My 1001 Albums Journey

Album	You	Global	Diff
Wonderful Rainbow Lightning Bolt	5	2.29	+2.71
Trout Mask Replica Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band	5	2.3	+2.7
Now I Got Worry The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion	5	2.52	+2.48
GI Germs	5	2.53	+2.47
OK Talvin Singh	5	2.56	+2.44
Welcome to the Afterfuture Mike Ladd	5	2.56	+2.44
Idlewild Everything But The Girl	5	2.58	+2.42
Kenza Khaled	5	2.59	+2.41
The United States Of America The United States Of America	5	2.61	+2.39
Space Ritual Hawkwind	5	2.69	+2.31

Album	You	Global	Diff
A Night At The Opera Queen	1	3.95	-2.95
Who's Next The Who	1	3.88	-2.88
Siamese Dream The Smashing Pumpkins	1	3.83	-2.83
Bad Michael Jackson	1	3.81	-2.81
American Idiot Green Day	1	3.77	-2.77
Grace Jeff Buckley	1	3.74	-2.74
Hot Fuss The Killers	1	3.73	-2.73
Appetite For Destruction Guns N' Roses	1	3.71	-2.71
Moondance Van Morrison	1	3.69	-2.69
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness The Smashing Pumpkins	1	3.68	-2.68

Artist	Albums	Average
Miles Davis	4	5
Joni Mitchell	4	5
PJ Harvey	4	5
The Kinks	4	4.75
Johnny Cash	3	5
Jimi Hendrix	3	5
Kate Bush	3	5
Radiohead	6	4.33
Bruce Springsteen	5	4.4
Led Zeppelin	5	4.4
Stevie Wonder	4	4.5
The Beach Boys	3	4.67
Bob Marley & The Wailers	3	4.67
Pixies	3	4.67
Prince	3	4.67
Nirvana	3	4.67
Beatles	7	4.14
Kendrick Lamar	2	5
Ray Charles	2	5
Aretha Franklin	2	5
Dusty Springfield	2	5
Grateful Dead	2	5
Cocteau Twins	2	5
Sly & The Family Stone	2	5
Fleetwood Mac	2	5
A Tribe Called Quest	2	5
Funkadelic	2	5
Fela Kuti	2	5
Willie Nelson	2	5
Fiona Apple	2	5
Fairport Convention	2	5
Curtis Mayfield	2	5
Todd Rundgren	2	5
Emmylou Harris	2	5
Siouxsie And The Banshees	2	5
Ali Farka Touré	2	5
Iggy Pop	2	5
Hole	2	5
CHIC	2	5
Sonic Youth	5	4.2
Neil Young	4	4.25
Bob Dylan	7	4
The Stooges	3	4.33
Black Sabbath	3	4.33
Marvin Gaye	3	4.33
Beastie Boys	3	4.33
Public Enemy	3	4.33
Beck	3	4.33

Artist	Albums	Average
Tom Waits	5	1
The Rolling Stones	6	1.5
U2	4	1.25
The Who	5	1.6
Aerosmith	3	1.33
Kings of Leon	3	1.33
Kanye West	3	1.33
George Michael	2	1
The Prodigy	2	1
Pulp	2	1
Bee Gees	2	1
The Smashing Pumpkins	2	1
Eminem	2	1
Robert Wyatt	2	1
Rod Stewart	2	1
LCD Soundsystem	2	1
Public Image Ltd.	2	1
Rufus Wainwright	2	1
Orbital	2	1
Coldplay	2	1
The Chemical Brothers	2	1
Van Morrison	3	1.67
Queen	3	1.67
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds	5	2
Ryan Adams	2	1.5
Def Leppard	2	1.5
Van Halen	2	1.5
Green Day	2	1.5
Rush	2	1.5
ZZ Top	2	1.5
Fatboy Slim	2	1.5
XTC	2	1.5
Jane's Addiction	2	1.5
TV On The Radio	2	1.5
Scott Walker	2	1.5
Suede	2	1.5
The Beta Band	2	1.5
Peter Gabriel	3	2
Frank Sinatra	3	2
Deep Purple	3	2
Morrissey	4	2.25

Artist	Ratings
Amy Winehouse	2, 5
Pere Ubu	4, 1
Motörhead	1, 4
Metallica	3, 1, 5, 3
Michael Jackson	1, 4, 4

Dire Straits by Dire Straits

living on a prayer, the perfect song if you want a more grating and less poetic Springsteen song to play at a Christian fundamentalist wedding

I've listened to this album so many times and it somehow just never hits for me. like i know it's good, and i want to like it more than i do, it just doesn't hit my brain in the right way or something. sorry patti!

returning for a post-mortem review (on this originally unreviewed 5 star rating) to say that this album was the first big surprise for me on the list and out of all of 1089 my favorite of the albums that i probably would not have heard if not for the generator. god bless you Gene Clark, you strange little man, for making the most mesmerizing psychedelic cosmic country rock gospel album to ever exist, and rest in peace!

whoever told john mayall he could sing the blues was playing quite the prank, the only question is if the prank was on john or the listening public

Radiohead for theatre kids

fine music that just does absolutely nothing for me

now these boys know how to rock

more backbone musically than 21, but otherwise just sort of "there"

moves effortlessly between mind numbing and annoying. what an achievement!

to quote John Hinckley Jr: "Fantastic songs! RIP David Berman."

wholeheartedly agree that it's significant enough to be on the list, also absolutely not my cup of tea. sorry bjork!

a lot to like here but i simply have never liked michael stipe's voice. sorry mike!

make some cuts, get this down below 35 minutes, and you'll have a solid 2/5 album

billie joe's voice has always been nails on a chalkboard to me, but the music is well enough executed, saving it from a 1

was never a huge Bowie fan in addition to thinking he was kind of a creep, so this never really had any emotional resonance for me as his "goodbye" or whatever but the actual music is objectively pretty good and interesting

never really been one for electronic music but even i gotta give it up for the boys

I'm sure seeing this live would be amazing but taken this way it just feels kind of overwrought and musical theatery. There's plenty of good here but when standard bearer for a Pink Floyd album is Dark Side of the Moon I can't give it better than a 4

not the epitome, but still public enemy

i just so happen to have been listening to taylor swift's discography for the first time, so i feel like I'm in a uniquely good position to speak on this album. as the wizened geniuses in the top reviews so bravely point out, taylor swift is a pop musician. hopefully by the time they finish this list they'll have slightly more open minds and maybe have lightened up like 10%. so of course while I'd love to disagree with them, this just isn't that good even as a taylor swift album. coming off the heels of lover and folklore, her two best albums up to this point, this is a huge downgrade. pretty bland, and mostly just feels like a poor imitation of folklore, but more national-y, which to me is not a good thing. it's too scientifically engineered by pop scientists to ever slip into bad, and it has its moments, but it's pretty much the definition of average, and thus, it gets a big ol' 3

1001 talking heads albums to listen to before you die

stone cold classic

objectively good by nearly any measure but i just don't like piano so let's compromise on a 3

kinda feel like a chump giving every Beatles album a 5 but sometimes you just gotta give it up for the boys

one of my favorite albums of all time, words can hardly do it justice, or at least not my words

i used to love this album, but now, I don't know. maybe it aged poorly or maybe my sensibilities have changed in a way to misalign me from it. still plenty of highlights but it verges on plain ol' annoying too much to me now

on the one hand, pretty innovative and impressive for 1970. on the other hand, I'd pay good money to never hear ian gillan sing again

bit of a genuine classic innit

can't resist anything by joni Mitchell, the voice, the complexity of the music, the lyricism. she's got the goods

leads off with a song that made me think this might be good, but no such luck. ranges from numbers for a musical I'd never want to see to songs that were somehow written with the hope they'd eventually be included in an awful indie movie from 2005. none of the instruments are played with any recognizable emotion, and cocker's voice is better suited to hosting a children's tv show. hard pass

cannot bring myself to care

production is very sterile and inhuman to me, the drum machines make me want to die, cheesy and not in a fun way. bad indeed

one of the standard bearers of the dark age of mainstream music. squeaky clean and totally vacuous production, no subtlety whatsoever, any emotion feels purely artificial, and to top it off i simply just don't like Brandon flowers' voice and overblown, melodramatic delivery. i did like it in high school so revisiting it was kind of fun for that reason, but I definitely won't be listening of my own free will ever again

waffled a lot between 4 and 5 but at the end of the day Essex Dogs clinched it

a little too laidback for my tastes and a bit annoying but not bad by any means

this was coasting to a cool 2 until he said "noivus" in "I'm Shakin'." the atrocious vocals of "Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy" are just the nail in the coffin

i somehow wasn't very consciously aware of little simz before listening to this, but that has been permanently corrected

a bona fide classic from one of my all time favorites. joyful and powerful and what music should be

you almost have to appreciate a white guy bringing into reality the most debased, terrible version of what so many white people have imagined all rap music to be

always loved Ball and Biscuit, but the rest just doesn't do that much for me

I've only ever heard more recent stuff from queens of the stone age and never loved it, but compared to this, those albums at least have some unique and interesting artistic qualities even if they aren't for me. the best words to describe this are boring and generic

just dreadfully boring

a combination of engrossing, forceful and endlessly inventive percussion, beautiful and heart wrenching lyricism, and a gorgeous, insanely expressive vocal performance. it didn't hit me quite right on my first listen when it came out, but from then on it's just grown on me more and more; on every listen it just opens up more and more.

the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was getting two albums by the prodigy put onto this list

The TBI Beatles

very pleasant surprise, the vocals are usually what make or break metal for me, and this has exactly the vocal style i typically dislike, so i immediately was a bit down on it but i tried to keep an open mind. good thing i did, because while i never really came around to the vocal performance, the blending of sounds and styles here is really something, and excellently performed. I don't know that I'll be listening over and over by any means but it's definitely interesting, and very enjoyable

this? now this is that kinda stuff i do not like

blandly pleasant music to play in a "cool" clothing store

put this one down as pleasant surprise; like many I'm not usually one for Bob Dylan's voice, but i didn't mind it here and the song writing is pretty good as per usual. but a lot of it feels kind of samey to me, and i can only listen to so much harmonica

probably tolerable if you, like many of these other reviewers, were 13 when it came out and listened to it a lot. i was 13 when it came out, but i did not

pretty enjoyable mix of jazz and prog, like it quite a bit, would have liked it more if Robert Wyatt had kept his trap shut on Moon in June

as someone who hates "Loser" and has allowed my knowledge of Beck to begin and end there, i was extremely skeptical, but let's be real: this shit goes

i always complain about albums being too long, and to be fair, this is a little bit of a unique situation in that regard since truly this is two solo albums-- if you think it's too long, just listen to one! but it is still packaged and presented as one, so i feel it has to lose some points for that. the bigger issue with the runtime though, is that while i do quite enjoy the Big Boi half, once you get to The Love Below, it just doesn't do that much for me. it's very poppy and fun and well made, but i don't respond to it as much as Speakerboxxx. maybe if i did listen to it in isolation i'd feel differently, since the fatigue of the runtime probably isn't doing it any favors, but if i'm rating the whole thing as one album, i can't go above 4

one of my biggest musical pet peeves is horrible dude vocalists who simply can't accept they have a voice for the newspaper and barrel right ahead into performing lead vocals. the actual music here is good, but Billy Corgan is one of the kings of this archetype, and his singing completely kills the album

starts out so strong through the first three tracks, and then just kind of... keeps going

hopefully brexit will make it more difficult for the english to get their hands on musical instruments

not usually one for instrumental hip hop but this is obviously a beautiful example it. still, I don't think this would ever be a repeated active listen for me, but i can certainly appreciate it. midnight in a perfect world is a banger though

terrible man, fantastic Christmas album

okay: I'm finally convinced that everybody should in fact listen to 4 barely distinguishable talking heads albums before they die

zappa zaps again with all the noodling on this one

very likely the best version of this sort of thing, which is not saying much

an amazing opening track, a fantastic closer, a pretty good beatles cover, and some other songs i don't quite remember

very pleasant surprise! i think my big criticism would be directed at the length; personally i feel that there are very very few hour long albums that earn it, and there's a handful of songs here that could be dropped and they wouldn't be missed, but otherwise color me impressed

what a coincidence, i was just thinking this list could use even more new wave albums!

really brings me back to mvp baseball 2005

never really gave these guys a fair shake. i miss those days

so insane that I can't help like it a little bit

inject it into my veins

probably my least favorite experience album (I don't think that's a hugely controversial opinion) but Jimi's worst is still better than many's best

i mean, it's not terrible, i guess

i love Bruce, but the production here is just completely limp and lifeless, and it mostly ends up sounding like a bruce springsteen impression

i think 'Zilch' must qualify as some kind of crime against humanity

ADAM RAISED A CAIN

are some of the songs embarrassingly weird and bad? sure. do i still like it? of course

lana is the modern standard bearer of what i often refer to, somewhar derisively, as "weepy music." like, it's fine, but it is extremely not for me, and i have a hard time imagining anybody not critically depressed wanting to listen to this front to back on any kind of regular basis also tolkien should get a songwriting credit on "not all who wander are lost"

the reduction of bob marley/reggae generally to a brand and a punchline by many parts of white America is impossible to not be infuriated by after you actually listen to him

do i even have to explain?

the contrarian part of me always wants to not like bob dylan but there's really just no helping it

really boggles the mind that people try to argue the stones are better than the Beatles. annoying, misogynist, repetitive. at least the beatles paired their misogyny with good music

untouchable

beautiful and mesmerizing. probably a 4 on a lot of days, but Cybele's Reverie and Emperor Tomato Ketchup, among other tracks, just hit me perfectly tonight

absolutely serviceable

is it good? hey, sure, but when I'm getting this a few days after blood on the tracks i gotta make some kind of differentiation to indicate how great blood on the tracks is

what is there to say that you can't read in the other reviews? as we all know, he's very technically proficient, and the production is fantastic, but the lyrical content is just abysmal. clearly, he's being intentionally outrageous and provocative and trying desperately to be funny, but it all falls flat, to put it mildly. this sort of peurile 90s outrage is just endlessly tiring. and to top it off, hey, he can't help it, but i just really dislike his voice

not the most mindless house or big beat album I've been saddled with by this list, so there's that. I'll throw it a +1 for the KLF also being very bonkers and interesting

somehow my first time listening to nine inch nails; enjoyed it quite a bit, but probably will never seek it out on my own again

it's bad, it's good, it's aggressively not music as well as very musical. comes closer to 'art' than many many albums on the list. really there's nothing i can say that hasn't been said already, but i gotta slap a 5 on it just for the novelty, influence and vision (if you can call untreated schizophrenia vision). there really are many snatches of genuinely catchy and enjoyable music here, but i think only someone interested in developing some schizophrenia of their own would want to listen to this front to back on anything approaching a regular basis. as they say, fast and bulbous

there is just something about Pink Moon and I that is fundamentally incompatible. i have never been able to come remotely close to wrapping my head around what the appeal is. it's just so dreary and boring to me, no matter how many shots I've given it over the years. i like bryter layter but this just drives me crazy happy for everybody that loves and appreciates Nick Drake, but that will never be me

pretty funky tunes

do i like it? not really. but it's definitely interesting, bracing, and quite obviously very ahead of its time. I can't really say i hated it, although i do hope I'm able to go the rest of my life never hearing "Girl" again

I've heard this recently enough to feel comfortable providing my thoughts without giving this gigantic asshole any more streams: like probably many other white people my age, Kanye was a big entry point for me into rap, and was essentially the only hip hop i listened to for a good while (very embarrassed to have been a "everything but rap and country" kid in middle school). now, I've exposed myself to much more rap & hip hop and i just find my tastes have changed. the actual quality of production is pretty unimpeachable but the style of it just does nothing for me. a lot of it is weirdly weightless and the sounds just don't wow me the way they did back in 2010. and of course many of the actual lyrics are eye rolling how much of this is just a subconscious response to what Kanye has become? probably a lot, i dunno. i try to listen unbiased but there's just an inescapable level of slime over all of it now. i want to say my diminished view is honestly come by, but truly i can't say how much my opinion of the man is causing me to be less generous than i otherwise would be. but, hey, I'm not a professional critic, i can afford to be biased

beautifully realized and fulfilling piece of art; that being said I don't love what she's doing with her voice here as a big time Rid of Me fan, and there are some stretches that are definitely on the grating side. have to give it up and give it a 5 for the excellent realization of a vision, but this is not something I'd ever have going on repeat

generally just quite tiresome. he's got a good flow and the beats are fine if not anything to write home about, but the lyrics are just completely lacking in any artfulness or subtlety. i tried to be on bored at first but it really just wears on you. the beats and music start to blend together, the lyrics just get lamer and stupider

interminable and frankly just kind of lame. james hetfield's voice also just does not sound great in that weird way a lot of 90s and 2000s metal vocals sound that i can never quite describe. I'm sure this would have been cool to attend, but as a recording it is miserable and neverending

now this is some genuinely interesting freak music. very dramatic, weird and eclectic, and laibach themselves and the NSK state are fascinating. can't imagine I'll be reaching for this over and over, but very happy to have been exposed to it

listened to this album for the first time a little over a year ago and didn't particularly care for it. guess i grew a brain since then

can't think of a worse mega-successful band. musical styrofoam packing peanuts, absymally bad lyrics, somebody should remove Bono's vocal chords, may god have mercy on their souls

better than the last echo and the bunnymen album i got on here, which is frankly a vague memory (just the kind of impression you'd expect an "album you have to listen to before you die" to make!) a little more squirmy and sonically interesting than a lot of its ilk. it almost thrums and dare i say crackles at points! however, the obvious and embarrassing bias towards British music (especially all the post-punk and new wave) is getting more than a little tiresome. it's really too bad that hardly anybody outside of the US and UK has made any music in the last 70 years. ah well

i feel like every song immediately exited my brain after listening, but overall it's pretty much fine. however, It's A Shame About Ray is one my least favorite songs of all time so that's an automatic deduction right there

some undeniable bangers (don't stop til you get enough, get on the floor) and some undeniable stinkers (she's out of my life, I can't help it)

reheated and disposable. if art decorates space and music decorates time, this is auditory motel art

when i finish this list, I'll look back on this album and think "which one was that?"

very impressive and deserves its spot on the list, but i personally am not a fan of hour long solo piano recordings, regardless of proficiency or significance

after noticing some discrepancies with the lyrics, i dug around and learned that on spotify (as well as at least apple music according to another reviewer) tracks 4-7 are actually tracks 4-7 from their first album. can you just swing over to the debut and play the correct Mystery City songs there? no, that'd be too easy, Bangkok Shocks of course has the correct tracks 4-7. this works for and against my initial impressions, as it means both the vile lyric "the sweet taste from the lips between your legs" (which sent me down this rabbit hole) and my favorite song (Cheyenne, mislabeled as Lick Summer Love) are both not actually on Mystery City. without this valley and peak, it's pretty unremarkable. more fun and less grating than the glam metal bands they'd influence, at least

usually I'm at least somewhat generous to stuff that tries to be "artsy" like this, but this just feels super forced and pretentious. there are a couple glimmers of enjoyable music but as everybody and their dog has pointed out, his voice is just unlistenably bad. is there supposed to be some point being made by the juxtaposition of the awful vocals and the passable-to-good music? possibly, but just because you do something bad on purpose doesn't make it magically not bad

pretty economical way to make 44 minutes feel like 90

first time really listening to the kinks, i was hoping i could say "more like The Stinks" but unfortunately it was good so i am unable to put "more like The Stinks" in this review

a voice i would usually find to be a turn off but oddly works for me, and the musical backing is by and large gorgeous. my political sympathies also make me inclined to like the bastard, and after all I'm always a sucker for this folk shit

often I'll just leave the review blank for 5 star albums where i have nothing to add that hasn't been said a million times already here and elsewhere, but sometimes i need to write something just to emphatically underline that sentiment. this is one of those times

sure there are some songs I don't love (namely Two For The Price Of One which is terrible) but on the whole this is just very fun, very well made and actually fairly interesting pop music. Arrival is more fun, but this is the better album

the light at the end of the tunnel that is 90s electronic music

i mean i obviously appreciate how important this album is, and it has some real bangers, but it's just not something I'm gonna be listening to on a regular basis. at only 25 minutes it's short and sweet but there are still songs i just don't care about. 5/5 for deserving a spot on the list, but 3/5 in my heart

i really like this in theory but in practice i don't want to hear David Thomas's vocal performance ever again (can't believe he had time for this band on top of running Wendy's!) challenging in a way that doesn't feel forced or (excessively) pretentious. not something to throw on in the background for sure, but active listening is certainly rewarded here. again, i just wish there wasn't some unwritten rule about post punk vocals being insufferable 85% of the time

i went in expecting to really hate this, but instead i only mildly disliked it 👍🏻

somebody kill me!!!! soul crushingly lame I'm sure this was a thrilling release for people working at advertising firms!!!

i can appreciate the weirdness and there's some glimmers of stuff here i like, but overall i just find it really grating. they obviously have talent and are clearly pulling on some good reference points but the final product just doesn't work for me. the a cappella shit is just the final nail in the coffin (if i never hear Ambulance again, it'll be too soon) only by the strength of Wear You Out does this crawl up to a 2

when i got shleep on here a couple weeks ago, i figured that Robert wyatt's voice must have changed as he aged, or he was doing a little late career experimentation or something. apparently, no, he's just been rocking with this god awful vocal style the whole damn time

never have been and probably never will be the right flavor of gay for sufjan stevens, but i can recognize that this is almost objectively good, even if it doesn't really do anything for me. a begrudging 4

i mean it's not gonna be in heavy rotation for me by any means, but I'm always gonna be a sucker for this sort of thing to a certain extent. also you can't not laugh when it's a guy named "Ramblin' ______" and half his songs are about bugs and cocaine

basically didn't know any chicago past 25 or 6 to 4 (which is kinda lame but gotta admit is still a banger) this is pretty fun and well made, and the boys are technically good musicians, but it's a little too long and just kind of cheesy. overall: solid but not a hit for me

good thing no one was around when i listened to this because it meant no one heard when i blurted out "oh, shut the fuck up" when he started singing Amazing Grace

not an ounce of fat on this bad boy

kinda felt like it would never end. otherwise passable to good!

there's definitely stuff here that didn't age, uh, gracefully, but there's a lot more that's still very relevant and sonically it's just so fuckin heavy and powerful

great first try, boys! oh, this was their second album? well, nevertheless,

was i high in the bath tub while listening to this? sure, of course, so what?

TWO ryan Adams albums on this list??????

eclectic, engaging and funky; finally a good electronic album on the list (although I think simply calling this "electronic" music really doesn't tell the whole story)

still gestating here but an amazing debut nevertheless

without this list, i would have in fact died never listening to this, and upon my arrival in hell would have been dutifully informed i had missed out on some classic British jangle pop. "thank god" i would have said

i could almost get behind this musically but it is just soooo saccharine and twee

if i was a white middle class suburban dad desperate to formulate some kind of identity by staking a bizarre claim on irish heritage despite my family being in america for 150 years, i would probably love this!

if i had any suspicions that many of this site's users were dull, pretentious men, then the reviews for this album certainly would have done nothing to confirm them! 👍🏻

i truly expected to absolutely hate this, and while I didn't, i did also go out of ny way to make sure i listened to the album as originally released (not the one disc version the spotify link here leads to) and good lord there is no album that can justify a 2 hour and 20 minute length, and certainly not when that album is entirely drum and bass. I'll toss it an extra star for not making me 100% bonkers which is an achievement, but if I'm grading this as an album listening experience than holy shit you will never ever catch me putting this on again

by all rights, i should love this, but it just doesn't really do that much for me! hard to put my finger on it, but it's just missing some sort of oomph. feels kind of paint-by-numbersy, which is obviously an opinion i can only have with 50 years of hindsight of music no doubt influenced by it and having heard Apache sampled a million times, but i never claimed to have rational opinions. if somebody put it on i wouldn't complain but I'll probably never reach for it myself

i simply can't fathom why such an annoying and utterly forgettable album was removed in later editions of the book!

feels a lot more like poetry read over music than a lot of rap, unfortunately I'm not the biggest fan of poetry. musically it gets pretty repetitive but there are some nice moments, and i do appreciate the well expressed political sentiments (which i am of course biased towards) but sonically there's just not that much to write home about

i want to go back in time and stop myself from ever learning about this website

I don't think this is really horrible or anything, and i do recognize the cultural significance of destiny's child, especially in hind sight as the jumping off point for Beyoncé, but this whole thing just feels extremely cynical and barely even like an album. in terms of content and themes, there's absolutely no cohesion or consistency here-- to jump from Bootylicious right into Nasty Girl is some crazy whiplash, and then when you sprinkle in all the god stuff it doesn't feel like an album at all but just a mish mash of songs scientifically designed to hit as many segments of the population as possible. there's no overarching ideas and you really don't get the impression this is intended to be listened to as an actual album at all, you're just supposed to pick out your favorites and ditch the rest. again, not awful, but it gets a 1 for the cynicism of it and for barely even qualifying as an album

uncle music (derogatory)

barf

perfect album, but only if you want to show someone why this era of music was so fucking lame

is it good? not really. will i be listening to it front to back all the time? definitely not. is it more interesting and engaging than 60% of the stuff on this list? absolutely. is Hamburger Lady cool as fuck and AB/7A a banger? you know it

i just don't like bjork! you can't make me!

somebody please kill me before the next Tom waits album comes up (this is definitely better than the other two I've had to listen to so far but i still hate it)

of course it's 5 stars, please, it's funkadelic, i would allow George clinton to cut my head off, you are silly if you expected a different rating

i have a nostalgic soft spot for nu metal but this is just kind of vaguely annoying to me

short and sweet 🌺

put me to sleep (literally) but not in a bad way

the platonic ideal of Average Metal

my least favorite fiona apple album and still absolutely fantastic

put me to sleep (figuratively) but in a bad way

there's that thing people say about film scores, that you hardly even take notice of the greatest ones when actually watching a film. in that sense, this certainly achieves its stated goal

i really appreciate the restraint they showed in keeping this to a brisk, mind numbing 75 minutes

after 5 listens i finally perceive the truth: this is pretty good

on different class there was some interesting stuff going on sonically in spite of Cocker's massively unlistenable voice. here, the music is boring and his voice still sounds like he's auditioning for the part of a carefree and lively tree on a nicktoons animated series

i remember the first time i heard this a couple years ago, the names "Primal Scream" and "Screamadelica" led to me to believe i was about to experience some cool as fuck weirdo psychedelic punk music, and instead i just got some fairly psychedelic rock with a big heaping helping of grating house music. at least Loaded is a fucking banger

beautiful music and i want to like bill callahan more, but he's just another case of a voice I don't like at all. he can't help that though, and he's brilliant when it comes to all the stuff he can

i dunno, it's pretty good, but i can't really stand the very very 80s pop sound on full display here. i can appreciate that she's touching on the subject matter she is (including the sample of the newscast about a shooting is a pretty legit move for an album this big and mainstream) but it doesn't really feel like she has anything specific or novel to say. I'm a broken record on this, but it's also too long, I'm now thoroughly convinced that CDs, digital formats, etc were all mistakes since at least when everything was on vinyl artists had to know how to exercise some restraint. it's good, but it has a lot of flaws that keep it from being a heavy rotation album for me

useful at least for defining the word "grating"

never really been my fav Beatles album, although "got to get you into my life" is one of my fav songs by them. if this was the only beatles album on the list it'd skate by with a 5 probably but when there's so many, you gotta grade on a curve

sure, i had a horrible ex who loved LCD soundsystem and i always found them annoying, but I'd be willing to look past that if this dweeb could produce a pleasant or interesting sound with his voice

i do think big bad pop zeitgeisty albums deserve to be on this list; after all, it's just "albums you must hear before you die," not "the best albums of all time." influence and significance and reach have to carry a lot of weight too that being said, this album is wholly unremarkable, there are others that would fill this niche/time period better, and I'm surprised this one ever made the list and equally unsurprised that it was removed from future editions. two thumbs way down JT

annoying voice and weightless music: truly emblematic of 2007!

many other complaints but the disgusting sound of lips on the opening track are basically an automatic 1 on their own

explosive, righteous, powerful, and just fucking cool as hell sonically. one of the best albums on the list flat out

i appreciate the goofiness and tongue-in-cheekness of it all, but goddamn you cannot make your album this long when you have so little to say

i harp a lot about albums being too long, but here's an exceedingly rare example of an 80 minute album that actually earns its length

horrifically generic and boring glam rock, solidly in the category of "will be impossible to recall exactly how it sounded two months from now"

not offensively bad, but just kind of boring and very repetitive. a lot of what you hear here sounds like first drafts, both lyrically and musically. pass!

a huge dork's idea of the kind of music you'd put on for sex

perhaps this list's biggest problem is the number of repeats there are when there are still so many amazing and artists (especially from africa, Asia and latin America) that are totally unrepresented. this is a pretty good album, but when it's the fifth led zeppelin album on the list and (in my opinion) markedly not as good as the others, it feels like a waste of a spot that could have gone to a band like Amanaz or Yellow Magic Orchestra

this feels so far ahead of its time. innovative sounds, cool riffs, leftist politics, sign me up

as a self identified britpop disliker and somebody who didn't like their first album on this list all that much, i was pretty amazed at how good and eclectic this is. basically every song is good, while covering a lot of territory but still coming together in a pretty cohesive and tight package. definitely one of the most pleasant surprises for me on this list!

starts out strong, gotta give it up for Enter Sandman, despite its overplayedness, then Sad But True is good and later on Wherever I May Roam kinda goes... besides those you're left with 45 minutes of forgettable to serviceable music

exhausting

on the one hand, it's self evidently really good. on the other hand, 3 hours of it is way way too much and i will die on the hill that this is not an 'album.' split the difference and call it a 3

me and my 8 awful smelling housemates recorded an album this summer. none of us had ever touched an instrument before and we all think we're the smartest person in the world. hope you enjoy it!

enjoyable, interesting, impressive, and actually fits the definition of an album you "should listen to before you die." probably won't be throwing it on all the time but I'm richer for having heard it

i hated this immediately, but unfortunately, a twisted compulsion to give every album a fair shake and listen to them in full means i have subjected myself to a shockingly self indulgent 3 hours of twee nick cave demos this is the worst album on the list so far by a wide margin. any jazz musician should be able to legally kill Stephin Merritt for Love Is Like Jazz. they would have played this at gitmo, but then they wouldn't have anybody left to torture after it killed everyone

just one black mark here: nick cave's abysmal and out of place performance on "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," but Fiona Apple on "Bridge Over Troubled Water" more than cancels that out

what do you think the odds are that Robert Dimery was a teenager/young adult during the new wave and britpop eras?

kind of conflicting, the beats and production are so cool and ahead of their time, but the lyrics definitely leave quite a bit to be desired. they're just kind of lame, without that much interesting to say and one thing i can never stand in hip hop of any era is an over reliance on repetitious lyrics. I'm not all that bothered by the content-- he's playing a character, 90s hip hop had a lot of content like this, whatever-- but the character is the only thing there, he's not saying anything novel or interesting, he's just inhabiting a marginally interesting character. but if i just threw this on and paid no attention to the actual lyrics, then that's some good music

finally, an answer to the question: "what if the rolling stones were good?"

an evil creep with some admittedly catchy/hooky stuff here buried under a ton of mediocre shit, in addition to being way way too fucking long (do you really expect me to buy this as some kind of 'masterpiece,' marilyn?) and as always his shtick is just so performative and lame. considered in a vacuum it's probably actually a 2 but I'm feeling particularly ungenerous towards it

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that every album by a black woman that hasn't been formally inducted into the """canon""" gets poor reviews on this site

I've always found the national to be kind of dull, pretentious and certainly quite overrated. I don't think you could really call this "bad" but it's absolutely not for me

not bad, definitely overlong and it steps a little too much into perhaps my most hated genre, electroswing, but overall pretty enjoyable

probably neat when it came out but now it just makes me think "why am i not just listening to either the Beatles or CSNY?"

honestly I wasn't expecting much but this is pretty cohesive and pleasant, with some pretty beautiful portions. plus who doesn't love a Manson family connection!

i had never heard of Skunk Anansie but this was a super pleasant surprise: funky, hard edged or beautiful as needed, and just plain cool sonically, with an amazing voice from Skin. will absolutely be checking out more of their discography

pretty nice to clean the house to

simon i love but once you get garfunkel in the mix? that's my time to catch a little shut eye

keep going, I'm sure the next forgettable new wave album is the one that I'll finally love (at least karma chameleon is good)

cool weirdo shit

some really cool riffs and hooky songs punctuated with extremely grating moments. bonus points for a band name I've always found to be eye rollingly annoying!

there will be a speaker in my tombstone that plays 1983 on repeat

like all frank sinatra, tops out at "nice background music." I can't really say it's bad obviously but you will never catch me actively listening to frankie by choice. great example of a 3 but I'm feeling spiteful so minus 1 point for all the dumb guys who think frank Sinatra is the pinnacle of music

blandly pleasant

it really blows my mind that Q-Tip doesn't come up more in conversations about the greatest rappers of all time, not to mention how talented he is as a producer. this is so funky and groovy & lyrically dense and cool, especially when you put it up against almost all of its contemporaries

twee 2010s indie pop rock drivel

i feel like Sisyphus except instead of rolling a boulder up a hill it's listening to mediocre new wave albums

i still don't love his voice but I'll be damned if i don't pretty much love everything else here. after all, guys like me are mad for turtle meat

it wouldn't be until Hey There Delilah that this level of cloying, twee irritation would be surpassed

I've been listening to ELO since i was a kid, and honestly, this is not nearly my favorite album of theirs. it's their big pop album with many of their huge hits, but i just think it's a lot less interesting than a lot of their other work. it's probably also the album that introduced me to the concept of an album being too long and having too much filler. i still love it, and comparing it to the rest of this list in general, it's gotta get a 5, but if Face the Music, Eldorado, ELO 2, etc etc were on here it'd be getting a 4 just in relation to those

better than a lot of the new wave/post punk on this list, lots of interesting and varied sounds, but also a very good example of what i call 'post punk voice' (guy who mostly can't sing and instead puts on a flat affectation as if he's the second coming of ian curtis)

there's nothing wrong with cribbing from your inspirations, lots of great art and especially music does it, but you do have to put something interesting or novel into the mix, or what's the point? i liked Idiot Brother at least

i liked the modern dance but no thanks

i dunno, by all rights i should probably dislike this, but I've always loved tracey Thorn's voice and for some reason the whole package just really hits. good thing I'm not a real critic because 'it just hits' probably wouldn't fly!

blandly pleasant!

it's so against my brand to like this. french electronic duo? this is devastating. absolutely unfair that this is so groovy and ominous and thrumming

I'm shocked that a hit 80s song that represents almost the entire modern legacy of a band comes from an otherwise completely forgettable and/or annoying album! probably the only time that's happened

anybody who says Fairytale of New York is their favorite Christmas song should be treated with the same contempt as somebody who names Die Hard as their favorite Christmas movie

pretty good but not particularly noteworthy

there's something very funny about Bowie bringing a band back from the brink of death so that they can continue on as a two-bit imitation of him

this is fine for what it is but for me personally i can't imagine a scenario where I'd put this on over a grateful dead set. simply a matter of taste, i think everyone only has room for one jam band in their life!

kind of a blessing in disguise that Spotify only has the shitty version, because for someone like me who doesn't have a ton of exposure to straight ahead Indian music (despite its relatively outsized influence on music in the anglophone world) it actually helps you appreciate the real thing more when you first accidentally get exposed to the same music only executed much more poorly

coming from someone that would usually say this as a compliment: this is just a whole bunch of noise, however.... she do be busy sucking on my ding dong 🤷🏻

i love music created only for licensing!

kind of a novelty but also i listened to it back to back 3 times so it was doing something right

john lydon's shtick is as always very tiresome, but Fodderstompf deserves some recognition as perhaps the worst album closer of all time

no thanks. really, the only purpose of this project is to broaden my own horizons and i heard this back when it came out, i remember it, no reason to give him even the tiny useless amount of money from streaming it. it was fine back then. I'm sure it holds up fine, but I'll never be listening again of my own volition

slick, gaudy and utterly vacuous

i think i just missed the boat on the white stripes. if i had listened contemporaneously, I'd probably be able to appreciate it more or at least have some nostalgia, but coming to them fresh in the 2020s, having already listened to plenty of blues, 70s garage rock and proto punk, I don't hear anything from them i wouldn't rather get somewhere else. not bad but just doesn't do anything for me. minus 1 point for jack white's nasally voice that feels even more untempered than on later albums (and not in a good way)

i dig it but compared to their first two albums it feels a lot weaker. less raw emotion and vitriol in Iggy's voice, the groove i love so much in the first two is gone. still great and its influence is pretty clear to see though

like every other elvis costello album this hits me absolutely nowhere, no real strong feelings about this, although i did find it to be about 15% more grating than his other albums

it's not very pretty or even particularly good but there is something affecting and tragic about the whole thing, both in the story behind its recording and musically. octopus does actually kind of slap though

actually ended up liking this much more than their later albums! sure, you could say it's a little derivative for the time but it's much more fun and wat less overwrought than tommy or who's next. you either die the good who or live long enough to see yourself become the bad who

it's definitely good but i don't know if it really warrants a spot on the list, i feel like this is one for a nirvana fan, not the general public. thinking of the list as a broad liberal arts education (which i feel is the basic premise) this feels sort of like an advanced chemistry class. like sure it's valuable, but it's something you pursue further as an individual, not something that should be part of the foundation

now this is my shit: i love desert blues, i love the guitar tone, i love how hypnotic and groovy and by turns lively and relaxing it is

the pinnacle of steely dan's career: recording Peg so that De La Soul could sample it in Eye Know

after years of cultivating a vaguely continental European vibe, bowie boldly declared "actually I'm just a german guy now"

killer queen is of course a banger. there were some other songs too, i think

utterly, painfully, unremarkable music paired with a voice that can be described as generically good but will never be hailed as unique or particularly interesting. I'll give rufus the benefit of the doubt that this was a labor of love and the result of his true artistic expression, which actually does make it somewhat impressive that it sounds like it was created exclusively in response to the feedback of focus groups

this is what you'd write to be the in-universe music of the main character's band in a crappy 80s movie

pretty good but left no real impression on me, and didn't seem particularly noteworthy or significant for the era. guess you had to be there!

it sucks

having never heard of this band, their name and wikipedia excerpt (1993 indie rock) gave me the impression that i was about to listen to one of the 90's Most Licenceable Albums but thankfully those expectations were subverted. instead i got some pretty cool post hardcore with a little industrial mixed in for good measure. the vocals aren't my favorite but they're low enough in the mix for me to tune them out and enjoy that guitar tone

this prick'll crank out some decent tunes now and again

I believe it was Shakespeare who once said "van BORRISON,,!!!!! bitch"

actually I'd have been quite okay dying not having heard nick cave's entire discography

i think if i had been way into this at the time I'd probably love it, but as it stands it's just fine

Richard Becomes Asleep

look I'm not saying this is totally without value and that scott walker lacks talent or skill, but i am saying that i found it boring and annoying

yee haw

cannot fucking stand Lemmy's god awful voice and while I don't think lyrical content exactly constitutes a moral affront or anything, Jailbait (among others) does make me personally feel very skeeved out (which could possibly be forgivable if it was a banger (it isn't))

pretty pleasant one to just let wash over you, but doesn't really stick with me

i prefer her more country stuff but Constant Craving is an absolute banger

always a sucker for a little twang but i don't really feel anything else off of this that would compel me to return very often

i like to have fun and listen to music 🙂

thank god this is 70 minutes, they just have so much to say!

Creepysexycool

notable for its unevenness at least, lots of catchy groovy moments but also many grating repetitive moments

perfectly replicates the feeling you get while waiting for the "skip" button to pop up on a youtube ad

bores me to tears when Bono's wailing isn't making me grind my teeth, which i guess does technically count as an emotional response, so fair play for that

forward thinking hobbit music

i would have sworn on my life there was a Sade SNL performance where she's introduced by Dan Aykroyd and he nails the pronunciation of her name but apparently I'm insane because i couldn't locate it anywhere. anyway this album rules

felt like listening to one 41 minute long queen song

totally serviceable and totally mystifying why it's on this list

ayyyy get ovah hea ya damn fugazi

as somebody who loves pop music: wow 76 minutes of horribly produced early 2000s pop music 🥰

this is basically the definition of 'blandly pleasant"

these funky boys are just having fun

it is very funny that even when beck drops the eccentricity & sampling and does a more straightforward & stripped down singer songwritery album it still blows all the contemporary clowns who built their careers around that style out of the water

pretty positive I'm gonna come out on the other end of this thing actually having less appreciation for new wave

it's good

maybe in another life I'm the right kind of gay to like madonna

this era of rap is just absolute garbage to me and this album is its poster boy. basically you've got 3 or 4 songs, some of which sound like they're using Casio keyboard beats, repeated over 54 minutes (thank god the last 4 songs were bonus tracks, which to me means i was under no obligation to subject myself to them)

i have a black denim guns n roses jacket i thrifted years ago with this huge embroidered design on the back. i love this jacket. so guns n roses brought at least one good thing into existence

saints row 1 alternative radio station ass music

some killer lots of filler

careful, if you hear this band playing in a bar, it probably means that an ex-cop looking for his kidnapped wife is about to beat up you and all of your goon friends

the later "a little too full of themselves" albums are good but this one hits the sweet spot for me

I'm starting to think this Zappa guy makes music that isn't exactly normal🤔

i would like to like the cure but i simply do not

wow now i see where buckcherry gets it from

the problem with me is that i unfortunately like this kind of weirdo folk bullshit

I'm thankful for this list for showing me all the different flavors of annoying you can get from british electronic music

there's not really anything wrong with it but i just have no affinity or patience for all of the 2000s indie garage rock shit

okay so i probably gave this an unfair advantage by listening to it at the gym

this is good but doesn't really feel very distinct from its contemporaries in any way that would make me a repeat visitor

M.I.A.’s whole deal is basically objectively cool (sans recent developments) but sonically the music just annoys me

who knew that the Vorta in that one episode of Deep Space 9 had it in him

yah it's ok

i actually really dig the music but dear lord someone needs to go back in time and tell bryan ferry to put a sock in it

stranger things will never be able to ruin running up that hill for me (although the best song on the album is actually cloudbusting)

speaking as someone who loves pop, i think that even more so than other genres what you like is going to be heavily colored by the time you grew up in, and unfortunately i was 3 when this came out so i just hear it as some passable pop r&b

Listening Without Caring

i love to say that all live albums are bad except for the grateful dead but Folsom prison and san quentin are of course also exceptions to the rule

pretty nice but I won't be raving about it from any rooftops

a few notches above car commercial music

sadly changing the 114 to 0 on the "days without an elvis costello album" sign

it's really funny to name drop de la soul in a song about the old school when even their oldest album was only 6 years old when this came out

not horrible but pretty unremarkable and just sort of irks me for some reason i can't quite put my finger on

i could shut my brain off and ignore how cynical and lacking in any kind of artistic sentiment kiss is if there was anything fun or enjoyable about the music, but as far as i can tell the music only exists to serve as an in-group signifier for America's most tragically boring simpletons (and to sell licensed merchandise of course)

this alternates between some real bangers and some real snoozefests but interestingly for my typical preference i actually find the more down tempo songs to be the more interesting and ear catching ones

i do have to begrudgingly give it up for take it easy, and the rest is more pleasant and country than the later eagles I'm more familiar with

I don't even have to look at the reviews to know people are trotting out the same old complaints about the amount of sexual and violent content here, and frankly it's not my absolute favorite subject matter either, but if you're gonna use that to wholesale dismiss the amazing production and flow on display here then you really need to lighten up. plus it's funny how fixated he is on balls specifically

the title is very appropriate since it made me forget that i mostly like radiohead

i cravement the pavement

gotta contact the owner of this site and let them know they fucked up by not putting the FUNK tag on this sucker

i like the music. do not like the voice that would be more at home announcing the names of clowns at the rodeo

radiohead for morons

it always sucks to see jobs get outsourced overseas. spare a thought for the poor Pentagon officer who lost his job designing audio to be played as part of psychological warfare campaigns because these English lads were willing to do it cheaper.

you gotta love that 80s pop production where all the instrumentation sounds like it was recorded in an aluminum shack

honestly the title track kind of undeniably goes but thankfully for my own personal convictions and dislike of lennon the rest of the album ranges from fine to unremarkable to annoying. musically i do actually like How Do You Sleep, but even being also kind of a Paul hater, i find it just a little too crass as a response to the much more mild jabs on Ram

for all i know, within the pantheon of raï, people feel the same way about Khaled as i do about U2 and coldplay, but in the context of this list, this album is like water and I'm a man dying of thirst

okay look a lot of it is very good but i did also involuntarily say "jesus Christ how long is this shit" somewhere near the end

if I've learned anything from this list it's that Nirvana is actually the only good grunge band

nowadays it's maybe a little cliche to hate coldplay but fortunately my hate will long outlast that trend

some good catchy tunes, some annoying ones (cough Saturday night's alright for fighting cough) overall solid but it's a little too long, overwrought and theatrical for my tastes

the album that fooled a younger version of myself into thinking i liked new wave

Yellow is one of the worst songs of all time and i hope Chris martin is having a horrible day

this is nothing music. can't be bothered to care, not even positive i spent the last 40 minutes actually listening to music. technically a 2 but spiritually a 1

unfortunately this was so bad it killed me and it was the last thing i ever heard. goodbye.

on first blush I was not a fan, but listening more it did grow on me a lot. I don't like it as much as her earlier stuff, but there are a lot of cool melodies and inspirations being pulled in here, and her songwriting is fantastic. it does also sound a little of its time in some respects, which to me is not a compliment. this is another one where i think it may actually be a 4 but I'm feeling generous and well disposed towards it

I'm starting to understand the real premise of the book's title, which is that some of these albums are intended to make you welcome death

you know, i had a ska phase in my school days just like any awkward dork, but i could never really get into the specials or most of the second wave stuff, and now i see this is one ska related area that i can agree with my teen self on

at the risk of echoing the prevailing sentiment: superstition is an all time banger and everything else here is absolutely fine

i think if you replaced shirley Manson with a dude i would hate this so maybe I'm just a misandrist

this is a good album elevated to a great album by Cynicrustpetefredjohn Raga

delicious, finally some good fucking food

pixies are the ultimate "listened as a kid and wasn't into it but revisited as an adult and just went 'oh word'" band

i can dig later Elvis when he started leaning more into gospel and soul; this is just a boring slog

okay i love hole but i vehemently disagree about including a second hole album and picking this over pretty on the inside. still rules though

really, what is there to say that hasn't already been said a million times and more eloquently?

at least if i ever get my hands on a time machine, knowledge of the time and place of this performance gives me the perfect opportunity to put a stop to the Who

surprisingly enjoyable!

musically i like it a lot actually but minus 1 point for whispery voice and unforgivable mouth noises

pleasant surprise considering my preconceived notions about mudhoney. rough, raucous, hooky

every album that's been removed from the book is from 1997 or later, usually removed in the next edition after its initial inclusion. somebody needs to work up the courage to go back and excise some of these boring, generic piles of bones cluttering up the early years of the book

probably the platonic ideal of a live album, really good recording quality but still captures some of the energy and charm. i dare you not to crack a smile when she acknowledges an on-stage mistake or speak-sings to the crowd mid-song!

björk is maybe the ultimate "basically objectively good but just not for me" artist

it's got some classic 2005 weightless production and corniness, but i still enjoyed it thoroughly (although naturally i get my first latin album in like 300 days and it's still an LA band)

some flashes of annoyance but overall much more enjoyable than i was expecting

i was hoping today to listen to an excruciating 2 hours of a man doing a parody of singing! you really gotta hand it to billy for being that rare combination of insufferable prick and talentless hack! at least if you drop the "mellon collie" bit the album would have an accurate name!

the integration of reggae sounds keeps this more interesting than a lot of its ilk and i am on the record as a fan of Mezzanine but overall it's kind of in one ear, out the other for me. not bad, but a little droney and, perhaps only to my untrained ear, a little monotonous. side note just because it made me realize but: why does the book have two massive attack albums to this day, but gorillaz only had their self titled album make it in, and even that eventually got removed?

I'm not usually a fan of electronic music, but i do enjoy daft punk for the most part (whether that's because they made a more palatable version of electronic music or because they're good enough to transcend that prejudice is up to the scholars). like the other reviews ironically note over and over and over, it can be a bit repetitive, but i think they're overstating it. there's plenty of lows here, but also more than enough highs

hmmm idk it's pretty good but it might be a little on the long side

it's funny, because i actually follow arrested development's very good contemporary releases, but I've never really listened to their earlier stuff, and i now feel like that was probably the correct course of action; the very rare act that has actually gotten better in their later career, it seems. this is not bad but it's very very much of its time. at times it even dips into the kind of sound you always hear in parodies of old school hip hop. again, it's good, but you're better off going and giving For The FKN Love and Bullets In The Chamber a shot

mischievous sexy clown music

well, you can't accuse joe of false advertising with the album title

absolutely dreadful, incessant and grating. the kind of music you put on to teach someone a lesson. mylo should have seen jail time for sunworshipper

pretty unremarkable and occasionally annoying

A Mercifully Short Album About Love

feels kind of weightless compared to other central african music I'm familiar with but it's pleasant enough

I'm running out of ways to creatively express the strength of my disdain for this kind of mind numbing, irritating, insipid electronic slop, but that doesn't mean I'll stop trying!

kind of kept forgetting i was listening to this but when i would tune back in i was certainly not unhappy

I'm not a Peter gabriel fan at all but Solsbury Hill, Down The Dolce Vita and Here Comes The Flood kind of go, whereas the rest of the album is middling to bad. very uneven, the phrase that keeps coming to mind, sensical or not, is "mud album"

this comes in hot with a voice tailor made for me to hate, but the history it's drawing on, the whole aura around it, the arrangments and music, it all builds up together until i realize the voice is not really bothering me at all

dopey so-2010s-it-hurts lion king electronic junk. 2 stars but minus 1 for having the gall to talk shit on Zappa when they're making MGMT music for guys who spend all their time at concerts trying to talk to girls aged 18 and lower

on the one hand, this is infinitely less annoying and repetitive than its ilk; on the other hand, we may be looking at patient zero for electro swing, which is basically unforgivable

blood sugar sex magik was a pleasant surprise, suffice to say this was much much more in line with my preconceived notions of rhcp's whole "deal"

it's kind of crazy this is from 1990, you can hear a lot of what will come in the late 90s and early 2000s, which is generally my least favorite era of hip hop, but this is much more varied sonically and with a lot more of the humor and playfulness later mainstream rap lost and never quite regained. it is overly long though, especially considering there are some (in my opinion) obvious stinkers that break up the album flow and could have been cut with no loss whatsoever

surprisingly bad! i knew I didn't like modern Common but I figured there must have been some good era of Common, that does not seem to be the case though. leads off with a weird down tempo jazzy interlude that's both aggravating to listen to and insultingly labeled as "a tribute to Fela" (big swing and a miss from Femi) and pretty much continues along those lines

annoying, distasteful and not in a fun way, and a downright unlistenable singing voice. kind of amazed that this seems to be considered some great classic

can is really cool and this is a very interesting album but I don't think i would call it "enjoyable," at the very least i definitely prefer the likes of ege bamyasi (which is not on this list) or tago mago (which thankfully is)

i just love the kinks now i guess

kind of baffling to call this an "album" you must hear considering the only things even arguably worth hearing here are the singles, which almost every english speaker (ie the primary audience for this book) has probably already heard. no one's gonna get anything out of these album tracks, and even the singles are big dumb meatballs that aren't remotely appealing to me after a first listen and at this point I've heard them all about 300,000 times. bonus points for the cover art being just laughably stupid

what a shame that this was their only concept album, they certainly had a very "interesting" take on the idea

is morrissey a gigantic prick? well, yes, but you have to forgive him for it because he also made a lot of really average music

it's corny and kind of bad but also pretty fun (yes i listened to this a lot between the ages of 9 and 12 why do you ask)

this is nothing to me

i was pretty flabbergasted to see a second Doves album on the list; fortunately this one at least was deservedly ditched in a later edition

pretty solid but he's definitely still finding his footing post NWA. a lot of the content also feels more objectionable than on the predator (although I'm probably fooling myself there, considering the "Hitler without an oven" lyric) i think this is a decent album that's significant enough to recommend to someone who's immersing themselves in hip hop given the political content and as kind of a herald of the slow transition away from rap crews and towards solo acts. but as an album everyone should listen to before they die? nah, just listen to the predator

the bangers you know and some fine songs you're perfectly okay not hearing

i just had Van Halen's 1984 and I thought it completely failed the premise of this list: the only things on there that you could even potentially argue deserved to be heard before you die were the singles that almost every english speaker has probably already heard a billion times. this album is basically the complete opposite. yes, there are huge singles we've all heard over and over, but it turns out they come with a whole album of no skips! basically every song on here could have been a single for a lesser artist, which really highlights how good the big hits here are, for them to have risen to the top of this selection

objectively a really good execution of this sort of thing, unfortunately i despise this sort of thing

1001 Interminably Long English Electronic Albums to Make You Wish You Were Dead

this would definitely merit inclusion if the title of the book was "The Rise and Fall of The Doors." limp blues facsimiles with a jim morrison who sounds like he has an inordinate amount of phlegm stuck in his throat

totally generic and forgettable. it's certainly not bad and if i had gotten it anywhere in the first 100 albums it might have gotten a 3, but now, almost 800 in, I'm just absolutely sick of listening to all these totally milquetoast 80s and 90s english bands; on no planet is this an album everyone should hear before they die, there are plenty of better, more interesting and more influential albums of very similar stripes on this very list. we get it, Robert dimery, these were your formative years, maybe next time let some other people pick out a few albums

this is the last peter gabriel album i have on this list, and let's just say that if i have my way it'll be the last i ever hear of peter gabriel

this is overall pretty good, but i find it to be much more uneven and unfocused than Things Fall Apart, and i can't really fathom the rationale behind including this over that album

as a certified The Who hater, you know i love hearing them at their most grating and self indulgent

there's a certain playfulness to this where it seems like they're just having fun, that makes it hard to get too upset at it. it's not exactly unlistenably bad, but well, i probably won't be listening to it again of my free will either

no strong feelings about this one way or the other; in one ear and out the other

this is quite good, but it's certainly on the long side, and I don't know that it ever rises above "quite good" relative to some of his other albums. I'd never be upset if someone put it on, but i won't be rushing to do so personally

thank god, i had just been thinking that the 4 steely dan albums on the list weren't enough representation for Donald fagen, but luckily they made sure to include this inoffensive and bland masterpiece. I'm sure the introduction to fagen's solo work is a big day for any steely dan fan, who can then amaze and astound all of their yawning friends with the bombshell that they aren't actually hearing "The Dan" but rather donald fagen all on his lonesome, with all of the verve and charisma that we've all come to expect from an expert steely dan fan

this was probably a very pleasant evening if you had been there in person, but as a recording it's just fine. I'm always happy when some non-English music comes up, and i had never heard of Jacques Brel, but looking into him more, i definitely agree with his significance and inclusion, especially given his relative low profile within the English speaking world-- to me, getting more ears on artists like this should be the point of the book. unfortunately, I'm just lukewarm on the actual music

bowie doing his best bowie impression

"i wish this list had more music incorporating rhythms and sounds you don't hear in typical anglosphere pop music" the monkey's paw's finger curls

it's actually quite amazing how many British new wave bands made albums that you have to hear before you die

this is some truly evil shit, the only two possible explanations for this album's existence or presence on this list is that it's either a test from god or a punishment of the devil's. either way it's settled thousands of years of spirited theological debate

an epic, meandering journey through more faux-blues bullshit. it's beyond me how this so regularly ends up on lists of the greatest albums of all time. at times it did remind me of the grateful dead, only without any of the heart or playfulness

this guy's pretty good at the sax

we need more popular music about hobbits

in terms of cultural relevance or impact, i can't really argue with elvis's inclusion on this list but that doesn't mean i have to like him or his crappy rip off music

kind of a 90s indie pop inflected beatles sound. this is not a compliment

fun enough, but a little flat for me personally. funk country and folk are claimed as influences and uh i don't know that Madonna's ever actually heard any of those genres

quite literally one of my favorite albums of all time, what is there to say that hasn't already been said a million times by people more knowledgeable and insightful than me? it rocks, it slaps, it goes, even if the insane misogynist conspiracy theory (you know the one) was true this album's existence would still go a long way towards canceling it out

you have to admire the chutzpah necessary to be party to the founding of Human League, only to leave a few years later and start a worse version of Human League

somehow there's always more of this

misogynist, homophobic, and much much more but unfortunately it's also very ahead of its time and exceedingly enjoyable throughout, one of the best hip hop albums of the 80s

bizarre and unique in a way that i can't help but find a little endearing, especially in the broader context of this list

cooler than i was expecting but not by much. the noodling on "Generation Landslide" is very fun at least

boring rock slop with one of the most aggravating singers to ever disgrace the microphone in Steven Tyler

i do really like led zeppelin but there is just no compelling reason for this to be 80 minutes long. there's a fantastic 50 minute album in here but instead it just sort of meanders and repeats itself

overwrought, overly theatrical and slightly pretentious. not awful but certainly not for me and definitely not the best arcade fire album

low quality recording and low energy performance, everything i look for in a live album

i was pretty into this album at release but had the distinct displeasure of working in retail at the time and had to hear High Horse about 5 million times, which really killed my enthusiasm or really any positive feeling towards the album. given some space (cowboy) though, I'm right back to thinking it pretty much slaps

outer space music (not complimentary)

the TBI Doors

this isn't the worst of the otherwise barely distinguishable 300 Elvis Costello albums on this list, but it *is* the only one where he says the n-word!

knowing the story behind this album's production it feels like it may not be very authentically 'beach boys' (at least as that is generally understood, especially in terms of lyrical content) but as someone who isn't a huge fan of vocal harmonies and loves Student Demonstration Time I'm okay with that also i don't know if the generator specifically gave me this because of Brian Wilson's death but RIP buddy

first half is more lively and new wavey than i've heard brian eno before and i can't say i'm exactly a fan. not a bad album by any means but certainly not my favorite of his

pretty fun and engaging in moments but also pretty meandering and self indulgent in others

well i *could* do without the Kanye shoutout

this whole project would be much more exciting and enjoyable if there was a strict "1 album per artist" rule. I'm sorry for nick cave's loss and this isn't nearly the worst of his albums appearing on the list but i hate his voice, i hate his whole "deal," and i don't know what i possibly have to gain from listening to another 70 minutes of him

if i wanted to listen to a really unpleasant and annoying man go on and on about a gangbang I'd just redownload grindr

interminable indie boy bullshit

first time really listening to erykah badu outside of her features on other artists' songs and honestly I'm a little disappointed. the music is a little too flat for my tastes, there's no ups and downs, just very chilled out and stable, both in terms of volume and energy. her voice is undeniably good but i feel like she's not doing anything too crazy with it, again she's keeping it at like a 4-6 the whole time when I'm wanting her to crank it up to 10 and pull it back to 1 as needed. not a bad album, just very much not to my tastes

even if you somehow like this melodramatic, caterwauling doofus, i don't know what could possibly be gained from having FIVE of his godforsaken, unlistenable albums on the list. shouldn't the point here be to provide as broad and varied of a selection as possible? I'd argue there shouldn't be ANY repeats, even of the Beatles or david Bowie or whatever other artists have been canonized, but certainly not of this insufferable show-tunes-for-people-with-donnie-darko-tattoos garbage i like no wave, i like experimental music and weird jazz and stuff, hell, I've given good reviews to captain beefheart and pere ubu and throbbing gristle on this very website! his voice makes me want to never listen to music again, i get and am thoroughly over his stupid fucking shtick, and i eagerly look forward to receiving his fifth album from the generator and finally being free of this unbearable pretentious idiot

classic floaty 80s pop production that i frankly cannot stand. everything's tinny and shallow but otherwise it's fine

oh no someone dropped Oasis and left it outside for a couple days 😞

I've always hated these guys and their awful cover of tainted love. sure, it's maybe not as bad as Marilyn manson's version, but it's still a crime that this limp, lifeless garbage is more well known than Gloria Jones's amazing original, not to mention it's always corny, cowardly and just downright lame to change the pronouns/gendered nouns in a song you're covering besides my personal axe grinding, it's just more weightless, grating, and ultimately forgettable, english synth pop new wave bullshit. yawn

now where have i heard this before....

perfectly emblematic of the bland, shallow indie pop rock the 2010s were so good at producing. even if you haven't heard this album before, yes you have

i have no problem believing this was important and influential at the time, now it's just kind of limp and unremarkable

marginally better than most of the new wave/post-punk pablum on this list

it rocks

absolutely deserves a spot on the list, being as notable as it is for its uhhh well, it's bluesy, and you see, um, ronnie lane does a bit of a bob Dylan thing with his voice on track 2?

desperate youth, bloodthirsty babes was interesting and weird but not my cup of tea, this is just some barely-more- interesting-than-average indie rock with some pretty consistently aggravating vocals

more danceable talking heads?

the Smiths for people who hate music

the pee pees

what were they putting in the water in the 2000s that made all these dudes want to produce the most corny, lame and unimaginative music possible? music to watch paint dry to

yeah it's good but did we really need 5 sonic youth albums on here?

personal fav, absolute classic, 10/10 if you think this is like "being yelled at by your girlfriend" I'm sorry that you hate women

based on the cover and time period i was expecting something whiny, maybe smashing pumpkins-adjacent, so the general inventiveness and atypical rhythms and structure were a very pleasant surprise, although i can't help but think I'd enjoy it much more as a purely instrumental album

i was aware of this album but didn't think i had ever heard any of it, but turns out i was wrong, I've heard several of these songs.... over store PA systems. which to me is a pretty good summary of the whole thing: pretty pleasant, some catchy stuff, and it's got pretty broad appeal, but the flip side of that is that it doesn't have any weird hard edges or big swings for me to latch on to. it's fine, but doesn't leave me with any really strong impression

this era's leonard Cohen was extremely good at doing what he did, which was mostly writing sparsely instrumented, fairly languid folk songs. unfortunately, that's a style of music that just doesn't jibe with me. that being said, this is a very good, brisk album, and "a bunch of lonesome heroes" is about as close to a banger as you could hope for from early leonard Cohen

6 years on from live at the witch trials they appear to have mostly abandoned the freewheeling air that was about the only they had going for them, while mark smith has committed to keeping his vocals solidly in the "forgettable to grating" range

wow! it's the combination of new wave and musical theater i always knew i never wanted!

countryfied desert rat Pavement (i know this pre-dates pavement bear with me)

yet another monotonous and teeth grinding 90s electronica album that its self indulgent artist decided simply had to be an hour long. what a waste of a very funny album title

i can imagine how this hits if you're a huge fan of the beatles etc but as a begrudging respecter rather of the beatles, this feels like a needless detour. something to dig into for the real 60s psychedelic rock head, but not something that everyone should be listening to before they die (old man going does kind of rock though)

björk just not 4 me

it's good but at the end of the day it's kinda just more bowie, eh?

grunge from neil yunge

pretty tiresome

still think (pre-covid) M.I.A. is very cool, still think her music has a lot of abrasive (and not in a way that appeals to me) and frankly annoying sounds Jimmy is the first song here that i don't find grating and then you get a good 3 song run of that, Hussel and Mango Pickle, but following that it sort of meanders on its way to Paper Planes before fizzling out with Come Around. a fine album that's elevated by Paper Planes being a generational banger

I'd probably really like Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart if it had less Jah Wobble

i was more than prepared to leave this album with a simple "this is my last tom waits album on the list, rest in peace you dumb bitch" but i find i have to give this one its due: this isn't just *any* tom waits album, it's also an excruciating 73 minutes, takes his pretentious shtick to heights i was simply not prepared for, and finally manages to be vaguely racist with Tommy's put-on stereotypical "jazzman" voice. the other musicians are pretty good, especially the bass player who is putting in some serious overtime, so it's a damn shame that it's in service of this pig brained mother fucker rest in peace you dumb bitch

this is probably her worst album but it's still too scientifically engineered to be enjoyable to call it "bad" per se. a 1/5 as a taylor album but perfectly acceptable in the grand scheme of things

undoubtedly influential but johnny rotten's nauseatingly english voice is like nails on a chalkboard, although it's fun imagining how much better the band could have been if malcolm mclaren hadn't bonked his head really hard the day he decided to recruit johnny

a truly delightful weirdo

what if david bowie was born in 1973 and had zero sense of subtlety?

lots of funky and mind bending sounds and grooves, and the early use of sampling is both very cool and very modern sounding, regrettably Czukay took a look at stereotypical prog-rock vocals and said "these aren't annoying enough"

sorry, Yellow Magic Orchestra, we know you were very influential in the field of electronic music and you made lots of good music, but we REALLY had to make room for our 300,000th album of English electronic drivel, and we just really strongly felt it was important we include a second Fatboy Slim album that most people haven't heard of and doesn't even seem to be particularly well regarded. it truly is regrettable that you aren't from a western country and didn't appear in NME when Robert Dimery was a teenager but we're sure you can make it into the next edition if you simply become English and get a lobotomy!

oh boy! echoey vocals, cheesy synths, no bottom or weight to the sound at all, corny lyrics! all the beautiful sounds of the 80s, and they come complete with george michael's vacuous, bland voice! maybe I'm just not the right kind of gay to like this (I'm the kind with good taste)

beautiful and inventive compositions and playing (especially the strings) a voice packed with emotion, some damn pathos! another album i had listened to in previous years and left unimpressed but revisiting it i agree wholeheartedly with all the praise it's received

D'Angelo is indisputably very talented and this is basically objectively amazing, and his music has many of the pieces of something that should appeal to me, so every time i give him a shot i feel like i should like him more than i do musically there is of course a lot to like, but the whole thing is just too consistently down tempo for my tastes, and this R&B vocal style has never been to my tastes in the slightest. and of course you get the strong feeling that the keyword he always has in mind is "sexy" which is simply not something i look for in music. a great album that i gotta give it up for, but not for me

this is totally fine but I'm kind of baffled by the idea that it's on the list, we get like 7 reggae albums, and we're gonna have one of them be this?

i do like this sort of 90s indie noise rock bullshit but at the end of the day I'm having a hard time imagining picking this over one of many superior and comparable albums

there's some twanginess here that appeals to me but at the end of the day it's still so much like many of the other mediocre new wave albums on the list and he's still doing new-wave-guy voice

[downtroddenly] yeehaw

gotta be one of my top ten favorite uncle/nephew bands

i "Want Two" of this guy's albums to be removed from this list

snoooooooze fest, give me sex funk tim buckley over this any day of the week

of course it's good but it just doesn't really hold up against purple rain or sign o the times so it's hard for me to accept that it deserves a spot on the list when so many deserving albums have been excluded

I'll concede the point about this being influential blah blah blah but at the end of the day i just don't find it enjoyable to listen to

dig it but it can't even begin to compare to No Other (my first real revelation from this generator)

thom yorke jump scare

love it in theory, in practice it's just never quite hit me right I suppose

uniquely insufferable, initially I would have been tempted to call it grocery store music but that's way too unkind to grocery store music. Caleb folowill's horrible, histrionic vocal performance at least lets the album substitute for ipecac. vocals aside, all the music is limp and uninspired, but the exact right blend of inoffensive and generic rock subgenres to guarantee success in the dire 2008 radio landscape while instantly vanishing from the minds of anyone who hears it. Use Somebody is a grating, saccharine slog only made worse by how overplayed it is, which is proof that we are in fact in hell. the absolutely superfluous and eyerolling fade in/out on Cold Desert is the final nail in the coffin for an album that's already been rightfully forgotten by the general public

a triumphant return at the time, and now an utterly unremarkable piece of Bowie's discography

pleasant enough on its face, but its inclusion in the book is frankly insulting considering the complete omission of Louis Armstrong when Prima is more or less an Armstrong knockoff

this rocks, I've been hearing mike ladd feature on stuff for years but I've never listened to his actual albums. lots of cool/funky/weird beats, star trek references, what's not to love?

easily one of the best albums of this stripe on the list; not for me but probably great if you're into this sort of thing

what if you took jimi hendrix, removed most of the talent and emotion, and stirred in a heaping helping of U2? ah well, someone had to make music for moms in the 90s to half listen to while they drove their kids to school

this album rocks so hard, what a pleasant surprise to see it on the list

amazing album from an amazing artist. i love Hugh masekela and south african jazz and it's a real delight to see him on the list. a beautiful, expressive album that i could listen to on repeat. if you liked this i encourage you to check out Pops Mohamed, Allen Kwela, Bheki Mseleku or really just any of the amazing reissues labels like Matsuli Music and As-Shams Records are putting out

a solid little pop album that i do have some nostalgia for, but there are little breaks in it i dislike (i internally groan every time at the "still the louvre" or generally every time she drops the singing for a spoken line) and the sort of romanticization you get in songs like Writer in the Dark will never not be annoying to me, but overall very good

i respect pet shop boys but i cannot say that i like them

sicky sweet music for people who i love but would never give an aux cord to listen to while looking out of train windows

Deep Sleep

i can easily see the alternate reality where i have boatloads of nostalgia for this album, but in this reality, having never gone out of my way to listen to incubus, this is just a bucket of melodramatic, vaguely funk inflected nu metal slop that's about 20 minutes longer than it has any right to be. it is kind of fun in a cheesy 90s way but I'd never willingly listen to it again

Cee-Lo Green... Is The Interminable & Forgettable Music Machine Childz Play is astonishingly bad, i think George Clinton should have the legal right to kill Cee Lo for Glockappella, the rest of the songs are varying levels of forgettable to bad. Cee Lo's voice is annoying and weirdly badly engineered here, and the music isn't half-bad sometimes but is mostly the sort of glossy, overly bombastic and repetitive slop you typically get with 2000s mainstream hip hop. the idea that this had to be a soul crushing 65 minutes truly shocks the conscience

fun enough and utterly unremarkable

kind of like a slightly less lively version of peak fela, it's probably a little too derivative, but i like it a lot more than femi's later work and i love afrobeat soooo

loud, dumb, cheesy, self indulgent, and all the album tracks are just worse versions of the singles. but it doesn't outstay its welcome and those singles are fairly fun

[joke about the jokes about the album cover t-shirts]

[AUTISM ANNOUNCEMENT] did you know that there's a unique edit of the title track that appears only in the climax of Manhunter (1986) and on its soundtrack?

i do like earth, wind & fire, but as I've gotten older and more into funk and soul, it's hard to not hear them as the more commercial and slick version of many of their contemporaries. it's fun, but there's just not a lot for me to latch on to, no crags or rough surfaces, to stretch an analogy. plus, i would say that this album doesn't even particularly stick out compared to other ew&f I'm familiar with. it's fine, but I'm not gonna get up in a lather about it

if i was in a dive bar and this band was playing, I'd have the time of my life, but outside of that specific context I'll pass

the idea that this nauseating indie pop bullshit with perhaps one of the worst vocal performances on the entire list could have ever been considered an album you have to hear before you die is laughable. truly shocking that it was removed after only one edition

this band is made up of tulpas inadvertently formed by our collective unconscious and they are inflicting their psychological revenge on us for burdening them with the pain of existence.

as an ex-ska kid who has spent many years in my friend circles presenting myself essentially as deprogrammed cult member, complete with sober expert analysis and regretful memories, it gives me no pleasure to report that this is still pretty good. I'm skanking and tears are streaming down my face.

merely mind numbing rather than aggravating. wow!

some genuine cool freak shit, weird punk blues hip hop noise rock. reminded me in spaces a lot of Beck and the Beastie Boys (so no surprise to learn they've worked together). had never heard of them and based on the reviews here i was expecting something much more avant garde and experimental, but the music has a really good shape to it, lots of cool grooves and riffs

there's nothing left to say about this kind of dull vacuous electronic music so instead I'll give my review for The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014): not very good, a lot of the dialogue is very poorly written but there's some decent spooky images and you could probably do worse for a group horror movie watch but you could certainly do a lot better

you'd have to be a "The Idiot" to not like this one!

far out

after 6 of his albums on the list, my main elvis Costello takeaway is simply surprise at how consistent his music is. this is not a compliment

this is about 10x more arresting than their later albums, but it's hard to imagine a lower bar. the whole garage rock revival scene does very little for me, and Caleb Followil's voice is awful as always, although he does put in a slightly more authentically emotive performance here compared to later albums. this album is probably only worth anything as a novelty: put it on to surprise people that don't know that once upon a time kings of leon was merely mediocre rather than awful

perfect, i was just thinking that the garage rock revival albums on this list could use a lousy singer with the worst accent on god's green earth (english)

keep the nile rodgers coming

(sly & the family) stone cold classic

new order for guys with top hats, black nail polish and stripey Tim burton shirts

i think fishbone is pretty fun and I've always appreciated their blending of genres but there's a little too much hard rock in the mix here for my tastes; never thought I'd be listening to fishbone and wishing for a little 🤏 more ska

if you've exhausted oasis's discography and also hate yourself, then boy do i have an album for you! thrice reheated britpop slop and just insulting that anybody could try to argue this is one of the 1001 most important albums ever

this sucks ass but in a way that i fuck with

musically it's slightly more engaging than U2's other albums but that's precious little consolation for putting up with Bono's caterwauling. still, i crown thee best U2 album (which is a bit like being the most complex and challenging dish on a cracker barrel menu)

KEN JENNINGS: fleetwood mac's semi-experimental art pop album that ends up being maybe their most cohesive album, in spite or perhaps because of its incoherence and variety– or, the name of an alien bounty hunter with a mysterious past CONTESTANT: what is Tusk?

weird and eclectic and (unsurprisingly given the name) unashamedly dorky. probably not something I'll revisit on a regular basis but I'm happy to have heard it

a really entertaining parody of new wave music-- the tinny vocals, the cliché synths, the complete de-emphasis of bass sounds, the stupid lyrics, gary really nailed it all in a way that's truly indicting of the genre. it's so close to the real thing that for a minute there i was worried it was genuine, but of course that would be ridiculous

banger tbh

MINGUS!

ominously groovy (the roky erickson promise)

horrible memory related to this album, i was at a thrift store and they had a CD copy for only a couple bucks but i opened the jewel case and someone had swiped the actual CD. devastating

Don't Want To Know: what a fucking banger everything else: john don't sing with your mouth full, it's rude as hell

alternates between infectious and serene, super engaging listen, baaba maal rocks, stone cold classic

probably wouldn't have been my choice for the solitary Ghostface album on the list but it's still top 3 ghostface of course. 10 stars

this could have been a good album but it's just murdered by awful production. the cover of I Can't Stand the Rain is such a lifeless, pale imitation of the original, and is immediately followed by the frankly grating title track, killing any positive feelings i initially had towards it. there are some decent performances here, but the production is just dreadful and I don't even think tina turner herself is turning in a particularly good vocal performance. glimmers of greatness drowned under waves of mediocrity

I'm sure alice cooper has been having a hard time ever since the coyotes left phoenix, and me posting my review of his dork music won't help, but unfortunately this is dork music

ah, NY State of Mind, the crown jewel of the Saint's Row 2 soundtrack

i'm back at the chicken shack. i'm back at the jazz club. i'm back at the combination chicken shack/jazz club

i know they eventually credited him but good lord the rip off of Warren Zevon is almost unbelievably egregious. everything else is just a listless reprise of Too-Rye-Ay

crazy to learn all these songs come from the same album and even crazier that they're all songs I've always disliked

lightning bolt's music makes me feel like a schizophrenic balrog who perceives the world in shades of red, artifacted like 20 year old jpegs, descending upon the city of Gondolin to hopefully have my cursed existence ended. 5 stars, who needs a guitarist anyway

thank GOD there are two chemical brothers albums on the list! after the first 50 minutes of psychic damage, you might not be totally convinced that these two contemptible numbskulls are one of the worst things to happen to anglosphere popular culture, so it was necessary to include another hour to help us appreciate just how soul crushing this garbage is

i recently had to look after a tortoise for about a week, she was kind of prickly, but very cool, steady and decisive. so basically Tortoise picked their name well

ending it on a frankly pretty flat cover of Natural Woman is.... a strange choice to say the least, but everything before that is wall to wall bangers

somebody get me a caipirinha

the Captain hasn't quite found his groove yet, which means this is almost inarguably more listenable than Trout Mask Replica. it's still abrasive and strange but it's not really complex or esoteric enough to be an object of fascination or as rewarding on repeat listens as TMR (to me, at least). it's definitely catchier and more, um, traditionally musical, but it's stuck in a weird middle ground where it's too off putting to be in constant rotation but not out there enough to merit me sitting down and focusing my attention on it

it fucking rocks, we all know it, we all love Nile Rodgers, we've all heard the bass line from Good Times a million times in various forms and we're not sick of it because it's probably the best bass line of all time

this shit fuckin rocks

i feel (maybe not 100% justifiedly) like the 2010s were littered with albums like this: critically acclaimed returns of legacy acts. and for the most part, they've all been quietly forgotten as the years stretch on. of course, audience's attentions just stray more quickly now with streaming, the sheer volume of music, etc, but you still hear people (deservedly) heap praise on Loveless and Isn't Anything, whereas m b v is just not usually held in the same regard (at least in my experience.) it's not a bad album by any means and of course I'm glad for all the fans that got more music from them, but it doesn't do too much for me (although new you is a banger)

pet shop boys has always been one of those bands that i think is good and interesting musically, that i should by all means like, but i just can't get past Neil Tennant's voice. it's not even awful, like many other male vocalists that have darkened this list, it just gets on my nerves in a way I can't quite put my finger on (too nasally? production problem?). but everything else is solid, so a regretful "not for me" and a recommendation to anybody else

i think wayne coyne is a dumbass

there will always be some nu-metal nostalgia festering inside of me, and while that does extend to Limp Bizkit to a certain extent, that advantage can only go so far. Fred Durst has one of the worst voices of all time, this is unbearably long, and at the end of the day, it's just not that interesting. the kind of hybridization that nu-metal and rap-rock is built on and was much maligned for will always be interesting to me, but Limp Bizkit feels like much less than the sum of its parts. practically anybody could rattle off a neverending list of better rappers, better metal bands, better hard rock, better etc etc. I can't really imagine any reason to reach for them besides nostalgia. the main appeal at the time was the kind of vaguely apolitical, directionless rage and anti-establishment sentiment, the provocativeness of it all, but in retrospect it's easy to see how other bands of every era much more genuinely, meaningfully, powerfully and most importantly entertainingly communicate anti-establishment and anti-authority ideas. Fred Durst just comes off as a whiny, effete poser when compared to the likes of Rage or Public Enemy or NWA to also briefly engage with the most common arguments in the favorable reviews here, despite my personal dislike, i do agree this deserves its spot on the list just for the cultural relevancy, how well it captured the contemporary zeitgeist. but the other thing that seems to come up is the classic bristly "you're a pussy if you don't like this" bullshit, and to ignore the obvious misogynist and nonsensical aspects, is just stupid on the face of it. this is radio friendly, super accessible rock with metal and hip hop elements where he says "fuck" a few more times than we were used to in 2000, if you think this is "abrasive" or "tough" or "confrontational" or whatever, you seriously need to broaden your horizons and listen to some Blood Incantation or Backxwash or something

exhibit three million that the most important aspect of producing a good album is knowing when where and what fat to trim. the second most important is not having a sound that is evocative of a sweaty armpit

according to wikipedia members of both Radiohead and Oasis praised the Beta Band, which makes sense to me given that this album feels like the midpoint between those bands (Steve Mason of the Beta Band's assertion that nothing sounded like this before or since is pretty comical) except much mellower, not really coming alive in any meaningful way until the closing track. i won't say this is awful or anything, but the vocal style is too mumbly and reserved, the sound is too thin, and it's generally just sleepier than i am typically interested in

a great album that becomes fantastic with the almost unassailable run of My Uncle/Wheels/Juanita

i would probably love this if it had been made 10 years earlier or even 10 years later, but there's too much 80s stink on it. Anita's voice and performance is fantastic but that can only go so far when accompanied by this limp, weightless faux jazzy soft-rock. imagine if this had been made in the 70s with some real funk and jazz backing her up and some decent production; now that's an album. my main takeaway here is that there's perhaps an Anita Baker album out there for me but it ain't this one

i certainly see the appeal, and i like to lynch landlords as much as the next guy, but musically there's other punk, etc that speaks to me more. inarguably correct inclusion for the list though of course

neil young never gets old

thank god they brought in Rick Rubin, or else they never would have been able to land on their true sound: hard rock that sounds like it should be in a royalty free music library

the byrds are definitely a band i should like more than i do. i blame david crosby

maybe the best Roxy Music album on the list but your worldview has to be narrow indeed to think that 3 out of the 1001 most important albums ever are by Roxy Music

very brave of Paul McCartney to do a Paul McCartney parody

is depeche mode one of the best new wave bands? almost certainly true. does that mean all that much to me? nope

you can't really argue with the riffs and grooves here, especially for the time period (this is why i like non-American and British bands, they don't feel as beholden to the trends etc of the anglo world) but the juvenile lyrics definitely hold it back for me. and while i think the music is well executed, it's not exactly to my taste in the first place. glad i heard it though!

i don't know if this is the worst album on the list, but it's probably pretty close to my worst experience. you'll spend a good chunk of time just tracking it down, and once you do, no sources can agree on the titles of the songs, the names of the artists, which is muddied even further by subsequent versions of the compilation over the years. and once you've finally less-than-legally acquired it, and settled for something resembling accurate track information, your reward is over 2 hours of the most monotonous, torturous electronic music that would be more at home at a CIA blacksite. and to cap it all off, as if there wasn't enough representation for this god awful kind of music on the list, this is, as previously mentioned, a fucking COMPILATION! it shouldn't even be eligible! this was a horrible waste of time in multiple dimensions, it makes me want to let a semi crush my head like a grape, and if i see LTJ Bukem on the street, i think i should be allowed to shoot him

all the English guys who insist on playing the blues are annoying and embarrassing, but i think clapton may be my least favorite. the weird racist vibes are much stronger with him (for easily verified reasons) and songs like I Can't Hold Out just make my fuckin skin crawl, this little twerp trying to do whatever the fuck he's doing with his voice. he's basically inarguably a good guitar player, but his whole deal inescapably gives me the creeps, i hate listening to his voice, and i think his guitar skills would be much better served in about a million other settings

overlong and uninteresting, but at least it's Welsh rather than English

when I say I don't like most electronic music, kraftwerk is one of the bands I'm leaving space for with that "most," but this is pretty different from their stuff that i'm familiar with and like. i do still like this when it's a little more melodic but a lot of this feels very drone/ambient and while i can appreciate how innovative that was and how influential it has been, that's also flat out my least favorite kind of music. big ups to the boys and this isn't a bad album by any stretch of the imagination, and undoubtedly influential, but at the end of the day not for me

great perfomances and writing all around but a little too bombastic and theatrical for my taste, to put it mildly

i can only imagine how exciting it would have been to be a huge Bob Dylan fan and be suddenly treated to a good album in 1997, but as a casual Dylan fan who was 3 years old when it came out, it's just fine

a lot of the stuff orbiting john reis and rftc is cool and i definitely respect him/them but that being said i do hate the vocal style here, and maybe it's just ex-ska kid PTSD but i truly hate this style of wind instrument playing: just kind of blaring and honking on that thing, very little artistry or variation in volume, tone etc. i love a band that can successfully incorporate any instruments besides guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, but i would not consider this a successful incorporation

heart wrenching and beautiful and just a pleasure to listen to, faithfull is so cool and, not to diminish or glorify her struggles, inspiring. hard to believe she ever even gave Mick Jagger the time of day

kate Bush does it again with this one

i hate Bohemian Rhapsody so much

beautiful, thoughtful, political, what's not to like?

i mean, it's fine

like more than a few dudes in athens, this is rambling, pretentious, pretty progressive, and a little too concerned with projecting a preconceived idea of "southernness." a pack of dudes I'd be happy to have rolling around my town being the local color, but i wouldn't want to hang out with too much, and somehow I'm always busy every night they have a gig

amazing album, too bad johnny cash and fiona apple have slightly ruined the title track for me as their ascending finish to the phrase "bridge over troubled water" is about a million times more satisfying to my brain

more english pablum but at least robbie Williams's nasally voice is really grating

three things: i think this is definitely important and influential enough to deserve a spot on the list, it's much more listenable to me than most ambient music, and i have a lot of respect for Brian eno. all that being said, miss me with this shit dawg

we get it Robert dimery, you did a lot of MDMA in the 90s

for how wacky & dissonant this is, it feels like it's lacking in the urgency & energy that I'd want from an album of this type. a very interesting listen that's combining a lot of cool elements and sounds that I don't really see myself revisiting

is this a fucking joke?

some fancy guitar work, an incredibly irritating vocal performance, the herald of one of my least favorite eras and genres of music. hard pass

pretty annoying and wholly unnecessary when there are 2 better albums from them on the list (and any more than 1 is pretty unjustifiable to begin with!)

the only decent britpop band turns in another fine one

Deliver Me From Nowhere was a shitty movie because they didn't show the Snoopy binder that Bruce wrote Nebraska in

some cool beats, some annoying ones; some awesome lyrics, some questionable ones. pretty uneven, by and large, but Good Newz Comin' is an absolute banger

personal favorite PJ harvey album, easy

Morissey, You Are The Hack that Should Have Given Up in the 80s

interesting conglomeration of a bunch of different elements that make it a much more engaging and fun listen than most of the other 80s english albums on the list, but those elements don't really come together to make anything special. the jazz parts are pretty uninspired and very lacking compared to what you'd get from talented, dedicated jazz musicians, the soul is a pretty pale imitation, and the less said about the embarrassing rapping, the better. fun and weird, but not particularly good

rips so hard, one of my favorite albums ever for sure

wow this steven wonder guy's pretty good!

very good landmark album that doesn't do that much for me personally

totally unfamiliar with the youngbloods prior to this, and what a shame. this is the exact kind of music i like: pulling together a bunch of different elements and sounds and combining them with a little wit, talent and brevity to produce something engaging and exciting. the addition of (actually decent) jazz (probably thanks to drummer Joe Bauer) and bluegrass to the standard folk/psychedelic/rock cocktail is very welcome and i salute these crazy white boys for taking a swing at it

honestly, i never knew Bjork had a career prior to her solo work, and i dig this so much more than her later stuff. all of her solo stuff is undeniably cool and well crafted but it's always felt pretty abrasive and unapproachable to me, more like a piece of fine art you appreciate but don't necessarily "like." this is much more of a daily driver for me. is it super groundbreaking or artistic? not necessarily, but it still has enough funky flourishes and weird stylistic seasoning to keep it interesting, and the tradeoff is that it's much more listenable, and lives up to the promise of her vocal talent much more to me than her solo work

just absolute dog shit. i see a band I've never heard of and "post-punk" and I'm marginally interested but no, it's somehow a surprise SIXTH fucking nick cave album. "Dead Joe" is horrifically unlistenable, i mostly tuned it out after that, I'm done listening to, thinking or talking about nick cave

before you die, you MUST listen to Love's fairly generic and uninteresting second album which was less successful and is universally held in less esteem than their third album, which you also must listen to, and which is itself just fine! you simply must!!!

thank you new order for not only being one of the only good new wave bands but also only of the only english acts to heavily incorporate electronic music that didn't all get their heads bonked by coconuts and forget that melody exists

fuck off

i agree, she is supa dupa fly

margo timmins has a beautiful voice and the production and sound quality is very good and warm, but it's a little too far into what i usually call "weepy music" for my tastes. weepiness isn't necessarily about tempo or volume, it's more about this just being more sad and mellow and understated than i would like. for all of the covers here, i can think of versions i prefer that have either higher energy, thicker instrumentation, or more varied registers and sounds. this is a pretty good album, but it's offering something I don't particularly want

i think it's probably pretty dubious to have ever included this in the book, but it's right up my alley so I'm not complaining

beck for guys who spend all their time whining about their "bitch" girlfriends

there's nothing for me to say about this one that you can't read elsewhere. just hit play again

histrionic vocals, embarassing lyrics, straight-ahead boring instrumentation? where do i sign!

i like the grateful dead more because i love throwing on a messy fun set and luxuriating in it for 3 hours but this is perfect for encapsulating that into a tight studio album, which the dead of course were famously not great at

astonishingly unremarkable jazzy folk rock, steve winwood continues to baffle me with his sustained success

exhausting album, exhausting to think or talk about britpop anymore. this is maybe the worst britpop album on the list which is saying a lot. who cares

i think we can all agree that the mark of truly great music is that it's enjoyed almost exclusively by people under the effects of a drug that increases your pleasure and energy, and we are blessed to live in a world where all of England's most insufferable head trauma victims produced an apparently inexhaustible supply of this stuff in the 90s. I'm just curious why these hard working dolts thought they had to make every album 70 excruciating minutes long, when you could just play the first track from any of them on repeat and none of the people rolling in the club would be able to tell the difference anyway, hell I'm sober and I can't tell the difference!

much love to the prefab sprout fans in my life but they just don't do anything for me

there's a lot working against this album: the general corniness of the whole thing, Billy Joel's goofy voice, my usual distaste for this sort of pop/soft rock, my hatred of long island, but all of that is meaningless in the face of a taut, tight 42 minutes of non stop undeniable bangers

a guy that I've been vaguely aware of for the last few years but I've never actually given a listen, and mama mia I've been missing out. this is what all the stuff in our current old-meets-new retro-futurism era aspires to be, the blending of modern production with psychedelic, soul, funk, everything gels together so well and the whole thing is a pleasure from start to finish, 50 minutes that feel like 30. you've got a new fan michael!

sweaty butt crack music

The Boreds

i enjoyed this well enough, but not having a ton of familiarity with Indian and Bollywood music or its history, I can't say whether this is a must-listen album or something Robert Dimery just pulled out of his ass in a half assed attempt to barely add some variety to the list. I'm not mad about it though

the kind of shit i usually like, ruined beyond recovery by a horrible singer and an absolutely unjustifiable running time

aggravating english man weaponizes his ugly ass voice to create an incredibly annoying concept album telling the dullest story in the world. come for his jerky line delivery that could possibly be described as anti-flow, stay for the canned music that alternates between obnoxious casio beats and mismatched, overly bombastic pseudo-orchestral music. the big question this one leaves you with is: what's worse, his rapping or his singing? the answer of course is both

gram Parsons you silly trust fund son of a bitch, you were what the byrds had been missing, apparently

if i never have to listen to John Lydon's nasally, grating wailing, see his smug fucking face, or think about his dumbass, self-serving, performative politics ever again, it'll be too soon. a man whose only ideas have ever amounted to "aren't you soooo mad?" and retrofitted everything else to fit that. this would just be more generic english garbage but he brings it to new lows with his caterwauling. the Ricky Gervais of music (or is Gervais the Lydon of comedy? who fucking cares)

there's a lot to like here, but unfortunately i would rather chew my own arm off before listening again to John Martyn doing whatever faux blues bullshit he thinks he's doing with his voice

The Cure for insomnia, maybe! this one is a Robert Smiss! the last time i consumed Pornography this bad i called for a wellness check on the performers! at least when they named the first two tracks One Hundred Years and A Short Term Effect they accurately described how long it'd feel and how long it'd stick in my brain, respectively!

kind of cool, overindulgent, i can imagine recommending this to someone but it's pretty "whatever" for me

the idea that the Beta Band somehow produced two albums you Must Listen To Before You Die is just laughable. i certainly didn't like Hot Shots II, but it had a lot more merit than this generic, homogeneous pile of slop. yawn, next

perfectly adequate pop music, I've never really liked Christine and the Queens and in fact kind of dread when he collabs with artists i do like. it's nothing special or unique musically and i think there are (especially now in 2026) better and more innovative contemporary queer artists to populate the list with, although i can at least imagine the appeal for others also, my sincere condolences to the reviewer complaining about the length who seemingly sat and listened to an album they didn't like twice back to back, although i suppose it's not to the album's credit that they didn't notice

absolute bangers, spin it again jack

i want to like this more than i do, the repitition of phrases, both lyrical and musical just kind of wears on me. but it is still enjoyable and of course very significant

pretty fun album that doesn't find that much purchase in my brain

good but I've never liked it nearly as much as unknown pleasures, which I'm also more or less fine on. cool riffs and sounds and stuff but generally just washes over my brain. plus since i like it less than unknown pleasures it's easier for me to hold ian curtis's legacy of inspiring a generation of the world's worst vocalists against it

i love drums, i love sinking into and luxuriating in a rhythm, worth the price of admission just for Asabache and Rhapsodia Del Maravilloso. time to start my fifth listen

very glossy and catchy and well crafted but the more down tempo songs don't do much for me (especially album closer You Caught The Light which is a big ol skip, put Lauren back on the vocals!) and i just don't think it has the staying power to be a regular listen for me, but i gotta give it up for just how many of these songs i knew despite never specifically listening to chvrches

unlike most British rap, this manages to not only not be downright embarrassing, but actually fairly enjoyable! there are some weird, cool, inventive beats on display here, especially considering it came out smack in the middle of the worst (in my opinion) era for beats. the flow is pretty angular in a way that doesn't work great for me but i think it's at least partly intentional, and partly just what it sounds like when an english person tries to rap (Little Simz being maybe the only english rapper with a voice/flow that's actually pleasant to listen to). overall it's pretty good and much better than what i typically expect from British rappers, although it does have some pretty bad low points, particularly the one-two punch of Round We Go and Jus' A Rascal, which are two of the most absolutely horrendous songs I've heard in a while

bobby dylan get your country ass over here my momma tells me you been in the city building an oeuvre big as a damn bus

the Smiths have done it again with this one (derogatory)

there are 5 albums by the byrds on the list, and the inclusion of this one in particular is pretty unjustifiable. worse songwriting than the others (bye gene clark, wish you were here gram parsons) the performances are lackluster in comparison, it just doesn't offer anything you can't get better elsewhere

boring prog bullshit, terrible vocals, just listen to Yes or Emerson Lake and Palmer

Sunrise most underrated New Order song??? Sunrise amazing??? listen to Sunrise again???

it's always interesting thinking about early days of wu tang when everybody expected method man to be the big breakout star, and listening to the 36 chambers and this it's extremely easy to see why, even if things didn't really shake out that way. this is just top to bottom bangers, that dark early RZA production is sooo good on my ears, and there's a really interesting juxtaposition between that and the actual content and just how pleasant meth's voice is to listen to and how smooth his flow is. it's dark brooding and shadowy but still irresistibly enjoyable and fun

earns 5 stars from Gigantic alone, i absolutely love Kim Deal (side note, it was only at this point that i realized there are no breeders albums on the list, which is a fucking crime, all my homies hate robert Dimery) as always I don't love Frank's vocals but everything else is beyond solid enough to make up for it

i could not possibly care less about frank sinatra. I'm not the biggest fan of vocal jazz in general but I'm specifically very sick of frankie. I've heard it said about Louis armstrong that he proved that singing doesn't have to be pretty to be expressive, and sinatra is like the antithesis of that. this is my big problem with most "good" male vocalists, that they're either so focused on being technically proficient or have enough natural talent to have never considered what, if anything, their voices are actually expressing. from this you either get completely flat, emotionless singing, or affected emotion that's way too over the top and/or reads as phony, and sinatra is solidly in the final category. i simply don't buy any of it. he's affecting these emotions and feelings because it's what's marketable and identifiable with his "brand" and what's expected of a "good" male singer, but none of it reads as real, i do not ever feel or perceive anything genuine from his vocal performances. of course, he did employ and collaborate with many talented musicians, but I'd much rather listen to them play without his listless crooning over the top. this does deserve its spot on the list for its history in the development of the album as an art form in and of itself but i certainly don't want to actually listen to it ever again

in a book of insulting, laughable inclusions, this has gotta be somewhere in the top 10. a SECOND Jane's addiction album? one that sounds like a collection of demos? that has been so thoroughly forgotten that today was the first time i was ever aware of it? get this shit out of my face

actually a very pleasant surprise! no shocker that with my third to last album, there had to be one final (i hope) British new wave album, but it is surprising that it's actually pretty good! kind of like watered down New Order, nothing I'll ever want to revisit but i at least didn't begrudge the time spent listening to it

i wish i liked this more, baaba maal rules but a lot of the music here feels super flat and it sort of feels like he's spinning his wheels for a lot of it. i still like it and it certainly has its moments, but it's definitely nowhere near peak baaba maal

i don't think i could possibly get an album with a more relevant title for my final generation (fuck you Robert Dimery (the kinks rule))

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