434
Albums Rated
3.47
Average Rating
40%
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655 albums remaining
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2010s
Favorite Decade
Soul
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Wordsmith
Rater Style ?
98
5-Star Albums
18
1-Star Albums
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You Love More Than Most
Albums you rated higher than global average
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Djam Leelii | 5 | 2.79 | +2.21 |
| LP1 | 5 | 2.8 | +2.2 |
| Ananda Shankar | 5 | 2.82 | +2.18 |
| Live / Dead | 5 | 2.83 | +2.17 |
| Freak Out! | 5 | 2.84 | +2.16 |
| A Walk Across The Rooftops | 5 | 2.86 | +2.14 |
| E.V.O.L. | 5 | 2.89 | +2.11 |
| Brown Sugar | 5 | 2.91 | +2.09 |
| Ghosteen | 5 | 2.97 | +2.03 |
| Larks' Tongues In Aspic | 5 | 2.99 | +2.01 |
You Love Less Than Most
Albums you rated lower than global average
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garbage | 1 | 3.38 | -2.38 |
| Vivid | 1 | 3.19 | -2.19 |
| Your New Favourite Band | 1 | 3.13 | -2.13 |
| No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith (Live) | 1 | 3.06 | -2.06 |
| Myths Of The Near Future | 1 | 3.06 | -2.06 |
| Very | 1 | 2.94 | -1.94 |
| Street Signs | 1 | 2.87 | -1.87 |
| Stripped | 1 | 2.87 | -1.87 |
| Greetings From L.A. | 1 | 2.86 | -1.86 |
| Colour By Numbers | 1 | 2.84 | -1.84 |
Artist Analysis
Favorite Artists
Artists with 2+ albums
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Bob Dylan | 4 | 5 |
| Stevie Wonder | 3 | 5 |
| Radiohead | 5 | 4.4 |
| Simon & Garfunkel | 3 | 4.67 |
| Led Zeppelin | 3 | 4.67 |
| Van Morrison | 3 | 4.67 |
| Jimi Hendrix | 3 | 4.67 |
| A Tribe Called Quest | 2 | 5 |
| Peter Gabriel | 2 | 5 |
| King Crimson | 2 | 5 |
| The Who | 3 | 4.33 |
Least Favorite Artists
Artists with 2+ albums
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Tim Buckley | 3 | 1.33 |
Controversial Artists
Artists you rate inconsistently
| Artist | Ratings |
|---|---|
| Bruce Springsteen | 5, 2 |
| Pet Shop Boys | 4, 1 |
| Leonard Cohen | 2, 5, 2 |
| Nick Drake | 2, 5, 2 |
| The Kinks | 3, 5, 2 |
5-Star Albums (98)
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Popular Reviews
Marvin Gaye
5/5
"But who really cares? Who's willing to try... to save our sweet world?"
Shadows and light. Chiaroscuro, in painting. The bitter and the sweet, in chocolate. It's the stuff of melancholy, of regret, worry, dark times ahead. Marvin Gaye's human pleas, genuine and earnest... to save the babies, up against a symphony that's filmic, romantic, in an almost 1001 Strings kind of way. An orchestral setting that Berry Gordy thought was too old, outdated, the kids will never dig, etc. etc. But it's the perfect backdrop– nostalgia– that gives us context for Marvin's anguish about the future.
It's also personal. It's an album about his brother's letters to him from Vietnam... the anti-war protests that Obie Benson saw firsthand which lead him to write "What's Going On?"... his own dark struggles with his family, addiction. A changing planet. And somehow Marvin is perfectly positioned to help us understand. He doesn't preach, he doesn't condescend. He brings you into his inner world, and doesn't count you out.
And it's a Motown album? Impossible. I can't imagine the whiplash from the American public when this came out. Motown? Song cycles? Dark subject matter? *That* Marvin Gaye? An album for a coming storm... and one to put together the pieces from a few very real personal storms in the 1960s.
An amazing album. The soundtrack to so many people's lives, their own anxieties and dark places and chances for redemption. Music for a sweet world.
5/5
33 likes
Bob Marley & The Wailers
5/5
I came into this album mildly interested. I listened to Bob Marley a lot when I was younger, and my lasting impression was pleasant, political, fun. Good background, maybe. In other words… I was wholly unprepared for the 40 minutes I was about to get. This time, I decided to listen a little closer to the musicianship, get a sense of what is going on in the background.
And let me tell you. These players are…. So. Fucking. Locked. They are locked like a locomotive. They’re not going anywhere. When you look up “pocket” in the encyclopedia it should be the smiling face of that clav player on Track 1. Unbelievable. This is how you start a reggae band, folks. You hear some music that is so unbelievably locked like this and you think maybe, just maybe we can pull this off. Well you probably can’t. Don’t let it stop you, but… the level of locked and loaded on these rhythm parts puts most other reggae and ska to shame. To shame. That’s how high the heights are here.
This kind of rhythm is so infectious. I was having a hugely fun time. I am thankful this exists, and it is no longer background music to me. It is music music. I am going to evangelize to all my music friends. They’ll think… “Jacob, aren’t you’re exactly 50 years too late?”
Fuck I don’t care. 5/5
29 likes
Bonnie "Prince" Billy
4/5
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.
27 likes
The Killers
2/5
Today, in 2023, I am no longer a 12-year old American boy. No longer am I the pimpled king of "Roller Kingdom," scared to death to meet the eyes of my middle school crush in the adjoining Birthday Party Room. Nor do I wait for the 6:45am bus, scribbling frantic answers to a history worksheet– a poor writing surface, those bus seats!– that has small, pitying holes in it from my erasable pen. These facts put me at an extreme, almost disqualifying disadvantage to rate an album like this. A genuine handicap for an album whose influence is foundational to many of my 2000's peers, but in retrospect may only be a good time if you're deep in Angst Mode. I knew kids who picked up guitar because they listened to this CD! The patron saints of Lazer Zones everywhere.
In seriousness. I like my Blur, I like my Arctic Monkeys, I like my Strokes. This is hard to get through. Grating. This shouldn't happen, because I know all the songs already. Halfway through, I'm thinking, "Maybe I'm having fun! Maybe I should sneak one of these songs in at my wedding."
Alas. Not Enough Fun.
A generous 3 might be possible. But I have dutifully deducted a point for the refrain, "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier," sung forty times behind a gospel choir. That line's been bouncing around in my head since the Roller Kingdom Days, and unfortunately, now illuminated by the scribes of Genius, it yields no special magic. 2/5
27 likes
Peter Gabriel
5/5
WOW.
I was so completely floored by this album, I don't know where to start. I listened through twice before I looked up on the Wikipedia and discovered all about its cultural significance, the first prominent use of gated reverb, all the connections with Phil Collins' drum sounds, the Fairlight, Kate Bush's contributions... etc. All wonderful errata to know. We have seen the best and the worst of the 80's, and I now can declare my allegiance solidly to the vision that these artists (with Steve Lillywhite producing) are pushing for.
But none of that preamble really captures how it felt to hear this album for the first time. Which was a moment of real WOW. It floored me, from the first song almost all the way through. It's a complex, challenging, bold listen from a disturbed mind. Peter Gabriel never sounds more strident and more deranged, his soundscapes never more expansive and challenging. There are enough hooks, soaring melodies, rhythms to keep the ship on course, but as a listener you're just thrown into this chaotic world of staggeringly bold, almost atonal ideas. Little did I know that the album that the gated snare would come from contains multitudes... a real mission statement of sound. No wonder copycats abound. No wonder it took people a decade to work through this. If I had been learning guitar, drums, production when this album came out, I would have been obsessed. Just the guitar work alone by Robert Fripp is so challenging and groundbreaking. The strange Fairlight patches..!! It all sounds so singular. This is an album where it feels like all these strange new ideas really crystalize into a Sound. And it's a genuinely disturbing one!
Bowie, of course, is the standard by which all art rock must be held up to, and there are some strong shades of Bowie in this album. But where I feel like Bowie in this period (the Berlin Trilogy etc.) feels weirdly aloof or absent from his albums, or doesn't commit all the way to the sound he is going for, this album delivers. It is full 100% balls-to-the-wall commitment to the insanity of the sound and the concept. I think it's the best Peter Gabriel album we've had, and it's maybe one of the best first listens I've had to an album in a long time. I'm so glad I'm doing this list. 10/10, 5/5.
19 likes
4-Star Albums (120)
1-Star Albums (18)
All Ratings
David Bowie
4/5
several classics! Liked it much more once I paid attention to the songwriting
Rod Stewart
2/5
It's definitely not an album that I thought I'd be into, but I found things to love in it after giving it more listens.
I like the more 70's folk elements of the songs, and the more tender moments. Rod Stewart is kind of a force on all the songs, and I wish the songs were a little more dynamic to go along with his singing.
Taylor Swift
4/5
This album was so enjoyable! From the first 5 seconds of Willow, I was hooked. I thought many of the songs were strong, and there’s a lot of variation between tight songs and open-ended songs. The production is subtle and never overpowering. Some of the transitions between sections were just masterful. It’s a little uneven in the second half… there are just a lot of songs!… but then Evermore happens and I’m like, that’s a great end. Overall enjoyed the natural confidence of this record a lot, as someone who came in expecting things to be much more buttoned-up.
The Kinks
3/5
Sweet, endearing record. And possibly the most British thing I’ve ever heard. This is what I picture in my head when I think of what a random British person had on in the 1960’s, while eating some equally British foodstuffs.
Just fun and enjoyable to hear. There weren’t any huge standout songs to me, but they have a very immediate, almost theatrical sound that I liked. Some almost McCartney moments with the songwriting, and I enjoyed the genre switch-ups. For me, they get a 3, via a somewhat generous rounding-up.
Arctic Monkeys
4/5
Another album that took me by surprise! I didn’t know what to expect coming in. This is the kind of record that oozes authenticity. We’ve all heard the inauthentic, canned, commercial version of this sound, but this feels like a record whose bona fides can’t be questioned. Plus, the band is so tight. And extremely British! Checks all the boxes for me.
John Lennon
3/5
Okay. This is not fair of me, I know… it’s a classic album, it’s without a doubt strong all the way through, it sounds like the fulcrum upon which music was shifting from the 60’s to the 70’s. But I just have trouble *enjoying* John Lennon’s solo music. Where people hear peace and love, I hear cynical, jaded, angry. In common parlance… he sounds butthurt! The McCartney “How Do You Sleep?” track doesn’t help adjust my perception. I think John Lennon’s writing has to contain some of the most widely misinterpreted lyrics in music. People wish to ascribe to him a mistaken sense of optimism and level-headedness that I see nowhere in sight.
There’s nothing wrong with the album, the Phil Spector production feels nicely restrained, there are great sounds. He sings his heart out. But I’m not eager to return to John Lennon’s world.
Britney Spears
2/5
I could not stop laughing through the first 15-20 minutes of this album. I think the song “E-mail my heart” finally broke me.
Bad in an enjoyable way, and good in some ways that count. The producers are clearly having tons of fun with their assignment. It’s not jaded, apathetic, soulless pop… it’s often very silly, but you can have fun with it.
So dated, too! Every one of Britney Spears’ songs have the same quality of her album covers: you can tell immediately what year it was made in, because there could be no other.
Minutemen
3/5
I feel enriched by listening to this, and there are some surprisingly touching moments. Pictures from a scene I was never a part of..: feels like a time capsule, and I’m at the show they’re playing these in. As an album, it’s hard to recommend because it’s so long, and there are a lot of records that could have been cut. But it shines bright where it does! I’ll be chewing on this one for a while, it’s not digestible in just a few bites.
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
I have to put down a 5. A life-changing one for sure. Bruce didn’t connect with me before this album, and this was the first one that made contact. Emotional, complex, musically perfectly on point. It got me singing in a new way. I really connect with these songs.
Funkadelic
4/5
Really fun, super creative. Way more variety and just plain quirkiness than I thought there would be coming in. I was thinking a strong 3, but the guitar solo on the last track converted me to a totally new religion.
Grateful Dead
3/5
I like Grateful Dead, I could enjoy them more, I like a lot of the songs on this record. That said, for every studio version of these songs, I feel like I've heard a live version that's way better or has more soul in it, and I'm not even much of a huge Grateful Dead follower. So I think I'd prefer to listen to their live records over this. That said, I'm surely missing some context with this record, but that was my reaction.
The Hives
1/5
It's hard to get myself in the mindset of what this would be like to hear in 2004. The fact that this music surely has been in 100 commercials for a new iPod is not helping.
I have to grade it poorly as an album, because 1) there's just not that much complexity, and we've heard more interesting and complex garage rock albums already, with more of a character, and 2) it's a compilation album, which as an album does what it needs to do (showcase their best songs), but mostly just feels like a lot of swings at bat. I thought it was well-produced, and I have nothing against the band. Just not a great album, I'd say.
Fever Ray
4/5
Agh, I've been fretting over whether to give this a 3 or a 4 all day! I listened to this album religiously in college, and I'm drawn to it for the same basic reasons: very striking artistic vision, anachronistic production (the new age synths, sequencing, processed vocals, with a few clean guitars in there), creepy lyrics and vocal delivery. In essence, everything a girl could want.
I'm just a little hung up on some of the lyrics. There are some really mysterious, stunning lines, but some just feel either repetitive, or others obfuscatory. But overall, I want to reward albums that feel confident and out of time, and this one really feels that way.
The Smiths
3/5
I don’t quite know what to make of the Smiths yet, if I’m honest. I’m too distracted by Morrissey’s lyrics and the pervasive silliness of the music. There’s clearly something more complex going under the surface with these lyrics, but it evades me. It’s got this funny skip to it, most of the music… almost silly? I think I need more time with this one.
Marianne Faithfull
4/5
I really felt like I connected to Marianne Faithfull in this record. You can hear the years of pain, suffering, grief, defiance. I think her performance is captivating, and it helps that the music is so well produced, a really good example of this style, great guitars. The one track in the middle that sounds like an English folk tune, but with a different take on it production-wise… THAT I really liked. But it had me hooked from minute 1! Four stars!
David Bowie
3/5
An album that really sounds good on paper! David Bowie and Philly Soul, recorded with some current and future Philly greats. I should like this album! I ultimately wasn't very attached to it. A lot of the songs seem very jamm-y, and were no doubt fun for the musicians to play, but seem to just go on for longer than they should. The Philly Soul-inspired sound can often be much too busy for my taste... a lot going on, but not a lot of dynamics or things that are too interesting. I prefer the more stripped-down, motown-esque tracks, like "Right. And Bowie isn't his most spirited in his delivery... he seems a bit detached from the energy of the rest of the track (the backup singers are trying their hardest!)
Still, there are a couple solid classics. This album really should be a a high two stars, but I put it to three stars because of Fame and Young Americans, both excellent tracks.
Brian Wilson
5/5
I can't believe I never listened to this album! What an emotional conclusion to Smile. The first two songs made me tear up, thinking of what this must have been like to actually finish after so many years. I'd listened to the Smile sessions dozens of times before, but I would always come away confused its overall direction. It felt beautiful and far advanced from Pet Sounds, but incomplete. This really feels like all the pieces of the puzzle are in their place. And what a treatment!
Brian's writing is incomparable... wide-eyed and childlike, but always with some complexity lurking. Now that everything is arranged the way it was intended to be, it makes so much sense. The album plays out like a film or musical... very strong arcs.
I could gush about this more, but I mean... it's one of my favorite and most cherished songwriters, finally realizing a vision that was a dream for 40 years. Emotional and captivating. 5 absolutely deserved stars.
As an album, it feels completely realized, in a way that I never appreciated before
Neil Young
4/5
I've never really given Neil Young's music a fair listen, which is totally unfair of me. I found a YouTube video of a vinyl rip, which I have no doubt elevated the experience.
Really moving songs, great performances, and I love the orchestral stuff mixed in, which actually elevated the music without it feeling corny at all. Some undisputed classics on this album as well, which felt like they happened at the right time. I really enjoyed it, and I can't believe I never gave Neil Young a chance before now!
I know that doesn't need to be said, but it pains me that this isn't on Spotify, so I don't know how often I'll go back and listen to it. Scarcity in music! What an idea. We're used to having everything all the time. I enjoyed my time with this album, and hope we'll meet again soon.
Fleet Foxes
5/5
I mean, what to even say. Ambitious and full of joy. Re-listening to it, I’m struck by how much heart is clearly in the making of this album, especially in Robin Pecknold’s vocal performances. There’s really nothing like it… he’s laying it all on the line for some of these recordings.
It’s easy to take a backseat listen to “Fleet Foxes,” to keep it on in the backdrop and largely tune out to its arrangements, its lyrics. But poking under the surface is a real, joyful world that they carved out on this album. It’s a sound that feels like it’s always been there, but it hasn’t… it’s fully unique to this record! There are plenty of influences to string the story along, and I especially noticed some of the psychedelic folk influences this time around. But it’s really a world unto its own, which is easy to forget after 15 years.
A monumentally ambitious sound, confidently realized on a debut album. 5 well-deserved stars.
The Human League
3/5
Like DJ said... I liked it the more I got into it. At first I was a bit lost and distracted by the lyrics, which are somewhat jarring. The second listen was where it started to come together for me. I read that this was a radically new sound, that really nothing like this had been done, and that nobody was clear (even up to the last minute) whether it was any good or not. That made me understand the album more... it's unintentionally groundbreaking. It does feel a little bit effortless in a funny way, and not contrived. I liked it the more I got into it.
Jane's Addiction
2/5
I didn’t love this album. I enjoyed the first few tracks, but couldn’t get over the lyrics toward the later tracks. Juvenile, but not in an endearing way, to me at least. I was also fairly unimpressed by the instrumentals… rather relentless. “Three Days” feels like the standout, but only because it’s a break from the more relentless pace. Agree with the other reviewers… would have loved to see live, but as an album it feels a little tedious to get through.
ABBA
3/5
I’m so polarized by ABBA, and so gosh-darn ambivalent about this album! It’s probably been the hardest album for me to give a proper rating… for every individual aspect, I find things to both love and hate.
At baseline, I’m just not an ABBA guy… something about the production feels fairly schmaltzy, and too “tight” in an uncomfortable way, like I’m hearing a MIDI recording, or the backing track of karaoke night. It gives me a headache if I listen for too long. It doesn’t help that so much of the more cheesy 80’s rock musicals seem to have taken direct cues from this. And the chorus/delay effects on the otherwise stellar vocals are just gratuitous and unnecessary. All I’m thinking is… if only this was recorded in a different decade. Any decade! That said… there are moments where the instrumental really locks, and it just surprises you! And there are a couple great guitar solos.
Songwriting: some super moving songs, and wide open, creative structures. Love when the choruses take you by surprise! I’m much less crazy about the slight whiff of The Barber of Seville I get in most of these songs. When it works, it works, but many times it’s gratuitous or is at best a bad impression of the reference. I get the idea, but it seems to work as often as it falls flat for me.
Still, I listened a second time, and I found more to like than dislike! Even if the more grating parts of the album bothered me even more. So I’m straight down the middle on this one! Hope I haven’t lost all of my friends.
The Smashing Pumpkins
4/5
I've never really given Smashing Pumpkins much of my time, and this was a lot to digest at the first go– my only major critique of the album is that it feels a little long. But from the moment Disarm came on, I was completely onboard with the sound, completely taken by its narrative voice. The tracks on the back half really allow the songs to build from ballads to these full, raw tracks. I was just impressed by the range and the performances, even if I wasn't catching everything lyrically on the first listen. One I'll definitely have to go back to. But very, very impressed on the first go.
Side note: prog rock albums don’t sound good in my car! So I nearly got the wrong impression. The guitars felt misleadingly busy on a system that had poor midrange. Glad I got it on a better system eventually.
Teenage Fanclub
2/5
It was fun! I had a good time. Nothing super standout. Loved the Beatles-y sound and melody writing. As an album it’s a little empty in the middle, but I liked some of the cuter songs like Metal Baby.
Def Leppard
4/5
Am I crazy?? I loved this. Absolutely loved it. All I could think was, am I supposed to not like this or something? Because on paper, I shouldn’t love it as much as I do. Plenty of the choruses and grungy “yeah”’s are so corny, the writing is so over-the-top pop anthemic, the guitar solos gratuitous. It’s like Thriller meets AC/DC meets We Will Rock You meets basement-pinball-tournament metal (complete with some early 8-bit pinball-sounding Fairlight samples). I should not like this!
But I LOVED it. Something about it just works, in this super funny way where all these disparate pieces come together to form a whole. I think a lot of it is the genius of the songwriting. All of Def Leppard’s hooks are really four hooks crammed next to each other, with some death-defying way of getting from hook A to B to C to D. Almost atonal in its approach! Keeps you guessing. The songwriting is so gratuitous, but the skrelt-y metal vocals and vibrato guitar solos make things feel so silly and over-the-top that it feels theatrical. “Metal on ice.” The guitar work on some of the tracks is just unreal, like watching a high wire act.
If there was only a third act with an ear break, maybe more downtempo, more complexity… if only! It would be an easy 5. As it is, an hour of just single after single tires you out. And it’s an hour! Too long. If it was, say, everything up to and including Gods of War, minus some of the more conventional AC/DC rips, I would be pretty much dead set on this. But it’s so close to perfect! I’m a convert and you’ll have to fight me. 4 stars!
Einstürzende Neubauten
1/5
Among the “1 Star Album Club,” some space must be reserved for bold, exciting ideas which have been ruined by their execution. I actually enjoy a lot of the experimentalism on this album, and I want reward any and all artists willing to go out on a limb. You can hear some nightmarish— but somewhat enticing— sounds on the second half of this record. Almost a more homespun, industrial version of the Raymond Scott/Manhattan Research tapes. Little ideas made from experiments, and some are pretty neat. That’s the instrumental second half of the album.
Unfortunately for Eunsturzrnde Neubauten, most of us start our albums at the beginning, and the beginning of this album is absolutely unlistenable, and it is entirely up to the screaming, frightening vocals. Comparisons have been made to the sound of Hitler screaming one of his speeches while giving you a root canal. I think that’s not at all unfair. I can’t hear anything redeeming in those first three tracks, and that’s a lot of time to lose someone. If Neubauten was really going for this, and they actually want me to turn my mind to the dark, repressed memories of my last dentist appointment, then “Steh Auf Berlin” is a stunning achievement. And so it is with all of the good ideas on this album: ruined by horrific vocals. I’m so repulsed by them that anything else redeeming on this album is forgotten.
I was going to write an unserious review, but halfway through my second go-round I realized that this band is actually deadly serious, and so they deserve to be more than just slagged off. 1 star for me.
Doves
3/5
I enjoyed this one! There were plenty of surprises. Even though it's a sound we all know, and has at this point been nailed down pretty much completely, I came away feeling like there was some definite joy in making this album and writing the songs. Open-ended structures, more exploratory sections and sound design. The parts that are meant to sound straight-ahead even do so with ease... it's doesn't feel too belabored, wrought, or (on the other hand) disinterested. I really liked it. Inversely proportional to how much I dislike the bands did this kind of thing, but with no feeling.
Beck
4/5
Just an amazing sound for Beck. Elements of psychedelic folk, twangy guitar sounds, and gorgeous orchestration. They fit so well together… it’s a cinematic sound and a great pairing.
I especially loved Nigel Goderich’s production treatment on this album: inventive, versatile, but never feeling too full. How does he do it? Everything sounds like a movie.
I will definitely return to these songs. It was a comfortable, contemplative morning listen.
Muddy Waters
3/5
Ah! I was hoping this would be the one for me. I’ve been hoping that a blues record would come along someday and convert me. I love playing the blues, and I think I’d really dig seeing a blues band play. So maybe an hour record of Muddy Waters, laying it all on the line, could get me there.
Sadly, not this record for me. I still had a good time, and the first track is iconic. Past the first two tracks, things got more monotonous. I always feel like I don’t know what I should be listening for! What am I missing? What’s the part of the blues that I need to “get” to unlock it?
A fine listen! Just not a conversion experience, which upon reflection is a lot of pressure to put on any one record. 3/5.
The Pogues
3/5
I am enjoying this album! I like the drunken dive bar sound of the lead singer. The musicians are very fun to listen to. They're so versatile and there are so many of them! It just sounds like a whole packed crowd of people playing. I'm enjoying listening to the unison parts, like when the banjo and the mandolin are together.
These songs run the gamut. "Fairytale of New York" is too beautiful... such a good duet. A lot of these songs sound like they're in a movie. I like how joyful the music is! I got to the "Sketches of Spain" track and was like ????????. I feel like I'm hearing a folk band stretch its wings and try things out.
It's long, and this is a LOT of Irish folk for me to do over two days. But overall very pleasant, at times emotional. Good time was had.
Morrissey
3/5
This is my second Morrissey album for 1001, on the long road to "getting Morrissey's music." I have to say... I'm starting to get it more. The production is overall pretty safe, and not super interesting, save for a couple of standouts... it has that kind of safe, U2 sound to it. Steve Albini producing, who isn't ever bad, but never really my favorite choices... other than a couple of spirited guitar solos.
But the background music doesn't seem to be the point of Morrissey. I get this sense that all of Morrissey's songs are the same: there's a backing track, which is almost totally disconnected from Morrissey and his lyrics. And then front and center you have Morrissey, with lyrics that range from sarcastic to pathetic to darkly funny. In a funny way it reminds me of some kinds of hip hop, where there's this wide gulf between the musicians making the track, and the lead, who's floating above it all, in his own world. There's something kind of funny about that. I enjoy it more once I get into the lyrics and discover the darkly funny stuff, but as an album, it's got a lot of "same." 3/5.
Ananda Shankar
5/5
Incredible! Such a creative, spirited album. You can read much about Amanda Shankar’s ambitions for this album— he put his statement right on the cover!— so it’s a manifesto kind of album. His goal is to combine his advanced study in the sitar, plus Indian classical forms, with 60s psychedelic rock, heavy Moog synths, big operatic arrangements. A platform for him to show us how expressive the sitar can be.
On every one of these points he succeeds. The album is innovative as a piece of music for its time, but it’s also fun, and you can tell that everyone is having fun. The idea of combining Sitar and Western music could have been boring, or academic, or shallow in its exploration. This album is none of these things. I get the sense that Amanda Shankar is exploring this idea to its absolute fullest, complete with some crazy Moog sound effects on the tracks! And it’s a perfect environment to show us his skill in playing, with different shades of an instrument you might have overlooked. I’m getting major Herbie Hancock vibes on this album, in the way the album feels so inviting, excited about its own sound, like he’s the first explorer. And the musicianship is just amazing throughout.
This album made me re-discover the sitar! Which makes me one more convert to Amanda Shankar’s way of thinking. What more can you ask for. 5 stars!
The Byrds
3/5
I enjoyed listening to this album! It was fun to have on in the background. Some of the songs are undeniable, and I especially loved their Dylan cover. They suffer somewhat from the same affliction that so many bands had at at the time, which is being difficult to distinguish from being a b-side track on a Beatles record. But of those bands (there are many), I found these guys to be pretty fun, and at times more experimental. when they lock, they locked! Enjoyed my time with this record.
Gang Of Four
4/5
this was a stunning album on first listen... so pointy, and almost unapproachable? I keep thinking about pointy towers and brutalist architecture when I hear this album. I gotta say that I enjoyed the lyrics as well... Never too on the nose for me, maybe it's in the delivery. I feel like I'lll return to this album. Great morning punk listen while buying groceries at the co-op! To quote Charlie, "I feel like this should be 4 stars, but I can't exactly point to why." 4/5!
Green Day
4/5
Undeniably a good album. There are just too many hit songs, it’s hard to believe given how short it is! I love the fun childish energy of the Band all over this… it feels like they’re really leaning in to their strengths.
Unfortunately for me, I grew up after Green Day had already come and gone through the halls of my high school… really, in Green Day’s wake. That unfortunately means that I remember one or two kids who seemed to base their entire whiny personality on Billy Joe Armstrong’s most tortured vocals. So it’s no fault of the band that I have this strong association between their lead singer and some bullies from 2006, but there ya go.
4 stars, without a doubt a classic. Thank you Billy Joel Armstrong for inviting the whole front section onto the stage at the Tweeter Center in 2009, sorry Billy Joe Armstrong if I offended you in an unflattering connection to our high school “punk scene.”
Dead Kennedys
3/5
Three punk albums in one week… all from very different eras! This might be my favorite time period. It just feels so silly and unserious, and then you get behind the lyrics and there’s more to it. I think the singer alone gives this album an extra star, he’s so unique.
Holiday in Cambodia is pretty amazing. When he started screaming “Pol! Pot!” I must have been at peak Dead Kennedys.
I really wish this album were mixed better. It’s a shame that it sounds like a pretty lofi, live recording… some more fidelity would have done a lot for me.
Thank you punk albums for being so short! In and out and done! Thats how it should be.
XTC
5/5
This is the perfect blend of sweet, salty, and bitter to me. It's got tons of that anxious, foot-tapping energy, mixed with a tiny bit of that Steely Dan cynicism, but plenty of wacky fun in the production. Lots of Beach boys backing vocals, funny early Fairlight sampling, just silly songs performed seriously.
Sounds like an extremely contentious recording process, from reading the Wikipedia. On that page, there's a picture of Andy Patridge self-seriously belting into a mic while reading from a comic book, and I think that pretty much sums it up for me! So wacky and fun and also serious. Gets me in all the right ways.
Bob Dylan
5/5
Captivating album. It really feels like you’re hearing the last breaths of Bob Dylan, as he’s nearing the end. It’s rough, yearning, full of pathos.
But what really struck me about the album was the way it’s recorded! I read about the album production beforehand… how everything was done live, in this one-mic-in-the-room style, how the effects on Bob’s voice were printed on the performance as he sang. I had read all this background, but I honestly didn’t expect to hear that much of a difference in the sound. Man was I wrong! It’s such a unique-sounding album, sonically. It sounds full and live but also fuzzy, like an hazy, impressionistic version of a 50’s blues record. Something about the recording makes it feel so out of time, so strange… and made me on my toes for the whole listen.
You know, 5 stars! It had me all the way through.
Jefferson Airplane
3/5
This was a fun listen. They undeniably have hits! This was one of my mom's favorite bands, growing up. I like to picture her getting this record as a brand new vinyl, and putting it on for the first time. It really is like time-travel music. That's how I'm getting to understand bands like Jefferson Airplane more... not as particularly groundbreaking, not because they have the most poignant songs, but as capturing a very particular energy and time. It feels like the music that plays as the backdrop to so many young people's adventures in that time. There's definitely more depth to the music than I may be leading on, but that's my overall impression.
Dinosaur Jr.
3/5
I wasn't able to give this album the listen it deserves. My impressions are that this reminds me a ton of garage rock bands from my hometown in MA, and sure enough, they're from Amherst! It's really endearing. But I have to dock points for the mixes! Some of the recording and mixing on these records (especially the first few ones) are so, so bad! And not bad in an endearing kind of way... they just feel pulled right off the board, or like they were referenced in a really bad room. So I'm feeling a safe 3. I'll definitely return to this, and it feels buzzy and creative, reminds me of my hometown. But could be so much more listenable.
The Verve
2/5
I did not love this. There are moments of earnestness, longing, excited energy in the songs, which makes it feel like the records are about to turn a corner. But really, it's just bathed in a morass of pretty bland arrangements, songs that are too long, chord changes and structures that feel uninspired. "The Drugs Don't Work" is genuinely great, and there's something to be said for "Bitter Sweet Symphony" being an undeniable timestamp of the era, of that scene, of what being in middle school was like for every middle schooler in 1997. But even that song don't hold up well! I was looking for something more, and there are hints of it, but I didn't find it.
Shack
2/5
This is one of those albums that makes me wonder how the 1001 Albums list was conceived, and what possessed the writers to put this on it. The album isn't bad by any stretch! Just fairly middle of the road. A stalk of grass among many, cut to exacting length. It's hard for me to get past the production, which seems very, very safe.
Which leaves me with questions! Why is this on here? What cultural, historical significance does it have beyond the music? I must be missing context here. It certainly is hard to find in the music.
Blur
5/5
I unexpectedly, quite unexpectedly, LOVED this album!
Green Day
4/5
We are closing out 2022, and it is time I put aside all the old, well-worn prejudices against Green Day that I harbored in high school. The sins of the fans– the many sins of some *particular* fans I knew in high school– are not the sins of the band, and they should not cloud my judgment. At this point, 50 albums in, I am like Spock, a Vulcan reviewer, evaluating albums on pure logic. So utterly removed am I from emotion. So advanced beyond the petty, petty drama from 2007. I have attained escape velocity. The baggage I once came to this record with has all but escaped my mind. I have forgotten it. I am one. With Green Day.
To listen to this album is to experience a divergence... a dissonance. On one hand, here I am with all of my prejudice. On the other is a genuinely captivating record. Oozing with ambition, with confidence and vision and rock opera-ness and so many goddamn hits that it seems impossible they're all on this album. The height to which this band climbs on this album is so impossibly high, it's hard to not just gawk at how high up things are. It really feels like a capstone record for a time, and maybe for the genre altogether. The conclusion of something. I think the band should be extremely proud of the record, and they really deserve the praise they get for it. And really... really, I'm over it. I swear. Really.
I'm going on two listens. We'll see about 3.
Bonnie "Prince" Billy
4/5
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.
Tom Waits
4/5
I mean, man. Tom Waits grew on me. Not on listen one, not even on listen two. My first listen, I was pretty close to repulsed. Such an abrasive voice, it’s easy for it to feel like sandpaper on your ears. But something was telling me that there must be more going on, must be something there. Tom Waits on this record is deep in America’s underbelly. We’re in the deep, dark caverns of depravity along with him, and for someone like me it’s just pure shock and distaste as he pulls you in. Honestly, I was gonna turn it off until I got to “On The Nickel” and I was like wait… this is a genuinely heartbreaking song.
So I went on the journey with Tom Waits. And 3 albums in (I listened to the late career, sultry bayou villian-character record Blood Money, as well as the genuinely charismatic Closing Time, with barely a family resemblance to his later self), and… I’m a convert. It’s a fulcrum record, on which Tom Waits is becoming the character, getting drawn into the darkness. And it’s now genuinely captivating. I can’t tell what is the performance art, or where the character ends and the person begins, but I’m enthralled. Consider me a fan.
The Who
3/5
Definitely a high 3 for me. It’s always hard to get inside the mind of someone hearing this for the first time, and having their world changed. There are aspects of the sound that are just starting to get more progressive, for sure. The guitar tones in particular are starting to sound more biting, the drums more pushed and distorted (at times it feels like they’re literally pushing the recordings as hot as it can go). But for a listener today, this album feels like a point on the drive, a stop before the destination, for both harder music and The Who as a band. Still, I really enjoyed listening, and there are some catchy ones!
Various Artists
4/5
Wow, maybe my favorite Christmas album I’ve ever heard? I didn’t just have a good time… I had a Great Time. Phil Spektor in his prime! The Ronnettes with their most Brooklyn accents! Lots of fun sound effects and orchestral stuff. Always fun, never too jaded-commercial, always having-a-good-time-with-it-commercial. I gained a new appreciation for songs I’d heard before, it helped fill out the missing pieces of the puzzle for me with these Christmas songs I’ve no doubt heard in countless shopping experiences. 4 stars! I have been gifted.
David Bowie
2/5
I had high hopes coming into this album, as with all my exposures to Bowie from this period. This is late 70s Bowie, however, and it would seem that much of the album was made in the absence of our leading star. At least that’s how it sounds to me on my first few listens. There are so many tracks that are puzzling to me; on the one hand, here are some of the best instruments and production on any Bowie album, with really creative instrument choice, sound design, and arrangements, especially for the period. And almost nothing Brian Eno touches is without merit. That said, it sure sounds like Bowie phoned it in on top of a couple of these instruments after they had been recorded. I keep waiting for Bowie to come through with one of his signature, aching yet effervescent rock star lines. But he’s almost nowhere to be found! And when he does arrive, it’s too little too late. I’ll have to hear the rest of this supposed trilogy, but until then, I am left none to impress. 2/5.
This review was translated and dictated by Becca Lipstein. No proofing was done.
The Rolling Stones
5/5
Instant conversion experience!
A band that, for silly reasons, I never gave the time of day. And then 1001 Albums Generator made me sit down and really listen. And I realized… I already knew half of the songs! And they’re amazing.
I just get a great feeling, listening to this album. I’m sure others have some background on this, but one thing that surprised me was the recording quality, for the period. I think this was 1971, and it really sounds like a big upgrade in overall sound quality, compared to rock albums beforehand. The guitars in particular sound perfect. That’s the sound in my head that I hear when I think “guitar.”
Just amazing. Going back for my second go-round, driving across the Midwest. Perfect.
Garbage
1/5
I am completely unimpressed by this album. I must be missing something! To me it just sounds really boring. The recordings and arrangements just sound really… square? There’s some interesting sounds, sonically, but overall I feel like I’m being beat over the head repeatedly. The lyrics I tuned into are all pretty corny. I must be missing context! I dunno… maybe all of the ways this album was groundbreaking or original have now been beaten to death. To me, it sounds boring, slow, and square. I don’t think it should be on this list.
MGMT
5/5
Stunning, stunning debut album. An album that feels like it set the tone for an age. A great case of an album that I was super familiar with in high school— I probably played it a few dozen times while driving around— but a retrospective listen only caused me to love to album more. The first half of the album (up to Kids) is just immediately iconic… but the production was what caught my ear! 15 years later and I’m like… something about this sounds so Flaming Lips. And sure enough, it’s Lord High Wizard Dave Fridmann on production! An amazing combo. I feel like listening to this album deeply got me a masterclass in dynamic, full, quirky, Phil Spektor-y wall-of-sound gushiness. I don’t know much about the background on the making of this album, but it sounds like a perfect pairing to me, between the silly, irreverent lyrics and the Phil Spektor-y symphonic sound. I loved it all the way through. I got so many ideas from just listening to the instrumentation. For a debut album? Nothing less than a perfect first ball.
Burning Spear
4/5
Really enjoyed this one. From track one! Such a perfectly tight sound, subjects, political messages, fun, all those great grooves. I felt like the band was so tight! Listened a few times this weekend. Overall great stuff.
DJ Shadow
4/5
How to review an album like this! Something that’s so self-evidently influential, that it must have inspired every producer within a 15-year timespan afterwards… from Alchemist to No ID to Nujabes to Doom. It’s all there. I get why it’s on the list… it’s very significant. Supposedly it’s the album that got Radiohead to start sampling on OK Computer! It’s kind of the moment when it all crystallizes for hip hop… when sampling really takes on a life of its own, is coming into its own as an art. And I’m really happy that 1001 made me finally sit down and listen to this album… one I always said I’d get around to.
It’s also really, really interesting to listen to still. There are things about it that are funny, like the skits (which hip hop is now replete with). There’s sentimentality… I can just picture a younger Nujabes listening to this and the gears start turning. And still, there are aspects of the production that are surprising, or feel like you haven’t heard it copied to death yet. All on an MPC60, which makes the record sound both familiar and yet like sonic unobtanium. It’s the way samples are supposed to sound to so many producers, because this is how they hear it in their heads, but it’s more truly lo-fi than all of that.
Inspiring as heck. Even the super dated parts feel fresh on this album. Long live sampling! 4/5.
Billy Bragg
2/5
Didn’t love it, I’ll be honest… and I really tried to get in deeper. Listened a few times on this road trip. You can’t deny his sincerity… I just didn’t quite get onboard.
The Specials
3/5
Had a great time with this record. And now I feel like I understand the British ska scene more, which always seemed opaque to me. The styles on this album run the gamut, but the pervasive feeling of cynicism, feeling trapped, angst is present throughout. But it’s also fun! I just appreciated how deftly this album moves between styles… things feel very urgent and never overwrought. I read that it’s not unlike a live album, and I really get that sense. Great listen!
Elvis Presley
3/5
Okay, I'm definitely warming up to this one. But it was a long road to get there. My first reaction to hearing this album was feeling a little distant from the music. I guess that's a fair way to put it... listening to Elvis' voice has always had the quality to me of viewing an historical artifact behind a glass case. Very much like listening to a broadcast recording of Churchill. You can't help but listen to it and go "oh, that's just Elvis The Historical Figure," and it almost rolls off my ear like it's a museum piece.
It doesn't help that– and I'll be honest here– Elvis really hams it up. An amazing performer, no doubt, but you get the sense he could be singing about anything! I'm always wondering who's the man behind the singer, what his internal life must be. Whether he is actually connecting to the words in "In The Ghetto" (written by Mac Davis). Is he really feeling it? Why am I getting the same feeling I get when I hear an audiobook reader recite someone else's book? Where is Elvis in this picture?
All that said: This is just a really pleasant album to listen to, and a great example of a crossroads album between the Nashville sound and some soul/ Motown influences. It's just a good mix. Part of me is like, eh, the playing is nice, but have you heard the basslines that James Jamerson is doing on all those Motown records? Really any late-60s Motown record puts this record in stark relief. Especially for 1969... a LOT has happened to develop that sound by then.
But the cool thing about this album is that Elvis is doing it, and he's doing it *well.* I need to stop wishing that an album *isn't* this other, better produced album, and just appreciate the moment that we get. And it is a treat that we get to listen to this kind of crossover. 3/5
Sly & The Family Stone
4/5
Here's what I'm here to say. This is absolutely some of the tightest playing I've heard on any funk record period. This is the album that should be referenced as what playing in the pocket sounds like. Everything, from the keys, bass, guitars sound like one machine. And most of it was played by one person! Insane.
I'm not getting any of the lyrics on this listen, and they're hidden, darkened, almost like the singer is trying to confess something but is somewhat timid to say. But supposedly the lyrics cast a long cynical shadow on the record. And the dark, dull, supposedly heavily overdubbed recordings add to that flavor... the record feels a little dour, even as it's some of the catchiest and funkiest playing you'll hear. I'm totally onboard. I think it's only a 4 for me because I wish the lyrics took these instrumentals to that next level, and really dug their heels in. But I'm definitely playing this album a bunch more times. It's a weirdly cozy, Sunday afternoon pleasant record to put on, dark as it is, and I'll be putting it on many more times.
Simon & Garfunkel
4/5
At least one star has to be given to them for Scarborough Fair... an unlikely hit if there ever was one, and one that perfectly captures the woody nymphy folk sound of the era. I'm a huge fan of where that genre ends up... I think psychedelic folk might be one of my favorite ever genre for how weird it gets... and this song is definitely in the minds of a lot of artists as they go in that way.
The rest of the album is a mix. Homeward Bound and 59th Street Bridge Song perfectly capture the lyricism, the playfulness that I love about Paul Simon's songwriting. Tongue in cheek and then yearning visual, pulls you in. At times I think he's a little too clever for his own good, but what can you say about an English major who soon to become one of the greatest songwriters of his generation. That's the artist's journey.
I'd absolutely listen to this a few more times. There's always more to the lyrics to pick up. We're right around the corner from Bookeneds and that's when my ears start to really perk up. But there are some really tender moments on here. Two caterpillars in metamorphosis.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
2/5
Something about this album just isn’t clicking for me, even after 3 listens over a couple of days. I am not sure if it’s the album’s problem, or mine. I am not counting out CCR… this is just the first time I’ve given them a real, honest listen. There are some guitar parts that feel *awesome*, like they really get you going. The lead singer is selling it on those first two tracks. But I feel pretty distant from this music, like it’s a culture I will always be an outsider to, and I’m craning my neck for some vantage point to get a proper look in, but it’s no use. It all feels a little foreign to me. I think I need another entryway in, and maybe there’s another CCR album that gets me there. For me, 3 stars is “had a good time,” and I’m still standing outside the venue, trying to figure out what the whole thing is about.
Dwight Yoakam
2/5
I didn't like this record, but I'm holding out that there's something I'm missing. Sign me up for pained, afflicted, sobering, wistful country. Some amount of dirt, or edge there. The songs here feel simultaneously safe and pitying. Nothing goes right for Dwight Yoakam. It's all pain, denial, rejection, affliction. That's a part of the story, of life, yes. To me, it felt like too much of the same note. Maybe this just isn't the time of my life to hear this record. Maybe I need a breakup and a rejection and my best friend dying. Even so, I don't think this is the one I'd reach for. 2/5
Mike Oldfield
4/5
Okay before I write anything, just know that I am *for sure* buying this album on vinyl. And it is going at the absolute top, most-easily-accessible place in my future dream record playing room
A cooky, campy, proggy symphony if there ever was one. I came into this listen with LOW expectations. A while back, I saw a YouTube vide of Mike Oldfield performing the title track of Tubular bells, and 20 minutes left I was left feeling dizzy, Eurovision-y, a little numb from its sheer length (?), and feeling super unimpressed. Just confused, like... what is this silliness? It felt very indulgent, but the music behind it was so uninteresting, very loop-y. A guitar would come in after 15 minutes and you'd be like, oh wow, something new. And then lost again.
I don't know where *that* piece of music is on Mike Oldfield's original Tubular bells from 1973... it seems to be absent. This Tubular Bells is very different. There are high highs and low lows. My high point was probably the growling muppet prog rock in the last third of Tubular Bells Pt.II... so silly. Then there are themes that, no fault of Oldfield, have been completely beat into your brain by every video game composer of the 90s and 2000s. The opening track, while I'm sure was used well in The Exorcist, sounds... kind of lame. We've heard it. But again, there's so little continuity between the vignettes that, at some point, he just pulls the rug on you, and you're off to some other land.
Super proggy (especially the second part, which I liked vastly more than the first part), never too serious (I'm thinking of the "And Now... Spanish Guitar!" sections), sometimes genuinely interesting or beautiful. Really a surprise, a grab bag. And recorded in one of the best years for music recordings, so that doesn't hurt either. It's hard to hear it, today, as something groundbreaking, but sounds like it really was. Nowadays, it may be a little unserious, a little silly, medieval, parochial, but... it's one of those one-of-a-kind experiences. Absolutely worth a trip. 4/5
PS: I found the YouTube video that I saw, of a very late 90s Tubular Bells... prepare thine ears. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSRJvq4Wd48
Grizzly Bear
4/5
An album that I would always look at and say, "oh yeah, I played that a million times in high school." Apparently I didn't have the full one on iTunes, because quite a few of these songs are brand new to me! I know so little about Grizzly Bear's story, but to hear this album up against their first is like seeing boys becoming men. The records on their first project are wandering, searching, somewhat nervous lofi when put up against this album, and I can't help but think that the songwriting is a huge part of that journey. I can't get enough of Daniel Rossen's songwriting... I think he's just a really unique writer, both in tone and in the way his melodies and chords work. The Rossen songs tend to be my favorites, especially when you can feel the band going off the deep end a little, but oh man! That last song "Foreground!" That's an instant favorite for me, and it hits me right in the heart.
"Two Weeks" is an obvious giant hit, but it feels a little misplaced on this album, like it's an entirely different band from the one that does "Southern Point" or "Dory." A real mystery of a band! Some of the textures are some of the most beautiful things I've ever heard, other songs feel a little meandering or confused, sort of like their earlier works. It's a little uneven for an album, but I wouldn't want to live in a world where this album didn't exist. 4/5
Led Zeppelin
5/5
Wow. I get what all the fuss is about. This is the kind of album that 1001 Albums was made for... an album that you might have some ambient awareness of, that you might think, abstractly, "that sounds like it would be good," but never actually gave it your ears.
This is the first time I've ever properly sat with a Led Zeppelin album, and I've gotta say... it was pretty unforgettable. I was taken from basically the first moment of the first song. So many things were clicking for me... Robert Plant's feverish, skrelt-y vocals that immediately recall a half dozen other singers so clearly indebted to his sound, the drums (the drums!!) and how creative the fills were, the inventive ways they're re-interpreting blues records... I really, really got it. It was like a lightbulb moment... ah, so that's why every late 60's band and their mother was trying to make this kind of music. They were all listening to Zeppelin!
I was really on the edge between 4 and 5 here. Truth be told, I spent the next several hours mainlining as much of Led Zeppelin's next 3 albums into my ears as I could, and what I heard was... insane! So now I know where the story goes with this band. I know how they rapidly evolve, how some of the best music they ever did is yet to come. But for introducing me (and the world at the time) to such a bold, intense, sexually-charged-guitar-solo sound, I have to give the album high marks for sending me in a tailspin. With so many albums to get through, it's rare to have an instant conversion experience. A well-deserved 5/5
The Streets
2/5
Finally had a breather after a crazy week to review… a funny album. The Streets’ “A Grand Don’t Come For Free.” An album I’m already a little endeared to. Perhaps unreasonably attached. I kept thinking “I’ve heard this before!” But I just couldn’t remember where. I think it was midway though a heavy alt hip hop phase I had.
Here’s what I’ll say. It’s an ambitious concept. Some blending of musical theater, lyrical storytelling, multiple characters, etc. And all about such a mundane life and characters, with mundane problems, that it’s pretty funny. I actually like the cheap 2000’s production… you get the sense that the main character is so strapped for cash that he could only afford the absolute cheapest sampler and a Casio keyboard. A few of the songs sound basically unmixed. Something about it kind of works.
It’s a pretty unique album because you get the sense this could have almost been cleaned up to be a… musical? Maybe it just wasn’t the right time. With a good editor, maybe broadening the other characters out, I could see it.
But I mean, some of the lines are just grating to hear… after a while, are you sympathetic to the main character, or just annoyed at his stupidity? I guess that’s kind of the point. But it doesn’t make you want to return to the album a ton. But yeah, this kind of storytelling is kind of normal for hip hop, you hear some version of this everywhere. Mundane problems, gossip, axes to grind. Which is all really fun if the music grooves. This music is intentionally not tight and almost low effort, which again, fits with the story, but makes it less of a fun listen. I’ll still feel vaguely affectionate to it if it were to come on randomly, but I don’t think I’ll be returning by choice. 2/5
The Style Council
2/5
I’m left a little confused by this album. Stylistically it’s all over… and many instrumental records that feel out of place. I’d say the rap… wasn’t bad?… but the songs played for me too close to their genre templates, and didn’t really surprise me. It’s eclectic, but throughout the album I was hoping for more cohesion, more of a reason why.
William Orbit
1/5
We’re far enough into 1001 Albums, and I’m hooked enough, that having a mediocre album feels like a genuine bummer. This album was just really boring! There was nothing about it that I really connected with. A while back, I got really deep into early 90s sample CD’s… when sampling had escaped the hardware, and now there were hundreds (!!) of loops available for use on the computer. And boy, it’s some great stuff, but it all sounds so, *so* impossibly 90s. Like, every sound in those early sample CDs made it into every CSI episode, every late night thriller b-movie, ever 90s techno or dance track.
This album is nothing but those CDs! I can barely hear anything else, past the super dated sounds and loops. I like those sounds, in a kind of fun endearing nostalgic way, but the compositions here just left me super bored. The ending of the album had a tiny bit more for me to like in it, but everything else is just hard to listen to for very long. And I’m not a listener who hears the lyrics first, by any stretch, but you get the sense that William Orbit actually does not care what lyrics his singers are saying.
Hoping for something spicier tomorrow… 1/5
Q-Tip
5/5
Loved loved loved this album! I thought I had combed over most of the highlights of Tribe and the individual members, but this one must have totally passed me by. This was pure quality. The Norah Jones record was amazing!! D’Angelo feature at the end was so up my alley, like right in the center of my zone. I love q-tip’s delivery, I love the funkiness of the record, I love the BASS PARTS. WHO IS PLAYING THESE BASS PARTS. The sample selection is amazing, harmonically in a totally different zone if it’s own. This is really really great. Sad to have missed this album for so long.
Madonna
3/5
This album is basically impossible to review. I've turned it over a dozen times in my head, in the last week. Did I enjoy listening to it? Almost universally no. Pretty much anything in this corner of pop, anything ABBA-adjacent is baseline annoying to me. But then...! You go into the history behind this record. Madonna's intentions, to make an album about forgiveness, atonement. A reckoning with her Catholic upbringing. The last song ("Act of Contrition,"), with the backwards music, where she realizes all the platitudes, the posturing toward God doesn't get her into heaven. I mean... that's an Extremely Good premise for a record. The parts that are darker, more moody... I like those parts. I like how human Madonna feels on some of these records. I like Prince's guitar playing, I like his duet. Can this record pull itself from under all the cheesy 80's production, all the misguided choices? I am completely unsure. I'm not gonna lie that I thought about this record a lot. Even if it's not to my taste, I have to give Madonna credit... there's a lot of ambition here. 3/5
Queen
2/5
A brilliant and talented band that very rarely makes any songs I like. You can hear very clearly in this album that their showboating, free-wheeling arrangements are nothing new, and they had been doing this thing for quite some time before Bohemian Rhapsody et al. Killer queen is a song where that kind of energy works brilliantly. Something about it focuses in just the right way, with just the right elements, that it’s infectious. It just works.
The rest of the album— with a couple exceptions— just doesn’t work for me. The pacing is too frenetic, there’s a lot of quick switch-ups, effects, guitar solos, but behind some fairly lackluster writing. “Bring Back That Leroy Brown” perfectly illustrates this. There’s barely two bars strung together before an insert, effect, banjo strum, bgv, guitar solo, harpsichord solo, etc. Can you imagine recording that live to tape? The musicianship necessary is next level. But it makes me feel nothing except mild anxiety, and some annoyance. I get that it’s the style, it’s this dinner theater style! But it tires my poor ears. And for what? For an okay song. That’s this album for me.
Beatles
5/5
Revolver is a basically perfect album, by an imperfect, human, but nonetheless a one-in-a-million, band. I mean, what are the freaking odds that two of our greatest songwriters are in the same band? And that they are coming into their own, writing-wise, at exactly the same time, pushing the band in two divergent, competing directions. Lennon’s mystic but somehow cynical, afflicted songs, about the mundane things in life that somehow keep you wanting. McCartney’s way of encapsulating phases of love and living in a small turn of phrase, so earnestly, but from the perspective of the songbird, maybe the muse, looking below on the human condition. And all of this song-y-ness happens in… 2 to 3 minute, experimental, baroque pieces of music that bear more resemblance to Mozart than music today. All while being silly, whimsical, experimental, uncompromising in its quality. On four tracks! It’s actually like going to the Moon. The talent here for everyone involved is just staggering.
I’ve given a lot of records from this period 3 stars, 2 stars, because Revolver etc. loom large in my mind. So many records of this time, sonically, sound like the era they’re from… chambers, stringy guitars, wall of sound, tape breaking up. And, well, Revolver actually sounds nothing like that. Totally a product of its time, but outside of it. These focused chamber arrangements, minimal and still whimsical, playful. I can actually hear the limitations of George Martin and the band as they struggle to fit their ideas down into four tiny tracks of tape. But rather than push the tape, they edit the arrangement, obsessively. Condense, break it up. There’s never too much or too little in the production, it’s exactly the right amount. Really impressive to hear.
I used to say this was my favorite Beatles record because that’s what everyone always says. Now, with 15 years worth of returning, and having gotten into the actual business of songwriting and production, I can say it’s got to be one of the brightest. Maybe the best example of their songwriting chops in action, George Martin’s budding experimentalism. It’s just tight, there are no misses (okay I never *loved* Dr. Robert), and it’s some of the band members’ best individual efforts. It’s the Beatles as maybe they should be best remembered. 5/5
Ozomatli
1/5
Am I being too cynical here? I’m imagining Robert Dimery going, “Oh no, we forgot that we need a Latin album in the book… what about the album that won the Latin Grammy last year?” In today’s world, where English-speaking artists are releasing high profile Spanish-speaking collaborations with huge Latin artists and dominating charts, where these artists are not just ascendant, but genuinely groundbreaking… should *this* be one of the few Latin albums on the list? For me, 1 stars means no, it should not. 1/5
I did like the Killer Mike sounding guy though. Not saying the music was unpleasant or even un-fun. But it should not be here.
The Doors
3/5
I liked it! I’m intrigued. I’m eager to hear more from the Doors. Some of the songs give you this offbeat, unsettled feeling. You get the sense that there’s something odd about Jim Morrison. He’s not immediately scannable. Like there’s something brewing under the surface. I’m only getting a quick look with an album that has a couple of standouts, but is mostly a mood. Where do they go next? (No spoilers). 3/5
Bob Dylan
5/5
I must be by far the least knowledgeable of the Bob Dylan reviewers on here. I have always been a “music first, lyrics… eventually?” kind of guy. This is changing. Now I crave music with something to chew on. Meanings superimposed on meanings. Poetry, which gives every shade of grey a sense of contrast, another color. Or turns a sad story into a joke, or a twist of the knife. A sense that things can be more than what they appear to be. And I never feel more like the uncarved block than when I come to Dylan. totally uninformed, but… moldable.
There’s just something mythical about his writing, and it makes his stories feel out of time. They are archetypes, but they’re very playful, referential. In a moment he’s serious, and at the next moment the collapses as a joke, or a play on words. I’m entranced.
Even in his most irreverent, most referential, whatever… there’s always “something there” with Dylan. The lights are on. You get a sense that there’s another layer you need to unravel, that there’s a reason he’s pointing you to this archetype, that situation. Much to take in. 5/5
Neil Young
3/5
I liked it, I had a good time! I heard a vinyl rip of it, as Neil would have wanted. come to think of it, Neil probably doesn’t want me to hear a version of this album that isn’t direct vinyl.
Nothing really stood out up re-visiting, but I’m open to putting it on again. His mix of melancholy is always home-y to me. It didn’t have the same effect on me as Harvest. But I had a good time!
Everything But The Girl
4/5
A real question… why do I like this so much, and yet similar versions of this style that are only 5-10% different are almost unlistenable to me? What’s the magic that makes this work for me? The first thing that stood out to me was balance… the elements that might seem dated, that otherwise would irk me, always feel properly balanced with other ideas. Something about the breakbeats, drum machines, the lonesome and somewhat desolate vocal, and the string arrangements… it all feels balanced. It just all works really well together. Where other examples of this 90’s dance, breakbeat style don’t hold up to me, this music is well-served by its counterweights. That’s true in the mixing as well… everything sounds very natural, never too slick. Never cheesy.
I had a great time listening. It’s also a clear jumping off point for artists today, some of whom are contemporaries. I think this is great, and genuinely feels like it could have been made a decade later and still be intriguing.
The Killers
2/5
Today, in 2023, I am no longer a 12-year old American boy. No longer am I the pimpled king of "Roller Kingdom," scared to death to meet the eyes of my middle school crush in the adjoining Birthday Party Room. Nor do I wait for the 6:45am bus, scribbling frantic answers to a history worksheet– a poor writing surface, those bus seats!– that has small, pitying holes in it from my erasable pen. These facts put me at an extreme, almost disqualifying disadvantage to rate an album like this. A genuine handicap for an album whose influence is foundational to many of my 2000's peers, but in retrospect may only be a good time if you're deep in Angst Mode. I knew kids who picked up guitar because they listened to this CD! The patron saints of Lazer Zones everywhere.
In seriousness. I like my Blur, I like my Arctic Monkeys, I like my Strokes. This is hard to get through. Grating. This shouldn't happen, because I know all the songs already. Halfway through, I'm thinking, "Maybe I'm having fun! Maybe I should sneak one of these songs in at my wedding."
Alas. Not Enough Fun.
A generous 3 might be possible. But I have dutifully deducted a point for the refrain, "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier," sung forty times behind a gospel choir. That line's been bouncing around in my head since the Roller Kingdom Days, and unfortunately, now illuminated by the scribes of Genius, it yields no special magic. 2/5
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
4/5
Charlie already said everything that I could have with this one. Early, experimental, confusing, funny, uneven pacing. But... a VIBE. An arrival. It does sound like they're figuring out what it is. I love the playfulness of it, the songs that feel like skits. And yeah, the title track is really worth the price of admission. I love how it just perfectly captures something, it's like a photograph. 4/5. Special.
Sufjan Stevens
5/5
I mean. It's spectacular. Ambitious. An artist who took the idea of "concept album" and ran so hard his legs fell off. Insane to think that he wanted to do one of these for each of the 50 States.
It's too long! But... damn. Small sacrifice for such a complete work.
The Flaming Lips
5/5
Four years after hearing this for the first time, this is an album is the one that stuck like glue on me. Far, far away from cynical land, commercial land, cool land, exists this child-like id this so so beautiful, so unconfined, so premature… but always with a hint of sadness. The big-ness of the world as seen through the eyes of a child in the backseat of the car, whose seemingly incoherent babbling may at first be inscrutable to the adults, until realizing that— hold on— what exactly is he saying? Maybe… there’s something profound he’s getting at? Out of nowhere, the words: “I stood up and I said YEAH,” you immediately understand. That’s The Flaming Lips.
Also, laying my cards out. I realized this year that I’ve been a Dave Fridmann acolyte my whole life, as a producer. And I had no idea. It’s because this album’s production DNA is stamped on so many follow-up indie records for the next 20 years. By now, it’s been somewhat codified, figured out. But there’s something so wild and untamed about the arrangements that use Disney-sounding orchestration on some 90’s synth patches, butting up against some really hard, intense shimmery synth jam. The rapid switch-ups, the wall-of-sound big-ness, the kid instruments. By now I have you figured out, Dave Fridmann. But this is a version of The Flaming Lips that isn’t fully figured out, so it’s more raw, more unpolished, than Fridmann’s later work. And I like it more.
PS: if nobody’s told you this, go listen to the Live At Red Rocks version of this album, with the full orchestra and choir. You’ll be glad you did.
5/5
Astor Piazzolla
3/5
Really enjoyed this listen! Dark hallways of deception and intrigue come to mind. Music for when you’re plotting your next palatial overthrow. But then again; when has the vibraphone not had that… vibe? 3/5
3/5
Not my favorite Blur album, but also never bad. I’m always inspired by their song structures and adventurous chords. I would have loved to have heard the Andy Partridge versions of these songs, which supposedly were demo recordings early in the process. It’s hard to rate this, knowing what the band will ultimately become, and how good it’s about to get, but I didn’t dislike it. I also love the super Britishness of bands like this and the Kinks… it’s a thing I’ve recently discovered through 1001. 3/5
Depeche Mode
4/5
Something about this just worked for me. It was the blend of synth, new wave, experimental music, but also very catchy. I loved the experimental vocal stuff. Yeah I overall was super impressed, it filled in the gaps for me! 4/5
The Stooges
4/5
Fascinating album. I read the background about all of the difficulties with the original mix… the David Bowie mix done in one day, off of only three or the original 24 tracks, so I was intrigued. I put on the original Bowie mix and was ASTOUNDED by what I heard. It’s so harsh it’s almost unlistenable! I’m listening on a nice system, and the only way I could stand this album was by a) going into another room, b) listening on worse speakers pointed away from me, c) turning it up so loud my hearing started to fatigue. And I expect that’s what happened to many teenagers who put this album on for the first time… it is so harshly mixed that it must have sounded like nothing anyone had ever heard. It’s those anger frequencies! The ones that you get with a crying baby, or scraping metal against metal. The ones we’re wired to get angry or upset over. It’s crazy that a badly mixed, almost unlistenable album is what inspired the seeds of the punk movement… and it’s probably in part because of the bad mix!
The 1991 “Iggy’s mix” is far, far more listenable. You get a sense of fresh experimentation, antics, fun, showmanship, just rawness. The guitar solos are all still there in the remix, I don’t care what anyone says. The rawness is still there. But the thing that’s going to be imprinted on my mind is how intense and angry the first mix made me feel. A great example of “not as great as you remember.” Because what you remember is more the emotion of the event, the feelings you get, the afterimage. And that says something about the experience of music by itself. 4/5
Goldie
2/5
An album that got worse, the more I listened to it. Seriously impressive feat. The first 5 minutes, I had my jaw dropped… what is this symphonic, atonal, music, how are these drums hitting so hard? It was really a treat. It felt like the overture to an extremely enticing sci-fi film.
But then the first track went on for 22 minutes. And it got worse! As in, repetitive worse. As a dance track, yes it makes sense. But then the album stopped impressing me. Its charm wore off by around track 3 or 4. Insanely interesting ideas at first, just lackluster execution that left me confused. 2/5
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
2/5
Have had some difficulties getting into this album. I’ve given it several listens, but Elvis Costello is currently rolling off of me. The production is interesting, songwriting is intriguing. I am just left with nothing to hold onto. Not counting him out. 2/5
Bad Brains
3/5
Didn’t have an amazing time, but I didn’t have an un-fun time either. And I’m starting to dig hardcore, and dig this album the more I listen to it. Bad Brains may be a band who requires several, orthogonal exposures to it before it settles in your brain. I’m coming around to it. Some of the grooves are seriously cool, and I like the proggy hardcore sound. The guitar sound is pretty amazing. I had a big moment with 90s metal bands like Megadeath… this seems like it shares some lineage. There are parts I like a lot. However, nothing getting around the fact that some of the songs are a little meandering or hard to follow. I know of Bad Brains from their other, self-titled album, which I just think is more fun sounding and maybe showcases them better. Also the mixing feels kind of… boring? Not “fun,” like their last record. More scooped and a little empty, which to me doesn’t suit the record.
The Jam
2/5
Okay! Back at it, after an unusual 1-week absence. Time for a prototype British punk record whose influence apparently knows no bounds, who seem like they must share DNA with the Kinks… who I had trouble getting into. I liked the eclecticism, I like the tongue-in-cheek feeling of the music, but nothing really stuck with me. It might have been the fact that I listened on the plane while half asleep. I gave it another chance while more awake, and there still wasn’t anything for me to grasp onto that I actually loved. 2/5
Missy Elliott
4/5
I really warmed up to Missy Elliot. The timbaland bounce— and I cannot emphasize enough— is I N C R E D I B L E. He’s the best at this by far. The danceability of every record. Ah!
Too much spoken word intros! It was great at first. Then it was too much. I got too much of a peak behind the curtain.
Ah I love the bounce.
Ghostface Killah
3/5
This is good! I should have been listening to Ghostface Killah way more when I was in the phase for this, somehow his solo work completely blew me by. It's moving, his verses really pull you right into a vice grip with their imagery, the skits are wild and funny. Pretty much everything I could hope for from a release like this. I just didn't enjoy myself too much... this album kind of made me stressed. Usually there's enough balance in the production, or enough funny, to offset this, to make something more colorful. There's a little bit of balance on this album, but for me not enough. Some of the productions are amazing, however, great examples of the period. 3/5
The Who
5/5
this is a GREAT album. and a great SOUNDING album. It's just fun! I get the appeal. This somehow conveys The Who to me way more than their first studio album. I feel like this really captures the spirit of the Who, and more importantly what it's like to be at one of these shows. 5/5!
The Triffids
3/5
I liked this album! I am intrigued. I want to hear more. The lead singer is compelling. There’s definitely something here, the songwriting is really interesting. I wasn’t thrilled with the production overall… somewhat generic? And I’ll have to hear the back half again. But I’ll definitely give it another listen.
Echo And The Bunnymen
3/5
I’m definitely warming up to this album. It’s theatrical, quirky, fun, if a little mystifying. There are some genuinely really cool guitar licks and arrangement choices here. It manages to be pretty approachable and never corny, I don’t know how they’re pulling it all off. I’m impressed, having a good time the more I listen. 3/5
Stevie Wonder
5/5
I needed Songs In The Key of Life more today than I thought I did. Most of us do. Who can't listen to "Love's in Need of Love Today" and not, on some level. feel a need to weep?
Every time I come back to this album, I learn something new. On his earlier albums, you'll find plenty of incredible songs, great arrangements. Key changes that make you question if you've ever really played music before. But this album is where it all takes flight.
There's something for everyone in this album, which is why its appeal must be so great. Songs about early love, lust, mature love, being a parent. Everything through this lens of an incredible songwriter, who also happens to have some of the greatest musicians of the day playing alongside him! This album is simultaneously an album to find new love to, an album to appreciate what you have, an album to put on in the background of your day, and one (for the songwriters and musicians out there) to study, for its influence is profound.
Heck, is this the only double album *ever* that I love, all the way through? That alone is a feat. 5/5
Bruce Springsteen
2/5
Yup. I don’t want to be unfair to Springsteen. His heart’s in the right place, and this album is clearly inspired. And this is an album that’s more made for The American— the idealized, the one who stands front and center in a Norman Rockwell painting— more than it’s made for me. To listen to this album is to get a quick shot of that specific blend of Americanness. He goes right to the heartstrings. I am usually a pretty easy for this, and I fall for it a lot of times in this album. Songs like “you’re missing…” I mean, come on! That’s pretty heartbreaking!
And then we have a lot of what sounds more like Bruce Springsteen-type-stuff than actual Bruce songs. It’s just a little unexciting. The fire in the songwriting and purpose is there, but the production or arrangement falls a little flat for me. Like they took the most middle-of-the-road approach to the production. Which is disappointing because there are some heart-tugging ones on here!
I’m going for a reluctant 2. Bruce was my first 5 stars on this list, for Darkness on the Edge of Town. He deserves every one of those stars, and I’m sure we’ll get more. But I’m not, like, convinced that this should be on the list, with such a messy middle. Whatever, I’ll still be feeling a little American wistful the rest of the night. 2/5
PS: genuinely think I took a star off because of the clear “Middle Eastern type beat” midway through, that is as transparent a choice as it can possibly be for an album about 9/11… that uses tabla. TABLA, Bruce. Why tabla. Why did you do that.
The Jesus And Mary Chain
4/5
Okay I warmed up mighty fast to this record. At first I’m thinking… ah yes, we’ve heard a lot of post punk music recently. And my brain falls into the same template. But then I realize that there are actual songs buried under here. Sweet songs, endearing songs, innocent songs. And the juxtaposition of the heavy guitar noise… never too much, but always poking through, so you’re aware of it. Like a swarm of intrusive thoughts. I had to get over the mixing (it’s not great), and try to focus. But, buried deep in that haze, there’s something delightful about what’s going on. 4/5.
The Who
5/5
An imperfect, too long, but like… amazing album. The story is what gets me. It’s so funny, moving, strange, dark comedy. I loved it. And this is a really groundbreaking album. It feels like the confines of rock and roll and being pushed against, cracking at the seams. Can we do full stories now, with instrumental interludes? A whole character arc, a whole life? I’m sold. It’s protean, in some ways, and at some moments still massively moving. 5/5
Billy Joel
4/5
Okay, this album is good. Very very good. Billy Joel is usually too schmaltzy for my taste. But like, come on! Movin’ out is undeniable!
Phil Ramone is very good at his craft! I wanna get into him more.
This just feels very specifically New York, Philly, jazzy, theatrical. I like it. It’s not Paul simon for me. I think the comparison is unflattering. The lyrics aren’t often to my taste, but like… this is a story. There’s a throughline. That’s what I want in my albums. And this one is undeniably a story of a lot of America from a time long ago, one that seems almost extinct except for when you turn on the radio. It’s not my favorite listen of the era by any means, but it definitely belongs there. 4/5
Sigur Rós
4/5
I don’t know why I never listened to this album. It somehow totally passed me by. I listened to some later Sigur Ros albums, but I never felt like I was in the mood for what I *thought* this album would be. I thought it would be mostly ambient, sleepy, uninteresting, long, drawn out. There are times for this, but I never found myself at that particular juncture.
Forcing myself to put this on today, I was stunned… it’s way, way more deep and inventive than I thought it would be. There’s some real dynamics in the music… the first few are what Sigur Ros are known for, ambient-leaning post rock music that’s contemplative, slow, dramatic. But there are… other sounds on here! And I loved those other sounds just as much. There are songs that are electric, songs that are really stripped back. Some utterly beautiful horn and string arrangements which I can’t get enough of. And the haunting vocals… so weirdly out of place, but somehow adding contrast.
I couldn’t help but think about all of the buzzing, atonal guitars behind all of this music, and how that’s such a good choice for a mainly ambient album. It’s contrast. We’ve heard a bunch of late 80s rock recently, where the noisy, buzzy guitar always threatens to overtake the beautiful music. There’s something of that here, and I think that’s why this isn’t just another ambient-influenced record. It’s genuinely it’s own world, and it pulls you in deep. 4/5
The Mothers Of Invention
5/5
This is early Frank Zappa (maybe… earliest Frank Zappa??), as well as a crew of what will become the revolving cast, and let me just say that, if you don’t know that context— if you aren’t already down with his antics or know what to expect— this has to be a confusing album. I’m the kind of person who regularly recommends Captain Beefheart to my friends, so yes… I’ve become that guy. For a Beefheart fan, and a fan of the weird 60’s and Zappa, this album is positively delightful in how approachable this album is to this blend of weird.
It’s parody, it’s experimental, it’s funny, it’s silly… and a little biting or cynical, in a way that only the silliest of satire can let you get away with.
“Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder” is like, peak Zappa. A 60’s doo wop trend, taken to absurdities. They are clearly having a laugh at the expense of the whole genre, but something about the character that Zappa does is disarmingly funny. Piercing. And his comedic timing is unmatched. It makes you think that maybe all of that other music you heard in the 60s was too stodgy, too self-important, too constrained by seriousness.
Let me defend the end of the album too. Even the most avant garde stuff is… never stuffy, never pretentious… what a relief! It’s experimental without the whiff of self importance. This kind of stuff is a breath of fresh air for me, who as a former student in a contemporary music department had to suffer through so many recitals of music whose “message” was so self-important or self-serious as to suffocate your impression of it. I’m talking about “It can’t happen here.” Any conscious human American in 1966 knows exactly what this is about. But man. This is pure id. Comedic, funny, disarming? Silly??? About a serious subject?? It makes you wonder how they’re pulling it off.
I’m going hard 5. We can’t reserve all the 5’s in the 60’s for the Simons and Garfunkels. 5/5
The Specials
2/5
I laughed when I saw the title. “More Specials.” Our group in particular didn’t love “Specials,” so now we’re treated to “More.” This will be fun.
For their first album... I think I gave it a higher rating than it deserved, just because this type of skinhead punk/ska was new to me, and “A Message To You Rudy” is undeniable.
A fun record. It doesn't have a lot of the *crunch* of reggae records. Nor the really insane pockets that those players have, the ones that make your whole body bounce. It's more clean. Nothing wrong with this. I mean, this kind of cross-pond ska and reggae was so pervasive when I was younger, I get the reason they're inspired.
I certainly didn't mind this record, and the parts about it that are funny, strange, campy are things that I also like. I also like the library records, the really strange and creative ska and dub records of this period that these guys are clearly inspired by. If this came out today, it'd actually be pretty prestigious... this kind of thing is championed by some big producers today. It would also probably lean into its influences more, sonically. They'd get the bass tone dead on, they'd have more pocket to their rhythms.
But it's also a little... boring? The music is very full and generic for a listener today, or anyone familiar with ska or reggae, and it kind of just rolls of you. It's not surprising. A lot of more generic instrumental tracks. Also the drop off in energy for the 7-minute "Stereotype" track is real. That track just goes on... forever!
I have questions. That's what my two's are for. 2/5
Fiona Apple
5/5
I went down a huge Fiona Apple spiral this morning, thanks to this album. She is AMAZING. I think Never Is A Promise alone, if that was just the album, should win an award. To think that she was, what, 15 when she wrote these songs??
This is about as good a debut album as you can possibly ask for. It's inventive, it's interesting, it's complex, it's got such a mood. It captures a feeling and then challenges it. I'm in love. Coming back to this album, I hear a little bit of Rickie Lee Jones in her delivery now that I didn't hear before. She doesn't hold it back.
I mean what more can you ask for from a singer-songwriter. Ask for more from Fiona Apple at your peril, she's already given so much. 5/5
Willie Nelson
2/5
Yup, echoing Caleb’s review. I didn’t love it. I liken what Willie Nelson was trying to do, I just thought the execution was less than great. Very inventive. I would not have expected this from Willie Nelson. I just wish it was done a little better. And yeah, Time Of The Preacher happening 3 times would *potentially* work. But here it doesn’t really. 2/5
Van Halen
3/5
The biggest surprise of this whole 1001 albums journey so far is that I like hair metal, I like 80s rock anthem pop. I like this. It scratches an itch for me. I think that Def Leppard is what did it for me... it was so ridiculous, so over the top, so cheesy that it had this kind of flip for me, where I started just having fun with what I was hearing.
This album is PARTLY that. The first few songs are addicting. Sticky. "Jump" feels like we're in a whole new world, it feels like the synth is finally here to stay. It's triumphant. "Panama" too. It's a great sound they've got going. I was so ready to give this album a 4, but then... the back half was kind of boring. Kind of what everyone assumes these guys do when they get in a room and jam. Less meticulous, fewer really compelling compositions. So close to hitting the mark for me. Could have been a moment for a tone shift! But even at 35 minutes it got a little old by the last 15. Had a good time regardless. 3/5
Marvin Gaye
5/5
"But who really cares? Who's willing to try... to save our sweet world?"
Shadows and light. Chiaroscuro, in painting. The bitter and the sweet, in chocolate. It's the stuff of melancholy, of regret, worry, dark times ahead. Marvin Gaye's human pleas, genuine and earnest... to save the babies, up against a symphony that's filmic, romantic, in an almost 1001 Strings kind of way. An orchestral setting that Berry Gordy thought was too old, outdated, the kids will never dig, etc. etc. But it's the perfect backdrop– nostalgia– that gives us context for Marvin's anguish about the future.
It's also personal. It's an album about his brother's letters to him from Vietnam... the anti-war protests that Obie Benson saw firsthand which lead him to write "What's Going On?"... his own dark struggles with his family, addiction. A changing planet. And somehow Marvin is perfectly positioned to help us understand. He doesn't preach, he doesn't condescend. He brings you into his inner world, and doesn't count you out.
And it's a Motown album? Impossible. I can't imagine the whiplash from the American public when this came out. Motown? Song cycles? Dark subject matter? *That* Marvin Gaye? An album for a coming storm... and one to put together the pieces from a few very real personal storms in the 1960s.
An amazing album. The soundtrack to so many people's lives, their own anxieties and dark places and chances for redemption. Music for a sweet world.
5/5
Leonard Cohen
2/5
Man, I super wish I liked this album, but I did not. I feel left out. There's clearly a joke here I'm not getting. Or rather... I might be getting the joke, but the poor execution is keeping me back from enjoying this album in any way other than to say "fine, I get it."
Put another way: there are other albums that do this kind of thing. But they do it better. Tom Waits comes to mind... someone who captures that misanthropic, guttural, antagonistic character. Comedic, yet deadly serious. The cartoon villain is the facade, he draws you in. Slowly, you understand his inner logic. In that way, this version of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits' characters share more than a little family resemblance. But unlike any Tom Waits album– whose music is equally compelling– this album falls almost totally flat musically. It feels like either a) the production was put together in a lazy, half-assed way, or b) the production was put together in a lazy, half-assed way, AND Leonard Cohen intended it to sound lazy and half-assed. Either way: that's what I mean when I say I don't get it.
I'm not going to lie that I loved "First We Take Manhattan" in a deadpan, ridiculous, laugh out loud kind of way. Same with "Everybody Knows." But the songs overstay their welcome, and the production gets lazier and more karaoke-like. There are some seriously bad, bad background singers. It just doesn't work. It would only work if I had no ear whatsoever for music, and only cared about lyrics. Even then!
Great concept, just poorly (or lazily ? ?) executed. 2/5
Sabu
3/5
I just like this! I can’t explain why. I love the Cuban rhythms. I love the conga. I love the “liveness” of this. I have nothing special to say. The rhythms really are my thing. I’ve always wanted to learn the congas, and this might be the thing that gets me off the couch and down to the local music store. The intense LCR stereo is INTENSE, but nothing you can't solve with a little distance from the speakers. 3/5
Björk
5/5
As a musician, it’s hard not to have exposure to Björk and not be forever changed.
What strikes me is her uncompromising vision for the album. Sonically, texturally, lyrically. Björk is not one to retreat into the weirdness, the safety blanket of “cool” that the avant garde sometimes affords its participants. She is loud, brash. Fully committed, fully 100%. Listen to “Play Dead” if you doubt this. The best end credits track on any album I’ve ever heard, full stop. Symphonic, serious, intense. The weight of the whole album comes to bear on that one moment. It’s so impressive.
Another artist who may be known for one thing, whose depth and complexity only reveals further on closer inspection. Björk is the very model of an artist. And not the sly, slinking, self-effacing, apologetic genius. The bold and the brash. The one to deliver a wakeup call to music. I’m entranced.
She has so much tension in her music, so much unresolved emotion. I feel stressed listening! It’s compelling. Symphonic.
5/5, life changed
Van Morrison
4/5
Classic summer album. Listening in March makes me even feel like the summer is a little closer, the sun is just a little sunnier. A little repetitive, but honestly… would it be such a classic “put on in the background and enjoy your one sunny day” record if it wasn’t?
I have nothing insightful to say! This album just feels good. 4/5
I know I’m 20 years late to this battle, but… Spotify, record labels, stop with this “Deluxe Album” insanity. A poor, hapless listener might happen upon “Moondance Deluxe” by mistake and be treated to 4 hours of scratch takes and demos. Nobody needs to hear take 9 of Glad Tidings.
Randy Newman
4/5
“Rednecks” is just stunning. I think I had heard this first from one of the Malcolm Gladwell podcasts about songwriters, and that's what hooked me. Such a tightrope walk he walks. That's the heart of all these Randy Newman records: dissonance. So feel-good, and yet so repulsive, but so warm, but so comically wrong, delivered straight and earnest. And he never breaks character. It's really only something I think he can do. Him and few others. Find the pathos and sympathy in unlikeable, racist anti-heroes, and then turn around and skewer them at the same time. How does he do it? We don't know.
And “Marie” gets me every time. Reminds me of “Coney Island Baby,” Tom Waits. Bittersweet. I love my anti-hero songwriters more and more with every passing day.
A lot of bittersweet this week! The string arrangements really give it that extra nudge for me. Randy Newman's range might be a little limited, but he nails the hell out of whatever it is he's doing. 4/5
Queens of the Stone Age
2/5
I think I liked their more experimental instrumental back end versus their beginning. At least that was more dynamic and less constant loud
Some exceptions. I liked "If Only." That hit me in the right way
I found a lot of the beginning / middle boring. Not turn off completely, just not fully onboard. Max told me that their later albums are much better and more popular— I think I’ll have to check those out after.
2/5
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5/5
This album took a full week to hit me. It’s so, so sad. You can just feel the grief and wonder and anguish in every song, but in particular songs it hits this crescendo, where you know he’s talking about his son. It’s like real grief: on waves between sorrow and anguish and peace and feeling. It took me a while but I started to feel really, really moved by this. I mean, the crescendo track, “Ghosteen,” it got me to cry, I actually rode with it.
This album is not for everyone, nor is it for everytime, but you have to just marvel at its sheer intensity, it’s operatic quality, the storytelling that Nick Cave has perfected and is really special at a moment like this. Are there things I would change? Yes, it’s overly long, hard to grasp, the instrumentation is a little too saccharine, too dirge-like for too long. But tell me you’re not grabbed by Nick Cave’s performance, his lyrics. And yes I had to read the lyrics to really, really get it there. I’m so bad of a lyrics person, even Nick Cave needed some translation for my brain.
But yeah... I mean, god damn. Probably only listening to this again in the most tender of moments, but you have to respect it. 5/5, if this was staged I would watch the hell out of it and probably weep.
Megadeth
5/5
Instant 5!!! This is the album that got me into metal. I finally got what everyone was talking about. It's so pleasing, it's so hilarious, it's so over the top, it's amazing. Fun metal. Fun like a haunted house pinball machine.
Crazy that it was made by such a troubled person. It’s really creative. People talk endlessly about the guitar solos but it’s really the songwriting and arrangements that feel inventive to me.
5 stars because if rocked my world when I first listened to it last year. 5/5
T. Rex
3/5
I thought it was great! But the front half is much better than the back. It’s good for a few great songs. It fun, creative, just loud and rough and got a lot of energy. I dug it! Though yeah, not enough to give it a 4. I still had a great time; though. 3/5
Van Halen
2/5
Well I mean, I didn't hate it, but it's just not something I love. I'm not against anything in this album, there's nothing lazy or unoriginal or lacking in spirit. I just think I might be alive at the wrong time to enjoy this album, because it just rolls off me like nothing happened. Lots of heavy guitars tend to do that to me, and this album has a texture whose sameness I can't really appreciate. Just don't think it's for me! Nothing wrong with it, though. I’m open to several more listens. 2/5
Deep Purple
3/5
I liked this! It was raw. This kind of thing I’m really warming up to. Something about it felt like it got this kind of thing right. Like Bloodsucker, which is pretty choreographed, well rehearsed. Just felt more like a complete experience, vs other albums like this we’ve heard. I dunno! All the early, proto-metal, rock albums are kind of blurring together for me. But this one felt tighter than others. Also I looked up some music videos of Deep Purple and loved what I saw. 3/5
Metallica
2/5
Live albums are basically un-reviewable. In the past I've given them either 1 star or 5 stars, based on what side of the bed I woke up that morning.
There are some exceptions. There are songs that are only truly captured live. Things that represent a significant moment in time. But, for the vast number of live albums, they are red meat for fans. They're enjoyable only with the significant context of the band's other music, and this makes them a categorically different listening experience than studio albums of fresh music. Context is half of everything in music, and the context required to enjoy a live album is missing. "Oh, you should listen to their other albums first." Exactly.
And to make it worse... this is my first Metallica album I've ever heard! Not a good start for a band that– my loss– I've ignored.
This one IS different. It's a genuinely ballsy attempt at mashing Metallica with an orchestra. Sometimes, that's amazing! It's a category I actually love. But the missing context is tying me in knots for this one.
Therefore, I must regress to a rough point system:
Starting at a neutral 3:
-1 points for being over 2 hours long
+1 points for sheer enormity of the balls required to do this
+1 points for the orchestra being really pro and sometimes really enjoyable to listen to
-1 points for many of the arrangements sounding like Super Bowl intro music. (but... what else could they have done?)
-1 points for Robert Dimery thinking this was significant enough to put on the list
So... 2/5? That's satisfactory. An ultimately confusing listen.
Eels
4/5
Great. Great, all the way through. An album that took me by surprise. I was taken in by the songwriting. I think someone on the reviews said that it was a lot of elements that shouldn’t necessarily work together, but they all work here. I just really liked it.
Fun fact: Mark Oliver Everett, the songwriter behind this project, is the son of Hugh Everett, creator of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory. And Mark made this amazing documentary about his relationship with his father (a very cold and absent one in his childhood), and re-discovering his dad, years after he died, by retracing his life and scientific work. It’s a really moving documentary! I’d recommend. That context really gave me a lot, going into this album.
4/5
Jimi Hendrix
4/5
First Jimi Hendrix album! You can’t knock this! So good! Inventive, magical. 4/5
Throwing Muses
3/5
Okay, very interesting album. You can only find it on YouTube, and the band’s works itself seems hard to find. I don’t see why it should be— the album is really good. I loved the singer’s performance in the album… so fun, and unthinking, and pretty unique. Some combination of what feels like psychadelic, maybe folk chord ideas, and alt punk. I mean it was super cool! After the second half my ear started to get a little tired of the tonality of it… it does feel a little long. But I had a good time, 3/5
Eurythmics
3/5
It was fun, it was funky, it was creative, the production I found very playful and silly and cool FX, and yet I barely enjoyed myself at all, and that might just be my personal taste the music.
Yeah, overall, it was way more interesting and fun and inventive than I thought it would be, but I wasn't super crazy about it!
2/5
I blame this album for being the reason I got behind on reviews in the first place (I think I’m caught up on listening to the albums, just owe some reviews)! Here’s the pattern: I get to an album, one highly regarded with a huge cult following, people gushing about its influence or breakthroughness. And I think it’s fine.
This album is fine. I listened to it about 5 different times and I think it captures the spirit of the show, I just found that I slowly lose focus and it creeps into the background and I am not very interested in what I’m hearing. I hear no major standouts, and before you know it I’m back at the beginning having wondered where the last 30 minutes went. So I just haven’t found anything to grab onto yet. And that’s just how it’s gonna be. 2/5
Pixies
4/5
Wow I love this! It’s so fun, and off-kilter, in a head-not-screwed-on-tight kind of way. And so sticky.
If I remember, this is an album where a garage, raw, imperfect band worked with a producer to get 10% more perfect, and I think they nailed the balance here. Nothing is ever too tacked down or “nice,” which suits the bad and the songs really well. And I love the lead singer… he brings the level of intensity that’s hard to look away from. Reminds me of another alternative album from last week— the lead singer can make or break a project like this.
“Here comes your man” is so good, and so sticky. They are good at their craft! A lot of Beatles structures or progressions, but done their way. Overall, great fun, and I’ll definitely return to this album. 4/5
Madness
2/5
Nothing about this album is really connecting for me. It has “Our House!” Which is better than we all remember. Theres plenty of inventiveness in the arrangements, in some of the chords. A little off-kilter! I like some of the stranger stuff with the sitar record, the very strange rhythms.
Cyndi Lauper
3/5
I’m not gonna lie, Charlie’s strongly worded review made me pause here and reconsider! But my first reaction was wow, this is WAY better than I remember it being! I enjoyed myself a lot on the hits. Cyndi Lauper is just wild and really committed, kind of raw? On the hits. And the production is just awesome on the big ones… girls just wanna have fun?? No wonder that blew up. Time after time?? Just has a hook-ness to it.
But Charlie’s right. There is some just plain generic to the back half. Still, I was impressed. And I liked this more than Madonna by a LOT. A lot a lot. Those first few tracks, that’s the 80’s female pop I want to remember, and I could honestly leave a lot of the rest. 3/5
The Isley Brothers
4/5
This is amazing! Just scratches the right itch for me. I love the sound, the synth playing is unreal, and they somehow took Summer Breeze and matched it, and went even further. Huge fan! 4/5
Ravi Shankar
4/5
This is extremely solid. A gentle, easy, yet comprehensive introduction to the sitar by Ravi Shankar, who knows his audience well. His stance of humility and grace comes through in the early recordings. And then you hear him play… wow! It changed my mind on the sitar, and showed me there was more than meets the eye. I just love records like that. Reminds me of the classic record that Pete Seeger did on how to play folk guitar— the one that Joni Mitchell picked up when she first started playing. This record must have changed many hearts and minds, and I’m happy it exists. And incredible playing! 4/5
Def Leppard
3/5
I had slightly less fun with this Def Leppard album than the last Def Leppard album we got. Something about this one felt 40% more cheesy, and 40% more “normal?” than the other one. There were some classics though. “Photograph” is amazing, and that’s the kind of thing I want all their songs to me. “Too Late for Love” is so hilariously cheesy in the beginning with “somewhere in the distance….” intro. And yet. I love it! There’s just less of that in this album. For my money I’d listen to their next album more, but the energy is there, the fun is there, I just know what they’re capable of. 3/5.
The Band
4/5
This is a really solid Band album. It’s a great listen all the way through, but To Kingdom Come is a favorite of mine. There’s something about those young, pathos-filled, pleading vocals on “Tears of Rage…” they get me! That’s what I get from The Band a lot… it feels genuine. The feeling of being young, upset at the world and wondering why it has to be this way. I know so little about their history as a band, or what gets them to this album. But I always get that sweet, sad feeling listening to them. Good album for many occasions, I think it has more than meets the eye. 4/5
Manu Chao
3/5
A pleasant surprise of an album! I liked it. It got a little repetitive toward the second half, but I found the blend of genres really surprising in how well they worked. A lot of these records I feel like I've heard before and don't remember where from. Just really liked it overall, 3/5
The Smashing Pumpkins
2/5
Impossible album. Really difficult to get my head around. It's long, so -1 star for its absurdity. It's monotonous. It feels like one long dream sequence, almost trancelike. I LOVED some of the songs, they were so precious, and for a few minutes there I felt like I really got what they were going for. But it's just way too gratuitous for me to want to return that much, 2/5
Van Morrison
5/5
I have to give this a 5, because it was life-changing. It’s an album which the spirit of it, the underlying story, and the experience of listening to it is more impactful than any one song, other than the two which carry the album, “Astral Weeks” and “Madame George.” Yes, much is repetitive, much is jammed out, a bit same-y, the box of melodies that Van Morrison draws from is a bit limited. The album feels rough around the edges. But it’s more about the album’s free, conscious-less, yet urgent feeling.It's like the ultimate "id" album. It feels like pure gut, pure expression of something beyond the artist. The jazz/folk palette is just the setting, the context with which the album unfolds.
What really astounds me about this album, after reading some history about it, is how little personal chemistry there was between the musicians and the artist, and how workaday the recording sessions sound for the session players. They took a couple days, walked in to Van Morrison's world, and came out with a masterpiece, all with such little report, little interaction between them. Just instincts, jamming, and improvisation. No talking, just music. Van Morrison thought the sessions were okay, the musicians were mildly pissed off. But they made some of the most emotional and free-wheeling pieces of music from this period, because the elements were in just the right place for it to happen.
That's why this album is so amazing... it's a prototype. Many musicians say they're eternally indebted to this album, and I can understand why. It asks you to walk through the door to this other way of making music, that's much more about the raw, the outbursts of emotion, the jam, the stuff that's rough around the edges. Accessing the spiritual, in the ordinary act of playing together. And that's why I love this album so much. 5/5
Red Hot Chili Peppers
2/5
What to say about this album? Meh? My first contact with it has been confusings. The musicianship is top notch, and the recording quality is extremely high. I like 90s, beastie boys type rap. I like funk. I like Rage Against the Machine. I like Dispatch when they were going more Rage Against The Machine. I like Rick Rubin... I think I do? I get this "eeehhhhh" taste in my mouth after listening to it for too long. Maybe they spend too much time on a single idea, and it gets boring to my ear? My negative feelings, I can't explain it! I'm all turned around! I want to feel the feelings of this album! But then I got to "Suck My Kiss" and I feel repulsed. Maybe it's the jammy, blues structures. Maybe it's the same-ness. You might have to just give me more time to form an opinion on this one. I can't keep up! I'm having a nervous breakdown! 2/5
Stevie Wonder
5/5
What a treat! A timeless album, with so much to love, so much to dig into. Some classic Stevie moments… that unending positivity faces off social issues, hardship, family. Higher Ground is such an insanely good sound. Whoever is on those keyboard parts is LOCKED.
I think I come back to this album as often as Songs in the Key of Life— it’s a little more digestible, the hits are there, the insane musicality is there, you’ve got Golden Lady, Living for the City— insane post section. Stevie seems to have no limits on these records. It’s a better world that we have this record. 5/5
Digital Underground
3/5
this is pretty hilarious, and got more hilarious the more I listened to it. It's campy, fun, and is a nice counterpoint to the 90's conscious rap we've been getting a lot of. I like that they're just trying to have a good time but also give it some campy backstory. Love my hip hop that's like this. 3/5
Fred Neil
2/5
I liked Dolphins. Nothing else caught my ear, sadly. That said, I'm going to listen 5 more times, probably so I can discover that Charlie was right and it's a keeper. 2/5
Sonic Youth
5/5
Caught me from the beginning. Immediately, really really good. I’m basically an instant fan. Beat poetry over the noisy, grinding guitars, I mean this is amazing. I loved how dynamic the songs were… there’s a cinematic quality to all of their music. Never too insistent on one mood— always challenging, shape-shifting. I had a great time, and I want to listen more to their work. Immediate fan! 5/5
David Bowie
3/5
Kind of a wild affair, even for David Bowie. I listened to this back to back a half dozen times over the weekend. It's impressive that he's still got a strong connection to lyric, this late in his career. I appreciate how improvised and experimental some of these records feel. And I love late career albums, that's something I've discovered from this list. Does it put it over the line for me? This might actually be one of my more favorite Bowie records we've heard on this list, other than the hits. I think it's a very special record, and I'm glad we got it. I'm gonna go with "Good Time Was Had," and I'll be returning. 3/5
Frank Ocean
4/5
I will never like this album as much as seemingly everyone my age does. And that's okay. I never have understood why I don't seem to like Frank Ocean as much as everyone else. I mean... talk about iconic stuff. Hits packed with hits. Every song on this album is a soundtrack song for nearly everyone in my life, especially around college. And I appreciate the "album"-ness of it. It feels cohesive, directed, Frank's singing is iconic. Beyond that... yeah? I just don't find myself coming back to it. Nothing against the record at all, it's just not something I connect with. And it's not over-the-line enough for me to be stunned, track to track, like a good kid m.A.A.d city, which came out right around the same time and for whatever reason I unfairly compare against. Were my standards way too high for this era? I lived through it. This was a special time for music, and everywhere you looked there was a brilliant concept. At least, that's how it felt. This one feels like we're getting a taste of that, but it's maybe too sleepy for me. I dunno. Maybe I'm just standing outside the coronation, feeling a little disoriented or sour for no good reason. Still, great. 4/5
The Birthday Party
3/5
This album is SO funny. It's so out there!! And it's a Nick Cave early glimpse. WOW. So over-the-top unpleasant to listen to. Just an album full of turn-offs. Great execution on a disgusting idea, 3/5
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
3/5
This feels good, this might be one of my favorite Neil Young albums I've heard other than Harvest! Definitely less hit potential than Harvest, but it's really solid all the way through, and the band just adds an extra flavor to it. I would absolutely put this on while doing other things. Neil Young never ceases to get me just a little more bittersweet-feeling than I did before. 3/5
Chicago
2/5
I feel slightly less than neutral about this album. I have been waffling between 2 and 3, but I have to shoot just short for this one. The playing is exceptional, and some of the arrangements are really fun– I especially like the horns! And this is not the sound that I expect from Chicago– I don't know what I expected, to be honest. Much more versatility. To me, though, it just feels like Normal Music. As in, it's nothing astounding or notable, other than the really great playing, and maybe the feeling I get around it? It just feels like I'm hearing a band having a good time, at an outdoor blues festival. So I feel overall "meh" about it, even though the recording and playing are superb. Just didn't speak to me. 2/5
Alice In Chains
5/5
I feel set up. I have been primed in about 2 dozen ways to like this album. First it was Def Leppard. Then Megadeth. Then, hearing this album, I realize that one of Dispatch's lead singers, Brad Corrigan– a band that was my North Star when I was younger– must be majorly inspired by the tight, pointy harmonies from Alice In Chains! The resemblance is striking. So I've had Alice In Chains harmonies in my head for years without even knowing. So even though metal/grunge is new to me, part of this album feels like a homecoming, to a harmony land I know very well and that influenced me in a lot of ways. From Alice In Chains! I missed this in high school. I wasn't ready.
So I have to go 5 again, dammit! It's catchy, great songs, nothing I know quite sounds like this blend, did I mention I love harmonies, it's clearly MEGA influential, they are giving it their all. If you aren't primed as much as me, I get it. But this was the link for me. I'm trying to think, what's the better version of this album? Not much. Maybe could be 10 minutes shorter. Ah fuck it, 5/5
Pet Shop Boys
4/5
Not only did Charlie’s review say everything I had been thinking already— fully in agreement— it’s also masterfully written, and got me thinking about how covert political or radical music can sneak into songs that seem unserious or campy. Wild that I actually liked this a lot. I’m almost more impressed with an album like this, where it’s so easy to be off the mark and be bad, but manages not to be. 4/5, surprise hit for me.
Stereolab
4/5
Oh man, really really really good. Sterolab is hitting on this really specific set of sounds, in concert. If there’s one thing that will reliably get me going, it’s the mixing of influences like this… their music feels like a melting pot. Experimental but charming, and the lead vocals are really the glue. I had an amazing time listening. 4/5
David Bowie
4/5
If the stated goal of 1001 Albums is to inject you with a broad scope of great music from the last 70 years, the unstated (implied) goal has always seemed to be getting you turned onto Bowie. He has by far the most number of albums on the list— 9 albums as a solo artist— and, for our group, the first album we ever got was Hunky Dory, which set us off to a very Bowie start. That album is a great opener to Bowie because, more conventional it may be, you get the sense that something much more interesting is brewing under the surface with him.
We’re 220 albums in and— by my count— 6 Bowie albums have showed up. Nothing has grabbed me by the throat as much as the end of Ziggy Stardust, an album where you feel like the whole of the world is resting on Bowie’s tortured shoulders. But for such a high height, that’s a hard ladder to climb twice. Some of the albums have been fine. The Philly Soul one— can’t even remember its name— was notable for the Lennon collab, but you get a sense that the more he retreats into mania and drug addiction, so, too, do his albums, into question marks and dead ends that start to feel unapproachably vague.
Aladdin Sane is a mix of this. The unbelievably good “Time” is on here, which is as raw and pained and theatrical as any on Ziggy Stardust. Panic in Detroit is amazing, a song whose lyrics just add to the frenzy and confusion and surrealism of the whole album.
With Bowie, other than Ziggy Stardust, I'm always left a little wanting. I never feel like he sticks the landing in his albums. I don’t know what makes me feel this, but they seem like ambitious projects that nonetheless feel incomplete, or with some songs that feel half-baked, like he had the musicians or engineers take over the track. It’s for some reason more unapproachable to me than any art rock of this period, and I’m always left wondering why that is. He’s no doubt an incredible songwriter, in his own way. You’re not gonna get McCartney songs. You’re going to feel a tiny bit anxious, disorientated, windswept after hearing Bowie.
I love the manic, tragic fun of this album. Sometimes I feel like he’s doing that Stones sound better than they do. And the playing is incredible. This is still an essential perspective on the “feel” of the art and rock worlds of the 70’s. That feeling that everything, Bowie included, is about to totally fall apart.
I rate this a 4. My gut just can’t give it a 5, even though I’m probably on at least 10 listens at this point, and I delayed this review for 3 months to see if I missed anything. Some bright, incredible moments, but not as “complete” feeling as his previous album.
John Grant
3/5
I agree with Charlie completely on this— a surprise album that has lots of family resemblance to a writing style that quickly got canonized in Father John Misty, Jonathan Coulton, etc— and one which I still can see writers today using liberally— this deadpan, literal, referential style which never leaves character. Feels like it’s 50% of the way to being a Lonely Island song, but it stops short of cracking a smile. I’m lukewarm to that kind of thing generally, but this writing feels less abrasive and more truly depressed than those other examples. And it’s just pleasant to listen to. I’m happy I got introduced to this, absolutely. I remember Midlake! They did a serviceable job, nothing exceptional. I’m glad this exists, 3/5
The Stooges
4/5
This is a cool album. I like listening to this infinitely more than their second album with Search and Destroy on it, because with that one the mix makes it unlistenable. This has a lot of the proto-punk harshness of that one, mixed with the always confounding, earnest and boyish delivery of Iggy Pop, which still sounds captivating. It's like, what combination of brain cells caused The Stooges to exist? I'm still wondering. I listened to this a ton a few months back without penning a review, and now I'm here to say that I really enjoy it. 4/5
Adele
4/5
I need to review these albums after I listen to them, my review backlog is long. This album really surprised me! You think you know an album. Along with everyone on the planet, I was assaulted by these songs against my will for about 5 straight years, and anything you are forced to do leaves, at best, an unpleasant taste. The radio’s superpower— to make a song heard by everyone on the planet— is also, when used too much, what causes weariness, exhaustion. If I have heard these songs 100 times each so far, the entire planet has probably heard them by now. And nothing is good enough to warrant that kind of campaign.
And yet… I hadn’t really “heard” these songs! To listen with both your ears, you’re just taken by both the craft of songwriting on display here, and the power and irresistibility of Adele’s voice. And it is so perfectly imperfect, and it’s beguiling… some of these lead vocals sound like she did them in one take! There’s no tune in sight, some of the background vocals are crazy out of tune. But in a really amazing way! Yeah, this album gave me hope. The heavy soul influences (I’m surprised Mark Ronson didn’t take a stab at this project, because every other super producer at the time seemed to), the really played out piano and guitar tracks. The production felt natural, unforced, not too over-the-top. Really a nice blend. I was thinking, imagine all the pop songwriters and producers of today instead try to make music inspired by soul, delta blues, country… imagine they broaden their influences in what they do, make things less bland. That imaginary album in my head is basically this album. It’s really NOT that bland, that soulless, that imitative, as a pop product… it’s pretty undeniable no matter how they got there.
So this is a heavy surprise 4. I was nearing 5 territory, honestly! But the unsettling sickness I feel from some of these songs, and every mundane memory I’ve had from the last 10 years being infiltrated by them, cannot totally remove my bias. 4/5
Common
4/5
Oh man this album. So good. It feels like both a quintessential Common, record, AND a quintessential Kanye-produced record. Kanye’s still, in this period and beyond perhaps, as inventive as a producer, maybe far more, than he ever has been as a lyricist— it’s his signature, it’s hard to argue with. This is straight from one of his highlight periods. I played this album a ton of times in college, I’ll never get tired of listening to it. Not a ground-breaking, life-changing work, but a fantastic example of the good in hip hop. 4/5
Emmylou Harris
3/5
I'm pretty much exactly with Charlie on this one. Discovered a whole new singer who I had never heard of and fell for her voice hard, she just has this incredible emotional range in her voice. But the background is pretty straight and feels uninspired. Could have been way, way more interesting. But as a vehicle to carry her brand of heartbreak, I think it's great. 3/5
Creedence Clearwater Revival
4/5
This is a great album! A strong listen. I liked our last, earlier (?) CCR album a little better, and I’m now warm to their thing and I want more. I will dutifully put this on for every subsequent time I grill things. 4/5
Snoop Dogg
3/5
This is pretty good! Dre makes this album really over the top for me. I love how irreverent it is, I love hearing snoop actually take the music thing kind of seriously. It is fun to be around. 3/5
Yes
3/5
Good album! A bit overwhelming. Wow that first song is a hit. I think I would have loved this kind of progressive stuff, if I was younger when it first came out. It’s a bit hard to get your bearings, as it’s developing, changing so often. But yeah, it’s like ear candy… almost irresistible. I had fun! 3/5
Beyoncé
4/5
I'm supposed to say this is overrated, no I think it's great! I think it's about 5000% cheesier than I remember it being when I was 20, haha. The drums do not hold up at all. They feel very very silly. The production and the general through-composed, interlude-heavy tracks, especially in the front half, are really like catnip for me. It's some aspect of what shaped me musically. Honestly people say this is pretentious but I like when pop artists are this ambitious and are trying something real. The lyrics are super weak in sections, haha. But this is really really good in sections, and it's not all formula. 4/5 I appreciate the ambition
Miles Davis
3/5
Miles, let’s go! I’m not nearly literate enough in Jazz to know what it is I’m hearing here, but to me it sounds free-wheeling, really tight horn parts, an extremely accomplished band that’s clearly played a lot together. This is not Kind of Blue, which I now grok, and it’s not Sketches of Spain, which is an unqualified masterpiece and a sleeper hit for me personally. I’m definitely gonna put this on more and see if I can get deeper into it. Good album, great morning listen, 3/5
Aphex Twin
4/5
This was really good. I had it on over the weekend pretty constantly. A fascinating proto-electronic project, gushing with interesting sounds, samples, all small adventures. Nothing is too ambitious, or too flashy… honestly I was expecting far more intimidating music. I was pleasantly surprised how understandable and listenable this thing was. Great for putting on behind your day. 4/5
Beastie Boys
2/5
I don't think I came across this at the right age to really appreciate this. The Beastie Boys impress me with their ambition but they also annoy me. A lot of amazing grooves, just too hard to grab onto anything. 2/5
Deep Purple
2/5
I feel like this is mostly a “meh” album. I liked Deep Purple when we first encountered them! This is a good representation of them, but it just doesn’t pack the punch of their studio albums from around that time, and they’re not to be blamed for that, the experience of a live show is just so different from studio that they don’t often translate. The songs felt monotonous somewhat in this format, which is odd, because on their studio albums I felt like they were a far more dynamic band. 2/5. Didn’t hate it, but didn’t really feel memorable to me.
The Saints
3/5
It was fun! I have nothing special to say other than I enjoyed my time on planet earth while listening. 3/5
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
4/5
Ah Nick Cave, always down for a good time that Nick. He really knows how to pal around. Stagger Lee won me over. Then Henry Lee I started to get. Is this like, that Leonard Cohen album we had, just better executed? This is the first Nick Cave album where it intersects between “interesting concept” and “listenable” for me.
I definitely don’t want to live in Nick Cave’s universe. That sounds like a miserable place to be. But I enjoyed this record a lot more than I thought I would going in. 4/5
FKA twigs
5/5
I loved this so much. Wow, why did I miss this when it came out. It’s so unique. I’ve never really heard anything like it. I remember hearing FKA twigs’s second EP, maybe? This is a whole world unto its own. Oozing creativity. I was just waiting to find out what she was going to do next. I loved the choral influences. I’m sad that I never heard this when it came out, but in hindsight maybe I just wasn’t ready. 5/5, blew my mind
The Allman Brothers Band
3/5
Such a great record to put on, well, anytime! The musicianship is stellar. I feel like this is a proper entry to blues, it feels a little easier to take in, the musicians are top notch, mixed well. Classic
The Rolling Stones
4/5
I'm coming back around to some albums that I must have listened to a dozen times but never reviewed. This is a particularly difficult one. I love Sticky Fingers, but the Stones generally don't land for me because, at this point, it's shorn of all the things I love... melody, song, things about the recording or production that make you go wow. There is no wow. None of it grabs at me immediately. So I stashed this album away as yet another, overlong, double-album fest for something that really didn't catch me.
But then something happened. I came back to it again after a month and... all of the ways it had felt too smooth for me, too flat or uninteresting, were giving way to this feeling of attachment. I just like rock and roll, and I like that this feels like a loving, confident send-up of it. It feels like you're listening through the studio door to this long-drawn out party. It feels really alive. Maybe rock at its most alive I've ever heard. Nothing about this is programmed, it's messy, it's kind of bad even at parts! But that's what you get when you hang with these guys. So now, thinking of it like an experience, a send-up to a big old party and worship at the feet of blues and soul and rock... I actually get it. It's really bright. Not perfect, but I'm coming on over. I'm getting converted. 4/5
The Beach Boys
4/5
On paper, an album by The Beach Boys without the involvement of its central, tragic character, Brian Wilson— and right off the heels of the collapse of their ambitious Smille— seems like it must be doomed to fail. That’s certainly the way you might tell the story, if you didn’t know better. Brian’s barely present on this album, contributing a few, brilliant songs other than his half-completed Surf’s Up— and, reportedly, he was all but completely missing for the production. And yet this album does a marvelous job of capturing not only the spirit of The Beach Boys as they were evolving, but also the songwriting voices of the other members, encouraging them to go further, stretch the concepts, try new things. This obviously doesn’t work well on “Student Demonstration Time”— no explanation needed— but I’ve always felt that “Feel Flows” and “Don’t Go Near The Water” are right up there with some of the weirder, stranger, more introspective Beach Boys songs from Pet Sounds etc. And “Surf’s Up” is probably up there for the best 4 minutes that the 60s ever produced, and the way the song was concluded, understood on this album, is an amazing rendition of it. No, it’s not Smile, but then again, nothing ever was. 4/5
Kendrick Lamar
5/5
We are spoiled with riches with Kendrick albums, and this one’s only sin is that it’s not my *favorite* Kendrick album, that it’s eclipsed by the artist that he would eventually become. Still, you see absolutely everything in this album that will stay with Kendrick… his eye for drama, his sly way of turning what sounds like a sleeper song into something that never leaves your head, his lyricism, his insistence, the mood. All there. And some of the most influential records of the 2010s! No way this isn’t 5. We are too spoiled when it comes to Kendrick. 5/5
Orbital
3/5
some of the 1-star reviews for this album are obviously unfair. The more I hear these 90's electronic artists– the Aphex Twins, the Orbitals– I realize that some of the genre-bending artists from the early 2010s which I love owe more than a little bit of their adventurous sprit to some of these artists. Some really interesting attempts and sounds here, and it doesn't sound hashed to death or so formulaic as to be uninteresting. And I am always tapping my foot to these. They have the pocket. Overall, not mind-bending, but really explorative and much more original than I had thought it would be. 3/5
Dolly Parton
3/5
Good album, short, sweet, I like the songwriting, nothing really grabbed me, 3/5
Isaac Hayes
3/5
pretty cool album. Walk On By is so epic, it's that sound that's escaped out from its 2-minute, tight pop constraints in to this loud experience, this really high octane jam. By The Time I get to Phoenix doesn't grab me in the same way, maybe because the burn is so slow, but I like what he's doing here. As an album, it's a little confusing, but I get why this was mega influential. 3/5
Drive Like Jehu
3/5
This is pretty sick. I can see why this was so influential in the hardcore scene. A really cohesive sound that just works. Super raw but also understandable, even for someone who doesn't listen to much hardcore. Not an everyday listen for me, but it was fun and I would definitely see them live. 3/5
Prefab Sprout
4/5
This was great, I really enjoyed. The songwriting really surprised me! 4/5
Megadeth
3/5
This is funny, I think Rust In Peace has spoiled me for this album, because while it’s really impressive technically it’s just a bit more boring for my ear, less hard and totally insane than that one. I mean, not every album needs to be Rust In Peace, but it definitely feels like a slightly more generic, more proto-metal album? Just a tiny bit more hairy and Van Halen -y than I was expecting. Still, good time. Can I just go for an aside here and say how funny I think metal is? It’s so funny. Like when they’re about to intro an insane riff and Dave grunts into the mic, “killing is my business… and business is GOOD!” It’s so funny! My brain lights up in all the same ways, like this is dark but also extremely hilarious. What a good combo, 3/5
Miles Davis
5/5
Insta 5 and a great weekender! I loved listening. It’s amazing how deep in my brain some of these solos are. They’re omnipresent, they’re canonical. I listened to this album a ton in college and we had a bunch of practice analyzing some of the solos. Truly one of a kind. 5/5
Buena Vista Social Club
3/5
Starts out so insanely strong, gets less interesting, but then comes back to being interesting again. It’s just such a great, great recording and representation of these musicians, which is what I think makes it endear. 3/5
Bee Gees
1/5
I’ve listened to this twice, waiting for something to grab me. Nothing ever did! A shame. I usually like big concept albums. Even the orchestration felt kind of flat to me, and I’m usually an absolute sucker for that kind of stuff. Charlie put me over the edge! It’s true! I thought this was gonna be cool and was bummed out. 1/5
Van Morrison
5/5
Wow, totally in agreement with Charlie on this one! A great find. Van Morrison is in top form for this album which is RARE, as so much of his discography seems like a mixed bag, never quite reaching the heights of what you know he’s capable of. Here it’s him in top form, and his band is INSANELY tight! It just works! He’s got that one note he loves to wail on over and over, but when he does, I’m like yeah, that’s why I like Van Morrison. Should have known that he would be terrific live, as Astral Weeks sounds like it was essentially a lot of pseudo-live compositions. I’m a big fan of this sound. I will definitely keep it around. 5/5
Big Black
2/5
Very good approachable actually musical and interesting industrial music with AWFUL lyrics that were repulsive to me. I guess that's the point? Thanks for making me disgusted, teenage Steve Albini. Wish I hadn't looked up the lyrics. 2/5
Black Sabbath
5/5
I was captivated by this album from the first minute. Completely sold. It is literally the birth of a genre, but that beginning… absolutely sounds timeless, and there is nothing like it! It still sounds so out there and not generic to me, one of a kind! I love this kind of stuff. It still sounds progressive, perhaps from another planet. The bluesy stuff toward the middle was also interesting to hear, how that develops out. It’s also so well-recorded for supposedly being a live album, essentially. 5/5 will absolutely get on vinyl.
Thelonious Monk
4/5
so good! An instant connection with this one. I had never heard of this Thelonius Monk album, though I’ve played out others. This one was just a great listen during my morning. 4/5
Ian Dury
1/5
No. But yes! But, no. 1/5
Paul McCartney and Wings
4/5
Feels like a quintessentially 4/5 album to me. An iconic showcase of McCartney at his most indulgent, most artistically free and fun, you can just tell when he bangs out those high notes that he's having a blast! Some undeniably good sounds, and an attempt at album-level cohesion that's not terribly convincing, but at least they give it a shot. I love McCartney-Beatles, I think compared to Lennon he's still (improbably) somehow under-uppreciated, but this was a tiny tiny bit too indulgent to me, before it got a little predictable. Still, great playing, some really fun George Martin-y arrangements, great musicianship. A master at his craft on a pure fun album, nothing too self-serious. Love it. 4/5
Björk
3/5
Beguiling! I don’t honestly know what to say! It’s a Björk a cappella album, we didn’t know that we were gonna get that, I didn’t know that was gonna happen, and yet here we are, with a Björk a cappella album. And it’s 80% so, so, cool. And 20% disturbing and gross! Whyyyyyy the weird disgusting sounds on Ancestors, Björk, why? Why? I was really enjoying the album and then i was like, please stop Björk. Please stop. It turned from admiration into complete disgust. But then again, that’s just me. So much to be repulsed by with this album is also what gives Björk her power… she is mercurial. Creatively electric, full of emotion, impassioned and somehow never pretentious, more childlike. She is our resident lovable space alien. I think so much of this album was brilliant, and a decent amount was misguided, but that’s what you get, and you don’t get upset. 3/5. I was very moved at points, but truly some of those grunting noises were the biggest turn-off
The Cars
2/5
Before listening to this, I had a vague feeling that The Cars were a mostly silly band who makes silly music that doesn't quite land for me. This album made me appreciate what they do *slightly* more than just be silly, but to me it ends up sounding 15% too generic, 30% too unnecessarily silly without being charming, for me to really get into it. I appreciated the compositions more, the carefree attitude throughout, but something about this album just turns me off. 2/5 for no concrete reason.
David Bowie
4/5
yeah, this is a really cool album. It took me a while to get into because it just makes me feel stressed, and other than potentially TVC15, there are no standouts where they really start to roll and I'm hooked. There's a lot of silly Bowie-isms, but the tracks are so well constructed and interesting and zany that you can't help but admire them. There's more going on here than I caught on my first, second, or even third listen. I wouldn't say it's a *fun* listen, it just makes me feel that slightly antsy, paranoid feeling I get when I hear Bowie from this period. I don't think it's Bowie's best, but it is really singular. 4/5
Deep Purple
3/5
I'm always more impressed with Deep Purple's stickiness than I think I am going to be, I end up humming their hits a lot more. We had gotten the live version of this album a few weeks back, and this is way more engaging than that! I'm not NOT a fan. 3/5
The Chemical Brothers
4/5
This was actually awesome. I've been overly harsh to 90s breakbeat albums in past reviews here. This one totally grabbed me beginning to end. Very danceable, very easy to work to in the background, just really grabby and interesting. And some actual... songs?... peppered in there? This is my breakbeat-hacker-man-in-some-unfinished-downtown-loft-hacking-shit album. I will put it on in such conditions. 4/5
Erykah Badu
4/5
Oooooh, this was *fantastic.* a slow burn all the way through. Long, jammed out tracks and sly melodic hooks that get stuck in your head, amazing sense of space, I was so invested all the way through. Felt like a truly artsy record. I thoroughly enjoyed. 4/5
The Rolling Stones
2/5
We're spoiled by the Beatles. That's all I really have to say. Aftermath will always be an important album, it seems, for both cementing the LP as an album, a thing young people were interested in, and also giving the Stones excessive confidence to write their own songs, keep going.
But... I don't like it. The closeness to Rubber Soul (and Revolver after it) make the Stones' attempt at songwriting and melody writing feels still nascent. This feels like: simple song (with crude lyrics and okay singing) + exotic or interesting instrument. That alone doesn't make me like this album. And the band doesn't sound tight in several songs. The instrumentation sounds a little lazy. I have to think that Aftermath has the biggest Beatles-adjacent lift of any album I can think of. Most of the classic, 1-degree-separated-from-Beatles albums around the same time have genuinely amazing songs, or have something about the performance that is captivating and remains timeless. There are so few good songs here. For all the stature of this album, there's just nothing memorable. I'll keep sticking to the stones, but this really isn't memorable. 2/5. Rounded up for its historical significance.
The Rolling Stones
3/5
God, what horrific accident of 1001 albums gave me two Rolling Stones albums in a row? Just trying to get through this and Aftermath singlehandedly killed my drive to keep going with the albums. It was rough! I am biased against the Rolling Stones almost eternally, something about them just feels empty to me. My brain needs good melody, good songs, interesting production, something to latch onto. Aftermath had so little of that, for all of its praise. But I loved Sticky Fingers, and I grew to really cherish the boisterous, happy-go-lucky, crazed party attitude of Exile on Main Street.
This is just getting to the part of the Stones that I like. The songs that just have that frenetic crazed energy with the rhythm parts– Monkey Man, Gimme Shelter. That has that same feeling in the guitar where you just want to jump up and do stuff, that kind of urgency and fun. I love it. A lot of this album is a bit boring and somewhat sleepy compared to the lightning in a bottle you get in the beginning and the last few tracks. So it's not a great, complete album. But it points to somewhere really good for the Stones, and those couple of tracks make the listen worth it. 3/5
G. Love & Special Sauce
2/5
We’re on over 175 albums, and I keep going back to the title of this project. 1001 albums to listen to… before I die? THIS is an album I need to listen to? Before I die????
Didn’t like. I think there are better bands that do some of this. Give me any early Dispatch song, any record on any album, over this. This just feels like what is playing in a random coffee shop in Cambridge 20 years ago. I could tolerate it in that environment, but that’s as far as your gonna get me onboard. I found it monotonous and kind of tiresome. It does feel very adjacent to things I like, as a Vermonter. But that doesn’t make me like it. 2/5
Echo And The Bunnymen
2/5
I've left this album on in the background several times over the last few weeks, and no special magic has revealed itself. I liked the last Echo and the Bunnymen album a lot, on reflection. The guitar lines in particular stuck with me. For this one, nothing's really sticking. Even though I like the sound. 2/5, would absolutely see them live if I had the chance, but nothing is clicking.
Carole King
5/5
Freaking Tapestry. Tell me you don’t need these songs. Tell me they don’t bring at least one tear to your eye. I don’t believe you. 5/5
Talking Heads
4/5
This was better than I expected! Way better. Wacky and really varied. 4/5
The Avalanches
5/5
This album has one of the most personally life-changing songs I head in my 20's ("Since I Left You,") Which was so bright and prophetic and singlehandedly steered me toward the kind of sampling I love in my musical life, and for which I have thought about countlessly in the years since hearing it for the first time. And yet, for silly reasons, I never got around to hearing the album that it came from. Sometimes a single song shines so brightly, it's like a mission statement and the whole thesis in itself, the premise and the conclusion. That's how I always felt about "Since I Left You," the title track. So I never ventured further. What a mistake! The whole thing just cements the sheer ambition of The Avalanche's Project, and how *much* further along in this stuff they were than anyone else at this time. The whole thing plays like one huge dance party, one big hurrah through the fantastical words they make. And it's funny! It's SO funny at times. I am awed by the ambition, the aesthetic, the originality, and the pure FUN I feel throughout this record– doubly so once I remember that they probably did this whole thing on ancient sequencers that are long defunct!– and I had such a great time. A one-of-a-kind record that I'm so happy exists. 5/5
Lana Del Rey
4/5
I really liked this album. I think the production is fantastic. Really gave me some great creative ideas. I mean it's a more intimate, songwriter-focused, version of Norman Fucking Rockwell which I also loved. I just think everything about it is silky smooth and so polished and really understated in this nice way, takes risks where you want it. Not my favorite songwriter or artist but plenty of things on the sonic level that gave me ideas, to aspire to. 4/5
Blur
3/5
Good! But why are there 16 songs? It's too long. I kind of am loving Blur. But there's too much filler that's hard to distinguish in the back half. I like how it's both super silly and has a strong identity to it. But it's too long. 3/5. Kind of wish I was a teenager when this came out, I'd probably be obsessed.
Sheryl Crow
4/5
I like this and you can't tell me I'm not allowed to. It's so good! Hits some soft spot for me that's emotional and comforting, just the right notes for me. A few tracks that are just a bit on the bland side, but I really appreciate the songwriting, and it just makes me feel really at home and comfy. I can't explain why I like this so much! I'm not doing a very good job at it right now. 4/5
Pink Floyd
4/5
Has to be overrated because its regard is so inflated. For historical reasons as much as anything. I found many of the same things in it to like that others always find, but I found other parts overlong, or not particularly interesting. Still, it’s an undeniable mood of an album. Feels like cinema. There’s nothing quite like this album, even if its ideas feel a little protean. 4/5
Led Zeppelin
4/5
This album wins me over every time. I get an urge to drive fast and break things. I think it’s brilliant. Amazing guitar songs. 4/5
Stephen Stills
3/5
Waaaaay too long! You can’t listen to this album and be grumpy at the same time. It’s hard to be mad at it. It just feels good all the way through. It is upstaged quite a bit by the songwriting genius of both CSN and Harvest which came out the same year, but I don’t think it’s totally fair to compare them. This is a different vision of that sound. I just was always waiting for the song to appear, but they rarely materialized. I thought the playing was terrific. Wild reading the harrowing stories of making this album and working under a cocaine-addled Stephen Stills for 100 hours a session! I liked it. 3/5
Dusty Springfield
4/5
I found this album charming! I really enjoyed Dusty’s performance, she has one of those voices that’s so powerful but so expressive, you can understand every nuance. And the songs she picked are really good! I just liked the “all live done in a room” sound for a change. Definitely a surprise hit for me. 4/5
The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy
2/5
Okay yeah, some of the lyrics are kind of cringey, but I like his delivery, reminds me of Gil Scott-Heron (not a particularly favorable comparison), but I'm not necessarily *not* down. the TV song made me feel like I'm listening to a street preacher outside a government building. Similar vibes. If it wasn't to rap, it'd be 200% more cringey. But it is a good-sounding album, it passes the test. I just lost interest after hearing yet another on-the-nose lyric. 2/5
Bob Marley & The Wailers
5/5
I came into this album mildly interested. I listened to Bob Marley a lot when I was younger, and my lasting impression was pleasant, political, fun. Good background, maybe. In other words… I was wholly unprepared for the 40 minutes I was about to get. This time, I decided to listen a little closer to the musicianship, get a sense of what is going on in the background.
And let me tell you. These players are…. So. Fucking. Locked. They are locked like a locomotive. They’re not going anywhere. When you look up “pocket” in the encyclopedia it should be the smiling face of that clav player on Track 1. Unbelievable. This is how you start a reggae band, folks. You hear some music that is so unbelievably locked like this and you think maybe, just maybe we can pull this off. Well you probably can’t. Don’t let it stop you, but… the level of locked and loaded on these rhythm parts puts most other reggae and ska to shame. To shame. That’s how high the heights are here.
This kind of rhythm is so infectious. I was having a hugely fun time. I am thankful this exists, and it is no longer background music to me. It is music music. I am going to evangelize to all my music friends. They’ll think… “Jacob, aren’t you’re exactly 50 years too late?”
Fuck I don’t care. 5/5
A Tribe Called Quest
5/5
This is a really really really good album. And an album you can confidently hand to anyone who has never really listened to 90s hip hop before, of all backgrounds, and get them invested. I listened to this a ton on a Tribe binge a few years ago. Ambitious, funny, never too serious but also very serious, just a lot of soul and heart. I have to give this a 5 because it's gotta be in the top 10 of hip hop albums I'll remember in 30 years. 5/5
Gillian Welch
3/5
I like Gilliam Welch and I like this album. This kind of private somber comfortable feeling. Her voice does all the heavy lifting for me. So steady, that’s why it’s a good companion. Never sticks out too much. I can feel the desolation and the loneliness a mile away. But it’s cozy. This is what a lot of New England sounds like to me, I don’t know where she’s from but it feels so familiar to the folk/bluegrass scene here. I think one of my friend’s parents put this on a lot I’m the car. Just feels like home. 3/5
10cc
4/5
This is a crazy romp. A crazy romp through the woods with four crazed musicians. I loved so much of this. It was really well done. If you’re feeling dazed or disoriented, I won’t blame you, because I felt dizzy from vertigo from some of these tracks! But they’re really well done. Nothing is ever bad. It’s all really engaging and some genuinely breakthrough sounds. And it wasn’t so parodic as to be annoying. Maybe it’s because I didn’t listen to the lyrics (?) but I unexpectedly loved it. I’m not sure if I’ll return to it anytime soon, but its impression will hang around. 4/5
The Beau Brummels
2/5
In spite of loving some of the orchestral arrangements, the horns and strings peppered throughout, and being pretty warm to this genre of psychedelic folk rock, I found very little to like in the songwriting. It's Dylan-adjacent but feels pretty watered-down. I thought I'd really like this! But there wasn't a lot there that didn't pass over my ear. 2/5
Jack White
3/5
I thought this was pretty good. I had a good time. I'm not sure if I'm going to return to this sound, I just don't fetishize this sound in the way that Jack White clearly does. The songs are good, but they don't really captivate me other than the opening few. 3/5
Dire Straits
5/5
This is fucking good. Money For Nothing, wow. what an entrance with that guitar. Solid solid amazing guitar work. But like, this album has the GOODS. "Your Latest Trick" alone, if that was the only good track on an album, I'd be trying to find ways to justify giving this a 4. That's an epic, epic sound. And so smooth. It really is an album that makes me feel good. There's something about this that keeps me grounded. Even just the instrumental tracks, those are so tasty and pleasant. Somehow these instrumentals introduce a tad of cheese with the 80s-ness, but it gets flipped around, turned upside down by the grooves and the rhythm section, which is really what pulls it into one thing. I will keep listening to this album. They just have a way with dynamics, where they keep you invested with so much surprise. 5/5
JAY Z
4/5
Really good JAY-Z Album. Hard to argue with. Very good hooks, very good early Timbaland productions, early Kanye productions, Just Blaze, you know! 2001 and the gang’s all there. I’m always gonna like JAY-Z, something about him is kind of endearing and I can’t put my finger on why, even with so much swagger and confidence and braggadocio. He seems like a good person to have at your party. I really like this. It’s good, but compared to the heights he’d reach on The Black Album, Blueprint 3, Watch the Throne upcoming… this is the entree. 4/5
D'Angelo
5/5
Hard to be left unsatisfied after hearing this album. It's just exquisite. It SOUNDS like D'Angelo at his most unconscious, his most musically free and unwrought. Just effortlessly making incredible music. But... apparently he spent ages, recording all of the instruments himself?? At 21?? Unreal. I couldn't believe that because it sounds so effortless. It just sounds like, an early incarnation of D'Angelo, with an incredible backing band. Well, it turns out that that's D'Angelo as the backing band. Wow.
Still a classic, still an incredibly fun time. 5/5
Culture Club
1/5
Not only did I not like this…
I did NOT like this.
Boy George’s voice annoys me to no end. I cannot understand how someone would find that voice attractive. It always sounds off, like we’re at this creepy community theater show. I can’t place why exactly I was repulsed by this album. But I think it’s 85% Boy George. The other 15% is when, on half their songs, they have an actually good gospel singer in the background doing mindless “hey, heyyyy” sounds that serve no purpose. I hate it when people do that. I hate-listened twice. One star. 1/5
Radiohead
4/5
To listen to Radiohead around the Kid A period, you have to be in a kind of a bummer mood. This is, after all, the most successful bummer band. I love these albums, they're evergreen to me... I discover new things in them the older I get, that 16-year-old me didn't see or understand. The lyrics alone you could spend a long time on. It always surprises me how alien Radiohead starts to sound at this point. Alienated from the sound and styles of the late 90s / 2000's, kind of lonely in their pursuit to get to the natural conclusion of this sound. And their sound palette alienates the listener a lot of the time. It's that mix of those noisy, antisocial, uninterested blasts of drum machines with the refined sound of Nigel Godrich's orchestration. And Thom Yorke has that quality to anything he sings... arresting. The bittersweet, tonal, in the same way a theremin solo can almost make you cry.
This is supposed to be the Pt 2 of Kid A, but to me it still feels like half Part 2, and half b-sides or slightly less polished demos from those sessions. Once we get past Knives Out, things get a little muddy. And there is some muddiness earlier than that as well. but then Life In A Glasshouse comes around, which kind of puts the whole project in context. Thom Yorke as jazz crooner of this dysfunctional band. Kind of an incredible ending.
I'm on the edge between 4 and 5. I am going to round down for the slightly messy middle. But really, hard to argue with those first few songs. 4/5
Boston
4/5
More Than A Feeling alone entitles this to a good rating. This type of arena rock is usually a big turn-off for me. Very low hit ratio. But Boston pulls it off! How do they do it?
Which brings up a topic I've been thinking about, throughout this 1001 experience. We often get albums which are the "canonically great" example of a style or genre. Sometimes, it's a genre where 90% of it seems to suck. But then... this band does so well. It's as fun and manic and silly as the pinball-looking cover.
Is that all some genres are? Someone like Boston comes around, makes a killer arena rock sound, and then hundreds of bands try (and fail) to replicate the formula? That sounds about right. This pairing just works for me.
I think they should be the only ones allowed to do it. Nobody else should be allowed to make this kind of music except Boston.
By the way, this album sounds GREAT on the ATCs. Great rock sound.
4/5
Peter Gabriel
5/5
The 80's. As oft repeated: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. This album is the most 80's, and it is in the keeper pile. Its focused energy, surprising emotional range, and classic after classic keeps it firmly in that camp. We had Brothers In Arms a few days ago, and now this. We have been blessed.
Daniel Lanois production! I'm becoming a big fan. He's hitting all the right notes with all the added percussion, drummers. The Kate Bush feature on Don't Give Up is iconic. The sheer hit-ness of this album pulls it up past the murk of 80's– the synths, the Phill Collins drums, the Fairlight stock sounds– into a new territory. There's something that goes past the cheese into this whole new territory, on something like "That Voice Again." It reminds me of why I like Bruce Hornsby. I don't know exactly what stirs in me feelings of longing, heartache. How does Peter Gabriel do it? I don't know. 5/5
Heaven 17
3/5
Is this what new wave is?? Because I like it. Just the basslines alone make you feel so silly listening to them. It makes me want to do a noodle arm dance. While grooving about that fascist groove thang. 3/5. I'm keeping this around.
Pavement
3/5
I liked this a lot. I've always been told to listen to Pavement but somehow never got around to it. I really like the energy, it feels like I'm in this chaotic playroom turned into recording session. There's something really effortless and playful about the album which I like. I'll need to listen more. 3/5
Steely Dan
5/5
Instant 5. Like Uncle Jim with the Boston album, I didn't realize there's a woman's face on the cover of the album until now. Somehow my brain always missed it.
I was super super lucky to see them with my dad in Boston in 2014 before Walter Becker's passing. The second half of the show they just played Aja straight through. We were spitting distance from Walter Becker on guitar. That is a show that, at the time, I didn't fully appreciate how rare this was– seeing the canonical "no touring" band, in concert. I'm so happy I went. Even if it may have compromised the final paper I had to write that evening...
Aja grows on me the more I interact with it. It's antithetical to my own musical approach– I'm a much more immediate, improvisational, happy accidents kind of composer. This music is famously squeaky clean, perfectly recorded, with player-book-grade solos from some of the best session musicians in LA, commandeered by two perfectionist dictators. Couldn't be more different. So why am I drawn to it? It's the lyrics. The mythical storytelling of sleaze, excess, losers. What a honestly weird combination. It takes everything that is borderline annoying about perfectionist music– antiseptic, unapproachable, too shiny– and gives it this strange, off-kilter spin. Mesmerizing.
Also, what a counterweight. We've had a lot of earnest, virtuous music recently. Fun to live in the world of quantum criminals.
I'm also reading Neuromancer right now. I feel like these two things somehow can go together. In a funny way.
5/5. The title track has been stuck in my head all weekend.
Harry Nilsson
4/5
Hold on, who is this? This is why I'm here for 1001 albums. I had no clue who this guy is. He's talented and a really good songwriter. Some ghostly, almost McCartney lines on some of his lyrics. I'm not surprised at all by the Beatles affiliation. What happened to him? I really enjoyed the sound. It's nothing groundbreaking, but again, thought I would have come across this artist by now, in one of my obsessive 70s music binges. Like finding a missing puzzle piece under the couch for that puzzle you've been working on. I liked it. 4/5
The Flying Burrito Brothers
4/5
Wow. The cover is so epic. Something about this is grabbing me in a way I didn't expect. It's got this simple, heartfelt sound that's straight to the point. Great songwriting. Are all of these originals? Could have sworn I've heard some of these before.
After about an hour, the sound got a little tiring to me, just because it was very predictable. But as a jolt in the morning, it was really nice. I could imagine this being in my rotation. I think the songwriting put it over the top. 4/5
The The
4/5
Agree with Charlie! I was surprised I had never heard of this. I haven't gone this deep down 80s New Wave world, but this album has an immediacy and undeniable hooks. It seems simple, minimal, sticky, and experimental. I love it!
What's going on with the Wikipedia of The The? There is one current member (Matt Johnson, who seems to have singlehandedly made this album) and... *19* past members of this band. Does this man just burn through band members???? I must know more!
4/5. Good fun
Radiohead
4/5
Thom Yorke is a genuinely weird frontman for the band Radiohead almost became. We have more context for what Radiohead would turn into than the band themselves had in 1995. They seem to have no idea that they are about to break hugely influential ground. On this release they sound significantly more tethered to the times. This album has almost more resemblance to something like Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill of the same reason than to OK Computer— let alone Kid A / Amnesiac. As a mid-career Radiohead fan, there’s little you can grasp onto— other than “weird chords”— that doesn’t have a tiny smattering of 90’s Britpop attached. But you can definitely see some glimpse of what might have been… if the band had just listened to one too many A&R men, flew a little too close to the sun imitating the success of Creep, gone for more radio. In that future, we don’t get Weird Yorke. We only get worse music.
So it’s a weird listen! But I like it! Fake plastic trees is a favorite. 4/5
Radiohead
4/5
My least favorite Radiohead album is the most obviously depressing. A friend told me it was his favorite when he was in high school… and that, in hindsight, he must have been “pretty fucked up.” I put it on many times but never got past track 3, because I was not fucked up enough.
A shame! The best songs are in the second half! There, There is gorgeous. Sail To The Moon is perfect for its off-kilter, slow-dance-during-the-apocalypse sound. Some of these swim in your head, an afterimage on a screen that never quite goes away. Even if they’re not the most sing-able, they haunt you. Like Amnesiac which we (crazy!) had also this week, you have to be in that mood. The mood that my friend was apparently in all through high school. If you’re there, this is the place. 4/5
Bob Dylan
5/5
Echoing Charlie completely… how unfair is it that we get one day to absorb Blonde on Blonde. This feels like speed-reading that Shakespeare play you were assigned in high school, the night before a pop quiz. It’s a real book we’ve got here.
I never got Bob Dylan until I was 29 years old. The year I started listening to the words the musicians were saying. As for Dylan, the nut finally cracked for me with Time Out Of Mind, one whose production drew me in enough, made me play it enough, that I had to listen in. And whenever I do listen in— which is not my forte— I find layers of play and irony and sarcasm and valor and archetype. Real mythic stuff. It’s gonna be a long time before I hit the center of this one. It’s like a book you want to read slowly, to savor the ending. 5/5
Taylor Swift
2/5
This is the first review I've written where I could actually stand to get in some pretty serious professional trouble, if certain friends of mine find this review 😂 (I know some of the people involved. And let the record show that, track by track, the people I know who worked on this all did stellar work).
This has got to be the biggest whiplash I've ever gotten for an album that I used to listen to in college. The difference between how much I liked it when I was 21 (which was, more or less, positive), and how much I like it 10 years later is... cavernous. I had MANY questions this time around.
I found every song Max Martin was involved in to be silly. His production is annoyingly uninspired. I consider Max Martin to be a net negative on music as a whole. Other producers did a fine job, but Max and his crew dominates the record, and it's that ultra sleek, maximalist, very bland sound that I just can't stomach anymore.
I think that certain pop artists, for whatever reason, in the press and the listening public, are afflicted with the soft bigotry of low expectations. We expect so little of them, from a music-y, album-y, concept-y side (they're busy doing other things, after all), that when they clear an exceptionally low bar we've been holding out for them, it's seen as groundbreaking. When this album came out in college, the press around it was very, very positive. Universal acclaim. We were all kind of swept up by this album, and the idea that Taylor Swift might be doing something exciting. The excitement lasts for precious few songs (Welcome to New York is great), before quickly being bloated by these maximalist records! Why did I think otherwise? I just never expected that much of Taylor Swift, and she cleared the bar.
I don't feel this way about Folklore, Evermore, or anything after. I think those genuinely are getting into great music territory. This one was so lacking the actual artistic meat and bones that my memory (and the press around it) promised it would have. A fate suffered by plenty of Britney Spears albums... also a Max Martin creation! There is a pattern here.
A generous 2/5. If you're reading this and you worked on this album (and you know me)... you know who you are, and I like your work on here. Actually good shit.
Paul McCartney
3/5
What a fascinating listen! To be Paul McCartney in 1970… I do not envy him. His band is breaking up, and he’s the one who’s been trying hardest to keep it together. And here he is, cranking out music. No studio, no fancy tricks, no producer… just him and a tape recorder.
And it’s… a funny listen! I find myself in awe of his songwriting, when the faucet is turned on. It’s just that it’s so stubbornly *off* for most of the album! It’s experimental, instrumental, certainly *interesting* that Paul has half of his songs meandering, a little basic, almost demos of the ideas. Even the songs feel half fleshed out… a far way to drop from Abbey Road, or Let It Be, just a year prior. This is someone who sounds like he’s figuring himself out… which is just plain weird, since the last 5 years of his discography make the self-evident case for a songwriter who had it *all* figured out. I’m glad he got back on his footing with Ram and McCartney II, but here he just sounds lost. There’s very little reason for anything that goes on, and ideas simmer into focus and then lose the plot.
I was close to a 2, but as a McCartney fan, I have to acknowledge the few great moments. They’re just so few and far between. Glad that he eventually made it out of the morass. 3/5
Brian Eno
4/5
It's hard to come away from anything Brian Eno does without a massive amount of respect. He is so evidently an artist with a capital A... the kind that someone in the contemporary art world would recognize a bit of themselves in. An experimentalist, an intellectual, but– thankfully for us– he actually walks the walk. I love that. I always come away from anything he does with a little bit of awe, looking up at the structure he's trying to erect. It's often ragged, rough around the edges. But there's really an artist there, amid it all. He's a perfect blend for me between the avant garde and the popular taste.
This album has some bright moments. It's just hard to figure out which would have been groundbreaking to contemporaneous listeners, and which (to my ear), sound overplayed. That's because Eno is so massively influential in instrumental music, period– never mind ambient, which he undeniably invented– that any of his best ideas seem like they were destined to be reprinted for the next 25 years by the ambient film scorers and elevator musicians of the world. So I lack context to know what truly breaks the mold. I will say that the title track, Another Green World, always grabs me. I love that kind of immediacy... that's the version of Brian Eno I am unconsciously imitating in my own work.
What a great listen. Rough around the edges, and so much less fleshed out than any ambient work is going to be in 25 years. But hey... it's 1975. So rarely does a new sound both break ground and crystallize into a solid form so quickly.
This is a lot of broken ground. But what an expanse! 4/5
Duke Ellington
4/5
This is so good! The band is in top form. I’ve never heard this before. A band at their most electric, most practiced. I especially loved those wild and free, squealing clarinet solos. Fun to listen, including all the commentary and banter between numbers! Captures an amazing moment we’d otherwise never hear. 4/5
Kate Bush
5/5
1984 was Hounds of Love *and* Purple Rain?? Insane. Am I right in saying that those two have no personnel overlap? What was in the air? It’s the LinnDrum again. Damn you, LinnDrum!
No, but really. This explosion of artistry from artists who got to be their own producer, thanks to the commercial availability of samplers (The Fairlight) and drum machines (LinnDrum), to do home recording demos. Kate Bush did this, Prince did this. One-human bands, demos then fleshed out by a band and probably a small army of other engineers on 24-track. Winning formula.
So now that I know that, and I’ve been disabused of the false belief that this was produced by anyone but Kate Bush herself… this is stunning. We heard her previous album, The Dreaming, and the through-line of her creative outbursts, explosive lines, and, a pure-spirited *witchiness* about her music aesthetically… it’s all here. A super, super creative person is given all the paints in the paintbox to play with, and just makes a masterpiece by having fun.
I’m fascinated by these moments, when technology suddenly enables people who wouldn’t make art in the way they do to take ownership of more of the process. It gives me hope that we may yet see some zany, insane, creative geniuses with the same mindset as Kate Bush here.
An artistic icon, with probably her most accessible and driving songs ever. I’m glad we got a version of Kate Bush that people can actually parse. God, those ballads though… “And Dream of Sheep.” Stunning.
Now I think, between this, Peter Gabriel, Prince… we were blessed. A genuinely insane time of quantum leaps for music.
5/5
4/5
Gave this many, many listens before I had an opinion, honestly. Came out of that a PJ Harvey fan. Not, like, a mega-fan, but definitely intrigued. This album showcases her versatility, and ability to do a lot of different things stylistically on her terms. There are some jaw-droppingly beautiful songs on here ("Horses In My Dreams" cast a spell on me when I heard it for the first time). The Thom Yorke duet is pretty cool. That made me think OK Computer, which we just had, whose monumental influence you can hear poking through just a little bit, in the way things are recorded, the general attitude, songwriting. And, like OK Computer, she starts out strong, abrasive even, and then pulls us into her world. She has a pretty wide range of things worth saying. I want to hear more from her. 4/5
Donovan
3/5
That was fun! I thought I'd like this more than I actually did– I'm biased toward Donovan. He's the kind of slightly campy, off-kilter, a little inscrutable edge to the 60's flower power thing that I think is fun. I really started paying attention to him with Mellow Yellow, which was a centerpiece record for me for discovering a whole lot of new stuff.
This one was... less exciting than Mellow Yellow, for me. Very 60's camp. The super sober, English fantasy songs are really funny. I just didn't connect with many of his songs, unlike his later records. I found his songwriting to be a little underdeveloped. I don't know whether this is the only Donovan record we get, which would be a shame, because he is a delightful counterpoint to the more *serious* rock and roll records we have here. Between a 2 and 3 for me, but rounded up for Season of the Witch which is great. 3/5
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
2/5
With Elvis Costello, I just don't think I can abide. It's just not doing it for me. This is the one where everyone becomes a fan right? It's just too fast, wordy, frenetic, clever. The band, yes, they are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, it gives the records this real fantastic tightness and intensity, as well as cohesion, as he moves frenetically from target to target. I'm just not super into the songwriting or the delivery, it just must not be my cup of tea because I can totally acknowledge it's a really infectious and fun series of songs. But altogether, it just doesn't do anything for me. Hate to dismiss such a *competent* and really well-played album like this, with a writer with a vision. Just not for me! 2/5
Beastie Boys
2/5
I didn't love this! I thought I would. The Beastie Boys really wear me out. Ultimately their voices and personas grate on me. This album is in Sample Hall Of Fame, and as a huge sampler I thought I would hear what others were hearing here, which is reportedly a quantum leap forward in the sounds of sampling, in the hands of the Dust Brothers. From my vantage point... it's hard to hear! So many of the techniques and collage stuff sound primitive to me. Even though I know it was groundbreaking at the time, this album is frankly left in the dust in terms of sophistication and technique just a few years later by... pretty much everyone. So I don't know! Maybe the lyrics and the braggadocio are throwing me off the scent here. There were some great standout tracks, and it was a fun record to put on all afternoon. I just don't really want to put it back on. 2/5
The Darkness
3/5
I had more fun with this album than I thought I would have when I was 5 seconds in. I was thinking, oh no, not another "The Hives." This was way less annoyingly polished (like the Hives), way more explosive, and just fun and silly. I ended up kind of coming around to it! This is pretty much on the opposite pole of my normal home turf, music-wise. I really don't love Queen or most glam rock stuff, and the lead singer is sometimes super eye-rolly in what he does.
Why is this working for me? Well it's honestly that they just sound like they're having an insanely fun time! So you can't be super grumpy at them for too long. And they just go all-in, 100%, on every record. Reminds me a tiny bit of why I liked the past Def Leppard albums. 3/5
Big Brother & The Holding Company
4/5
This was a good record! Sounds really unique. Feels like a sound plucked right out of a moment in time in the 60's, with this wild, frantic energy that Janis Joplin is so good at as a performer. I actually kind of like that it was live-esque (apparently the majority of it isn't live, there are just overdubbed crowd sounds), but for some reason it worked in my brain. Maybe it's because the record just sounds rough enough around the edges, the guitars and drums sitting in that unsure spot in the mix that you get with live albums. Added to the imperfect, messy, fun sound. I'm a fan, and its uniqueness as an album definitely gives it staying power. I'm going with 4/5
Throbbing Gristle
2/5
Goddammit! This is impossible to review.
I am very annoyed that I can't just turn this album off and throw it in the trash after discovering the "hidden," extremely creepy artwork of the little girl on the cover (removed in subsequent editions, but... supposedly still on Spotify?!?!) That made me want to throw up. So the already chaotic and disturbing soundscapes went beyond the purely disturbing and acquired a feeling tone of, for lack of a better word, "evil," after that.
But then I kept listening, and I heard... genuinely cool sound experiments, very compelling pieces of music. That was surprising. This already is leaps and bounds better than the other industrial records we've had. There are a few moments of pure brilliance and weirdness that was not just tolerable, but kind of cool. I can see why this was influential.
Aaaand then I got to the interlude track with the kids and the creepy music. And the interlude of the people talking about infecting people with E. coli. Whelp.
This is challenging me, because I'm getting a mix of REALLY COOL SOUNDS and GENUINELY VERY DISTURBED feelings at at the same time. And this is way, way, waaaaaay better than Kollaps, our other pioneering Industrial album on the list. That was a pure 1.
I just don't like this, I'm sorry. I don't like the evil, I don't like the attitude of shock music, I don't like feeling that I did all the homework and passed all my classes and here's the art school kids back again at my house making me suffer through sweaty bullshit. I like... music. And annoyingly, there is some good music in here.
Reminds me so much of my experience watching "Mad God" last year. Conceptually and artistically flawless... also made me want to throw up. Not a fun time.
Ugh! Fine. 2/5. I can see why it's influential, I can't just write it off like my deep senses of disgust wanted me to, and that'll have to be where we leave things.
The Icarus Line
3/5
It’s a 2004 album, so given how this list works, I’m immediately suspicious of this album’s staying power. A lot of the 2004/2005 picks are very… suspicions.
I really thought the first few records were sick! It’s a more intense, dangerous, noisy take on this kind of garage rock thing happening. On my iPhone speakers it sounds terrible, on my proper headphones and my good system it sounds AMAZING! Kind of funny how some of the biggest losers in the transition to computer / iPhone speakers have been the heavier rock groups. That stuff is just hard to get to sound good on small speakers like that, without compromising. This record sounds REALLY good on a proper set of speakers, and I’m glad I didn’t just put it on in the car or something.
I think it sounds pretty unique, not very cookie cutter. Not cheesy, not trying to hit a chorus, just really aggressive rock. Just goes 10-20% harder than others, and they really play into the noisiness. I assume they have 0 hits, there’s no real hit here, it’s just an hour of all-out assault. But can’t say I didn’t have fun with it! 3/5
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
Oh okay nowwwww I get it. This one was a casualty of the random sort of the 1001 Albums Generator. We got Axis: Bold As Love first, followed by Electric Ladyland, and then Are You Experienced. In my opinion, the wrong order to go about things. If we had started here, things would have made a bit more sense why everyone collectively went crazy over this.
Because it's soooooo good. Insane energy between the players, things just light up when they play together, it's not boring at all. Some monumental tracks, but also just a very enjoyable listen through and through. Sounds like there is some tracklisting confusion between this version on Spotify (17 tracks) and the various US and UK versions, each shorter but each with tracks that the other didn't have. My only complaint– a bit long and dragging at times– is pretty moot, if this is an extended "legacy" version. Regardless of any order, some songs just hit you out of nowhere, they're infectious. I'm happy for my man Jimi and the clear height of his stardom, both technical virtuosity and frontman appeal here. Everything is pretty amazing.
Always thought the title track, Are You Experienced, was more beloved! That's what I think about here. Just sounds like it's the continuation of Strawberry Fields, they just go one right into the other. I'm fully there for it. 5/5
Electric Light Orchestra
2/5
I’ve been caught up on the albums, but way behind the reviews. Uh…. There’s just too much going on! It’s a little too frenetic and try-everything for me to really want to settle into it. It’s also really smoothly put together. I admire the ambition of this guy. Truly some huge arrangements. But for whatever reason it doesn’t connect with me emotionally. And I can’t seem to figure out why. Mr. Blue Sky is awesome and proves that the mission statement here was worthwhile and worth trying out. But something about it is hard to listen to for a while. Like seeing a movie with extremely fast cuts… impressive, but after a while you feel dizzy. 2/5
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
4/5
I'm gonna get flamed... I thought this was GREAT! it was campy, funny, ridiculous, very over-the-top. The first two tracks sound like a massive joke. The closest thing I've heard to camp in music. This is not an ironic listen! I just had plenty of fun. I'm kind of embarrassed to say this. Was I born at the wrong time? Where are the clubs playing "Frankie Goes To Hollywood?" 4/5
Hole
3/5
This is so dead-center 90’s. But it’s a really good example of that, it’s great songs, it sounds really good, it’s kind of everything you could want from a 90’s album. I don’t really resonate a ton with it, but I do like it, I think it sounds good! Honestly this feels worlds apart from where music is today… maybe further than music from the 60’s and 70’s even, which has this evergreen quality of being imitated every generation. Has this “sheen” to it that practically no alt rock records today have anything close to. They really figured out how to make great rock records! I am just imagining seeing them live and having a great time. 3/5, enjoyed this much more than I thought I would.
Gram Parsons
2/5
an album I've put on about 6 or so times, so I can try to get it under the skin, to see what I'm missing. All I've come away with was that our other Gram Parsons album was better. The Emmylou Harris features are the highlight for me– she's been a surprising find on this list. I just don't think I remember a single song on repeated listens, except for Love Hurts. It's all a blur. Pleasant listen, but then again, we have enough of that. 2/5
Yes
3/5
Gave this several listens before settling on a conflicted 3. Enjoyed my time in Yes Land more than I usually do. To me they too often have a frenetic, ADHD-afflicted, too-smart-to-care sense about them, where every idea is boring and is discarded for the next new thing. The other records we've had by them certainly suffer from this. This is less bad, in that regard! There are really good moments, and some glimpses of good songs here! And it's a little less self-serious and kind of whimsical and silly. Still, I struggle to remember more than a couple of passing melodies here. My time in Yes Land has been more enjoyable and somewhat charming than other outings, but the idea of putting on yet another record of there's makes me feel somewhat queasy. 3/5
New Order
4/5
Something funny happened in the (many) months spent procrastinating on writing this review. I think I've pulled up this album at least four or five times, hoping that this would be the day I had something to say about it. Over those nearly six months, something must have clicked, because when I hear these songs I'm just like "this is really sick."
I was kind of ready to write this album off as another synth-pop 80's band, of which we've had plenty. That sonic signature starts playing, and I get a little queasy from all our other misadventures into this world. But this one just feels really, really fun and kind of unserious and pretty damn catchy. I realized that these songs have been floating around in my head for 6 months, because they all sounded like old friends. Isn't that funny? Took a long time to come around to it!
Now I just really dig this and want to hear more from the band. They're in it for the right reasons, they just want to have fun, and even if it's dressed up in this certain way, it's a bit silly and just playful, too. Glad I gave this a half dozen listens cause I'm kind of converted!
4/5
Justice
5/5
fucking yes. Such a palette cleanser after Throbbing Gristle nearly drove me insane. I mean, anything after Throbbing Gristle is just gonna sound like hearing the fifth symphony for the first time, like I just discovered tonal harmony.
But no. This is insanely good. Genesis is the most badass, microsampling, iPod-rattling, lightsaber-swishing song I've heard in a while.
what happened to this kind of thing? Did everyone just get swept away by the tsunami of EDM and its spinoffs in 2010/2012? Because this is so fucking original and... cool. I want to be back in this world, where microsampling is cool again, Avalanches are cool again.
And so original. Maybe the closest thing to me is early Daft Punk, but this is obviously far less reverent, more distorted, more experimental and ready to not give a fuck. Pure ear candy everywhere. And this really does sound like they made it on a Mac in 2007 running GarageBand with 256mb of RAM. I know I'm right. Limitations and creativity, man...
Thank you 1001 for making me listen to this all the way through. It's a party! I still think it's cool. Guess I just want to live in 2007. 5/5
Simon & Garfunkel
5/5
Bookends is my songwriter album *and* my 60’s album. I think that Paul Simon was one of the few people who listened to what the Beatles were doing around Pepper and actually sat up and took notes. Because this album doesn’t have many of the trappings of the psychedelic, wacky, unnerving sound that seems to pervade 60’s post-Pepper soundalikes, and even more far-afield hippie musicians like Donovan. But it is nonetheless a boldly *cinematic* album, and its identity is distinctly American. It’s a Simon and Garfunkel take on this new art form, proudly tackling this new demand that an album be more than it once was. But it’s their take! And that’s what puts it above the rest.
I am such a sucker for some of Paul Simon’s best lines. “wish I was a Kellogg’s cornflake,” has got to be one of the best openers of a song. And when I first heard “America,” and really understood what he’s doing, it was nearly transcendent. The telephoto lens on the subtle details, little passing phrases that make the mundane parts of life more livable— only to zoom out in the most dramatic way, the lens goes wide on the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, everyone looking for America. Utterly brilliant. It’s the closest thing music has to a Norman Rockwell portrait.
I could just go on and on… this one has Mrs. Robinson on it too?? And the exceptionally touching Old Friends, with the setup of Old People Talking that brings the message to focus much more. Somehow matches the sentimentalism of a McCartney song without ever seeming sappy. Maybe that’s what makes them a little different than the rest.
A legendary album which I will put with the best of them. 5/5
White Denim
4/5
Wow, this is fantastic! And a surprise hit. Could someone go back in time and and this to me during 2011? I needed this back then. I think, if you did manage to do that, I would have started a band at 19. I was already on this path, listening to a lot of math rock... but this takes all of that technical brilliance and love of absurd complex changes and pushes it to this fun-loving, really bright territory. This is a really happy record, and you can hear the chemistry. It's a new favorite! 4/5
Peter Gabriel
5/5
WOW.
I was so completely floored by this album, I don't know where to start. I listened through twice before I looked up on the Wikipedia and discovered all about its cultural significance, the first prominent use of gated reverb, all the connections with Phil Collins' drum sounds, the Fairlight, Kate Bush's contributions... etc. All wonderful errata to know. We have seen the best and the worst of the 80's, and I now can declare my allegiance solidly to the vision that these artists (with Steve Lillywhite producing) are pushing for.
But none of that preamble really captures how it felt to hear this album for the first time. Which was a moment of real WOW. It floored me, from the first song almost all the way through. It's a complex, challenging, bold listen from a disturbed mind. Peter Gabriel never sounds more strident and more deranged, his soundscapes never more expansive and challenging. There are enough hooks, soaring melodies, rhythms to keep the ship on course, but as a listener you're just thrown into this chaotic world of staggeringly bold, almost atonal ideas. Little did I know that the album that the gated snare would come from contains multitudes... a real mission statement of sound. No wonder copycats abound. No wonder it took people a decade to work through this. If I had been learning guitar, drums, production when this album came out, I would have been obsessed. Just the guitar work alone by Robert Fripp is so challenging and groundbreaking. The strange Fairlight patches..!! It all sounds so singular. This is an album where it feels like all these strange new ideas really crystalize into a Sound. And it's a genuinely disturbing one!
Bowie, of course, is the standard by which all art rock must be held up to, and there are some strong shades of Bowie in this album. But where I feel like Bowie in this period (the Berlin Trilogy etc.) feels weirdly aloof or absent from his albums, or doesn't commit all the way to the sound he is going for, this album delivers. It is full 100% balls-to-the-wall commitment to the insanity of the sound and the concept. I think it's the best Peter Gabriel album we've had, and it's maybe one of the best first listens I've had to an album in a long time. I'm so glad I'm doing this list. 10/10, 5/5.
The Smiths
4/5
Really like this. This album seems to have a lot of people who are permanently turned off— by Morrissey, mostly— and I can understand how that derails a listen. Didn’t we just have Boy George the other day?
For me, it’s how wry and acerbic the lyrics are, mixed with these bouncy and totally unserious melodies… it’s funny and satirical, and also sad, and also funny. The permanently aggrieved Morrissey has plenty of space for some good lines. I laughed so hard with the line “this must be how Joan of Arc felt.” Complete with the pitch-shifted vocal… It’s so self-aggrandizing and funny! That’s why I like the Smiths. Because it’s a mix. It’s that never-quite-serious, self aggrandizing humor that is the master skill of the melodramatic. Certainly Morrissey doesn’t sound like he’d be fun to live with. But it’s good in small doses. 4/5
Dolly Parton
4/5
This is a treat! We've been warming up for this one. Plenty of Dolly Parton, and some good Emmylou Harris picks (no Linda yet). I had no idea this existed! This so obviously needed to exist in the world because the three of them fit so well together and they sing so well together. This is my kind of old guard country. Big fan! 4/5
George Michael
2/5
George Michael whispering “sex is natural, sex is fun” over a bongo solo, is... not particularly sexy. 2/5
Living Colour
1/5
“I’m not part of your master plan, I’m just your middleman.” Such is the abysmal state of Living Colour’s lyrics, which blows right past I’m-14-and-this-is-deep level into unheard-of levels of lameness. This is my (probably unfair) impression of this 80-90’s funk rock. Really corny lyrics. I can’t take the Chili Peppers seriously most of the time. How can I take this seriously?
And the guitars… just this super thin wall of sound. These blues-tinged, overdriven guitars sound like the intro to every “learn to produce music in Pro Tools” video I’ve ever watched. I don’t know why YouTube content creators think everyone wants to rock like this. It’s so lame.
I lost it at “Open Letter to a Landlord.” “Now you can tear a building down, but you can’t erase a memory/ these houses may look all run down, but they have a value you can’t see.” In exaggerated over-earnest gospel rock. Who gave this singer Stevie Wonder to listen to? I hope they regret doing that. I hate hate hate it. 1 star. Haven’t done a proper 1 star in a while. Feels great!
David Bowie
5/5
God dammit Bowie, you get another 5 don’t you. I bounced off Low completely, finding there so much lacking in the songwriting and melody. This is a later version of the same style, and has the benefit of significantly more Brian Eno and Robert Fripp at their stations, and Bowie here is much more lively, more invested, you can just feel things coming back to life. “Heroes” is fucking amazing.
And I actually kind of loved the instrumental back half…! Something about it fleshed out the universe so completely. Two halves of the brain. That is the disadvantage we are presented with, on streaming… here, the A and B sides are meant to be two clearly different albums. Which is sick. It also means that there isn’t meant to be continuity here, more of a front and back. I find I miss the cue that the artist was intending for a very strong A/B side dualism, and here I’m glad I read the Wikipedia.
I dunno, this one just lets me settle into it in a nice way. I think it’s a way more improved version of the concept set out by Low. Different Bowie, different land we’re in, and one I wouldn’t mind going back to. I have this feeling that my mind is wiped, I’m left disoriented, and fully in Bowie land. It is sick. 5/5
The Jam
3/5
Felt good minute 1! I liked this. Nothing really stood out, but very of the time. I think I liked the other Jam album we had a little bit more– told the story a little bit better. 3/5
Rage Against The Machine
4/5
I had such an incredible takedown of this album written up, and it's killing me that I can't find it in my notes. Vitriol to vitriol. My writeup today will never measure up to that, a shame.
Incredible, incredible music with a band that is so locked and loaded, perfectly rehearsed, just unbelievable energy and sense of groove, whose performance is so insanely good, stylized, high energy, that you can almost unwittingly ingest its politically asinine message, like second-hand smoke billowing from a factory, the unintended side-effects that nobody asked for. We are all passive casualties downwind of Zack de la Rocha's sloganeering, delivered with the conviction and righteousness that only anger can give you. This music is the companion to much anger– real anger of real, dispossessed people, whose mistreatment must be dutifully politicized– and just the garden variety that all teenagers possess. Anger attracts both camps, and the point of the anger usually gets smuggled in. And here it is, unsubtly spewing forth with so much accompanying baggage, and the trappings of the self-styled revolutionary, that it has to have crossed your mind if this is just a parody of a person– if real people are uncritically buying what they’re selling.
That's the double-edge sword of music: you *do* take it more seriously because it's music. Because, with music, you’re hit with the emotion first. The point– the intention– just comes along for the ride. And everyone has been angry before. Scrape even an inch or two off the surface and you'll realize that, if this was just some guy at a rally yelling these things into a megaphone, even some the most hardened activists would be shuffling away to keep their distance. It’s stunningly cringey. I truly see no difference between the tactics in this music and those of those dubious, neo-Nazi skinhead bands. The starting point is anger, and you just get a buffet of political options from which the sellers are peddling to the buyer. I find this all deeply unserious. Maybe it is supposed to be unserious– at least, that’s the common motte-and-bailey retreat that people commonly use– “it’s just music! It’s just entertainment!” Okay, then. Find-and-replace these messages with those of the white power movement. Imagine a music whose lyrics, beneath layers of high energy guitar solos and unbelievable vocal performances, bears some uncanny resemblance to the politics of the January 6th rioters. Any takers? On that note… I would be surprised if the be-camoed, military LARP-ing rioters of January 6th *weren’t* playing “Take the Power Back” from their backpack bluetooth speakers. “They just didn’t understand the message!” Nope. The message isn’t that profound. The anger comes first, and the aesthetic of revolution, rebellion, anarchism is just the cynical way by which that anger is deployed by the politically smart.
4/5
Robert Wyatt
4/5
Extraordinarily listenable and emotional for being so bold and experimental. His lines are so lyrical. I'm hearing the portentous lines from future Radiohead, Grizzly Bear, others. I was pretty onboard until LITERALLY Alife, which I found unlistenable with those weirdo sax sounds! Very awful! I must deduct a star from this otherwise very adventurous journey into a unique mind. I just love the touches, the strange harmonium and string pads, really wild stuff. A strange, genius mind made this, and I’m just getting to know its contours, because it’s not like anything I’ve ever heard. 4/5
Neu!
4/5
The are some albums which cross your path at precisely the time they are most needed. And so it is here, this morning, our plane taxiing at Logan airport , through the early morning mist, the bleary-eyed flight attendants barely keeping up the appearance that we’re all on a flight, rather than in bed. And as I— in the “still in bed” camp— put this album on. Exactly the right space. The sounds of drifting back to sleep in the early morning, the sun creeping up the walls but never enough to disturb.
I wish I could have been just by the ocean, wherever they had been, when they recorded the waves on “Leb Wohl.” That is truly perfect. This reminds me very much of Eno’s work, but just a touch more song-structured, and more dynamic than I thought it would be. Even at its loudest “Hero,” recall the same droning, never-ending records from something like Bowie’s Berlin period. I was gently coaxed by this record, and then I was brought onboard. For being both gentle and alluring, I can think of no better. 4/5
Neil Young
3/5
This is not my favorite Neil Young album, but it's still really good. I recently listened to some producers talk about this whole period for Neil, starting with After the Gold Rush. The albums are super loose. I think this album was recorded in two days? To my ear it literally sounds like the unedited, raw recordings of a band playing live in a room. Bone dry. I think, at least for Gold Rush, there was a bunch of editing involved, but this one sounds sloppy and very, very loose. Just dudes playing music in a basement. Neil Young is the king of that. Makes all us (relatively) perfectionist musicians shake in our boots a bit... and compared to Neil, we're all perfectionists. This is raw like meat, and still packs a ton of emotion. He manages to do that. If I'm honest... they should probably have done 4 days, rather than 2. Some of the tracks are just a bit too rough, and another take would have been good. Who knows, though? Would it have been any better? 3/5
A Tribe Called Quest
5/5
First off, this may be the coolest, smoothest hip hop albums of all time. The extremely tight jazz rhythms and samples are just enough, never too much— I can only imagine how small a sample time they’re dealing with here!— and it just has this overall smattering of cool over the whole thing. Massively influential, of course— there are about 10 artists I can think off the bat who you can trace directly to this sound— but it’s very singular by itself. The mix of the drums, samples, and bass always sounds coolly atonal to me. Maybe it’s the heavy bass, or the pastiche of samples that are just whimsically put together. But it has a tonality like nothing else.
Mix that with these super fun guys who are both super lyrical, poetic, and yet never take themselves too seriously, dealing with the roller coasters of their newfound fame. The charisma is off the charts. I really love this kind of hip hop, which always feels more about real life advice, neighborhood relatable stuff, even as they’re talking about this new fame they’ve got. They just seem like super relatable kids you might hang out with in high school. That kind of juvenile but also earnest truth-telling is still in hip hop today, but it’s rare. Refreshing. You can’t help but root for Tribe. Or put them on in the background and tune out, it’s just as good. 5/5
Charles Mingus
3/5
Terrific. A complex listen, right from the get-go. A type of darkness in those horns that is hard to find anywhere else. I am close to jazz-illiterate, and I’ve heard the legends of Mingus, but haven’t heard much firsthand. Worth more exploration. 3/5
Korn
1/5
Korn’s lead singer has all the dramatic subtlety of a poorly-dubbed anime villain. I literally died laughing when he did his first muppet intro... an angst-ridden “KOORRRRRRRNNN!” Amazing. I have not really stopped laughing thinking about this.
The muppet monster beatboxing is SO FUNNY!!! Omg!!!! I am dying.
Such is my Jekyl-and-Hyde reaction to this album: unqualified disgust, followed by incredulous belly laughs. The absolute nadir of this album (yes, I listened through the full hour and seven minutes) is the 14-year-olds-whining-"no, ur gay", poorly conceived diss track “All in the Family.” If I was dissed by Korn, I would be proud. What an honor!
It’s really not the band, or even the production, that makes this so bad. The production may be a tad cheesy, even for 90's nu metal. But that's just the price of admission. No, It’s really those vocals, and the heinous, hilariously self-aggrandizing lyrics. No one human has sounded this whiny for this long. He manages to make me cringe so hard until I've collapsed in on myself into a small, cringey ball. Then, from deep within this small super-dense object that has become my disgusted soul, comes... laughter. Deep, uncontrollable belly laughs. Then repeat. It's a kind of enjoyable cycle.
I had fun! 1/5
Prince
3/5
Ooof. This is definitely a 3 stars rating I’m gonna regret being so low in a few months. I can just feel it. This is Prince unleashed. He’s so all over the place here, it’s kind of all-inspiring. He is trying so much. This guy seems like he has unlimited energy and unlimited groove. Insane. As an album, it has some amazing, standout records (“starfish and coffee” is still one of my favorite Prince songs, since hearing him sing it on The Muppet Show of all places), and there are some tracks where I just have to stop the record and go “wow.” From a production standpoint, he’s so quirky. I just get this feeling of excess listening to this album. It’s too long, some of the tracks are so gratuitous and over-the top, especially on the vocal delivery, that it gives you a bit of vertigo sometimes. I had a super fun time, and Prince’s mind is like no other, but there are more album-driven, focused, thematic Prince albums out there… obviously! The man was a machine! Also, not enough Prince guitar. For a good time, but not likely to pick it up again (and the overlong runtime)… 3/5
OutKast
5/5
We gotta do this in multiple sittings. This is way too much good music, way too much, packed with too many insanely good songs, that I'm gonna need a little siesta in between side 1 and side 2. Remember when I said that there is only one truly great double album– Songs In The Key of Life– and every other album is merely good in spite of its double-ness? Well, my friends, this is a DOUBLE CD. Which is a truly disgusting amount of music. We are witnessing a level of workaholism and love of the game at near unprecedented levels. This is an un-repeatable event. I can't imagine an artist today releasing such a large album that has almost NO filler. Most artists just don't have that kind of focus on the concept these days. Let alone have two creative savants in one group.
Speakerboxxx: You can't deny it. This is… amazing! There are so many hit records I don't know where to start. And records that weren’t hits but should have been. There are tons of features that feel fun, complementary and chummy. There's a kind of through-line about relationship trouble, growing up together and maturing and changing, positivity amidst life's bigger problems. But man. Tons of just dumb fun. This is hip hop royalty. It doesn't get a lot better than this. At their most fun, relatable, but also hard-working and shooting high.
The Love Below: I don’t think I’ve even gotten this far into the album before. Sorry Andre. I imagine I’m not alone. I usually would put this on at the gym, starting with track 1 (I’m such an album boy lol), and leg day isn’t exactly a 2 hour affair for me. Anyway.
Tracks 1 and 2 just broke my brain. Why did I never get this far? Has anyone done ANYTHING even remotely like this before? This is just silly. These people are savants. So scary. If this was released today, in 2024 it would be groundbreaking today. The totally effortless use of swing/bebop, new age, jazz, then back to those quantized fucked up grooves over which Andre just floats like it’s no big deal, like he’s not even trying. We are in uncharted territory, Andre is unlocked.
Blown away. Blown away.
To say nothing of Hey Ya... (!)
Yes, its insane runtime is just gonna turn people off, it’s a fact. That’s a shame. But what else can they do? Honestly they probably made 5 times this much music, just cut it down to 2 measly hours. This is the most impressive hip hop I’ve heard in a long time. Probably should have been 2 separate albums. Ah, now I’m doubting myself. Maybe it’s perfect just the way it is.
Speakerboxxx: 4.5/5
The Love Below: 6/5
Combined: at LEAST 5/5
John Coltrane
5/5
I’m not qualified to say anything smart about A Love Supreme! So let’s get that out of the way and get on with the business of my reactions. This is the first time I’ve put this album on, and it strikes me as a really dense, impressive showcase of Coltrane, who is no more a freak of nature than on this record. His lines sound so foreign, angular, jagged, dexterous. A wailing, lone voice in a tonal land of his own. This kind of jazz beguiles me, because it’s both easy listening— easy to tune out and just put on for a mood— and also extremely dense, full of complexity and depth and dramatic, bold choices when you listen carefully. Somehow works on both levels. I don’t really get the spiritual component, but I hear in his playing meditative voice, a lonely one, sometimes very tender, sorrowful lines. Unlike the 60’s, “sax” just sounds like Coltrane now, 50% of the time. But there is only one so masterful. 5/5
Motörhead
1/5
uhhh... I loved the first track. A sweaty, frantic, wailing first track. And then it just kept... going? Lost interest quickly. Nothing grabbed me, once the initial shock got in. I'd vastly prefer being at that venue than getting 1 hour of this album in my kitchen. a low 2, -1 "live album tax." 1/5
Aerosmith
2/5
I like the parts where they’re not doing Aerosmith. There are little moments here, sometimes intros to whole songs, where you realize that these guys are actually great musicians and have creative ideas. Then it’s just smothered by the Aerosmith thing. I’m not sure what came first: Aerosmith, or the wave of sound that Aerosmith is clearly a part of. All I know is that I like bands that dip their toes into this thing for a song or two— Dire Straits come to mind— and don’t love it when it’s 47 minutes of just that. This feels pretty boring. 2/5
Run-D.M.C.
3/5
Pretty great album that has one foot planted in the future sound of what hip hop becomes. Walk This Way was a huge deal when it came out, right? I can see it. It was way better than the Aerosmith album we had the other day, which came out the same time! Immediately compelling. No doubt many artists heard that and though, we've gotta do something like that. "It's Tricky" was the title of "SSX Tricky," a game I played one billion times as a kid. They're fun and I like fun hip hop. A little in the middle sounded pretty dated. Good times! 3/5
Little Simz
4/5
I LOVED this. This one slipped me by. Even in 2019 it feels like an artifact of a time quickly disappearing... the early/mid 2010s, when every rap album was as ambitious as this one. When ideas were adventurous, sampling was smart, often funny, whimsical. Every album its own world. Somewhere along the way I fell off the train of new hip hop releases because, frankly, many people stopped trying. Little Simz and Inflo are trying. The string arrangements, old Warner bros sfx, cheeky minimalist Moog and drums alone are worth the price of admission. I found it very immediate and compelling. Let's get back here. 4/5
Stevie Wonder
5/5
This is amazing. Put this on over breakfast. Somehow I never gave the earlier Stevie albums the chance they deserved. As a writer he’s so confident. Somehow he makes anything work. A combination of brilliant musicianship, really tricky and complex writing. And the clav grooves!! Yes, a little sappy at points, but I always feel brought along for the ride. Blame it on the Sun is an amazing example. It’s easy to imagine a blander and more boring version of that song. But each change leads to another beguiling change, taking you in. Layers inside of layers. I love this so much. 5/5
Germs
3/5
I don't think the rating system is going to capture my feelings with this album at all. It's probably the best hardcore punk album we've had on the list, and I actually thought the sound was awesome. It's got this dry, flat, really cool sound to it. Like you're in a dead basement and getting your ears assaulted.
Still, my YouTube rip of this album had about 30 seconds of silence in the middle, between side A and side B. And I welcomed that silence. A few of the snippets of lyrics I heard sounded asinine, and some of the leads are so raw it'd be hilarious to get a solo'd version of them. But that's what you get! It definitely awakened a need to seek out some of this stuff more. I will probably never listen to this again, but it did its job. 3/5
Japan
4/5
The extremely rare "New Romantics" album that gets me excited. My distaste for Boy George and everything he represents keeps me perpetually cool to this genre. This, however, is really genuinely cool and unique. Doesn't really fit in any box. Just a bit of darkness, but also very danceable, kind of alluring, irresistible, hard to get out of your head. For a specific type of mood, but I kind of like how I feel listening to this record. It just is very well done. 4/5
Alexander 'Skip' Spence
2/5
First, I have to get out of the way that Diana is one of the most tear-jerking performances I've heard a folk song in a while. The place this guys' voice goes to in that song, man. We've all been there. That one blew me away the first time I heard it.
This list is revealing a type of album which I love, which basically boils down to "Good find." Hidden gems. Overlooked performances, entire artists who just got dealt a bad hand in life. If you picked it up in a discount record bin, you'd feel like you won the lottery. I'd say Nick Drake is the ultimate "good find." As a writer and performer for the period, he has some fucking drop-dead gorgeous songs, but a lot that's kind of average for the troubadours of the era (I said it, sorry not sorry). As a whole artist? Pretty decent, sometimes brilliant. As an artist who was universally overlooked in his life, and discovered posthumously? You know how it goes.
All this to say that, "Albums that are a Great Find" and "Album You Need to Listen to Before You Die" are two VERY different lists. And I like that this list has some of the former, but it does advertise itself as the latter, goddammit!
This album is an extreme example of this disconnect. As an album, it's extremely disjointed, almost unlistenable at times, just drags and drags. You get exactly what's on the tin: a man with a beautiful talent for songwriting, suffering violent nervous breakdowns, has complete creative control over demos that were released practically without his permission. Moments of sheer brilliance, psychadelic strangeness ("War In Peace" is incredibly cool and weird). I feel uncomfortable through a lot of this record, and I don't think it's because I'm being challenged. I'm worrying for the person I'm listening to.
A sad, mournful 2/5. Purely as an album. Because again, I'll be thinking of this for a long time, and I'll have the beginning of "All Come To Meet Her" floating in my head for years. But as an album, it's like staring straight into the abyss.
Elton John
5/5
Who is *this* Elton John?? This guy is soulful, gravelly, makes risky decisions, fully locked and loaded. Have I not been paying attention? This is fucking fantastic songwriting and vocal work. He sounds so engaged, he is selling you on every note. A little more Van Morrison or The Band in his delivery than I remembered. Somehow I missed this AND I don’t think I’ve ever heard Tiny Dancer before! Instant convert. Taking no prisoners. The insanity orchestrations, too! Wow I’m such a sucker for that stuff. I’m hooked. Since listening to this album I’ve started writing the score to my first musical. We’re doing opening night at the Brattleboro community center basement next Thursday. 5/5
R.E.M.
2/5
This album was so boring! I was bored from minute 1, I was briefly lulled from sleep for "It's The End of The World As We Know It," and I soon drifted back to sleep. I listened two full times and barely noticed a thing! The offensively vague, against-the-system lyrics insult your intelligence after more than a few seconds of critical listening. The entire sound is super flat and boring. I really don't like the vocalist's delivery. Listening all the way through an R.E.M. album is exactly the kind of thing I knew I would be signing up for by doing the 1001 Albums Generator. So it has come and gone. There's always tomorrow. 2/5
Brian Eno
3/5
For any musician, Brian Eno is amazing brain food. Pick any period of Eno and you’re gonna come away with something. This is him at his far more deranged, far more “Bowie’s-gone-wild.” It’s stimulating! But I don’t know what to make of it! Through even his most disturbed experiments, there’s a sense of two things: rhythm and pulse, and instrumental glue— this man knows what he’s doing. But it’s almost like seeing a master painter, well-versed in all forms from the traditional to the abstract, suddenly splattering paint all over his canvas at random. It’s going to come out a little masterful, even if unintentional, because of the master who’s doing the splattering. But it is a head scratcher nonetheless! And the deranged, abstract surreal humor can catch you off guard!
I do not know what to make of this at all! It’s beguiling! An extremely ambivalent 3/5. I may come to regret this rating, once I get a sense of what he’s on about.
Willie Colón & Rubén Blades
5/5
Delicious! Is this the first time I ever consciously listened to a salsa album? Yes! But it was unforgettable. So many fun surprises around every corner. It’s like jazz, man… sounds all the same, but then you go in deeper. And deeper. Except this is approachable and fun and you can put it on in all fun times! Very heavily colored by being in Costa Rica as I’m listening to this. The horn arrangements! I’m going 5/5. Rightfully should be in the canon!
Tim Buckley
1/5
Yup… this is pretty flat. A few days removed here, and I don’t feel anything from this album. Tim Buckley as an artist is one of my least favorite types: singers who are so naturally, obviously talented, who use their voice for mediocre music. It always boggles the mind! You’re so talented. Do something cool with your gifts! I got about 5% of what I usually get from, say, Van Morrison out of this. The sound from this period is rich… but we’ve had better albums from this time. Cole described it as “listening to a bar band.” I agree. All the worse because these are supposed to be songs! 1/5. Maybe a little low. But I won’t be coming back here anytime soon.
Pretenders
3/5
A perfectly fun album. Would love to see this live! I wasn’t blown away, and I liked some of the more deep bass cuts, like Lovers of Today. Those got me to perk my ears up. 3/5
ABBA
2/5
I should just stop being a grump and admit that “Dancing Queen” is a perfect song, and it’s perfect everything, so vibrant, amazing, yeah. But I’m still grumpy. I should like this, because it’s so fun and unserious and they’re making hilarious risky choices with the production. But for some reasons, the whole is less than the sum of its parts for me! Or maybe it’s like adding salt to a dish… a tad too much, and you’ve overdone it, and all you can taste is the salt. That’s my reaction to the music part… over-salty. I tend to fall off the train with albums where the pieces fit together a little *too* well. I start to sense a conspiracy.
Yes I’ll dance to these songs at every wedding, yes they are fun, I found myself having fun occasionally, but something about it just feels super off and… weirdly sterile? Solely in the production here. The songs make sense to me. I think I have to give this at least a 2 for sheer voluminous effort, and I did have something of a good time, really. I just feel a little nauseous afterwards and want to skip everything other than Dancing Queen, the second run. 2/5
Nirvana
4/5
This is my first Nirvana album! I don’t think I’ve ever heard Nirvana before. Okay, I have, because everyone has. But I assume we’ll get Nevermind at some point.
This is really good. Dark, stirring, very rough. Some incredible songs. Something about this just works, and grunge isn’t usually my thing.
This has been Uninformed Reviews with Jacob! Thank you! Tune in next week. I like this nirvana band. 4/5
Genesis
5/5
What drugs are Genesis on? What’s going on inside Peter Gabriel’s brain? I want to be on those drugs. The sheer stamina to do insane things. Creative, silly, unserious. Adventurous. Dizzying to listen to! And yet this fatigues me far less than some of the more proggy picks we’ve had. I think I’m just a fan of prog! Because to me, this is really emotional, beautiful in many moments.
“More fool me” stunned me. Came out of nowhere. One of my favorite song discoveries I’ve heard on this list in a while. I’m not sure why the more questionable, strange self-indulgences on the later half of the record don’t come across as gratuitous to me. Maybe it’s the exceptional playing from the band. The rhythm section seems to be able to sell anything! Any idea works!
This is an inspiration. I’m reading the backstory now. I LOVED the folk, Britishness. It challenged me, and a lot to digest. One of my favorite strange, weirdo picks we’ve had. 5/5
New York Dolls
4/5
Every time I turn on the 70’s-era rolling stone, this is what I think I’m gonna get. I almost never do! This has that. It makes the stones look low energy! That’s what rock and roll sounds like right there! I feel immediately more sweaty listening to this. The floor feels a little bit more sticky. The band feels so alive. Got a little more on my nerves toward the end, maybe that’s because I was trying to do my accounting while listening to this. But as a glimpse at that budding punk scene, it’s an essential sound. 4/5
Iron Maiden
5/5
This is such a 5 it’s not even funny. They did this in 13 days??? And they now think the production and recording was garbage? Well fuck me then. Fuck me for LOVING this sound, this dry, raw, band in a dead little room sound! It’s incredible! Every song seems to outdo the previous one. I had my music stank face on, for this epic 20-minute run, straight from Remember Tomorrow into Strange World. I can only assume that, if they recorded this in 13 days, and they were given as little guidance as they supposedly had, it was immaculately rehearsed beforehand. This kind of music isn’t accidental or thrown together.
Now I’m happy I just gave that Motörhead album a 3. This is adjacent but far, far superior. Always got turned off by their gaudy covers so never gave Iron Maiden a shot. A fool I was! A fool! If my friends start wondering about me and why I like heavy metal now apparently, I’ll just put this album on because it’s self-explanatory. An EXTREME hell yes 5/5, made me purchase an electric guitar.
Coldplay
5/5
Can we have this Coldplay back? Respect to Chris and co, for living their best life the last 25 years, but… it’s like invasion of the body snatchers over here! What happened to these guys? This is so self-evidently *great.* I’ve listened a billion times already, so it’s an old friend. A bit of Radiohead’s head, so to speak, but a softer heart. It’s crazy that this is a debut. Just a really great band that I would see live any day. Terrific. 5/5
The Byrds
3/5
Every time The Byrds come around, I think it’s gonna be just another mid-60’s pseudo-psychedelic swampy Beatles-esque time, and while it’s not like it *isn’t* that, there’s always enough new to pick up on, something interesting about their approach that I didn’t pick up on last time. This time, it’s definitely the rhythm and lead guitars. This stuff feels well past the Tomorrow Never Knows riffs and into really crazy, frantic, jagged territory. I wanna play guitar like that. The guitar to me has more of a personality than their songwriting, which is often kind of meandering and formless, or pulls too deep into the psych folk, Bob-dylan-y direction for it to feel like I’m hearing something new. I really love harmonies too, and these songs let the harmonies breathe. It’s experimental! Especially on the stereo mix, you feel the walls of music start to crack. The whole rhythm section is in one ear… what is it doing there?? The drums are turned way down, just keeping time for a vocals-and-strings arrangement. This doesn’t have any of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting star power at all, and the album drags in parts, but there are fresh ideas here, and it’s maybe my favorite Byrds pick we’ve had so far. I’m feeling like they deserve a deep dive… a bit of a dark horse pick for this 60’s psych stuff. I had a good time so it’s 3/5
Milton Nascimento
5/5
This is an amazing album. I listened to it dozens of times during COVID. Perfect intersection of post bossa Brazilian weird. Some of the songs are so moving! It’s a beautiful listen up close, and also a great backgrounder. A classic! 5/5
Baaba Maal
4/5
Wow… this made me an instant convert. There’s something in here which I had never heard before, a sound that’s so energizing and different. And his voice… so emotional, resonant, fully present. It seems like most people bounce off this record… that wasn’t the case for me, not at all. I was obsessed immediately. Ran to find all his songs. There are very cool things in here that I will be thinking about. 4/5
Guns N' Roses
2/5
Yup, this album totally bounced off me. It’s not *awful,* and I don’t begrudge anyone for loving it as many clearly do, but it repulses me more than it attracts. A combination of things… maybe it’s the lead singer, whose skrelt-y lines are a big turn off for me and make it hard to take this seriously. The general feeling of sleaze and excess you feel burdened by listening to this record… maybe I’m projecting that, and maybe I’m just stuck up, but it feels like that late-80’s turn where the arenas keep getting bigger and the songs get more excessive. I’m not even saying the music is overproduced, it just isn’t super exciting to me after listening for a while.
Right around this year (88 or 89?) is where I start getting off the hard rock train and feel like things take a turn for the worse. I don’t think Sweet Child of Mine is even that great, or at least great enough for me to start having fun for any of the rest of the album. I might just be wrapped up in all the places I’ve heard Guns N Roses play, what I associate them with, maybe that’s what’s doing it for me. But other albums we’ve had have had me start out with extreme prejudice against, and they won me over! No, there’s just something I feel repulsed by, and I can’t explain it. Sorry it took me two paragraphs to come to that conclusion… 2/5
King Crimson
5/5
Fantastic. Another album where the first 5 seconds are just as influential as the next 39 minutes and tell you everything you need to know. I’m not sure many people sat, rapt at attention, through dozens of plays of the 12-minute meandering, confused “moonchild.” And sure, it’s repetitive at times, almost boring. But the top half is what counts. That’s the drama.
It turns out that I must really, really like prog! A low— but still steady— 5/5. Credit where credit is due at how absurdly world changing this debut was.
Thundercat
4/5
I think I'm becoming a Thundercat convert. On paper, really none of this should work, but it all ranges from "kind of works" to "really really fucking amazing."
I don't know enough about this music except that it sounds like an extended album of the "History of Japan" YouTube video, lol
I've always been a little intimidated to listen to this music, it's just so many notes! Hard to take in at once. But it's somehow easy listening. Some absolutely essential nice harmonies and grooves. And I love Thundercat's super earnest, if a little deer-in-headlights, innocent and smart delivery. The lyrics and sounds of a de-realized, nihilist-but-it's-all-good-though new post-Internet future. I really get a sense of Thundercat's inner, vulnerable state here, it's kind of endearing. The Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins features are so cool and really gives you the context. It's sick.
It's a little bit of a daze, a little disorienting, to be going on for so long. He gets a lot of mileage with this kind of beatmaking, beats-first-songs-later workflow. And the bass is somehow SO impressive and never showy. Essential for an instrumentalist-artist. (We just had a string of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, so that's what I'm thinking of). Thundercat just likes making music and bass and creating cool things and anime and Mortal Kombat and Japan, and I'm here for that kind of!
A little long, could have been tightened. 4/5 great overall effort.
Dexys Midnight Runners
3/5
This was fun, lots of energy, kind of hilarious vocals at points, good time had! 3/5
Frank Sinatra
2/5
A mostly disappointing album that still left a sweet impression. I will go with the 1001 consensus here and say that Frank Sinatra is horny and so self-absorbed. An odd pick for 1967! We've had a late 60's Philly soul Elvis, and now a late 60's odd Getz/Gilberto-esque Sinatra record. I have no clue why this is on the list except that it probably sold boatloads. I am a huge sucker for these string arrangements, though. 101 Strings is unironically my favorite guilty pleasure music. 2/5
Johnny Cash
5/5
This is one of my favorite albums. I think I appreciate it more and more every time I come back to it. It’s funny, I remember being into Sting as a teenager (my dad had many of his records), and I found the Johnny Cash cover of “I Hung My Head.” “Why did he take out the 9/8 time signature from the original??” I remember thinking. What’s the point of covering this song if you don’t keep the cool, offbeat, disorienting and slightly nerdy features of the original song? I didn’t get it.
Now I get it. And maybe it’s because I’ve become fascinated by the last albums of musicians in decline. Or at least, albums where it feels like the last. To hear Johnny Cash on “Hurt” is so powerful, so unexpected, and completely fucks with the fabric of space time. This is the man in black we’re talking about here! This is where it all goes? His cracked, broken vocal cords on some of these lines, man. It’s amazing that this project even happened.
I don’t know if this is Rick Rubin’s doing, or Johnny Cash… but whoever picked the songs that he should cover is an absolute genius. The Roberta Flack cover of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face…” man. Makes you want to cry. Just perfect programming. We have standards and we have risky decisions, in equal measure.
Great cover songs should do one of two things: 1) expose the brilliance of the songwriting that you might have overlooked from an artist whose writing deserves praise, 2) offer a moment of juxtaposition, contrast, between your world and theirs, like salty and sweet. This album doesn’t just do that, it seems to reveal the inter turmoil of Johnny Cash. While staying solidly in his world. Absolutely incredible. 5/5
Buddy Holly & The Crickets
3/5
It’s amazing how some records not only define a specific place for you, personally, but seemingly everyone else, simultaneously. What starts as a few songs quickly hardens into a sound, a territory, an affirmation. There are few examples of American cultural hegemony more universal than the sound of Buddy Holly playing in every American diner in the last 70 years. There are probably thousands playing it now. What happened and why? Why is that music so stubbornly untouchable, an artifact almost within years of it coming out? By 1962 it sounds dated, by 1966 practically a fossilized record from the Cretaceous. We’re listening to a culture preserved in amber by many people, some of whom are alive today, and for them this was their music as teens and they’re playing anything else. It’s wild.
I just love this because it really sounds so innocent. Every band around this time sounds so unpolished, young, almost like they picked up their instruments last week when someone’s friend’s dad gave them a drum set. Maybe I’ve been listening to a lot of 60’s garage rock, so that’s coloring my listen here, but that’s such a sound! Kids picking up instruments. No doubt this inspired many kids.
3/5 for the love of music and the significance of this sound, but obviously, eclipsed by a tidal wave of… pretty much everything else 5 years later. A tragically short reign.
John Martyn
4/5
Oooooh, this is right in the dead center, taste wise, for me. I love John Martyn, I love this late 70s, very expansive but groovy and soft stuff, long guitar solos, great playing. I really connect with John Martyn’s vocal style— that raspy, imprecise, covered vocal. So I’m already set up to love this. Compared to his other works, it feels like his songwriting is taking a bit of a backseat to the groove, the playing, and the general ambiance of the album. But “Couldn’t Love You More” is my favorite song of his, since I heard a B-side with a demo of it on there. Amazing. A little meandering, and I wish there were more punctuations of real sharpness to balance out the laid back feel. Definitely coming back to this. 4/5
Motörhead
3/5
Yeah… I actually loved it. Until “Jailbait.” Even my… lyrically challenged… brain picked up on that one and set off alarm bells. I was biased not to like Motörhead at all, and I suspect our group might have skipped this one because we *just* had a 2-hour long live album of Motörhead a couple weeks ago. That one started strong with an amazing live version of Ace of Spades and then… fell flat. Got very boring. This one is called Ace Of Spades, it starts with an EVEN BETTER recording of Ace of Spades, and then… keeps going…? Still a little boring and flat by the last couple songs, but I think we have a much better version of the electricity of the band than the live version. As long as I put a lot of my brain cells on standby mode I kind of loved it.
I think this album is probably more influential than it is a fantastic listen. But I am still shocked how much more I like thrash metal than I thought coming into 1001. 3/5. Good time, but not speaking to me. Tempted to deduct multiple points for Jailbait.
Jacques Brel
4/5
Well this was a real treat. I think this might be the only chanson artist I have ever properly listened to. I know about 5 total French words, so the language barrier is obviously strong in something as wordy and passionate as chanson, but I mean… just listen to this guy sing. “Amsderdam” needs no subtitles, his passion, anger, intensity is brimming. And listen to that band! Reminds me a little of Bernstein’s Candide score, that’s my only touchstone to this, I have none other, I’m so uncultured! I thought this was so passionate and surprisingly feel a bit in love with it. And I love that it’s so live. Good moment in time, captured on a record. A post-listen-high, maybe too generous, 4/5. It did enough to convince me that I should be simply ignoring chanson just because I don’t speak French.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3/5
I wasn’t crazy into this album! But I also didn’t hate it. I thought the lead singer’s energy is awesome, really infectious, fantastic, and I just like this kind of sound, reminds me of the indie-goes-mainstream period of late high school for me. I just thought they could do better with some of the songs… some are a little too predictable, maybe boring even? Others you can’t take your mind off of. Listening to the demos at the end of the album was enlightening… I think the songs themselves seemed great, but suffer from being overproduced. Maybe I just have the benefit of hindsight here. Loved the drum sound. 3/5
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
2/5
This album just clearly isn't for me, even if it might actually be good. I'd never take away the fun that both the band seems like they had making this record, and the immense fun that they must be to see live. The record really captures the insane energy that it might be to see them live, and honestly sonically it's aces the assignment. I just am kind of annoyed the whole time I'm listening, and kind of rolling my eyes, and just don't really vibe with it. 2/5 with prejudice! Sorry guys!
Derek & The Dominos
4/5
People seem to really hate this Clapton guy! I was not aware of all the vitriol and history.
I think this album is great! I don't think it's just Layla, which is so assured to be one of the most memorable songs from this era, everyone knows it. It's the build-up of infatuation, love lost, sadness and despair, that takes you over the edge in the second half. And I kind of did tear up on the last track, "Thorn Tree In The Garden," I'll be honest. I don't think the songs are particularly great, other than a few standouts, but most things *feel* great, and the through-line is convincing and kind of fun to watch him totally fall apart in this super dramatic way. 4/5
Jeff Beck
3/5
Good album, good blues, I wasn't crazy about it, I haven't really connected with Jeff Beck yet, but I had a good time listening and would happily put it on whenever and so should you. 3/5
Goldfrapp
4/5
This is... pretty incredible. I was not expecting an album of such cinematic proportions this morning. I feel like someone's dropped me into a continuous opening credits scene of a Bond film. The string arrangements alone pretty phenomenal and unexpected. And the very odd vocal / synth manipulations! Some of them are so exposed and bare and just plain weird.
I thought the songwriting was kind of lackluster, but made up completely by both the performances and the utter strangeness of these genres mashed together. 4/5, a strong contender for coolest conceptual pair I've heard in a while.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
3/5
This is the kind of album that will trick me into thinking it's way better than it is, because sonically it just *sounds* perfect to me. Everything about it, from the way the guitars and bass sits, to the vocals. It's just right. An absolute pleasure to listen to on my monitors. But American Girl is not enough of a record to lift up the rest of the album, which, though a really solid listen, feels a little meandering. I kind of tune out midway through and forget where I was. Maybe I'm hypnotized by those perfect 70's sonics. Definitely piqued my interest in Tom Petty, though, I hope we gt more from him. 3/5.
Rush
4/5
This is siiiiiick! Wow. Am I a rush fan?? A band I totally ignored. This is really really cool. There's a lot more going on under the surface. Something about this is in the sweet spot of prog, rock, adventurous, great sonics. I need more listens but my first reaction is, AMAZING. 4/5
Death In Vegas
3/5
Even though this is not my thing, I started coming around to it in the second half! The first track kind of turned me off— felt very formulaic. But every track after that felt more fresh, experimental. Nice blend of live instruments and drums with the usual fare. I think this album is a cut above the other 90’s electronics albums we’ve had, and even though it’s not my thing, I can respect that there’s more artistry in this one. I REALLY loved the addition of the vocals… sometimes very campy! I think that did a ton to awaken my interest level. Definitely brownie points for originality, combining a more typical electronic sound with plenty of live studio fun. 3/5 for a good time.
Antony and the Johnsons
3/5
Well I learned one thing from reading all the other reviews: apparently I’ve been in a giant vibrato bubble all my life! Because the vibrato didn’t even register for me as abnormal. If anything, it was somewhat typical of this style, I’ve heard it before with singers in this lane.
I’ve gotta be honest, “Hope There’s Someone” blew me away, I was swept off my feet at the artistic maturity on display. I just loved the direction the melody went. And… loved the performance too gotta say! The first 3 tracks genuinely shone bright, were so, so precious, revealing, and so sad.
Then we got an unexpected Rufus Wainwright cameo for just under two minutes, and… that’s when I realized that it would have been nice if Rufus just closed out the album for us. I realized that listening to the lead singer takes a lot of work. It’s lots of emotion, but it asks a lot of the listener to pay attention, and furrow their brow in commensurate degrease in sync with the singer’s pain. It’s stunning at first, but then becomes draining. I also just don’t like the feeling that we’re flying just a bit too close to the pop ballad sun. I don’t like the songs where the lines are just a little too pat, the chords and resolutions a little too predictable. And I really don’t like singers who I can tell are showing off. There is… a little bit of that going on here.
So that’s where I have to leave things. I probably would have gone crazy over this when I was younger, but now it’s just… a lot. I wanted more variation and less predictable-ness. I listened to the first track and thought, if the whole album is like this it’s gonna be amazing! But I gradually realized that, no, that’s not what albums are about at all. It’s a play, and there are five acts.
3/5. Conflicted, but it must be said that those first few songs are just brilliant.
Elis Regina
5/5
I LOVE BRAZIL WEIRD. This is the perfect level for me. Every measure a surprise, everything easy to listen to. But I’m not gonna lie, I had my music stank face on for… pretty much the entire album. Such insane musicians! How is everything so tight? This sounds excellent, excellent. I think I hearted every song. Thank you 1001 Albums for making me realize I love weird Brazil. A lot. 5/5
Booker T. & The MG's
3/5
This is one of those albums that’s in the background of every documentary about the music of the early 60’s. You just feel that early, “hey, let’s make an album, guys” energy. The organ player has that awesome, nervous, frantic energy on the keys that somehow translates so well, gives the instrument a totally new type of groove. Fun, and unique, in that you can hear this sound and immediately go, “that must be the Green Onions album.” Good time was had. 3/5
Joy Division
3/5
Very influential album. I think this is some artist's ground zero. I liked it a lot! Fun in a sloppy, strange, disorienting way. I kind of love that the playing is so loose. Something unsettling about the lead singer. Makes you feel a little off balance. A great-time-had 3/5, definitely worth listening, I may get into it more with more listens.
Supergrass
3/5
So much energy, so inventive and engaging, and so much WORK! It strikes me as a Not Lazy Album. They really went 110%. Despite this… I didn’t really love it! I was kind of annoyed most of the album. Maybe it’s too much caffeine, too early in the morning. I’m pretty impressed overall, but it feels a little fatiguing after listening for the full 43 minutes. A blast of energy that’s a little too much or too sustained. I LOVED “it’s not me.” Those America chords that melt into some psychedelic changes. That’s a highlight— that and the first track.
Not gonna lie, I thought this would be a 5 star album when I started! But it started to kind of wear on me after a few listens, however. Too peppy for too long? Well hey, this is my subjective list. It’s not Billboard or NME over here. So I get to give this phenomenal album a 3 because it’s my reviews my rules. 3/5
Meat Loaf
3/5
I must rate this a *tortured,* high three stars. I think it's TERRIFIC. I had much more solid time with this album than I had with many others. When I first listened, the musicality and plain dumb fun just blew me away. I don't know what I expected going in (hadn't read that this was shopped as an essentially completed musical score in the 70's before becoming an album), and it's just so campy and silly and FUN teenage angst album! Feels like a parody. Like I'm laughing as much as I'm amazed.
Three stars for... it was a great time, but do I really want to come back to this zany zany world all that often? Kind of got fatigued with the intense energy of the record, after a while. There seemed to be no breaks. I applaud its songwriting wizardry, I'm just not sure that I want to come back too often. But as a piece of theater, hell yes, I'd definitely go and see this. A near-4 for an album flawless first few songs. I will stay at my solid "good time was had" 3 stars.
Amy Winehouse
5/5
WOW. I've been pretty ignorant to have ignored Amy Winehouse for as long as I have. People have referenced it to me, I know producers who are supremely inspired by Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson and consider this their urtext. No wonder! It's so good that it makes me wonder if I rated Adele's 21 too high. This is the real deal. The REAL DEAL. I have this suspicion that it would be a 5, even over production that's banal. This album is carried by the songs and, most importantly, Amy Winehouse. Nobody needs to be told that she has a one-in-a-million voice. It's just apparent. So I'm guessing that, even if the production was just slightly off the mark, we'd still be talking about this album.
BUT. The fact that the production is so incredibly brilliant, on TOP of a world-class voice, makes this an incredible album. They don't just nail the soul sound, Phil Spektor on up, they album (I know this is heretical)... improve upon it? They at least update it. The drums sound inspired by hip hop drum samples, which themselves are soul records a lot of the time...! But they're played live. Genius. Everything sonically is perfect.
Hearing this album makes the late 2000's / early 2010's soul revival period make so much more sense to me. We've had some great records come out of that. As well as plenty of lazy records. This is really where it begins and ends for me.
Also I have two friends who played on these records! So that's kind of cool. Maybe I should move to New York...
5/5/5/5/5!
Kanye West
5/5
I'm just gonna cheat and not listen to this album and review it anyway. That's only because it would be the 150th time I've played MBDTF. That's probably accurate. It's the album that was my gateway to Kanye, to hip hop, to weird hip hop, and the entire scene of 2010's hip hop mixtape culture, Soundcloud, heavy concept albums. Everyone is inspired by this in some way. It has that Kanye signature, "Instant Classic," minimalist sound with the production that's both inventive, full, and also stripped back. I'm drawn like a moth to a flame to this album. It'll probably (almost certainly) be Kanye's greatest work. Hard to top. Somehow he gets a dozen guests artists on this record, and THEY do their best work in years on HIS album. How does he do that?
I mean, this is right at the top of the artistic mountain for me, in terms of what's possible in hip hop. Think I'm just gonna say that and not elaborate. Mic drop! 5/5
The Notorious B.I.G.
5/5
This has to be a 5. Just has to be. It's a 5 because Biggie Smalls is a 5, as an artist. Has nothing to do with the production, the artistic ideas behind the album (which are still pretty early-days for hip hop albums). Biggie is just timeless. And sooooo influential. His flow is authoritative. Never bad, always pristine quality.
Yes, the sex scenes are awful. But. Have you heard 90's hip hop?? They're all like that! They're not meant to be serious. I get if it's a massive turnoff. It is for me. But you can't throw out this album for the skits. There are 5, 6, TIMELESS records on here.
In my top 10 hip hop albums for sure. 5/5
Kate Bush
4/5
What to even SAYYYYY about this Kate Bush album? Did I assume, putting it on, that we'd just be getting 12 tracks that sound like "Running Up That Hill Pt. 2" Yes. I'm ashamed to say that I thought that. I am super bad this new thing I'm trying, which is being a Kate Bush superfan. I actually sent several mind-blowing songs to my friends that were so... *crazy.* Genuinely deranged. And the response I got from everyone was "love Kate bush she's a good time." Dear reader... I am willing to bet that they *too* thought I was sending them a song that sounds like "Running Up That Hill Pt. 2." They most assuredly did not listen to the songs.
Well, if they *had* listened... they would have been just as baffled as I have been. That singular, free-wheeling, artistic spirit of the hyperactive, disturbed mind of Kate Bush. What to even say! Nobody's mind works like Kate Bush's mind. It's genuinely unique music. This is Kate Bush during her Witching Hour. I was astounded!
I think it's really good. But it's a VERY difficult first listen. Now on listen 3, with the lyrics open, and I'm at a place where I can understand what she's doing, and actually get it in my brain.
Reminds me of Bjork, in the sense that the creative tap is not just flowing, it's on full blast, all the time. And, also like Bjork, every once in a while she does something that does NOT work, and it's a huge turnoff. Hugely distracting. But... how can you not listen to this and go, what a fascinating mind!
4/5. I feel like I can hear a version of this album that is smaller, tighter, and cuts just a bit back from the edge of the witching hour. Just... 10%, maybe, and it would be a perfect album.
3/5
I'm recovering from a wisdom tooth extraction so good time to catch up on my massive review backlog. If my reviews seem a little more loopy and incoherent than usual, it's just the drugs
This has been my favorite Yes album we've had. I haven't really understood why there are (at minimum) three yes albums on this list, even as a recent convert to the proggiest of the prog. Through doing 1001, I realized that I actually love this shit.
Yes has always felt super impressive to me but a little unfocused. A lot of "throw paint at the wall." But as a musician, you can't help but marvel at the lengths they'll go to challenge and surprise you. This album felt more raw, more live in the room, more really expressive and experimental. I love that. I did NOT love the Simon and Garfunkel - America cover. In fact, that cover was so bad, so excessive and pretentious and frankly *unnecessary*- that it cast a heavy pall over the ENTIRE rest of the album. I started to forget what was great about the rest of the album. Was I really into this album, or was it just surprising to my ear? What actually... happened on this album?
Never mind, totally just the drugs. Ignore this review. A conflicted 3/5
Orbital
1/5
Orbital 2, this time... more orbital?
Didn't like the first Orbital album we had. Like this one only *slightly* more. I'm not really understanding the significance of Orbital, or why this is on the list. Maybe because, as other reviewers say, it's about as "album-y" as techno albums get? I mean, techno is so, so much farther along as a genre compared to this. This feels... very dated still. Not a terribly un-fun listen, I just emphatically believe it doesn't belong on this list, let alone two Orbital albums. 1/5.
Leonard Cohen
5/5
I had this whole writeup for this album that was light, interested, and professing my love of late-career albums by artists on their deathbed. I'm throwing that all out in the trash, because Jacob actually started to listen to the lyrics.
And... are you hearing this? This is a man, broken, still suffering, in a very personal and desperate tussle with God, to come to some truce at the end of his life. "I wish there was a treaty we could sign / between your love and mine," is the through-line, a man exhausted by a wayward and unsatisfying spiritual search, hoping for some way to make it all make sense. The disconnect between God's forgiveness and his own broken self and failing body. "I heard the snake was baffled by his sin / he shed his scales to find the snake within / but born again is born without a skin." His vulnerability in these final moments, looking for some out, some way to have peace with all these loose threads. In between is a real reckoning with past loves, current ones ("If I Didn't Have Your Love" is gonna make me cry just thinking about it). Biting takes on the hypocrites of the faith, and the contradictions of the faithful ("The blunted mountains weep / as he died to make Men holy, let us die to make things cheap", such a pure, darkly funny line) and just a lot of baggage told through humor. I loved the line about turning your back on the devil and the angel, too, with a beautiful woman. He can still make you laugh.
I'm not here to just explain away Leonard Cohen's jokes. You really have to sit up and pay attention. Thankfully, it's easy– he is a wordsmith with an economy for words, a poet and court jester of the holy kingdom, and he's very serious. Just listen. It truly is a beautiful, painful thing. I've never more felt a window into his life. Actually cried at the last song. Man.
5/5.
Herbie Hancock
3/5
It IS cool! That second track is just a bop. I can understand why this was the moment Herbie went mainstream. Undoubtedly hugely influential. Maybe I overplayed it last week, but I was kind of hoping for more substance, more tracks like the second? 40 minutes but feels over much too soon. I'm not sure why that is! 3/5, great record, good time.
Can
2/5
Don’t you feel like the Germans are working out their national trauma in their music sometimes? Second German experimental album where we get screaming assaults in German over 250bpm machine-gunfire-speed drums (on the B-side in “Peking O”). Mercifully, it’s one track, and relegated to the mostly unlistenable second half.
Man, the early 70’s really were a fertile time for music, huh? So many “firsts.” I’m hearing strong shades of ideas that later Radiohead would perfect around Kid A. Did I say that for the last krautrock album we had? Mixed with this super bluesy, driven but meandering series of jams. Some of these grooves would be at home on a Chemical Brothers record! I almost got out my hacker keyboard. And this is 70s!
I think it’s great, but… that was a pretty miserable second half. Almost unbearable. If you forget about tracks 5 and 6, it’s stellar, but I’m sadly just a tad turned off enough by that back half that it’s hard to recommend. A tortured 2/5 – was close to a 3, really close! But Peking O pulled me off the edge.
Michael Kiwanuka
5/5
This is an A-grade album. Michael Kiwanuka with Danger Mouse and Inflo producing... the absolute dream team! These guys know how to make an album. I was very pleased to see this on the list because I was a fan of Michael for a while, but hadn't given his self-titled a listen. Heavy leans on the 60's soul sound that he just sounds so natural on, but it doesn't stop there... plenty of surprises everywhere. Along with the Alabama Shakes album, "Sound And Color," this strikes me as an Album Album, made in the 2010's, by Not A Rapper, and so that alone makes it exceptional. Kudos to Michael Kiwanuka and all involved for fighting the good fight. This sounds like it was a fight! 5/5. Greatest new album I've heard in a long time.
Jethro Tull
4/5
Is Aqualung the weirdest popular song that's ever been mainlined on rock radio? What a weird song and WEIRDO album to be so popular! It's wild. Jethro Tull is kind of corny but also classic! I am loving every prog album we're getting. This one doesn't stand out to me as particularly brilliant, just more of a summation of everything in the water at the time. And the recorders seal the deal for me. Any album featuring heavy use of the recorder is at least a 4. Some pure innocent fun mixed with sadomasochism, what more do you want? 4/5
Ray Charles
4/5
Yum! Thoroughly enjoyed my entire day with ray Charles. You can put this on, any occasion, and it just enhances everything. This is going on my Spotify Wrapped for 2024, for sure, because I had it on repeat for the entire day. Legendary voice. Not much to say other than I loved it! I'm not sure if it's a "I need this before I die" album for me. More like a pleasurable comfort food. 4/5. If I had to pick one of these 50's pop artists, it would be Ray Charles.
Aretha Franklin
5/5
I thought I had a Greatest Hits album of Aretha Franklin all this time, but I think the Greatest Hits album is just this album, because THIS is the greatest hits album!! There are so many hits on here it's stunning. I Never Loved A Man, Do Right Woman, Respect, Dr. Feelgood. These are all INCREDIBLE songs and Aretha can sing anything and I'll listen. 5/5. Take this album to my grave.
Christina Aguilera
1/5
I'm gonna do this once and once only, because this album is not worth thinking about for a single minute longer than the 1 hour and 20 minutes runtime. I like singers. I really do. But the problem is that so many singers do not use their immense talents for good. With great power comes great responsibility, and, all too often, singers like this use their incredible, undeniable talent for long parades of slovenly riffs, runs, and frills that truly do nothing whatsoever. When I hear Christina Aguilera sing, I just hear that. I hear that kid guitarist in guitar center who just learned how to shred riffs 25 times faster than you, and won't stop shredding. I really dislike that. Maybe it's jealousy. None of us mere mortals can do that. But really! So many singers are like this. Go on Instagram or TikTok, if you dare, and look up singing culture.
This album is an hour and 20 minutes long, there are 20 songs, I listened to every one of them, and she has... three good songs. Whether she wrote them or a team of songwriters did matters not at all to me– plenty of great music was made either way. But she is trying her absolute hardest to *ruin* every single one of the songs, lovingly crafted, for this project, with her obscene riffs that go nowhere. The other songs are not exactly songs... more like platforms. A blank canvas where every conceivable riff can go. It is absurd.
1/5. I could have absolutely seen myself giving it a 2, because some songs are a little touching, but we need to remove a star for "Dirrty" [sic], which is how I feel now after listening. That song is what my freshman year bus driver blasted at full volume for all of us 14 year olds at 6:30 AM. Thanks to Redman for setting my discovery and eventual love of rap music back by at least 5 years with that abomination. Man, the mid 2000's were a rough time for music.
Take this album off the list and put on... something! Anything!
Bon Jovi
4/5
I think my brain was broken by Def Leppard, and now I like hair metal. Something must be seriously wrong with me because I listen to this and go, yeah this is sick. Which is a MAJOR change. High school me would barely recognize me now. I can feel the disdain that scarved, suitcoat-wearing 17-year-old hipster Jacob is giving current-day Jacob right now. Pick any year in the last 20 years, and Bon Jovi is the least cool band in any one of those years.
But... okay but but but it's kind of sick though right???
Maybe I'm just turning into a smooth-brained old man. Maybe I just like guitars and hair and sweaty rooms and three chords. I don't know what's happening but something happens when I listen to Bon Jovi to the back of my brain, like a cat being pet on just the right spot of their ears, and I go... "this is good." I just watch a video on tonic immobilization of sharks, where if you pet them on the front of their mouth, just above their sharp teeth, they just go into this docile state and you can turn them upside down and they're super fine about it. That's me with... Bon Jovi?? Seriously? I can't believe it. I just LIKE IT! I DO!
Good album? I mean there was only one song I didn't like, and it was the last track, Wild In The Streets. Every other one was just... tonic immobilization.
4/5. Can't stomach a 5, because it's genuinely such trashy music but it's MY TRASHY MUSIC DAMMIT.
Roxy Music
3/5
I really relate to the ethos of Roxy Music. It's decadent, wild, spirited and has tons of energy. It really has this lovely "anything goes" spirit, while being very baroque and extravagant in its arrangements, decisions. I just don't seem to like listening to it as much as that might suggest. It's kind of a hard listen. Even though everything on paper should really WOW me. It kind of does! Those weird, wild synth interruptions by Eno are really inspiring for the period. But yeah, in this case, the whole thing just doesn't add up to me enjoying myself that much. I'll give it a 3, even though I didn't have too wild of a time, simply for the ingenuity, creative risk-taking, and general IDGAF attitude you can feel throughout the whole record. 3/5
Air
3/5
Really pleasant listen. first track is amazing! Somehow a very sophisticated, smooth sound throughout. Great background music as I was getting some work done. Got a little fatiguing after a few listens, maybe it was the vocals? 3/5 for a very pleasant time.
Coldplay
4/5
A rush of blood to the head has been my calibrating album for “4/5 stars” this whole time. It’s exactly, dead center, 4 stars out of 5. Why is this? We don’t know why. Like the famous “stone” of antiquity that would become the one stone from which all weights were measured, this album was dug from the earth and borne before the world, and so was the concept of “4 stars.”
4 means it’s a great album. I have heard it at least a hundred times while doing homework in high school, but never on fancy speakers like today. The songs are good. They get sneaky with the harmony. Did every early 2000’s band have to squeeze in a B section with some oddball changes? Some of these progressions are soooooo Radiohead, and The Scientist even feel like some kind of strait-laced cousin to “Fake Plastic Trees.” But then again I’ve always understood Coldplay to be the lawful good version of Radiohead’s chaotic neutral. Neither truly cancels the other out.
Playing them along on keys today, and quite a few songs are in between keys. Would love to know the story there.
The melodies are very counterintuitive. I think that’s one of the things that’s stuck with me. Chris Martin still has, improbably, a one-in-a-million voice, personal aspersions aside (people seem to really dislike this man), and this band would be much more uninteresting without him. A bit on the bland side, but you just have to sink into it. Never too risky. Maybe it’s the mix that makes it feel a little safe? Some of those guitar walls seem pretty dated and uninteresting now, just gonna say it. The chords are still fresh, songs are still strong.
It’s been a 4.000000 out of 5 this entire time in my head, and so it shall remain! May its memory be a blessing. 4/5
Happy Mondays
3/5
Don’t know what to think about this at ALL. If any of you didn’t read the Wikipedia for this one, do that! It’s HILARIOUS. Someone should make a movie about this. A label trying desperately to keep the band away from their favorite drug, ecstasy, ships them off to a very remote studio with an army base nearby. The band befriends the soldiers, gives them ecstasy, rave culture spontaneously starts on this army base, people get arrested, it’s a great time.
What is this album though? Well, it’s exactly what the description sounds like. A live album made on ecstasy. None of the lyrics or melodies are at all memorable, everything is drenched in this oppressive reverb and delay, the tracks are so repetitive as to be hypnotizing. But there’s so much spirit and fun in it, and just enough about the tracks themselves that feels hypnotic, not quite right, dreamlike, that it gives you a double-take. Like, what am I even listening to right now? It doesn’t really scan as belonging to any genre that I’ve heard. It’s just very… confusing.
I’m confused! I don’t necessarily love it, but I’m also kind of attracted to it. Maybe this is how love starts. Certainly, most bands I’ve grown to love start this way, being something I can’t understand but nonetheless draws me in. Alas, the 1001 Albums keep pumping out, and I must move to more familiar territory. Still, a little confused and intrigued by what I just heard. 3/5
Fleetwood Mac
5/5
A band at the height of their power, with songwriting chops to rival the best of them, come out with a sprawling, frenetic, all-directions double album. Sound familiar? In Fleetwood Mac’s hands, it’s probably the only path after Rumors. Reinvention. And you can just hear them trying, hard, to get somewhere. And kind of spinning their wheels! The guitar sound in particular is a standout… this punk, almost grungey, dirty sound played with this wildness. But they’re still Fleetwood Mac, and their songwriting abilities just come out, like it’s nothing. It’s not the White Album, but I’m reminded of that somewhat, in that the songwriting is so natural that, even when they don’t seem to want to write a song, they end up getting one anyway. And that back-to-basics, blues infused sound gets them far.
This is a Really Good Band. You can just hear the energy in the way they play as a group. It’s locked, energetic, fun, dangerous energy.
“Storms” is a song to make you cry. Stevie Nicks can just take you there. Everyone’s been there. The hurt in her voice, the real despair. She is so powerful on that song.
I don’t think they ever land on a definitive “sound” here. Which is interesting. For all the attempts, it still sounds like “Fleetwood Mac trying hard to get somewhere new.” But… every song has something to love in it. A funny riff, a stray line, something about the production that makes you do a double take and rewind 15 seconds. I just love hearing the band of the moment, fresh off Rumours, try to jam it out, searching, looking for the new source of inspiration. Amazing to witness. I love the fun and the danger.
Also… I have a personal connection to this album. It was made in studio D at the Village, the Tusk Room— created for this album! And what a cool room. I have a history with that studio, and the few sessions I’ve done there have been standouts. I love to imagine this band working in there, newly completed but probably not quite done, trying to figure it out. I love albums where they made a recording studio just to make the album. A surprising number of them!
5/5. Weird, creatively risky, fun. Serious play. I love it.
Nick Drake
2/5
I’ve given this enough listens to say that its definitely bouncing off me. Nothing’s really landing. Nick Drake’s songs at his best really is good. At the worst, it feels monotonous, energy-wise. I don’t know if it’s his voice (?) that sounds a bit plain and unchanging? That’s a bit unfair. I always feel like the arranger of strings, overdubs, etc, is just trying to spice up and make more interesting a collection of songs that don’t really go anywhere, don’t have a ton of drama. Some of the songs are really beautiful, gorgeous, but things just stay stagnant for a long time. This isn’t my favorite Nick Drake album, even though I liked it when I first listened. A few more listens made me feel apathetic to even the good parts. 2/5
Elliott Smith
3/5
VERY hard album to review. I listened to it passively hundreds of times in college. I really liked it back then, and it was just in the air. The people in college cooler than me were all telling me to listen. Now… I’m a little surprised that I’m much less into Elliot Smith and his voice and his writing than I used to be. The spell has definitely lifted. This is the one where he wrote hundreds of songs for, right? It sounds like… he wrote a hundred songs, and he released 12 demos. The songs just smack you upside the head, like, this is really good in a subversive, surprising way. Every once in a while he has a song that’s a unicorn song. One you would love to have written.
But… the delivery! Is kind of lame! I’m not nearly as into it as I used to be. Seems lazy. I used to think something magical was going on. Now it just sounds lazy and a little hasty. First record was like… wow this isn’t nearly as good as I remembered it being, with those rose-tinted retrospective glasses.
This might be my most unpopular opinion TODAY. For where music is today. It’s that this album is prettty okay with some phenomenal songs peppered in there that pretty mediocre in their delivery. I’m pretty over it. Could have gone for a 4 but will say a conflicted 3/5.
Nina Simone
5/5
Fuuuuck man. Nina Simone is in a league of her own. That first, somewhat crowd-pleaser of a pop number out of the way, she gets almost immediately down to business, which is to really hammer home the dark business of slavery, mistreatment, heartbreak of all kinds. She can sing anything, and I not only believe her, but I am just awash in empathy. A voice that can change hearts.
I love the clear jazz lineage here. “Lilac Wine” is just so, so freaking beautiful.
This record bums me out, and puts me in a Genuine Mood, but it is phenomenal. Hard to look away. Nobody can do Nina, I’m stunned how many of these songs I have heard covered, that’s a very very gutsy thing to do and I honestly can’t imagine covering someone who shone so uniquely on her version. This doesn’t have my favorite Nina songs on it, but as an album it’s kind of dark, moody, orchestrated, and singular. And very live. Very of the moment.
I’m spellbound. We should all be thankful we have a recording of this.
5/5
Dr. Octagon
4/5
Was gonna say high 3, but fuck it, it's a 4. Just for the skits alone, which are that perfect blend of disturbing, nonsensical, hilarious. That kind of dark absurdist humor I LOVE. And 500x more horny and juvenile than your typical 90's hip hop. Which is saying something! I love a good concept that takes itself exactly as unseriously as the subject demands. We've had some good examples of this in 1001 so far, but this one just really goes to the depths of absurdism. I literally think they must have gone to the public library and feverishly written down words in popular science mags, in some kind of fever dream. It's just so silly and pornographic and just funny and irreverent. You see this theme throughout hip-hop, the surreal, juvenile absurdism, but they just go there that much harder and that much farther. It never lets up! Some of these skits had me genuinely laughing out loud! A low but nonetheless deserved 4/5. It's just on that edge where I love it.
Merle Haggard
3/5
Just because Merle Haggard bums me out doesn't mean it isn't VERY good. This is what I think about when I imagine that dark, wry, witty humor pervasive through country music. It really requires you to be in the right mood to perk up and listen, otherwise it just sounds like pleasant enough country. Tune into the background, and you get a real feast of great musicians. But it's all about those dark lyrics, gently delivered, with a wink and a grin. 3/5 for a "good" time.
Nick Drake
5/5
This is a great album. Just calms me right down. An excellent find. I find more layers to Nick Drake’s writing every time I interact with it. Something so lovely about his lines. The album feels a bit incomplete, sparse, toward the back half. You can feel the walls breathe a bit. The songwriting is just excellent throughout. 5/5
Keith Jarrett
5/5
When I sit down at the piano, I always have the Köln Concert in mind. This is an album that worked like a little worm in my head, over many years, that slowly changed my playing, my approach to writing and performance, and my entire stance on how important it is to capture a moment is exactly as it is. Because that's what we're witnessing here: a captured moment. No artifice, no stage directions, no scene changes. Just a man versus the piano he was given.
It's so, so beautiful. You can forget exactly how special it is that we have this on tape by spending too much time admiring Keith Jarrett's playing, or wondering, "how is he that good of a player?" You can forget that your job is to lose yourself in the same moment as he was in, as the audience was, when this took place. I'm so happy we have beautiful recordings of moments like this. It's why I collect recordings like this. It's why I love jam sessions, throwing a mic up, just living in the present with my recordings. It's really an attitude toward living.
And it's SO BEAUTIFUL. God, Keith Jarrett. Thank you. A brilliantly-captured and well-deserved 5/5
Beatles
3/5
“With the Beatles” is… still the Beatles, albeit not the striking early sound of Twist and Shout, nor anything that escapes traditional ABA form. But man, this one’s got tons of filler! Some of these records in the middle are so forgettable that, even as a (former) Beatles obsessive, I barely remember them! Maybe it’s the covers they picked. We’re supposed to rate this as an album? This is not really much of an album. It’s more just a bunch of covers for the hit parade. Pretty unfair to rate this as an album, when the group in question were a mere two years away from being on the vanguard of what the entire *concept* of an album is in the first place.
But It’s fun! I like hearing them have fun. It sounds, truly, leagues better sonically than most early 60’s records. 330 albums into 1001, and I can now confirm this. Great work all around boys.
We are better off that this is a mere historical footnote in what the Beatles would become. This album is somewhat charming, but— notably— only if you know the punchline, which is that we’re hearing (soon to be) of the greatest songwriting duos of all time do cover songs.
Including the dozens of time I played this in high school, I think I’ve heard “With the Beatles” enough times for one life! 3/5.
Robbie Williams
1/5
This whole album manages to sound extremely generic and VERY annoying at the same time. I’m on Track 2 and the lead singer is really getting on my nerves. Track 1 did not… inspire confidence. Some of those transitions were waaaay too calculated. We have 45 minutes to go! Oh boy.
Carson says Budget Coldplay, I get strong vibes of Budget Blur. And Budget Blur… is really something you don’t want to be budgeting on. I don’t like to do this, normally. Such direct comparisons invite trivializing the whole, no doubt laborious, complicated artistic affair. But this really is a trivial album. And it’s flippant and unserious and clearly trend-chase-y. So I’m also allowed to be a little unserious, too.
1/5. Get this off the list! Posthaste!
Public Enemy
5/5
Public Enemy is so cool. I feel like I’m showing up to a revolution and a neighborhood block party at the same time. The music just feels SO New York! You get that sense of cacophony, things popping in and out, disruptive and freeform and so much noise and static… on one interlude it literally sounds like they’re tuning to different stations of pirate radio. It’s political but somehow very zany, wacky, a little larger-than-life satirical in the way the voices are done and the message is made. Somehow never preachy, though they do a lot of preaching! I was getting Booty Collins vibes with some of the rap delivery hahaha, is that weird? It’s got that same kind of wacky energy. Political, fun, complex, 2-bit characters but somehow very real. The world is a complex place, but it’s also kind of like GTA. I don’t know where I’m going with this. A surprise 5!
Dennis Wilson
5/5
Dennis Wilson:
An utterly unique album that's touching in a way only a Beach Boy is capable of. From the jump, we are WAY more in rock land than any beach boys album has been. Echoes of the Stones, more bluesy, more obviously big rock storyteller energy. But the first track certainly makes you feel like that's going to be the abiding energy of the album... it is not! There's so much more beneath the surface... waves of obvious angst, grief, loneliness. The kind you quickly pick up on after a few spins of a Brian Wilson record. My radar's going off, in a big way,
Some of these songs have an unbelievable sense of emotion and hurt. I feel like Dennis is more in touch with that side of him than on any Beach Boys record I've heard... it's more raw, more honest in some ways. Amidst this texture of Haleakalā blues, the real pet sounds, in a way that only a Beach Boy could do. It's an intimate and deeply personal version. It's got less of the childlike, and wide-eyed naïveté of Brian Wilson, it's more mature, but no less... hurt. He's spilling his heart out in a way only he can do. I love it, but I also want to cry.
5/5
Metallica
2/5
I like a lot of the music that came out of Metallica, such as Megadeth, speed metal in general... but so far on this list, I have not liked Metallica. I just reeeeally dislike the lead singer's of Metallica's voice. He sounds so laaaaame! I just have a visceral "don't like" reaction when he starts. He just sounds super douchey and I can't get over it.
Nothing is bad, per se, just a pretty big letdown with the vocals. The guitar stuff is obviously fantastic, technically brilliant. But, even there, unlike some of the more fun and dynamic metal I'm starting to like, the tone is kind of "same-y." Guess I just wasn't into this in high school and missed the critical incubation period. Missed the boat of enlightenment with Metallica, and unfortunately now I just think it kind of sucks.
My new favorite hobby is telling bluegrass fans that bluegrass and metal are extremely closely related. Gets everyone mad. But it's true! 2/5
Frank Zappa
5/5
Man. This was really cool. That first track is out of this world! I can totally see the appeal. This must be one of the foundational Frank Zappa records that started us off on the absolute roller coaster of records that were to come. There are certainly peaks and valleys, and not everything is perfect, but… I can’t stop thinking about how unique and singular this album’s sound is. It sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard— free-wheeling, very bizarre, improvised and off-kilter and seemingly made in a daze, but also so obviously composed, obviously written out with all the intention of a mad scientist dictating his every perverse thoughts. I have no idea how this could have been made, because it sounds too planned to be totally random, but also too “live” to not be done in a super loose and freeform way. There are definitely better and more complete “albums” that Zappa gets into, but this one struck me as this perfectly insane, bizarre concoction that I don’t quite understand. For musicians and writers like me who are all about jamming, improvisation, this seems positively genius. For someone with a jazz background, I’d bet you couldn’t help but feel that there’s some insane method to this that we’re all missing.
Zappa before the absurdism really took hold, but also a really convincing, *good* piece of music that defies the laws of gravity somehow. I’m gonna be thinking about this for a while. It’s 1969 and this kid is blowing my mind, 5/5
AC/DC
3/5
“I’m not like the other kids… I actually can appreciate the music of my parent’s generation,” he says, grimacing, as the skrelty muppet vocals of “What You Do For Money Honey” play on chorus four over an utterly normal guitar solo. 3/5
James Brown
2/5
Gonna go with what I feel is the general 1001 consensus with this one. As an album, it’s not particularly great, and its influence clearly far outpaces the musical content itself on this album. At times the band isn’t super tight, even. Clearly I’m just not hearing what every other screaming girl at the show that night heard, which was a step change in music, a very important one, but one that nonetheless sounds normal and even boring to a listener today. Though my mind was gonna get blown, I left kind of underwhelmed! I don’t remember sitting through a James Brown album, though, so it was worth it for that. 2/5. Great musician, clearly electric, not a good album.
Dexys Midnight Runners
4/5
I'm hating this way less than I thought I'd hate it! I came in with pretty serious prejudice. What made me like this? Did the other Dexys Midnight Runners album just roll of me that badly? I remember not loving that one. My wariness quickly melted away when I realized... this album is a ton of fun!
Complex, FUN arrangements, everyone sounds like they're having a good time. I love the horns every time they enter! Everything's NICE. And great energy. I would love to see them play.
Honestly? Won me over completely. By the end I'm thinking, between the horn arrangements, the indulgent instrumentals, and the often quite silly songs, this is just great music, great musicians, fun, interesting. I kind of loved it. 4/5
Bill Evans Trio
5/5
A Good Album that is impossible to review. Kaleidoscopic phrases, beautiful interplay, a moment of true inspiration and sweat and grime captured by some of the best musicians who lived. It's complex! And it's instantly a huge Jazz favorite for me. It's kind of a page-turner, this record... tons of harmonic stuff to sink your teeth into. If 1001 Albums had 20 Bill Evans albums, sure, I'd probably have a tough time telling you the 3's from the 4's from the 5's. This ones' a 5. 5/5
Norah Jones
3/5
Realll good record with an incredible voice and some beautiful songwriting that’s made a little less fun to re-listen by how safe and a little boring the production/band choices are. Everything feels just a little too squeaky clean for my liking, the solos just a little too pat and perfect. Not to diminish whatsoever from the players, it just feels a little same-y after a while. But what a voice, what a good showcase for her talents! I could just put this on in most any environment and feel pretty happy about that decision. A high 3/5, I will most definitely be returning to this album when the time is right.
Dinosaur Jr.
3/5
This was great. It was far more creatively strange, oddball, experimental than I thought it was going to be, 10 minutes in. Some weird tape experiments, strange overdubs. But mostly I feel a fondness for this record because it sounds like so many of the grunge/punk bands of my hometown, just what was in the air in Massachusetts at the time. It's got a really nice, homey sound that, if you grew up around this, just makes you feel kind of cozy and a little nostalgic? It's a nice kind of jagged sound blanket.
And it's more creative and listenable than the last Dinosaur Jr. album we had! Kind of surprising that this was as influential as it was, I can't get a sense of whether this was a breakthrough sound for the time or not, because it just sounds so characteristic of some parts of my childhood.
Just sonically, it gets a little repetitive and kind of dull-feeling. And there's a way in which the roughness and super DIY feeling of the album becomes kind of a turnoff after a while. It just doesn't have a great sound– just the record sonics– that a lot of the good grunge bands we've had on this list share. A little hollow-feeling.
Still, kind of nostalgic and had a fun time with it. 3/5
SAULT
3/5
We are outside the (large) splash zone of the summer of 2020, it's been almost four years, and I have no urgent, self-preserving need to rate this the #1 album of 2020, as NPR supposedly did. Then again, what else was getting released in 2020? Weird year. And I must say, this album had a sense of perfect timing that Bruce Springsteen could have only dreamed of with his post-911 album. "We need you, Bruce." I still think about that album and chuckle.
This encapsulates, if nothing else, the aesthetic of this kind of politics, and generally politics today– it is very polished, it is glossy, it is full of affirmations, it is ready for a media rollout with multiple cover stories, and it's kind of inoffensive. I hate to give it the treatment, and compare it to the amazing political protest albums we've heard over the years. One thing many of those has that this lack is the feeling of it being a *personal* story. I'm getting a lot of slogan, a lot of affirmation, a lot of positive psychology, a LOT of Instagram. And not a lot of storytelling, which is harder, but infinitely more powerful.
I love the musicians involved, I am becoming a mega Inflo fan from this list. I know these musicians can do better because I've followed and loved their other projects. So this is a weird one because it's so surface-level, I've come to expect complexity. I will check out their other projects and just chalk this up to, yup, 2020 was weird. 3/5
The Auteurs
3/5
I've never really heard an album like this before. Kind of unique sounding. I'm still wrapping my head around it. It's not really my cup of tea, but it's not going the places I expect it to go. Like, is this Britpop? what IS this? I'm not exactly enjoying it, but I'm just intrigued. 3/5 for confusion and general entertainment.
Nick Drake
2/5
Ah, Nick Drake. We've really gone and blown our load on Nick Drake these last few weeks because we've had all 3 of his only albums, all in the last 3 weeks. And this one is... still pleasant, but my least favorite of the bunch. There's a lot more on here, especially in the instrumentation, that feels a little programmatic and uninspired, a little boring. The songs are beautiful as always, the treatment on this one is just a little too back-of-the-record-60's for me to appreciate it. A couple of the instrumental tracks *almost* have this Pet Sound-y "Let's Go Away For A While" way of taking you on a journey. But that comparison is probably in poor taste and certainly unflattering, because the Nick Drake versions sound slap-dashed together by contrast. Yeah, listening through a little time, everything just sounds... lazy.
Nick Drake, you don't deserve this treatment! Maybe that's why we all love Pink Moon. Not nearly as much "production" around his ideas. More reclusive, minimal, letting the songs breathe. These songs have breathing room, but I'm just distracted by their somewhat uninspired setting. 2/5
Radiohead
5/5
For OK Computer, I may need 6 stars. In fact, putting this as *merely* 5 stars makes me start sweating a bit about my other 4 and 5 star picks. Because this is one of the best things.
There are very few albums which give you the exhilaration of a movie when you’re finished with it. You know that feeling, leaving a really concept-heavy, head-spinning movie where you're just lost in this delirium, exiting the theater. Processing. So few albums do this. This album does that. Concept-wise, record-wise, it's shooting for the freaking moon. It makes every album feel like they're just shooting for the distant hills. I cannot stress how much effort it sounds like they put into making this album. Everything just feels in the right place, perfectly placed. That's no doubt due to the literal years of band rehearsals that lead to these recordings. Radiohead rehearses. They also fucking commit to their songs. Nothing sounds unsure. Everything so confidently delivered, doubtlessly honed through years of attempts on the same thing.
Thom Yorke writes lyrics, and Radiohead writes songs, that are good for them. They are not universal, they are heavily wired into the internal logic of Radiohead, to understand them requires the context of their other music sometimes. Their music is not immediate. But the stakes here feel so *personal.* The band sounds genuinely disturbed at the prospect of our Brave New World. Their warnings are not dispassionately given, nor are they preachy. We're always viewing this future through the eyes of what seems like a terrified victim of its uncaring superstructure. It's personal.
I think this album genuinely goes to somewhere new. Somehow a thesis that's never preachy, a perfect set of recordings that are never sterile, never forced, always room for the magic of happy accidents. This is one hill I'll die on, this is a damn good record.
5/5
5/5
I kind of think this album is brilliant. And this is coming from someone who has been mostly underwhelmed by the Kinks. On this album they take a BIG swing, and I think it pays off. They pull off this commentary on all things British. I picture them sitting in the cheap seats, heckling, middle fingers to all forms of power, all the adults. With this dry, acerbic, cheeky, and with touches of real sadness and despair. They touch on the real costs of war, the sons who aren't coming home, and the dispassionate people who put them there. I was thinking about it, and honestly, this is the first album (by date) that deals with topics from WWII in a way that I can actually understand, that makes sense to me. Digging up a few feet under the earth to loose a bit of the trauma and disaffections of war. What other album is actually seriously (or... un-seriously?) doing that? In the 60's? Other than the Pete Seegers... really, nobody.
Comparisons to the Beatles are so obvious as to not be even worth mentioning, as with all records by the Kinks, but these are topics that I just cannot imagine Lennon or McCartney touching with a 12-foot pole. Colonialism, war, the promised suburban lifestyle and its eventual letdown. There are NO Beatles songs like this.
I think this is my first Kinks that stands alone. And it's a real treasure. It helps me understand more of the turbulent scene of English society from that time, warts and all, and it's FUN! Well deserved, boys. 5/5
Pentangle
4/5
Ugh I just love Pentangle, I have a soft spot for this stuff. It's just the right amount of English folk + psychedelic for me, great harmonies, great performances really. Really relaxed and enjoyable and fun. It also sounds really good as a record! I love how adventurous the arrangements can be, with the fairly limited instrument set they're working with. Cool sitar stuff. Yeah I love it. 4/5
George Michael
2/5
Because I was born in 1991, George Michael will always sound to me like being a 1 year old baby. It sounds like being dragged around Macy's or Michelle's by my mom as I'm probably bawling endlessly, strapped into the shopping cart, probably in need of a nap. So to "Listen Without Prejudice" to this music... I laughed! It will be hard!
I still have prejudice. I still found it kind of lame and empty, and the music weirdly lifeless and not very fun. I hear more Stevie in his delivery than the last George Michael, which was kind of surprising to me! This one is absolutely more touching and in the feelings than our last George Michael, and I respect that artistically he's broadening out. I just don't really care for his vision! Also these tracks are just drenched in that bright digital 80's reverb. Sounds like the producers just figured out what reverb is. Makes everything sound super washed and kind of brittle and inaccessible.
So. Somehow too cheesy to be taken seriously, but too self-serious to be having any fun. I just don't like it. It might actually be good, but I still do not like it. My apologies to George Michael! 2/5
Eminem
4/5
This is another one of those undeniable artists. You can’t help but just watch slack-jawed at the sheer guts and skill on display here. Manages to make it look so easy, but it is not easy! Eminem’s flow has this whole logic to it that feels so natural, like it was just meant to come out that way, but it’s really really really hard to pull off. And as a character in his own world he’s kind of undeniable. Might not be your cup of tea, but you’re probably gonna start snorting laughing in spite of yourself at some of these skits, the ridiculous dark depraved violent masochistic humor on display here. Are we in on the joke? Is this a joke? Is this real life, is it all some kind of game of chicken, are we really seeing a self-proclaimed basket case fall deeper and deeper into the cycle? Who blinks first? Why am I laughing? Because it’s also hilarious.
A point off for the overlong runtime, and the album kind of loses steam in the second half. Nearly gave it back for the brilliance of Dre’s productions here, which is really everything great about hip hop from this period. I mean, what more to say? It’s so great. 4/5
Prince
5/5
Ah, Purple Rain. What would we be without you. A truly weird, one-of-a-kind record made by a space alien named Prince. It's hard to write anything about Purple Rain on a random Tuesday, so I saved this review for a rainy day. Actually a snowy day here in Vermont– in April!
First of all, this is a historically significant record, like... I'd put this in the Library of Congress, and I don't think a lot of records really qualify for that. Captures this fun-loving, decadent, but also genuinely *weird* freaky feeling you get when you interact with anything 80's. Prince is right at the top of that heap... so weird as to be almost inaccessible, but so infectious in that toe-tapping Elvis kind of way that you can't not dance to it. To say this record is "dated" record is like, totally fair, but also not even the right words to describe what is going on here. It's all Prince. It's got the mind of a very special person all over it. I always think of that quote from one of Prince's producers in that Kevin Smith story: "Prince has been living in Prince Land for quite some time now." Somehow totally fits how it feels to hear this. It's so of the time, perfectly sums up the 80's, and yet could only be made by one very weird person.
I feel *weird* listening to this record. I can't place why. It's like the hyper-earnestness, the hyper-sexualization, the crazy vocal screams that make you feel uncomfortable unless you're particularly Prince-sexual. Maybe it's just the Linn Drum. That's it. The Linn Drum certainly isn't helping. You get the sense that Prince has been in this isolated bubble, and he's got so much energy and he just needs to get it out.
You can't *not* react to this. It's like one person's really weird, really strange vision of his own sexual power, experiences with romance, weird fantasies and fetishes, technology's intrusion on it all. There's really nothing like it.
And THEN purple rain. Another one that just sums up that velvet-soft, saccharine, totally cheesy side of the 80's too– that Prince sells like nobody else can. I always think about that meeting between Prince and Joni, how Prince was a super shy fan when it came down to it. I hear more than a little bit of Joni in this song, in a funny way. But through the lens of this unlikely rockstar.
The WEIRDEST pop record ever, and also the most overly earnest and cheesy rock record ever. I don't love all of it, I don't even like how I feel after listen to it, but I have to give it 5 stars.
5/5
Cat Stevens
5/5
This is suuuuuuuch a good album. All my favorite things in one album. Great songwriting, fresh writer and perspective, peppered with a mix of 60’s psychedelic folk and this new sound, very energetic, very fun. It’s kind of like a psych folk album, in that it comes clearly from the same stock, but somehow catapults beyond the restrictions of that scene to reach new heights. And the songs!! They’re so beautiful, precious. Same kind of beautiful, wide-eyed timelessness of a Pete Seeger song, somehow takes a hazy feeling and puts a finger on it. Oh man I love this album. Perfect period of Cat Stevens for me! 5/5
Steely Dan
4/5
Okay so this is a funny one. It’s not my favorite Steely Dan record— there aren’t a ton of standouts, and the heights of Can’t Buy A Thrill really aren’t here to be found. It’s a little meandering, long, and almost sounds jammed out? I mean, I know it’s not, but that’s my impression. Despite this… it’s Steely Dan. The sheer technical and musical brilliance on display here lets the album punch way above its weight class. Come for the solos, stay for those signature jaded, Chiba-City-in-Neuromancer lyrics. It’s inviting and threatening. And I like it. 4/5
Nirvana
4/5
I would put this more in the camp of “interesting” or “intriguing” than “great album.” It’s obviously a big surprise. In some ways, unplugged Nirvana is even more compelling, with this 60’s dark folk American Bandstand sound, than on their actual albums. It kind of feels like a marker of how much things have changed… 30 years into the revolution, and we’re still making groups, that still play guitar, but beyond that we may as well be in an alternate universe. That’s the impression I get from this album… more of a statement, a marker in time of where the world was. Put this in a time machine to 1962, see people’s reactions. It’s recognizable but utterly alien.
It made me like Nirvana a lot more. I’m not sure if that makes it a great album, but it is a lot of great performances, and the band makes a hell of a lot more sense now. Really fascinating listen, nothing really has sounded like this. A tiny peak into that world and what made their mind tick. 4/5
Led Zeppelin
5/5
this is THE rock album! If I have to keep one of them I keep this one!! Led Zeppelin IV forever!!!!
Had a funny experience with this. I never had listened to Zeppelin until 1001. We got Led Zeppelin I, and I remember thinking, wow, this is pretty good. Intrigued that weekend, I pulled up Led Zeppelin II and... it was even better! Then so on, and so on, until you get to mind-melting IV! It's the most exponential growth graph in rock music. IV is stratospherically high heights!
This album is not ruined by the fact that it's been played on classic rock radio for basically 100 years. I'm proud of my fellow Americans that we think so highly of Led Zeppelin.
It's WAY MORE 70's PROG than I ever appreciated. Stairway to Heaven could totally have been in the middle of a Genesis record of the same year. Some of it sounds like pastiche-y, Laurel Canyon folk, in a funny way. Tons of funny overlap with that.
5/5
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
I strongly believe that “Voodoo Chile” should have been placed later in the album, or perhaps taken out altogether. This is an example of what I see are major programming issues with the album… an overlong, indulgent blues number ends up killing the energy and momentum of an otherwise very creative, inventive album. Little Miss Strange is a sharp breath of fresh air after that!
When we leave murky waters of Blues Jam Zone, Hendrix is powerful. His creative zeal is very detectable here… powerful, infectious guitar licks, but plenty of great synergy with the band. The songs are pretty good too! Lots of songs that slap you upside the face with their immediacy, locked rhythm, and AMAZING moments on guitar.
Why does this need to be a double album again? Oh yeah, because it’s 1968, Blonde on Blonde happened, and these artists just can’t help themselves. Boo! More single albums please. Cut out the 14-minute jams, trim the fat, give me a deluxe in 39 years, or better yet another album. So few albums deliver on the promise of an hour 20, because so few artists have that kind of creative output that warrants that much music.
Hendrix is a guitar god among mortals, but he’s also a creative songwriting force, and a true bandleader that goes beyond merely showcasing his considerable talents. To relegate his gifts merely for the guitarists to enjoy is a disservice to his legacy. As an album and a set of songs this is really, really good.
Hendrix gets a pass, and this gets a 5. Most double albums are automatic deductions for me, and this clearly crosses a line into serious flaws, but I’m letting him off with a warning! Just for the sheer creative sparks flying by both Hendrix and his bandmates here. 5/5
Grateful Dead
5/5
This is for all of you here who just can’t stand this, who think it’s boring, long, too much noodling, not very interesting.
I used to be like you. That’s why I avoided the Dead for years. It’s kind of the exact opposite of all the other music we all love. That music is carefully thought out, composed. It reads like a book, it has drama and intention and characters. This is… a bunch of guys noodling?
But then I realized, listening to the Grateful Dead radio night that Vermont Public Radio dutifully provides, that there’s something else going on. Amid all of the endless droning numbers, my brain started to kind of relax and accept it. I stopped waiting for something to happen. I stopped being impatient with the music. I just sat back and let the music be there, and let its own internal structure unfold.
This is a kind of music whose rhythm and melody and shape isn’t written down by anyone— there really isn’t an author. It’s just a collision. It’s what happens when one musician does whatever feels natural to them at that moment, without thinking, without much regard for what anyone is doing at all. I kept closing my eyes and seeing waves crashing on the beach. I really think there is something there. You can stare at waves on the shore for long enough, and the experience is soothing and hypnotic, even as the slight variation of each individual wave might pop out to you. It has its own internal logic and drama, even if Nature is the ultimate author.
I really feel like this music works the same way. If you sink into it, and stop waiting for anything to happen, its own pleasurable logic reveals itself to you, and the variations you hear are just enjoyable moments in the larger texture. And man, it’s kind of soothing! And healing in a way.
This is a way of listening to music that I almost never do. I’m always listening to things written by other people, where there is an author on the other end, a creator. I’m always waiting for something to happen. But there’s something deeper and more soothing and satisfying going on here.
5/5. This album wasn’t the one that got me into the Dead, but it did give me that insight last night, lying awake, letting the whole drama unfold.
Massive Attack
4/5
This surprised me and intrigued me in a way that no other 90's trip hop / electronic album ever has. I was confused and turned around by the massive transition from track 1 to track 2, the very strange 90's dub record. Honestly they should win an award for the weirdness of the "Light My Fire" cover at the very end. Super expansive, cinematic, weeeeeird! It's one that I'll need more time with, but at 350 albums into 1001, "surprise" usually means good. 4/5
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
3/5
It’s good! I like Grunge Neil Young. There were no standouts, it’s just a fun record to listen to, clearly just a good time to make, low effort but that’s his vibe, and I’m at the point where I’ll probably get a kick out of anything he does. 3/5
Arcade Fire
3/5
This is the Arcade Fire album I never got around to listening to in high school. If I had, I probably would have resonated very strongly with its bleak desperation, its biting criticism, its gothic and melodramatic affect. And just now I'd be penning an interview full of nostalgia for being 17. But now it's been 15 years, and it just feels a little too on the nose for me! But I can't deny how bold and bright they're going for. They're kind of a force. Might not be your cup of tea, but you have to sit up and pay attention, because they're going for broke. I just don't resonate as much with the tone. Really cool record though. A conflicted 3/5
Al Green
3/5
The award for weirdest typography on an album goest to...!
great album! feels sooo good! That first track is just forever perfect. I’m never mad about getting something like this to listen to. Beautiful arrangements. The rest of the album kind of blurs together a bit, but it’s a nice blur. 3/5, good time was had!
Django Django
2/5
Gave this several spins to confirm that my original instinct were right: meh. The influences that they are drawing from are all way more interesting and less dull than this. Not a good sign. Their vision of this album is kind of cool, and I appreciate the commitment to the sonic concept they’ve got going, but I think they really wanted to make this music both vocal and also danceable, and those two things just aren’t working together here. The vocals feel kind of badly delivered, a little dull, and the lyrics really have nothing going on. The sheer monotony of the delivery made the rest of the album seem like it had less variety than it did.
Toward the end (“Skies Over Cairo,”) I realized hey, if this were a soundtrack to some whimsical, 2010’s indie studios’ video game, people would be all over this. Just enough conceptual fun and weirdness to get me interested. But as a piece of music… they got one part of the assignment right, but not the other bits. 2/5
Bert Jansch
3/5
This is a good album. Great songwriting, just good for the period. Love the exploration of chords. "Needle of Death" is such a beautiful, poignant song. That could be a desert island song for me. Just really touches something painful and sad. 3/5, great time had
The Black Keys
3/5
"The Black Keys" has always struck me as a fitting name. The band eeks out as much as seems possible from their (extremely limited) premise, and they get some amazing records out of it. They're shooting for hits, and they deliver. But I can't help but feel like they're being held back by their own premise. It's what gives these songs a kind of "one-note" feeling, which is solidly in the tradition of blues, garage rock, of course. I'm always waiting for them to escape outside the prison they've put themselves in, and try something genuinely new. It's just not enough for me to give brownie points to a band that just gets all the sonics right, the recording, the sound that they have in their heads. They need to go further. The Black Keys has always felt to me like they stunted their own growth, somewhere along the way. I'll have to listen to their more recent material to see where they've gone.
But yes. Monochromatic.
This is the point in the review where I really give them props, though... sonically, this album is IMMACULATELY recorded. It sounds really perfect. EXACTLY how I want everything to sound.
That pulls this from a high 2 to a very low 3 for me. I just should be having more fun, and I'm not really, unless I think about how phenomenal those guitars sound. 3/5
Santana
4/5
Delightful, delightful album. Really a perfect example of psychedelic, Jimmy Hendrix, meets jammed-out, blues guitar, great musicianship. Just feel GREAT throughout. Never too showy, but just enough on those fantastic solos to make you do a double-take. I really like how this album feels pretty sly in its brilliance. Just enough to keep you from tuning out, though a really great album to tune out to. Love it. 4/5.
Radiohead
5/5
Got spoiled by this album, really early. I was the sophomore kid in 2007 who Googled "what are the best bands?" and found a forum of very annoying people arguing whether it's The Beatles or Radiohead. Which of the two? There were no other options discussed! Obviously. How can a group of people be so wrong and... weirdly kind of right... at the same time??
That forum has set me up for decades of disappointment, as I realize that yes, Kid A is a real diamond in the rough, even if it was the second album I listened through in full. What a weird entry point to music. Now, at 32, I am many years into atoning for my early mis-steps, and this list is part of that.
But... In Rainbows is genuinely, genuinely still stunning. They manage to get so much right, even as it's a fairly radical departure for the band that waited 15 years to make an album like this. It's much better that they waited. So much songwriting, production maturity in every decision they make. A familiar Radiohead and yet still so, so very strange.
This really feels like the best thing that Radiohead could have put out in 2007. You know the old saying, that the great artists always seem to try to re-create some of their earliest, great works over and over. They continue to come back to the place where things started, and try to approach it again. That's what this album feels like. It's a homecoming for Radiohead, after a loooooong journey abroad.
Nothing more to say! I LOVE this album. 5/5
Os Mutantes
4/5
what the hell is this!!
Okay, truly, I needed a few days’ separation from this record and a little bit of *physical* separation from my speakers this Sunday. Whoever mixed these tambourine overdubs, let’s just say, we are not listening on identical systems, lol. And I think my winter cold had properly stuffed my ears, to the point that this was just a bit annoying to listen to head-on, sonically.
But… it really sounds like NOTHING I’ve ever heard. It sounds like a strange lovechild between the arrangements of Pet Sounds and the real strangeness of a genre I have discovered since 10001 I call Brazil Weird. The cover looks like some campy TV show, and honestly, that image stuck with me…. Strange, whimsical, campy. These musicians are having way more fun than you or I have on a given day. Kind of brightened my day… as long as I was sufficiently outside the splash zone of those tambourines! This one could use a remaster. 4/5 for pure wiz-kid zaniness, creative risks, and fun.
Traffic
2/5
Agree with Charlie on this one! Pretty underwhelmed. nothing stood out on even the second listen. A little allergic to anything exciting or bold. Felt like it just kind of dragged. Was a bit fooled because sonically, this is from 1970, where almost everything sounds great. a high 2/5
Klaxons
1/5
In my rating system, 1 means "shouldn't be on the list." This is an emphatic 1!! Get this off, asap!! 1001 slots for "albums you should listen to," I am realizing, is a precious resource that must be rationed. We can't afford to have this on there. Unite against this pick!
Every choice they made musically is the opposite choice I wanted them to make. Musically, like George Kostanza in that one Seinfeld episode, who could have succeeded simply by doing the opposite. Somehow wacky but not in an endearing way at ALL. I really dislike every choice they made. I'm getting the sense that they are trying to write anthemic, show-stopping mid-2000's hit singles on every song. It's just that they fall flat on their face every song. Embarrassing to listen to honestly!
Bummer about the album cover. A genuinely cool cover that caused me to give this a closer look than it deserved! 1/5
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
5/5
The jazz album that’s soooo insanely popular that real jazz heads have a tough time admitting it’s as good as people say. Too bad for them, it is! As good as I remember it. That perfect meeting between accessible, original, and just plain cool. And it’s not just the polyrhythms! That’s just a thing to talk about. No, Take 5 is not cool because it’s 5/4. It’s cool because it’s amazing composition, full stop! (Always disliked the polyrhythm music theory nerds, sorry if that’s coming out a little strong)
But it blue rondo a la Turk sounds so active! So interesting and frenetic. I love the random Stravinsky-esque moments of interruption in there.
Inventive, fun, playful, a REALLY enjoyable listen. Hope that the 1 billion record sales this generated went generously back to the artists and musicians who played on it.
5/5
AC/DC
3/5
Kind of controversial but I enjoyed this more than Back In Black. Felt like they were more confident, mature, really solid on this record, maybe it’s just my perception but it feels like this band has grown up. More badass? also like this MUCH more than most bands doing this thing around this time. We’ve had Guns N Roses and Aerosmith, and while those were memorable they kind of rolled off me. This is more focused but more sure of itself? Really good. Never gonna be totally 100% for me, but I respect the hell out of this. 3/5
The Temptations
2/5
Conflicted about this Temptations album, which is full of nice sounds and good funky grooves but kind of misses the mark for me. It feels super all over the place, unfocused. Maybe it’s the nature of the group to feel like kind of a grab bag. There are live tracks, there are pretty uninspired covers, there are good funky long instrumentals that don’t seem to go anywhere. I get the sense they’re grabbing for anything that might work, and a lot of it just isn’t landing for me. Interesting reading the backstory about “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone,” how they actually all respected their fathers and disagreed with the message, no doubt pressured by Berry Gordy or one of those guys. I think their heart’s in the right place, but too many compromises that really hurt the cohesiveness of it as a record. 2/5
Baaba Maal
5/5
Well shit. This is so, SO good. We had a 1993 Baaba Maal album a few months ago, and this is a clear precursor to that one’s high-tech, larger-than-life jams. This one, I feel like it was just tracked by great musicians in a room together. And it’s SO compelling. I can’t get over how expressive Baaba Maal’s voice is. I wish I could understand the language, but even without it it’s just arresting.
Let’s talk groove, though… this grooves like NOTHING else. This is some crazy shit!! “Muudo Hormo,” that is my favorite track of the entire year so far. So sly. It starts in this totally pretty, folk pastoral, style, and gradually speeds until it’s this infectious JAM. I was dancing all over my house listening to this. Couldn’t stop. Even now as I’m listening to it a fourth time. It just has this sweet, beautiful, yet joyful quality. I can’t remember the last time a song compelled me to dance so JOYFULLY. This is a beautiful thing.
Do I detect a tiny hint of prog influence? Just in the way some of the guitars are played, recorded. Those super bright DI acoustics, we call that sound “cheap” in America. I’m starting to really, really like it.
I don’t mind the long runtime at all! The bonus tracks were some of my favorites. Really, that balafon player should win an award.
It’s criminal that this music is so overlooked here in America. I want to go to the places where it’s celebrated, where it’s danced to.
5/5
CHVRCHES
3/5
I had this on my iPhone in 2012 during a summer in NYC as a sophomore. Just sounds to me like, exciting times, big city! It was very in the air at the time. Everything was starting to have this 80’s synthpop / M83 sheen to it.
This must have been one of the albums that I mistakenly downloaded only half of the songs, because I know half of the songs super well, and the other half are unfamiliar. Which leaves us with a natural experiment: do the ones that I randomly didn’t have downloaded, and now get to hear with fresh ears in 2024, give me as much of a boost as the ones laced with nostalgia, romanticism, young college love?
The answer is no. No, I think the other “new” songs to me are kind of lame and not interesting.
So that should tell me something, but in spite of that still have a vague fondness for this! So I’ll go 3. By no means as earth-shattering as those first few singles promised, but still a pretty good time. 3/5
Count Basie & His Orchestra
3/5
This was nice! In context with some of our more recent music... it sounds like it was made by people on a completely different planet than the music just 10 years later. Obviously, this was well on its way out even in 1958, but… still! I think I still can’t quite comprehend how radical the shift in music was in those 10 years.
At some point, I recognized track 2 again, and had this moment of wait– have I just been repeating track 2 over and over? Let me get onto track 3! And then I realized that I had listened all the way through the album, and had almost no recollection of the other tracks. It was pleasant though!
Nice palette cleanser, given the recent ones I've been working through. 3/5
Jimmy Smith
4/5
Giving this a high score for being “the best version of this thing you could ask for.” People are right, the sax player totally upstages the organist! Then again, what does music sound like where the organist upstages the sax player? That would be weird. The B3 has a very sly way of just slotting into the texture. I love this. Definitely could see myself coming back to this again and again and putting it on in several environments. 4/5
Doves
2/5
Apparently I loved Doves’ last album (The Last Broadcast) on our list. But I can’t remember any of the songs! That does not bode well.
My impression overall is: could have been worse, but not great. Dunno if this is unfair, but I get the feeling that nothing really... happened. Maybe it’s the fact that the vocal is mixed so far down, it would be unmemorable if it wasn’t simply inaudible. I think the band and their decisions are really in sync, there’s a lot of sympathetic vibrations and good band play. But the vocal makes Snow Patrol feel risky and alive!
This does fill in a missing puzzle piece for me, between Blur and Radiohead on one end and something like Coldplay, very soon to come. But it's far, far less exciting than any of the things I just mentioned, the songs aren't tight, and I have a feeling we aren't going anywhere. Really, the first song made this out sound much more interesting than it ended up being. Could do without this. 2/5
Tim Buckley
2/5
I wasn't crazy into this. I get a kick out of all things vaguely medieval, psychedelic folk, so this should be a pretty easy win. But I just felt like, as unbelievably good as Tim Buckley's voice is– maybe top 5 voices, technically, we've heard here, he has a gift– he just isn't connected to anything he's singing. I get the sense that Tim Buckley has his "Performance Voice" on, and it kind of separates me from him in a way. Almost in the way you can feel weirdly distant from, say, Sinatra when you listen to him for long enough. Is he just performing, merely singing the words, or is he actually there?
And then I found out that he's Jeff Buckley's (criminally absent) father, and things clicked for me what's going on here. His other album we had is a true miss for me, and I went on a rant about how I don't like singers who have insane talent but aren't– again– using their powers for good. It seems like his son inherited these superhuman genes as well, and I'm glad that, unlike his dad, I really feel things when I hear Jeff sing. I'm just not feeling anything here.
Not saying I didn't like some songs. "Phantasmagoria in Two" has this nice, wild country swing that struck me as weirdly fun. At the very least I've never heard anything like that.
2/5. A pretty cool find, something about that cover is so damn cool in an unsettling way but I honestly will probably not return to this.
Tina Turner
3/5
Tina Turner is kind of GOATed for What’s Love Got To Do With It alone
Incredibly sly, sneaky fun production, one-of-a-kind voice, great combo. There’s something so cool about her super beat-up, chain-smoking badass hurt voice over this super cheesy, silly New Romantics kind of shit. Whoever decided to do that is kind of a genius.
Kind of new-wavey? Do I feel some Culture Club? Except I don’t hate it?
Tina could sing anything and I’ll pay attention. Kind of like an Amy Winehouse, she just gives the song authority. And she respects the song! A lot of these songs would kind of suck without her singing it, with her singing it it’s a BOP! “Show some Respect,” great example. You can imagine the lame version of that, it’s too easy.
Embarrassed to say that I unfairly judged a book by its cover. I kinda loved this! Minus some silly, superfluous covers. This is a super weird album, in a good way. Truly, could only have been made in the 80’s. Nobody would dare do this today, take a voice as unbelievably soulful as this and give it the slicked-back 80’s treatment.
-1 for double album. -1 for a kind of confusing series of covers and less exciting ones toward the end. Felt more lost and meandering. But, as Charlie mentioned, it looks like we’re listening to a bloated “deluxe” edition on Spotify, and there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to hear the original LP as intended. I imagine even the 40-minute version would dip in interesting-ness toward the back half.
Was very close to a 4 honestly, but yeah, this back half is confusing enough to temper my excitement. 3/5
Arcade Fire
4/5
Woah. I really really remember living through this exact moment in music, or rather, the aftermath… 2007 was when I started listening to actual music, and this was already extremely in the air. Just the way Win Butler phrases things and sounds so stylized and intense here, that’s a super familiar sound.
Charlie summed up 100% of my thoughts as well with his review, I 100% agree. A bold, intense, beautiful album that is shooting higher than it has any right to. I’m glad Arcade Fire got a chance to refine this sound in The Suburbs, which is really the band’s masterwork and what this first album is leading to. But there’s something about that desperate, intense wildness of Win and Régine on these records, plus the really desperate guitar, it’s kind of unmatched on any of their subsequent records, which were always going to sound more “perfect.” This was recorded in a week! That’s an achievement in itself. That’s insane. An album that promised to all of its followers and acolytes that there’s beauty to be made by just bleeding your heart dry, giving it your all on the bandstand, and perhaps rock is not dead, but it’s ready to wake again. 4/5
Red Hot Chili Peppers
2/5
Can any album truly claim to be ruined by a terrible *master,* other than Californication? I can’t think of one. I think this is a famous example, but I’ve never heard it before so I didn’t know if I should expect something quite subtle that’s been overblown by audio nerds such as myself.
No! It’s unlistenable! Everything sounds AWFUL.
That’s pretty harsh. It’s just unfortunate. The music sounds like a a bug that's been smooshed against the glass window of a moving car. For absolutely no good reason! It’s oppressive. They didn’t need to suck the life out of it like that.
These are musicians, producers, engineers who spent years of their life on their craft, on tone, on the art of recording. For it to come to this??
“Scar Tissue,” that’s a pretty good song, I just can’t listen to it now that I’ve heard the master. Can’t un-hear. I feel like my ears are getting chopped off by a kitchen knife. Some tracks (“Get On Top”) I can literally hear the digital clipping.
There’s only one moment on the entire album that doesn’t sound destroyed by a mastering engineer: the first minute of “Californication.” I can actually hear… drums! And maybe “Porcelain,” as well. The insane compression sounds like kind of a choice on a quieter, jazz-brushed ballad.
Ah, now I get it. *this* is the tipping point, whose swift reactions lead to analog-vs-digital, vinyl fetishism, audiophile USB cables. I can see the original sin that set off the chain reaction of nonsense.
I am, happily, no audiophile. I have done the double blind test between uncompressed files and 128kbps mp3, and, with a couple exceptions, performed slightly better than random. But I feel like I have a pretty good ear for tone. And the tone of this album is… so bad.
So maybe that’s why on this list? Historically significant for its audio awful-ness?
I read about this being a bad master, ugh, years ago, I thought those people were just old men yelling at clouds. Old man, look at my life, I’m a lot like you... 2/5
(Open to re-reviewing if this is ever remastered)
Siouxsie And The Banshees
4/5
It just worked for me! I loved the leads, loved the energy, just thought it was the perfect blend of raw and musical at the same time. Really kept me engaged. Helter Skelter cover was very good, good example of what a cover can do to bring you into a new band's world. Well executed and kind of awesome! I enjoyed running to this.
I listen to a podcast where the three Gen X hosts routinely segue from their normal stable of (non-music) topics to obsess about post punk bands from the late 70s and 80s. Siouxsie And The Banshees they have 100% played before in the outtro credits. I think this is the reason I'm so primed to like it, a level of wild and sweaty and Helter Skelter rawness whose entry point for me had to be my older cooler friends liking it first. 4/5
Patti Smith
5/5
Agree fully with Charlie on this. SUPER fucking unique. I’ve never heard anyone go this direction before, other than maybe someone like Rickie Lee Jones, and even then, not this far and this much insane energy. Kind of iconic. A lot to digest here! I saw her play last summer, got this INSTANT regret that I was unfamiliar with her music as I IMMEDIATELY knew that I would be kicking myself, years later, that I enjoyed the show with far less context than I should be having. So it is! Wish to death that I had heard this beforehand.
Musically really all over the map. Sometimes kind of intimate and beautiful, other times raucous and intense and very indulgent but in a way that doesn’t alienate you, just mystifying. She has a power over me when she delivers some of these lines.
A missing puzzle piece artist for me if there ever was one! 1975 was a good year. There’s nothing really exactly like this, as intense and wordy and unapologetically Lou Reed-esque beat poetry but also aggressive and bluesy and fun. I’m gonna have to listen to this way more to get under the skin of the lyrics, but it was a WOW for me. Hedging my bets here that it’ll be a 5/5
The Offspring
2/5
I was pretty unimpressed! Came in with high expectations. It’s a lot of songs that sound like a more aggro, guitar-heavy version of styles that everyone was into at the time. The surf rock through-line piqued my interest! Gotta say I enjoyed the 1 minute bonus track, where they play actual surf rock and give the game away, more than a lot of the album though. Doesn’t feel like I’m gonna return to this, it just wasn’t a special enough listen if I’m honest! 2/5
Elliott Smith
5/5
This is a version of Elliott Smith with a lot to love. His songs here feel mature and unleashed. He feels even less tethered to song structure, a lot of great through-composed moments. Lyrics are stellar. And I really enjoy the more focused, semi baroque rock sound. Makes that this was done at least partly at Abbey Road. Feel like I can guess pretty accurately which songs were tracked there. Now I’m imagining every tack piano, harpsichord, every tubular bell coming from that little closet in the side room of Studio B. It’s gotta be B, right? B for Beatles. Even the guitars have a little bit more George Harrison in them. Do the techs at Studio B ever get tired of being asked to set things up the way the Beatles did it?
Damn, on “In the Lost and Found” you can literally hear someone walking up the stairs in B! Confirmed. Sorry for the huge digression. I’m a mega nerd for this shit, lol.
His piano playing is pretty amazing, I don’t remember hearing his playing on other records! Everything feels cohesive and kind of adventurous and a little nostalgic and NOT what I was expecting for a mid-career, (sadly) last album. And come on, songs like “Somebody that I used to know,” he knew how to write a killer song. 5/5 I loved it! Grew on me a ton.
Nightmares On Wax
3/5
I expected very little from this, given that pretty rough cover… but was pleasantly surprised! It really all sounds great. A good blend of cinematic, good rhythms and samples used. Easy to pick up and keep on for a long time… I went through the album twice before realizing it was done the first time. I could see this entering my rotation and occasionally challenging Nujabes’ Modal Soul for “the thing I put on when I want to get shit done.” Hard to get too excited about an album that was essentially fantastic background music, but there is more than meets the eye here! 3/5, good time was had.
Pet Shop Boys
1/5
Something about Pet Shop Boys always feels like what a younger, more impressionable and maximalist producer like me in the 80’s with access to a Fairlight. It’s like looking through the distorted mirror of your worst self. So lots of projection in this review. Be warned!
This is just cheese city. Sooooooo much Fairlight. I feel like in every song they are trying to go for broke, shoot for a hit. Every song. It makes the whole thing feel like wading through karaoke hit parade molasses. It’s weirdly monotonous.
So there are no stakes, and there’s no reason for anything. Every choice feels at 85% energy, constantly, nothing above or below. A lot of shit thrown at all the songs. Even the orchestrations feel uninteresting, your ear is just getting all this other shit thrown at it!
No! I must put my foot down. This is not good, it should not be on this list.
I have to listen to our last PSB and see what the heck I liked about that one! Plenty to dislike here. I can’t think of anything that rolled off me this badly since that one Bee Gees concept album.
These key changes kill me. Make me feel dirty.
1/5
The Police
4/5
Coooool! Love this album. Was an album my dad had when I was a kid growing up, so it was one of the few Music albums I listened to in the Before Music Jacob period.
And I think it’s great! I happen to not be in the “I profoundly dislike Sting and everything he does” camp. I am solidly in the “intrigued, pleasantly entertained, sometimes pretty impressed with Sting’s melody and lyrics” camp. Sting seems to really rub some people the wrong way. The fact is that he is one of the Good Songwriters of this period, his writing style is inimitable, somehow worldly and literary and brainiac but never too much, and his melodies are ones that only he can sing. That is a winning combo.
I also appreciated how understated and weird the production is on this. Some strange synth / organ / guitar work that I never picked up on before.
It’s a fun listen, it’s pretty tight, over before you know it, has some weird antisocial hits. Gotta say I love it! 4/5
Calexico
2/5
first half, really enjoyed! But I'm right there with Charlie on this one: an overwhelming feeling of "I already have that." There wasn't anything too special to hang my hat on and go "wow, that was pretty unique." And I thought the second half of the album was less great and harder to get through. Could have pulled through with a 3 for this one, but I'm not feeling a strong pull to return. 2/5
Simon & Garfunkel
5/5
The album where songwriter Paul Simon goes on a motherfucking tear!!
Every song is INCREDIBLE. The writing is right up there with the best Lennon/McCartney, and you can just feel the competitive New York edginess here. I've always felt like this feels like a Simon & Garfunkel Greatest Hits record more than an actual album, because any cohesiveness or continuity of the album is dwarfed by the sheer quantity of AMAZING hit songs.
Released January 1970, but this is the last album of the 1960's, as far as I'm concerned. Ring in the bell of the new decade. Hard to pick a favorite song... if Paul Simon didn't go on to have a terrific career after this, this would be rightfully seen as a songwriter and duo at the height of their creative powers. They manage to do everything right, in a language they built for themselves and perfected, and just sum up everything there is to love and cherish about the folk period of the 60's.
What an incredible album. 5/5
Scott Walker
4/5
Scott Walker seems like such an anomaly. He just seems to surprise me at every turn. Every decision he makes is like a left turn, where I would have gone right. It's amazing that such an iconoclastic person got the resources to make an album like this, full orchestra, choir, it's wild! Every line, confident yet strange. Much prefer this to some of the more hokey, medieval-themed adventures of people like Tim Buckley, whom we've had to listen to. This is just way more pleasant and fun. It's good all of the time, and sometimes *really* really good. 4/5
Jeff Buckley
5/5
5/5/5. Stunning. Everything I could ever want in a singer of Jeff Buckley's caliber. He is in his own lane. The songs are often dark, melancholic, yet so intimate and live-feeling. You get the feeling that an audience member could shuffle or cough a little too loudly and interrupt the spell that he casts. I think this album is kind of un-repeatable. The more I get into this list, the more I realize how much of a rarity it is that a singer of Jeff Buckley's abilities is also a good songwriter, also a conjurer of worlds, also such a unique and yet somehow restrained performer. A true troubadour. Shame we get only one album. In an alternate world, a sophomore album would have been hard-pressed to beat this. 5/5
Common
4/5
The great silver lining about being a bit behind on this list is that I can choose which album to put on when. It’s Deep Clean Saturday, so this album’s hour 20 minute runtime feels less like a chore and more like a perfect pair for today’s work.
Always loved this album. Long! I don’t think I’ve ever gotten past the pimp song and skit, lol. That’s a skit to wake you out of a daze, one of the lasting memories I have from this album. You get the sense that Common feels sure of himself here. Tons of confidence. It’s “Jazz Rap” via Tribe, all grown up, with plenty of delicious horns, Afrobeat bins fides (I see Fela’s son on the title track and throughout), and lots and lots of good vibrations. Feel good records, not super ornate or adorned— they get their point across. The playing is understated but excellent throughout. A slew of recurring guests, and one of my favorite DJ Premier beats (“The 6th Sense”). Great to put on and just vibe to. Never asking for too much, understated in a nice way. 4/5, have come back to this many times and will!
Isaac Hayes
2/5
Fairly ambivalent about this record! It was certainly fun and pleasant, and I’m sure that title track was a hit, fantastic example of that sound, good jazz interspersed there. I felt soundtracked to. It no doubt must be brilliant in its effect of scoring the film, but it suffers from being unsupported on its own without the film itself to lead the way. 2/5, probably not returning to this as an album, despite its acclaim!
The Zombies
3/5
Begrudgingly like the Zombies. Such copycats! Doors, Beatles, too many “The” names. This has about twice as much of the zany weird and adventurous decisions as your average Sgt. Peppers track— perhaps more at times, more indulgent and fun!— but about a third as much good songwriting. “A Rose for Emily” really has something going for it. Great song, shifting smartly between chords in a really satisfying way. Same with “This Will Be Our Year.” Terrific. The rest (“Changes” a good example) is so indulgent that it’s hard to get really invested. “Time of the Season” is really good and one of those you would be ecstatic to find in a dusty record bin. 3/5, good example of this period but not outstanding.
King Crimson
5/5
WOW. This is pretty much peak prog, and I was along for the ride. so engaging!! I don't know how it manages to be both massive, inventive, but also doesn't ever feel too indulgent. I feel like we've heard a lot of prog that gets this formula wrong... just because you can have a 13 minute song in six parts, doesn't mean you should, every time. This really does feel like a book-length album. Tons of scenes, development, and big surprises, and the guitar work! It's one of a kind. I think I liked this even more than In The Court Of The Crimson King? Very, very mature. 5/5
Wu-Tang Clan
3/5
It was good! I enjoyed the fun, the cumminess, the creative lines, the wordplay, it wasn't earth-shattering to me as someone in 2024. It'd be hard to appreciate this the way it was received at the time. I'd love to go back in time and experience this album, and that era of hip hop as it happened. Enjoyed! 3/5
Rufus Wainwright
2/5
Ah man, Rufus! I have such respect for you, but I didn't want to finish this! Too much, too much. I'm a little annoyed by the vocal delivery, it's kind of fatiguing after a while. But man, what beautiful tracks, there's this lovely gold, brass sheen on every song in my mind. The musical sense here is very good. Something that I really should like on paper, but ended up kind of bouncing off of! Sorry! 2/5
The Rolling Stones
2/5
This is the sort of Rolling Stones album I'm afraid we're going to get, every time an album of theirs comes up. It's extremely mediocre! There's nothing really to like here. I don't find the music charming, I find it mostly forgettable, this feels like prehistoric compared to The Rolling Stones of just 5 years in the future. It's just... conservative and boring. Not a fan! 2/5
Sepultura
2/5
Despite this being about 180 degrees from “my thing”— and, for many of you readers, I imagine this is not your thing either— I feel a defense is necessary. Yes, I did laugh extra hard when they started track 1 with “ROOOOOOOTS! ROOOOOOOOTS!” (why do they all do that?), and yes, some of the lyrics are particularly cringey when translated from monster-speak. But there remains something extra musical and kind of charming (?) with some of the music here. Amid waves and waves of cringey doom roars, I turn my head and go— wait— what’s that percussionist doing? That was kind of sick! Same with the guitarist. This is far, far from my favorite metal album (is this even metal? Far more angsty and scream-adjacent), but there is something redeeming in the playing and general tightness of everything other than the groans, moans, the microphone spit-launching sessions. 2/5. Too long!
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
5/5
EXTREMELY good album. Sounds immaculate. Not much to say. Their voices, blended, sound pulled from the beginning of time, as if they’ve always been there. Intoxicating harmonies and group lock. Incredible songs. Neil Young is so precious, you just want to give him a big hug. One of the greatest! 5/5
The Vines
2/5
Quite Commercial. Struggling to figure out who this album was for. Very energetic yet verrrry generic sounding. Everything is well-recorded, but nothing seems to have a reason why it was recorded. I kept asking myself, “why?” Why was this album made? Is this pre-iPodification of all rock music, or does this just sound like an Apple ad because it was latched onto after the fact? I really don’t like this sound, but I’m just struggling to picture the person who does. Who listens to this?? 2/5
R.E.M.
2/5
I'm finding this just about tolerable, and significantly more tolerable than the other R.E.M. albums we've had. Its earnestness is barely just under the line, in that I can sometimes appreciate the lyrics if I don't concentrate too hard on them. When they start doing that recitation thing, I just cringe so hard I need to hold onto something. It's just totally uninteresting. But this album is sliiiiiightly less bad for that stuff than the other albums we had by R.E.M.
Earnest and boring, never a great match. 2/5
Abdullah Ibrahim
5/5
This is pretty much dead center for me. Right on the cusp of all this brilliant, American folk, Copeland-esque harmony of the plains, very new school, Keith Jarrett, but also mournful, spiritual-feeling, even in the way the horns are played. But… just the tip! Tiny bit of that, and stone cold horn standout solos here, too. I love it. I love it! Is it just me, or do the horn player all sound like they’re really buds in real life, pal-ing around, trading lines? It’s so loose and fun!
1001, I love you, but you have been a slog recently. Sometimes the generator just wants you to have REM album after REM album. With a nice after-dinner serving of Costello. No, but this! This is some genuinely good shit! 5/5
Earth, Wind & Fire
4/5
Earth, Wind & Fire, fellow haters of the Oxford comma, deliver again. I come away significantly more impressed with them, every time we get an album of theirs. It's strong stuff! The first three tracks are kind of unbeatable. I’ll dock them a bit for the album cover, which seems pretty hastily put together. Fantastic, musical, 4/5
Louis Prima
4/5
Wow! Had no experience with Louis Prima before coming in, other than his hits. I was struck by how electric and *fun* the performances on here are. They're really, really tight instrumentally but wild and free, and Louis' huge personality and charisma carries most of the tracks. I feel more connected with him than I feel with Sinatra, if I'm honest, or most of the crooners that always feel like they're barely disguising a little smirk at their audience. Louis Prima feels genuine, funny, big, warm, crass. I took to him immediately. I'm going for a 4, for a charismatic artist and utterly fantastic, perfect performances from the players here! 4/5
Leonard Cohen
2/5
Leonard Cohen, sparse and cold and distant as ever, a spinner, weaver of couplets, more sparse and unforgiving than any Dylan of this period. You’d better love song if you want to love this. It’s a hard listen because of its emptiness, sonically. The recordings are a bit rough around the edges and monotonous— especially the vocal delivery— even compared to the first Leonard Cohen album. That one really felt like he got ALL his great songs out, in one go. This feels more wandering, more strange, a bit more uncompromising on the poetry. You have to respect the writer, and Leonard Cohen’s writing makes you believe it’s possible you’re missing the point entirely, the joke’s over your head. Still, I can’t help but wonder if some of these poems needed a rewrite, a few more edits, for pacing. As an album, it’s a hard sell. As a collection of poems, songs, it reveals in layers. 2/5
Joni Mitchell
5/5
This is my desert island album. It's my coming-home album. My traveller's album. It's the jewel at the center of the galaxy. I don't know what caused me, midway through Joni's discography (chronologically) at age 26, to pause at Hejira and go no further. For years. But I'll just say that I've been stuck on this album for years and years now. Don Juan is, in some ways, a more expansive and intense vision of the Hejira sound. Court and Spark has some lovely, lovely songs, and I'd never be mad to put it on. But Hejira? This wormed its way into my brain. For years.
Flashy albums are great. I love artists that go for broke, make a statement, pull you along kicking and screaming. But what strikes me about Hejira every time I listen is its quiet confidence and its (frankly) uncomplicated brilliance. It's just: beautiful poetry, set to Joni's utterly entrancing guitar tone that hits its stride in a huge way on this album (it's transformative, here). And some of the best and most forward-thinking session/jazz musicians of the class of 76. Jaco, of course, but... Chuck Findley. Victor Feldman. Larry Carlton. All at their best, but all serving the song.
It's what I think of when I think of a truly musical collaboration. The jazz influence is authentic and brilliantly executed, but it's so... loveably Joni. I'm reminded of the Frank Ocean quote to James Blake, working on Frank's record: "You're in my world now." We're in Joni's world, no one else's.
Her poetry is just entrancing. I don't know how she keeps getting away with it! Such an honesty, almost an earnestness that's been in her lyrics since she was 19... here, delivered in its most confident and assured form.
This really is an album that doesn't have an equal. This new jazz-pop style, with the modulations, the Pat Metheny-esque chorus and phased guitars, the open tunings (very Joni) all seems to have collapsed into elevator music as soon as it was just getting going. I've hunted and pecked for anything, anything that has this kind of sound. And I'm sad to say... it doesn't exist. Beyond a couple of standouts or collaborations, we just get this album.
This album is so good, you can almost sit back and miss it. It feels over in a second. Just hypnotic. I'll treasure it for the rest of my life, and it really is my one of one.
5/5
Donald Fagen
3/5
I've given this a few spins at this point. I *should* love it! The first track, I.G.Y, is one of my Dad's favorites, and he loves it for its weird, prescient, sly cynicism that feels like it's pulling back the curtain. I love it for that, but also for its alluring cleanliness. It's almost the cleaner than any other Steely Dan record! Which is saying something! This is the era of Ultra Clean. Something so hypnotic for the musician in me, at the utterly, pointlessly perfect sound. There's just something so weird about it, you know? Like, why did they decide to do this?
I just think the songs kind of fall off after the first song. I like the more bluesy, open arrangements, but the songs at the heart feel a little less immediate for my taste. Feels like we're laying back in the comfort zone. Which, for Donald Fagan, is still cool. But for me, the listener, I'm waiting a little for stuff to happen. Still, great record. 3/5
Boards of Canada
4/5
My first penned review in 3 months! I needed a bit of a 1001 break. But we’re back.
This is a classic I somehow missed. I LOVE it. It’s both proto electronic music and somehow ahead of its time if you released in 2024. Had a great time listening. 4/5
Elvis Presley
3/5
I'll say that this was a right-smack-in-the-middle 3. Meaning, it was fun! Elvis is all over the map with this record– I think his earliest? You can tell he's growing into his voice. Some tracks are so delicate as to be almost beautiful, others are hammy, unserious, the almost suffocating sound we all know. It's strange to hear him trying out so much, vocally, not really settling. I have a special place in my heart for "Blue Moon." I wrote a song sampling the last 30 seconds of that, and it's one of the most beautiful songs I've made. I had the radio on, and only got the last 30 seconds recorded, wondering, who is this?? Turns out– it was Elvis! A very early Elvis, at that. So a high 3/5
Bonnie Raitt
4/5
Ah, Bonnie Raitt. She had that magic power, possessed by few, to sing words that sound truer sung than spoken. There's something about her lyrics that are so simple, plain, and just ring out in her voice. I don't really know how it works, how you get that ability. But she's got it. And that makes her lines cut to the core more than most. She's also straddling this line on most of the songs– they're definitely commercial, but not overly. A production style of a certain time– plenty of Prince influence here, which I was surprised by– but never too much. Never so much to distract from her performance and her delivery, her gift. I love it and I love her. 4/5
Neil Young
5/5
Damn. Don't you just wanna give Neil Young a hug? He needs a hug.
5/5
Pink Floyd
5/5
Yes, it's true. I'm taking psychedelics while l'm listening to Wish You Were Here. It just happened to be my album of the day, and... INCREDIBLE. 10/10 experience. Very much would recommend.
It was a low dose, so plenty of werewithal left to write a review.. no tangerine trees here. What I love about this album is its drama. I love that it's just this long-playing film, leading to these soaring highs, biting lines. It's really a play. But it's also the Perfect 70's Prog Album. All the lovely sound effects, Prophet synth leads, gorgeous guitar drama. It's all there. Really a compelling piece of art.
I think I liked this album the way people like Dark Side of the Moon. For my money, this album does what people say Dark Side has on the tin. 5/5
808 State
3/5
Pretty fuckin sick??? It was cool. I imagine putting this on in 1989 and being like, well this is cooooooooool. I like to imagine what I'm wearing, this imaginary 1989 Jacob. It obviously sounds dated in the ways you'd expect, but there's enough new and engaging there that you don't get bored, even as someone who's heard a less fun / engaging version of this kind of thing on every 90's commercial ever. I kind of liked it a lot and could see myself pulling it out! 3/5 for a good time.
Tim Buckley
1/5
It's true! I have absolutely no taste whatsoever for Tim Buckley. I just hate how he sings and how carelessly he throws away a talented voice. It feels like he's barely trying, and something about that gets under my skin. But I only know this because this list has, like 4 Tim Buckley albums (I think we've had 2 so far??), and they were further into the era of excess and laziness that seems to define Tim Buckley's output. It's like Van Morrison, except instead of liking it, I don't. At all. This is maybe the least offensive of all the Tim Buckley albums we've had, but it does little to reduce my extreme prejudice against him.
Oh no. Nevermind. We got to Gypsy Woman. My rage has awakened again.
1/5 is generous. Suck it Tim!!!
The Undertones
3/5
This list is so random. That was fun! I loved how short it was. Honestly might come back to this in some moods. Short, aggressive, fun, feel like I'm there. 3/5
Aretha Franklin
4/5
delightful album! it's not quiiite as hit parade as the other Aretha album we had, where it truly felt like every other song was a hit song. But you've got some stunners! And any day I get to hear Aretha sing is going to be 50% brighter. What a treat. Incredible voice. 4/5
Bob Dylan
5/5
Don't know what the fuck to say about this album. This is an album that stands completely out of time, and if you're not ready for it yet, you just need to be at that exact place in life where it enters in your life. Music that works like water, filling a deep hole. Or those videos of "things that fit perfectly into other things." You know the ones? With the golf balls? Basically I'm saying it's for a breakup. Put this shit on!! I've been there. Lot of us have been there. "She was once a true love of mine..." 5/5
Funkadelic
5/5
Agh! This album was INCREDIBLE. Do you ever get the feeling, listening to a record, of… delight and sadness at the same time? Delight, in discovering yet another sweet, wonderful new flavor. An album that proposes a whole new genre, a new way of thinking of music. And sadness when you realize, as the album nears its end… this is all you’re probably gonna get! The feeling that, with 20 minutes remaining, we’re probably never gonna get a record that sounds quite like this, works in the same way this one does. You could search far and wide for influences, contemporaries, b-sides. But… this really is it, isn’t it? Nothing’s gonna sound like these 40 minutes.
That’s how I felt with Maggot Brain. I don’t have to have a doctorate in this blend of funk/soul/psychedelic music to know that this is one of a kind. Creatively explosive, high energy, yet strangely paced. Experimental but lovably homey. You get the sense that all the backup singers are cousins of cousins, and they’re all having a blast doing this. No idea censored. Just feels un-replicable. Shades of Hendrix, of course, maybe (later) de la soul? And that guy who did “it’s a family affair” and did all the vocals lying down in bed. Too lazy to look up his name. But… way more fun! That perfect blend of weird, experimental, funny, and somehow kind of important! I would give this record as homework to anyone trying to understand everything from soul to funk to the encouraged weirdness of the early 70’s, all the way up to Bootsy Collins and Thundercat and Kendrick Lamar. It’s all there! What a fucking cool, cool record. 5/5
The Blue Nile
5/5
I think I have to give this a 5! I didn't come into this expecting to be so charmed and weirdly... entranced... by this record. But it's so... alluring! Something so odd and wonky about the production, but crazy enticing. Spacious but just enough ear candy, compositionally delightful. With this broken, mourning, Bowie-esque voice at the end. I was talking with my uncle a while back about how it's hard to find some really iconically great 80's albums that feel great all the way through. This feels like that! And the fact that it's a phenomenal example of an album in the 80's feels like it should get top marks alone. Wow! Kinda crazy into it. 5/5
Talvin Singh
3/5
I found this to be pretty compelling! The album definitely won me over by the back half. I don't feel like returning too quickly to this world– wasn't keen when the album started looking again– but it really beat out the premise that I figured we were working off of (trip hop plus Indian classical) and managed to be funny, pretty musical, a little odd and intriguing at points. Really, everything I said above is the beginning of falling in love, and I wouldn't be surprised if it started happening. I'll give it a high 3/5
The Police
3/5
“Message In A Bottle” is an absolutely perfect song and deserves all the awards. The perfect amount of feverish British Post-Punk, sweaty 3-4 piece band singles, tight, tight instrumentals. With the intriguing, confusing lead lyrics told through Sting’s boyish, strangely-accented singing. All the elements of a hit. So tight. Sounds bigger than the entire rest of the album, combined. Band’s going for broke.
Aaaaand… the rest of the album. An absolutely hilarious second single in “Walking on the Moon,” funny reggae-influenced, rock-tinged record. Is this right around the release of Catch A Fire? Sounds so related to that record’s polished rock-ready reggae. They can’t swing it like the Jamaicans, but hey… the album literally translates to “white reggae,” right?
I read that the band hardly had any songs ready for the recording session, and… it sounds like it. Plenty of duds. Fun to hear a good band play it out! But a lot of dead air. If “It’s Alright For You” was the lasting legacy of The Police, they’d never get a second album.
And that’s The Police! A sometimes frustrating, uneven band. Rare that they get an album that behaves itself all the way though. (I think Synchronicity is about as close as they get?) But… absolutely one of a kind band, not a perfect album of any stretch, but worth anyone’s time. 3/5
Cocteau Twins
3/5
Hey! I think this was great! It wasn't exactly as INCREDIBLE as I thought it would be. I think this is talked about with such reverence. Personally, I just feel like I'm in Brooklyn in some slightly industrial third space, like a third wave coffee shop or anarchist bookstore. That first song is undeniably beautiful. It's special. Some of those vocal lilts just GET me. The rest of the album's blurry! It's not my least favorite world to be in, but hard to find standouts. I'm saying high 3/5 for lots of enjoyment, wouldn't be mad to put this on!
New Order
3/5
This is just plain silly, but something about the production goes just over the edge enough to catch my ear! It's fun again. It's not just pure camp, there's something that's a little reckless about it, in a way that a lot of this drum-machine-led 80's music just isn't. I like that it's so silly, on some level. This is a clear template for a lot of indie records I've enjoyed, down to the slightly phoned-in lyrics and vocals. 3/5 for a good time.
The Kinks
2/5
This Kinks album just isn't doing it for me! I'm not sure in what direction I should focus my complaints. This is clearly where the Kinks get more obviously British, more village countryside tongue-in-cheek, which as a (American) villager I can appreciate. I'm just a little bored by the arrangements, which feel a little constant, unrelenting, kind of "stock" for the period. Something I don't remember feeling about with "Arthur," which felt kind of bold in arrangements, alive. I feel we're nearly out of that stagnant, stock-Beatles period with them, and all this album makes me want to do is put their later work on. I've gotta get a copy of "Arthur" for the record player. 2/5