, that "Wake Up" is obviously another mind-blowing anthem, because of how its heavy guitar riff leads to those incredibly epic "ooooh-oooohh" vocal parts... And the climactic build-up of "Rebellion (Lies)" is also a fantastic moment, as is last ballad "In The Back Seat", a cinematic closer where all the emotions explored throughout the record join in perfect unison. Here, as elsewhere, the string section literally *shines* in ways both elating and melancholic. And Régine Chassagne's vocal contributions are simply, utterly heartfelt AND powerful. Jesus H. Christ, what an album. Even a supposed "deep cut" such as "Haiti" (where Chassagne is also taking up lead vocals duties) is a keeper. It is a somewhat "naïve" composition, in spite of its very topical subject matter. Yet this also harbors great hooks and endearing details aptly conveying the whole Haitian culture and its tumultuous history.
So that's it. 5/5. I can totally understand if the latest news about the band and his frontman would have other reviewers dismiss this record for purely ethical reasons. As I said, I believe I take those matters quite seriously. But I still feel that this debut remains "important" for the history of popular music. And I just can't personally "dismiss" my subjective feelings about it, to use the exact same word. Frankly, I just wish Arcade Fire could split as a band so that everyone could move on today. Win's brother Will has already left this sinking boat, by the way, and what he does with his new band is quite interesting...
Sorry for the harsh words, Arcade Fire *hardcore* fans. Sometimes, you just know it when an act has *said* everything it needed to say. And with *Funeral* on my music shelves, there will always be one *good* thing to remember the band for anyway.
Number of albums left to review: 258
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 325 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 185
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 238
Beatles
5/5
Tomorrow never knows which masterpiece the 1001 Albums Generator app may or may not bring on the table. And today's it's *this* jewel. One gem among many in the band's discography (*A Hard Day's Night*, *Help!*, *Rubber Soul*, *Sgt. Pepper...*, the "White Album", *Abbey Road*...). The book this app is using as a basis should be called "The 995 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, *Plus The Mandatory Six Beatles Albums Every Music Fan Worth Their Salt Has Already Listened To*". You just need to read the reviews in here. I mean, aaah, look at all the lonely people giving perfect 5/5 grades to this record, making them feel less lonely than Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie as a result. Listen to what "she" said or "he" said. I might be taxed for being a little too cute about it all, but this record is just insanely great, and this here, there and everywhere. Spinning it instantly brings a good day sunshine to your room. Your bird can sing whenever you listen to the whole thing, even if it's for no one. And if you don't know this album yet, I want to tell you this: you got to get it into your life. If only for closer Tomorrow Never Knows, a miniature psychedelic epic whose breadth and groundbreaking nature has rarely been matched since... 1966.
Number of albums left to review: 257
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 326 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 185
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 238
Alice In Chains
2/5
Personal grade: 2/5
With a more "objective" grade of 8/10???
That last mark might equal a 5+2 addition, plus *one extra point* for the "impact" of this record on a small subset of "alternative rock" fans during the nineties. When you read what those fans wrote about this record, it sounds like a treat *on paper*. Too bad said treat escapes my attention whenever I actually listen to *Dirt*. Are my ears at fault here?
You see, having gone through the nineties as a "alternative rock" teenage fan, I've tried to "like" *Dirt* many times. Yet it never clicked for me. I've always found it linear, repetitive yet not hypnotic enough, and displaying poor melodies and uninteresting rhythms. And Jesus H. Christ, those cheesy hair metal solos, so ridiculously hackneyed. Not to mention the "dated" sound of this album (not as dated as Pearl Jam's *Ten*, in another genre, but close).
A few cuts stand out ("Rain When I Die", ballad "Rooster", and the somewhat famous single "Would?" closing the proceedings. But the rest just drowns into sameness, just like a heroin junkie drowns into a drowsy state indeed. It even surprises me to admit it, but if I had to listen to depressed, ill-at-ease vocal meanderings over somewhat jammy dirges, I'd rather listen to Tool (are Tool albums in Dimery's list, by the way?) Or closer to Alice In Chains' mark, maybe I would elect to explore Soundgarden's LPs instead. I know all of those acts are quite different animals. But those different animals can at least make me "feel" something once in while. Can't say I'm feeling much whenever I listen to Alice In Chains. My loss?
Number of albums left to review: 255
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 326
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 186 (including this one--an extremely rare occurence for a record I grade with a 2/5 mark. Consider me open-minded here. Or open to the idea that my music taste makes it impossible for me to enjoy an admittedly well-crafted album on a "technical" point).
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 238
Jimmy Smith
2/5
Nothing inherently wrong with this vintage little record. Except that it's jazz so "laidback" that it's absolutely predictable, and that, as nicely musical as that organ and saxophone duet is, the whole thing still borders on "muzak" for modern ears like ours. In 1963, at the time this album was released, jazz was already going to much more complex AND promising places. Plus, and I'm going to repeat myself here, the fact that Dimery and co. selected this record and forgot *key* albums by Coltrane, Davis, Mingus and Coleman is, simply put, a little maddening. 2/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential records". Even if, "mock-objectively speaking", we're probably closer to a 7/10 grade here (5+2).
Number of albums left to review: 254
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 326
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 186
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 239 (including this one)
Kid Rock
1/5
Honestly, that was a pretty interesting listen. More interesting than I thought it would be. Somehow *Devil Without A Cause* both confirmed and thwarted my expectations about what sort of artist Kid Rock really was at the end of the nineties. A poser for sure. But one that had the right bag of tricks for those times. *Tricks* being a key word to remember here...
Musically speaking, a lot of those rock-rap cuts could have found their place in the tracklists of Beastie Boys gems *Licensed To Ill* and *Paul's Boutique* (case in point; the title track). And Robert James Ritchie's rap flow clearly draws from that time period as well. It's just that Kid Rock was only ten to fifteen years late compared to how the game was played everywhere else, ha ha. Anything related to rap moved so fast during the last decade of the previous century. But this can't fully excuse from how terribly derivative and/or out of touch the whole thing already was when it was released in 1998.
The first six tracks, roughly speaking the first half of the record going from "Bawitdaba" to "Wastling Time--shrewdly sampling a famous Fleetwood Mac hook--are catchy in their own right, probably. And those songs respect the usual requirements in their respective nu-metal, rap-rock, grunge and hip-hop-adjacent subgenres, I'm not gonna deny it. The attempt to mix rap and country on "Cowboy" falls flat on its face (I hate most of what Lil Nas X does, but in that area, far later single "Old Town Road" is at least ten times catchier than "Cowboy" for instance). But I also admit "Cowboy"'s slot as a second track is well-thought out. Contrast and 180-degree turns abound in *Devil Without A Cause*. And on paper at least, it's the right thing to do for that sort of project.
Unfortunately, the second half of this record (plus the tail end of the first) is just downright *terrible*. When the tap of *truly* effective rock/metal guitar hooks peter out, you can indeed see Kid Rock's music for what it really is: void, empty, fake, awkward, and frankly embarrassing... Most of those tracks on the second half are lazy attempts to emulate Rage Against The Machine, and nothing more. And with a very different message to boot! (shot out to that genius reviewer who only wrote " Rage In Favour Of The Machine" in this section). One or two other cuts are also second-rate rants about "old-school hip hop" that are not fooling anyone. And the lyrics on most of those "songs" are ridiculously dumb and hackneyed. Which, frankly, is a worse crime than their supposed "vulgarity".
But the worst is yet to come. It's actually when Kid Rock attempts to look sincere and heartfelt through "autobographical" introspection that he actually *sounds* the most ridiculous. And it's when he even looks *more* calculating and formulaic than in any of the opportunistic singles sprinkled on the first part of his record. A mindboggling paradox that I would have a hard time explaining--you'll have to listen to "Only God Knows Why" and last track "Black Chick, White Guy" to get the full picture...
About the first of those two cuts... The narcissistic self-homage on the autotune-laden country cut "Only God Knows Why" is as shallow and pointless as the music is in the song--clearly going nowhere on a compositional standpoint. Besides, that use of autotune has nothing groundbreaking or "artistic" to it: as the autotune's digital enhancements suddenly dissappear for "harder" vocals at the end of the track, you quickly understand that this trick was only here because Kid Rock couldn't properly *sing* in the booth. So there was a B plan. And it's a horrible, horrible one.
But the cream on the shitcake is the closer "Black Chick, White Guy". Because the instrumentation and vocal performance on it sound so frigging *weak* and *thin* that they actually magnify how "artificial" and overproduced everything before was. And not even the autobiographical "topical" contents of the song can save it. Explaining how Kid Rock ended up as the father of a mixed-race son at a very young age, and how the mother of that son got the singer into trouble, and how the mother's situation replicated some generational curse for African Americans, could have led to something at least emotional and "conclusive" for the end of the record. But the song sounds like an awkward addtition instead, a deliberate afterthought. And mostly because Kid Rock's voice on it is incredibly flat and soulless. And because, ultimately, there's nothing you take home from that song, both lyrically and musically. It just stops after 5 minutes or so. What the f*ck was that for?, you end up thinking. But not in the sense that it makes you ponder on the issues at the heart of the song. There's just not enough soul and brightness in the way that personal story's told anyway. It's, once again, *empty*. But given that the topic is both personal and dead serious this time, this comes off as a bigger crime.
About that story, I've just read that Kid Rock eventually managed to raise a stable, well-rounded son. Good for them both. Who could have seen that coming, huh? Never judge a book by its cover, and don't let any prejudice obscure your better judgement. Of course, now we are into the future, we know that if this particular story ended quite well, we also know what Kid Rock stands for on a political level these days, unfortunately. And *here*, there's a whole negative aura surrounding him that we can't fully dismiss--even if *Devil Without A Cause* was released decades ago. Honestly, you could have predicted that downward spiral from the dumb lyrics on this album. You can't change a leopard its spots, but the latter also stand out more clearly as years go by.
In spite of all that, let me just point out that I tried hard not to take the artist's later trajectory into account in my overall assessment of the record. And so here's my conclusion: on a musical standpoint, *Devil Without A Cause* is still a far better album that the Limp Bizkit's "Chocolate Fish..." nonsense, also famously panned on this app. Yet I've discussed with some Limp Bizkit fans online recently, about that other "bad" rap-rock-nu-metal record that "Chocolate Fish..." is, and I have to admit most of those fans were cool, chill, and even pretty gracious when I literally shat on the album. In other words, they didn't take the album very seriously themselves, and were very humorous and yet respectful of my tastes when they "defended" the album. And even more importantly, they showed me I shouldn't take all of this seriously either. A valuable lesson for someone who routinely writes overlong reviews on this app?
Now, can I have that sort of fruitful conversation with *current* Kid Rock fans? Nope. They'll ramble about "woke culture" cancelling their favorite artists, among other paranoid delusions and contrarian ignorant takes. They'll promote hateful takes about society, and praise politicians passing off as saviors whereas the latter are at least as crooked as the system they supposedly fight against. They'll try to hide their many prejudices at first, but in their hatred of the "left", they'll end up showing their true colours quite quickly. And those devils have a "cause" fortunately: to maintain the status quo against anything that could move society forward.
So f*ck'em all. And f*ck this album--even if objectively, it probably deserves a 2/5 grade. Since I gave a 1/5 grade to Limp Bizkit, I've gotta maintain some sort of internal consistency anyway, especially when it comes to "negative" impacts on music culture overall. None of those records are "essential", everyone and their mothers know that. Hence why it doesn't matter to me if I take out a point for the grading of a Kid Rock album, even unfairly.
Lastly, if a "hardcore" fan of Kid Rock *today* loses their way into this app, I hope they read this review, among the myriad of other negative reviews, and get pissed off as they should. You can't reason with those people anyway, right? Just like you can't reason with their "idol" publicly blabbering increasingly fascistic and/or hateful takes. Because here's the thing about artists getting "cancelled": it's just that they reap what they sow. And what's right for Kanye West certainly is right for Kid Rock as well, *ain't it*?
Number of albums left to review: 253
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 326
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 186
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 240 (including this one)
Small Faces
4/5
Pretty interesting album documenting a turning point for British "pop-rock" music. Many psychedelic flourishes on the first side, and a proto-prog rock "conceptual" atmosphere on the second side. Not every song was exactly memorable in terms of the music played on them, though. Few people remember it now, but there was a huge promotional machine behind this LP (plus that whole thing about the off-kilter "package" in which the record was distributed). Hence why said LP might still be a little overrated today...
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums", rounded up to 4. Which translates to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 252
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 326
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 187 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 240
The Young Gods
3/5
Franz Treichler, Young Gods' mastermind is not French, he's Swiss. And he's a *German-speaking* Swiss, mind you. Even if he's perfectly fluent in French, as this album proves, he's still got a German accent that's unmistakable for a French native (such as your humble servant). Which gives an extra layer to the "Dark Cabaret" shenanigans in *L'Eau Rouge*. Those specific shenanigans (as exemplified by the strikingly ominous, waltzy opener "La fille de la mort") are pretty evocative and cinematic, and they aged quite well. Which is not exactly the case for some of the Industrial / Metal flourishes found in other parts of this record. In that realm, how cheesy, hackneyed and stilted do "Rue des tempêtes" and "Longue route" sound in 2024. You know, Belgian "neighbors" Front 242 did that sort of thing better around 1989 / 1990. Not to mention later "Industrial" acts going from NIN to Daughters.
The title-track's rhythms and loops are interestingly "restrained" AND groovy, though--unwittingly foretelling drum'n'bass patterns. "Charlotte" goes to convincing middle-career-Tom Waits Brechtian territories--obviously off-kilter, but oddly charming as well. And some tracks on the second side explore early Swans-adjacent punishing soundscapes in quite a convincing manner (the album was produced by their drummer at the time by the way).
All in all, not the utter debacle that the global score for this record on this app would have you believe. General audiences are probably way too narrow-minded for this sort of "extreme music" anyway. But does that mean that this album is a reasonable candidate for an "essential album" list? Hard to believe, in spite of its reputation as the band's magnum opus. Seems to me that the subsequent Young Gods albums displaying gems such as "Skinflowers", "Kissing the Sun" and "Moon Revolutions" are way more listenable than *L'Eau Rouge*, for instance. The investigation is still ongoing, as far as I'm concerned. But *L'Eau rouge* is pretty much a closed case as of now.
2.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential records" (rounded up to 3). Which translates to a 7.5/10 grade for more general purposes. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 251
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 326
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 187
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 241 (including this one)
The Black Crowes
4/5
*Shake Your Money Maker* starts strong with "Twice As Hard" , "Jealous Again" and "Sister Luck", with a nice "classic" bluesy rock feel to those cuts that hearkens back to the legendary early-seventies Rolling Stones era (circa-*Sticky Fingers* and *Exile On Main Street*). The thing is, as skilled as Chris and Rich Robinson are as performers, they're not exactly in the same league as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, as the rest of the album proves. Then again, nobody is, and you can bet your cowboy boots that the Robinson brothers were themselves too respectful of their models to claim the contrary. So what matters the most here is that their music is aptly composed, well-played and feels heartfelt most of the time. In such "retro-genres", you need that sort of thing to stand out from the pack. And ballad "She Talks To Angels" is a wonderful example of the ways the Black Crowes can stand out. It's the sort of "peak" that surges during the second part of this LP that helps you follow it until the very end.
Besides, the voluntary "derivative" aspect of the record is actually not such a big crime when compared to its undeniable assets. For example, its sound aged extremely well for a record released minutes after the end of the dreadful, "gated-drums"-infested eighties. Secondly, *Shake Your Money Maker* actually manages to appear timeless *thanks to* its reverence to the past. This thing could have been recorded yesterday, and not only because it harbors appropriate production values for the genre. But also because there are enough moments in it that proves that "classic rock" can still be fun to listen to, whether in 1990 or in 2024. All of this proves the Black Crowes had taste, at least. And you can only commend them for wanting to do their own thing at a time where such retro endeavors were not that fashionable. Remember: they still hit the charts with some of those songs anyway! Two birds, one stone.
Wikipedia points out: 'In Entertainment Weekly, Dave Marsh wrote, "The Black Crowes are to the early Rolling Stones what Christian Slater is to the young Jack Nicholson: a self-conscious imitation, but fine enough in its own right." '. I concur with that analogy, as strange as it is. And the years that have passed since the days it was uttered only confirm how fair it is. Christian Slater has never reached the legendary status of a Jack Nicholson. But he's a fine actor, and has been involved in all sorts of interesting projects. So I like him. Just as I think I "like" the Black Crowes now.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list gathering "essential albums", rounded up to 4. Which translates to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 251
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 326
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 188 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 241
Peter Gabriel
3/5
If "Solsbury Hill" and "Here Comes The Flood" are absolute gems, the rest of Peter Gabriel's first solo LP after his exit from Genesis is, give or take, a little wack. Prog-rock opener "Moribund The Burgermeister" is so ridiculously verbose and stilted it sounds like a parody of the genre. Not a smart way to start your first solo LP. "Waiting For The Big One" could have been a nice cut if it had solely been based on the melody of its instrumental climax--but unfortunately, the bulk of the song is a blues-rock dud that turns in pointless circles. Apart from that, there's a couple of more minimalistic cuts that remind you of Randy Newman--alas, without the latter's bite and/or unforgiving eye for narrative details. Nothing offensively bad, but rather innocuous overall. And there's a couple of more classic-sounding rock tracks going into Bruce Springsteen territory--without the latter's charisma. "Modern Love" is the best of that small pack, but if it's nice enough to be salvageable, it's still a notch under the two songs mentioned at the start of this review. On the *plus* side, Bob Ezrin's production is effective and the man does the best he can to give his unmistakable dynamics to those songs. Yet ultimately, he can't save half of them from utter oblivion, as nice as his disticnctive orchestrations are in the more "epic" moments.
So that's it. *Car* is the very definition of a mixed bag and a topsy-turvy affair. Wish there were more tracks displaying the catchy and elegant instrumentation and arrangements of "Solsbury Hill" (one for the ages), or the sheer emotions of heartbreaking closer "Here Comes The Flood". But you gotta look for other Peter Gabriel albums for that.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: less than 300, approximately (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me)
Snoop Dogg
4/5
The platonic ideal of a G-Funk masterwork, pivotal for that whole nineties West Coast gangster scene. More fun and entertaining than *The Chronic*, actually. Hence its huge commercial success and the imprint it left in pop culture. *Doggystyle* is not *exactly* a rap masterpiece, firstly because Snoop Dogg is not a good enough storyteller for that, yet the man's nasal, skillfully laidback drawl is so irresistible and effective that you gotta be deaf to the whole hip hop umbrella genre not to hear its merits. Dr. Dre's production work is filled with all sorts of endearing details, a lot of them pillaging (but also revitalizing) the former P-Funk scene of Parliament, Funkadelic and the likes. And the tracklist is particularly strong up to legendary hit "What's My Name?", with highlights and bangers such as "Gin And Juice" and "Murder Was the Case".
Too bad that the second part is a bit of a letdown musically speaking. "Ain't No Fun" is admittedly kinda catchy, but its mysoginistic antics are up to a such a cringeworthy level that they risk becoming unbearable. The two last tracks slap, though--even if the lyrics are no Shakespeare. Not that you listen to that sort of album to find Shakespeare-inspired lyrics anyway.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums" (a *strong* 4). Which translates to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4).
Number of albums left to review: 251
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 327 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 189
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 241
Burning Spear
3/5
Of all days *today*, an acquaintance of mine told me about the time he had Burning Spears play a live show at the tail end of the nineties. The band had requested to eat McDonald's food. If they didn't have those burgers, they would simply refuse to play.
I'm not quite sure what I can do with this information, to be honest. It sure sounds a bit ridiculous when you take this memory into account and then listen to the *real* topical issues this album from the seventies deals with.
All in all, *Marcus Garvey* is still a good reggae record. But since I still don't know why this app claims reggae is one of my favourite genres (whereas I'm only a casual fan of it), I'm gonna be a little severe about the album. Guess giving 5 stars to Bob Marley's *exodus* played a part in this. But that shouldn't be so pivotal. So *now*,I just wanna know if the mentions of my supposed "favourite genres" change after today.
3/5 for the purposes of this list. 8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to listen to: more than a half.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: more than 300
Number of albums I *might* include : a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I won't include: more than a quarter.
Orbital
4/5
Maybe not the most "essential" Orbital album, *Snivilisation* documents a transitional phase between the iconic *Orbital 2" and the bouncy and sonically more adventurous *In Sides* within the British band's discography--with more drum'n'bass rhythms, and less orthodox techno flourishes. The thing is, "transitions" can sometimes lead to an interesting offer that surprisingly ages better than expected (as witnessed in many key moments of this record: "Forever", " Sad But True", "Science Friction"...). The record loses the thread a little as it delves into increasingly grating dada experimental shenanigans (a tendency also found in *In Sides*, but probably better executed there). Yet the two last 10-minutes-plus epics "Are We here?" and "Attached" makes listening to this album until the end worthwhile. Aging well is not so easy in electronic genres. So I might revisit this album later on to confirm my suddenly large benevolent feelings here.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums" (rounded up to 4)Which translates to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: less than 300, approximately (I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me)
The Black Keys
4/5
Seen in the second review topping this section:
"This album is basically Blues for people who are afraid of black people."
A black friend of mine loves this album and he is the one who made me like it a lot, through repeated listens. People can be so dense when it comes to that sort of issue sometimes. 🙄
Personal, subjective grade following the purposes of this list: 3.5/5, rounded up to 4.
More "objective" grade: 8.5/10 (5+3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 248
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 327
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 192 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 241
Dusty Springfield
3/5
Apart from "Son Of A Preacher's Man"--obvioulsy a killer track, as everyone who has ever watched *Pulp Fiction* knows--I have always had a hard time understanding the appeal of this record for so many people. Those cover versions of other people's tunes have nice arrangements, such as their lush string sections, but they're also very sugary, and they don't necessarily groove the way the album's most famous song does.
Unfortunately, I don't have much time today to try to like this record--and I do want to like it, you know. Maybe I'm missing something, and it's me who is not patient enough to spot the assets of the album. So I'll probably return to it some day. Yet as of now, it seems to me that Springfield's debut LP *A Girsl Called Dusty* offers a slightly more fun and fresher experience.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums", translating to a 8/10 grade for more general ones (5+3)
Number of albums left to listen to: more than 200, I've temporarily lost count here
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: a half, approximately.
Number of albums I *might* include : a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I won't include: more than a quarter.
Nick Drake
5/5
Returning to this album is like returning to your favorite secret place in a forest or in the countryside. It doesn't merely feel good. It feels essential to your soul.
5/5 - 10/10
Number of albums left to review: 246
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 326 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 193
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 241
Missy Elliott
3/5
Probably a significant upgrade compared to the other Missy Elliott album included in this list (her debut LP, if I'm not mistaken). But still quite derivative overall. Timbaland was (is?) a hell of a producer, of course--someone very skilled and talented. But as nice and effective as his arrangements and production values are, they still point to everything that now sounds dated when it comes to early-naughts hip hop / r'n'b. I'd rather listen to current rap artists to be honest. Or go back to the nineties. Because this 'middle ground' between the two periods now sounds so 'generic' that it loses the impact it supposedly had at the time...
About some of the words I've just used in this first paragraph...
First, I want to point out that being "derivative" isn't necessarily a dishonour when you're a singer or a musician. It's just that having some sort of polished cover version of Method Man's "Bring The Pain" as track number 2--almost ten years after the original track was released--is maddeningly devoid of imagination, let's not lie to ourselves here. And it's not because Method Man himself comes to cash in a check as a featured artist that the idea suddenly becomes acceptable. Also, what's with this huge letdown that the overlong first song is? This record doesn't start well at all. Not a good omen in this genre...
Missy Elliot is a gifted lyricist and a stellar performer, don't get me wrong. You need someone like her during the naughts to have Little Simz or Cardi B today. Yet musically speaking, this record has few original highlights. Famous single "Work It" is fine, I guess. "Gossip Folks" (featuring Ludacris) is extraordinary. And on the second half of the record, "Slide" is pretty great. But that's about it when it comes to sheer originality mixed with effective touches. The rest of the songs sure is "effective" but you feel like you've heard that sort of pop / r'n'b / rap drivel a thousand times before. And I have a sneaking suspicion that I would have felt the same way if I had listened to this album when it was released, in 2002. Everthing is so goddamn predictable. You even have featurings by Mr. and Mrs. Carter, mandatory for any "big" hip hop name between 2000 and 2005. The track featuring Jay Z is admittedly quite fine, and it's always a joy to hear Beyoncé's voice, even though I'm more excited by her 2010s output, or 2022's *Renaissance*, or the upcoming *Cowboy Carter* album, than anything she's done during the naughts--bar "Crazy In Love", of course.
So here I am rambling about things unrelated to *Under Construction*. A sure sign that this album can't be "essential" to me, as well-crafted as it is. And it seems to me that having too many commercial hip hop albums from this period of time does a disservice to the whole genre. Unless you go for truly cool, interesting underground stuff such as MF DOOM / Madvillain or EL-P. But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies.
2.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential records", rounded up to 3. Which translates to a 7.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2.5). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 247
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 326
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 193
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 242 (including this one)
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
5/5
Taking some time out from the hectic rhythm of writing one review a day to... listen to *Time Out* instead. And it feels good. You see, this jazz record is not merely memorable for following its sophisticated musical concept to the letter. If it's memorable, it's first and foremost because of its mellifluous, instantly catchy piano and saxophone melodies (such as the ones found in timeless "Blue Rondo A La Turk", "Take Five" or "Three To Get Ready"). It's rare that an "essential album", whatever its genre is, can be striking on both fronts--sophistication and pop appeal.
I've just realized that I *did* manage to write some sort of short review here. Just like Mr. Brubeck and his Quartet does, I went to one direction, then unexpectedly shifted gears, and, eventually, I managed to get on my feet somehow.
My grade? 5/4. Or 9/8. Or whatever weird time stamp Dave and his boys used for this legendary record--as long as it's a highly positive one.
Number of albums left to review: more than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here. *Very ironically*, ha ha.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half of the measure so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter (many others are more important to me)
The Thrills
3/5
Irish indie-rock with callbacks to "classic" American pop (more specifically *Californian*), with occasional forays or arrangements pointing at C&W, rhythm'n blues, garage rock and surf-rock. There's a timeless feel to some of those songs, I'm gonna give them that. Like they could have been written any time between the late sixties and today. The production values are pristine enough to attach those tunes to the early naughts, though.
Not that it's a bad thing in this particular case. Some of the faster cuts make The Thrills come off as a clean version of The Libertines, and the slower ones to what Pavement could have sounded like had the latter been more polished and "professional". The band rarely reach the intensity and/or likability of their models, though, whether the latter came from the sixties/seventies, or from the more recent nineties / early naughts. And Conor Deasy's vocal performance sometimes leans on a few unnecessary twee affectations. Yet I would lie if I said I didn't find most of those songs well-crafted, pretty catchy or at least endearing on a first listen. Might revisit at a later time. Who knows? My grade for this record could even go higher than the one I currently give to it during those subsequent attempts to love this band?
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums". Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: more than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
Tim Buckley
5/5
Pure magic for most of this LP's duration. Dimery's team also selected at least one later Tim Buckley album for no discernible reason--*Greetings From LA*, quite a letdown, to be honest. But this one's a keeper. The problem with Tim Buckley is that he sprinkled gems of songs throughout his discography, hence why his hardcore fans are tempted to single out lesser LPs containing said gems. Yet *Goodbye And Hello* is different. Because it is the most cohesive and most impressive album Buckley has ever released by a wide margin. This genre here draws from folk rock with a psychedelic edge, but with very specific idiosyncracies and so many emotional peaks: epic opener "No Man Can Find The War", groovy yet deeply melancholic highlight "Pleasant Street", the acoustic guitar-driven, aptly titled "Hallucinations" (with its blurry yet evocative echoes in the background), elegiac and yet incredibly hectic and intense "I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain" (possibly written for Tim's son Jeff), the solemn "Once I Was" with its "western-like" overtones, "Phantasmagoria In Two" and its delicate and heartbreaking vocal line, or closer "Morning Glory" and its cinematic tone, ethereal choir in the background, and heartbreaking existential lyrics about isolation... The title-track is a striking piece as well thanks to its classical orchestration, even if it's lengthy and a little quaint overall--but not as quaint as shorter "Knight Errant", fortunately, the only song that's clearly a miss here. The second track from the record "Carnival" is weird as well, by the way--but it's mostly an endearing sort of "weird" we're talking about here: not so far from the Kurt Weil-inspired shenanigans performed by the Doors at the time...
Of course, you've already gotten it, dear reader: the "mood" displayed by this album could only have been created during the sixties. Yet what makes *Goodbye And Hello* great is truly timeless: the haunted voice of an angel--yet one that's often very lively and even sexy--, infectious melodies and rhythms, great atmospherics, a very dynamic tracklisting... File next to Gene Clark's *No Other One* and Fred Neil's eponymous masterpiece.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 5. Which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 244
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 328 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 194
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 242
The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy
5/5
Along with Public Enemy's *It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back* and *Fear Of A Black Planet*, *Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury* has been my entry point into "conscious", militant rap during my formative teenage years. Therefore, this album will always hold a special place in my heart (and brains), even though stylistically speaking, it didn't *always* age gracefully. That said, Michael Franti's take on PE's Bomb Squad-produced sonic aesthetics still has its own merits and distinct flavours--a lot of them drawing from the "industrial" scene, actually--in keeping with Franti's lyrics drawing from the everyday static that America produced around the topics that "shook the nation" at the times. Franti's cold snarls about the latter very often hit the mark. And so does his music.
Besides, you can't beat the incredible sequence of cuts that goes from "Television The Drug Of The Nation" to "Language Of Violence" to "The Winter Of The Long Hot Summer" to "Hipocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury". "Language Of Violence", in particular, is a master statement about internalized homophobia and how the use of certain words is always the starting point that leads to tragic ends for everyone involved in many harassment and abuse cases. A message that has lost none of its potency in 2024, and that actually foretold many needed societal changes, and the struggles that are still currently happening around them. The 15-year old boy that I was surely needed to listen to that song in 1992. Hence why the album it's from is "essential" to me (and should be for many other hip hop heads).
I can't give a "real" 5 stars grade to this record because, as important as Franti's message against racist, corporate, and war-greedy "America" was, his vocal delivery admittedly might sound a bit stilted at times for today's ears--maybe because said message was admittedly more important than the artistic medium he used anyway. Musically, a couple of cuts might also be a little lengthy or lacking in welcome dynamics--especially on the second half. Yet I strongly advise everyone caring to know how The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy could actually be more versatile than they looked at first glance to explore this second half for at least three other gems. First for minimalistic jazzy outlier cut "Music And Politics", where Franti switches to an unexpected introspective and humourous mode to question his own political obsessions. Then for his awesome and bouncy "updated" cover of The Dead Kennedys' "California Über Alles"--roasting the sort of despicable figures that have pestered US politics for a long time now, very unfortunately, while also giving a heartfelt tribute to the old Bay Area punk scene. And finally, don't miss trippy, atmospheric closer "Water Pistol Man", its mesmerizing sample of Wally Badarou's "Leaving This Place", and Franti's last words of wisdom during its chorus. Sung, not rapped, here. Yet equally potent.
Public Enemy's Chuck D once dubbed conscious rap "the Black CNN". But this album proves that during the early nineties, there was more than *one* channel to watch. And that they were *all* better than regular "television, the drug of the nation"...
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential record (rounded up to 5). Which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 242
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 329 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 194
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 242
Slipknot
3/5
Iconic nu-metal debut. Clearly better than the other later Slipknot album listed in Dimery's book. I don't have much to say about this record--at least nothing original--so I'm gonna take a (very small) page out of the positive reviews topping this section, and sum up what they say instead (not taking into account the unambiguously *negative* takes here, as they only signal those other reviewers can't "get" anything even only *resembling* nu-metal anyway).
PROS:
- Drums / percussion work / breakbeats slap HARD.
- The sound is rough around the edges, but the overall energy and creepy atmospheric touches in each individual track never disappoint.
- This debut is less of a mixed bag than the band's later LPs (either unnecesarily stifling, or too metal FM-oriented).
- "Wait And Bleed" is a phenomenal highlight with a stellar vocal hook.
- Just like Korn (or even better, Deftones), Slipknot pioneered a specific sub-strand of metal that clearly revitalized the whole umbrella genre, for better or for worse.
CONS:
- The "white rapping" (as some reviewer labelled it) can sound cringey. Even more so today.
- The scratches are maybe one extra gimmick the band could have left aside without ever ruining the rest of the music, as "gimmicky" as its other elements are themselves.
- The album goes on for too long, as "cohesive" as it is.
- Like all horror films--which is clearly the cinematic template Slipknot had in mind to create their "musical universe"--this album risks coming off as dumb, gratuitous and corny. It's hard to reproach the band with taking such a risk given who they are and what they want to accomplish. After all, everyone can enjoy the cheap thrills of a wild ride at Six Flags once in a while. But 'cheap' is bound to be the word that's on the back of your mind when you listen to this sort of music. At least if you're a little serious about music and songwriting...
- This record aims at a target demographic that doesn't really exist anymore, since all those "troubled" teenagers are now in their forties (or very close). Imagining people of that age *seriously* listening to this kind of aggro sound today seems a bit daft, at least on paper. More power to those middle-aged folks if they do, though. The thing is, given what it is, "pure" nu-metal clearly had a peremption date written in capital letters on its forehead. And as iconic as it is, this record is no exception to this rule of thumb.
Exceptions: Deftones, once again. Too eerie and stylistically ambiguous from the get-go to be pigeonholed like that...
End grade: 3/5.
My grading for this list of albums is quite specific, though. If I had to grade this album for what it does for its intended audience, I would grade it 8/10 (5 for general musicianship and "cultural" impact + 3 for its genuine artistic merits).
However, I highly doubt there will be enough room for this debut in my own list. Which does not mean it shouldn't be remembered as an important milestone for that ephemeral sub-strand of metal. If you had to take *all music genres and subgenres* into account to establish which records are essential for each of them, you would probably need to mention MORE than 1001 LPs. Nu-metal is a "dead" subgenre that doesn't have much influence today anyway--except for a few recent niche hyperpop records, oddly enough... But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies.
Number of albums left to review: 241
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 329
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 195 (including this one, maybe?)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 242
Doves
1/5
Everything about the inclusion of this album in the list angers me. First, there's that Wikipedia blurb saying that, quote unquote, "*Lost Souls* is considered by many to be the best debut album since Oasis' *Definitely Maybe*." Endquote. "Many"? Who, "many"??? You know what they should say about that sort of statement: "This article needs additional citations for verifications." Apart from a few subsets of music nerds, literally no one outside of Britain cared about that album when it was released. That comparfison is just ludicrous and based on thin air. I can actually find flaws in Oasis' debut, but it's just wishful thinking to consider the two records had the same sort of cultural impact. Wikipedia's supposedly "objective" blurb doesn't start well to say the least.
Actually, there was a "reference" for that statement up there, with a link to a short piece on Canadian website *Exclaim* about Doves' next LP *The Last Broadcast*--when their promoting machine was trying to reach the overseas market for the band's second album. Quote unquote, without any reasonable piece of evidence: "*Lost Soul* was hailed by *many* (a-hem) as the best debut from an English artist since Oasis's *Definitely Maybe*. But there was only one problem" adds the short piece: "it was so damn gloomy." Endquote.
"Gloomy"??? Or damn boring and self-indulgent overall? Portishead can be "gloomy". Chelsea Wolfe surely is "gloomy". Nine Inch Nails, too... In comparison, Doves' *Lost Soul* isn't gloomy. It's only three British lads coming from the Manchester house music scene opportunistically switching gears towards indie pop rock as the Hacienda party was drawing to an end, eliciting comparisons to what supposedly occurs when it's 4AM and the drugs and booze wear off after a wild night out.
You know what those sorts of "comparisons" are... They're just... stories. Some sort of selling points that don't say anything about the music per se. And this one sure omits to mention how most of the music in the album is bland and self-indulgent--a second rate version of Coldplay that brings nothing "essential" to the table (yes, such a situation is possible, and it actually redeeems early Coldplay in my eyes!!!). And what's mind-boggling is that some easily-swayed reviewers are still buying that story on this app. Or maybe they just care too much about music that favors style over substance, orbackground hums over truly engaging stuff. Hence, maybe, that incredibly high global score of 3.27. Isn't marketing powerful?
In all fairness, I can try to find mitigating circumstances explaining why the British music press decided to be so helpful to Doves. Their studio burnt to the ground, erasing from the surface of the earth all the recordings that their previous iteration as an electronic outfit (Sub Sub) had garnered. Doves also had an ear for "textures", a skill they had probably acquired when they were a house music act. Yet in terms of *compositions*, they were still dilettantes most of the time. Case in point, the first two tracks in this debut, *both* using lazy descending half-note progressions as an attempt to create a *mood*. I've mentioned Portishead earlier... When the Bristol outfit sampled an Isaac Hayes instrumental to build *Glory Box*, they added a *key* element: Beth Gibbons' moving, memorable vocal line, which goes straight to the heart. In comparison, what Doves' singer does on that sort of progression is just a meandering, pointless doodle that goes into endless circles without any clear emotional payoff. And it's the same sort of self-indulgence that can be found in 75% of the record.
About the remaining 25%: third cut "Break Me Gently" fares far better, thanks to its proper chorus. So does the title-track, where the band flexes compositional chops at last. And then, there's the Foo-Fighter and Super Furry Animals-adjacent "Catch The Sun". Taken on its own, it's a very nice indie pop / indie-rock song, with Jimi Goodwin's voice suddenly acquiring more presence and warmth compared to his (or Andy Williams') previous vocal performance. But maddeningly, the song's inclusion in the middle of side 2 brings its own set of problems. Unexpectedly switching gears once more, Doves operates quite a jarring turn compared to the lazy proceedings that occured before said song jumps out to your ears. Remember that promotional blurb about this album being the equivalent of a return to home in the dead of the night, after a night at the Hacienda? Well here, as the band takes a peep out of the window to catch the rising sun, you suddenly realize that everything before was only a drug-induced illusion--in case you didn't realize it before.
Guess it's part of the album's "concept", after all. But everyone who went through a similar experience knows it usually leads to perceptions that are, quite often, a little unpleasant. People next to you, who seemed to be shining all night long, now look tired, drowsy, dull or incoherent. And you feel tired, drowsy, dull and incoherent yourself. You all get one last high as you watch the sun rising, and then everything turns into "The Man Who Told Everything"-levels of boredom and exhaustion. Because even though that latter track stays on the indie-rock lane explored by "Catch The Sun", the whole Doves thing becomes pointless once again, up until the very last, inconsequential cut.
So here it is. You have three or maybe four good songs out of the twelve tracks from this album, but the rest is instantly forgettable 24 years after the fact. Maybe I could have bumped my grade to a 2/5 mark, you know, just to respect that sort of proportion outlined up there. But since this middling record has been so inexplicably praised, and since it's using up a slot clearly more useful to hundreds of better records, I'm gonna go lower than that, just to protest about the whole situation. In more general terms, that means a 6/10 mark (5+1), because Doves are still skilled musicians. But honestly, having *Lost Souls* in this list even made me reconsider my previous benevolent feelings about Doves' sophomore LP *The Last Broadcast*. And this is the first time such a thing happens since I started to use this app.
Number of albums left to review: 240
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 329
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 195
Albums from the list I won't include in mine (many other records are more important to me): 243 (including this one)
4/5
Just when you think you've gotten to the bottom of Dylan's legendary sixties output, you keep on fishing other pivotal releases by the man as related to this period--here in the shape of a 'bootleg' recording of a 1966 concert in Britain. And as usual with Dylan, a postmodernist wealth of key information, endearing details, and other interesting tidbits and anecdotes abound as soon as you start 'studying' such a release...
First, there's the misleading title, since this bootleg album was not recorded at London's "Royal Albert Hall" but in Manchester's "Free Trade Hall". Bootleg live recordings are infamously unreliable for that sort of information, and I reckon it took some 'research' by experts to find the real source of said recording here. But I guess that this initial confusion only adds to the mystique usually associated with sixties Bob Dylan...
Secondly, that concert in Manchester was already known to Dylan hardcore fans for other, rather extra-musical reasons. And this even before this album was "officially" (re)released in 1998. It's indeed where that notorious "Judas incident" occured, and one can only regret that said incident was edited out of the recording right before "Like A Rolling Stone". That said, with this album's two-part construction--one fully acoustic disc where Bob plays alone, followed by one disc dedicated to the second *electric* half of the gig with The Hawks (aka The Band)--you have a perfect illustration of the controversy surrounding Bob during those years, and how it led to that famous "Judas" confrontation. If you've never heard of that story, go and explore that wikipedia page linked up there...
Said twofold construction for the recording also allows the listener to have a sort of "anthology" gathering Dylan's many gifts and iconic sixties cuts in one single release. Not exactly a "best of" LP (you would need far more popular "hits" for this). But certainly a fitting entry point to get why so many people fell in love with the man's music and poetry.
Finally, you have two *very interesting* curios opening the second, "electric" half of this release. First, there's "Tell Me, Momma", an original Dylan song and a very lively cut I had never listened to before--and this for good reasons, since it was only played during that 1966 tour, and never recorded in a studio. And then you have an equally lively, fully "electric" version of "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)", originally from *Another Side Of Bob Dylan*. And I got to say that this incredibly intricate yet hectic live version beats the original out of the park BIG TIME, ha ha
So if you're only judging the music, songwriting and performances in this record, it's obviously a 5/5. And in terms of "historical importance" for pop culture, the albums also warrants a very high mark. That said, and as much a fan of Dylan as I am, maybe selecting this album in a list such as this one is a bit redundant--at least if you've already selected 5 out of the 7 albums (!) the man recorded between 1962 and 1965, just as I intend to do for my own list. Not to mention later records such as *The Basement Tapes*, *Blood On The Tracks*, *Desire*, *Time Out of Mind* or *Rough And Rowdy Ways*...
Which is also why I will just click on "four stars" instead of five tomorrow, in spite of my 5/5 grade. Indeed, and bar a few exceptions where they represent the best thing an act has ever done, it seems to me that live albums shouldn't be put to the forefront of a selection of "essential albums" such as this one anyway. And the same goes for the albums that should appear on my "summary wall". We have enough on our plates sorting out the whiff from the chaff with only *studio* albums! No need to make everything even harder than it already is. As I already have nine or ten Bob Dylan LPs in my own selection, I therefore think it's better to leave a little room for other artists. At least as much room as we can, given the giant that Bob Dylan has been for pop music for so many years... 😉
Number of albums left to review: 239
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 329
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 195
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 244 (including this one, even though it's excellent--it's just that most of the musical and lyrical content of this particular recording is *already* available in studio albums that, surely, you DO need to "listen before you die")
The Clash
5/5
The platonic ideal of a seminal punk rock album. Abrasive yet incredibly melodic. Shouty and yet high-class in its execution. Topical and yet constantly fun and entertaining. There's not a single dud in this legendary debut, whether in its original UK version or its later US release. The Clash may have left its mark on pop culture through the more professional-sounding *London Calling*--when they started exploring a vast array of styles for the benefit of more general audiences--yet this first album is the essential matrix from which they started. Which is why selecting one of these two LPs and not the other doesn't make a shred of sense. 5 stars.
Number of albums left to review: more than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
Beth Orton
2/5
What's with all those Mercury prize "nominations"? They're never about "bad" albums, but a lot of them point to releases that quickly go past their peremption dates. You feel like this Mercury club is a sort of lobby of "critics" getting riled up for no good reason for whatever British fad garners praise on any given year.
Case in point, this particular record. "Stolen Car" is a great opener for it, with tense and intricate arrangements. But starting with second cut "Sweetest Decline", you feel like Beth Orton is overplaying her hand as a vocalist--if you didn't feel it in that opener already. Besides, if the string section is rather impressive on that second track, the rest of the instrumentation is just bland, innocuous, or simply lacking in clear stakes or gripping harmonic progressions. The third track is even worse, and if the fourth is a little more subtle and moody, you still have Beth's voice going into meandering circles, just like in most of the songs before and after. It's as if she "forces" the inclusion of her stilted, unimaginative melodic lines into the uninteresting templates of those compositions--as if to infuse some life into them at the eleventh hour. Yet what comes out of this forceful inclusion is even more awkwardness. Whether folk or "folktronica", you have the same sort of painful self-conscious posturing in the vocal performance supposedly carrying those tunes.
Such type of performance also kinda ruins the old folk shenanigans of a track such as "Pass In Time". Like a woman's version of Van Morrisson's *Astral Weeks*, actually underlining all the ways in which the supposed "soulful" improvisational intents of the original have been overrated for decades. The title-track surely has all the right atmospheric touches. But the one that follows (produced by Everything But The Girl's Ben Watt--a cheesy act for sure) has all the wrong ones. It's more awkward vocals over a backing track devoid of charm and personality--a soundtrack fitting to a Starbuck Coffee salon.
I could go on like about all the other tracks, but honestly, why should I bother? You want transcendent performances by a stellar female vocalist who knows her way around a *good* folk-rock composition, and who can give them all the authentic feelings one is looking for in that sort of umbrella genre? Go and listen to Big Thief (or solo albums by her frontperson Adrienne Lenker). Here's the real, heartbreaking deal. Not this self-indulgent drivel.
2/5 for the purposes of this list. Which translates to a 7/10 grade (5+2) following more general purposes. This thing is competently written and recorded at least, even if the vocal performance and artistic intent are awkward. Now can we move on to real "essential" albums? Please?
Number of albums left to review: 237
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 330
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 195
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 245 (including this one)
The Verve
2/5
This is my team here:
'In a more mixed assessment, Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune felt that Urban Hymns lacked more songs as memorable as "Bitter Sweet Symphony" and "The Drugs Don't Work" to justify the album's long length. Robert Christgau of The Village Voice cited "The Drugs Don't Work" track as a "choice cut", calling it "a good song on an album that isn't worth your time or money". Emily Tartanella of Magnet felt that Urban Hymns was undeserving of its accolades, calling it "one of the most bloated, boring and overpraised albums of the '90s." '
"Bittersweet Symphony" is still a stellar opener. You could listen to that emotional, lively-yet-indeed-bittersweet swirl of strings sampled from Andrew Loog Odham's orchestral version of a Rolling Stones song for far more than the five minutes dedicated to it at the start of this record. But that's part of the problem here: the only *instantly* memorable melody in this album was not written by the Verve. Because, generally speaking, they're bad music writers. And sometimes even awful ones.
Okay, Richard Ashcroft's smartly double-tracked vocal lines for that opener is still imaginative enough, I guess. And so is the one on *The Drugs Don't Work*. But for the vast majority of the other songs, oh Lord, his input amounts to meandering doodles over bland, beige, by-the-numbers britpop FM version of supposedly trippy, yet really 100% self-indulgent "rock" jams. My Lord, how can this album go on for so long without any sense of proper dynamics? Guess The Verve couldn't decide which tracks were the true highlights during their recording sessions, so they elected to put all of them into the album, probably deluding themselves to consider they were all great. Oh Lord, the hubris. And the maudlin lyrics, matching the melodically uninteresting vocal lines surely don't help, my Lord. I mean, Lord, it's easy to see how Ashcroft constantly uses certain words for emphasis (yes my Lord!), because he has nothing even remotely interesting to write about nostalgia, getting old, and the vicissitudes that go with that sort of thing (the supposed lyrical content of those songs). Lord, how boring. Lord, how self-indulgent. Lord, how repetitive and dull. My Lord, has Robert Dimery turned deaf?
This one escapes a 1/5 grade because of its legendary opener. But even when you put this record into the context of its release, it becomes abundantly clear that it's been overrated for years. 1997 is the year Radiohead's *OK Computer* came out, for chrissake! And you can't seriously compare dull *Urban Hymns* with the brilliant stylistical forays and dozen of breathtaking left-turns contained in that other album. The Oxford gang was already years ahead into the future. In comparison, The Verve was only rehashing a ground that had been tread countless times before. Suburban hymns indeed.
Number of albums left to review: 236
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 330
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 195
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 246 (including this one - I'd give it a 1.5/5 grade if I had to follow the purposes of this list of essential albums, here rounded up to 2. More "objective" grade? 6.5/10? (5 + 1.5) Guess it's decently played and professionally recorded at least).
Scott Walker
3/5
I've always preferred *Scott 3* to any of the other albums in that famous tetralogy of Scott Walker album. Including "critics' fave" *Scott 4*. *3* has more obvious experimental arrangements, such as that dissonant string section on opener "It's Raining Today"--which clearly inspired Jonny Greenwood for his own "glissandi" string arrangement on Radiohead's "How To Disappear Completely"... And it has more memorable original songs ("Copehhagen", "30 Century Man"), cinematic instrumentation ("Butterfly", "Winter Night") and stellar covers (Jacques Brel's "If You Go Away"). Guess Scott Walker's borderline-stilted and hackneyed gravitas is pretty much the same on 3 and 4, yet 3 is the only record I can see appearing in such a list. Even its drugged-out artwork is better than the one on *4*. You know what they say... "Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder".
Not to say that *4* can't be excellent at times. "The Old Man's Back Again" and *Boy Child* are up there with the best tunes from *3*. Yet the first four tracks from this subsequent record still sound kind of boring to me. And if things get better after them, I feel like I prefer to listen to The Divine Comedy's "copy" of those sorts of songs rather than the original. It's an odd feeling, I gotta admit it. But I would lie if I stated the contrary.
3/5 for the purposes of this list. Translating to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 235
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 330
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 195
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 247 (including this one)
4/5
A couple of quaint (yet actually charming) "novelty" cuts here and there. But most of all, a lot of deftly pop-rock songs that miraculously sound like they could have been recorded in the 19th century somehow--in keeping with the album's sarcastic thematic program, explained in its title. Probably those lush horn and piano arrangements messing up with the "rock" template.
Lots of gems in this record, including three "essential" micro-epics pivotal for anyone who's ever got interested in The Kinks--all ending with the letter 'a', oddly enough: good old sixties rocker and opener "Victoria" ; "Australia" and its insane jam during its soaring conclusion ; and tight and harmonically gripping "Shangri-La", also full of unexpected surprises during its "progression". Ray Davies really was an unsung hero of those times, on an near-equal footing with his more commercially succesful peers, like Paul McCartney or John Lennon.
Too bad that weird psychedelic film whose script inspired those songs never got made. The artwork here suggests a Monty-Python-like, Terry Gilliam-animated kind of fantasy. To which I would add some steampunk elements for good measure. But maybe it's good that Kinks fans can all make their own private version of that movie in their heads...
4/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential records. Which translates to a 9/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 234
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 331 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 195
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 247
Jeru The Damaja
3/5
I pushed the "like" button for one of the five-star review up there because that take was well-informed and nicely phrased and/or thought out. My own personal take about this hip hop record--which admittedly flew under the radar at the time of its release--is a little less enthusiastic, though. File under "very good", but not good enough to make it to that sort of list.
Lyrics and rap flow are well-executed, generally speaking. "Da Biches" will rub a lot of people the wrong way, though, for obvious reasons. Jeru's take on the situation he's addressing is a bit immature and limited: complaining about "bitches" taking advantage of his foolish male friends while praising "sisters" and "queens" is missing the point about systemic patriarchal oppression, if I may venture to use that sort of feminist take. Actually, Jeru doesn't really "praise" the "sisters" and "queens". He's only interested in roasting the so-called "bichez". He may say he's not a misogynist because he doesn want to "body-slam" one of them (Uh-huh. Wow. How *nice* of him!) But he is a misogynist nonetheless. *Of course*, many other rappers have uttered FAR WORSE things about quote-unquote "lascivious" women. So maybe it's unfair to criticize Jeru, who tries hard penning "conscious" lyrics here and there. I mean, given that I can enjoy a Snoop Dogg song once in a while, I'm probably being a little hypocritical here. Still, let's be serious for one second...
The thing is, musically speaking, there's not enough "stuff" to redeem those passing lyrical flaws or cringey moments. Indeed, it seems to me that there's nothing on a purely musical level in *The Sun Rises In The East* that its producer and beatmaker DJ Premier didn't do at least twice better for Gang Starr (and for probably many other rap acts as well). And there's nothing in it that a bunch of Nas and Wu-Tang albums (including their members' first solo ventures) didn't do ten times better. Not that the music is bad per se. It's appropriately moody and minimalistic on the first side. Yet it's as if some spark was missing to turn it into an "essential" offer.
That said, fans of that sort of golden age hip hop shouldn't miss two or three gems on the second side, which is more convincing than the first. But does that make the whole album those gems are from "mandatory" somehow? I doubt it. You can't have every *decent* albums in this list now, can you?
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential records. Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 233
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 331
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 195
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 248 (including this one)
Hot Chip
5/5
With most songs of this album, Hot Chip manages to beat LCD Soundsystem on its own turf--a turf filled with cold yet infectious grooves drawing from EDM regalia, eighties sugary vocal hooks, krautrock-inspired dirges, and adequate callbacks to Pet Shop Boys, Prince or Steely Dan. On paper this sort of description risks coming off like a cheesefest, but Alexis Taylor and co. very often avoid that pitfall by relying on tense and tight *minor* harmonies, giving a little substance or gravitas to the admittedly festive proceeedings. Those sorts of harmonies are the secret sauce here. Otherwise, I don't think I would like that menu as much as I do now.
Only two tracks come off as awkward or hackneyed, in a The 1975 fashion: They're "Don't Deny Your Heart" on the first half, and "Now There Is Nothing" on the second. But the rest is excellent, from the somewhat ominous opener "Motion Sickness" to house-music-adjacent jam "Flutes" (concluding on a surprising and quite sophisticated chord sequence to boot!). Or from the touching, subtly layered, and surprisingly restrained and concise ballad "Look At Where We Are" to the maniacal, devilish, and syncopated off-kilter rythms of "Night And Day". So minus the two partially forgivable duds quoted earlier, the tracklisting of this LP offers a very dynamic experience of Hot Chip's talents--with songs that are both in the same vein and yet varied enough to offer fresh and new angles on that sound, and this up until the very last cut. Quite impressive. And fun, considering I wasn't too attuned to this sort of experimental pop sound when this record originally came out.
I remember seeing the band live in a festival around *In Our Heads*'s release, though, and even back then I admitted they were a strong act. But, as I said, I didn't expect to like this album as much as I do now. I'm probably more open-minded to this sort of sound these days--even though said sound aged a little. Because what's interesting in that particular strand of indietronica is that it takes the best of both the indie and the dancefloor worlds in ways where the mix sounds natural and enticing. Not so easy to pull off. And even more admirable when you realize how stong the writing is, often allowing Hot Chip to avoid pure gimmickry--a flaw often found in that sort of mash-up genre.
I browsed through a lot of other Hot Chip albums after listening to this one, by the way. You have stellar gems in some of them--like "Over And Over", "Boy From School" and the title track on *The Warning* ; or "One Life Stand" on the LP that bears that song's name... Yet it's clear to me that *In Our Heads* is the band's most convincing offer in a long format. As of now, at least. Sometimes hits are not what makes a record great. Sometimes it's the overall story, or the whole adventure, whether the latter are in an LP, a film or just in your heads. Glad Hot Chip got that particular "story" out from theirs.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 5. Which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more gemeral purposes (4.5 + 5).
Number of albums left to review: 232
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 332 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 195
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 248
ABBA
2/5
ABBA goes Schopenhauer. Or alternatively, ABBA goes political and/or deeply disillusioned.
I can appreciate the artistic effort, as well as the generally well-crafted songs. But can I take this record seriously? After all, *The Visitors* still harbors one song (sung by Bjorn) about a threesome possibly involving a mother and her grown daughter (!). Of course, this tune drastically contrasts with the quaint poetry, topical allusons, and deep introspective moods found elsewhere on this album. Who said that ABBA couldn't sound grim, in their very own wide-eyed and elated fashion?
All of this is admittedly interesting, yet this record can't possibly beat a proper ABBA hits-filled album such as *Arrival*. And by "hits", I mean legendary singles. You know what their names are... Everyone does. So let's be serious for one second, and agree we actually *don't need* to be so serious. Especially when talking about ABBA.
2/5 for the purposes of this list. Which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2). Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: 231
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 332
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 195
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 249 (including this one)
Dolly Parton
3/5
Long after Crosby, Stills and Nash, and long before Boygenius, country music also once had its own mega supergroup of legendary vocalists. Bonus points to the record such mega C&W superstars released in 1987 for its unobtrusive, "traditionalist" production values. In a decade generally plagued with awful choices when it comes to synthetic-sounding flourishes, it's reassuring to hear some people involved in the mainstream business still had taste at least. *Trio* is obviously blind to the eighties "aesthetics" that were prevalent when it came out (which, by the way, ruined the Dwight Yoakam and Steve Earle LPs also mentioned in the 1001 Books--if you want to stick to that overall genre). And this is exactly what made this album age like fine wine.
With such a cast of singers, the vocal performances are obviously stellar and heartfelt through and through. This can't fully redeem how "generic" the music of this LP is, as tastefully produced as the record was. Likewise, and given the writing credits, it seems that most of the tracklist is made out of covers, which is always a little disappointing on a creative viewpoint. But some of the songs and compositions are still impressive enough to make you forget about all that at times. Especially "To Know Him Is To Love Him" and "Telling Me Lies"...
I'm listening to this as the sun rises through a deep fog over my countryside garden this morning. This is a nice view with such background music in my ears (definitely better than the kitsch artwork for this LP). So, even if country music will never be my thing, this view inspires me to be more open-mind than usual, maybe. Hence why I just *might* select this album in my own list of keepers. If only because I surely need more than a "trio" of good C&W records in said list.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to an 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 230
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 332
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 196 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 249
Blood, Sweat & Tears
3/5
OK boomer. And I mean that, by the way: It's "*OK*".
I also say this as a huge fan of the sixties and the seventies. The thing is, this stylistically topsy-turvy album does not always manage to avoid a few self-indulgent and/or derivative moments, as tight as the "jams" on the record are, and as stellar as its performers are as well. One time the music is groovy, another time it's bluesy, then it's jazzy, then classic rock, then folk, then afro-cuban, then flute-enhanced psychedelia, then organ-laden prog, then post-classical (and not only during those admittedly sweet "versions" of Erik Satie's "Trois Gymnopédies"). It's a sort of mix (minus the jazz and classical/prog parts, and adding C&W) that Stephen Stills managed to do at least twice better for his "Manassas" project a few years after the release of this eponymous LP. The latter admittedly offers great musicianship, and it's often interesting. But it doesn't always "gel" well. Besides, the horn section makes Blood Sweat And Tears sound like a second-rate version of early Chicago. Which can't be a *total* compliment, you know...
In other words, there's nothing utterly bad per se in this LP. But I doubt its supposed "essential" nature is easily translatable for today's ears. And the fact that covers take up more than half of the tracklist don't help mitigating this derivative nature I touched upon earlier--covers going from Billie Holiday to Laura Nyro, or from Cream and Willie Dixon to a Tamla Motown hit. The first proper song is an adaptation of an *outtake* from Traffic's debut album, for chrissake! Are we supposed to think it's the sort of material that can yield a transcendent artistic breakthrough?
A couple of highlights still shine, I'm gonna admit it: Steve Katz's touching ballad "Smiling Phases", or the (at the time new) lead singer David Clayton-Thomas' timeless hit " Spinning Wheel". Too bad the vocal interpolation at the end, supposedly recording David's reaction to the band's recording of flutes ("that was(n't too?) good"), plus the fake laughs following said reaction sound quite cringey, actually summarizing how "artificial" the artistry comes off at times. Long jam "Blues part 1" has some great moments as well (that bass player is surely impressive on it!). But can those assets redeem the flaws found much elsewhere in this record? Like the layers of cheese on "You've Made Me So Happy?", or the unneccessary complications on that version of Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child", or the lack of clear stakes on *More And More*, and on Laura Nyro"s "And When I Die". The jury's still out on this one.
Wikipedia points out this is one of the first rock LPs recorded through a 16-track console. That sure explains the layering of sounds in the album, quite pristine for those times. Obviously, what we have here is a breaktrough on a technical viewpoint. The question I have in my mind now is this: does this LP represent a breakthrough on a more *artistic* level?
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums. Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 229
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 332
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 197 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 249
Dion
1/5
An interesting curio. Producer Phil Spector's trademark "wall of sound" is so murky and echoey on this one it's as if said wall was made out of fog, goo or radioactive material. Quite a decadent atmosphere, probably explaining why the album was revisited again during the nineties, and somewhat put to the spotlight. Two tracks were not recorded by Spector by the way, and it's easy to spot which ones they are given that they stick out like blasted thumbs within the track list. And the album feels "weird" because of that as well. It's not even as cohesive as it could have been.
Worse, the songs--whether originals or covers--are lengthy and often quite boring. Appropriately moody, off-kilter sonic aesthetics are one thing. But genuinelly interesting or thrilling compositions and arrangements are another. Plus, Dion's vocal performance sounds stilited or borderline hackneyed most of the time, as spotless as this performance is on a "technical" level.
Waiting for the release of the book "The 1001 *Long-Format Curios* You Need To Listen To Before You Die" to finally revisit this record one day. Or not. In the meantime...
1.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded DOWN to a 1/5 grade, because... you know... Phil Spector, his conviction for murder, his lifetime of abuse of the ones living close to him and everything... Of couse, Dion has nothing to do with this. But still... Spector's ghost looms over this record so much.
That 1.5/5 grade translates to a 6.5/10 grade for more general purposes, by the way.ther way for me to say that I still consider *Born To Be With You* as a Dion album.
Number of albums left to review: 228
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 332
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 197
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 250 (including this one)
Isaac Hayes
5/5
Four tracks, three absolute gems. "One Woman" is fine, but it's both the shortest and most mundane cut in what is a crazy album elsewhere, especially when it comes to textures and arrangements, all deftly handled by Hayes and his cast of stellar musicians. Recently, I've had a few albums on this app in which cover versions of other people's songs play an important part (LPs by Dion, Blood Sweat And Tears and Trio), and all of those were at least somewhat unconvincing as a fully-embodied artistic statement. *Hot Buttered Soul* feels very different in that regard. Because it displays a mastery that this sort of record mostly containing covers rarely reaches
I love the fact that the old schmaltzy Bacharach / David standard "Walk On By" opening this record is barely recognizable, for instance. As I love the notion that this smoooooth version of the song feels very much like an elder brother to Hayes' "Ike's Rap II" (famously sampled by Portishead and Tricky). Hayes savours very moment here, and so does the listener.
"Hyperbolicsyllable...", the only "original" composition in this album, is a thing of wonder as well. Sensual and groovy, thanks to its killer bassline and its thick, moody instrumentation. And a composition which is a testament to Hayes' songwriting skills. After all, the man knew a thing or two about that, since he co-wrote Sam And Dave's "Soul Man". Even if what we have here is a very different animal, opening the way to the "progressive soul" subgenre...
Finally, "By The Time I Get To Arizona" is another unrecognizable cover--a version of a sad country song I had never heard about before. Needless to say, this version (which probably inspired the title of Public Enemy's "By the Time I Get To Arizona") beats the original out of the park. With this 18-minute tour de force about a couple breaking up, Hayes is not merely groovy here, he becomes fully epic--"Black Moses" indeed, or maybe "Black Homer". After a long spoken-word introduction setting you in the right mood and explaining the stakes of the proper tune about to follow, Hayes' deep voice propels you to another dimension, supported by cinematic orchestral arrangements --those lush, lush strings! Those sudden blasts of horns!. Man oh man, what a treat!
Buying this record right away. 4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 5. Which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4.5)
Number of albums left to review: 227
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 333 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 197
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 250
Neil Young
5/5
This is the sound of Neil Young "heading for the ditch" after the huge success of *Harvest*. *On The Beach* is consequently a less immediate, more "understated" affair, but it's heartfelt, moody and endearing all the way through. It has clear highlights, and they are the self-assured rocker "Walk On", elegiac "See The Sky About To Rain", drowsy and floating "On The Beach", and stern-yet-elated closer "Ambulance Blues". Yet as noticeable as those songs are, the whole album flows from one song to the next without a bump--just like a cloudy yet still warm afternoon at the beach draws on, eliciting nostalgic memories about the summer about to end.
The "summer" is here a metaphor for youth and optimism, of course. And because all things end, all you have left with you is memories of those things, eventually. Those memories could even be about that already old "summer of love" a few years back, tragically concluding with the senseless murders commited by Charles Manson and his "family", personified and even given a "voice" during that snarling and yet instrumentally lively "Revolution Blues". Different sort of shudders here, in keeping with other spooky overtones heard elsewhere in this album, as in a paranoid "Vampire Blues" inspired by the shady dealings of the oil industry...
As dark as those passing moments are, the whole mood of this LP is still rather soothing, and even epicurean. Exploring the "ditch" also means you can savour all the little pleasures music can offer, as in "For The Turnstiles", a banjo-driven deep cut that foretells the minimalistic illuminations of a later song such as "Captain Kennedy". Epicurean, and also stoic at times, as in that non-confrontational break-up song that "Motion Pictures" is...
But whatever Neil's philosophy really is, and as blurry as it is ("honey slides" enhancing the drug-induced feeling), that unnamed, ambiguous ethos here exemplified through those tunes informs everything that the Canadian singer and guitar player does on this record, as if he was constantly building an ephemeral castle in the sand. And as for all castles in the sand, it's the little details that make such an endeavor endearing--a shell placed on top of a derelict crenellated tower, a little tunnel slowly crumbling under the weight of the miniature sandy edifice above, a seagull's feather planted in the middle of a small yard... Here, those details are all those discreet yet enchanting instrumental arrangements: the fingerpicking on the acoustic guitar, the delicate and frail suspensions during the electrical guitar solos, or those manifold small flourishes played on hamonica, banjo or violin... Waves of oblivion constantly threaten to engulf those endearing details in your mind. Yet they can resurface again on each listen. *On The Beach* is that sort of record that does not merely "evoke" melancholy and longing for ages past. It actually *reenacts* that movement in time, through compositions sufficiently striking to make you gape at their inner beauty, and yet never forceful enough to leave a clear mark in your memory--therefore becoming new again each time you play them. You feel like those songs have been heard by countless other listeners before, though--only not by *you*. Neil Young's album plays with your memory, thwarts it, jogs it at other times, and then erases its own input as soon as the needle hits the circled groove. Its music seems to be about the act of remembering itself, uncovering feelings, discovering things long buried in the sand. Until the sand covers everything again.
"Under the paving stones, the beach" said an old revolutionary slogan during the May 1968 Paris student riots. Far from Paris, in California, a Canadian rock singer-songwriter who had been there long enough to feel disillusioned after everything he had seen unwittingly found a new, personal meaning to this slogan. With this record, Neil Young indeed accomplished his own private and near-mute, unobtrusive revolution as an artist, and paved the way for his long and unpredictable career to come. He would never be bound by any shackle from this point on. He would be a free man, for better or for worse. In front of him, the waves lap up each moment of his past, and also each moment to come.
4.5/5, rounded up to 5.
Number of albums left to review: 226
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 334 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 197
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 250
Paul Revere & The Raiders
3/5
Can't do any better than the hilarious review currently topping this section. That writer perfectly nails what this record is all about, and it's a shame he abandoned the project after listening to a third of the albums. The global score for this LP--a precise *3*--also rings very true. Textbook somewhat debatable inclusion here. I'm not even sure this is the Paul Revere & The Raiders LP to keep in such a list, if *really* you had to select one. The more sonically adventurous *The Spirit of '67* might indeed be a better fit. *Midnight Rides*' tracklist admittedly harbors great songs such as "Kicks" and a stellar version of "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone" (famously covered by the Monkees and Minor Threat, among others), which may justify spending some time with it. Plus two or three good deeper cuts I won't bother naming here. But honestly, what we have here is still a second-rate version of The Beach Boys mixed with "British Invasion" shenanigans. A compilation might probably be a better choice for your shelf. So I guess the jury's still out on this one...
3/5 for the purposes of this list. 8/10 for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 225
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 334
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 199 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 250
Nirvana
5/5
There are many reasons to love this quite perfect album, and I'm not gonna waste anyone's time repeating them in too many details. Just read the other reviews. But there's one particular point I would like to emphasize first, already stated in that Wikipedia blurb about *Nevermind* up there:
"[Nevermind] is also often credited with initiating a resurgence of interest in punk culture among teenagers and young adults of Generation X."
And this is exactly what this record did: by mixing Beatles-like harmonies, Kurt Cobain's hoarse voice, incredibly catchy punk guitar parts, quiet-loud-quiet dynamics, disillusioned lyrics speaking to a whole generation, and a few hard rock touches here and there, *Nevermind* singlehandedly changed the face of popular music--and this nearly overnight, and for a long time to come. Of course, countless "independent rock" acts had already explored similar aesthetics before, Cobain admitted this himself (Pixies, Hüsker Dü, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., etc.). But the crux of the matter is that never would I have discovered those other stellar acts myself without this album's success (or if indeed I had eventually discovered them, it would have been far later). Even more importantly, Kurt Cobain was a genius songwriter. His lyrics are still a treat today for any teenager with "rock" leanings going through a rebellious / slacker phase, and this even if other fads have come and gone since 1991.
Besides, Kurt's vocal lines are a masterpiece of subtlety and precision, so eeriliy wonderful that they should be mandatory studies in songwriting classes. Such songwriting skills actually contrast a little with the streamlined efficiency of the recorded music--a little "dated" in some aspects (mix and mastering), but who cares? Dave Grohl's drums are still cataclysmic enough to make you forget about all that, and this album is only a "starting point" to get things even more right later anyway--as *In Utero* and many different records by other "alternative" / "indie" acts would prove in the decades to come. The thing is, without this more "streamlined" efficiency, *Nevermind* would probably never have had the impact that it has had, adding to Cobain's inner curse, but also to the blessings of rock fans all over the world. Hence also, the extremely high score for this legendary and clearly "essential" record on this app.
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By the way, could we all agree that the input of unfocused users of this app who never went over the 50 albums line could be erased by now? Yes, I'm referring to the current "most popular" review in this section: "Shid pants".
"Er... Uh-oh, Beavis, that's a good one!"
"Niark, niark, Yeah! Thanks Butt-Head!".
What's bittersweet is that the writer of "Territorial Pissings" (and also *In Utero*'s "Tourette's") would probably have found that sort of review for his band's "breakout album" darkly hilarious. But Cobain also wrote "Come As You Are", "Lithium", "Polly", "Drain You", "Something In The Way" and all the other gems in *Nevermind*'s tracklist. And I'm not even mentioning the ones from their third LP... Some edgelords (and their clique) should probably buy themselves some pairs of ears before ridiculing themselves like that...
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Number of albums left to review: 225
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 335 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 197
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 250
Big Black
4/5
Here are the stats / summary of the person who left the review that's currently topping this section :
Albums Rated
1
Average Rating
5
Favorite Decade
80s
Favorite Origin
US
Favorite Genres
Punk
Rock
Worst Genre
Rock
Highest Rated Albums
Big Black - Atomizer
Lowest Rated Albums
No low rated albums yet.
Yes, you've read that correctly. That reviewer who professed their love for Steve Albini only reviewed *one* album--an album by the man's old band Big Black, still legendary for the sort of sheer, uncompromising aggressive sound said band was playing in the middle of the 80s (but clearly one or two notches under Albini's later act Shellac--conspicuously absent from this list).
In a way, it's perfectly fitting (and frankly hilarious) that Albini can attract that sort of "extreme" reaction, given how extreme the man's own early musical endeavors (and personality) were. *Atomizer* doesn't profit from the stellar and very personal chops Steve later acquired as a sound engineer (that unmistakable deep and echoey sound he gives to drums!). But this record (and subsequent Big Black LP *Songs About Fucking") perfectly encapsulates how this band was years ahead for genres such as noise-rock or industrial music. Not always a *pleasant* listen. But most often thrilling, offering a musical mood that's a perfect backdrop for the tragically dark subject matters dealt with in the admittedly offensive lyrics.
This album was recorded by Iain Burgess, by the way--very much a mentor for Albini, not only as a musician but also as a producer, since Burgess also helped the Chicagoan become the awesome sound engineer that he is still is today. Burgess later recorded many excellent albums--with a less abrasive sound than this one--and he passed away a decade ago. May he rest in peace.
To be honest, I hesitate putting this record in my list of "keepers": as admirable as it is that such an extreme LP was recorded in the middle of the eighties, I would rather have Shellac's *At Action park* instead. And Big Black's own *Songs About Fucking* also sounds slightly superior to me as well...
Yet according to my own estimation,1986 was one of the least interesting years for music anyway, and under that light, it's not surprising that *Atomizer* manages to reach the 15th slot in my album ranking for that year (thanks to a few killer tracks such as "Kerosene"). If only for this, that album deserves to be in my " waiting room" list...
Number of albums left to review: 224
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 335
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 198 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 250
Kendrick Lamar
5/5
Already a stone-cold classic. The first of two -- *damn*, no, *four*--consecutive masterpieces from Kendrick Lamar, still the best mainstream rapper in the game in 2024--as stellar on a technical standpoint as he is inspired by the muses on a lyrical and topical one. *good kid, m.A.A.d city* swarms with incredible ideas. Its overall narrative, told in a, complex, out-of-order fashion, explores the psyche of the titular "good kid" living in hellish Compton in ways that had never been touched upon before. And the album's team of producers (almost a different one for each track) provides Kendrick with the perfect musical backdrop for each of those memorable cuts.
People far younger than I am still idolize this artist more than a decade after this official debut came out, and deservedly so. But Kendrick is also important for hip hop fans of my own generation. For decades, the hip hop world had indeed been divided between "conscious" rappers and gangster rappers. With this stellar debut, Kendrick splits the difference at last, proving that there were ways to explore that gang world while conveying sensibilty, lucidity and even empathy--in spite of how harsh that reality is. Or actually *because* it's a harsh world, and you've got to make sense out of this mayhem somehow. Even the way Kendrick's parents are portrayed in this yarn about how a young man had to find his own way so as to survive Compton--through a thread of skits when they repeatedly appear--is multi-layered. Just like their son, they're neither role models nor totally devoid of a moral compass. They're just *human*, making the best out of the circumstances they've been thrown in. The album tells things as they are. It's how it becomes raw *and* endearing.
The autobiographical input K-Dot uses here also help him avoid two pitfalls: a "moralist" take that would fall flat on its face for his intended audience, and a dumb "celebration" of the gang world that would bring nothing relevant to the table twenty years after the gangster rap subgenre surged. That people on this app fail to see how brilliantly ambitious Kendrick Lamar's lyrics are, and how moving they can be, is evidence enough that the sort of "profiling" dealt with in some of those songs is still very much in effect. Those--let's face it, probably white--dudes "project" the gangster rap stereotype over this record all too easily. Whereas it's not your usual, run-of-the-mill gangster rap album. It's either that those folks can't help "profiling" the music and lyrics. Or that they are just illiterate. Take your pick.
This is not to say that people who don't like rap should automatically fall in love with this LP. If it's a sort of music they can't appreciate, so be it. But for people who *do* like hip hop, this record is a mandatory listen for sure. Because it's as groundbreaking as it's potent. Lamar would even take things further with *To Pimp A Butterfly*, an even more complex and sprawling affair also harboring its fair share of gems and killer cuts. But *that* is a story for another time, kiddies.
Three types of songs populate *good kid, m.A.A.d city*. The first group is made out of a few shorter tracks that primarily serve to advance the album's overall "plot"--like moody and nightly opener "Sherane", acting as an ominous *in media res* overture as it frames parts of the narrative ; or "Poetic Justice", probably the weaker cut, also plagued by a Drake featuring ; or closer "Compton", actually the first track Lamar recorded with this album, and marking the day he met (and collaborated with) Dr Dré--it's a rather classical "west coast rap song" ironically symbolizing that Lamar was out of the gang world at last and entering the music business at the end of the narrative. It's not the strongest cut, but the destination is less important than the journey for this record, as we are about to see later...
Then there are the instantly memorable rap hits: "Swimming Pool" and its adequate gurgling synth sounds evoking gang members' binge drinking "prowess"--once again not a "moral" take on the issue, but clearly a way to emphasize how "peer pressure" further that unhealthy habit (but more on that later). And there's also "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe" and "Backseat Freestyle", drawing from recent trap aesthetics in ways that are both infectious and efficient. In that vein, finally, you have the insanely gorgeous "Money Trees" and its mesmerizing guitar loop and its sly sing-along (Lamar is actually a great singer too, making the best out of his croaking, high pitched timbre)
The last group of songs is what makes this record the masterpiece that it is though. It's all those cuts displaying a thick and cinematic atmosphere on a musical level, and equally thick and cinematic lyricism--filled with all sorts of genius details I wouldn't be able to properly single out as a non-native English speaker. It's rare that awesome music and awesome music can go hand in hand so cohesively, and this in *any* genre. And yet those songs pull it off efortlessly. They are the hypnotic and topically heavy "The Art of Peer Pressure"--about how gang members intuitively encourage each other to take the wrong way--the titular double-feature "good kid" and "m.A.A.d city", exploring further that theme, and most of all, that other absolute, devastating, heartbreaking "double-program" that "Sing About Me, Dying Of Thirst" is (here gathered on a single track in CD and streaming versions--it's impossible to skip one of those two cuts anyway). In "Sing About Me", Kendrick takes the part of two "doomed" characters who crossed his path (one gang member and one hooker), and if that song can't move you, I don't know what to tell you. And I won't go into details about *Dying Of Thirst", a tale about finding redemption in the darkest places. You just need to listen to it. So yes, this "double-track" is one of the top five rap songs in the 21st century, period. And the album it's from is easily in the top ten rap albums list from the same century.
Number of albums left to review: more than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately. (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
Nanci Griffith
3/5
File under the eighties country albums that aged extremely well (contrary to some others in this list). Griffith was a good songwriter--so sad that she passed away at 69--the production values are devoid of all the cheesy shenanigans typical of the decade when this album was released, and you often haved either interesting harmonies / chord progression, gripping arrangements (especially on the violin / fiddle), or a very lively, rock-derived energy in the best tunes from this record. A couple of duds, but good tracklisting overall. Country is not a genre I'm overly familiar with, but I'm glad Dimery's list help me find my way into it at least.
Putting this record in my "waiting room". After all, 1986 is not a stellar year for music by far, so who knows? Maybe there will be room for this record in my own list at the end.
Highlights: Love At The Five And Dime, Banks of the Pontchartrain, Lookin' for the Time (Workin' Girl), One of These Days, Fly By Night, The Wing And The Wheel
3/5 for the purposes of this list.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: more than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately.
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
Deep Purple
4/5
Oh well. A lot of old dad-rock fans clearly overrate Deep Purple, including on this app. When it comes to blues-inspired, original "metal", I will always favor the darker tones and more exaggerated, off-kilter "moods" of the early Black Sabbath LPs to the technical virtuosity displayed in such a record--impressive, but not always potent on an emotional or "cinematic" level. *Machine Head* is part of the canon of "classic" rock albums. But that doesn't mean you must be blind to its streamlined nature, its self-indulgent moments, or to the patchy songwriting here and there.
That said, begrudging the importance of *Machine Head* (and also *In Rock*) would admittedly be unfair to an extent. Of course, having the iconic "Smoke on the Water" in the tracklist gives an extra point to this record all by itself, as overplayed as that song is--not only on dad rock radios, but also by almost every beginner learning how to play the guitar. Amazing how that simple riff entered public consciousness for ages to come. That Swiss casino burnt down to the ground for a reason, I guess...
The best tunes are found elsewhere, however. They're the catchy opener "Highway Star", epic and cosmic "Space Truckin' ", "Maybe I'm A Leo" and its bouncy riff--whose ripples can be heard up to the era of the Red Hot Chili Peppers--and that touching ballad "When A Blind Man Cries", originally a b-side, but now included in every copy of the LP.
Apart from that, you get very nice jams with another batch of inventive guitar solos during the course of the other tracks "Lazy", "Pictures Of Home" and "Never Before". Not revolutionary, but well-crafted overall. The specific Deep Purple touch, that deep and sizzling hammond organ supporting the six-strings heroics, is also aptly recorded here. Which makes the record pleasant for everyone interested in classic rock, hard rock, or early metal.
4/5 for the purposes of this list.
9/10 for more general purposes (5+4)
Number of albums left to review: 221
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 337 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 199
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 250
Joanna Newsom
5/5
Don't have a lot of time on my hands today, and of course, of all the albums this list could have churned out, this is the one that comes out. Impossible for me to pen a proper review explaining why this record is great. Because *Ys* is a masterpiece, enough said. Not as directly effective as *The Milk-Eyed Mender*, which admittedly harbors its share of more easily-digestible gems. And yet as rewarding as Newsome's debut once you spent a few listens learning how to navigate inside its melodic digressions and many intricacies. At first, you need to apprehend this one just as you apprehend reading a poetry book in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. You sit with it, read and listen to the lyrics at the same time (sometimes cryptic musings, sometimes delightful "narratives"), and gape at every little detail inside. Then, after a few listen, you can equally return to this record in this mode, or conversely, you can play it as a soothing yet often lively soundtrack in the background.
I've just spoken of "every little detail" in this admirable record, but it's not as if it was overflowing with so many layers either--the bulk of it, recorded by Steve Albini (but it could have been anyone else, basically) is pretty raw: it's Joanna's precise and enchanting harp, along with her high-pitched, frail-yet-fully-expressive voice, like a warble in your ears. Newsom feels very much like a Medieval or Renaissance bard telling us of her loves, losses, joys and sufferings through so many elegiac metaphors, or similes drawing from the world of animals and nature. Then, adding to this otherworldly atmosphere, you have Van Dyke Parks' elegant orchestral flourishes, underlining every event within the singer's yarns, and every inflexIon of her off-kilter voice. Plus a few other instruments here and there (banjo, guitar, accordion, marimba etc.). The songs are long, yes, but they need that time to properly develop their musical and narrative ideas, and they ALL build up to wonderful climaxes for each of their thrilling conclusions, that can have you sitting at the edge of your seats. Don't miss the latter in the longest cut, by the way, sung with Bill Callahan of Smog. Yes, "Only Skin" lasts for almost 17 minutes, but if you have leanings for experimental-yet-emotional "confessional" music, I can guarantee those 17 minutes just fly by. And the same can be said for each of the four other tracks in this record.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 5. Which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4.5). 2006 is rather a "mid" year to be honest, filled with very few truly "essential" albums. It would heve been a shame not to have this one in the list.
Number of albums left to review: 220
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 338 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 199
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 250
Saint Etienne
3/5
Oh well. A touch of pre-trip hop intuitions--including some deep dub-like basslines--a large serving of EDM / house music drawing from renowned names at the time--whiffs of Orbital or 808 State abound--and a generous slice of 60s influences through those vocals reminding all those naive girl groups of that already bygone era (with naive and clichéed lyrics indeed).
Well-crafted generally speaking, but with a somewhat similar mix of influences, Broadcast would achieve a far classier, more cohesive, and certainly more impressive result ten years later. With also far more intresting lyrics. Worse, parts of this debut are already plagued by a few unfortunate slices of cheese: all those commercial "dance" arrangements à la Lisa Stanfield that would be even more annoying on Saint Etienne's subsequent LPs--and which aged like sour milk not even put in a fridge.
Finally, you have an endearing curio as the first proper song of this album with that 4/4 cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", in a style fitting with this album (but not with the "Loner"'s original intentions, lol). 2.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 3. Which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 219
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 338 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 199
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 251 (including this one).
Jungle Brothers
5/5
What a blast revisiting this criminally underrated masterpiece from the hip hop golden age (underrated in the sense that it's still forgotten in some retrospective best hip hop albums lists). *Down By the Forces of Nature* is the quintessential Native Tongues (and Zulu Nation-adjacent) album. And as such, it paved the way for the commercial success of De La Soul (who had already released *3 Feet High And Rising* in 1989) and A Tribe Called Quest (who would release their own debut the year after). Both acts (plus Monie Love) feature in the funky party cut *Doing Our Own Dang" by the way, and you can find the latter towards the end of this tracklist--another reason this record is "historical" for all hip hop heads out there. Forget "Daisy Age" rap, a term mentioned in one of the reviews up there--this was just a joke De La Soul used to promote their debut LP, and they quickly disowned that reductive tag. The name of that collective was NATIVE TONGUES: conscious and afrocentric-minded lyrics, some humourous moments to give a human spin to the latter, and most of all, rich, multi-layered music piling up tribal rhythms, infectious basslines, Parliament-Funkadelic-like guitars, house music-tinted trippy synth touches, and huge sprinklings of jazzy textures and tones. It's probably hard for younger listeneners to realize this today, but the overall sound of this album marked a *huge step forward* for the whole rap genre, and this almost singlehandedly. Just compare this to 90% of the other rap albums released in 1989.
So the influence of *Down By the Forces Of Nature* cannot be overstated. The Pharcyde and Souls Of Mischief also owed a lot to this record, for instance. And oddly enough, so did West Coast gangster rap: listen to snarly "U Make Me Sweat" and good-spirited "Belly Dancin' Dina" (the subtle lyrics of both cuts about how women can entice and obsess men, coincidentally--but without any blatant misogyny either) and once you've listened to those two cuts, make the connection yourself. Here it is, in "Belly Dancing Dina": the same winks and quotes going back to the George Clinton songs that Dr. Dré would recycle a few years later for Snoop Dogg. Dré listened to that album for sure. Funny how you can find hidden bridges between those two parts of the rap world that were officially "competing" with each other at the time...
Speaking about rap and misogyny, "Black Woman", featuring Soul II Soul's Caron Wheeler, makes it clear woman-hating and women-objectifying has no place in the Jungle Brothers world. Of course, that good-natured track also exemplifies the few moments on this LP that sound a little too naive or dated today (In terms of the rap flows and some of the instrumentals used for instance--but also when it comes to the cheesy artwork on the cover). After all, *Down By The Forces Of Nature* was released in 1989, so it can't have aged *that* well. But the minor flaws are easily outweighed by the manifold assets present in this record. Take moody-yet-tight-and-driven opener "Beyond This World", airy-yet-lively "What U Waiting 4?"--with its sci-fi-adjacent synth loop coupled with hard P-funk rhythm--or "Acknowledge Your Own History", a proud and dignified track--both lyrically and musically--aptly explaining why systemic issues in education got Black students uninterested in history classes given how white and European-centered the latter were...
Even more impressive is the *perfect* string of cuts gracing the middle part of this album. Starting with the wonderful, cinematic instrumental highlight "Good Newz Comin'" (what a stellar breakbeat!--and don't miss the frankly incredible electric guitar flourishes at the end of the instrumental!), that admirable string of tracks then lines up bangers after bangers: the title-track, "Beeds On A String" (beads on a string indeed, ha ha), "Tribe Vibes (featuring KRS One!) and "J Beez Coming Through".
As some other reviewers on this app, I wish that sort of album had taken precedence over the more mind-numbing (yet more commercially successful) Gangster Rap albums that followed--even though I like or even love some of them, and readily recognize their cultural importance as well. Unfortunately, Western societies--including American society--are indeed *violent*, competitive societies. Hence why the utopia represented by that sort of hip hop record couldn't take hold. I have the CD of this album in front of me, and on its back cover, I can see a logo saying "Stop the 🔫" ("Stop the guns and violence", in case that emoji doesn't look clear enough for you guys). In this day and age, one cannot praise *Down By The Forces Of Nature* enough for pointing the way towards a sort of rap entertainment that promotes political consciousness and positivity, and this over music that slaps as hard as this on an artistic level! Here's me hoping new versions of that sort of rap albums can go back in style one day. And I also hope some of you concur, especially younger listeners. I can admire rappers such as 21Savage or Future these days. Doesn't mean other philosophies and aesthetics aren't possible. And this even today. Food for thought, I guess...
4.5/5 for the purposes of this app, rounded up to 5. Which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 219
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 339 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 199
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 251
JAY Z
4/5
Oh the nerve, Hova! Dissin' Nas on "Takeover", supposedly because he only released *one* "hot" album during the first ten years of his career, does take some guts, you know. Especially since said "hot" album is none other than *Illmatic*, and that the latter is on average ten times more relevant and mind-blowing (both lyrically and musically) than anything Jay-Z ever released himself (and yes, INCLUDING *The Blueprint*). Hova's commercial success be damned, I might even venture to add... Jay-Z being "attacked" first by Nas (as far as I know) does bring mitigating circumstances that may explain why Mr. Carter had no choice but to retaliate... But still, man... Surely there were less ridiculous, and less "bad-faith" ways to phrase said retaliation.
Apart from that, *The Blueprint* still comes off as an excellent rap album more than 20 years later, all neat and glossy and enticing--thanks to its production values filled with marvelous soul samples (including ones crafted by a young up-and-coming wolf named Kanye), and also thanks to how self-assured and obviously talented Jay-Z comes off as a rapper. Amazing how every moment shines in this LP, from the effective lush samples of an old Jackson 5 hit to a few more "hardcore" moments here and there. There are still some cringeworthy lines that didn't age too well in this record (in "Girls, Girls, Girls" for instance). But *The Blueprint* is still an album that can be listened to from front to back without ever needing to skip any track. In the landfill that was commercial hip hop starting from the early naughts up to the mid 2010s (generally speaking), that's gotta count for something.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5+3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 218
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 340 (including this one--even if, by my current count, this album almost missed its slot here. Which is certainly not the case with *Illmatic*, ha ha!)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 199
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 251
Primal Scream
4/5
Out of all the supposedly "essential" albums that were released in Britain at the start of the nineties, this is clearly the most bizarre one, and its critical and commercial success therefore looks more than a little dumbfounding today. A topsy-turvy mix of late 60s / early 70s Rolling Stones rock 'n roll (lively opener "Movin' On Up", ballad "Damaged") and contemporary dance music shenanigans, obviously sounding quite dated in 2024 ("Loaded", as remixed by Andrew Weatherall, that weird cover of The 13th Floor Elevators' "Slip Inside The House"...). Plus some chill-out electronic instrumentals or near-instrumentals that add to the druggy mood ("Inner Flight", "I'm Comin' Down"). Because drug consumption and late nights out had to play a huge part in this hype, didn't they? This may explain why this record neither rhymes nor reasons, as endearing as it may be for some souls nostalgic of their now faraway youth.
That strange mix of genres comes off as more "integrated" and streamlined in the "Loaded" track than it is in the rest of the LP, fortunately, and it's also the case on the 10-minute epic "Come Together", by the way. Those cuts admittedly still sound like music I'd hear in the dressing room at Express or H&M. Yet I'm sure that in the early 90s, it was very cool, at least. And I would lie if I said playing this record from front to back didn't set a quite pleasant mood in my living room. A somewhat contrived one, but nothing that was overly obnoxious. Oh, and "Higher Than The Sun" is a very cinematic gem. It's the sort of trippy track that aged far better than the rest, and its inclusion almost singlehandedly warrants a place for *Screamadelica* in my own list (by a hair's breadth). Guess it's nice that I have at least *one* album like that on my shelves. But it's all I ever need when it comes to dated MDMA and ecstasy-fuelled artistic achievements in the larger field of "rock" music.
In case you haven't noticed, this "review" up there is actually a collage of different people's takes on this app I agreed with (here "remixed" a little). If Bobby Gillespie and co. can get away with a somewhat nonsensical patchwork of different styles and "sounds", so can I.
3.5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5+3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 217
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 342 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 199
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 251
R.E.M.
5/5
Always felt that REM's *Out Of Time* has been critically underrated all these years, and that its follow-up *Automatic For The People* (often heralded as the best LP released in 1992) has conversely been *slightly* overrated as a result. For many people, the first of those two albums is mostly the one with the timeless hits "Losing My Religion" and "Shiny Happy People"... But I think the whole LP is far more worthwhile than that. I don't know, maybe the partial awkwardness of this other record's first track "Radio Song" (with a strange featuring by KRS One), rubbed people the wrong way. That said, I have absolutely nothing to reproach with any of the other songs after that opener. " Low", in particular, is an absolute highlight--in many ways foretelling the melancholic, acoustic and "orchestral" aspects of *Automatic For The People*.
What about the latter, then? Well, it's a great album also harboring terrific highlights, such as intense and emotional opener "Drive", delicate "Try Not To Breathe", lively (in a rather *Out Of Time* fashion) "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight", plus the ultimate textbook torch song "Everybody Hurts", one of REM's most famous tunes for a reason, along with catchy "Man On The Moon", about Andy Kaufmann (even inspiring a whole biopic about the latter). "Monty Got A Raw Deal" and closer "Find The River" are excellent as well, and so are most of the other cuts I won't name here.
The somewhat forced heavy-handedness of "Ignoreland" makes the latter a borderline-dud, though. And if I can understand the "classic" appeal of "Nightswimming"--whose instrumentation exclusively uses very "dignified" strings and piano arrangements (crafted by none other than John Paul Jones, here miles away from the musical world of Led Zeppelin, like in all the other cuts using orchestral flourishes)--the end result still sounds a bit quaint and stilted to my ears.
Those are minor grudges, however. As a nice example of a record exploring the different ways a band can mature with grace as they write stuff about resilience and getting older, *Automatic For The People* deserves its place among the pantheon of "essential" REM albums (with *Murmur*, *Reckoning*, *Life's Rich Pageant*, *Document* and *Out Of Time*--and possibly also *Green*). 4.5/5 for the purposes of this app, rounded up to 5. Which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 216
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 343 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 199
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 251
Kendrick Lamar
5/5
And here's Kendrick *second* masterpiece in a row, right after official debut album *good kid, m.A.A.d city*. Just like the artwork on its cover, it's unruly, wild, provocative, filled to the brim with brilliant ideas and nice touches--its questioning of the American dream as African Americans can perceive it, its autobiographical musings, its different "characterizations", the wide variety of different rap flows and intents performed according to the "character" (or side of Kendrick's persona) this genius rapper puts under the spotlight, plus music styles so varied--drawing from P funk, hard funk, jazz, r'n'b, and of course hip hop--that the whole shebang is bound to make your head spin when you reach the end of this record. The last five minutes where, through an editing trick, K-Dot interviews the idol of his youth 2Pac and then leaves his final "thoughts" to him (and to the listener), is a moment that can easily make you shiver--even if, like me, you're not really a fan of Tupac Shakur's work. Evidence enough that Kendrick Lamar is a genius songwriter and storyteller.
Of course, many other stellar moments abound in this essential LP. First you've got the highlights, which are too numerous to be all mentioned here, from "King Kunta to BLM's unofficial anthem "Alright", from enticing "These Walls" to the draker "How Much A Dollar Cost", and from the tense and intense "The Blacker The Berry" to the moving closer "Mortal Man". And then you have all the secondary tracks and 'interludes", which never distract from the whole but actually strengthen it--adding layers upon layers on the "fabric" unspooled here. A rare occurence for a hip hop LP, often pestered with too many unnecessary "skits". Versatile, multi-facetd, infectious, conceptually ambitious... One of the best rap albums of all time, which left us so many details to discover (again), and whose "rough" and raw power of attraction is potentially inexhaustible.
Number of albums left to review: 215
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 344 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 199
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 251
Japan
3/5
I have always been a little nonplussed by the supposed "cult status" of this album. Take a glam-rock, Roxy Music-inspired act that was first playing an already "dated" style in a frankly awkward fashion, add synthetic production shenanigans inspired by disco and Georgio Moroder to drastically update them, and you have an album that indeed foretells eighties' "New Romantics" such as Duran Duran or Alphaville.
The thing is, I fear there's not much in terms of truly memorable tunes in *Quiet Life*, a record that mostly digs two grooves in a somewhat flaccid fashion and undynamic pace: some upbeat songs in the vein of the opener and title track, that quickly sound quite interchangeable unfortunately, and two or three more "atmospheric" tracks with admittedly stellar orchestral arrangements.
On the positive side of things, Japan's fretless bass sounds great--thanks goodness it's here, since it offers the most dynamic and original instrumentation in the record. And David Sylvian's vocal performance is nice as well. *Quiet Life* is a record I've tried hard to love before, but as of now, it didn't "click" for me. Not fully giving up on it, though. Because on a more distanced and "objective" level, I readily admit it was at least somewhat groundbreaking for pop music at large...
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 214
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 344
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 200 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 251
Neil Young
5/5
There's a good reason *After The Gold Rush* is one of the most popular Neil Young albums. It's that perfect string of songs on the first side, plus the gems on the second. That string starts with "Tell Me Why", a folk tune whose arcane lyrics are easily transcended by the emotional performance here ; "After The Gold Rush", another very emotive number about ecological concerns where Young is not afraid to sound frail and vulnerable (and, I think, the first time he sang a song solo on the piano in the studio) ; then, there's the timeless ballad "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", written to console Graham nash after his break-up with Joni Mitchell. I have to admit I found the title of this song a little daft before (duh!), but it's a moving tune and one Young's most recognizable songs ; and so is "Southern Man", a raging scorcher of a rock song denouncing slavery and segregation - awesome guitar adlibs at the end, in the vein of Young's previous LP " Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" ; and to conclude the perfect string, you have "Til The Morning Comes" with its infectious chorus and good-natured spirit on a purely musical level.
Side B is great as well, without any single dud to complain of. My personal favourites are "When You Dance, I Can Really Love" and "Cripple Creek Ferry". The first was another single for the album, and the other rocker in it (guess " Southern Man" was too polemical to be released as a single) - and it's a great song, lively and moving at the same time. And the second is an incredibly short track, and yet one that is both endearing and cinematic as hell. Too bad the film that inspired this tune (plus the rest of this record) never got made. 5 stars.
Number of albums left to review: more than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one).
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me
Waylon Jennings
3/5
Sooooo...Apparently you could pester and harass Waylon Jennings from town to town, and if you were motivated and talented enough, you could have him record an album filled with *your* songs, not his. As a former songwriter without any real knack for performing my own songs in public, I really wish I could have pulled off a trick such as this one with a famous artist I admire, ha ha. The thing is, as usual with countrty albums--even in most of those known as "outlaw country"--it too often feels like the chord progressions are interchangeable to an extent. So did it *really* matter who wrote those tunes?
That said I really enjoyed the twofold nature of the title track and how the second part of this opener went to livelier turf. "Old Five And Dimers" has nice humming towards its conclusion. I love the chord sequence on the chorus of "Willy The Wandering Gypsy And Me", but it's probably because they are the *exact same ones* used for Johnny Cash's "Ring Of Fire" (officially written by his wife June Carter Cash). Remember what I said about interchangeable chords? Prefer "Ring Of Fire" anyway.
As for the other tunes, I readily admit they are pleasant, at least in that sort of "honky tonk" style. For the liveliest tracks such as "You Ask Me To", "Black Rose" and "Ain't No God In Mexico", the drums use the same sort of rock-inspired patterns also used by Willie Nelson for his own version of the "outlaw country" genre. Which is nice. And the pedal steel or guitar soloing are excellent in those cuts. I'm still of two minds about closer "We Had It All", the only song not at least partly written by Billie Joe Shaver. As such, this love ballad with admittedly quaint overtones sticks out like a sore thumb, even though its orchestral arrangements are spectacular. And did I mention that Jennings had a heartfelt and spectacular deep voice as well, not only during this closer, but throughout the LP? Now it's done.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential records.
8/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: more than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately.
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
Christine and the Queens
1/5
"Chris..." "Chris..." "Chris???".
Huh, what was *that* on the second track of this album? And what was that whole album for anyway?
Everything that a mainstream pop record can do *wrong*, this one does it. The instrumentation is bland or hackneyed. The arrangements or outside contributions are grating ("Chris..."). The melodies of the vocal lines are flat and unmemorable. The performance of those vocals is either forced in a quite obnoxious way, or just pointless and tasteless. And the accentuation and scansions for the English versions of those songs are often horrible (and I say this as a French person myself--it really feels like even *I* could better at times, ha ha!). In other words, Letissier is no Laetitia Sadier, he brings zero charm and zero effective intent to his own drawl. And the French versions of those songs are somewhat annoying as well, even if the vocal performance is less ridiculous in them. Worse, *Chris* doesn't even have the dynamics of its eighties models (some of whom are admittedly cheesy, but also have their own quaint/retro charm after all...). Evidence enough that it's a total artistic failure. It's not even "zany" and "over-the-top" in the way that modern "hyperpop" can be. You can bet your boots that most people who love this album have no idea that sort of record has been done "better" a hundred times before.
Of course, all of this can't possibly justify the couple of homophobic/transphobic rants found in this reviews section (take your pick). I get and even respect the fact that Letissier addresses hot topics in his lyrics, whether those lyrics are linked to his personal identity quest or not. But it just seems to me those topical lyrics and the "melodies" they're sung with are not fodder for good pop songs anyway.
So not even this can redeem this lame album in my eyes. To me the professional reviewers who loved it *all* looked like pretentious fools ("pretentious" because of the heavy-handedness of some of the lyrics--which they chose to ignore in spite of common sense), while also proving the whole world that they had awfully kitschy tastes in music. Which takes the cake, really, as it's the *worst* of both worlds. To put it in a nutshell, rarely an LP has been so overrated by music critics.
0/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential LPs". Which translates to a 3/10 or 4/10 grade for more general purposes. In the realm of mainstream pop, I gave a 1/5 mark to Taylor Swift's *Folklore* and a 2/5 mark to her other album *1989*. I would probably bump those grades one or two notches today, because I sort of mellowed whenever the subject of Swift has been dealt with in the last couple of month. But even with those slight latter-day changes in mind, I gotta maintain some sort of consistency for my own ranking of all these albums (which started more than two years ago). Hence why Christine And The Queens actually deserves *less* than 1/5.
Number of albums left to review: 201
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 345
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 201
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 254 (including this one)
Joan Baez
3/5
"In 2015, this album was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for inclusion in the National Recording Registry."
OK. I guess Joan Baez was a pivotal figure in that famous sixties folk scene that also saw the likes of Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan emerge. And yet today, this record feels more like a "historical document" than a truly timeless record filled with legendary details and touches such as the ones released by... Bob Dylan. Including during his folk period.
Oh, and it's an album of covers, of course (contrary to Dylan's usual output). Those are traditional folk tunes expertly and tastefully played for sure... But (mostly) everyone knows the art of truly "essential" albums should go beyond that. "Silver Daggers", "John Riley" and "Girl Of Constant Sorrow" (in the bonus tracks) are beautiful and evocative. The rest sounds a bit quaint and stilted, though. Including that cover of "House Of The Rising Sun", which has had better versions elsewhere...
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential records.
8/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: more than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately.
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
The Notorious B.I.G.
4/5
'Steve Huey from AllMusic gave it five stars, stating "The album that reinvented East Coast rap for the gangsta age, Ready to Die made the Notorious B.I.G. a star. Today it's recognized as one of the greatest hardcore rap albums ever recorded, and that's mostly due to Biggie's skill as a storyteller".'
OK. I guess The Notorious B.I.G. was a pivotal figure in that gangster rap scene that also saw the likes of 2Pac and Mobb Deep emerge. I voluntarily mix East Coast and West Coast here--make of that what you will. And yet today, in spite of its "reputation", this album feels more like a "historical document" than a truly timeless record. Legendary songs and details abound. But it's too damn long. And the music on it didn't age that well, contrary to many other East Coast legendary rap albums, going from Wu Tang Clan to Mos Def.
Oh, and it's an album filled with too many unnecessary skits, as everyone knows (including reviewers who gave this a 5-star grade). The art of truly "essential" albums should try to be a little tighter and more cohesive. Including for rap, a genre (in)famously known for yielding overlong LPs. In spite of fortunate exceptions here and there, of course...
To write this review, I used the same template as the one I used for the first Joan Baez LP, by the way. Make of that what you will, once again. 🙃
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential records, rounded up to 4/5
8.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: more than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one, even though it almost didn't make the cut. 1994 is one of my most favorite years for music: I've selected *45* albums for that year, and *Ready To Die* is at the bottom of that sublist--the last record on it, actually).
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
The Coral
2/5
'Chris Long for BBC Manchester Music saw it as an "interesting debut. [... D]espite it's derivations and blatant robbing", the album was "original, challenging and above all, fun". AllMusic reviewer Bryan Thomas wrote that the "fantastic voyage that is The Coral [...] is the real discovery", citing an amalgamation of various influences, often within a single song. Pitchfork contributor Chris Dahlen wrote that the band "seems more curious than inventive", tackling various ideas "but don't always have an original hook or clear idea to attach them to". John Mendelsohn of Blender said that very "[l]ittle else here [...] is quite as glorious" as "Dreaming of You". He added that there was "enough moments to suggest that, should they ever concentrate on, say, just 10 of their favorite styles, they could be fab" '
OK. I guess The Coral was a somewhat noticeable act in that early-noughts retro-rock-revival scene that also saw the likes of The Strokes and The White Stripes emerge. And yet today, this album feels more like an example of the impact of passing fads and trends than a truly timeless record. The art of truly "essential" albums should try to be a little tighter, more cohesive, and more convincing than that. In other words, you need more memorable tunes...
To write this review, I used the same template as the one I used for the first Joan Baez LP and The Notorious B.I.G.'s *Ready To Die*, by the way. Make of that what you will. 🙃
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential records.
7/10 for more general purposes. (5+2)
Number of albums left to review: less than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately.
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (including this one, many other albums are more important to me)
Pavement
5/5
Another nineties masterpiece. Lively, messy, sarcastic, heartfelt, filled with lots of endearing details and downright elegiac *all* at the same time. Very American, conveying a feeling of wild open spaces only matched in older classic rock, but also winking at a lot of more recent influences from both sides of the pond.
This records also abounds with lots of instantly memorable songs. "Silence Kid" is a lovable opener. "Elevate Me Later" has a killer, multilayered guitar riff. "Stop Breathing" is a lovely ballad under the guise of a topsy-turvy pile of disjointed elements -- rarely have awfully detuned strings on guitars sounded so frigging *right*, as can be heard in the suspenseful instrumental outro of this song. "Cut Your Hair" is the ultimate slacker anthem, hilariously making fun of indieheads while slyly paying tribute to them (and its "ouh-ouh-ouh-ouh" hook is infectious). "Gold Soundz"'s harmonies are the stuff indie-rock dreams are made of, thus creating a great "meta" song. "5/4=Unity" is a nice little tribute to Dave Brubeck, adding even more varied textures to the whole shebang. And "Range Life" is a folk-rock / country-rock masterpiece about life on the road when you're in a band, also poking fun at Stone Temple Pilots and the Smashing Pumpkins--who said only rappers could write diss tracks? Crucially, it takes someone with the genius of Stephen Malkmus to do it. As it takes someone like him to cover so many grounds and lyrical modes in the space of one album--not to mention one song.
Finally, there's the epic closer "Fillmore Jive", conveying homesickness, nostalgia and fatigue in a manner that makes the whole thing sound like the ultimate transcendent experience. At heart, and behind the apparent slacker pose, Pavement were cunning and conniving romantics, if that turn of phrase makes sense (feel like Malkmus would approve its poetic / nonsensical / surreal flavor, at least). And the noisy, heartrending, abrasive, delicate, fragile and orgasmic climax of this wonderful cut proves it.
Number of albums left to review: 197
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 347
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 202
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 255
Kate Bush
3/5
Tried one last time to enjoy this quote-unquote "experimental" album by this grand priestess of weird "avant-garde" pop. Opener "Sat On My Lap" and second cut "There Goes A Tenner", with their ridiculously cheesy and artificial-sounding simulation of trumpet / brass section on the Fairlight CMI synth, make that umpteenth attempt extremely difficult. More atmospheric "Pull Out The Pin", where Kate Bush screams her lungs out to perform the "I love life" vocal hook in such an impressive and fully theatrical fashion, surprisingly fares far better. And so does waltzy "Suspended In Gaffa", thanks to its (this time lush) synth parts imitating a string quartet, along with its memorable ecstatic chorus. Background male vocal parts (some of whom performed by Bush's mentor Dave Gilmour, from the Floyd), also bring interesting layers to those tunes.
Conversely, "Leave It Open" comes off as a pointless, shapeless and tasteless dirge that's mostly a pretext for more performative or heavily produced and manipulated vocal shenanigans. Skip that one as soon as you can. At first, the track that follows (giving its name to the whole LP) sounds like another self-indulgent, gratuitous exercise in being weird for the sake of being weird, but I have to admit the performance and composition quickly becomes strangely addictive. The didgeridoo brings an evocative background mood, but it's mostly the Meredith-Monk-inspired vocals that seal the deal here. After that full-blown delirium, the admittedly *objectively* extravagant "Night Of The Swallow" almost come off as "mundane", in spite of its lively Irish folk music instrumentation. Likewise, "All The Love" hits interesting marks, especially in its cinematic breaks / bridge sections using haunted vocals to suggest a foggy landscape filled with forlorn ghosts. Yet one can't help feeling that those two cuts are drafts for the even more wonderful experimental moments that would make *Hounds Of Love* so striking and breathtaking.
Ballad "Houdini" then tries hard to revisit the peculiar and yet enticing harmonies of "Wuthering Heights", mixed with some weirder (and sometimes more grating) moments in keeping with the overall feel and tone of this record. Yet what comes off is that the song is only an afterthought to Kate's debut hit (or the later one "Breathing"). Finally, "Get Out Of My House" concludes the whole weirdfest in a way that nicely sums up what the whole album conveys, both in its good and arguably terrible moments. The braying of donkey was a fun touch (just like the sheep bleating on the title track), but it's mostly the guitar parts and the (qawwali-inspired?) vocal adlib during the fade out that leave the strongest impression here. Not that said impression is "fully" convincing...
Verdict: glad I tried one more time, because in spite of the blatantly self-indulgent or overblown moments in this LP, there are also terrifically creative and let's dare say *entertaining* spots in it. It's always a very thin line between the two with Kate Bush, who managed to find a more satisfactory middle ground between her experimental, extravagant drive and a more streamlined pop appeal elsewhere, in her truly *essential* albums (*Hounds Of Love*, and possibly also *Never For Ever* or *The Kick Inside*). Yet I now like or at least can appreciate half of those songs, most of them in the middle of this LP. And it's possible others grow on me after.
That said, the first two tracks (singles from the album, I think--quite inexplicably, I might add) definitely come off as bad and tragically "dated" and daft to my ears. Therefore, there's no way I can ever consider this LP as "essential", not with such clunkers opening it. *The Dreaming* was a great laboratory for Bush, allowing her to try out new ideas and sounds. But, in science as in music, some results should stay in the test tubes and never see the light of day.
2.5/5 for the purposes of this particular list, rounded up to 3.
7.5/10 for more general purposes (5+2.5)
Number of albums left to review: 195
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 347
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 202
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 256 (including this one)
Led Zeppelin
5/5
A legend takes flight. One that, ironically, would not crash down as easily as the aircraft on the cover of this debut. Of course, Led Zeppelin is the ultimate "dad-rock" band today (grandad rock, even). And yet, they're also timeless.
Jimmy Page was a sly fox, "recycling" (and sometimes pillaging, let's be honest) blues tropes to create something unheard of at the time. Robert Plant had the voice that could fit with the ones of both angels and demons--heavily sexualised, and yet so pure in the same hollers and inflexions. John Paul Jones was the rock from which the band could conquer the skies. And John Bonham was an absolute tornado.
Who could have predicted that the "New Yardbirds" could pave the way to something so iconic and so groundbreaking? No one. And yet that's exactly what happened.
Number of albums left to review: 194
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 348 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 202
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 256
Tina Turner
3/5
To paraphrase the lyrics of the title-track, "any old music will do" to illustrate the comeback of an artist who probably deserves to return under the spotlight after being treated like shit by her partner (both professional and domestic). And this whereas her talents as a performer were clearly pivotal for the success of their common past endeavors. Fortunately for her, Tina Turner managed to find allies from within the industry to relaunch her career as a solo act some years after her painful divorce from Ike. And this record is when her efforts paid off at last.
Of course, the music on *Private Dancer* wasn't "old" at the time, it sounds terribly old *now*. But you still have the feeling that "any music", as long as it fit with the cheesy commercial aesthetics of the day, would have done here. There's a case to be made about how hackneyed and ridiculous some of the production choices are on this thing. Any lover of this album consciously ommiting to point that out today is not giving you the full picture. The eighties were quite a horrible moment for mainstream music at large. Let's *never* forget that.
*That said*, and quite surprisingly given that I had already tried to enjoy this record before (to no avail), I feel far more benevolent to most of those songs this morning, as I spent some more time with them. Is it because Tina passed away?--may she rest in power. Is it because I imagined that late-career Talking Heads were playing the instruments behind her on the admittedly slightly underwhelming opener "I Might Have Been Queen -- Soul Survivor"? And that, somehow, it made the song a little more interesting? Or is it because, actually, the overall energy of Tina's performance in this opener, as well as in the midtempo plea "Better Be Good To Me" and the very lively and fast-paced rocker "Steel Claw", indeed manages to make the cheesefest of the production somewhat irrelevant. Those compositions are also well-crafted overall, with some interesting chord sequences and salvageable arrangements. One can dream about what an updated remix of those songs could sound like, as one reviewer has pertfully remarked here...
We haven't even addressed the real highlights of this album, and I already have positive things to say. Now, with "What's Love Got To Do With This?", you gotta admit that the song is a soulful hit for a reason--and one aptly showing Tina settling the score with her difficult past. And "Private Dancer", written by Dire Straits' Mark Knowfler, is another pivotal moment giving its distinctive appeal to the whole LP: by telling the inner monologue of a stripper, one feels like Tina is offering a metaphor for what she does here as an artist--probably selling parts of her soul for money (and getting her rightful place again within the industry), a situation underlined by the sadness conveyed by the chord progression on the bridge, and then still looking dignified and vindicated enough to do so in a somewhat graceful manner. And Jeff Beck's wincing guitar solo at the end, as strange as it might sound for some ears, actually emphasizes this interesting ambiguity...
This LP also has its significant share of covers. And apart from "Help", which just literally murders (and even *slaughters*) what makes the Beatles song great in the first place, those covers are very nice as well. "I Can't Stand The Rain" offers an excellent new-wave-tinged version of Ann Peebles' progressive-soul sleeper hit, and Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" and David Bowie's "1984" get the slick eighties treatment to great effects.
So the only real dud here (apart from "Help") is "Show Some Respect"--sounding too thin, too dry, and too bland harmonically speaking to deserve being showed what it asks for. But apart from that, let's call this reviewer pleasantly surprised this morning. Still erring on the side of caution here, because I feel like my feelings could change again, but I'm glad most of those tracks "clicked" for me at last, in spite of their horrid production values. Plus, given that Tina didn't write her own songs here, there's no way I can *automatically* include this record in my own list of 1001 keepers. Yet I leave the door open for it, at least as a culturally relevant milestone for mainstream pop music. Knowing how Tina never took "no" for an answer when she eventually managed to shackle her chains, chances are that this LP might blow those doors into oblivion in the foreseeable future anyway. :)
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 193
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 348
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 203 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 256
Wire
5/5
Punk? Post-Punk? Proto-Post Punk? Proto Crank Wave by-the-way-of-post-punk? Who the f*ck cares? It's a f*cking masterpiece. How terrifically abrasive and yet effectively "moody" are its obvious highlights, having a somewhat "normal" length for a song (opener "Reuters", "Ex-Lion Tamer", "Lowdowm"," the title track, "Strange" and, of course, "Mannequin" and its infectious backing vocals), and looking like long epics next to the many one-minute angry bursts also bringing their fair share of gems:"Three-Girl Rumba", famously plundered by Elastica, prophetic "It's So Obvious", foretelling the importance of year 1977 for culture overall, raging "Mr.Suit", probably against music industry goons, or closer "1 2 X U" and its homoerotic context--possibly a comment on internalized homophobia--covered by Minor Threat, by the way. In that particular league of songs, everyone will have their favorite. But they're all objectively good.
To put it in a nutshell, this record is like no other--not even the two awesome albums following this debut (which Dimery should have included as well). Its off-kilter concept makes it timeless, and its overall effect is both mysterious and exhilarating. As seen on the wikipedia page for this record, one Pitchfork writer called it an explosion of "song-fragment shrapnel". Can't do any better than this to conclude this tentative review.
Number of albums left to review: less than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
Tori Amos
5/5
A Kate Bush clone? No, no, much more than that. Those misguided "professional critics" who dared label Tori Amos with those words probably deserve our contempt today. It's like saying Mick Jagger is the clone of John Lennon, or the other way around. Of course, Kate Bush was probably one of the influences Tori drew from to create her own musical universe. But the latter is still very much its own thing, light years away from anyone else. Guess at the start of nineties, music reviewers were still attracted by lazy categorizations when it came to female singer-songwriters. Hopefully, we all know better now.
As off-kilter as it is emotionally potent, this official debut album (not counting Tori Amos' first attempt as the leader of her former band "Y Kant Tori Read") is thus filled to the brim with gems. And the insanely catchy (yet insanely self-deprecating) lead single "Crucify" is a perfect opener for it, even in its slightly more subdued album version (the single's instrumentation is even more gorgeous). When Tori croons the word "chains" you want to shackle them for her. "Got enough guilt start my own religion" is a line for the ages, by the way, aptly summing up Tori's gently provocating stance as a female artist. Not long after this pristine opener, the moving and confessional "Silent All These Years", the lively yet tormented "Precious Things", the airy and dreamy "China", and the in-turns delicate and epic "Winter"--which will talk to the soul of anyone having fond yet conflicted childhood memories about that titular season--add up to offer wonders after wonders. The tracks supported by full orchestras are cinematic masterpieces, and the more "baroque-pop-rock"-oriented tracks among them slap you in the face. It's *this* good.
If most of the cuts found in the second part of this admittedly long but impressive collection of deeply personal tunes do not come off as immediately great as the ones before, a few repeated listens are enough to help you find your way into them and their sudden peaks of pure emotion. And crowning this collection, you have the devastating "Me And A Gun", depicting in so many blunt phrases the inner monologue of a woman being raped--an autobiographical song to boot, apparently. Performed a cappella, thus adding to the uncompromising nature of the lyrics, this track is chilling and thought-provoking, just as the best topical songs can be. No need for flourishes here. Even if terrific ones are found throughout the rest of this debut revealing a rare talent to the world.
Between her composer chops, her amazing, classical-trained flexes as a piano player, her spectacular mezzo-soprano voice, and her extravagant persona, Amos indeed has so many assets that it's easy to lose count. The only minor grudge one can find with this record is that she sometimes negotiates the hairpin curves within the tracklisting a little too recklessly at times, and that one track in the second half, "Mother", meanders a little as it follows a very "stream of consciousness" writing method--which lets on that a slightly edited and reorganized version of this record would have been even more impressive.
That said, one could equally consider that such self-editing work would have neutered the very elements that made this album age like fine wine. So it's not a big deal. Tori Amos even went further with those 180-degree turns on her subsequent jewel-of-an-LP *Under The Pink*, refining the weird formula to the most blissful extent--a record criminally ignored in the 1001 Albums book, unfortunately. So we can all be glad she "experimented" stuff in her debut to eventually get to that point after. Never tell an artist like her to shut up and do what's "conventional". It's up to the listener to be worthy of what she has to offer when getting off the beaten path. Anyone with a heart, an interest for women artist with a voice of their own, and a functioning set of ears, will thank her for that. Because let's face it, without Tori, early nineties mainstream pop would have been a far less interesting place.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 5
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5+4.5)
Number of albums left to review: less than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
Morrissey
1/5
At last a "review" that's pretty easy to write. As Morrissey became increasingly obnoxious as a person, his music (or rather, the one *other composers* wrote for him) ironically became more and more pedestrian, devoid of any real risk as it pandered to old fans of the late eighties / early nineties "rock" idiom, who never managed to move on from that point. Here is the mind-boggling paradox: if at least the Moz had chosen to sing on truly abrasive "stuff" by 2004--in keeping with his grating persona--he would have succeeded in making a cohesive point to both his fans and detractors. Alas, the production in this record is desperately bland and safe, and so are most of the chords and harmonies found in it. At this point, it doesn't really matter what the lyrics are about. Here, you basically get the oh-so-precious, yet oh-so-cynical stance he's used since the Smiths era, with many hamfisted lines sung in an overkill mode to boot. In his first solo outputs, you at least had a few pleasant surprises. Nothing is either surprising or pleasant in this album. It's just an utter borefest of unprecedented proportions, both lyrically and musically.
Good that we have the hilarious reviews about this "bad" album in this section, though--including some written by reviewers a tad bit more benevolent to this record than I am. I'd dare say there's more artistry, genuine *wit*, and imagination in a single one of those funny reviews than in all of the songs in *You Are The Quarry* combined. But who am I to say? After all, I'm not the "quarry" Stephen is looking after. Fortunately so, I might even venture to add...
1/5 for the purposes of this list of so-called "essential albums".
6/10 for more general purposes (5 for overall competency + 1 for the artistic flair--or lack thereof).
Number of albums left to review: 191
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 350
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 203
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 257 (including this one)
Solomon Burke
3/5
Sure, this album sounds groundbreaking for the soul music / rhythm'n blues genres, especially given the year it was released. Burke apparently didn't like the rhythm'n blues tag, oddly enough. But no matter what the particular tags are here, the lineage is crystal-clear. "Rock 'N Soul" indeed offers a template that Otis Redding or Marvin Gaye refined to quite sophisticated proportions a few years after.
The thing is, I'm having trouble identifying what makes those songs so memorable. Unfair to call them "generic" when they paved the way for great things to come (maybe my ears are at fault today). But I would be hypocritical to say otherwise. At least for this micro-reviewing of this "historical" record.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums".
8/10 for more general purposes (5 for overall competency + 3 for historical reasons)
Number of albums left to review: 190
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 350
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 203
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 258 (including this one)
Soft Machine
5/5
The first five minutes borrowing from the gurgles of *musique concrète* could scare you into believing that this record is a self-indulgent borefest even worse than the ones of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. But as some other reviewers pointed out here, that introduction is just a recording of Soft Machine flexing their muscles onstage ("Facelift" is a mash-up of two live shows) before the *real* performance begins. And what a performance it is!
*Third* is a double-album. Forget prog-rock, its first disc, with one long track for each side, is actually a free jazz masterpiece akin to the ones of John Coltrane or Miles Davis circa-*Bitches Brew*. Coupled together, those modulated harmonies and syncopated rhythm patterns offer so many *tight*, intense moments that it's easy to lose count. And even if the guitar work is stellar there, it's mostly brass and organ that steal the show. The fusion of the two into a fully zany, "experimental"-yet-groovy mode--plus the addition of tropical flutes and more abrasive tones once in a while--has rarely sounded so inspiring and enticing. Not only will *Third* delight most fans of the legendary jazzmen quoted up there, but it will also please a lot of folks looking for hypnotic soundscapes of all stripes.
The second disc, also made out of two tracks with each one of them taking up one side, uses those jazzy shores as a starting point to indeed explore uncharted territories--thereby foretelling Robert Wyatt's solo output. The drummer's distinctively frail yet expressive and moving voice can thus be heard throughout *Moon In June*, a very adventurous track that oscillates between dreamy dirges and prog-rock flourishes. And interspersed between short "ambient" sequences that would have sounded at home in Tangerine Dream's early LPs, the "Out-Bloody-Rageous" instrumentals closing the proceedings return to a vein that throws post-bob and free-jazz aesthetics into a mesmerizing arty landscape close to what krautrock would have to offer in the months and years that would follow the release of this record. The penultimate section of this cut is for instance a gorgeous thing, with its ecstatic sax lines aiming at the skies, drenched in echoes and propelled by a hectic rhythm section grouding the whole thing into very human emotions. And the synthetic-sounding outro is a pure wonder, the stuff that dreams are made of. *Third* is therefors one of those records structured around the idea of "build-up", either within the tracks or as a whole. And patience will warrant any listener who's attentive and open-minded enough to give a chance to it.
Given the very poor global score this album received on this app, it seems that patience and open-mindedness are not key assets in most listeners, unfortunately. Their loss. And the gain of everyone else who *get* what Soft Machine accomplished here.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5+4.5)
Number of albums left to review: 190
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 351 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 203
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 258
Justice
4/5
Those Daft Punk clones mananged to fuel the hype machine on all cylinders in 2007, thanks to their Ed Banger connections. What's left of that hype seventeen years later is... a well-crafted dance / electronic album, but maybe one that might sound less "timeless" (and therefore more "dated") than what their models offered before them,very ironically. It's a bag of effective tricks. But a bag of tricks nonetheless. Beyond the relentless disco-funk rhythms, you can find some good earworms here and there. But most of them sound copied-and-pasted on the same sort of melodic template. The latter is stellar on the absolute hit "D.A.N.C.E", paying a sly homage to the Jackson 5 heritage, thanks to its smart vocal samples. It's lively and enticing on "Phantom pt. II". The "song" on "The Party" is a humourous detour. But those melodic endeavors are not as numerous as they should be.
The second half of the record oscillates between debts to another act sometimes associated to the so-called "French Touch", AIR, and far more "hardcore" shenanigans owing a lot to "minimal" strands of techno. "Stress" *is* tight and hectic, for instance, yet the harmonies in its short conclusion convey a "baroque" soundscape that seems to come out of nowhere, as beautiful as it is, and *most of all* goes nowhere very fast. Odd how all those sorts of melodic conclusions are almost never developped, except in the awesome dual closer "Waters Of Nazareth" / "Minute To Midnight". Justice must have felt too many melodies would ruin their rythmical drive. That's a mistake Daft Punk would never have made--at least if their starting points for a track required them to go there. There again, the pupils are not exactly up to the level of their masters. *Cross* is good. Is it "essential", though? Only god knows. Or maybe Jesus.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5+3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 189
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 351
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 204 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 258
Roxy Music
5/5
It took a while for me to understand what so many people heard in that debut (and early Roxy Music in general), something like a couple of years since I first listened to this album. I was fan of Eno's solo career, though. But Bryan Ferry's vocal performance was a bit grating for me. Yet, finally, and quite recently, something clicked. Now even Ferry's have a point: they bring some sort of Brechtian, cabaret-like dimension that fits with the artful, sophisticated-yet-lively nature of this unpredictable music going from glam-rock renditions of early rock'n'roll impulses to forward-looking experimental thrusts. *Roxy Music* is like a retro sci-fi fever dream using the rock idiom to point towards the future. Its first side is absolutely perfect, and the second, admittedly more disjointed one, harbors many gems as well. Don't have a lot of time today to go into specific tracks. But I will still use a few more words to say this: never say never about a record that eludes your comprehension at first if you *objectively* feel it brings something artful and original to the table. Chances are that you can be able to enjoy it very *subjectively* later. It's one of the greatest lessons this app taught me.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 59.5/10 for more general purposes (5+4.5)
Number of albums left to review: less than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately.
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me).
Leonard Cohen
5/5
Apart from the penultimate track "I Can't Forget", each song in this album is instantly likeable and memorable. Sure, the instrumentation is often marked by a maximalist, synth-enhanced approach typical of the eighties--a 180-degree turn compared to Cohen's early classic LPs, and one that feels borderline "cheesy" in the opener "First We Take Manhattan". But here is the very rare case where such "commercial" approach actually brings something relevent to the table.
Indeed, willingly or not, such hackneyed arrangements thus add to the sarcastic overtones of the Canadian singer-songwriter's oeuvre. Or they aptly underline his musings about love / personal validation / selfish drives / empathy and how everyone plays some sort of "game" to have all of those things. The end result is *both* heartfelt and disillusioned, oddly enough. Listen to the admirable trilogy of songs "Ain't No Cure For Love" / "Everybody Knows" / "I'm Your Man" to find stellar examples of how Cohen is both tender and wry when he addresses those themes. In the second of those three songs, you also have a sort of "comedy of manners" that sums up everything that's great in Cohen's songwriting:
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah, give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
The oud played not long after those lines is a gorgeous thing, bringing pure emotion to those descriptions of flaws typical of the quote-unquote "human condition". Side two then broadens the scope to include topics related to "romantic" decadence ("Take This Waltz"), partly ironical dystopian concerns ("Jazz Police") and even a mystical meditation about the "Babel-like" act of artistic creation in closer "Tower Of Song". Bright, brooding, witty, moving, rich and layered, *I'm Your Man* is everything you want an "essential" album to be.
Number of albums left to review: less than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
Happy Mondays
2/5
It seems that Happy Mondays have never written a song that's worthwhile on a compositional level. They were a one-pony trick, using the Hacienda to promote their lame shtick and thus succeeding in creating some sort of "aura" around them--thereby attracting a hype that was mostly based on extra-musical endeavors: drugs, booze, clubbing, style over substance, you name it... They offered a subpar version of what PIL could offer, or what the Stone Roses had already produced by the time this record came out. *Pills 'n' Thrills And Bellyaches* is admittedly more "listenable" than *Bummed* thanks to its production values. Yet those dance-oriented rhythm patterns are still a subpar version of Primal Scream's *Screamadelica*, and those guitar arrangements are still a subpar version of The Edge's work with U2, for instance. And the vocals are most often grating, to the point where it doesn't matter what nonsense and/or witty takes they are sputtering.
Oh, and as informative and interestingly written as that raving review topping this section is, it still gives me the feeling that Happy Mondays fans can be quite shallow whenever they try to defend their fave act. I also have a homophobic father, you know. Turns out I stopped "loving him", contrary to this reviewer, and I even stopped talking to him--for this AND for other reasons, admittedly, yet the man's homopobia and neuroses were enough to give me a hint that I shouldn't waste any time with him. Just as I don't see why I should waste my time with Happy Mondays. Show some integrity, for chrissake. Show some backbone. The sort of integrity and backbone that Happy Mondays never had in even one second of their overrated career. I don't even care they blabbered some homophobic rants at some point. Their music is not worth getting interested in their public stances on *any* subject.
2/5 for the purposes of this list.
7/5 for more general purposes (4 for competency--one minus point for the lame vocals-- + 3 for "cultural impact", I guess...)
Number of albums left to review: 186
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 353
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 204
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 259 (including this one)
Aretha Franklin
5/5
A list like this without at least one LP by the Queen of Soul wouldn't be taken seriously. And I guess *Lady Soul* is the one album where all the stars align to display Aretha Franklin's vast array of skills as a performer. You 've got timeless hits ("Chain Of Fools", "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman", "People Get Ready"), lively and enticing groove machines ("Niki Hoeky", "Since You've Been Gone", "Come Back Baby") and the slower-paced yet equally timeless blues-infused pleas ("Good To Me As I Am To You", the stellar and moving closer "Ain't No Way", with its incredible vocal arrangement in the background). Of course a greatest hits compilation is also mandatory on your shelves to own all of Aretha's signature songs not found in this particular LP. But as far as studio albums go, this is the ideal entry point here
Number of albums left to review: 185
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 354 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 204
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 259
The Velvet Underground
5/5
There's the iconic debut LP featuring Nico. And then, there's this sophomore album that is the best representation of what the Velvet Underground sounded like *live*. And it's wild, man. Wild. Countless modern genres find their origin in this record (punk, noise-rock, no wave, indie rock...). The shorter tracks go from messy, animated rockers (the title track, "I Heard Her Call My Name") to abrasive-yet-stellar ballads ("Here She Comes Now", " Lady Godiva's Operation") in the vein of the band's debut. Yet it's in the two longer, fully experimental dirges ("The Gift", and the absolutely insane "Sister Ray") that Lou Reed's mad genius shines the most. After this album, John Cale would leave that freaky circus and be replaced by Doug Yule, who would help the VU record two more jewels (*The Velvet Underground* and *Loaded*). But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies.
Number of albums left to review: 184
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 355 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 204
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 259
Coldcut
3/5
Always thought that "People Hold On" was a Lisa Standfield song, instead of a song officially "featuring" Lisa Standfield. What's hilarious is that this "commercial" dance music hit single opening this record doesn't compare to anything else in it. Mostly because everything else sounds like a (somewhat dated) dada collage of bleeps, bloops, vocal snippets and off-kilter samples.
That said, Coldcut has often been an interesting "electronic" act, and this debut is no exception. And you can sense the two Brits had a lot of fun recording it, at least.
The thing is, *What's That Noise?* is definitely not up to the level of the essential LPs its usual fans compare it to. It's not as "focused" as a classic Kraftwerk album, and it's not as lively, driven and hectic as the Beastie Boys' *Paul's Boutique*, for instance. It lies in its own niche space, and dust seems to have covered said space for a while now.
I guess that an album gathering guests as different as Lisa Standfield, The Fall's Mark E. Smith, Queen Latifah and Junior Reid probably deserves to be mentioned somewhere. The question is, where?
If you think this short review has too many hairpin curves, this album is definitely not for you. Come to think of it, I *do* think this review of mine has too many of those 180-degree turns. Therefore...
3/5 for the purposes of this list.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 183
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 355
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 204
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 260 (including this one)
Run-D.M.C.
5/5
A very early milestone for the art of the rap album. The grandad hip hop of *Raising Hell* obviously sounds terribly dated in 2024, but what it loses because of this is counterbalanced by its contagious energy, its dynamic tracklisting exploring all the options you can choose in that similar groove (with or without the rock flourishes), along with its cultural relevance and impact. "It's Tricky", " Peter Piper" and that version of "Rock This Way" featuring Aerosmith are classics. And most of the other cuts are worth a detour.
Number of albums left to review: less than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
The Last Shadow Puppets
3/5
Oh well. Long before Alex Turner proved his self-fellating prowess to the rest of the world--a difficult, and admittedly dangerously athletic "art", as exemplified by his more recent LPs with his original band Arctic Monkeys, the man went on a pleasurable side escapade with The Last Shadow Puppets, where that time around, he had the opportunity to receive hand jobs from his dear pals Miles Kane and James Ford. Reminds me of that wild night out in Köln, when ephemeral pals of indefinite genres took me blindfolded to a backroom where I had to taste different sorts of leather gags on a swing. My tongue still remembers the taste of the last one, just as invisible pudgy fingers fiddled with my shlong until the whole ordeal made me pop my load on the hind parts of Gertrude (or was it Günther?).
Take this micro-review a homage to the artful writer who left so many tasteful remarks on this app, a man of "taste" indeed, who inexplicably left us after 600 reviews or so (remember the one about *Scum*? It's a masterpiece!). Those of you who have read those reviews can't forget them that easily. When you know, you know.
As for that Last Shadow Puppets record, it's a pleasant one, even if it's very well-mannered and *one-note*, just like most releases involving Turner. The spaghetti western-like cavalcades (such as the one displayed during the title-track and opener) are lively and enticing enough, with their obvious Ennio Morricone flavours. Are they "essential", though? Or are they just a little too calibrated and "precious"? The jury's still out on this one. Methinks that kinkier "cavalcades" are more to my tastes, generally speaking...
3/5 for the purposes of this list.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 181
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 356
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 205 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 260
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
5/5
Alice Cooper can go to hell (actually, I think he's meant to have a good time there). I have read the name "The Sensational Alex Harvey Band" quite a few times before, but from their description, I always dismissed it as the one of yet another British shock-rock / glam-rock act like the early seventies produced dozens of them. Turns out that this band is indeed yet another shock-rock act, but that *this one* ticks all my boxes and pushes all the right buttons. It's not only Alex Harvey's *outré*, theatrical vocal performance, or the mindless (and probably dated) hedonism at the heart of his lyrics, you see. What seals the deal is the sheer *musicality* of the stellar roster of musicians playing with him. Because the music is often inventive, harmonically rich, and always expertly performed and recorded.
The tracklist (and album) is short, and that's what makes the whole thing slap even harder. "Swampsnake" starts with low stakes belying the richness about to follow as it foretells hard rock guitar tones AC/DC would hone later on. But from that starting point, this record builds up into a dirty masterpiece (love it when "essential albums" do that). "Gang Bang" is an efficient meat-and-potatoes cut, and its lyrics are in poor taste, but somehow, I can't help but admire the result here. And then comes the absolute gem "Faith Healer"--ominous, deranged, with all sorts of disturbing harmonies and moods and textures, Harvey's crazy performance supported by the obsessive coupling of synth bass and palm-muted quavers on the guitar. No wonder another young Aussie, Nick Cave, fell in love with this band...
"Giddy Up A Ding Dong" is admittedly a rockabilly cover that brings nothing important on the table (except its synth solo during the middle-eight, and its bluesy outro section with all the background vocals). But then "Next" offers a great English version of the Jacques Brel staple song. Once again, Nick Cave must have taken notes here, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the young ruffians from black midi had done so as well when I hear those histrionic vocals and the lively and unpredictable instrumentation supporting it...
Following the title-track, "Vambo Marble Eyes" returns to hard rock territories, and boy oh boy, it's a riot. What a great chorus, and what a striking performance--so striking that I wonder why the band had the idea to record a lesser version of that song for their next LP. Yeah, the one after *Next*--are you following this? Actually, they recorded the song two more times, for two different versions of their third album. Now I'm pretty sure you are lost indeed. But anyway, guess that's a story for another moment, kiddies...
Because, hell yeah, after listening to *Next*, I have listened to five other LPs from Alex Harvey and his wonderful band of misfits (the one before *Next*, their debut album *Framed*, plus the three that follow). And now I can say they're my new favorite band from the early seventies, a moment of music history that was ripe with so many good records it can make your head spin. A golden age of rock'n'roll for sure. And I wasn't even born then.
Speaking of the "golden age of rock'n'roll", there's also an iconic feel to the three-part extravaganza that *Next*'s closer "The Last Of The Teenage Idols" is. The only thing I can reproach this very *harveyesque* song with is that its "legato" first section could have been twice as long, so good it is.
And here I am using the word "harveyesque" about an act I had never listened to this morning. But sometimes, music appreciation is a no-brainer. When you know, you know.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this app, rounded up to 5 (that 0.5 substraction is the only compromise I will make with any idea of caution here. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band's music doesn't elicit such sorts of compromise anyway--I'd rather have listeners with different tastes finding it distasteful instead of feeling "neutral" about it).
9.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 180
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 357 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 205
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 260
The Birthday Party
4/5
In 1993, I won a three-day trip to the US when I was 16. The prize was the opportunity to be there for an interview of Nirvana, in Seattle. That's how I spent one afternoon with Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl. It's not that I wanna boast about that particular experience here, yet I feel the need to mention the latter because there's a connection in my mind between that three-day trip and this Birthday Party album. A journalist was with me, of course. His name was Youri. Some time before the interview took place, we went to an independent record store. Youri bought some CDs there. Beastie Boys' *Check Your Head* was among them. And more crucially for the purpose of this review, so was The Birthday Party's *Junkyard*. I remember Youri telling me I should listen to those two records. Being as much an Indie-rock buff as I was a hip hop fan at the time, I followed his advice for the Beastie Boys CD, and this as soon as I got back to France. But I didn't for The Birthday Party (an admittedly harder CD to find, even in those years). And now here I am, more than thirty years later, finally listening to *Junkyard*. It's quite moving, to be honest.
Of course, since 1993 I have already caught up on many stylistic aspects pivotal to the understanding of this uncompromising work of art. I have a decent collection of post-punk "classics", going from Wire to IDLES. And I love most of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds albums. In a sense, I am more "prepared" to listen to this record than I would have been at the age of 16. And indeed, *Junkyard* feels very much like a laboratory given to Cave to test out ideas he would later refine and polish with The Bad Seeds. Of course, it's the laboratory of a mad scientist--raucous, noisy and unsettling in a manner presenting The Birthday Party as the love child of Bauhaus and The Jesus Lizard (forgive me for the anachronism here, yet "Big Jesus Trash Can" sounds *a lot* like David Yow's outfit). Roland S. Howard was also an amazing guitar player, by the way, not to mention a brilliant writer of bluesy lines and memorable hooks (as the more restrained and yet ominous "Several Sins" can prove). It's very sad that he passed away so soon.
What I'm gonna add is a bit commonplace for quote-unquote "difficult" and "abrasive" records, but repeated listens do enhance the experience of this collection of scorchers. The most "animated" tracks (a-hem) usually stand out, between Cave's howlings and the hectic rhythm patterns played by that insane drummer, whoever he was. Check this out in the opener "Blast Off" (inexplicably left off in the original vinyl release). Or in "Dead Joe", "The Dim Locator" and the single-only "Release The Bats" (also found on CD versions). And some moodier cuts do stand out as well, especially the terrific title-track.
So, not for the faint of heart, obviously. Yet truly rewarding for anyone interested in the umbrella genre of "post-punk" and goth/no wave shenanigans. There you go, Youri. I have finally listened to this album. I hope you're still enjoying it these days, wherever you are, man.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5+3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 179
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 357
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 206 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 260
Bob Dylan
5/5
Contrary to some reviewers here, I won't say this is Bob Dylan's last *absolute* masterpiece. To me that honor goes to *Rough And Rowdy Ways*. Yes, I'm talking about Mr. Zimmerman's latest record, released a couple of years ago or something. Not that Dylan didn't have his share of duds between *Blood On The Tracks* and his latest LP (and also his share of very good records, fortunately--starting with *Desire, the one that immediately followed this album suggested by the 1001 Albums app today).
Anyway, I wish *Rough And Rowdy Ways* could join this list a.s.a.p.. In the meantime I rejoice at the inclusion of *Blood On The Tracks*. The first four cuts are essential Dylan songs. The three that follow are shining examples of his different songwriting skills as well, even if slightly less essential. And the last three are delicate and heartfelt gems that are actually as essential as the first four. There's not much I can say about this record that others haven't already told in an eloquent and more convincing fashion than anything I could ever attempt to conjure at the moment. I feel tired today, even exhausted. So I'll just shut my trap and listen to Bob's tales. After all, most of the "voices" and characters in this record are world-weary figures. Best way to not feel so alone tonight.
Number of albums left to review: 178
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 358 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 206
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 260
Dr. Octagon
3/5
Clearly, a rap project where self-editing would have strengthened the whole offer. The last leg of this *long* record would have benefited from the erasure of some useless cuts ("Halfsharkalligatorhalfman", "Girl Let Me Touch You", which is in poor taste both musically and lyrically...). The first leg is also a little bumpy, and Kool Keith's rap flow is a little weird at times (plus I can't see what folks see in "Earth People" and its ridiculous vocal hook). Fortunately, the rest of the album is a shining example of the wonders of "alternative hip hop". There are lots of great cuts in the album, too many of them to name them all. "Blue Flower", especially, is a gem.
Guess I'm in two minds about this inclusion. Amazing how the reviews in this section see very different things in *Dr. Octagonecologyst*. Some people focus on the music and the artistry. Others are shocked by the "transgressive" lyrics. Here the discrepancy goes beyond usual personal likes or dislikes about hip hop in general. Maybe why Kool Keith sort of dimissed the album. And Dan The Automator went on to release far more impressive projects later on.
Under that light, I won't include this record in my own list. But that doesn't mean I can't fully enjoy 75% of it.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 177
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 358
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 206
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 261 (including this one)
Finley Quaye
2/5
I apply "The Rule".
See up there in the review section for what that "rule" entails. The first four tracks are nice enough I guess, from the dub instrumentation of the opener to the classic rhythm'n'blues feel of "It's Great When We're Together" and "Sunday Shining"--a minor 1997 hit I still remember today, after decades without any news from Finley Quayle. Unfortunately everything after (and by that I mean *absolutely everything*) lacks dynamics and clear endpoints. Those other songs go nowhere, and what's amazing is that a wide array of styles are experimented here, from dub and trip hop to electronica and world. And yet nothing jumps to your ears. You even have the impression that the record is *both* messy and one-note (at least within *each* genre and subgenre the record tackles with). Which takes the cake a little.
Nothing is grating either, admittedly. But it's hard to believe anyone has ever considered *Maverick A Strike* an "essential album". Maybe the fault lies in Quayle's voice. This Horace Andy clone is a skilled vocal perfomer, yet his distinctive-yet-quite-mechanical inflexions can't fill the blanks left by his compositions. Under that light the useless cheesy effects on his voice in some of those cuts sound like a last-minute attempt to bring dynamics to those tunes, unfortunately to no avail. There's too much style and not enough content there anyway.
Reading the way Finley wrote about himself to introduce his music on Spotify, you have the feeling he's a humble and unassuming individual. Basically a good guy. Tabloids say otherwise, but what do they *really* know about a man's life? The thing is, it's hard to have strong emotions about his music, whether positive or even negative. Hope Finley still enjoys singing to some audience out there, wherever he is now. Spotify suggests so. And glad that this record gave him the push he needed to keep on doing so decades later. Not that said record actually *deserved* a BRIT award. But awards have been given to worse things than this.
2/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums".
7/10 for more general purposes (5+2).
Number of albums left to review: 176
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 358
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 206
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 262 (including this one)
Sonic Youth
5/5
My entry point into the world of that great American band, back in the day. This and *Sister* and *Daydream Nation* and *EVOL* and *Goo* and *Washing Machine* are surely "essential" albums. And they're also mandatory listens for anyone who can enjoy dissonant yet ultimately catchy (alt-)rock that blows your socks off. For the ones who *can't* enjoy such wonders, consider this: by 1992, Sonic Youth had toiled for a decade in the underground, from their no-wave and noise roots to the more melodic, streamlined, and yet equally gritty, intense and adventurous alt-rock of their EVOL - Sister - Daydream Nation "trilogy". And the early nineties were where the mainstream then caught up at last on them, when it was high time most of the overblown and cheesy aesthetics of the eighties went to the bins of music history (helped by the success of Nirvana's *Nevermind*--and also, admittedly, by the band's signature on the same major label, Geffen, a few years earlier). So in that context, *Dirty* feels like a triumph. Sonic Youth had pointed to the way forward all these years, and now came the time to reap what they had sowed, gaining a younger audience as they did so. Another reason why that 1992 album is still *100%* "essential" today.
Of course, it does help that this record is one of Sonic Youth's best albums, equally aggressive and catchy, and that its 60-minute runtime is filled to the brim with rough gems and epic cuts. "100%" is the perfect dry and tight opener, "Drunken Buttefly" is a hectic and wild ride, "Wish Fullfilment" is a romantic scorcher that's equally dreamy and hardcore, "Sugar Kane" is an indie-rock anthem for the ages, and "Theresa's Sound World" and "JC" (about the murder of the band's roadie and friend) are moody, mesmerizing cuts. Also don't miss "Chapel Hill* and *Youth Against Fascism*, which are rocking out like hell while bringing burning topical issues on the table.
Many reviewers up there have already rightly pointed out how Sonic Youth's guitar work aptly plays with tension and relief, disonance and consonance. Since those reviewers have used far better choices of words that I ever could come up with, I invite you to read those reviews again. I also can't help noticing the number of folks who were not familiar with this record and ended up loving it. And that crocheter explaining that she was about to create the creature seen in the album's cover (or a similar one) brought a big stupid grin to my face, by the way. I hope she did create it and put it on her album shelves.
So maybe indeed this record is indeed the best entry point for SY's oeuvre (as it was for me at the time it came out). So don't hesitate to get *dirty* with it. Because it still feels as vital and dynamic decades later as it was in 1992.
Number of albums left to review: less than 200, approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
The Smashing Pumpkins
4/5
Two things prevent me from giving this (in)famous early-nineties "alternative rock" record a 5-star grade. First there's the issue of its guitar sound and overall production values, which sound paper-thin at times--at least if you manage to hear through the avowed grand pretensions of the multiple arrangements and layerings. Maybe recording so many songs for those sessions (far more than the high number of cuts that ended up in the final album) happened to the detriment of giving the production and sound dynamics of this thing a real flair. Hard to say whose fault this is. Billy Corgan's? Alan Moulder's? Flood's?
And of course, there's the issue of the "double-CD" length, with a second volume plagued with too many fillers (half of the tracks by my count)--secondary cuts that would have made interesting b-sides, but that were never the stuff of proper album material. And this time, Corgan's notoriously overblown ego is clearly at fault here. Make no mistake, "double-albums" are *always* topsy-turvy affairs, this goes with the (large) territory here. Yet too many songs in here are way too self-indulgent to allow me to give this thing full marks.
Yet as uneven the whole shebang is, and as obnoxious as Corgan is today (and already *was* at the time, let's face it), *Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness* is still an *iconic* album (and its "haters" certainly helped build its reputation, very ironically). Which is the reason why I will include the record in my own list. With its immediately memorable and singable alt bangers, insane metal-inspired scorchers, heartfelt and touching ballads, along with its more long-winded-yet-ultimately-epic tracks, this album has a bit of everything for everyone, which is where its length comes handy, in spite of the shortcomings the latter also brings. Corgan's vocals and lyrics are obviously an acquired taste, but oddly enough, the whiny, juvenile and somewhat forced tones of what the Smashing Pumpkins frontman and songwriter does have never rubbed me the wrong way. Once again, this goes with the territory here, just as Ozzy Osbourne's antics go with the one of Black Sabbath. I have always banged my head over the chorus of "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek manner. But deep inside, that does not prevent from genuinely enjoying the song. Call that a "guilty pleasure"--the sort of pleasure I can feel for 70% of the record. "Zero" 'and "Jellybelly"'s heavy guitar riffs, "Tonight, Tonight"'s string extravaganza, "Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans"'s prog-rock regalia and "1979"'s chorus immediately come to mind here. But honestly, I could feel the same thing for a lot of other songs taken from the album.
About the latter's interminable length, and just for the sake of a quick experiment, I've imagined what a "redux" version of it would look like. Its duration could fit in a *sole CD*, and I have an inkling such a shorter tracklist would give you a tighter listening experience while still managing to convey the band's multifaceted essence. Maybe I'm wrong about this. Yet it was a really a no-brainer picking the best songs. Maybe some of you can more or less agree with me on this selection. Push the "like" button if you do.
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Tonight, Tonight
Jellybelly
Zero
Here Is No Why
Bullet With Butterfly Wings
To Forgive
Fuck You (An Ode To No One)
Muzzle
Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans
Where Boys Fear To Tread
Bodies
Thirty-Three (or alternatively, In The Arms Of Sleep)
1979
Tales of a Scorched Earth
Love
X.Y.U.
Thru The Eyes Of Ruby (maybe in an edited version - and, if possible, segueing into an extract of the original album's closer, Farewell And Goodnight)
4/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential records".
9/10 for more general purposes (5+4).
Number of albums left to review: 174
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 360 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 206
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 262
Richard Thompson
5/5
This record from a former Fairport Convention member and his wife is a precious offering, in all senses of the word. "Precious" because some of its British Folk-inspired cuts are admittedly quaint (yet not fully devoid of charm). But also "precious" for the memorable gems you can find in it, going from rock and country-adjacent ballads ("When I Get To The Border", the title-track), to a delicate acoustic vignette about late-night misfits, both picturesque and heartfelt ("Down Where The Drunkards Roll"), or to the mysterious, moody and hypnotic tunes closing the proceedings, filled with off-kilter chord changes ("The End Of The Rainbow", "The Great Valerio"). Interestingly, the most striking highlight gathers *all* those qualities in one song: it's the second track "The Calvary Cross", whose slow ominous pace, guitar work and dark harmonies make it an instant outlier. Yet it's not because there are no other songs like that in the album that the rest shouldn't be cherished. All in all, a very endearing record. And the amazing artwork for its cover gives it the 0.5 bonus it needs to make it appear in my "gallery"/"summary".
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 5
9.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 175
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 206
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 262
Ministry
3/5
Went to this one as open-minded as I could. That terrible one-star review at the current third position of this section also motivated me to give Ministry a somewhat benevolent assessment--the individual who wrote said lame "review" obviously had a huge chip on their shoulder because of some of Jourgensen's provocations (which is why they just forgot to talk about the music). Looks like personal religious beliefs can easily lead some folks to become practioners of "bad faith". Oh, the irony.
The thing is, for a record with such a "reputation" in the industrial metal genre, said music is admittedly a little uneven at times, and with an overall mixing that feels very "flat" compared to, say, the dynamic sound of Nine Inch Nails albums. One reviewer in here aptly pointed out it's pretty hard to distinguish the different guitars, and I concur. There were ways to create a similar "mechanical" atmosphere without sacrificing said guitar work, or even the potential crushing impact of those rotating-cogwheels-turned-into-"music", which is what Ministry is all about. I get that the band's sound and production choices did improve a lot after their eighties LPs. Yet they didn't improve enough to make it pass the test of time. Add the fact that half of those compositions are second-tier at best, and *ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ* feels like a missed opportunity indeed.
Not that some tracks are not worth a detour. "N.W.O." and "Jesus Built My Hotrod" are killer cuts -- fun, moody, zany, topical, nonsensical, dark, driven and repetitive/relentless all at the same time. "Just One Fix" follows that groove efficiently, and "Scare Crow" is yet another interesting animal, an admirable 8-minute metal-ambient-industrial mix I wish I could listen to more when I'm in a foul mood.
But the rest is not *really* good, is it? "TV II" is a tongue-in-cheek and *very* thin-sounding parody of death-metal, here rendered practically toothless and harmless. Given that I hate that overall genre, the idea makes me chuckle at least. But I'm not sure this is what Jourgensen intended here... "Hero" is a meat-and-potatoes, quite boring thrash metal cut, with nothing exceptional to it. And "Psalm 69" and "Corrosion" are mostly a messy collage of metal shenanigans (distortion? check ; gated drums? check ; lazy chord sequence? check) and industrial tricks (more vocal samples -- including one of an ecstatic church choir in "Psalm 69", to mock Christians again ; more automatic-mode riffing ; more electronic-sounding drums ; plus the by-now mandatory snippets of sirens / bomb alerts / yelling crowds, etc...) -- a formula that, in here at least, neither rhymes nor reasons, and goes nowhere fast as it turns into endless circles.
As a matter of fact, chances are that you will feel short-changed as you get out of this album. The latter indeed ends on two *instrumentals*, with the second, "Grace", being nothing but a self-indulgent brutalist noisy experiment. Which means that side B clearly misses one highlight or a stand-out track to make it worthwhile. A shame Jourgensen didn't think of that when he conceived the tracklisting. It's rather easy to shock bigots and devout fools. But crafting a truly "essential" album that can affect people out of your niche audience is a far harder task, is it not?
3/5 for the purposes of this list.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 for general competency + 2 for the actual assets of the record + 1 for it being a supposedly "relevant" LP in its own metal subgenre)
Number of albums left to review: 174
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 207 (including this one, even if I doubt I will have room for it at the end)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 262
1/5
So... This is what my square and tone-deaf colleagues are hearing and feeling when they listen to my favourite experimental acts (acts such as Sonic Youth, Can, Beak >, Women, Preoccupations, These New Puritans, Animal Collective, Swans, Death Grips, Squid, Dry Cleaning...). I can't dare imagine what they would feel listening to this transitional, clearly self-indulgent Liars record. Looks like they would probably not even give the thing a thought. Lucky bastards.
If really you had to select one Liars album, *Drums Not Dead* is the one to go to, not this misfire. *They Were So Wrong So We Drowned* sure conveys the idea that the Brooklyn outfit is at least an interesting band to see play live, at least if your ears are attuned to experimental ideas. But as far as studio albums go, this record feels like a meandering and *style-over-substance* pretentious parody of "experimental music". And in this genre as in any other, it's hard to get excited by *bad* ideas. Here's what I would tell to my colleagues who usually enjoy Adèle, Sia or Muse.
The thing is, there's not even a chance my square colleagues will ever listen to Liars one day. And the day this happens, it will probably be the end of the world. Physicians can predict what occurs when matter and anti-matter meet. It's not a pretty sight, and something that is even uglier than what the music on this record.
1/5 for the purposes of this list.
5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 0)
Number of albums left to review: 173
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 207
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 263 (including this one)
Mike Ladd
3/5
This one sounds like Sun Ra reincarnated into a rapper in the world of *Blade Runner*. +1 for sampling Gorecki's *Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs* on "Planet 10". And closer " Feb 4. '99" is quite epic and impressive.
Some cuts are very original, and somehow foretell the "afterfuture" of J Dilla or Flying Lotus. Others are just messy and a little self-indulgent. And some others alternate between the two ends of that spectrum.
Apart from that, Mike Ladd is an interesting figure who has dabbled in experimental hip hop and "art-rap" for decades now. He can be very good. And not only with this album, but with a lot of his other projects, at least from what I heard browsing through his discography today. I might buy second hand LPs and CDs among those...
Not sure any of those records is "essential album" material, though. There's been countless decent experimental hip hop records since the nineties, from Sole to Cloudead, or from The Goats to Saul Williams. And I can't see why Mike Ladd should be singled out in that league, instead of all the others. 1001 is too small a number for that, and we have other genres to take into account.
That said I'll leave the door open to Mr. Ladd as of now. We'll see if I warm up even more to his music later on...
3/5 for the purposes of this list.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 172
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 208 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 263
Apart from the occasional total misfire (the hackneyed and utterly pointless "Last Orders, Please"), those are more-than-decent rock jams, plus two nice ballads. The thing is, as well-performed and well-arranged as those songs are, they are still meat-and-potatoes cuts lacking any truly creative spark on a compositional level. The LP preceding this one, *Long Player*, had a clear stand out track with "Sweet Lady Mary", a ballad that was both moving and harmonically rich. And it had a stellar version of Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed". Unfortunately, nothing in *A Nod Is As Good As A Wink To A Blind Horse* reaches that level. Rod Stewart can show off his raucous vocal skills all he wants, the tunes he sings are ultimately vapid, as impressive as the instrumental layers of the music can be at times (especially in closer "That's All You Need"). Someone should clean up Dimery's list and take out those secondary records that didn't pass the test of time, contrary to many similar acts from the sixties and seventies on both sides of the pond. More room for more recent "essential albums".
2.5/5 for the purposes of this list rounded up to 3.
7.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2.5)
Number of albums left to review: 171
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 208
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 264 (including this one)
CHVRCHES
1/5
Per Wikipedia: 'Kyle Ryan of The A.V. Club complimented Mayberry's songwriting and wrote that Chvrches "have crafted one of the year's best albums, which means that buzz won't be dying down any time soon." '
Well, it *did* die down. The more Chvrches released albums after this debut, the less the rave was noticeable. And so reviews for that cheesy synth pop band became less and less positive, until ten years later, virtually no one gives a rat's ass about their music. And truth be told, the latter was not even that extraordinary in that debut LP.
Chvrches is, for all intents and purposes, a watered-down version of The Knife / Fever Ray, Baths or early Grimes, without the quirks or the creative spark that made the latter artful, mesmerizing or inspiring. With a different, more sophisticated chord sequence, cuts such as "Lies" or "Science/Visions" could have had some merits. Unfortunately, style *always* takes precedence over substance in *The Bones Of What You Believe*, a revealing title in the sense that there's zero "flesh" in this album. The result is the blandest harmonies and the most predictable vocal lines you can imagine this side of late-noughts / early 2010s "poptimism". Lauren Mayberry is not even that stellar a performer. Behind all the gloss, some of the vocals have their share of flaws and undercooked aspects. And for a record with such obvious commercial goals, such flaws are laughable at best.
So including this record in a 1001 "essential albums" list only betrays how out of touch said list has become for the last two decades. Dimery and co. trying to stay "hip" during the 21st century mostly produced blunders of epic proportions. As is the case here. Incredible how this album aged fast. You can bet your boots the next time there will be an eighties resurgence, most listeners with a decent knowledge of music history will still dismiss Chvrches as a mere footnote about passing trends that don't matter in the long run (file under "poptimism", once again).
Of course, that will take out Taylor Swift fans, who might see some sort of lineage between Chvrches and their idol's latest synth-pop "era". But are Taylor Swift fans *really* interested in music history? The jury's still out on this one...
1/5 for the purposes of this list.
6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1)
Number of albums left to review: 170
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 208
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 265 (including this one)
Erykah Badu
3/5
Groove. That word can elicit wonderful memories of music. But there's also a less pleasant connotation to that term, especially when it's associated with more negative-sounding words. As in the phrase "being stuck into one single groove".
I just can't get the appeal of early-noughts "neo-soul", generally speaking. It's a lush sound for sure, but it's usually devoid of memorable vocal hooks and harmonies. Who suddenly decided that "soul" can't be found in the latter, and that you'd have to go to drowsy instrumentation and unimaginatic vocal lines instead--with a result that's so "laidback" that you actually end up lying on the cold hard floor? I'd rather have livelier hip hop-inspired beats instead, and not as many shapeless, meandering compositions lacking any true backbone as they run into endless circles.
Fans of this genre need to explain to me what they hear when they listen to it. My take is that those listeners are more in love with "sound" than with music per se--music as in "surprising harmonies", "enticing rhythms", "dynamic chord sequence", "verse/chorus/verse", " propulsive middle-eight", "experimental flair"... All of which you can find in classic "soul music", by the way. But very rarely in Erykah Badu's "Mama's Gun*. A nice flute sound here and there, or a double-bass flourish, or a sensual piano fill are all fine enough. But if that's all you can notice in a record, I think you're doing something wrong. Especially when said record is so damn long. Self-editing never hurts when you're privileging mood over compositional chops. Unless you admit writing "wallpaper music", like Brian Eno. Seems to me this is not Erikah's goal here. But what is her goal? Does anyone even know?
I might admit being under the sway of a blind cultural spot here. So I'll refrain giving this record the lowest mark this app can provide (a 1/5 is still equalling a 6/10 grade for more general purposes in my book, but I won't go as low as that on this one, don't worry). In the middle of the tracklist, "A.D. 2000" get things going a little, thanks to its mesmerizing tones (and it does not hurt that the song is a heartfelt tribute to a victim of police violence). And at the umpteenth minutes, you have two stellar tracks back-to-back. They're "Time's A Wastin" and "Green Eyes", nicely closing the proceedings. The first is a mysterious-sounding, strings-enhanced, progressive soul gem (seventies progressive soul being the corrective to what late-nineties / early-noughts "neo-soul" constantly missed). And the latter is a ten-minute wonder, almost starting like a Billie Holiday bluesy standard, and then building up to a multi-layered jazz epic, glowing like a perfect closer should glow. For those three tracks, and for the admittedly tasteful (yet ultimately empty) ditherings found elsewhere in the record, I can give a 7.5/10 grade (5 + 2.5). But as far as "essential albums" go, it's a 2.5/5 grade, here rounded up to a 3/5 mark. Hope Mama's not gonna point her gun at me for that.
Number of albums left to review: 169
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 208
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 266 (including this one)
Dexys Midnight Runners
3/5
"Geno" is no "Come On Eileen". But it's still a nice hit. Apart from that, this debut surely has a voice of its own with its ska-tinged new wave / Northern soul / blue-eyed soul shenanigans, even if those styles often appear a little quaint to my ears. The voice is messy, but also fully expressive. And the natural-sounding production sounds honest enough. Leaving the door open to this one, even if the first listen was not a full blast.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 169
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 209 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 266
Simon & Garfunkel
4/5
Two distinct grooves run in this album, whose songs are like "Couplets out of rhyme / In syncopated time", as one of the best tracks of the record phrases it.
The most prevalent groove displays what Simon And Garfunkel are mostly known for, i.e. delicate folk-inspired ballads with hushed vocals, tastefully arranged, and with lyrics whose poetry can't fail to impress. In that group of generally short songs, a couple of cuts may sound a little quaint, stilted, or even somewhat half-baked and unconclusive ("Cloudy", the Art Garfunkel-led "For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her"). But the rest is actually an incredible collection of tunes. Of course, there's the opener "Scarborough Fair / Canticle", an original composition that has all the earmarks of a centuries-old traditional song, and probably one of the most famous tracks ever sung by S&G. Yet it's "The Dangling Conversation", about a couple of rich intellectuals slowly becoming out of sync with each other--they're the "Verses out of rhythm / Couplets out of rhymes" mentioned earlier--that crowns that group of folk ballads, both musically (Those incredible chord changes! That moving string arrangement!) and lyrically--the bite of Simon's words is so effective and subtly expressed here that they become a miniature literary masterpiece. Right after this gem, the existential and elegiac overtones of "Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall" slap as well. And so does "A Poem On The Underground Wall", whose simple little story sums up the counter-cultural concerns of the sixties in such an elegant and evocative fashion. Which 'four-letter word' do you think was written on that wall? "Fuck"? "Shit"? "ACAB?" (lol). That cut also has a dreamy organ line in the background to convey the nightly atmosphere surrounding the events of the song, evidence enough that Simon rarely sacrificed musicality over narrative purposes in his tunes. As for the closer "7' o'clock News / Silent Night", it also serves as a historical document about the sixties, with its news bulletin heard above the Christmas song in the background. As such, it's nothing more than an "outro" of sorts. But it's in keeping with the contemporary concerns sprinkled throughout the record.
That particular topical streak, navigating between a somewhat distanced and critical glance at the world of "hippies" and some sort of tenderness towards the latter, is actually even more represented in the second group of songs, smartly (and opportunistically) using what was hip in 1965 to add more "commercial" flavours throughout the record. One needs to remember that the world-famous version of Simon And Garfunkel's signature song "The Sound Of Silence", released the year before, was actually a "remix" made by Tom Wilson (Bob Dylan's producer), i.e. an "overdubbed" version using "rock" arrangements to liven up things a little. Just as they did for the *Sounds Of Silence* album, in *Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme*, the duo tagged along to follow Wilson's direction for the livelier tracks. "Homeward Bound" is undoubtedly the hit song in that latter group, but the patchouli-scenting "Patterns", the happy-go-lucky "The 59th Street Bridge Song", and the snarling "The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine" (whose parody of advertising hasn't aged a day--you could swear Paul Simon refers to i-phones at times) are also worth the admittance price. Lastly, "A Simple Desultory Phillipic" is clearly intended as a lesser cut, but the fact that it's a both a homage and a parody of Bob Dylan (plus a sly dig at some of his most devoted fans) makes it a fun listen for anyone interested in that particular era.
So yeah, it's a very good album. The thing is, it's one of thoses rare cases where the whole is actually *less* than the sum of its parts. Many 180-degree turns are a little jarring in this record, as if Simon and Garfunkel had not yet exactly found the way to balance the two ends of the spectrum they're exploring here. It's a minor grudge for sure, but given that the duo would then find a more satisfactory and effective way to organize the "flow" of their subsequent LPs *Bookends* and *Bridge Over Troubled Waters*, it's a grudge that can still work against *Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme*. Yet if a book about the 100 best *transitional* albums was ever written, you can bet your boots this record would find its place in the top ten list. After all, some of those "transitional" LPs are sometimes the most endearing to music fans.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9/10 for more general purposes (5+4)
Number of albums left to review: 168
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 210 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 266
Cat Stevens
3/5
*Sentiment*. As a French speaker, I've always found the possible undertones of that English word interesting--undertones that are absent in the equivalent of said word in my native language, i.e. the cognate word "sentiment", which is a rather "neutral" noun compared to its English version. The latter indeed *either* seems to point to an emphatic understanding of how noble feelings can be expressed--with somewhat positive connotations--*or conversely*, it is quite a derisive word to mock slush, mawkishness and oversensitivity (in a second meaning here close to "sensiblerie" in French). It's as if the Brits and Americans couldn't decide what to do with the word. Which, from my vantage point, is quite a weird situation.
Of course, and you've probably guessed it by now, this ambiguous impression is exactly what I feel about this album, and about Cat Stevens in general. On the one hand I can't help admiring the simple (yet effective and heartfelt) nature of the British folkman's signature songs, three of which, "Where Do The Children Play?", "Hard-Headed Woman" and the absolutely stellar hit "Wild World", are obviously standing out as the first three cuts of this record. On the other hand, such constant display of sentimentality risks becoming a little annoying at some point. The gentler cuts are a little too gentle. And in the somewhat livelier numbers, Stevens' vocal performance switches to a borderline "overkill" mode that wears my patience thin.
To put it in a nutshell, there's something a little too quaint, "safe" or even bland in those songs. They're admittedly well-written tunes, but they're also streamlined to a fault, and devoid of any risky moments instrumentally speaking. "Going Folk" doesn't necessarily imply you can't get a little rough and dirty once in a while. Ask Neil Young, Fairport Convention or The Incredible String Band. Well, maybe not the latter act. Feels like they would be too leftfiled and "out there" for fans of this record anyway... Don't want to ruffle any feathers here.
So, more tea? Well the first cups were fine. But if I drink too many of those, I might just end up peeing on myself. Compilation *The Very Best Of Cat Stevens* serves all my needs whenever the British folkster is concerned, think you very much. Don't think I need this more specific brand of Roibos on my shelves. At least as of now.
Thanks for asking, though. One can still be polite when talking about a "talent" that's so instantly recognizable. Who said French dudes like me couldn't try to be gracious once in a while? 😉
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums".
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 167
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 211 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 266
Billy Joel
1/5
During the course of *The Sopranos*, one episode mentions that Tony Soprano and his wife Carmela have booked tickets for a Billy Joel concert. Although we never see them go to the gig (this happens between episodes), I remember telling myself that I should listen to a Billy Joel album one day, just to see if there were hidden references or cultural tidbits there that this favourite TV series of mine could have sprinkled elsewhere. And sure enough, the New Jersey setting of *The Stranger*'s opener "Movin' Out" (a well-put rock track with memorable vocal and instrumental hooks) sounded familiar to me. The mere fact that the secondary title of this cut is called "*Anthony*'s Song" even suggests that David Chase could have found inspiration in that tune to name his lead character. Tony Soprano's tastes for the most commercially viable strands of boomer rock indeed align with Billy Joel's offerings on this record. And I have a sneaking suspicion Chase and his writers were being ironic when they made Tony a fan of Joel. Even though it's sometimes difficult to distinguish irony form earnestness in the show, including for its soundtrack or musical references...
That said, the lyrics of second track "The Stranger" seem to suggest a different picture. Here are expressed concerns about the power of the unconscious and subconscious, and also about the hypocrisy of social mores, which are all very present in David Chase's show. This might just be a coincidence. But if that's the case, the latter allowed me to have a personal interest in Joel's music for the duration of a second track, at least. Which is not a given. The whistling part of the intro and outro sections of this song (also played again at the very end of the album bearing its name) is nice enough in its Ennio Morricone undertones. But the dad-rock, somewhat "funky" shenanigans of the song itself are a bit of a letdown compared to the opener, and also to Joel's obvious models Steely Dan, Paul McCartney or Randy Newman. Which says a lot about the amount of cheese used here.
Because one thing's for sure, album *The Stranger* is such a downright *cheesy* record that it's hard not to feel ironic about it today. That some reviewers in here point out that Joel only became a purveyor of hackneyed and grating music a few albums after this one is mind-boggling to me. And so is the incredibly *high* global score for this album on this app. How many misguided boomers à la Tony Soprano are roaming in this group? Is it because this record garnered Grammies in 1977? Winning Grammies has never been a sure sign of artistic success. Look at some of the albums garnering Grammy Awards *today* and weep, you old fools.
Sure, this record has its share of famous hits, with the slow-paced, sax-enhanced number "Just The Way You Are" leading the aural assault--a cut whose sickening fake sentimentality makes you wish it should never have become a hit in the first place. Never noticed the subtle synth layers in the song's background before, which sound nice enough, but also come off as if they had been directly nicked from 10cc's "I'm Not In Love". The song is a sacharine cheesefest anyway, so loaded with sugar I'm starting to worry about my insulin level.
"Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" is a little more interesting, maybe. I already knew its introductory section, but I had never realized it was a "2-in-1" song, with a lengthy and livelier middle sequence telling about the marriage and divorce of former teenage friends of the song's protagonist, who is himself hesitating to commit adultery--with a old flame of his that he's meeting after all these years in that titular "Italian restaurant". Sorry for the novel here, but at least, that's what I've gathered from the subtext of this one. The thing is, in the course of his disjointed narrative, it's never clear if Joel is leaving things ambiguous on purpose, or if he's just an awkward storyteller. And fittingly, the musical structure of this one conveys the same sort of ambiguity. After two different lively and driven sections at the center of this 7-minute track, featuring an inspiring vocal performance, said structure syddenly aims for a quick Las Vegas-style build-up, before returning to the "bottle of red, bottle of white" routine of the intro section (iconic lines, I'm gonna give them that). But truth be told, the whole composition neither rhymes nor reasons, and so feels as unconclusive as the lyrics are.
Following that partial misfire, "Vienna" is a more "existential" version of the synth-enhanced ballad "Just The Way You Are". Unfortunately, its undeniable truths about the shortness of life are ruined by an accordion player, just like when you're bothered by the latter at a terrace when you just want to have a conversation with your partner. After that, "Only The Good Die Young" is a blue-eyed soul and reggae-inspired cut whose horn section is as on-the-nose as its lyrics about how Joel tries to seduce a "Catholic girl" (and naming her "Virginia" is such a ridiculous and laughable choice that the whole conceit crumbles on itself quick). "Just Like A Woman" is a borderline misogynistic 3/4 piano ballad conveying the some sort of artificial sentimentality used in "Just The Way You Are". "Get It Right The First Time" harnesses Brazilian flavours to hide its mundane nature as a boomer rock cut--rather effectively, I would add in a somewhat benevolent mood. And "Everybody Has A Dream" is a return to the quaint, oversentimental tones explored before, this time supported by a massive background choir that, willingly or not, underlines all too well the delusions of grandeurs dreams are all too often made of.
And that's it. This is the "album of the year" according to many pundits and commentators in 1977, the year punk broke out. What a blast. At least, Fleetwood Mac's *Rumours* aged with grace.
I could still have given Billy Joel's *The Stranger* two stars. But then, listening to it once again, I've just realized one thing: apart from a couple of songs here and there, a lot of the man's vocal inflexions are actually just annoying as hell, going from "overkill" moments to others betraying a somewhat flimsy control of pitch. Which takes the cake when you're having those sorts of mainstream ambitions. One star then, equalling a 6/10 grade (5+1 for "cultural impact), here following purposes others than the ones used for a list of "essential albums". I always try to be kind to "strangers". But it looks like I've reached my limit here. Please don't send Tony Soprano to my house. I don't think I deserve having my kneecaps destroyed just because I don't like this record.
Number of albums left to review: 166
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 211
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 267 (including this one)
John Martyn
2/5
It's a "mixed bag", as many reviews topping this section point out. The good (moving folk tunes "Over The Hill" or "Go Down Easy" ; the more-mundane-yet-decent "May You Never") and the groundbreaking (the instrumentation of "Solid Air", the airy, experimental conclusion of "I'd Rather Be The Devil"--sounding like nothing else in 1973) are mixed with the inconsequential,("The Man In The Station", which goes nowhere fast ; "Dreams By The Sea", immediately forgettable ; "The Easy Blues", lively but a little empty) and the utterly bad, bordering on muzak, such as "Solid Air"', once again, along with main song "I'd Rather Be The Devil", which are either hackneyed or awkward as compositions...
Odd how this tracklisting neither rhymes nor reasons. And this lack of cohesivemess is worsened by one key feature for the jazzy / bluesy cuts. John Martyn was a very skilled guitar player and singer-songwiter--a treat for the folk tunes. Yet for the jazzier tracks, he took on a different persona, inexplicably. And on those tracks, he sings as if he had a potato in his mouth.
The result come off as overaffected, and it's mind-boggling to consider no one was in a position to advise Martyn against this very strange choice for his vocal performance. Mixing folk music and jazzy flavours is a delicate endeavor. You need a voice of your own, both figuratively and literally speaking. Joni Mitchelll had such voice. John Martyn had a potato.
Number of albums left to review: 165
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 211
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 268 (including this one)
Deee-Lite
1/5
If ever there was a book about the 1001 *singles* you need to listen to before you die, "Groove Is In The Heart" would be in it, probably in a very prominent position. Amazing how such a crazy mix of so many different styles can come off as instantly memorable and likable. And how that track can still have everyone shaking their hips on a dancefloor, even today.
That single is indeed a dance party anthem for the ages, drawing from a vast array of key influences, through all sorts of samples, stylistic borrowings or featurings within the track. There's a bit of everything in it: Herbie Hancock for the bassline ; Vernon Burch for the drum track and the hilarious slide whistles ; a wink to Parliament-Funkadelic (and G-Funk in general) through the presence of bassist Bootsy Collins ; sixties psychedelic girls group and The B-52's for the infectious main vocals ; a very subliminal layer of house music ; and, last but not least, a large serving of "daisy age rap", via the presence of Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest, whose featuring adds yet another layer of fun. All of this gathered in a single song shouldn't work on paper. Yet in spite of its all-in-the-pot nature, said song holds up like no other. An absolute miracle.
Unfortunately, the album this gem is taken from is simply not very good. Indeed, most (if not *all*) of its other cuts have aged like milk--between the attempts at commercial dance music and more minimalistic house music dirges, both running into circles without buiding up to anything thrilling, contrary to what the best acts in that genre can offer. "Groove Is In The Heart" promised an album that could be light-hearted, fun, richly textured, precisely layered and adventurous. What we have instead is a display of lazy formulas, shallow and repetitive patterns, and a distinctive lack of imagination totally at odds with the album's centerpiece. Too bad. I was ready for a record digging the vein that single was so good at digging. Guess I will have to fantasize about what *World Clique* could have been in my dreams instead.
Number of albums left to review: 164
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 361
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 211
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 269 (including this one)
Led Zeppelin
5/5
No list such as this one can omit at least four or even five of the "classic" albums recorded by Led Zeppelin during their heyday. *II* is not even my favourite LP by the legendary British rock band--I prefer the peaks of *III*, *IV* and *Physical Graffiti* to the high plateau of this one--but it's certainly the most cohesive offering of their career.
Of course, the band pillaged the music and riffs of key bluesmen for this one, a form of cultural appropriation that would be viewed very suspiciously today, and rightly so. But even with that in mind you can't deny Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham's genius, as well as their stellar performing chops, along with the perfect production that was used to transcend the latter. Here lie the little details that can make the record sound fresh decades and decades after its release.There is something akin to a mystical atmosphere in the way those blues riffs come off here--and that mystic aura is nowhere as striking as it is in "Heartbreaker", where you start to suspect Page and Plant indeed have had some shady transactional dealings with "the man in black" so as to succeed in harnessing such a seductive devilry from start to finish.
Which doesn't mean we should forget the other gems in the record. By the way, the production values also transcend other details not directly related to blues-rock or "hard-rock": One example among many: that elegiac organ in the airy yet impressive ballad / torch song "Thank You". Add a quite large array of styles to the mix--"The Lemon Song" and its unpredictable traps / rhythm changes / 180-degree turns, going from sleazy to hectic ; "Living Loving Maid" and its callback to the sixties upbeat British Invasion shenanigans the Yardbirds had popularized a few years back (with or without Page) ; the terrific "Ramble On", oscillating between incredibly catchy electric / electrified hooks and some more acoustic flavours foretelling the countryside wonders of *III* ; or the percussive and repetitive/obsessive extravaganza of "Moby Dick", which chases the most unbelievable Leviathan the rock idiom has ever known: a drum solo that can actually truly excite you instead of boring you to tears--and you end up with a masterpiece. Jimmy Page is a versatile guitarist, driven by a wild imagination that allows him to be everything at once: precise, messy, vituosistic, instinctive, highly harmonic, noisy, forceful, subtle... Robert Plant's high-pitched yet manly voice is haunted by all the devils of the Delta. John Bonham is not a drummer, he's a tornado. And John Paul Jones is the stable rock over which the whole endeavor stands (without his steady hand on the bass, all of this piling up of elements would crumble under its own ridiculous weight).
Finally, *II* also harbors one of the most extraordinary killer LP openers of all time, "Whole Lotta Love"--whose cyclical and descending guitar licks, drug-addled, "psychedelic" middle section, and final guitar solo make the whole album worth a visit on their own. *Led Zeppelin* is obviously the epitome of "dad-rock" today (actually, more like *grandad rock*, even). It's the platonic ideal of what a blues-influenced, early hard-rock LP is. And yet sometimes Dad is not just an old fool, he sounds *damn* right as he elects to tell his truths to the young'uns. As in here.
5/5, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 163
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 362 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 211
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 269
Public Image Ltd.
4/5
It takes some (post-punk) nerve to start your second album with the most overlong, repetitive improvisational dirge within its tracklisting. Very much a second hand version of the sorts of cold, hopeless soundscapes Joy Division had specialized in during those late-seventies years, "Albatross" never soars in the course of its 10 minutes indeed. Instead, it stays stuck to the rotten ground, eliciting an ill-at-ease response at best. This opener bordering on parody is definitely not a proper way to welcome your listener.
Fortunately, the rest usually fares far better if you're interested in experimental grooves that are admittedly unsettling, and yet often evocative--the sort of groove fitting to a society of misfits living in desolated warehouses after the apocalypse. The first half of this album is especially notable in that regard. "Memories" is a somewhat intense cut where the record truly hits its stride. "Swan Lake" builds up its own noisy mayhem around the famous Tchaikovsky leitmotiv--an ironic borrowing that blurs the line between catchiness and a total mockery of it. And while "Poptones" and "Careering" explore moodier territories, subsequent tracks like "No Birds" manage to liven up the proceedings a little (if you can consider demented howls over cranky noises a proper option to liven things up). The last half of the album is less memorable, but it often succeeds in pulling the rug from under your feet (those stylistic changes) while keeping you on your toes (the tension remains in spite of those 180-degree turns). Which is quite a feat, you gotta admit it. :)
PIL inherit from all sorts of influences here, from punk to Can to dub to musique concrete. But their sound is unmistakably theirs. They admitted a large part of this album has been "improvised" or written on the spot as they booked late-nights sessions between other bands in the studio (the famous metal packaging came first, what music would turn out to be was only considered later). But somehow, the artful pretense worked out in this case--even if not totally--the 10/10 or 5-star reviews feel a little unwarranted in 2024. But the overall proposition still holds water today, given how vital the current post-punk scene feels like.
Of course, one can't write a small review of this record without saying a few words about the individual contributions of PIL's key members at the time. Jah Wooble's dub basslines are often mesmerizing. David Levine's slashing guitar lines and overall sound are both spooky and groundbreaking. And of course, there's John Lydon. Yes, the public persona of the former Sex Pistols is 'obnoxious' in all the worst meanings of the term today. He is a "reactionary" fool, an old man yelling at clouds. But maybe the man has always been a fraud after all. The thing is, in this record (as in the Pistols' *Never Mind The Bollocks* and a couple of other PIL albums), the fraud manages to convince you he is the best thing that could have occured to punk and its later offshoots. And you just need to be somewhat open-minded for this miracle to happen. The sort of miracle that didn't happen on this app, given the small global score *Metal Box* received, admittedly.
My score is different:
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5+3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 160
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 362
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 212 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 269
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
What's interesting in that sophomore album from The Jimi Hendrix Experience is that its many highlights are slightly less iconic than the ones found in *Are You Experienced* and *Electric Ladyland*. And oddly enough, this is what makes it sound fresh after all these years, because those great tunes can be listened to for what they are, instead of others that you already know by heart through their uses for TV, commercials, videos or film soundtracks. It's easier to put yourself in the shoes of a rock fan in 1967, discovering the album for the first time.
Not that this record doesn't have its share of memorable cuts, just like the two others quoted up there. There's the lively "magic" of the titular "Spanish Cstle". There's the delicate glockenspiel-addled ballad "Little Wing", quickly followed by the intricate bluesy lines of "If 6 Was 9". In the vein of "Little Wing" you also have "Castles Made Of Sand" (admittedly in a livelier mode, thnks to its upbet rhythms, impressive chord changes, and its "backwards-recorded" guitar solo) and also "One Rainy Wish", aptly couterbalanced by rockers "You Got Me Floatin'" and "Little Miss Lover". Even a deep cut such as the Noel Redding-led sixties ditty "She's So Fine" sees Jimi adding his trademark set of sparks through one of his hectic solos. And closing the proceedings, you have the catchy and moving track giving part of its name to the album, and building up to one of the most epic solos and psychedelic instrumental climaxes of the rock idiom (whose phasing sound has aged like fine wine, by the way).
*Axis: Bold As Love* is often seen as a moodier offerring compared to the other Jimi Hendrix albums, probably because it starts with the low-key "Up From the Skies" (after that weird and tongue-in-cheek "Exp" intro"). It's true that when he croons and goes gentle there, Jimi displayed a subtlety and restraint he is not often associated with. But when this thing rocks, man, it *rocks*. Best of both worlds, even without the truly iconic stuff.
Number of albums left to review: 160
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 363 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 212
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 269
The Who
5/5
Mod masterpiece. Probably the one album among the representatives of that British sixties rock subgenre to keep. And, well, *The Who* is written on its cover. That's gotta count for something, right?
Of course, there's the stuttering title-track, itself one of the most iconic rock singles of all times. But contrary to the early forays of the Kinks--another close-sounding London act who met early success in the singles charts at the time--the album this gem ended in is almost as good as its most famous song--if not actually *perfect*. The Kinks would refine the art of the long player album some time after the success of "You Really Got Me". But in comparison, The Who got that art *right* on their very first attempt. Let's just say that the stars aligned here, thanks to American producer Shel Talmy and a bunch of other key players.
First, there are a few r'n'b / blues covers (two James Brown hits, plus Bo Diddley's "I'm A Man"--in quite a strange version of it until Townshend's guitar roars, justifying the whole idea). All of which place the album in that mod lineage The Who would only revisit in a nostalgic / operatic fashion in the far later double album *Quadrophenia*. Here, in 1965, those early r'n'b cuts are not drowned in long, complicated narratives. They're mostly here to bring variety to the tracklisting, and to be honest, they serve their part well. But you can't say they're the best thing in this record, as good as they are.
Because the rest of the songs (most of them taken from a second recording session) explore even more promising territories. And as they do so, they foretell the future of the rock idiom, from punk to hard rock to power pop. The raga-rock-inspired "The Good's Gone" displays mesmerizing menacing tones for instance (through the guitar sound, the chord changes, and the way Roger Daltrey uses his pipes, in a surprisingly low fashion here). Elsewhere, both Daltrey and the backing vocals shine brighter, aiming for the skies. In opener "Out In The Streets" first, but more specifically in the power pop jewel "Much Too Much", the legendary hit "The Kids Are Alright" or in "Circles" (only found in the US version of the album). Digging that vein, "A Legal Matter" and "It's Not True" also offer bundles of early rock'n'roll joys. And if "La-La-La Lies" is more airy and upbeat, it's still manages to slap, never ruining the overall sense of energy.
So Townshend's songwriting is pitch-pefect in this record. And his guitar lets generous shares of sparks fly off in the air (even in the compositionally mundane "The Ox", which almost becomes a pre-Stooges, proto-punk scorcher during its conclusion, thanks to Townshend's aggressive solo). Entwhistle also has impressive moments (see the title-track, for example). And, needless to say, drummer Keith Moon is a powerhouse in this debut, thanks to his sense of attack, his crazy drum fills, and his overall youthful, take-no-quarter performance.
5 stars, what else? The Who obviously recorded more iconic (and far more complex) LPs after this one--landmarks of classic rock / hard rock so ambitious they initiated the whole "rock-opera" thing (*The Who Sell Out*, *Tommy*, *Who's Next*). But it's here, with this debut, that they sound the most fun, the most spontaneous, and the most straightforward. Sometimes simplicity is better than all-too-grand ambitions. Especially when it's the solid *rock* over which everything else can be built later on.
Number of albums left to review: 159
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 364 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 212
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 269
Ella Fitzgerald
4/5
How many reviewers among those who gave a 4/5 or 5/5 mark to this release listened to the latter until the instrumental pieces conducted by Nelson Riddle on disc 6? Yes, disc *6*! Pretty sure there's not many of them.
Technically, *The Gershwin Project* is not a compilation, contrary to what some complainers on this app grumbled about. It's a discrete project assembling recordings made for a year that were all designed for this "anthology" boxset. The thing is, the complainers might still have a point here: can you consider this mammoth project as an "album"? I mean, really? Isn't the length of the whole thing jeopardizing its inclusion in the list?
Sacharine jazz ballads and big band shenanigans for the livelier cuts are the two mandatory modes explored in this gargantuan set of records making the best of its orchestral personel. The good news is that, for the first two discs at least, there's enough variety and invention infused into the songwriting and performances to make far less repetitive than expected. A stellar string of key staple songs on the first side of the first record also nicely propels the whole shebang: the languid "But Not For Me", the dreamy "The One And Only", "Let's Call The Whole Thing Off" and its iconic "tom-EI-to" / "To-MAH-to" routine, that most listeners already know, "Beginner's Luck", "Oh Lady Be Good", " Nice Work If You Can Get It"... On disc 2, the impressive "The Man I Love" ups the ante, and takes the symphonic /orchestral proceedings a notch further, from the impressionistic, Debussy-indebted introduction to its epic climax at the end--all enhanced by so many intense chord changes. George Gershwin was undoubtedly a master when it came to mixing jazz and classical vocabularies. And elsewhere on that second disc, the witty lyrics of his brother Ira also provide many memorable moments, as in "By Strauss", "They All Laughed", "My Cousin In Milwaukee", or "Somebody From Somewhere".
So when the genius of the two brothers work in perfect unison, as in the third disc's "A Foggy Day" (also an iconic cut), you have the best of what this "songbook" can offer you. The problem is that it's a near-impossible task to digest those five or six discs in one sitting, as imaginative as the Gershwin brothers are in that admittedly "restricted" and "retro" genre. After a while, all the sophisticated arrangements and cutesy turns-of-phrases tend to blur into each other. And so do the tunes.
What's really at fault here is the all-encompassing presentation: what should churn out musical sparks come off as all-too "calculated", as if George and Ira were some sort of maths geniuses applying formulas to create all those similar-sounding tracks, somehow ruining their potential emotions (hence the pretentious use of French "high art" for the album cover?). It's too much in one single serving. To the point that you might find the relish a little too sickening.
What's left in your memories is Ella Fitzgerald's perfect voice, the sweet inflexions of the vocal performance--its crooning, the winks, the sheer emotion and the whimsical feeling said performance conveys depending on the tune. She's hilarious in " Let's Call The Whole Thing Off", vulnerable in the ballads, and sensual in the sexier cuts. But even someone like Ella can't bring the dynamics this overlong tracklist needs. Except for some hardcore jazz / classical fans, this boxset might therefore be useful only to play some unobtrusive soundtrack on a sunday afternoon--with many, *many* cuts that will never force your attention towards them. Moody for sure. But "essential"?
So shall we "call the whole thing off" or "call the calling off off" ? The jury's still out on this one. To be fair I didn't have the time to listen to the fourth and fifth discs, which is a shame since that means that if hidden gems are hidden there, I couldn't listen to them. Just like a lot of people in here, I will give a "good grade" for the overall presentation and talents involved, and then move on to another thing. Wish there was an Ella Fitzgerald album that is a middle ground between the grand yet flawed ambitions of this project and, say, the succint, straightforward and streamlined-to-a-fault "Ella and Louis (Armstrong)" records. Maybe there is one. But this list here has yet to provide its name for me.
Number of albums left to review: 158
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 364
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 213 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 269
Khaled
2/5
Seven years before *Kenza*, Khaled hit the charts with the catchy and animated single "Didi", at least in the Arabic world, but also in the French mainstream billboard. Before that--that is to say before he decided to "westernize" his sound, recording in Europe and the States--he was already a living legend in the Algerian "raï" genre. And his crossover success in 1992 was quite memorable in France, where many immigrant communities originally hailing from North Africa live.
Four years later, he found commercial sucess again with ballad "Aïcha", another crossover hit in the French pop charts written by the cheesy-yet-proficient novelty pop singer-songwriter Jean-Jacques Goldman. I feel extremely weird writing the latter's name on this app, by the way, since Goldman is a figure I guess my English-speaking colleagues in here have never heard about, and yet he is someone who has been famous nationwide in France since the early eighties.
To return to Khaled, he kept trying to "modernize" the *raï* genre after those two hits, but never to the point where he would forget the commercial potential of his music. Raï has its purists, or so I hear. But it's a first and foremost a "popular" genre. So I guess you can't blame the Algerian singer because of that.
All of this is to provide a bit of context for the people who have never heard of Khaled before. To be fair, and as objectively as I can try to be, selecting this 1999 album for such a list feels like being a latecomer to one of those North African community parties the "raï" genre is a popular ingredient of. It's always a little disappointing or laughable when Dimery and co. catch some trendy trains a little too late. It gives you the impression they're not really sincere or well-informed. Which takes the cake when most of your job is to write about music.
About "Kenza": there are few standout tracks in this very "professional" record, and none of them is as memorable as "Didi" (even in a "bad" way, like "Aïcha" was). "El Harba Wine" feels nice thanks to the impressive Bollywood-inspired vocal contributions of British-Indian singer Amar. Electro-adjacent "Trigue Lycee" also has mesmerizing, UK-techno-inspired layers of synths. And, on the second half of the record, the more "traditional-oriented" tracks such as "Melha" and "Raba-Raba" have aged better than the dance music chessefest found in too many parts of the album. Interestingly, prog-rock and electronic stalwart Steve Hillage was involved in most of those more "traditional"-sounding cuts--evidence enough that Khaled's closer Algerian or French-Algerian collaborators didn't care much about "traditions" at this point. contrary to Hillage.
This was for the assets of this record. Now the problem is that the album's flaws weigh heavier in the grand scheme of things. Placed in a pivotal point of the tracklist, towards the end of side one, the hackneyed, "now-that's-what-I-call-hits"- inspired danceteria of "E'dir E'sseba" and "Ya Aachkou" is borderline unlistenable today. Before that, another Jean-Jacques Goldman-penned cut named "C'est la Nuit" tries to reproduce the success of "Aïcha", to no avail. I just knew Goldman had written that song without checking the credits or even hearing Khaled's voice singing in French. Evidence enough as to how predictable and quaint that sort of Jean Jacques Goldman novelty shtick had become by 1999.
Worse, the cover of John Lennon's "Imagine" found right after "C'est La Nuit" (and right before "E'dir E'sseba") reaches such high cornball levels on your cheese-o-meter that it's hard not to smirk at it with disgust. "Imagine" is already a tricky song to cover given how syrupy the original may sound to some ears (not mine, yet I can respect the feeling other listeners have about it). And here, in this particular cover, the instrumentation and production values are so bland and devoid of any true artistic flair that the whole endeavor becomes authentically sickening. I can relate to the original plan Khaled had to have verses sung by him in Arabic and others sung in Hebrew by Noa, an Israeli singer. A commendable initiative for sure. And yet here we are, 25 years later, where the disaster of terrorism and warfare, killing innocent people on a daily basis, rage on on both "sides" in the Middle East--with fanatics and crooked politicians routinely trampling human rights, murdering women and children, and fanning the worst sorts of extremist, pro-war sentiment there can be. Under that light, any benevolent feeling one can have towards this cover will soon evaporate and give way to cynicism, sadness or bitterness. This cover of "Imagine" didn't age well to say the least.
Who knows? If that version had not been so quaint and corny, maybe more people would have listened to the message, at least. 🙃 Are all the bad things that have occured in this cursed area of the world since 1999 partly the result of Khaled's bad music tastes then? You tell me. Of course, I shouldn't laugh about anything even remotely related to the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's just a tragedy. But at least, I can laugh at this cover and its terrible execution.
Bad music is not as terrible and tragic as war and genocide, of course. So if anyone in here disagrees with me and still manages to find hope and beauty in this particular cover, more power to them. Me, I just can't. As I can't take the inclusion of *Kenza* in this list seriously. Not that it's important compared to far more serious topics and issues. It's just that it takes far more powerful music than this to either transcend said issues, or make you forget about them altogether. If you can't do one OR the other, it's a sure sign you shouldn't be in this list of "essential albums". 1001 is a finite number after all.
2/5, which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2).
Number of albums left to review: 157
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 364
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 213
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 270 (including this one)
Baaba Maal
4/5
Nice. And far better than the later, commercial-pop-oriented Baaba Maal album selected by Dimery and co. for their book. *Djam Leelii* displays many mesmerizing, atmospheric soundscapes, with all sorts of interesting harmonies in the background, courtesy of the magnificent interplay between guitars (both acoustic and electric), kora and balafon. Baaba's voice often soars like a frail yet noble bird over that lush instrumentation. This music--simple yet rich with layers, dreamy yet also grounded to earth somehow--sounds both timeless and modern. It's repetitive like a lot of traditional African music can be, yet if you pay attention, you soon realize it's filled with a lot of variations, and even sudden unexpected departures towards the end of a few pieces.
The original album only has eight tracks (the bulk of the four extra ones are badly recorded, and should therefore be considered as outtakes). It's not a long list of songs, but many stellar highlights are gracing it: opener "Lam Tooroo", conveying such a mystical aura that you could mistake the tune for a Dead Can Dance cut ; quiet and soothing "Muudo Hormo", slowly but surely building up to a somewhat livelier conclusion ; the extraordinary "Maacina Tooro", whose guitar flourishes, moody handclappings and memorable vocal melody will haunt you long after the track ends on that breathtaking coda ; or the title-track "Djam Leelil", whose obvious blues inflexions link African and African-American traditions into a single, seamless whole--evidence enough of the sort of connections historical tragedies of the past didn't manage to sever after centuries. "Adventurers" of music indeed.
I have expressed this before, I often feel like full-length recordings from continents other than Europe and North America should have retrospective books of their own--not to unfairly separate them from the "Western Canon", but to give a chance to all the musical traditions of the world to be fairly represented. But when I listen to the standout tracks from this record, I just want to let go of that obsessive-compulsive urge to rate and classify, and simply enjoy good music for what it is. Maybe I've used this app for too long. Time to adopt a new mindset, maybe?
In the meantime, here's a provisory "classification" for this one:
Number of albums left to review: 156
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 364
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 214 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 270
The Charlatans
3/5
Not so bad overall. Catchy Britpop with memorable choruses and great instrumentation throughout. Feels like it could belong to such a list, except from one little detail: this record, supposedly the magnum opus of The Charlatans, was released in the second half of the nineties, not the first. To be more specific, it was released one month before Radiohead turned the game of British (alt-)rock on its head with *OK Computer*. Talk about a last-minute feat before that whole Stone Roses / Oasis-adjacent sound immediately became less relevant.
This situation might explain the Britpop "fatigue" of some listeners on this app (sometimes harshly expressed), and so the album's relatively low global score. It's true that this record goes through very predictable stylistic twists and turns at times, from Rolling Stones-indebted compositions to Stone Roses / Primal Scream-like syncopated rhythms and heavily guitar-laden spots à la Oasis. And this to the point where it sometimes feels you don't even need to listen to the album to know what's in it. Add the fact that the record's second half is far less impressive than the first (except for one organ-enhanced cut reminding me of Bob Dylan circa *Highway '61 Revisited*, before one instrumental closer paying tribute to the band's keyboard player--who tragically died during the sessions of *Tellin' Stories*), and what you have here is a record that clearly lacks something to *truly* stand out.
Pretty good music is still pretty good music, though. Had this thing been released three years earlier, chances are The Charlatans would have been a more famous figurehead for that whole Britpop thing, maybe up to the level of Oasis themselves. To be fair, Blur was still more interesting as an album band than any of those acts, but to use words used by The Charlatans themselves, that's a (music tabloid) "story" I'm gonna tell in another time, kiddies.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums"
8/10 for more general purposes
Number of albums left to review: 155
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 364
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 214
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 271 (including this one)
Roxy Music
5/5
Sure, the peaks in the first two Roxy Music LPs make the latter iconic selections for this list. But *Country Life* is certainly the British band's most cohesive record, with no dud in sight, and with a string of sellar cuts that must have made the quite recently departed Brian Eno mad with envy--odd how the songs on this album are still very much in tune with Eno's contemporary solo forays in those years, as if he and Ferry still had some sort of psychic connection, in spite of their rivalry.
Ferry undoubtedly had flair for the dramatic AND the melodic for this fourth LP. On side one, "The Thrill Of It All", "All I Want Is You" and "Out Of The Blue" see his band honing their glam-rock skills to perfection. And side two is near-perfect as well, thanks to the moodier, cabaret-like, nightmarish or dreamlike "Bitter-sweet", "Triptych" and "A Really Good Time", not to mention the explosive closer "Prairie Rose". *Very* close to a 5/5 mark for this one.
Number of albums left to review: less than 150 approximately - I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll include in my own list: half so far, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* include: a quarter, approximately
Number of albums I'll never include: another quarter, or just a little more (many other albums are more important to me)
The Fall
2/5
Clearly, this is NOT the right album by The Fall to select for such a list. To me, that would be *This Nation's Saving Grace*. Or possibly *Hex Enduction Hour* or *Perverted By Language*--at least if you're not afraid of noisy experimentation also showing a lot of heart. Or it could even be a later LP, such as *The Real New Fall LP - Formerly Country On The Click*, whose overall melodicism make it a better candidate as a postpunk "mock-pop" album in the band's extensive catalogue.
Admittedly, with such a prolific output from such an idiosyncratic project, it's hard to pinpoint what should be considered "essential" in the long run in The Fall's discography. Its leader and mastermind Mark E. Smith even made fun out of that situation once in a while. Some cuts in this 1993 LP still display the peculiar subversive sparks this band will always be associated with, especially on "Glam-Racket", " It's A Curse" and "Paranoia Man In Cheap S**t Room". Smith didn't sell his soul to the devil to make this record. He merely rented it for a year or two. Who else but him could make such a benificial bargain with the man in black himself?
The thing is, c'mon, let's be serious for one little second. Decades later, *The Infotainment Scam* can't be considered as effective as those other grittier-yet-more-impassioned releases I've mentioned earlier. The cheesy synth-laden dance music shenanigans on it have aged like milk, and if Mark E. Smith's contrarian personality is indeed aptly conveyed through this relelase (as it is in most The Fall albums I've had the opportunity to listen to), this record doesn't profit from Smith's antics enough to provide truly timeless stuff on a purely musical level. It rather remains stuck to the clichés of its Cool Britannia era behind the oh-so-convenient self-conscious layers of irony. The Fall were never better than when they didn't give a rat's ass about fashions and trends. And it seems to me that Mark E. Smith did care a little too much about all that on that particular album, even if it was mostly to make fun of himself and his audience.
By the way... Anyone in the possession of at least one partially functioning ear should be able to go further than 81 albums on this app. *This* is for the smart-ass reviewer thinking he's better than everyone else in this section (I guess he's a bloke--he's gotta be, right?). Doesn't matter if that person left the premises long ago now, I still think he should be ridiculed. The problem when you play the "contrarian" card too much is that you never know who can be even *more* contrarian than you.
2/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums".
7/10 for more general purposes (5+2).
Number of albums left to review: 153
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 365
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 214
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 272 (including this one)
Bob Marley & The Wailers
5/5
Chris Blackwell is a sly fox. When the Island records boss signed (Bob Marley &) The Wailers, he knew he had gotten his hand on a Jamaican phenomenon, just as the world was slowly starting to discover the music from this former British colony. Even shrewder than that, he made the astute move have the band record *Catch A Fire* while they were still in England (a way for them to pay the ticket back home with the advance they got for the recording of the album). And after the first sessions, he had a few cuts tweaked so as to add discreet yet pivotal rock flavours in the instrumentation.
The end result was, simply put, a timeless record, both authentic to the bone and yet palatable to the wide world outside of the Carribean island. With a stellar sound to boot. Of course, Bob Marley was about to become a "legend", with most of his subsequent albums displaying its string of iconic reggae cuts as they integrated different sorts contemporary sounds (always very subtle additions) while never losing the mandatory "roots" feeling in the picture. But that conquest of the planet started here, in tandem with other promising figures in that genre, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer.
To this day, this is probably one of the most fascinating reggae records, with lush instrumentation, all sorts of fascinating guitar or organ licks, and a rebellious spirit that would be explored further in Marley's other masterpieces *Burnin'* or *Exodus*. "Concrete Jungle" is a perfect opener, thanks to its smart chord changes. Wayne Perkins's slide guitar arrangements on "Baby We've Got A Date" bring unexpected Hawaian or Country-like colors to the song. "Slave Driver", "Kinky Reggae", "No More Trouble" and "Midnight Ravers" are excellent cuts as well. All those tracks might not be the most famous songs written by Marley but they're certainly among his very best. "Stir It Up" , introduced by a phasing effect immediately sending you to reggae heavens, is both a world-famous hit and an excellent track, though. And Peter Tosh's "400 Years" and "Stop That Train" are topical jewels. The incredible clavinet arrangement on the first, along with the soulful vocals backed up by those airy guitar lines on the second, makes those cuts musical gems as well. Finally, the Zippo lighter design of the original release is, simply put, a genius idea. 5/5.
Number of albums left to review: 152
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 366 (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 214
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 272
Billy Bragg
4/5
There are far worse choices than Billy Bragg and Wilco to use Woody Guthrie-penned lyrics for songs whose music was never written. Quite an admirable project here, which undoubtedly helped the American band hone their own stellar songwriting skills.
Speaking of "stellar", the first three cuts of this album are endearing and memorable tunes, especially "California Stars". And if the rest is a little patchy or pedestrian at times, you will easily find gems there--gems such as "One By One", "Eisler On The Go" or closer "The Unwelcome Guest".
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums", rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5+3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 151
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 366
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 215 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 272
Gene Clark
4/5
Gene Clark's *No Other* has been a personal favorite of mine for a few years now. So obviously, I was looking forward to discovering this earlier solo album from the former Byrds frontman. This is a collection of very pretty songs, performed in an obviously more understated fashion compared to the compositions on Clark's magnum opus (which was so unfairly underrated at the time). The chord changes look simple, but that's a very deceptive first impression, since quite a few of them actually go to interesting places on a harmonic level.
*White Light*'s highlights are opener "The Virgin", delicate "With Tomorrow", bluesy "One In A Hundred", fully acoustic and harmonica'-laden "For A Spanish Guitar", the cover of Bob Dylan's "Tears of Rage" (where Clark translates the song into his own streamlined-yet-fully-effective folk grammar), and also closer "1975", another bluesy cut propelled by a nice bassline that sounds both laidback and bouncy. And the rest of the tracklist is more than decent, even if neither stellar nor groundbreaking.
As usual, Gene's vocals might sound a little too polite (and even quaint) for some ears, but with this particular singer, this is how the artist can convey his touching vulnerability to the listener, as long as the latter is perceptive and sensitive enough to listen to the whole thing as a genuine example of a singer-songwriter pouring his soul into his art. *White Light*'s straightforward qualities actually pave the way to the grand ambitions of *No Other*. If the two records sound very different, they're still two sides of the same coin. Even if, admittedly, one of those sides shines far brighter today.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential album, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more gneral purposes (5+3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 150
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 366
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 216 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 272
Amy Winehouse
4/5
I don't have much to add to the review currently topping this section (as of June 2024). This is not a *perfect* album, but the peaks on it (exactly half of the tracklist: "Rehab", "You Know I"m No Good", "Back In Black", "Tears Dry On Their Own", and "He Can Only Hold Her"--plus bonus track "Addicted") make it worth the price of admission. And if the rest is slighly less impressive (more by-the-book reenactments of old soul / classic rhythm'n'blues shenanigans, with a tinge of Jamaican music sometimes), it's still enjoyable overall. Add the iconic figure that Amy Winehouse was, plus her idiosyncratic lyrics and phrasing, and surely, you have an "essential album". 2006 didn't have a lot to offer when it came to up-and-coming artists. Without Amy, it would not have been the same
4/5 for the purposes of this list.
9/10 for more general purposes (5+4).
Number of albums left to review: 149
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 367 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 216
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 272
Pearl Jam
1/5
One of the most overrated albums of all time. Many heavy-handed riffs and even more heavy-handed guitar solos. Many useless dirges inside a lot of pointless compositions. Most of the chord progressions in those songs are lazy and predictable, and if Eddie Vedder's public persona suggests he is a good guy, generally speaking, his vocals are unfortunately displaying a lot of hackneyed inflexions.
Worse, the sound of this album has aged like milk: the drums have that awful echoey sound only enhancing their one-trick poney nature, the guitar sound as if they were recorded in a bathroom, all wet and with no edge to them, and the mix is terrible -- with Eddie's vocals bobbing up and down the surface for no discernible reason.
That such a record manages to almost reach a 4/5 global score on this app defies my imagination defies my imagination. What is wrong with you people? Why can't you hear what's so middle-of-the-road in those songs, and what's so predictable in those tracks? But maybe what I find appalling here are the very virtues nostalgic gen-x listeners find endearing. Waiting to hear what millenials and gen-z music fans have to say about this record. As of now, I haven't heard a single one of them mention it anyway.
1/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums"
6/10 for more general purposes (5 for musical competency and commercial success + 1 for the actual artistic flair).
Number of albums left to review: 148
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 367
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 216
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 273 (including this one)
Christina Aguilera
2/5
This nearly-80-minute commercial pop album is actually separated in two very distinct halves. And the first half is an utter disaster of major proportions. No matter how many times Christina cosplays as a "different" sort of artist going beyond the usual expected modern r'n'b shenanigans, she fails miserably to leave a lasting impression, and this with almost every dud presented here. "Walk Away" is supposedly a moving torch song that unfortunately overstays its welcome due to its interminable runtime of pointless, undynamic vocal meanderings. "Fighter" is a terrible attempt to use the (arena) rock idiom to hide the same endlessly copied-and-pasted r'n'b formula found elsewhere on the first part of the album. Everything sounds *fake* on it: the guitar, the drums, the overall artistic intent. And the vocal performance is so artificially placed over this shitcake that the whole thing ends up not making a shred of sense. "Infatuation" uses the "latin" card--acoustic-guitar chords and Spanish-sung hooks included--but forgets to showcase a proper chorus. The chord progressions are so lame and lazy on this one that the whole burrito comes off as stale and cold in spite of the time it spent in the microwave oven. Worse, musically bland "Loving Me 4 Me" displays the ABSOLUTE WORST lyrics I have ever had the displeasure to hear on this app. 6th-grade / 7th-grade level poetry--so dumb, naive and cringeworthy that anyone even only remotely interested in proper songwriting will probably want to puke. After that, Alicia Keys gives a song to Christina (and performs its piano parts)--a soul ballad that's obviously in better taste than the track before it--but she forgets to write a real hook in it, sadly. I'll leave the other duds aside... The only time Christina and her producers' reach don't exceed their grasp in this first half of the record is with the "undisguised" modern r'n'b opener (or at least proper song on the album), "Can't Hold Us Down", which conveys a distinctive feminist message, a little on-the-nose, but not too awkward either. But as "effective" as that cut is, it's nothing that Destiny's Child or TLC had not already done ten times better before. At least when it comes to their hits.
The fact that this album was a commercial success in spite of how bad its first part is is a testament to the terrible, *terrible* tastes of general audiences in the Western world during the early years of the second millenium. Here, the fault mostly lies on Aguilera's producer and music writer Scott Storch (a cocaine addict, by the way, who lost his personal way as he recklessly navigated into that fake world of pop stars), along with "vocal producer" E. Dawk, who probably pushed Christina to the worst sorts of "performative" shenanigans, ruining the very few things that could have been salvaged in those compositions, through her overuse of endless "ooh-oohs" and "aahs-aahs". I guess restraint is rarely your strong suit when you have unlimited access to ressources and personnel, is it?
So that was for the first half. But *very* curiously, the second half of the record turns everything on its head as soon as the hit ballad "Beautiful" enters the scene. Former 4-Non-Blondes Linda Perry wrote that song (both the music and the lyrics), which bears its name well and has everything that *all* the others songs before lacked--a good chorus, memorable hooks, pretty arrangements, a heartfelt feeling... Music coming from someone's individual soul is most often better than writing-in-committee, isn't it? Linda Perry is also in charge of three other cuts as a producer / music writer on this second part of the record, and it's good stuff. Especially the tearful acoutic ballad "I'm OK", along with the oriental-sounding, alt-rock / Beck-adjacent "Make Over", which, miraculously, doesn't come off as an artificial and cynical attempt to co-opt a different music style (contrary to "Fighter").
Most of the other cuts in that second half, produced by a bunch of other people than Storch or Perry, are also fun, lively or effective. The hooks are nice and memorable, the production is on point, the string sections are cinematic, and the dynamic tracklisting goes from one interesting place to the next. "Get Mine, Get yours" is a genuine banger, sexy and catchy as hell (those idiot music executives should have chosen it as a single), and this song proves that Aguilera sometimes had the chops to go up to the level of Beyoncé Knowles. "Dirrty" is in that same dancefloor banger league, even if sounds a little more derivatory to the whole Destiny's Child thing. And the laidback-yet-bouncy "Soar* builds up to the sort of climax that was nowhere in sight in the first half of the record. Actually this is exactly where Aguilera's vocal chops and ad-libs come off as justified and useful, instead of gratuitous and pointless--simply because the composition is good enough to justify getting excited about it. And even when Scott Storch returns to the picture as a producer / music writer for closer "Keep Singing My Song", it's actually not too bad, thanks to the moody atmosphere and a nice drum'n'bass-inspired rhythm at the end of the track. It's not a killer song by all means. But I guess Scott deserved to enjoy his bag of coke after a hard day's work for this one, at least.
Does that far better second half save the whole album? Nope. The first half is too terrible for that, and there's not a precise musical throughline in the second half to imagine an alternate universe where its many good moments could have been reorganized into a genuinely cohesive project. Plus, the latter would still lack an absolute banger that would have a timeless nature (for that, see Aaliyah or Beyoncé). It's what those sorts of commercial pop albums aim at after all: strings of pop bangers + some truly adventurous by-sides to make them the records more interesting in the long run. And as far as *Stripped* is concerned, there are problems on both sides of the picture here. Honestly, *Stripped* is still a better album than *Back To Basics*. Yet in the end, it does not really matter. Because what we have here is a strong piece of evidence proving that Dimery should fire the ass of whoever is responsible for the inclusion of TWO Christina Aguilera albums in the 1001 Albums To Listen To Before You Die book.
2/5 for the purposes of this list.
7/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 147
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 367
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 216
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 274 (including this one)
White Denim
4/5
This is one of the rare acts on this list I had never heard *of* before, and it's a very pleasant surprise. Buying the album right away. *D* goes to MANY places, mostly psych-rock, but with winks towards a vast array of other genres (garage, classic rock, prog-rock, along with tiny-yet-pivotal nuggets of funk, krautrock, blues-rock and soul). But in spite of this catalogue of styles, White Denim manage to maintain cohesiveness from the first second to the last. And they sprinkle catchy hooks everywhere. One of them will remind you of a Motown artist while another recalls Radiohead circa-*In Rainbows*, when the Oxfordians were channelling a lot of CAN influences into their music. Not to mention all the other influences (one reviewer said 'Osees-lite', and I have to concur).
So this is quite as impressive feat here. As is the musicianship through and through--expecially that virtuosistic drummer! As many other reviewers pointed out, White Denim sounds like a "jam band" on *D*, and yet they're never self-indulgent or boring. I still haven't indentified clear standout or killer tracks in my initial listen, but I have no doubt that if I focus again on this record, they will quickly come up and please my ears. A true banger should stand out right away, normally, which is where this very good record might fall short to get into my own list if ever are too many last-minute LPs to include. But it's hard to blame White Denim for this, given how insanely ambitious and original their music is. Writing bangers is not the only way to write great albums anyway.
I've had the time to browse through the other LPs of this band hailing from Austin, TX, though. And as of now, it seems to me that their earlier releases are less impressive, with a more lo-fi sound that--in this case--doesn't fully match with the music that's played. And the later LPs apparently weigh heavier on African-American inspirations, but in a fashion that sounds a wee bit more streamlined and less sonically adventurous overall.
So, to me, *D* looks like a perfect middle-ground and ideal entry point into the band's *oeuvre*. And White Denim records will stay on my radar no matter what. Pretty sure that if I'm not yet fully sold on the other recordings they made so far, there must at least be a couple of gems in each of those other albums. So thank you Robert Dimery, and thanks to the creator of this app. This is exactly what I signed for when I started this project.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums", rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 146
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 367
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 217 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 274
Motörhead
5/5
Lemmy Kilmister was a man of few words, with simple yet efficient pleasures. He loathed long intellectual takes such as the ones I routinely churn out on this app, often seeing them as condescending, pretentious, and unsincere. Which is food for thought, very ironically. Whether Lemmy was right or wrong in his distrust of "music critics", their tastes, and their long-winded paragraphs, is not for me to say. Yet I'm gonna keep my own review short as a loving tribute to the man, God rest his soul:
This live record KICKS ASS! Most early Motörhead bangers can be found in it, and they SLAP. 5/5, what else?
Number of albums left to review: 145
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 368 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 217
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 274
My Bloody Valentine
5/5
It took 22 years for Kevin Shields to record a follow-up to *Loveless*, a pivotal and timeless record for every noisy shoegaze fans out there... So you can bet your boots expectations were sky-high when *mbv* was released. And yet the latter delivered, even exceeding expectations on key moments. No dud, all killer no filler. Many cuts (the dreamy "she found now" and "only tomorrow", catchy banger "new you", the rhymically and harmonically hectic "in another way"...) would have fitted right into *Loveless*'s tracklist, actually. For any other "legacy" band, this would mean that you're just stuck in the past, yet My Bloody Valentine's magnum opus was so groundbreaking and influential that the usual rules about treading old ground can't apply here. There is indeed a melancholic, chiaruscoro poetry to the Irish band's sound that makes it stand out compared to all its followers. And there's also a manic, obsessive attraction to layers and depth that belies its apprent droney surface. This album even ups the noise-rock ante with its challenging last two cuts "nothing is" and "wonder 2", where guitar tones wince, wail, drill, tremble and enchant, helped by the ever-eerie vocals of Bilinda Butcher. Punishing for folks not attuned to off-kilter rock music (a sad majority?), but pitch-perfect for everyone else. 5/5.
Number of albums left to review: less that 150.
Numbers of albums I'll keep in my list: half approximately (including this one)
Numbers of albums I might keep: a quarter, approximately.
Numbers of albums I won't keep: another quarter.
The National
3/5
Never understood what made The National so successful when there are quite a few other acts sounding very close to them while having tons of personality to provide listeners with something truly unique, idiosyncratic, original, what have you--acts such as Other Lives, Tindersticks, Interpol, The Walkmen or Grizzly Bear (most of them less commercially succesful)... The thing is, where are those tons of personality when it comes to the National? Is having no clear-cut personality an actual asset to attract the biggest streaming numbers in this day and age?
My personal feeling is that a lot of fans of The National are just ignorant of those other bands' albums, and are just happy a well-oiled promotional machine led them to become admirers of Aaron Dessner's outfit first. Of course, there's no way I can confirm or prove this feeling, and I already understand why those admirers could accuse me of bad faith here. Yet nothing is gonna shake that initial impression of mine that The National represent a very safe and conformist vision of what quote-unquote "indie bands" should sound like starting from the tail end of the noughts. It's like that review in this section where the reviewer complains that opener *Terrible Love* is the lo-fi version of the song, instead of its clean alternative rendition found in the deluxe edition of the album. What more can be said? Clearly, some listeners of The National want to "play it safe", quite literally in this particular case. And this is not how I envision art in general, and music in particular.
Don't get me wrong, *High Violet* doesn't deserve a 1/5 grade (or even a 6/10 grade according to how I translate my grading when it comes to more general purposes). The lyrics (and the stories said lyrics evoke) are interesting enough, the arrangements are tasteful, the pristine production values are well used, the chord sequences are effective (in spite of the fact that not many risks are taken), and Dessner's deep voice is more than decent overall (in spite of its frequent drowsy inflexions). It's not bad at all, by all means.
You even have a majority of clear stand-out tracks in *High Violet*, such as "Anyone's Ghost", "Afraid Of Everyone", "Bloodbuzz Ohio", "Lemonworld", "England" and "Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks"... But even on those objectively "nice" cuts, the overall effect/affect is, well, a little *bland* at times. Tindersticks have their rough-around-the-edges aesthetics and Grizzy Bear their dreamy atmosphere, counterbalanced by a few convoluted flourishes here and there. Other Lives display cosmic or wild west-inspired moods exploring the concept of the American frontier in breathtaking sonic moves. Interpol have their postpunk influences to liven up the proceedings. And, depending of the time period they released their LPs, The Walkmen could either sound instictively brawly or charmingly retro. But in *High Violet*, The National are just The National. Full stop.
Is it even possible to ascribe evocative adjectives to their music? They just play "well-written" and "well-arranged" songs, and as such, they point to the lowest common denominator. I'm not so sure that's a good thing in the long run, to be perfectly honest. At least in the grand scheme of selecting 1001 albums you must absolutely listen to before you die...
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential album.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 143
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 369
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 218 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 274
Common
3/5
Is it because I never finished my Ph.D. in 20th century literature that I can't fully connect with this album? Obvious sarcasm here. You've read the top reviews in this section, so you already know who I'm laughing at with those words. Glad that such an insufferable app user didn't go further than 20 albums or so. After all, that maths dissertation ain't gonna write itself, right? 🙃
That said, and even if that lame review makes me want to bump this record's grade a notch or two, *Be* is admittedly a somewhat overrated album in my book. Potential hot take here (hopefully not as ridiculous as the one of that poor misguided maths student): a lot of people who love this album probably need to explore the fifteen years before its release to find smooth-sounding, intelligent hip hop that still managed to *pack a punch* in spite of its potential use of laidback, jazzy and soul-infused moods. Music by ATCQ, De La Soul or Mos Def for instance. In comparison to those acts, *Be* sounds way too polished as a whole, even streamlined to a fault. And it's so loaded with sacharine layerings that listening to it can become sickening in the long run--with a sugarcoated presentation that can even become borderline-annoying for cuts like "Faithful" or "Love Is..".
Yet the trouble does not really stem from what's in the music. It rather comes from what you *can't* find in it. I understand why some folks missing the "old Kanye" enjoy this record, since it allows them to enjoy Mr. West's production chops without having to bear with his grating persona as a rapper (which has since worsened to cringeworthy and even politically concerning proportions I don't need to elaborate on here). The thing is, without Kanye's abrasive persona (at least when the latter was still bearable to an extent), the soft-sounding production and instrumentals on this record come off as a little devoid of personality and lacking in genuinely thrilling dynamics. Admittedly a little ironic in hindsight, huh?
There are still clear stand-out tracks in this album, however, which explains why the ride it offers was enjoyable for a lot of rap fan in 2005. There's the enticing "Be (Intro)", and also "The Corner"--probably the most solid cut in the tracklist when it comes to painting a vivid picture of the state of society through rapping. Not to mention "Go" and "Testify", whose scope might not be as sweeping as the one of "The Corner", and which yet both shine thanks to their many hooks.
Said hooks are more lackluster on the second side, unfortunately. First single *The Food* is nice enough, for instance, but even Kanye West's interpolations can't make it that much of a stand-out track. And speaking of Kanye, some of his trademark chipmunk flourishes have aged like milk. It was a sonic phase that suited well West's off-kilter, loony persona when he was the center of attention in his own early albums. But for someone else's record, using those sped-up vocal samples doesn't exactly feels like a marriage made in heaven. Common's flow, as skilled as it is, is a little too demure and aloof for such zany musical aesthetics. And the second side is where this discrepancy is felt the most. When Common's steady pace covers jazzy laidback elements, the whole thing lacks clear dynamics (which is where it is "streamlined to a fault", as I said earlier). And when that steady rap flow is interrupted by a hysterical high-pitched vocal snippet, either one or the other sounds out of place. The music becomes *too* dynamic, in a way (read "messy"). It's a neverending conundrum.
The tail end of the record is fortunately way much stronger and more cohesive, thanks to the last two cuts "They Say" and "It's Your World". The latter song even serves as a moving conclusion nicely wrapping up the topical overtones found here and there throughout those 42 minutes--overtones which started with the introductory track praising self reliance and self-confidence against all odds, and paving the way to the emancipatory message gracing the last minutes of the album. Conveyed through a preacher's voice, along with all those moving vocal snippets of children having dreams about their successful lives as adults, that message has lost none of its potency today. So even if it's the official name of the "intro", "Be" is first and foremost the hidden name of that last song, and it's affecting that its contents rhyme so well with the one showcased on the first track in the album.
In spite of that nice touch, *Be*'s topical program never strays too far from a somewhat predictable surface level, though. And from time to time, Common's reach also exceeds his grasp. Case in point: "Testify". It is a courthouse yarn that's admittedly vividly told, but the ultimate twist in its final lines comes off as either pointless or unwarranted. And for a song supposed to suggest how mature, thoughtful relationships with "ladies" should be handled, *Go* also misses the intended mark somehow. Having lyrics comparing love interests with cars--not once but *twice*!!!--... well, that might be a little cringeworthy, right? Not gonna elaborate on notions of male gaze and the objectifying of women... I just find it interesting that for both songs, said women are the topics of the lyrics, and that the subject Common chooses to explore there is not exactly shown under a truly "reliable" angle, let's say. Of course, he doesn't paint all women as "hoes" the way Snoop Dogg does. But what's the worst? A provocateur/entertainer no one in their right mind can take seriously on those topics? Or a Philistine that's a little out of his depth when tackling said topics, thereby taking the risk to convey regrettable conceptions while claiming to be thoughtful and on the "right side"? The jury's still out on this one.
Long story short, there's apparent wisdom on the surface of *Be*, but its waters might also be a little too shallow in some spots to elicit the sort of deep emotional response Common aims at eliciting. Of course, some funny punchlines bob up that wise surface from time to time, sending some needed jolts at appropriate moments (I like this one: "They ask me where hip hop is goin' / It's Chicagoan"). But as said earlier, those jolts might appear as too far in-between compared to the ones found in the other hip hop albums I consider as truly essential (either released before or after that album).
But maybe it's because those records do better than just *be*. They come alive. And in the end, whether you're wise or raucous, whether you play the gangster card or, conversely, the "conscious" one--in other words, whether you're a jester, a tough guy, or a preacher, that's what great rap album should do. *Come alive*. *Being* is not enough. You have to know *what* you want to be. Ironic that it's the very message of this record, and yet that Common doesn't fully apply this message to himself in my eyes.
3/5 for the purposes of this list.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 142
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 369
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 218
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 275 (including this one)
Norah Jones
1/5
It's all in the cover, isn't it? A gorgeous-looking artist in a close-up shot, pretty lettering for her name in the top right-hand corner, and a more discreet font and size for the name of the album on the other side. A bland, unimaginative cover. Fitting with what is, for all intents and purposes, a bland and unimaginative lounge-jazz album of unobtrusive ballads, too demure and by-the-book to elicit a strong response from anyone enjoying truly *vital* music.
Norah Jones obviously has stellar skills as a performer, both as a singer and as a piano player. But those skills are never put to good use, i.e. playing music where a minimum amount of risk is taken. The mere fact that 1001 selected this Blue Note album instead of, say, John Coltrane's *Blue Train* speaks volumes about how misguided their priorities are when it comes to jazz albums. They only looked at recent commercial sales, and estimated Jones was the next big thing in that genre. Well, the next big things are not always the next best things. I remember some acquaintance of mine trying to attract my attention towards the production values of this record around 2002. But I don't remember that person's name 20 years later. As I didn't remember the album itself, so unmemorable that mix of cover songs and unremarkable compositions by Norah and her team of musicians is. Tried to see if listening to the recors again would make me change my mind, but in retrospect my assessment of it is even harsher now. I'd rather go through all the cheesy 80s synth pop albums this app routinely sends my way all over again. At least they have something distinctive to offer.
1/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
6/10 for more general purposes (5 for musical and professional compentency + 1 for the artistic flair).
Number of albums left to review: 141
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 369
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 218
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 276 (including this one)
Haircut 100
3/5
XTC and Talking Heads take the "Love Boat", with large swabs of funk and lounge-jazz in their luggage, along with a few disco handbags and a tiny Steely Dan purse for nights out at the casino. Given the description given up there, you can expect the music on *Pelican West* to be a little too derivative--and make no mistake, it very much is. Yet I have to admit the musicianship on this record is so stellar that Haircut 100 managed to make me lower my guard so as to enjoy most of their songs for what they are, quite surprisingly.
*Pelican West* comprises two sorts of compositions: some full-formed songs whose vocal hooks aim at the charts ("Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)", "Love Plus One", "Fantastic Day"...) and some longer cuts whose pivotal contents are mostly instrumental in nature ("Lemon Firebrigade", "Kingsize"...). This mix makes for a somewhat disjointed experience, most of it pleasant if you can put your head back to the time the album was released, but maybe lacking in lyrical and topical substance overall.
Worse, *Pelican West* lost me during its underwhelming second side, whose lower point is probably that "chromatic ascent" in the middle of "Love's Got Me In Triangles" (God, how I hate that lazy-ass, unimaginative trick). By that point, the overreliance on major chords / harmonies was already tiresome for me anyway--XTC and the "Heads had ways to turn that same reliance on major keys into an asset, thanks to their off-kilter energy and thirst for daring experimentation, but unfortunately Haircut 100 didn't take as many pages from their books as they should have. And, going to the other side of the musical spectrum that's relevant to this LP, their sense of pop catchiness is not honed enough to make a lasting impression in that regard as well. Except on the wonderful XTC-adjacent "Nobody's Fool", who was only a non-album single at the time, unfortunately...
I'm still glad this app and the 1001 albums book made me discover Haircut 100. Listening to them feels like getting acquainted with Hot Chip's dads and hidden forerunners--as if they were a missing link between that other geeky-looking, more recent groove-oriented British act and their far older influences. Odd how exploring music history makes you associate artists that look like "reincarnations" or variations of each other from one era to the next. As when you discover that Terry Hall's Fun Boy Three, played by Spotify after this Haircut 100 album, had an album that sounds a little like an earlier and flimsier version of Young Fathers' own genre-defying music...
Unfortunately, my CD shelves dedicated to New Wave / British eighties pop genres are full as of now, so there's no way I can add this admittedly very decent Haicut 100 LP to my own list. There are still too many elements in it that rub me the wrong the way, as minor as said elements are. And, yeah, before any of you pops the question, I *do* buy secondhand copy of albums I add to my own list of "essential" album (in CD versions, and not in vinyl, otherwise I would end up surviving on food stamps, lol). In my opinion, it's the best way to get involved in this app in a serious enough manner, and balance open-mindedness with enough critical high standards. Wondering if other app users do the same thing as I do. Alas, I'm not a Reddit user as of now, so I can't discuss this with other music fans that are in forums relevant to this app. Maybe one day I'll find some time to go to those forums, and for instance exchange views about our individual assessments of this LP. In the meantime...
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums"
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 140
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 369
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 218
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 277 (including this one)
10cc
2/5
*Sheet Music* should please the weirdo living rent-free in my head, always in the lookout for off-kilter sounds and loony songs and artsy shenanigans (or even *mock*-artsy stuff of the same ilk). Does it, though?
All the songs are interesting in their own right, like an amped-up version of Steely Dan's mix of unexpected modulations, sophisticated arrangements and tongue-in-cheek sarcasm. With a lot of hairpin curves when it comes to the use of instrumentation, and a bit of Paul McCartney, Sparks, Queen, post-*Pet Sounds*-Beach Boys and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band thrown in. The thing is, as a collection of songs, *Sheet Music* fails to leave a somewhat cohesive impression as a full-blown artistic statement. It's not because you run all over the place and refuse to use by-the-book standards that you have to indulge in a fully automatic-mode way to create an LP worth of its salt *as a whole*.
Of course, I get that 10cc consciously used a let's-throw-everything-at-the-wall approach and then thought later about how to make what sticks the landing stand out. But what you get from *Sheet Music* is that *almost nothing* stuck. As conceptually wild and unhinged and goofy as all the other artists I've mentioned up there can be, their best work had enough highlights on a purely pop compositional level to make their projects shine as a whole. But this is not the case with this 10cc album, lining up different song sections as if the vocal lines and chord sequences used in them didn't really matter.
What I can salvage from this record are the cuts "Wall Street Shuffle", the delirious and 100% meta "The Worst Band In The World" (of 'workinonit' fame, thanks to J Dilla's sampled use of that vocal snippet), and that extraordinary, hectic art-pop composition about the fear of flying, "Clockwork Creep". Plus the tropicalia parody that "Hotel" is if I'm in an ironic mood. But everything else blurs into the same indistinct wishy-washy pointless self-indulgence, with many harmonic and rythmical twists and turns that soon manage to cancel each other.
I'm still glad this app made me discover those songs, loony to a fault, and this very interesting album, whose contents are miles aways from the band's most famous hit, i.e. dreamy and synth-heavy ballad "I'm Not In Love" (which I love, personally, even if the album it's from is underwhelming as well). But to me 10cc is not a *stellar* album band. It's just an interesting curio from times long gone by now.
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
7/5 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 139
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 369
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 218
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 278 (including this one)
PS: Spotify's algorithm made me discover Brian Protheroe's *Pinball* right after *Sheet Music* was over. It's also pretty goofy, off-kilter seventies music, yet it's also much more focused and inspired as a whole. Exactly the sort of qualities that are lacking in that 10cc album. When an algorithm does better than human beings to suggest music of a certain genre (or even music actually going *beyond* the concept of genres itself), I think we can all start to worry a little, right?
Big Star
5/5
For a long time, there's been a misunderstanding between this album and me. But today's suggestion to have yet another go at it, and to listen to it *properly* this time around, puts that misunderstanding to rest, once and for all. This is an extraordinary LP, the sort of record that attracts a cult following indeed. And now, I understand why, finally.
I believe that my initial misunderstanding of *Third / Sister Lovers* stems from misguided expectations. Its first two tracks, "Kizza Me" and "Thank You Friends" sounded nice enough, but Alex Chilton's frail voice on those two power-pop cuts suggested that his "big star" was irremediably fading, and that his vocal performance couldn't stand the comparison with the one on *#1* and *Radio City*. Which brought another level of misunderstanding on my part: I thought that fans of this album mostly loved it for extra-musical reasons, because the recording sessions for *Third* also documented Chilton's sad descent into a personal emotional turmoil that made listening to the music a sort of voyeuristic experience. I suspected that the positive reponses to this record was too much influenced by such a sensational context (just as it did for Syd Barrett's solo output). If you add the two layers of misunderstanding, it sort of "blocks" a more open-minded and spontaneous assessment of the music *actually* played, the sorts of risk it takes. And how those risks can eventually pay off.
The thing is, rather than comparing this LP with Big Star's early releases, I should have compared it with later "essential albums" by other acts inspired by them later on. Because the entropic and emotionally raw nature of *Third* indeed foretells those later great albums in surprisingly prophetic ways. There's an illuminating review at the top of this section, which basically says that without this LP, there wouldn't be Wilco's *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot*. That take was an eye-opener for sure. Or should I say, an "ear-opener". The messy-yet-delicate aesthetics are indeed the same. "Jesus Christ" is even a close cousin of "Jesus, etc.", and not only because of the similar titles, but because of the music itself. Chilton and Stephenson were inspired by timeless muses here, even if they consciously thought they were getting nowhere during the sessions.
Another reference point is This Mortal Coil, whose *It'll End In Tears*'s tracklisting displayed cover versions of *Holocaust* and "Kangaroo", two uncompromising cuts that make for a challenging listen, owing to the bluntly depressive nature of the first and the experimental, partly-improvised (?) instrumentation of the second. No wonder Ivo Watts-Russel was drawn to those off-kilter compositions like a moth to a flame. Yet the original versions have their own special kinds of light as well. A muted, chiaroscuro sort of light, admittedly, but one that elicits a deep response if you're in the right melancholy mood for it.
All of this is well, but on their own, those elements wouldn't fully redeem the record for me. What does redeem it however is how incredible the second side of the album sounds and feels, with a stellar string of breathtaking and devastating ballads, most of them enhanced by incredible chamber orchestra arrangements. Those cuts, "Stroke It Noel", "For You", "Blue Moon" and "Take Care" are the true gems of this LP. And the latter song, which concludes the original tracklisting, is also a pretty obvious influence on my friend Nick Wheeldon's music and songwriting (very few people outside of France know Nick, but if you like or love this Big Star record, I cannot encourage you enough to check out his recent albums, available on Spotify--they're worthy of a list like this for sure, it's THAT good).
So here I am, falling in love with *Third / Sister Lovers* at last. Glad I've just found a rather cheap secondhand copy of this album online (with the same tracklist as the one found in those links on this app). You know how the saying goes, "true love waits" sometimes.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 138
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 370 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 218
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 278
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
1/5
Matt Groening is way too naive. He got scammed when he bought that expensive double album, and so listened to it again and *again* to convince himself that he had actually made a good "investment" when he acquired that unlistenable record. If that's not a symptom of a "hellbent late-capitalist world", I don't know what is.
As suggested in that last remark, a couple of reviewers on this app are probably as naive as Groening. The truth is that if most people keep on listening to *any* record, they will eventually find some redeeming features in them. Heck, this app made me go through albums by Christina Aguilera, Taylor Swift or Bonnie Raitt, and I eventually found a fistful of listenable songs in them (Yes, I did, as hard as that was, lol). Didn't work with Limp Bizkit or Kid Rock, of course, but I guess that if someone tortured me by exposing me to their albums 24/7, I would make some sort of effort to focus on the "positive", let's say.
To put it in a nutshell, I'm not buying that "you-need-to-listen-to-this record-six-times-to-get-how-brilliant-it-is" yarn. Some truly great records are indeed "slow growers", but we're talking about very different animals here. A "slow grower" implies that if you're not directly and automatically attuned to an album you actually end up loving, you're not entirely put off by it either. This eventual love can't happen if your first reaction is to find the music obnoxious, grating, egregious what have you... And make no mistake, *Trout Mask Replica*'s music is VERY egregious.
A couple of famous artists, including some that I find brilliant, like David Lynch, have professed their love for this double-LP. But my take is that they love it because its apparent free-formed nature liberates their own unbridled creativity, just as John Frusciante puts it so nicely in that wikipedia quote. More power to them. Maybe I'm not bright enough as a creator myself. Maybe the fault lies in my blocked shakras. Yet even if that's the case, I don't think those positive takes can "defend" this music so well. Gestalt therapy can for instance help you open your mind's eye and get "in the zone", as they say. But Gestalt therapy should be considered as a means here, not an end. If therapy was considered as an artistic achievement in itself, you would have bland new age sophrological albums sold for yoga classes in this list. Glad there's not any.
The "therapy" suggested by *Trout Mask Replica* is admittedly very different. But that doesn't matter. What it has in common with sophrological music is how perfunctory and artificial it sounds. And it also doesn't matter that its contents are supposedly so "difficult", as if only "great minds" could get it (that's elitist bullshit, right?). For the record, I'm not saying that all "essential albums" should be easily digestible. And I do believe that challenging music can be rewarding in the long run. But you need something that counterbalances the solipsistic nature of said challenging music at some point. You need a buoy to prevent you from drowning into nothingness, whether this lifeline is a recognizable rhythm or a sketched melodic hook. Heck, even Throbbing Gristle can pull it off once in a while. And Captain Beefheart himself had tons of great musical ideas as well in his *true* masterpiece *Safe As Milk*, a groundbreaking, tongue-in-cheek and also challenging work for sure, and yet one that could be enticing and even accessible at times...
Plus, you need some sorts of relatable emotions. Seems to me that so-called "difficult" acts such as Robert Wyatt or Ensturzende Neübaten have those emotions in spades within their off-kilter music. In comparison, the music on *Trout Mask Replica* is just a stifling hysterical performance *pretending* to display those radical emotions, and doing it within a pointless simulacrum that even worsens things. I've read that Don Van Vliet actually harrassed and mistreated his musicians during the sessions for this album. Probably why it sounds so devoid of true joy in my ears. You can't fake genuine emotions.
So fuck Lester Bangs and Rolling Stone magazine. I'm not even mad at Van Vliet, because he followed his vision at least, and he tried hard to think out of the box. Which on paper, is always commendable. But I blame the pretentious fakers having some sort of influence at the time of this album's release. They're part of the scam. That scam gave the opportunity for folks such as Matt Groening to tell a story from their youths, which proves that the album is relevant on a cutural and intellectual standpoint. But musically, it's just a pile of turd. And anyone who says the contrary risks coming off as a pretentious faker as well. Not saying they *all* are. But *some* of them are, you can bet your boots on that...
1/5 for the purposes of this list.
6/10 for more general purposes (5 for general musical competency + 1 for the album's reputation and "impact")
Number of albums left to review: 137
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 370
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 219 (including this one - for historical reasons only, and also because this record is the "platonic ideal" of the quote-unquote "hermetic experimental album", and as such, could be considered as one you need to listen to, if only for your "intellectual" edification).
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 278
The Fall
5/5
Finally, The Fall album you need to select for a such a list. From post-punk scorchers (still rough around the edges, admittedly) to garage-rock-inspired excursions, from the catchy mock-synth pop of "L.A." to the full-blown delirium of "I Am Damo Suzuki" (a tribute of sorts to Can), Mark E. Smith goes to places his early fans didn't imagine him going, while preserving the abrasive, loony and somewhat disgruntled essence of his life project. The melodicism on the "pre-indie", borderline-folk cuts on the second side ("My New House" and "Paintwork") is also surprising and quite impressive, especially since it never waters down The Fall's true nature, once again.
Of course, The Fall is The Fall, and as such it remains an acquired taste. That said, the short Brix-Smith-composed instrumental "Mansion" opening this LP will probably have a Pavlovian effect on many post-punk fans. What directly follows is admittedly filled with strange hairpin curves, but young (at the time) producer John Leckie--who had already guided Magazine into their *Real Life*, and later on production duties for famous records by The Stone Roses, Radiohead and Muse (!)--is here to make sense out of the mess.
So even if you think The Fall is not for your ears, don't let yourself be daunted by the loose proceedings on the first side. This album really hits its stride with the fifth cut, "Spoilt Victorian Child", and if you like the latter, chances are that the music will never let you down after that. Because *This Nation's Saving Grace* is the sort of record that builds up its crazy-yet-inspiring artistry from one track to the next. There's a bit of everything for every weirdo out there. And yet the whole shebang is cohesive as f*ck.
4.5 stars out of 5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to the maximum grade.
9.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 136
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 371 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 219
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 278
The Jesus And Mary Chain
4/5
I advise everyone with sensitive ears to turn down the treble volume for this one. In 1985, this noisy, tinnitus-inducing debut was obviously a striking feat, especially compared to the bland mainstream aesthetics of the time.
Yet retrospectively, I can't help feeling like the songwriting on this admittedly seminal record is so mundane at times that it becomes difficult to gulp it down in one sitting (and this is where the abrasive production can't really help redeem that flaw--whether your sound suggests you made your record in a basement or a professional studio, mundane songs will remain mundane). A potential hot take here: picking up this noisy-garage thread with nods to goth, punk, rockabilly and the Velvet Underground, a later band known as A Place To Bury Strangers has written far better songs with catchier arrangements. Check them out if you've never heard of them.
Which doesn't mean that Psychocandy is ultimately bad. The way the extreme sound of "In A Hole" foretells APTB is impressive to say the least, but it also conveys some welcome dynamics in an LP lacking them overall. And on the other side of that spectrum, opener "Just Like Honey" is a gem. Too bad that the duo is stuck in those two modes, generally speaking, and rehashes the same sort of tunes elsewhere, only with a lesser impact.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list (rounded up to 4)
8.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: less that 150.
Numbers of albums I'll keep in my list: half approximately (including this one, but mostly for "historical" reasons)
Numbers of albums I might keep: a quarter, approximately.
Numbers of albums I won't keep: another quarter.
Billy Bragg
3/5
Only knowing Billy Bragg from his reputation as a pivotal punk-inspired singer-songwriter in a time where Tories were ruling the UK with an iron fist, squashing the hopes of the working class. So it was pleasant to get introduced to his music in a proper manner here. Browsing through his other early albums, it feels like this selection splits the difference between his early barebones LPs and his subsequent records where the production is a little more sophisticated (alas, sometimes giving in to the trends of the day in a couple of cuts here and there). So I guess *Talking With the Taxman About Poetry* is an ideal entry point. Billy's vocals are admittedly rough around the edges, but the artistry still shines, whether it's for the political songs or the more narrative cuts about doomed romance. Some of the violin or fiddle arrangements are stellar. Oh. And
"Train Train" was a nice surprise, all moody and cinematic as an early rock'n'roll pastiche.
3/5 for the purposes of this list.
8/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 134
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 372
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 221 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 278
Talk Talk
4/5
The best of both worlds when it comes to Talk Talk's discography. You have the pop hits ("Life's What You Make It", "Living In Another World"...), but also the sophisticated production and the very organic-sounding arrangements leading to the British band's later jazzy art-pop / post-rock period--crisp and glossy to a fault here, maybe, yet so interesting and even often mesmerizing to dive into. A couple of songs are just a little too long given Hollis' plaintive tones as a singer, but the many assets of this LP outweigh those minor flaws. Opener "Happiness Is Easy", with its small toddlers choir, a little out of tune, has an incredible atmosphere to it. And "Time It's Time" is a perfect closer. The arrangements on both those tracks are high art, dreamy yet also tangible and tied to a very solid musical ground.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums".9/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: less that 150.
Numbers of albums I'll keep in my list: half approximately (including this one)
Numbers of albums I might keep: a quarter, approximately.
Numbers of albums I won't keep: another quarter.
Stereo MC's
2/5
I remember buying this one on the strength of hit single "Connected". Alas, as fun as all of this kinda felt at the time, the rest of the album comes off as very lackluster compared to said single, and clearly didn't stand the test of time. Only now do I realize that "Playing With Fire" rips off an old moody cut by the Rolling Stones, to a very cheesy and dated result here. Lost that CD a long time ago. Not gonna buy it again.
1.5/5 for the purposes of this list, generously rounded up to 2
6.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 133
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 373
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 221
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 279 (including this one)
Beastie Boys
5/5
The one where the Beasties refined the multifaceted formula found for previous LP *Check Your Head*: a joyous, unpredictable mix of organic-sounding old school hip hop bangers, a fistful of punk rock scorchers, and an small avalanche of jazzy instrumentals, with an incredible atmosphere to them. All of this with most
of the instrumentation played live, minus some memorable samples and loops here and there (including two flute earworms on two pivotal tracks). The hip hop bangers include "Root Down", "Sure Shot" and "Alright Hear This", with the cream on the rap cake being the extraordinary "Get It Together", featuring the great Q-Tip on an hypnotic minimalistic instrumental that would indeed have felt at home on a A Tribe Called Quest record ; the punk-rock tracks are led by "Sabotage", probably the Beastie Boys' most recognizable hit from that era of their discography (with a hilarious video to boot) ; "Tough Guy" and "Heart Attack Man" hearken back to the trio's hardcore punk beginnings in a fresh and tongue-in-cheek fashion ; and most of the jazz, funk, and funk-rock instrumentals are pitch-perfect, as laid-back as they are sophisticated : melodic, double-bass laden "Ricky's Theme" is my favourite among them, but "Sabrosa", closer "Transitions" and "Futterman's Rule" are exceptional as well (the latter was the opening titles track for a local radio show I was a part of decades ago so I might be biased here, but listening to it again, I can't help thinking that picking that cut for that use was a pretty good choice). Oh, and the Tibetan diphonic chants and traditional temple music used for "Shambala" and "Bodhisattva Vow", conveying the Beasties' interest for Buddhism at the time (and their militancy around the political status of Tibet), also give a very distinct and idiosyncratic mood to the tail end of this awesome record.
With *Paul's Boutique*, the Beastie Boys had already released a sort of "Sgt. Pepper" for hip hop at large. But what no one could have predicted in 1989 is that they would accomplish that feat again and again for their subsequent LPs, using live instrumentation that the boys would perform themselves, belying their early reputation of being mere jokesters and a music business hoax once and for all (here helped by Mario Caldato Jr., Money Mark, Eric Bobo or Avery Smith). Plus, when it comes to their rapping skills, MCA, ADRock and Mike D were still at the top of their game, with a lot of memorable one-liners. The result of this combination is an album that's fun and varied, and that feels spontaneous and highly ambitious at the same time. A very rare mix. 5/5
Number of albums left to review: 133
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 374 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 221
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 279
Ride
4/5
Just as The Jesus And Mary Chain's *Psychocandy* a few days ago, this Ride album, supposedly their magnum opus, might be slightly overrated. My main gripe with it is that it's status as a 'shoegaze' essential record seems a bit unwarranted. What *Nowhere* offers on its first side, for instance, is more bent towards some sort of early, borderline-lo-fi and admittedly "hazy" version of the nineties britpop frenzy about to submerge the UK than anything that sounds perfectly close to Slowdive or My Bloody Valentine. Too many airy major chords and not enough genuine melancholia. Sound is important, but music matters too. And here the music might be a little mundane or predictable, as decent as it is. Add some vocal parts and harmonies that have a flimsy grasp of pitch on some cuts--and not necessarily in any endearing ways given the intent to immerse the listener in an all-encompassing soundscape--and you may get the impression that Ride's reach exceeds their grasp at times.
It's true that the last three songs in the album eventually up the ante in the shoegaze idiom in ways that make listening to the album from start to finish enjoyable at least. "Decay" is a driven exercise in repetitive, obsessive mania. "Paralysed" is somewhat moving thanks to its plaintive chorus. And "Vapour Trail" ends the LP on a very high note, thanks to its pretty guitar riff, the timeless and strangely dignified aspects of its la-la-la vocal hook, and its elegant use of a string section until the very last seconds of the original record. Plus, the sprinkling of psychedelic influences here and there during the course of this album have aged quite well, all things considered.
That said, if truly you want stellar shoegaze records, I'm pretty sure there's half a dozen of them that are more efficient than this particular LP in this overall genre. The question is: "is there room for more?". As of now, I'm gonna say 'yes'. But for what it's worth, the global score of *Nowhere* on this app--a perfect 3 signifying an album that globally neither irks average listeners nor triggers a tidal wave of enthusiasm among them--emphasizes an intermediate position that prevents this LP from reaching a perfect score in my eyes. Ride's music was probably noticed in 1990 because, apart from The La's and The Stone Roses, there was not much competition in the British rock idiom at the time (at least when it came to interesting acts). Yet retrospectively, *Nowhere* looks like a ripple on the surface of a quiet sea, and not like the tsunami everyone said it was. A ripple pleasant to your eyes and ears. But a ripple nonetheless.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 for general musical competency + 3 for the artistic flair +0.5 for the album's "impact")
Number of albums left to review: 133
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 375 (including this one, mostly for the "impact" it had at the time, once again)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 221
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 279
Tortoise
4/5
Not going to sound very original here: this is a seminal album in the post-rock genre, still nascent by 1996. A music style that's so BADLY represented in Dimery's book (no GY!BE, no Mogwai, only one Sigur Rós album...) that I'm pleased to give quite high marks to this one. The mix of influences--going from jazz and classical to rock, dub and funk--is hypnotic, the instrumentation is always interesting and often surprising, and some of the harmonies used here can send you into a meditative state that's one of a kind. As other reviewers remarked, those tracks can equally serve as background or "foreground" music, and hit all the right spots in both modes. Plus, the Steve Reich influence on the repetitive patterns of the percussive instruments (including a xylophone, I guess) give Tortoise a very distinct personality in that whole post-rock family. Which is exactly where you can separate the whiff from the chaff in that overall genre.
That said, I think the Chicagoans' formula was greatly refined for their subsequent, even more ambitious double-LP *TNT*, unfortunately not mentioned by Dimery and co. So maybe I will keep that Tortoise slot for that other record of theirs in my own list. I have other important post-rock albums to include, you see...
4/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4)
Number of albums left to review: 132
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 375
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 222 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 279
PS: speaking of Steve Reich, I have to point out that the latter is another shameful blind spot in that 1001 Albums book. A couple of pivotal albums presenting historical renditions of his key works (albums from the ECM label, obviously) should have been included in the list at no great cost. Just erase Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, or Hanoi Rocks from everyone's memory and voilà!
Fairport Convention
5/5
Even more than *Liege And Lief*, admittedly a strong contender to best represent that late 60's British folk scene in which Fairport Convention shone so much, this is the album where the English band reached an emotional level that was still unmatched in that genre at the time. Traditional "Sailor's Life" concludes with an epic jam, in case the song proper wasn't epic itself ; Sandy Denny's "Who Knows Where The Time Goes" is very moving, Thompson's "Cajun Woman" rocks, and the Bob Dylan covers slap, especially the incredibly heartfelt and instantly memorable "Percy's Song". Not a single dud on this one, even if a couple of cuts are less striking then the rest during first listens. The couple of old folks on that tongue-in-cheek cover can be proud of their offspring.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 131
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 376
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 222
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 279
Kings of Leon
2/5
Oh well. This Kings Of Leon debut probably harbors less grating moments than their subsequent LP. That said, the fact that the band here take zero risks is not an asset either. Their sophomore album has more personality in spite of its flaws--flaws including their singer's vocals, obviously an "acquired taste", which yet also makes their early albums endearing for some listeners. Here, in this first album by the southern rockers, the songwriting and performance often lack that magic spark that could make their act *truly* stand out. Sometimes, 'intermittently grating' is preferable to 'mid'.
The four singles extracted from *Youth And Young Manhood* are pretty decent, I guess. But the rest, going from the same sort of southern boogie rhythms to half-baked slower cuts, is too mundane for a list like this. Not all early-noughts landfill retro-rock records are "essential", far from it.
2/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 7/10 grade for more general purposes (5+2).
Number of albums left to review: 132
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 376
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 222
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 280 (including this one, even if it's still better than the start of the arena-rock period of the band--like many reviewers, I feel like giving three slots to this overrated act in the 1001 albums book is particularly unwarranted).
Skunk Anansie
3/5
Certainly an upgrade in terms of sound, vocal performance, production, concept and overall ambition compared to Skunk Anansie's previous LPs. That said, it's not the stylistic 180-degree turn that its Wikipedia page pretends it is either (a dubious take that's probably inspired by the PR blurbs released about this album at the time). The band's very-nineties-albeit-one-of-a-kind alt-rock formula is indeed pretty much the same as before as they go from groove-metal and RATM-adjacent crossover-rock cuts to unabashedly poppier ballads, with a couple of quote-unquote "punk' moments here and there--counterbalanced by lush string sections for good measure.
No matter what (sub)genre Skunk Anansie tackle, 90% of the emotion is conveyed through singer Skin's soulful vocals anyway--here reaching unarguable peaks in the standout tracks, such as rock ballad "Lately" and its equally slow-paced follow-up track "Secretly". The rest is decidedly hit-or-miss, and there again, the music style that's chosen doesn't matter as much as the songwriting and/or execution. Hits include the Tool-inspired opener "Charlie Big Potato", the hectic and topically heavy "On My Hotel TV" or lively rocker "The Skank Heads". Misses include "Tracy's Flaw", a composition that doesn't make a shred of sense, or the two duds unfortunately ending the album on a bum note--one penultimate punk cut that completely fails to dynamize the LP's last run, so awkward it sounds, plus one extra ballad, "I'm Not Afraid", which was clearly useless after the other mundane, major-chords-driven slow cuts the band had indulged in during the course of this tracklist. There, for the conclusion of the record, the stylistic left-turns neither rhyme nor reason. As a matter of fact, the album could have ended on "You'll Follow Me Down" without missing anything relevant to say on a musical standpoint. And even there, it was one ballad too many, maybe.
In spite of my complaints up there, *Post-Orgasmic Chill* is not so bad overall. There's always been something artificial-sounding to Skunk Anansie's projects--a feature also enhanced by the fact that the band quite sometimes used an outside writer for their music. Yet I would lie if I said the album wasn't enjoyable overall.
Is that enough to consider it "essential"? Nope. Its tracklist is still a little too patchy at times, and those particular "alt-rock" shenanigans didn't age so well anyway, to be honest (even if they're ten times less ridiculous than what Evanescence released not long after in a somewhat close genre!). Before enjoying the state described by the album's title, you need genuine excitement first. And if the latter can be found at times inside this LP, it's not the sort of excitement that can send you head over heels into the moon either.
3/5 for the purposes of this list, which translates to a 8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 131
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 376
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 222
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 281 (including this one).
Meat Puppets
4/5
Not familiar with the history of the different editions of the 1001 albums book, but I suspect that the retrospective inclusion of this album in Dimery's list partly stems from the fact that Nirvana covered three songs from it in their MTV Unplugged concert (backed by members of Meat Puppets themselves). It sure takes the genius ear of Kurt Cobain to spot the potential of those three standout tracks as recorded here.
Not to say that the original album is not worthy of indie-rock fans' interest. The psychedelic folk-rock cuts are stellar on this one. Of course, there are "Plateau", "Lake Of Fire" and "Oh Me", of *Unplugged* fame, but also the equally beautiful (and yet strangely ominous, not to mention harmonically unpredictable) "We're Here" and "The Whistling Song". Plus the wonderfully dreamy instrumentals "Aurora Borealis" and "I'm A Mindless Idiot". The guitar work on each and every one of those cuts is truly impressive, with a lot of intricate flourishes that bring a lot of off-kilter and uncanny emotions on the table.
The only (somewhat important) issue I have with this record is that its punk-rock / country-rock / cowpunk tracks (take your pick) are pretty underwhelming (and even grating) at times. They're cluttering the start of each of the sides of this original LP, and please, oh please, keep on listening after they're gone, or you will miss the truly great stuff this record has to offer.
One last thing, about the vocals: a lot of listeners will notice that Curt Kirkwood is often out of key, but I don't think that's a real problem if you focus on the surreal-yet-evocative lyrics and the emotive performance. Even with its flaws, this album is one-of-a-kind, and has aged pretty well. Evidence enough that during the eighties, you had to look into the underground to find more authentic and heartfelt music. Not sure I will include *Meat Puppets II* in my own list, because if you take its few duds away, its length is more akin to the one of an EP than an album proper. But I'm glad it was on Dimery's list, at least.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 130
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 376
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 223 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 281
New York Dolls
5/5
The past, the present and the future mingle in this one. Iconic opener "Personality Crisis" winks to the contemporary glam-rock shenanigans occurring on the other side of the pond in 1973 (think Mott The Hopple and Bowie) ; there are sprinkles of T-Rex's boogie and Steppenwolf's road rage in closer "Jet Boy" ; the infectious "Trash", with its instantly likeable high-pitched background vocals, both hearkens back to the early days of rock'n'roll and foretells the 1977 punk revolution ; and so do "Looking For A Kiss", "Vietnamese Baby" and "Subway Train", equal parts Rolling Stones and The Sex Pistols--it's no wonder the New York Dolls' Johnny Thunders would soon partake in said punk revolution across the Atlantic with his own Heartbreakers, even if that's a story for another time, kiddies... "Vietnamese Baby" also logically picks the proto-punk ball that The Stooges had just dropped in those years, which leads us to the sinister "Frankenstein" a couple of tracks later--an incredible centerpiece not only impressive because of its ominous atmosphere, but also because of how its noisy and apocalyptic contents directly point towards what another legendary New York outfit, Sonic Youth, would start to accomplish a decade later...
So yeah, this debut is an angular stone for sure. *Very* angular at times. But beyond its pivotal place between classic rock and punk, what makes it stand out today is the reckless, raunchy, devil-may-care artistry and performance on it. Just like the record's provocative artwork showing the Dolls in drag--exactly how the band looked onstage, I hear--its proceedings give you the feeling that danger lurks around the corner at all times. The dynamic tracklisting, cohesive enough to dig a clear groove throughout, yet also varied in its different intents and moods, is to thank for that. And Todd Rundgren's simple and straightforward production is to be praised as well--the band claimed they sounded even wilder live, but given where Rundgren comes from as a rather "baroque" musician enjoying all sorts of mannerism in his own work, the results could have been far less appropriate than what we ultimately had. What matters is that the guitar work is "dirty" enough, with quite a few messy details here and there to make that whole monster of an album come alive in front of your incredulous eyes and ears. Aptly "Frankenstein'-like, as if made out of the disparate, most outrageous bits and pieces of the history of rock'n'roll, from both days yonder and the ones to come...
To put it in a nutshell, freaks will "get" this record for sure, and instantly perceive why it should not be confused with most other dad-rock LPs from the early seventies--you think your average "dad-rock" can post that sort of album cover on Facebook anyway??? 😄 As for the other listeners, well, they can get kicked by a platform boot and go find their pleasure elsewhere. After all, there are all sorts of kinks for everyone out there in this list. Even if I doubt a lot of them sound as fun or wild as the transgressive pleasures offered through this seminal album...
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 5
4.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 130
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 377 (including this one).
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 223
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 281
Fuck you, 1001 Albums book. And fuck you too, U2. :) At least the one playing on this record. There are probably *2,000* albums more worthy of your attention out there.
Oh, and by the way, a big "fuck you" to Rolling Stone magazine as well! Their own expectations and tastes for the reception of this record were so predictable that they're actually far more worthy of contempt than U2 themselves. At least, the Irish band were 'doing their job' right on a competency and professional level. Which is not the case for Rolling Stone as serious music critics.
I'm not the one easily going for expletives on this app... But c'mon, praising this late-career attempt to become relevant again from the admittedly iconic Irish rock band is just plain ridiculous. Especially when you consider the obvious artistic flaws in the album, and this even in the context of a band that couldn't possibly top their past successful LPs (both artistically and commercially speaking).
Case in point: "Elevation", which painstakingly tries to catch that *Achtung Baby* magic spark, alas to very mixed results. The issue here, as in the rest of this record, first stems from Bono's lackluster vocal performance--with his trademark mannerisms often worsened by some stifled or raspy inflexions at odds with the epic ambitions displayed throughout the proceedings. Add all those goddamn *generic*, middle-of-the-road compositions plaguing 90% of the tracklist, along with the eyerolls-inducing lyrics about "peace on earth", "redemption-through-love", and bla-bla-bla and so on--filled with so many hackneyed clichés that those lines of predictable words become sickening at best--and what you ultimately get is a borefest only aging critics and fans out of touch with the youth of the time could appreciate.
Once upon a time, U2 could wear their hearts on their sleeves and yet still manage to elicit genuine emotions (the classic string of eighties albums, plus some other later songs at the start of the nineties). Or conversely, they could go through more abrasive and off-kilter territories, with a more cynical outlook, and thus offer a somewhat challenging version of what postmodern pop music could offer to the masses (through other songs mostly found in *Achtung Baby* and *Zooropa*). But here, you have none of those two extremities on a musical standpoint. You just have a bland middle-ground that's so calculated and calibrated that the whole thing quickly becomes sterile in your ears. Everyone is on full 'automatic mode' in this album: Bono and his sense of self-importance which prevents him from perceiving how ridiculous he is, Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois at the production helm, and even The Edge's guitar playing--the man does nothing grating for sure, and yet there's nothing to really get excited about in his own performance. Well, apart from a couple of moments here and there, like that interesting experimental solo at the end of "When I Look At The World"...
Alas, those moments are too few. And they can't mitigate that overall impression that this record is ultimately pointless. I mean, how downright *boring* that second side is. And how awkward and self-conscious the first side feels like anyway... To put it in a nutshell, many talents are here gathered to record music cruelly lacking in stakes and even genuine "life" at times. Heck, even Coldplay's most middle-of-the-road tunes sound livelier than any of this (to use a reference point that's also related to Brian Eno's production chops). "Walk On" is a decent ballad, I guess. But let's face it: in albums *War*, *The Joshua Tree* or *Achtung Baby", that song would be a deep cut, and not the standout track.
If only for this, there's no way I can give more than a 1/5 grade to this album. In truth, it's probably closer to a 2. But for once, I'm going to *lower* my grade to protest about how misguided that selection is.
1/5 for the purposes of this list gathering "essential albums" to listen to.
6/10 grade for more general purposes (5 for musical competency +1 for the actual artistry).
Number of albums left to review: 129
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 377
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 223
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 282 (including this one)
The Sabres Of Paradise
3/5
So out of all the EDM / IDM releases from Warp Records, the 1001 Albums book had to pick this one. Andrew Weatherall, who was at the helm of this project during the early nineties was probably a deciding factor for the inclusion of this LP (may he rest in power). The man got known for remixing songs by Happy Mondays, New Order, Primal Scream... So tell me you have a rock bias without ever directly telling me you have a rock bias, Mr. Dimery. And this while selecting a record whose DNA is 99% electronic. Nicely done...
This album is still a more than decent representative of its overall genre, but it's got a huge problem if you want to consider it for a list like this: it's unable to dig one clear groove, and thus risks losing large chunks of its potential audience. Frankly, I think this lack of cohesiveness is here a fatal flaw. Worse, those stylistic U-turns, which could have been assets with slightly different choices, mostly fail to properly dynamize the tracklisting. The worst of both worlds, so to speak.
To be more specific, the album is divided in three parts that don't really fit with each other. Its first third displays some sort of minimalistic EDM that's a bit too linear and drowsy at times. You do get the picture of bubbles being slashed by swords in the two-part opener, as announced by the latter's title... but after mere minutes of slow build-up, the predictable layerings of patterns at its heart can be as hypnotic for some listeners as it will be boring for others. Interesting, I guess... But "essential' electronic music? The second third of the record suddenly explores big beat and dub-adjacent territories, and this part just aged like milk. Dated breakbeats and weird loops are not enough to hide how vacuous those four or five cuts are... The last part then returns to very ambient soundscapes, and it's the one that fares better today. FAR better. Ironically, those last four cuts are also the moment where The Sabres Of Paradise are very close to the electronic masters from the seventies and the early eighties. As if only exploring the past could allow you to appear as relevant in the future (a phenomenon that's actually not so rare in electronica)... You can scent whiffs of Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre or John Carpenter in that great tail end of the album. But that admittedly derivative-albeit-pretty-nice-and-convincing upgrade is very much a last-minute course-correction, and therefore can't justify including the whole album in my eyes.
Warp has so many better and stronger records and artists in its roster, from LFO and Boards Of Canada to Aphex Twin, Broadcast, PVT, Oneohtrix Point Never or Squid. Some of those artists are mentioned in Dimery's book, others are conspicuously absent in it. And it's up to you to discover them all...
2.5/5 for the purposes of this list gathering "essential albums" to listen to, here rounded up to 3.
7.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 for musical competency + 2.5 for the artistry).
Number of albums left to review: 128
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 377
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 223
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 283 (including this one)
Stan Getz
4/5
This album is like the "Girl From Ipanema". It's "tall and tan and young and lovely", yet with its lack of variations and refusal to leave its decidedly one-note groove so as to have a little musical adventure on the wayside, it also comes off as distant and even a little too detached at times. Seems to me that other strands of Brazilian and Brazilian-inspired music can be much more engaging and livelier than this famous LP (think Chico Buarque, Milton Nascimiento, Lô Borges, Caetano Veloso...). Listening to the record, I feel for the guy watching the titular girl from Ipanema "when she walks to the sea" and "looks straight ahead, not at me". Because this is the exact emotion I go through when I try to love this album: the music sorts of passes me by without ever doing anything that makes me feel I can interact with it somehow. I imagine some listeners enjoy that 'floating' affect... Maybe I'm not cool and aloof enough to let it naturally sink in, who knows?
That said, I guess *Getz/Gilberto* is still a classic in its bossa-nova / cool lounge jazz subgenre, mostly thanks to its most famous cuts, Jobim's "Garota De Ipanema" of course, but also his other compositions "Desafinado" and "Corcovado". And if those sessions make for functional background music, they're still doing their job perfectly right. Play this when you're having a bourgeois dinner with friends.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list gathering "essential albums" to listen to, here rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5/5 for musical competency + 3.5/5 for the artistry).
Number of albums left to review: 127
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 377
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 224 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 283
Simon & Garfunkel
5/5
Bridge Over Troubled Water, The Boxer, Cecilia, The Only Living Boy in New York, El Condor Pasa... You just can't beat a tracklist containing gems such as these. And all the deeper cuts are perfectly nice as well.
Funny how this record received very mixed reviews at the time... Guess the "critics" missed its main point: yes, this album's production is lush and expansive, and goes to all sorts of directions... but this is another reason why the album is the crowning achievement of Simon and Garfunkel's career.
I'm not gonna elaborate here--the second review currently topping this section does that perfectly. Just wish I could have been there first to talk about Artie's "moustache". Alas, the *first* review topping this section beat me to it long ago...
Number of albums left to review: 126
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 378 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 224
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 283
The Beach Boys
5/5
The story of the Beach Boys post-*Pet Sounds* is admittedly messy, but to me, the music they played during the first half of the seventies is as worthy of attention and even as exhilarating as their "classic" sixties period.
Ending this classic period, there's been the *Smile* debacle that saw Brian Wilson lose its grip on reality and suffer a mental breakdown--and yet now that that *Smile* has been "reconstructed" (it was a decade ago, approximately), fans of experimental rock are aware of the 'trip' that this unreleased LP was. Some of its best moments had already been used on the actual *Pet Sounds* follow-up *Smiley Smile*, of course (unfortunately mixed with a few duds...). Yet listening to the whole original project sure tells you what the Beach Boys: audience had missed back then: the fact that the *real* album never came out after all the expectations its announcement had raised was a cruel blow to the Californian band's career. Not that you necessarily need that context in mind to appreciate *Surf's Up* for what it is... Yet it sure explains its peculiar tone a few years down the line, with its somewhat grittier or disillusioned mood, in keeping with the artwork and the irony of the album's title (as well as the one of its opener "Don't Go Near The Water").
After a trio of underwhelming albums following the release of *Smiley Smile" (*Wild Honey*, "Friends* and *20/20*, quite boring to my ears), it seems that the Beach Boys had indeed lost all sense of direction, just as their main songwriter took a back seat creatively speaking for the sake of his fragile mental health. Worse, their trademark sound was definitely out of fashion by the end of the sixties--hence their first flawed attempts to include soul, novelty cuts and more contemporary strands of rock into their music...
Yet what occured right after those first misguided attempts was essentially an artistic miracle: mostly everyone in the band wrote compositions to make up for Brian's far lesser involvement, and the band also tried to keep up with the evolution of American rock to boot. And looking back, their efforts paid off, because the string of four albums that followed (*Sunflower*, *Surf's Up", *Carl And The Passions: So Tough* and *Holland*) is filled with so many gems, going from surf-rock to weird psychedelia to The Band-adjacent wonders, that it's easy to lose count of them all. Too bad that those records never really had the commercial and critical success that they deserved at the time--none of those LPs are perfect, yet their many assets outweigh their shortcomings by far. And a lot of the songs on them aged like fine wine, which is why those albums have been so kindly reevaluated today. Here is a lesson about how one should always be suspicious of the critical fads of the day when said fads risk preventing you from enjoying great music. The Beach Boys were not the only victims of that phenomenon. Other artists wrote masterpieces or near-masterpieces that were unfairly ignored during the seventies (Gene Clark comes to mind here). It's nice when history proves those artists right decades later--even if it's also bittersweet their ambitions were not recognized at the time...
Second in this string of four great early-seventies Beach Boys albums in a row, *Surf's Up* thus has five key tracks that definitely justify its inclusion in this list: Mike Love and Al Jardine's wry opener "Don't Go Near The Water", that we mentioned earlier ; the extraordinary Carl Wilson-penned "Long Promised Road" and its catchy riff at the end, slick and yet also abrasive, to the point where it sounds like an amplified krautrock synth (is it?) ; the psychedelic and tropical flute-laden extravaganza "Feel Flows", also written by Carl ; and finally the last three tracks of the record that see Brian return to the fold as a composer/songwriter, two of which are part of his most stellar work--first there's the part-esoteric, part-melancholic cyclical chord sequence of "Til' I Die" recounting an existential crisis experienced by Wilson as he contemplated both the ocean and his own mortality ; and finally there's the title-track, which was actually written and recorded for *Smile*, and is one of the latter's finest moments as it ends on the Wordsworth-inspired mantra "The child is father to the man". A very mystical conclusion, here enhanced by the fact that the song was resurrected from those legendary *Smile* sessions...
The rest of the album is maybe a small notch under those gems, yet those other tunes are still very nice. And I really can't see why so many folks seem to have a problem with the fun and tongue-in-cheek "Student Demonstration Time". Sure, by 1971 it was a little too late to get interested in those topics of political rebellion and revolution... but the Beach Boys don't take themselves seriously here anyway (even if they look like they do for other lyrics). Besides, that chorus snarling the words "there's a riot going on" is... well, it's *riotous* to listen to. Why should people be such party-poopers, huh?
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 5
9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 125
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 379 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 224
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 283
Le Tigre
5/5
We've talked about it in reviews
And we've talked about it on this app
But how you really feel about it
I don't really know...
What's Yr Take on Le Tigre's *Le Tigre*?
What's Yr Take on Le Tigre's *Le Tigre*?
What's Yr Take on Le Tigre's *Le Tigre*?
What's Yr Take on Le Tigre's *Le Tigre*?
Cool feminists? Genius? Cool feminists? Genius?
Cool feminists? Genius? Cool feminists? Genius?
What's Yr Take on Le Tigre's *Le Tigre*? [x4]
Kathleen's breakout? Her selling out? Kathleen's breakout? Her selling out?
Kathleen's breakout? Her selling out? Kathleen's breakout? Her selling out?
What's Yr Take on Le Tigre's *Le Tigre*? [x4]
Genius? Cool feminists? Sellouts?
Hey where's Bikini Kill?
Genius? Cool feminists? Sellouts? Riot grrrrls breakout?
What's Yr Take on Le Tigre's *Le Tigre* [x4]
(Seriously, though... This album and its electrorock bangers slap from start to end... 5/5 for the purposes of this list. And a 10/10 grade for more general purposes).
Number of albums left to review: 124
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 380 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 224
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 283
Grateful Dead
3/5
Oh well. Don't know if it's a hot take here, but as of now, I think I prefer when Grateful Dead was performing their quote-unquote "psychedelic" noodling, as in this live recording, to their subsequent "Americana / country-folk" phase--as exemplified by *American Beauty* (more quaint to my ears at times, even if some songs and arrangements in it are great). I'm not gonna lie, some moments in *Live / Dead* sound beautiful to me, even if it's in a "jam-rock" realm that will never *fully" fulfill me...
Another potential hot take of mine would be to favor Grateful Dead's *Live/Dead* over Quicksilver Messenger Service's *Happy Trails*, contrary to what a prominent review in this section posits. It seems to me this live record is more expansive and also leads to more meditative states than *Happy Trails* when you open your mind to it. That Haight / West Coast hippie scene that propelled both bands to the foreground is such a cliché in itself anyway... Maybe I listened to too many punks ridiculing it in my youth to have a somewhat fair assessment of its musical qualities. It's funny because I think I have opened my shakras since my teenage years, especially when it comes to sixties / early seventies bands. Yet it's also true that there's still something lacking to my ears in this sort of music, as nice as some of its spots can be...
So for once, call me decisively undecided on this one. Maybe one day... I think it's one of those cases when you needed to be there at the time to really, really "get" it, with or without drugs. One thing's for sure, I don't want to howl with the wolves anymore. Seems to me that this record doesn't deserve the bad rep it still routinely gets, as exemplified in some of the reviews in this section... In all honesty, anyone who had ever tried their hand at an improvised rock jam can relate to what was happening during those gigs. Such endeavors are never about perfection, they're about "feelings". And I think *Live / Dead* has some interesting ones to spare...
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums".
8/10 grade for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 123
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 380
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 225 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 283
Aretha Franklin
4/5
When there's "Respect" opening the proceedings, how can you *not* select this album in a list such as this one? Aretha transcends Otis Redding's song and her choices of vocal arrangements are so effective and soulful that the original version pales in comparison, as nice as said original version already was (and who among general audiences even remember it today, right?).
The thing is, as far as essential or near-essential albums go, *Aretha Now* has more hits, and it's also clear to me that *Lady Soul* is an even better record than *I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You*. Let's face it, those other Aretha Franklin albums have a far more dynamic tracklist, with a perfect balance of lively cuts and slower ones. Conversely, *I Never Loved A Man...* mostly comprises ballads, and if the four that follow "Respect" are stellar (special mention for the bossa nova tones of ""Don't Let Me Lose This Dream"), the ones at the center of the LP ("Baby, Baby, Baby" and "Dr. Feelgood") are quite lukewarm. And most of all, they sound too damn similar. Sam Cook-penned "Good Times" is a bit more enticing, but it's also somewhat mundane and quite predictable as well. Which is not the case for another tune written by Cook, closer "A Change Is Gonna Come"--Aretha's performance on this ballad serves its oh-so-topical contents in such a moving way that the song soon becomes quite anthemic. And the two other highlights on side 2 are "Save Me", with its pop-rock overtones, and "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man", with its tense-yet-sensual mood and its dramatic background vocals. As such, those three standout tracks make up for the relative loss of momentum that has occured right before their appearance, at least...
So yeah, maybe that's a slightly overrated album in my book, but the overall message of emancipation conveyed by a lot of those songs, plus Aretha's legendary singing chops, still make this one a keeper... And if you think I'm splitting hairs here, look at my final grade.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums".
9/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4)
Number of albums left to review: 123
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 381 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 225
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 283
Dr. John
5/5
So... Eighties Tom Waits actually existed a few years before he started the first phase of his career in the early seventies, and his name was actually Dr. John, from New Orleans... Good to know. And awesome to listen to. Even if this thing comes from the late sixties, its swampy, voodoo-inspired mood is so singular that it's basically timeless. Would have loved hearing this music in a David Lynch or Jim Jarmusch flick. Fortunately, the 1001 albums book and app were there to make me discover this gem in another way...
All jokes about Tom Waits aside, I already had a superficial knowledge of who Dr. John was, but that was through *Dr. John's , Gumbo*, his breakout LP of covers related to his hometown, nice and dandy, but not very surprising sonically speaking. I have to say that this far more original debut is definitely more suited to my tastes. It's bookended by two killer cuts in their off-kilter bluesy genre, "Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya" and "I Walk One Guilded Splinters". "Mama Roux" and "Jump Sturdy" sound great as well, and the two "danses" are mysterious and cinematic enough to seal the whole deal for me (only the lengthy "Croker Courtbullion" is grating after a while).
Spent some time this afternoon falling into a rabbit hole and exploring other Dr. John albums prior to *Gumbo*. Those records are all flawed to an extent, but on the other hand, they all have a couple of gems to spare at the same time. Who cast a spell on me? Looks like "the night tripper" did...
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums", rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4.5)
Number of albums left to review: 122
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 382 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 225
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 283
Serge Gainsbourg
4/5
Cargo culte, disque culte. Le sujet et certaines paroles de ce disque majeur dans la discographie de Gainsbourg n'ont pas forcément bien vieilli. La référence à Sunderland, ville natale de Jane Birkin dans l'avant-dernier titre, suggère que l'histoire dans le disque est surtout une ode érotique à la femme (et muse) de Serge, ici transformée en fantasme quelque peu crapoteux où Jane serait mineure au moment où Serge la séduit. Gainsbourg était coutumier de ce genre de provocation, et ça ne s'est pas arrangé avec l'âge...
A quick aside in English about the Sunderland reference for readers living a across the Channel: didn't know that Jane Birkin, here gracing the suggestive artwork of this record, had a Geordie background, which strikes me as funny given that she was considered as a typical London fashionista in France--anyway, one cannot underestimate how Jane's presence on Gainsbourg's side, both as a wife and an artistic partner, was pivotal for the success of some of his most timeless musical endeavors, whether through her suave vocal performance on this record, or through the lustful one on the song "Je t'aime moi non plus". Sad that Jane recently passed away, she was such an endearing figure. May she rest in peace...
Pour finir (en français), sur cet album, sa production, ses orchestrations novatrices et ses arrangements ont toujours une influence notable cinq décennies plus tard, et ont donc eux particulièrement bien vieilli. On ne compte plus les grands artistes qui ont pris pour référence ce disque, de Beck à Neil Hannon, de Tricky à Broadcast, ou de Jarvis Cocker à Portishead...
4/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums"
9/10 grade for more general purposes (5+4)
Number of albums left to review: 121
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 383 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 225
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 283
Einstürzende Neubauten
5/5
I have always liked this debut album, in spite of its infamous low global score on this app. It's a wonderful and evocative clatter of metal platters and industrial distortion, whose edge and singular poetry haven't aged a day. The longest cuts ("Tanz Debil", "Steh Auf Berlin", "Kollaps", "Abstieg Und Zerfall"...) are the best moments in the original tracklist, and if the other selections are not as wild and lively, they still function as useful moodpieces bringing a lot to the album's flow and cohesion.
I don't know, maybe I'm a sucker for hypnotic percussions on scraps of metal and other "found objects". The ones displayed here do even remind me of Balinese gamelan music at times, admittedly a far different beast, yet one with the same relentless drive in its best moments... Which is why I just can't understand people who find this music off-putting, very honestly. My best guess is that they're also repelled by the gritty German vocals, which even encouraged some reviewers on this app to compare the latter to Hitler's speeches (!). Ugh. That's such an ignorant and cringeworthy take I don't know where to start here... You think the f*cking n*zis would have condoned such quote-unquote "degenerate" art? I can live with people having vastly different different aesthetic requirements than the one I have, but some of those people should try to make the two brain cells they have left connect to each other before opening their goddamn mouth.
Einstürzende Neubauten have had a long and very interesting career after this debut, with albums sounding miles away from what *Kollaps* had to offer. Not saying everything is essential, far from it, but that discography is worth checking out for anyone interested in industrial, post-punk or art-rock endeavors. Oh, and Blixa Bargeld has been a part of Nick Cave's adventures with the Bad Seeds for a very long time, which makes him quite an important figure in music history. So I guess having at least one album by his main band in a list such as this one makes sense somehow...
So just for this one album, I'm gonna click on the five-star grade, even if my own mark for the LP is actually closer to a 4/5 (which translates to a 9/10 score for more general purposes -- 5+4). As that other reviewer said, let's all try to save the turtles here (and drown Kid Rock under a flood of turds). I might disagree with this particular reviewer about some other artists or genres, but people of goodwill should unite for the common good here. Next step, we end global warming, find endlessly renewable energy sources, solve the problems in the middle-east, destroy imperialism, neuter religious fanaticism, outlaw economic exploitation, and stop wars and famines everywhere. You gotta start somewhere, right?
Number of albums left to review: 120
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 384 (including this one, most probably)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 225
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 283
Joe Ely
4/5
Very interesting suggestion today, which allowed me to put the *Flatlanders* / Lubbock honky tonk "mafia" on the map, right in North-West Texas. It's a group of country music performers / songwriters I had absolutely no knowledge of before today, and browsing through the music made by that gang (Joe Ely, Butch Hancock--who wrote almost half of the songs in this record--Jimmie Dale Gilmore or Terry Allen), it seems to me that they managed to keep their C&W roots authentic while implementing interesting instrumentation and/or artful flourishes in their music at the same time. Which is no small feat in my book--the sort of feat only greats such as Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash could pull off in my honest opinion. "Progressive country", that thing is called, and barring a small bunch of country-rock artists (Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons), it's the only country music worth listening to for outsiders of a genre often plagued by bland compositions and clichéed lyrics.
Case in point: *Honky Tonk Masquerade* and the stellar arrangements that grace half of its tracks (along with some very endearing lyrics once in a while). I don't have the time to go into details today, but let me just say that the hectic electric guitar solo at the end of "Boxcars"--one of the standout cuts--is just simply incredible, and gives an epic mood to the whole ending. The southern rock influences are on point in this record, and some of the ballads are quite effective. Three or four tracks might be more "run-of-the-mill" for my admittedly demanding taste in that genre, but the whole collection is dynamic enough and it never stays in one particular groove for too long (which is a real repellant for me for that particular style of music). And the production and sound of this thing aged pretty well--I was surprised to read other reviewer saying that it didn't: c'mon, this is no eighties gated-drums horror flick à la Dwight Yoakam here!
Not sure yet if I can include this record in my own list. 1978 was a stellar year for music of all stripes, and I just can't sacrifice some pretty important albums for me, whether in that year or another. But as of now, I leave the door open and boost my overall grade a little to make up for any future omission of this good album.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 119
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 384
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 226 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 283
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
3/5
Full disclosure: I was a sucker for "Enola Gay" as a kid, and it's only very recently that I have discovered the album including that world-famous OMD signature song (found in a secondhand records shop). The name of that album is *Organisation*, and it had a bad rep, critically speaking, which is maybe why I had never listened to it before, in spite of my love for its lead single. Turns out I really, *really* enjoy many of its darker and moodier cuts, with only a couple of duds in the tracklist that I need to skip when I spin that LP... How come this album received some very skeptic reviews at the time of its release? Beats me... The fast-paced transitions of many music styles at the end of the seventies and start of the eighties sure got many professional critics unsure of where pop music had to go at the time. Hence why they could easily be misled?
Flash forward to today, as I listen again to *Organisation*'s 1982 follow-up *Architecture and Morality*, supposedly their magnum opus. It's not bad either, and the tracklist starts strong with abrasive, borderline-post-punk opener "The New Stone Age", catchy-yet-melancholic cut "She's Leaving" (which would have become a terrific single in the UK if the band had not unfairly nipped that idea in the bud), then followed by pop ballad / lead single "Souvenir"--probably OMD's *second* most famous tune, and still a highly melodic gem after all these years...
Too bad the album then loses its way (and its steam) as it negotiates the curve between side one and side two. With its title winking at Neu!, "Sealand" seeks to take a page out of the kosmische / ambient masters of the seventies (think also: Brian Eno), but it's as if McCluskey and Humphrey here confused the terms "ominous" and "darkly meditative" with "nothing much happening". And nothing much happens either during the instrumental found on side two that gives its name to the album by the way: OMD could sometimes dive headfirst into musical dead-ends for deep cuts, and I have always found that flaw maddening. Just as I have always found the two *very* repetitive singles about Joan of Arc at the start of this album's second side musically underwhelming to say the least, in spite of their "conceptual" ambitions and their interesting use of singular vocal parts "floating" over the all-too-linear proceedings. Full-blown repetition gave "Elona Gay" its hypnotic power. But what works for one melody doesn't necessarily work for another. Maddening, also, that OMD never learned that lesson, which other important electronic acts such as The Human League, Pet Shop Boys or Depeche Mode learned so well through their verse-chorus-verse aesthetics.
Leaning too much on the idea of "vocal" textures, through background choir effects and the use of mellotrons, McCluskey indeed forgot a key element sometimes: real compositional work. That work on voices and their "religious" potential, which was the avowed, paradoxical goal that atheist McCluskey had for some of the album's tracks, was commendable on paper, surely. But the execution leaves to be desired sometimes, especially when the band's reach exceeds their grasp at the moment of finding memorable melodies that would carry out that program in a somewhat striking fashion. That middle part of the album is not exactly a borefest, but it's nothing to really get excited either... For true mysticism as expressed through new wave aesthetics, please check out Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins or This Mortal Coil first...
OMD fortunately injects a little energy again on the penultimate track "Georgia" which is, let's say, an interesting experiment in synth pop terms. And closer "The Beginning And The End" is an absolute gem. That last track, both dreamy and tense somehow, oddly foretells XTC or Talk Talk's later elated pop experiments many years in advance. And as it does so, it thereby saves the whole album at the very last minute.
So not so bad overall, yet to me, *Architecture And Morality* falls short when the time comes to select "essential" albums in that particular synth-pop subgenre. OMD wrote a fistful of amazing singles, yet all of their early full-length releases are mixed bags to an extent in my honest opinion. Including this record often selected in retrospective lists such as the one used for this app. And by the way... Just discovered that many music critics and long-time fans of the band now think that OMD's *real* magnum opus is actually the LP released right after *Architecture And Morality* instead of the latter. The name of that subsequent LP is *Dazzle Ships* and it looks like it was unfairly maligned at the time--mostly because of a couple of weird spoken-word interludes featuring lengthy "radio transmissions".
I have also listened to that other record for the first time today, and I have to say that it contains quite a few lively songs, some of them very catchy on a first listen. Which suggests a tracklisting that's far more dynamic than any of OMD's previous LPs if you ignore those weird interludes. Looks like the "architects" that McCluskey and Humphrey were at the start of the eighties always had trouble building sound foundations for their ambitious musical endeavors. In one way or another, they would hit quicksands of some kind, between far too linear moments and sudden left-turns which could lose large swaths of their potential audience. But that doesn't mean some nooks and corners within their monuments could not be illuminating at times. Perfect albums are not the only way to appreciate good music. So to be continued, I guess...
2.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 3.
7.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 118
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 384
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 226
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 284 (including this one)
Public Enemy
5/5
An absolute hip hop masterpiece and one of the very best albums of 1988 in *any genre*. For that year, only Pixies' *Surfer Rosa* and Sonic Youth's *Daydream Nation* beat Public Enemy in my book (Leonard Cohen's *I'm Your Man* and NWA's *Straight Outta Compton* were great albums as well, but they're still behind the east coast rap legends). *It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back* is indeed an unrelenting barrage of wild noisy breakbeat rhythms, crazy abrasive samples pillaging everything from funk to hard rock, and devastating rapping with a take-no-quarter attitude. I guess it's hard for young 'uns these days to picture how groundbreaking The Bomb Squad's production was on this thing--I do advise younger listeners to check out other rap albums in 1988 and hear the difference for themselves so that they can get it. Not that it really matters if they don't: yes that sort of fast-paced hip hop has aged, but its energy and messaging have not, most definitely. And given how f*cking intense the latter are on this record, it's still a treat to listen to decades after the fact.
Out of all the LPs out of Public Enemy's early "imperial" phase, this is indeed the one album that manages to keep its momentum until the very last seconds. *Fear Of A Black Planet* has its share of classic, iconic cuts, but its second side can't compare to the one here, with its uninterrupted string of gems going from instrumental "Show 'Em Watcha Got" and "She Watch Channel Zero" to 'Rebel Without A Pause" and "Prophets Of Rage". And given that the first side is
filled to the brim with epic and iconic moments as well ("Bring The Noise", 'Don't Believe The Hype", "Louder Than A Bomb", "Caught, Can I Get A Witness"...), the result is a masterwork that can't fail to impress. Chuck D was the best rapper in the world during that early phase of the golden hip hop era: his punchlines *burn* everything on their way, and his overall political analysis is still as relevant in 2023 as it was back in the day. Meanwhile, Flavor Flav was a master at creating a sardonic atmosphere as the perennial-yet-pivotal sideman that he was. And when he took the center stage, it was often for good reasons. Listening to "Cold Lampin With Flavor Flav", admittedly a deeper cut in P.E.'s catalog, I was struck by the way his goofy presence and delirious rhyming schemes (here very surreal) also brought a lot to the whole mayhem that the album was.
The album ends with "Party For Your Right To Fight" a huge wink to former Def Jam labelmates Beastie Boys--with its sample of "Fight For Your Right (To Party)". Get it? Public Enemy made political consciousness in rap sound urgent, vital and even "fun" at times, and it's unfortunately a trend that's all too rare in hip hop these days. Some parts of their legacy can be found in what Run The Jewels currently do, for instance, but in a musical landscape where insane amounts of cash rule everything around rap, I guess it's far harder for more socially-conscious artists to get heard.
Don't get me wrong, I love some of the most recent evolutions of hip hop, a genre that has seen its share of other masterpieces in the last 15 years or so (as released by Kendrick Lamar, Tyler The Creator, Mac Miller, Mach-Hommy, Run The Jewels, Cardi B, Metro Boomin, Travis Scott or even Kanye West before that nutcase became a full-blown fascist...). The thing is, it wouldn't hurt said rap landscape to return to that sort of political agenda P.E. once stood for--even if done differently, and mixed with the latest trends in the genre. There is so much to say about the dystopian inequities of today. An album in the vein of *It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back* would sure serve as a needed wake-up call...
So here's me hoping, probably in spite of all odds. But as a rap fan, I'd rather look like a naive dreamer than give in to facile cynicism. It's all too easy to wallow in such empty posturing today... And it would indeed take a nation of millions to hold me back on my dreams of a better world. So let's start with good music and vital lyrics, shall we?
Number of albums left to review: 117
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 385 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 226
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 284
Frank Black
5/5
This is one of my partner's favourite albums of all time, so I know it well. As she puts it: "It's a collection of nuggets. And their weird charm works on you whether you're in a foul or a happy mood. So you can stop using this app now. Look no further, this is *it*". Her words, not mine. 🙂
Truth be told, being a huge Pixies fan myself, I did buy *Teenager Of The Year* at the time of its release, and I have also enjoyed it for a long time. So I have my own personal compliments to give to this weird and wonderful gallery of post-1950s snapshots put into nineties indie-rock regalia, going from space conquest fantasies to UFO obsessions, or from Atlantis fairy tales to Hollywood conspiracy theories. The American spirit, as seen through a genius distorted lens of folk myths and urban legends... With the inclusion of the previous eponymous solo debut (also exploring those themes through so many memorable tunes), this sophomore LP is thus certainly the other Frank Black offering to select for such a list. And thanks to its whooping 22 tracks, it's also a *gargantuan* offering for sure--in keeping with Mr. Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV's rotound figure.
22 songs sound like a lot, but the album just flies by, really. First because a large quarter of the tracklist is made out of quite short and endearing jittery hectic punk-rock-inspired cuts only a mind like the one of Frank Black could pull off: they're tongue-in-cheek, surreal, very much in the abrasive loony spirit of Pere Ubu (who had Eric Drew Feldman in their ranks at the time, and helped produce this thing), and yet there's always something accessible to them. Half of the other songs in the album encompasses a larger indie-rock / hard-rock / pop-rock spectrum, sometimes acoustic-guitar-based, sometimes electric, with so many great melodies and catchy choruses it becomes a festival of standout tracks: "Abstract Plains", "Calistan", "Freedom Rock", "Two Reelers", "Olé Mulholland', "Pure Denizen of the Citizens Band", "I Could Stay Here Forever", "Headache"... The latter song was a hit in France, by the way, and this unexpected success in my neck of the woods probably explains why Frank Black will play the album in its entirety in Paris next February for the anniversary of its release. But even if I go to that gig and find a way to sneak in backstage, I don't expect Mr. Kittridge to remember me from the time I interviewed him for a local radio station at the end of the nineties--that interview was a bit boring, honestly, and to this day, I still don't really know if the fault was his or mine--just a way to say that if I have those personal recollections of the artist, I don't think they're influencing my positive take on *Teenager Of The Year* almost three decades after...
To return to the album, each song from the last 25% of its tracklist seems to explore a different musical genre not directly adjacent to the main bulk of the record. The organ-laden surf-rock overtones of a couple of cuts were not so surprising from the former Pixies, but the mock-reggae song, along with the folk, country-rock and even doo-wop whiffs on a fistful of other cuts were quite unexpected. This is where complainers will bitch and moan about the album's length the most, I guess.
I would retort to them in two ways: Frank Black's singular songwriting chops are still very much intact and *very much his* on those deeper cuts, which brings the necessary cohesion to the whole shebang ; and rather than being unnecessary detours, those fun exercises in style sprinkled throughout the record's tracklist give a sense of space and scope that's also necessary for such a project. Because long albums need to *breathe* once in a while, and this is how they can justify their lengths, at least if their twists and turns manage to keep you on your toes...
Per Wikipedia, *Teenager Of The Year* was "not originally well-received", but it seems that this lukewarm assessment ended a few years down the line. I do remember a couple of mixed reviews at the time of the album's release, but frankly, I didn't give a rat's ass about them. I knew it was a great and very fun record from one of the most important musicians in its genre / category. Glad other folks seem to concur today. Frank Black might not have been the *real* "teenager of the year 1994" (and he was probably aware of the upcoming backlash / turn of the tides trendwise, hence the ironic title and the goofy artwork). But in retrospect, he does deserve his place on the indie-rock podium of all time. If there's one thing that this app can teach you, it's that yesterday's pageants don't matter that much.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 116
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 386 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 226
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 284
Wilco
5/5
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Gems including "Hotel Arizona" and "Outtasite (Outta Mind)"--great cuts which nicely split the difference between indie-rock and classic rock ; or the *Exile On Main Street*-era Rolling Stones homage that "Monday", "I Got You (At The End Of The Century) and closer "Dreamer In My Dream" are ; or nice winks to the late-sixties / early seventies Beach Boys through "Outta Mind (Outta Sight)"--"Outtasite (Outta Mind)" 's alternative version)--and also "Red-Eyed And Blue" ; or delicate and heartbreaking folk ballads "The Lonely 1" and "Someone Else's Song" ; or, finally, admittedly quaint but also quite moody alt-country cuts "Far, Far Away", "Say You Miss Me" and "Someday Soon"--sometimes infused with chamber pop, like "Why Would You Wanna Live"...
Besides, the two sonically-rowdy-yet-also-incredibly melancholic tracks opening each disc alone could warrant a place for this double album on the list. The expansive "Misunderstood" and "Sunken Treasure" indeed point the way to the noisier, more abrasive experiments Wilco will be known for at the turn of the next decade (and century)--with band members even swapping their instruments during the course of the first song (and playing on one they were not necessarily used to), so as to create a brutalist wall of sound nicely mirroring the existential torments expressed in the lyrics... and with a similar climactic, tense and dissonant bridge for the second disc's opener, even sadder than "Misunderstood" was. Those two cuts are cinematic, evocative and profound in their intentions. And they give a timeless feel to a record that's otherwise very reverent to the past (probably to a fault at times).
This last remark is only a very minor gripe of mine. I have tried to find a bad song in this double album and I have come up rather shorthanded. "Kingpin", right in the middle of the second disc, is an overlong bluesy jam dirge that's too mundane and a little pointless to stand up to the many highlights of *Being There*. But when you want to create a double album, there's always gonna be at least a couple of songs some listeners won't find to their taste, so it goes with the territory here. It is said that Wilco recorded around 30 tracks for this project. I don't always say this for long records, but in this case, I'm glad the self-editing process didn't go too far. Jeff Tweedy was right to give us so much stuff. And the fact that he was adamant the two discs should be sold at half the normal price (thereby paying for the difference out of his pocket) is a testament to his intelligence, and dedication to his art.
I have only discovered *Being There* quite recently, through my--also-recent--growing appreciation of Wilco's later LPs *Yankee Foxtrot Hotel*, *A Ghost Is Born* or their latest release *Cousin*. So this is not nostalgia talking here. Before the 21st century, I had never even heard of Wilco were. Yet retrospectively, I now know they're an important band that actually foretold many later developments of indie-pop, indie-rock and even rock in general (for better or for worse). So surely, there must be some room available for at least a couple of albums by them in a list such as this one...
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4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 115
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 387 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 226
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 284
Throwing Muses
3/5
Yeah, Kristin Hersh surely is a one-of-a-kind vocal performer. Her stream-of-consciousness lyrics, haunted ad-libs and literally "possessed" artistry as a lead singer often leave a lasting impression, not exactly as a purveyor of memorable hooks, but as a creator of evocative "moods" at least. And yes, with its somber hues, this 1986 debut album is certainly more impressive than the ones that saw Throwing Muses later reach a somewhat honourable recognition as they jumped on the guitar-laden alt-rock bandwagon during the nineties. In all fairness they had quite anonymously helped kickstart this trend a few years before, through their connection with Pixies, Breeders, and the Boston indie scene. So I guess you can't blame them for reaping what they had sowed. Yet this is here, through this first eponymous album (later compiled in the *In A Doghouse* 2CD boxset) that I find them the most striking and original. Which took a long time coming given that I've been aware of that band for decades now, and that I had yet to discover this particular record.
The thing is, the music itself on this LP is rarely as exciting as the vocal performance in it. It's either very linear, with repeated riffs and flourishes whose quality do not always justify their lengthy runtime, or it's sometimes plagued by sudden jarring twists that don't make a lot of sense on a compositional level. And more crucially, the sound palette and styles chosen don't always fit those vocals anyway. It seems to me that the barebones folk aesthetics of Hersh's later first solo LP *Hips And Makers* are actually a better fit, to the point that this other LP could make it to my own list. There, in that ascetic environment evoking haunted woods and the derelict cabins found in them, Kristin's voice makes more than an "impression": it literally inhabits those strange whereabouts, and therefore yields truly memorable moments.
Not that the Throwing Muses debut never pulls off such feat for a small bunch of standout tracks, here played in an admittedly very different genre. It was 1986, which means that the British post-punk phase was still fresh in everyone's mind. And with lively, knotty cuts such as "Call Me" and "Fear", the Muses surely sounded like a thrilling American response to the crazy antics of Siouxsie And The Banshees across the pond. Add the ominous "goth" leanings of a couple of other songs such as "Hate My Way" (not so much within the music, but through the hallucinated lyrics), and this explains why 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russel was bond to fall in love with the band given what his label was releasing at the time. Here is the missing link that explains how that same label would soon sign American acts such as Pixies, who actually played stuff that didn't have many common points with coldwave, new-wave or even post-punk. An unforeseen development, but one which only reinforced 4AD's overall legacy decades later...
I wasn't aware of the exact nature of this missing link before, and I think that if one single album could stand for it, it would be *this one* (I mean, it's pretty obvious when you listen to its contents and the stylistic curves they make). So thanks, Dimery and co. On the other hand, and given what the record is and how it sounds like almost 40 years later, I'm not exactly sure that selecting such missing link for a finite list of "1001 albums you *must* listen to" is gonna suit anyone except eighties and nineties indie-music nerds. I consider myself one of those, but let's be realistic for one second: this is an admittedly interesting and even at times very cool little LP, yet nothing that screams "essential" either, at least if you're not aware of the overall context behind the record's creation. I don't want to end up "in a doghouse" myself, you see, just because I was tempted to select this particular bone in my immediate backyard. There are probably lots of better-sounding ones a little further, as this app has already proved to me then and again. Woof.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 102
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 387
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 226
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 285 (including this one)
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5/5
Another wonderful album by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, a double-album in this case, and certainly the one of their best full-length releases during the noughts (with 2001's *No More Shall We Part*). Following the huge letdown that *Nocturama* had been, this one was a huge relief for Cave's fans. Recorded after the departure of long-time member Blixa Bargeld, *Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus* is also the project that saw The Dirty Three's Warren Ellis take over as Nick's main creative accomplice. Already an official member of The Bad Seeds for a few years at this point, Ellis probably had an large influence on a few compositions, whether they were officially co-written with him or not, and he surely helped Cave reach another step of his extraordinary musical journey, which started here, with this exact album.
Gospel-like background vocals, guitars that sound "electric" in every sense of the word, and possessed imprecations from the dark crooner with a booming voice that Cave is abound in this record. As noted by other reviewers, *Abattoir Blues* is (generally speaking) rockier and livelier than its companion piece *The Lyre Of Orpheus*, mostly comprising moodier and slower cuts. Standout tracks include the martial and delirious "Hiding All Away" and the catchy midtempo pop-rock songs "There She Goes, My Beautiful World" and "Nature Boy". There's also the laid-back groove of "Abattoir Blues"--already very much in the vein of later masterpiece *Push The Sky Away*--, the Dr. John-like "The Lyre Of Orpheus"--a brooding, swampy cut where Greek myths sound haunted by the ghosts of bluesmen from the Mississippi delta--, the flute-laden, mostly acoustic, generous and optimistic-sounding "Breathless"--whose sweet, memorable chorus will surely bring a smile to the face of many listeners--, the mysterious and subtle "Easy Money" and "Spell", or the twirling and agitated "Supernaturally"--also graced by an exciting chorus going "Hey! Ho!" like the best grassroots folk-rock bangers of days yonder (not to mention that intoxicating fiddle!), here proving that the second disc has its share of lively moments as well. To conclude on this list of highlights, one needs to mention the wealth of epic, heartrending, elegiac ballads on this one--ballads such as "Let The Bell Rings", "Carry Me" and iconic closer "O Children", where the Bad Seeds excel at creating sweeping soundscapes carrying Cave to new heights.
Reading back on what I've just written, I realize I must have mentioned close to the two thirds of the tracklist, which was not my intention at first. Yet I could have mentioned even *more* songs, that's how good this album is! If really I had to find a "dud" in it, I might say that "Baby, You Turn Me On" in the second tracklist sounds a bit indistinct and mundane. But does it really matter with so many gems before and after it?
My only (initial) major gripe when I first listened to this project was that I thought the rock number serving as the opener of its first disc, "Get Ready For Love", sounded a bit heavy-handed in such a prominent position. But oddly enough, I don't think any other track could have taken its place, as great as they are (most of them take their sweet time to "build up" their assets, so to speak, which is not so ideal to get things started). So now I'm fine with the way the record begins, I guess. This is just to say: please don't judge the album on the merits of that first song alone. Nick Cave is of course a hell of a performer and lyrics writer, his scope has rarely been broader than the one in this record, and consequently, this here easily reaches the level of his "classics" from the eighties and nineties. So it would be sad if you missed all of it just because of one song.
This review was written in mid-August 2024, and at the end of the month Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds will release their new album *Wild God*, the follow-up to Cave's far more subdued and darkly meditative trilogy" *Push The Sky Away*, *Skeleton Tree* and *Ghosteen*, (some of whom should definitely be selected for a list such as this one). The singles from *Wild God* released up to now suggest that Cave will here return to the livelier and soulful rock vein of *Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus*, after spending two studio albums (and other side-projects, live or not) mourning the tragic loss of his son through his art. Not sure he will be able to pull off a *rock* album as good as the one I had to review today--a throwback that sure will sound difficult to accomplish after spending so many years exploring that very different, emotionally intense turf. But Cave's been a creative force to reckon with for decades now, so everything is possible...
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5+4.5)
Number of albums left to review: 101
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 388 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 226
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 285
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
4/5
Thought listening to a full album of acapella Zulu chants would get tiresome after a while, but it turns out there were enough interesting variations in the songs to keep me engaged until the very last seconds. Reading the Wikipedia blurb about this project, I found out that a very large part of it comprises new recordings of "hits" the vocal group had sprinkled throughout the many records they had already released in South Africa in the 15 years that preceded this one (if you want to have a little fun, check out the artwork of those albums, it's an endearing festival of kitschy pictures 🙂). So it doesn't come up as a surprise that *Shaka Zulu* is so accessible, because it looks like group leader and songwriter Joseph Shabalala has selected the cream of the cake here (beside the fact that around half of those tunes are sung in English). And it is absolutely not surprising either that those sessions were produced by Paul Simon, who had already used the band's impressive vocal skills on a few cuts from *Graceland*, released the year before. So much for the accusations that Simon bypassed the cultural embargo against apartheid... He was pivotal in getting Ladysmith Black Mambazo--and also Zulu culture at large--become a little more famous outside South African borders. It was *another* smart way to fight apartheid, I guess, even if it felt polemical at the time...
Those (admittedly subtle) musical variations I've referred to up there are what makes the album the artistic success that it is, between the cutesy kiss sounds in the chorus of "Hello My Baby", the solemn, evangelical / biblical overtones of "Golgotha" and "King Of Kings", the equally solemn, but also elegiac "Rain, Rain, Beautiful Rain", the wink to old American rock'n'roll basslines at the start of "How Long"--which then mutates into something totally mesmerizing with a 100% African character--, or the hypnotic stomping of feet during the conclusion of closer ""Wawusho Kubani?". Hope there'll be some room left for this record in my own list of 1001 "essential" albums. When you manage to convey so many ideas with such a quote-unquote "restricted" canvas, and when your art is bound to convey political awareness--because of the historical context that presided its birth--that means that you are artists who deserve to be noticed and remembered.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5+3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 100
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 388
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 227 (including this one -- cultural blindspots and musical conditioning probably explain why I can't put *Shaka Zulu in my own list right away, but I guess that's unavoidable when you're making a subjective list of "essential" records with a finite number of them...)
Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 285
The Killers
1/5
God, how I hate this band. In the category of Mormon musicians operating in the general realm of "rock music", give me Low, a glaring omission in Dimery's book, and please erase this style-over-substance disgrace. "More concerned with artifice than artistry," that Pitchfork review puts it, and I heartily agree here. In other words, "smile like you mean it," just as singer Brandon Flowers puts it himself. Call that a lapse of the tongue that he chose that catchphrase for the chorus of one of the couple of listenable songs on the album (including opener "Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine", with its catchy bass hook, and maybe "Andy, You're A Star" if you can enjoy weird, moody stuff). Everything else comes off as pure pretense. It's, indeed, a fake smile.
Is Flowers aware of the irony himself? Does it even matter? There were enough followers with questionable taste in music praising his band's shtick to make the latter a huge commercial success (sorry for the apparent contempt here, but as you're gonna see at the end of my review, Brendan Flowers is not faultless himself when it comes to expressing unfair contempt--so I guess it's only fair game). More power to those Killer fans, and to the band they thought was so great at the time. But less power to good music at large, might I venture to add. 🙃
Highlighting those two or three salvageable cuts up there is indeed as far as I'll go to give compliments to the songwriting and production on this thing. Between the annoying singles displayed on the first side, with so many forced inflexions on vocals and hackneyed arrangements (gosh, those laugh-out-loud, cringe synth flourishes on "Somebody Told Me"!), and the boring deeper cuts on the second side, either bland ("Change Your Mind") or overblown to ridiculous proportions ("Believe Me Natalie"), there's almost nothing to save in this record. The chord sequences are predictable and unimaginative. The vocal lines rarely favor interesting harmonies and Flowers's performance is often grating. The Killers steal aesthetics going from U2 to The Strokes, or from Interpol to Duran Duran (a-hem), and yet somehow, they manage to retain the worst, most clichéed and worn-out features from each of those iconic bands (they'll do the same with Bruce Springsteen a few years later). And the result is, mildly put, a cheesefest of truly epic proportions.
In that regard, they even push the envelope for the conclusion of the album, just when you think things couldn't get worse at this point. *Hot Fuss*'s original tracklist indeed ends with the meandering, pointless synth-heavy "Everything Will Be Alright", and here the Last Vegas band actually yield to their most performative impulses rather than try to find a way out of their all-too-calculated imposture. On paper, a good rock album can end with a slow, moody, borderline-experimental cut to show the full scope of your skills. The thing is, Killers have absolutely no idea how to make that sort of composition work. And here it shows.
And then there's the cream on the shitcake: "bonus track" "Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll", which sounds like a Flight Of The Conchords parody. Except that it's not. Except that there's nothing funny about it. And except that its runtime reaches the four-minute mark, and that it's three minutes and fifty five seconds too long as it is.
Here's what Flowers had to say about this song supposedly mocking "hipster culture" in August 2009: "There's so much snobbery. You go through high school and all the paranoia and crap that goes with that. It's bullshit. I just didn't want to be like that. We like big songs and we're going to embrace it." In other words, *true* indie-rock musicians and their fans are insecure snobs, and the song has to be interpreted as a snarling takedown of that mindset. There's so much contempt for people that are probably just sincere about what they like on the part of Flowers here that I don't know where to start to roast him... And then, *one month later*, this is what the Killers frontman had to say about "Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll": in an interview with Rolling Stone, in September 2009, Flowers cited it as his least favorite Killers song, stating that hearing it makes him want to "crawl under a rock".
Had he suddenly found out that he was actually the insecure snob here, possibly stemming from the slow realization that going after big, 'arena rock' compositions wasn't that fulfilling on an artistic viewpoint after all (even if it filled his pockets)? Or has he just simply realized how cringeworthy the whole track is? Well, as Wikipedia points it out, two years later, in a comeback show at London's Scala, The Killers played "Glamorous Indie Rock &Roll" live in London for the first time in four years, and then they played it again on the following day, in another gig in the city. Conclusion: the man has no personal integrity. Pick a lane, for chrissake.
So f*ck him. And f*ck his lame band. The Wikipedia page about *Hot Fuss* remarks that it was, at one point, listed among the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. *At one point*. Which means that someone in Dimery's team came to their senses and erased the record for subsequent editions. So I guess I shouldn't have wasted so much time writing this long review on that shitty band's account. Just hope I didn't waste yours here, and that my review was at least informative enough for you so as to make up your own mind about The Killers. No reason to make a (hot) fuss just because some people disagree with you on music, whether in high school or elsewhere. It's probably a lesson Flowers should have mulled over before making artistic choices he later bitterly regretted. As a lot of impassioned music fans know, all the money in the world can't buy true integrity and genuine artistic flair.
0.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 1.
5.5/10 for more general purposes (5/5 for overall musical competency + 0.5/5 for the actual artistry)
Number of albums left to review: 99
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 388
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 227
Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 286 (including this one)
Crosby, Stills & Nash
5/5
One former Byrds + one former Buffalo Springfield + one former Hollies = the late sixties/early seventies folk-rock version of "Avengers Assemble!".
Stephen Stills is the star of the show, either Iron Man or Captain America, through iconic opener "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes", bucolic and insanely catchy folk cut "You Don't Have To Cry" with its incredible guitar harmonics (so subtly and slyly added to the main riff), nice classic-rock closer "49 Bye-Byes", or the transcendent ballad "Hopelessly Hoping", whose perfect alliterations, ascending chords and soaring vocal harmonies beautifully convey the pains and heartbreak experienced by a lovelorn soul.
David Crosby is like a Thor versed in delicate pagan pleasures through more complex, less immediate compositions in the vein of his solo record *If I Could Only Remember My Name*--chiaroscuro cuts named "Guinnevere" and "Long Time Gone", which only yield their off-kilter charms during subsequent listens. Crosby's songwriting chops often make him go through strange little detours, and as such, he acts as a counterpoint to Stills, often favoring clearer and more straightforward lines. Yet the union of the two sixties rock superheroes for the writing of "Wooden Ships", as instantly striking as it is sophisticated on a conceptual level, sure uses the best of the two talents in one single shot.
As for Graham Nash, he is the Hawkeye of the story, sometimes going astray in all-too-quaint, sentimental meanderings... but when he hits the mark, as on sensual barebones acoustic number "Lady Of The Island" or country-boogie single "Marrakesh Express", whose patchouli scents are obviously covering far less *legal* smells, it's a clean sweep. Whiffs of the Summer Of Love and Flower Power abound in the record, even if that time period is already viewed through a melancholic, nostalgic lens, which makes the overall themes of the lyrics relatable to this day. And the trademark vocal harmonies are stellar, that's a given at this point. Truly, they're the "Avengers assemble!" moment here, the money shot, automatically warranting a slot for the supergroup debut on this list.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5+4.5)
Number of albums left to review: 98
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 389 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 227
Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 286
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Addendum:
Wondering if drummer Dallas Taylor, ominously watching us with a sour look on his face through the window of that derelict house's door in the rear of the album cover, could fill the shoes of Loki or even Thanos... Whatever the case may be, the story didn't end there. In a second phase, another former Buffalo Springfield would join the team for *Avengers 2: Déjà Vu*, which easily beats *Age Of Ultron* out of the park. I was too busy that day to write a proper review when the app suggested this record to me a couple of years ago. So here is the draft of a few notes about the highlights from that subsequent and equally "essential" record, just in case I might need them later on...
For *Déjà Vu", the addition of Neil Young to the cast, like a Spiderman shooting his inescapable strings of raw feelings everywhere in sight, sure threatened to throw a shade over Stephen Stills' leading figure--first through timeless ballad "Helpless", probably one of Young's most distinctive compositions, but also through the less known and yet incredible "Country Girl", with its relentless, climactic build-up. That being said, Crosby, Stills and Nash each have at least one moment where they shine as brightly as Young in *Déjà Vu*, whether it's enticing opener "Carry On" for the first, topical and rowdy "Almost Cut My Hair for the second (unless it's the near-psychedelic title-track), or touching and instantly memorable novelty cut "Our House" for the third--where the fine line between excessive naivety and the convincing expression of domestic happiness is probably straddled more gracefully than on "Teach Your Children", another Nash cut with notoriously quaint flavours. But the money shot here, what unites the whole supergroup into one single transcendent effort--including drummer Dallas Taylor and bassist Greg Reeves--is "Woodstock". That syncopated "rock" cover of Joni Mitchell's elegiac folk tune about the famous music festival even manages to equal the original, as vastly different as the latter sounds. And this is no small feat here.
Speaking of comparisons, whether warranted or not, I am sad to point out that there won't be the equivalent of *Infinity War/Endgame* in CSN(Y)'s career, quite unfortunately. The only real "infinity war" audiences witnessed after the release of *Déjà Vu* was the constant bickering of those endearing (yet also hopelessly grumpy) granpas of Anglo-American classic rock. More like *Captain America: Civil War* taking place in a nursing home, to be honest. But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies...
Rest in peace, David Crosby.
Björk
5/5
A notch under Björk's previous albums *Post*, *Homogenic* and *Vespertine*--all absent from Dimery's list if I'm not mistaken... I've said it before, but the fact that those Björk LPs are not included in the 1001 Albums book is one of the main reasons I can't *fully* take the latter seriously.
In comparison to its predecessors, *Medúlla* is still a very nice record, if maybe not an "essential" one (more on that very soon). And this because it admittedly displays large amounts of Björk's stellar skills, as an artist blessed with a golden, formidable voice, along with an unquenchable thirst for groundbreaking innovations, and as one who can navigate the fluid waters of pop catchiness with the same ease that sees her crossing the treacherous tides of challenging experimental music.
*Medúlla* is a concept album paying tribute to the human voice, and as such, it also questions the core notions behind Dimery's book or this app (which means that its inclusion was an interesting call, at least). To use one of the phrases used by Björk herself, here diverted to a new context, "where is the line" between establishing a list of the greatest records ever made (the, quote-unquote, "essential" albums) and doing so to highlight ones that may not be *that* essential, and yet sound like no other album on Earth, so original and singular are they (hence why you must listen to them before you die). I guess that if you cross that thin line, surely *Medúlla* should be listened to by anyone interested by vocal performances at large. The question is, is it *your* interpretation of what those nerdy lists are useful for?
Hiring the services of luminaries such as Mike Patton, Robert Wyatt, beatboxers Shlomo, Dokaka and former Roots member Rahzel, the Inuit throat singer Tagaq or the Icelandic Choir, Björk thus created an album with 99% of its "instrumentation" composed of human vocals. And the result is definitely impressive on a purely "technical" and performative level (even if reading the liner notes, you realize long-time collaborator and programmer Mark Bell, from LFO, tampered with some of the performances through subtle editing). The beatboxing parts slap *hard*, most specifically. And Björk's vocals over them are a joy to hear.
That said, when it comes to the purely artistic results yielded by that ambitious experiment, *Medúlla* admittedly risks coming off as a somewhat "mixed bag" at some points. Four groups of songs populate the album, and depending on your mileage, you might be at ease with all four of them, or just a couple, or maybe none.
The first group of songs is made out of instantly memorable gems (in my humble opinion), which are mostly found right at the center of the tracklist. They are "Who Is It", as pop-sugarcoated as it is strangely tense in some of its nooks and crannies (owing to the unexpected modulations of its chord sequence on the chorus), or the soothing and mystical "Desired Constellation", whose meditative wonders will send you spinning between stars in the night skies. And there's also the mock-disco closer "Triumph Of The Heart" to take into account, a little quaint, but with a joyful killer chorus, and the most organic-sounding cut to boot when it comes to the vocal performances, with a very "live" feel.
The centerpiece of that bunch of awesome cuts, however, (and the centerpiece of the whole album, really) is "Oceania", once performed for the London 2012 Olympics. It's one of the best and most elegiac ballads Björk has ever written (here with her friend and poet Sjón, like a lot of her other signature songs), as immediate on the ear on a melodic level as it is evocative on a conceptual one. Beatbox and tongue noises are logically moist in those deep-sea-inspired soundscapes, the eerie samples of Robert Wyatt's wordless humming ooze like floating seaweed--smartly hearkening back to his masterpiece *Rock Bottom*--and the elated voices of the London Choir spin and twirl like so many jittery shoals of fish around the Icelandic singer. Apart from compositions by Debussy and Ravel, whose music could express the sensations conveyed by the ocean so well, so *graphically*? "Your sweat is salty, I am why," the electronica diva gently croons after her voice soared one last time to the surface like a dolphin, in one of those typical and exhilarating ad-libs only her can pull off. Björk becomes the *ocean* here, literally. And the "mythic" result is as beautiful as it is transcendent.
The second group of proper songs usually makes the best of the album's vocals-driven canvas to explore more specific tones and emotions, whether eroticism and sensuality in the lush--yet also curiously understated--opener "Pleasure Is All Mine", or frustration and nervousness as related to an intense, possibly unsound romantic relationship in the abrasive (and at times quite spooky) "Where Is The Line?". Those sorts of tracks are often displaying great musical moments, it's true. On the other hand, you'd be hard-pressed to find them in a playlist of Björk's most striking songs. Potential hot take here: I sometimes caught myself thinking Mrs. Gudmundsdottir could have released those sorts of thematic and sonic explorations in an extraneous EP so as to preserve the flow and continuity of her full-length releases. But more on that later...
The third group of songs consists of very minimalistic odes ("Show Me Forgiveness", "Vökuró", "Sonnets / Unrealities XI", drawn from an e.e. Cummings poem...). They are all wonderful pieces taken individually, but their presence takes a toll on the album's flow and cohesion, once again, and this especially on the first half of the record. In that group of sober, solemn tunes, don't miss "Submarine", though. That cut, mostly sung by guest Robert Wyatt in a hypnotic multi-track superposition, is very special. And it proves that Björk was right to yield to *some* of her most unhinged impulses at least...
Which might not be the case for the last group of compositions, at least according to the naysayers. Those cuts ("Öll Birtan", "Ancestors", "Miðvikudags") go full experimental-mode with all sorts of quirky squeaks, gurgles and grunts, and their off-kilter presence takes a toll on the second half of the record this time, almost ruining the latter's momentum. Björk confessed that she was looking after "primordial' emotions here, something cavemen would feel the need to express with their voices. It sure is interesting on paper, but what her most hardcore fans will see here as "liberating", "instinctive", "free-formed" or"free-spirited', her detractors will probably just label as "self-indulgent". Björk and her collaborators sound like they're having a lot of fun performing those cuts, sure. But in all honesty, they are probably having more fun than large swaths of their potential audience.
Interestingly, the Icelandic singer-songwriter has recently largely returned to that full-blown experimental mode on her latest LP *Fossora*, maybe with an extra maturity that was lacking the first time around (even if *Fossora* is not always an easy listen either). As usual, fans rejoiced and others went "meh". But maybe there's a third way to make sense out of Björk's later career, which more or less started with *Medúlla*, incidentally. That third way is to keep an open mind for what she tries to accomplish, praise the artistry and the incredible imagination she pours into the latter, while maintaining some critical distance whenever she loses her way at times. In other words, be a listener first, and a "fan" next
Having this record to review today proves it's actually nothing new. In 2004, twenty years ago, Björk had already reached a point where she probably deemed it pointless to prove anything to anyone: she had had hits, critical recognition, countless homages from her peers, all sorts of artistically rewarding forays into groundbreaking soundscapes that somehow managed to also be popular... Now she could let herself go to wherever her deep instincts led her to, whether it was a commercial track trying to catch up on the trends of the day, or a totally hermetic avant-garde endeavor. Now she could follow the footsteps of someone like Joni Mitchell, one of her models, and this for the rest of her life--risking potential ridicule, just like her, but also garnering long-time admiration for her undeniable integrity as an artist. Under that light, who cares if you're not releasing "essential albums" anymore? That sort of freedom is not for everyone, whether you're a musician or a mere music listener. And it's the sort of freedom that should be cherished. On *Medúlla*, Björk heard her later calling. And surely, the fact that it was expressed through voices, her most potent instrument, is no mere coincidence here.
- 3.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 4 (and no, I didn't make a mistake when I clicked on the stars: it's a rare *positive* protest vote to complain about the absence of other key albums by Björk--just like I clicked five stars for Lana Del Rey's *Chemtrails Over The Country Club* to protest about *NFR*'s omission)
- 8.5/10 for more general purposes (5+3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 97
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 389
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 228 (including this one--but I will select *Debut*, Post*, *Homogenic* and *Vespertine* first, and I don't want my passion for Björk's music to ruin the occasion to include other great artists either)
Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 286
Steely Dan
5/5
Before listening to the album again:
Never really understood why *Aja* is even more praised by the critics that *Can't Buy A Thrill* or *Pretzel Logic*. I guess that compared to their previous LPs, the "band"'s sound, along with the performances given by the many session musicians hired for this one, had never come off as maddeningly slick and pristine as in this 1977 album. The thing is, it seems to me that Steely Dan's choruses and vocal lines are generally less memorable in *Aja* than in the records I've quoted up there (except for "Deacon Blues", of course)...
After listening to the album again:
Damn. I still have a problem with "Black Cow", that I find a bit mundane and indistinct for an opener. But the string of songs that follows is indeed quite perfect. It starts with "Aja", where the album it gives its name to hits its stride at last: gosh, those gorgeous syncopated drums in the climax of this one! And that eerie synth! It continues to "Deacon Blues", still catchy as hell, and then ends with "Peg", oddly graced with jittery male backup vocals uttering the name of the titular girl like frail robots smitten with love at once. Truly, you "see it all in 3-D" here. There are so many great moments in that string of three songs that I will bump my initial grade by at least one point.
As usual with Steely Dan, the song lyrics, some of them oblique and even cryptic, are about a bunch of characters "down on their luck", as that other reviewer politely describes it. And as usual with them, it's sort of a cheesefest instrumentation-wise "You can see why punk happened", as yet another reviewer puts it. Which, to be honest, aptly supports the sardonic tone of those lyrics about "being a doomer 30-40 something in the late 70s witnessing the rise of Neo-liberal realism and the death of effective counter-culture" as a third pert reviewer explains elsewhere...
Yet it's also such an imaginative cheesefest, with so many subtle-and-yet-elated twists and turns, and with so many layers to marvel at, that the whole thing soon becomes an aloof and immersive jazzy adventure like no other--even if it's an adventure in a land filled with pathetic losers, as pointed out before. The Dan had always desperately tried to look like cool cats. And it's here, as what remained of their "rock" influences had been so well-digested--to the point that said rock influences became indistinguishable or totally subliminal--that Becker and Cage *did* become cool cats in the eyes of the whole world...
Apart from all that, I'm neutral towards bluesy "Home At Last"--in spite of its cute references to Homer's *Odyssey*--"I Got The News" is kind of fun, and the final guitar break of *Josie* always gets me. Not writing an overlong long review here. If I did so, it would be doomed to look flat compared to the weird witticisms Steely Dan routinely used themselves to talk about their equally weird--but also often wonderful--music. Or rather, *not* talk about it. At least not really. You can't beat cool cats at their own game, I guess...
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 5
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5+4.5)
Number of albums left to review: 96
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 390 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 228
Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 286
Blue Cheer
3/5
Mostly a historical document showing how three acid-rock musicians unwittingly birthed a style later known as heavy metal. With also clear connections to stoner rock, possibly even contributing to the style's name given the huge amount of drugs Blue Cheer reportedly took between takes. The band plays loud, the near-atonal moments are indeed prophetic, and I have to admit that the guitar solo overdubbed by a *second one* during "Out Of Focus" made me laugh, as it perfectly encapsulates the excessive aesthetics of the other bands who would follow Blue Cheer's footsteps later. The musicianship is good, even though the three members of Blue Cheer don't always sound as if they're really listening to each other, which might come off as either pleasantly unhinged or annoying depending on your mileage. And speaking of "sound", the one of this debut is extremely paper-thin, with very barebones production values--which can admittedly have a very "retro" charm as seen from 2024.
No track particularly stands out. The cover of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" (miles away from the famous original, or even The Who's version), "Doctor Please", "Parchment Farm" and the noisy, full-blown chaotic conclusion of closer "Second Time Around", all have nice moments to offer... but they're not bangers either, in all honesty. And since we've heard way *way* more loud and violent music since 1968, whatever stuff in that realm was striking for that year sure gets lost in translation today.
Blue Cheer also released another very interesting LP right after this debut, by the way. *Outsideinside* is admittedly not as wild and not as "extreme" for the time period as *Vincebus Eruptum*, but it's not watered down either--and it nicely splits the difference between slapping hard rock and the psychedelic influences of the day. That sophomore album has better production, better performances, and better songwriting overall. So maybe you should include that other record in your own list as well. Or none of them. After all, "being there first" doesn't automatically mean you're a genius at what you're doing. Some magmatic eruptions do not start with a bang, but with a short pop.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 95
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 390
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 229 (including this one)
Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 286
Neneh Cherry
2/5
"Buffalo Stance" slaps. What a riot of a chorus (and what a terrific synth hook just before said chorus surges!). And so does proto-trip hop ballad "Manchild", co-written with Robert "3D" Del Naja, from Massive Attack. Its slow beat is infectious, and its string section, following so many great harmonic twists and turns, modulates the hell out of the song. With such a lush canvas, Neneh Cherry only needs to spin her yarn through both enticing crooning and youthful rapping to take that cut to a whole other level.
Unfortunately--and apart from a third cut nicely winking to Marvin Gaye ("Inna City Mama", a little above the fry)--everything that follows those two great singles is absolutely grating and has aged pretty horribly. Neneh Cherry is an endearing figure, but the music she sings to is here pestered by all the worst clichés of the pop / R'n'B commercial fodder of the late eighties. Case in point, "Heart", which could have been a highlight without all those awful choices for the instrumentation and arrangements. And I'm not even gonna bother mentioning all the songs that are even worse than "Heart". OK, maybe that terrible, *terrible*, supposedly goofy duet with whoever that r'n'b clown is on the last proper composition of the album (just before the mandatory-yet-absolutely-useless remixes of the LP's singles), whose name I don't even care checking out again... *Raw Like Sushi* "almost comes across as satire," as that other reviewer puts it. Except that it's not. If there is one thing that the bulk of this album comes off as today, it is that it appears as totally cringeworthy.
Incidentally, second Neneh Cherry LP, *Homebrew*, is far, *far* better than this very mixed bag of a debut. Had "Buffalo Stance" and "Manchild" found their way into that other record attuned to much more interesting strands of music that were popular at the time (namely trip hop, indie rock and old school funk), you would have a perfect album for this list. Alas, I'm daydreaming about an alternate universe here. In *this* universe, I still have those two CDs at home, and once in a while, I return to my favourite moments in them. But you can't label them as "essential" albums. And neither can you say that their contents are striking enough to become mandatory listens for anyone who was not born in 1989 yet. At least as a whole, and not by a long shot. After all, sushis are delicious, but they have a very short peremption date, don't they?
1.5/5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 2
6.5/10 for more general purposes (5+1.5)
Number of albums left to review: 95
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 390
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 228
Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 287 (including this one)
Beck
3/5
Beck returns to the *Odelay*-era mixing of styles that made him a household name in the first place, albeit also with mixed results, unfortunately.
Not that the music on *Guero* is "bad", not by a long shot. Most of the songs will actually sound pretty good for anyone who loved Mr. Hansen's couple of early major-label albums. Linear yet driven *Guero* is the mandatory locomotive opening the proceedings, with its killer guitar riff taking a page out of "Devil's Haircut" ; "Girl" is a lively, sweet-sounding pop-folk number only belied by its sinister lyrics ; "Missing" takes a short detour though string-laden *Sea Change* territory ; jittery "Black Tambourine" offers David Lynch an occasion to use Beck's music for a hectic, hallucinatory scene in his own *Inland Empire*, *Hell Yes* is a quirky cold-funk / electro cut that wouldn't have felt out of place in *Midnight Vultures*, "Broken Drum" is a delicate and understated tribute to Elliott Smith ; Jack White comes to cash in a check by playing a riff he could have played in his sleep in "Go It Alone"... And so on, and so forth...
The thing is, there is a distinctive *lack of stakes* in the music recorded here. And it's not merely because said music had been heard before in Beck's oeuvre. No one in their right mind would reproach that to countless great acts always digging the same groove, contrary to the endearing Californian kitchen-sink troubadour. No, the real problem is that the pace is often far more inert here compared to the early records of his discography Beck tries so hard to "copy-and-paste" for this one album (subsequent LP *The Information* would offer a more exciting experience in that regard). Besides, the way *Guero*'s tracklist is organized is also conducive to a very disjointed experience, triggering many "so what?" reactions. *Mellow Gold* and *Odelay* harboured myriads of twists and turns, and yet somehow, almost every hairpin curves in them--either between the songs or *inside* them-- was a "wow" moment. Decisively, those miracles don't happen here.
I won't blame Beck himself for the misguided inclusion of this record on the list, though. The man is talented, and if the record comes off as if his heart wasn't fully into it, he was just doing his thing at least. The real issue is that someone in Dimery's team actually made a very lazy choice when they considered this LP for inclusion on the 1001 Albums book. Because it's taking up a slot that could have a far, *far* better use.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 94
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 390
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 228
Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 288 (including this one)
Emmylou Harris
4/5
If there's one music style that this app taught me to better appreciate, it's seventies country, more of the "progressive" ilk (or, alternatively, the "outlaw", "honky tonk" one). Emmylou Harris' *Pieces Of The Sky* is a rather wonderful album, for instance, more in the vein of the crossover mainstream success experienced by the likes of Linda Ronstadt and Dolly Parton. "Bluebird Wine" is a great, lively bluegrass opener. "Boulder To Birmingham", co-written by Bill Danoff and Harris herself, is a very touching tribute to her late mentor Gram Parsons, with a killer tears-inducing chorus, and with a great guitar hook during said chorus. "Before Believing" is a delicate acoustic cut that hits all the right elegiac spots, and once again the guitar arrangement on it is stellar. Apart from that, it's fun to hear Emmylou sing Merle Haggard's "The Bottle Let Me Down" and rather moving to witness her perform Dolly Parton's "Coat Of Many Colors". "Sleepless Night" has the most wonderful chord changes, proving that C&W can be inspiring when it goes away from the same stale harmonic progressions it's often associated to. Finally, "For No One" offers a nice version of the Beatles' deep cut from *Revolver*, and "Queen of the Silver Dollar" is a truly epic closer, written by Shel Silverstein--who also penned, o surprise, Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue", another memorable tune which is yet miles away from that very emotional song here.
It's honestly mind-boggling that Harris rarely felt confident enough to write songs herself. As "Boulder To Birmingham", but also far later LP *Red Dirt Girl*--in this list as well--proves, she was a more-than-decent songwriter. It's always a little disconcerting when 90-95% of an album is made out of covers. But Emmylou's subtle mastery for her vocal performances, so rich and sweet-sounding and perfectly attuned to the music, makes the album a gem nonetheless (just like Linda Ronstadt's *Heart Like A Wheel*, out the year before--to take an example of another important record released by a female country singer who didn't write her own songs at the time). Besides, and as suggested before, the musical arrangements, whether on guitar or for the strings sections, are pitch-perfect, especially for the end of the tracks. When the latter fade away you kind of wish they could go on a little more. Always a sure sign that the music is damn good. So this album is a keeper, I guess.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums.
9/10 for more general purposes (5+4)
Number of albums left to review: 93
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 391
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 228
Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 288
G. Love & Special Sauce
1/5
Like a bland, boring, linear, unimaginative version of the weird wonders Soul Coughing was offering around that time period. The most distinctive track as seen from 2024 is "Blues Music", and it's basically a rip-off of Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth". Being nice performers doesn't make you a "1001 Albums You Must Listen To Before You Die" fodder.
Some people in Robert Dimery's team were definitely out of their depth (hopefully not Mr. Dimery himself). There were at least 60 albums released in 1994 (admittedly a stellar year for music at large) that were far better than this one. Here's the list:
Weezer - Weezer (The Blue Album)
Pavement - Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
Portishead - Dummy
Nas - Illmatic
Blur - Parklife
Shellac - At Action Park
Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral
Nirvana - MTV Unplugged In New York
Hole - Live Through This
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Let Love In
Beastie Boys - Ill Communication
NOFX - Punk In Drublic
Jeff Buckley - Grace
Vangelis - Blade Runner
Green Day - Dookie
Tori Amos - Under The Pink
Massive Attack - Protection
Sonic Youth - Experimental Jet Set, Thrash And No Star
Beck - Mellow Gold
Gravediggaz - 6 Feet Deep
Liz Phair - Whip-Smart
Sebadoh - Bakesale
Frank Black - Teenager Of The Year
Low - I Could Live In Hope*
Lisa Germano - Geek The Girl
Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works vol 2
Superchunk - Foolish
Method Man - Tical
The Magnetic Fields - Holiday
Beck - One Foot In The Grave
Lisa Germano - Happiness
REM - Monster
Oasis - Definitely Maybe
Helmet - Betty
Neil Young - Sleep With Angels
Kristin Hersh - Hips And Makers
Soundgarden - Superunknown
L7 - Hungry For Stink
The Notorious B.I.G. - Ready To Die
Drive Like Jehu - Yank Crime
Kyuss - Welcome To Sky Valley
The Divine Comedy - Promenade
Korn - Korn
Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible
2PAC - Me Against The World
dEUS - Worst Case Scenario
Guided By Voices - Bee Thousand
Girls Against Boys - Cruise Yourself
Pulp - His'n'Hers
Joni Mitchell - Turbulent Indigo
Rancid - Let's Go
Warsaw - Warsaw
*Soul Coughing - Ruby Vroom*
Tortoise - Tortoise
Dinosaur Jr - Without A Sound
Body Count - Born Dead
TLC - CrazySexyCool
Pearl Jam - Vitalogy
The Offspring - Smash
Suede - Dog Man Star
Now, Mr. Dimery... Can I be part of your team? Where should I send my resumé?
1/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums.
6/10 for more general purposes (5+1)
Number of albums left to review: 92
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 391
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 228
Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 289 (including this one)
Jean-Michel Jarre
5/5
I have a personal fond memory of Jean-Michel Jarre. I was at a Fuck Buttons gig in Paris, with a friend who often worked in the venue where the Scottish electronic powerhouse duo was playing that day. Thanks to my friend, we stayed in the venue after the show, and as we hung around next to the small stage sipping beer, I noticed that a man was chatting there with one of the Fuck Buttons guys, just as the latter was unplugging his pedals and putting away his miscellaneous gear in flycases (don't remember if the Fuck Buttons guy was Andrew Hung or Benjamin John Power). I couldn't hear what the visitor was saying, but he sure looked enthused to be there, pointing at this or that electronic device and asking questions about them. At times, it felt like he was explaining how he used said device himself. Or maybe he was just pointing out how such and such electronic gizmo had created such a great sound for one of the tracks played during the show... The Fuck Buttons guy was smiling, and nodded politely the whole time. But he didn't talk much, busy as he was. You could sense that he was flattered by the youthful enthusiasm of his interlocutor, even if it was not exactly the right time to chew the fat with him. It was as if an uncle of his had paid him a visit, and he was doing his best to make that endearing uncle feel at ease, even if he had other concerns in his mind at that exact moment... After a while, I realized I knew who the man was. He looked like he was in his forties, yet in truth, he was much older than that. And as a lot of French people know, Jean-Michel Jarre is one of those individuals who seem to age very slowly, having that eternally youthful outward appearance that makes one suspect of vampiric qualities.
My friend confirmed the man was Jarre indeed, probably in Fuck Buttons' guest list that night. Honestly, it was refreshing to see an artist who was in his sixties by that time express such enthusiasm for being at a small show given by an act from a generation far younger than his. Jarre's music lost its relevance a long time ago, yet if you read stuff about his latest albums, you soon discover that a lot of younger prestigious guests populate some of them (like Fuck Buttons indeed, but also Air, M83, Gesaffelstein, Massive Attack's 3D, or even Moby...). Given the currently small commercial impact of those rather confidential records, I'm pretty sure that the presence of those guests mostly stems from a very sincere knack for collaborations of all kinds, instead of any cynical calculation to boost album sales or personal rep, whether for the guests or for the host.
During the eighties, Jarre was yet in another league of musicians. He would famously give some mega-concerts worldwide, which were desperate-yet-also-hugely-successful attempts to translate such nerdy aesthetics into rock arenas. Heck, even arenas were too small for Jarre's ambitions, hence why he routinely broke insane records when it came to the number of people attending the shows. You had all sorts of insane stuff happening during those mega-shows--Jarre grabbing a "synth-guitar", gigantic screens, loads of pyrotechnics, not to mention that crazy staging for his "laser harp" that saw rays of light cross one side of the pit to the next. Nice that decades after those grandiose shows aiming at being "popular" at all cost, the man was now seemingly more in touch with what up-and-coming electronic acts were doing, and that he even went to small venues to see them do their thing. It's a stance that appeared as being miles away from what he had accomplished during the first fifteen years of his career under his name--even if said later stance probably never yielded anything as arresting and wonderfully poetic as Jarre's official 1976 debut *Oxygène* (in spite of attempts to release "sequels" to it in the 21st century).
The seventies were a golden age for precursors in the field of electronic music. You had German kosmische wizards such as Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Cluster, Neu! or Kraftwerk. You also had Brian Eno's "ambient" series. But what set Jean-Michel Jarre apart from all of them was his impulse to create so many memorable and straightforward melodies surging from his cold analog magma. Kraftwerk admittedly had a knack for innocent-sounding melodies as well--ones you could even hum in the shower--but theirs always had pastiche overtones that Jarre didn't seem interested in. In *Oxygène* you can sense some more immediate, and less conceptual endeavor at play. And if that earnestness was criticized as naive by the UK press at the time of the album's release, this mix of *naïveté* and avant-garde leanings is, retrospectively--and quite ironically--what makes the album sound like no other one today, even within Jarre's discography. Those criticisms were valid in the sense that they predicted the artistic dead-ends and many cheesefest "commercial" turns the French musician would be known for later. Yet those early critics totally missed what *Oxygène* was doing so well within the confines Jarre had set for himself--somewhere in the uncharted haze between Pierre Schaeffer's *musique concrète* and blatantly pop ambitions. And what it was doing so well was to create the rarest of animal: truly timeless music acting as a perfect bridge between the past and the future.
In a way, Jarre very much acted as a "remixer" here. Not through literal remixes--mid-seventies gear would never have allowed him to create them anyway--but through his compositional work. A lot of his ideas indeed hearken back to Bach, Beethoven, Mahler or Debussy--that dark and solemn "orchestral" climax soaring above arid soundscapes towards the end of "Part 1" ; the very animated Bach-like fugue in fantastic album highlight "Part 2" ; the slow, 'andante' introduction of "Part 5", followed by that livelier section, where, for that particular round, the melody winks at Ravel's "Bolero". There are also forays into subliminally jazzier territories--best exemplified by the latin-tinged drum machine and its cheap rendition of rhumba and bossa-nova rhythms on "Part 6", whose "breathing" sound also ends the album on a note that's disturbingly ominous, and yet also soothing somehow.
Equally ominous are the impressionistic synth spikes darting the bulk of *Part 1*, over which a spooky shrill whistle hovers like a lonesome bat in the twilight, reminding you of a theremin or Ondes Martenot. In keeping with Michel Granger's iconic artwork for the album, the mood is delightfully post-apocalyptic here. It aptly illustrates the impressions of the last scattered batch of humans living in a emptied, dilapidated earth where nature would slowly regain its rights at last. The obvious ecological message hasn't aged a day, it goes without saying--even if it's conveyed by a music that's 100% instrumental. Synth layers and echo-drenched immensities sure abound, but they're also telling a very relatable story, one as epic as it can be heartbreaking if it falls in the right set of ears. Something very "human" after all...
"Part 3", which is one of the most famous Jarre compositions, is where all the different influences and leads listed up there mesh into a single whole, with a minor-keyed tune which is as melancholic as it is strangely light-hearted, and whose simplicity and "humanity" is at odds with the background plastic-sounding gloss, here propelled by that distinctive airy drum machine--grinding, enticing, and delicate all at the same time. Here is the sort of balance between naive-sounding compositional work and richly flavored soundscapes Jarre would rarely attain in his subsequent releases--except for subsequent LP *Equinoxe*, for all intents and purposes a perfect follow-up to *Oxygène*...
Starting with 1981's *The Magnetic Fields*, the French composer--now turned into an star as he went through the delusions of grandeur that his massive concerts were--indeed often stumbled upon interesting-yet-ultimately-flawed experiments with different "world music" styles (the *My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts*-adjacent *Zoolook*, incidentally boasting a groundbreaking use of samples and sequencers, or later *En Attendant Cousteau*). Worse, he also frequently dived headfirst into grand statements where European classical music influences took over again, unfortunately yielding albums that managed to sound both annoyingly pompous and incredibly childish and hackneyed at the same time (*Rendez Vous*, *Revolutions*...). Some listeners with a knack for cheap psychoanalysis would even argue that this second trend was a way for Jarre to compete with his estranged father, Hollywood film composer Maurice Jarre... But there's no need to act like a two-cent shrink here. What matters is that 90% of all this has aged *horribly*, period.
Yet now that the dreadful eighties period of Jarre's discography is long gone, I hope many listeners with an open mind and an interest in great electronic music will discover *Oxygène* again. The kitchen-sink approach Jarre used to record his debut (sellotape was reportedly used to fix inadequate or partly-broken instruments), born out of constraints stemming from the technological limits of the time period rather than anything else, unwittingly brought a sonic palette that's as effective today as it was in 1976. The now "retro" canvas (or, should I say, the *pre-retro-futuristic* canvas) even bring *more* melancholic emotions to an album that was already filled to the brim with them. If anything, *Oxygène* sounds better in 2024 than it originally did. Surely, that rare occurence guarantees a place for it in a list of the best albums of all time, doesn't it?
Number of albums left to review: 91
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 392 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 228
Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 289
Britney Spears
1/5
In the words of Amanda Murray of Sputnikmusic:
"With the exception of the terrific title track, *...Baby One More Time* is a collection of either competent pop songs underwhelmingly executed or underwhelmingly written pop songs competently executed."
Today's suggestion is excellent news. I don't need to write a long-ass review about an album I intend to defend tooth and nail (or conversely, that I want to roast). Which means that instead, I'm gonna listen to a little Charli XCX (who once professed her love to Britney's old hits, incidentally). And that most of all, I will get on with my real life. Shallow Y2K cheesefest teen pop can still be useful for something, I guess...
1/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums.
6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1 for the title-track, and maybe for bits of its clone "(You Drive Me) Crazy")
Number of albums left to review: 90
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 392
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 228
Albums from the list I certainly won't include in mine: 290 (including this one)
Jack White
3/5
Pretty good solo debut from the former White Stripes mastermind. Feels a bit a weird not to have Meg's distinctive barebones-yet-full-powerhouse style of drumming at first, but it's nothing that can work against this slightly different beast of an album. *Sixteen Saltines* is the obvious retro-rock highlight here, in the vein of Jack's former legendary act. And if some of the other, generally moodier and more restrained, cuts are a little hit-or-miss, you can still find little gems among them (like "Love Interruption" or "Weep Themselves To Sleep"). It's just that a reasonable amount of self-editing would have worked in favour of the record as a whole, that's all...
That said, nice touch adding all those delicate piano parts on a lot of tracks, or that cello followed by a jazzy double-bass on the hypnotic and melancholic "On And On And On". And "Take Me With You When I Go" is a great closer, starting with a Dave Brubeck-indebted extended introduction (except that it's in 6/4 and not in 5/4), before going to the more classic retro-rock territories White will always be associated to.
Is *Blunderbuss* "essential album material", though? Nope. Close, but still second-tier. It just cannot stand the comparison with the White Stripes, sadly. And even if you don't compare the two, there are still moments on this record that feel a little too low-stakes, in spite of the stellar musicianship and the skills involved. Jack's music, as awesome as it can be, has always had "derivative" aspects, that's unavoidable given the sort of artistry he favors. But there's a limit not to cross so that said derivative music yields truly "historical' albums in the long run.
3/5 for the purposes of this list.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Currently listening to Jack's latest surprise release *No Name*, his return to more straightforward pleasures (effective as hell on this listener), after a dreadful decade where the man lost his way through cringeworthy and hackneyed "experiments" so as to find a new sound for himself. Looking at you, *Boarding House Reach* and *Fear Of The Dawn*. You see me darting those reproachful glances at you??? Yeah, go inside a hole and never come back!
It's a little too soon to know if *No Name* could be mentioned in a list like this one. But only after two weeks, it's got more chances to do so in mine than *Blunderbuss* after 12 years. I can empathize with White for wanting to experiment ideas and not rehash the same sorts of songs all over again after the White Stripes's demise. But now that he has had his fun, it's the audience's turn to have a rewarding listen. And after all, Jack is *also* having tons of fun in *No Name*, it's pretty obvious. Because everything in it is what makes him *truly* tick. You can't change a leopard his spots, I guess. And this, whether those spots are red or blue...
Number of albums left to review: 89
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 392
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 228
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 291 (including *Blunderbuss*)
Bad Brains
2/5
Soft pass. At least to consider this record as "essential album material". Huge respect for Bad Brains for initiating hardcore punk in D.C, around the same time or even before Minor Threat and Black Flag did. And also a fair amount of respect for them trying to here branch out to other styles going from funk to metal and pop during the mid-eighties. The thing is, the production values of *I Against I* are downright *horrible*. To the point where that sickening, echoey sound on the drums (and also the background chants), along with the paper-thin one for the guitars, just ruin everything. Even Ric Ocasek's production for previous LP *Rock For Light* wasn't as cheesy as this. Besides, it seems to me that frontman H.R. often gave far more impressive vocal performances live than in the studio. Which is particularly noticeable on this 1986 album...
So points for pointing the way towards the future of crossover rock at least. But not enough to put this on my own record shelves. If really you want essential Bad Brains records alternating between hardcore punk and dub-reggae, go to debut *Banned In D.C.*, or even earlier sessions for the demo *Black Dots*, recorded by future Fugazi sound engineer Don Zientara, and ultimately released in 1996.
2/5 for the purposes of this list.
7/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: 88
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 392
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 228
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 293 (including this one)
The Darkness
4/5
I mean, *seriously*?
Well, after paying the right amount of attention to this hard rock revival debut, whose commercial success in the early noughts was quite unexpected, I readily admit that it was quite a fun ride. Strong whiffs of AC/DC, Kiss and Van Halen abound in The Darkness's music. "More fun than *Use Your Illusion*," magazine Classic Rock goes. Yep, I concur. Shorter, too, and far less self-indulgent--oddly enough for a band playing such extrovert songs. Oddly enough, for me, this music is even far better than the one of their other obvious models Judas Priest--because *Permission To Land* is both sonically more adventurous and blessed with catchier hooks and choruses. It's camp, over-the-top extravagant, thanks to the Sparks-indebted castrato lead vocals (people comparing the latter to Freddie Mercury clearly miss the true influence here), and it has its share of hilarious one-liners--which proves that the band don't take themselves so seriously, at least for this debut (and it's all the better when you have an outrageous song irresponsibly praising the use of heroin, I guess--which, given the outrageous performance in that track, no one in their right mind will take seriously anyway).
"I Believe in a Thing Called Love" is the obvious highlight here, but there are so many other great songs as well, both rock bangers and the mandatory metal power ballads. The only minor issue is that the last quarter of the album can't quite keep up the pace initiated by the rest before, but nothing too annoying in the end.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums", rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 87
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 392
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 229 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 293
Mariah Carey
1/5
This butterfly has no real effect. It was a hurricane when it came to sales. But it's an inconsequential draft when it comes to its actual importance within music history at large.
Even worse than the hackneyed, cheesefest pop R&B performed on this record, you most especially have all those flat, "dear-diary-you're-my-only-friend" garbage lyrics. They're on the nose, and devoid of any interesting turn of phrase, image or metaphor. And the fact that Carey has written those lyrics herself is somehow even more embarrassing than if she hadn't.
The problem here is not merely that Carey writes and performs commercial pop music. No, the real issue is that said pop music is *both* bland and grating somehow. Two wings of the same annoying, ugly-looking butterfly, which should have stayed a caterpillar.
I recently gave a 1 to Britney Spears' debut LP. Wish this app could make us select *zero* stars to differentiate the two records. Hit single "Baby One More Time" is fun and memorable at least. Whereas it's just inconceivable for me to enjoy any song on *Butterfly*, even with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek.
1/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums.
And 5/10 for more general purposes (5 for music competency + 0 for the artistry).
Number of albums left to review: 86
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 392
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 229
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 294 (including this one)
Pink Floyd
5/5
My relationship with Pink Floyd's *oeuvre* is the one many people from different generations experienced. Discovered them through their classic seventies prog albums in my early teens (Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, The Wall...), rejected them later as a young adult when I got into punk-rock, before reconciling with them between being 30 and 40 years old... And somewhere during this timeline, I also explored their psychedelic beginnings during the sixties, of course. Syd Barrett was a mad genius, and this debut is the magnum opus of this early phase of the British band's career. Even if the group had split after Barrett went full coo-coo, and its remaining members had not kept on under the Pink Floyd moniker (adding Dave Gilmour to their ranks), you can bet your boots *The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn* would still be a cult classic today--ignored for a time, and then avidly praised later on.
With the exception of one-off single "See Emily Play" (an *extraordinary* song), *The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn* gathers all the key compositions Syd wrote for the band, tittering between epic psych-rock regalia (opener "Astronomy Dominé"), a brooding song supported by ominous guitar tones--suddenly lighting up for the chorus--in which Syd hallucinates his cute cat is actually Satan in disguise ("Lucifer Sam"), and a bunch of seemingly whimsical yet also disturbingly LSD-soaked tunes that would fit a psychedelic reading of Lewis Carroll's stories ("Flaming", "The Gnome", "Chapter 24", "Bike"). "Mathilda Mother" is also an unsung off-kilter gem of a ballad--which, oddly enough, kinda foretells the moments in "The Wall* where the topic of childhood trauma would be explored, twelve years down the line, by a band still reeling from the incomprehension Syd's early tenure as their unlikely "leader" had left them with...
Finally, *The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn* harbors one of the craziest instrumentals ever performed in the psychedelic umbrella genre, the epic and partly dissonant "Interstellar Overdrive", whose sonic scope must have appeared as unbelievably daunting in 1967. The only real dud here is the Roger Waters-penned "Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk", where Waters tries to ape Barrett's style without ever reaching a tiny fraction of the man's surreal poetry. Roger would do a far better work of it with "Let There Be Light" and "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" in the follow-up (and admittedly more uneven) LP *A Saucerful Of Secrets*, where Barrett's eerie and mysterious presence ended up fading into full oblivion. Richard Wright would be pretty good at it as well, through "Remember A Day" and "See-Saw". But I guess all of this is a story for another time, kiddies....
Number of albums left to review: 85
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 393 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 229
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 294
The Monkees
2/5
Funny how music history is filled with surprising connections no one would dare imagine... For instance, who during the nineties was aware that hit single "Mistadabolina", released by nineties rapper Del Tha Funky Homosapiens, actually took inspiration from a vocal skit found within an goofy interlude from this Monkees album? That fun interlude is named "Zilch", and I encourage every nineties hip hop fan to jump on it right away...
This unexpected connection aside, there's not much that I really found crazy or even notable in *Headquarters*. Oddly enough, it's an album that actually doesn't harbor any famous hits from the Monkees. Under that light, you would then expect a record that takes "risks" at least... yet *Headquarters* doesn't push the envelope in meaningful ways either, quite sadly. It was nice to hear that the band took some amount of creative control with this LP, after two albums where each and every artistic choice was decided by music industry goons and the people responsible for their popular TV show. Yet it feels like fans of the sixties pop-rock outfit still decidedly favor their two first LPs (of "Last Train To Clarksville", "Stepping Stone", and "I'm A Believer" fame). And a lot of those fans still prefer the two other LPs that follow this one (which also contain their fair share of little gems), at least if you take the current streaming numbers into account. Besides, given that there's the same mix of covers and originals in *all* those albums (the originals either written by members of the band, or by in-house songwriters), it's not as if this relative autonomy as artists is retrospectively *that* striking anyway. So all in all, having this transitory record in the list feels like quite a weird choice, to be honest...
Not that there aren't pleasant--or even pretty great--highlights in *Headquarters*. Opener "You Told Me" is an enticing textbook sixties Californian pop number, and second track "I'll Spend My Life With You" nicely anticipates the country-rock developments that would occur later in that same US state (with a cute and wonderful use of glockenspiel towards its conclusion to boot). "You Just May Be The One" is so effective that it's the track where you think the album hits its stride at last (too bad it never really does). And I admit that the finish line is close to awesome, with two surprisingly nervous, almost *angry*, cuts about, let's say, "girl issues" ("Randy Scouse Git" and "All Of Your Toys"). I had not realized the Monkees were able to tick some relatively disturbing boxes at times--even if they never fully abandoned their usual boyish charms as they did so...
The thing is, the rest is almost instantly forgettable, and the stylistic twists and turns neither rhyme nor reason. Worse, you also have appalling clunkers... Third track "Forget That Girl" is so bad and hackneyed, and its lyrics are so on the nose that they instantly made me think of a "song" written by current AIs. Quite the wrong way to be "prophetic", I would say--even if the thing was unwittingly hilarious... "I Can Get Her Out Of My Mind" is also incredibly quaint, and if "Shades Of Grey", "For Pete's Sake" and "Sunny Girlfriend" are not *that* offensively bad, they're still far from being memorable. In that sort of airy, happy-go-lucky line of work, only "Mr. Webster" leaves some sort of imprint, thanks to its funny nonsensical yarn...
So when it comes to include *Headquarters* in a list such as this one, well, let's just say that I am not a believer indeed. Truth be told, I'm not a believer for those other sixties Monkees albums either, even if it seems to me that most of them are less patchy, or at least slightly more cohesive. There are lots of nice (and often cheap) Monkees compilations on CD out there... And they do the intended job better than any of the band's LPs, at least as far as I know.
2/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums.
And 7/10 for more general purposes (5 for musical competency + 2 for the artistry).
Number of albums left to review: 84
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 393
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 229
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 295 (including this one)
KISS
5/5
I also enjoyed The Darkness' *Permission To Land* quite a bit when it was suggested to me the other day. What is wrong with me? Am I turning to a fan of cheesy hard rock just because of the unsound influence of this app???
In all seriousness, *Destroyer* is what happens when a band heretofore known for its flat, derivative, self-indulgent take on good old rock'n'roll suddenly up their game in an unforeseen fashion, and then meet a genius producer (Bob Ezrin -- see also Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd) to transcend their efforts into an evocative whole filled with all sorts of thrilling details. "Detroit Rock City", "King Of The Night Time World" and "Do You Love Me" are absolute bangers. "God Of Thunder" is moody as fuck, thanks to its background noises, echoes and subtle dynamics, which take the admittedly linear and unoriginal music to a whole other level. "Great Expectations" is a rich and surprisingly subtle ballad building up to an epic climax. Not a "power ballad", you see--something much more interesting than that, which indeed owes to Lou Reed's *Berlin*. And yeah, "Flaming Youth" DOES have whiffs of an ABBA hit (which Kiss would use even more spectacularly again on their legendary single "I Was Made For Loving You" a few years later), but who says it's a bad thing? Music, whether disco or hard rock, going full camp doesn't necessarily mean that it's conducive to bad or ineffective songs. Of course, the lyrics are a little ridiculous at times... But hey, we're talking about a band with full make-up on stage having all sorts of Spinal Tap-worthy shenanigans going on there. What did you expect? A thesis statement?
The negative reviews topping this section made me smirk. I fear that some of them were based on readymade prejudice, and that those reviewers didn't really use their ears (and heart) to listen. Or maybe they just can't stand that genre, and in that case, what are you gonna do? The first 5-star review nailed it perfectly, though. I'm only taking half a point off for my own grade because of the lack of variety for the first half of side two (fortunately broken by the unexpectedly delicate "Beth"). And even there, I feel like I might be a little severe, because taken on their own, those songs are nice and fun as well. So I readily believe folks more knowledgeable than I am when they say this is the one Kiss album to keep for such a list. Don't feel like I need to explore their discography either before or after this one. Life's too short to inflict all sorts of half-baked cheesefest hard rock songs on yourself. But it's also too short to decide you shouldn't have a little fun once in a while, thanks to the cream on that usually bloated hard rock cake. So let's rock!
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 83
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 394 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 229
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 295
The Kinks
5/5
One of my favourite albums from the "classic" period of the Kinks. It's got their wonderful signature songs "Waterloo Sunset", "Death Of A Clown" and "David Watts", but in all honesty, I'm equally smitten with quite a few deeper cuts as well here. There's the lively rocker "Situation Vacant", the (quite rare for them) psychedelic foray of "Love Me 'Til The Sun Shines" (penned by Dave Davies), the very moody and poetic "Lazy Old Sun", and the mischievous "Two Sisters", where Ray Davies uses the two titular characters to actually address in a metaphoric way the complex relationship he has with his brother Dave. Ray was a stay-at-home dad while Dave was the life of the (sixties) party around that time (and this is also actually hinted through the song Dave wrote all by himself for the LP). Quite a funny and elegant way to go "meta" here...
I could split hair and say that a couple of cuts on side one play the "oh-so-quaint" card a little too much. But those less enticing tunes remain important for the album's concept, all about the daily routines of "normal" British folks: commuting from the "city", afternoon tea, typical self- deprecation, and so on... "Cool Britannia" has rarely sounded any cooler than this.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 82
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 395 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 229
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 295
Bert Jansch
3/5
Not to deny Bert Jansch's stellar skills as a guitar player, OR his nice voice, OR his importance for the nascent British folk scene of the sixties, but that record of his, if agreeable to go through, doesn't exactly scream the words "intense", "catchy" or "thrilling".
It makes for nice background music, though. And you have two or three highlights, such as "Needle Of Death" or "Running From Home". Those ones stand out for sure, and they will probably make you stop doing whatever it is you're doing while playing the record--if you're a folk music buff, that is.
It's a little weird that even for songs about tragic themes, Jansch always favors major harmonies for his main keys. In the highlights the trick works, with quite a bittersweet mood as a result. But used for the whole duration of a record that is also filled with instrumentals that come off as a little "performative" at times, that lean toward airy major keys conveys the impression of 'low stakes' somehow.
Maybe I'm too much of a minor chords fan myself. Maybe I lack the necessary patience and peace of mind required to appreciate Bert's delicate aesthetics. I don't know... Hope I'll find the time to revisit this record one day, and find out that it actually grows on me. In the meantime, I can't put it my own list of mandatory listens, at least not right away. There's something a little quaint in that album, with a result that doesn't fully pass the test of time for me.
If you like folk songs or folk rock, and want to discover a recent, truly *stellar* British songwriter, by all means go check out Nick Wheeldon's work (especially his LPs *Gift* and *Waiting For The Piano To Fall*). In spite of Jansch's historical importance, he can only come second to Nick for me. Those critical rankings and best albums list get outdated quick, even for artists who are as old and "respectable" as Bert Jansch. Or they're not addressing the full scope of current music (because it's too soon to reach a consensus for musicians that target audiences missed somehow). In other words, those lists are imperfect (and even cruel) tools to know more about good music. In the end, all that's left is your dear subjectivity. Here's what I tried to express with this failed "review".
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential albums'.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 81
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 395
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 230 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 295
Grant Lee Buffalo
5/5
A underrated gem of an album, that isn't praised enough to this day. The incredibly moody, yet enticing and hypnotic, title-track is the obvious draw here. But the whole album shines from start to finish. Grant Lee Buffalo borrow folk-rock aesthetics going from the Gun Club, REM (Michael Stipe was a fan, and praised the band back), *Joshua Tree*-era U2, Bruce Springsteen or Kristin Hersh, and effortlessly make all those different influences gel into their own identity. Band leader And songwriter Grant Lee Phillips' suave, expressive voice is a pivotal element of the latter, and transcends any passing "derivative" moment found throughout this charming LP. And the elegant production, here managed by bass player Paul Kimble, hasn't aged a day. The sound is clean, clear, yet also filled with all sorts of rich and warm flourishes. I won't bother singling out any stand-out cuts here, just know that there's not a single dud in the album.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: 80
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 396 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 230
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 295
Beatles
5/5
With the Beatles you start with the red and blue compilations to have all the legendary songs and one-off singles, then you buy all the studio albums to have some of the insanely great deeper cuts. I bought this one pretty late in the game, long after the essential LPs from the band's later psychedelic and mature rock phase. And I've never regretted it since.
The most legendary track is probably the title track starting the proceedings, propelled by that harmonically complex chord strummed on the guitars, not to mention George Martin's piano -- the ensemble now triggering a Pavlovian response for all Beatles fans out there... That initial chord is then followed by a perfect pop song, brightly enhanced by George Harrison's solo on his 12-string Rickenbacker. The second most legendary song is the insanely catchy "Can't Buy Me Love", already a hit single by the time of the album's release. And if course, you need to add the delicate ballad "And I Love Her", also present in the red compilation.
But you must also go beyond the hits, because some so-called "deep cuts" are actually as good as those world-famous tunes. The best ones are found on side two, not devoted to the soundtrack of the promotional film that gave its name to the album (and filled the contents of its first side). There's John's lively rocker opening side two, "Any Time At All", with its elated vocal hook. And there are also Paul's "Things We Said Today" and John's "I'll Be Back", both oscillating between major and minor chords, to a mesmerizing effect in the listener. Those awesome tunes nicely foretell the later periods of the band, hereby establishing the genius compositional skills of the Lennon / McCartney songwriting team.
*A Hard Day's Night* is the epitome of the first half of the band's career, when their massive success established them as the figurehead of the 'Mersey Beat' pop-rock sound. In all honesty, I think later LP *Help* is at least equally pleasant (and relevant) for that same period, with the same mix of legendary cuts and stellar outlier songs. But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies...
Number of albums left to review: 79
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 397 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 230
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 295
Meat Loaf
1/5
3.45 as a global score? Really??? How many boomers just simply nostalgic for the huge commercial success of this cheesefest, overblown rock-opera in 1977 are using this app?
In all seriousness, parts of *Bat Out Of Hell* are still somewhat listenable today, I guess, at least if you can enjoy camp with your tongue firmly planted in your cheek. But the manner in which the "rock" songs in this record--using all the ropes once used by Springsteen and the E-Street band--alternate with full-blown saccharine "ballads" neither rhymes nor reasons. Worse, the whole quickly become unsurprising, boring and mundane. Which takes the cake when you try so hard to be 'over-the-top'. I mean, just listen to "Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad" and please prove to me this is not the most formulaic slow-rock cut that has ever been written.
I have no beef with the silly lyrics and overall concept for this project, they go with the territory here. But musically speaking, this is just self-indulgent, derivative drivel pandering to the lowest common denominator. Alice Cooper's schlock shock-rock was ten times more interesting. *Destroyer*-era Kiss went to the same sorts of turf (rockers + ballads), yet with a far livelier (and decidedly off-kilter) energy, thanks to Bob Ezrin's spacious production values. The one on *Bat Out Of Hell* feels decidedly paper-thin in comparison, in spite of the piling-up of instruments, arrangements and orchestrations. I can have fun listening to those sorts of extravagant, "bad-taste", hard-rock burritos. But this one here leaves me totally cold. Probably because it is only a Broadway farce parading as "rock", and that as such, it has absolutely nothing essential to offer to the latter genre.
One last thing: I always thought hit single "I'd Anything For Love" was part of this record, but it turns out it's part of its sequel, released in the early nineties... So I won't even have *one* truly famous track somehow showing the sort of cultural long-term impact Meat Loaf has had. I give up. As an album artist, the man has absolutely nothing to offer me. And he didn't even write those songs himself anyway...
1/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums.
And 6/10 for more general purposes (5+1).
Number of albums left to review: 78
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 397
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 230
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 296 (including this one)
The Residents
4/5
Curiously, this is the most listenable Residents album I've had the opportunity to explore so far. That duck voice in "Constantinople" and many other tracks from this 'double-EP' reminds me of the sorts of surreal antics David Lynch would perform as a musical artist many years later. The result is moody and disturbing, but also evocative, and often endearing (in keeping with Lynch's cinematography). Some of the textures and instrumentations are hypnotic. And many moments are frankly groundbreaking for the time period.
It might be a stretch to consider any Residents album as "essential records", yet I respect the 1001 Albums book for trying hard to include the weirdest sort of experimental music that can exist, here rubbing shoulders with blatantly commercial pop artists whose success in the charts is light-years away from the underground fame painstakingly reached by the dadaist outfit (the problem, as always, is to decide which sort of experimental stuff you must select). Ironically, I will say the same thing about the Residents than the thing I've recently said about the Monkees or Britney Spears: a compilation or playlist of the best cuts in their discography is probably more satisfying and dynamic than discrete studio albums.
That said, being the underdog that they are because of their niche "artistry", the Residents deserve as many benevolent takes and open-minded assessments as they can garner. Which why I will bump my own grading of this album a notch. This won't save this record for its infamously low global score on this app. But it will be my good deed of the day.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5+3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 77
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 397
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 230
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 297 (including this one)
The Beta Band
3/5
Still waiting for the "alpha" version of this band borrowing all sorts of "cool" influences from the late nineties / early noughts (Beck-inspired electro-folk compositions, short funk forays, neo-psychedelia, indie-rock, trip hop, Warp-adjacent slow-paced EDM flourishes, proto-Gorillaz mash-ups of all the genres listed here..). The music is generally nice, and some of the arrangements are adventurous, but the whole rarely leaves a strong imprint. And the lethargic, unobtrusive vocals--close to bland at times--don't really help. It seems to me that, in a closely related "soft-spoken" genre, German group The Notwist released far more fascinating and memorable records than this one. Besides, listening to The Beta Band shamelessly RIP OFF the bridge of "A Day In The Life" for the closing section of "Alleged" (not only the chords, but ALSO the vocal melody) is more than disconcerting, as nice as that moment sounds in the spot. If you want to steal ideas from another band, it's better to choose one that's far less famous than the Fab Four. At least if you don't want to get caught red-handed. 😉 Oh, and the rest of the song is just uninteresting muzak anyway...
Still leaving the door open to this one, just in case it turns out to be a slow-grower. But something tells me its polished surface, reflecting far greater records than *Hot Shots II* will ever be, is all there is to see here...
3/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5+3).
Number of albums left to review: 76
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 397
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 231 (including this one, *maybe*)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 297
The Libertines
5/5
Probably a better album than the band's debut *Up The Brackets*, thanks to more memorable songwriting, more dynamic instrumentation, and crispier production, *The Libertines* is the textbook early-noughts retro-rock album, which makes it kind of essential. Pete Doherty's sense of pace as a vocalist is still as rambling as ever, but provided he doesn't sing total duds (looking at you, "Don't Be Shy"), his performance is fully endearing here. And "Can't Stand Me Now", "The Man Who Would Be King", "The Ha Ha Wall", "Tomblands", "Road To Ruins", and "What Became Of The Likely Lads" are absolute garage rock gems.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5+4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 75
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 398 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 231
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 297
Brian Wilson
5/5
My preference when it comes to *Smile* will always go to the original unfinished album by the Beach Boys that Brian Wilson abandoned in 1967. Indeed, in 2011, *Brian Wilson Presents Smile*'s sequencing served as a blueprint for *The Smile Sessions*, a compilation dedicated to the original Beach Boys recordings, reconstructed through all the tapes recorded in 1967. You just need to listen to the two versions of hit single "Good Vibrations", between the 1966 original one (released to tease the album that never came to fruition) and the 2004 version, to understand where the difference lies. The original is simply iconic, whereas the 21st century version, admittedly endearing and perfectly faithful to the original, is obviously the work of an older man that doesn't possess the voice of his youth anymore, through no fault of his own...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smile_Sessions
So there's absolutely nothing wrong with this project, which was executed with a profound respect for Wilson's original intents, even with the minor changes here and there. It's just that *Smile* is a product of the sixties, and that even if its 1967 release only occured in an alternate universe, that's where and how its emotional impact is the most potent for me. Pretty sure the off-kilter, experimental nature of the project would have been controversial, had Wilson managed to overcome his insecurities (fuelled by drug use and a schizoaffective disorder) so as to not abandon it at the time. But you can bet your boots that the album would have been considered a milestone decades later. Its complicated history in our world sure added to the myth. But the elegiac, Wordsworth-inspired vocal mantras of "Surf's Up / Child Is Father To The Man", the hypnotic, surreal groove of "Cabinessence" and whimsical adventures of "Vega-Tables" (pointing to far later Animal Collective gems in quite an outstanding manner), or the sly, playful twists and turns of "Heroes And Villains", are as stunning today as they were during the late sixties. Evidence enough of Wilson's mad genius.
Number of albums left to review: 74
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 398
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 231
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 298 (including this one, but I'll add *The Smile Sessions* instead).
Nirvana
5/5
Released after the immense success of *Nevermind*, *In Utero* is the album where Kurt Cobain settles the score for once and for all, just as he displays the full scope of his songwriting genius. *Nevermind* had the punk-rock hits and the iconic grunge-pop earworms, sure. But *In Utero* is quite a different beast. Indeed, while still having its fair share of instantly catchy cuts, Nirvana's third album is also a much more interesting and, most of all, much more *intense* affair, where the whole is definitely more than the sum of its parts.
Going from "Serve The Servants", a gnarled, knotty, tortured-yet-melodic opener all children of divorced parents will obviously relate to, to the tragic beauty of the cello-enhanced and delicate closer "All Apologies", Nirvana also explores apocalyptic post-metal turf oozing to the brim with molten lava ("Scentless Apprentice" and its massive rhythmical pattern suggested by Dave Grohl; "Milk It and its demented screams chilling you to the bone ; or the full noise attack -- yet also very driven -- "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter", whose title tells you everything you need to know about how Cobain envisioned his band's sudden commercial success). You also have a couple of essential snarling rockers. First the self-referential parody of "Rape Me", aping the band's former international hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with a perverse twist... But also the ominous feminist revenge fantasy of "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle", where a plume of smoke, ash and red-hot embers spurted forth by the St Helens volcano cover the titular city to punish it for having doomed the silent film star. Before all that, first single "Heart-Shaped Box" is a grunge ballad for the ages, where Kurt's admiration for the Beatles shines with a reddish glow that could only be his. "Dumb" picks up the folk-rock, valium-soaked thread left hanging by "Polly" and "Lithium" on the previous album. And "Pennyroyal Tea" is probably the most devastating song ever written by Cobain, which speaks volumes given his usual output and artistry.
The deep, abrasive sound and uncompromising aesthetics provided by Steve Albini for the recording of the album haven't aged a day (contrary to parts of *Nevermind*), and the whole record serves as a tantalizing journey into the tormented mind of Kurt Cobain in the very last years of his life. His loss was tragic. But he left us with such a singular LP here, whose dark star will probably shine for decades and decades to come for fans of 100% authentic, devastatingly sincere music.
Now that my review proper is done with, I must confess something: I've met Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl twice as a teenager, under circumstances I won't elaborate on here. Just know that I was a very lucky kid who had had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it simply changed my life. When I first met them, they had just finished recording *In Utero*, and sure, that personal memory does explain parts of my enthusiasm for this record, very much intact to this day. Was it not for them, I wouldn't be here using this app to explore albums from the last seventy years or so three decades later. Yet in spite of those very subjective memories, I do believe that, *objectively speaking*, Nirvana single-handedly changed the course of music history. And it's in *In Utero*, where they were at their rawest, most creative, and most emotional, that you can grasp the full scope of their eternal legacy.
Number of albums left to review: 73
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 399 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 231
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 298
Machito
3/5
Take out a Cuban cigar, make yourself a Mojito or a Daiquiri, and pretend you're in a New York smoky club to attend a Son Cubano gig... Is that a cliché? It is. Just like this sort of music today, that I guess only music history tourists (and also real ones) are drawn to in 2024.
I said "I guess", because in truth, I don't really know. The thing is, as broad as my tastes are (at least I'd like to think they are), I'm miles away from the target audience for this one, so I can't really write a proper review. I have a cheap Tito Puente compilation at home, but I'd be hard-pressed to quote any cut in it beyond "Oye Como Vas". It looks like someone in Dimery's team was really enamoured of Cuban sounds...
Browsing through Spotify, I noticed that there is at least one other Machito album with vocals on it (including the musician's foster sister Graciela), there topped on this same sort of big brass instrumentation. Without that sort of vocal lifeline, *Kenya* is for me a much more difficult listen. I can't help feeling that this very codified music plays along some sort of pre established program, which prevents me from having any real emotional response to it. Most certainly a cultural blindspot on my part. What are you gonna do?
Guess I'll have another Mojito then, and try harder not to overthink any of this...
Huh. Doesn't work at all. But the Mojito feels good at least. 🫠
Going for a "neutral" grade here...
Number of albums left to review: 72
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 399
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 231
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 299 (including this one)
Led Zeppelin
5/5
1. No to the first question. Yes to the second. Some of those stray dogs I routinely feed are known as "albums". The one I'm feeding today starts with an incredibly intricate and wonderful guitar riff. Woof. (Black Dog)
2. I don't have a driver's license, but I can be partial to American made luxury cars in some films. Or to Model T Fords. Or to Model T Fords converted into luxury cars. (Rock and Roll)
3. I love all things Tolkien, and if I don't smoke weed anymore, I can still take a virtual puff or two from symbolical reefers, listening to trippy early-seventies folk-inspired cuts. Especially if Sandy Denny is involved. Or alternatively, listening to some dreamy-yet-also lively boogie propelled by a Rhodes piano (Battle of Evermore, Misty Mountain Hop)
4. Yes, I remember slow dancing with my crush at an 8th grade party on this song. But things got real awkward when its second part surged. You can't slow-dance to a rock banger, can you?
I also remember the sign that said "No Stairway To Heaven" in that guitar shop Wayne and Garth visited in *Wayne's World*. Good times, good memories. (Stairway to Heaven)
5. I have a quite high tolerance for drum circles and the phrase “oh, baby”? (Four Sticks)
6. I have never wondered what a Joni Mitchell song about wanting to sleep with Joni Mitchell would sound like. But I'm wondering *now*. So thanks for popping the question here. (Going to California)
7. I have never taken Quaaludes and tried to write a blues song. But I leave that to Page, Plant, Jones and Bonham. Oh, and Memphis Minnie, of course. It's nice that for once, sly fox Jimmy officially credited the African American blues artists he routinely ripped off or even pillaged. Funny that many years later, the Beastie Boys pillaged that deep echoey drum beat themselves to create one of their best rockers. Good music is an eternal cycle. (When The Levee Breaks)
Number of albums left to review: 71
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 400 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 231
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 299
Suicide
5/5
"Natural born losers, shells of genuine human beings, Alan Vega and Martin Rev were first known for the way they haunted mid-seventies downtown New York--East Village, Bowery, Lower East Side--with all its sordid clubs blooming like so many decadent, proto-punk flowers. They were two half-tramps sticking out like a sore thumb (wine-stained leather on their backs, large sunglasses, an off-kilter beret), hanging around a city they knew by heart, surviving through tips given to bookmakers, and assembling a fanzine where horse-racing predictions and gynecologist pornography mingled. And when they had a little time on their hands, they drew minimalistic compositions out of a broken-down Farfisa organ they were too broke themselves to repair.
Naming themselves Suicide--"because if we had named ourselves Life, no one would have bothered coming to our gigs"--, they also gave a couple of *concerts* once in a while. To put it in a nutshell, Martin Rev's fingers fidgeted around some prehistoric gear including a basic drum machine while Alan Vega, either sitting or standing up according to his whim of the moment, gave his mike the full torture treatment--beating, spitting and also singing on it when he suddenly remembered to do so. Most of the time, after throwing insults and unbearable hissing sounds at the pit, the outfit darted out of the scene without ever casting a glance at the appalled audience.
Suicide's duo had been active since 1971, but they only started recording in 1977. The result is this seminal LP, which serves as *both genesis and apocalyptic end of the rock world*. "End of the rock world", because Suicide's music cuts through the melodic spine of the old rock'n'roll idiom to only keep two or three scrawny chords out of the butchery, repeated into loops by the organ and covered with static sounding like the beep beep of a vintage electronic game. Over that backdrop, Vega mumbles a pre-rap rant interrupted by cries of pain and bliss, the whole drowned into an unsettling echo whose origin is impossible to pin-point. And "genesis", because it is now impossible to number the acts--including some very commercial ones--who ripped off Suicide (from the *Nebraska*-era Springsteen to MIA, from the Jesus And Mary Chain to Young Fathers, from The Cars to The Kills, from LCD Soundsystem to Gilla Band). Industrial, Cold Wave, Techno, even some strands of Hip Hop all owe something to Suicide's electronic minimalism. It also offers one of the most evocative urban soundscapes from the time and place in which it was conceived, while sheltering one of the most heartbreaking love songs that has ever existed, "Cheree"." You can have trouble digging this record, sure. But you can't deny its importance.
Review adapted and translated into English from the one Alexis Bernier wrote for French magazine *Rock & Folk".
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of "essential" albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5+4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 70
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 401 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 231
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 299
Portishead
5/5
Sepulchral, ominous, pessimistic, hopeless, down-in-the-mouth, overwhelming, daunting, charcoal-painted, tormented, fragile, layered with so many levels of darkness, haunted and haunting... How many adjectives can I pile up to express how much I love this record? Portishead was already a project worthy of this list by the mid-nineties, thanks to the immense success of their first two seminal albums, triggering a whole genre Beth Gibbons, Geoff Barrow, and Adrian Utley had actually not much interest in. Then, moving far away from "trip-hop", and after a somewhat long period where they felt creatively drained, Barrow and Utley joined their forces with the ever-moody and melancholic Gibbons again, and the result is this masterpiece. One that is to this day often misunderstood, sadly.
*Subtly* ripping off rather obscure vintage acts such as The United States Of America or Silver Apples ("We Carry On" basically shares the same premise as "Oscillations" for its rhythmical pattern, for instance), Barrow offers Gibbons perfect jewellery cases for her rough diamond of a frail voice, her genius vocal lines, and her despondent lyrics. Drawing from a lot more of Krautrock influences this time around, Portishead thus manages to outdo its already iconic legacy. They might have lost some "casual" fans in the process, but to hell with them. *Third* is the one album in the Bristol band's discography that proves that trends and lucky strikes are not all that there is to make you fall in love with a band (again). The ever-cinematic soundscapes are various, but also uncompromising. The arrangements offer a treasure trove of unforgettable melodies for listeners unafraid of dark subject matters. Adrian Utley's electric guitar moans and winces like an injured animal licking its wounds. And the emotions expressed are so intense that *Dummy* and *Portishead* sound like The Verve or Spiritualized in comparison. Those albums are still perfect gems in their ephemeral genre, yes. But *Third* is the moment where the project reaches a whole other level for fans of all the styles used here. And as such, it is truly timeless, contrary to the band's other LPs.
And the songs, goddamnit! Sure, some of them are impressionistic, so to speak, in keeping with narrators too crushed by life and failed love relationships to shake a leg again. But honestly, there are a vast majority of highlights. And they start with the long-winded-yet-fully rewarding opener "Silence" and its curiously lively rhythms, preceding the devastating entrance of Gibbons on the scene, soon backed by a sinuous string section. Yet the song is just an appetizer here. "Hunter" and its frantic, worried beeps ensues, then "Nylon Smile" and its echoey, chiaroscuro guitar lines. Stretching its delicate wings like a butterfly soon engulfed by the twilight, "The Rip" builds a carousel of emotions over its core melancholic arpeggios, leaving a moving imprint in your soul forever. A couple of tracks later, relentless "We Carry On" gnaws you just like life and old age do. After a sweet interlude, comes the other centerpiece, minimalistic "Machine Gun", where Gibbons' cries of wonder, pain and worry into the night contrast with a merciless electronic beat blasting your ears into oblivion. And when a suddenly luminous, John Carpenter-inspired synth line suddenly surges, it's as if frail sun rays pierced into the black clouds and the overcast sky at last. Not long after, surprise, "Magic Doors" actually *grooves*, thanks to its cowbell-addled drums and bouncy bassline. The song manages to make an accordion of sorts sound *good*, its chorus is an emotional rollercoaster, and the whole offers one glimmer of hope, barely dirtied by a short off-kilter free-jazz sax. Yet that ephemeral light soon gets covered by "Threads", probably the darkest composition ever penned by Portishead, WHICH SPEAKS VOLUMES. Beth's anguished cries towards its conclusion... I don't even have the words to describe such a hellish closer.
*Third* is hands down Portishead's best LP, and the fact that a lot of people aware of its existence fail to see it (pussies!) only adds to its dark legacy. Here Gibbons, Barrow and Utley explored black pits where even The Cure, Bauhaus or Sisters Of Mercy feared to tread. A black diamond indeed.
Number of albums left to review: 69
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 402 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 231
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 299
Neil Young
5/5
*Tonight's The Night* (1975)
Neil Young has just lost two friends to junk. One of them was a musician from his backing band Crazy Horse, the other was a roadie. *Harvest*'s hit on the chart is still récent, but he couldn't care less. His mind is despondent. He wants to record again with Crazy Horse, gathering them for the first time since the tragedy. The music is played loose, some of Neil's vocals are off-key, the overall mood is like a funeral wake. The first version of the album is anything but tight and cohesive, before new recording sessions strengthen its limp backbone. But even the final product sounds a little too sepulchral and disjointed to the label executives, appalled when they hear the record. The LP is shelved for a time (*On The Beach*, recorded after the *Tonight's The Night* sessions, was released before it). When *Tonight's The Night* is finally released, Young has completed his "ditch trilogy".
It doesn't take a seer to understand that this album is not the ideal entry point into Neil Young's protean discography. But if your soul and ears are open enough, you might just sense why it is a favourite for many of his fans. The (double) title-track sums up everything that's striking about the record--its slacker, borderline-depressive ethos and, ahem, "work ethic", but it shouldn't hide all the other endearing cuts in the record. "World On A String" and "Mellowed My Mind" conceal classic Neil Young choruses beyond their meat-and-potatoes surfaces (Young's objectively atrocious vocal performance in the second actually makes the song better and more emotional in my humble opinion). "Speakin' Out" offers the prettiest piano solo in Young's oeuvre. Speaking of piano performance, the loner rips off the Rolling Stones' "Lady Jane" to an incredible result for the aptly-titled "Borrowed Tune", as good as the original--this one is a tearjerker for sure. Classic rocker "Come on Baby, Let's Go Downtown" then wakes you up, and makes you ready to paint the town red. Unless it's black. The track is actually a live recording of the song from 1970, and Danny Whitten's ghost looms over the proceedings. He was the Crazy Horse member who had recently passed away, and it's his guitar and background vocals that can be heard here Later, Neil Young will pay his tribute to roadie Bruce Banner, for the second version of the title-track closing the LP. The result could have sounded awkward or self-conscious. But it's just bittersweet and touching instead.
All the tracks (apart from the album closer) that I've mentioned so far are from side one, and, you probably guessed it, things get even better on side two. Well, except "Roll Another Number For The Road", the only dud in the album, and a number that should ironically be left in the cutting room's floor. Everything else is pitch-perfect, though: cinematic western ballad "Albuquerque", where Neil drawls agonizingly long vowels ; the deep ominous minor harmonies of slow rocker "Lookout Joe" ; or the heartbreaking plea of "Tired Eyes", where confessional spoken words seamlessly lead to an unforgettable chorus where everyone sings in frail harmonies. Stellar piano and steel guitar arrangements abound everywhere. Just close your tired eyes and picture the sort of Americana scenery that could be shot with this music in mind. Then, just like Neil asks, open them, and breathe. Life's good, in spite of its unavoidable, inherent tragedies.
Number of albums left to review: 68
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 403 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 231
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 299
The Chemical Brothers
5/5
The perfect textbook "big beat" / late-nineties british electro album that made the whole 'rock vs. techno' debate moot. You could also select Prodigy's *The Fat Of The Land*, out the same year.
Out of the 11 tracks of *Dig Your Own Hole*, six explain why the latter is worthy of such a list. It doesn't look like much, but those six tracks alone are the equivalent of a 40-ish-minute album. There us the iconic "Block Rockin' Beats", with its no less iconic slapped bassline either ripping off Pink Floyd's "Let There Be More Light" or 23 Skidoo's "Coup". There are also the title-track, aptly named given that it digs the same groove than the opener ; "Elektrobank" and its climactic conclusion, like a jet exploding mid-air in slow motion, the hectic yet also melodic "Setting Sun", featuring Noel Gallagher, the moody and more relaxed "Where Do I Begin", and"The Private Psychedelic Reel", a flasy epic 10-minute closer.
The rest, mostly drawn from the "electronic battle weapons" series of singles asking DJs to test them on dancefloors, might be a little samey and secondary. And follow-up LP *Surrender* might be more varied, and overall a better album, than *Dig Your Own Hole* (or at least one more accessible). Yet there is still something that screams "essential" in that record. You had to be there at the time to fully understand the thing now. But you *had to* be there, whether in a club or at a friend's party.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: less than 70, I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter.
Aimee Mann
3/5
Looks like sexist morons had a field day looking down upon this record. Not good, especially since "Whatever" is filled with many interesting and/or pretty arrangements, beyond its "alternative" / MOR / post-REM surface. The subtle 'chamber pop" ones, especially, are awesome.
Unfortunately, the production values and overall sound haven't aged that well (some of those horrible "gated" drums shouldn't have seen the light of day in 1993). And beyond the arrangements, I personally feel that some songs and melodies in the record are far better than others--when the chamber pop arrangements disappear, Aimee's music indeed sounds a little too sweet and tame, even a little quaint. The middle of the record feels like a slog to go through, especially. And even for the rest of the album, it is my opinion that there were far more exciting things happening in the early nineties than that part of Aimee Mann's albums (and I also feel like some of her later records are a tad bit more impressive than this debut overall).
Reading myself again, I fear that I might actually rehash some of the points made by haters on this app. I don't want to, but on the other hand, it's always a fine line when you want to wear your heart on your sleeve. I sometimes have trouble reconciling some of the different intents of the album--between the few off-kilter touches and the incredibly formulaic ones. I'm glad the first are here, but they fit so badly with the rest that some awkwardness lingers in the air every time a song leads to another...
That said, *Whatever* succeeds in kindling my interest again in its final run ("I've Had It" is a gem). Not so bad, I guess... Essential, though?
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: 66
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 404
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 232 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 299
The Beach Boys
5/5
One side of surf-rock hits or near-hits with the trademark harmonies from the Californian band, plus one side of even more sophisticated arrangements and chord sequences for slower, more "intimate" cuts, foretelling *Pet Sounds*. The whole thing equals... two sides of Beach Boys happiness.
Critics have always loved this one. Out of the band"s classic early period, album *Surfin' USA* is probably even more iconic for the fans. But it would be a shame not to select a second album from that early period, and *The Beach Boys Today!* is the most likely candidate for that. Then add those albums from the band's two subsequent "eras": *Pet Sounds*, *Smile*, *Sunflower*, *Surf's Up*, and maybe *Carl And The Passions* if you have room left. But I guess all that is a story for another time, kiddies...
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9.5 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: 65
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 405 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 232
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 299
Os Mutantes
2/5
Potential hot take here: if the psychedelic rock on this album had not been sung in Brazilian, and logically tinged by strong splashes of samba and bossa nova, chances are it wouldn't be as fondly remembered by later fans of that time period as it is today. I readily admit that this take of mine here may sound quite counter-intuitive. But if you know the same time period a little, the record can't stand the comparison with the greats of those days.
I have tried to love this record many times before: an old friend of mine, who also made me discover Love, was quite a fan of it years back. My response to this debut has always been more polite than enthusiastic, though. I can't help sensing the whole thing as way too derivative. A lot of style, but not much substance. To me, the Beatles, Love, Yardbirds, The Zombies, The Pretty Things, Billy Nicholls, The Seeds, 13th Floor Elevators or *Fifth Dimension*-era Byrds are the real deal when it comes to the psych-rock and psych-pop of those years. Os Mutantes are just a trendy, secondary offshoot. Many times, those songs do not sound or feel like a real psychedelic LP, but rather like a made-up version of that style that advertisers of those days could have used for campaigns promoting an airline company or some alcoholic beverage. Too bad there's never been a *Mad Men* episode where Don Draper and Peggy Olsen go to Brazil. You can bet your flip-flops Os Mutantes would have been included to its soundtrack.
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
7 for more general purposes (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: 64
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 405 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 232
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 300 (including this one -- will select Chico Buarque's *Construaço" instead, just to keep a close number of Brazilian albums...)
Elis Regina
3/5
OK, the story behind this record's inclusion in the 1001 Albums book needs to be spelled out, because without said book in front of your eyes, it's hard to understand what we're supposed to assess here. The Spotify link points to a 1998 compilation whose bulk is drawn from an album named *Elis*, released in 1980 (checked that in Discogs -- the tracklist of that 1980 *Elis* album is differently ordered, and omits a couple of cuts found in that later 1998 compilation -- maybe one-off singles, or songs recorded during the same time period?). Trouble is, Elis Regina released at least *seven* LPs named *Elis* during the course of her career, which is where this app probably got it confused with another album with completely different songs, also titled *Elis*--yet *one out in 1977, NOT 1978*. Unless it's the book that was confused about that release date in the first place. Just like all of us now, I imagine...
🫠🤔🙃
Not that it matters that much when I listen to the Spotify link. The four cuts either partly composed (or sung with) the legendary Lô Borges and Milton Nascimiento go from good to great (even though the cover of "O Trem Azul" pales in comparison with the natural groove of the original, found on the no less legendary *Clube Da Esquina*). Among those four cuts, "O Que Foi Feto Devera (De Vera)", with Nascimiento, is simply insane -- so driven, so intense!!! But most of the the rest has all the earmarks of the worst impulses of mainstream music in those years -- bland instrumentation, half-baked synth layers, hackneyed disco-funk rhythms, predictable electric guitar blues flourishes, you name them! -- to which you need to add a few compositions that go nowhere fast, all of them written by some different guys (except for the Borges and Nascimiento cuts).
Latin jazz is still there, of course (see Rhodes piano-enhanced "Rebento" to admire its pure form in the album). And Elis Regina was an extraordinary vocal performer for sure. But too often, those assets are drowned out by the fully performative, tasteless, muzak-sounding surroundings. "Apprendendo A Jogar" works quite well in that kitschy vein, I readily admit it -- but it takes too damn long to get there in that particular tracklist (contrary to the one of the real 1980 album?). Add the confusing nature of the record we're supposed to evaluate here, as I've just pointed out again (an original from the late seventies / early eighties? a later compilation of that time period?), and the whole proposition sounds rather unconvincing to me.
So nope, not this one. I suspect the sad fate and untimely death of Ellis played a huge part in this album's inclusion within the list, and I feel a little cruel kind of shrugging it off right now. But, once again -- and here I'm gonna repeat what I've written just yesterday about that Os Mutantes debut -- a list of so-called essential albums that doesn't mention Chico Buarque's *Construçao* is not exactly a steady reference point when it comes to Brazilian music. At least in my own "book".
2.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 3.
7.5 for more general purposes (5 + 2.5)
Number of albums left to review: 63
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 405
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 232
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 301 (including this one)
The Triffids
4/5
The most questionable aspect on this thing is the production. Even if you put the album back to its eighties context, some of those horrible gated drums have aged like milk, especially when they're supposed to support folk-rock, country-rock, jangle pop and traditional-inspired, bagpipes-enhanced shenanigans. Producer Gil Norton -- later to be known for producing classic indie-rock jewels for Pixies -- is probably to be blamed for that choice: what would work for the Bostonians later on sounds a little clunky for the Australian band. Probably because Black Francis's music was so idiosyncratic that not even the eighties trend of gated drums could ruin his songs, actually adding to their endearing, catchy weirdness. In comparison, The Triffids sound like a less original, more "derivative" animal. And as such, they can't fully redeem Norton's sonic aesthetics.
As far as music compositions and other arrangements go, there are quite a few salvageable parts to be found in *Calenture*. Synth-laden, subtly understated "A Trick Of The Light" is a small gem that has aged surprisingly well, for instance. "Unmade Love" is an effective abrasive cut, hearkening back to the band's post-punk beginnings. David McComb quite often sounds like fellow Aussie singer Nick Cave treading a more commercially viable path many years before the latter would do so. Emotional highlight "Lay Me Down" and its *perfect* string arrangements, could have found their way in *Let Love In*, and I don't think anyone would have batted an eye.
We have seriously good songwriting going on in many parts of this LP, and it's kind of a shame many users of this app didn't recognize it. Guess the quaint, borderline-cheesy nature of album opener "Bury Me Deep In Love" misguided a lot of folks here. I suspect too many app users rarely go further than one track or two in their daily listening of the albums suggested. Their loss...
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: less than 70, I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately.
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately.(including this one)
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter.
Madonna
3/5
One of Madonna's better albums, which would probably have been up there with *Like A Prayer* with a minimum amount of self-editing from the Ciccone diva. Nothing is really unpleasant in those William Orbit-produced songs (either downtempo or techno-adjacent), even if they also sound a little tame and safe overall. "Shanti / Ashtangi" is an electronic updating of sixties fascination with Indian gurus and meditative cults -- drawing from Madonna's interest in mystic new age stuff at the time -- that might sound ridiculous for some ears... but if you listen to it with your tongue firmly planted in your cheek, it's possible you spend a somewhat good time at least.
The rest is less adventurous or risky from today's vantage point -- neither a good thing nor an utterly bad thing, I'd venture to add. In other words, the album was a milestone in Madonna's career, but it certainly wasn't one for music at large. Besides, it's a little tricky pinpointing how serious those songs intend to be at times. Like, are they pop ditties? Or are they grand statements that supposedly go deeper than what their glossy surfaces suggest at first glance? One notable exception, though: "Frozen", with its -- aptly glacial -- string section and its mesmerizing background vocals, was indeed a fantastic hit single. It's both sophisticated and accessible. And it's cinematic and inspired in ways most of the other cuts can't be.
The thing is, there are at least 30 albums released in 1998 that are more essential than this LP in my "book". So I would lie if I said *Ray Of Light* has any serious chance of making the final cut in my own list. The fact that Madonna had already left a legendary imprint on pop culture during the eighties stands against this later album somehow. It might come off as a little "cold" to state it this way, but I'd rather use the slot here occupied by this record for one released by a band or artist that had something fresh or truly groundbreaking to offer to the world in those years (or even now). 1001 is a finite number after all...
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: 61
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 405
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 233
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 302 (including this one)
Frank Ocean
5/5
With Frank Ocean, it's always gonna be either early mixtape *Nostalgia, Ultra* or this official debut album . I recognize *Blonde*'s impact later in 2016, but I would lie if I said that other Frank Ocean LP does as much for me. Whereas in *Channel Orange*, you got everything that makes this stellar artist hit all the right spots. At least *my* right spots.
I almost never had the chance to understand (and then love) this album because of a pretty weird cut on its first side, "Sierra Leone"--really the second song on this record (filled with moody interludes I won't touch upon so as to leave room to discuss the real songs in this review). Now "Sierra Leone" is part of this record's perfect track flow in my mind, but at the time it was a no-go, so strange and seemingly pointless that it made me stop listening. Fortunately, I quickly fell in love with the individual highlights from this LP, which lead me right back to it as a whole.
Needless to say, hose highlights slap.There is the delicate and subtle "Thinkin About You" (displaying an unobtrusive mood that would also be used to great effect on later cut "Pilot Jones"), the gently grooving "Sweet Life", Elton John's "Benny-And-The-Jets"-inspired "Super Rich Kids", and, of course, the absolutely epic two-part "Pyramids", where stripper 'Cleopatra' roams through Bladerunner-like soundscapes / cityscapes, her sad tale cryptically narrated by a protagonist who could either be her pimp, her soulmate or her best friend. The second part of the song is melancholic as f*ck, and imbued all sorts of fascinating, fully cinematic layers. High class art R'n'B here.
And then it goes on and on for side two as well. "Lost" is a perfect smooth pop song with a killer synth hook. "Monks", just like "Crack Rock" some time before, brings some much needed funk-rock dynamism to the tracklisting. And "Bad Religion" is a terrific ballad supported by impressive string arrangements, and a song as awe-inspiring in the economy of the words it uses to effectively tell its story as it is mesmerizing on a purely musical level. Malay is one hell of a producer, and whether some of the unexpected chords modulations -- along with their wonderful, catchy harmonies -- come from him or Ocean himself, I gotta say they did a legendary work together in this record. The album keeps you on your toes until its very last seconds. And to this day, it still exudes a certain mystery as to the manner it brilliantly manages to hold all its odd swipes and discrete forays and sudden left turns into a single cohesive whole.
Closer "Forrest Gump" unexpectedly ends *Channel Orange* on a surprisingly light-hearted, almost tongue-in-cheek note. The song is used in a humorous manner to close the subject when it comes to the nameless man who broke Frank's heart by not reciprocating the latter's feeling about him -- a subject that was way more painful on "Bad Religion"! Ocean finally sees his obsession for what it is, the first step to heal and mend his broken heart. When you rewind back to the beginning of the album, you soon realize what a rich, emotional journey it has been. There's indeed something that's also a little dissolute and slightly cynical about some of the album's vibes, at least in its first half--in keeping with the world of the "Super Rich Kids", from the song that bears their name. But then, it soon dawns upon you the record is really about Frank coming to terms with who he really is, and you understand why the journey had to start that way, by giving impressionistic portrayals of the sorts of environments he lives in -- the whole context behind the main plot of the unrequited love yarn. To be fair, I can't think of any other record that that makes the topic of bisexuality feel so vital, so artistically sound and emotionally engaging. And that's the cream on an already quite perfect cake.
Number of albums left to review: 60
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 406 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 233
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 302
Ms. Dynamite
3/5
Ms. Dynamite follows Frank Ocean, yesterday's suggestion being *Channel Orange*. And that won't work in the favor of the British rapper / singer for sure!
Fortunately, I've always loved the hit-single "Dy-Na-Mi-Tee" that opens this debut album. It's a song that's got a killer main hook, and Niomi Arleen McLean-Daley gives a vocal performance on it that's both powerful and endearing--quite a prefect way to introduce herself to the audience here.
Sadly the second track is a *huge* letdown. Much has been said about the phrase "meat and potatoes" to mock classic rock, but let's be honest, you have the exact r'nb equivalent of that in "Anyway You Want It", a song so bland and predictable it will be an automatic skip from now on. Plus whoever that Kevin Bryce is, he's not a great singer. Why was this stupid filler placed in such a prominent position in the record?
Bouncy "Put Him Out" fares far better, fortunately, and so does cutesy "Brother" -- Niomi's tender tribute to her little bro Akasha (also a rapper now) and the occasion to reminisce on the hardships they both experienced as children. The gentle acoustic guitar on that song is a nice touch, just like the cut-and-pasted accordion is on "It Takes More (Bloodshy Main Mix)", where Ms. Dynamite sounds so close to Amy Winehouse it's almost eerie (*Back To Black* would only be released a few years later, and if one of its producers Salaam Remi also worked on *A Little Deeper*, it looks like he didn't work on that particular song, oddly enough -- you could swear his paws were all over it, though!). After that awesome streak, two very good tracks also follow: "Sick 'n' Tired" and "Afraid 2 Fly", with their winks to P-Funk / West Coast rap, segue into one another seamlessly. If you take out "Anyway You Want Its", the whole tracklist of the first side feels pretty solid overall.
And quite predictably, the second half of the album is at least decent, but it's not as great as the best moments of the first. It starts with "Watch Over Them", a -- pretty underwhelming -- acapella cut, which flies by without ever leaving an imprint in your mind (listened to the song three times to make sure I didn't miss something!). Jamaican Ragga-tinged "Seed Will Grow" then ensues (featuring one son of Bob Marley? I was too bored to check...), and it's too bad that it only remembers to use interesting musical arrangements during the *very last seconds*. "Krazy Krush" is a little more memorable, thanks to its "arcade games" sound palette and background vocals, even if it does not exactly reach the heights reached before either. And if reggae-based "Now You Want My Love" has interesting off-kilter harmonies to offer, and Niomi has a commanding presence at its helm, the song still feels a little too long and linear to be considered as stellar or merely pretty good...
Worse, "Gotta Let You Know" is, to put it mildly, a boring filler. Interesting guitar lines on "All I Ever", though (almost atonal at times during the verses). Finally, the title-track concludes the proceedings, with more acoustic guitar and a quick build-up to Niomi's last "thoughts" that actually fall a little flat on their faces.
Oh, there's a hidden track too. But this review is already too long as it is. The main takeaway is that the record ends with a whimper, not a bang. It's a choice that could have made sense on paper... But are the actual contents of that last leg compelling enough to make it stick the landing? The jury's still out on this one.
So, to put it in a nutshell, four of five duds, an equal number of bangers, some of them absolutely stellar (basically the singles), and in-between, some pretty cool stuff that may or may not be filed under the word "essential"... In other words, what you got here is your usual, run-of-the-mill album (probably an overrated one), as it is often churned out by this app (and the book it is based upon)...
So *Channel Orange*, this is not indeed. But maybe it's unfair to compare apples and... oranges.
😁
I'll see myself out ------------->
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: 59
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 406
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 234 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 302
Bob Dylan
5/5
Stone cold masterpiece and the apex of Bob Dylan's early folk protest singer phase. Any record that has "Blowin' in the Wind", "Girl from the North Country", "Masters of War", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", and "Corrina, Corrina" in its tracklisting MUST be included in a list like this, even if the rest was made out of absolute duds.
Luckily, the rest is not made out of duds, so ignore the usual grumblers complaining about Bob's voice and dive in. The words and stories are fascinating. The music is subtle and far more sophisticated than it seems, with some terrific harmonic moments. And once you get that, Dylan's vocal performance becomes perfect as well.
I don't have enough time today to elaborate, sadly. But in a way, I *refuse* to elaborate. There's a very clear reason Bob Dylan became a cult figure -- in spite of himself, at first. And this album is exhibit A. for it. A lot of people telling you that he is overrated end up changing their minds at some point. I did. It's just that I didn't know what I was talking about before.
So dive in as well if you haven't yet. And for those who may have questions about how I ended up changing my mind... Well indeed, the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. But if you end up loving this LP, you'll manage to catch said answer before it's out of your grasp. It's all up to you, really.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
(a quick note about that grading: no album in my list of 20 records released in 1963 reaches a perfect mark. *The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan* is the best album of that year for me, followed by releases by Charles Mingus, The Beach Boys and the first two Beatles LPs. Anything beyond isn't really essential as far as albums go. So you have to put your head back then to picture what a shock for the audience this sort of album could be. Which is another good reason to include it here...)
Number of albums left to review: 58
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 407 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 234
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 302
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5/5
As that other (admirable) review puts it:
"I don’t know. It also just all seems silly to say anything about this album at all. It’s stunning."
I will only add a few things. There's a misconception that this album as a whole is Nick talking to his deceased teenage son. Cut "Ghosteen Speaks" is about that, sure, and the tragic story of Arthur Cave's death is central to the overall narrative of this indeed stunning record. Yet I believe that what most of those songs are really about is Nick slowly and gently trying to have Susie Bick, his wife and Arthur's mother, return to the world of the living, while passing through all the stages of grief himself.
Not that this misconception changes a lot of things. Listening to *Ghosteen* is a harrowing experience, but also a strikingly beautiful one. And if you listen to it the right way, it's also a record filled with faith and hope. Extremely sad, obviously, but also mystical. You feel like you're staying silent next to the characters depicted in those songs while they muse about their past and current lives in front of the sea, a grey overcast sky looming over them as the twilight takes hold. Rarely in the history of music in the last fifty years or so has a so-called "one-note" album offered so many memorable moments like that.
The record, which uses minimal input from the Bad Seeds apart from Warren Ellis, also contains two of Nick Cave's most beautiful songs ("Bright Horses" and "Waiting For You"). Which, given his huge body of work, is no small feat. "Galleon Ship" and "Ghosteen Speaks" recycle Ellis's trademark circular loop sound -- already used in "Jesus Alone" on previous LP *Skeleton Tree* -- to great effects. Wordless background vocals abound, mostly performed by an angelic choir. And Cave is a commanding presence just as he takes us into a fascinating maze of melancholic impressions.
The "second part" of the album containing the two long narrative songs "Ghosteen" and "Hollywood", linked by the short meditative interlude "Fireflies", is a whole cinematic adventure all by itself. "Ghosteen" starts with Cave using all his powers to see hope on the horizon through an early climactic build-up, before a lengthy, more muted and subdued sequence ensues, showing how fragile hope still is in his predicament. And "Hollywood" cryptically narrates the story of Cave and Bick trying to escape from their unbearable pain on the other side of the world, with Cave recognizing that it's gonna be the place where he's waiting for his time to come as well -- reminding the listener that death will always be around the corner for each one of us, and that it's up to us to make the best out of the time that's left. That closer is in turn ominous and soothing, displaying the sort of obsessive one-note bassline that already sounded so great in that other masterpiece that *Push The Sky Away" was. An ambiguous finale, adding to the whole mystical mystery of the album, where Cave eventually goes full falsetto to convey his most intimate thoughts. Who would have thought the eighties Prince of Darkness was able to convey so much grace?
I tried my best here, yet it still feels "silly to say anything about this album at all". It's the sort of record that can't allow you to do anything else while you listen to it. It works in relentless waves, and you either fully yield to them or you don't. Hope there's enough strength and empathy in you to do so
Number of albums left to review: 57
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 408 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 234
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 302
Thundercat
3/5
Stephen Bruner is a killer bass player -- a fully accomplished musician for sure, but also an imaginative, unhinged, very creative one. And drawing from the videos of his interviews, he's the coolest (thunder)cat in activity in the current American post-funk / alternative hip-hop/R'n'B scene. For instance, it's great listening to him talk about the sounds and harmonies that have pushed his buttons since he was a teenager deeply interested in music of all stripes. I have nothing but mad respect for stellar, enthusiastic musicians of his ilk.
There's a decisively seventies feel to *Drunk*, here mixed and updated to more contemporary strands. And as such, I think the record does scratch an itch for a lot of fans of African-American music tired of excessive standardization and other tired tropes in their favourite genres. This is music for people who don't like easy categories being shovelled down their throat. And it's filled with life and all sorts of endearing details.
That said, I would lie if I said I'm fully sold on Thundercat's vision as displayed on *Drunk*. There's an voluntarily "episodic" nature to the man's music that hearkens back to J Dilla and Flying Lotus (the latter actually on production, mixing and performance duties on a large part of those tracks). Yet said music is also far less various in tones and intents than its obvious models. And as a consequence, a "samey" vibe ends up spoiling the journey, which is crazy since so many efforts have been put to create off-kilter instrumentation and arrangements in some of those cuts.
Not that there are no highlights: "Bus In These Streets", "Lava Lamp", "Jethro", "Show Me The Way", "Friend Zone", "Them Changes", "Drink Dat" all split the difference between hard funk and yacht rock, and sparks routinely spurt forth from this clash of styles (always operated in a very laidback manner, mind you). The thing is, barring a very rare exception, all the other cuts in this quite long record sound like drafts or less realized equivalents of said highlights, and the comparison soon does a disservice to the whole project. And this especially on its last leg, which just sounds esoteric for the hell of it. I'm OK with the album starting with all sorts of different short teases seeing Stephen having his tongue firmly planted in his cheek (the first proper "song" is about going home wasted and jerking yourself off to sleep , for chrissake!). The album does not seem to take itself too seriously for one second. But I would have expected some more cohesive building-up of all these threads at the end--meshing up to something more decisive and emotional. What you have instead is just *more* weird shit that neither rhymes nor reasons (even though closer "DUI" harbors a couple of mesmerizing synth sounds). Pretty sure that a lot of listeners will feel a bit cheated to have spent so much time with this album, very honestly. It's quite a frustrating situation: Thundercat is talented enough to yield wonders when his heart is set to it, as the delicate "3AM" can prove it. But that cut is only a one-minute oasis of bliss lost in what feels like a fifteen-minute of desert nonsense.
There's a difference between not taking yourself seriously and being entirely self-indulgent, and as of now, it is my opinion that "Drunk" is the work of a very skilled artist who doesn't always know how to draw the line between the two. A piece of potential self-criticism needs to be expressed at this point, though: maybe I should resume smoking pot after decades abstaining to do so (minus one rare relapse at times), so as to "dig" this record for what it is: a goofy, unpretentious attempt to reconcile feelgood intents with somewhat abrasive yet also pretty original soundscapes. Behind the sleazy atmosphere of some of the songs, there's a childish sense of wonder in many parts of this LP -- partly conveyed by the nonsensical yet sometimes personal, autobiographical lyrics found in it. Stephen Bruner is not the singer of the century, and it would be a little idiotic to expect classic "songwriting" from him. But he sure knows how to create a "mood", even if I'm not always fascinated by them.
So leaving the door open for this one. Who knows, maybe I'll end up "drunk" on it one day?
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: 56
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 408
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 235 (including this one - but there are around 40 albums in my 2017 year's end list* that I think are better than this one, so this is a purely symbolical gesture that I'm making here)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 302
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*Just for the sake of documentation, and to allow you to personally assess what I've written here, here is my list of favourite albums for 2017:
Big Thief - Capacity
Idles - Brutalism
Protomartyr - Relatives In Descent
Kendrick Lamar - Damn.
King Krule - The Ooz
Slowdive - Slowdive
Aldous Harding - Party
King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard - Polygondwanaland
St Vincent - Masseduction
Tyler The Creator - Flower Boy
Pissed Jeans - Why Love Now
King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana
Mount Kimbie - Love What Survives
Björk - Utopia
OMNI - Multi-Task
Broken Social Scene - Hug Of Thunder
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Luciferian Towers
Thurston Moore - Rock'n Roll Consciousness
Fleet Foxes - The Crack-Up
Thee Oh Sees - Orc
Metro Boomin / 21 Savage / Offset - Without Warning
The Psychotic Monks - Silence Slowly And Madly Shines
Chad VanGaalen - Light Information
Lana Del Rey - Lust For Life
Lorde - Melodrama
Mogwai - Every Country's Sun
Do Make Say Think - Stubborn Persistent Illusions
Kamasi Washington - Harmony of Difference
Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked At Me
(Sandy) Alex G - Rocket
Cloud Nothings - Life Without Sound
Grizzly Bear - Painted Ruins
Wolf Alice - Visions Of A Life
LCD Soundsystem - American Dream
William Basinski - A Shadow In Time
Charli XCX - Pop 2*
The xx - I See You
Converge - The Dusk In Us
Pile - A Hairshirt Of Purpose
Jay Z - 4:44
Sheryl Crow
2/5
Gosh, I tried my best to be open-minded as I quickly revisited this album, which starts with a couple of very famous moody cuts, "Run, Baby, Run" and "Leaving Las Vegas", before losing its way real quick. Once those two good songs are in the rearview mirror, key shortcomings indeed prevent me from including this admittedly famous LP in my own list: first, Sheryl Crow's grating vocal performance on a lot of those tracks (not "bad" as in "endearingly-frail-and-emotional-in-a-Lucinda-Williams-sort-of-way", but just... "bad-bad") ; and then, there's the subpar nature of a lot of the compositions, leaving a foul taste in your mouth. The second part of side one has both shortcomings in spades on the *same damn songs*, and it's so awful that the whole thing almost becomes comical.
The barebones, delicate "No One Said It Would Be Easy", and the decent "What I Can Do For You" at the start of side two, fortunately end that bad streak, and given that they're followed but the lively, insanely stellar hit "All I Wanna Do", you might feel like you can forgive the "critics" who overrated *Tuesday Night Music Club* when it was released. The thing is, we head towards tedious "meh" territory right after that. "We Do What We Can" is a film noir pastiche that hovers by without leaving much of an impression, whether good or bad (and what's with this obsession with the verb "do" for three titles in a row, by the way? Couldn't Sheryl "do" something else for her lyrics? Pretty ironic flaw here.). And the same goes for the overlong closer "I Shall Believe": not much interesting happens.
To put it in a nutshell, a pretty decent start for this LP, then a full disaster, then good to great tunes, and then a borefest. There are at least 40 albums released in 1993 that are better than this one (see the list after this review). Better as in "more groundbreaking", "more intense", "more fun", "more sophisticated", "more relevant", "more emotional", "more genuine", "more spontaneous", "better composed", "better written", "better performed" and so on... For chrissake, get a grip, you "critics"! Your job is not to pander for the lowest common denominator up to the point when you sacrifice quality over the predictable popularity of an artist, just because they have a couple of promising singles up their sleeves. If anything, retrospective reviews of this thing should be harsher. Now we have the hindsight to realize there was nothing extraordinary about this album overall, don't we?
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
7/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: 55
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 408
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 235
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 303 (including this one)
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List of my 40 favourite 1993 albums as a reference point:
Nirvana - In Utero
Wu-Tang Clan - Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
The Breeders - Last Splash
PJ Harvey - Rid Of Me
Fugazi - In On The Kill Taker
The Posies - Frosting On The Beater
Björk - Debut
A Tribe Called Quest - Midnight Marauders
Liz Phair - Exile In Guyville
Frank Black - Frank Black
Les Thugs - As Happy As Possible
Girls Against Boys - Venus Luxure N*1 Baby
Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream
Cypress Hill - Black Sunday
Dead Can Dance - Into The Labyrinth
Snoop Dogg - Doggystyle
Slowdive - Souvlaki
Grant Lee Buffalo - Fuzzy
Morphine - Cure For Pain
Yo La Tengo - Painful
Mazzy Star - So Tonight That I Might See
Dinosaur Jr. - Where You Been
Tindersticks - Tindersticks
The Auteurs - New Wave
Sebadoh - Bubble And Scrape
Souls Of Mischief - '93 'til Infinity
Suede - Suede
The Divine Comedy - Liberation
De La Soul - Bulhoone Mindstate
U2 - Zooropa
Neil Young - Unplugged
Tool - Undertow
Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works '85-'92
Digable Planets - Reachin' (A Refutation Of Time And Place)
Depeche Mode - Songs Of Faith And Devotion
The Afghan Whigs - Gentlemen
Kate Bush - The Red Shoes
Radiohead - Pablo Honey
Us3 - Hand On The Torch
Ace Of Base - The Sign
Yep, Ace Of Base made a slightly better album than Sheryl Crow that year. Ain't that telling something...? 🙃
The Fall
4/5
With The Fall's protean discography you gotta start somewhere. Why not start indeed with their first LP, where Mark E. Smith proved from the get-go he was leagues ahead in the post-punk game? As weird as this record is, it could have been released yesterday, and -- in the current British crank wave revival at least -- no one would have batted an eye.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 54
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 408
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 236 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 303
Ice Cube
3/5
I'm in two minds about this debut from the former NWA rapper, just like the album itself, actually. Its reputation as a topical and partly groundbreaking "golden age" hip hop statement is not unwarranted, just as two strings of cuts in the record prove. There's the one starting the LP on a all-time high: "The Nigga You Love To Hate", the title-track, and "What They Hittin' Foe?". And there's the one going from "Turn Off The Radio" to "Endangered Species" (with a killer Chuck D featuring) to "A Gangster's Fairytale. Ice Cube borrowing Public Enemy's production team on the other side of the west-coast / east-coast divide was a genius move. And both that production team and he as an unforgiving storyteller create sparks on those tracks.
The thing is, beyond the skits parodying the ridiculous, obviously racist reality show the album's title draws from, the rest can be tedious at times, and sometimes even awful to an extent. The misogyny is blatant on some cuts, especially "You Can't Fade Me". In that same infamous league, "I'm Only Out For One Thang" is not Flava Flav's shiniest hour as a guest performer. Interestingly that dumb song is omitted in some editions of the album found online. Guess someone (hopefully the two men themselves) realized how incredibly stupid that attempt at low-brow rap college humour sounded. Leave that sort of degrading of women to 2-Live Crew, please. Much respect to Ice Cube telling about "Black experience", but come on, Black women are at least one half on said experience, and promoting clichés about them being just hoes when you try so hard to make good points against oppression elsewhere is a bit hypocritical.
Gonna pop up the same question as the one I asked for other rap albums: what's worse? A provocateur / entertainer such as Snoop Dog, whose take on that sort of subject won't be taken seriously by anyone in their right minds? Or rappers in the ilk of Cube, who want to see their takes about society taken seriously to a certain extent, here falling into the trap of stereotypical misogyny? The jury's still out on this one.
Apart from that, the last leg of the album is correct, but never reaching the heights of its raucous start or equally raucous middle section.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: 53
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 408
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 237 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 303
Foo Fighters
4/5
So, being a huge Nirvana fan, I bought this debut when it was released, liked it a lot at the time, then I lost the CD when I didn't care that much for Dave Grohl's band anymore (except for "Everlong", one of the ten best songs *of all time*, found on sophomore album *The Colour And The Shape*). Then, some time later, I bought a Foo Fighters "Greatest Hits" compilation, and I never felt the urge to buy the band's debut again.
There's certainly something endearing to the latter's partially lo-fi sound, probably stemming from the fact that Grohl recorded all the instruments himself. But like all the later (and cleaner-sounding) LPs, that first album is mostly worth its singles, i. e. the first three tracks opening the proceedings (plus "Alone And Easy Target", along with the mesmerizing, shoegazy closer "Exhausted").
Apart from that, "essential", really? The answer to that question is still as hard to find as a box containing alien DNA in an area 51 warehouse... It's a good album, don't get me wrong. But there's nothing in it that hasn't been done at least equally well by quite a few bands of a similar style. And you can't cram them all, can you?
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 52
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 408
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 238 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 303
Brian Eno
5/5
One side of post-punk gems, quite incredibly released at a time when punk itself was barely just born
+ one side of very "ambient" songs, soothing and evocative
= an absolute masterpiece.
There is not a single dud in that wonderful record, which sees Eno using his singer-songwriter chops one last time before embarking on his 100% instrumental adventures for the next thirty years or so. The middle section of the album (rocker "King's Lead Hat", ballad "Here He Comes", and the two slow and gently minimalistic cuts that follow, "Julie With..." and "By This River") truly reaches iconic heights. Yet each track before and after said section, either with vocals or instrumentals, shines with its own muted, poetic light. *Before And After Science" is very much a swan song for Brian Eno. And what a swan song it is.
Number of albums left to review: 51
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 409 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 238
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 303
Kelela
2/5
Lush and expansive electronic soundscapes serving as a backdrop for a leftfield R'n'B singer who is obviously skilled on a technical standpoint, yet also often devoid of any striking personality on an artistic one, quite unfortunately. Most of those gentle vocal lines are sensual for sure, but they are also so *generic*, for Pete's sake! "Critics" who went out of their way to compare Kelela to Björk are just tone-deaf, plain and simple! Sure, Kelela shares with the Icelandic arty diva a knack for collaborations with gifted contributors (Arca, Ariel Reichstadt...), along with a love for futuristic moods. But most of the time, she just can't pull off something truly memorable, contrary to FKA twigs in a very close genre. And if, instead of electronica, you take R'n'B as a reference point, let's say that I'd rather go to Beyoncé's whole discography instead of wasting too much time on this record. At least I would find way more highlights there. A lot of those songs just pass you by without leaving much of an impression or even have the time to build up to something conclusive. Interestingly, if you take out Kelela's vocal lines out of the picture in at least one half of those songs, you can even suspect that the music would actually sound better overall.
There is something a little ridiculous in seeing Warp Records so desperate to become relevant for a new generation of listeners and yet partly failing at it. Just see those streaming numbers -- they reveal there is indeed a relatively niche audience for this artist, yet those numbers are probably not up to the level of popularity they had hoped for in the first place. Good for Kelela that she found a home to express herself artistically, and that she can make a living out of it. Yet if the future of Warp Records is to aim at soundtracks for H&M changing booths -- and actually only manage to have one song or two played there once in a while -- I can't help feeling it's a sad outcome for the historical electronica label.
All considerations about the future of Warp records aside, I really tried to open my mind to what the record had to offer. As its first half played, I noticed that the impressive chord modulations at the end of the title track were nicely done, that the moody and twirling sci-fi cut "Enough" was a clear standout track thanks to Arca's daring producing chops, and that "LMK" has a nice bounce to it, explaining why it was chosen as a single. Once again, please note that Kelela's input is absolutely not decisive to make those tracks work. Her input becomes much more pivotal during the last leg of the album, though, thank the heavens! Her vocal performance acquires an intensity not witnessed up to that point on "Onanon", it's nicely attuned to the strings-enhanced twists and turns of "Turn To Dust", and it finally finds out how to create a sweet and memorable vocal hook and catchphrase at the *literal* last minute on closer "Altadena". It's too little and too late, but at least, it saves this album from a 1/5 grade for the purposes of this list. Better than nothing, I guess. 🤷
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
7/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: 50
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 409
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 238
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 304 (including this one)
As a reference point, here's my list of favourite albums for 2017, to me *all better* than *Take Me Apart*:
Big Thief - Capacity
Idles - Brutalism
Protomartyr - Relatives In Descent
Kendrick Lamar - Damn.
King Krule - The Ooz
Slowdive - Slowdive
Aldous Harding - Party
King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard - Polygondwanaland
St Vincent - Masseduction
Tyler The Creator - Flower Boy
Pissed Jeans - Why Love Now
King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard - Flying Microtonal Banana
Mount Kimbie - Love What Survives
Björk - Utopia
OMNI - Multi-Task
Broken Social Scene - Hug Of Thunder
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Luciferian Towers
Thurston Moore - Rock'n Roll Consciousness
Fleet Foxes - The Crack-Up
Thee Oh Sees - Orc
Metro Boomin / 21 Savage / Offset - Without Warning
The Psychotic Monks - Silence Slowly And Madly Shines
Chad VanGaalen - Light Information
Lana Del Rey - Lust For Life
Lorde - Melodrama
Mogwai - Every Country's Sun
Do Make Say Think - Stubborn Persistent Illusions
Kamasi Washington - Harmony of Difference
Mount Eerie - A Crow Looked At Me
(Sandy) Alex G - Rocket
Cloud Nothings - Life Without Sound
Grizzly Bear - Painted Ruins
Wolf Alice - Visions Of A Life
LCD Soundsystem - American Dream
William Basinski - A Shadow In Time
Charli XCX - Pop 2
The xx - I See You
Converge - The Dusk In Us
Pile - A Hairshirt Of Purpose
Jay Z - 4:44
Incredible Bongo Band
2/5
Er... Seriously? Not that it ain't a little fun, even if you're not a bongo buff or a hip hop producer digging crates for samples ideas...
But, I mean, seriously? Like it's important that I listen to this once in my life??? Like, SERIOUSLY???
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
7/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: 49
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 409
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 238
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 305 (including this one)
----
Better albums released in 1973 (at least 45 of them):
Pink Floyd - The Dark Side Of The Moon
Iggy And The Stooges - Raw Power
Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells
David Bowie - Aladdin Sane
Stevie Wonder - Innervisions
Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
The Wailers - Catch A Fire
Can - Future Days
Bob Marley And The Wailers - Burnin'
ZZ Top - Tres Hombres
Lou Reed - Berlin
Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters
Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure
New York Dolls - New York Dolls
Lynyrd Skynyrd - Pronounced Lehn-Nerd Skin-Nerd
King Crimson - Lark's Tongue In Aspic
Mott the Hoople - Mott
Blue Öyster Cult - Tyranny And Mutation
John Cale - Paris 1919
The Who - Quadrophenia
Steely Dan - Countdown To Ecstasy
Bruce Springsteen - Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.
Wings - Band On The Run
Free - Heartbreaker
Genesis - Selling England By The Pound
Tom Waits - Closing Time
Hawkwind - Space Ritual
Gram Parsons – GP
Led Zeppelin - Houses Of The Holy
Willie Nelson - Shotgun Willie*
Tony Conrad and Faust - Outside The Dream Syndicate
Neil Young - Time Fades Away
Procol Harum - Grand Hotel
Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Next
Vangelis - L'Apocalypse des animaux
Faust - IV
Eno / Fripp - (No Pussyfooting)
Kingdom Come - Journey
The Beach Boys - Holland
Roxy Music - Stranded
Toots And The Maytals - Funky Kingston
Todd Rundgren - A Wizard / A True Star
Duncan Browne - Duncan Browne
Sun Ra - Space Is The Place
Alice Cooper - Billion Dollars Babies
Michael Jackson
3/5
"Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" and "Rock With You" start the first real Michael Jackson debut on an all-time high. Yet minus a couple of small ephemeral peaks afterwards, il all goes downhill from there. The small peaks are the title track and the cut "I Can't Help It", which was co-written by Stevie Wonder (I knew something interesting was happening melody-wise on this one before I even checked the credits). And the moody, vibraphone-laden (?) instrumentation on this latter song sure adds to its evocative surroundings.
Apart from that, well, it's just mind-boggling that some critics estimate this is one of the very best albums of all time. Apart from the opener and its follow-up song, what is there in the full-blown disco cuts that those professional critics thought was so revolutionary? All I can hear is generic proceedings in the schmaltzy genre, even if I try real hard to put my head back to 1979 (see "Workin' Day And Night", "Burn This Disco Out" or "Get On The Floor" - I admit that the short instrumental bridge on the latter is quite cool, but there's absolutely nothing memorable to the song per se). Some production ideas are interesting, and Jackson and his mentor Quincy Jones were well on their way to *Thriller*'s level of pop sophistication. But apart on the two famous singles, they had not reached that point yet. *Off The Wall* still lacks the luster and bite of its successor. At least as found in the latter's lively, groovy, legendary cuts.
Besides, there are a few clunkers in this debut, and they grate even more than the ones in *Thriller*. The cream on the shitcake is obviously "Girlfriend", as cheesy and awful as the Paul McCartney and Wings original. But one should also mention the bland, inert and saccharine "She's Out Of My Life"... And even if I don't go there, the mere fact that this record is so blatantly overrated in today's retrospective lists gets on my nerves a little. What "legacy", for chrissake? Pointing out that The Weekend and later Tame Impala albums found their inspiration in *Off The Wall* in particular is actually doing a disservice to the latter. Those albums are way more annoying than most of what can be found in this debut, very ironically. But they're *so annoying* that I might be tempted to blame Michael Jackson for the fact that they even exist. 🙃
To put it in a nutshell... I gave a 2/5 or 3/5 grade to the last Chic album spurt forth by this app. So tell me... Why should I give a far higher grade to *Off The Wall*, honestly?
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
7/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: 48
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 409
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 239 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 305
Brian Eno
5/5
Almost one time out of three, everytime I want to write "Brian Eno" in reviews for this app, I go a little too fast on my keyboard and write "BRAIN Eno" instead. I always have to double-check. And the funny thing is that I've seen that uncorrected typo at least a couple of times in this review section. 😉 In a sense, this tells you a lot of what you need to know about the guy's mad genius.
Apart from that, well, the review about this solo debut currently topping this section is pretty informative as well if you want to understand why his early discography is so important for quite a few music fans. Sad that I don't have the time today (and am probably unable) to write anything half as good. There are some people who are definitely talented to shine at what they do. That reviewer and Brian share that, in a way.
Before I go, check out French band Marvin's cover version of the immense title-track. It proves -- once again -- that the original was decades ahead in the game.
Number of albums left to review: 47
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 410 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 239
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 305
Talking Heads
5/5
Thank you for sending me an album (like this one). I have so much work to do these days that I don't have the time to listen to records I never listened to before. Plus, playing *More Songs About Buildings And Food* makes a nice soundtrack to my self-alienated predicament. A bit of a hellish feeling, but it adds to the topical weight of the album's snarling lyrics. And the music is great, as usual with the Talking Heads (with so many subtle, nice touches created by Brian Eno's production). Wish I could write a proper review for this one, which ends with "The Big Country", one of my most favourite Talking Heads songs ever. Maybe one day...
Number of albums left to review: 46
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 411 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 239
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 305
Peter Frampton
3/5
If you think I have the time to try to understand what Peter Frampton is all about *again", between my insane workload these days and the fact that so many great albums are released this year (2024)? Think again. My personal memory is that "Show Me The Way" is a memorable hit, but that everything else is just fodder for fans of old hags reeking of mildew spurting out bland jam songs after bland jam songs.
But I might be wrong. Saving that one for later. The thing is, as of now, I'd rather "come alive" for 2024 than that sort of *apparent*, old meaningless nonsense. Plus it's a live album, and I think most of them take up slots that would be better used for studio albums. And the vocals on it look distant and artificial. I don't want to think of an arena when I listen to music. I want something cinematic. And I'm pretty sure I won't find it here.
3?/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8?/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3?)
Number of albums left to review: 46
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 411
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 240 (including this one?)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 305
Ryan Adams
1/5
Beige rock / country rock with phony, faux-Americana affectations and unremarkable production values, whose peremption date occurred a long time ago by now. And the whole thing is played by a figure whose real personality and supposed unsavory acts with women in the music business has had a few eyebrows raised in the last couple of years. Hard pass.
1/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1)
Number of albums left to review: 45
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 411
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 240
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 306 (including this one)
The Undertones
4/5
No "Teenage Kicks" in this one, but plenty of punk hits with pop overtones about the working class that are both wry and endearing, and can even be tender at times. I'm not gonna list the songs. I'm late for work this morning, and those great songs make up two thirds of this album anyway. As usual with The Undertones, the only minor issue is the relative lack of variety, but if some folks don't reproach the Ramones with this, why should they do that with the songwriters and performers on *Hypnotised*, huh?
4/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4)
Number of albums left to review: 44
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 412 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 240
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 306
The Go-Betweens
3/5
Quite an overrated pop-rock album, partly under the influence of Lou Reed or that other Aussie folk-rock act the Triffids, which would have been probably taken with a far huger grain of salt by the "critics" had it been released a couple of years down the line. But well, it was still the eighties at the time, with so much drivel being pushed forward, that this record was bound to shine a little in comparison (its stellar string arrangements on some of the songs played a part in that, I guess). So it's nothing downright horrible either.
"Love Goes On" and "Quiet Heart make up for a good starting point (too bad that follow-up track "Love Is A Sign" uses almost the same guitar arrangements as the latter, because it gives you the impression that the musicians are a bit lazy here). On side two, "Was There Anything I Could Do" is also a great, lively jangle-pop cut, with a memorable chorus that's indeed The Smiths-adjacent.
About the rest (including "Streets Of Your Town", which is -- quite incredibly -- a very popular song for the band's fans, or so I hear): many by-the-book harmonies and chord successions, and many songs that sound a little safe or bland by today's more sophisticated standard... Worse, the rough-around-the-edges vocals in some of those recordings fit poorly with the latter's glossy, clean-to-a-fault, eighties production values (or with Amanda Brown's evocative oboe on closer "Dive For Your Memory"). Those sorts of pop-rock records released before 1990 have not always aged well. Might be all too easy to point it out in retrospect. But you *do* need to point that out for a project such as this one. Decent songwriting can't always redeem those types of flaws in the long run.
Was almost tempted to take off a whole point to the album because of how particularly boring the reviews at the top of this section -- whether laudatory or quite harsh and critical -- are, at least compared to what you can usually find there. That rare situation also conveys the idea that the record is not very inspiring, even for those who claimed they hated it, very ironically. But honestly, doing that would take the cake, wouldn't it? Going for a neutral grade instead. In a way, this is me avowing I'm not particularly entertaining as a reviewer either.
Post-scriptum: after this album, Spotify played tracks of New Zealand's Dunedin scene bands The Clean and The Chills, plus a Smudge cut where the singer claimed "I Don't Want To Be Grant McClellan" (actually one of the two Go-Betweens singer-songwriters -- even if I'm not sure whether the song eventually mocked or paid tribute to him...). Interestingly, all those compositions sounded better and way more memorable than most of what can be found in *16 Lovers Lane*...
2.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 3
7.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2.5)
Number of albums left to review: 43
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 412
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 241 (including this one, even if I doubt there will be room left for it in the end)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 306
Grateful Dead
5/5
As said elsewhere in this review section, "The Byrds, The Band, and Creedence Clearwater Revival all put out much better and more interesting records along similar lines in the same timeframe as *American Beauty*". And by my count, there has been around 30 LPs released in 1968 that are probably better than this record will ever be.
The thing is, do those pretty uncontroversial statements make this album a bad one per se? 1968 was a *stellar* year for music, after all...
My father-in-law is a big fan of The Byrds and the members of CSNY. But as much of a fan of sixties Californian hippie country-rock he is, there is no *American Beauty* to be found in his extensive record collection. I suspect it's because of the partly unwarranted critical bad rep the band received at the time where he discovered those other great bands, diverting him from the genuine interest he could have given to The Grateful Dead. I gotta ask him about that one day...
Sure, some of those tunes sound pretty standard or even quaint from today's vantage point. Yet I would lie if I said I've not grown fond of "Box Of Rain", "Friend Of The Devil", "Sugar Magnolia", "Operator" or "Truckin'" over the last couple of years. There's definitely something endearing in those songs, including their patchy and "unprofessional-sounding" vocal parts at times. And many chord changes, the few mandolin touches, or that phased-out guitar solo in the middle of "Candyman", all bring something valuable to the table musically speaking.
I think I wish to tip the karmic balance to the other side now, maaaaaaaaan -- and this after so many decades during which The Grateful Dead have mostly been considered in quite a derisive fashion for no tangible reasons. Hence why I'm definitely tempted to include this record in my list...
Fuck it. Those vocal harmonies in "Antics Of My Life* are so pretty. 4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5. Which translates to a
9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 43
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 413 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 241
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 306
Tim Buckley
4/5
"Strange Feelin'" starts with a huge wink to Miles Davis's "All Blues" -- dissonant at first, then a little less anguished. And when Tim Buckley's vocals enter the scene, it's as if Fred Neil was covering the legendary jazzman. A match made in heaven, if you really want to know about my opinion here.
With this idiosyncratic mix of influences, such a perfect opener actually perfectly encapsulates the jazz influences bobbing up on the surface in many other great moments of this nice LP -- with a lot of those influences conveyed by that wonderful, dreamy vibraphone in the background. Tim's angelic voice also does wonders on follow-up track "Buzzin' Fly" or the delicate moving closer "Sing A Song For You". "Love from Room 109 at the Islander" and "Gypsy Woman" are more complex, sprawling affairs -- two cuts drawing on lengthier jam dirges that might phase in and out your consciousness but never overstay their welcome. I had to work on my computer while listening to today's album, and I gotta say that session was pleasant and quite productive. Wish I can find some time later to listen to those two compositions with more attention.
Probably not as arresting as *Goodbye And Hello* and *Starsailor* -- but still far better than the generally ridiculous and hackneyed *Greetings From L.A.* -- I can understand why someone would wish to include this LP in a list of albums to listen to at least once in your life. Not sure if I would do that myself -- at this point of my own project, it seems to me there's not much room left in my list, and maybe having more than one or two Tim Buckley albums in it would be overkill. But I'll leave the door open to it. At least for today.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 41
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 413
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 242 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 306
Fishbone
5/5
What I love about Fishbone is the special kind of intensity of their performances and choice of melodic lines, whether they're used for vocals, the brass section, the baselines... And this typical intensity is what unites the mind-bogglingly vast array of styles used here - hard rock, funk, soul, metal, ska, reggae, bluegrass, pop, folk - in other words that nascent crossover thing which confused so many professional "critics" at the time. Those narrow-minded guys only saw the stylistic switch's and not the talent that made it work on all cylinders, as it would on *The Reality Of My Surroundings*
To me, there's only one dud in the record, "Mighty Long Way", where an extra amount of hard FM cheese makes it impossible to listen to today. But the rest still sounds damn good today. "Bonin' In The Boneyard" has an incredible energy (and funk bassline). And Side 2 is even better than side 1, thanks to a few stellar cuts that allow the LP to build up like a motherf*cker from the first, harmonically rich yet also understated guitar tones of "One Day", calling for revolution in a fun and tongue-in-cheek manner, the organ-laden, Bad Brains indebted "Subliminal Fascism" (sadly prophetic), up to the wonderful and even gracious "Change". Needless to say, the topical lyrics are the cream of the cake. In 1988, Fishbone were bright, talented creative, young men, thoughtful but also FUN. So they got to be on this list somehow.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5
9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 40
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 414 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 242
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 306
X-Ray Spex
5/5
Oh well. The only real problem I ever had with this album is that the one-off single "Oh Bondage, Up Yours" is not included in its original tracklist. But it's a mistake that's repaired in later CD releases of the album.
Apart from that, this pivotal British punk record foretelling the later American riot grrrrrl movement (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, Kathleen Hannah, Sweater Kinney...) is a keeper, thanks to its infectious saxophone and Poly Styrene's energetic performance. There is no real highlight, but at the same time, everything is rowdy and excellent in quite a timeless fashion.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5
9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 39
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 415 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 242
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 306
Stephen Stills
4/5
Probably one of the most (unwittingly?) downright hilarious album artwork among all the records mentioned in the 1001 albums book. I mean, OK, it's Stills freezing his ass off while playing guitar outside at a ski resort. But that psychedelic giraffe, man... What the hell??? With such a kitschy cover, you kind of expect the former Buffalo Springfield to sing his own version of the Frozen soundtrack -- if you can forgive me uttering this lame anachronistic joke. And maybe the giraffe will sing it too.
But *in a way*, what Stephen Stills does on this record released around the time of Crosby Stills Nash and Young's *Déjà Vu* is not so far from the sentimental, wear-your-heart-on-your-sleeve shenanigans of a Disney movie, thanks to his recurrent use of soulful and epic female background vocals throughout this record. And starting with the anthemic "Love The One You're With", the first three cuts are memorable anyway, and certainly up to the level of the best Stephen Stills songwriting chops and performance abilities around the late sixties / early seventies, from CSN to the Manassas project. The rest is maybe a notch under those first three highlights, admittedly. Yet it's still pretty good, especially the closer.
Maybe having both this debut and Manassas in the 1001 Albums book is a little overkill, though, and my preference will certainly go to the Manassas album. But hey, if ever a miracle happens and I have room left in my own list, I'll try to remember about this record... Miracles rarely happen. Yet maybe the "christmas spirit" infusing this wonderful album cover will bring Stephen Still a little luck, who knows? 🙃
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 39
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 415
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 243 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 306
The Byrds
5/5
The one where they eventually replaced David Crosby with a horse. Sure suggests that copious intakes of LSD might have been taken during the making of this album, which may explain a few things that's going on in it.
The many twists and turns of *The Notorious Byrd Brothers*, with so many hairpin curves between full-blown psychedelia and the country western flavours the Byrds would later dive headfirst into on *Sweetheart Of The Rodeo* -- not to mention its jazz forays, or its novel use of electronic touches such as phasing, flanging and the Moog synthesizer -- make for a complicated initial listen. But once you get your footing, you soon realize how wonderful and groundbreaking this LP is. Ironically, its experimental nature has been watered down a little over the years -- so much has happened since then. But it's the songwriting and guitar arrangements that makes this record quite a distinctive one today.
Both the songs and their instrumental arrangements are stellar on the first side. "Artificial Energy" starts things up in a brass-laden regalia evoking later albums by Beck (Hansen, not Jeff Beck), the Carol King and Gerry Goffin-penned country-rock songs "Goin' Back" and "I Wasn't Born To Follow" are absolute gems. "Natural Harmony" is an epic micro-adventure all by itself -- not only for its experimental production values and effects, but also for its moody harmonic modulations. And "Draft Morning", obviously about the Vietnam war, is another small jewel, both topical and aptly evocative on a musical standpoint.
Side two also comprises great stuff: "Change Is Now" splits the difference between psychedelic rock and country-folk in a very elegant manner (and what a great guitar solo in its middle section!). "Tribal Gathering" starts with a jazz-inspired 5/4 rhythm (also found on "Get To You"), and then transmutes to quite a heavy rocker for the time period. And "Space Odyssey" is... well, all you need to know about that one is already stated in its name. That closer eerily sounds like a Silver Apples composition, which can only be a compliment coming from my mouth.
Too bad David Crosby's "Triad" (now found as a bonus on CD editions) was not included in that second side. It would have been perfect between "Old John Robertson" and "Tribal Gathering" and brought the fantastic ballad that was needed in the second half of this quite short LP. Had the Byrds been better at interpersonal relationships within the band, and kept Crosby until the end, the overall end result would have been even better.
Still feel like *5th Dimension* is an even more striking album within the Byrds discography. But the more I listen to *The Notorious Byrds Brothers*, so finely attuned to the artistic (r)evolutions of the late sixties, the more I'm growing fond of it. Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn and Michael Clarke sure were creative forces to reckon with at the time. Oh, and let's not forget that very talented horse, of course!
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 38
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 416 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 243
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 306
The The
2/5
Each side of this LP starts rather well, with Matt Johnson injecting relatively gruffy, messier sounds to the winning formula of previous album *Soul Mining*. "Relatively", because we're still knees deep into eighties new wave / synth pop here. But opener "Infected", "Out Of The Blue (Into The Fire), "Sweet Bird Of Truth" and "Slow Train To Dawn" (a duet with a not-yet world-famous Neneh Cherry -- not to say a "virtually unknown artist at the time") all have some of the trademark intensity and interesting intricate flourishes of The The, transcending the temporal context in which those tunes were written.
The thing is (*the the thing is*?), the end of each side is quite a letdown, with a few bad choices production-wise, and some quite awkward moments in the songs to boot, either musically or lyrically. Those rather annoying features are exemplified by a dud such as "Heartland", which sounds both bland AND a little pretentious today.
Matt Johnson's heart was probably in the right place, just as he tried to evoke some blurry, vaguely-defined social concerns through his lyrics. But maybe his copious intake of drugs at the time made him self-delusional about his real assets. Him telling that it took him months and months to write "Heartland", which he considered as a very important song, sounds a little weird given the half-baked end result. The man later admitted that he had lost his way on a personal standpoint in those years. But as a subjective listener first knowing nothing about that, it gave me a similar impression when it comes to the artistic intent behind half of the cuts in this album.
So it's a mixed bag, to put it in a nutshell. Not awfully bad overall. But probably not worthy of this list (or my ideal version of it).
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
7/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 2).
Number of albums left to review: 37
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 416
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 243
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 307 (including this one)
The Pogues
5/5
As I already own the iconic "Fairytale Of New York" on a compilation somewhere, I originally dismissed that LP as an unnecessary addition to my record collection, and as record that was probably second to *Rum, Sodomy And The Lash* and its own iconic tunes. Guess the tongue-in-cheek mariachi antics of "Fiesta" also put me in the wrong track here (as it was also the title theme of a very stupid show on French TV when I was a kid, which is probably why I took the whole album derisively when I browsed through it before). But boy was I wrong! And I got this app to thank for allowing me to revise my judgment today.
First, there are the killer arrangements. They're just everywhere. I'm not a traditional Irish music buff, so all of this could have left me cold without all the crazy and original flourishes gracing the vast majority of those songs, from the oriental scales of "Turkish Songs Of The Damned" to the dissonant Peter Gunn Theme-adjacent brass of "Metropolis". And then, and most of all, you have the songs per se. Sure, there's the title-track and opener. But what totally led me to lower my guard is the Peter Chevron-penned sea shanty "Thousands Are Sailing", with a killer introduction, a killer chorus filled with all sorts of tense minor harmonies, and then a killer bridge to boot.
From then on, I fell in love with most of the other tunes, like the political ballad "Streets Of Sorrow", the topically and musically heavy "Birmingham Six", with its abrasive sounds in the background -- like prisoners grinding the bars of their jail cell -- or the melancholic "Lullaby Of London". Steve Lilywhite's production aged very gracefully considering the time period, and the whole album is a perfect companion to *Rum, Sodomy and The Lash*. Unless it's the other way around.
Rest in peace, Shane MacGowan. You were a toothless alcoholic punk and you had poets, pundits and generals waltzing in the aisles at your funeral. A life well-lived.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5
9.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 4.5).
Number of albums left to review: 36
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 417 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 243
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 307
Megadeth
2/5
It's 2024, Chat Pile has just released their second album, and here I am listening to old eighties thrash metal instead. The things this app makes us do...
The thing is, as "dated" as Megadeath's style is (and as less impressive compared to Metallica's better LPs this album is overall), a few elements redeem *Peace Sells... But Who's Buying*'s expected overabundance of virtuoso-technical-feats-for-virtuoso-technical-feats-sake. They're *formulaic* elements, but sometimes formulaic elements work outside of the laboratory.
The first elements are the use of descending scales for the first side. Except for the opener (which I'm not too fond of, and doesn't really use them), those descending scales can guide you through the whole thrash metal shebang in quite pleasant ways. The second is the atmospheric arpeggios used as introductions for most cuts on side 2. And the third is the presence of some indeed pretty imaginative ideas when it comes to the guitar solos, as cliché as they are. Compared to *Rust In Peace*, this record has less impressive production values, sure. But it may be a little more fun overall...
The thing is... Is that album "essential" really? As in "must be listened to at least once in your life"? I'm not sure I'm really buying it. Maybe it's my bias against eighties metal. Ot maybe I'm just in a hurry to listen to Chat Pile instead. Even with that bias of mine in mind, metal is a genre that moves forward from the past very fast. Decades after, it's always pretty hard to decide what stuck the landing in the long run.
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
7/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 2).
Number of albums left to review: 36
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 417
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 243
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 308 (including this one)
Barry Adamson
2/5
Guess Barry Adamson's whimsical intents and film noir inspirations were too out there and unhinged even for the Bad Seeds. No wonder one of those cuts found its way in the soundtrack of a David Lynch flick. You can readily believe this album is itself the soundtrack of an imaginary movie taking place in Adamson's head. And as disjointed as it is, it would be unfair to say that this record is an unpleasant listen overall.
The thing is, too often is *Oedipus Schmoedipus* stuck in one of three repetitive modes, without any of them yielding absolute highlights either. You have the jazzy cuts, pretty cool, at least if you take out that safe-sounding cover of Miles Davis's "Milestones" (simply named "Miles" here, and which brings nothing valuable to the iconic original and its modal jazz shenanigans). You have more contemporary trip-hop-adjacent forays whose rhythm patterns unfortunately aged rather poorly, most of them without the harmonic and melodic creativity of the greats in that ephemeral genre (and that sample from Massive Attack's *Blue Lines* in the opener sure sheds a somewhat unflattering light on its new surroundings, as "cinematic" as they're supposed to be). And finally, you have moody musique concrète and spoken-word interludes that just sound weird for the sake of it.
Worse, beyond some admittedly evocative moments here and there, nothing during the clash between those three musical modes gels cohesively. You have a few cool scenes, but the whole story doesn't resonate. If *really* we had had access to the pictures and narration that went in Adamson's head while he recorded those tracks, maybe there would be a little more to relate to. The problem is that the many obfuscated elements of this record don't really encourage you to create your own pictures in your head either. It's all a little blurry. It feels like the cinematographer is too often doing a lame job. And the end result is just mostly confusing -- not in the sense of David Lynch's best films, which confuse you in ways that can make you react very strongly to what's shown onscreen -- but rather in the sense a B movie filled with plot holes, clichés and missed opportunities can be.
The guest list is interesting, though (Jarvis Cocker, Atticus Ross, Carla Bozulich, Nick Cave -- who has since "acted" as a crooner with far more emotional potency than on the day he recorded the dark ballad in which he appears here, "The Sweetest Embrace"). Everyone plays their part as convincingly as they can. And, sure, in spite of what I wrote up there, there is nothing truly obnoxious in this record overall. But it is no "essential album" for me. I'd rather flirt with the love interest next to my seat, brought to that dark theater with some sly afterthoughts in my head, than actively watch the film.
Now bring me the popcorn (and another album, please).
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
7/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2).
Number of albums left to review: 35
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 417
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 243
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 309 (including this one)
The Clash
5/5
If only for two iconic tracks, opener "London Calling" and "Guns Of Brixton" (sung by bass player Paul Simonon), this album should be in the list. The first is a marvel, whether because of its evocative and cinematic songwriting, its sheer melodicism, or its timeless production values (Guy Stevens was a genius on par with the one of the band for this one). And the second is a killer composition that transcends its dub template into something both ominous and riotous, in all the senses of those two words
Those impressive trees shouldn't hide the terrific forest behind, though. Minus one secondary cut, the string of songs that goes from "Hateful" and "Rudy Can't Fail" at the end of side one, to "Clampdown" and "Guns Of Brixton" at the end of the second is just pitch-perfect ("Spanish Bombs" and "Lost In The Supermarket" are perfect Clash songs in their own right, as much as the ones I've just quotes here, maybe even more). Besides, the third and fourth sides harbour three particularly memorable classic Clash gems as well: "Death Or Glory", and the Mick Jones-sung "I'm Not Down" and "Train In Vain".
Going through different punk-adjacent genres (pure punk, reggae, ska, soul, classic rock'n'roll...) the tracklist of this double album is therefore sprawling, and yet feels very cohesive overall (this won't be exactly the case for triple-album *Sandinista*, very infamously, even if you have other very important songs in it). Joe Strummer gives terrific vocal performances throughout. The man is still sorely missed today: not many artists, whether punk or not, have had a knack for describing societal concerns in such a thrilling or poetic way. Admittedly, a patch of songs on the second vinyl is down a notch compared to the rest, but remember that The Clash managed to sell this double-album for the price of one at the time. So it's just nice gravy on an already very tasty cake.
Oh, and that iconic artwork. Most people don't even realize today that its font actually references Elvis Presley's debut. When that sort of thing happens, you can bet your Doc Martens that pop culture was hit by a sheer phenomenon here, one that it will still need to be reckoned with for decades and decades to come...
Number of albums left to review: 34
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 418 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 243
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 309
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
3/5
Forgettable run of the mill rock n roll songs indeed, generally speaking. Yet four cuts in it can be considered as iconic--and this in such a striking manner that I could almost considered including the album in my own list.
Those highlights are the lively "Breakdown", "Strangered in the Night", whose lyrics about a deadly confrontation between a white and a black dude could admittedly raise a few eyebrows (yet Petty was certainly no racist, he made it clear again and again with his collaborators and on a number of takes related to the confederate flag), and also "Luna", a moody, impressionistic nightly and mysterious ballad that sticks out like a sore thumb in the tracklist, but in a good way.
And of course, there's the all-time hit "American Girl". First time I heard the song, it was when I watched *The Silence Of The Lambs* as a teen. Its use in the movie told you everything you needed to know about a certain character in five seconds. That's how good and evocative the song is.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3).
Number of albums left to review: 33
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 418
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 243
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 310 (including this one -- Let's be honest, I don't have room for it now)
Rage Against The Machine
5/5
"Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me"
So no review, today, 1001 Albums app. You're a machine, too, after all.
Number of albums left to review: 32
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 419 (including this one, of course -- the intensity of the music and the incendiary lyrics makes this record a classic today, just like the three other studio albums by this pivotal nineties band)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 243
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 310
Ash
4/5
"Kung Fu" has always been an endearing pop punk highlight à la Buzzcocks for me. I even bought a special edition of Ash's first EP just because the latter had it as a bonus track. But by the time the band's first album came out, I had gone out to other things. "Kung Fu" was in the album, but drawing from the other new singles, there were also a lot of more "romantic" songs that didn't interest me that much.
In retrospect, I know I was unfair to Ash.
"Lose Control" is a killer opener taking a page out of Sonic Youth, "Goldfinger", "Girl from Mars" and "Oh Yeah" -- the poppier "romantic" tunes -- I've just referred to, are actually very well written songs, "Kung Fu" still slaps decades after, and "Innocent Smile"'s guitar riffs make the latter a great moment. The rest goes from instantly forgettable to decent. Among the decent cuts, "I'd Give You Anything" conveys the impression that frail teenagers are trying to act like the Stooges circa-"1969" (very much what happens, actually). A little ridiculous or quite fun and charming, take your pick. Not going to elaborate on the forgettable tracks, because they're forgettable for a reason. It's just a little annoying several of them clutter the last leg of the record.
So not a bad LP overall, in spite of the filler. But there were so many better album released in 1996. Not to mention the ones released in... 1977, of course. 😉
3.5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 4.
8.5 for more general purposes (5+3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 31
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 419
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 245 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 310
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
3/5
I'm a huge Neil Young fan, yet even I feel like there are maybe one too many albums by him in Robert Dimery's list. And *this* might be the album to take out. Good rock guitar playing after a decade in which Neil spent time doing other things, for better ("Trans", "Freedom") or for worse (most of the other LPs he recorded during the eighties). The thing is, the songs in "Ragged Glory" are a little flat, and the tracklisting is not dynamic at all. When Neil Young released *Broken Arrow* five or six years later, the critics panned it. How ironic since it's very much the same sort of album, only with a couple of better highlights than the ones on *Ragged Glory*. Context can't justify everything. And there were quite a few better album released in 1990 anyway....
So now that I took out a Neil Young album from my own list, I have room for other great records. The only problem is that I'm now *very* tempted to include *Le Noise*, a criminally underrated, sepulchral-sounding later gem by the Loner himself. Unless I pick *Psychedelic Pill*, where Young finally succeeded in writing and recording the sort of project he partly failed to pull off for *Ragged Glory*. You're never out of the woods with good ole Neil Just when you think you can dismiss him, or even get rid of him, he's back for one reason or another. Just ask Stephen Stills about it.
3 for the purposes of this list.
8 for more general purposes (5+3)
Number of albums left to review: 30
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 419
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 244
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 311 (including this one)
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
4/5
"Wail" slaps HARD. And it sounds tempting to include at least *one* punk blues album such as this one in a list of essential albums of all time (although JSBE's *Acme* could be a good candidate as well). Taken on their own, you have some pretty impressive rockers in this album. Seeing this project play live at the time was probably insane.
On the other hand, all the tracks sound a little samey after a while, at least when it comes to experiencing the studio version of what Spencer and co. can pull of as band firing up on all cylinders. It goes with the territory the man has explored throughout his career, sure, and there's nothing wrong with the record's lo-fi production, which aged like fine wine. Yet the one-note intent here is still something that can be detrimental to my overall benevolent feelings. Didn't prevent me from buying the album at the time of its release. But beyond a bunch of songs, I'm not really inclined to listen to it from start to finish these days (or even explore the many bonus tracks on this Spotify link).
So I can't really decide if I'm gonna include this one in my list. Now I got worry of my own anyway, between some work shenanigans and an interview with DITZ I got to prepare. If only I had the time to write proper reviews for everything...
3.5 for the purposes of this list, rounded up to 4.
8.5 for more general purposes (5+3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 29
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 419
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 245 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 311
Megadeth
4/5
Metal is an umbrella genre that moves forward from the past very fast. Decades after, it's always pretty hard to decide what stuck the landing in the long run. My first impression of *Rust In Peace" was that
it was a kitsch fest. Compared to *Peace Sells... But Who's Buying?*, it had more impressive production values, sure, yet it was also a little less fun and more formulaic overall... But that's an impression I totally disagree with on my second listen. You do have some striking examples of thrash metal at its most "impressive" in this record. The question is, is thrash metal as a whole genre "impressive" itself? Or is it just laughable?
Some of the lyrics and vocals (background or not) do sound unwittingly hilarious and hackneyed from today's vantage point, I'm still strongly feeling that! I sometimes complained about James Hetfield's vocals in the past, but he's far less insufferable than Mustaine when the latter fully indulges in grating vibrato-laden wailings, as in the interminable title-track closing this album. And as usual, the demonstrative and performative nature of the endless solos and riffs can be exhilarating or just tiring according to the moment--or your exact mileage on that sort of thing.
For me, the exhilarating moments are found in the middle and last sections of opener "Holy Wars...", or in "Take No Prisoners" 's insane guitar riffing (redeeming the cliché-laden, grunting backing vocals). As for the tiring moments, they are are found in the ridiculous "Poison Was The Cure" and the supposedly "iconic" title-track. Oh, and "Dawn Patrol" is also a dud and a pointless, quote-unquote "goofy" interlude, which is not worth anyone's time.
Some nice melodic moments elsewhere, though, more interested in harmonies than showing off how great a guitar soloist you are Which is a welcome breath of fresh air in that very cluttered style. "Hangar 18" and "Tornado Of Souls" (which I feel like someone like Fever Ray could actually cover without any of their fans batting an eye) are pretty easy on the ear, for instance. Great pop songs actually hide beneath the surface of those cuts. Good thing that it's not *too* obvious, though.
Besides, some there sorts of micro-styljstic forays done by Megadeath on this one pay off a lot, as when "Lucretia" uses nascent groove-metal elements in quite an effective fashion, or with "Five Magics", which works pretty well as an overall less fast-paced composition with a mesmerizing, killer bassline opening the proceedings (and a killer guitar solo at its end, I readily admit it).
Guess what makes "Rust In Peace" such a landmark album for thrash metal is its balance between accessibility for newcomers and the usual headbanging aesthetics expected in that genre. Too bad Dave Mustaine has become a sort of crypto-libertarian ass today. Not that this development really bears on my opinion of the album, recorded way before that. But still something that needs to be known...
So all in all, and in spite of my nitpick up there, this record is, like *Peace Sells... But Who's Buying?*, a very good trash metal album. Now I even see why it is considered as superior to it. Not sure "classic" Megadeath played in a style I can *fully* enjoy 24/7, but feeling generous today. Giving a 3.5/5 grade for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4. Which translates to a 8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 28
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 419
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 246 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 311
Ananda Shankar
4/5
The sitar is a fascinating instrument. Not only sonically, but harmonically. In spite of its quarter-tone scales, it can perfectly adapt to Western music, a feature that Ravi Shankar's nephew uses to generally great effects on this record. The addition of a moog synthesizer is also a nice touch, and for every electronic music nerd out there, this LPs helps document what it was possible to do with what was at the time a quite novel instrument. Which is quite a lot, actually, as the conclusion of the short and moody "Dance Indra" can prove. Very nice to hear from today's vantage point.
Covers of the Stones' "Jumping Jack Flash" and the Doors' "Light My Fire" were obviously added for commercial reasons. The first sounds great, but the second is a little ridiculous. I would even venture to add that this cover of the Doors enhances what's potentially annoying in the original composition to new levels of grating. "Light My Fire" is such a weird hit -- an iconic earworm for sure, but also one that can quickly become tiring or self-indulgent. But, as the hilarious review that's gonna top this section until the end of time suggests, maybe that second rock cover is just added there to prevent the end of the world from obliterating us all... 🙃
This record is mostly interesting for the original compositions anyway. "Snow Flower" is a delicate ballad that's perfectly placed after the Stones' cover opening the proceedings. "Mamata" veers too close to sickly sweet territories, and at this point, you wish you could hear music that sounds closer to real Indian raga traditions. Fortunately, that's what Ananda Shankar elects to do on the next two very fine cuts, "Metamorphosis" and "Sagar". The latter track even ends on a hypnotic segue, both meditative AND melodic, and nicely supported by a simple yet effective moog bassline.
After "Dance Indra", "Rhagupati" returns to the patchouli-scenting, sun-baked turf of the record's first side, with quite stereotypical vocals (first and last time they appear) uttering somewhat clichéed lyrics, sure, but also chanting an outro section that manages to sound both "pop" and mesmerizing. This closer here epitomizes both the assets and pitfalls of this sort of project, aptly summarizing the album. Luckily it ends *strong* on the assets, which can make you forgive the quaint-sounding shenanigans in its first minute.
All in all, a pretty cool album. The thing is, this is the *second* record in the list mixing classical Indian traditions with sixties rock / pop rock, if my memory serves, and I fear that might be one record too many. *Ananda Shankar* is probably the better album in the pair (don't quite remember what the first one was anyway). Yet I'm not sure that even this one is the sort of record that screams the word "essential" to my ears. Once again, the "problem" might stem from the title of Dimery's book. Maybe this is an album you need to listen to at least once in your life. But in that case, there are probably more than 1001 of them, and it's disconcerting to think all those "interesting" LPs might use a slot that could be used for masterpieces in different music genres (including some badly represented in the book).
That said, I can readily admit that listening to this album in California in 1970 must have been a memorable experience for a lot of music fans out there. In other words, that it was a whole trip, man. 🙂 So I'm leaving the door open to this LP, as quaint and dated a couple of tracks on it may sound today. Because, interestingly, and apart from that couple of misses, most cuts aged quite well, all things considered. And that if you open your shakras, so to speak, there are enough evocative soundscapes in here to spend a good time. After all, and all concerns about 'album podiums' left aside, that's what music is for, is it not?
3.5/5 grade for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 27
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 419
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 247 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 311
American Music Club
4/5
Ah. A real "blind spot" in my knowledge of household names in music from the last six decades or so. At last. Of course there have been lots of acts I only had surface familiarity with during the completion of this project (and it's not because I listened to a couple of key LPs from them that my knowledge really significantly deepened). But the acts I have *never* listened to are rare, and this is what I signed for here. I was aware of who Mark Eitzel and his first major band were. But if my memory serves, I had never sat down to give a spin to any song of his.
My first impression is of American Music Club's *California* is that it is the sort of record you need to spend time with to fully appreciate its merits, a little bland at first sight, but gaining colors as you dig further. Not the sort of album you fall in love with right away. Not "catchy" enough on first listens. But you can sure feel it has potential as a "slow grower", and this for many reasons...
The first reason is "contextual". Striking albums released in 1988 are not so numerous compared to most other years (only found less than 10 absolute keepers in that year). And this record offers something that was lacking in my 1988 list: some gracious, pretty dignified strand of Americana (Cowboy Junkies admittedly released a rougher rendition of that tradition in 1988, but its "messy" nature is leagues away from "California"'s glossy production values).
The second reason is the wide array of stylistic touches lurking beyond said Americana surface, giving a scope to this record that pretty impressive. In a way, this album can feel as a very "American" response to the pop-rock of mid-career Talk Talk, with a bit of REM thrown in for good (American) measure.
Yet this second take doesn't even dig enough. Which leads us to the third reason I want to spend more time with this album, i.e. its "prophetic" nature: early whiffs of Slint's post-rock and Silver Jews or Wilco's post-country-rock distinctly tickled my nostrils here -- maybe mixed with Arab Strap and Red House Painters's abrasive and "confessional" storytelling put into music. And this peculiar formula gives somewhat "timeless" assets to this LP -- a couple of typically eighties production values notwithstanding. Saying that the band's music foretells "slowcore" is a stretch however. But it's not because contemporary critics are misguided in their retrospective takes of "California" that you should bear a grudge against it.
My only real doubt is about Mark Eitzel's vocal performance, which oscillates between somewhat "forced" and stilted inflexions to suddenly quite odd, more "slacker"-like moments, impeding on the necessary cohesion you need to feel for something as important as vocals. But I feel that if the songs stay long enough with me, these are the sorts of passing flaws that can actually become endearing in the long run.
Will the songs stay with me, though? When I listen to the gently cinematic "Western Sky", or the ascetic-yet-terrifically evocative "Jenny", I have an inkling that they will. Only time will tell, though. Hence why I want to give a tentative "good grade" to this record, even if I can't give a perfect one. There might be some even better records in the *real* "American music club" that I have never listened to, after all.
3.5/5 grade for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 26
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 419
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 248 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 311
Joan Armatrading
4/5
Joan Armatrading's stellar vocal skills and Glyn Johns' pitch-perfect production values easily explain how this very good album ended up on the list. Oh, and you have at least four memorable cuts on side one, subtle yet also lively opener "Down To Zero", tongue-in-cheek "Water With The Wine" (about a narrator falling all-too-quickly into a man's arms, maybe regretting it a little the morning after), and the delicate and heartfelt "Love And Affection" and "Save Me", two already stunning songs made even more stunning thanks to the cinematic string section playing on them.
The second side is a little less memorable song-wise, though. It goes to usual seventies folk-rock fare in rather pleasant ways, with a lot of bluesy and jazzy inflexions to spice things up a little (that fretless bass!). But even with those nice arrangements, and Joan showcasing her impressive acoustic guitar-playing chops on "Like Fire", there's something that feels a little too 'derivative' in Armatrading's music in that second half.
Of course it would be quite reductive to merely state Joan was playing a slightly lesser version of the sort of African-American-indebted music Joni Mitchell was playing around those years. Armatrading had a voice of her own, just like Mitchell had. Yet Joni's oeuvre also had extra quirks and distinctively poetic and idiosyncratic touches that made it fascinating in the long run (and grating to some people, I readily admit it).
Joan was into simpler pleasures, it seems, maybe stemming from the fact that she was British, obviously didn't have to resort to the 'blackface' nonsense Joni sometimes fell into (both metaphorically and literally), and so had no stakes in the sort of tireless "deconstruction" Mitchell constantly operated within her own songwriting. Maybe those simpler pleasures resonated with a possibly less pretentious audience at the time. More power to the latter. But decades after, it's hard not to notice the difference between the respective ambitions of those two artists, as admittedly unfair as associating Joni and Joan is.
Armatrading is releasing a new album next month, by the way (November 2024). Its two singles sound like an updated version of her slicker, glossier eighties adventures. Well, sort of. But anyway, it's nice to learn that she is still very active, and that she keeps on releasing records almost fifty years after this eponymous album came out.
3.5/5 grade for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 25
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 419
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 249 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 311
Fever Ray
4/5
I have tried to love this album many times, after the hype that surrounded it in 2009. I readily recognize its originality and groundbreaking soundscapes, but I only *like* it. Quite casually, I gotta say, and not any more than that.
Seeing it pop out today on this all made me think about the reasons I can't love this album. So I had to listen to it again (I even got it at home, given the sort of hipster I was in 2009). And after three spins, I think that the real effect of this record on me all boils down to the "a-lot--of-style-but-not-a-lot-of-substance" situation.
By this I mean that in spite of the lush, nightly synth textures, not much happens harmonically speaking in this record. Quite often, Karin Dreijer's distinctive pitch-corrected vocals aimlessly wander around the many repetitive icy-cold patterns spiralling on themselves in those cuts. I played some parts of those songs on the piano during one of the times I spun the LP. Gosh, some of those synth parts are all very droney and one-note. And they're not droney in the hypnotic sense of the word, given that the rhythm patterns rarely convey much excitement either. Recently discovered The Knife's *Deep Cuts*, released years before Dreijer's first solo LP, and, on its first side at least, I found the pop potential that *Fever Ray* barely touches upon, so mired it is in its somewhat artsy-fartsy posturing. Maybe *Deep Cuts* should be on that list instead.
Still, I'm gonna go as far as giving a rounded-up 4/5 grade to this album. Why, after so many harsh words on my part? First because of the iconic nature of "If I Had A Heart" and "When I Grow Up". Puts my head back 15 years ago. That's a pretty shallow reason to feel so benevolent towards an album I only merely like, but I can't deny the Pavlovian impulse here. Then there's "Seven". It's one of the rare moments when something truly interesting happens on a harmonic level, and it's too bad it doesn't happen that often on the record since it creates such a great song. Finally, there are the two last tracks "Keep The Streets Empty For Me" and "Coconut", where the post-goth moods manage to hit their mark after so many attempts when they don't.
Now, my personal opinion is that 2009 was one of the worst years ever for music at large. Throughout my search for musical gems (hidden or not), I've managed to find quite a few of them for most other years in the last six decades or so. But my list for 2009 remains a huge letdown. There are only nine or ten LPs form that year I would like to see on a list such as the one used for this app. Which is *nothing*. Sometimes, I wonder why Fever Ray got such traction for her first solo endeavor. But maybe all it boils down to is the lack of competition in that year.
3.5/5 grade for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 grade for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
Number of albums left to review: 24
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 419
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 250 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 311
Basement Jaxx
4/5
Remember the hype about this one. Wasn't really convinced at the time. But in retrospect, it's a good electronic album, surprisingly holding up far better than I expected. Some people (me included) grumbled about the hype surrounding this record in 1999, because it apparently pandered to mind-numbing, instant gratification--especially compared to more left-field electronic acts from labels such as Warp or Ninja Tunes (check out Brett DiCrescenzo's scathing yet hilarious review on Pitchfork when the LP came out--where the author fortunately also makes fun of himself and his expectations--to have an example of such grumbling). But to be honest, those complaints feel like moot points today. For better or for worse, *Remedy*'s unhinged sense of fun, inventive spirit, and lack of boundaries, actually pointed towards the *actual* 21st century. Amazing to see that there would actually be no Jaimie xx without this record. And you can even find more "contemporary" reference points. *Remedy*'s vocoder elements, for instance, were not merely a nod to past retrofuturistic disco endeavors (as they were in Daft Punk's music). The loony vocal parts of "Rendez-Vu" and "Yo-Yo", for example, perfectly fit with the current hyperpop "nonsense". It was 100gecs decades before 100gecs existed. No surprise the latter recently collaborated with Basement Jaxx on a remix of "Where Your Head At?", the great hit single from their second album *Rooty* (sampling none other than Gary Numan!).
As a whole, *Rooty* didn't age very well, however, because it dug a maximalist trench where UK-Club-indebted cuts featuring a lot of unimaginative female vocalists felt a little too derivative, with too many "manufactured" emotions as a result and not enough real pizzazz. That sophomore album was supposed to be wilder than the debut. But it ironically sounds both tamer and more tiring in retrospect. It's on *Remedy* that the right balance between maximalist and minimalistic tendencies had been reached from the get-go, enhancing the "wild" moments, but also shedding a more favorable light on the more subtle ones. Of course, you have the obvious hits (opener "Rendez-Vu", "Red Alert"...). But the vast majority of the deeper cuts are as interesting as the latter, if not more (minimalistic "Same Old Show" and its obsessive Selectors sample ; maximalist "Don't Give Up" and its fat, epic, expansive synth bassline...). And for both types of tracks, you have quite impressive, multi-layered soundscapes it's rewarding to get immersed in, like those lush and non-linear acoustic guitar flourishes on "Rendez-Vu", or the sly, enticing synthetic layers in the background of a bunch of other tracks. It's thanks to those details that genuine emotions manage to seep in. Of course, some stuff here and there still feels a little "dated". But not more than any deep cut on Daft Punk albums. Thomas Bangalter himself recognized that Basement Jaxx actually made more groundbreaking music than his in 1999. When an act profiting from such massive success in their chosen genre pays their tribute to the underdog, you gotta pay attention.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9 for more general purposes (5 + 4)
Number of albums left to review: less than 25 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions). I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
The Gun Club
4/5
Pretty seminal album mixing nascent punk and Modern Lovers shenanigans with blues and Americana So many acts drew inspiration from Jeffrey Lee Pierce, from Nick Cave to Pixies. A band in France once reached huge commercial success there offen ripping The Gun Club off. As the latter were virtually unknown in France, no one except music nerds noticed the blatant theft.
So I understand why this record is on the list, even if, when it comes to pure songwriting, it's not the most impressive LP that has ever been written (even Pierce admitted it). I have even always slightly favored sophomore album *Miami*. In many ways it's more of the same, but it's got the absolutely beautiful closer "Mother Of Earth", which is the greatest Gun Club song I have ever heard. So call me undecided on *Fire Of Love*....
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 22 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 420
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 251 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 311
R.E.M.
5/5
Very important album in REM's discography, which allowed the band to reach another step in their upward curve towards popularity, which started in the eighties and saw them attain global stardom during the early nineties. *Document* has a couple of valleys songwriting-wise (basically the middle of side one, plus the quite awkward "Lightning Hopkins" on side two), but its peaks (epic and instantly memorable "The One I Love", rowdy and snarling "It's The End Of The World As We Know It", angular-yet-catchy opener "Finest Worksong") are, simply put, iconic. "Welcome To The Occupation" and "Fireplace" are also great cuts. They don't exactly reach the same legendary heights, but they make the whole album worthy to check out for both REM fans and more casual listeners. Which is why it would be criminal not to include it on the list.
Now, like each and everyone of those REM fans, I have my own idea of what the ideal ranking of the band's ten best albums should be. Lots of people can argue about what the so-called "objective" list is, and everyone knows that finding such a list is impossible. Here's my own ranking anyway:
1. Murmur
2. Reckoning
3. Automatic For The People
4. Out Of Time
5. Life's Rich Pageant
6. Document
7. New Adventures In Hi-Fi
8. Green
9. Monster
10. Fables Of The Reconstruction
Those records go from good to insanely great. I will only include the first six in my own list though. *Document* is thus the last one to make the cut. Because in spite of its couple of missteps, *fire* runs through this album, both lyrically and musically.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: 21 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 421 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 251
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 311
Everything But The Girl
3/5
'I've never liked Everything But The Girl. They've always been too "lite" for me. However, when I heard Tracey Thorn singing on Massive Attack's "Protection," I have to admit I was impressed. A year and some month's later, I was impressed again when I heard that EBTG had changed their sound to a more dance/trance kind of thing, thus creating more "Protection"-esque soundscapes.
It works out fine, too, surprisingly. (And, for the record, I'd also like to mention that anything's better than another EBTG folk implosion.) Thorn's vocals are stunningly sweet against a drum 'n' bass backbeat that can either put you right to sleep or shock you awake, depending on your mood.
Only thing about this future Lite FM staple, it gets pretty boring at the half-way mark. If there were only some sort of change in tempo or something...'
-Ryan Schreiber, for Pitchfork (1996 - full review).
Looks like the sort of review you could find on this app. Except this one was penned by an (at the time) up-and-coming critic who eventually managed to get paid for writing that sort of thing (in a better form elsewhere, admittedly). Just Imagine getting paid for writing your daily reviews for this app... 🙃
Don't totally disagree with the content of this specific, so-called "professional" review however (except for the sly dig at the band's "folk implosion" from previous record *Amplified Heart*). *Walking Wounded* is better than the quite blurry memory I've had of it, honestly, at least if you take out the overly bland "Mirrorball", and maybe also "Wrong"'s cynical attempt to replicate the formula of the winning dance remix of previous single "Missing". The drum'n'bass instrumentation in the other cuts does sound strong and legit, though. And Tracey Thorn's vocals are wonderful. It's just that beyond those clear assets, the songs often go on for too long, overstaying their welcome. Or they feel a little "safe" and predictable in the long run. FM lite indeed.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: 20 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 421
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 251
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 312 (including this one)
Slade
1/5
Is this the meat-and-potatoes, workingman's answer to T-Rex? If this is so, it's one that aged like milk. Glam rock and glitter can be so much more interesting than this on a musical level. Huge commercial success at the time, or so I hear. In another rock-related genre, reminds me how Amyl And The Sniffers are going big these days. Well, let's see how their studio albums hold up four or five decades from now. If not only one of those.
What Slade and Amyl have in common is the sheer lack of originality of their very derivative music, and how it still inexplicably manages to cater to target audiences who could find something at least twice better in the same genre if only they put a little heart and energy into it. You'd have to add the awkward delivery of most of the vocal parts for Amyl, something that Slade can't be blamed for, admittedly. Quite a maddening situation, only mitigated by the fact that the two bands profit(ed) from the reputation of their incendiary live shows. Yet for both Slade and Amyl, even so distant in time from each other, there's the same mind-numbing phenomenon going on when it comes to the commercial success of their studio albums. Pure consumerism. Sheer ignorance of real musical virtues. Zero critical distance.
Reading myself again, I know that I might come off a little too much like a sourpuss nitpicker here. So let me stress something positive about *Slayed?*. Given its very effective production values and the energetic choruses found everywhere in this record, it's probably not really a surprise that it reached initial success, and that even a lot of professional critics fell for it at the time. It's all dumb, but being dumb pays off sometimes. Besides, you can't expect each and every rock act to reinvent the wheel. At least, I'm glad that this app (and Dimery's book) made me spend some time to know more about Slade. I certainly didn't think that album was worth being included in their list, but it's always interesting to realize how some past crazes then fall into obscurity. And I can still put my mind back into 1972, get a whiff of that simpler-looking era, and enjoy the hackneyed ride in a tongue-in-cheek way. *Slayed?* ain't worse than 99.99% of the hair metal bands that followed their steps in the decade after, I guess.
"My Life Is Natural", "Candidate", "Wonderin' Y" and "Man Who Speaks Evil" are even great tracks, far more imaginative than the rest on a harmonic and instrumental level. Still sleazy, yet also quite sophisticated. Sly and enticing. Slower yet more infectious. Alas, all those gems are not part of the original album, they are B-sides from the band's one-off singles. And comparatively-speaking, they make you realize why the album itself is such a letdown (as does the Janis Joplin cover in it). Because *Slayed?* is melodically inert, probably for commercial reasons. It takes the easy (middle of the) road. In other words, it's nothing other than a cheap cash grab for an act that had such a great potential in them, studio-album-wise. Ironical that a handful of compositions by the band themselves give you all you need to hear so as to realize how bad that record actually is.
I don't know how many real hardcore fans of this band are still actively engaging in music these days... But I even suspect that some of them could actually agree with me here. When you look at the band's most popular individual tracks on Spotify, none of them comes from *Slayed?*. The leader of that pack of songs, one-off single "Come On Feel The Noize" is everything that the LP wants to be, only this time good and memorable. And I should probably hate the guts of "Merry X-mas Everybody", but I can't (probably because the song was already familiar, and has an interesting chord sequence to make up for the whole X-mas tune cliché). Likewise, *Slayed?* is not listed in the most popular albums by the band. So what, does that mean that, following the masses, the professional "critics" had it all wrong about the British glam rock band? And most of all, about where their strength really lay? Jeeze louise, that would be a first, right??!! 🙃
1/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1)
Number of albums left to review: 19 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 421
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 251
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 313 (including this one)
Anthrax
3/5
Out of the "big four" of eighties thrash metal, (Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax and Megadeth) Anthrax are probably the closest one to hardcore punk music, as this album proves again and again. Which automatically warrants them an extra point to my usual maximum 2/5 grade in that style. I obviously still have a hard time to see the merits of this metal subgenre more than three decades after the fact generally speaking, so mind-numbingly dumb the small fry in that style is. And metal subgenres age so fast on my book anyway. Only Metallica's *Master Of Puppets* and 'black album' will surely be included in my list, Megadeath's *Rust In Peace* will probably be as well, and Anthrax just might (with this particular record). Don't think Slayer will, though. Fooling around with n*zi imagery and the Holocaust, even if you clearly don't support any of those horrors, is not a laughing matter. And their music is too goddamn tiring anyway, more grating than energetic.
I'm digressing here, and I know I should only address this Anthrax album in my review. Unfortunately, I feel like whatever my take is on it, it will be of not much use. Fans of that old genre will dismiss me as one of those listeners who "doesn't (fully) get it". And the others will probably agree with me without learning anything themselves. If the legendary collab between Anthrax and Public Enemy, "Bring The Noize", had been in this LP's tracklist, I might have bumped up my grade a half-point. Alas, *Among The Living* was released three or four years before that collaboration happened. It still puts a favorable light on Anthrax. But it can't really help me write today's review.
I'm almost done with this project (at least when it comes to the albums listed in Dimery's different editions of his book--I know more stuff will follow...), and here's one of the most important lessons I take out of using this app for three years: before I started doing so, I had three pet peeves when it comes to music styles--they were reggae, country / western, and thrash metal. This app has helped me change my outlook on the first two, because it sometimes pointed to records that made me lower my guard very quickly. It made me see how a lot of artists in those genres can create great or at least very good albums. But not much of that happened when it came to thrash metal--apart for the couple of albums I've listed up there. And it's either because I'm too close-minded OR that there is something that's beyond repair in that style. I'll never know for sure, but honestly I don't care that much about it...
And don't talk to me about the aggro "energy" in those records. Hardcore punk has it in spades, and it's not ruined by those cheesy, godawful vocals. Other stripes of metal can do wonders in that department. The late noughts 'emo' wave produced some striking LPs. And post-hardcore and noise rock still regularly yield unsung masterpieces. And yet NONE of those genres are correctly represented in Dimery's book. Sometimes, I have a sneaking suspicion it's because the "big four" have sold so many albums during the eighties, and that the critics in Dimery's team that are specialized in "aggressive" genres are too much interested in commercial success in the first place. And if that's really what makes them favor thrash metal, they can eat shit.
It's probably not the case though. It's just that Dimery's team is missing key contributors to widen a scope that direly needs to be widened. That also works for jazz, post-rock and the current post-punk / crank wave revival, by the way. And even for more recent strands of pop and hyperpop. Here's me hoping that the suggestions made by users of this app once they finish the initial project can fix that a little...
Anyway, here's a "neutral" grade for today's album. Because "among the living", you can find far more than just... thrash metal.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: 18 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 421
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 252 (including this one?)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 313
Thin Lizzy
5/5
The late seventies is a time where punk came to the foreground, which led me to believe that not much else in the rock idiom was interesting in those years, bar some part of Bruce Springsteen's output and a couple of punk adjacent acts (Television, Blondie...), all of this before "post-punk" reshuffled the cards anyway. All of this explains why I didn't know the first thing about Thin Lizzy before I started this 1001 Albums project. Apart from their name, that is. But I just had that filed next to Cheap Trick in my head rock canon--which is not so bad, all things considered, yet not necessarily conducive to an immediate listen that would turn out to be essential.
That was a GRAVE mistake. Studio album *Jailbreak* had already given me a hint that I was already missing out on something excellent before I listened to my first Thin Lizzy song. But this double-live album reaches yet another level. The instantly iconic one. Discovering this record is like finding out the missing link between Van Morrison and AC/DC. Or the lovechild of Motörhead and Jimi Hendrix (Phil Lynott's vocals, goddamn it! So close to Jimi!). Yes, along with Phil's distinctive, one-inch-before-the-beat bass playing, you have that clichéed hard work guitar soloing drawing on fifths and thirds. But the end result is so damn melodic, so damn infectious, that it's impossible for me now to resist to it.
To put it in a nutshell, the whole thing is a thrill, and I won't even name a single song here. Obvious hits from the studio albums (from the information I could garner online--I only really know *Jailbreak* up to know) fell as equally important as their deep cuts here. That hour and sixteen minutes fly by as if it was a 40-minute album. Everything is energetic, imaginative, fun yet elegant. No wonder a lot of punks actually lived this band. They played something different, but there was common DNA there.
And I usually don't like live albums. Yet here my usual criticisms of live albums can't apply. Maybe it's because Thin Lizzy "cheated" with those supposed overdubs. But I don't give a rat's ass if they did. What matters is that the songs are served right. And since you have such a large tracklist, you can enjoy the closest equivalent of a "best of" album here, yet one that feels 100% cohesive. The best of both worlds, really.
Number of albums left to review: 17 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 422 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 252
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 313
Miles Davis
5/5
...
...
...
...
Jazz.
Rock.
None of the above.
Somewhere in between.
Somewhere in between things that are not there.
Things that are not there.
Take them out.
Edit.
Splice.
Take out.
Wrong note.
The wrong note is the right note.
Insist on the wrong note that is the right note.
Stop insisting.
Ambient.
Electric.
Organic.
None of the above.
Somewhere between electric and organic.
Somewhere between
is the silence.
Wayne Shorter.
Joe Zawinul.
Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock.
John McLaughlin.
Dave Holland and Tony Williams.
Teo Macero (the genius editor).
And Miles.
"Shhh"
"Peaceful"
"Shhh"
"In a Silent Way"
"It's About That Time"
"In a Silent Way"
...
Number of albums left to review: 16 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 423 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 252
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 313
Manic Street Preachers
4/5
Quite a striking album. As that extremely passionate and pretty convincing review from the hardcore fan of Manic Street Preachers topping this section puts it, it's not always an easy ride or even a pleasant listen, but the record sure has its share of memorable moments.
Just like its cover, this LP comes off as uncompromising art with disturbing yet also fascinating features. It's still poppy and melodic as far as rock albums generally go, oddly enough, especially in its first half, thanks to earworms "She Is Suffering", "Revol" or "Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforoneday...". But it's also so "angular" that you feel like you might get pricked just listening to most those songs. Like some sort of British version of early Green Day, only far more political and provocative. And, indeed, the lyrical contents of the album feel like a testament documenting the obsessions of Richey Edwards during his last days on this earth. He didn't sing his own lyrics, James Dean Bradfield sang them instead. But his ghost ominously looms over the proceedings here. Stylistically speaking, not everything in the album aged gracefully, though. But it's still a *huge* improvement compared to the band's hackneyed, immature hard rock -inspired debut.
After Edwards's disappearance, Manic Street Preachers would reinvent themselves as an even more melodic and streamlined britpop act -- still exploring the same leftist agenda, fortunately, but with various results musically and artistically speaking (from the overrated *This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours* -- whose very catchy singles belied the actual drowsy -- and even at times inert -- contents of the album, to the more exciting *Everything Must Go* and *Know Your Enemy* bookending that particular letdown). But I guess all of this is a story for another time, kiddies...
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 15 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 423
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 253 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 313
UB40
4/5
So... Before they became internationally famous for their reggae versions of all sorts of standards--most of them cheesefests of utterly catastrophic proportions, except maybe "Red Red Wine" and "Kingston Town"--it turns out UB40 wrote their own songs. And even that they sounded good, and like a hackneyed, watered-down version of Jamaican music. And all of that even allowed them to find commercial success in their native Britain.
Call me surprised. The only cover to be found in this debut is their rendition on Randy Newman's "I Think It's Gonna Rain Today" on side two. It's far from being the most interesting track in the album, but I guess that's where UB40 realized that making covers of other people's songs could pay off in the long run. Maybe they felt they were not that good writing their own tunes. Or maybe they just went for the easiest cash grab as the eighties went by...
If that's the case, that's a missed opportunity because the band had the potential to become so much more on an artistic level. "Food For Thought" is an immense song, for instance, so moody, so evocative... "Little By Little", also found on side two, is almost as equally awesome. And on side one, "Tyler", "King" and "Burden Of Shame" are pretty good as well, and their topical lyrics also bring something interesting and even moving to the table.
Too bad that most of the rest, which goes from lesser cuts to drowsy dub soundscapes that can't be as crazy and ample and sweeping as the ones of Lee "Scratch" Perry, kinda hurts the album's flow... The last track, giving its name to the LP, is surprisingly hectic and lively for a dub instrumental, though. I always have a sweet spot for albums that nicely build up in its last run of three or four tracks, as this one easily pulls off.
And then, after the main LP, you have a quite striking EP as a bonus, with the long jam of "Madam Medusa", another topical cover (Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit"), and another interesting instrumental with a greasy synth for its foundation. Just as in the LP, there is something definitely gritty in the production values. Somehow, you really see it was made in the grey landscapes of urban Britain. Which soon eliminates its derivative aspect on first glance, not to mention any accusation of that album being nothing other than soulless appropriation of Jamaican music. At least to my ears.
Never thought that I would include a UB40 album in my own list. I'm almost done with this project, and some nice surprises are still coming up. That's pretty cool.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: 14 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 424 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 253
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 313
Mercury Rev
5/5
I lived in England for a year not long after this album came out. Although Mercury Rev are American, it was everywhere during my stay in the UK -- on the telly, in friends' homes, on the shelves of HMV and other record stores... And I suspect that it's because of the LP's reception in Britain that it's in this list. So many good melancholic songs with lush and extremely original instrumentations in there: "Holes", "Endlessly", "Opus 40"... At the time, I remember that out of all those songs, only "The Hudson Line"'s relatively hackneyed and middle-of-the-road sax arrangements rubbed me the wrong way. But decades later, I've even warmed up to this cut, just because it's bookended by such memorable moments anyway...
Jonathan Donahue's frail-yet-fully-emotional vocal performance is so effective in this great record. I especially love the latter's second side, probably because it also goes to more ominous territories once in a while, bringing nuance and dynamics to the whole tracklist. Back-to-back "Goddess On A Hiway" and "The Funny Bird" are among the greatest one-two punches I have ever found in any album. Rarely has twilight music sounded so persuasive and cinematic. Music to daydream about love and loss until the end of times ...
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: 13 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 425 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 253
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 313
Van Morrison
4/5
OK, let's get one thing straight from the start: for a live album recorded in the mid-seventies, the sound of this double-LP is just INCREDIBLE, actually twice better than most of the studio versions of those songs. You can hear the tiniest details and flourishes here, from each guitar lick, each piano embellishments, each brass blast, and each layering of that wonderful string section. And minus one specific moment (more on that later), the performance is absolutely pitch-perfect. If only for this, I can see why Van Morrison die-hard fans would want to include *It's Too Late To Stop Now (vol 1)* in this list.
The tracklist is a huge selling point as well. It mostly draws from key studio albums *Moondance*, *Saint Dominic's Preview* and *His Band And The Street Choirs*, plus two pivotal Them staple songs (including a version of the legendary "Gloria" exploring some surprising *funky* territories), not to mention a handful of rhythm'n blues covers dear to VM's heart. To be honest, I think I would have enjoyed the album more if the covers had been left on the cutting room's floor. Van Morrison can be a wonderful performer, but his music is already a little too derivative and "by the book" on a harmonic level sometimes--especially through the man's very similar vocal lines from one track to the next--and those covers only enhance that minor flaw... Worse, more often than not, they are not the punchier cuts here anyway, and they take away some much needed energy before you reach the stellar last leg of this record (more on that later as well). The length of vinyl records and VM's personal tastes required to add those tracks that I consider as "filler", I imagine. And since it was impossible to sum up the project in one single LP, this is the choice that was made here. Makes sense on a subjective level, I guess. It's just that my own subjectivity would have favored a different choice. 'Vol 1' is added to the title, by the way... Under that light, I'm pretty sure other selections of terrific live performances of omitted songs in VM's repertoire could have been added instead. But that boat has sailed a long time ago now...
Another point of contention: a couple of songs for the much maligned *Hardnose The Highway* could have been left aside as well, especially the very hackneyed "Warm Love", where, inexplicably, Van Morrison's vocal performance is even *worse* than on the studio version. It's like he's chopping wood instead of singing. Very 'forced' and awkward. Normally, one single bad moment for an album this length shouldn't really influence my overall appreciation of it... But since it's the second track we're talking about here (and the first Van Morrison original song to appear), that dud *does* take its toll, I would lie if I didn't say so.
The rest is wonderful, fortunately. I could take so many examples of the many memorable moments in this record, but I'm just gonna mention a couple of them found at the end of the fourth side, like the meditative conclusion of "Listen To The Lion", which keeps you on your toes until the very last second, or the fantastic rendition of *Moondance*'s "Caravan", which builds up to a terrific finish. And when the record ends its long run with a very adventurous version of *Astral Weeks*'s "Cyprus Avenue", it really feels like you've made an incredible journey into Van Morrison's universe. A little like Thin Lizzy's *Live And Dangerous*, this album could serve as a kind of "best of", even if essential tracks are missing from it ("Brown-Eyed Girl", "Jackie Wilson Said"...). And yet it's still one cohesive thing. The best of both worlds, really.
So I will surely add this record to my own list, right? Well... It might come off as a surprise after what I've just said, but I'm not so sure I will. First there are the little flaws I have spotted up there, adding to the album's perceived length. And then, there's that nagging doubt in my mind that using a slot for this live album sort of wastes an opportunity to praise other artists. As stellar as the sound and most of the performances are on *It's Too Late To Stop Now*, it feels like welcoming it in my list already including *Astral Weeks*, *Moondance*, and also probably *Saint Dominic's Preview*, is overkill to an extent. Yes, the renditions of the important songs from these albums are probably all better than their studio counterparts. Yet do we need to use an extra slot for the *same songs*?
Besides, one specific moment in this album perfectly encapsulates another sort of hesitation I have here. It's towards the end of "Caravan"... At that point, just as the rest of the band jams hard, the string section surges and performs one of the most beautiful orchestral arrangements in a record already filled to the brim with the latter. Van Morrison harmonizes with the strings for a few seconds. This truly feels like music heaven at this point. The whole is gorgeous, cinematic, evocative, what have you... But then, out of the blue, and *as the orchestral arrangements are not over yet*, the Irish singer introduces the names of each string player, before then naming everyone else in the band. And I have to say, my heart broke a little when I suddenly heard that. I was truly entranced before, I didn't care I was listening to a live version and I just wanted to immerse in the music. But Van Morrison ruined that a little for me.
Of course, if you were there in the audience that night, it makes total sense that every player's name should be mentioned just as the show nearly reaches its end. But it's just not how I envision the experience of listening to albums at home. I don't need to be reminded that someone is playing. I need the playing to take me to another world. And under that light, I'm not so sure I need this record in my list. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I had the opportunity to listen to it, and I will probably listen to it again in the future. But even if it were the greatest live record of all time (some say it is), it feels like it's not the most convenient and natural entry point into Van Morrison's body of work. It's "too much" in a way. And I'm not only talking about the album's length here. Because in some other sense, it's also "not enough". Without the context given by the studio albums, it's sort of hard to understand why those live performances are so important for Van Morrison's fans. So, let's say that as of now, I'd rather err on the side of caution, and wait to see if really I feel the urge to return to this live album one day. After all, it's never too late to open your heart to a pivotal artist such as Van Morrison. You just need a little time sometimes, that's all.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 8.5)
Number of albums left to review: 12 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 425
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 254 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 313
Metallica
5/5
I don't care if this album *partly* abandoned the speed metal / thrash metal style found on all previous Metallica LPs. It's true that if you really love that particular genre, the handful of songs that follow that old template here are not as good as the ones included in *Master Of Puppets* or *Ride The Lightning*. The thrash metal stuff is only here to energize the tracklist. It's with the slower cuts -- both *each and *every* heavier number and *each and every* ballad that this record made a lasting impact.
To be more specific, if only for *Sad But True*, *The Unforgiven* and *Nothing Else Matters*, this album should be in the list. And then you have the absolutely *iconic* opener, "Enter Sandman", whose main riff is up there with Deep Purple's "Smoke On The Water" and Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" in the podium of the most significant heavy riffs of all time. Under that light it doesn't really matter if the last two songs of this admittedly lengthy album are a bit of a letdown--thereby preventing me from giving it a perfect grade. The Black Album could have ended right before that, with the confessional, yet also angular and tough "The God That Failed" (pretty moving if you know Kirk's very personal source of inspiration here), and still manage to be equally impactful. Besides, Bob Rock's shrewd and glossy production, along with Metallica's more streamlined and adequate music writing, quickly managed to erase the tragic memory of *And Justice For Jason Newsted*, er, excuse me, *...For All*, from most fans of good music -- except from a subset of die-hard fans of the very bizarre genre that "progressive metal" is. Won't listen to a metal album where the bass is indiscernible, that's for sure. Here, for this album, every instrument, and each instrumental touch, slaps as they should, at least ..
I've used the word "impact" or "impactful" on two occasions in my paragraphs up there, and this shouldn't hide the fact that this historical record also marked the start of a downward slope in the band's trajectory, very ironically. Embracing your full commercial potential is sometimes a dead end on an artistic level. Yet the Black Album's influence should never be underestimated. Without the melodicism of "The Unforgiven", or Kirk Hammett's stellar vocal performance on "Sad But True" (maybe heavily edited by Bob Rock?), you wouldn't have System Of A Down a decade later, for instance. But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies!
4/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums. To which, exceptionally, I will add 0.5 points for "Enter Sandman"'s iconic riff. And as usual, I will round up my 4.5 grade to 5
9/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4)
Number of albums left to review: 11 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 426 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 254
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 313
Travis
1/5
The very definition of beige, bland or inconsequential. On an artistic level, Travis are too sweet for their own good in this LP filled with ballads so demure and safe they quickly become sickening for anyone looking for interesting chord sequences, inspiring harmonies, genuine thrills or even *true* subtlety. At best, those songs sound like the b-sides of Radiohead singles circa-*The Bends*, here rather laughably released two years after *OK Computer* came out--showing how Travis were surfing on the most boring post-Britpop wave at the tail end of the nineties, instead of offering something that would feel a tad bit more exciting in 1999 (just like Radiohead did in 1997).
The thing is, even if you pretend this album was released in 1995, you can't really forgive how dull it is overall. That lead singer tries as hard as he can to go to Thom Yorke's turf for his vocal performance, but what he does falls flat compared to the manifold emotions routinely expressed by the Radiohead frontman. First because the music writing is predictable and devoid of any real spark or dynamics. But also because his vocals often lack a clear sense of attack or punch. The performance might be technically spotless at times (there are some weak moments, actually), its artistic flatness only underlines how linear Travis' music feels.
The 'professional critics' sensed all this at the time. It's the target audience which made this LP a commercial success, and retrospectively, I can't help feeling said audience was so complacent and reluctant to be challenged that they were *objectively* wrong to enjoy this band so much. Sort of, obviously--music appreciation is always subjective, after all. But this sort of commercial success didn't bode well for the noughts, a very 'conservative' decade in my ears. And I could almost see myself going to a tantrum because someone thought of including this LP in the 1001 Albums list whereas it's a very questionable choice in my own book. When public taste is godawful to my demanding ears, I feel like I'm the one who is looking down upon them whereas I don't want to.
I can't really blame Travis' fans, though. I blame part of the subsequent 'critics' who looked at the sales numbers to then profess this album was worthy to be in a list such as this one. Because I feel they're a little hypocritical. Pretty sure that if *The Man Who* had not sold so many units, it would have been quickly forgotten, plain and simple. I'm not the one to often complain about the British perspective regularly churned out by the 1001 Albums book. But here I sense one of its unwanted and undesirable consequences. When so many genres and subgenres are so badly represented in the book (post-rock, post-hardcore/emo, some recent strands of noise-rock, metal and pop, or some not-so recent strands of jazz...), you can't waste a slot for frigging Travis! It's a slap in the face of all the fans of those music genres!
I've compared Travis to Radiohead earlier, and I have to admit I feel bad for doing so. Some might say I should have compared them to Coldplay instead. But even that would be unfair to a degree, leaving aside the fact that Travis' frontman is a Chris Martin lookalike, lol. Coldplay sound like Nine Inch Nails, King Crimson and Black Midi jamming together compared to Travis circa-*The Man Who*. And even if they didn't, Chris Martin has sung loads of more memorable songs compared to Travis, so that doesn't even work out. Anyway, I'm pretty sure that the world--and most specifically this list--doesn't need a second-rate version of Coldplay, which is itself a second-rate version of quite a few other important acts from the turn of the century. Gives this slot to artists who offered something truly vital, for chrissake!
1/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
6/10 for more general purposes (5 for the 'professional' musical and technical abilities + 1 for the actual artistry)
Number of albums left to review: 10 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 426
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 254
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 314 (including this one)
Arcade Fire
4/5
A notch under debut *Funeral*, *Neon Bible* is, like the latter and follow-up LP *The Suburbs*, a pivotal chapter from Arcade Fire's golden age. I wonder if I have not unfairly given only four stars to *The Suburbs* on this app, by the way, as the latter only struck me with its brillance very recently, just as I revisited it -- if that's the case I can't give more than four stars to *Neon Bible*, even if I love it as well. Truth br told, that sophomore album is *very* close to a 4.5 stars in my book. Which basically means it's close to be rounded up to 5.
All ratings shenanigans aside, *Neon Bible* offers a very cohesive yet also slightly disturbing vision of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne's one-of-a-kind indie melodic universe, filled with all sorts of troubled, neurotic, *Confederacy Of Dunces*-like characters trying to adapt to a post-9/11 world, here all gathered in a metaphorical church of sorts for freaks and misfits of all kinds (good thing that the LP was recorded in an actual church -- the echoey sound fits with the songs' moods and thematic imprints so well). This record is very *postmodern*, in a way, which is why its apparent "grandiosity" must be taken with a huge grain of salt, as songs such as "(Antichrist Television Blues)" proves -- and that aspect of the album is still a little misunderstood to this day imho.
Another peculiar thing about it is that it picks up steam in its middle, when the formidable "The Well And The Lighthouse" surges. And the album ends on two essential Arcade Fire songs. First there's the epic and mock-utopian "No Cars Go", which is actually a new, more pristine version of a song already recorded for AF's first EP (both versions are great and have assets their counterparts don't have). And then there's the short but extraordinarily soulful "My Body Is A Cage", concluding the proceedings on an absolute bang. If only for that last leg, this album must be in the list.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4)
Number of albums left to review: 8 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 427 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 254
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 314
Bob Dylan
4/5
Old Dylan can be rather excellent Dylan, as *Rough And Rowdy Ways* very recently proved again. *Time Out Of Mind* marks the beginning of the latest era in the legendary singer-songwriter's career (and it started more than 25 years ago, how time -- out of mind -- flies by!). Daniel Lanois's hazy and atmospheric production style brings a lot to those songs (the Canadian producer would accomplish the same feat for Neil Young's sadly underrated *Le Noise* more than a decade later). But the main draw is still the songwriting here, as in any "classic" Bob Dylan. Best songs: the terrific opener "Love Sick", and the melancholic yet still lyrically sharp "Standing In The Doorway", "Million Miles", "Tryin' To Get To Heaven", "Not Dark Yet", or the swampy and bluesy "Could Iron Bounds".
4/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4)
Number of albums left to review: 7 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 428 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 254
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 314
William Orbit
2/5
Electronic dance music with large strands of dub, world and ambient in its DNA, released by a producer that was so trendy in the early nineties that he ended up producing Madonna. Just like some electronic acts listed in the 1001 Albums book, there is nothing truly ridiculous in this music, and yet you can't really say that it aged very well either. Ironically, this type of music is supposed to sound futuristic and yet 95% of it quickly becomes outdated. It's music that loses its groundbreaking and cutting-edge nature so fast. Unless it's made by a mad genius like Aphex Twin...
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
7 for more general purposes (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: a handful (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned ed albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions). I've temporarily lost count here.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter (including this one)
The Smiths
3/5
Probably my least favorite Smiths album, even though it's the favourite of a certain subset of Marr and the Mozz's fans, quite inexplicably for me. I suspect the iconic cover art, only bested by *The Queen Is Dead*'s Alain Delon, plays its part here. But for me, the music in the Smiths' magnum opus is as good as its artwork (if not more), instead of what occurs with *Meat Is Murder*.
Musically and compositionally speaking, a couple of tracks indeed verge on ridiculousness in this LP (example, second cut "Rusholme Ruffians"). Most of the others are decent enough, even if a bit mundane at times (or they overstay their welcome, like the heavy-handed funk of "Barbarism Begins At Home", whose album version is twice too long). Fortunately, you also have a handful of stellar tracks that are part of the very best of The Smiths' repertoire: opener "The Headmaster Ritual", sinister "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" and lively-yet-also-snarling "Nowhere Fast". But that's only a tiny minority in the track list (the old US version also including "How Soon Is Now?" makes the album better, but it's not considered a "cannon" version today, I'm afraid).
Lyrically and vocally speaking, early Morrissey does what he does best: grating your ears with over-affected simpering for one second, suddenly impressing you with an unexpected change of pace in another, and delivering strings and strings of striking one-liners and punchlines about how miserable and inadequate his borderline-autistic narrators all feel.
One of my favourite examples in that realm, found towards the end of "Nowhere Fast":
"And when I'm lying in my bed
I think about life
And I think about death
And neither one particularly appeals to me
And if the day came
When I felt a natural emotion
I'd get such a shock I'd probably lie
In the middle of the street and die
I'd lie down and die
Oh, oh"
I mean, there is some obvious form of self-deprecating humour at play here, and that triggers tender feelings on my part (whereas latter days Morrissey triggers nothing but scorn from me).
As for Johnny Marr's guitar playing, nicely assisted by Rourke and Joyce, it's constant fireworks after fireworks, as usual. And this even on the disappointing compositions, and in spite of the unimpressive, paper-thin eighties production values -- admittedly less annoying than on the band's debut, but still clearly doing a disservice to the guitarist's work decades after the fact.
So, overall, it's rather a mixed bag for me. But it's a mixed bag by one of the most idiosyncratic rock bands that has ever graced this Earth. That explains why the album landed on Dimery's list, I guess, even if I doubt it will ever land on mine.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: 5 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 428
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 255 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 315
Genesis
4/5
It seems fitting that I have to review this double-LP towards the very end of this 1001 albums project. Spending three years on this app, and going through so many different music styles, is like listening to a gigantic prog album, is it not? At times it's like going through a treasure trove, in the same sense that there are many treasures to dig out in *The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway*. You feel like your understanding of music broadens, just as your horizons do. Other times, it's mind-numbing. You feel desensitized and alienated a little, as if you were "In The Cage", watching "The Grand Parade Of Lifeless Packaging" (what a neat way to sum up capitalist alienation, by the way, and how does that song lyrics nail that idea on the head!).
To sum it up, using this app for three years is both thrilling and exhausting, just like this Genesis double-album -- a release I struggled with before, because I found it so damn *chatty*, squashed by its heavy concept and ambition, instead of being really musical. I guess my mind *did* broaden, because now I find it rather wonderful, and much more musical than my memory of it, with actual memorable tunes. Like most positive reviewers, they are the title-track, the amusing and snarling number about the story's protagonist buying a book about sex and losing his virginity, "Counting Out Time", and the moving-yet-also-ominous "Carpet Crawlers".
About this double-album as a whole, and to use a contemporary reference point, it sort of comes off as a slowed down version of a Black Midi or Geordie Greep LP. Which means it's pretty digestible after all. 😉 The entirety of the first disc is worthy of a 5/5 grade, apart from that horrid synth solo displaying a slimy and hackneyed sound in the middle of "In The Cage". Given what l've read in the reviews, I expected the second disc to be a huge, self-indulgent letdown, but I was pleasantly surprised it was not so much the case. I didn't mind the experimental, illustrative or musique concrète cuts (mostly instrumental in nature) -- apart from the stupid and pointless "Riding The Scree", they allow the second disc to breathe in a way, and bring welcome dynamics at this point. And the songs per se are still pretty good -- It's just that they're exploring turf already well-covered in the first disc, and so sound extraneous to an extent. It's a 3/5 grade for this second disc, then.
As for the story, I would lie if I said I followed it closely. We're talking about a music album anyway, not a book. If I return to this album, I will end up following the conceptual yarn a bit closer for sure. What struck me instead here is a musical takeaway: out of all the Genesis albums, this is the one that foretells the most the subsequent solo career of Peter Gabriel -- up to its Hipgnosis black and white artwork. Pretty logical given that it's the last one Gabriel made with Genesis
As you can see, I have mostly *musical* feelings about this record, which belies my earlier estimation of this record as being too *chatty* (it still is to an extent, but not to the point it ruins the music). So all in all, *The Lamb lies Down On Broadway* is a pleasant surprise. One of the things I love the most about this app is when it manages to make me change my mind. Glad it does that here.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4)
Number of albums left to review: 4 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 429 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 255
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 315
Massive Attack
5/5
Out of all the classic trip hop albums Massive Attack released during the nineties, this is probably the lesser of the three -- my minor grudge is mostly directed at the instrumentals featuring piano performer Craig Armstrong (who was somewhat trendy in Britain at the time, but has since faded into oblivion, at least as far as I know). Those cuts verge a little too much on elevator music for my taste, sapping some of the momentum found elsewhere in the album.
The thing is, the floors you explore once you get out of those lifts are *all* fascinating. It's like roaming inside the cold and somewhat dilapidated corridors of a business building late at night, crossing the paths of all sorts of ghosts and spectres. One is Nicolette, lending her Billie Holiday-adjacent voice to the eerie "Three" and the lush neo-psychedelic, string-laden tones of "Sly". Another is an elderly Jamaican following your unsure steps as you cross empty rooms in the sound of "Spying Glass" -- doesn't he exactly look (and sound) like legendary reggaeman and dub prophet Horace Andy? And then at some point, you feel like you're gonna get mugged by a young ruffian with a burly mug named Tricky, with 3D and Daddy G looking at the scene with an approving look on their faces. "Eurochild" is hypnotic and trippy, but it's on the ominous and iconic "Karmacoma" that Tricky sounds the most menacing, in spite (or maybe because) of his hushed vocals...
The most impressive ghost, however, is Everything But The Girl's Tracey Thorn. Her ethereal yet precise presence irradiates the minimalistic "Better Things". And most of all, it transcends the legendary opener "Protection", eight minutes of sheer beauty and incredible musicality -- slow yet hard-sounding hip hop beats, a simple funk guitar loop and an ominous, obsessive, one note-bassline all caressed by Tracey's motherly vocals and soothing layers of keyboards piling up on one another. That cinematic title-track is pure magic, and in that particular realm often explored by 3D, Daddy G and Mushroom, only "Teardrop" featuring Liz Fraser, from follow-up album *Mezzanine*, can be deemed superior.
Oh, of course, you also have that controversial cover of The Doors' "Light My Fire", also with Horace Andy. I always thought it was only a tongue-in-cheek joke to close the proceedings. My only real issue with the last leg of the album is mostly that not much happens after "Sly" (the second instrumental featuring Craig Armstrong which follows it is more boring than that goofy version of "Light My Fire". The latter elicits some snarling emotional response on my part, at least.
Given what I've just written, I could have easily gone to a 4/5 grade here. But the peaks on *Protection* are so damn high that I can forgive its two or three valleys. It's been such a nice ride in that haunted glass tower anyway. It's gonna be a 4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, then, rounded up to 5. Which translates to a 9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: 3 (plus the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past versions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions)
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 430 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 255
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 315
The 13th Floor Elevators
5/5
Seminal psychedelic garage rock. This 1966 record still routinely inspires quite important musicians today (examples : Osees, Ty Segall, Chad Van Gaalen, The Black Angels...). It's not so hard to put your head back to 1966 and imagine the shock that the album's lo-fi sound and wild performances throughout must have been for innocent rock'n'roll ears at the time.
There's also that crazy electric jug, not to the taste of some reviewers on this app, apparently. It's obviously a noticeable detail in the instrumentation, but at the same time, I find it pretty unfair to dismiss the whole album because of it. Especially when the majority of the songs are so great and catchy on a compositional level ("You're Gonna Miss Me", "Splash 1", "Reverbation", "Don't Fall Down", "You Don't Know (How Young You Are)" "Kingdom Of Heaven", "Tried To Hide"). And if the rest doesn't exactly reach that stellar level, it's pretty groundbreaking stuff for 1966, performed with a lot of heart and stamina by Roky Erickson.
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've went over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 431 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 255
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 315
Tom Tom Club
2/5
Things haven't changed that much since the advent of the internet. In a world where the latter didn't exist yet, you had the same phenomenon as the one that still routinely occurs in 2024: you take a hot band absolutely deserving the raving success they recently experienced (here, the Talking Heads), then critics get interested in a side-project from some of their members (here the 'Heads' rhythm section, also a couple in their private lives), and whaddayaknow?, you have a huge hype going on.
The thing is, let's be honest for one frigging second, shall we? If Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz had not been a part of Talking Heads, you can bet your mohair boots *Tim Tom Club* (both this debut and the name of the whole project) would have faded into oblivion as soon as the latter half of the eighties had been reached. Just look at the way critics panned their following LPs by the way. As soon as the project lost its "freshness", so to speak, it's as if scales immediately fell off the eyes (and ears) of everyone. How amusing...
What this record has going for it from today's vantage point is that its first tracks are attuned to the nascent sounds of rap and prehistorical hip hop, and you gotta give credit to Frantz and Weymouth's open minds and adventurous spirit. But the musicality is so paper-thin in those pivotal (and relatively popular) cuts, the experimentation is often so linear, that I can't bring myself to consider it a mandatory listen. "L'Eléphant" and "As Above, So Below" expand the initial scope in interesting ways. Then "Lorelei" goes on for too long, unfortunately. "On On On On" is pretty good and catchier than the rest, but it still sounds like a lesser version of what David Byrne could write with the 'Heads. "Booming And Zooming" is a borefest and the cover of "Under The Boardwalk" is just plain ridiculous. And then the album is already over, and its memory is gonna fade into oblivion again. At least in my mind.
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
7/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've went over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 431
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 255
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 316 (including this one)
Sam Cooke
4/5
I tried to "Feel It (Don't Fight It)". But maybe not hard enough at first. Or maybe I don't love soul music enough to fully appreciate this very early album in the genre--at least right away.
Don't get me wrong, I quickly understood that the grittier sound of this live recording sounds so authentic that it can provide great emotions to all Sam Cooke fans. The thing is, I would rather get acquainted with the studio output of the legendary soul singer first. Live versions are rarely good entry points, are they? And apart from pretty "(What A) Wonderful World", or moving a "A Change Is Gonna Come" (not in this album, but that most people have heard in film or TV soundtracks)", I'm afraid l don't know much about Cooke. If the man is the legend that soul fans say he is, isn't it a better idea to first discover what he sounded like on the radio?
Those cuts on this live album, admittedly groovier that "Wonderful World" and "Change", document awesome performances. The songs on the first side seemed are all interchangeable in my ears. And yet this record received a 3.78 global score on this app, which is rather high as far as its usual 3/5 grade goes. I started to wonder: "What is wrong with me?"
As I finished writing the words up there, "Somebody Have Mercy" began playing. And that's how it goes : "Somebody have mercy, baby, and tell me what is wrong with me". I swear that I had never heard that song before (or didn't consciously remember it). It was a nice serendipitous moment, and I guess that song is gonna stay with me because of it.
Then "Bring It On Home To Me" followed, and unless I'm mistaken, the intense, mesmerizing introduction to this version of the live ballad is absent in the studio rendition, that I discovered on the list of Cooke's most played tracks on Spotify. Another cut that's gonna stay with me, I guess. And so will "Having A Party". It's tribute to good songs "on the radio" bring me back to the start of my review. Something's going on with this album. Its last leg sound incredible, which is, I guess, quite logical if you follow the template of a live show. Leaving the door open to this one, then. Leaving it wide open...
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've went over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 431
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 256 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 316 l
Johnny Cash
5/5
"I shot a man in Reno, Just to watch it him die". When you're not a murderer but in honky tonk show business and you sing that to a crowd of actual criminals, and they rejoice and welcome you in their ranks, allowing you to give one of the most entranced performances ever put to tape.
Gangster rap, please take some notes here.
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've went over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 432 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 256
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 316
System Of A Down
5/5
An absolute game changer for metal at large. This debut is not only important because of its commercial and artistic success (that would be even more impressive with sophomore LP *Toxicity*). It's important because it took the best of what the nu-metal formula had to offer (not much, some voices might snarl in the background) and peppered it with touches so personal and idiosyncratic that a lot of *good* metal acts took notes and understood it was how they could put some true soul into their music as well. And it took four Armenian-Americans from California, deeply inspired by the musical traditions of their community, to pull it off.
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've went over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 433 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 256
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 316
Richard Hawley
3/5
It looks like 2005 was Richard Hawley's moment, thanks to this grammy-nominated album. That said, listening to all those nostalgic torch songs, it also looks like Richard Hawley's *real* moment is to be found way back into the past, which will make this record sound timeless for the man's fans and a wee bit predictable for everyone else. Nice as background music in the living room on a quiet Sunday night (like tonight). But "essential", though? Everything sounds good, nothing has aged in this album because its point is to sound "vintage" anyway... But apart from "The Ocean"'and its string section (and maybe the magnificent ambient instrumental concluding the proceedings), no song really stands out either in this lethargic, textbook "retro" LP.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've went over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 433
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 256
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 317 (including this one)
The White Stripes
4/5
It's never a drag to listen to The White Stripes. After the breakout success of *Elephant*, Jack and Meg White sure didn't disappoint overall with their *Get Behind Me Satan*, which nicely expands their initial garage sound with all sorts of imaginative touches going from weird pedal effects and dreamy marimba to a LOT of piano playing from Jack (instead of the usual bluesy guitar, still found in half of those cuts, though). All of this partly explains why this record is a firm favourite of a friend of mine, who is admittedly a die-hard fan of the Stripes.
That said, I'm not 100% sure I'll have room left for this record in my own personal list. You have great moments in this LP (namely "Blue Orchid", "My Doorbell", "The Denial Twist", "As Ugly As I Seem" and "Red Rain"), but do they add to the cultural touchstone the band represented during the noughts in really significant ways? Let's just say that the jury's still out on the one. *White Blood Cells* and *Elephant* will be in my list for sure. Any other White Stripes album is in the waiting room as of now. We'll see. After all, it's still an encouraging sign when you are in purgatory instead of heading straight to hell. Especially when the word "Satan" is in the title of your album. 😉
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've went over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 433
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 257 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 317
Lenny Kravitz
1/5
Insipid, just like each and every one album by Lenny Kravitz, a talented musician and performer but a rather bland composer, except for a fistful of hits. Worse, this debut doesn't even have the bangers of *Mama Said*, or "Are You Gonna Go My Way" and its infectious hits. Deep cuts are not just deep cuts with this rich Beverly Hills kid who just profited from happy circumstances. They're abyssal.
1/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've went over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 433
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 257
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 318 (including this one)
Koffi Olomide
1/5
If you went to the Barbès quarter in Paris, and asked young Africans and French Africans there about their opinion on this album, they probably won't give a rat's ass about it. And if you asked old-timers with a distinctive sense of fashion (la sape), of course, they would say they love or loved Koffi Olomide's music. Yet my best guess is that they could select any of his albums, and not specifically this one. But what do I know?
I should probably give a neutral 3/5 grade to this one, as it's out of my cultural sphere of reference. And yet it's hard for me to remain neutral ... a) Most definitely, this music does not sound as tight and intense as the one of Fela. b) Whenever Koffi sings or speaks in French (my native language), his lyrics reach cringeworthy levels I won't even address here. c) The r*pe allegations.
Oops, my bad. French courts of law finally stated that Koffi's minor dancer might not have been the victim of SA from him after all. Koffi just kidnapped her, you see. Just as he kicked another dancer onstage, and didn't strangle her right away. We're all feeling better now, aren't we?
1/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
6 for more general purposes (5 + 1)
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter (including this one)
De La Soul
5/5
De La Soul would not be my first pick from the Native Tongues collective (which also included A Tribe Called Quest and Jungle Brothers), but this debut is the trio in all their "Daisy Age" regalia, and it was a little revolution in hip hop, kiddies. Not that you would necessarily perceive it that clearly decades after the fact.
What's a little strange about De La Soul is that most of their subsequent albums during the nineties were probably as good as this one, and maybe even aged a little better. In all objectivity, *3 Feet High And Rising* shows the rappers' sound not exactly fully formed, contrary to *Stakes Is High*, for instance. Follow-up LP *De La Soul Is Dead*, from whom the exciting single version of "Ring Ring Ring" was extracted, also harbors a more interesting album concept at its heart (essentially killing the Daisy Age trend though a more sardonic view of the band's artistry).
Besides, and like a lot of great hip hop albums, even the most legendary one, this debut is a little too long (even though this could be argued against *De La Soul Is Dead* as well). And sometimes, it even becomes difficult to separate the (native) tongue-in-cheek skits from the earnest cuts.
Taken together, all those aspects *could* work against the idea of including the album in the list... BUT, and as said earlier, this record -- even if not as good as JB's *Down By The Forces Of Nature* or ATCQ's *The Low End Theory* -- was a small revolution in and by itself. Here were three young man breaking new ground in hip hop by refusing all the clichés associated with the genre, whether hardcore rap or commercial ditties. And of course, it's got some absolutely essential tracks: catchy "Me Myself and I", atmospheric real opener "The Magic Number", "Potholes In My Lawn", the smoooooth and jaw-dropping "Buddy" (featuring the Jungle Bros and Q-Tip from ATCQ), or "Eye Know", nicely sampling Otis Redding's whistling from "(Sitting On) The Dock Of The Bay". As for the lyrics, they are sometimes so oblique and obfuscated they (unwittingly?) become high art. Like, it looks like said lyrics are firing on all cylinders, and yet the three boys had such idiosyncratic code words and imagery, it may become a whole surreal adventure to try to make sense of it all.
I hesitated to give a 4/5 grade to this one. And then I listened to the goofy skit "Transmitting Live From Mars", shrewdly sampling language lessons recorded for cassette tapes (you got to be as old as I am to understand what I'm talking about here) :
"Écoutez, "à midi"
Quelle heure est-il?
Il est midi
C'est l'heure de déjeuner
Qu'est-ce qu'il y a à manger?
Des saucisses, sans doute
Écoutez et répétez, "à midi"
à midi
à midi
Quelle heure est-il?
Quelle heure?
Quelle heure
Est-il?
Est-il?
Quelle heure est-il?
Il est midi, midi, midi
Il est midi
Il est midi
C'est l'heure de déjeuner
C'est l'heure
C'est l'heure de déjeuner
De déjeuner
C'est l'heure de déjeuner
Qu'est-ce qu'il y a à manger?
Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?"
Only now do I remember how that skit made me roll on the floor with laughter at the time, so absurd it is. "What is there to eat?" "Probably sausages..." (inexplicably said with a very despondent tone of voice by the French woman on the tape).
Yeah, as you've probably guessed, I'm French myself. And this fond memory gives me the extra half-point I needed to include this LP in my gallery. 😀
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 434 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 257
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 319
Tom Waits
4/5
Out of the now classic trilogy of Tom Waits albums that completely renewed and reinvigorated his music during the eighties (*Swordfishtrombone*, *Rain Dogs* and *Frank's Wild Years*), you got to to at least include one. It's very rare that an artist so convincingly and so radically alters his craft ten or fifteen years into his career. Tom Waits did it effortlessly, or so it seems. The kitchen sink approach and the Brechtian overtones had always been there before, but in *Swordfishtrombone* and the two albums that followed, they're put in the foreground, thanks to all sorts of off-kilter instrumentations giving more distinctive Old Europe flavors to the Californian singer-songwriter's tunes. The percussions provided by Victor Feldman (who also played for Steely Dan!), including that wonderful marimba, are, simply put, moody as f*ck. But the most obvious element in the recipe is still Tom, who accentuates the growls and the theatrical shenanigans on his vocal performances in quite an incredible fashion. It can be a little off-putting on first listens, but once you get your footing in those new whereabouts, it quickly becomes a wonderful experience. "Underground" is a stellar opener -- granting "stellar" is a word that can be used for songs reeking with the stench of sewers! "16 Shells From A 30.6" is a fun deranged bluesy number, and "In The Neighborhood", where Waits paints the portrait of a working-class urban area, is a very touching impressionistic moment.
The thing is, follow-up LP *Rain Dogs* is even better at this cinematic, evocative game, and it has the good taste to add lots of memorable ballads in the vein of "In The Neighborhood" in between the same sort of theatrics. Which nicely amplifies the dynamics of that other LP's (admittedly longer) tracklist. So for me, *Rain Dogs* is the *ideal* album to keep in a list such as this one if you want to represent that pivotal era of Tom Waits' career. *Swordfishtrombone* has better chances to be included in my own list compared to *Frank Wild's Years*, true... But 1001 is a finite number after all, so I can't guarantee it.
Now come on, Tom, I can see you sulking from the other side of the bar's counter... Don't give me that, you know it's impossible to welcome the whole neighborhood into this seedy dive. Come on, chin up, let me buy you a drink... Bartender! The next round's on me, alright?
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
King Crimson
5/5
Probably my third favourite King Crimson album, maybe even my second (it's always between this one and *Red* for me -- and of course, debut *In The Court Of The Crimson King* is impregnable), *Lark's Tongues In Aspic* is not mere prog-rock, it's prog-rock with a bite. King Crimson mark III were verging close to nascent metal at the time, and it's what made this record age with grace. Some parts of it even unwittingly foretell post-rock, like that hectic, abrasive and obsessive violin and/or viola performance by David Cross in the opening cut giving its name to the album. Given that post-rock is *never* represented in this list (barring one exception), I'm glad that one of its ancestors is here at least. The eastern European and classical influences sure explain the originality of the sound, as wikipedia recalls us, but the most striking thing for me is the way that all the different influences mesh together. Sounding hard one time, pretty trippy in another, cerebral and yet moving in one moment (the wonderful "Exiles"), fun, groovy and playful in another ("Easy Money"), this LP has a very nice sense of balance to make its admittedly excessive aesthetics sound more accessible.
Fun fact for those who know close to nothing about King Crimson. The two parts of the composition "Lark's Tongues In Aspic", opening and closing the proceedings, are just a start here. In the two decades to come, bandleader Robert Fripp would continue to release new parts in the same compositional vein to that instrumental, and include them in other King Crimson's albums. What's mind-boggling about that, is that the renewed line-ups of musicians and music styles used in subsequent eras of King Crimson are very different from the ones the band had during the early seventies. And yet those new parts to "Lark's Tongues In Aspic" never felt out of place in their new surroundings. If this isn't evidence enough that the music on this album is prophetic, I don't know what is.
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 435 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 258
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 319
David Ackles
1/5
List of pivotal and/or terrific albums NOT listed in Dimery's book that would put the slot taken by David Ackles to FAR better use:
Nina Simone - Little Girl Blue
Nina Simone - I Put A Spell On You
Nina Simone - Pastel Blues
John Coltrane - Blue Train
John Coltrane - Giant Steps
John Coltrane - Africa / Brass or My Favorite Things
Ornette Coleman - The Shape Of Jazz To Come
Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um
Mike Oldfield - Ommadawn
Adolescents - Adolescents
Laurie Anderson - Big Science
Dead Boys - Loud Young And Snotty
The Wipers - IsThis Real?
The Wipers - Youth Of America
Beastie Boys - Check Your Head
Vangelis - Blade Runner
NOFX - Punk In Drublic
Tori Amos - Under The Pink
Björk - Homogenic
Björk - Post
Fugazi - The Argument
Fugazi - Red Medicine
Fugazi - In On The Kill Taker
The Breeders - Last Splash
Mogwai - Young Team
Shellac - At Action Park
Weezer - Weezer (blue album)
The Posies - Frosting On the Beater (and maybe Amazing Disgrace?)
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - F♯ A♯ ∞
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Yanqui UXO
Grandaddy - The Sophtware Slump
Grandaddy- Sumday
Grandaddy - Under The Western Freeway
Sonic Youth - Washing Machine
Refused - The Shaped Of Punk To Come
Low - Things We Lost In The Fire
mclusky - Mclusky Do Dallas
Converge - Jane Doe
Mogwai - Happy Songs For Happy People
Sigur Rós - Kveikur -
Jay Reatard - Blood Visions
Women - Public Strains
Vietcong - Vietcong
IDLES - Brutalism -
IDLES - Joy As An Act Of Resistance
Lana Del Rey - Norman F*cking Rockwell
Low - Double Negative
Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Push The Sky Away
Big Thief - Capacity
Big Thief - Masterpiece
Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
Fontaines DC - Dogrel
Fontaines DC - Romance
Wet Leg - Wet Leg
Radioactivity - Radioactivity
Nick Wheeldon's Demon Hosts - Gift
Charli XCX – Brat
Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us
Coilguns -Odd Love
Chat Pile – God’s Country or Cool World
Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee
Ty Segall - Twins
Jamie xx - In Colours
Billie Eilish - When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go
IDLES - Crawler
Low - Hey What
Black Country New Road - Ants From Up There
Young Fathers - Cocoa Sugar
Lankum – False Lankum
Protomartyr - Ultimate Success Today or The Agent Intellect or Relatives In Descent
Run The Jewels - RTJ 4
Father John Misty - Mahashmashana
Crack Cloud - Pain Olympics
Lana Del Rey - Uktraviolence
Shame - Songs Of Devotion
That's around 75 albums. Pretty sure there are many more of them that could deserve that slot as well. And here's the main thing to remember: there's more soul and vital energy in *a single second* taken from each one of those records than in the hackneyed music-hall borefest of Ackles' *American Gothic* taken as a whole.
This album indeed painfully tries to follow the footsteps of Jacques Brel, Scott Walker and Tim Hardin, yet in his wordy endeavors, Ackles forgot that even narrative-driven singer-songwriters as the ones mentioned here never left aside genuine musicality and enticing harmonies in their songs. Musically speaking, *American Gothic* sounds incredibly flat. And given that David Ackles was not a stellar singer anyway...
1/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 435
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 258
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 320 (including this one)
Björk
5/5
I will repeat myself, but one of the most baffling mistakes in the 1001 Albums book is that *Post* and *Homogenic* are missing in it. Selecting *Debut* makes sense, *Medulla* and *Vulnicura* a little less so -- even if I'm always happy to see Björk's face pop out on this app -- but if *really* you want to represent the Icelandic diva's huge impact in the music world (and culture at large), you just got to include her second and third solo albums, period.
What about *Vespertine*, then? Well, in some sense, it meticulously follows the footsteps initiated with *Homogenic*, and as such, it's the last step of Björk's upward curve from the late nineties to the early noughts -- just like when you are hiking on the breathtaking mountains of Iceland, to finally reach a scenic plateau where you can stand, look back, and admire the wonderful path you've taken so far. Sometimes, the journey matters more than the destination. But the destination is so beautiful here on a general level, that it makes this particular step as crucial as the ones that preceded it.
Compared to *Homogenic*, the rhythms and sonic landscapes are somewhat less rough, more inviting or glossier to the touch, thanks to guests such as Danish electronic artist Thomas Knack, the off-kikter duo of American programmers Matmos, or harpist Zeena Parkins. You have crystalline music boxes, dreamy choirs and cozier moods. It's as if the lava that clashed with ice on "Homogenic" had now solidified, allowing you to tread on a firmer ground to explore more terrain. It's a listening experience that's a little less adventurous than what occured before during the hike, admittedly, and with some more complacent (or at times suddenly weirder) dynamics in the second half of the album. Yet I guess most of the other songs are also very digestible or accessible to general audiences, hence why this album ended up in Dimery's list, maybe.
That being said, it's still 100% Björk, which means that the glacial surroundings and the elated vocals are still there to take you to unprecedented heights in the realm of electronic music. Opener "Hidden Place" turns an erotic tryst between the singer and her new lover into a whole fantasy quest of epic dimensions, thanks to that insane choir in the background, supported by one of the most enticing electronic rhythm patterns ever written. Subdued and subtle "Cocoon" explores post-orgasmic bliss in an incredibly poetic fashion (also strikingly graphic at times). Björk here proves that she's equally at ease singing in soft, hushed tones, belying her unwarranted reputation as a sole purveyor of theatrics and drama. "Undo" is part a meditative, introspective search for meaning, and part another epic adventure transporting you to realms of the soul yet unseen, "Pagan Poetry" is tense and poignant in its new exploration of physical and emotional attachment, and closer "Unison" is filled with a fragile yet also wide-eyed sense of hope for the future. "I never thought I would compromise,' the young woman sings, discovering that she doesn't need to master her surroundings and love interests to master and channel her own well of surging emotions. Yielding to the other, surrending yourself, and finding out who you really are in the process, this is what Björk asks of herself here, and if you manage to do the same, you will end up receiving more than what you gave in the first place so as to finally open your heart to this beautiful LP, even for the vast majority of the other tracks I haven't mentioned here. "Undo," the Icelandic genius constantly suggests us in *Vespertine*. Sometimes reaching bliss is just a question of how to let go.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 436 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 258
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 319
U2
5/5
The one with "The Fly". The one with "Mysterious Ways". The one with "Even Better Than The Real Thing". The one with "Until The End Of The World". And finally, yes, the one with "ONE".
To be a little more specific, it's the one album where U2 realized they could go for somewhat more abrasive moods and off-kilter, borderline "industrial" flourishes at times, along with a sly, more cynical outlook with postmodernist overtones, instead of their usual wide-eyed elatedness. Given that you also have a fair share of ballads and heartfelt feelings in the record (such as the emotions found in "One"), the whole is quite well-balanced, allowing the Irish band to enter the nineties without looking too much at odds with the quick sonic evolution of those pivotal years, and therefore prolonging their relevance for a little while (as sales figures proved). The times they were a-changing *again* and heading to Berlin right after the fall of the wall, along with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois as producers to catch the mood of those years, was probably the right move. Up to that point, Bono, The Edge and co. had always been sly foxes, both artistically and business-wise, and *Achtung Baby* didn't disappoint on that front. But what really matters is that the music still had the distinctive U2 touch in spite of the recent change of mood. *Achtung Baby* was not exactly the same sort of work of the band had accomplished before. And yet they managed to stay as relevant as they were for pop culture at large. Some walls have fallen sooner because of erosion or unpredictable revolutions, after all.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 437 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 258
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 319
Manu Chao
4/5
If you lived in France around 1998 or 1999, there was no way you could escape this album, it was just everywhere (to the displeasure of my hardcore punk friends, lol). Manu Chao has Spanish origins on his father's side, and he drew inspiration from his many travels in South America and even recorded parts of the album there on his laptop, but he is also French, you see. And he was already a celebrity in French alternative circles thanks to his iconic former band La Mano Negra. *Clandestino* is his début, and also, his crowning achievement as a solo artist. And whether you like the album or not, you just can't deny the man had a singular vision for his music, which interestingly, he found through a trial-and-error process related to his fragile psychological mindset during his travels.
Said insecurity somehow fit with other stories told about Chao. I for instance heard that he could sometimes be a little tyrannical with outside musicians in the studio. Other people say he pillaged the works of obscure music players he met during those travels in the Spanish-speaking parts of the world. But maybe those stories were just unfounded rumours...
Anyways, the tones are here softer, more minimal and more polished than in La Mano Negra (even though seeing Chao play live with his new band proved that he could still be very excited, hectic and even totally bonkers on stage). More importantly, the result is as evocative and cinematic as what Manu had accomplished with La Mano Negra, and probably more accessible for the masses, as the international success of this album proved.
I didn't immediately like *Clandestino* though. I slowly came in terms with it, and now readily recognize it conveys a quite timeless atmosphere. And the stories around the record only emphasize its singular quality today. Sure, its 'global' sounds can come off as 'gimmicky' at times, like a laboratory version of the sort of music you hear very far from home, here recreated through incomplete snippets and blurry memories. But that's exactly where the impressionistic poetry of the music also surges. Sometimes there are graceful ways to embrace clichés. And Manu Chao has certainly found an interesting and evocative way to do it here.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums,.
9/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 438 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 258
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 319
Rahul Dev Burman
4/5
It was quite a fun listen overall, and I guess that Bollywood soundtrack was selected because of its tongue-in-cheeks winks to Western music, sprinkling the mix with references a non-Indian listener might find amusing or entertaining going from a lot of Ennio Morricone-adjacent pieces to funk (the one about KC And The Sunshine Band's "That's The Way (I Like It)" on "One Two Cha Cha Cha" had me laugh out loud). The moods and tones are also varied, and can make up for enticing, vintage background music. And the compositional work and arrangements are often stellar.
That said, I'm not sure those assets are enough to include that album in a list of mandatory listens. We're reaching the limits (and even the slight absurdity, let's admit it) of the 1001 Albums project here. I bet there are dozens of other great Bollywood soundtracks out there, given how pivotal music is in the Indian film industry. I dunno... Maybe this album should be presented in a separate book listing motion picture soundtracks instead.
I shouldn't even grade this thing. Going for a pretty positive one, because the record isn't bad by all means. It's just that its fun parts are very derivative anyway, which is a very conscious choice from its composer, and therefore not a flaw. And yes, there are also beautiful songs in that record. Yet until I know more about Bollywood music, if I ever do so one day, I won't decide in one way or another if this should be a mandatory listen for everyone.
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
Muddy Waters
4/5
Of course, the iconic song opening the proceedings -- here in a later, pristine version whose timeless production values slap... hard (again and again) -- is worth the detour, absolutely. The thing is, everything after sounds a little too predictable, repetitive and middle-of-the-road for me. I readily recognize that the recordings and the energy of the performances are top-notch. And I admit I don't have much of an ear for original blues, generally speaking, so maybe my own tastes and sensibilities prevent me from estimating this record for what it's objectively worth. Also, I already have this later version of "Mannish Boy" in my CD collection, as it's part of the first soundtrack of The Sopranos TV series, that I must have listened to dozens and dozens of times. So I don't really see why I should add the album it's from to my collection now.
I'm leaving the door open for *Hard Again* for my own list, though. Maybe one day, I'll truly "get" the blues, lol.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4, a good chunk of that grade owing to the cultural importance of the opener.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 438
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 260 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 319
Franz Ferdinand
5/5
I kind of hesitated between a 4/5 and a 5/5 grade for this debut, because in a sense, I feel like you had to be there in 2004 to understand the impact of this album at the time, and I'm always wary of misplaced nostalgia when it comes to this list.
Then again, the first side of this record is pitch-perfect, as exemplified in the punch of absolute hit "Take Me Out", with its very original structure suggesting two songs copy-and-pasted together, yet displaying a whole coming off as groovy and instantly memorable. "The Dark Of The Matinee" and "Auf Achse" are also incredible, belying the unwarranted reputation of a band coming from the dreadful "landfill indie" era, which nonetheless had very distinctive aesthetics inspired from older luminaries going from Talking Heads to Blur, Suede, dance-punk and Squeeze (yet still unmistakably theirs as a whole). Here were enough stellar assets to make the noughts band easily stand out from the pack, to be honest.
The second side is admittedly a little less impressive, even if the tongue-in-cheek homoeroticism of "Michael" and the catchiness of "Come On Home" are still providing nice thrills. But fuck it, I think I still need this artsy, iconic, subliminally brutalist album cover in my gallery anyway.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 439 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 260
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 319
Goldie
4/5
Yes, of course, "jungle" went out of fashion only a few years after this release, which is why I can understand *some* of the criticisms addressed to this double-CD album. I know a guy around 1995 who had sold his relatively impressive indie-rock record collection to buy loads of expensive drum and bass white label vinyls. He then moonlit as a DJ in that style in my small hometown. You could sense he really thought this was the music of the future. Oh, the irony. That bloke left town around the time the chips fell, and no one ever saw him again. I wonder what became of him....
Not that he was *totally* wrong to feel this enthused, however. Drum and bass sounds may have aged to an obvious extent (most electronic subgenres do), yet that idea of using sped-up hip hop breakbeats to make dancers lose their shit is still very influential today. See the nascent footwork subgenre, or how drum and bass patterns themselves resurface in the works of artists of all stripes, at least once in a while...
So maybe you shouldn't heed the folks in this app section when they fail to reckon how pivotal this album is for electronic music at large. The three-part title track alone (especially its opening section "Inner City Life") exemplifies everything that can be labelled as "iconic" in Goldie's music, beyond the typically hectic rhythm patterns themselves. You've got the ominous synthetic layerings, the soulful vocals of Diane Charlemagne (RIP), and the crushing descending basslines blasting out of your speakers. And after that epic 20-minute-opener, whose length is perfectly justified to either convey a cinematic mood (this type of music can be *very* cinematic), or to convey the feeling of what's going on on a dancefloor during a wild night out, Goldie then switches and rearranges.all the different pieces of that initial puzzle in various manners, mostly to good or great effects. Apart for an all-too-safe trip-hop-adjacent "State Of Mind" (supposed to be a breather in the tracklist, but actually a lengthy snoozefest), everything indeed sounds pitch-perfect on the first disc. "Saint Angel" and "This Is A Bad" most specifically slap hard.
The second disc starts strong with "A Sense Of Rage", but then the album loses its way and its momentum a little, unfortunately. When Charlemagne's vocals reappear for some cuts, the whole thing sounds less imaginative overall, more like on an automatic pilot mode. Most of the compositions on the second part are actually older tracks and singles Goldie had written and recorded in the years leading to the album. It's still pretty impressive that, in that early work (a lesser one that yet turned him into a household name for specialized British dancefloors), the sound of the album was already fully-formed. Those cuts are not re-recordings, they were just remastered along with the subsequent tracks directly written for the album. And sonically speaking, you can't notice any difference between the two sorts of tracks.
Of course, keeping the best material on a single CD would have created a stronger offering. But it's a reproach you can basically address to all double-albums out there. Now, decades after the fact, it feels nice to have all those early singles documented on the second disc. And honestly, if only disc one existed, *Timeless* would still be an apt candidate for this lis anyway
4/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 440 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 260
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 319
Patti Smith
5/5
I'm a "music-first, lyrics-later" person, and accordingly, I've always had trouble enjoying the most theatrical and conceptual cuts on this album (like "Land" or "Birdland"), whether as background music or even as in more focused listening sessions -- probably because harmonically speaking, the music is very linear, or not very sophisticated when it comes to the chord sequences. After all, the first section of "Land" is basically a rehash of the album's opener, and it's not particularly striking music on paper. Likewise, Patti's voice can be grating if you're not entirely focusing on her lyrics. I've just played it while we were eating as a family tonight. And it was more static in our ears than a provider of an enticing mood for everyone involved.
But maybe that's all for the best that this music still sounds inadequate in a bourgeois or "normative" setting decades after it's release. Because when you *do* listen to Patti's words and performance, oh boy, it becomes a one-of-a-kind epic, poetic adventure. Rare are the albums when the difference between the two listening approaches is so telling.
And then, as far as the music is only concerned, the one on opener "In Excelsior Deo" (which I mentioned earlier), followed by the iconic cover of Van Morrison's "Gloria", definitely manages to equal the original source of inspiration, which is no small feat. Because as "unoriginal" as this music is, it also displays an energy that sounds like no other one on Earth. And so does the one of "Free Money" or "Break It Up". There, what might sound annoying or even grating on casual listens becomes a mystical experience. Especially Patti Smith's fascinating vocal performance. I mean, the line opening the album says it all, doesn't it? And so do the last moments of eerie closer "Elegie", filled with a sense of dread about the dead that borders on mysticism as well. Here was a new sort of prophetess, and you just can't deny that what Smith attempted to do on this debut was bound to be high art first or never exist at all.
So yeah, maybe this record has been a tad bit overrated by the "critics" when it came out. But it's still so distinctive, and such a harbinger of so many great things to come -- mostly for female-fronted rock and punk bands -- that absolutely, it's got to be in this list. And also mine, I guess.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 441 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 260
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 319
The Everly Brothers
3/5
The spirit of Take That, A-ha and One Direction, if not their music, already existed during the late fifties / early sixties, as this album proves. Of course, boys bands from that time period have some sort of timeless cinematic charm. But they're boys bands nonetheless. You still have stellar work on the vocal harmonies, of course. Oh and you have the original version of "Love Hurts", then made even more famous by Roy Orbison, Gram Parsons, Nazareth or Traffic's Jim Capaldi. Enough to grant the two playboys three stars, I guess. But not enough to include them in my own list. Let's just be serious for one second.
Un point en français pour mes chers compatriotes s'étant éventuellement égaré dans cette section de "reviews". Maintenant je connais aussi la chanson adaptée par l'équipe artistique de Claude François pour son "Belles, Belles, Belles", originellement écrite par un des frères Everly sur ce disque. On notera juste que le tube des yéyés de Claude François suit de fait la version bien plus enlevée enregistrée par Eddie Hodges que le morceau original. Même pour les chansons qu'ils écrivaient eux-mêmes, les deux frangins passent définitivement comme responsables d'interprétations très "vanilla" du bon vieux rock de grand-papa. Si vous voulez bien me passez l'anglicisme ici...
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 441
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 260
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 320 (including this one)
Beatles
4/5
You can't have *all* the Beatles albums in this list, can you? I love the (relatively less known) opener "It Won't Be Long", and of course "All My Loving" is a classic. The covers of early American rock'n'roll staple songs are pretty cool, but it's not why we remember The Beatles today. Apart from that, *With The Beatles* sounds like a transition to greater things. This LP, along with the charming yet relatively subdued *Beatles For Sale*, are the two Fab Four records I'm not considering for my own list. *Let It Be* is also an arguable choice I guess, but as the last studio album the band released, Its historical importance cannot be underestimated. Now here's the most important takeaway : every other Beatles album should be on a list such as this one, ideally. And the mere fact that the number of LPs I will keep out from mine is WAY lower than the numbers of keepers speaks volumes about the cultural behemoth that the Beatles still are today.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter (including this one)
The Bees
3/5
To be honest, I didn't listen to this album. It never happened before, I never left a review without doing so, but given the description of this album's music, its obvious lack of stakes, and the reviews in here, it's pretty obvious it's not gonna be in my own list. I'll listen to it later. Hope I'm not wrong. Leaving a neutral grade here, just to err on the side of caution. I usually write a countdown of albums left to review and mention if the current one is gonna be in my list. But I'm already too bored to do so.
Napalm Death
3/5
Hugely influential for countless acts in an admittedly niche extreme genre. But borderline unlistenable today, even for the acts Napalm Death influenced?
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
The Cure
5/5
First album of the "trilogy". Before *Seventeen Seconds*, The Cure already managed to leave a huge imprint with the "Killing An Arab" / "Boys Don't Cry" / "10:15 Saturday Night" / *Three Imaginary Boys* early era. But their true legend started there, with that second album digging one single gloomy groove until it lives rent-free in your soul. You can't beat "Play For Today", "In Your House" and most specifically "A Forest". Except on subsequent albums, that is. 5 stars, what else?
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 442 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 262
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 321
U2
5/5
Two notable things about U2's *War*: first you have its couple of absolutely iconic "political" hits "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "New Year's Day", plus a couple of other great bangers after them. And secondly, people have now forgotten about that, but U2 were still kind of considered as a post-punk band at the time, and *War*, coming off at the tail end of said early post-punk period in the Irish band's career, definitely has a distinctive sort of energy and freshness going on for itself. One that would soon disappear for more grandiose or less spontaneous endeavors. And this for better of for worse.
Guess I have a question in my mind here. And that question is: what if *War* was U2's best album after all?
I can already hear cries of protest, but if you think of it, the more you're away from the punk explosion in the timeline of rock music, the more U2 albums gave lots of munitions to the band's haters. "Pompous", "Stilted", "Unnecessarily sentimental" were the words written on those bullets. Maybe the real "war" had not truly started by 1983. And this is coming from someone who really likes *Achtung Baby*, for instance. Was the band playing on *War* still immune to those sorts of bullets. Your guess is as good as mine. But I'd tend to say it was.
Also, let's be honest for one second here. What was offered to fans of glorious rock in 1983, apart from REM's *Murmur*? Violent Femmes were great but were all about acoustic guitars. New Order were already exploring a more synthetic approach. Wipers were virtually unknown and far too punk and abrasive for broad tastes anyway. And Echo And The Bunny men were deep into their *Porcupine* transitory period, and not yet winning the hearts they would win with *Ocean Rain*. So who was left standing among the rubble (at least in the British Isles)? Yep, you get it now. F*cking U2.
All of this explains my near-perfect grade, I imagine...
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 443 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 262
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 321
Funkadelic
3/5
Sure, George Clinton's Funkadelic / Parliament P-Funk collective offers an important act in music history, and the title-track is a pretty groovy. The thing is, whether I'm right or wrong about this, I feel like Funkadelic's *Maggot Brain* and Parliament's *Mothership Connection* are enough to represent that particular corner of the music world in KY own list of 1001 albums you must listen to before you die. I'm snowed under with work today, and I don't have the time to return to the album in details (especially given that Spotify link is pretty incomplete and I only have a Funkadelic compilation at home), so I'll leave the door open to *One Nation Under A Groove*. But when will I have time to return to it? It would be nice if my nation was under that groove indeed and that album played in supermarkets when I'm doing errands. Unfortunately, it's mostly Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter these days... Bummer.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
The Waterboys
3/5
Newsflash: what I knew about the Waterboys so far bored me to tears, but with this record drawing on more traditional folk tones (both from Ireland and The US), I soon realized I was up for a pleasant surprise. Some of the songs are pretty moving, and with this record's production values favoring more acoustic tones, you don't have that horrible guitar and gated drum sound typical of the eighties (at least not to that extent). I didn't have the time to listen to the 2nd disc and its session outtakes but it doesn't matter. I'm leaving the door open for this one...
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 443
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 264 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 321
Sisters Of Mercy
1/5
Nope. Hard pass. Love early gritty works by Sister Of Mercy, but as soon as they got sanitized by eighties sonic aesthetics, I lost all interest in them. See also the three reviews topping this section. The description of the first is spot on -- even of the 4/5 grade isn't. The grade of the second one is closer to the mark. And the grade of the third is perfect, along with the description.
Funny that another (rather negative) review compares one track to Pixies' "Tame", by the way. The starting points of the two songs are indeed the same. It's just that what follows is WAY different.
Nobody has ever really said that a Pixies song sounded like Sisters Of Mercy in 1989. It's now that you can say that a Sisters Of Mercy song sounds like Pixies. Even if it was released *before* it. If that's not proof that Pixies will endure in public memory and Sisters Of Mercy won't, I don't know what is. 🤷
1/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 443
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 264
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 322 (including this one(
Dolly Parton
3/5
Here I am stricken with the flu, or something close to it, and today's album is a country one--by none other than Dolly Parton in an era earlier than "Jolene", at least if I followed all of this correctly. Country is far from being my favorite genre, and in the haze I'm in, it's hard for me to find redeeming features to this apparently by-the-numbers record (always preferred outlaw country and honky tonk anyway).
The opening title track is pretty enough, but Dolly's high-pitch rant on the livelier second track already gets on my nerves. More of the same after that. "The Mystery Of The Mystery" has strangely metaphysical lyrics, the cutesy yet groovy "Early Morning Breeze" displays strangely original instrumentation, not owing much to C&W, there is quite an original piano part on "The Way I See You", and "Here I Am" has a memorable chorus with soulful background vocals typical of the early seventies. Closer "A Better Place To Live" returns to the annoyingly predictable country shenanigans of the first side, unfortunately.ooks like the second side is whole different album, and honestly, that's all for the best.
I'm too much sick and exhausted to open my shakras today anyway. Going for a neutral grade here, just to err on the side of caution, and then I call it quits. Pretty sure there are a lot of typos in this "review" anyway, and honestly that's all that I can take with C&W today. Pity me folks. Leave a "like" button if you bear with my moaning. *Sneeze*! Good night folks. See you on the other side of the not-so-OK Corral!
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 443
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 265 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 322
Willie Nelson
4/5
Willie Nelson and Booker T. Jones here pair up for what is literally a heist or a hold up : recording classic jazz and broadway standards for an album that would help Nelson cross over from his outlaw country audience to more general ones. It worked fine for him in the charts, and decades later, the LP is still pleasant to listen to -- very dignified, and yet also unobtrusive and unpretentious, even if not particularly challenging. The instrumentation is top-notch of course, Nelson hits all the right buttons as a vocal performer, and the familiarity one can have with those songs can help you appreciate the whole thing for what it is. To this day, I'm still wondering if this album is not a little too "safe", though. But if you picture yourself listening to these songs under a starry vault, as suggested by the record's artwork, maybe you'll fall under its many charms...
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 443
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 266 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 322
The Beta Band
2/5
Someone in Dimery's team (Dimery himself?) had a very strange obsession with The Beta Band---a British act whose leader decided to terminate not long after the release of this third album, apparently because they had not met the commercial success they intended to have. Oh the ego. Yes, a couple of UK critics had hailed the band as some sorts of geniuses, inexplicably, hence maybe the high expectations of said band leader. The thing is, if really that man was sincere in his musical endeavor, did he really need to sell *huge* numbers to motivate himself? Sounds rather proud and capricious to me. Especially when you listen to the music itself, some sort of kitchen-sink, pot pourri-flavored ditties sung through rather banal and bland vocals, lacking all the dynamic marvels someone like Beck had already explored in that genre *ten years before*. Opener *Assessment* is pretty OK. Yet most of everything after is a snoozefest, simply put. File next to "The Bees", also found in the 1001 Albums book. *Yawn*.
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
7/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2), and I'm feeling incredibly generous here
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
(including this one)
Jorge Ben Jor
4/5
OK, the opener "Ponte De Lança Africano" slaps HARD. Don't know the first thing about Jorge Ben, but it's fun to see someone I reckon was already prominent in the bossa-nova and samba-adjacent Brazilian scene explore those sorts of afrobeat-infused funk-rock territories in 1978. The rest is never as impressive -- on a first listen, at least -- but this album is still a great find. Fun to see that Rod Stewart ripped off "Taj Mahal" for the vocal melody of "Do You Think I'm Sexy", by the way. And the eerie synth lines found here and there are also a nice, original touch.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5).
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
Traffic
5/5
Feel like Traffic is a sixties act that has been quite unfairly forgotten so many decades after. I'm not a huge fan of Steve Winwood's solo career, but his first band had a pretty impressive run of albums during the early sixties / early seventies era, and this second LP is probably my favourite in that group of LPs. Of course, "Feelin' Alright" is a massive hit with an infectious chorus, and its inclusion right in the middle of the tracklist helps propel the whole thing until the end. But each and every other cut is worth the detour here. The songs are varied, lively, heartfelt, the arrangements are either fun or sophisticated, and it's just a pleasure for anyone who is interested in that particular era of rock music.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 444 (including this one(
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 267
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 323
The Incredible String Band
5/5
Very tempting to give this one a perfect grade given the bad rep the ISB have gotten on this app (see also: Robert Wyatt's *Rock Bottom* and Einsturzende Neubaten's *Collapse*)...
As stated on the wiki page, each track on *The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter* is closer to a suite than a song, with Celtic folk, rock 'n' roll, gospel, plainsong harmonies, near qawali moments, and North African, Indian and Bahamian sonics meshing together to form a rather perfect union -- obviously ripe with patchouli scent, but still retaining its sheer originality to this day. The near qawali moments are especially striking here. And centerpiece "A Very Cellular Song" -- which includes an ode to mitosis, sung from the point of view of an amoeba (!!!) -- is a whole trip in itself, worth the price admission on its own. And the last part of this composition, which saw Robert Plant and Jimmy Page take notes, is an epic affair. You just need to hear that chant "May the Long Time Sun Shine" once, and then your shakras open as if by magic. At least if you're attuned to music that takes a risk and tries to go places...
The only very minor issue I see in this record is that it is missing a more straightforward cut such as *The Hedgehog's Song* (from the preceding album). Believe it or not, The Incredible String Band were good at that, too. But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies....
In the *meantime*, I gotta grade this LP, and I think I'm gonna grade it to something I can round up to a perfect 5. *The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter* is OF its time, sure. But it also feels timeless to me.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 445 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 267
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 323
Dirty Projectors
3/5
Stellar vocal work by the American experimental band, who caught the attention of none other than Björk herself, and led her to perform on the follow-up EP to this album. *Bitte Orca* currently occupies the 26th slot in my own personal ranking of the albums released in 2009. Which is not too bad, I guess. That said, there are so many other pivotal releases from that year that Dimery's book doesn't mention -- including some by acts such as Girls, Fuck Buttons and Vic Chesnutt that could easily be placed in the top 5 positions... You see where I'm heading at here?
Besides, I partly share the impression of many casual listeners on this app : *Bitte Orca* is maybe a little too obfuscated and well-mannered for its own good. You can draw all sorts of wonderful doodles if you want, but once in a while, the economy of a straight line is a thing of wonder as well. It's a lesson those admittedly great musicians and performers seem to have lost along the way. And it's maybe why I don't think this LP, as artfully crafted as it is, will ever go straight to my heart.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 445
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 267
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 324 (including this one)
Orbital
5/5
Looking for the perfect album that can make you experience what it felt like to attend a rave party in the early nineties? Look no further. Orbital's 2nd LP, constructed like a giant mix where each infectious track segues into the next, is THE quintessential album in that genre. Plus it's got pretty melodies and harmonies. Plus it's subliminally conceptual, with its spoken-word interludes using the phasing tecnique once pioneered by Steve Reich. Plus it's got "Halcyon + on + on", taking Opus III's hit "It's A Fine Day" to a whole other cosmic level. And the whole thing aged surprisingly well, too -- probably thanks to its intricate ambient layerings, as essential as the dance / house beats found in this record.
Dadancable (dada and dancable). Perfect 5 for me.
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 446 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 267
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 324
John Prine
3/5
Love the lyrics. "Your Flag Decal..." is for instance a stunning political statement I wish current country music could spell out with as much conviction, spite and wit.
Not so sure about the music, though. "Hello In There" and "Sam Stone" have wonderful arpeggios, but they sound a little too similar, especially for back-to-back tracks like this. And the rest sounds... well, it sounds pretty mundane to me.
I'm a "music first, lyrics later" type of guy. Therefore, I'm gonna wait for this particular country record to grow on me. I know John Prine is a stellar songwriter, as later track "In Spite Of Ourselves" proved (whether the original or the cover version by Viagra Boys). It's just that as a music writer, I don't really think there's anything striking to him, generally speaking...
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 446
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 268 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 324
The Jam
4/5
Much has been said about the naughts retro-rock wave, but if you get interested in the discography of The Jam, active during the late seventies / early eighties, it really looks like Paul Weller and co. were ahead of the curve here (or maybe they were *behind* it, depending on your point of view 🙃). In *Sound Affects*, many pivotal rock figures thus loom over the proceedings : The Kinks, The Who, The Beatles... "Start!" even rips off "Taxman" in such obvious ways it's indeed astonishing Paul McCartney didn't sue. Let's call that "sampling" before samplers became a well-known commodity for artists, and leave it at that for now...
Don't get me wrong, "Sound Affect" is still a "pretty good" album (see what I did here?), partly thanks to its added punk flavours interspersed with the rest of the band's influences. But even if I take into account the fact that this LP never tries to reinvent the wheel I just feel that with the same set of key influences, a later act like Blur, for instance, managed to leave a more lasting legacy, thanks to a more personal and distinctive input -- the sort of input The Jam only pulled off here and there, as busy as they were cosplaying as a mod band first and trying to think out of the box only on a second thought. "That's Entertainment!" is bittersweet and yet very effective earworm, and the deep cuts ("Monday", "Man In The Corner Shop") are as interesting and well-crafted as the obvious hits (the three songs quoted up there, plus maybe "But I'm Different Now" and "Boy About Town"). Yet there's also a quite "meat-and-potatoes" aspect to the whole endeavor, even for the successful tracks. Maybe the real cosplaying Paul Weller indulged in wasn't so much him dressing as a mod, but rather him harnessing the punk flavours of the day to offer something that was, at its real core, strikingly conservative after all.
So... Can *Sound Affects* be labelled as "essential" today, sandwiched as it is between its models from the past and the more idiosyncratic and talented followers of those models in the future (possibly breaking new ground just as they referred to the latter)?
Well, the jury's still out on this one... 🤷
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around a hundred, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 446
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 269 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 324
Radiohead
5/5
A game changer. Think of the impressions left by a dystopian sci-fi novel, and translate them into an album bursting at the seams with killer songs and mind-blowing studio performances (especially Thom Yorke's incredibly moving voice). Simply put, this record is a treasure trove of evocative soundscapes, stellar melodies, and instantly memorable lyrics. From the tight guitar riff opening the DJ Shadow-inspired "Airbag" to the conclusion of "The Tourist", showing Thom begging his own self to "slow down" as he freefalls through the clouds, this masterpiece -- mingling epicness, melancholy and angst in ways only Radiohead can pull off -- is filled to the brim with legendary moments. You have the sad-yet-lively arpeggios, the latin rhythms, and the *many* vocal climaxes of "Paranoid Android", an insane seven-minute composition whose drawer-like structure sounds like nothing else, even to this day -- Thom pleading for the rain to fall down at the end of this song is, all by itself, worth the price of admission here, and with such an early centerpiece within the tracklist, the stakes are raised in ways that are bond to be thrilling for anyone looking out for musical thrills. You also have the absolutely perfect tearjerker "Exit Music (For A Film)" (originally written for Baz Luhrman's *Romeo + Juliet*), another example where the band's use of off-kilter song structures and unexpected chord changes actually strengthens the emotional directness of the song, against all odds. The song's instrumentation is a thing of wonder (that mellotron aping an angelic choir, indeed suggesting the voice of a depressed computer!), and so is its tragic conclusion -- another heartbreaking evidence of Yorke's knack for devastating vocal climaxes. There's also the cosmic scope of cuts such as "Subterranean Homesick Alien" and "Let Down", and the inarguably iconic nature of "Karma Police", "No Surprises" and "Lucky", with so many great moments in those songs it's simply impossible to mention them all.
Yet beyond the individual songs, it's also both the cohesiveness and the adventurous nature of the LP that continues to amaze today. Radiohead's accomplishment here is difficult to describe: They're both in dread of the future on a thematic level and yet fully embracing it on a musical standpoint. Only two songs still have one foot in the (admittedly recent) past here: full-blown rocker "Electioneering", more in the vein of "The Bends", and trip-hop-adjacent "Climbing Up The Wall". They might be the two songs that don't hold up so well sonically speaking decades after the fact (the songwriting is still impeccable though), and yet what's amazing is that those two tracks would still be the centerpieces of other lesser British rock bands' albums: it's only because those two songs are surrounded by such perfect gems that you can maybe pinpoint them as some sorts of relatively weakest links. Evidence enough that Radiohead went so fast and so far just as they renewed their sound that no one could keep up with them (not even themselves at times). *OK Computer* didn't only make britpop sound outdated the minute it came out. It also blurred the lines between mainstream rock, indie rock, prog rock and electronica in a fashion that is still influential almost 30 years later. *Kid A* would then go even further than that on a conceptual and sonic level. But I guess that's a story for another time, kiddies...
Number of albums left to review: around eighty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 447 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 269
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 32
George Harrison
5/5
The album is notoriously long (it's the first *famous* triple-album), so I'll keep this review short. If you consider the third disc of self-indulgent blues jams as bonus tracks before the latter were named so, it's a really good record, nicely channelling a lot of what was *still* going on during the early seventies (the baba cool mysticism, the Bob Dylan contributions for two great ballads -- "I'd Have You Any Time" and "If Not For You" -- Eric Clapton among the performers, Phil Spector's 'wall of sound' production -- admittedly a little tiring at times on the more grandiose cuts.. ). The chord changes are sometimes supremely exquisite and if the charms of this record are a little quaint once in a while -- never quite reaching the timeless nature of the Beatles' LP -- they can still nicely operate today for anyone invested in that prolific time period. "My Sweet Lord" is a legendary earworm, of course ; and "Isn't It A Pity (version one)" is a touching ode to a loved one, not shying away from the qualms and worries that go with true love ; lively and gargantuan "Wah Wah" displays a one-of-a-kind mood, almost devilish in its profusion of wealth ; in a similar 'wall of sound' vein, "What Is Life" is pretty effective ; "Beware Of Darkness", opening the second disc, sounds both soothing and ominous - if such a thing is possible ; "Ballad Of Sir Frankie Crisp" is as driven and tight as a "ballad" can be (superb guitar and piano work in this one!) ; and "Art Of Dying" is groovy as hell and its tex mex-flavoured are quite infectious. What's peculiar about the record is that the second disc flows even better than the first (even with the extraneous "version 2" of "Isn't It A Pity"). There are "deep cuts" that I won't bother naming in both discs, but the ones on disc two go to more interesting places, I'd say.
So yeah, not perfect. But worthy of a 4.5 grade in my book, which isn't too far off the mark for me.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to a perfect 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around eighty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 448 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 269
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 32
The Specials
3/5
Can't say that the Specials broadening the scope beyond ska a little for their second album yields to an unpleasant listen. Apart from the easy-on-the-ear opening (and closing) cut "Enjoy Yourself", *More Specials* has its share of moody hidden gems, like "Man At C&A", and even more crucially, the frankly incredible "International Jet Set". Call to hedonism are here a nice, snarling way to underline the topics such as mortality, the nuclear threat or, more pointedly, the roasting of the Tory agenda at the start of the eighties.
The thing is, there is still something a little too disjointed in this LP lacking in clear stakes l. Which is a little maddening when you know the terrific non-album singles from that particular era of the band's career ("Ghost Town", "Gangsters"...). Call that a missed opportunity to release a truly 'essential' album.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3).
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
Soft Cell
2/5
Sometimes great singles hide even greater albums. And other times, legendary singles actually hide clearly underwhelming full length records. This is case number 2 here.
File under "the 1001 cover versions (bettering the originals) you must listen to before you die (if you haven't already)". The album that hit single is from can be mentioned in a footnote, though.
2/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
7/10 for more general purposes (5 + 2)
Number of albums left to review: around eighty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 448
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 270
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 325 (including this one)
Harry Nilsson
5/5
Mostly famous for "Gotta Get Up" and the (far more commercially successful) cover of Badfinger's "Without You" -- schmaltzy for sure, but iconic nonetheless --, not to mention the tongue-in-cheek "Coconut" and the more fiery "Jump Into The Fire". The charms of this LP is that it jumps over all sorts of different places, yielding to a messy, dishevelled and yet endearing result. Now if you don't mind, I'm gonna return to bed. It's way too early to write a proper review, and this ain't the sort of album that triggers me to make a somewhat substantial effort. Have a good day, folks.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around eighty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 449 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 270
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 325
Dexys Midnight Runners
1/5
So there was life after "Come On Eileen"? Ouch, it seems there was. If you consider pest, bugs and annoying little critters as "life", that is. What was left of the band wearing suits on the artwork says it all: city traders are just parasites sucking blood for a livelihood after all. I don't know what went in Rowland's head at the time, maybe that was his own ironic way to ape the 'New Romantics' hitting the charts, hence the attempt to sanitize the folk-soul music of Dexy's Midnight Runners and trying to have his cake and eat it too through some vaguely formed "concept" supposedly giving 'substance' to what turned out as very unsubstantial music. I mean, if you try to look at this thing *objectively*... (I very, very rarely use that last adverb to talk about music, you know...). Glad that Rowland's attempt to suck blood out of the audience failed, at least. He probably refused to release a single out of the album because, deep inside, he knew the latter was quite a worthless effort. Under that light, that's very rich that he puts the commercial failure of *Don't Stand Me Down* on his supposed artistic "integrity".
Nope, Mr. Rowland... it's just that whether you consider the art OR the commercial potential of this thing, it is obviously bound to fail on every level. Comparing the self-indulgent, 12 minute-long drivel "This Is What She's Like" to the *Pet Sounds*-era Beach Boys era is probably one of the most misguided takes by professional critics I have ever read (it was a tiny minority of them, fortunately). It's like slapping every good music that has ever been played in the face. Everything is obnoxious in this song: the opening dialogue -- actually pointless and unfunny -- the forced vocal performance, the stilted instrumentation, the drawn-out sections going on for no rational reason, the pretense of reaching narrative and musical genius when the lyrics are so dumb and the chord and harmonies are so bland... Everything in the album is up to this level of... nothingness. Don't even want to go into specifics for the other tracks. Life's too short to spend it on pointless drivel.
The only good news if that now I might be a little more predisposed to consider the contents of Dexy's Midnight Runners first two LPs. But including *Don't Stand Me Down* in a list of 1001 albums you must absolutely listen to...? Get the f*ck outta here. Seriously.
0/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
5/10 for more general purposes (5 for musical competency + 0 for the artistry)
Number of albums left to review: around eighty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 449
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 270
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 326 (including this one)
Syd Barrett
4/5
Sometimes madness has a method. And sometimes, it doesn't, as in here. This is a fascinating album, if not always an easy listen. See also Alexander 'Skip' Pence for that sort of artistic endeavor where mental health issues seem to bring something new on the table. Hints of (post)punk can be found here. But what we mostly have here, are hints of a genius mind slowly sinking into its own solipsistic world. Shine on you, crazy diamond.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 for more general purposes (4/5 for musical competency + 3.5/5 for the artistry + 1 rare bonus point for the contextual aspect and "mythos" around this record).
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
Hole
4/5
*Live Through This* is Hole's magnum opus, and when this follow-up LP was released four years later, the opinionated young adult that I was instantly took it as Courtney Love 'selling out'. See also the hilarious review currently topping this section, paying tribute to Beavis and Butt-Head (folks under 30 will probably be at a loss to understand the "alternative nineties" reference here). All those admittedly understandable reasons can explain why you could consider this record quite derisively overall.
In a way, I still think that Hole decided to "sell out" here, whatever the term really means. Those Fleetwood Mac overtones bobbing though the nineties-like saturated guitars say it all. Yet I also get why Courtney Love couldn't care less about what so-called "alternative" kids would think of her after the different ordeals she had been put through since the release of the prophetically-titled *Live Through This*. Going to California and leaving Seattle behind was probably the best choice she could make to "survive" (what's more "American" than reinventing yourself after a trauma, even if it leads you to apparently "shallower" territories?). Hence the different "new" tones of this album.
More crucially, I've revisited this record quite a few times since it's release, and I admit that a lot of its songs slap. You have the hit singles "Celebrity Skin" and "Malibu", obviously, but also the catchy "Awful", the devastating acoustic ballad "Northern Star" -- obviously drawing from Love's grief after her husband decided to leave this earth -- or the twisted scorcher "Playing Your Song" --proving that Hole had not lost their gritty edge after all. And the epic closer right after that penultimate track, "Petals", is everything you can love Hole for, thanks to its killer chorus and its relentless drive, worthy of a road trip flick. *Celebrity Skin* ends on a double-bang for sure
I also now admit that most of the other tunes are actually pretty good. On the downside, there's the lengthy "Hit So Hard", the pointless ballad "Dying", or the mundane "Boys On The Radio" (without those three cuts, you could have a perfect album, even if one a little too short). But what matters is that there are also the very nice "Reasons To Be Beautiful", the tense "Use Once And Destroy" or the jangle pop, REM-adjacent "Heaven Tonight". In other words, the assets, whether very good or stellar, far outweigh the flaws here.
Interestingly, the unifying "Californian" themes of the album also bring some cohesion and interesting overtones to what is otherwise a distinctively "manufactured" effort. In a sense, the glossy production values add to the 'decadent' or cynical themes found in some of the songs, and help make it a memorable listening experience. Some listeners might discuss the sincerity and authenticity of the whole thing, if only because Billy Corgan officially gave a hand to Courtney and Eric for some of these songs. But whether or not you like the guy and his music, you can't deny he has a knack for earworms, so I guess his input was welcomed here. And what truly matters is that Love's abrasive and sensitive personality still pierces through the gloss and the subtle "pop" recalibrations. All in all, a very pleasurable LP, if not Hole's *true* masterpiece.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 for musical competency + 3.5 for the artistry)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 450 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 326
R.E.M.
4/5
Some REM fans sometimes complain about *Out Of Time*'s happy-go-lucky "Shiny Happy People", but I gotta say that the latter is still ten times better than the frankly obnoxious (and even infectious in all the worst senses of the word) "Stand". It's a song, which simply, I can't... *stand*. And which single-handedly prevented me from listening to this album at first.
Now, here it is, I've vented out my negative feelings. And now, I can serenely state that apart from that particular cut, *Green* is still peak REM. From "Pop Song 89" and "Get Up" to "World Leader Pretend" and "Orange Crush", here is a collection of important, lively and catchy songs by the American band, adding to an already impressive collection of iconic tunes released during the eighties. And on the darkest or moodiest side of things, you also have deeper cuts such as "You Are The Everything", "Hairshirt" and the ominous "I Remember California" that nicely foretell the sorts of folk and/or atmospheric tones that would be found in *Out Of Time* and *Automatic For The People*.
If I'm not mistaken, *Green* is the one REM record from Dimery's list that I once hesitated to place in mine. But today, as I'm listening to the album again, I feel it would be unfair to exclude it (*Stand* notwithstanding). So here we are. Call me a REM fan, I don't care. Without them, you would miss a key piece of the puzzle that rock music has been for seven decades now.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9/10 for more general purposes (5 for musical competency + 4 for the artistry)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 451 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 326
Antony and the Johnsons
5/5
I never knew where to exactly start with Anohni / Antony and the Johnsons. The only record from her I bought was her synth-oriented solo effort *Hopelessness*, which harbors pretty good tunes and tones. But I had an inkling it wasn't the full picture to really grasp why Anohni is considered as an iconic artist. The thing is, everytime I browsed through her other albums, whether the solo ones or the ones with her original band, I didn't fully get it. Maybe it's her distinctive use of vibrato, admittedly an acquired taste for people quickly fed up with "drama" and "mannerism" (as can be witnessed in this review section). Yet I've become a fan of certain "dramatic" performers such as Nina Simone over the years... So it was a bit weird that I still didn't get it for Anohni.
Until today, with this suggestion. "Hope There's Someone" is a stellar opener, and I wonder why it went over my head all these years. The final climax of this song, mixing mystical vocals with that unhinged, seemingly improvised piano performance is a thing of wonder -- probably one of the most beautiful and moving moments of 2005 in retrospect. And what directly follows (the trans ode "My Lady Story", the touching "For Today I Am A Boy") is equally striking. A bit later, "You Are My Sister" (featuring Boy George), and most specifically, the livelier, brass-laden "Fistful Of Love" (with Lou Reed!) open up new avenues. As soon as I listened to this latter song (foretelling the soul-inspired vintage tones I could spot in the recent *My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross*), I was fully sold. I still need to find my footing in the last quarter of the LP, but it matters not. I'm pretty confident I will soon enjoy *I Am A Bird Now* from beginning to end.
Thank you, Mr. Dimery (and kudos for the maker of this app!). For once, it seems that a Mercury Prize has not "doomed" one of its recipients into a career filled with partial letdowns for artists' target audiences. Because Anohni, with or without the Johnsons, has actually managed to create a dedicated fandom around her. Yet I think it's with *this* record that I might become a fan myself, two decades after the fact. And that sort of late recognition doesn't always happen for me.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 452 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 326
Laibach
3/5
When confronted with accusations that they were recycling n*zi and totalitarian aesthetics, the Slovenian act Laibach was quoted as replying with the ambiguous response: "We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter".
Well, that's the thing: Adolf *did* use his brush on canvas during his youth in Vienna, didn't he? Failed fascists, maybe? Because Laibach were... not serious enough??? All I know is that I ended up on the Wikipedia page about the early pictural works the future Third Reich dictator / mass murderer painted as a student in fine arts while listening to this LP. Quite a nonsensical experience, lol.
As goofy and obviously tongue-in-cheek as Laibach's use of totalitarian imagery is (it's obviously a bad taste cosplay act), there's still something quite unsettling in it. Even if it looks like such clownish cosplay routine also aims at provoking questions and reactions in the audience: how on earth is it possible to find something fascinating in those mechanical, 'inhumane' sounds, here delivered with some dubious 'futurist' artwork (the latter even downright inspired by the SS or Stalinist regimes at times -- see those videos!)? And isn't covering Opus' "Life Is Life" (twice! - the first a slower, more ominous version sung in German, and the second as a catchier rendition sung in English) a way to underline that the liberal "west" and its own glorious, "transcendant", arena-friendly aesthetics are actually NOT exempt of that totalitarian impulse? That the latter is actually deeply ingrained inside them? That both systems just might be two sides of the same coin?
That questioning aside, I admit that I have always found those cover versions hilarious (and even thrilling when I'm in playful mood). The thing is, this is an app about *albums* here, not 'singles'. And the awful truth is that as an LP, *Opus Dei* doesn't really hold water. Apart from the two versions of "Life Is Life", you have a barely recognizable Queen song and then.... some experimental industrial-classical forays. With some interesting tones once in a while, sure... except that the latter have been done better elsewhere. Consequently, the original album feels more like an EP than a an album proper, to be honest.
The CD and streaming version have bonus tracks from an actual EP at the end (a soundtrack about... something -- I was too lazy to check). The experimental tones are a bit better in them, ironically. But it's no life-changing experience either.
So let's keep Laibach's name for a book about the 1001 (most extravagant) *singles* you must listen to before you die, and then move on, shall we?
2.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 3.
7.5/10 for more general purposes (5 for general musical competency + 0.5 for some interesting experimental tidbits here and there + 2 for the two cover versions of "Life Is Life")
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 452
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 327 (including this one)
David Bowie
5/5
What can I say? This is a masterpiece. Maybe not the first, given that the rougher-sounding *The Man Who Sold The World* has left equally stellar moments to music history, even if they were less commercially successful at the time. Yet *Hunky Dory* still probably supersedes its predecessor, if only because it saw Bowie properly enacts his will to constantly mutate from one identity to another. It's all spelled out in the opener "Changes", one of three absolutely iconic songs in this album. The other two being "Oh You Pretty Things" and , of course, "Life On Mars?". About the latter, there's quite an interesting story behind it. The story goes that Bowie was first tasked to write the English adaptation of the French hit "Comme d'habitude", sung by Claude François (which would become the overblown *My Way*) but he lost the rights to the song, and so got inspired by the first song's dramatic chord changes to write something at least ten times better. What a genius move. We can all be thankful that he lost those rights, can't we?
There are also three gems that are admittedly a notch less famous in this LP: the moving "Quicksands", the livelier and reckless "Queen Bitch", and the part-moody, part-moving, and part-extravagant closer "The Bewlay Brothers". And if the rest can be considered as "deeper cuts", they are still tunes that are extremely pleasurable to listen to. Especially the best Vaudevillian one of the bunch, "Kooks". As for "Andy Warhol" and "Song For Bob Dylan", they are catchy and playful acoustic guitar-driven winks to two absolutely legendary pop culture figures, with those two songs retrospectively signalling Bowie was on his way to join their ranks. Historical album, the first of many victory laps during David Bowie's career. Of course, it's gonna be in a list such as this!
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately (including this one, I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
Miles Davis
5/5
More like 'Witches Sonic Brew". Not my favourite Miles LP -- in his "free-form" period, for instance I have a stronger lean towards the meditative "In A Silent Way" -- yet you can't deny how groundbreaking the whole thing -- infusing rock and latin tones to jazz -- is. And what a star-studded cast as well. My most preferred contribution within the personnel is Bennie Maupin: his clarinet performance is so dark and ominous! Another "milestone" in a career ripe with them
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5/5 for musical competency + 3.5/5 for the artistry + 1 for the ambition and the stellar, incredibly evocative artwork).
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately (including this one, I've temporarily lost count here)
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
Grizzly Bear
4/5
Sophisticated indie from the late noughts, with many original chord progressions and a couple of off-kilter rhythms thrown in for good measure (see what I did there?). The middle section of this LP is a little too static to fully impress (maybe getting rid of drowsy cuts such as "Dory" and "Ready, Able" wouldn't have harmed what is originally a 52 minute-long album). But the couple of songs starting the LP (the lively and unpredictable "Southern Point", followed by the pop-infused "Two Weeks" and its immediately catchy background vocals) are rather wonderful. And when Grizzly Bear finally wake up from their hibernation on "You Wait For The Others" they indeed prove what they are capable of "when they try and meet the pop-inclined listener halfway" to use Pitchfork's words. Too bad they don't do that as much during the course of this album. Right after this feat, "I Live With You" is a rather interesting and extravagant experiment with strange and obsessive patterns. And closer "Foreground" is an autumnal ballad for the ages, worthy of the best ones penned by Radiohead.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 455
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 327
Gram Parsons
3/5
Posthumous album from one of the progenitors of "country-rock" (sounding way more country than rock, though). Emmylou Harris' vocals are to be heard everywhere, accompanying Gram's voice. Which is nice.
Most highlights are to be found on side two on this one: There's the lively "Live Medley From Northern Quebec", a cover of the saccharine "Love Hurts" that's not exactly the one I would go to (apart from the Everly Brothers release, that would be the Roy Orbison version for me)... but I guess the song is properly covered at least. Then you have the cinematic, exhilarating and fun-as-hell "Ooh Las Vegas", followed by the touching closer "In My Hour Of Darkness".
Not bad, but compared to the *GP* LP, or to Parson's accomplishments with The Flying Burrito Brothers, we're clearly a notch below in terms of overall quality. Parson's "Cosmic American Music" always risked coming off as a little mundane musically speaking, quite ironically given the name (a risk it shared with C&W, generally). And here it straddles that line a little further than on previous releases. Guess the fact it was a posthumous album helped rehabilitate it at some point down the line...
Oh, you do have some stellar arrangements once in a while (the fiddle on opener "Return Of The Grievous Angels" ; the vibes on "Hearts On Fire"). But the chord progressions and the artistic intents are pretty predictable, even in the most effective cuts. The record is varied enough to wake you up from time to time. But never enough to give you decisive jolts of energy. Apart on "Ooh Las Vegas". I really like that one. But it's not enough to make me "keep" this otherwise nice record in my list.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 455
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 328 (including this one).
Turbonegro
4/5
I'm not gonna lie, this is a pretty cool album if you like punk rock infused with glam / Dictators / Stooges-adjacent tones. Just like The Hives, the Scandinavian act had all sorts of aces up its sleeves: efficient production, relentless energy, catchy riffs and sing-alongs (best exemplified by "Get It On" and infectious closer "Good Head", about looking for... blowjobs!), to which you must add a couple of timeless rock'n'roll moments where the band even reach the sky-high levels of The Who during their early-seventies apex (opener "The Age of Pamparius" ; the penultimate "Humiliation Street", with its epic climax and guitar solos, -- which you must absolutely listen to before leaving your impression about the whole album).
Then, I'm not gonna lie either : the lustful, tongue-in-cheek lyrics (and tongue-on-other-body parts-as-well) might turn off some folks who would find that sort of lyrical content heavy-handed at times (or they might turn you on, conversely -- but only if you're sexually-obsessed, lol). Turbonegro's shtick as a faux-gay, leather-laced band redeems those flaws somehow -- sexual proclivities sound more transgressive as seen from the homosexual underdog lens. But that doesn't make the lyrics any brighter, just more ambiguous and open to interpretation than they really are.
As usual, reception of the music and lyrical contents in this LP depends on your own horizon and expectations. And about the latter... are you catching or pitching?
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 455
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 328
Arcade Fire
5/5
I remember that when *The Suburbs* came out, I was largely disappointed. Compared to the first two LPs by Arcade Fire, which said what they had to say without getting lost in unnecessary detours, it was like the Canadian band were getting a little crushed by the weight of their own concept-album this time. You could easily argue that said album would have been better without relatively underwhelming cuts such as "Half Lights" (I and II) or "Wasted Hours", for instance. *Funeral* was a far tighter affair, there's no beating about the bush here. And yet, just because the Grammies belatedly caught Arcade Fire's train and its joyful and/or melancholic coaches, we were supposed to believe *The Suburbs* were their magnum opus? Nope, the "hipsters" had gotten the greatness of the band before, and *The Suburbs* was not the *best* that the band had pulled off so far, even if it became their breakthrough success... Guess the Grammies boomers received the message that Butler and co. were leaning a little closer to Bruce Springsteen's shenanigans in 2010, and in their narrow-minded world, that suddenly made Arcade Fire "important" (whereas they already were before).
That said, and without changing a word of my little rant up there, my "hipster days" are now long gone, and I can recognize that *The Suburbs* is a very good album today, in spite of its unnecessary length and patchy spots here and there. Its first half is particularly solid, thanks to songs such as the title-track, "Ready To Wait", "Modern Man" and "Empty Room". And beyond the cuts sung by Win Butler, it's got the best-ever composition with Régine Chassagne as a lead, the incredibly emotional AND catchy "Sprawl II", obviously winking at Blondie's "Heart Of Glass", and yet still its own thing.
To put things in a nutshell, *The Suburbs* is Arcade Fire's last "essential" album. Everything after felt like a slow demise, both artistically and on a personal level -- due to Win Butler's persona and the (at least 'questionable') things he seems to have done in his private life, now revealed after years of hypocrisy.
It's not even a story I will tell you in another time, kiddies, it's too sad for me to linger there. Maybe I reassure myself a little too much by thinking Butler had not become this caricature of a narcissistic rock star yet, using his status to get away with psychological abuse in his love life when *The Suburbs* came out. All I know is that I won't be too quick to judge the man on a personal level. Individuals lost in a "system" can become gravely flawed, and yet their past artistic achievements somehow stay with you. It all depends on where you draw the line, I guess (but the line *must* be drawn at some point!).
In Arcade Fire's case, it's not so difficult to know where to draw the line, admittedly. Maybe because on an artistic level, no one in his right mind can say that anything after *The Suburbs* is better than what preceded it anyway. And it's not always like that. As a consequence, even if the band's past achievements are somewhat retrospectively tainted for me, they're not *fully* tainted. But I can respect a differing opinion here, of course. It would be very insensitive NOT to do so. I just hope that Butler has now learned from his serious mistakes, just as he said he did. But in any case, that's not for me or anyone to say.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens - *except if personal or somewhat ethical reasons prevent you to go there*: 455 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 328
Les Rythmes Digitales
1/5
Stuart Price is now a pop music producer and he does an awesome job providing stellar disco-adjacent instrumentals for singers such as Dua Lipa or Jesse Ware, helping them hit the charts quite gracefully. He also works with the insanely boring faux-indie act The Killers, but I guess you gotta earn a living when you operate in that part of the music industry. As long as nobody died because of The Killers' duds...
Well, did someone *die*? With a name like that, maybe I should err on the side of caution here...
But I digress. Let's go back to 1999, just like Charli XCX once did (if you know, you know). That was when British-born Stuart more or less started his career under this French moniker, "Les Rythmes Digitales". The name sounds good in French, even though there's a huge grammatical error in it (it should be "Les Rythmes *Digitaux*", "Rythmes" being a masculine noun, and adjectives taking on the 'gender' of the latter in a 'groupe nominal' in my -- admittedly difficult -- native language). But I guess Price was too much in a hurry to catch on Daft Punk and friends' *French Touch* train (while it was still a hot thing) to double-check how correct his idea for a cool artist's name really was... You got to have priorities in life, right?
French grammar and French Touch aside, *Darkdancer* is an absolute borefest that aged so badly you kind of want to put whoever mentioned it in Dimery's book in prison for life. It's not repetitive in a hypnotic way. It's just repetitive in a *poor*, unimaginative way. It's neither joyful nor sullen. It has the emotional range and connotations of a desk lamp with faulty batteries. Textbook one-star album.
Now if someone suggested to add Dua Lipa's *Future Nostalgia* in Dimery's book, I, for one, would certainly consider it as a valid suggestion that could be honestly discussed. But please, oh, please... Not *this*. It's as if you included Picasso, Monet and Cézanne's early childhood doodles in a book about the greatest art masterpieces of all times.
And make no mistake... I'm not saying that Price's *current* work can be considered as up to the level of those painters in the field of modern music. I'm just saying that he has become a gifted and resourceful producer, who is now excellent at what he does, nothing more. Everything in its right place, please.
And you know what? Let's start by ejecting this *Darkdancer* thing from all future editions of the book (if ever it's *still* in the latest ones). We can do this. Together. Let's save the turtles, as someone in this group -- someone wise -- once said.
0/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
5/10 for more general purposes (5 for musical competency + 0 for the artistry)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 455
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 329 (including this one)
The Dandy Warhols
3/5
*Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia* included in a list such as this one > Yes.
Unfortunately, it's not in Dimery's book.
*This* previous album included in the list? > NO.
The second part of side one ("Orange", "I Love You" and even the overrated "Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth", often singled out because of its importance in the *Dig!*-related Dandy Wharhol / BJM feud) are absolute borefests that go nowhere *slow*, both lyrically and musically.
Too bad, because the rest is often livelier and/or pretty good, generally speaking. But you won't find anything there that *Thirteen Tales...* didn't do at least twice better during its best moments.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 455
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 330 (including this one)
Scritti Politti
1/5
In the field of 80s synth pop, Depeche Mode, Tears For Fears, OMD, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Human League, Heaven 17 or Eurythmics had the melodic hooks, the surprising or effective chord changes, some killer choruses, the sometimes-dark or sometimes-elated tones... The hits were great but so where some of the deeper cuts. Heck, even Wham! had some memorable moments going for them.
In comparison, Scritti Polliti had... nothing, or close. A couple of nice arrangements here and there (mostly in "Absolute"), unfortunately drowned in an ocean of cheesiness that lacked clear lines, stakes or memorability. The vocal performance is shy and demure in ways that totally go against the supposedly triumphant textures of the music. And if this thing is competently executed for sure, it ultimately has the emotional range of a desk lamp.
How this band ended up being "successful" is an 80s pop mystery I don't care to solve forty years after the fact. Maybe because large swaths of the target audience were tone-deaf or drawn to surface effects instead of truly powerful music. This is a very judgmental take here for sure, but look at the global score of this record! With unpopular picks such as Einsturzende Neubatten or Robert Wyatt (which I both love), I can understand that the music is too "out there" for general tastes, at least. But for that sort of 80s mainstream drivel, you can bet your boots that the opposite phenomenon occurs and that most people can see through that sort of glossy stuff to understand how void it ultimately is. And I'm glad that they do.
1/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 455
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 331 (including this one)
Blur
5/5
Blur's second-best album after *Parklife*, simply put.
First, it's got the essential one-two punch opening the proceedings, i.e. "Beetlebum" and "Song 2" (which are part of the most iconic Blur songs, along with "Girls And Boys", "To The End" and "Parklife", from... *Parklife*). Sure, "Beetlebum" can be considered as a White-Album-era Beatles pastiche, but it's one that's pulled off in such a stellar way that it just becomes irresistible. The song goes from ominous to elated in a blink, and it's a perfect opener to state what the whole record's about (but more on that in a second). As for "Song 2"... WOO-HOO! That goddamn guitar riff! Those vocals hooks! That sudden turn into a short and oh-so-impactful saturated mayhem! You got to be allergic to simple fun pleasures not to recognize the stroke of genius behind such a banger. Yep, you can use the words "fun" and "genius" in the same sentence. That track is one of Blur's most recognized songs for a reason after all.
Secondly, *Blur* is the album where Albarn and co. understood they had to get out of the dead-end that "Britpop" had become around 1997 (a year where Radiohead also did the same in a strikingly different fashion, by the way). Not that the record doesn't have its share of British references ("M.O.R." still sounds like the Kinks, even if it's on steroids this time around! ; "On Your Own" indeed winks at Bowie, as another reviewer in here smartly remarked ; punky "Chinese Bombs" pays a tongue-in-cheek tribute to The Clash...). Yet clearly, the band had also listened to pivotal American acts such as Pavement, The Flaming Lips or Guided By Voices before recording this thing, yielding to more abrasive or more ambiguous-sounding results. One good example is the lo-fi-albeit-touching Graham Coxon number 'You're So Great" (where the guitarist taking on lead vocal duties in such a vulnerable manner brings unmistakable emotion to the tune). Or it's dreamy and moody cuts such as "Strange News From Another Star", replete with Rhodes piano tones and spacey, echoey soundscapes...
Thirdly, and going beyond the America-against-Britain debate, this adventurous-yet-still-cohesive-enough LP develops a knack for endearing weirdness that makes it stand out from the pack decades after its release. It's those evocative carousel sounds in "Death Of A Party" (and also the quasi-instrumental interlude "Theme From Retro"), suggesting an atmosphere akin to Ray Bradbury or Stephen King yarns. Or it's the equally hypnotic "I'm Just A Killer for Your Love", part trip-hop, part Primal-Scream on valium.
The pop songwriting is rarely left aside in the album though, even in those "weird" cuts, very fortunately. Except on the instrumental closer "Essex Dogs" ending the album on a question mark instead of a bang. Were The Fall or The Residents the key influence here? Your guess is as good as mine... Weird is weird, whether it's British or American. Interesting conclusion, at least, even if a bit underwhelming.
Doesn't matter if the album ends in a valley anyway. The many peaks speak for themselves, don't they? Few bands have managed to reinvent themselves from scratch this gracefully and this effectively. Which is why this record MUST be included in a list such as this one.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 456 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 331
The Pharcyde
5/5
Always a pleasure to return to this gem from the golden age of hip hop, and for once in that realm of laid-back and melodic rap, we're talking about *west coast* hip hop here. From "Oh Shit!" to "Passin' Me By", from "Officer" to the unhinged and loony "Pack The Pipe", *Bizarre Ride II* is a treasure trove, both fun as hell and filled with all sorts of excellent old-school rapping, wild textures and layers. Too bad I don't have the time for a proper review today, but the third one in this section (and first 5-star-graded one) is just perfect anyway.
From that similar hip hop era, wish more people could discover The Goats again. *Tricks Of The Shade* is another unsung masterpiece.
I'm out. Got a ride of my own to catch.
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 457 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 331
Fleet Foxes
5/5
Surely an important album (and debut!), which unreservedly deserves to be in a list such as this one. I can admittedly understand the point of view of listeners saying that there might be something a little too "distant", "cold" and even "plastic" in the strand of folk-music revival practiced by Fleet Foxes. The production and the vocal harmonies are indeed so pristine and "clean-sounding" in this album, maybe even to a fault sometimes. That said, the record also harbors FIVE absolute gems that make it a worthwhile experience overall. Those gems are "White Winter Hymnal", "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song", "Your Protector", "Blue Ridge Mountains" and closer "Oliver James". And in my "book", there are only four other records released in 2008 that can be placed higher than this LP -- namely Portishead's *Third*, Chad VanGaalen's *Soft Airplane", Vampire Weekend's own debut (also eponymous) and Deerhunter's *Microcastle*. So yeah, I think it's a safe bet to predict that there will be room left for Fleet Foxes in my own list of 1001 albums you must listen to before you join folk singers heaven. :)
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 458 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 331
Talking Heads
5/5
Let's get one thing out of the way for starters. Could someone handling this app just erase the "contributions" of the lunatic who kept on leaving stupid salacious "stories" instead of reviews at some point -- stories such as the one currently topping this section for *Remain In Light", for instance, *this one being particularly dumb, predictable and unfunny*. For real, who "liked" that review? (sigh). You could preserve the one said deranged bloke wrote about Napalm Death's *Scum*, because it's obviously his Sistine Chapel -- very graphic and picturesque, and somehow indirectly pertaining to the actual contents of that other album, in a way, lol. But anything else can be scrapped, honestly. It's so dour and tiring. I'm all for free speech and the likes, but the man isn't even among us anymore, he left after 600 hundred albums or so. So who cares, really?
OK, take this as an unfunny joke of my own... I know I'm here to review *albums*, and not to *review other reviews* anyway.
The thing is, I'm not sure of what I could say about Talking Heads' magnum opus that hasn't already be written a hundred times before. "Remain In Light* is their own masterpiece, their own Afrobeat-influenced Sistine Chapel, famously pulled off with the pivotal help of genius producer Brian Eno (and also stellar musicians such as Jon Hassel or King Crimson's Andrian Belew). *Once In A Lifetime* must be among my ten favorite songs ever, so it's the obvious centerpiece here -- one I don't think I will ever be tired of listening to, because there are always some new details that bring me back to it. These days, it's the fact that Brian Eno's voice is actually so prominent alongside David Byrne's vocals for its perfect chorus, for instance... With a calling card like that, how can you *not* explore the album?
And truth be told, large swaths of the whole LP reach those exact same heights. "Born Under Punches" and "Crosseyed and Painless" are infectious white funk machines with catchy hooks and a relentless groove. "Houses In Motion" or "The Great Curve" are less immediate, but they reward repeated listens. And the album's got another absolutely favorite TH song of mine, "Listening Wind", with its suddenly moving and elegiac atmosphere and its not-so-cryptic critique of American economic colonialism. Even so-called "deeper cuts" such as "Seen And Not Seen" (about the psychotic effects of consumer society) and ominous closer "The Overload" (possibly Joy Division-adjacent, or so I hear from a reviewer) are worth the detour here. I can picture myself going out from a projection of *Blade Runner* in 1981 and listening to those songs on my walkman (did they already exist, then?), my head still in the movie's hellish urban landscapes...
Byrne's postmodernist imagination is also on fire for the lyrics (and as some other reviewers pointed out in here, the themes of constant simulacrum, derealization and alienation they suggest are just timeless). And sonic flourishes abound, never so prominent to distract from the overall grooves of the song, and yet still distinctively there to give the flavours needed to take those tracks to a whole other level. That studio-as-an-instrument approach did wonders here (just as it did for Byrne and Eno's collaborative album "My Life In The Bush Of Ghost", another reference point recorded in that same era that sheds light on the way *Remain In Light" was conceptualized and performed in general). Lots of genius brains involved, but lots of heart as well. You don't pull off vocals like that, or insane rhythms sections like this (the Frantz-Weymouth combo), or intricate and out-of-this-world guitar licks like that (Jerry Harrison) without giving out a little sweat. The best of both worlds, and the best album of 1980.
5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
10/10 for more general purposes (5 + 5)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 459 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 331
Incubus
1/5
This streamlined and rather glossy strand of nu-metal aged like milk, even if I readily recognize that the main guitar riff in opener "Privilege" is still ten times better than anything from Linkin Park's *Hybrid Theory*. The thing is, Incubus' music manages to be less offensively risible than Linkin Park only because their melodies are *less* memorable. It's an interesting paradox: would you prefer to have an annoying song stuck in your head all day, or just go through a somewhat bland example of that sort of song and just forget about it right away? As of now, I choose the second option.
Not that the vocal lines can't feel hackneyed or pointless in this album: that lead singer, as competent as he is on a "technical" level, is circling around the same bag of tricks most of the time, and therefore going "nowhere fast" indeed. Speaking of that second song in the LP: there are interesting arrangements going out of the usual nu-metal formula in that particular cut, so I can't deny Incubus isn't *trying* hard once in a while. But going through the rest, you can't help lamenting about how ultimately vacuous and devoid of real stakes this sort of music is. Basically put, it's like a nu-metal version of Pearl Jam going through the motions without putting much imagination into the latter.
So it's gonna be a one-star review for *Make Yourself" no matter what, even if it's gonna be one less overtly critical than my own review of *Hybrid Theory*. Everyone with an open mind for nineties nu-metal-adjacent music should check out Deftones first (masters of gloomy tones and atmosphere, with a knack for emotional intensity and stellar studio performances -- either vocally and instrumentally). THEN, maybe, you can go through stuff like Incubus. When you attempt to write a list such as the one of the 1001 Albums book, you should indeed first single out acts that sound like no other one on earth, and think about the middle fry later. And this in *any* given genre.
1/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 459
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 332 (including this one)
5/5
I have often pestered against some of the choices and omissions of the 1001 Albums book, but I have to admit that without the latter, I would never known this *perfect* record. As early *American* progenitors of prog-rock, Spirit is a blind spot for my friends invested in the latter genre, so drawn are they to *British* acts instead. Likewise, the psychedelic, post-Summer-Of-Love sound present in parts of this album got shadowed by more famous and earlier acts such as Jefferson Airplane or Love. I really, really like the latter, but I can only recognize that the Spirit of *Twelve Dreams...* beats LPs such as *Surrealistic Pillow* or *Forever Changes* out of the park so easily that it's maddening for me that this album has been half-forgotten today. Everything is just *stellar* in this LP, the catchy melodies, the insane arrangements, the soulful vocals... This LP is one of the very best records of 1970, if not of the seventies as a whole. And without Dimery's book, I would have known anything about it.
It all starts with a crazed-out, rather experimental number, "Prelude - Nothin' To Hide", and then proceeds with two absolute bangers, ballad "Nature's Way" and its gorgeous chorus and imaginative chord sequence, followed by the livelier and infectious melodies of "Animal Zoo". "Love Has Found A Way" is another great ballad also returning to more experimental-yet-lush tones (thanks to its vibes arrangement, reversed guitar loops and forward-thinking synth). A bit later, "Mr. Skin" makes a sudden funky left-turn (using the brass section that had already graced the ending of "Prelude", but also an in-turn bouncy, in-turn *fat* Hammond organ). Instrumental "Space Child" then proceeds to another hairpin curve by dabbling into off-kilter shaggadelic psychedelia, here counterbalanced by dreamy piano chords. "When I Touch You" sounds like a power ballad made before the word for it ever existed - fresh and extravagant and relatively *heavy*. "Street Worm" touches upon ragtime and blues and traditional folk and, yeah, proto-hard-rock, once again. "Life Has Just Begun" is a gem of a pop-folk ballad with whiffs of novelty shenanigans (its vocals a bit messy, but *endearingly so*).
And then BAM, "Morning Will Come" sounds like good old rock'n'roll, but it's a song that's so well pulled off that it sounds like an automatic classic (it's actually a power pop victory lap a couple of years before Big Star ever existed). Still wondering why it wasn't used in a *Guardian Of The Galaxy* soundtrack, it would have fitted right in. Finally, closer "Soldier" is one last piano-driven which wouldn't have sounded so out of place in a latter-phase Beatles album (even if the vocals are a little less spectacular than what John and Macca would usually do). It may remind you of the extravagant forays closing *Abbey Road*, or the swan songs within *Let It Be* or even the White Album. American for sure. But still attuned to what was going on in the other side of the pond.
As a bonus track, *Rougher Road* is excellent as well, by the way, a nice document of the apex in Spirit's career. If only "dad-rock" could always feel as imaginative and instantly iconic as this.
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 460 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 332
James Taylor
1/5
Never understood the appeal of James Taylor. Like everything I've heard from him, this album straddles the line between the so-called "freshness" of simple pleasures to mundanity devoid of any real stakes so fast that it's hard for me to take this artist seriously. And the same goes for his vocal performance, so saccharine that it often makes me feel queasy.
My theory for the success of "Fire And Rain" is that it owes a lot to the stellar cello arrangement within its string section. But like all the other rather hackneyed tunes in this LP, the song doesn't feel particularly memorable per se. Oh, and give me a break with that dumb rendition of "Oh Susannah"! How much more cliché can you go here? Gram Parsons, this is not indeed.
More adventurous closer "Suite For 20 G" has the best arrangements and some very nice moments in its middle section, though. But by that time, it's too little and too late.
1/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums (mostly a protest vote for a slot badly used)
6/10 for more general purposes (5 + 1)
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 460
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 271
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 333 (including this one)
k.d. lang
2/5
I'll start directly with my grade for once:
Musical competency: 5/5 (as for 99% of the records listed here)
Production values : 1/1. Relatively timeless for a country album produced during the dreadful eighties.
Vocal performance : 1/1. No one can deny the heartfelt vocal chops of k.d. lang.
Personality: 0/1. It's a debut album exclusively made out of covers.
Compositional work: 0/1 (or very close). It's a debut album exclusively made out of covers that are VERY predictable or "by-the-book". There's a nice song here and there ("Black Coffee", the title-track...). But not enough to make this LP a thrilling listening experience.
Groundbreaking aspects or thematic impact or lyrics that would be particularly striking...: none of the above, 0/1.
So that's 7/10 for *Shadowland*, but if we talking about *essential* albums here, only the last five points matter (musical competency is a given for acts reaching those heights, apart from the Shaggs, maybe). And this is how I interpret the five stars grading system in this app. Which gives us a 2/5 mark.
In other words, there's nothing to really hate in this record, but there isn't really anything to love either. 1/5 albums are often more memorable than 2/5 LPs, very ironically. Ain't life cruel?
Number of albums left to review: went over the 1001 line, those are the extra LPs mentioned because the lists evolved from one edition of the book to the next...
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: almost half, approximately, I've temporarily lost the exact count here
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately.
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter, almost a third (including this one)
Next, please.
Dagmar Krause
4/5
I'll start directly with my grade, just as I've just done yesterday for k.d. lang,'s debut, also released in 1988.
Musical competency: 5/5 (as for 99% of the records listed here)
Production values / groundbreaking aspect : 0.5/1. Given the sort of album that this one is -- i e. a "recital" of songs composed by a Bertolt Brecht accomplice in his usual "distanciated" / expressionist fashion -- it would be surprising that the required professionals called for the production of such a specific endeavor could ruin the performers' efforts. The "recital" aspect doesn't give a lot of groundbreaking quality to the tracklist, though. Those were songs written in the first half of the 20th century, and you have the feeling that they're most of the time sounding just like they must have sounded back then. Maybe they don't, actually, but it's hard to find something striking enough in the record to help a non-expert make up their mind on the matter...See also "Personality" below.
Vocal performance : 1/1. Well, that singer knows how to perform such weird stuff. And the strange German inflexions in English only add to the weirdness of the subject matter
Personality: 0/1. Once again, the "recital" aspect muddles the picture. On the one hand, Hanns Eisler's songs show TONS of personality, but on the other hand they could be performed by a radically different, yet equally apt personnel, and they would probably sound the same in broad strokes, if not *exactly* the same. There's a reason "classical music" isn't included in this book (it would actually deserve to have its own 1001 albums list, albeit with a totally different set of requirements). The "modern album" format implies that artists bring something on the table that only *they* can pull off ,(which is why in the field of orchestral music, albums under the names of Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich or Philip Glass *should* have been included in Dimery's work!). This is not what happens here. Hence that 0/1 grade, not about the personality of the music, but about the personality of the *album* presenting the latter.
Compositional work: 1/1. You just can't deny the musical imagination that has been put into those compositions. Is this musical imagination easy to digest in large spades? Nope. *Tank Battles* surely feels like a *long* album. But there are enough gems along the way to reward active listening (one example among my favorites: "The Perhaps Song").
Thematic impact or lyrics that would be particularly striking...: 1/1. Here the "récital" aspect is an asset, as you obviously have a treasure trove of themes and other things to catch in the lyrics, as well as a strong artistic impact overall.
So that's 8.5/10 for *Tank Battle*, but if we are talking about *essential* albums here, only the last five points matter (musical competency is a given for acts reaching those heights, is it not?). And this is how I interpret the five stars grading system in this app. Which gives us 3.5/5 mark, rounded up to 4. Next, please.
Number of albums left to review: around forty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 460
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 272 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334
The Monks
4/5
I haven't automatically fallen in love with this album when I first listened to it, but as a very early missing link between the MonkEES (lol), The Sonics, Frank Zappa, Can and the Stooges, *Black Monk Time* should at least be considered as a little *more* than an interesting curio. It's an album that often straddles the line between the primal, raucous stuff going on in the foreground, and something far more experimental in the background (with that amplified banjo, for instance, or that echoey organ). Both aspects being groundbreaking at the time. Not always a 100% thrilling listen, retrospectively, but often a lively or slyly sardonic one at least.
The first two cuts, "Monk Time" and "Shut Up", remain my favorites in the LP (it's more of the same after that, even if it is in slightly different declinations each time). And gosh, that lead vocalist was wild, but only as wild as the crazed-out instrumentation if you pay a little attention to it. Can see why young German audiences watching those discharged American soldiers playing this live around 1966 would have a different view of rock music right after. Some folks see The Monks as the direct progenitors of krautrock. Not sure I can fully give credit to that take, but I certainly want to!
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 460
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 273 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334
Donovan
4/5
Already knew the nice "Sunshine Superman" and the groovy and enticing "Season Of The Witch", of course, thanks to the iconic *Donovan's Greatest Hits* compilation released at the tail end of the sixties (also harboring essential cuts such as "Mellow Yellow" and "Hurdy Gurdy Man"). But I never had the occasion to listen to the album where those two songs were taken from (named after the first). I kind of expected the more folksy, less shaggadelic stuff I knew I would find there to be somewhat of a letdown, but I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Those deeper cuts are actually as good as their "Greatest Hits" equivalents. In that specific genre, I especially enjoyed the very charming "narrative" second track "Legend Of A Girl Child Linda", for instance. You can easily picture a poetic and colourful cartoon illustrating the song in your head...
The rest of side one ("Three King Fishers", "Ferris Wheel", "Bert's Blues") is also ripe with all sorts of instrumentations and catchy arrangements that were obviously quite trendy by 1966 (sitar, harpsichord...), but if they're not a full surprise , they're nicely pulled off and bring what those particular songs need.
After "Season Of The Witch", the album somewhat loses its momentum at times, but its closer "Celeste" is a thing of wonder thanks to its tight chord sequence and dreamy-albeit-effective-and-memorable vocal lines. I get why Donovan was this popular during the sixties. He could be a little sugary, sure, but he was also versatile enough to explore all sorts of turf with a certain flair and rather significant class.
4/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
9/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 461 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 273
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
4/5
I'm quite a fan of Nick Cave (And The Bad Seeds), yet I first need to say that *Henry's Dream* is not exactly among my top-tier albums of his. Even with its obvious highlights "Papa Won't Leave You Henry" (a raucous dark "narrative" number only Cave can come up with) and "Straight To You" (a stellar, surprisingly heartfelt romantic ballad), I have always found that record slightly less effective overall compared to most other Bad Seeds LPs, whether they were released before or after it. And now reading about the production issues involving long-time Neil Young producer David Briggs (including a supposedly awful "mix" for some songs that had to be fixed later), it looks like my personal, subjective feelings about this album might also have stemmed from some factual shenanigans going on behind the scenes, here effecting the whole artistic intent of the LP...
So why is this record in the list, then? Well, *Henry's Dream* helped Cave broaden his audience (there's a significant uptick in the charts position of the album compared to the ones of *Tender Prey* and *The Good Son*, and it also saw the Bad Seed charting outside of Oz and the UK for the first time). Were it not for the stellar follow-up LP *Let Love In* actually going even further in those accomplishments, *Henry's Dream* would be considered as Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds' breakthrough album. Some members of Dimery's team are evidently very influenced by that sort of thing (which does not always make sense if you look back at it). Hence also why *Henry's Dream* is remembered fondly by some fans who may have discovered Nick Cave with this album. Or, I don't know, maybe the wonderful artwork evocative of southern gothic or modern wild west themes for the cover also played its part at some point...
All that being said, it's still a *very good* Nick Cave album. Maybe the other issue is that the dark boogie and perverted bluegrass numbers on its first side might feel quickly redundant for some listeners. Like, what is "Brother, My Cup Is Empty" musically and vocally speaking if not *almost* a carbon copy of "Papa..." and "I Had A Dream, Joe"? Yet I have to admit that, taken individually, each of those three songs sound great nonetheless. Maybe if another order had been found for the tracklist, those similar-sounding cuts would have found more room to shine or breathe...
Not that Cave and company don't explore other avenues once in a while, mind you, as the medieval, oneiric tale of "Christina The Astonishing" proves. The fantastic music here transcends lyrics about the legend of a crazed-out saint which could almost read like a Wikipedia entry -- evidence enough that the Bad Seeds were not solely a one-trick pony, and could produce some wild cards out of their sleeves if they wanted to. Likewise, the "Katie Cruel"-inspired "When I First Came To Town" see the Australian act treading on slightly different cinematic landscapes, owing more to western soundtracks or contemporary American road movies this time around. And the centerpiece of side two, "John Finn's Wife", is not merely a frantic, lively and ominous tragic string-laden cut. It's also the template of the *Murder Ballads* Cave would explore further a couple of albums down the road.
Placed after "John Finn's Wife", the drowsier "The Loom Of The Land" feels a little mundane and underwhelming, unfortunately. But luckily, capper "Jack The Ripper" returns to catchier-yet-also-fully-sinister territories. It's a surprisingly *simple* song, enhanced by equally simple yet "haunted" background vocals. You might feel that it's *a little too simple* at times. But never forget that simplicity can also be an asset, at least depending on how it is pulled off.
To put it in a nutshell, "Henry's Dreams" is a transitory, rather "streamlined" effort by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, which could still be as good an entry point in Cave's body of work as many of his famously "essential" full-length releases. That said, follow-up album *Let Love In* would take that newfound formula to admittedly more surprising and more sophisticated heights, while retaining its key characteristics and overall spirit. Which is why I will put *Henry's Dream* in my "waiting list* for now. After all, the tales of woe and gothic awe once routinely spun by Mr. Cave suggest that purgatory awaits most of anyway (if not worse). Surely, the titular "Henry" won't mind if he has to wait *just a little longer* now.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 461
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 274 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334
Songhoy Blues
4/5
"Soubour" is an INSANELY CATCHY opener that almost single-handedly justifies buying this debut album. And if the rest never reaches those heights, this marriage between Malian music and American-inspired blues-rock still often feels like a match made in heaven. A lot of guitar riffs *rip* on the livelier cuts, and the more introspective tracks on side two ("traditional"-sounding "Wayei", the gorgeous acoustic guitar-driven "Petit Métier" and "Mali", or the pretty and yet also hypnotic "Jolie") are heartfelt gems with endearing vocal hooks. Listening to those voices as they sing about life in Mali while reading about the band members escaping from war and fanaticism in the north of their country is surely edifying or moving. And speaking of voices, the production values serves those background vocals just as they should be served, in equal footing with the effective work on the instrumentation. *Music In Exile* thus feels like an interesting and accessible entry point into the music of a whole continent -- one I still don't know very much about today, very sadly.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 461
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 275 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334
The Teardrop Explodes
4/5
Eh, not so bad. After reading that The Teardrop Explodes was one of the initial bands fronted by Julian Cope, I was about to dismiss this album as yet another unfocused and self-indulgent effort routinely released by an artist whose music erudition I respect, but whose later solo output generally leaves me cold or nonplussed. Yet I have to admit that the second-hand version of XTC I'm hearing there -- also featuring touches of krautrock, eighties psychedelia, (mock-?) disco, and Madness-adjacent shenanigans -- is quite fun, and sometimes even pretty catchy, as second-hand as it is.
Sure, the supposed psychedelia flavors are a little exaggerated (as they often were in those glossy, quote unquote "postpunk" years -- it's just some reversed-recorded guitar parts, or eastern / oriental scales, used once in a while). And the (fortunately rare) synthetic-sounding horns didn't age very well. Yet cuts such as opener "Ha Ha, I'm Drowning", the lively "Treason" (with its memorable, tight, moving chorus) or the multilayered groove of "Poppies" display some contagious songwriting and arrangement energy I didn't know Cope was capable of. Also worthy of note, "Books", covered not long after by Echo And The Bunnymen, those simple yet driven tom drums on "Bouncing Babies", or the interlaced vocals, guitars and ominous synths towards the end of closer "When I Dream".
Side two admittedly loses part of the album's momentum at times, but it's nothing aggravating in the long run. And there is a distinctive nightly mood to those tracks, which is why I prefer the original cover artwork showing the band in shadows to the artsier one more in keeping with the name of the album. As for the bonus tracks, I found the one-off single "Reward" -- supposedly The Teardrops Explodes's most popular single according to Spotify numbers -- a little heavy-handed and hackneyed, oddly enough. But the moodier and far more experimental cuts after said single *do* offer an interesting change of pace. So for once, late additions on CD versions do bring something interesting on the table. This record (whether the original version or the more recent "expanded" one) might not reach the exact heights of the Kilimanjaro, sure. But it still comes very close. Not so bad, as I've said earlier.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 461
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 276 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
The only potential problem with *Electric Ladyland* is that it's all over the place. But being "all over the place" is actually not a problem at all when you're a mad genius like Jimi Hendrix. What you have instead is a treasure trove of tones and intents and moods and melodies and colors. As you go through this legendary double album, some moments stick out like an *agile* thumb (and never a sore one), just like Jimi's right thumb, so expertly placed on his guitar neck -- a detail I have always found as fascinating to watch on film as what the man could do with his other fingers on the fretboard. So when you finally see (or rather "hear") the whole picture of those "sound paintings", you can't help but be in awe. And also a little saddened that no one would hear where the man would go next for his crazed-out studio endeavors
What's terrific about *Electric Ladyland* is that it indeed does not simply rely on Hendrix's blues-inspired virtuoso powers. It is the transcription of a far wider picture than that, going from American psychedelic acid-rock to sixties British pop to progressive soul/funk to jazz lounge cuts to proto-hard-rock to indeed long swampy blues jams here and there (putting the lengthier version of "Voodoo Chile" in side one was *bold* for sure). And then, you have the absolutely iconic cuts: "Voodoo Child" in its "slight return" version, "Crosstown Traffic" and the cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along The Watcher", transcending the original version on all cursors. Plus a handful of less famous yet stellar hits in their own right ("Gypsy Eyes", "Burning Of The Midnight Lamp", "House Burning Down", Noel Redding's "Little Miss Strange"...). And if the rest is often more experimental and not as instantly memorable, it's always a pleasure to return to anyway.
Simply put, *Electric Ladyland" is thus an album that's still inexhaustible almost sixty years after the fact. Surely that warrants an automatic 5/5 grade here.
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 462 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 276
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334
The Prodigy
5/5
Along with The Chemical Brothers' *Dig Your Own Hole", *The Fat Of The Land* is the *other* key big beat LP released in 1997. Liam Howlett first ground his axe taking part in the early nineties rave party scene, but he soon understood that he had to infuse rock tones and hip hop breakbeats in his "techno" music to really make a difference and affect popular culture. And thus, "big beat" was born. And so, very logically, a couple of years later, Howlett and his partnering vocalists (both from within the band, and from without) recorded this album -- not only The Prodigy's magnum opus, but also an important LP to understand the evolution of British electronic music at large. Younger folks might not be aware of this, but the iconic cuts from this album ("Smack My Bitch Up", "Breathe", "Firestarter", "Diesel Power", the Beastie Boys-sampling "Funky Shit") were heard everywhere at the time. But more crucially, those beats are still sounding BIG today, not pun intended, just like those mean basslines. And this even if "big beat" is 100% out of fashion almost three decades later
Compared to *Dig Your Own Hole*, *The Fat Of The Land* is admittedly less adventurous (and maybe a little formulaic). Yet it's also a *tighter* affair, especially on side one. Just like for the Chemical Brothers' LP, there is kind of a soft underbelly in the middle of the tracklist, but that underbelly still yields a lot of lively moments, and so comes off as less underwhelming than its equivalent in *Dig Your Own Hole*. And as soon as *Firestarter* surges to your ears, you're back to the intensity level at the start of the album, and the latter keeps on grabbing you until the very end, thanks to the amazing "Climbatize" and that L7 cover closing the proceedings on a surprisingly full-punk-rock note.
The punk influence cannot be underestimated indeed. One of the main assets of this record is how "dangerous" it sounds. Plus, there is something very "cinematic" to that sense of danger. Hence why *The Fat Of The Land* manages to remain fresh in 2024, in spite of the way electronic aesthetics have evolved so far from it since 1997. Style is often not enough anyway. To light a fire, you also need a very personal spark. Guess Howlett and company had it in them.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 463 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 276
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334
Coldplay
3/5
Let's get one thing out of the way first: Coldplay are indeed *overrated*, whether commercially or even critically (at least to a certain extent). There's something a little too predictable and complacent in their chord sequences and vocal melodies. To the point where loads of people have labelled their music as "beige" and "bland" (which is certainly true for some of the deep cuts they wrote and recorded from the get-go). In other words, there are not enough "alarms" and "surprises" in their songs, to borrow words from lyrics by the band Chris Martin dreams he could rub shoulders with on an artistic level (without ever managing to do so). Not everyone has the crazed-out genius of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, mind you.
Yet that doesn't necessarily mean their first four albums are not worthy of your time if you're interested in that sort of indie-soft-rock they helped popularized during the noughts. Let me try to put it in another way. Sure, if you compare them to Radiohead, as I just did, they can't have the upper hand (which is why it is maybe unfair to do so). But if you compare their music to the one of Travis or Keane, the comparison becomes far more flattering.
Even if they are simpler on the surface, Coldplay's compositions *can* have some memorable and truly endearing features. And it's never easy to write something that's equally memorable and moving and evocative. Case in point, "Clocks", its instantly catchy piano arpeggios, its dreamy yet also subtle background synthetic and guitar effects, and its heartfelt vocal performance. This example is not the most daring hit single to have ever hit the charts, sure. But that doesn't make it a bad track either.
So as usual with this band, you need to sort out the whiff from the chaff. Which is not too difficult in the case of this record In a sense, the major flaw of *A Rush Of Blood To The Head* can be summed up by the fact that it can't really choose between replicating the formula of debut LP *Parachutes* and trying some new things. It does a little bit of both, and partly succeeds in each endeavor, but also partly fails for both. Examples: "The Scientist", "In My Place", "Green Eyes" and "Warning Signs" all closely follow the "Yellow" template, but only the first song manages to offer any sort of new thrills in that old mold. As for innovation, the production values are a little more self-assured, and there are very interesting moments of tensions in the quite driven and obsessive patterns of great opener "Politik", as well as in the simple yet effective half-tone descending lines of "God Put A Smile Upon Your Face" or the eastern-sounding flourishes of "Daylight". Yet starting with that song, the second half of this LP gets bogged down by too much sentimentality, too much complacency, and not enough punch. Nothing grating for sure. Yet nothing really exciting either. Only the hypnotic "A Whisper" brings back a little Radiohead-adjacent tension to the tracklist, even if the song is not exactly a banger. After that, the title-track had rather good lyrics that seem to express a sardonic view about toxic masculinity (with some surprisingly aggressive overtones to describe the latter). And closer "Amsterdam" is a pretty good unobtrusive ballad expanding a little sonically towards the end. But it's *yet another damn ballad*! And by this point you truly get ballad-weary...
In the notes from my copy of this album at home -- bought in a second-hand CD shop -- there is a praise for organizations and businesses practicing "fair trade" with third world countries, with some online ressources to check on the subject. As if capitalist-driven "fair trade" was indeed possible on a systemic level in the first place... (heavy sigh). Just like their music often is, Coldplay are either a little too naive, or a little in self-denial about how true strength (whether musical or political) can be reached. That doesn't necessarily they're bad people or even bad artists. But it might partly suggest that people who are very derisive about them might have a point. They're not the worst band in the world by far. But they're so "unchallenging" that it comes as no surprise that their success is frowned upon by many. After a while, you truly want to shake the fans of this act and say: "OK, fine! Now can you also look for good music *elsewhere*???" You can't have "fair trade" when you're facing a monopoly.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 463
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 277 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334
Arctic Monkeys
5/5
In my "book", 2006 wasn't exactly a stellar year for music. Apart from this album, only Jay Reatard's *Blood Vision*, TV On The Radio's *Return To The Cookie Mountain*, Joanna Newsom's *Ys* and probably Amy Winehouse's *Back To Black* can reach the "essential" level usually reached by at least a dozen of LPs for most other years. To be perfectly honest, I thought this rave about Arctic Monkeys was a bit of an exaggeration at the time, but now I readily admit that revisiting this past hype is pretty thrilling, all things considered. Alex Turner has always been a *chatty* frontperson, to a fault sometimes (especially recently), but in this official debut the instrumentation is so insanely lively, youthful and inspired that it makes up for it tenfold (if only for that crazy powerhouse of a drummer, whose cheeky mug is shown on the cover up here if I'm not mistaken). And Turner's lyrics are really, really evocative or witty most of the time anyway.
I could go track by track here (which means I would have to write all those incredibly long song titles -- another evidence of Turner's knack with words), but it would probably not really be useful: you got to listen to the whole shebang.
To put it in a nutshell, I say *yes*, this record looks as essential in a list of 1000 best albums of all time as it looks good on the dancefloor. So when it comes to that realm of noughts British dance punk LPs, (here infused with quite a bit of garage and indie-rock), you surely need to give a spin to this LP -- along with Block Party's *Silent Alarm* and Franz Ferdinand's début. You could maybe also add Arctic Monkeys' own *Favorite Worst Nightmare* and *AM*, and you would have a long enough sublist to cover your ground here.
Giving this one full marks, even if it's closer to a 4.5 grade in reality. I gave full marks to the (strikingly different) Joanna Newsom and TV On The Radio albums from that year, so I gotta maintain a minimum consistency, I guess...
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 464 (including this one)
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 277
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334
Ramblin' Jack Elliott
3/5
The missing link between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, at least that's what I understand from the folk troubadour's Wikipedia page. Guess the initial release of this record in Great Britain was pivotal in its inclusion in Dimery's book (written with a prominent British perspective, including for American artists). Apart from Jesse Fuller's "San Francisco Bay Blues" (that I had already heard played by other performers) and the traditional "Boll Weevil" song, one clear highlight is "New York Town", even if it took me two clicks on Spotify to find Ramblin' Jack Elliott performing an even better version of the song later. Please check the relatively short Wikipedia page about Jack, by the way. The man sure had an interesting life. Not sure that's enough to make this particular record of his truly essential, but Mr. Elliott, still among us, deserves respect for fraying with the greatest back in the day, not to mention more recently. And even without that, *Jack Takes The Floor* still provides a rather nice listen no matter what
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3).
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 464
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 278 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334
David Crosby
5/5
I'm snowed under with work today, to the point where I can... hardly remember my name. It's too bad because there are tons of things to say about this album, which is sort of an outcast in this list. It's from a world-famous artist (at least for anyone interested in the Californian rock scene of the late sixties / early seventies), and yet it's very much a curio and an oddball release as seen from today's vantage point. It's probably the most famous solo album recorded by David Crosby (whose career in legendary acts such as the Byrds and CSNY made him a household name), and yet the record still has a niche, cult-like, elusive reputation. Its bluesy jams and psychedelic forays are a little self-indulgent at times, and yet they also possess a one-of-a-kind mystery and musical poetry that can make said dirges fascinating and even addictive in the long run.
I could say that opener "Music Is Love" is the platonic ideal of psychedelic freak folk as it was performed on Californian beaches. Or that "Cowboy Movie" borrows grooves from frenemies Stills and Young's Buffalo Springfield so as to take them to a whole different, far stranger sort of dark narrative about America's violent roots (here secretly reincarnated as a love triangle involving Crosby, Graham Nash and Ritz Coolidge, according to Wikipedia notes). Sure, that slow guitar riff supporting the yarn was nothing really new. Yet it's still 100% hypnotic, and just yearns to be sampled or stolen by more recent rock acts today.
I could add that the slick vocal harmonies of "Talmapais High" sound like CSNY taking LSD instead of Mary Jane. I'm even hearing something approaching nineties post-rock act Tortoise during its conclusion, oddly enough. I could also say a zillion things about "Laughing", but I will only say it's one of the most beautiful ballads of the early seventies. And I could say a zillion of other things about the epic vocals of "What Are Their Names", the gorgeous zither of "Traction In The Rain" and the quaint lounge jazz flourishes of "Song With No Words" (maybe the only *real* self-indulgent cut in the record).
But all I want to say now is that the one-two punch of listening to the hypnotic traditional tune "Orleans" and the very short, very appeasing, yet also very spooky near-Gregorian chants of "I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here" back to back is a hell of a way to close an album. It tightens your throat. And makes you want to explore those infinite Californian beaches so as to find your soul again. Then you read that Crosby was still coping with the death of his girlfriend in a car accident a couple of years ago when he recorded all this, and you start to "get it", maaaaaaan... And you also read that the performers in those loosely-planned sessions included the Grateful Dead's Jerry Gracia, Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick, Graham Nash, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell or Santana, and you realize the communal "feel" this record gives away is the real deal. There's an elated emotion running throughout *If I Could Only Remember My Name* that makes it very, *very* special. Or at least, it makes it special enough to be remembered today indeed, just like you're remembering the old beach parties involving the sunbaked youngsters of times long gone by now. You've never been there, you were not even born when they happened... And yet, you *do* remember. Because music is not only "love". It's also eternal.
Rest in peace, David Crosby.
4.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 5.
9.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 4.5)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 464
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 279 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 334
The Chemical Brothers
3/5
*Exit Planet Dust* is worth listening to for mostly three reasons: it sets up the Big Beat sound with which the "brothers" would later fully hit the charts ; with classic opener "Leave Home" they had a visit card that proved their potential in that realm -- the sort of potential that would be taken a notch further in *Dig Your Own Hole* ; and with closer "Alive Alone", they made an interesting foray into their own electronic version of ambient psychedelia, later further explored in *Surrender*.
The thing is, between those two tracks, everything pales a little in comparison to their later output. Back then, it was a small revolution for British electronic music. But they did better, went for catchier hooks, and left a more memorable imprint with their two following albums. There's a reason no track from this record is present in the ten most played songs on Spotify. There are acts where this sort of absence doesn't really matter. But for that particular music style, it speaks volumes.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 464
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 279
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 335 (including this one)
Holger Czukay
3/5
I'm huge Can fan, but honestly if I had not known that Holger Czukay was responsible for the music in this record, I would have taken some parts of it as somewhat lopsided or meandering just fot the hell of it (which is *not* how I receive a very large part of the music played on Can albums). I can see how the sampling techniques or subtle afro-beat elements in *Movies* might have influenced David Byrne and Brian Eno for *My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts* and *Remain In Light*, but chances are that the latter mostly took inspiration from their own technical abilities or the African sources themselves, and so didn't really need to have heard this album to create their masterpieces. Oh, and their own results after being exposed to those sorts of influence sounded tighter and more direct anyway.
Not that *Movies* is a bad album, mind you. It's really interesting stuff. Some of it aged quite a lot, but other moments still sound as fresh as they did in 1979. "Persian Love" is an amazing track for instance (and maybe one where experimentation is admittedly more digestible). Yet I'm afraid the *overall* results of those experiments are not impressive enough to make it a mandatory listen for newbies in the different genres here tackled with (kraut, world, jazz, afro, disco, white funk...) Plus, ain't there one or two essential Can albums missing in Dimery's list (which this slot could be useful for)?. So kudos to Holger for using all those test tubes so as to potentially allow himself and others to break new grounds. Yet not all peer-reviewed papers out there have changed the world. It's in the very nature of experimentation to *not* guarantee any result, is it not?
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums.
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 464
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 279
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 336 (including this one)
Penguin Cafe Orchestra
4/5
Penguins now. I'm almost at the end of my three-year stint with this app, and I would lie if I said that I am not a little exhausted by now. What can I say about this sometimes wonderful yet often downright *bizarre* record? That penguins are just as fascinating to watch as they are goofy?
Of course, I'm only half-serious here. I had heard *about* this project promoted and executive produced by Brian Eno before. Something between chamber strings regalia, guitar arpeggios, Rhodes keyboards flourishes, lounge muzak, world, whiffs of musique concrete, avant-pop, contemporary minimalist compositions, beach ukuleles and Haydn / Renaissance-inspired strings and harpsichord. Or so I had heard. But hearing *about* one thing and listening to it will never be the same experience.
I feel like penguins are currently staring at me in an inquisitive fashion just for stating the obvious here...
Listening to the whole thing admittedly offered what that initial program promised, with "Penguin Café Single", "In A Sidney Motel", "Surface Tension" as the highlights of side one (the rest is generally charming as well, but rather secondary in comparison). And on side two, long smooth and airy instrumental "The Sound of Someone You Love Who's Going Away and It Doesn't Matter" is the obvious centerpiece, of course. That one sums up the rest of the record, between its agreeable main theme, melancholic yet inviting, and its sudden atonal bridge betraying all the hidden turmoil behind the surface. After that, "Hugebaby" sounds rather mundane and even boring, but "Chartered Flight" brings back a little tension, thankfully.
Quickly went through the rest of Simon Jeffes' band's eighties discography after that. The question is: why *this* album in Dimery's list, and not the eponymous one, *Broadcasting From Home*, or *Signs Of Life*? Those other LPs might sound a little less spontaneous or mysterious, and also less indebted to Eno's own transitory masterpieces between the rock and ambient idioms (*Another Green World* and *Before And After Science*). Yet those later albums also seem glossier, more cohesive within the scope of their loony fantasy soundscapes, and it looks like they have their fair share of gems as well, or so it seems.
Sometimes this project of selecting a finite amount of albums is SO arbitrary. It's like all the penguins on the ice shelf that look like one another, and yet you want to save them all.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 464
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 280 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 336
TV On The Radio
4/5
This one starts right off the bat with cryptic lyrics including a snarling take about the offensive cliché of so-called "magic n*ggers" in Hollywood movies, nicely setting up the universe of TV On The Radio -- a deconstruction of indie rock, post-punk, kraut/electronica and soul music tropes that actually sounded very close to Young Fathers long before the Scottish band picked up that particular thread. Just like them, and probably more famously, the New York City act saw its members having diverse backgrounds infuse transcendent African and African American influences to their elated vocals, soulfully performed by Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone. The result is very good, generally speaking, with quite a cohesive first side (thanks to abrasive opener "The Wrong Way", catchy "Staring At The Sun", driven "Dreams" and the subtle ode to sexual desire "King Eternal"). As good as that side is, a welcome change of pace occurs with "Ambulance" right in the middle of the tracklist -- good lord, what a love song, mostly supported by Lynchian Acapella Doo-wop vocals and a killer emotional chorus, something along the lines of "I will be your ambulance if you will be my accident". The rest of the album is a little hit-or-miss, but long triply closer "Wear You Out" easily reaches the heights of side one again. Minus point for the production and the overall sound of the album, though -- so paper-thin it unfortunately takes away the potential pleasure those compositions can offer to less delicate ears than mine. It's an issue that the band's own Dave Sitek would solve himself later by partly handling the production side of later LPs (maybe out of disappointment from this one?). Oh, and *Return To Cookie Mountain* is probably a better candidate for a list such as this anyway (better sound, as I said, but also more iconic songs and more memorable vocal lines -- "Wolf Like Me" is a gem, for instance). Not that *Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes* doesn't have its own assets, mind you.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4.
8.5/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3.5)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 464
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 281 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 336
SZA
3/5
Signed to what was admittedly the biggest rap label at the time (Top Dawg Entertainment), alt-r'n'b / neo soul singer SZA spent two years refining around 150 - 200 songs, and her and her producers were repeatedly unable to select which ones should make the final cut for her debut (until TDE put their feet down and forced them to do so). I'm wondering... Is it because a large majority of those 150 - 200 cuts were just supporting the same sorts of meandering and tired vocal lines mostly devoid of hooks or anything that would make them memorable (or just endearing for general audiences)? Is it why they couldn't sort of the whiff from the chaff? Because a very large part of that crazy effort was actually *underwhelming*? (at least, that's what could be inferred from the 14 tracks out of that gargantuan output that did end up in *Ctrl*). To her own admission, SZA relies a lot on improvised adlibs over music written by others in her artistry. And here's the thing, folks: unless you're a killer jazz vocalist or instrumentalist, vocal adlibs rarely yield to a clear-cut artistic vision, transcendent songs, or a personal, sophisticated knack for *composition*. And there's not the density of full-blown rapping either. TDE needed a return from their investment, hence why those sly foxes heavily promoted the thing anyway -- their first female r'n'b singer, big whoop! -- and they first did so to a select choice of "music critics", probably favoring surface gloss over real substance, of course. And then, well, all you needed to do was to promote SZA to a massive target audience that's never too picky as long as you have a good-looking singer doing the same type of neo-soul theatrics. It's a book as old as *The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill*, another decent album that's been overrated to ridiculous proportions. There are things that money *can* buy in the music world. And TDE had loads of it in the first place.
OK, I admit what I've just written on obviously sounds incredibly harsh and polemical for SZA fans (and also for fans of Ms. Hill, btw). Let me be clear, though, I don't *hate* this album. Once you set your mind into the correct expectations, a lot of it is rather nice and chill *background music*. It's what I will eventually enjoy in the first three tracks of this LP: opener guitar-driven "Supermodel", "Love Galore" and "Doves In The Wind". I also fully appreciate Travis Scott and Kendrick Lamar's rap featurings on those cuts - especially the latter deconstructing the use of the slur "pussy" in a near-feminist angle. Likewise, I love some of the left-field shenanigans going on in the background -- all those futuristic synths, enticing loops, or indie-rock-inspired guitar licks, whether in the cuts I've just quoted or in many other ones in the record.
But *SONGS*, folks? Ones you can hum or whistle in the shower? Ones that you instantly and *truly* feel for? Are there any of them in this album? Good news, there is at least *one*, "Drew Barrymore", with its emotional killer chorus, with a lush string section helping the whole thing make a home run at the end of the track. Was finding a memorable chorus all that hard, Solana? Apparently, it was, since follow-up synth-pop cut "Prom" comes close pulling it off twice in a row, and yet ultimately fails at it. Because there's definitely something missing in that one composition, just like for at least half of the other ones...
After that, it's indeed more and more adlibs and soul-trap meandering theatrics, unfortunately ("The Weekend", "Broken Clocks".. ). Lyrics are fine, I guess: women's perspective on love relationships (or lack thereof), and so on. Nothing revolutionary, though. Self-indulgence still comes off in spades throughout the album, whether musical or lyrically. Two highlights magically reach the heights already explored in a more spectacular mode by "Drew Barrymore". They're the moody, cinematic and afro-futuristic "Garden" and "Pretty Little Birds" (with also nice jazzy and scat flourishes in the latter, and what a surprising ending, to boot). But once again, the achievements here owe more to the greatness of the music in the background than to SZA's vocal ideas.
So that's it. I tried hard to open my shakras on this one, and there is stuff in this record that I can genuinely say that I love. Yet, there are also tons of moments where I'm just bored to death. Sometimes I wonder if the target audience for this sort of music truly cares about the *album* format. Just like that sort of audience maybe does, I can see myself adding my favorite cuts from this record in a playlist, and then not only totally forget about the rest, but also totally *dismiss* it altogether! Which is another reason why I believe this particular record won't make my own final cut of 1001 albums you must listen to before your demise. And I feel like the same sort of thing will happen with SZA's other LPs (the visibly bloated *SOS* and *Lana*, apparently displaying the exact same share of assets AND flaws in even *longer* runtimes -- I mean, for *one* "Kill Bill", how many "Low", "Snooze*, "F2F" and "Gone Girl"?). Not exactly an immediate ctrl-alt-delete, but if my 1001 album software gets bogged down by too many performance issues, I'm afraid I won't have much choice than to start losing excessive data with this sort of overrated LP. Unless I want my IT gear to join all the technological garbage behind SZA. Guess that's where the rest of those 150 - 200 songs ended up anyway.
3/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums
8/10 for more general purposes (5 + 3)
Number of albums left to review: around thirty or twenty, as I've gone over the 1000 line and this generator is including albums from all editions of the book.
Number of albums from the list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 464
Albums from the list I *might* include in mine later on: 282 (including this one)
Albums from the list I won't include in mine: 336
Peter Gabriel
4/5
With *So*, *3* (aka *Melt*) is probably the other mandatory Peter Gabriel album to own if you can enjoy art-pop with unabashedly commercial ambitions -- here the best of both worlds, really. It took Gabriel a little bit of time to reach this balance, and he would lose it again in the future. Debut album *Car*, with its remnants of prog influences not totally digested, aged quite poorly (apart from hit single "Solsbury Hill" and maybe closer "Here Comes The Floor") ; there are very few highlights in the quite inert, often cheesy or ineffectively shrill transitory LP *Scratch* ; and if *Security*, sandwiched between *Melt* and *So* starts off great, it still harbors a second side that returns to the somewhat tepid territories of *Car* and *Scratch*.
No, *Melt* is the true keeper here -- maybe even more interesting than *So*, because of its darker moods. "Intruder", ominous, unpredictable and unnerving, is a perfect opener to set up those dark tones. The sound of that hypnotic drum pattern also does wonder. It's interesting that Gabriel asked his drummers in the studio (including former bandmate and new Genesis singer Phil Collins) not to use any cymbals, leading producer to patent the infamous "gated" sound for percussion (which will lead us to the most horrible musical moments of the eighties). That "gated" sound is fortunately not "over the top" yet, and is even quite effective to dynamize the songs -- it's a lesson that Phil Collins himself put to good use in his own hit song "In The Air Tonight", once again a composition where said sound is pertinent at least. But I digress here...
To return to *Melt*, second song "No Self Control" uses marimbas to great effects, indeed recalling Bowie's experiments for his Berlin trilogy. Proper third cut "I Don't Remember" (after interlude "Start") is a catchy single with post-punk and new wave overtones foretelling Gabriel's future charts hits. Robert Fripp's relatively dissonant guitar solo is also another nod to Bowie, as well as to the contemporary iteration of his own act King Crimson. The two songs that follow, the great "Family Snapshot" and the admittedly less stellar but still pretty good "And Through The Wire" see Gabriel investing Bruce Springsteen's turf, suite surprisingly (with yet again some abrasive punk overtones, courtesy of Paul Weller's guitar). "Games Without Frontier" is yet another memorable hit, this one with highly topical lyrics about the scourge that war is. The ironically naive vocal hook performed by Kate Bush adds a layer of sarcasm to the song that is very welcome here. The overlong and grating *Not One Of Us* aged badly, however (you can't hit the mark every time I guess). "Lead A Normal Life" is another OK interlude, and we're already at the end of the LP, with the undeniably iconic and, again, highly topical "Biko", which not only sees Gabriel singing from the right side of history, but also offers a hell of a tribute song, epic yet also dignified, to the titular figure who bravely fought Apartheid in South Africa. That mix of long saturated guitar chords, bagpipes in the background, and elated vocals (both in the lead and in the background) is perfect for a protest song such as this one.
So yeah, minus one dud and two interludes, those are either nice tracks or absolutely essential ones (four or five for the latter by my count). Hence why I think there is room left for this record in my own list of 1001 albums you must listen to before you die.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
Prince
5/5
The only bad thing about this album popping out is that I got a lot of things to do today and I don't have the time to elaborate about how wild a ride it is. *Sign ☮️ The Times* is an exhaustible treasure trove filled many different sounding gems within Prince's discography, and as such, this double album probably equals the magnum opus that *Purple Rain* is. The opening title-track is moody and iconic, "Play In The Sunshine" is lively, inventive and adventurous (especially in its second half), "Housequake" is a fun old school hip hop romp (whose very formula will be used later for hit single "Sexy MF" on another Prince album). "It" is epic eighties regalia as it should be done, cold and driven with its mesmerizing synths and drum machines. "U Got The Look" is another catchy hit with one instance of crazy guitar soloing along many during the course of the album. "If I Was A Girlfriend" is a ballad for the ages, where Prince's falsetto conveys both his lust and love in ways that are simply irresistible (see also the excellent musical mini-narrative "Ballad Of Dorothy Parker" on side one for yet another example of love songs with a knack for endearing details - both musical and lyrical). "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man" delves into rockier tones (whose glossy eighties feel didn't age that well on a production level, maybe, but the intent can still be felt at least). And "The Cross" is a moving and dignified folk-rock-adjacent topical cut with late sixties, early seventies psychedelic overtones that's instantly lovable.
The songs I haven't mentioned yet (most of them on the second side of disc 1) are maybe a small notch under the ones I have, but they're all *very good* anyway. "Slow Love" and closer "Adore" tick the soul ballads boxes in nice enough ways to offer the full monty in terms of a Prince multi-music-styles experience, and if the live-recorded "It's Gonna Be A Beautiful Night" is an obvious funky jam filler that helped this release reach the 80-minute mark, it's still a fun "document" to listen to. Tracklisting a double album is always tricky, but the Minneapolis genius pulls it off effortlessly (or so it seems).
I had not listened to this great record for quite some time, and what I got from it as I did so again today (while working on stuff I had to work on) is how my memories of its many melodic, harmonic and stylistic twists and turns were still vivid today. And of course, Prince was a powerhouse in terms of vocal and guitar performance.
Full marks for this one (rounded up just a tiny wee little bit). I'm almost reaching the end of this project. And it's very pleasant that I have so many great albums to listen to for the last run.
Number of albums left to review: almost none of the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
Bebel Gilberto
4/5
Pretty good and very interesting record of Brazilian music, most of the time correctly and nicely updated to the trends of the day. And of course, terrific vocal performances from Bebel Gilberto.
The first track is Bebel actually singing over Brazilian electronic wizard Amon Tobin's "Nova", the closer of his own album *Permutations*, which I have at home and really like -- and it's a cut that's smoooooth and still futuristic-sounding almost 30 years later (!), so that can't hurt as an opener here. Pretty "August Day Song" follows, mixing English, Portuguese, Bossa and subtle electronic rhythms, which then leads to "Tanto Tiempo", which nicely explores even further trip hop / electronic turf. That song is produced and co-written with Suba, just like more than half of the other tracks on it, and I got to say I find his work for this record more convincing than the album under his name mentioned in Dimery's book. I don't know how much credence I can give to the story that he died to save tapes recorded for this record, but may the man rest in peace anyway. It's also tragic that we don't know what the Serbian producer and DJ would have done in the field of Brazilian music next.
The two cuts that follow are nice but not revolutionary in the genre. Thankfully, the stakes get a little higher (and hotter) thanks to "So Nice (Summer Samba)", produced by Mario Caldato Jr. -- renowned for his work with the Beastie Boys -- and "Lonely", produced by the Thievery Corporation. Unfortunately, there is "Bananeira" next, which is far more hackneyed, and so clearly a dud in the context of this record. A minimalistic cover of Chico Buarque's "Samba E Amor" quickly fixes things, fortunately -- I think I've said it elsewhere, but it's a damn shame Buarque's *Construçao* is conspicuously missing in Dimery's list. Then, "Close Your Eyes" serves as a really cool capper for the whole thing.
Not exactly sure this is "essential" album fodder, but this record is nicely done and aged quite well, which is not always a result you get when you want to update a music style with contemporary arrangements. If only for this, I leave the door open for this one.
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: almost none of the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter
Morrissey
4/5
Oh well, Morrissey's first solo album, quickly released after The Smiths' demise. Not so bad overall given the circumstances. The musicians hired by the Moz to write and play the music he would sing to knew their way around a good tune, and there are certainly highlights in this record ("Alsatian Cousin", "Everyday Is Like Sunday", "Angel, Angel Down We Go Together", "Late Night, Maudlin Street", "Suedehead", "Dial-a-Cliché", "Margaret on the Guillotine").
That said, given the twat that the man has since become, it's not an automatic addition in my own list. And also, there are some pretty underwhelming cuts ruining the middle of side two. Don't want to spend too much time on Morrissey's account these days to be honest...
3.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 4
8.5/10 for more general purposes.
Number of albums left to review: almost none of the 80-ish extra LPs listed on this app, included because different past editions of the book have mentioned albums that have since been dropped in subsequent editions.
Number of albums I'll keep in my own list: half, approximately
Number of albums I *might* keep: a small quarter, approximately (including this one)
Number of albums I won't keep: a large quarter