1001 Albums Summary

First thing: it's much too jazz-oriented for my personal taste. Somebody who likes 1960's nightclub jazz would probably enjoy this more. Second thing: It's incredibly, ponderously sexist. The ten-minute sermon leading into"By The Time I Get To Phoenix" is a doozy, but I was already gritting my teeth at the patronizing "One Woman." Maybe some GUY who likes 1960's nightclub jazz would find this fun, but it was excruciating for me. It's slow, it's sexist, there are virtuoso jazz people doing virtuoso things for many minutes at a time... I did not like it.

Enjoyable, interesting, different. My Spanish is lousy, but if you grab the lyrics off genius.com & toss them into Google Translate, monolingual English speakers like me can discover that Manu Chao is a heckuva thoughtful lyricist as well.

Sonically this sounds like Phil Spector recorded music for goth funerals. It's all slow and ponderous and boomy and gloomy. The instrumentation was complex and interesting, I will say. It's okay as background music, but when my work got a little dull this became a terrible soundtrack - the mournful energy made this a big wet blanket.

I wish I liked jazz more. The musicianship is flawless, but I just find the content dull. Please don't take my opinion seriously. This just isn't my kind of thing.