Jan 12 2023
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Songs Of Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen
I can appreciate why this album was picked and it was pleasant to listen to for ~10 minutes, but it is a little too peace-lovey for my tastes. I'd say this isn't something I could just pick up and enjoy at any given time; a very specific setting and mood would be required to make it through much of this.
3
Jan 13 2023
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Dear Science
TV On The Radio
Very creative and pleasant, but the songs tend to blend together a bit when listening to the full album. In isolation, the songs are pretty great, other than my aversion to the falsetto style that appears every once in a while.
3
Jan 16 2023
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The Chronic
Dr. Dre
Phenomenal mixing and rhythms.
4
Jan 18 2023
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Under Construction
Missy Elliott
I've heard a few of these songs before way back in the day. At that moment in time and at the ripe age of 10 or 11, it was pretty good. It's honestly pretty hard to listen to now and I don't think it has aged very well. Definitely not something I could listen to for more than 10 minutes without being ready to move on, it's just a little too intense and in your face.
2
Jan 19 2023
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Music From Big Pink
The Band
I love the range of instrumental expertise on this album. "The Weight" is my favorite song from 20+ commercials. The organ work on this album is masterful, reminds me of the doors in that regard. The drums are crisp and really pulls all the other melodies along with it. The singing reminds me a bit of jam band kind of stuff, a little all over the place, not always on key, but that's the beauty of this music, it's raw.
4
Jan 20 2023
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OK
Talvin Singh
5
Jan 25 2023
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Surrealistic Pillow
Jefferson Airplane
Embryonic Journey is the most beautiful song on this album. These guys need some haircuts, they make the Beatles look normal.
4
Jan 26 2023
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Teenage Head
Flamin' Groovies
Reaaally not something I could hang with. I Listened to maybe half the album hoping there would be at least 1 song I could jam to, I think the eponymous track was pretty solid at least. Other than that, the music is OK, but the mixing is pretty bad and I'm constantly trying to ignore the vocals.
2
Jan 27 2023
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Beautiful Freak
Eels
Even though I've only heard 1 of the songs on this album before and that might have been in a commercial, this album felt very nostalgic and comforting to me.
4
Jan 31 2023
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Heartattack And Vine
Tom Waits
This is VERY different than most things that I listen to, and i'm very surprised that i'm saying this, but this is pretty damn good. I am not a fan of the vocal style, but it definitely adds an extra layer of grungy tone that amplifies the delivery of the music. Fantastic mixing/production, I love the strings.
4
Feb 01 2023
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Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space
Spiritualized
"The best known and most critically acclaimed of these is 1997's Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, which NME magazine named as their Album of the Year, beating other critically acclaimed albums by fellow British bands such as OK Computer by Radiohead and Urban Hymns by The Verve.[1]"
How the hell did this beat OK computer??? They sound like an above-average Radiohead cover band with more instruments.
3
Feb 02 2023
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Rust In Peace
Megadeth
I remember when I first discovered Megadeth.. I had just gotten big into Metallica and learned about their connected histories with Dave Mustaine leaving Metallica to start Megadeth. I was blown away by what I was hearing.. Megadeth is clearly more committed to the thrash metal scene for the long haul unlike metallica who moved on from it after an album or two. Dave Mustaine is a riff wizard. He is not a great singer, but it's impressive that he maintains both lead singer and lead guitar.
5
Feb 03 2023
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Queen II
Queen
This is most definitely early early days queen, quite different than the Queen we all know and love. It's fine, pretty great guitar going on, but I wouldn't say anything mind blowing going on here.
3
Feb 06 2023
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Bryter Layter
Nick Drake
Beautiful and skillful acoustic guitar work here... but the mood/tone is really not doing it for me. A few songs like this are great, but I can't listen to an entire album like this. The piano and strings accompanying the guitar are great as well, but the album as a whole is not doing much.
3
Feb 07 2023
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Vespertine
Björk
What the hell am I listening to. I will admit, there are some beautiful instrumentals going on, but when the singing starts, i'm out.
2
Feb 08 2023
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At Newport 1960
Muddy Waters
Pretty great overall, I definitely see the historical significance of Muddy Waters' music, he's quite talented. Having said that, I can't listen to blues like this for very long, I get too anxious for more variety, spoiled by modern music.
3
Feb 09 2023
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Lost In The Dream
The War On Drugs
2
Feb 14 2023
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There's No Place Like America Today
Curtis Mayfield
Pretty good overall, really love the funk, but I can only listen to so much of that high-pitched singing.
3
Feb 15 2023
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Will The Circle Be Unbroken
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
You can imagine the immediate reticence to listen to this given the rebel flag on the cover... but at the same time I live 10 minutes from a civil war era monument (stone mountain) with confederate generals carved into it. I grew up hearing this kind of music from various family members but I still can not stand most twangy county/bluegrass/folk like this. I listened to 3-4 songs on this record trying to find something that didn't make me cringe, it wasn't easy but I managed to find some great harmonies and musicianship going on. I will never listen to this again though lol I'm giving this 2 stars because I think the musicians are skilled and the harmonies were pretty solid
2
Feb 16 2023
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Pet Sounds
The Beach Boys
This is really not my style, but i'm glad i'm listening to it. There's some awesome musical stuff going on here! There's timpani, sitar, triangle, tuba, duyuglar (horse hoof clapping sound), the list goes on.
4
Feb 17 2023
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Autobahn
Kraftwerk
Autobahn makes edgar winter group's frankenstein seem like childs play synth. Apparently they even invented some electronic instruments, that's badass.
Also this is an amazing tidbit I found on wikipedia...
Chris Martin of Coldplay recalled in a 2007 article in Q magazine the process of requesting permission to use the melody from the track "Computer Love" on "Talk" from the album X&Y. He sent a letter through the lawyers of the respective parties and several weeks later received an envelope containing a handwritten reply that simply said "yes".[77]
5
Feb 22 2023
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Fisherman's Blues
The Waterboys
Meh... that's about all I have to say. I could try to get more detailed, but it would be the equivalent of just saying meh.
2
Feb 23 2023
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Another Green World
Brian Eno
This is some wild stuff; I really dig creative ambient music like this for focusing and getting into a creative groove. I always look up the artist on wikipedia and read about them for these selections, and I learned that Brian Eno invented the oblique strategies card deck! Sounds like this guy might be pretty familiar with LSD and it's effects on the mind :-p
Some of this stuff reminds me of King Crimson
4
Feb 24 2023
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Liege And Lief
Fairport Convention
hippie++
The singer is pretty good, but she leans too much into the same style/rhythm and it gets old pretty quick.
I love the vibes of the music though, it's got me head bobbin' for sure.
3
Feb 27 2023
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Dummy
Portishead
Once again, Wikipedia dropping knowledge bombs on me here: "The cover features a still from the band's own short film To Kill a Dead Man", how cool is that?! Almost as cool as the covert art for tool albums coming from guitarist Adam Jones' own art, cinema, and claymation.
I listened to this entire album cover to cover without a hiccup and loved every second of it. Incredible focus music, the vibe is top tier.
5
Feb 28 2023
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Sweet Baby James
James Taylor
Somehow, I've never listened to James Taylor before, but I certainly know about his impact on the industry and how revered he is be so many.
This is incredibly pleasant, i'm really enjoying it. I particularly love the acoustic work.
4
Mar 01 2023
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Skylarking
XTC
"Due to poor management, XTC never received a share of profits from record sales (of which there were millions), nor from touring revenue, forcing them into debt throughout the 1980s and 1990s." Wow... that.... sucks.
Anyway, there was a pretty good song or two, but it was pretty hard to listen to straight through without skipping halfway into a song that I couldn't stand.
2
Mar 02 2023
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Killing Joke
Killing Joke
I've never listened to killing joke before, but I HAVE heard the Metallica cover of the song "The Wait". The song itself is pretty meh, but Metallica did an awesome cover of it on their "garage days" double album of covers, which I highly recommend.
https://www.revolvermag.com/music/killing-joke-weird-wild-story-revered-cult-industrial-pioneers
There's some great songs on here: primitive, complications, and the opener are fantastic
4
Mar 03 2023
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Buffalo Springfield Again
Buffalo Springfield
Good lord, the guitar SUSTAIN on the song "Everydays", that was awesome. And that bass walking, wow so good.
The acoustic work on "Bluebird", WOW, FANTASTIC!
4
Mar 07 2023
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That's The Way Of The World
Earth, Wind & Fire
The funk is funky (I think that's a good thing!). The highlights for me are the incredible drum and bass going on here, hard to miss. There's also some fantastic brass in some of the songs that I think adds some extra punch.
4
Mar 08 2023
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Sound of Silver
LCD Soundsystem
Hey! It's that song from Step Brothers!!
The synth/electronic work on this album is TOP tier..
4
Mar 09 2023
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Bright Flight
Silver Jews
This is VERY VERY different from anything i've ever listened to (on purpose). That does not by any means I dislike it, in fact, I really dig the vibe (even though some songs can be a little gloomy).
I read through all the wikipedia info on the bands frontman (Berman) and was entranced in all the crazy details and events that this guy went through in his life, mostly very sad. There was, however, a hilarious quote I found: "I've got a credit card rotisserie system that would dazzle the ancients"
4
Mar 10 2023
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Parachutes
Coldplay
This is the epitome of "meh" for me. It's definitely music, these people are certainly musicians, but the music they make is just so..... uninspiring and uninteresting. I do appreciate some of the celestial sounds they tend to gravitate toward, but other than that, I wouldn't really seek this out.
2
Mar 14 2023
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Urban Hymns
The Verve
This album is a bittersweet symphony.
There's the obvious incredible song on here, then there's some fantastic snippets of songs, but there aren't really any GREAT songs that spoke to me, they somehow lose me in the middle. Maybe that's just the psychadelic alt-rock genre in general for me?
I ALMOST made it to the end... this album has like 5-6 songs too many
2
Mar 15 2023
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Songs From The Big Chair
Tears For Fears
It's hard to deny how wonderful this is and how influential the music being pumped out by these guys is/was. I was jamming to almost every song on the album and listened to another album, this shit slaps, as the kids say.
5
Mar 16 2023
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Close To The Edge
Yes
Any album that starts with an 18 minute song has my attention, unless it's U2, of course.
I have huge respect for all the instrumentation going on here (sitar and harpsicord are some wild ones), namely the pipe organ!
The guitarist really likes harmonics for some reason.
4
Mar 17 2023
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Life's Too Good
The Sugarcubes
I really don't know what i'm listening to... what the hell is happening. Musically, this is shit. How in the world is this album influential? I could easily die without hearing this.
These songs are all over the place, musical anarchy. I will admit, there were a handful of bars that I was grooving to thanks to some neat percussion work.
I'm gonna try to use Chris' cafe scale on this one: I walked out halfway through my scone and took back my tip from the tip jar on my way out.
1
Mar 20 2023
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I'm Your Man
Leonard Cohen
This whole albums feels like a big "you had to be there" joke. After 2-3 songs I wanted to stop and move on to something else, but instead I kept listening with it in the background and actually found that I started enjoying it. That's got to be a rare phenomena for me, but I think it's because the music being produced here is SO different and unique than anything i've ever listened to.
3
Mar 22 2023
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Dirt
Alice In Chains
Jerry "riffmaster" Cantrell is one of my all time favorite guitarists. His guitarwork on this album is top tier.
"Dam That River" might be my favorite AIC song of all time.. just so "in your face" and heavy.
One cool thing is that AIC songs heavily inspired some of the songs on the OG Doom soundtrack: https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Doom_music
5
Mar 23 2023
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The Seldom Seen Kid
Elbow
This is quite pleasant and creative.. great music for a relaxing morning sipping on some coffee. Nothing really blowing my mind here from a musical or lyrical perspective, but there's definitely some catchy sections that i'm digging.
Praise aside, there are some songs on this album that really droned and didn't have any sort of climax or interesting sections and I got pretty bored. This is dangerously close to the coldplay category for me, but still a step above.
3
Mar 24 2023
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The Notorious Byrd Brothers
The Byrds
Meh... not bad. I could imagine this being a 69' woodstock headliner with everybody tripping out of their minds, they would lose it.
Pretty chill stuff, the end of the album gets pretty darn psychadelic and progressive, which I definitely enjoyed.
Okay, i keep coming back here to update my review as i listen to a few more songs because it keeps getting better, the first few songs kinda fall flat and gets more and more progressive
This is pretty cool though: "The Byrds also introduced the sound of the pedal steel guitar and the Moog modular synthesizer into their music, making it one of the first LP releases on which the Moog appears"
4
Mar 27 2023
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Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables
Dead Kennedys
IDK why I like this honestly, but I do. It's so fast and in your face and there's not a very strong sense of rhythm. Yet, I can't stop listening.
The songs are so short, they kinda blend together and I'll check to see if i'm still on the same song and i've listened to like 3 different songs and didn't even realize it.
4
Mar 29 2023
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Penthouse And Pavement
Heaven 17
This entire album feels like a "you had to be there" (maybe a working-class adult in the early 80s, to be specific). The songs are just all over the place, madness!!
I really love the synth work though... and they REALLY love slap bass, it's front and center in like every single song i listened to, it feels like i'm watching seinfeld.
3
Mar 30 2023
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Manassas
Stephen Stills
This is pretty solid, I dig the vibe and all the awesome musical intricacies going on here... but this is starting to blend in with all the other 60s and 70s rock we've listened to so far and I think that's a big shame.
Having said all that... i could only make it through about 10 of the 21 songs on this album, they were mostly fine, my favorite song of them was definitely "Both of Us", I loved the percussion.
3