1001 Albums Summary

Ok. "I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor" is a good song and the rest is forgettable, insincere-feeling Britpop. Not enough ire to be punk, too loose and loud to be polished pop, too many words and too little melody to be notable in any way. Guitar player writes really repetitive stuff, but just obtrusive enough that you can't forget he's there. If there are two of them, it's a crime against imagination. Musicians like Coltrane were widely lauded for the notes they didn't play -- their sense of space. I don't think the vocalist is familiar with that idea.

Good arrangements, lovely in the fullest sense of that word. Excellent bass and keys (Rhodes?) tones. Drums competent; good beat, no groove. Varied somewhat, stylistically, but not at all in terms of melody or dynamics. Ultimately: highly polished, tight, laid back and unobtrusive to the point of being pretty boring. Really well made but I just don't care. Best track: Sweet Life. It's almost catchy -- starts to groove in the outro when Ocean stops singing.

Competent, very much of its time. Poetic and literary in the way that Stipe was famous for, tight and exactly appropriate in the way the rest of the band has always been. Overall, a somewhat dark and menacing tone here, despite the manic exuberance of "The End of the World As We Know It". I always find R.E.M. missing some kind of emotional release, whether it's Peter Buck's relatively mild overdrive sound or just a tendency for the band to end songs without harmonic resolution. I feel that R.E.M. build their work to the edge of catharsis and then leave me without release. An important stone in the grand building of Rock & Roll, but not one I'll frequently return to.

Catchy, folky, punk-y, radical, familiar. This album calls back to Jonathan Richman while also injecting some existential or political rage into that rarely-revisited formula. Not a perfect album by any means, but a rare and well-executed torch bearer for a singular form of proto-punk that we'd all do well to remember. Worth revisiting now and then for both fun and for reference.

Psych-blues. End of the sixties. Iconic. I'm coming around to the importance of the Doors, but they're less psych and less blues than their contemporaries. You could listen to Little Feat, Canned Heat or Eric Clapton if you just wanted some white guy blues or a more trippy rock band (Jefferson Airplane?) if you wanted the psych. This album also reinforces that one of the things they're most famous for -- lack of a bass player -- is a fault, not a virtue. Jerry Scheff (Elvis's bass player) shines here and it's a real insult to him to jam to this album while wearing a "No Bass" T-shirt. Every rock fan should listen to this album, though. Yeah, it's loose in deliberate ways that don't benefit it ("LA Woman" is at least two minutes too long), Jim Morrison seems subscribed to his own fan club and there are frankly much better blues outfits from any era, but there was never a blues more psychedelic, doom-y and downright weird as this. There'd be no Sabbath or QOTSA or all kinds of modern, polished, focused doom-y stoners playing what's ultimately a gussied-up version of Black music from the Delta without these weird white dudes on acid.

Still a perfectly good album and sounds good, to boot. It's pretty easy to see why this took off in '56. Presley makes a good vehicle for rockabilly: his phrasing, sense of dynamics and his deep, easy and well-controlled vibrato make him a really great vocalist. I still find most of his ballads boring, but I can see the talent. Still listenable after almost 70 years and it shows its influence with little digging. It's also a pretty quick listen.

This is an all-time great. Innovative use of samples and synthesizers and reverb and whatever studio techniques aside, this is a profoundly emotional album. Where psych records can often feel muddy or just stoned, Dark Side is immersed in a clear feeling of longingv for or grasping at something, not in spite of but amplified by its dreamy nature. The reverb and production and sampling and bouncing pans all give the feeling of bewilderment, while the lyrics and the composition drive the clear emotional content. Breathe longs to relax. Time vacillates between a dead and a yearning regret. The overall theme lends itself to the oft-stated theme of mental illness (or the pressures of being a young band expected to both rebel against society and also comply with its wishes for more music). The hearts of the songs exert themselves to express something totally clear, but the echoes and the voices clamour for our attention, too. In the end, bursting through the sonic maelstrom and the deeply felt malaise, Brain Damage/Eclipse makes triumphant peace with itself, and perhaps with the band's relationship with its industry, and even their old friend, Syd: "If the band you're in starts playing different tunes, / I'll see you on the dark side of the moon."

Varied, ambitious and both of its time and tied to its past and present personally, it drags for a stretch in the way many double-albums do, but I have to respect the conceit of a hip-hop/rap concept album (or two?). Slight preference for Speakerboxxx over The Love Below, but the latter's themes of a player investing himself too far into The Game to accept love when he finds it shines -- and stands in critical contrast to many of its contemporaries at this time. Both albums stand out from the male-dominated misogyny of rap at the turn of the millennium -- at least questioning it, if not breaking that mold totally. This is also a watershed moment for the Atlanta scene in terms of artistic achievement, reinforcing the commercial success of contemporaries like Nelly. I think, anyway. I dunno, I'm still learning my history on these things. Not going to be a regular listen, but well worth a dive.

Among the guitar production (Search & Destroy features fuzzy leads over overdriven rhythm), the throwback song structures (fairly short, punchy, blues-based, verse/chorus structures), Iggy Pop's vocal delivery (usually smooth, occasionally raw shouting) and the themes of alienation from mainstream society, this is the punk template -- just as much as Jonathan Richman's Roadrunner. At the same time, this album sounds just as vital today (2023, as I write this) -- thanks in part to its profound influence and also in part to the garage revival at the millennium's turn. It's also of its time: there's a sort of acoustic number (Gimme Danger) and Penetration plays a sort of glockenspiel-like keys lick on repeat, giving the song a clear Doors connection. Of course, Iggy also makes angry cat noises through the whole of Penetration, just to remind you that they're still weird. This doesn't sound 50 years old (unless you're a real nerd; some instruments have a beautiful vintage sound and the production techniques have some pre-Loudness Wars, pre-synth tells).

Sounds like a pop album from 1988. Everything is fine, the songwriting is competent, the arranging is good, the playing is professional and I'm sure this band has a healthy group of fans. I did not need to listen to this before I died; I don't know what broader influence this band had on popular music, but it's not self-evident from a listen.

Some lovely and interesting compositions paired with rightly-lauded production. Varied, arguably progressive. Album opens with a two-part in Summer's Cauldron/Grass that feels as warm as that season's sun, complete with some birdsong. I'd describe it as baroque pop. The album closes with a run of varied tunes on introspection that sound a bit more like pop jazz (The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul), a modern composition of English trad folk (albeit with 1986 production - Sacrificial Bonfire) and a 60s folks protest song written to God instead of the government (Dear God). It's an effective album, and I can hear its influences now. Having said that, it remains somewhat ephemeral -- perhaps just a little bloated in the middle. Unlikely to get another full listen, but I'm glad I visited Skylarking.

Blue-eyed soul. A perfectly cromulent album, but I'm unclear on why this is in here alongside the Motown and Stax stalwarts. Maybe this is the specific, idiosyncratic lens that translated the sounds of Black soul to mainstream music, but it seems unremarkable, otherwise. I won't revisit it and wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless I learn some earth-shattering context about these guys. This is just thirty minutes of not displeasurable noise from 1967. Summary: better than Pat Boone or nails on a chalkboard (the two compete mightily).

Weird and dark. World music influenced (We Will Fall seems to draw some of its key, chant and hurdy-gurdy drone from India, but it's hard to say), introspective and navel-gazing. Fuzzy guitars are fully incorporated. Songs are more rambling and less focused than '73's Raw Power, but the march toward punk is fully underway. The writing is simple and draws on 50s pop and rock structures, including chord progressions, call & responses and lyrical content in many places (seemingly teenage love, for example). There's no effort to keep the vocals or guitars clean, though.

A band demonstrating their considerable musical powers. The Allman Brothers pack more American popular music innovation into a single live album here than most bands manage in whole careers. It's subtle: we're talking about the seemless fusion of the sonic roots of blues-based rock & roll to the structures, methods and theory of jazz. Two lead guitar players, two dueling drummers and a lot of improvisation. It's not for everyone. Jams meander by their nature but the Allmans and their band keep you hooked because of the infectious grooves they lock in. The melodic and harmonic ideas they elaborate on throughout their extended improv sections are entirely accessible and diverge very gently from where they begin. This is a very pleasant listen, and one that rewards but does not demand close attention throughout. Anyone who likes rock music should really listen to this at least once. Not just for its technical showcase (at every spot in the group) but to hear why twin guitars caught on, and why double drumming survived beyond James Brown's insistence on having a backup, just in case he had to fire one. Maybe not an everyday listen, but essential homework for every blues lover, jam hippie, metal head and guitar noodler out there. No Polyphia without the Allmans.

Great voice, pretty good songwriting. Sort of pop-blues, for the most part. A surprisingly American-sounding album for a Londoner (mind you, the same was surely said of Clapton, from Surrey). Good studio playing (you get what you pay for, here -- names like Pino Palladino get the job done). Good Cure cover. Autobiographical and confessional but written generally enough to be a massive pop record. I'll put on my folk/rock hat for a moment and say that a more specifically confessional current and a less-produced sound would have let her own voice shine through (in both ways) -- more like Someone Like You -- but might have sold less. As it stands, she's a titan economically and a supremely capable performer, but can't hold a candle to the intense confessional work of Lucinda Williams or the drive and verve of work by the Arethas and Brittany Howards of this world because they live inside a genre, a tradition -- Adele writes music that floats above those genre conventions, broadening her appeal to the whole pop world, but leaving her work less fully-felt. There's a flirting with real authenticity here that never quite culminates. The music feels slightly veiled; the groove never fully forms, the catharsis never builds. But this is surely how you make a hit record -- keep it just vague enough to be universal; just enough blues or folk or rock to be spicy, but not enough to stake your claim to a piece of a real tradition.

This album opens with a pair of tracks that explain immediately how tied to the punk movement the Pretenders are. The mix and the thin guitar sound bely how aggressive and straight-ahead the rhythm playing is. Heavy modulation on the guitars throughout (phaser? flanger?) really sets this in the 80s. Vocals mixed high. I see Chrissy Hynde getting criticism for the sing/talk delivery but, to me, she deserves placement in the Lou Reed and Iggy Pop school of vocalists. It suits the genre they came up in. Some song conventions that depart from the spare, classic 50s & 60s songwriting formulas (guitar solos, certain kinds of key changes) offer a bit more ornament than the punk scene which these four grew from -- the effect seems a direct line to Cheap Trick. Stop Your Sobbing has a more Cyndi Lauper feel -- a more marketable pop ballad -- and Private Life wears its reggae influence on its sleeve. This was a band confident of its diverse influences from the beginning. I think that the 80s production techniques of mixing down the band and lavishing them with reverb does a disservice to the music; the record feels more detached and less emotionally direct because of it. That's no fault of a group making their first record, though. I also usually hate that production style typical of the era anyway, so it's a boilerplate objection. In all, a great album. An interesting contribution to the theme that punk didn't fizzle out after a few short years and magically reappear later in the 80s, but evolved as a scene into bands like the Pretenders and Talking Heads, subsumed into the mainstream as many subcultures inevitably are.

Their own description of 'rock with horns' is fairly apt. The jazz influences are there plain enough (chordal choices, the changes, etc.). The progressive label that gets attached is interesting; fitting insofar as their compositions are more ambitious than always writing 3-minute verse-chorus-verse pop. Drummer Danny Seraphine is a real highlight, outside of the obvious horn section, which is also tight enough to sound like a single instrument. 'Maximalist' is a good word for Chicago. In today's terms, they're a lot. Surprisingly, it never seems indulgent on an individual level (save for the nearly seven minutes of Terry Kath's Free Form Guitar) -- every player contributes interesting, memorable musical ideas, whether melodic or rhythmic hooks. Vocals are good but not standout, but that's the whole conceit: they're a seven-piece band that sounds completely cohesive and in-sync. The downside of a cohesive seven-piece prog-jazz-rock band writing ambitious 6- to 7-minute songs is that it can get a bit dense. That's not to say that Chicago is impenetrable on this debut, but it's hard to recall anything after it's happened. It needs and merits further listens. It's catchy as heck from the get-go, though. Give this a spin: you get some danceable jazz-rock driven by the horns in the first several, some singable radio rock in the middle, utter (talented) nonsense when Kath goes Free Form (probably inspired by Hendrix, at a guess) and by the time you're at South California Purples, you could be listening to a groovier Sabbath tune. It's a trip.

Band work typically loose for Dylan. Works well on the (in)famous Rainy Day Women; apparently about getting baked, sounds like the band is declining into a ganga-infused stupor -- really, it's about being persecuted, leaving the declining feeling of the song more metaphorical than the average radio exec realized. Pledge My Time feels like a similar blues pastiche but isn't as interesting. Some quality melodic folk entries -- Visions of Johanna has some lovely imagery and Dylan's determined, propulsive strumming that give him such a unique quality as a writer about love. Dylan's vocal delivery, it just be said, is an acquired taste. He writes lovely melodies and is perfectly capable of hitting his notes. His voice tends to have a breathy hoarseness, but that's effective, too. He often ends lines with an unfocused-feeling glissando, sliding down off of the closing note, past the 'blue' note and off into oblivion. Sometimes it's not just the end. Whether he's doing it on purpose to ape the unsophisticated airs of his hero, Guthrie, to disarm the common folk listener and dissuade the snobs or maybe just plain lazy about singing will remain a debate we can all choose to indulge in or not. I choose not to -- that's just what Dylan sounds like. Frankly, I think his protest music remains his most lasting and emotionally-accessible work, but this album is has a well-deserved reputation as a classic of Western popular music. Listen to this with a lyrics sheet at least once, just to see if you buy the hype about Dylan as a poet.

I'll start with Art. Possibly the greatest math-teacher-turned-vocalist in American history. Garfunkel is the oft-reduced half of this iconic folk rock duo and is an excellent singer with a delicate voice and a great ear for harmony. Paul Simon rivals Dylan as the best songwriter to emerge from the 60s NYC scene. Whether you want a hand-clapping sing along about a romantic interest you just can't figure out (Cecilia), a meditation on the struggles and traumas inherent to selling our labour to get by (The Boxer) or a surreptitious bossa nova-tinged farewell/tribute to Mr. Garfunkel (So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright), Paul Simon can write it all. To boot, it's snappy. If a song's not for you, it won't last long. Not Simon's best album, but a worthy and accessible entry into his life's work.

This album has some funk. Not for nothing, but Bernie Worrell of Parliament/Funkadelic played with the band on the ensuing tour. It also draws on producer Brian Eno's ambient work (there's a straight line from Music for Airports to the atmosphere of the sound m album's closer, The Overload). It's a lot and it's often weird -- and you should listen to it. Thanks to Eno, Talking Heads take this album to explore rhythms, melodies and structures common to West African (especially Fela Kuti) and North African music (Arab influence, in particular). Bearing in mind that these four came up through the same New York scene at CBGBs that incubated New York Dolls and the Ramones (keys/guitar man Jerry Harrison previously played in the Modern Lovers), you need to imagine this as a close relative of punk, even if it may not seem so immediately. It's just less-distorted and departs more from the early rock & roll song structures. Tina Weymouth she Chris Frantz kill it all record long. They're an underrated rhythm section outside of the New Wave world. Singer, guitar player and chief songwriter David Byrne is in fine form as well, pushing the envelope of that a front person does in popular music. Remain In Light does occasionally drift far enough into experiment to lose its emotional resonance. The record drifts out on a pair of songs that communicate dread, but you'll need a few listens to start feeling the what and the why of it. Talking Heads polished up a product that sits in the middle of a Venn diagram with bubbles for West African dance, King Crimson and CBGBs. It's weird. Not every track is a banger. But everything has a purpose here and you should listen to this if you wonder what kind of creative bravery went on as the NYC punk scene faded from the popular eye. A classic, but a challenging one.

I've always found it hard to peg Costello to a genre. There's something to it that feels more Americana than that. This is a record that's varied, catchy and has something to say. Definitely worth checking out.

A diverse and dreamlike record from a truly great folk singer-songwriter who stretches on this one. Not her catchiest work, but a good example of her jazzier stuff if you're uncertain.

This album is very good and an interesting snapshot of some musical trends from California in the last years of the nineties. This is the best lineup of the band, without qualification and the most vital and tight thing they produced together. John Frusciante is the perfect partner for Flea -- the heart of the band on bass -- to the point where it's often difficult to tell their parts from one another. They are capable of such utter fluidity together as to justify the worth of rock and roll entirely. Chad Smith is a great compliment and support to them on drums, filling out any style they flit to, even briefly. Never obtrusive; always solid. In a band with wild flights of goofy fancy, Smith remains a stable platform from which the others can launch. And then there's lead singer and lyricist, Anthony Kiedis. I'll paraphrase Lester Bangs for this: Anthony Kiedis is a drunken buffoon posing as a poet. Songs like Californication and Scar Tissue are genuine contributions to the modern canon, but his unseriousness as a musician, his frequently silly but uninteresting lyrical choices and his generally lackadaisical affect all hold back not only him but the entire group. The frustrating part about Kiedis is that the great songs suggest there is so much more there. Worth a listen or ten, but this isn't the best music produced in the 90s.

Not my thing. I think I'm missing some context for where this fits in the history of rap and hip-hop, but the record generally lacks in interesting melodic ideas and groove. In both ways, it's very much of its time for successful pop. The Next Generation isn't bad, but I nearly quit during Love Ghetto, which uses a baseball metaphor for its refrain but seems to misunderstand how a home run is talked about in that sport. Not a godawful record, just a bit boring to my tastes.

Smooth and sultry, this is as easy to listen to as anything you'll hear. It might fly right past you that this is about Gaye's divorce from his first wife. It starts out very, very slow -- not inherently bad, but slow R&B trends not to be my thing, so there's my bias upfront. There's some funky guitar here, some very smooth sax (When Did You Stop Loving Me jumps out) and you just cannot beat a Motown rhythm section. Gaye himself is extremely introspective lyrically, but it never descends into navel-gazing and it remains emotional and compelling. His vocal work runs from silky and seductive through howling and plaintive. He's one of the greats, period. Check out Anger for a grooving, seething jam about being pissed off (and possibly about a cocaine habit, apparently). I can't begin to list all the musicians on this record, but as Gaye writes in the liner notes, they're all superstars. Listen to this record even half-attentively and you'll frequently catch a player laying down something completely infectious behind a whole band that's busy with something else.

A clear progenitor of modern English blue-eyed soul icon Amy Winehouse, Dusty Springfield performs the kind of smooth, delightful 60s pop that at worst is entirely fine and at best is utterly infectious. She didn't invent this musical genre, but this merits inclusion in the soul canon. Lighter and breezier at times than Motown, the musical rudiments and the chops are nonetheless here. Solid production work, too -- everything sounds good. Apart from the excellent vocal work here, keep an ear out for the rhythm section just killing it.

This is probably the first Stones record that, throughout, you'll recognize as quintessentially them. A couple country tunes (Dear Doctor) that are a bit on-the-nose, some straight but totally respectable blues numbers (Parachute Woman and the excellent Prodigal Son, especially), an acoustic ballad about the working class that builds smoothly up to a choir (Salt of the Earth) and two of their utter classics: Street Fighting Man and my personal pick for best Stones song of all, Sympathy For The Devil (Gimme Shelter is second, but won't come till their next album). Jagger wails and pouts and pleads on the vocals. He even shows himself capable of literary artifice and metaphor on Sympathy. He's dynamic, rangy and powerful -- yet gentle in places where it suits. Richards plays basically all of the guitar parts on this -- Brian Jones was famously unreliable and scattered during recording -- and his work is competent and varied throughout. For a guitar icon, Keith Richards plays few solos. His work is often severe and terribly effective, spare and to the point. Rarely ornamented, but his gifts for melody, for hooks and for arranging chord structures are all evident here. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts are inimitable here. Watts is so tasteful that when he does go for something elaborate, it's often so smooth that you miss it. Wyman plays the bass both rhythmically and melodically; his work on this album is prototypical of what great bass playing brings to the table. It reinforces the beat while driving the feeling of motion by adding additional rhythmic elements -- swing, syncopation, just a little interest. It's said that the band brought some Cuban and African influences to the fore in this record and so much the better -- rock and roll music has always included those in the mix, but feels dry and stilted when they are forgotten. Wyman and Watts deserve credit for holding into that legacy. Last, Nicky Hopkins plays piano for them on Beggars Banquet and his work deserves its own mention. It's not everywhere, but even just his work backing up Sympathy in place of a rhythm guitar is inspired. If you are curious about the Rolling Stones, start here. And when you've listened to a bunch of other rock music and you're not sure what it even means anymore, come back. This is the level set for the whole genre.

A fascinating entry into the early years of the British progressive rock movement. Songs here are derived as much from Western orchestral music as they are from the blues. It's experimental and it rocks a bit less than something straight-ahead, but it's still listenable. The are only five songs, originally: 21st Century Schizoid Man is the most accessibly 'rock' tune, doubling its guitar riff with a horn section so seamlessly that you might not notice. I Talk To The Wind is a sweet tune driven by a flute melody, lovely two-part harmonies and really interesting drumming. Epitaph is gloomy and bass/keys driven under Greg Lake's best vocal performance of the record. Moonchild is highly atmospheric and a really interesting composition for rock instruments, but ultimately more a mood than a song. You might love this but you're unlikely to hum it. In The Court of the Crimson King sounds like the reprised overture from a suite, but it stands alone. No two are the same. Robert Fripp (whose control of this band later became absolute) does weird and interesting guitar things, Greg Lake kills both the bass and vocals, Michael Giles is a terribly skilled drummer (often playing in odd time signatures just so the band could show off) and Ian McDonald does just about everything else. The album is maximalist, overwhelming, thoughtful and meandering. But in 1969, this was a planted flag claiming what you could do with the instruments from a rock & roll band (plus McDonald standing in for a whole orchestra). It's not always an easy listen (though it is thoroughly, inescapably musical, unlike other albums that are described that way), but you should listen to it at least once in your life.

Not terrible, but also not compelling. Suffers in places from some of the early 90s production stalwarts (a nigh-suffocating amount of studio reverb, instruments mixed into the background beyond the point of notice). In general, it's pretty rare to get ear-catching tone choices from instruments in this era of music production; guitars sound anemic, the bass disappears and the drums are just ok). The best sound is late in the record on Dixie Drug Store and Grace, where the producer relents just a little on the overbearing reverb. All the same, the whole thing lacks texture. Grant Lee Phillips himself sounds like he's taken influences from Bob Dylan and Eddie Vedder -- two talents to be sure, but idiosyncratic in their vocal delivery to say the least. Lyrically, the effect is a bit indistinct at times and less emotive for it. The overall feel is more of the darkness and angst of Alice in Chains than Dylan or Pearl Jam. He's got talent (Phillips's range comes through a bit better with the closer, You Just Have to Be Crazy, but it's too late by that point). In all, nice to hear some truly alternative voices from the early 90s, but I'd rather listen to Sloan or Thrush Hermit. There's talent here, but not enough drive to compel further listens. With that said, I'll remain curious to hear more from this group, even if I'm not returning to Fuzzy for a full listen.

A pretty good entry into the "classic" blues-rock canon. Lord & Paice prove themselves as perhaps the most vital part of the band on this record, keeping most songs in the groove and in time. Ian Gillan is a perfectly serviceable hard rock vocalist but lacks the fireworks or the attitude of a Plant or a Mercury. Ritchie Blackmore and Jon Lord are supremely talented (guitar and keys/organ, respectively) technicians and pretty good at melodies, but they can tend a bit toward the baroque, eventually. Machine Head is a tremendously competent album and a big influence on heavy rock to follow, but after twenty minutes of the gymnastics running from Highway Star through Never Before, it's pretty refreshing to arrive at Smoke On The Water, which feels downright restrained in context. Lazy is a great, fairly straight blues if you wade through the first five minutes of it. Space Truckin' is a bit more riff and rhythm based (almost like slow motion Helmet, thirty years early). Ultimately, for all their influence on what was to follow, Deep Purple are a band better at playing music than writing it. Machine Head is a masterclass in playing, but you're unlikely to hear something new in the composition. Listen to this once and understand its importance, but you already know the best two songs on the disc. Unless you really love guitar solos, you're probably not coming back regularly.

And interesting and somewhat diverse post-punk entry from the late eighties in middle America. Mike Watt (bass, vocals), Ed Crawford (guitar, vocals) and George Hurley (drums) built a brisk (30 minutes!) and catchy one here. In particular, the rhythm section of Watt and Hurley keep things both steady and infectious. I hear things in this album that were clearly still resonating when I was actively consuming my local punk, jam and rock scenes in the early 2000s. Don't sleep on the vocals or the melodies, either. Good album. For sure worth at least a full listen.

Strange, atmospheric, dense, elusive. Bowie's final album sounds like Radiohead but a bit less dark. His voice shows both the same depth and strength it's always had but also the character and wear of age. It's strange to be so vital, experimental and interesting so late in one's career -- let alone such a mainstream successful one. Bowie is rightfully acclaimed as an innovator and explorer, but he deserves as much credit for seeking out great collaborators, embracing their strengths and often applying lessons from them long after the collaboration ends. There are very clear Brian Eno influences here and he's not on this record at all -- only safely embraced up in Bowie's own head. There's no hyper-catchy Modern Love sort of single here. It's beautiful, though -- reverb-drenched, overdriven rhythm guitars backing wild, clean saxophone solos while Bowie emotes just to the side; that sort of thing. It's unlikely to be your favorite David Bowie album, but you should listen to this. It's poppy electro-jazz by way of rock music's greatest chameleon frontman and it's a lovely, fitting, challenging swan song. A deserving entry into one of the great bodies of work in modern popular music -- even as it stretches those pop confines.

Surprisingly diverse (it's all rock music, but it certainly doesn't all sound the same) and thoroughly effective. If you've ever wondered what the big deal about Iggy Pop is, listen to Raw Power by the Stooges, then go immediately here. You can hear some punk and some swinging drums (Lust For Life, right off the hop), whatever reflective bop The Passenger is (bonus Bowie backup vocals) and then there's a sort of choral opening to Tonight. The album sounds carefully-crafted (Pop wanted to differentiate himself from his friend and producer Bowie), yet spontaneous and authentic (the lyrics of Success are largely improvised and it works). Bear in mind also that the year this came out, 1977, is widely considered the watershed year for punk, a movement with which this album should absolutely be considered. Pop's writing, composition, arrangement and, especially, vocal performance are diverse, committed and effective. He's a dedicated, professional musician, provocateur and weirdo, with the order of precedence varying as needed. This album is both influential and excellent. It's a stone cold classic as vital was it was the day it was released.

Pretty straightforward blues rock from the beginning, of course with excellent playing from Beck - one of the Old Masters of the mid-century white blues revival. The surprise if you're into guitar-based blues or rock music with the guitar player as the headliner is that Beck leaves tons of space for his collaborators, here. So much the better: the band (a young Rod Stewart singing, Ron Wood on bass and Micky Waller on drums) sounds as cohesive as you'd expect of three guys who had already been in bands together in various combinations. Stewart is an excellent choice, rasping and wailing to great effect. Ron Wood on bass (soon to return to guitar when he joins The Faces alongside Stewart) is a surprise standout, playing a very riffy four-string style reminiscent of Zeppelin's John Paul Jones (who shows up later on Beck's Bolero), but keeps lovely, groovy time. I'd never heard of Waller before this but it's clear why he featured prominently in so many bands of this genre - he's an ace. A note before I continue: I often identify music like this as "white blues"; it's not a put-down, but an acknowledgement that this is a branch of a musical family that was founded almost entirely by black musicians in the American South. Their work (hastily or scantly recorded, often) was not widely available or heavily promoted to mainstream (in its time, that means white) audiences, especially in the UK where Beck (and Clapton, Zeppelin, the Stones, Deep Purple, etc) was working. Players like Beck made important and valid contributions to the tradition, as well as helping within their means to popularize artists like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. Most knew their place in the scene and revered the originals but I feel it important to implicitly call out one of the things that helped Beck and his contemporaries break through to the mainstream: they were white, and so perceived as more marketable by record companies. Little Richard and Hendrix and others did break through, but Beck and Clapton et al had an unquestionable leg up. Mind you, Beck was a supreme talent. Naturally gifted, relentless in practice and a highly creative blues disciple, he continued arrangements, techniques, recording ideas and much more to the blues, to popular music and to the culture of guitar playing, writ large. This album features creative use of guitar effects, a spectacular sound from Beck's famous Stratocaster and wonderful arrangements of old and/or traditional tunes ("You Shook Me", "Old Man River", "Bolero"). Beck's Bolero is the first real departure from the blues roots (an adaptation of Ravel's famous composition). Everything works. And if you've listened to guitar-based music for more than a few years, pay attention on Truth -- you'll hear when more than a couple things you take for granted were invented. Innovative, engrossing, immensely listenable and *maybe* under the radar in 2023 as I write. Give this a few spins, as soon as you can.

The Reid brothers wrote something here that sounds somehow both sad and not despondent. Dark but hopeful. This is pop in the vein of the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman and Elvis Costello. It's rhythmically straight ahead (no heavy syncopation or West African polyrhythms, here) -- melodically pleasant, familiar and harmonically just a bit darker than those predecessors. It's layered: the arranging and production give it a Cure or Smiths feel but the Jesus and Mary Chain are more hopeful than either of those. It's dead-on, masterful pop with 80s layers, fuzzy guitars and a depressive but sunny edge. This is the gentlest application of cliched 80s production I've ever heard. The slightly-overdriven, chime-y, reverby guitars and very reverb-ed drums (particularly the snare) are mixed to precisely the levels where it's unmistakable but not irritating. All that said, while this is an album well worth a listen, not a single song stuck with me when I was done. I'll probably come back eventually but I wouldn't assume that everyone will. A good album and an influential entry into this pop tradition, but not an essential full of sing-along bangers or mind-blowing epics.

Made no impact on me at all. Possibly the least compelling work of the punk/new wave/post punk movement that I've been exposed to. I forgot to write a review and could scarcely remember having listened by the time I got to it.

A strange experience. Melodies emerge from chaos, grooves underpin mayhem and suddenly you're whistling something despite the dissonance it's being played against. Bitches Brew is a challenging listen, though remaining pleasant if you're adventurous. Unlike Trout Mask Replica, I still have faith that other people do enjoy this -- as do I. I'm not a jazz nerd (just every other kind), so I can only marvel at the swirling maelstrom of sound and how the band pulls it together. The record seems determined to test the limits of how rule-breaking a song can become while still being compelling and enjoyable. Ultimately, though, it is compelling and enjoyable. It asks much of the listener, but rewards just as much. Must listen.

Dramatic, narrative, often dark but always compelling, Hounds of Love by Kate Bush is a masterwork. Conceptually, it's split into two: the first five (ending with Cloudbursting) comprise Hounds of Love while the final seven see subtitled The Ninth Wave - a concept suite said to be about a woman drifting alone at sea. The album is dense with ideas, not only musical but of production and storytelling. Rich with textures, melodies and rhythmic ideas, it leaves an emotional mark. Bush's vocal work is vulnerable and powerful and there's little more you could ask of a singer. Throughout, I was continually reminded of the concept albums of progressive bands like Pink Floyd, or more modern entries from projects like Ayreon and Dream Theater. The song Under Ice should feel familiar to any metal fan, even without distorted guitars. It really is fair to say that everyone ought to listen to Hounds of Love at least once.

"You can look for answers / but that ain't fun" seems to summarize Kid Rock pretty well. Is this album a sincere contribution to rock, rap and country music or a cynical costume hat thrown into the ring of 1998's highly corporate music charts? Unlike DB Cooper (who Rock references favourably in the opener, Bawitdaba), I don't know that even Kid Rock knows his own Identity. Though he expresses an affinity for those of the underworld -- thieves, hustlers, sex workers, addicts -- and a disdain for authority ("all those bastards at the IRS"), it's unclear what alternate world the lyricist proposes. That's the nadir: any claims to authenticity from Kid Rock would be seated in either his musical choices or his lyrical content but the latter consists entirely of boastful self-aggrandizement, references to drug use and sex and expressions of admiration for various criminals and CEOs. The latter is particularly confused as the references to hustlers, including sex workers, tend to be positive until turned toward himself (he's careful to advise you that he, himself, is not a "ho") and also his references to authority are disparaging unless coupled to wealth (he's seemingly rather proud in I Am The Bullgod of the respect he now receives from record company CEOs, despite implicitly disrespecting their contemporaries by earlier mythologizing DB Cooper who stole millions from corporations in 1971). The hard rock edge of the album (it's not metal by any reasonable standard) is palatable but a thin veneer - it consists entirely of distorted guitar riffs and has none of the bite, showmanship or technical panache of a dedicated hard rock or metal album. The song forms and vocal delivery are all borrowed from country and rap. No speed, no interesting keys, no groove, no difficult time, no instrumental solos and, while serviceable, no virtuosity. Even the guitar tones feel half-finished -- dedicated guitar players tend to carefully curate the particular sound of their instruments, but this is neither here nor there, like he plugged into a ProCo Rat and never fiddled a knob. The most authentic seeming reference in all of this work is the tie to country music. The chord structures and song forms (as well as the occasional, unexamined disdain for the government) are all lifted right out of southern rock. The echoes of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd are throughout and there's no explicit callout (apart from the general vibe of Cowboy). It stands to reason that the one thing that shines through naturally is the true heart of his music; the strangest part is that he's not at all from the South or any place country-centric: he's from Detroit. All the same, the most authentic part of this album is the country heart of Kid Rock's songwriting. In the end, the rapping is competent if a bit stock, the rock production is the same and the more country bits are actually the best. Only God Knows Why would be a fabulous ballad about the pitfalls of fame if it weren't thematically gutted by the rest of the album. Should I believe that's the real Kid or is it the asshole screwing over his family and his production team at the end of Fuck You? It doesn't really matter: this is a surprisingly decent Southern rock album with hard rock production and some elements of rap, but written without a soul. Genre mashups sometimes get labeled as posing -- toe-deep dalliances with no respect for the history and context of the costume they're donning for a lark. In some cases it's unfair, but you don't need to deeply consider the lack of lyrical content beyond boasts or the Boss MetalZone guitar sounds to peg Kid Rock as a poser. You don't even need to know that he's the son of a car dealership tycoon in Detroit and not a kid who rose from the mean streets. You just need to know that he probably isn't both the plaintive, regretful soul of God Knows Why and also the Bullgod on the same album; he's an asshole in a mask. He's faking something and I don't care what -- and I'm pretty sure he knows it's obvious. You should probably listen to Devil Without A Cause. It's surprisingly listenable but it's important to keep an eye out for just exactly how empty it is. This music is a perfect example of the state of mainstream culture in 1998 and by better understanding that, we can undo all the harm done by fakers like Kid Rock. This is perhaps the single greatest act of poserism in the modern history of music.

Originally a punk band in the vein of the Ramones, Let It Be saw The Replacements incorporating new instruments (acoustic ones!) into their music along with some slower song structures (Unsatisfied, Sixteen Blue). The result is still raw and mostly very loud but really displays the heartfelt sentiment behind many of their tracks. It's technically competent (no small feat given the DIY feel of the record) but the impact goes beyond any particular drum fill or bass groove. It's been said that this band invented alternative rock and the similarities to a host of later groups are as plain as day. Paul Westerburg's singing has obvious influences on the grunge movement (Eddie Vedder especially) and the whole band deserves respect for their own contributions. Listen to this front to back and you'll hear just where a lot of song conventions came from. Seminal.

Epic, spacey, emotional and intimate -- all from a band who sings in Icelandic (or occasionally their own, invented dialect), which I do not understand. Less doom-y than Godspeed You! Black Emperor, more delicate than Explosions In The Sky; this is perhaps the most accessible entry point into circa-2000 post-rock. You won't dance to this record. You likely won't sing along much. Some pieces are long and some meander. I'd encourage everyone to check this out, though. There's a reason this has been used in countless movie scores since its release: there's little music out there that contains more sheer feeling than Sigur Rós's masterwork, Ágætis Byrjun.

This is an utter masterclass in infectious, compelling, completely fun electronic dance-pop. It's no wonder that Norman Cook is also a bass player. There's not much to say here (and that's coming from a guy who wrote 750 words about a Kid Rock album I found to be mediocre). You've Come A Long Way, Baby isn't terribly challenging (apart from the occasionally profuse cursing -- see In Heaven for a high-cadence string of F-bombs) is immediately accessible and never overstays its welcome. I'm not well-educated in this genre of music but this record connects directly to the reward centre of my brain and shuts off the part that knows I can't dance. One of the best things from the 90s.

Solid British guitar pop with a little creative edge. Bye Bye Bad Man is a 60s pop tune in the vein of the Beatles or the Kinks but it's got an 80s sensibility to it -- reverby, phaser-ed guitars and a melodic line to the guitar hooks that's clearly informed by Island Records. Waterfall/Don't Stop presents the first real album-oriented creativity of the record. The first presents some guitar ideas (a certain blend of overdrive, slide, blues progression and pocket playing) that they'll revisit to great effect on their 1994 hit, Love Spreads. They transition seamlessly from there to Don't Stop where the drums (Alan "Reni" Wren) and bass (Gary "Mani" Mounfield) start you out in a perfectly stable groove only to be joined by the guitar player (John Squire) with a wicked reverse-delay riff that leads into Ian Brown bringing in his vocal melody with some more reverse-time effects. It's a clever piece of effect/production engagement of an arrangement and something still rare in pop and rock music -- it's interesting and catchy and prominently strange. They show their diversity by repackaging Greensleeves on Elizabeth My Dear and the record does not sag after that point, including some longer and more technically showy tunes later (see the multi-movement, style-hopping, 8-minute jam of I Am The Resurrection). This is a clear pillar upon which the 90s Britpop movement was built -- and perhaps a quality to which it rarely again rose. This beats Blur any day. Give it a go. The Stone Roses are well-remembered by the music geeks of the world but deserve more widespread acclaim than they got in the end. If you've ever wished Oasis were just a better band and better writers, this is that.

Gloomy but pleasant, post-punk but with a punk energy, Joy Division is ironically named but worthy of knowing. Closer is worth a listen at least for the clear influences on a number of bands (from the 80s onward) but it's genuinely enjoyable in its own right. Highly recommended.

Competent but fatally overwrought. Way too much reverb, just so that you know it was made in the 80s. Many blame Peter Gabriel for this studio sound. Nothing compelling.

One of the clear links between punk generations. Hüsker Dü sound much like the 70s originals, their 80s contemporaries and you'll hear some stylistic influences on 90s bands like Green Day here, too. They also occasionally sound like REM, among other things -- evidence that this is a later album, less hardcore punk than their beginnings. It's a double, but it goes quick.

A solid carrier of the fun and personal side of punk at an ebbing moment guy for the genre in the 80s. Sounds almost as much like surf or the B-52s at times as it does the Ramones. Good songwriting, very good vocals (nice harmony work) and solid playing throughout -- especially Gina Schock on drums and Kathy Valentine on bass, providing the heart and backbone of this band. Not an album that blew me away, but certainly one that I enjoyed and one that I'm sure got plenty of kids -- especially girls -- starting bands of their own. That's a legacy worth honoring with a listen. Standout tracks are the singles (Our Lips Are Sealed and the evergreen We Got The Beat) and Can't Stop The World. The Go-Go's might not become your favourite band but don't skip this one!

Ambient, morose and beautiful. This album owes as much to Brian Eno as it does any of its contemporary guitar bands. Its descendants are more Sigur Rós (see: Treefingers) than any British rock bands that followed. All that is just staggering in contrast to The Bends (one of the great records of the grunge and post-grunge genres). It's not all electronic texture. The glassy soundscape of Treefingers gives way to the decidedly more analog Optimistic. The National Anthem sits between the beeps and boops and the crunchy to jangly stuff, chugging out an angular bass groove that unsettles and ensorcells in equal measure. Weird but accessible; critically acclaimed and wildly popular; haunting and beautiful, this album is an utter masterwork.

Particularly cool if you're into heavier rock music. Blue Cheer get mixed credit for the specific legacy of this album (it either is or isn't one of the very first heavy metal albums, depending on the critic you ask), but the groove-heavy, blues-informed (it has a B.B. King cover, after all), fuzz-drenched power trio sound went far. You'll still hear this sound today in bands like Sleep and Queens of the Stone Age. Peterson (vox, bass), Stephens (guitar) and Whaley (what better name for a drummer?) thunder through music descended from the blues and 50s pop, but in a way that predates the relentlessness of punk (this is 1968, after all). Every piece of the band is audible, they have a genuine sense of dynamics and they start stop on a dime. It's psychedelic as hell, mind you: they meander and jam, they take liberties with covers (Summertime Blues opens the record in stellar fashion) and they write very clear drug anthems (Doctor, Please). Is it an utter masterpiece? No, it falls short there - sometimes a little less compelling, sometimes too focused on the guitar noodling and while Dickie Peterson is a capable singer (and genuinely screams to good effect at times), he's a little limited in range and not exactly Paul McCartney with the melodies. It's good. You should check it out. But for most people, it isn't Sgt. Pepper's -- just another important incremental step in the grand history of rock music.

Pure groove. Hancock brings some of the prevailing funk of 1973 into this record and spends most of the effort playing some electric keyboard (be it a synth or a Fender Rhodes). Everyone in the band kills, here. Know that this is an instrumental jazz album and they're definitely not playing standards but the groove is solid and the rhythm is hot (at least listen to Sly). It meanders - they explore a bit for sure. But this is a fun effort from a jazz chameleon.

It's important to know, if you've never heard this, that Steinman (the principle writer on this project) developed this material from what was originally a rock opera. It really shows -- especially in the several songs herein that sound like mini-medleys. They shift and morph and return to themes (though primarily within arrangements rather than across the record). It's downright fun. The rock & roll is in full effect here, as is the goofy camp of a musical. If you can suspend your disbelief enough to buy the drama they're selling (in the classic Paradise By The Dashboard Light, it's two teenagers deciding whether or not to get it on), several of these are absolute anthems that build to duets singing counterpoint, refrains returning, major fifths spiking and space for an obvious audience sing-along. You'll need to check your own self-seriousness at the door to enjoy any Meat Loaf, but that's true as much of the singer as the eponymous food. Just sit down and have a slice. This is the epitome of schlock masterpiece.

A solid folk effort from one of America's truly great songwriters. As an occasional Simon listener generally but a stalwart evangelist of Graceland as a top five album and The Boxer as a contender for Greatest American Song, it's no insult when I say that much of it just sounds like a bulk order of 'some Paul Simon'. The mid-record run of Armistice Day/Me and Julio/Peace Like A River is the strongest section for me but it's all worth listening. Even the low points of Paul Simon's songwriting career are worth listening to. The melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, textural, poetic and story elements of his writing are rich, deep and often unexpected. His prime influences seem to be Delta Blues and Tin Pan Alley and those are bright as day, here. Plus, it's a short one. It's not my favorite Simon work, but it's an album that most of us could only dream of writing. Check it out regardless - maybe I'll be your favourite.

Perfectly good guitar pop that presages the sound of numerous bands like Oasis and Blur to follow. Presumably, this record and the work of The Stone Roses served as catalysts for the development of that sound. I found the closing track, Failure, to be the most compelling tune. They're all decent but little stuck with me. Not bad, not great and seemed to serve to push British music back to basics at just the right time. Points for influence.

It might seem strange for a punk album to be monotonous but it's something the genre can fall prey to. The swaggering sneer throughout this record blends together as much as the straight-ahead rhythm work of guitar, bass and drums. Sonically, some ideas that echo the dark electronics of Joy Division and the jangly rock of the honky tonk side of the Stones do creep in, but they never save the album form feeling like it's dragging on.

You should know, upfront, that this is one of the first albums I ever bought. I certainly try not to let my nostalgia colour my perception but I'm not perfect. This was a good record, period. U2 drop much of the studio layering that they'd become buried in by Pop, revealing precisely what remained of their songwriting by the 2000 release of All That You Can't Leave Behind. The singles get a lot of attention (Beautiful Day, Walk On, Elevation) and while they're good efforts (Beautiful Day, in particular, is a rare sunny anthem from a band known for their songs about deathbed reconciliations and The Troubles), the second half of the album contains some hidden gems. Wild Honey recalls the acoustic bops of the Rolling Stones while In A Little While offers a soulful effort that shows each member playing with little effect support - Clayton and Mullen keeping a slow shuffle groove, Bono showing his genuine capacity for vocal dynamics and the Edge providing a deeply organic electric guitar part that relies on nothing more than artful phrasing, varied pick attack and some spot-on overdrive to achieve the song's atmosphere. U2 are a band known for their bombast and their polished, sweeping rock soundscapes but they're genuinely good writers and players. They can't resist their bombastic nature here, but the stripped down record proves perfectly that it comes from them genuinely and not just from their racks and racks of studio electronics. ATYCLB closes on some slicker numbers but the varied, infectious, affecting nature of the work remains. Unlike some of their more constructed efforts, any band could pick up this whole album and play it through with whatever gear they already have (excepting a deceptive octave effect on Elevation) and it would sound great - that's a mark of well-crafted songs. This is accessible to both the listener and to a musician following along -- you don't need three hours puzzling over an arcane chain of delay pedals to replicate the guitar sound or an ocean of reverb to get Bono's vocals. But you've gotta have some range and a delicate touch to get it right. Is it melodramatic? Yeah, that's them through and through. But is it good? Unequivocally, yes.

A great album with a well-deserved reputation as a classic. Just listen.

A tremendous vocalist and bottleneck slide guitar player, Bonnie Raitt certainly deserves consideration in the pantheon of 20th century American music -- if for no other reason than her torchbearing for blues and what later became known as Americana. This record feels a bit over-polished, however. It's good, it's stylistically varied, but it's too clean an effort to be truly interesting. I Will Not Be Denied stands out as a showcase for the Raitt with whom I'm familiar, but overall the album is a bit staid and sterile. Worth a look if you're curious but not a must-listen for general audiences.

Interesting. Rock with early mid-century influences - staccato piano, folky progressions, Beach Boys vocal harmonies with falsetto and swimming in reverb (without the slightest 80s taint). But also electronic. Sunny textures, shuffle grooves, choral-quality four-part vocal arrangements. The closest comparison I can give you is Montreal's Half Moon Run, though that's a bit obscure and they're a little more folk and a little more rock. Spare but skillful and textural guitar arrangements. Driving but delicate drums. Deft but restrained bass. Keys! But good luck catching them in the act. This is an album where everything serves the song -- no technical flourishes in the playing for the sake of showing off. Deeply dynamic. Gentle, affecting, potent, moving. Very cool.

A raging, roaring, vaguely menacing album of folk/rock tunes about dark things, sung by a songwriter with a rangy, smooth, growling baritone. The band sounds like cartoon characters hanging, flapping from the back of the runaway stagecoach that is Cave. Sounds, all at once, like Leadbelly, Dylan & The Band or an evil Leonard Cohen. Rare. The musical forms are very old and a bit theatrical but the tradition of writing ballads about dark themes like this is old. It's just not so prominent as it once was, anymore. This is very nearly a country album but absolutely does not come from that tradition (though I'm sure Cave has heard some Johnny Cash) - that distinction alone makes this a fascinating and engrossing listen.

I wanted to say, "incomparable," but even George Clinton would be more flattered by direct comparisons to Sly Stone and James Brown and to Motown. Come for the rhythm - for the syncopated in-betweens and the hard, precise thunk of the whole section when the bar comes back to ONE. Generations of bass players and drummers have studied this work (Bootsy Collins and Cordell Mosson on bass, Tiki Fulwood, Jerome Brailey, Collins and Gary Cooper all rotating through percussion roles). Everything is good. The songs can go on a bit, but the impulse to move with these rhythmic patterns is strong enough that you may not notice. Just as you may not notice in Give Up The Funk when the whole band starts singing 'ga ga goo-ga' over and over to the rhythm. The various parts diverge and reunite around that propulsive hit on the first beat of every bar in a manner (lifted from the godfather, Brown) that is at once mesmerizing, fascinating, engrossing, dense and accessible. Funk is a genre music. It is a thoughtfully constructed tradition built upon Motown and the Blues and bebop jazz but in a way sufficiently coherent as to have its own frames and strictures. It is recognizably borrowed from, having transcended being an offshoot of other things. This is funk in pure, uncut form: the raw, elemental source. Think what you want of the silliness, the psychedelia, the sci-Fi influences but come open-minded to embrace the beat. Like whisky or coffee, you may find you prefer its flavours watered down a little (funk metal? pop-funk? samples of The Gap Band throughout hip-hop? it's all there), but you should try the genuine article at least once if you love music. Funk is an oft-referenced influence by numerous musicians but a somewhat forgotten genre for contemporary fans and writers. Give it a visit: it is an utterly infectious, jubilant, kinetic musical style that deserves the reverence associated with the likes of Robert Johnson, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. This is as important as the Beatles. A masterwork. Parliament is a well from which we continue to draw but do not acknowledge enough.

Timeless. It's worth reading a bit about The Bomb Squad's production work on this record because some of their innovations are now so ubiquitous (the density of sampling, in particular) that it's hard to imagine their invention. It's like explaining to fish that water had to be invented. It's a gem even without the context. Certainly the rapping style is different from contemporary (I write this in late 2023) trends, but it doesn't feel old -- just distinct from today's trends. Exceptional. Entirely deserving of the reputation of Public Enemy.

Totally serviceable, off the beaten path alt rock that sounds not much like the decade it's from. The Flaming Lips have never tickled my brain in the same way that they seem to for many fans and critics but they're well worth a look for any music fan. It's built around melody and harmony, lovely chord cadences and clever lyrics. Very well made.

Ambient-with-a-beat electronica. It didn't draw me in and grab me, but it was enjoyable. Great music to work to.

Reminds me of The Doors, but less doom-y. Cool, detached early 70s California rock. Pretty good throughout; starts strong and the closing trio ends strong. Highlights are Devil Eyes and Hong Kong bar. Part of a tradition, a vibe, a signature of an era. Not a forever part of my rotation, though.

An oft-derided storyteller who leads with a strong voice and his piano. Whether modern dismissals of Joel's career (I'd call this rock snobbery) are driven by his own success and the lazy programming of North American radio (the "overplayed" school) or the fact that he's a piano player first (a professor of mine argued that Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his child cousin ruined the piano for rock music for decades; exceptions prove the rule), he deserves another listen. Melodically interesting, lyrically smart and relatable, vocally strong and rangy, Joel fills The Stranger with concise tunes influenced as much by the early 40s and 50s roots of rock & roll (jazz, Tin Pan Alley, the blues, Broadway) and largely avoids getting too bogged down by the oncoming reverb-pocalypse of the production conceits of the 80s (this is 1977, but the tremors have begun you can hear them on Just The Way You Are, which is why it's so schmaltzy). He's kind of like a more-sentimental, less-angry Bruce Springsteen. Give it a shot. Movin' Out is great, you can skip Just The Way You Are it it's too saccharine for you and Only The Good Die Young is an absolute all-time jam.

Good. Its strongest material is the opening pair - the classics, Tiny Dancer and Levon. Otherwise exactly what you expect from Elton John - lovely, plaintive vocals, good work at the piano, a strong backing band and good storytelling from Bernie Taupin. Elton does tend to run on a little but that was his style. I do think it's worth it for folks familiar only with his hits to listen through some full records. You may return to just listening to greatest hits compilations afterwards, but the man deserves credit for the fairly solid albums otherwise. It's no Dark Side of the Moon, but it's a strong collection.

Uncontroversially, this is a very good album. Not my genre of expertise but it strikes me as much sparser, samples-wise, than the most prominent work of even five years before. 2pac has an easy flow and a steady rhythm, making the tracks much easier to relax into than their subject matter might lead you to believe. I think the spare arrangements led later artists to mistake that for the central quality of Shakur's work; his writing and his delivery are stellar. On top of it, the rhythms and hooks that he does use are infectious and extremely effective -- 2pac only needs a simple beat because it's a great one and because he's plenty to hold your attention on his own. Influential and rightfully so. Probably won't convert any skeptics of rap, but if you're at all curious you should give this a spin.

Beautiful, emotional, spare, direct. My first full Waits album. I'm familiar with his gravelly voice and his reputation for strangeness but they're unmistakable. Waits is, arguably, actually a subtle artist but the rough nature of his voice and the dark feel of his composition are not. It's the loveliness of his melodies and chord progressions that are. This use of his weary-sounding voice deepens the pathos on display. Something about the natural inclination of our voices toward vocal fry when we tire lends a gravity to Tom Waits that isn't easily replicable in another way. He sounds like he has traveled continents but simply must sing you one song, give you one message before he can rest. It helps that his pitch and dynamic control are excellent in spite of what seems initially to be a classically naive voice. Make no mistake -- the gravel is natural and his skills as a singer are practiced and genuine. Both are a rare combination (though admittedly, more common as I write in 2023, thanks to specialist vocal coaches). A diverse and extraordinary album.

Well, it's the Wrecking Crew working under the intense direction of the profoundly talented Brian Wilson, so I'm not sure what more you can ask. Not everything is an earworm single here but the lush harmonies of the Beach Boys married to one of the most storied session groups of the 20th century (see also: The Funk Brothers, Booker T & The MG's and The Swampers), married under the direction of a genuine musical genius. Just imagine writing all of these parts in your head, which Wilson did. God Only Knows is, alone, a masterpiece. But why read my views on this? It's one of the most famous albums in the history of modern Western popular music. You don't need me to tell you about it.

A good album. In the grand scheme of modern popular music, this band probably served to bring funk back into the popular consciousness. On the other hand, Anthony Kiedis is and has always been both juvenile and overly self-serious, which often limits the Chili Peppers. Under The Bridge is a masterpiece, in part because he's writing something genuine, rather than trying to cram the maximum number of innuendos into his bandmates' work. For me, the combination of braggadocio and sexual reference just combine to give the impression of a creepy young man at a bar. When I hear his words, I find him profoundly off-putting. Like if Iggy Pop were a drunken frat boy. The others in the band are typically excellent here. Flea is a legend, John Frusciante is the smoothest California guitarist of the whole 90s scene and Chad Smith is the ever-morphing glue that holds them together. Good, but deeply flawed, much like the 90s themselves.

Simon has always been a brilliant writer and arranger but this one is the softest of the soft folk/rock. One wonders if the producer enforced whispering in the studio for fear that rock music might break out. It's very good. Mrs. Robinson and America are utter classics that have served all of the mountainous praise they've received over the decades. In places, it feels pretty emotionally flat (Punky's Dilemma) flat. For a concept album about coming of age, that's a problem. Critically acclaimed, though - so what do I know?

Dramatic, oppressive. The lyrics have been translated from German; this was all originally written by Hanns Eisler. Well-orchestrated, performed with skill and conviction. I nearly didn't finish it. Maybe it's just of a different time but I could not attach my interest to this.

Catchy and capable, well played and composed. A little bit emotionally cool, which feels typical of pop from the late 90s to my recollection of the time. Good, not great.

The second major label release from Eminem (Marshall Mathers, of course) is a real snapshot in time. Everything is on display here: the simple, thorough, concise production mastery from Dre, the incisive, fluid, boundary-pushing lyrics and flawless, emotionally-charged and often irreverent delivery. It also contains the stream-of-consciousness examination of fame, moral outrage and parasocial relationships that made Mathers infamous. Technically, it's excellent and the sales of the album are an indicator of its lasting influence on popular music. It's worth examining what lies beneath. Overall, Mathers seems to be outraged by outrage. By all accounts, his overtly violent, misogynistic, occasionally homophobic themes are intended to skewer attitudes he perceived in society at large. At the same time, his shock at others ascribing those attitudes to him by paying attention to his writing is hard to take seriously. It's true that the microscope under which pop stars (even the accidental ones and the ones famous *for* their bad behavior, like the Jackass crew or Ozzy Osbourne) was absurd at the turn of the millennium but for someone who observes the machine so astutely, the incredulousness must be at least partly cultivated. The Marshall Mathers LP is best experienced by stepping back and observing it as an entirely constructed artifact. Take our narrator as a character, whether constructed or genuine (or vassilating between the two), who demonstrates the toxicity in his contemporary culture. He does insult men by insinuating their homosexuality in one breath and then declares there's 'no reason a man and another man can't elope'. He both discusses his concerns that a fan will commit violence against his girlfriend and also his own violent actions. Eminem's thesis is that we're tragic players in this harmful production -- and he does not spare himself. He also wants you to know you shouldn't take him seriously. Which was very common in those days -- nobody wanted anyone else to think they wanted to be taken seriously -- and an easy dodge to criticism was to claim unseriousness. With apologies to Mr. Mathers, his influence on oughts culture is too thorough to dismiss him. He's a filthy lens though which we can examine a filthier culture of the time. A damaged, flawed human being who said some problematic things in a poetic way that sold records and pointed out that the culture surrounding him was just as bad but pretending otherwise. Eminem has deserved much of the controversy he has courted -- mostly deliberately -- and correctly observed that few who expressed outrage were righteous enough to judge him. It was the early 2000s. It was shiny, plastic, brightly coloured and it was deeply rotten underneath.

Sunny, laid-back and fully fuzz-drenched. You can tell from the melodies and the simple lyrics than Marc Bolan started as a folk songwriter. I'll be honest in that some of the refrains repeat a bit too much for my taste ("Metal Guru", I'm looking at you) but there's a bluesy bounce and a modern production style that make this album timeless. It mostly doesn't land for me ("mid", as the kids would say) but I think that's a me problem. Everyone should check this out -- it'll probably suit most listeners very well.

Good Lord, Kate Bush is talented. This roars out of the gate with the grooving, toms-driven "Sat In Your Lap", in which she nails a smooth, staccato come-hither whisper, a distorted, near-falsetto wail and a vibrating, deep, powerful belt. Instant masterclass. The dark, synth-y, reverb-drenched composition and rangey, emotional, catchy vocals, all packaged in infectious, weird, highly produced pop is right in line with Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel albums of the same era. Except that Bush might actually be the best of the three. I read another review that described Bush's work as avante-pop and I think that's perfect. It's not prog but pushes the envelope in its own way, from a different genre. I like Hounds of Love a little better (that one'll haunt you) but this is a spectacularly good album and you should listen to it. In fact, here's a lukewarm take: we should all listen to more Kate Bush.

Pretty good. Blues-inflected seemingly by way of the Stones. Lightly electronic in the sample-heavy way of early 90s British stuff. Inoffensive, recognizable while feeling new. Your mind will remain safely un-blown but you will be entertained.

Not even my favourite Beatles record but nonetheless an essential part of the Western pop canon. So much has been written about this album that it's like pouring water into the ocean to join in. However, here are some notes about the album that you should consider: This is a double album. It sags much less than when other bands attempt them, but settle in. These guys were basically a boy band when they broke out in (arguably) February of 1963 -- only five years before this album was released. That they played their own instruments was not even a given at the time (singers fully in the pocket of the record industry have been around forever) but the stylistic restlessness that they exhibited in their short career (1960-1970) demonstrates not just a phenomenal musical curiousity but also an immense talent for digesting genre music. On top of that, the Beatles remain profoundly musical and enjoyable throughout their various genre dalliances and they may be what convinced rock musicians that rock & roll could subsume any influence. They must also have been terribly aware of what was happening in diverse other musical scenes because they aped everything going in The White Album. The Beatles were so taken with Pet Sounds that they felt themselves in direct competition, artistically, with the Beach Boys at this point. You can hear the direct reference on Back In The USSR. This album was disruptive. Helter Skelter is one of the many, diffuse roots of punk rock, nine years later. Watch Peter Jackson's documentary about their last sessions. They're busy trying to record Let It Be, but you get an impression of how disorganized and shambolic they could be in the studio, despite how polished they are often perceived to be in retrospect. Also, the amount of times that one of these guys (mostly John) would hum a half-finished idea for Paul and then McCartney would extrapolate it into something beautiful boggles the mind. This isn't a masterwork in the sense that it's an incomparably polished monolith of craftsmanship beyond mortal reckoning. It's an essential classic because it represents a feverish and wild creativity that forever marked Western popular music. Much like The Beatles themselves, this is just a whorl of concentrated magic in the great, smooth continuum of sorcery that is music. Also, the guitars sound absolutely great. Buy a Vox AC30.

Rap sure was different in 1994. Samples from real records, DJ scratches, sketches, credible threats of violence and an extraordinary flow. Some of it we don't miss, but Biggie was a rare talent. I'm not aware enough of what's going on in rap today to speak broadly about it, but I will say that it's rare for me to come across someone whose lyrical gifts and knack for delivery produce something so compelling. The tension that usually pulls me along in other music that I listen to is the resolution of a chord progression and sometimes the infectiousness of a groove. A flow like Biggie's is enough to pull me in -- comprehensible, stacked with various kinds of rhymes, often very clever and rhythmically diverse enough to keep the listener engaged. Recommended, if only so that you can listen to the Drakes of today and understand why people say, "it used to be different." I don't miss the sketches, though.

Big Star has never resonated with me. They have a real sense of musical drama, they seem like an early, distant ancestor of Wilco and the vocals are emotive yet rough in a way that's pleasing. It just doesn't pull me along. However, as much as I don't get it, you should probably check them out. Everyone else seems to like them. In the words of my generation: meh.

Perfectly good, bite-sized electronic music. It's not going to stick with me even an hour after listening but I also didn't turn it off. Let's assume by its inclusion that it's influential, so you should give it a try; maybe it's your jam! For me, it's fine.

Their Spotify description calls them "socially conscious noise rock" and I have a phobia of invertebrate parasites. I wasn't sure what to expect, to say the least of how I started out. Microshift opens with Negative Space, which builds from a highly programmatic intro (you can hear the krautrock influence immediately) to a clean, fairly soaring feel by the end of its near-seven-minute length. For the grittiness of the guitar tone, the vocal delivery, electronic accents and production all combine for a fairly clean, atmospheric number. In short, it builds. Mostly, reminds me of early (Suburbs) Arcade Fire, but with a little less catharsis. This music is very nice and if you like it, you should go back and work through the Canadian indie collectives of the Oughts (Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire).

Released, tragically, the same year as The White Album. This is a jangly, plaintive record that would sound more like modern folk than the brash rock of You Really Got Me, the utter cheek of Lola or the (later) danceable Come Dancing. It's still a solid record. Some folks I respect greatly consider this their favourite album. I doesn't get close for me. There's a concept album here, if you want to listen closely to Ray Davies' music. I could take or leave it. Ultimately, a profoundly pleasant listen and likely the sound of a band reconnecting with their roots (parallel to the theme of the album), but not all of us are compelled through a record by its literary content. Some days, this album is a 3/5 and sometimes it's a 4/5 for me. I'm settling on 4, if only because I'd rather people discover this than the fucking Arctic Monkeys.

If you wonder what musical context this album emerged into, you'll only need to listen to Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough to head the disco. It's worth remembering that, at this point, Jackson was still making music with The Jackson 5 and could maybe legally order a beer in the US (he turned 21 the year that Off The Wall was released). He wouldn't reveal the Moonwalk to the world for another four years. I'm not a massive Michael Jackson stan and his particular pop oeuvre lands best with me when he's dabbling in rock (Thriller is my Michael album) but it's impossible to deny the polish and clarity of vision on Off The Wall. Both singles (the aforementioned Don't Stop and also Rock with You) are infectious and, if you live in the West and lived through a wedding dance as recently as the Oughts, will be immediately familiar. No doubt the legendary Quincy Jones's work as producer deserves credit. The horns on Workin' Day and Night are killer. Probably my favourite disco album of the 70's/80's cusp, but it's distinctly a part of that moment. Still a little colder than other genres I prefer, owing to a very clean production, I think. This is a notable and important stop on Michael Jackson's journey from Motown prodigy to the King of Pop, well worth investigation for context but enjoyable enough that you won't be mad about the time you spend with it.

Excellent production (hello, Mark Ronson), perfectly competent pop songwriting, Aguilera's voice sounds powerful and agile. The marketing of her career vacillated between selling her innocence and exploiting the sexuality she often played up in the music (go back to Dirrty if you want a very Oughts pearl-clutching controversy) but there's no question here that her voice is a powerful woman's voice and not just a young girl's. The elements of hip-hop (samples, scratches, drum loops, occasional rappers breaking in briefly) work but her gospel influences (backing choirs, harmonic choices) produce superior music. Makes Me Wanna Pray is excellent pop; Back In The Day just doesn't do anything for me. Overall, though, this is a much more pleasant high-commerce pop outing than I expected; I hated this genre back in the day and had to wait a day to come to this with an open mind. If you want to know what female vocal pop sounded like in the Oughts, this is as good an example as you might find. Obviously, check out Adele's 19, as well, but this is a good place to start.

My first My Bloody Valentine album (weirdly late to jump in, but thus spake the Album Generator). Immediately: down-mixed, dreamy vocals underneath lush, beautiful guitar textures. Nothing roars and dips and wobbles in quite the same way (maybe Dinosaur Jr.). Drums & bass are steady. Lyrics are apparently important but totally inaudible to my ear. Just more atmosphere. This isn't my jam. This bad has clearly been influential (apart from having heard the name repeatedly in my quarter-century playing guitar). Come for the lesson in the beauty of saturated audio circuits adding just the right overtone chaos to chords. Normally, I'd tell you why to stay, but I didn't.

Simple chordal arrangements, straightforward vocals and pop-friendly choruses. If you'd like a yardstick against which post-grunge singer-songwriter guitar rock can be measured, this is probably as good as anything else. Go janglier and you'll get The Shins. Brighten it up a bit and you get Ted Leo. Add a transparently crushing depression and you've got Elliott Smith. Mix in a little bit of country and you're listening to Wilco. I'm not saying it's the very best, just that it offers a sort of centre-of-mass or average around which everything else sort of rotates. There's always something a little bit arch or wry about Eels -- probably an affectation of E, their sole songwriter. It works, mostly, most of the time, but it wears thin, naturally. The album closer, Manchild, breaks that spell and is worth sticking around for. Anyhow, it was solid and perfectly fine. In fact, you probably should actually listen to this one. It's competent and of-its-time in a good way. It sounds a little wistful but still sunny, like a bummed out Californian writing songs outside on a nice day. Eels are solid like that: kind of dark but also kind of hooky and light. You could pick up an instrument and learn most of these songs in an hour -- but they wouldn't have quite the polish of the original, as there's real craft in each of these works.

Mellow and pleasant yet wistful and angry. That's Neil Young for you, in general. Some of the album is partly live and some of it's partly country. It's also famously an early precursor to grunge. In 1979, this album does stand more with the recently-emerged punks than it does with the highly-ornamented, drug-soaked industry of what rock & roll had become at the time. It's meaningful that the record is so country-tinged, stripped down and borderline lackadaisical. Is it a required listen, though? It's probably worth a listen but, even as Neil Young albums go, this isn't as good as Harvest. The thing about having a list that's 1001 albums long is that it's going to be largely padding. This is pretty good padding, but make no mistake: you're here to hear "My My, Hey Hey" and "Hey Hey, My My" and those bookend the album (due respect to Powderfinger).

It's notable and important just how heavy this album was in 1970. At the time, rock & roll sounded like the Beatles. This was weird, it was loud and it was distorted. It was also highly technical, instrumentally. Deep Purple were, therefore, an influential band and they're still a pretty fun listen (if you don't mind the extended instrumental parts). Probably only one Deep Purple album needs to be an essential listen though -- and that's probably Machine Head. If you like your rock on the heavier side, definitely check this out. If you're more into pop or R&B or jazz, this album isn't going to convert you. Probably only essential listening if you were buying records in 1970.

This one's good. This comes from an interesting but not overly-challenging era of jazz and is a very pleasurable listen. I'm only a beginner jazz listener but I find this accessible and enjoyable. Speaking as someone who's primarily a folk and rock fan, this is worth a listen for music fans like myself to hear the profound influence that Cuban music has had throughout the history of the other genres that I love. That's where the Bo Diddley Beat came from (probably from Africa, before that). Standouts for me were the opener, Wild Jungle and Cannonology, which both place a stronger emphasis on the percussion, which is what I love the most on this record. And Frenzy, which reminds me profoundly of Caravan. There's masterful playing throughout the recording, though.

You might hear something on this album that sounds like a cliche, but if you do, this is probably the guy that invented it. The fluid, continuous melodic content that Carlos Santana provides throughout this record is remarkable not just in its fluency but also in its ability to take over and recede from the listener's focus as needed. Santana also pioneered a couple of other guitar-nerd classics: popularizing Paul Reed Smith guitars and Mesa/Boogie amplifiers (he literally gave Mesas their second name, saying on first hearing Randall Smith's work, 'man that thing really boogies!'). Wonkery aside, this is an album that is unapologetic about its influences, whether Latin jazz or psychedelia. It's cohesive, too -- the Latin rhythm section, the Ray Manzarek-like organ work, the (occasional) vocals, the driving bass lines and the namesake's searing guitar work, veering between expressive jazz-influenced solo lines and hard rock. It's a lot for a band to wrangle if you think too much about it, but this is an album that must have been thoroughly felt in the writing of it. This is an album for which words like 'lush,' 'driving' and 'influential' pour out easily. It's better to sit for 40 minutes with it through some good speakers or headphones and experience for yourself. It's not perfect -- I think without the emotional weight of affecting lyrical content on most of the songs, this'll leave you a day or two later -- but it's a gem. As long as you like music made with guitars, because that's a strong focus, here.

If you're wondering what year this is made, you'll know just as soon as the intro synth solo (a minimoog, Wikipedia tells me) begins. You might think this is some slick 80's pop-rock in the mold of Billy Joel or Huey Lewis (and it's not not that, as the kids say) but Winwood at this point in his career has been going for 17 years. He got his start in the Spencer Davis Group in 1963 (with his improbably-named brother, Muff). That feeling during While You See A Chance that you should be watching a hero train for a movie's climax via a montage is no coincidence: that's a mainstay of 80's album rock and this is a prime example. There are strains here of Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel and Winwood's credit of playing every instrument on the album is absolutely no discredit to the quality of all the work. It's also not over-produced in the way that big-name 80's records typically are. There are elements that sound a bit cheesy today (the bass tone and the synth fills are borderline silly), but I think it manages to remain earnest, if a bit overly-so. A guy did this whole thing on his own and did remarkably well at each part. Winwood's self-harmonizing is lovely, his drumming is more than serviceable and his guitar playing is rightfully famous (if chiefly among guitar players). A+ on all the technical aspects of the album, A- on the diversity (Second-Hand Woman's intro is a straight up late-disco banger) and a B on the songwriting. Like most of the 80's, this is the sound of precisely-executed excess: technically masterful, highly skillful, emotionally bereft in most places. How does it sound both earnest and flat, you might ask? That's the magic of three to seven layers of synth on every song. I think it means something to Winwood, but I don't think it means anything to me. Must you listen to this? No, it won't change your life. Should you listen to this record? Absolutely, especially if you want to hear what "multi-instrumentalist" really means, or you'd like to know what the mainstream white dudes of the 80's sounded like (and maybe why they sounded like that).

One of the greatest rock & roll bands in history was founded by two Dutch guys and a couple of dudes they met in California as kids. That's Van Halen. 80's hair metal was irritating attempts to chase Eddie Van Halen; Van Halen the band was almost irritating but saved because of how good Eddie was. If you got sick of 80's pop-metal ("hair" metal) or the swaggeringly overt misogyny that much of rock became, I get it. But this is the grand stele amid the ancient town square from which that dubious movement proceeded. Somewhere buried in this fountain of joyous noise is the blues, but you'll have to dig for it a little (Ice Cream Man aside). Michael Anthony plays a lovely, melodically and harmonically interesting bass while meshing solidly with his rhythm counterpart. Alex Van Halen is a seriously underrated rock drummer -- pretty restrained on this record, but he'd confound a generation of musicians with his intro to 1984's Hot For Teacher. "Diamond" David Lee Roth is a quintessential, prototypical, hypersexual rock frontman (100% wishes he was Freddie), complete with both a raspy belting timbre and frequent falsetto screams and moans. They all owe immensely to their predecessors (let's just say all of Led Zeppelin, for concision's sake, even if they're all more interesting than that). I spent a paragraph talking about everyone else so that there'd be time for Edward Van Halen alone. Eddie heard everyone else in the 60s and 70s -- Jimmy Page, Brian May, Ritchie Blackmore, Tony Iommi, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix -- mastered their techniques, got bored and added Paganini to create something that was wholly novel and iconic. Eddie was famous for his two-hand fretboard tapping (which he may have first heard from Les Paul), but his ability to produce wide bends, huge dive-bombs, sweep picking sections and at-will harmonics were remarkable because of how smoothly and musically he integrated them. Van Halen didn't write groundbreaking songs (or You Really Got Me, at all) in terms of structure or harmonics or content or anything like that. They wrote songs that sounded like the Kinks (or literally were the Kinks) or maybe Delta blues but were simultaneously way, way heavier than Deep Purple. And some short dude with a cigarette behind his guitar's nut was doing musical stunts in the background with a fluidity that would make Carlos Santana blush. You should listen to this album because other bands spent a whole decade trying to be as cool as this and in the end, they got so irritating with their imitations that rock did a full reset with grunge. People (mostly other dudes) tried so, so hard to play guitar solos as good as Eddie's that the grunge kids banned guitar solos altogether for the duration of the 90s. Eddie was so good that it fucked everybody else up. I could go on longer about how this is the other side of the 80s (though this is 1978, still) -- no synths in sight until Eddie writes Jump -- or about how gorgeous their harmonies actually are, but there's little point. This is a solidly B-tier nationwide touring band and a 2- or 3-star album. But the guy who built the band and writes the songs happens to be an all-time great and, somehow, that format worked for Van Halen. Must listen, but 4 stars -- they changed music but they won't change your life (unless you become obsessed with playing guitar). It explains what went wrong with 80s guitar music; but Van Halen (and at least two follow ups) are actually good, by dint of the absolute colossus who carried them into glory, every night of their hard-touring life.

The first two tracks on this album were unmitigated hits. I'd be shocked to meet someone near my age (40, as of writing) who's never heard both 1999 and Little Red Corvette. It's pure, uncut pop music -- but not overly sugary, just catchy and accessible. Part of the reason it just lands in the 'pop' category is likely that the various genre influences (you can hear funk, R&B and rock in parts, throughout) are so various that it kind of averages back out to pop. Some (Delrious) is just weird, but it's always catchy. I'll take a moment to diverge into the production of this album. The synths were cutting edge at the time, I have no doubt, but they sound like children's toys now. The drums, likewise, are shit. Well-played, groovy, perfectly serviceable in every way except that they sound like a Casio keyboard -- too much reverb, no dynamics, way too clean and sterile. I would be shocked to learn that there was an acoustic kit involved at all, but 80's hyper-compression and over-reverb can do that. Vocals are great. Mixed a little bit down in the blend for pop, which does allow the band (this is the first record with Prince's longtime backing back, the Revolution) to shine. The harmonies are precise and sweet but I could stand more of them. The bass is round and mercifully left out of the 80s-ness of things. Prince's guitar sounds excellent (probably a Tele, but who knows) but is mostly pretty quiet among the other elements. The last part is kind of a shame but prototypical of Prince. He's probably a top-100 guitar player for the 20th century and always kept it pretty discreet. Pay attention to the solo at the end of Little Red Corvette. In the end, it's a catchy pop album from Minneapolis and it probably contains a lot of technical innovation. The thing about technical innovation is that it sometimes doesn't sound all that impressive, 40-odd years later. It's hard to say if I needed to hear this in my life. I don't have the context for what came before and after this in the mainstream that would mark this as influential, or as a part of the work of many generations of musicians. It's not clearly a voice of anger like early Dylan or Rage (though 1999 is a protest song about nuclear proliferation). It doesn't wear its musical genius as obviously as Brian Wilson's Pet Sounds (dozens of parts composed in his head). I'm going to put the problem down to the 80s. Between Prince's habit of keeping his personal technical musical talent (a clear, wide-ranging voice and a ferocious guitar ability) only modestly displayed and the way that 80s production trends flattened everything into a mess of cheesy synth textures and soulless reverb, I'm going to say we should probably all take in a Prince album or two, and they should be Purple Rain and one other; why not this one? Not a masterpiece, but maybe that's just because I find most pop boring. 1999 by Prince almost transcends that but, ultimately, doesn't.

Shrug. Competent. Unclear as to what was influential about this. You won't want to puncture your own ear drums from listening to this. I've seen better local bands that never made it, though.

Oh look -- more 70s soft rock by a guy who wrote and played everything. As a bonus, it's long as hell. 'Wolfman Jack' was alright, though not as infectious as The Guess Who's 'Clap For The Wolfman.' Unfortunately, you've got to listen to two 'Cold Morning Lights' for every 'Wolfman'. Other decent tracks: 'Couldn't I Just Tell You', . I might even like 'Little Red Lights' if it weren't for the archaeological expedition to find it. But that's eleven minutes enjoyable out of an hour and a half, so you do the math on the value here. This album goes through the motions of genres like R&B and rock & roll but never seems to accomplish either in any genuine way. Mr. Lundgren, please step away from the slow jams and come out with your hands up. We'll give you two stars if you promise to stop.

OK, this is actually pretty decent. The bass (Julian Cope) reminds me of the Clash in an excellent way, Gary Dwyer rocks the drums and Alan Gill and Michael Finkler play a surprisingly interesting post-punk guitar. David Balfe can fuck off with the synth bullshit throughout, though. Apparently the recording of their third album (this is their first) culminated in Dwyer chasing Balfe through the hillsides with a loaded shotgun and I have to say, it's a shame he didn't catch him. There's an album in here. It's probably a pretty good one except for the terrible stain of 80s synth all over it. The Teardop Explodes would've been a pretty good three-piece. In all, I'm not longing to forget this experience but I know I will and I'm at peace with that before the record comes to a close. Apparently this was highly influential for both Blur and the Smiths and, unless this album-a-day project changes some long-held opinions for me, I guess it's all downhill from here for Britpop. 3/5. Might've been a 4 without Balfe.

Could I replace 70% of the Britslop on this list with soul music from Detroit? Just a little bit psychedelic (I genuinely wouldn't have noticed without a little research) and all the way soul. I'm not a Motown expert, but it has never, ever let me down. How do you run a male vocal group centred on five-part harmonies without devolving into cheese? I have no idea, but this is that. The Temptations were cool as hell, the vocal performances are excellent and the whole album cooks through its 35-minute length. After a week of 1001 Albums giving me self-indulgent tripe from dudes who thought they could fill more than an hour with their ideas, Cloud Nine was like diving into a pool on a hot day. The backing band -- which I'm fairly sure is Motown's legendary Funk Brothers -- could play anything and I'd listen to it. This is the drum sound that everything should be held up to. Put these guys on stage at a middle school talent show and they'd make anybody in front of them look stellar -- and in this case, The Temptations don't really need help. Notably, this record has several extended instrumental sections where they just let the Brothers cook and it's an absolute joy ('Runaway Child, Running Wild' is 9:36 in length, more that a quarter of the runtime of this LP, and you might not notice -- it's just a full-on groove). I don't give out many 5's, and that continues here. This is a 4/5 album; it doesn't change how I look at music. It does reinforce every positive notion I have about Motown and everyone involved. Absolutely worth listening to before you shuffle off this mortal coil.

This is a landmark that you should probably read other people's opinions on. This type of music, and Gaye in particular, is often so smooth and pleasant that it fails to catch on any part of my subconscious attention. This makes it pass right through my brain as if it hadn't been there. Marvin Gaye is like weather so pleasant that you could be convinced that air doesn't exist (which, as a Canadian, is rare; the air is usually biting and occasionally violent). My rating doesn't matter -- you should listen to What's Going On on reputation alone, on someone else's recommendation. For me, this is 3/5, but that's highly personal and probably says more about me than it does about the album.

I don't want to become one of those participants constantly complaining about the Britpop on this list but I always look forward to an album from outside the Anglosphere, especially Africa. So much of the popular Western music that I love -- variations in the blues, rock, folk space -- derive some of their most compelling elements from music brought along with enslaved people from Africa during the Transatlantic slave trade. This is a little too soft jazz for me in a lot of places, but I love things like the drum/sax interplay on 'Frustrations'. Nawa is excellent. Plenty Nonsense is catchy, too, with a melody that sounds familiar but I can't place. Come forewarned that these jams go on a little (9-10 minutes, many of them). Definitely worth checking out, though. It's not the Afrobeat that influenced the clash, but it's literally that guy's son. 3/5

I am a fan of heavy metal and it has been a long time coming for me to dip into Anthrax. This is a good album. It's interesting to hear the state of the genre in 1987. You can certainly hear the influences of hardcore in the rhythm structures and Iron Maiden throughout. Great riffs, fun songs. Standouts for me were the Judge Dredd-themed 'I Am The Law' and 'Medley: A.D.I/Horror of It All'. The most interesting thing I found about this one is what the recording sounds like. The drums and bass are very clean and prominent and Scott Ian's guitar sounds a little bit thin and distant (I had this cranked on Spotify in my car; maybe it sounds thicker on vinyl). Some texture is missing from the guitar sound, but that may be due to this being early in the evolution of thrash recording. Modern Metal frequently features distorted vocals as well (Death's Scream Bloody Gore also came out in 1987, so the style was somewhat new, yet) but I was surprised to hear Joey Belladonna singing in more of a Bruce Dickinson style, mostly in his upper chest range but occasionally pushing to a high belt (possibly a falsetto mix? I can't do it well, so I'm not sure). In all, a classic of heavy metal but one that will sound slightly less heavy by standards 38 years later. You can hear each musician distinctly, though, and that's a treat in the case of Anthrax.

Downright symphonic. For once, I'm not even curious what others wrote about this. Clockwise from top left, the band were an electrical engineer on bass, an astrophysicist on guitar, a dentist on the drums and Freddie Mercury doing possibly the only thing his body could do: be the best fucking rock singer in history. For a band with only one guitar player, the sound of Brian May sure is a lot like The Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd when he's playing hooks. It also sounds like horn blasts announcing the arrival of some royalty. He also plays call-and-response. Taylor remains one of the most underrated drummers in 20th century music. He has the verve and musicality of Keith Moon; he just didn't threaten to blow up the stage. His vocals are, as always, excellent -- he sounds like Daltry and Bonham at the same time on 'The Loser In The End'. Deacon is a perfect foil to the rest of the band. He's a very capable bass player but tends to recede into a supportive role in their arrangments. His sound is perfectly placed between Taylor's thundering toms and May's soaring six-string. Always, always perfectly in the pocket. That they were all capable singers is evident even outside of their pervasive harmonies and occasional turns at lead or co-lead vocals. Every member of Queen's playing has a melodic quality to it -- they all take turns at call-and-response with Freddie, they all play parts you can hum. In the Oughts, this band would've lasted two years before being broken up into at least three side projects. Mercury himself on this one is surprisingly restrained. His voice is capable of softness (and a shocking amount of vibrato in his breathy lower whisper register) in addition to utter bombast and he gets use out of a lot of his subtler tones on Queen II. Queen were one of the greatest bands of the 20th century, a group so dense with talent that it makes no sense that they stayed together. If Freddie hadn't died, they would certainly have had the staying power of the Rolling Stones. From 1973 through 1977, they produced Queen, Queen II, Sheer Heart Attack, A Night At The Opera, A Day At The Races and News of The World. That's a little more than three years and six albums better than most groups produce in a whole career. They were progressive, hard-rocking, dramatic, irreverent, provocative and served as both orchestra and choir. You shouldn't just listen to Queen II (you should); you should spend a day listening to all six in a row and think carefully about how diverse the styles they traversed were, and yet how they always sound unmistakably like Queen. They invented production techniques, refined the sounds of their influences and pushed boundaries. Today, they're mostly known for two sports anthems and Bohemian Rhapsody and somehow, that's still a travesty of shortchanging their legacy. Yes, you must listen to Queen II before you die. At at least five other albums from the beginning of their career.

When you listen to The Strokes, you have to remember the progression that led there, otherwise this just sounds like 'some music.' The dirty, callous bombast of 80's hair metal (a failed cultural attempt to capture the same lightning in a bottle as Eddie Van Halen) gave way to Seattle's grunge movement in the early 90's (still crunchy, less technically-focused, sensitive and singer-songwriter driven). The post-grunge sound (let's just say Smashing Pumpkins) was cleaner but similar in theme -- dark, emotional -- but redeveloped some of the hard rock technicality, and by the late 90's, that had given way to a lot of nu-metal slop (due respect to a few honest weirdos like Deftones and Incubus). That turn-of-the-millenium nu-metal phenomenon contained a bunch of neat rhythms but a also a ton of the heavy, depressive moods of the preceding decade (and if you're using Limp Bizkit as your yardstick, three whole brain cells). The Strokes and the White Stripes burst into widespread consciousness hot on the heels of Limp Bizkit's cultural domination with a stripped-down sound and way less focus on breaking stuff and doing it for the nookie. It's just a bunch of chimey guitars, rock beats and bright melodies. And for some reason, vocals that sound like they're from the other end of a rotary phone. The Strokes moved rock and roll back from the dark, angry place that nu-metal had dragged it. To be clear (and even more digressive), music can certainly be great and angry (Rage Against The Machine) but when the economic incentive is for that sort of negative emotional spiral, the quality underpinning that expression drops. At least bubblegum pop makes people feel good; doing it all for the nookie is a cash grab that makes everyone feel bad -- neither means nor end are justified. If this seems like a long review of a Limp Bizkit album that I didn't even listen to, that's kind of what makes The Strokes interesting. They're reasonably fine musicians in their own right but the thing that made them important was the cultural moment that they helped to rescue us from. It's both important to understand that to place them in their proper place and also hard to get into the vitality of their music when they're not a breath of fresh air. Anyway, 'Someday' is a catchy tune and the album gets 3/5 on its own merits. It'd be 5/5 for helping to rescue us from The Nookie but I don't need rescuing anymore.

A good album. Dreamy in a way that's consistent with the music back then but also a bit more mainstream-rock-accessible. The synths and organ and the swirling soundscape have always made this feel a little 80's to me, but without the brutally bad reverb on everything. If you want to know what it felt like to be engaging with the world in the short time that followed the Great Recession of 2008-2009, this is it. There's hope in here but there's also a great deal of anxiety and angst. It's a good album and was influential in its own time. As a fairly modern entry in the list, it's hard to say that this is fundamentally essential listening. It may not confer a great understanding of music as it is today but it's still worth a spin. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a masterpiece, nor to say all music ought to sound something like this. It's an hour and four minutes of your life that you're likely to enjoy. 3.5/4; whatever rating I actually gave this in the end depended entirely on how I was feeling by its end.

I'm not sure that this one has aged particularly well. Hybrid Theory was huge in the turn-of-the-millenium music world, particularly among kids between their early teens and early twenties. The rapping feels a little simplistic, the music has a dark harmonic bent and the vocals sound like they're lifted from a melodic hardcore band but cleaned up a bit. Lyrically, Linkin Park hint at an angst beneath the surface ("I'm about to break") but they're just broad enough about it that there's everything to latch onto for a teenager, but nothing to dig into. There are a lot of bands that wouldn't have been big in the early Oughts if it weren't for Hybrid Theory, so this is a bit of a landmark album in that sense. It's very of its time -- rather than a genuine example of underground music breaking through to the mainstream, this feels like music inspired by a number of alternative rock and hip-hop subgenres that was just sent global by clever A&R work by Warner. Some interesting things that happen with Linkin Park that are worth looking at elsewhere: the guitar rhythms and chord structures are pretty typical for nu-metal of the time. You'll hear that kind of chugging and chromatic descent through a riff and periodic discordant harmonics/feedback squeals throughout Korn (sadder and weirder) and Incubus (much sunnier and still weirder). Even the "glassy" tones like the hook that runs through 'Papercut' are typical of the high-gain, rectified amps (and probably a phaser and an MXR Distortion+) that were everywhere at the time. The electronic bits added in by their tuntablist were everywhere; I have a preference for the way Chris Kilmore injected dupes of Brandon Boyd's voice into Incubus's work, but you may also enjoy the scratch-heavy stuff that DJ Lethal was doing in Limp Bizkit. I don't hate Mr. Hahn's work in LP, though (he's not the problem). The thing that makes Linkin Park distinct is the dual vocalists. Mike Shinoda handles most of the rapping but does some backing vocals (I think he also plays a little guitar). Chester Bennington became the face of the band and he deservedly earned praise for his vocal work. Both his clean and distorted vocals are impressive. A really decent scream, especially for 25 years ago -- and that broke some rules in 2000's pop music. He has a good range and a strong delivery and is complimented nicely by Shinoda's call-and-response chiming in in a deeper, more speaking-like register. LP are let down by the repetitive song structures, same-y melodies and the bland way that they express their angst. Most songs follow the theme of 'I am experiencing a darkness and there is no light of hope' which is a feeling worth expressing but would benefit from some more poetry than is offered. Add a little quiet/loud dynamic play (never a slow build with these guys!) and then mix in the other stuff and you've got a Linkin Park stew going. This album is kind of like The Strokes: it's probably someone's whole introduction to other kinds of music. On its own, this really isn't an exemplar of what was best about the music of Y2K; it's just what sold a lot of records. It's like the exact average of nu-metal but with the studio polish you get from early major label recruitment. Try White Pony by Deftones or one of Incubus's circa-2000 albums instead (Make Yourself for polished semi-metal and Morning View for the post-nu-metal drift toward mainstream rock). Or Faith No More or Dillinger Escape Plan for something more heavy. It's fine, and should you wonder what the hell was happening with the alt that broke mainstream around Y2K, this is a good place to start and stop your investigation. Just suppress your cringe reflex or it's going to come on hard. Or get a full crash course on nu-metal cliches by listening to 'Crawling In The Dark' by Hoobastank and save yourself some time. 2/5 Most enjoyable tracks: 'Papercut', 'Points of Authority', 'Cure for the Itch'.

Ozzy died yesterday. I can't help but think this wasn't an accident, but human brains are prone to make those connections; who knows? This was Sabbath's best album, on the strength of War Pigs alone. The vast majority of bands will never write a song that interesting and groovy, let alone with an evergreen theme like the callousness with which those in power lead us into conflict. War Pigs is defined by tension. The syncopation between Bill Ward's drums and Geezer Butler's bass, the whole song's slowness to return to the root, the couple of guitar solos, the strain in Ozzy Osbourne's voice, and the iconic quiet/loud call-and-response between the hi-hats and the strings that back Ozzy's near-a capella delivery in the verses. The song is so spare in the sung parts and so busy in the instrumental sections. Luke's Wall (the outro instrumental) has a two-bar guitar hook repeating for its first third (making you wonder when it'll develop), but it sounds as much like a siren as anything. It's urgency, emergency, war. The song is heavy but also often very quiet; it's written around a minor blues scale, which gives the tension of shifting between a major and a minor feel (that's the blues, baby) but never commits to it (go read someone who knows what they're talking about on this; the song shifts all over the place) -- this is a profoundly influential harmonic choice in heavy metal and in this song, gives the composition both a tense or dark feeling, but also a sadness. Again, war. Sabbath used a lot of dark imagery related to Christian views of the occult (and arguably Christian-tinged views of paganism) but the things that they framed as evil (other than themselves) were usually recognizably so: by the end of the song, 'Satan laughing / spreads his wings' because of the outcomes of, again, war. The true evil isn't Sabbath themselves, but the song's titular War Pigs and war, itself. Paranoid is fine, Iron Man is kinda boring (probably overexposure), the rest is just top-notch proto-metal. The whole thing is full of the jazz/blues fusion corner case that underpins heavy metal, still. Honestly, Sabbath were excellent (so fucking grooving), this is them at the peak of their powers and the first track on this record is good enough that you should stop what you're doing *right now* and listen to it, if you haven't heard it before. Pull over. Put it on Spotify. Rest in power, Ozzy. 5/5

1980 California punk written to shock and to rile. Also, it's pretty funny and catchy. This isn't as musically innovative as a lot of things that I rate highly on this list, but I think we all need to listen to Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. If song titles like 'Let's Lynch the Landlord' don't give you an idea what you're in for, I can't help. My favourite tracks are 'Holiday In Cambodia' and 'Kill The Poor', with additional props to their surprisingly straight cover of 'Viva Las Vegas.' Top notch, old-school punk. You should listen. 4/5

Generally good, occasionally brilliant. Standouts in this album ('Fu-Gee-La', the all-timer cover of 'Killing Me Softly') elevate this group into myth; that's especially true because of their later descent or dissolution, however you'd like to frame it. The Fugees were a thoughtful and interesting, socially conscious hip-hop group from the 90's .Between their strong ties to Haiti and their advocacy, they seemed somehow apart from the East/West beef that defined rap for many of those years. Each of the three MCs -- Wyclef Jean, Pras Michel and Lauryn Hill -- were major talents in their own right, evidenced by their solo work and collaborations with other artists. All three blur the line between the spoken-word tonality of rap and the melodies of R&B. Certainly they fall on the rap side of hip-hop, but the fluidity with their voices is noticeable. All three have distinct flows and timbres, though it is easier to spot Hill for obvious reasons. Her singing voice is a special contribution to this trio; without Lauryn Hill, the Fugees would be somewhere on the Wu-Tang/Roots/Public Enemy spectrum of rap groups (less to more activism, that is). Her smooth, warm, clear singing work elevates the Fugees to something that much more remarkable. The Score isn't without flaws: I've never been a fan of sketches in rap albums, even if they've been around since the beginning. The parts of the record that hold up less well tend to be in these sections ('Fu-Gee-La' ends with a confrontation in a Chinese restaurant which seems less than charitable to Chinese immigrants). They're relatively limited, thankfully. Each of these members were multitalented (they'll remind you!) and it's worth revisiting this Grammy-winning Best Rap Album of 1996 just to see how much more there was to 90's hip-hop than a feud between New York and LA. It's worth addressing the central role that Hill played in both their success and their demise: she remains a rare talent -- gifted in flow and lyrics, blessed with a beautiful singing voice and, to boot, a talented actor, she pushed the Fugees to another level. However, Hill's relationship with the other two members was always fraught, leading to each reunion disintegrating with a public feud. This is chill as hell and very well-produced. It feels loose and comfortable, as if the members could show up in a studio and do this any day of the week, which is a real trick of production for a group that likely prepared meticulously for this. If 36 Chambers feels like a kung-fu film (not a great insight), this feels like a Western. The Score is a solid damn album and you can listen to the whole Fugees discography in a morning, so you should. They're one of hip-hop's (and possibly the 90's, writ large) greatest what-could-have-been questions. 4/5 (or call it 29/36 chambers)

Baroque in ornamentation, cool in execution. There's some great funk at times, excellent (ensemble!) vocal work and really wonderful production. Every performance element is perfectly competent and the sound comes through clean and clear. Something about this record just didn't grab me. Needed more funk. Whether I didn't get enough sleep last night or this is a me problem more generally, or maybe this does lack the hooks to bring me back, That's The Way Of The World gets the same score as every other terribly competent but emotionally un-resonant album on the list: 3/5. Based on the general critical consensus, it's a me problem. I can live with that.

Weirdly, not available (apart from the title track) on Spotify in my country. With due respect to George Clinton & company, Mothership Connection hits me harder. There's a lot here, including some incredible guitar playing and some great crowd chants. This is an album that surely contributed a great deal to the mainstream of rock, but it's just less compelling in terms of groove (ironically) than other work by Parliament/Funkadelic. Worth an hour of your time, still, but not a masterpiece yet.

Only a hair over forty minutes long, the most epic track is just under ten and there's no Dave Gilmour. If your familiarity with Pink Floyd is a little on the casual side, this might not be what you expect. Frankly, it's not the powerhouse that you'd soon listen to on later records but there are plenty of moments worth visiting. On the other hand, they're entirely recognizable -- something that is fascinating, given the degree to which Gilmour's guitar playing figures in their later style and how much Syd Barrett's contributes, here. Gilmour very obviously took inspiration from his erstwhile friend (in fairness, they did overlap, briefly). This is really it for Barrett -- he semi-voluntarily left the group in 1968, before the recording of A Saucerful of Secrets. If ever I get to write one of these about Wish You Were Here, we'll talk more about him then. This is very 60s British psych. The dreamy vocals (and lovely harmonies), combined with the mostly fairly clean guitars make this sound like the contemporary of the Beatles that it truly is ('Matilda Mother' could be by one of several bands). The interplay of Richard Wright on keys and Nick Mason on drums to start 'Pow R. Toc. H' is very catchy and also illustrates the fundamentals that underpin the more ambitious and weird (that is, "progressive") stuff that Floyd end up making. 'Pow R. Toc. H' also demonstrates the band's ability to slide into strangeness and back to something catchy and familiar; they're capable of luring you into something comforting, shifting to unsettling sounds (largely produced with instruments, some with samples) and then reassuring you. On later albums, their play with tension is much more musical and less jarring but the seeds are here already. Barrett's guitar playing is interesting. Fast and furious but sloppy at times. Obviously skillful but generally unrefined -- particularly by comparison to David Gilmour, who is one of the more polished guitar heroes of his period. Much of the writing about Syd Barrett has some element of focus on his struggles with mental health but it is terribly tempting to analyze his music through that lens: there's a certain franticness, possibly mania to his instrumental work but it's impossible to know whether that frame is there because I know of his difficulties or if I can really hear the sound of his musical talent trying to express his overwhelming feelings (just check out 'Interstellar Overdrive' for a peek). You can even hear the influence of the blues in his work -- something much harder to sift out of the later tunes from the band (especially in their concept album era). I wonder if Pink Floyd's later focus on concept albums had anything to do with the diffuse attention that Piper seems to display. You could listen to this album and wonder "What's this about?" all your life and never find an answer. With every record from The Dark Side of the Moon through The Wall, it's pretty easy to tell. Maybe they were relieved to have an answer. In the end, this is a pretty good entry in the oeuvre of English psychedelia but it certainly won't be for everybody. I just gave Funkadelic's One Nation Under A Groove a 3/5 because it was good but just didn't hit for me. By that standard, I should probably grant Piper the same -- it's good, and it's an important part of the history of a very important band but, overall, most of you will listen once and that'll be enough. 3/5

Somewhere on the journey from The Beatles to glam rock, there is Alice Cooper. You can hear the times -- a little Bowie here, a little Ian Gillan there. The real question is what shock rock holds for us when there's no shock remaining in it -- something I've always wondered for a medium that requires no visual engagement of the listener. I didn't clock anything shocking about the music itself. Standouts: 'No More Mr. Nice Guy', 'Generation Landslide'. In the end, this is a perfectly good record of radio-friendly rock from the early 70's. You'll also hear some callbacks to 60's guitar and to future 70's and 80's hard rock frontmen (Diamond Dave owes something big to Alice Cooper). But that doesn't make it a great record, just another puzzle piece to add to our other 1000. 3/5.

Thanks, algo. Yeah, um: you should check out The Beatles. I love late Beatles. They were absolutely killing it at this point (their last recorded album, though Let It Be came out after). The first side is all gold (Come Together is a perfect song), but there's plenty of good music on the second, too. I don't think there's any way I could feasibly contribute at new idea to the tomes that have been written about the Beatles, so I'll offer you this: I think that people write so much about this band because of how enjoyable it is to write about them. It's also surely true, all that stuff about the development of music journalism and scholarship and the timing of their career in the prime of the youths of the Baby Boom generation but it's also true that the Beatles remain interesting and enjoyable to listen to, which makes them a joy to write about. It's much more fun than cranking out 750 angry words about why Devil Without A Cause is a monumentally mediocre, smash-hit album that perfectly represents the Y2K-era music industry. So listen to some Abbey Road and give your ears a break from whatever you've been working on this week thanks to the heartless 1001 Albums algorithm. 5/5

Maybe I was having streaming problems, but the recording came off muddy and indistinct. That's not a stylistic criticism; this is in my wheelhouse. This may simply be a good example of how far the recording techniques around very heavy music have come in the past almost-forty years. The whole thing sounds like I'm listening to it from the end of a long, dark tunnel, possibly with my head shoved inside my winter coat. It's not cool, it makes it seem less present, less heavy. Also not a fan of the vocals. Now, this is pure transgression: the point is to put off the mainstream, casual listener but we've certainly reached a point where distorted vocals are moderately familiar to most casual music fans (he wrote from the middle of 2025) and I listen to my share of heavy music; these just aren't compelling, anymore. They sound like a parody. That's just a matter of age -- this is a good album to listen to for a peek at one of the early touchstones of that style. Riffs are good. Drums suit well. Both sound tinny and shit, certainly not the fault of the players. Bass is a little indistinct. Overall, the blend of hardcore punk, old-school metal and thrash is compelling. The songs are also insanely short ('You Suffer' is famously only four seconds long) -- there are 28 crammed into 33 minutes. You really probably should listen to this album. This will not be everyone's cup of tea but this type of heavy music persists to this day, whether in modern grindcore bands or throughout other genres (High On Fire sounds a heck of a lot like Napalm Death, for example).

Full-on weird, on top of being musically brilliant and, honestly, a very chill place to hang out. Jimi Hendrix may have invented psych blues, but it's probably best not to dwell on genre. This is the peak of what Hendrix could do: a sublime, unprecedented electric guitar talent to whom everyone else is compared. The only other players that have been as influential are perhaps Les Paul (who literally invented the instrument) and Eddie Van Halen. Hendrix was also a very fine singer and a surprisingly poetic lyricist. He was also, of course, backed by Noel Redding on bass and Mitch Mitchell (it's a nickname; his birth name was John), both of whom careen through the album with something to prove. Because the power trio is so spare and the music is so focused on just an instrument or two -- and because his playing is so fluid and remarkable -- Jimi Hendrix's work is often reviewed with long, flowery passages about his guitar playing. It's also because most of us don't have enough music theory to dive into that (equally interesting) side of his work, though I recommend seeking out qualified comment. I'll be brief: Jimi Hendrix incorporated every element classic to the blues (the call-and-response, use of the same song forms, the chord structures, the showmanship and the braggadocio) into rock and pop music that were both wholly contemporary to the late 60's he worked in, and he drove those forms all further into the future. Guitar players are still unwinding his genius -- technical, musical, structural, etc. Just go listen to some Hendrix. It's spiritual. Hendrix was also a very fine singer and a surprisingly poetic lyricist. He was also, of course, backed by

Really good, didn't stay with me the next day. I've always felt like most of Steely Dan's fans are other musicians. I usually write a lot more but there's not a lot that needs to be said that hasn't already been. I will say that there are some interesting melodic things that made me think of poppier 80s rock bands, like Huey Lewis but it's hard to put my finger on. Steely Dan deserves the rep for being more complicated than that, though. I'm going to say 4/5; this was pleasant and utterly skillful, but I'm probably not going to go back to it on purpose again (or maybe even remember the name of the album). It'd be 3.5 if it were possible. I respected this more than I enjoyed it.

This guy is a Canadian legend, wrote one of the most beautiful songs I know ('Hallelujah') and is utterly beloved by a ton of people I respect. Here's the problem: I don't get it. He writes lovely music, it's all just so very, very slow. My hottest take is that Leonard Cohen songs are better as covers. I've just never loved his voice; it's deep and fairly soothing but his music (when performed by him) always plods for me. And for a singer-songwriter (especially one with a reputation for meticulousness), there's no one else to blame. If you don't fall asleep during 'Winter Lady', I'm very impressed by your alertness. Highlights: 'Suzanne' and 'So Long, Marianne'. 3/5 because everyone loves Cohn except me, and even I like his songwriting. Check out any tribute to Leonard Cohen; they're all pretty good.

I'm going to need to come back to this. There's a lot of atmosphere, the arranging work is really very good and the end product is highly listenable. It's a slow burn in a lot of places (especially 'Four-Cornered Room') but it drips with an atmosphere that pulls me in. I don't know War very well ('Low Rider' aside, which is a fucking jam), but this has the sounds of a large band that's locked in and yet giving each other space to work. Wikipedia tells me they were/are an R&B and progressive soul band. I don't fully know how to describe soul, but when I wondered "what really is soul music?", I got the impression that this album might also ask that. Anyway, give this one a go. I think I can un-cringe-ily say it's a vibe. I think it'll both reward and invite more listens. 4/5.

Oh, good. The cover looks like heroin-chic, circa Y2K. I'm sure this won't be a crude Stroke-alike. This follows my general feelings about Y2K indie. It's not that the music is terrible; it's fine. The problem I have is that, far from an album I must listen to before I die, this sounds just like the bands I used to listen to locally in bars in my early college years, just slightly different (in the way that different regional scenes develop different accents, for lack of a better analogy). This isn't better or worse than the local bands of college kids here in those years (I'm being insincerely polite; it's much less interesting). The argument would then go that this is the essence -- Pete Doherty and Carl Barat are the wellspring from which my college bands flowed. But you can trace this back to Elvis Costello pretty easily and farther if you want. Which is all to say that this music is part of a tradition, which is great! I honour that, I just don't particularly care about listening to it. This reminds of me of the La's, which isn't a compliment (and something I didn't think was possible). Again, this isn't offensive but I can't fathom what could be essential listening about this. It's emblematic of an entirely forgettable moment in music. Strokes > Arctic Monkeys > The Libertines and I think the Strokes are overrated and boring. If you think the Strokes are amazing, learn an instrument and see how quickly you're playing through their work. Twenty minutes, tops. A band that sort of existed alongside and transcended that moment was Coldplay and look how that turned out (musical wallpaper paste with sugar added). What this really does is demonstrate to me how creative and interesting the White Stripes were. They were similarly stripped down (only moreso) but did a much more interesting, authentic and skillful job of replicating early American rock & roll. That was the fucking blues, man. The White Stripes felt like anything could happen and Jack and Meg could back that up. With Pete Doherty, anything *could* happen but that just meant some dude getting thrown out a second floor window. Standouts: 'Music When The Lights Go Out'. If you like this, try listening to Nick Cave or Tom Waits instead. Or Rage. Or Herbie Hancock or Miles Davis or ... honestly, this project is probably for you -- there's real music out there, this just ain't it. 2/5

Not quite where it all began, this album represents the first time that most of us heard Marshall Mathers rhyme. Slim Shady is one of many personas the rapper adopts as a framing device for his multiple styles and themes; perhaps the most transgressive and also the most prominent. Eminem is a supremely talented (and famously hard-working) rap artist with a flow that is somehow both jam-packed with information (syllables, rhymes and weaving rhythms) but also entirely smooth and uncluttered. On this album, he is supported by NWA legend Dr. Dre. This is a tremendous album but it falls short of a masterpiece. In the end, this broke through for more reasons than simply talent -- similar to the big Bloodhound Gang hit, 'Bad Touch', Eminem's transgressive, aggressive, profane music found a home in popular culture for the same old Alice Cooper reason: shock value. Volumes have been written about the seriousness or not of Slim Shady's attitudes (particularly towards women and gay men) and whether it matters whether those homophobic and misogynist themes are sincerely held by Mathers, himself. You can see how these conversations become complex very quickly: a man's success was partly due to his transgressive content; he may have satirical intent in the use of that content, but is the intent or the effect more important? What if he plays multiple characters through his work that are at odds with one another in that respect? And what if (some of) his fans don't notice the satire? Eminem produces all of these conversations, is a brilliant rapper and leveraged both to become a genuine force in the pop culture around and following Y2K. In the end, this is only the beginning of his work and reflects that. The Slim Shady LP is somewhat less interesting musically and thematically than later work, just as his skills as an MC advance significantly on later records. This remains a 3/5 and also a must-listen: you should absolutely hear what this sounded like when it arrived on the scene in 1999. Bonus note: rap album skits were terrible.

This is an interesting blend of a number of country and country-adjacent genres. And it doesn't even suffer from the modern affliction of the Country Music Patriotism Arms Race. Unfortunately, I don't really enjoy most of the genres represented. I enjoy all of blues, bluegrass, folk and Americana, which are closely related to this. But I don't like this. 'Fingernails' was the most blues-inflected and enjoyable and had the least yodel-style pedal steel, which, ironically, are a bit like fingernails on a chalk board for me. The accordion on 'Honky-Tonkin'' was great -- it's nearly a zydeco number. I'm going to do that thing I've been doing lately: 3/5 out of respect and a suggestion that you should listen to this. *You* might like this and it's interesting to get all the influences of modern country all crammed together into one record.

You know you're looking at a cultural landmark when most of the 1-star reviews for something are about its influence on the cultural decline. One reviewer, misguidedly quoting (failed hyper-conservative US Supreme Court nominee) Robert Bork, holds this album up as an example of the postmodern attitudes that led us to no longer build cathedrals. They also go on to suggest that, to choose the one religion of many that must be true, one should look to the one they hate. The weird turnabout is that there are only two kinds of people who frequently talk about postmodernism: academic cultural critics and Christian conservatives. I guess evangelicals think postmodernism is true. Know that this album is getting review-bombed by a bunch of cranky, fundamentalist church-goers who give it 1-star reviews because their pastor said so and they're incapable of empathy. The album is about a person in a self-destructive downward spiral. NIN's Trent Reznor has always said that this is not someone to be emulated. That's never stopped troubled people from identifying with TDS's protagonist, just as people emulate Patrick Bateman (of American Psycho) -- neither are intended as role models. Our ability to choose role models, however, is something entirely up to us and, just as someone might misguidedly see Robert Bork as possessing useful insights into culture, some might see The Downward Spiral's protagonist as a symbol of their own turmoil -- actually, I think it's more relatable for a depressed person to identify with an album about depression. Industrial music isn't always an easy listen. Its textures and rhythms can be by turns aggressive, abrasive and difficult to parse. The intent is to push away pearl-clutchers and draw some listeners closer -- those that smell a funky cheese and want to sample it to understand the appeal might understand the reflex involved. Close listening reveals a multi-layered production, dense with highly technical playing and production. The widely-cited dark atmosphere of the record is present but, for anyone who's stuck with 1001 Albums long enough to hit Napalm Death, is actually tempered quite a lot compared to hardcore industrial. This is kind of like making a challenging but enjoyable cocktail from Malort (try a Hard Sell or a Bitter End). Reznor's depiction of the angst and internal conflict that a lot of young people experienced in the mid-90's (and always have and always will) is thoughtful and empathetic, if appropriately angry. The album's combination of mainstream rock sounds with industrial's grimey, electronic side makes for an infection listen and a timbre highly evocative of its time. The world was ending in the mid-90's, to paraphrase Francis Fukuyama. Though this album isn't exactly about foretelling the permanent ascension of neoliberal capitalist democracy, it is very much about the feeling that we all had that the meaninglessness produced by megacorporate, consumerist capitalism was here to stay. Since the 90's, you are only what you buy, insofar as government policy is concerned. You may wonder why I'm talking about politics more than the album. They're kind of inseparable at this point, since TDS was turned into a scapegoat for conservative angst at their loss of control over culture. My point is that when the mainstream political and cultural conversation is about how great the economy is because corporations are doing great in the stock market, you might be led to feel pretty crappy about yourself and your feeling of emptiness. That feeling has been written about since we've been writing (the Greeks coined 'anhedonia', an absence of feeling). Writing music about it is natural and, I would argue, necessary -- but the cultural backlash to this record (and I should acknowledge that it was also lauded in other circles) was essentially that this conversation, itself, is obscene, those feelings are blasphemous and anyone feeling empty should just do more church. A lot went into making this album -- special equipment to make the vocals distort nicely, a real drummer and a machine, sadness, rage, talent, King Crimson's Adrian Belew, ProTools, synths, a bunch of guitars, the house Sharon Tate was murdered in and even Reznor's late regret of having fetishized that place. It takes a long time to unpack -- probably as long as its cultural legacy. You can draw a lot from this album. If you don't feel profound sorrow when 'A Warm Place' comes on to follow the rage of 'Big Man With A Gun', you need to seek therapy. You can also learn a hell of a lot about America's Culture Wars by listening to this, reflecting on depression and self-destruction and then reading the skin-deep vitriol that was written about it by conservatives. Listen to The Downward Spiral with an open mind. If you haven't been depressed, imagine feeling hopeless in a time when your TV tells you everything is awesome. Imagine a summer cold and watching your friends play in the sun, except you're an adult and the cold is in your heart and it's gone on for months. That sadness and anger is what this album is about, with pinpoint precision, a profound empathy and a delicate touch, if you're willing to listen. The end of this album is harrowing: from 'Big Man With A Gun' through 'Hurt', you're on a rollercoaster headed someplace scary and there is a deft craft involved in making that happen. If you listened to this and thought, 'that's just some shock-rock noise,' I would implore you to put on an Anal Cunt record and please punch yourself in the nose. 5/5 and eat shit, Robert Bork.

Good, folky but with various twists, including melodic percussion and the occasional reggae-inflected rhythm section. Chapman's plaintive and personal lyrics are a feature here, so if you're not aligned on all the issues she sings about, it may not land (Erlewine for AllMusic is critical of her use of "begged questions" and truisms, so apparently rhetorical techniques are up for musical criticism now, too). 'Fast Car' was absolutely everywhere on the radio, growing up in the 90's, so this album had a crater to go with its impact. It was a sizeable debut and starkly different in an era defined by hair metal. A political singer-songwriter didn't often make a splash in those days and this kicked something off. How does it hold up to the ears of a (aging) modern listener without the need for a palette cleanser from hair metal (which is actually refreshing to hear occasionally in 2025 -- see the 'Peacemaker' soundtrack)? It's OK. Folk-inflected and singer-songwriter music in the late 80's and early 90's was often wordy (a crude imitation of Michael Stipe? a desperate need for an editor?) and that is often the first thing that hits me. 'Fast Car' is kind of an all-timer but the rest of the album sounds a bit like a competent mid-billing act from Lilith Fair. That's no an insult, either -- just the most distilled description I can give you. If nothing else, the album is only 36 minutes long. If you're looking for a female singer-songwriter, you might be better served with Ani DiFranco from this era, or Lauren Hill from a little later (her second pseudo-album, especially). Carly Simon or Joni Mitchell from earlier. Lucinda Williams, Sarah Harmer or Madison Cunningham if you want to get, stepwise, more modern. You won't be sad you listened to this -- and it's short -- but I'd suggest that to really grasp the impact on the music scene of its time, you'll need to do quite a lot of reading. That's not necessarily disqualifying, but it is qualifying -- and that's exactly the sort of pedantic, lexicographical nadir that is typical of this style of music. If you hated that last sentence, maybe listen to something else. 3/5

Parsing what makes The Jam a New Wave band vs a punk band might tell you quite a lot about the difference between those genres (they're record label fabrications, just like a lot of genres, but there's something there). It's less aggressive than Sex Pistols or even most Clash music, for example. Sounds of its time. Chorus-y, chime-y guitars (Paul Weller, often on a Rickenbacker 12-string, where George Harrison and Tom Petty got a lot of their shimmery sounds) and sunny chord progressions. Hooky verses, slightly raspy vocals, a melodic bass (Bruce Foxton, showing off his versatility) and a really restrained but driving job by Rick Buckler on drums. Anyway, it's some late-70's British punk/New Wave/post-punk. It's a good listen and a part of a scene that was influential. Will you hear familiar strains that show up in later music that you love? probably not. 3.5/5, but I'm rounding down because I think it's a disrespect to Tracy Chapman if I round up. I should probably revise my Kid Rock review to 2/5.

Classic rock with capital letters. I hope you like guitars. Lush harmonies, multi-layered guitars (gold top Les Paul -> EQ -> Cry baby -> Marshall head), tight rhythms and interesting (but not challenging) song structures. The whole thing, for all its studio tricks, was recorded by three people (Tom Sholz, Brad Delp and Jim Madsea) in Sholz's basement. Mind you, Sholz was a professional project manager with a Master's in engineering from MIT, so the three people mattered. Boston has been accused of representing an early example of corporate rock, designed in a lab by producers to sell records rather than cultivated organically by a hard-touring band on the road. I'm open to arguments about authenticity in music but I think the real genesis of this record undercuts the accusation. If you reframe it to just cover pandering to music fans, well it was written, performed and produced by a bunch of music nerds in a basement: it stands to reason that they produced something that's a refined synthesis of stuff that already exists. I will say, as much as this is a technically wonderful recording, it does ring a little hollow. Don't get me wrong: the bass lines and the hand-claps and the sections where the band drops out to just leave the guitar hook playing for two bars before crashing back in -- they're all highly effective and involving. But when you listen closer to the lyrics, they're a little empty. You can get by writing nonsense (Yes!) or insincere lyrics in the industry for a whole career, but I sure won't give credit as a masterpiece. Overall, though Boston built a template that was widely imitated in the arena-rock scene after this, the talent on display really shines brighter than the pale pretenders that followed. This album features two exceptional guitar players dueling; a bass player finding the perfect line between melody and a rock-solid groove; a keys player absolutely murdering his solos and no synths in sight; a drummer absolutely careening through songs; two to five part harmonies soaring behind all of it. Every instrument sounds like someone cared deeply about how it sounded and the mix and master reflect it, too. This might not be as profound an album as Dark Side of the Moon but there aren't many better records to put on, roll down the windows and cruise. I'll be exhibiting some bias probably, but for me it's a 4/5.

More or less Talking Heads without David Byrne, at least in terms of personnel. That's a disservice to Chris Frantz (drums) and Tina Weymouth (bass), though: that a side project formed by 2/3 of a band would sound similar is inevitable. That it should be as infectious and interesting as this is a credit to the creative contributions that Frantz and Weymouth were clearly making to Talking Heads -- sometimes reduced by critics to a mere Byrne vehicle -- all along. Nothing here is as affecting as 'Once In A Lifetime' or 'This Must Be The Place'; the sense of melody is simpler and somewhat less emotional in Tom Tom Club than Talking Heads but this is a fun album. Hits of synth, a disconnected sort of 'world music' rhythmic influence and some electronic drum stuff all combine to make this sound like the 80's pillar that it is, but without the cold, heartless, over-reverbed schlock that ruined so many recordings as that decade wore on. It certainly didn't hurt to have the chameleon-like Adrian Belew (equally at home in King Crimson or fleshing out Talking Heads' Remain In Light) onboard for some guitar work. You already know 'Genius of Love'. As is evident from my other reviews through this project, I'm no 80's stan. This is a good album from the decade, though: it has all the weirdness, the electronic production flourishes, the laid-back vocal delivery and the subdued guitar work that could've been great on other records, but without all the racks of muddling effects that hang around the decade's music like a cursed albatross. Instead, it's gently weird, in a playful way. 4/5: check this one out.

The Pogues have the reputation of a punk band masquerading as an Irish traditional folk band. Really, they're a trad folk revivalist band with just enough of a punk bent to break through to the mainstream in the highly-polished late 80s. Make no mistake: the subjects of their songs would be entirely at home on a Clash or Boomtown Rats album but that's always been the case with folk music: it's frequently about hard times and injustice. Anyway, it's fun and it's thoughtful and its place in the recurring popularity of traditional folk forms is important. Follow music long enough and you'll live through at least one folk revival (in my case, as of 2025, the most recent one gave us Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers, among others). The only thing more interested in staying away from corporate control than punk is trad folk. Not even my favourite folk album but one worth listening to.

Beginning to end: stylistically innovative and reverent of its predecessors. The kung-fu theme is somehow cool instead of hokey (it's incredibly earnest) and every member is an ace. This is the album that I reference when 90's hip-hop is good but not great ("it's no 36 Chambers"). There are no generic beats here. It's a million samples layered up to propel the flow and to drag you in. I'm no expert on this kind of music, so I have an enthusiastic endorsement and then a long disclaimer, because 90's hip-hop was often about looking *hard*. Advice: wear headphones. Wu-Tang's liberal use of the N-bomb has the potential to cause some folks to take notice, 30 years later. In addition, you should be warned that there are some pretty graphic references to violence, particularly various methods of torture described in the intro to 'Method Man'; I don't think there's any question that the members of Wu-Tang are serious but it's jarring if you're not expecting it. That's a part of the posturing of rap in this era, however -- and part of why someone like Kid Rock, six years later, comes off as such a poser: he vaguely gestures at being a hard character but Wu-Tang members riff for a couple of minutes about the graphic ways in which someone crossing them would meet with creative and excessive suffering. Makes Drake look pretty silly. Peak. 5/5

"Hiphoprisy" is kind of an awkward fit, even if it's obvious what the intent is. Similarly, this has the slightly awkward-feeling flow of hip-hop from the early days. It's still cool, the samples work and the beats propel, but it does have the feel of a political speech that was adjusted slightly to become spoken word, rather than something that was built from the ground up to be music first. None of that is to say that this is an unpleasant listen. Michael Franti has a recognizable voice, a compelling take and serviceable skills as an MC. I'd never heard this album before and I'm glad that I did. Not as good as Public Enemy or the Roots but still a good listen. 3/5

Not bad. Suffers from 80's snare drum reverb production. Hot take: English goth rock ruined baritone lead vocals for years. Eddie Vedder was a rare exception for a long time; even natural baritones like Chris Cornell sang in their extreme upper registers for like a decade to avoid sounding like this. Probably worth listening to if you're committed to this project, just to hear that The Cure weren't a one-off. Not necessarily worth listening to for pure enjoyment, though. I just have never liked goth rock.

A powerful reminder that human beings can do this without the support of technical wizardry like click tracks and auto-tune. These folks didn't even have particularly good stage monitors, let alone in-ears -- you've really gotta know your part to sound this good when you can hardly hear yourself. In fact, you can hear the first few bars the guitar player (Les Buie) plays on 'I'll Go Crazy' are rushed. He settles in quick enough to avoid a fine from the boss, though (it was standard for bandleaders to dock the pay of musicians of this period for all manner of infractions, from musical to personal issues; it's how they ran tight ships). Check out the bass playing on 'Think', too. Hubert Perry just killing it. And, of course, the Famous Flames sound divine. It ought to be said that a great deal is lost without seeing Brown's performance. The show is choreographed and his charisma is magnetic, the costumes immaculate. James Brown was a top-to-bottom showman. It's worth checking out video of The T.A.M.I. Show (1964) for proof (it also features The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, Leslie Gore, The Miracles, The Supremes and The Rolling Stones, back in the Brian Jones days). In the end, this is an easy recommendation: it's a live recording of a live legend at the peak of his powers. 4/5 and by the time its 30-minute runtime ends, you'll be in a better mood than you started.

Live off the floor -- there's no ProTools bullshit in this. This is just a band playing some songs (often a lot of damn times; The Boss is a perfectionist). Springsteen has a particular sound. It's straightforward and it's unapologetic, so I expect this is a take-it-or-leave-it album for a lot of folks. The risk of live-off-the-floor recording is bleed between instruments (and inconsistent meter, but who the fuck cares about that?) but it doesn't seem onerous on this one. The drums are punchy, the guitars sound distinct, the organ hums along, the bass is round and sweet and driving, the horns cut and then recede to a supporting role. Vocals are just the right amount of raw for Bruce. Anyway, good album. If you're here, you'll probably like at least some of it.

90's hip-hop built on top of jazz samples. Ever found hip-hop beats boring and repetitive? Try this. It's the foundation of alt-hip-hop for a decade. 'Buggin' Out' and 'Check The Rhime' are excellent.

Weird as hell. More than just beeps and boops and synth swoops, which is what I worry about with electronic music. Good beats, not a lot of melody. I will say that this, like most albums of electronic music for me, overstays its welcome by at least double. Six of fourteen tracks are over 6 1/2 minutes long and when most of them are the same eight-bar loops for the majority of their length, that's inexplicable to me. In a live setting, a good electronic musician can tailor their music to the energy in the crowd -- a real joy to witness, I might add -- but in recordings, The Sabres of Paradise have clearly struggled to decide when their compositions should peak and when they should end. Not bad music to work to, as you can forget that it's playing and focus. That's an indictment in terms of must-listen status, though. 2.5/5 but I'm rounding down to 2. I've spent too much time defending the validity of prog rock songs with multiple movements and rich with melodic ideas to put up with it in a genre that stretches two ideas over eight minutes.

Once we get back to bands I haven't heard of from the 60's, it's a little hard to hear what makes a band essential (maybe excepting Blue Cheer - that was self-evident). The vocals get a little growly at times (just a distorting belt, nothing in the Death lineage), the rhythms get quick and the bass follows some R&B conventions, and 'All I Really Need Is You' gets a little interesting with a sort of middle-eastern, chromatic thing going on. Though this gets occasional credit as being proto-punk, I think that's more in the pace and simplicity which are just band-driven pop of the era. There's no backbeat to speak of, the time changes ('All I Really Need Is You', again) are just between a march and a waltz and the lyrics are largely pretty vapid teen stuff. If I had to guess, this is a pretty palatable example of a random band from 1966 that was a little better than the others. It's telling that there weren't any revival tours on the scale of AC/DC or the Stones. This is a mildly interesting footnote in the history of rock & roll (in fairness, most of us don't merit even a mention). Not sure it'd make the list if I were writing it. But: it's more pleasant to listen to than Kid Rock. 3/5; it's fine.

Of course, very catchy. Madonna is and has been a master of pop music and, as here, a driving force in the musical zeitgeist. This album marks one of a few moments that drove the mainstream of popular, commercial Western music toward a more heavily electronic sound. Between the beats and the vocal processing, it's hard not to imagine a Daft Punk influence throughout. It's also remarkable that Madonna dominated the charts with this album in her forties: something particularly difficult to do for a woman at that period of time, when female pop vocalists were typically in their early twenties. I've never been a fan of producer-dominated music. I'm interested in the contributions that producers make to albums but on the other hand, I'm left cold by most music that's built from the ground up by a producer tying to figure out what will sell -- and there's a strong current of that, here. That's true as much for pop as it is for Nirvana. To her credit, Madonna scrapped most of an album's worth of material that she'd produced with William Orbit for this record, so her input her is primary. But: as much as she deserves respect for her ability to understand the cultural moment deeply and to push it in a direction (and to drop 9 completed tracks because she doesn't want to repeat herself), the actual music sounds a little clinical. The Western theme has a real foreshadowing of Beyoncé's country turn. The electro-country vibe is still very cool. Madonna's vocals are excellent throughout (and in 2000, let me tell you that you could spot AutoTune from a rural mile away). Honestly, you really should check this out. It's eclectic and weird in the ways that culture from the turn of the millennium could often be. The convergence of disparate genres had begun at this point, but our ability to synthesize them into something organic was still underdeveloped and, though this is a polished version for the era, it still feels a little off-kilter. It's pleasant. The music still feels sterile and more for the benefit of shareholders than listeners but it's at least kinda weird. Standouts: 'Music' was a hit single and it's pretty good. The cover of 'American Pie' is alright; it kind of fucks up the tempo (too straight; thanks, pop music) but the use of a Rhodes piano is pretty great. "What It Feels Like For A Girl' is interesting and also packs a genuine emotional heft -- I'm shocked it hasn't had a resurgence. 'Don't Tell Me' and its chopped up acoustic guitar hook is cool, full stop -- best track on the record and would still be on a lot of good albums. 3.5/5; she's got better albums, but this isn't a bad listen.

It's basically impossible to comment on Radiohead without being accused of either over- or under-stating their quality or importance. It's kind of fair: they've been darlings of music critics for like thirty years, so people have opinions. They're an experimental rock band, too; takes veer wildly between "they're no Captain Beefheart" and "shut up and just play The Bends". They've got some tropes of their own: there are usually some repetitive electronic elements that underpin the rhythm, the guitars don't just strum, Thom York wails plaintively in his falsetto register, songs suddenly stop or start or just change character altogether. The thing is, those are all actually very hard to do -- especially in a way that's as listenable as Radiohead remains. It's a good album. There are some really catchy beats (Phil Selway is an underrated drummer), some nice tunes (I really enjoyed 'Go To Sleep') but also some real drags: 'We Suck Young Blood' takes three whole minutes to pick up from its hand-clapping, monotonous dirge and then goes immediately back into it. The melancholy is highly affective (and effective!), to be sure, but it's a profoundly unpleasant listen. Like listening to a eulogy at half-speed. This is exactly the kind of thing that people hate about Radiohead. 'There, There' is a great example of the less-weird stuff that Radiohead can do. The open, acoustic sound of the drumming (I think the first cymbal hit is at 1:47) propels this one while Colin Greenwood's bass winds around it melodically but subtly, producing a deep groove. Ed O'Brien and the More Famous Greenwood's guitars strum along sparsely with a sound that is both overdriven and somehow shimmering. It all builds, piece by piece, into a busy final third but at that point, the listener can still hear the central features that the song started from; they've followed the whole plot. Yorke's voice soars over the whole thing, extending for bars with quavering vibrato, serving almost as a background instrument. And then for the last verse, it all falls back and the song feels complete. Radiohead's ability to build something and pull the listener along so that the sound bath isn't overwhelming exists -- sometimes they just don't seem to bother. 'A Punch Up at a Wedding' has a cool-as-hell groove driven by bass, drums and piano. Yorke's contributions are occasionally Way Too Many Vocal Layers, but the intensity of the Choir Of Yorkes is used mostly sparingly. It's not a perfect album by any means -- on first listen, much of it is too dense or too melancholic to invite anyone to listen a second time. But Radiohead remain an immensely capable band who are very able to inject electronic strangeness, sonic complexity and emotional depth into rock music that is just that -- perfectly recognizable as rock music. If all your experiments work, you're not actually experimenting. This is a solid 3.5/5 album and its second half makes it well worth a listen. If you're here giving this 5/5 just because it's dense and weird, fuck off. If you're here giving this 1/5 just because you've got beef with Radiohead fans, please equally fuck off. Would be 4/5 but for the interminable dirges on the first half.

I'm going to start this out with a useful metaphor: basketball was invented by Canadian James Naismith in 1892 but our national teams were utterly dominated by other countries until very recently. Catchy, radio-friendly rock from the tail end of the 70's -- the decade arguably most dominated by rock radio. You could pick any of the first three tracks ('Good Times Roll', 'My Best Friend's Girl' and 'Just What I Needed'; all singles) and get a sense of the album as a whole. 'Just What I Needed' is my standout for the album, as a whole. The record rolls along competently with polish, pout (thanks to bassist Benjamin Orr, and rhythm guitarist Ric Ocasek, who both sing lead) and propulsive drums. The synths meander around in the background with a tone that sounds a bit sci-fi, but not in an unpleasant way. The whole affair sounds a bit cheesy to my 2025 ears but that's probably a function of time. As much as The Cars sound like the geometric centroid of all radio rock (not quite Styx, not quite Supertramp, nor BTO, nor Genesis; neither blues nor pop), to some extent that's because that common thread of rock & roll they identified was turned into a template after them. There's a whole genre of bands that refined and polished that median rock template over time (Cheap Trick begat The Cars begat The Replacements and on and on) and the result is that their imitators have made their music sound generic. There's something to be said for the skill and talent and hard work it takes to chart (or direct) the zeitgeist of rock so precisely. On the other hand, it's the most supremely radio-friendly rock you could find and you've listened to it before -- whether you've heard this album or not. It's the most broadly palatable cafeteria lunch you've ever seen -- your whole office is perfectly satisfied by it and yet you'd never bring a date to impress them. You could probably put The Cars on at a party and nobody would notice the music at all. I guess that makes this the perfect 3/5 record. It's all totally competent music and I'd never come back to this out of craving for something. You should give it a listen: between the harmonies, the early melodic use of synths, the falsetto leads and the concise guitar solos and the straight, clean toms rhythms, you'll catch things that other bands you actually love have borrowed from. And then you'll go back to listening to those other bands, anyway. The Cars might've invented something like basketball, but other bands are still beating them at it.

A masterful job layering samples -- musical, found sound, interviews, otherwise. I've said it before: I don't really know much about music that's not primarily made with instruments. this is compelling, though. It's dark and moody but also lively and infectious. DJ-based music like this may not involve the person named on the album playing every instrument but it certainly reflects a deep understanding of music. I first encountered DJ Shadow's music in the 2000 documentary, "Dark Days" (by Marc Singer), focusing on people dwelling in a disused train tunnel beneath New York City. It's easy to see why he was picked for that soundtrack. This is an easy 4/5 for me. Not life-changing but worth a listen anytime and well worth revisiting, whether for study or fun.

Wanna hear something grunge-adjacent that didn't get Nirvana and Pearl Jam's radio play? This is that. As a Canadian, this sounds a lot like early (Naveed-era) Our Lady Peace or I Mother Earth, which is fascinating because they had always seemed a bit anomalous in their weirdness. Right out of the gate, 'Halo of Ashes' is very interesting, melodically. The chordal choices and sitar-like sound of Gary Lee Conner's guitar give this a moderately Indian feel (probably much more generically than I'm able to identify with my limited understanding); the toms-heavy rhythm (Van Conner on drums) is distinctly not a standard rock beat but moves the song along perfectly with the groove built opposite Barrett Martin on bass (very melodic and wandering). Mark Lanegan's vocal work is unusually baritone for rock music (notably, his grunge contemporary Eddie Vedder is also a baritone) but smooth and laid-back and really centres the song. 'All I Know' follows it up with a more straightforward composition but indulges in lush, sustained chorus harmonies and some rad solo and fill work from Gary Conner that all combines for a grunge-y take on something that sounds quite Grateful Dead on the whole. This is distinctly a 90's record. The vocals and lyrics are intimate (close mic'ed), introspective and a little wordy and psychedelic, from time to time. If you wanted to make an argument for the quality of the decade, rock-wise, and avoid well-worn ruts like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Tool and their ilk, I would start here. 'Look At You' builds from a fairly simple ballad feel (you can hear how this was written on an acoustic or on a piano) until its outro absolutely roars with propulsive drumming, a lovely, overdriven arpeggio part on guitar and a bass line that won't quit. Lanegan croons and the harmonies blend and it all feels like a triumph. 'Dying Days' is excellent. I thought 'Make My Mind' was just fine until it hit the guitar solo before the denouement and suddenly the final third was back to crystalline beauty. The Pacific sun shines through this music. The keys solo on 'Sworn and Broken' is both lovely and hilarious, somehow. This is it: their last recorded album. Just like the Beatles (Abbey Road), they went out at the height of their powers. Sometimes I listen to a pop album and I stretch my feelings to accommodate the competence and the craft of the thing -- I look at it from some perspective external to myself and I say, "yes, this is a 4/5 album -- very good mainstream pop." I don't need to pretend to be someone else to love this album: I gave this 5/5 after four tracks. It would've had to be abysmally boring in the second half to even drop to a 4. I can only wish that this had been more imitated. 5/5, more please. I'll give you the most self-centred and honest compliment that I can give: I'm a musician and I wish I sounded like this.

OK, it's dance music. It has a great beat. It's hard on the 1 and the 3 but that's fine; it works for funk, so we'll allow it. They syncopate enough that you won't get bored with it and, frankly, it moves around. What's key is the amount of musical interest throughout Justice's work: catchy, varied melodies; harmonic tension; electronic wails that rise until the breakdowns come. Where house music often feels trance-like to me, as if trying to hypnotize me for hours rather than grab my attention and hold it, this relentlessly grips my brain. Justice are always building to something and it always comes, eventually -- there's never a letdown, always a breakdown. I think that the most important thing that underpins this record is that the foundation of every song is a fabulous set of drums samples. The bass, the synths, the ambient noises, the jazzy guitar hits: it all perfumes this beautiful curry but one thing sits beneath it like the onions that every curry builds from -- just fucking fantastic drumming. Dance music that'll make you feel something other than untz-untz-untz. What a concept. 5/5 and there will be no arguing from the audience.

You're gonna like reggae or not. It's idiosyncratic. It's clearly related to other forms of guitar/drums/bass music, both in the rock traditions and in some African genres, but it's its own thing. Be sure to listen on something that can handle the bass comfortably: it's mixed high enough that you'll want good fidelity. Reggae bass lines are profoundly deep and driving but they're also effortless and chill; I recommend some good headphones. I've never heard anything that sounds so effortlessly-played but also likely to blow a speaker. Reggae is also a revolutionary and profoundly spritual music. It's about Rastafarianism and it's about how black slaves came to be in Jamaica, and about their plight both contemporarily and historically. Anyway, it's a chill, spiritual protest music from a culturally-distinct part of the world that has a really unique character. 'Concrete Jungle', 'Stop That Train' and 'Stir It Up' are great tunes and this is something we should all stop and spend a little time with. It is a classic in both the broad sense and in the narrow sense of the genre it transcended. 5/5 -- the third this week (Screaming Trees' Dust and Justice's Cross, if you're asking), which means either I'm getting soft or the machine spirit has been kind, recently.

A versatile and talented vocalist, there are a lot of great renditions by Dusty Springfield that are worth checking out. Her take on 'Song of A Preacher Man" is pretty good, even involving a little bit of gospel choir in the backing vocals. I don't want to diminish her artistic input in this record but I will say that the whole thing sounds a bit like it was put together by some record execs saying, 'I bet this'll chart.' She shows a versatility here -- this is a bit of a shotgun blast of vocal-centric genres -- but some commitment would've helped. In all, not an unpleasant album but one that fails to land with me because of some biases I have against Top 40, essentially. 2/5

You'll recognize the bass line from 'Good Times' immediately -- and it's still perfect in every way (if you're curious, that sound is probably a Music Man Stingray, a classic instrument too-often unsung outside of bass player circles). My basic impression is that the dance numbers are excellent but the slow jams go on a little long ('A Warm Summer Night' chilled in its outro jam way too long for my liking). It's all catchy, though, and Bernard Edwards is an absolute master of the electric bass guitar -- so clean, so punchy. Honestly, this is probably a 4/5 disco album but that's a bit out of my wheelhouse, so for me it's a 3/5. We'll have to let the democratic process decide whether disco is good, relative to everything else, or not.

Most likely, the version of 'I Want You To Want Me' is from this album. Cheap Trick were heavily influential in the realm of writing lovely, catchy melodies and then layering them atop loud, driving guitars -- something that just sounds like a thousand bands in 2025. However, they hadn't achieved significant popularity in their home country until this particular record. This is a document of a band that had honed its craft for most of a decade (honestly, eight years isn't that long to toil on the cusp of making it big but I guess it seemed like it in the 70's, when music was everything and radio was music) and the skill is on display. You might think there are some corrections or some overdubs in post, but there aren't. Cheap Trick are what they are: power pop or melodic hard rock, however you want to slice the pie. They're the Foo Fighters, thirty years before there were Foo Fighters. Or Weezer. Or Nickelback, I guess. It's worth remembering that the dominant music of the 70's was a blend of soft rock (think America or Carly Simon) and disco, so an act breaking through with music based around pentatonic scales, power chords and ubiquitous distorted guitar is noteworthy. It's why Alice Cooper seemed shocking and why Kiss still has some real respect in elitist rock circles (despite being open, unabashed sellouts; this is kind of a hot take). It's also a fun listen. It functions as a bit of a greatest-hits up to that point, the recording is actually good (and has enough crowd noise to feel real) and Cheap Trick were genuinely a good band. It might sound kind of trite as I reach the first-quarter mark of the 21st century but that's because of almost fifty years of people building on this foundation. Great hits and the rest is also pretty good. Surrender is an absolutely excellent song and it's kinda halfway between Kiss and pop music -- and that's a remarkable innovation. Give this a listen. It's a 4/5 if you're predisposed to enjoy this sort of rock music (you probably know what I mean, at this point) but in the spirit of my electronic-hater-adjustments, it might be a 3/5 for people who aren't me. Still: well worth your time, if only to hear how live albums really took off at this point in history.

Some rap/rock from the turn of the millennium. It's better than Limp Bizkit, so there's that! The guitar playing is less interesting, but it doesn't have Fred Durst, so that's a plus. The band actually learned to play their instruments for this album, which would be an extraordinarily condescending thing to say except that it's true and *this is their second album*, which means they didn't finish for their first album. So: if you like this kind of music, I'd suggest checking out Incubus. There's much less rapping (especially as they go on), but it's got the beats, the DJ work, the angular guitar parts and the weird vocals, but every part is just better. It's fine, though. That 3/5 I gave Kid Rock is really haunting me; I can't give this less than that, so I guess it's a 3/5. Never forget, though: Kid Rock sucks.

The history of western pop music is just filled with folk revivals. Ultimately, music is made by people and traditional forms that can recognizably be made by people (not yer beeps and boops and fancy drum loops) come back into vogue. Plenty of tunes survived the Baroque period or Lisztomania, so folk music popping back up contemporaneously with the British Invasion or Deadmau5 is really not something that should surprise us. But it always does! At this time in history, see also Mumford & Sons's first album or the first couple from The Lumineers. Or a ton of others -- all of whom, like Fleet Foxes, are still making good music, it's just fallen out of vogue. This is kind of like the recurring popularity of workwear-derived fashion (or, arguably, the modern phenomenon of athleisure) -- the sort of music that people are making anyway becomes fashionable once every ten or twenty years, lately. And then we go back to 'what other weird sounds could be music?' This is a really popular example of the form. Folky friends held this in the highest regard among its Aughts Folk Revival peers and I'm glad to have had an opportunity to spend time with it. The harmonies are delicately beautiful, the compositions are largely pretty straightforward -- neither terribly traditional (every song is an original Robin Pecknold composition) nor pop (no weird song forms and all instruments that have been involved in western music for at least a couple hundred years, depending on whether the electric-ness of the guitars bothers you). It's a good one, though it doesn't stick with me. I'll come back to see if it starts to, but I like my folk a little sadder, angrier, more foot-stomping or all of the above. However, that's still a 4/5 from me.

Some folks don't like Pearl Jam -- I get it. Eddie Vedder can be a bit hard to understand, sometimes. Maybe they just don't like a baritone lead (that makes less sense to me). The primary one that I hear from people is that these songs are played-out; I can't accept that. It's true that the songs on Ten are going to be familiar to you if you were listening to music anytime in the thirty years after its release but that's not a fault in the music. The compositions are interesting and all of the performances are solid. Dave Krusen's drumming is solid and driving. Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament serve as an excellent rhythm section, texturally and harmonically. Mike McCready is a hell of a guitar player. Eddie is Eddie -- poetic, emotive, dynamic and a little mumbly, sure. But if you haven't read about Pearl Jam already, I'm not your guy. There are whole books. This is a tremendous album; it's emotion-first, performance-second, coherence-third rock music. It does, indeed, fucking rock. 5/5

It's a fucking masterpiece. If you don't like this, rock music probably isn't your thing. It's Abbey Road or Dark Side Of The Moon gigantic in the culture. Required listening unless you hate rock music. 5/5

It's jazz! I don't know might about jazz and even less about South African jazz. This had some diversity of mood, some really interesting harmony going on (especially on Sameeda) and some lovely melodies. Worth a listen! 4/5

Really listenable, 23 years later. Elliott played the same boastful, sexually explicit game her male counterparts were playing at and demolished them. Her flow isn't as compelling to me as some others and I'm lukewarm on the beats produced in this era but this is an excellent record. That's without even mentioning the featured artists (Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Ludacris, Method, Ms Jade, TLC and 50 Cent). There's a definitely touching moment later on, mourning the passing of several of her young peers. Even the brief, spoken interludes hold up better than typical hip-hop sketches. I'd argue that both hold up because they represent Missy Elliott's genuineness throughout what's otherwise a typically posturing, braggodocious rap album. She knows who she is, she knows what she's doing and she's killing it. Better than Eminem's actual output at the same time (and he's still rightly a legend). 5/5

Interesting bass and drum work. Greg Dulli's vocals don't do it for me. Some of his growls feel put-on, his deviation from pitch sounds lazy rather than natural and his timing and lyrics just seem to go on like bad beat poetry. Wo-man. Woooooah, man! The title track feels downright bloated, despite a very interesting and tense-feeling guitar texture. The band is tight and interesting. Their timbral and harmonic choices are compelling, with a snappy active bass tone (that's gotta be a StingRay) and a kind of Johnny Marr/The Edge guitar chime.'Fountain and Fairfax' works better than most because it's more instrumental than others; when Dulli caterwauls through the climax, it works despite him rather than because of him. But the songs ultimately drag and that's down to Dulli's inability to hold my attention. Instead of the loose, relaxed feel of Dylan or Jeff Tweedy, he sounds like someone who thinks it's cooler not to try. It's cool if you don't have to try but you succeed anyway, Greg. Sprezzatura. Coming up short because you obviously didn't try is just apathy. Which is very Gen X! 3/5 for the band; Dulli almost drags it to a 2.

This is one of my favourite albums. Discovering the plaintive, folk-drenched sounds of The Band crystalized my lifelong love of roots/folk-rock/Americana (or preferentially, Canadiana, on this side of the border). It was life-altering in the subtle way that art improves and undergirds our lives. This is another record that I shouldn't rhapsodize too much -- there's been enough ink spilt on its account. Just give this a listen. Keep an ear out for the harmonies and for the strains of each band member's contributions bleeding through: Levon's traditional folk from the South; Garth Hudson's conservatory training; Robbie's fire; Rick Danko's obvious R&B influences (and his utterly unique vocal timbre) and the pure, uncut sadness of Richard Manuel. It's not easy to write a standard. They've written several -- two ('The Weight', 'This Wheel's On Fire' with Dylan) and stole a third ('I Shall Be Released' is a Dylan composition but it belongs to The Band and Richard Manuel in particular) on this record alone. If you've ever heard some lazy, jangly bullshit, it was probably trying to get to this place.

Perfectly good music but it faded into my background. Worth a close listen and a welcome departure from my norm.

Kinda reminds me of Tom Waits. Also pretty grunge-y. Sure sounds like 1993. Doesn't resonate with me -- partly because the lo-fi recording sounds a little raw. Normally that's my jam but this is a but unfinished-feeling. On the other hand, if you were an alt listener in '93 and were sick of the testosterone and mediocrity of the Afghan Whigs, this would be the perfect antidote. This works better for me when it's heavier (usually true of grunge and garage). I don't love the textures they picked but it feels very DIY. 'Rub It 'Til It Bleeds', '50ft Queenie' and 'Me-Jane' all landed for me (plus the loose Dylan cover) and I can hear just what folks like about Harvey. There weren't many prominent women in this genre and her presence is vital and noteworthy (as is her Englishness, in a highly American grunge wave). Well worth anyone's time: this is a pretty singular voice with what seems like a clear vision. It didn't blow my hair back but maybe it'll be your favourite thing! An album like a plate of good olives. Another 4/5 because it's mostly not for me but I'm pretty sure it's for someone out there!

Brian Eno is a fascinating guy, with a wildly creative approach to how he writes and produces songs. He has adopted and invented techniques and technologies way ahead of his time. Most of the time though, the music is pretty inoffensive. This is a pretty accessible and palatable album. The case for its necessity is pretty nerdy, though -- to steal a derogatory term from his home country, it takes a certain kind of anorak to appreciate what makes this album important. You'll need to do some reading, I imagine. That's not to say that it's not enjoyable, though. It's not as self-indulgent as a lot of songwriter-does-everything albums. It feels like a collection of songs that he polished until they took their proper shape, rather than an act of self pleasure inflicted upon the listener. If anything, the album is so un-grating that it fades into the background. It's a great work listen, though less good than his real ambient work (Music For Airports, for example). Talented, competent, pleasant. Maybe not emotionally resonant, but he's headed for (and inventing) that sterile 80s sound that just does that to me (this is 1977, but Eno is always ahead). Give it a go -- the worst that'll happen is you'll end up doing the dishes and forgetting it's on. 3/5

Very 80's. This works a lot better than sterile attempts at rock music from this period. Creative, fun, catchy use of synths and other probably other electronic instruments. This is also emphatically not my jam. Let's call it 3/5. I can't forget this album because Tainted Love will be played everywhere forever but I'll probably forget the rest. Except the title -- fun title.

Technical, grunge-y and morose. There's a lot to compliment with Soundgarden but I'm going to call out two: Kim Thayil, a fascinating guitar player who never got his full due (this is his only band that broke big) and singer Chris Cornell -- much has been written of Cornell's work but the single thing that ought to blow your mind as you listen is that Cornell's natural vocal range is that of a baritone, despite his soaring, wailing, gritty falsetto that highlights so many songs. Soundgarden is a little less likely to change your whole life than The Beatles. But they might. 4/5

Solid 70s folk. Reminds me of Bob Seger. Great sounding instruments. Most of the album will slip by as a pleasant blur. The second to last song marks a fascinating and worthy guitar composition worth the price of admission. This is good. It didn't change my life but it did make me wonder why I haven't heard her music before. 3.5/5 -> 4/5

Polished, weird, catchy, innovative, poppy and with a subtle acid edge. This is masterful. It's all more or less encapsulated on their 'Iron Man' cover: structurally the same, sonically worlds away. This is a band winking at an influence but turning the whole thing to their own uses. It's an acknowledgment and also a statement about how deeply buried our influences can be. The result is a lounge/pop/sitar cover re-keyed to nearly obliterate the proto-metal sound of the original. Like Cake's take on 'War Pigs' but a little less silly (which is just a part of Cake). You may very well hate it. If you're a millennial, you'll recognize Lovefool. The whole rest of the album is excellent, though. There's a whole world of brilliant, subversive music from the 90's that kind of flew under the radar because of the particular way corporations dominated the music scene at the time (they still do, just in a different way). First Band On The Moon is a melange of influences, originality and slick melody writing (and utterly compelling lead vocals from Nina Persson). What keeps this from being a 5 star album in my books is just the empty emotional content for me. Part of the ultra-clean production (technically, a huge accomplishment) and primarily sunny-keyed pop style is that it slides off me like oil on Teflon. It's gorgeous, it's clever, it does have dark undercurrents but I will absolutely forget about this in four hours.

Strange and playful, which is an odd descriptor for 90s hip-hop. Heavily influenced by (and sampling from) Parliament/Funkadelic (according to Wikipedia), this is appropriately humorous but not nearly as infectious, groove-wise. A good listen and a nice taste of the diversity that actually exists in the rap world but also not an album that'll go into my rotation. Better than another boring, self-absorbed Britpop record.3/5

Mellow, kinda morose music in a classically 90's folk/pop vein. If you're not reminded a bit of Tracy Chapman then you probably haven't gotten to her in this project, yet. His writing is confessional and his slightly nasal, occasionally gravely voice gives his compositions a vulnerable feel (added to his habit of drifting off notes in a downward glissando, adding a weary feel). It's a really lovely record. 'Babylon' was a real, deserved hit, 'We're Not Right' has a rare and fun use of theremin and I'd recommend 'This Year's Love' to anyone feeling weary or wary about romance -- it expresses a particular side of being in love that's neither jubilant nor heartbroken and is more internal than external. It's a great record, an enjoyable, digestible confessional that may sound like some later British songwriters like Ed Sheeran, for good reason. It's not perfect (some numbers drag a little) and it's not revolutionary but it is influential, well-crafted and showcases genuine musical talent without relying merely on technical fireworks to carry it (though it's not quite Nick Drake). It's a prime example of a singer-songwriter conveying an internal landscape that's clear and nuanced and that impact carried forward for a decade or more in the larger music scene. 4/5

A famous blunder by a major record label, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot represents an album a band wanted to make, refused to change under label pressure and which exploded when it finally came out in its unadulterated form. 'I Am Trying To Break Your Heart' is one of my favourite songs. The record represents something of a template for the Aughts folk/indie/singer-songwriter scene. We got a lot of these sort of thoughtful, introspective, metaphorical songs that would work on just an acoustic six-string but gained something from some ambient production work. I don't think it got better than this in the decade that followed. 5/5 this sets a bar for the early 2000s in the modern alt/folk/rock/country/indie sphere (which is a mouthful but really exists).

In which Eddie Van Halen, one of the most important guitar players in the instrument's history, reminds us of his classical musical training and composes a bunch of great stuff for synthesizers. Still somewhat anathema for hard rockers, it works. Later, Alex Van Halen reminds us that he's a formidable drummer by recording a drum intro to 'Hot For Teacher' that may never stop causing debates about how to play it correctly. Michael Anthony supports, David Lee Roth pretends to be as important to the band as either of the eponymous brothers. Once again, this is an album that fucked up rock music for a long time. It's not straightforward to make a song like 'Jump' compelling. A lot of synth-powered motivational ballads followed. Most sucked (Rush and, to a lesser extent, Triumph had a few good ones). 'Panama' reminds us of Van Halen I & II. 'Hot For Teacher' is maybe Peak Diamond Dave-era VH. Hot take: this is a perfect album. Within the micro-genre that Van Halen forms the gravimetric centre of, this is the ur-record. 5/5

Never been a Priest fan but I am a casual metal fan. Let's f'n go. When you get down to it, this is simpler, more accessible version of what Iron Maiden does so well. Priest sounds a lot like Kiss but with a bit of a harder edge (though, in 2025, we might get into an argument about whether or not this is metal). It's catchy and driving but it's less melodic or dramatic than Maiden or even Kiss. If I were to be uncharitable for a moment (and I gave three stars to a Kid Rock album, so take my presumption of good faith seriously), I'd say this is probably popular because it's really simple and a little repetitive. Vocals ok, rhythm section solid and serviceable, and KK Downing's solos are pretty cool. There's a certain 80's metal template that this sets and is later refined into thrash. I'm cutting some slack for a band that every 90's metal giant cited as essential listening but it comes of a little slow, dynamically flat and mildly boring to my modern ears. I'll have to try some of their earlier stuff. 'Living After Midnight' is a classic. Still a super repetitive melody though. 3/5 -- it's fine but you're unlikely to be as inspired by this as James Hetfield and Max Cavalera were.

I like Cuban jazz but I'm way too out of my depth to comment on it meaningfully. That I'll write a whole review of hip-hop and not this should tell you just how little I know. Worth a listen!

I'm not sure how to feel about this one. It's mostly a collection of covers of rock & roll hits. Their takes on Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" and Little Richard's "Good Golly, Miss Molly" (written by Marascalco & Blackwell) are pretty good but not as good as the originals. A quick perusal of the Wikipedia entry reveals that critics find it an essential influence for later, noisier punk and grunge bands and that the messy, few-mics recording is influential in the garage/DIY scene. I can't help but wonder how to reconcile the honour that they do to the original artists by recording this with the fact that at least some of those artists (at least Berry and Little Richard) just did better versions of this song. The Sonics may have had a somewhat harsher sound but I don't think they were any less likely to spur the Ramones or Sonic Youth. But we should also make more space for our own canon in rock music. Jazz musicians might include standards in their repertoire because the compositions are that good and because every other recording of it is a foil to define yourself against. A sprinter runs the same race every time, they just try to run it better. "David" isn't the only sculpture of a man. Whatever. 3/5. This is Seattle's version of The La's. I listened and thought, 'sure, I guess.' go listen to The Tragically Hip instead. Or Sloan, or Thrush Hermit. Better bands from smaller markets that just didn't get in front of the right people to really make it big in America or Britain.

It's a masterpiece. This album and Harvest are required listening to understand Young's place in the 60's-80's rock canon. Add some of his collabs (Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, etc) and you'll see why people revere this scruffy-looking old Canadian ex-pat who's always feuding with Spotify. This record is full of mournful melodies, delicate guitar and piano playing (contrasted with his loud, brash, chaotic electric work with Crazy Horse) and heartbreaking lyrics of both a personal, confessional nature and an allegorical, broad one. It might not be your deal, but Neil Young doesn't really sound like anyone else. His nasal head voice cuts through and mix and lends him a fragile, vulnerable sound. This is essential to the nature of rock & roll -- a voice lamenting the excesses and vices of the industry during its headiest years (recall that Zeppelin owned a 747). 5/5: 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' is enough on its own.

Cool, sexy, beautifully sung and competently played. I will say that this much sax is not my usual thing. I'll give this a middling rating because it falls into that tragic category of things done very well that I just don't care much about, just like elite handball or tennis or top quality fermented yak milk. 3/5

It's catchy! I'm surprised that the first work from India that I've encountered in the list is a soundtrack. With that said, this us pretty accessible to my Western ears: not so much microtonal stuff that I'm lost.

As lush and competent as a Beatles or Beach Boys recording. Just not quite as sophisticated. Don't let that turn you off The Mamas & The Papas, though. Mama Cass (don't call her Big Mama) is one of the best vocalists of the era. All the same, while the band remains as lush-sounding as ever (they sound like a full choir), it's still a 3.5 for blending into the 60's scene. Better than The Sonics, not as good as The Stones, not as earth-shattering as Blue Cheer. We'll round up to a 4/5 because Mama Cass never got the respect she deserves.

5/5, absolute banger. Alanis's music before this is entirely unrecognizable and Jagged Little Pill is so catchy, well-produced and such a departure from what came before as to obliterate it. It also represents a milestone in popular music -- her idiosyncrasies and directness spawned countless similar artists that record companies would try (sometimes with success) to match the appeal of one of Morissette's singles. The instrumental work backing the record is also spectacular, transcending the template-matching work of many pop sessions.

Really loud skiffle, with one of the greatest drummers of all time. The Who have kind of receded from our consciousness of late, as classic rock radio has become less and less cool. Ultimately, there's a great deal in common with earlier forms of music -- particularly mass-market blues from the 50's and British skiffle. As the first side of the record wears on, the band shifts to songs like the titular one: 'My Generation' features an unusual delivery and a growling, plaintive wail that prioritize the full expression of an emotion (angst) over clean, pretty delivery. In that moment, they proclaimed that they spoke for their peers and, somehow, they made good. This is totally fine, plus one all-timer. And Keith Moon. Usually, I make some notes about how incredible John Entwistle was but he's pretty restrained on this one. Moon, though, is always a torrent of fills and ornament while somehow keeping perfectly steady time. He was utterly maniacal and also a drummer who elevated every piece he played on. There's something edifying about this record. 'My Generation' marks a departure, not just for the band but for rock music generally -- its key changes, structure, delivery and instrumental flourishes all feature more chaos, more posturing, more fire than the previous five songs and their solid foundation in the multi-part vocal groups and popular rock & roll that came before. On this album, this band moves into the future and inches a whole movement a little farther toward what we recognize today as rock music.'The Kids Are Alright' is a subtler step along the same path. 'It's Not True' was a surprise favourite for me -- great beat, fun melody and great guitar-playing. Townshend does start laying on the distortion as the album goes on, especially as 'It's Not True' settles into a late bridge and in parts of 'I'm A Man' (which must involve a Fuzz Face). The back half of the album, which explores the upbeat new direction, the instrumental skill of the band and a heavier sound is the much stronger of the two (much as I enjoyed the harmonies of the first), starting with 'The Kids Are Alright'. 'The Ox' is a tour de force that the whole thing closes on, a surf/blues/hard rock jam that would sound just as vital and driving as today. Notably, it's the only instrumental. If you wonder, at any point, who the stellar piano player is, it's none other than the man who would have been the fifth Beatles, Nicky Hopkins. Come for the title track, stay for the drums. 3.5/5, rounded up. The first half is a 3, then the title track hits and the second half is a strong 4.

Original trip-hop can be pretty great. I find it's at its best when it's electronic in production but draws from real sounds. 'Safe From Harm' has the cleanest bass sound and nicest drums you could want. 'Hymn other Big Wheel' keeps out of the way of a really excellent vocal performance (Neneh Cherry). The rest is largely good but those two tracks stand out for me. The closer ('Big Wheel') is the high point for me, but my experiences with Massive Attack are all coloured by first hearing 'Tear Drop' (from Mezzanine, six years hence), which is a song of such staggering beauty as to throw my whole sense of the group off-kilter. It's a tare error in scientific parlance. This album is often credited as founding a genre. You should listen to it. The rapping isn't very good but the rest is. The best of Massive Attack will put you into a pleasant trance and some of this record will do that. Remember the context of 1991 when you listen to this: communication was still one-to-one, unless you published a zine or owned a platform. Raves were a secret. The Berlin Wall had just fallen. Thatcher and Regan/Bush had overseen ages of austerity but the economies were recovering and young and working people didn't know that that would mean, but there was both hope and cynicism. And there was also Massive Attack, blending R&B and band-based dance music with the electric stuff that had developed over the previous two decades. It was very novel and very effective, especially as the group coalesced in 80's Bristol. Anyway, 4/5. Hopefully Mezzanine comes up later - I think that might be a 5.

Not but favourite genre but undeniably groundbreaking in 1974. You should listen to Kraftwerk if you like electronica or simple, atmospheric music. I would suggest not to expect mindblowing songwriting or melodies. I don't really like Kraftwerk. I find it boring, repetitive and lifeless. It sounds like a parody of German electronic music. However: this music represents an utterly inventive use of technology for 1974. That the only real instruments present are human voices is what sets this apart, even if I find that to turn me off entirely. I have never liked Kraftwerk. This is also 5/5 album for anyone interested in the history of popular music or just fans of electronic music production. It's impossible to overstate its influence and importance. My aesthetic distaste for it (not completely! But mostly...) is irrelevant to its essentialness.

Reminds me of my ex-fiancee. She loved The XX, which continues to strike me as an even darker version of this. I'm not a fan of either. It's interesting to hear this so recently after Autobahn and Blue Lines. The long influence of Kraftwerk and, later, Massive Attack seems to extend to CHVRCHES. Mopey breakup vocals atop heavily-processed instruments (electronic and otherwise). Reminds me of a retread of some 80's styles but if you want that, listen to Bleachers instead. This isn't un-talented music, it's just that, for me, electronic music should be like fun drugs. It should lull you into a pleasant trance, leave your mind relaxed and wandering like a psychedelic or else be pure, uncut cocaine (Fatboy Slim, I'm calling you). This is a fistful of downers at a rave. You should listen to this with friends so they can keep an eye on you. 2/5

I just got done whining about the dull and depressing Scottish electro-pop of CHVRCHES. I stand by my description of that as a fistful of downers at a rave. This is somehow the opposite: somewhere among the samples and real instrumentation, psychedelic textures and nonsensical lyrics, this is a bong rip on a sunny day. Is the little bit of rapping all that great? No, but the flow is fine -- it's just laidback and mostly meaningless. That can be fine, in my judgement: Yes got by on pure emotion despite a purely word salad approach to lyrics. The feel of this record is all Southern California relaxation. Your grass might be burnt but you've got a cold beer and a lawn chair. And, again, probably a joint. You don't have to like Beck and there are plenty of reasons not to (you may have feelings about his family's role in spreading Scientology around). It's worth listening to a few of his albums, though: the laid-back-yet-propulsive rhythms, the open-sounding drums but sample and effects-heavy recordings, the disaffected but precise vocals -- this was all heavily imitated through the 90's by people who wanted to break big (and A&R assholes who thought they'd cracked the code). Are the horns samples cheesy or perfect? Can they be both? Why does this sound like I'm outside in Bakersfield, cooking in the sunshine? I'm giving this 4/5. You should be cautioned that I'm an elder millennial and some of that score is nostalgia. I think that the 90's are worth understanding and this is a record that'll help you. Plus, it's pleasant if not groundbreaking.

Robert Smith's voice is urgent and dramatic. The music is atmospheric and tense. It all sounds like it's recorded in an echo-y concrete basement. There's no emotional payoff, no resolution. Why, oh why do people enjoy The Cure? 'Hanging Garden' is pretty cool (nice work on bass, Simon Gallup). Smith's use if a flanger is pretty cool and Lol Tolhurst's drumming is insistent. Still sounds like you're listening from the far end of an unfurnished bunker. I have an admitted axe to grind against 80's music production and there's no exception, here. Everyone was using waaaaay too much reverb and it drowned the songs like cereal gone mushy in too much milk. It ruined a lot of albums. Phil Thornalley, Mike Nocito, Robert Smith's depression and a lot of drugs are to blame, here. Look, I'm a depressive. I'm alright these days, thank you, but I'm touched by music that comes from that place. Sometimes it's just mope, though: 'Siamese Twins' is a perfect example. The song sounds as if the whole band entered a hypnotic trance (or just took a bunch of heroin, or ketamine or something) and droned away while Smith did a stream-of-consciousness rant set to their music. The impression is interminable. On the other hand, the whole album is suffused with an atmosphere that is wholly of that depressive feeling ('Is it always like this?', Smith cries at the end of that track). If you value the effectiveness of mood creation, this is, as the kids say, peak. On the other hand, if you don't want to feel the anhedonia of depression -- the endless numbness, the interminable sense that the outside world's cold sunlight feels warmer to other people but freezing to your skin; that the dead taste in your mouth will last forever -- this'll feel like a slog. Which is just two ways to colour the same line drawing. In the end, it's the sound of a depressed, drug-addicted goth man breaking up with his band in realtime, but recorded from the opposite end of a dank fucking cave. I prefer a delicate, tragic beauty to my depressive music. I think people who like The Cure should like Matthew Good Band instead -- Good is slightly angrier and, for my money, much more poetic about his bipolar disorder. Everything from Last of the Ghetto Astronauts through his first solo release (Avalanche) is rife with angst and sadness, both personal and political. But he's Canadian and from the 90's, so nobody remembers him. The most frustrating thing is that I think there are good bones in here. Smith's guitar almost sounds good underneath the suffocating blanket of synthetic echoes (or maybe the did record this in a goddamn geologic feature). The rhythms are propulsive and precise -- even interesting, sometimes -- but they're usually at about half of a compelling speed. A little less opiates and a different decade might've made this excellent. Instead, it's just a chore. Anyway, if you want to listen to a sad heroin addict melt down in a cave with a rhythm section that hates him, you'll like this. If not, go try listening to Beautiful Midnight instead. 3/5 because it's marginally better than The Smiths.

Aretha Franklin was a legend, even in her own time. It's deserved. This album features all of The Queen of Soul's talent, plus a Carole King composition, The Swampers and Eric Clapton, just to name a few things. 5/5, put it on as soon as you're doing reading this.

It's ABBA. It's impeccably written, performed and produced. This one's a little less bright and happy than their previous work. Worth a listen to gather a sense of their artistic abilities. 4/5

Confused. This is both kind of sad and boring. Serviceable playing and singing throughout but nothing particularly interesting at any point. I'm confused because people discuss Dion in revered tones. This is somewhere at a midpoint between The Beatles and Billy Joel (a continuum heretofore unexamined) but with none of the charms of either. I'm guessing this ended up on The List out of a sense of nostalgia. 2/5 Let me take a moment, since this album is boring, to correct an earlier mistake. I believe I recently described Nicky Hopkins as the man who nearly joined The Beatles but that was incorrect. The keys whiz who was co-credited on 'Get Back' was Billy Preston. I'm sure these are primarily notes to myself but, even in what amounts to a public journaling project, I'm going to try to keep my record straight. Anyway, go listen to Abbey Road instead. Have you heard of The Beatles? They were pretty good.

Marvin Gaye is a legend of several kinds of music but I'll say, primarily, R&B and soul. I'm an utter novice at both, so let's just say I'm working on better understanding and feeling the grooves he worked with. The title track is a cross-genre classic though. The rest of the record is smooth, infectious and joyful. I think what fails to land for me with R&B is that smoothness often becomes slowness, which bores be. Sexiness becomes a sleepiness (or sometimes a vague threatening-ness). This is none of that: it is interesting, vital -- Gaye pleads with the listener. Anyway, 4/5 and it's not even my jam.

It may surprise some to learn that there was infectious, upbeat popular music before the rise of rock & roll. Louis Prima is an ambassador for New Orleans' role in that movement. All the pieces are here and I think listeners should pay special attention to the rhythms employed throughout the album -- there's no clapping on the one, here. Anyway, this is a short one. Prima is great -- and often very funny, if you can soften some of your modern sensitivities. Give him a go. 4/5

Grunge does pop is the vibe, I guess. Butch Vig (drummer, famous for producing Nirvana) & co reportedly sought a female vocalist to break themselves from their grunge associations, landing on Shirley Manson. Everything is fine and workable but it seems to mostly combine the lesser elements of grunge and pop -- it's all polish and mild emotion. It's a competent affair but not a totally compelling one. The singles are good. And this could really be somebody's jam. But it's more worth listening to as a time capsule of the mid-90s than a place we should seek to return or a style to emulate. Cool but not great. 3/5

The third of four albums by an idiosyncratic singer-writer who was considered to Tin Pan Alley and was underappreciated in his own time. Sometimes these pan out for me and sometimes they don't. This feels a bit like a one-man, dramatic Broadway musical that I'm missing context for. It's a committed performance but it's bewildering. My old music teacher described music as a tension between the familiar and the novel: too much repetition and your music is boring; not enough and it's inaccessible (and, ultimately, also boring). This contains not enough repetition and, as a consequence, the conviction and seriousness of it sound pretentious (the pretense being that I have any clue what's going on). Anyway, it's some 70's music with a rambling singer, a piano and a bit of orchestration. It's like if Neil Diamond had no bombast and couldn't write a refrain. 2/5: not painful to the ears but a bit painful to my sense of patience. Note: after having read some user reviews, I feel the need to establish that I wrote the above *before* reading everyone's thoughts. We all hear Neil Diamond and musical theatre, apparently -- and in the worst way.

For those who've been working through The List for a while, you'll probably hear the influence of Brian Eno on this record. There's a lot of atmosphere (the soundstage is chasm-wide, thanks to the clever reverb and the drama of the music) but even in the effects-drenched arrangements, everything is distinct and intelligible. There are arguments about this but I think this is clearly the best U2 album. The work of Adam Clayton (bass) and Larry Mullen Jr. (drums) backing up the two more famous members of the band (possibly still known as Paul and David, at this point) is essential. It's solid without being overly simple: Clayton's bass lines are carefully build to heighten the tension of songs like 'Bullet The Blue Sky' and Mullen's rhythms are timed impeccably alongside the cascades of delay and reverb emanating from The Edge. The Edge (David Evans) fills the sonic space with huge amounts of sound -- surprising for a man who plays a very sparse style of guitar. The use of effects (delay, reverb, chorus, various overdrive/distortion effects, wah and even crazier things like The Infinite Guitar) to expand chords and simple parts into a full-on sound bath is remarkable, particularly at a time when numerous Van Halen imitators were trying to do it with the maximum number of notes, instead. Much of it isn't entirely difficult to play but it is often quite difficult to write and arrange. Bono (Paul Hewson) is a drama queen. It suits U2 perfectly, especially on earlier works. Lanois and Eno have him backed up with both effects and session singers to sound like he is at the head of a massive choir, standing on a rock spire amid the Grand Canyon. The songwriting is actually pretty good. It's about longing and tension and tragedy -- all things that suit U2 very well. The Joshua Tree isn't a masterpiece (it's do over the top as to be borderline camp, at times) but it's a wonderful reflection of that time of music. You need to imagine this in the charts, up against Soft Cell, Bon Jovi and Duran Duran. Maybe, god forbid, a Todd Rundgren album. U2 have become self-parodic over the decades but they deserve their plaudits -- I expect that their early work will experience a revival in the near term. You should listen to The Joshua Tree. Take it a little bit seriously -- like Eno -- but not totally seriously -- like Bono. 4/5

I expected the interminable (if influential) beep-boops of Kraftwerk and was relieved when I heard a real hi-hat in the background. Don't get me wrong, there are beeps and boops and some weirdness. The end of 'Just A Second' devolves into semi-coherent noise. It's kind of fun, though -- it asks us when the song ceases to be melodically and rhythmically organized. Overall, I get why this is included in The List. It's neither haughty prog nor straightforward blues rock. It's very German. It's also quite lovely at times. All together, it's a nice album and an interesting snapshot of a scene (70's West German krautrock) that I knew nothing about. I think it's likely that an avid pilgrim on the journey through The List will enjoy this and hear its echoes in other work. Reminds me of Sigur Ros and Godspeed You! Black Emperor in a very pleasant way. 4/5