444
Albums Rated
3.88
Average Rating
41%
Complete
645 albums remaining
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Enthusiast
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178
5-Star Albums
23
1-Star Albums
Breakdown
By Genre
By Decade
By Origin
Albums
You Love More Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| D.O.A. the Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle | 5 | 1.88 | +3.12 |
| Metal Box | 5 | 2.41 | +2.59 |
| Medúlla | 5 | 2.72 | +2.28 |
| Olympia 64 | 5 | 2.77 | +2.23 |
| Yeezus | 5 | 2.77 | +2.23 |
| Third/Sister Lovers | 5 | 2.79 | +2.21 |
| Good Old Boys | 5 | 2.86 | +2.14 |
| Gris Gris | 5 | 2.88 | +2.12 |
| Apocalypse Dudes | 5 | 2.9 | +2.1 |
| The Only Ones | 5 | 2.92 | +2.08 |
You Love Less Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thriller | 1 | 4.22 | -3.22 |
| Bad | 1 | 3.8 | -2.8 |
| Violator | 1 | 3.7 | -2.7 |
| Brothers | 1 | 3.58 | -2.58 |
| Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs | 1 | 3.39 | -2.39 |
| Music for the Masses | 1 | 3.38 | -2.38 |
| 25 | 1 | 3.36 | -2.36 |
| The Yes Album | 1 | 3.31 | -2.31 |
| American Beauty | 1 | 3.24 | -2.24 |
| The Boatman's Call | 1 | 3.2 | -2.2 |
Artists
Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| David Bowie | 6 | 5 |
| Bruce Springsteen | 4 | 5 |
| Radiohead | 4 | 4.75 |
| Johnny Cash | 3 | 5 |
| Prince | 3 | 5 |
| Led Zeppelin | 3 | 5 |
| Stevie Wonder | 3 | 5 |
| The Stooges | 3 | 5 |
| Creedence Clearwater Revival | 3 | 5 |
| Beatles | 7 | 4.29 |
| Kanye West | 3 | 4.67 |
| U2 | 3 | 4.67 |
| Metallica | 3 | 4.67 |
| Jimi Hendrix | 2 | 5 |
| PJ Harvey | 2 | 5 |
| Bob Marley & The Wailers | 2 | 5 |
| Miles Davis | 2 | 5 |
| The Pogues | 2 | 5 |
| Aretha Franklin | 2 | 5 |
| Muddy Waters | 2 | 5 |
| Fela Kuti | 2 | 5 |
| Amy Winehouse | 2 | 5 |
| Alice Cooper | 2 | 5 |
| Simon & Garfunkel | 2 | 5 |
| The Cure | 2 | 5 |
| Marvin Gaye | 2 | 5 |
| R.E.M. | 2 | 5 |
| The Rolling Stones | 4 | 4.25 |
| Pet Shop Boys | 3 | 4.33 |
| Kings of Leon | 3 | 4.33 |
Least Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Depeche Mode | 2 | 1 |
| Michael Jackson | 2 | 1 |
| Yes | 2 | 1.5 |
Controversial
| Artist | Ratings |
|---|---|
| My Bloody Valentine | 1, 4 |
| Fleetwood Mac | 5, 2 |
| Joni Mitchell | 2, 3, 5 |
5-Star Albums (178)
View Album Wall
Popular Reviews
Doves
3/5
I definitely listened to this at the wrong time of day. This is an album that’s supposed to be listened to at 3am on a Saturday morning when walking through the streets of a wet Northern city in a post-party haze. I listened to it over my lunch break on a Monday afternoon, and I liked it just fine, but I do think it’d be enhanced by listening in the correct setting
24 likes
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
Bruce Springsteen has always been an artist of two sides, one representing the joyful exuberance that can be found in life’s simple pleasures, in dancing, in singing, in drinking with friends, in flirting and crushes and love and relationships, and in the beauty of music itself.
The other is the dark side of life, the struggles of broken people living broken lives, marred by lost love, economic strife, crime, inadequacy, and misplaced ambition.
It is a sign of a great artist to be able to deal with both sides of life with equal weight, and Springsteen is in a unique position of being both a great artist and highly successful and popular Pop artist. This position has unfortunately left him in another, less enviable, position, that of one of the most misrepresented artists in history. Very few people have so succinctly, so beautifully, and so heartbreakingly represented the life of the proletariat, but the overwhelming image of him is that of an unthinking patriot, proclaiming that he was Born In The USA with overwhelming pride in the evident greatness of his motherland.
Nobody who has listened to Nebraska could possibly make that mistake again. It is a stark, desperate, downer of an album, the stories those of people pushed to the edge by economic circumstance, who inevitably take desperate action in an attempt to get out.
What Springsteen does best is to represent the human behind the action. In very few words he is able to show the thoughts and situations driving his characters. I read a fascinating article in the Guardian magazine yesterday about whether or not song lyrics can be read as literature. One factor the author considered was that of performance:
‘Vocal delivery, melody, rhythm, arrangement and production are all used to enhance, or sometimes subvert, what the words are saying.
Consider Nick Cave’s 1988 song The Mercy Seat. To cave, the indignant death-tow convict was clearly guilty but Johnny Cash later covered it on the assumption he was innocent. Same words, different impact.’
Springsteen has no doubt that his characters are guilty of the crimes they commit. What he asks the listener to do is to dive deeper beyond the basic crime and punishment narrative. Consider Highway Patrolman, one of my favourite songs on the album. Joe Roberts is a cop whose brother Frankie ‘ain’t no good.’ When he kills someone in unknown circumstances, Joe pursues Frankie right up to the Canadian Border, but lets him go. All he can think about is the good times that he has had with his brother, and justifies his own crime with the line ‘a man turns his back on his family, well he just ain’t no good.’
There is no redemption, no sense behind the violence, no justice for the dead mans friends or family. But there is an explanation behind Joe’s actions, and it forces the listener to put themselves in that situation. Anyone who tells you that it has an easy solution is lying, anyone who tells you that it doesn’t move them or make them think is an idiot with very limited taste.
The music is cause for further commendation, the desperate quiet and haunting harmonica and mandolin evoking the dark, empty highways and plains that make up the majority of the songs settings. It creates an intimacy that further forces you to empathise with the characters, Springsteen making it feel as if they are confiding with you directly.
Nebraska is one of the great pieces of American Art, a cry from the very soul of the working class that represents their hopes, dreams and failings. It deserves to be pondered over with the attention that we give Steinbeck and Zola, and will remain relevant while we are all still broken yet still have a reason to believe
17 likes
Baaba Maal
4/5
It’s difficult to properly critique albums like this, because criticism is, at least partially, about being about to place a piece of art’s place within cultural context, explaining the trends that have led to it’s creation and whether or not it works as a continuation of, break from, or subversion of those trends. The albums that I find easiest to review are those which I have a personal connection to, those which I have something to say regarding the political, cultural, or social context, or those which I disliked enough that I can really rag on them.
I know precious little about Senegalese history or culture, and even less about Fula, the language Maal speaks. So with the exception of Minuit, which is in French, I wasn’t able to even guess at what the themes of each song was. In some ways, I feel incredibly lost with this album.
But in another way, the beauty of this record really does transcend my need for understanding. Like Classical or Jazz, the timbre and melody are enough to make me feel the music on a more instinctive level. And that instinctive level is telling me that this is just great music. Sometimes it’s fun to overthink and to intellectualise, try to make sense of everything, or come up with rational explanations as to why you enjoy things. Other times, it’s fine to just admit that this sounds pretty and funky, and that I enjoyed listening to it. It’s fine to have fun
17 likes
Red Hot Chili Peppers
3/5
A big problem with albums from the age of CD’s is that they were just too long. When with an LP you had a really limited time to fill, which meant you had to ensure that your 30-50 minutes of music was the best 30-50 minutes of music you could possibly put out. By the time the late 80’s came about, the commercial power of the labels had ensured that most pop albums were taking advantage of the longer runtime allowed by a CD to justify charging more money than for an LP. ‘You’re getting more songs for just a little more money, it’s completely worth it.’ This spilled over from pop and into the world of mainstream rock and even alternative.
As such, in the same year that Nirvana brought the Alternative Nation to the mainstream, alt long-timers the Red Hot Chili Peppers released Blood Sugar Sex Magik, their breakthrough 5th album. It is an hour and 15 minutes long.
The reason I’m harping on about album lengths in the early CD era is that Blood Sugar Sex Magik is a prime example of a good album that would have been even better for if it had been released just a few years earlier. I love a lot of the songs on the album, but it is as often a drag as it is a delight. Did anyone really need to hear Apache Rose Peacock, My Lovely Man, and the full 8 minute inanity of Sir Psycho Sexy? Cut track 12-16 and finish on the one two punch of Under the Bridge and They’re Red Hot and you’ve got an almost perfect album.
Except… would you?
Maybe I’m just a bit biased, cos I’ve been on a Springsteen and Paul Simon kick the past couple of days, but it is really noticeable that although the music is fantastic, Anthony Kiedis is the weak link by a country mile. I actually don’t mind his voice. But his lyrics, oh my god.
‘Sittin on a sack of beans,
Sittin down in New Orleans,
You wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen,
Sitting on that sack of beans.’
‘Oh good brother just when I thought that I had seen it all,
My eyes popped out, my dick got hard’
‘Said the girl who left me silly,
She liked the looks of me and my willy’
‘Chicken strut your butt, let’s rock’
‘Twinkle twinkle little star,
Shining down on my blue car,
Drivin’ down the boulevard,
She was soft and I was hard’
All of these examples are from the same song. My consolation is that Kiedis did get better when he replaced the obsession with his own penis with an obsession with California. Californiacation has a much better set of lyrics.
All in all, Blood Sugar Sex Magik is not a bad album. I loved it when I was a stupid 13 year old. I still love the music as a less stupid 24 year old. But only the music.
16 likes
Thin Lizzy
5/5
I have checked, and this is the only Thin Lizzy album on this list. So, outside of a comparison I made in the KISS review, this is the only mildly public chance I might have to discuss Thin Lizzy. I should try to make it a good one.
Thin Lizzy are my Dad’s favourite band. As such, I have grown up listening to their music in a way I have not listened to any other music. They are an integral part of my musical education, one of the reasons why I picked up the guitar as an instrument. And as such I am approached this listening of Live And Dangerous with more scrutiny than I would most other albums on this list.
And that scrutiny is not affecting the listening experience in any bit. This is one of the great, if not the greatest, examples of the live double album that bands in the 70’s put out with worrying regularity.
The band is on as tight a form as a loosely funky, bluesy, semi-improvisational Rock group could be. All of the playing is exceptional, all of the solo’s are exceptional, all of it is emblematic of tight group of sympatico musicians performing to their highest standard. There’s a controversy about how much of Live And Dangerous was overdubbed, and the obvious answer to the problem is that ‘all live albums are overdubbed, why does it matter so specifically in this case?’ but, in Lizzy’s case, the problem has been answered. There was a subsequent live album released called Still Dangerous, which was a full concert recording from the concerts that Live And Dangerous was taken from, with no overdubs. And guess what? It’s as good as Live And Dangerous is. It has the same energy levels, the same dynamics, the same virtuosity, that made Live And Dangerous such a good record.
And let’s not forget the figure without whom the whole thing would fall apart. If Iggy Pop is the consummate Punk front man, Phil Lynott should be in the conversation as consummate Hard Rock front man, partly because he’s the only Hard Rock guy whose sex appeal I have no problem with. Robert Plant would spend too much time talking about Lord of the Rings, Steven Tyler the less said about the better, I would fuck Ozzy but that’s just because I think it’d be a story. That leaves Lynott, who was both incredibly attractive, effortlessly cool and charismatic, and also as a black Irish man, the eternal outsider, which further added to a sense of style and mystery to his persona.
And Lynott wouldn’t have been as sexy if he weren’t also so damned talented. The songwriting is immaculate, full of Irish-American mythology and character pieces, written with the style of the best Gaelic sages, and the heartbreaking irony of the best American songwriters.
Live And Dangerous is a great representation of what it feels like to be in the crowd of a good Rock gig, with all of the sweaty exuberance, excitement and euphoria that goes along with it. And the songs, and the solos, and the writing, and the performances, and the arrangements, and the guest stars, and, and, and…
14 likes
1-Star Albums (23)
All Ratings
Elton John
3/5
The last minute of Bennie and The Jets is one of the worst sounds I have ever heard in my life.
Rest of the album was fine
Depeche Mode
1/5
This is one of those albums I think you have to have heard as a teenager to get. I’m in my mid twenties now, and I did not get the hype at all. The ‘good’ songs all sounded very similar to me, and three of the songs: Little 15, I Want You Now, and Pimpf, are amongst the most irritating things I’ve ever heard.
Everything else sounded generic, I could think of a dozen synthpop acts around the same time who were doing better things. I an sorry to say that I just do not get it.
Bob Dylan
4/5
I’m not a Dylan stan, nor a convert after listening to Blonde on Blonde, but I did appreciate this one. Dylan’s take on Rock is strange, it would take Springsteen to truly make the Rock big band work, but what’s important to Dylan’s music are the lyrics and the songwriting, and the guy is on top form here. He writes well and intelligently, with observation and with detail and reference. In fact he really would be the greatest songwriter of all time if he wrote about literally anything else but how much he seems to dislike women. So a star removed for misogyny, but otherwise check this one out.
The Lemonheads
4/5
OK, so this is the first album on this thing that I am immediately replaying. It may just be that I’m a sucker for Indie Rock, but I felt like I had more connection to the songs after one listen than I did to the other albums I’ve listened to so far, there were song where I could pick out a hook, something that engaged me and let me identify the song, which I’ve not felt with the records so far.
Maybe I just like short albums. This is less than half an hour, two of the albums I’ve listened to so far have been double albums and the other was Depeche Mode, which draaaaaaagged
Radiohead
5/5
Stone cold classic 10/10.
It’s more of a vibe than OK Computer, but it’s a perfect listen for an an autumn or winter evening, cold outside, you shut in from the world, ignoring everyone else
Eminem
4/5
Removing it from the social context, this is a good album. Em’s rhymes and flow are fantastic, the storytelling is impressive and it’s funny, like really funny.
It does sag a little in the last quarter, but ends on a high with Bad Meets Evil and Still Don’t Give A Fuck.
There should also probably have been less skits, most of them are pretty unmemorable. But the fact stands that the full songs are for the most part great.
But, and this is quite a big but, this album was suggested a couple of days after the allegations against Russell Brand came out, and as such that context forced me to consider the role that women play in the album. It’s less obvious than in the Marshall Mathers LP, but it cannot be denied that the reality of violence against women is there. It’s uncomfortable. Even if the vast majority of the violence is cartoonish, akin to a horror film, when the darker stuff bubbles up to the surface it does feel like it comes from a place of genuine hatred. And it’s terrifying. And to say that to terrify is the point of the album is kinda missing the point of the criticism. It’s terrifying because of how real it is, and how close to the bone it cuts, rather than how much like fiction it is.
As such, my rating is mixed. It’s a four, ignoring the social context and problematic stuff. Considering that, it has to be a one
Meat Puppets
2/5
Some things you just don’t vibe with. I can see why someone could like this, just like I could see why someone couldn’t like the Lemonheads album I rated highly.
Although, listening to the Lemonheads album as I write this, I think they’ve got a sharper instinct for songwriting, and a better lead singer. Not that I think the Meat Puppets guy’s voice is bad, I’ve willingly listened to worse voices.
I think it may be a thing about album structure. I don’t actively think this is bad music at all. I think that there are too many too similarly structured songs too close together. A lot of the instrumental tracks sound a lot like instrumental versions of the songs that came immediately before them.
Now that I’ve been introduced to it, I’m sure I’ll go back and listen to the album again at some point, but at the moment I’m not impressed.
But as I said at the top, some acts you just don’t vibe with. In terms of early 80’s alt rock, I think Meat Puppets may be the band I just don’t vibe with
Burning Spear
5/5
One of the best Roots Reggae albums: tight, funky, dense, political, dark, brooding, danceable.
There are just too many adjective one can use to describe this album. It’s seminal but also unlike any other album in it’s genre.
Please just listen to it if you haven’t already.
Wild Beasts
2/5
I really enjoyed this album for the first minute and 29 seconds. Then the vocals came in.
I’ve said before that I don’t mind bad vocals, as long as they fit the music. What I dislike are pretentious vocals, and there’s something really pretentious about most of the vocals on this record. I don’t mind the other guy with the lower range, he sounds a bit like Guy Garvey or the Bon Hiver guy. But the main singers inflection just seems so put on. There are points, two that particularly stick out, where he puts a bit more grit in his voice and it sounds fantastic, very early hard rock.
On the other hand, I did find myself kinda getting into it later on. It wasn’t a hard album to listen to. I may come back to it at some point, see if my opinion of the vocals has changed.
Rated two and a half but rounded down to 2
Johnny Cash
5/5
How have I never heard this one before? 10x better than At Folsom Prison, and I love that album.
Johnny Cash must’ve been just the coolest motherfucker ever
My Bloody Valentine
1/5
I listened to the new Parannoul album a couple of weeks ago. I understood as many of the lyrics of After The Magic as I did m b v, and I do not speak a word of Korean.
I at least understood the vibe of After The Magic. I do not understand what m b v was going for. I’ve listened to Loveless, what music nerd hasn’t? Loveless is a good album. m b v isn’t. It’s incoherent, it’s rambling, it’s ambient in a way that shoegaze shouldn’t be. According to bad faith critics, shoegaze is a genre that shouldn’t be interesting, isn’t interesting to anyone other than those paying attention to them themselves, to their own footware.
Good shoegaze is better than all the bad faith critics give it credit for. Good shoegaze is music that is worth paying attention to, because it is subtle, but also active, because it is simple, but contains multitudes. It is important for the same reason as punk, it seems amateur, but is far more complex than anyone could imagine on first listen.
Loveless is good shoegaze. Loveless seems simple, but contains multitudes. After The Magic is good shoegaze. After The Magic seems simple, but contains multitudes.
m b v seems simple.
m b v is simple. It is from one of the sound’s pioneers, but it does not push the sound forward. It is an album that looks backward rather that forward. At times it feels like consolidation rather than progress, which would have worked, had the album been released a decade earlier.
As such, it seems… simple. It seems basic. Halfway through this album I gave up on active listening and went and did housework.
This is background listening. I cannot think of any other way to describe it
Janet Jackson
4/5
I’m not usually a fan of Pop albums. I think it works best as a singles genre, and that albums are too often marred by bad filler tracks and a lack of cohesion.
Rhythm Nation 1814 is an attempt to create a cohesive artistic Pop album with both social and personal lyrical themes. I think as artistic statement it’s noble and for the most part works pretty well.
I think the complaint that the album is overproduced is ridiculous, it sounds pretty similar to other late 80’s early 90’s pop records. The beats are tight, although the occasionally drown out Jackson’s vocals. Otherwise her voice is interesting, sharp and cutting but also sensual.
I have a lot of thoughts about this album, and the way it seems to have been received, but I don’t think this is the right place to share them. Instead I’ll just say that I don’t think a lot of the critiques are justified, and that I would go to bat for Rhythm Nation 1814. It’s a good album.
Deep Purple
3/5
I’ve never liked Deep Purple’s studio work as much as I’ve liked them live. That’s a me problem I guess. This album’s great, and a classic.
But I’d have preferred it if it was live.
Nitin Sawhney
4/5
I’m convinced none of you have listened to anything other than indie rock sometimes. This album’s great
LL Cool J
4/5
The production on most of this album is fantastic, although I could do without that fucking synthesised trumpet on 6 Minutes of Pleasure. Musically, Mama Said Knock You Out is fantastic. I was nodding my head and tapping my feet for the whole hour. If I wasn’t on a cramped train, I might have got up and danced.
LL Cool J as a rapper is an intriguing character. I can see why he was acclaimed and influential. I really like his flow, he’s smooth and graceful in the way Jay-Z perfected half a decade after this album. But, and this is a big ole butt, Cool James is not the most delicate lyricist. While I can sort of appreciate something like Milky Cereal for it’s commitment to the bit, it can’t be denied that it is a monumentally stupid bit.
Which I think neatly sums up the appeal of Mama Said Knock You Out as an album. It’s big dumb fun. It’s the sort of album you could throw on at a party and not skip any of the tracks.
Except for that fucking trumpet though. Fuck that trumpet
4stars
Radiohead
5/5
Aah, I wrote a whole review comparing and contrasting Amnesiac to Kid A but obviously didn’t save it. Bugger
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
I’m definitely biased because this is my favourite Springsteen album, and as such one of my favourite albums of all time.
In many ways, Darkness is a less perfect album than Born to Run. Born to Run is perfectly structured, follows a story in an interesting way, and rises and falls in mood and tempo. It is structured like a great tragic drama.
Darkness on the Edge of Town is Noir through and through. It is darker, it is bleaker, it is more desperate. The instances where light does break through are still tinged with darkness. Because it seems less structured than Born to Run it weirdly seems to tell a more cohesive story. We get more of a view of the characters, more detail regarding their situation and their surrounding. And as such, the stories of these ground down losers are all the more heartbreaking than Born to Run’s hopeful losers.
Anyone who doesn’t like this album has no soul.
Prefab Sprout
4/5
Based on the first song I thought Steve McQueen was going to be more country rock than it ended up being. The fact that it ended up being a collection of really good mid eighties synth was a pleasant surprise. I’ll definitely come back to it.
Best tracks: Bonny, Appetite, When Love Breaks Down, Desire As
Paul Simon
5/5
Paul Simon is a better songwriter than Dylan. Dylan always seems to be attempting to convince the listener of his own cleverness, with the historical and literary references but this so often leads to an emotional immaturity especially when it comes to portrayals of women.
Paul Simon tells the story as is, in a direct but beautiful style, and as such is a songwriter whose work hits emotionally. This is best expressed in Graceland, but Paul Simon, his second solo album, is a close runner-up.
It’s a gorgeous perfect little folk album, full of perfectly observed vignettes about people from all sorts of walks of life, and one Gypsy Folk Jazz duet with Stéphane Grappelli. The album is worth listening for that song only, but in between I’m sure everyone will find something to admire and to fall in love with.
Just a perfect little gem of an album
Red Hot Chili Peppers
3/5
A big problem with albums from the age of CD’s is that they were just too long. When with an LP you had a really limited time to fill, which meant you had to ensure that your 30-50 minutes of music was the best 30-50 minutes of music you could possibly put out. By the time the late 80’s came about, the commercial power of the labels had ensured that most pop albums were taking advantage of the longer runtime allowed by a CD to justify charging more money than for an LP. ‘You’re getting more songs for just a little more money, it’s completely worth it.’ This spilled over from pop and into the world of mainstream rock and even alternative.
As such, in the same year that Nirvana brought the Alternative Nation to the mainstream, alt long-timers the Red Hot Chili Peppers released Blood Sugar Sex Magik, their breakthrough 5th album. It is an hour and 15 minutes long.
The reason I’m harping on about album lengths in the early CD era is that Blood Sugar Sex Magik is a prime example of a good album that would have been even better for if it had been released just a few years earlier. I love a lot of the songs on the album, but it is as often a drag as it is a delight. Did anyone really need to hear Apache Rose Peacock, My Lovely Man, and the full 8 minute inanity of Sir Psycho Sexy? Cut track 12-16 and finish on the one two punch of Under the Bridge and They’re Red Hot and you’ve got an almost perfect album.
Except… would you?
Maybe I’m just a bit biased, cos I’ve been on a Springsteen and Paul Simon kick the past couple of days, but it is really noticeable that although the music is fantastic, Anthony Kiedis is the weak link by a country mile. I actually don’t mind his voice. But his lyrics, oh my god.
‘Sittin on a sack of beans,
Sittin down in New Orleans,
You wouldn’t believe what I’ve seen,
Sitting on that sack of beans.’
‘Oh good brother just when I thought that I had seen it all,
My eyes popped out, my dick got hard’
‘Said the girl who left me silly,
She liked the looks of me and my willy’
‘Chicken strut your butt, let’s rock’
‘Twinkle twinkle little star,
Shining down on my blue car,
Drivin’ down the boulevard,
She was soft and I was hard’
All of these examples are from the same song. My consolation is that Kiedis did get better when he replaced the obsession with his own penis with an obsession with California. Californiacation has a much better set of lyrics.
All in all, Blood Sugar Sex Magik is not a bad album. I loved it when I was a stupid 13 year old. I still love the music as a less stupid 24 year old. But only the music.
Yes
1/5
I have no strong feelings one way or the other. I’ve listened to the album all the way through twice now, and no parts have stuck out to me at all. This music just does not move me. It’s marginally better than listening to nothing at all. It’s background music. If you get something from this then more power to you. But I really cannot different any separate bits of the album, because it all sounds the same to me.
And all the positive reviews seem to say the same. ‘No thoughts, head empty, just vibes’ is a direct quote from a review I just read. That isn’t what I want from my music, I don’t want the audio equivalent of a Fast and Furious film. I want something that engages me. I want more than just, oh this sounds pleasant.
The best song on the album is an instrumental Portuguese folk guitar show piece. And it’s the best song because it actually sounds passionate, it feels like there was an actual idea that the writer wanted to explore. The idea may just have been, ‘I’ve just bought a Portuguese guitar, let’s write a Portuguese folk song’ but at least it’s an idea.
God I hate Prog Rock
The Who
5/5
Obviously this is a classic, but relistening for the first time in a while, I’m intrigued at the amount of songs that are about the craft of songwriting itself. It has an almost Cohenesque sense of the deconstruction of songwriting as an art form.
I like The Who a lot, but I’m not a big enough fan to have looked up Lifehouse to know what the plot would have been. I don’t know how the theme of songwriting would have fit into the story of the concept album, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t now intrigued. Pete Townshend seems to have been having a bit of a mid-fame crisis about his role as lead songwriter, which leads to a really fascinating listen.
Coming off the back of the first great Concept Album with another, more complex Concept Album would have been predictable. Coming off the back of the first great Concept Album with an album of abandoned songs from another concept album that ultimately has no direct theme is, fascinating. It certainly helps that The Who were hot shit. I’d place money on the idea that anything they’d have released following Tommy would have been amazing. That it ended up being Who’s Next, which is just a fantastic set of songs, irregardless of theme or connection is just proof of how good they were.
I’m not gonna go ahead and say it’s their best album yet, I’ve not listened to a lot of their stuff in a while. But to say it’s one of the best collections of music of all time is undeniable
Dexys Midnight Runners
3/5
I’d hesitate to call this a classic. The most recent album I’ve been exposed to that I also wouldn’t call a classic was Beyond Skin by Nintin Sawhney, but I think that I enjoyed that one more. More of the songs stuck out. Another reviewer has said that most of the songs blend into a fairly enjoyable mush, which are my sentiments exactly. The good songs are really good, and the weaker songs aren’t unenjoyable, just forgettable. Or maybe it’s an album that needs more than two listens to fully appreciate. I’ll probably find myself coming back to it.
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
It’s five stars for Little Wing alone.
I’ve always been surprised that this is considered the weakest of the Experience albums. Maybe it’s just that I listened to Are You Experienced as the ungodly mix of the British and American albums that is the CD release before listening to either version as they were originally released.
Are You Experienced probably had the biggest impact of Hendrix’s albums, Electric Ladyland probably has the best songs, and that leaves Axis: Bold as Love by the wayside a bit.
What I do think Axis has going for it though is that it’s probably Jimi Hendrix’s most perfect piece of art. It’s a natural progression from the heavy psychedelia of the first album, features a good mix of heavy rock riffs early funk rock and delicate, lyrical rhythm playing. It’s also probably Hendrix’s best written album, the lyrics are fun and often funny, but also sweet, touching and occasionally heartbreaking (I’m looking at you, Castles Made of Sand)
Bad Company
3/5
Perfectly servicable blues rock. The title track is obviously a classic, but outside of that a lot of the songs blend into each other.
I probably won’t listen again
The Jesus And Mary Chain
2/5
I’ve tried to listen to Psychocandy many times in the past, and I’ve never got past track 4. I love Just Like Honey, but I think that’s probably because it’s the only track that really truly lives up to the name Noise Pop. Taking the iconic opening to Be My Baby, adding heavily feedbacking guitars and a new catchy melody. That’s lightning in a bottle.
And then they do it again on Sowing Seeds. But it’s less good. In fact a lot of the songs on this album feel as if they’re just rehashes of previous songs with more distortion. You Trip Me Up uses the riff to Blitzkrieg Bop, Taste the Floor sounds exactly like the Stooges.
The influences are there, and they’re influences that I really like, but they’ve never been truly reconciled themselves to me. I love a lot of what came before Psychocandy, I love a lot of what it influenced. But as a stepping stone, The Jesus and Mary Chain always just slipped for me
Norah Jones
4/5
This is not a Jazz album in any way shape or form. People seem to be tricked by Jones’ voice and the inclusion of The Nearness of You, but Jones could have released an entire album of standards in this style, and it still wouldn’t be Jazz. Come Away With Me is Country through and through, from the pedal steels to the corny lyrics to the obligatory Hank Williams cover.
All this is to say, if we judge Come Away With Me as Jazz, then it doesn’t work. It ain’t got that swing, and it doesn’t quite have the same emotional range as the great late night heartbreak records that Jazz has. It’s too refined, too respectable. The thing about good Jazz is that even the slow stiff has grit.
If we judge it as Singer-Songwriter Folk-Country album though it is infinitely better. The respectability makes more sense, as does the slide guitar. This is a very good piece of music, well written, well arranged, well played. Norah Jones has one of the great voices of the early 20th century. As a piece of music, this is fantastic. I really am just continually surprised that this seems to be what people regard as Jazz. Dislike it all you want, but dislike it as Country
Terence Trent D'Arby
5/5
I don’t like Prince’s production.
I think that his production of instruments falls flat, it all sounds a bit hollow, a bit too muddy, a bit too artificial. I love everything else about Prince’s music, the instrumentation, the songwriting, the voice. Prince is one of the great artists of the late 20th century, of all time. It’s just a shame that his production sounds so relatively weak.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world.
We have an R&B singer and songwriter, with a divine voice and just a classic sense of cool, regarding everything from his look to his songwriting. No, it isn’t Prince.
It is Terence Trent D’Arby.
This album is a masterpiece. It has everything, great music, great songwriting, great vocals. There is hardly anything on this album that could not be described as great.
I came up with the Prince introduction because I thought it would be a fun way of mocking the album for it’s similarity to Prince, if it turned out to be bad. But it didn’t. Which is probably a massive dunk on me as a music critic. But I don’t see this as a negative. This is inspired by Prince, no doubt, but because of that it is still really, really good music. Possibly even better than Prince, because the production is better.
It’s really a shame that the guy seems to have fallen off. Based on the music on his Debit it feels as if Trent D’Arby really should have taken off more. Bit at least we have Introducing The Hardline, which really is perfect
Kanye West
4/5
It’s been hammered to death at this point, and I really don’t think I have anything new to add to the conversation so.
I did listen to it, Kanye’s already rich, I don’t see how the fraction of a dollar I’m gonna give him is gonna make much of a difference.
Judging by the quality of his character, I’d have told Kanye to go and shove his head up his arse, if he hadn’t already done that years ago.
Judging by the quality of the music; this shit slaps. Apart from Last Call, fuck that noise
Joy Division
5/5
This is Gothic in the truest, most original sense of the word; it sounds like the musical equivalent of Notre-Dame, a huge gaping Gothic soundscape that drags you into its world of paranoia and isolation and doesn’t let you go until the full 44 heartbreaking minutes are over.
I am conflicted with this album. Not because I don’t love it. This is arguably one of my favourite pieces of music ever written. It’s ability to move, considering it was recorded by only four people and mixed by another with a wildly different view of how it should sound, is unprecedented. I am instead unsure whether I should insist on it being listened to as a full album, or whether it can be listened to piecemeal. All of the songs are fantastic on their own. I’m an especially big fan of the second side, and Isolation is a weird but still inspired choice for a single.
But there is something about experiencing Closer as a complete, artistic statement. The terror grips you. The hands of Ian Curtis rise to suffocate you in an embrace of desperation and depression that envelops you until the organ of Decades finally fades away, but which doesn’t leave you, not really, not ever.
I haven’t listened to this album in years. I came to the realisation on my second listen through of the day, that I am older than Ian Curtis. As a precocious teenage consumer of Punk and Post-Punk, he always seemed this great elder statesman of the genre. And yet, now I am not just his contemporary. I am older than he ever was, than he ever will be. Curtis is said to have worried that Joy Division had reached an artistic peak with Closer. And while New Order never reached the heights they did with Curtis in the band, it’s hard to judge how much that is to do with his influence over the group’s music. How could the artists behind two of the most perfect albums ever recorded not record a third, or a fourth? I’m not naive enough to think they could have gone on forever. But surely there must have been more than just the two in them?
Willie Nelson
3/5
An awful lot Red Headed Stranger sounds like Bender’s attempts at writing Folk songs in that episode of Futurama.
I don’t think this is actually bad music at all. I just find the story a little hard to follow. Wikipedia tells me that the second and third songs are about the Stranger killing his wife and her lover, which I didn’t get at all, but should I have? They’re both less than two minutes long! And then the narrator spends four minutes detailing the killing of a random woman who touches the Strangers horse, and five minutes talking about how much he’d like to fuck a random bartender.
Maybe it’s just a problem with incorporating cover songs on a concept album? The only other rock opera I can think of that has a cover on it is Ziggy Stardust, and to be honest It Ain’t Easy also always felt out of place to me.
I’d like to come back to this, because I’m sure it has a lot more to offer than I’m getting from the limited listening I can do in one day.
Laura Nyro
3/5
I feel like I should enjoy this more than I do. It’s unique, and I like it a lot as music. The fact that it’s a female musician leading a band is remarkable for the late 60’s. The fact that she wrote all of the material is equally remarkable. In a way I have a real respect for this album, despite only having heard of it this morning. That respect is essentially doubled based on the sheer amount of artists I love and respect who list Nyro as an influence.
But, based on an initial listen, Nyro feels like an artist whose art I admire more than I actively enjoy. I’m a writer by trade, and the best example of a writer I think of in this way is Henry James or, to take a less pretentious reference, Isaac Asimov.
I can recognise, and admit that both of these writers created works that were artistically perfect. The Portrait Of A Lady is a perfect fin-de-siècle society novel. Foundation And Empire is a perfect Golden Age of American Science Fiction novel.
But… But… despite their artistic perfection, despite the fact that I can understand people’s devotion to them as works of art, I admire them from an arms length. There is something about their approach to art that doesn’t grab me.
When I finished Eli And The Thirteenth Confession, I put on my liked songs on Spotify, and what came up was Little Wing by Jimi Hendrix and Painter Song by Norah Jones. Little Wing was a perfect palette cleanser, because Hendrix is an artist I know is divisive but whose appeal I understand. The Norah Jones song is one I was only introduced to recently via this project, but it’s an example of a female led band project which I also vibed with. I don’t think that Come Away With Me is a more mainstream release than The Thirteenth Confession has coloured my impression. Despite my current top rating including two Radiohead albums, I’d like to think my taste was more eclectic than a lot of the music nerds around at the moment who seem to listen to Indie Rock exclusively.
My favourite album that was influenced by Eli And The Thirteenth Confession was Pirates by Rickie Lee Jones. It is one of my favourite albums of all time. I’m not adverse to this weird shit, I swear.
I use this line a lot, but I probably need to listen to this more than once in order to get it. But unlike other albums on this list where I didn’t hate it, I just feel like I didn’t get it, I’m not sure I will revisit this. I might eat these words. This has all the makings of being a special favourite of mine. But at the moment I’m not feeling it.
It’s two stars, bumped to three because I admire it.
God I hope I don’t fall in love with this album on potential future listening, because this rating has the potential to be a real embarrassment
5/5
The first song of this album that I heard was You Said Something. I was a teenager, making a playlist of songs that could be played while sat on a rooftop. And it was perfect for the playlist.
But for some reason, I never found myself checking out PJ Harvey more.
Boy did I fuck up. This is fantastic. Sparse and simple yet strangely elegant Grunge sung by that voice, expressive and piercing, sultry and shrieking.
I will be absolutely checking out more of PJ Harvey’s work now
Prince
5/5
I have mentioned my problems with Prince’s production problems before, so here’s a lost of the most egregious ones on 1999:
-The Kid talking about bombs at the end of 1999
-That fucking baby at the end of Delirious
-The very dated keyboard sound doing tbe fills in Let’s Pretend We’re Married
-The other very dated keyboard sound in D.M.S.R.
-‘Somebody call the Police Help me, somebody please help me, somebody help me’ ???
Adele
3/5
It’s fine. It’s a fine Pop album. None of the songs resonated with me particularly. Obviously I know the singles the best, and they’re all good pop songs. The album cuts are mostly not as good. I mean, they’re fine. I liked He Won’t Go and the Bossa Nova cover of The Cure the best.
Like with a lot of the albums I’ve had trouble with, I can see how this could resonate with someone, but it doesn’t with me. I mostly ended up concerned about the relationship. Adele’s ex is clearly a douchebag, and yet come the end of the album, she’s looking for ‘someone like [him].’ She hasn’t learnt a thing! Which is possibly the point? It’s a portrait of when she was 21, everyone’s an idiot when they’re 21. But based on Adele’s later albums, it doesn’t seem like she did learn anything after all. Which is a shame
Al Green
4/5
Al Green can basically do no wrong with his music, but I’ve always thought you could do better with a greatest hits sampler as an intro to his work. If you can’t find one, this one’s great as well
Radiohead
5/5
This album is just beautiful from start to finish. I still probably prefer OK Computer, but In Rainbows is a close second, and All I Need is my favourite of their songs.
Neil Young
5/5
It’s in the title of one of his later albums; Neil Young’s music is Ragged Glory, and Tonight’s The Night is an epitome of sorts. Harder and more ragged than any of his other 70’s output, this is an album full of moments of sheer beauty interwoven within it’s bleakness.
And it’s not even his best album, that’s how fucking good Neil Young is!
Van Halen
2/5
I listened to Eruption for the first time all the way just now. Was that really it? Was that really what all the hype was about?
And adding random needly needly guitar bits to You Really Got Me, really does not, it just ruins a perfectly good song
Otherwise, I think I’d like this album a lot more if it embraced some of the weirdness that is clearly lurking just behind it’s surface, and comes out in instances like David Lee Roth suddenly scatting for no reason, midway through I’m The One, or the proto-cyberpunk dork that are the lyrics to Atomic Punk.
Doves
3/5
I definitely listened to this at the wrong time of day. This is an album that’s supposed to be listened to at 3am on a Saturday morning when walking through the streets of a wet Northern city in a post-party haze. I listened to it over my lunch break on a Monday afternoon, and I liked it just fine, but I do think it’d be enhanced by listening in the correct setting
The Verve
4/5
It seems to me that non-Brits always have an odd concept of what Britpop sounded like. American’s especially seem to associate it almost exclusively with acoustic ballads a la Wonderwall.
And while I do get how that image has come about, it’s pretty far from the truth of what was happening with Britpop. It was a diverse genre, stretching through the early 70’s-ish hard rock of Oasis, the late 60’s-ish power pop of Blur, the spiky glam of Suede, the class politics fuelled New Wave of Pulp, and numerous others. Any sound you liked from the previous three decades of pop music, you could find a good Britpop approximation.
Where the Verve come in is providing the Psychedelic part of the Britpop movement. Coming from a shoegaze background and eventually adding more keyboards, strings and acoustic elements as their sound evolved, by 97, when Urban Hymns was released they had already broken up and reformed a couple of times. I’ve always thought this tension really came through in the music. It’s big and orchestral, and more than often light and airy, but there’s always a brooding melodrama just behind the surface.
It’s one of my favourite Britpop albums, and a lot of the songs are a close contender for some of my favourite songs of all time, but I do bow to some of the more critical voices this time. It is 75 minutes, no album needs to be that long. But, for a lot of those 75 minutes, Urban Hymns is perfection
KISS
1/5
Well, at least it isn’t too long…
God, Paul Stanley is pathetic. Middway through the album his whole deal is how a girl has to have great expectations to want to sleep with him, by the end of the album he’s worried that the sort of woman he’s attracting with his rock n roll life style doesn’t really love him for who he is deep down. What deep down, Paul? You’ve spent all of your songs talking about how well you fuck and do rock n roll. There is no deep down, she’s as attracted to your personality as you are to hers.
Is how my joke was going to go, until I found out that Great Expectations was written and sung by Gene Simmons. Motherfuckers can’t even set up jokes for reviews properly. I was gonna give this two stars to be charitable to Detroit Rock City and Beth. But fuck ‘em
Outside of those two songs, everything else on this album is really bad and boring slabs of artless party rock that was no doubt very influential to the bad and boring slabs of party rock that made up the majority of mainstream rock in the decade that followed Destroyer’s release. I honestly don’t know why anyone would want to make music like this. I went and listened to Black Rose by Thin Lizzy immediately after this, and the difference is night and day. Phil Lynott actually had topics he wrote about, and they’re interesting and varied, he can go from a character piece about a down on his luck gambler, to a song about his daughter, to a song about addiction, to a song about Celtic mythology, all on one album.
Kiss sing about sex, partying and rock, exclusively.
The two highlights are, as mentioned above, Detroit Rock City and Beth. DRC is interesting mostly because of the instrumental sections. There’s some good harmonies there, and I can’t work out the time signature, so it always keeps me on my toes. It could have done without the minute and a half long build up of someone driving a car, but whatever. I enjoy the song at least.
Beth is a nice ballad, Peter Criss has a good, throaty voice, and the lyrics make it seem as if he’s as pissed off at having to hang around with the rest of the band as I was at having to listen to them. It’s a great portrait of someone in a relationship being forced out by his asshole friends, and just counting the minutes until he can go home and stop pretending to be an asshole himself.
Kiss do not work without the makeup and pyro. When you’re forced to listen to them just as music, the flaws in their songwriting and personalities become blindingly obvious.
Gene Simmons can go and fuck himself for making this awful, awful band a thing with his marketing tactics
Hookworms
3/5
It’s fine. It’s blessing is that it’s very similar to LCD Soundsystem, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like LCD Soundystem. But that’s also it’s curse. It doesn’t have any of James Murphy & co’s heart.
Also, apparently the lead singer is a piece of shit
The Temptations
4/5
Yeah, I enjoyed this one. My image of The Temptations is similar to my image of a lot of other Soul & R&B acts of the time, singles acts rather than album ones. This may have changed my perspective a bit. The songs are still totally crafted around the sound of a single, but the album is so packed with singles ready songs that I couldn’t pick which ones were designed to be the singles. I had to look it up. And that’s the way I think pop albums should be crafted. It’s one of the reasons Rumours is so fucking good. All of the songs could have been singles, to the extent that most of the deep cuts have become classics in their own right.
That’s not quite the case with Cloud 9, but I still thoroughly enjoyed all the songs on the album
Linkin Park
2/5
One thing that struck me as I was listening to this for the second time is that it’s metal that’s not based on the riff. Instead, it’s hook based, like a pop album.
I’ve not listened to enough Nu-Metal to know if that’s a trademark of the genre, but I could pick out riffs from the limited Korn or Limp Bitzkit songs I have listened to to suggest that it’s relatively unique to Linkin Park.
I’m torn on this, because I don’t hate it as music. The two songs after In The End are pretty bad an overall it’s pretty entry level industrial lite. It’d be a good warm up if someone wanted to get into, like, Nine Inch Nails, or something. I’d have taken out the record scratches but hindsight is 20/20.
On the other hand, the cringe. Oh. My. God. The cringe.
I listened to my fair share of angsty music as a teenager, but nothing this blatant. And now that I’m in my mid 20’s, my sad boi music is more heartbreaking gentle stuff, and my angry white boy music is… political, it’s all political.
So I don’t have any fond memories of listening to this as a teenager, it’s not the sort of thing I can have a sad drink over, and the lyrics aren’t something I can get angry over. I get that they come from a place of personal pain, but that’s what I have my sad music for. I’m not angry about my personal life. I’m angry about the lives that are being lived by people around me that they have no escape from.
But I can still appreciate this. It’s music for angry teenagers, as I’ve said multiple times across this review. And while my angry teenager music was, dare I say, more cerebral, there is a place for this sort of music.
Does everyone need to hear this? Probably not. But despite everything, I’m glad I took the time to find out for myself.
Also, I really like Chester Bennington’s voice. R.I.P.
4/5
So, finally got round to it. This is fun, it seems more structured than the other John Zorn album I’ve ever heard, Naked City. It’s a shame the only way I can listen to it is on YouTube, cos I’d like to revisit it more often. C’est la vie
The Bees
2/5
I’d have probably enjoyed this better if I’d heard it in summer, but it was two days off Halloween. Also, I’m not a huge fan of just vibes, which is what this album seems to be going for. It’s all very, turn off your brain and just chill, which again is great for a stoned summer, but not so much in the middle of autumn
5/5
The Joshua Tree has a sense of both the Sublime and the Beautiful that few other albums manage to achieve. It’s vast and expansive like the Romantic landscapes that fuelled the philosophical musings of Burke and Schopenhauer, but sparse in a way that is uniquely American.
I’ve always read this album as a loose concept documenting the migrant experience, which is not in anyway how it is intended to be read, but hey if it works. It’s got everything, the initial rush of freedom, the comedown of worry, a love/hate relationship (With your partner? With your new home country? With your adopted country? Who knows!’) explanations as to why you left, following the news in and around your home country, following the news in your adopted country. I’m rambling a bit, and I wanted this review to be good. I just love it so much. There, that’s the review
Marianne Faithfull
3/5
There’s a quote that I think about a lot about music criticism; One good song can make an album but one great song can break it.
It’s the way I felt about Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together. No matter how good the rest of the songs were, the title track is always gonna overshadow them.
Broken English has two great songs, and they bookmark the album. I think that the reason these two stick out to me is that they’re the best musically. The title track has this great slow burn, late night cold new wave sound, and Why’d Ya Do It starts off like a Berlin era Iggy song and becomes this great Clash like white reggae jam. They’re both great.
And as such, the rest of the album seems to fall a little flat. Lyrically, they’re all quite good, The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan being a particular standout. Unfortunately, I think it’s also the worst track musically. The vocal melody has this classic English Folk song lilt to it, which really does not fit with the warbling electronic keyboard that provides the background. Nobody but Dexys Midnight Runners tried doing New Wave Folk, and they did it mostly acoustically.
I dunno, based on the two songs I really liked, I want to really like the rest of the album, but it just doesn’t do much for me
Jorge Ben Jor
4/5
It’s a shame that Rod Stewart didn’t rip off any more of this album, otherwise his late career might actually have been good
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
4/5
OK, I’ll admit it. In groaned when I found out this was my album. I knew it by reputation, the singles are all still huge in the UK, and it’s filled with a load of covers and mediocre album tracks, and when the first song came on it just confirmed my fears that the album was gonna be an overblown, badly produced, slab of overwrought 80’s synth.
But then the title track came on. And I found myself engrossed. And I stayed that way for the rest of the album. The production problems really only exist in the intro, and yes It’s overwrought and overblown, but in a way that really works. There are less covers than I realised, and they’re all quite good, with Born To Run being a standout for the album as a whole.
So yeah, I’m pleasantly surprised
The Who
4/5
I’m fascinated that this is characterised as Psychedelic Rock on here. I guess the plot is pretty psychedelic, but musically it doesn’t really fit with the rest of the psych scene from the late 60’s.
This isn’t my favourite Who album. Not by a long shot. If you think about it as an actual opera, where the music is the most important part, and the libretto is secondary, then this album is a masterpiece. The combination of Townsend, Entwhistle and Moon plus orchestra is a winning one. And I love Daltrey’s voice.
But, although Pete Townsend is a brilliant composer, and often a good lyricist, the lyrics when it comes to Tommy are often too weird for their own good. It may just be that it’s the entirely opposite sort of story to the one that I as a writer would write. I’m a realist, I try to deal with ordinary people in ordinary situations. The idea of a damaged, but brilliant man becoming a messiah and then losing his religious following is interesting. But, it’s not anything I’d want to write.
Quadrophenia is a better album, both musically and storywise. But, Quadrophenia is pretty much perfect and as great as Tommy is, the nonsensical plot really does let it down. From what I’ve read, the plot to Lifehouse was even more nonsensical, and that completely fell through, which lead to Who’s Next, which IS a perfect album. Maybe, The Who just needed a few missteps to produce their masterpiece Rock Opera.
But, as it is, Tommy is still a great album. Most authors first novel’s are worse than this, and they weren’t pioneering a new art form. All in all, it could have been worse. Which really is underselling it, because this is a really really good album
Brian Eno
4/5
The first song started off good, but by the third I was kinda losing interest. Too much noodly guitar wanking.
But I kept at it and On Some Faraway Beach, something clicked. The second half of HCTWJ is brilliant. So I went back and relistened to the tirst half, and that had clicked for me as well. I’ll be coming back to this one
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
5/5
I’m biased, 100%. I grew up with Elvis Costello, and this album was always a particular favourite of mine. But I really do think it’s pretty much perfect.
One of the talking points about Costello is his often blatant stalker-ish qualities and anger towards women, and while that’s certainly a feature of his writing, it’s interesting to note that people forget to mention how great his straight love songs are. Little Triggers is a particular highlight
Green Day
5/5
Oh man, this album was my life as a teenager. I’m sure if I’d gone the Nu Metal route instead, then this review would have been similar to the Linkin Park one. But I was a punk, so here we go.
Todd In The Shadows is on record saying that he thinks the political stuff is the weakest part of the album (which I know other reviews have pointed out, but I quote professional sources dammit 😂) but it’s only really the title track and Holiday that have anything explicitly political to say, and I personally think Holiday is really quite a good political statement.
But if we ignore the political stuff, we’re still left with a lot of pretty solid character pieces and representations of disaffected and alienated youth, who in the story are left behind by the Bush presidency and the aftermath of the war or terror, but are actually representative of people from Billie Joe Armstrongs own youth left behind by the Reagan presidency and the aftermath of Reaganomics, but could equally be applied to youth left behind by the Obama presidency, and the aftermath of the 2008 recession, the Trump presidency and the aftermath of *gestures vaguely* or, in my own case various increasingly conservative Tory governments and the aftermaths of austerity and Brexit.
The theme of disaffection is universal, and obviously resonates with the young people that the album is marketed towards. But I do think that there’s a lot here that can be enjoyed by everyone. Billie Joe is great at hooks, and a sharp smart lyricist. There’s a really strong showcasing of classic pop sensibility presented within a rock context. It makes a lot of sense that this reminds me more than a bit of The Who.
American Idiot is a fantastic album. There is a reason why it continues to be listened to and loved by subsequent generations of young people left behind by an uncaring callous and cruel political system. When you hear it at the right age, it just changes your life
James Brown
5/5
It’s just a masterclass in how to play to an audience. James Brown was the master of showmanship. He wouldn’t have been as good as he was without having such a great backing band, but the band wouldn’t have been as good without James Brown at the helm.
A lot of people are decrying the quality of the recording and the fact you can hear the audience over the performers.
But… that’s the point… it’s a live album, and it’s a live album from a performer who’s biggest draw was the fact that he was the best! fucking! showman! in! existence!
And that comes across in the performance even through a recording made 60 years post the fact. The fact that the audience are responding in such a raucous way is testament to the greatness of the performance.
Maybe it’s a due to a difference between performance values in the early 60’s compared to now, I’m listening to Sam Cooke at the Harlem Square club writing this, and there’s a similar vibe, little to no patter between songs, little between songs at all really. But too quality bands backing a performer who just knows how to play to a crowd, how to keep them engaged, how to keep them in the palm of their hands
Little Richard
5/5
I’ve got a real soft spot for early Rock n Roll, and Little Richard is pretty much the best of the bunch. This is undeniable
Fatboy Slim
4/5
I’ve never been much of an uppers guy, so this isn’t exactly the kind of music that I’d choose to dance to regularly. Still, it’s fun for a change occasionally.
None of the songs have the same kind of impact as Fatboy Slim’s big hits, but they’re all still pleasant, well produced, and danceable, which is really what it’s all about
The Velvet Underground
5/5
Every time I listen to any Velvet Underground record, I fall back in love with them the exact same way I fell in love when I first listened to them at 13. I go right back to the first leather jacket I bought, the first time I learnt to play these songs on guitar.
The Velvet Underground is my personal favourite of their albums, and I really don’t listen to it enough. If & Nico is the origin of Alternative, and White Light/White Heat and Loaded are the origins of Punk, then this is Indie, Alt Country/Folk, Cowpunk and even Post-Hardcore? The Murder Mystery is totally a proto-post-hardcore song.
Words cannot describe how much I love this album
Beck
2/5
It’s fine, I guess. My exposure to Beck is minimal. I know Loser, I listened to Debra a couple of times after Baby Driver came out. The biggest thing I know him from is the episode of Futurama he appeared in, which brings the number of Futurama references I’ve made in these reviews up to two.
Much like the Dexy’s Midnight Runners album, a lot of the songs blend together to a worrying degree. It’s not an unpleasant blend, I really enjoyed Girl and Broken Drum, but a few times I was listening, zoned out for a second and came back to a something that I thought was just a different movement of one song, only to find it was a completely separate one when I looked up the track listing.
I really dunno, I’m really not feeling this, as evidenced by the fact that I’m reviewing this two days late. I suspect Beck is the US equivalent of all of those middling UK Indie albums that keep popping up on this list. He was part of a movement that made sense in it’s time, but ended up not being the predominant trend in it’s genre and so leaves modern listeners a little confused as to the level of critical acclaim that it received.
I want to like it more than I do, but I just can’t bring myself to care too much about this collection of mostly middling summery Beach Pop.
4/5
I don’t love it quite as much as later Blur albums, but everything that initially made them great is there
Rage Against The Machine
5/5
AgitProp never sounded this funky. There’s a lot to be said about this from a political point of view, but it’s too early in the morning rn, so I’m gonna go all lib on this and just say the music slaps and that’s enough
Barry Adamson
3/5
Like a lot of others, I’m intrigued at this albums inclusion on the list. Another reviewer made the point that most of these odd picks are late 90’s, early naughties, usually British albums that have not been vindicated by history. I am left wondering whether or not this was nixed from later editions.
As music, this is mostly enjoyable. The weirder tracks worked well at telling what little story is discernible and the more regular tracks were mostly fun little cod-Jazz, although I could have done without the version of Miles, the only actual Jazz standard on here, which Adamson has misnamed, intentionally or not, I can’t tell.
My biggest problem is with the concept rather than the music. Making a soundtrack to a fake movie is unique, or would be if Adamson hadn’t done it four or five times by this point. But it doesn’t actually sound like any film scores I’ve ever sat down to. It’s supposed to be a Noir I guess, but so much of the songs sound so un-Noir-ish that it took me a couple of tracks to get that concept. Although, I praised the use of weirder tracks to tell the story, thinking specifically about the tracks with narration, I’m not sure they actually work as either music to be listened to independently of the album’s context, or as incidental music for a film. It’d be a little weird to have scenes from a film just pasted over the soundtrack with little rhyme or reason.
The only album I can think to compare Oedipus Schmoedipus to is the other late 90’s British mostly instrumental music I’ve had the chance to listen to recently, Fatboy Slim’s Better Living Through Chemistry. And I think the difference is ultimately down to personality. I get more of Norman Cook in his music than I do Barry Adamson. The only thing that we have to base Adamson’s personality on is the concept, which is just a bit weird, and the titles, which are just a bit weird. And I’m not even sure he wrote all of the titles himself, because Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Pelvis is 100% a Jarvis Cocker line. It just doesn’t feel as if Barry Adamson puts much of himself into his music, and for that I’m not sure how I feel about the album as a whole. I’m gonna go 3 stars out of five, because I enjoyed it more than I didn’t, but this is the instance so far that I most wish we could give half rankings, cos this is definitely a 2.5 if ever there was one
A Tribe Called Quest
4/5
The beat work is 100% the best part of this album, but come the second listen I found myself really enjoying the lyrics as well. Q Tip’s flow is fantastic, and the other guys aren’t half bad either. I’ll need to listen again to really get it but for now
Girls Against Boys
2/5
I tried to get through this album twice yesterday, and I didn’t get more than halfway though. I also willingly listened to a whole Nickelback album yesterday
Queens of the Stone Age
4/5
I got into QOTSA through Lullabies to Paralyse, and have checked out basically everything they’ve done since but their debut, so this was an interesting experience. It’s a clear blueprint, everything that Josh Homme & Co. would go onto record is hinted at here, and so if you’re a fan then it’s well worth checking out.
It’s interesting to see how well they had achieved their signature sound even by the first album, but also how they’ve allowed themselves to evolve it.
And while I’m glad for the excuse to have finally get round to listening to it, the self titled isn’t the album I’d have picked to represent QOTSA on the list. Songs For The Deaf or Like Clockwork… would have been better choices
Rahul Dev Burman
3/5
So this was an interesting listen. Is this the only Indian album on the list? Because if so I’d be kinda miffed that a whole country’s tradition of fantastic Folk and Classical music was distilled into one very 70’s Bollywood soundtrack
I spent a very enjoyable hour cooking with a nice bottle of wine and this album for company last night. It may just be that I’m in a fairly difficult place in my life currently, but the uplifting songs did make me feel a bit better about life. Musically this is all very similar to the second half of The Judas Tree, which isn’t a bad thing. It doesn’t soar as high as the opening three tracks of that album, but then again what does?
The only dud was Peace on Earth, and that isn’t really the album’s fault. Bono has managed to keep his faith throughout his life, which is admirable. I haven’t, so there’s a clear conflict of thought there. But, I’ve never minded U2’s other religious songs throughout their career. I liked Grace on this album. Peace on Earth is the song that comes closest to sounding like full blown Christian Rock though, which is why I think I had a problem with it, even if the lyrics are actually quite depressing.
What can I say? I enjoyed it
Ramones
5/5
One of the things that I think is really underrated with the Ramones is their songwriting and how conversational they are. The songs are written how people talk, and with the same topics. The repetition, the banality, the simple joys of complaining about love, being bored, sharing inside jokes, talking about terrible movies you’ve watched recently. There are less than 1000 unique words across the whole album, I know I looked it up, but I do think in their brevity, The Ramones managed to capture something of the vastness of the human condition.
The music fuckin rips too
The Byrds
2/5
If I may complain about Spotify for a little bit, why oh why do they not have regular editions of albums? I don’t want to listen to half an hours worth of song that weren’t good enough for the original release and demos or rehearsal tapes unless it’s an album that I already know and like. I own a super deluxe version of Rumours because it’s one of my favourite albums, and it’s fascinating to see how these iconic songs came together. But it’s the actual album that I listen to most, not the demos.
Anyway… The Byrds.
I’m not even sure this is Country Rock. This is just straight up Country. What’s the distinction? Do you have to have lived in Tennessee at some point?
On top of it being Country, it’s country of a very jerky, oompah variety that I’ve never enjoyed. The Country Rock label is starting to make more sense to me. It’s a Rock guy’s interpretation of Country, without the understanding of why it doesn’t necessarily work.
I just prefer my Country with a bit more grit. This is amateur shit.
Also, I cannot work out for the life of me if The Christian Life is supposed to be satire or not. It’s presented as if it should be, but it’s played so straight that it reminds me of every fucking sanctimonious evangelical motherfucker I’ve ever come across in my life. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!
Guns N' Roses
4/5
One of my favourite parts of recorded music in general comes at about 1:53 into Nightrain, when Rhythm Guitarist Izzy Stradlin gets to play his only solo of the album, delivers 8 bars of the most underwhelming pentatonic nonsense ever recorded, panned to the left side of the mix as if they engineer was saying ‘It’s alright, this is just the Rhythm Guitarist’ before Slash comes in, blows Stradlin away with like two bends, and basically doesn’t stop shredding for the rest of the fucking song
Beach House
2/5
Listening for the second time, the twee bullshit of the lyrics to Zebra kinda pissed me off. It’s not a ‘black and white horse’ it’s an entirely separate species. And why the fuck is this what you’re writing songs about?
And then the rest of the album just sort of faded into the background. I guess it’d be good for studying, but I always found Lo-Fi Hip-Hop Beats To Relax/Study To always fit the bill just fine
Fats Domino
5/5
Five Stars. What more can be said about Fats Domino?
Well, actually… I think a lot can be said about him, and about the selection of pre-60’s music for the list. The compiler doesn’t seem to know what to do with music pre-Beatles. In fact it feels like he regards it as a chore. Fats was one of the original Rock n Rollers, but like most early pop music his stuff wasn’t intended to be sat down and listened to as an album in the way we think of today. The fact that we got a lot of good albums out of the weird mixed system that was around is a miracle akin to the amount of Euripedes we still have; you keep around/keep putting out enough and some of them are gonna stick.
But this means that the representation of the pre-album era is kinda spotty. We do get a lot of the greats: Fats, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, but miss out on Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, because they didn’t put out those miraculous good albums. Surely Bo Diddley deserves more of a spot on the list than Louis Prima or the Louvin Brothers?
So what does this have to do with Fats Domino specifically? This is Fats Domino is not his best album, it’s probably only put on the list because it’s the one with Blueberry Hill on. I think it’d have been better to include compilations on the list, like Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest albums did. It would allow for a better representation of important artists who aren’t on this list, Hank Williams being a prime example, and would potentially reduce the glut of late 60’s, late 90’s and early 00’s albums that seem to have only been put on to make up space.
Fats Domino by all means deserves a spot on this list. But he deserves better representation than one random album just to save face
Led Zeppelin
5/5
It took me longer to get into Led Zep 2 than any of their other albums, and I’ve never been entirely sure why. I love Led Zeppelin, I mean everyone does, but when I was growing up, my family had albums like Presence playing in the background all the time. That was the soundtrack to my childhood. But I never remember having listened to Led Zeppelin II before a few years ago when I first started getting into music actively. And as I said, it took me a while for it to click.
But when it did… My god, this album is good. It is amazing how solid the band sounds, how foundational. It is an interpretation of the blues that is very rooted in Britain in the late 60’s, but it sounds as if it’s been around forever. Fuck Smoke on the Water, Whole Lotta Love is the first riff everyone should learn. There was a world without Whole Lotta Love at some point, I almost can’t believe it.
I’m gushing, I’m sorry. And it’s only gonna get worse when I come to Zeppelin’s other albums, because I love those even more!
James Taylor
2/5
Taylor looks about as pissed off at having to sing this saccharine bullshit as I am listening to it.
Steamroller Blues is apparently parody, which I guess does come across but it comes immediately after a song where Taylor seems to sing about a personification of the fucking sky completely unironically.
Or perhaps it’s all irony. Oops! All Irony!
I don’t vibe with this at all. It’s very whitebread, very clean cut American Boomer music. Most people who are giving this positive reviews seem to refer to it as the musical equivalent to comfort food. If this is comfort food, it’s processed American instant Mac n Cheese, an approximation of good home-cooked food that takes up less of the time, but provides a lesser experience. Give me the quiet melancholy of Jackson Browne or the tortured spiritualism of Leonard Cohen over this any day. With them you know where you stand, you know when things are ironic, you know when they’re sincere, and none of it is twee, like Taylor is.
The only high spot is Fire and Rain, where the emotions don’t get muddled, it’s straightforward and not sickly sweet. But Jackson Browne would have done a much better version of it, both performance-wise and lyrically. I think Taylor includes too much simplicity, and in this genre, there needs to be a balance.
Arctic Monkeys
5/5
The mid 2000’s in Britain saw the height of what was known as Lad Culture. Young, usually middle class men slumming it and being as obnoxious, drunk and misogynistic as possible.
During the same time, Britain was going through a bit of a cultural renaissance. Nowadays it seems as if the music is what’s best remembered, but it also coincided with a lot of good films, fine art, literature and television. I bring up television because I want to talk about The Inbetweeners and Gavin & Stacey. These were two incredibly popular and influential sitcoms that both dealt with Lad Culture in interesting ways. The Inbetweeners showed the influence the culture had on young people, portraying the often boorish behaviour that a group of four teenage suburban misfits engaged in while trying to be cool. It is heartbreakingly relatable even to someone whose teenage years came a half decade after the lad’s. It also allows the characters to be flawed but to be surprisingly sweet in their own ways, showing the humanity behind the stereotypes.
Gavin & Stacey takes place a few years down the line for these sorts of characters, and deals with the whirlwind romance of a handsome young man from Essex, England and a pretty young woman from Barry, South Wales, Smithy and Nessa, the title characters respective best friends. Through their interactions, Nessa gets pregnant and Smithy has to grow up in order to take responsibility as a father. He goes from a typical lad, to a half decent dad. Lad culture had grown up. The humanity shines through.
At the same time as all this was happening on your telly screens, there was a music scene going on. Spearheaded by The Libertines, eho I think we get to later, and eventually fizzing out by about 2013, the British Indie Boom. Inspired by the Post-Punk Revival in the US, the British scene took the music in it’s own direction, and produced some fantastic music. Arctic Monkeys came a bit late to the party, but quickly established themselves as scene leaders. The Libertines had imploded in a catastrophe of celebrity relationships, heroin addiction and prison time. The Monkeys had been making waves underground since about 2004 with the release online of a demo that spread across the country, so by the time it came to release their major label single, the band were warning people to ‘[not] believe the hype.’
But we did. Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not is still the best selling Debut Album of all time over here. Both AM and Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino have gone on to become the best selling albums on Vinyl in the years they were released. Arctic Monkeys are a huge deal.
Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not is pretty representative of Naughties Lad Culture. It’s a loose concept album about nights out. There are songs about drinking, about girls, about dancing. The cover was condemned by the press because the smoking ban had recently come into affect. It all seems like it smacks of the same blend of sexism, laddishness and bad decisions that plagued real club culture at the time.
Except it doesn’t. The only really dodgy bit is Still Take You Home, but that song slaps and it does seem as if the narrator is actually in awe of the girl in question and so putting on some bravado to save face. Instead, much like The Inbtweeners and Gavin & Stacey, we get a sharply observed, well written, smart and funny dissection of Lad and Club Culture. The protagonists don’t get into the clubs, are intimidated by bouncers, complain about the bands, fail at skipping out on a taxi fare. And interspersed between these vignettes are songs like Mardy Bum, Riot Van, When The Sun Goes Down, which showed that the band could slow it down and write about women and cultural issues in a much more nuanced, reflective, sensitive, and in the case of Mardy Bum, romantic way than many of their contemporaries. Alex Turner establishes himself as one of the great songwriters on this album, and he’s kept that reputation up ever since.
I love this album. It was one of the first bits of contemporary music I was aware of. I basically taught myself to play bass along to this album. So going back to it and listening with a critical ear has been fun.
A Certain Romance closes the album on a high. It deals directly with the sort of culture that has been the background of the whole album, and gives them a haranguing. Their clothes, their music, the fighting, the drinking. There isn’t any romance in it. But with those friends over there… After two verses of demonising, he encourages the listener to humanise with certain of the lads, because they’re alright really. And in doing this, in allowing himself the luxury of circular thinking, he makes himself flawed, just as human as everyone else.
This album deserves a place on this list. Not just because it is very good music, but because it is a cultural document. This brash but compassionate, cocky and sensitive, raw and lush collection of perfect guitar pop encompasses everything it meant to be young in Britain in 2006. And because of that, you just cannot get angry in the same way
Frank Zappa
2/5
The difference between this and a pure Jazz jam session is the length of the solos. A lot of great Jazz goes on for a long time, especially the Hard Bop stuff that I particularly love, but there is a structure. You play the head, everyone the band leader wants to take a solo takes a solo, and the bandleader lets you know when to cut it off. Maybe I just don’t vibe with Zappa as a bandleader, because he lets things drag on for far far too long. The solos don’t have any structure, they don’t have any rests. The quote from Miles Davis that everyone misinterprets is ‘it’s about the notes you don’t play.’ He’s talking about the space you leave inbetween phrases, where you let the music breathe, and then you launch into the impressive long runs when you’re building to the climax of the solo. You don’t launch immediately into a long run, because then you’ve got nowhere to build up to. I was gonna give an example, Joe Henderson’s solo on Song For My Father, but Zappa proves that he can do that in It Must Be A Camel, which is by far the best song on the album. Still, check out Song For My Father, it’s a great track.
And the fact that Zappa proves that he can do it properly makes the mismanaging of the solos earlier in the album all the more infuriating. Some people should just not be allowed near Jazz
U2
5/5
I’m just in a good fucking mood this morning. And listening to this vehemently anti-war album on the day the news broke that the biggest fucking war criminal on the planet finally kicked it is very cathartic. I’ve also maybe had a bit too much coffee. FUCK YEAH!
Rest In Piss Kissinger
Silver Jews
4/5
I listened to the first half last night when on a drunken stumble to the local shop to pick up more booze.
I listened to the full album this morning when on a hunger stumble to pick up painkillers and caffeine.
Both times, this album just spoke to me. The melancholy, the directionless protagonists, the simple, bleak instrumentation.
I noticed that the can of beer that I had left half empty next to the sofa I’m crashing on had tipped over sometime during the night. It was right next to a portable heater, and if it had been more full, it would have spilled and probably short circuited something.
These sorts of small coincidences are what makes up the vast majority of everyday life and, judging by the lyrics on Bright Flight, it seems as if these are the sorts of stories that David Berman was able to tell, and tell with such mastery. I was kinda shocked at the bleakness of the ending especially
Elvis Presley
3/5
I’d forgotten how much of this album was slightly boring, very sentimental Country. The Rock n Roll tracks are alright, but not a patch on the originals. The best song is the version of Blue Moon, which is such a song, I’m convinced that nobody could do a bad version. But Elvis’ version is particularly good.
I don’t mind this. It’s just, having listened to the originals that Elvis is gentrifying, it’s hard to get excited for the mid white copies
Raekwon
3/5
I struggled with this one. I’ve listened to it a lot recently, and each time I’ve come out confused. I don’t think it’s bad necessarily, the beat work is fantastic. I just have a problem with Raekwon’s flow. He doesn’t seem to switch it up, so a lot of the album seems to blend together. RZA’s production is fine, but it doesn’t hit as hard as in other Wu-Tang and Wu-Tang adjacent projects. And the opening skit just put me in a bad mood, which is something I can’t really explain. It’s just… like get to the point man, get to the rhymes. I don’t wanna hear this shit. And then he gets to the rapping, and it’s fine. But that’s about all I can give it
Steely Dan
4/5
I have a theory about the sorts of artists that people tend to listen to, and how they go about starting to listen to. It divides artists up into three categories.
Artists who you discover gradually: Maybe you hear a song on a playlist, compilation, or on the radio. You like the song, then start to gradually listen to more until you’re a bona fide fan.
Artists who you known from osmosis: You know their big hits from out in the wild, so you listen to their albums to get more of a grip of why people like them.
Artists you’re taking a punt on: This is I think the most interesting category. People who you’ve heard of, but haven’t heard, or at least not consciously. So you go and listen to one of their records blind.
Punt Artists I find usually fall into three sub categories: Artists you end up loving, artists you end up hating, and artists you end up appreciating more than you actually enjoy them.
I’ll probably refer to this theory at later points in the reviews, especially when it comes to The Libertines, who are responsible for my coming up with this theory. But, onto the review!
Steely Dan were a Punt Artist for me. Or at least, to an extent. My mother had a copy of The Nightfly, Donald Fagen’s first album, which I listened to at some point and absolutely adored, so I researched him a bit and discovered Steely Dan that way. I took a punt on Aja and ended up loving it just as much, so, when I had the money, went and bought all of their albums chronologically. Can’t Buy A Thrill was therefore the second Dan album I knew, and was probably pretty instrumental in my appreciation for them as artists. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have continued with the experiment. But coming back to it with a more critical eye, I’m realising that it’s the Dan album I listen to least. I don’t think it’s bad at all, I just think that there’s something hasn’t quite completely clicked into place yet. Maybe it’s the inclusion of other vocalists; I like Palmer’s voice but can’t stand Jim Hodder’s, and the idea of anyone but Donald Fagen singing on a Steely Dan song just seems wrong anyway.
I think there are inevitably gonna be teething problems, but what I find most infuriating about this is that I can’t quite put my finger on what I think is different about Can’t Buy A Thrill to other Steely Dan albums. I still thoroughly enjoy it, I just don’t love it
The xx
2/5
By stripping the production down to the bare necessities, The xx set a template for what Indie Pop would sound like in the decade after their first album came out. It’s simple drum beats, melancholy but melodic guitar lines, and personal lyrics about love and relationships delivered in unrefined voices with regional accents would all go on to be hallmarks of a sound that is still going strong to this day. There is a genuine argument to be made that this is one of the most important and influential albums of the 2000’s. By neglecting the spikier, more raucous elements of the earlier Indie scene and instead replacing them with electronica and sadness, xx by The xx allowed a movement that was running out of altitude a new gust of wind.
The reason I’m doing my best to define the sound of xx is because, I really don’t remember 75% of the music to this album, and I’ve owned it for about 8 years. I remember the general vibe, and I remember how much both the press and a lot of my cool friends from Sixth Form raved about it, but I was never able to get past about track 4. I can see how this has affected a lot of music that I really love, but I have never seen it as anything more than a rough sketch that pointed the way for others.
I’m tempted to give this a 3 because of it’s influence, but I know in my heart of hearts that it’s only a 2, so…
Depeche Mode
1/5
Music For The Masses was the second album I received when I started on this journey. It was also the first album I rated one star. And in some way I’ve been waiting for this day to come ever since. Violator, the other Depeche Mode album. The opportunity to prove me wrong, or to confirm my suspicions.
I do not like Depeche Mode. Their music is consistently both incredibly overwrought and abysmally dreary. Violator is supposed to have taken a break from their usual writing style but that doesn’t come through because it sounds exactly the same as Music For The Masses, same dull electronics, same boring string quartet droning the same few trills midway through the song, same boring lyrics that just repeats the one verse over and over again. Fucking hell. I really can’t stand it. Even the ‘good songs:’ Personal Jesus and Enjoy The Silence have been both played to death and done better by other people.
So… I am not going crazy. I do not like this band. What I’m now left to go crazy over is why you fuckers do like them so much
Wu-Tang Clan
5/5
I’ve been struggling with reviewing Raekwon’s debut which I was given a couple of days ago, and finally getting the opportunity to listen to a full Wu-Tang album again has made a few things clear as to why I wasn’t vibing with Purple Tape as much as I’d like to. Raekwon and Ghostface are the two least interesting rappers in the Wu-Tang. They work better in a group context, because their flow is offset by the other rappers verses, but when doing full songs by their own the fact that they both have pretty similar flows has a tendency to make the songs drag.
And also explains why 36 Chambers is possibly the best rap album of the 90’s. It is the best group effort from a predominantly collaborative genre. Everyone is able to play to their strengths. This is explained really well in the intermission to Can It Be All So Simple. The Wu-Tang is a group, they all have their strengths and they all play to them in the album context.
I might have a personal preference for other albums, but 36 Chambers shows best what rap has the potential to be as an art form, one which is based on a mutual respect for what each member brings to the table, whether that be with their rhymes, their flow, their beats, or just the energy they bring. And although as said before there are albums I prefer personally, I could still listen to this album all day
Queen Latifah
4/5
I had a thought about 3 in the morning last night, and had to go check my history because it was scratching my brain so badly. I have had 85 albums generated so far, not including the John Zorn album I couldn’t find anywhere, and generously, only 10 of them have been female lead. I say generously, because I’m including The xx, My Bloody Valentine and The Velvet Underground for having female members who sung at least one song on their respective albums. Not including those it’s down to seven.
All Hail The Queen’s thesis is essentially to prove that women can do this shit just as well as men do, and in that respect it succeeds spectacularly. The beat work is fantastic, and Queen Latifah comes across as this commanding presence on the mic. She flows with the best of them, her rhymes are tight, she’s damn charismatic. And she does it all while giving props to other women and other women of colour, doing her best to create a space for more female POC voices within a very male dominated field. Despite this, I’ve had a casual look at the rest of the list, and I don’t remember seeing much more female driven Hip-Hop, which I think is a shame.
The issue that many other top rated reviews seem to espouse is that Latifah has one topic, how great she is, and she sticks exclusively to that throughout the album. To which I say, have you listened to any other Golden Age Hip-Hop? That’s exactly what Run-DMC did, and I’ve never heard anyone complain about it. And like 50% of all rap is boasting anyway. It’s such a stupid thing to get mad at. And, for it being her one topic, Latifah approaches it in a variety of different ways, which helps to keep the album interesting
Bob Marley & The Wailers
5/5
There’s just something about Reggae and Ska. No other music makes me want to get up and dance in the same way, the skank is just irresistible. Coming midway through a particularly fertile period of Marley’s career, Natty Dread is not The Wailers first great album, that would be Catch A Fire, nor is it their best, that would be Exodus. What Natty Dread has going for it as an album is that it is probably the definitive solidification of what Reggae can and should be. The funkiness of the music, the quality of the performance is just top form here. There is a definitive sound, the album sounds cohesive, I don’t think Marley’s voice sounded better, except possibly on Redemption Song. But every song is perfectly formed. What I really love is how neatly each one builds. There’s often an extended instrumental section towards the ends, and there’s this fantastic trick of building up layers of instruments gradually, adding an organ, then a new guitar line, then horns, then harmonica. It’s great, and it sounds fantastic.
And I’ve not even mentioned the quality of the songwriting…
The Electric Prunes
4/5
The good songs were very good, and the mid songs range from pleasant if uninspired (About A Quarter To Nine) to hilariously baffling (The Toonerville Trolley.) I found the whole thing kinda charming. I could see how the better songs were a major influence on later psychedelia, the use of guitar effects I’m sure was an inspiration for various Shoegaze projects. It’s all quite fun, I enjoyed the experience.
Also, The Electric Prunes is an all time great band name
Megadeth
4/5
The difference between Metallica and Megadeth is their methods of constructing songs. ‘Tallica have very carefully constructed songs that rise naturally and make for a really satisfying listen in the same way that a well built pop song does. Megadeth smash a load of great fucking riffs together and then spend half the song soloing over them.
There are benefits to each method. I personally prefer Metallica for that itch scratching effect, but sometimes you need to listen to something that makes you want to run five miles, and kick every cop you see on the way
Johnny Cash
5/5
Has anyone ever presented the crushing weight of a life lived better than Johnny Cash? The potential of humanity was always a theme for Cash, potential both for good and for evil, and for the last album released during his lifetime, he chose songs that dealt with our potential for good. There are songs about love, both romantic and platonic, songs about showing simple kindness towards strangers, songs about guilt and songs about redemption. And as affecting as the subject matter is, it’s elevated tenfold by the strength of the performance. Cash is able to act and perform as well as he ever did, and with the bonus gravitas of being a frail 71 year old cowboy imparting the wisdom of the ages on us young bucks. The world is difficult, but unlike some who would tell you that life ain’t fair and that you’ve got to deal with that kid, Cash espouses simple acts of kindness and empathy. Life ain’t fair, sure. But we’re all in it together, and we can do our damned best to ensure we treat others fairly
Michael Jackson
1/5
Reading the top rated review, I waited in horror for 2:45 to come up. The dreaded unnoticed synth riff. ‘My God,’ I thought to myself as it played drearily on in the background. ‘This is bad.’
Little did I know, my horror had only just begun. For when I was reading through the personnel on Wikipedia, a familiar name stood out to me. No, surely not. But as my heart began to beat faster and faster, I knew I was not mistaken. For the name with which I was so acquainted was…
Jimmy Smith!
One of the great Jazz organ players, one of the greatest improvisers of all time, and they got him in to do 20 seconds of trite sounding rubbish on a badly programmed synth.
There are three big problems with most of the songs on Bad.
The first is that they go on for too damn long. The Way You Make Me Feel is a prime example. Jackson gets to the point where he’s ad-libbing, the point where the great Soul songs of the 60’s and 70’s would fade out, and the song goes on for another two fucking minutes! It’s fucking arrogance is what it is, oh of course you want to listen to two minutes of Jackson and the band cooking because he sold 32 million copies.
The second problem is that they are often unintentionally hilarious. The best example comes from the very first line of the album. ‘Your butt is mine,’ is not a badass line. Instead it’s overtly homoerotic, and exhibits a clear misunderstanding of the sort of character that Jackson’s supposed to be portraying. What makes this EVEN MORE ironic is that there’s some pretty compelling evidence that Jackson was involved with the LA Crips! He was a gangster who couldn’t write gangster characters. Mario Puzo he ain’t.
Liberian Girl’s Wikipedia page has a section about the reaction in Liberia whose only source is a Washington Post article that only let me read three paragraphs before sending me to a spam page, so please forgive me if I don’t think that it is the best argument to be made that ‘women from the country foun[d] the song empowering.’ I find this particularly hilarious considering the non-English vocals are sung by a South African woman in Swahili. If we were to put this into a European context, imagine a fabulously wealthy entertainer wrote a song called British Boy, and had an Italian bloke singing a few words in Russian. I’m not sure I’d feel particularly empowered by that.
Just Good Friends is also hilarious. ‘Oh, I know she loves me, but if you ask her she’ll deny it.’ You’re either getting strung along, or cucked mate. This is not romantic. Also, it was the only song not released as a single anywhere. This is a running theme in Jackson’s albums, why release the album as an album in the first fucking place? What’s the point? But also, I feel bad for Stevie Wonder, just for his 80’s output in general, but specifically because the song that he duetted on was the ONLY ONE not released as a single. Damn, gotta feel bad man.
The third problem with Bad is that is incredibly fucking boring. They are dreary sentimental ballads, they’re repetitive, they’re really annoying at times. Jackson’s vocal tics are so overdone that by the end of a full album in his company they become grating.
My theory about Thriller and Bad and the reason why they’re so critically acclaimed is two fold. Nostalgia and circular thinking. Most of the people who have reviewed this positively have mentioned specifically fond memories of listening as children. They have good memories and so cannot think of it badly. I admit that I’m guilty of this as well, I wrote a whole thousand words justifying why I like an Arctic Monkeys album that I first listened to when I was 7.
But I think that there’s something more interesting going on with the professional reviews. A fallacy of because it’s popular, it must be good, and therefore I must give it a good review. I think it’s popular, not because it’s good, but because it was well promoted. It sold well, because it was well promoted, and therefore it’s popularity must be justified. There are too many instances when critics get things wrong, when we tell the public they’re stupid for liking something, and for the most popular artist of all time, well we can’t let a large amount of the public think that we think they’re stupid.
So what does this all add up to?
Well in my opinion, a series of fantastically dull, gratingly long and hilariously underwritten slabs of dated 80’s cheese, that was, of course, the second highest selling album of all time at some point. I’ll never understand people. But, what I really wanted to do was to prove that there is stuff to be talked about on this album, and that the conversation can be more than just repeating that he was either the GOAT or a nonce. Those who don’t like his music can have reasons for disliking it other than his personal life. I’ve spent the full review outline quite a few of them. And you’re at perfect liberty to like the album if you do. But I’d love to know why you think he’s so good, why you think he’s worth having the best selling album of all time. Let’s have a conversation. Because that’s what being a critic is all about.
P.S. Do you want to know what the real kicker is? I still like this album more than I like Thriller
N.E.R.D
4/5
So, first time listening to N.E.R.D. Can this really be called Hip-Hop? Pharrell’s not really rapping, but then we’re in a place in 2023 where most of the really popular Hip-Hop artists don’t really rap either. He’s a pioneer!
This one was fun. The lyrics were by far the worst part, but the music was good enough that I could just tune them out. I was a little worried that the album was gonna be all the same rhythm-centric chugging guitar riff, because that’s what the first five songs are, but then Breakout came on with it’s accordion, which I really loved, and the whole vibe changed to a soul thing that I also really enjoyed. So yeah, I’m game with this. Might even check out some more
Dirty Projectors
4/5
I can’t get over how the guy pronounces quest-a-yon.
What I get most from this album is a real sense of exuberance. It feels joyful and alive, and as if the band is enjoying the ability to play together, and mess around with the weird time signatures and the odd vocal lines. I went into it fully expecting to hate it based on all of the negative reviews, but I had a really good time
Jefferson Airplane
3/5
I have trouble with albums like Surrealistic Pillow. Albums from artists who I know of, and feel as if I should know more. I have trouble with them because more often than not, I tend to be underwhelmed by their offerings. Part of this is of course just be down to the issues of listening to an album and judging it after just one day. My favourite albums are ones that I have built a relationship with, ones that I have listened to so often that I know the songs inside out. There’s no way to achieve that sort of appreciation within the space of just one day. It’s even worse considering, given I have other things to do during the day, I usually only listen to the album once.
All this is to say that I found Surrealistic Pillow underwhelming. I love Somebody To Love and White Rabbit, but those are the two that I knew before. I also liked Comin’ Back To Me, enough to add it to my liked songs, but it’s gonna take time to build the relationship enough to be able to say I love that song.
Ultimately, I think this whole process is kinda flawed. When I used to actively regularly buy albums it was always one a week and I spent the week after buying a new CD getting to know it. I feel like my ratings would be more accurate if I were to do this with this generator, but that would take something like 20 years, so in the meanwhile, I’m content with just feeling a little underwhelmed at times
Beatles
3/5
As someone not particularly well versed in The Beatles and who really doesn’t have anything particularly smart to add, I’ll just regurgitate the points that the good songs are great, nobodies gonna agree on what the good songs actually are, and that it’d could have done with a good number of the tracks cutting.
Honestly, I’m looking forward to other Beatles albums more, so that I can get a better grip on them. I feel like The White Album is not the place yo start.
Watch me get Sgt Peppers immediately after this
2Pac
3/5
2Pac is infuriating, because he’s so close to getting it. More than any rapper before him, he takes life in the projects as his topic and details the misery, the loss, and the spiritual emptiness of the gangster experience. Because of the strength of the feeling 2Pac exhibits, and because of the sheer variety of experiences he manages to document, Me Against The World deserves a spot in the great representations of underclass despair, up there with Dostoevsky, Hubert Selby Jr, Henry Mayhew.
And then he turns around and says some shit like ‘You just need to apply yourself’ as advice to the young people he’s talking to. I’m sure that he meant well, but exhorting the benefits of the protestant work ethic while also making some fantastically salient points about the facts of social inequality within the American system gives me such bad whiplash. Rather than advocating for true justice through either incremental reform within the society that we have, or a radical upending of the entire system, 2Pac ends up propping up the system and suggesting that the reason so many of the people that he loves that didn’t make it is not because of a system that is designed to keep black people as a necessary underclass, and is instead because they aren’t working hard enough to be accepted by the Capitalist system.
Little Simz
4/5
‘The British are terrible at Hip Hop, but they’re good at turning Hip Hop into other genre’s that they can do’ and ‘British rap music is so different from the Hip Hop we [American’s] know that it’s not even Hip Hop anymore’ are statements from Todd In The Shadows, a US based Youtube Music critic who I really respect, talking about Trip Hop and Grime respectively. What I find really interesting about the latter statement in particular is that the sound that American Hip Hop has been pursuing in recent years has been very influenced by Grime. Try as hard as you want, but you Damn Yankees can’t escape us, hahahahaha
Despite my like of my country’s rap scene, Little Simz is an artists I’ve not had the opportunity to check out, despite all the acclaim for Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. Boy is that gonna change. This album is fantastic
Miles Davis
5/5
Jazz was at a cross point in the late 60’s. Having experienced a major resurgence of innovation in the late 50’s, most notable artists had fallen into one of 3 major subgenres, as I count; Post-Bop, Free Jazz and Proto-Fusion. Post-Bop is a term I’m using rather more loosely than many Jazz critics would, as I’m including Cool, Soul, and Modal as well as more ‘pure’ Hard Bop. Essentially it’s best to think of it as the more traditional strain of Jazz, sometimes introducing experimental strains such as unusual harmony, lineup, theme, or influence, but otherwise sticking within more conventional structure as established with Bebop in the late 40’s. Free Jazz had pushed the limits of what melody could achieve by giving artists free reign on improvisation. By breaking not just Jazz, but music itself, down to it’s core components, the notes and rhythm in which we play them Free Jazz represented an innovation in art comparable only to the introduction of Free Indirect Speech and Stream Of Consciousness to the Novel in the early 20th Century, or the abandonment of subject and structure in Fine Art in the late 19th Century. Free Jazz is musical Modernism without a doubt.
Miles Davis was never a Free Jazz Cat. He spent the late 50’s pioneering Modal Jazz, which utilised uncommon harmony and allowed improvisers to build emotional solos based on mood rather than on impressive runs over complex chord changes. But, I’m fairly confident we come to that innovation later in the list, so I won’t go much more into it. The 60’s saw him moving towards what I’m calling Proto-Fusion, a style that introduces elements that would be important in later Jazz Fusion, such as the introduction of electronic instrumentation and a lack of swing, historically the most basic, foundational aspect of Jazz. Like, even the Free guys swung.
Miles Davis was never one to follow the crowd. By all accounts he was an arrogant bastard, but… the man invented like 4 or 5 distinct styles of Jazz, and was one the greatest composers, improvisers, and stylists of the 20th Century. If anyone in the world deserved to be be arrogant it was Davis.
So… if Free Jazz was a revolution in melody, and Modal Jazz a revolution in harmony, and various other smaller movements, most notably those who followed Dave Brubeck a revolution in rhythm, what was there left to revolutionize?
Bitches Brew is Miles Davis’ first album of the 1970’s. With it, he sook to present a revolution in timbre. While superficially it seems similar to what a lot of the Free Jazz musicians were doing a decade previously, what with the free improvisation, they all still sounded like a traditional Jazz band just going buck wild on a track. What Davis was looking to do on this project was different.
Bitches Brew is a dense soundscape. It’s punctuated occasionally by the shrill wail of Davis’ trumpet, but the overwhelming vision for the album is one of a muddy mix of unstructured noise. It puts aside any pretence at structure, any pretence at melody, instead it relies on the fact that the sound it creates is overwhelming, there are constant little parts vying for your attention, almost daring you to stop paying attention in case you miss something. This is maximalism turned to the max.
In many ways, it’s the perfect musical equivalent to Stream of Consciousness. Taking the constant subconscious rumble, adding the occasional shrill wail of conscious thought, Bitches Brew represents the most basic way that the human mind works and recreates it in such a way that it can seem revolutionary, insane, incomprehensible, batshit or just bad, all at the same time.
Despite being a big Jazz fan, I’ve only actually listened to this album a couple of times. I have to be the right state of mind, but when I do listen to it, it is a sublime experience.
The Residents
4/5
What can I say? Well, actually… I think I could say a lot. It’s outsider art. I thought that was pretty obvious. It’s an intentional deconstruction of music. If you listen to the rhythm section, the underlying beats are all pretty simple, almost punk like. And the discomfort that people feel when listening to the album is because it doesn’t behave in the way they expect, there’s no structure, the melodies never go where you expect, the harmonies don’t resolve in a satisfying way. But what that does is encourage you to question why it puts you on edge, why you dislike it. And some of the sounds are supposed to piss you off.
The music that I dislike most is stuff that bores me, stuff where I can’t see the idea that somebody had, or see that the idea was just to rip off something that was already done better by another artist. Duck Stab/Buster and Glen is 100% the opposite of that. The Residents have ideas, and they put them into practise in the best way they know how. So if you dislike The Residents, I would really encourage you to question why, you might discover something about yourself.
I’m tempted to give this five stars, cos I know it’d piss off a load of people, but…
Randy Newman
4/5
Randy Newman was born to be a satirist. I mean, his name sounds like a parody of American names; ‘Hi, I’m Randy Newman, I went over to the new world to become a New Man and because I’m horny as fuck.’
But satire is draining. There are always gonna be people who don’t get it, or people who get it but think you’ve gone too far, or who get it and don’t think you’ve gone far enough. For the record, I think he gets it pretty much perfect. The irony is always there, enough to make you ask enough questions to be truly subversive, but with enough leeway to lull people into a sense of security, ‘No, man. I’m just singing about how great America is.’
In my eyes, Randy Newman’s great problem is also his second greatest gift, which is his mastery of melody. His melodies and arrangements are consistently beautiful and lush enough to draw people away from the lyrics, which are his great selling point. To a certain sort of politics or writing nerd, this stuff is top notch. I am no exception, I think he’s one of the greatest lyricists of the 20th century.
Sail Away is probably the best Randy Newman album, because it typifies what his early sound was. The jaunty piano, orchestral arrangements, well constructed melody, musical lightness, and lyrical bleakness. But perhaps because of that culmination sense, I think it’s also the one I come back to least. It’s still great, but I love the rawer 12 songs and more character driven and darker Good Old Boys more
Talking Heads
4/5
I’ll talk more about Talking Heads later, I can’t be bothered right now
Moby Grape
3/5
I’ve heard quite a lot of this sort of folksy and jangly yet hard and muscular California Rock in my time, and I’ve never understood why anyone kept at it once Neil Young got into the game. These guys are clearly inspired by Young, through Buffalo Springfield, and they do it fine. It’s better than average. But, like a lot of cult art, I think the story behind the band is more interesting than the band’s music itself
Randy Newman
5/5
Well, I wasn’t expecting this so soon after Sail Away, early Christmas present I guess.
It’s albums like this that make me appreciate how far we still have to go. It’s easy to forget sometimes, but the Civil Rights movement in the USA was only 60 years ago. I kinda don’t want to get into anything too heavy on Christmas morning, so I’m just gonna say that Rednecks is one of the greatest works of political satire ever written, both the chorus and the second verse just hit like sledgehammers every time. And every other song is just great. Newman is able to be both acidic and sympathetic towards his characters, which is the best thing a writer can attempt to be
Various Artists
4/5
It’s a nice little touch that this is given on Christmas, but I agree with the comments that it’s kinda the last thing I actually want to listen to on Christmas Day, personally because I’ve already come up with my alternative Christmas playlist. It’s a good album though, as a producer Phil Spector could do no wrong
Lambchop
4/5
A lot of this album is just incredibly beautiful, both in terms of the music, and the lyrics. Up The People and The Book I Haven’t Read are particular highlights, exhibiting a gorgeous affinity for lush, sweet arrangement and orchestration. It’s the sort of album I’d feel happy putting on in the background while I just vibed.
I can’t stand the sound of the guy’s falsetto though, fuck that
The Strokes
5/5
Julian Casablancas is said to have wanted Is This It to sound like a pair of favourite jeans, worn but familiar and comfortable. Whoever engineered this record did such a good job with that brief that Is This It really does feel as if it’s been around forever.
Ground Zero for Rock in the new millennium, The Strokes feel like something new, a turning point away from the bloated and incoherent mess Alternative had become since Grunge fizzled out, a move towards an unkempt urban hipster cool image, that’s been so successful as marketing that it’s still what I imagine cool young people listen to in downtown Manhattan apartments over 20 years later.
What I feel is often undervalued is how interesting it is as music. It all slots together in a very intricate way, with parts stopping and starting, the guitars playing off each other, the metronomic drums giving a tribal motorik performance that is weirdly danceable.
I can slip this album on like a favourite pair of jeans at any time of day, at any point in the year and it fits. As a piece of art it is flawless, as a social document it is fascinating, and as an instruction manual in cool it is still functional. I love this album
a-ha
3/5
a-ha’s first album kinda suffers in context due to the fact that it’s biggest hit completely overshadows the rest of their career, to the extent that as much as I enjoy Take On Me when it comes on at a party I’ve never bothered to seek it out to listen to. It’s a what I like to call a peripheral hit.
It’s also probably the least characteristic song on the album, being the most upbeat and with the strongest chorus. It’s not that the rest of the album is downbeat with weak hooks, it’s just that it tends more towards a baroque inspired form of Synthpop that takes it’s cues almost entirely from the second half of Ultravox’s Vienna.
I actually enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would. It drags a little in the last third, but it’s problem is that it’s mostly just a bit dull
Pearl Jam
5/5
Listening to this a couple of days after The Strokes was interesting. I knew that Pearl Jam was counted as an influence on Is This It, but I’d never really got how. But on this listen through, I got it. It’s all there in the arrangement, in the delicate way all the instruments fit together into their niche to make the best of the sound. Pearl Jam’s is a really good model to take from.
I think Pearl Jam are unfairly categorised as the ‘Classic Rock’ Grunge band, because there aren’t as many obvious Metal influences they put on show. Soundgarden took just as much from Led Zep as anyone, and Nirvana had a song named after Aerosmith.
What Pearl Jam brought to Grunge was a Hard Rock understanding of dynamics, being able to slow down and be gentle when need be, and a great gift for character, storytelling, and social issues.
I first listened to Ten as an audio rip of a friend’s parent’s CD collection that I’d borrowed at a sleepover. Sometimes I miss the CD era. What I didn’t realise was that I’d somehow managed to unselect the final track, Release. For years listening to Ten, I was missing the last track, and I didn’t think anything of it because Deep is such a great song, and such a great closer to the cycle of ‘slow intricate song’ and ‘upbeat hard song’ that the album has been pulling since Black. Ending of the abruptness of a song about shooting up and jumping from a building is a fantastic way to get finish an album, and it feels a bit like I’ve discovered a secret chapter of a book I love that reveals it was all just a dream. I do like release, I just feel it’s a bit of a disappointing way of finishing such a good album, asking for release… How cliche can you get.
Also, I’ve never been able to work out if Garden actually is about sex or not. I mean, it’s littered with religious imagery and that’s usually a bit of a give away, plus all the stuff about hands being bound, and I mean, it’s called garden for Christ’ sake.
Anyway, I’ve lived with this album long enough to know that I’ve got no real complaints about the music. It may pull the ‘long extended outro’ trick a bit too often, but when the music’s this good, who cares? So enjoy my half baked musings and remembrances, and enjoy this album. It’s damn good
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
3/5
I first ‘got’ Tom Waits’ weird period one evening in Uni when I was doing some shopping in town. It was winter, it was raining and I was cold, tired, pissed off and wet. I don’t know what initially possessed me to put on Swordfishtrombones, but I did and it was perfect. The ragged creaky bones of a Jazz band playing nightmare blues stories about down on their luck prostitutes, gamblers, dwarves, and general fuckups fit my mood to a t. I’ve never looked back on my love for Tom Waits.
I wasn’t quite as pissed off today when listening to Safe As Milk, and I think that affected how much I enjoyed it. I’ve listened to Trout Mask Replica before, and was expecting something more like that. Trout Mask Replica I can defend as a great work of art. But although there were instances where I thought Safe As Milk came close to the weirdness of Trout Mask Replica, it was mostly fairly typical Blues Rock. Not unpleasant, but not as groundbreaking as his later work. It probably played better in the 60’s but now that the influence has been filtered through it seems less remarkable than something like The Velvet Underground, where the influence runs so deep that it still has stuff to give.
King Crimson
2/5
Outside of 21st Century Schizoid Man, I have no idea why anyone would want to make music that sounds like this. Alternates between slow and boring and drippy and boring. Takes the worst parts of Free Jazz and doubles down on them.
5/5
I’m not as up on Progressive Soul as I’d like to be, so this was an interesting listen. The centrepiece is the 13 minute City, Country, City which opens with an organ and a Spanish sounding guitar playing over the top, continues by alternating between a pastiche sounding country complete with harmonica and a more typical funk beat, before settling into a Jazz jam session with a latin funk sounding rhythm. It’s great, and fascinating to hear a funk bands take on jazz rather than a jazz bands take on funk. The best song is the opening Cisco Kid, with it’s slow reggae inspired beat. I’m trying to find something bad to say about this record but I can’t. This is great
The Pogues
5/5
This was the second Pogues album I listened to after hearing about Shane Macgowan’s death just over a month ago. The first was of course Rum Sodomy & The Lash.
And as such I’m incredibly pissed off at the British public for, well most things really, we are a bunch of bastards, but specifically making Last Christmas the number 1 Christmas song this year. George Michael died in 2016, 2017 would have been the year to commemorate him, but you feckless pricks streamed Ed bloody Sheeran instead.
There is however something fitting about The Pogues not hitting No.1, being always No.2 (or No.6 in this case.) Last Christmas was always going to be big. It was designed to be big. Shane MacGowan helmed a crew of motley, unruly, drunken underdogs from either Eire herself or Kentish Town who interspersed tradition folk songs with drinking songs and genuinely beautiful bits of music about losers, migrants, love, revolution and everything inbetween. They were not supposed to get anywhere near the chart, let alone number 2. So it’s easy to see the success of Fairytale of New York and of the band themselves as a grassroots movement. They are the real music of the people, not of record execs and worried parents. The filth and grime and ragged nicotine stained vocals, the humanity and empathy and sheer fucking beauty of the music, who could listen to the chorus of Thousands Are Sailing and not feel moved? This is humanity in all our sweaty, dirty, intelligent, creative, and majestic brilliance
Holger Czukay
3/5
I like Can, and Cool In The Pool scratched an itch to be propositioned by a camp sounding German accented man which I didn’t knownI had. I haven’t laughed so much at a song in ages. Oh Lord, Give Is More Money and Hollywood Symphony were both good, the former often sounding like an interesting funk jam, Persian Love on the other hand was mostly forgettable.
I liked this album fine, but it didn’t have the same sort of relentless experimentation that made Can’s work so groundbreaking. It was a fun, gentle, sort of proto-synth record.
Stevie Wonder
5/5
There are some works of art that are just so perfect that it’s hard to be objective about them. For novels, it’s Anna Karenina, for plays, The Importance of Being Earnest. Songs In The Key Of Life is one of the greatest collections of music ever written performed and recorded. There may be works of art that I personally prefer, quite often because the flaws inherent in them make them seem more human. I prefer The Brothers Karamazov to Anna K. for example. But personal preference is just that, personal, and I don’t think that it’s exaggeration to say that there are very few pieces of art that are objectively better than this album
Curtis Mayfield
4/5
When I listened to the album yesterday, I was a bit disappointed. Outside of the killer opening track, it was less funky and more slow soul. But I relistened to it this morning, and really payed attention to the lyrics, and by god it’s fantastic
Aretha Franklin
5/5
Outside of the brilliance of the two singles, I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You is really interesting as a consolidatory record for late 60’s Soul. It may not be the first album to approach Soul the way that it did, but it does it so well, and with such authority that I can’t help but see it as a definitive statement on what Soul should sound like.
Genuinely the only thing I’d change is turn the mixing down on the backing singers, and turn Aretha herself up. She’s the damn star, she shouldn’t be drowned out by her back up singers
A Tribe Called Quest
5/5
In my review of Tribe’s first album I praised Q-Tip as the obvious star of the record, and while I stand by that assessment, what The Low End Theory does best is to reposition the group as, well, a group. Phife gets more time to show off his skills, and all of the features are fantastic, including the Jazz great Ron Carter.
The reason why the repositioning of A Tribe Called Quest was important is because of the connection between their brand of Hip-Hop and Jazz. Jazz is a collaborative genre, and in the 90’s Rap was looking as if it were moving away from the group effort it had been since it’s inception towards one where individual were getting more attention. By intentionally seeking to explore Rap in a group context, The Low End Theory moved Hip Hop the closest it had ever been to Jazz not just sonically, but philosophically as well.
But while the sonic side of Jazz Rap has remained consistently relevant since the album’s release, the group philosophy has sadly fallen to the wayside. We don’t have any Rap groups nowadays, which is a shame. I blame Jay-Z
Muddy Waters
5/5
Very few albums have better captured the atmosphere of a genuine Electric Blues session like Hard Again. It’s difficult to analyse properly, because it’s so foundational that it’s impossible to imagine a world without this sort of music. It’s like trying to imagine a world without fire. So many of the innovations that we have made in the name of music come from the Blues, so many of the innovations that we have made in the name of cooking, or civilisation have come from fire.
And yet, Hard Again also represents a last hurrah for black led Blues music. Since it’s release, Blues in it’s image has been recorded almost exclusively by dorky looking white guys with beards. And a lot of it has been very good, don’t get me wrong. But there is something that hits differently when played by a group of originals and innovators like Muddy Waters and his group. And I can’t think of a better swan song for black led Blues than this
The Clash
5/5
During free periods in Sixth Form, I used to listen to The Clash’s debut and My Aim Is True by Elvis Costello as a double bill, because I felt the complimented each other thematically and, more importantly, they clocked in at just over an hour, so I knew when to prepare for my next class.
The Pistols professed to be Anarchists, but had a very adolescent sense of politics. They were angry and unemployed and lashing out at everything, which led to some great anti-Monarchy tracks, but nothing too substantial. The Damned were great musically but mostly sang about girls. The Clash straddled the gap, being interesting musicians who were already incorporating elements of Reggae into the Punk sound. They were also angry, but had a more structured Socialist political view. They were angry at the system and were encouraging people to share their anger, to become more politically knowledgeable and active.
The Clash would go on to be even more politically and musically complex, but what their Debut has that their other releases do is rawness. It sounds scrappy and unpolished, like all the best Punk records do, but with the political insight of the best of your Marxist mates. It’s great, and fun, and makes you feel righteous and angry and ready to start the revolution. Or at the very least, rail against the inefficiencies of the Greater London Transport System
The Dictators
3/5
I’m conflicted on this one. I like it musically, but man the lyrics rubs me the wrong way. Two Tub Man is a reminder that for some, Punk wasn’t an opportunity to engage in radical politics, or express your dissatisfaction with an unjust system, but rather an opportunity to revel in mindless Libertarian Hedonism.
Maybe it’s a case of humour not translating nearly 50 years after the fact. But on the other hand, I think I can point to why I’m struggling with the humour. I think it’s trying too hard. Kinda like the high school drop out class clown schtick they’re going for with the character pieces, it’s lowest common denominator humour. Saying bad words like ass, putting on silly voices, pretending to be gay. It’s stuff that’ll get a reaction when you’re 13, but should be passé by your mid 20’s. If you compare it to The Ramones the difference is crystal; The Ramones are still funny because they play it deadpan. By not trying to provoke the reaction, the reaction comes more naturally.
Also, I don’t think that they’re really Nazi’s, but using the Master Race imagery is a little troubling. But again, it does fit with the high school loser persona. There are a worrying amount of people I know of from secondary who flirt with Far Right ideas.
Another problem I have with the humour is the character. I knew the sort of loser characters they’re trying to portray, and they aren’t getting it. The seem more like preppy douchbags pretending to be high school drop outs. Compare them to The Dead Boys say, and it becomes obvious how off the mark they are.
The real influence of this albums is in the music, and because of that, I can see why the album’s on this list. It is a really well crafted Hard Rock album. The riffs are fantastic, it moves through parts of the song effortlessly. I can see how this was a big influence on later American Punk.
But, it’s not as good as various other influences I could name. It just hasn’t stood the test of time
Baaba Maal
4/5
It’s difficult to properly critique albums like this, because criticism is, at least partially, about being about to place a piece of art’s place within cultural context, explaining the trends that have led to it’s creation and whether or not it works as a continuation of, break from, or subversion of those trends. The albums that I find easiest to review are those which I have a personal connection to, those which I have something to say regarding the political, cultural, or social context, or those which I disliked enough that I can really rag on them.
I know precious little about Senegalese history or culture, and even less about Fula, the language Maal speaks. So with the exception of Minuit, which is in French, I wasn’t able to even guess at what the themes of each song was. In some ways, I feel incredibly lost with this album.
But in another way, the beauty of this record really does transcend my need for understanding. Like Classical or Jazz, the timbre and melody are enough to make me feel the music on a more instinctive level. And that instinctive level is telling me that this is just great music. Sometimes it’s fun to overthink and to intellectualise, try to make sense of everything, or come up with rational explanations as to why you enjoy things. Other times, it’s fine to just admit that this sounds pretty and funky, and that I enjoyed listening to it. It’s fine to have fun
De La Soul
5/5
The three F’s, fun, funny, and funky. This album has it all. The only problem is that it does drag a little towards the end, but that’s just an issue with albums from the late 80’s in general. I’m not sure whether or not to drop a point for that, because this is some seriously good shit otherwise, like a 4.5. Screw it
Black Flag
4/5
Side 2 isn’t as good as Side 1, and Black Flag would go on to better and more interesting things when they started messing about with spoken word, Free Jazz and Sludge Metal, but this is still a solid, influential US Punk album. I’ve had Six Pack stuck in my head since I discovered this was my album yesterday
Can
5/5
I’ve never quite been able to understand why I like Can as much as I do, but this is just inarguably brilliant
The Cars
3/5
There’s a particular sort of music nerd for whom this sort of Power Pop is absolutely the best music that has ever been recorded. Unfortunately, I am not one of them. I can understand why people do enjoy it, it’s insanely well crafted Pop Rock, but for some reason this style’s never clicked for me. I’m probably being overly cynical, but it strikes me as an attempt at popularity rather than a sincere attempt at artistry. It’s the exact same feeling I get with Big Star, but they were put in the fascinating position of being a group grasping for mainstream stardom, but never achieving it. It makes for a better story.
I dunno, it deserves props for being an early synth album that doesn’t sound like shit, and I do like My Best Friend’s Girl and Just What I Needed, but that’s just liking the singles on a Pop album, they’re designed to be liked, and this album’s supposed to be more than that, and I just am not feeling it
Jean-Michel Jarre
4/5
I was in a band in Sixth Form with a guy who was super into this album. I’ve always though we were a weird match for a band, because he was this fantastic classical guitarist and saxophonist with a plan to play video game sounds over electronica played by our bandmate, and I was a budding singer-songwriter and self taught punk guitarist, trying to find a balance between my love of the Replacements, Bruce Springsteen, and Carly Rae Jepsen. We came up with some decent stuff, but it mostly downplayed the electronics and played into our shared love of Jazz and Funk.
Now that I’ve finally got around to listenong to Oxygène, I can appreciate how it would have fit into our sound (and maybe have sounded pretty good with one of my amateur solos over the top.) Although, my appreciation may be entirely down to my ability to enjoy 70’s Sci-Fi, who knows?
Beth Orton
2/5
I’ve always found the tendency to describe any sort of music that happens to feature acoustic instrumentation anywhere as ‘Folk’ pretty disingenuous, ignoring the substance of actual Folk music in favour of a substance level aesthetic description.
The example set by this album is particularly egregious. It’s ‘folktronica’ which in this case seems to be typically late 90’s Pop with an occasional acoustic guitar and synthesised bouzouki. The worst tracks for it actually come towards the end, which mostly seem to be a simple guitar part backed by a classical string quartet. If anyone can explain to me what’s folky about a string quartet, I’d quite happily listen, but it seems to me so stereotypically Pop that I cannot understand how anyone could overlook it.
My problems with it’s genre classification aside, I’m also not sold on this album as music. The more explicitly 90’s Pop tracks are awful, and the other tracks go on for too long. They’re all nearly or over 5 minutes, and so frequently repeat the trick of reaching the end of the written verses and then ad-libbing on the chorus for a minute or so before fading out that it becomes cliched. I was aware of it as a trend by track two, and it just kept going throughout the record. The only song I thought the trick worked on was, ironically, the longest one, Pass In Time, which at least had another singer for Beth Orton to play off.
I’m also not a huge fan of Orton’s voice. She’s got the habit of over-pronouncing vowels and syllables, fake lilting Irish brogue, and fluty breathy timbre that has plagued this sort of ‘serious’ female singing since, well the 90’s. Is this the originator? Did Beth Orton start this trend that I loathe?
The saving grace of the album are the lyrics which are, if cliched, at least interesting. But it isn’t enough to make me see past my dislike of the singing or my problems with the production. Put somebody willing to cut songs down in charge, and get her to stop with the affectations, and this’d be passable. As it is, two stars
Gil Scott-Heron
5/5
Gil Scott-Heron is severely underrated when it comes to the discussion of 70’s Soul. This album, like a lot of his work, is a masterpiece
Black Sabbath
5/5
I fully intended to go into this review saying ‘I was intending to give it a four because it’s not quite as good as later albums.’ While I do think that it’s a valid criticism, it isn’t as good as Paranoid, it’s also a pointless comparison. So what if it isn’t as good as Paranoid, it is still a fantastic album full to the brim of riffs, twisted and knotty as the roots of ancient trees. It is a masterclass in guitar drums and bass, to the extent that I cannot decide who performs best. And this isn’t to downplay Ozzy’s contribution. I love Ozzy’s voice, but it’s not the most important thing he brought to the band. That was his fantastic harmonica playing of course. Oh, and the fact that he’s one of the most charismatic performers to have ever existed.
Outside of the influence context, I think that this is just a damn good Hard Rock album, of the sort that Britain did so well in the 60’s and 70’s. And because of it’s influence in birthing a whole new genre of music, this album deserves all the praise it gets
Stevie Wonder
5/5
Talking Book is probably my least favourite of Stevie Wonder’s classic period albums, not because I don’t love it, but because, well, something had to be. I feel as if part of it’s problem is that Superstition is so good that it eclipses everything else in terms of media exposure, whereas his other classic albums seem more balanced. I do still love it though
Fela Kuti
5/5
There’s a story I remember reading at some point about the guy who was hired to play bass on Rapper’s Delight. He was told that he was supposed to play the same thing, the Chic sample, over and over again for 15 minutes straight, so that somebody could ‘talk real fast over it.’ This has always really struck me as an anecdote, because it relays in just a few sentences what the life of a studio or touring musician must really be like. None of that pretentious, artistic, express yourself through the music crap. Get out their, and play the riff perfectly for 15 straight minutes.
The Rapper’s Delight anecdote betrays a dissonance with the fundamental idea of a lot of art, that I proposition comes from the way that writers and painters have been treated especially in Europe since, by my reckoning the Roman empire, but especially since the Renaissance. This is the idea of the genius. We hold an idea of an artist, as an individual, an auteur, presenting their own individual image for an artwork, and spending the time setting it to canvas or paper without interference, producing works of genius this way. Of course, we understand that this doesn’t work quite the same way for instances where groups are needed: film and television, theatre, music all require ensembles. But we have just as much tendency to place the overall credit of a collaborative work’s success or failure on just a handful of people: the director, the playwright, the songwriter. We are in the habit of seeing all art as the work of one genius.
I’ve extolled the work of collaborative efforts in previous album reviews. For some reason they all seem to have been Rap albums, which I will have to do some further thinking about. But, it seems unfortunately necessary to point out that all artistic endeavours are inevitably group ones. Nobody can do everything, and nobody can do everything well. I’ve talked about Prince and how much I love everything but his production before. But he wouldn’t have been in the position he got himself into without people willing to promote him, play him, play with him live. Even the commercial side of of art is collaborative.
I am obviously not the first critic to point this dilemma out. Necessarily, I am building on the work of other people, criticism is just as much a collaborative medium, if through proxy. Music it seems is even more so afflicted, the big names are almost always the singers or the bandleaders, the people who get top billing and so the most attention. Listening to Fela Kuti it’s easy to forget that there are a dozen other people on stage giving as much as they can to the performance. The best I’ve ever felt about my contribution to live music I’ve played was a night playing rhythm guitar in an Irish Folk group. Although I was just providing a basis for the strings and wind, it felt such an essential element, as if I was a bigger prt of something. Live!’s music is so vital and full of life, and as charismatic as Kuti is, I think that it’s important to remember the bass players, the Maurice Epko’s of this world, who provide so much grounding to the music we love, and do it not for the stardom, but for the love of the music. So to all of the unknown musicians out there. Thank you
N.W.A.
4/5
I kinda always had a suspicion that Straight Outta Compton was as acclaimed as it was because of the careers that it spawned, and that it would drag like a lot of late 80’s tap albums do, but this was fantastic. The production is great, and although some of the lyrics have really not aged well, if they weren’t considered bad at the time, each of the rappers have distinct presences. The hour I spent listening to it really flew by
Nirvana
5/5
Although Nevermind is by far the more iconic album, everyone agrees that In Utero is better. It’s more streamlined, it has better lyrics, better hooks.
I’ve always been amused that Kurt Cobain seemed to be a fan of Leonard Cohen. Artistically, they’re more similar than people would think, but as people they’ve got completely different energies
Mylo
1/5
It’s a really cuck move to name a song Destroy Rock and Roll and then sample a bloke naming a load of artists who are all cooler and better remembered than yourself. Fuck me was this tedious. Poor Kim Carnes
The Flaming Lips
4/5
A surprisingly easy listen, lush and orchestral, I’d like to give it more of a listen when I get the chance. The only thing I do not understand is the inclusion of all of the bloody remixes. The last two tracks are essentially bonuses, but they’re on the main album. Completely puts off the flow
Pulp
5/5
Pulp emerged from Sheffield as part of the Britpop scene, but always stood apart from the pack for various reasons. For a start they were older, having been around as a band since the late 70’s. They were also less laddish than either Blur or Oasis, and while Suede made Byronic pansexuality part of their aesthetic, most of their songs were actually about women or drugs rather than other men. Pulp’s topics were heterosexual sexual and class politics. And they did it fantastically.
There’s a genuinely unsettling darkness in a lot of Jarvis Cocker’s lyrics. A sense of sexuality as conquest, as a way of crossing class boundaries, that miraculously doesn’t ever cross into misogyny, because Cocker is as aware of the female presences that he is conquering as he is of the underlying class struggle behind his sexual desires. And despite all the despair regarding the character’s circumstances, there are moments of genuine romance embedded within the cheating and failed relationships.
And on top of all of the fantastic songwriting, Jarvis Cocker being one of the great British lyricists, Different Class is just fantastic musically, an incredibly catchy, simple yet layered Pop album that draws on the traditions of Rock, Pop, and Electronica from every decade since the sixties, with a modern twist that still stands as a template for Indie Pop nearly 30 years after the fact.
Maybe I’m just guilty of assuming that everyone is as interested in this sort of topic as I am, but I genuinely do not understand the criticism of this album in some of the top rated reviews. This is one of the few mature, realistic looks at class & sexuality in the modern Pop canon, and anyone who can’t see what it’s trying to do is genuinely missing out
Pretenders
4/5
I’ve always been a Pretenders fan in theory more than practise. I like a lot of their singles, and James Honeyman-Scott is one of the few famous pop musicians to have come from Herefordshire, where I’ve lived for quite a long time.
However, I’ve never sat down and listened to one of their studio albums all the way through. This was a shame, because Pretenders is a great debut. Much spikier than I’d have thought based on their later singles
The Byrds
4/5
I fear I may have dismissed The Byrds too harshly after Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. There were elements of the Country sound they’d adopt in that abysmal experiment in Younger than Yesterday, but it was gentler, more of a seasoning than it being the main dish.
But yeah, I enjoyed this one. It’s possibly not completely essential, but it was a fun half hour distraction
David Bowie
5/5
What Aladdin Sane did best was prove the brilliance behind Bowie’s image and marketing. Guaranteed the first image most people have in their heads when thinking about Bowie is THAT cover, which was apparently the moat expensive album cover of all time up to that point. It’s amazing what a good cover, good promotion, and a few choice singles can do.
But that isn’t to understate how good the music is as well. Drive-In Saturday and The Prettiest Star are two of my favourite Bowie tracks, the hard rockers are all fun and frantic, and Aladdin Sane, Time, and Lady Grinning Soul took some of the mystery and artiness of The Man Who Sold The World and Hunky Dory and transposed it perfectly into the harder Glam sound. So, it isn’t as good as Ziggy Stardust. What is? Bowie is still head and shoulders above any of his contemporaries
John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers
2/5
There are better Blues Rock albums. Star removed because Eric Clapton is a cunt. If Clapton was God then who was his Nietzsche?
Willie Colón & Rubén Blades
3/5
I’ve listened to this album about 5 times all told, and I still don’t know what to make of it. It’s fine, I guess, but it does all sort of blend into a mesh. I don’t speak Spanish, and so can only pick out a few words, there seems to be quite a lot about both women and flowers, but I don’t know how much knowing what the topics of the songs would help. Maybe I just need to listen to this while dancing, but I can’t do the samba either. A true five out of ten if ever there was
Amy Winehouse
5/5
Oh, Amy, Amy, Amy.
Frank is not the tight R&B masterpiece that Back To Black is, but in many ways, I think that in many ways it’s a more representative album of just who Amy was. Confessional art lives or dies on the artists ability to convey their own sense of self, not just through the content of the art, but through form and structure. Frank as an album is messy, oddly structured, and probably overlong. But because of the brilliance of the songwriting, I understand completely how the woman who wrote these songs put them together as an album that was messy, oddly structured and probably overlong. And it breaks my fucking heart, every single time
Metallica
5/5
I wanted to write something intelligent about brutality and extremeness in art, but I can’t think of the right angle to take. So all I can say is that this scratches an itch in my brain in the same way that great Classical does. The layering of riffs and motifs works in such a perfect way. This shit just slaps
My Bloody Valentine
4/5
It’s been a while since I’d listened to this one, and my first MBV since absolutely loathing mbv for this project.
It’s rawer than either mbv or Loveless, more of a blueprint for what Shoegaze could be than a true Showgaze album, with much simpler, almost Punk sounds and structure.
Honestly, I don’t think it ever gets better than Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside) and it’s not as good as Loveless. Loveless really is the mvp of mbv, it’s doing a lot of heavy lifting for the band’s legacy. But Isn’t Anything is still a good Indie Rock album, maybe not my favourite but still enjoyable
The Smashing Pumpkins
5/5
I went to Secondary School in a different town to where I lived. My hometown had a School, but I so hated the town, and the fuckers that I’d previously been at school with that I wanted out.
A few years later, when I was in Uni, I went back to the town on the same train that I must’ve caught a thousand times before. As it started to pull up to the station, my phone started to play Mayonnaise, and as I walked up the slope and saw the town centre for the first time in years, the heavy riff started, and for a moment I was transported into the start of my very own Teenage Romantic Drama, the protagonist coming home for the holidays, going to a party, seeing everyone from school, and how they’ve changed, inevitably falling in love with his former best friend. It was a perfect moment, one of only two I’ve had regarding music. The other involved Road To Nowhere by Talking Heads and another train, thinking about it. Huh, weird.
Maybe it’s because Alt Rock in the 90’s has always been so intrinsically linked to adolescence and so revisiting is invariably going to feel nostalgic, but Smashing Pumpkins always felt particularly nostalgia fuelled to me. I was never even the biggest fan of them. They were a bit too Proggy, too much guitar noodlery, not enough Punk. But relistening at a time when I have less teenage angst and more genuine Existential despair, I better understand it. The problems of your 20’s are similar to those of your adolescence, but if anything as a teen I felt more hope. There was possibility, there was a chance of getting out, of opportunity on the horizon, even if the present was less than shining. Nowadays, ‘I’m not living, I’m just killing time.’
But at least the music is beautiful. Bleak and despairing, but Beautiful
David Bowie
5/5
The first Bowie album I got for this project was Aladdin Sane, about a week ago, but before I listened to that, I listened to The Next Day. The two albums he released before his death felt respectively like a consolidation, and a push forward. The discussion of the push forward will come when I get Blackstar, but it couldn’t have happened without The Next Day’s attempts to solidify Bowie’s sound and reputation for the 20th Century.
I’ve always found it interesting that after a certain point in an artists career, the intricacies of their sound and subgenre are put aside, and everything just gets labelled something generic. The Next Day, according to all sources, is a Rock album, plain and simple. But it isn’t that simple. The first single, the excellent Where Are We Now? is Jazz tinged, with maybe a touch of Trip-Hop, If You Can See Me foreshadows the manic electronic Jazz percussion of Blackstar, Valentine’s Day and (You Will) Set The World On Fire hark back to the harder Glam of Aladdin Sane. It’s all very eclectic, much like Bowie’s whole career, and, paired with his best set of lyrics since the late 70’s, it feels like a well earned return to form, pointing the way for potential albums in the future. It’s a shame that we only got the two late career albums, but man what great albums
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
3/5
My favourite thing Nick Cave has ever done is that photo with Henry Rollins, looking absolutely terrified at a baby.
This was alright
Saint Etienne
3/5
Decent, relaxing Trip-Hop that didn’t require much effort to listen to. The ‘Would you like some sweets, Willie?’ sample was a bit odd, but overall, not bad
The Stooges
5/5
Iggy Pop is one of those figures who, in hindsight, seems almost mythological and Raw Power is his Holy Book, his New Testament. And much like the Christian New Testament, it’s influence has spread so far from it’s intended audience that it turns up in the most unlikely places.
Everyone who has picked up a guitar since 1975 has been influenced by Raw Power, even if they don’t realise it. Whether it be through the influence of Johnny Ramone, Tom Verlaine, Johnny Marr, whether it be powerful rhythm playing, impressionistic leads, jangling licks, everything from straight Punk, to Glam Metal, to landfill Indie, directly or indirectly, has come from this album. If we were to put together a list of Rock albums based solely on influence then this is in the top five, and along with The Velvet Underground and Nico, it’s the album with the most oversized influence compared to how many people have actually listened to it.
But all this pontificating about influence obscures the fact that this is just really fantastic music. James Williamson’s already been dealt with pretty thoroughly, but Ron Asheton takes a fantastic, underrated turn on bass, Scott Asheton is still a monster on the drums, and Iggy… oh Iggy. Iggy Pop was never so Iggy as he was on Raw Power, a snarling, bestial, sinister, genuinely dangerous presence. He mellowed somewhat for his first two solo albums, allowing the deeper voice he employed on Gimme Danger to shine through. But Raw Power remains the definitive vision of Iggy, and probably the definitive vision of a Punk frontman.
And for what it’s worth, I think that the debate about the mix is kinda pointless. Yes, I prefer the Iggy mix, but the Bowie one’s fine too, and it’s the one that everyone had access to before the 90’s, so people must’ve seen past the thinness to the fantastic album that lies beneath. And it is fantastic
Thin Lizzy
5/5
I have checked, and this is the only Thin Lizzy album on this list. So, outside of a comparison I made in the KISS review, this is the only mildly public chance I might have to discuss Thin Lizzy. I should try to make it a good one.
Thin Lizzy are my Dad’s favourite band. As such, I have grown up listening to their music in a way I have not listened to any other music. They are an integral part of my musical education, one of the reasons why I picked up the guitar as an instrument. And as such I am approached this listening of Live And Dangerous with more scrutiny than I would most other albums on this list.
And that scrutiny is not affecting the listening experience in any bit. This is one of the great, if not the greatest, examples of the live double album that bands in the 70’s put out with worrying regularity.
The band is on as tight a form as a loosely funky, bluesy, semi-improvisational Rock group could be. All of the playing is exceptional, all of the solo’s are exceptional, all of it is emblematic of tight group of sympatico musicians performing to their highest standard. There’s a controversy about how much of Live And Dangerous was overdubbed, and the obvious answer to the problem is that ‘all live albums are overdubbed, why does it matter so specifically in this case?’ but, in Lizzy’s case, the problem has been answered. There was a subsequent live album released called Still Dangerous, which was a full concert recording from the concerts that Live And Dangerous was taken from, with no overdubs. And guess what? It’s as good as Live And Dangerous is. It has the same energy levels, the same dynamics, the same virtuosity, that made Live And Dangerous such a good record.
And let’s not forget the figure without whom the whole thing would fall apart. If Iggy Pop is the consummate Punk front man, Phil Lynott should be in the conversation as consummate Hard Rock front man, partly because he’s the only Hard Rock guy whose sex appeal I have no problem with. Robert Plant would spend too much time talking about Lord of the Rings, Steven Tyler the less said about the better, I would fuck Ozzy but that’s just because I think it’d be a story. That leaves Lynott, who was both incredibly attractive, effortlessly cool and charismatic, and also as a black Irish man, the eternal outsider, which further added to a sense of style and mystery to his persona.
And Lynott wouldn’t have been as sexy if he weren’t also so damned talented. The songwriting is immaculate, full of Irish-American mythology and character pieces, written with the style of the best Gaelic sages, and the heartbreaking irony of the best American songwriters.
Live And Dangerous is a great representation of what it feels like to be in the crowd of a good Rock gig, with all of the sweaty exuberance, excitement and euphoria that goes along with it. And the songs, and the solos, and the writing, and the performances, and the arrangements, and the guest stars, and, and, and…
Creedence Clearwater Revival
5/5
Despite liking CCR a lot, I’ve always subconsciously associated Swamp Rock with the timbre of the muddy sort of stuff the Stones were putting out on Exile On Main Street. Getting the opportunity to listen to Bayou Country all the way through gave me a newfound appreciation for their clarity. This album is remarkably well produced, the musicianship is fantastic, with the longer tracks managing to produce a hypnotic quality in their simplicity, and the songwriting is as good as ever. It’s probably a bit premature to be thinking of the summer in February, but I will make sure I listen to more Creedence come July
New York Dolls
4/5
The New York Dolls are a band whose influence I understand more than I appreciate. It’s fine, it’s pretty good, it’s just not got that something that would mean I would go out of my way to listen to it. And that kinda infuriates me, because they are so beloved by critics and artists whose opinions I respect a lot. I feel like I’m missing out on something.
So, for personal enjoyment it’s a three, but I’ve bumped it up to four for the influence
Fatboy Slim
4/5
The consensus seems to be that this album has not aged well, and while I agree that it is a little too reminiscent of the general excesses of the late 90’s, I also think that it’s worth exploring why Fatboy Slim deserves a spot in the discussion of contemporary music history.
It’s easy to forget, but Fatboy Slim and You’ve Come A Long Way Baby especially were incredibly popular. Off of the singles were Top 10 in the UK, the album itself reached No. 1, and in addition to the gang busters numbers, it’s got legs too: you still hear Praise You and Rockafeller Skank out in the wild. I’ve heard multiple different covers of Praise You in my lifetime. And in addition, Fatboy Slim himself is still part of a wider cultural conversation; in 2022 there was an episode of the excellent Channel 4 Sitcom Derry Girls that featured him as a major plot point. And not in a way that felt mocking either. It felt playful, the way you’d rib a genuinely important artist.
And I do think genuine importance is also something that we can ascribe to Fatboy Slim. The big mainstream era of EDM was clearly inspired by his maximalist beats and minimal lyrics, and his influence as a producer of Hip-Hop has also vastly informed the current state of beat work, not just in the UK, but in the US as well. There’s a case to be made that very few artists have had the influence of Dance and Electronica that Fatboy Slim have had, and for that I do think that giving his work a listen is the least that we can do in an effort to better understand EDM and where it came from
Grateful Dead
1/5
I’ve not had any experience with The Dead before, is it bad that I expected something… more? The way they’ve been built up in Boomer Folklore, I was expecting… at least something a bit weird, obviously not Captain Beefheart, but something more substantial than this.
For what it’s worth I did listen to some live recordings after, just to see if there was a recognisable difference, and they were better live… but not by much. It’s the same bland boring Country Rock bullshit. It’s not unpleasant to listen to. It just feels like there should be more for such a supposedly great band.
Also, the sexism is really off-putting. The woman in Sugar Magnolia for example, what does she get out of the relationship, other than driving his drunk ass home and paying his fucking speeding tickets? I was teetering towards a two, because as I said, it isn’t unpleasant to listen to. But, fuck this Boomer nonsense. Damn the dead
Mike Oldfield
1/5
How many ways are there of saying self indulgent?
My biggest problem with Progressive Rock in general is summed up by one of the most upvoted reviews of this album:
‘there is a complete lack of cohesion—a random mixture of moods that are missing a symphonic theme. It’s composed and arranged as if it were a high tech hobby’
There is what I see as a lack of passion for the craft of composition and songwriting in Prog Rock. It seems so impressed at it’s own ability to produce music as an abstract idea, a Platonic ideal of music as a complex mix of melody and rhythm, that it seems to forget great art is not bouyed by complexity alone. It becomes about showing off how sophisticated and musically literate you are, rather than about how well the music goes together.
Tubular Bells is one of the worst examples of this sort of excess. Yes, it’s musically complex, yes it’s impressive that he played all of the instruments himself. But it doesn’t feel as if there’s anything more substantial, no theme or idea, which just devolves into an exercise of how noodly can I make my guitar playing? The best part is the Sailor’s Hornpipe, but he also ruins that by trying to impress everyone by playing it too fast.
So to sum up by stealing a joke from my parents: Tubular Bells? More like Tubular Balls
Buzzcocks
5/5
I’m genuinely trying to think of something negative to say about this album, and I’ve got nothing. This is everything that a Punk album should be: fast, furious, and funny. It’s not as political as other British Punk, but there’s something to be said about presenting the ordinary social lives of young people and how dissatisfying it is, as a companion to the more explicitly angry political commentary that The Clash of The Pistols were representing.
Also, to clear up some confusion, the story about their name is that ‘cock’ is another way of saying ‘mate’ and there was apparently a headline in a music mag that the band read about the excitement of playing on stage titled ‘It’s the buzz, cock!’ Yes, it must’ve partially been picked because cock is an inherently funny word, but there is also a non filthy meaning behind it
The Band
4/5
The problem with this album, I think, is that the influence Music From Big Pink had on the people who followed it has been so effectively filtered into the general cultural conversation, that it’s difficult to see just what was special about it in the first place. Listening 50 years later, this sounds like a good dozen or so slightly Country, slightly Folky Indie bands who I listen to on a regular basis. And the thing is I understand that this is exactly why this album is on this list, it’s influence on basically every subsequent Rock band trying to be sincere and rootsy rather than psychedelic and ironic. But unlike other groups, such as The Beatles or The Velvet Underground, I don’t think there are the elements that are so hard to replicate that the only place to get them is the originals. The USP is rootsyness, it’s the melancholy sincerity. It isn’t anything to do specifically with the music or the songwriting. All this does is create this weird sensation when listening, because I know this is the original, this is the one all of those other bands copy, but because of all of the copying it ends up sounding so archetypal that it’s slightly underwhelming.
I liked Music From Big Pink fine. Actually, I liked it quite a bit, and I will probably find myself coming back to it. But I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’ve heard this one before. Mr. The Band, I know this isn’t your fault. You had no idea that legions of Indie kids would jack your style 30 years after the fact. If anything it goes to prove just how good you were. But it does slightly water down your legacy, which is unfortunate. Anyway, as a consolation, have four stars. That’s more than I gave my first Beatles record
Suzanne Vega
4/5
Neat and intricate lyrical Pop Folk album. Enjoyable, but I feel like I’d need to listen more to fully appreciate. Added to my library
The Beach Boys
3/5
Mike Love’s said that Bull Session With ‘Big Daddy’ was included as a way to ‘lighten the mood’ of The Beach Boys, which is just a further example of how much of a shit Mike Love is. It’s in there because without it, the album would only be 25 minutes long, which was OK a year or two previously, but which didn’t work now that artists like The Beatles and the Kinks were raising the game on what Pop albums could be. Also, lighten the mood from what Mike? You’re not singing The Velvet Underground here, you’re singing about dancing and how spoiled your little sister is. It’s not exactly Heroin.
Musically this is fine. I’ve never been a big fan of The Beach Boys harmonies, they always sounded a bit shrill to me, but in theory they’re fine. I prefer the pastiche Doo-Wop of the second half to the more upbeat first side. It’s aged better, some of it would pass for late 2010’s Indie Pop at points.
If I try to turn off the analytical part of my brain, and just pretend that I’m an American Teenager in 65, then I can see why this would be popular. I’m white, I’ve got nothing more to worry about than girls, exams, and the ever-present threat of nuclear holocaust, and suddenly I really enjoy this album. But it does not work 60 years down the line
Red Hot Chili Peppers
4/5
The album’s pretty toploaded, but the later material isn’t bad at all. The Chili Peppers were always hot shit. Kiedis’ rapping takes a back seat for most of the album, and his lyrics have taken a big step up from BSSM, focusing on more self reflective themes, as well as engaging in a certain amount of politics with the excellent title track. The streamlining also helps, the album comes in at less than an hour, which is a good manageable time, and there isn’t nearly as much filler
4/5
The Oasis phenomenon is one of those things that I think you have to have lived through to totally understand. I was born the year after Be Here Now imploded the band’s critical acclaim proper, but growing up in the UK, the after-burn of their success has been possibly more interesting than their actually successful period.
I genuinely don’t think I’ve been to a pub or a karaoke night where the place hasn’t burst into Don’t Look Back In Anger at some point. I’ve genuinely never been at a gig, or passed a busker where I’ve never thought it was hilarious to request Wonderwall at an inopportune moment. I’ve never played a gig where some annoying idiot hasn’t requested Wonderwall at an inopportune moment. You still hear Roll With It, She’s Electric, and Champagne Supernova played on the radio all the time. And in addition to that, both the Gallagher’s projects get a certain amount of radioplay and hype.
So, is the album that spawned all of this hype worth it? Yes? Musically, What’s The Story? is quite contradictory, being both a rather bare-bones Rock n Roll effort, and a lush, orchestrated, 60’s tinged Britpop album. And lyrically… well, let’s just say that Noel Gallagher is not the most oblique songwriter. It’s all expressed in such a way that the lyrics seem expressionistic and poetic, but if you try and nail down an exact meaning, it all falls apart for the utter bollocks it is. But, in a way I can defend that. It’s the equivalent to talking to a friend in the pub after a few pints. Everything you end up saying sounds profound, metaphorical. But to the sober eavesdropper, it’s nonsense, loosely connected by a vague theme. If anything, I wonder if this songwriting quirk is the reason why Oasis were seen as having won the Britpop war for popularity, if not the specific battle? Damon Albarn is by far a more precise, intelligent, and funny lyricist. As are Jarvis Cocker and Brett Anderson for what it’s worth. But, Albarn’s intelligence is always on full display. He can never turn it off. And the public… well, the public like Silly Love Songs, which is what Oasis did best. Blur were too smart and refined, Pulp too class-conscious and sexual, Suede too dark and bisexual. That left Oasis as the voice of the supposed everyman. The better-off working class who didn’t feel repressed in the relative stability of the 90’s. The underclass had their voices. For the moderates, Oasis was more than enough. These drunken laddish ramblings spoke to large swathes of Brits.
But perhaps I’m being unfair. The Gallaghers were genuinely working class kids made good, achieving their position through hard work. And the music is good, I enjoy it and I am much more a part of Blur’s world than Oasis’. But I enjoy it mostly from afar, for it’s influence that is intrinsically interwoven throughout the fabric of British society. And I think that from afar is the best way to view Oasis, get too close and the shine does seem duller than people remember.
Also, I cannot say the name of this album without singing the Balamory theme tune to myself
The Police
3/5
An album of two halves, quite literally. Side One is mostly very bad. Synchronicity I and Walking In Your Footsteps are sub Peter Gabriel attempts at Prog-Pop, and the lyrics are kinda insulting. I know what Synchronicity means Sting, I don’t need a psychological treatise written in rhyming octuplets to explain it. This isn’t the Golden Age Of Islamic Philosophy. And Walking In Your Footsteps is just trite, Hey Mr Dinosaur, my god…
Mother is Andy Summer attempt to keep up with Sting’s cultural and psychological references, by reproducing the inner monologues of Norman Bates. And fittingly, just like in Psycho, it sounds like someone murdering a synthesiser. Miss Gradenko is the best song on this first run of songs, because it’s the shortest.
But then, we get to Synchronicity II, which much better explains the concept by giving an narrative example, and is also just a much better song. It’s epic in scope and sound, and points the way to the much more coherent second side, where the New Wave sound comes fully to fruition. It sounds much more coherent, and is much more interesting as a result. But as much as I enjoy the last five songs, the dullness of the first five is pretty overwhelming, which leads to a pretty mixed experience overall
Aretha Franklin
5/5
Even better than I Never Loved A Man, better sounding, Aretha’s voice is more prominent in the mix, and the songs are all fantastic
Beatles
5/5
‘Oh! Darling, please believe me, I’ll never do you no harm’ McCartney says the song immediately after having sung about murdering multiple people with hammers.
But, yeah, fine, you got me. This is a masterpiece
Rod Stewart
3/5
It’s not a hard listen, in fact it was quite pleasant for a lazy Sunday morning, but it rarely rises above quite pleasant, and some of the songs are actively bad. You’re My Girl felt actively out of place, especially coming off the back of the gorgeous and subtle Jo’s Lament.
And it really made me question why this album I’d never heard of before by an artist better known for their late career soft rock cheese is on the list when there isn’t any Jackson Browne, a fantastically talented songwriter who did the folky, country-ish, melancholy much better than Stewart ever did
Penguin Cafe Orchestra
4/5
I have a theory that there are two types of great artists: Experimenters and Consolidators. Most artists would like to think of themselves as Experimenters, but the work of the Consolidator is arguably more important; being able to take the weirder aspects of Experimenters art and recontexualising it to the extent that it becomes an established part of an artistic movement or form is difficult, arguably more so than ripping the rulebook up.
Music From The Penguin Café is without a doubt a work of experimentation. An odd album made by a band who consisted of a guitarist, an electric pianist, a violinist, a cellist, and an occasional ukulele player and vocalist, it’s music is equally inspired by 70’s Sunshine Pop, Baroque String Music and Celtic Folk, with the odd bit of Atonality thrown in for good measure. It’s a mix that doesn’t always work. But when it does, it works incredibly. The best use is the centrepiece, the 12 minute long ‘The sound of someone you love who's going away and it doesn't matter’ which manages to perfectly balance all of the elements in such a way that it captures the journey from longing to acceptance and perfectly portrays the feeling of existential dread and the resulting panic attack.
Ultimately, I enjoyed this album. It’s often beautiful, occasionally touching, and not as twee as the name would have you think (apart from the lyrics to Coronation, wtf were they thinking with that?) But I do also think that it ultimately fails as a piece of experimental art. One of the things that Experimenters have to do is ensure their work is Consolidatable, and Music From The Penguin Café has no successors, nobody attempting to reproduce it’s sound in a more recognisable context.
But, for a piece of esoterica, it is well worth a listen.
Beastie Boys
4/5
To my shame, despite having been listening to the Beastie Boys for years, I still can’t tell Ad-Rock and Mike D apart.
License To Ill is a great record, it rocks hard, the braggadocio is infectious, and it’s just fun to listen to. However, it’s a good showcase of an artist still trying to find their feet. They were trying to parody unthinking Jock Jams with tracks like Fight For Your Right, but it was the jocks who initially adopted them, which I think always bothered them, because they were a weird weird group of people, artsy and funky and more sensitive than they let on. I mean, what jock would have the balls to mix the Mr Ed theme with a Led Zep song?
They went on to better and more representative things, which is the only reason this is only getting 4 stars. It really should be a four and half. This album’s great, but it’s an origin story, and the later instalments were even better
Paul Simon
4/5
Some of the production is dated, and Cars Are Cars is just an odd choice in an otherwise very personal set of lyrics, but when Paul Simon is on he is on and he’s on for a good amount of this record. Train In The Distance and The Late Great Johnny Ace are two of the best songs he ever wrote
Michael Jackson
1/5
At the end of my Bad review, I made the claim that I preferred it to Thriller, despite how much I hated that album. Having listened to Thriller all the way through for the first time in ages, I’m not actually sure if that’s true. In fact, it’s one of those complicated feelings that arise when trying to criticise art you don’t like. In my opinion, Bad is actively worse as music, it has more baffling decisions musically, lyrically, and production wise. But listening to Thriller reminded me just how boring it is. The music is in general better, it has more Post-Disco edge than the safe Pop sound that Bad attempts, the lyrics have less ridiculous posturing, which means that they’re less funny but also less interesting.
Honestly there are two songs that actually I like, Baby Be Mine and Billie Jean, but Billie Jean’s been so overplayed that I can’t enjoy it any more. But so many of the songs rely on the trick of repeating Jackson’s vocals with an echo affect and badly synthesised keyboard beeps, coupled with a dry, hollow-sounding production, that I’ve always just hated the experience of listening to the album. It sounds like a commercial product rather than a piece of art that someone has bled, sweated, and cried over. And if the artist can’t be bothered to seem passionate about their work, I don’t see why I should be either
Tori Amos
5/5
My biggest gripe is the same that I have with literally every other album from the 90’s. It’s too long. Release this 10 years previous with three songs cut for time, and it’d be better.
The problem is that I can’t decide which should be the three songs cut, because they are all really good when listened to in isolation. The songwriting and musicianship are both top notch, and once used to Amos’ weird vocal stylings it’s much easier to appreciate the beauty of her vocals.
I was going to give this a four, but the excellent and fucking harrowing Me and a Gun pushed the album into a whole other stratosphere. I’m not sure I want to ever listen to it again.
4/5
The issue with the psychedelic era, really with any sort of experimental work is that history vindicates the aspects that inspire, but leaves other elements looking less than impressive.
For Sgt Peppers, this means that while songs like She’s Leaving Home, Within You Without You and particularly A Day In The Life still seem fresh and inspired others date the album very squarely to the mid to late 60’s.
I am naturally going to be suspicious of anything so long regarded as the greatest anything ever, and so have given Sgt Peppers a pretty wide berth in the past, which I do regret. For the most part, this is pretty good, and while it’s good songs are arguably better than many of The Beatles other good songs, it’s less inspired songs are just fine
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
Bruce Springsteen has always been an artist of two sides, one representing the joyful exuberance that can be found in life’s simple pleasures, in dancing, in singing, in drinking with friends, in flirting and crushes and love and relationships, and in the beauty of music itself.
The other is the dark side of life, the struggles of broken people living broken lives, marred by lost love, economic strife, crime, inadequacy, and misplaced ambition.
It is a sign of a great artist to be able to deal with both sides of life with equal weight, and Springsteen is in a unique position of being both a great artist and highly successful and popular Pop artist. This position has unfortunately left him in another, less enviable, position, that of one of the most misrepresented artists in history. Very few people have so succinctly, so beautifully, and so heartbreakingly represented the life of the proletariat, but the overwhelming image of him is that of an unthinking patriot, proclaiming that he was Born In The USA with overwhelming pride in the evident greatness of his motherland.
Nobody who has listened to Nebraska could possibly make that mistake again. It is a stark, desperate, downer of an album, the stories those of people pushed to the edge by economic circumstance, who inevitably take desperate action in an attempt to get out.
What Springsteen does best is to represent the human behind the action. In very few words he is able to show the thoughts and situations driving his characters. I read a fascinating article in the Guardian magazine yesterday about whether or not song lyrics can be read as literature. One factor the author considered was that of performance:
‘Vocal delivery, melody, rhythm, arrangement and production are all used to enhance, or sometimes subvert, what the words are saying.
Consider Nick Cave’s 1988 song The Mercy Seat. To cave, the indignant death-tow convict was clearly guilty but Johnny Cash later covered it on the assumption he was innocent. Same words, different impact.’
Springsteen has no doubt that his characters are guilty of the crimes they commit. What he asks the listener to do is to dive deeper beyond the basic crime and punishment narrative. Consider Highway Patrolman, one of my favourite songs on the album. Joe Roberts is a cop whose brother Frankie ‘ain’t no good.’ When he kills someone in unknown circumstances, Joe pursues Frankie right up to the Canadian Border, but lets him go. All he can think about is the good times that he has had with his brother, and justifies his own crime with the line ‘a man turns his back on his family, well he just ain’t no good.’
There is no redemption, no sense behind the violence, no justice for the dead mans friends or family. But there is an explanation behind Joe’s actions, and it forces the listener to put themselves in that situation. Anyone who tells you that it has an easy solution is lying, anyone who tells you that it doesn’t move them or make them think is an idiot with very limited taste.
The music is cause for further commendation, the desperate quiet and haunting harmonica and mandolin evoking the dark, empty highways and plains that make up the majority of the songs settings. It creates an intimacy that further forces you to empathise with the characters, Springsteen making it feel as if they are confiding with you directly.
Nebraska is one of the great pieces of American Art, a cry from the very soul of the working class that represents their hopes, dreams and failings. It deserves to be pondered over with the attention that we give Steinbeck and Zola, and will remain relevant while we are all still broken yet still have a reason to believe
Nirvana
4/5
So, what to do with MTV Unplugged In New York? While I do think this is a very good album, it’s got to be said that a lot of the initial and subsequent acclaim is very much because of it’s release only a few months after Cobain’s death. In the context of it being a final statement from one of the most important cultural figures of the 90’s it is haunting in it’s beauty, and fascinating in it’s mix of irony and sincerity, especially considering the implicit irony of the project: a punk band doing an acoustic set and covering Lead Belly. That’s just not a sentence you could make up.
But because of it’s importance as a cultural document and Nirvana’s general importance as a cornerstone of Gen X culture, Unplugged has become a target for pretty shameless hyperbole. One quote I read from Charles M. Young in the Rolling Stone Album guide suggested that Cobain could have "revolutionized folk music the same way he had rock,” which… yeah man, I guess he could have, there’s no way to prove that he couldn’t’ve. But we’ll never be able to tell for certain based on an hour of deep cuts, covers and one Blues standard. The urban legend is that Cobain was looking at making the next Nirvana album with Michael Stipe of R.E.M. which would of course mean that it would be folky and acoustic, but after Cobain died, R.E.M. released the hardest, glammest album of their career. Who’s to say it wouldn’t be more like that?
Unplugged is the Nirvana album that I return to least, and I have a good experience listening to it each time, but I don’t feel the need to return to it as often.
At the beginning of Where Did You Sleep Last Night Cobain makes a joke about the Lead Belly estate trying to sell him one of Lead Belly’s guitars for $500,000. In 2020, the guitar Cobain used during Unplugged was sold at auction for $6 million. And if that’s not the best metaphor for the hyperbolic reaction to the recording, I don’t know what is
Queen
3/5
I really like 4 songs, Brighton Rock, Killer Queen, Stone Cold Crazy, and She Makes Me (Stormtrooper in Stilettos.) Bring Back That Leroy Brown really pissed me off for a reason I can’t quite put my finger on. The rest I mostly found just kinda forgettable. It’s a problem I have with Queen in general. Their Pop songs are so much better than their prog or stadium stuff, Bo Rhap excepted
Slipknot
4/5
The energy is fantastic, and it’s interesting to see how well the use of electronics, sampling and particularly record scratches fit within the sound. Unlike other Nu-Metal with record scratches it doesn’t feel out of place, but like an additional texture to the soundscape, as it really should be.
Unfortunately it’s also a long album, when it doesn’t necessarily need to be. The second half is less memorable than the first.
I think it’s probably a 3.5, so am teetering between a 3 and a 4. Ultimately I enjoyed it more than I didn’t, the energy and riffs on the less memorable tracks are still fun, so I’m gonna go with the 4
Nas
5/5
It probably is the greatest Rap album of all time, with immaculate rhymes, flow, storytelling, and beat work, but I’ve always been kinda fascinated by this album for another reason, which is that it is singularly responsible for most of Nas’ reputation nowadays. I don’t know any of his other albums, I’ve never felt the need to check them out, because this one is just so good
G. Love & Special Sauce
3/5
There’s definitely a place for bar band music in the world. But, is there really enough space on a limited list of absolutely essential albums for it? I don’t feel like I have a better understanding of the world after having listened to this, I don’t feel like I understand any musical trend, better understand where any specific artist got any ideas. I just feel like having a drink, ignoring the band and just talking with friends.
It’s fine, it might be worth throwing on at a party, but it’s definitely not worthy of a spot on this list
Elton John
4/5
I enjoyed this one a lot more than I did Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. The songs are all long, but they’re filled with great instrumentation and arrangement, and Elton John’s voice is as good as ever. I even enjoyed Indian Sunset, not knowing enough about Native American history to recognise which bits were historically inaccurate which seems to be the main complaint
John Cale
5/5
Gorgeous, an album filled with little avant-pop gems that’s complex enough to keep returning to again and again
Roxy Music
1/5
Is it fair to dislike something for trying too hard? It’s a feeling I have towards a lot of progressive music, a sense that the music is secondary to the performance. But for a group like Roxy Music, who were only tangentially Prog? Is it reductive, missing the point to dislike Glam for being over the top?
In the case of the two other great British Glammers, Bowie and Bolan, the answer is certainly a yes, but that’s because the style was mostly restricted to their image rather than the music. The music stands on it’s own without the costumes and pageantry; Bowie could have dressed in a potato sack and Starman would still have been a hit.
Roxy Music are, to my knowledge, seen less as style icons, and so their music must stand on it’s own. And I don’t think it does. I read a description of Re-Make/Re-Model before I listened to the track, and it came over as so fan-wanky that I probably put myself off. It’s not a song, it’s a load of ideas smashed behind a piano beat. ‘Oh, what if the guitar just played single notes until the solo, when we just play chords?’ ‘Oh, what if the keyboard just played random notes occasionally?’ ‘Oh, what if we quoted The Beatles and Wagner right after each other? That’d show how cool and irreverent we are. Post-Modernism!’ Oh, and it distracts from the fact that we mostly just sing about girls.
I’m not saying that every song has to be a State Of The Nation novel or a commentary on fame and fortune or everyday ennui: there is a place for love songs. I’m just not sure I want my love songs to quote Ride of the fucking Valkyries, or to be wrapped up in so many layers of irony and references that it becomes evident the composer is just trying to impress the listener with how clever they are. Recently, I’ve been watching Community while it’s still on Netflix, and what’s struck me is how little the various pop culture references actually affect the core of the emotional story the writers are trying to tell. Community’s reference humour is a way of presenting a love letter to culture, on top of a deeper story about a flawed man learning to accept his flaws by letting people into his heart. The irony is only skin deep, a reflection of Jeff’s character. Roxy Music’s irony is down to the bone, and as such it becomes very hard to appreciate, because there is no other substance to attach to
Metallica
5/5
By scaling down the excesses of their more complex Thrash Metal albums, Metallica were able to breakthrough to the mainstream with a strong, sleek and heavy-ass Metal album. The really interesting thong about The Black Album is how, despite the relative dearth of riffs compared to say …And Justice For All, Hetfield et al are able to play around with variations, creating interesting interpretations and interpolations of their own and, in the case of Don’t Tread On Me, others music. It makes for a fun experience to listen to, even if the lyrics are a bit of a downer. But, in true Metal spirit, the lyrics are personal enough to provide for an interesting examination of Hetfield as a character. It’s a very personal set of lyrics, dealing with trauma regarding family, addiction, and mental health. Recently, Metallica have been emphasising the joy of life, ‘Are you alive? How does it feel to be alive?’ has become a rallying cry at their concerts, and I think that the seed of that joy was planted during the Black Album. It’s an album full of pain and anger, but it’s music is still so full of life and beauty. Despite all the shit, they’re still kicking. And there’s something really inspiring about that
Miriam Makeba
4/5
Of all of the non-English language albums I’ve reviewed so far, this one felt the most as if I was missing something by not speaking the language. The songs all sound vibrant and full of life, and Makeba’s voice is fantastic and very reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald, which can only be a good thing. But there does just seem to be something missing without the context of lyrical understanding. Are they anti-Apartheid protest songs? Folk songs like House Of The Rising Sun? Songs of Heartbreak like Where Does It Lead? Novelties like The Naughty Little Flea? I have no idea, but I’d like to know.
It feels a bit mean to dock a star simply because I don’t understand some lyrics, but I think it’s partially the album’s fault for being otherwise so engaging that I want to know more about it
Syd Barrett
1/5
Fucking really?
Stevie Wonder
5/5
I have a hard time explaining just what I love about Stevie Wonder, and this album is no exception. It’s perfect, and that’s all you’re getting from me
The Who
4/5
I can only find the expanded version, which I do think is pretty good, but I have to imagine that the impact of the original single album version was greater when it was first released. I don’t think it quite stands out against other live albums on this list, I don’t think I’m going to be returning to it with the frequency I do James Brown At The Apollo, Johnny Cash’s Prison Recordings, or Live And Dangerous. But it’s still a fun listen, I was never bored during the hour and 15 minutes
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
1/5
I was teetering towards a 2 because there were a couple of songs that I didn’t mind, and the rest of the albums biggest crime is that it’s just a bit slow and samey.
But Green Eyes really took away any good will I had toward those tracks. Who on earth thought it was a good idea to let Cave record that?
Billie Holiday
5/5
What Billie Holiday’s voice lost due to age and health issues, it more than made up for with experience and gravitas. There is no-one better at portraying the emotional turmoil of life and love.
And if I may rant for a little, I think it’s a shame that we’ve lost the shared cultural heritage of standards. Lady In Satin presents possibly some definitive versions of some, but there are dozens of other interpretations of a lot of these songs, and they’re all fantastic. American’s especially, this is your culture, this is your contributions to art and to the great folk tradition that you’re ignoring. Just, go and listen to some Standards, please
Funkadelic
5/5
Every 16 year old who has sat noodling on a guitar for hours at a time has, directly or not, been channeling the excellent title track to this excellent Funk album. I'd heard good things about the song years before ever actually checking it out, and when I first went to listen to the track itself I was trepidatious, but it really is that good. The rest of the album feels as if it should pale in comparison, but it holds it's own pretty well, managing to incoporate Funk, R&B and Hard Rock into an enjoyable and cathartic blend of protest music
The Prodigy
2/5
There was only one song outside of the singles that really stood out as relistenable, Climbatize. Otherwise I thought it was all a bit poser-ish. They claim to be bringing Punk to electronic music, and then make an hour long album with only 10 tracks, most of which was mid tempo and boring, and on the few songs that had lyrics, was quite misogynistic. Sounds exactly like Punk to me!
Alice Cooper
5/5
Much like the great Vincent Furnier, I also often spontaneously break into show tunes mid-way through street fights.
If I may make a comparison that I assure you, dear reader, will hurt me more than yourself, I think a good point of comparison to Alice Cooper in their early years as a band is KISS. Both were known for their shocking makeup, theatrical live shows, and heavy Rock sound. And Alice Cooper pull it off so much more effectively. KISS, outside of their look, were always just another run-of-the-mill 70’s Hard Rock group. There was some Blues influence on some of the slower tracks, and some of the poppier ones could be considered Glam-adjacent but the only thing that could be considered actually interesting about their music and performances was all due to the makeup and the pyrotechnics.
Alice Cooper got to the theatricality first. And they did it while also making music that was strange and experimental without sacrificing any of it’s Proto-Punk edge. School’s Out, their fifth album, is the project where their theatrical nature first came to the forefront of their sound. Their third album Love It To Death had refined their early sound into a classic Hard Rock rasp, and following album Killer had introduced a more Glam and Experimental edge with a horn section and multi-part suites. School’s Out sticks with these innovations and dials them up to 11. There are more horns, more keyboards, more nods to Musical Theatre. It’s an ambitious project that, like the excellent Blue Turk, often feels like it’s about to fall apart into a ramshackle mess, but is always somehow kept together.
I think the key to the musics stickativeness is also the key to my preference to the band over KISS. Listen to the musical and vocal run in the second half of My Stars verse. It’s a fairly sophisticated musical phrase. When I showed it to my brother, he suggested it sounded a bit like a flamenco run. And yet it’s held together in a Hard Rock context by Alice Cooper himself, and the sheer attitude with which he sings the damn thing. Attitude. That’s all it is. But attitude is so important in Rock, and if your personality is gonna be that of a group of Detroit street kids who try and shock with snakes, fake executions and quotations from Rodgers and Hammerstein, you’d better be secure in your convictions.
I really love the self awareness that this album has. It’s all a bit silly, and over the top. But as a semi-concept album about high school losers and jokers, that makes perfect sense. We’re all a bit silly and over the top in school, trying to make an impression, trying to make the best of our time of relative freedom before bing ground up by the capitalist work system.
I’ve always assumed that Alma Mater was an answering machine message sent to the narrator’s high school buddied before he left for college or work in the big city, and his realisation that despite having thought of his time as that of a ‘lifer in the state penitentiary’ he’s actually gotten out. And he’s likely never gonna see these people ever again. But at least they’ll always have the memories… they’re never gonna forget each other… right… right?
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
5/5
I think that the overwhelming view of Neil Young as an artist is that of a songwriter, rather than than that of a musician. He’s a great lyricist, he’s able to compose great Folk-Country songs like those found on his best-selling album, Harvest.
And as accurate as the assessment of him as a great librettist and composer is, it forgets an equally important part of Neil Young’s legacy. That part is that, as a lead guitarist, he fucking rips.
Ragged Glory is ultimately a Jam record, an album that works best when considering that it was made by a group of experienced musicians who are simpatico with each each other. And as such, I think it works much better than other albums by similar groups of jamming musicians, firstly because it’s an album where a group of tight musicians allow themselves the opportunity to jam for the first time in forever, and secondly because they have the grounding of Neil Young’s songs, a luxury that a lot of Jam bands could try harder to achieve. Seriously, the only reason Jam bands are a thing is because they can’t write decent songs.
Most of all, there’s a sense of fun that Young hadn’t had for a while, a sense of just making music for the fun of it, rather than trying to experiment for the sake of it. And it’s pretty infectious, this is just a fun album to listen to. And for that, it’s one of my favourites
Pixies
5/5
First time I’ve gone through Doolittle in ages, and it was surprising how diverse it is. I am slightly in awe of just how good Doolittle is, the production, the songwriting, the performances and big fat bass tone. It’s a perfect album, and a perfect distillation of pre-Nirvana alternative
Super Furry Animals
4/5
This feels like the sort of album Beck was going for with Guero, but Super Furry Animals pull it off so much better. The psychedelic and electronic elements work well together, and the lyrics and their humour are enjoyable and thought provoking. I’d have to spend some more time with it, I think, to fully get it, but I enjoyed it a lot on a first listen through
The Go-Go's
4/5
Is this where American Pop-Punk comes from? It leans a little more towards the Pop side than the acts that would pop up in the mainstream with this sound in the next decade, but everything’s there; the unpolished vocals, the surf-inspired leads. Take the riff to Lust To Love, it could totally be a prototype to various Offspring riffs, The Kids Aren’t Alright comes immediately to mind.
It’s a shame that The Go-Go’s didn’t seem to follow through on the promise of Beaty and the Beat, and that their influence didn’t seem to last in the mainstream, because as much as I enjoy the album, it is unpolished, the songwriting could do with a little push to be truly great. Imagine what a Led Zep II level follow-up could have done for female-lead Rock music in the 80’s. But then there’s no point speculating, and what we have in Beauty and the Beat is a fun and infectious little New Wave masterpiece
Pink Floyd
4/5
One of my big problems with Prog is that, while I find the bad stuff soulless and insipid, an attempt to impress rather than to create true art, I’m also not particularly impressed by the good stuff, finding that it never really rises above the level of pleasant sounding distraction. I’ve been assured by multiple people who like this genre that that is what they enjoy. Turning their brain off and just letting the music was over them. But that isn’t what floats my boat musically. I like hooks and emotion, rather than chops.
Pink Floyd’s run between DSOTM and The Wall is probably the best of the classic Prog, and it’s firmly within my parameters for ‘good’ Prog. I can happily put any of the albums on and essentially just nap for 40-80 minutes. And of all of these nap albums, I probably like Wish You Were Here the most. It’s got the title track, which has the emotion that I find lacking in other Prog projects, and is otherwise a pleasant bit of music to listen to. It’s still nowhere close to my favourite music ever, but it’s passable. And for this overrated slog of a genre, passable is the best that it can hope for
Megadeth
3/5
I’ve said before that I prefer other songwriting and structuring styles to Megadeth’s, but the most infuriating thing about Peace Sells… is that the title is by far the best written thing they’ve ever done. The rest of the album is fine, really quite good in fact, but it still sounds like a lot of riffs smashed together without much care. Peace Sells… builds, it feels like it earns it’s climax. And the fact that Mustaine et al prove that they can do it suggests that they willingly didn’t for the rest of the album. And that is infuriating
Jane's Addiction
5/5
Honestly, I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would. From reputation, I’d kind of associated Jane’s Addiction with the early Funk-Metal scene, and I’ve listened to enough RHCP to kinda put me off that for a lifetime, but this ended up being more much eclectic and affecting than anything the Chilli Peppers ever did. It was the one-two ending punch of the fun and gypsy-folk like Of Course and the gorgeous little pop of Classic Girl that really clinched it for me. I’m excited to check out more Jane’s Addiction
The White Stripes
4/5
Get Behind Me Satan is, I think, the second White Stripes album I ever bought, but the last one I got into. When I was young and impatient, I listened to Blue Orchid and loved it, but was always put off from the rest of the album because of The Nurse and it’s marimba.
It’s an odd album, and less immediately satisfying for that oddness, but it’s also the White Stripes album I think merits the most replays, because it reveals more of itself over repeated listens. And their is a lot to enjoy, from the gorgeous piano balladry of White Moon, the acoustic guitar work outs Forever For Her (Is Over For Me) and As Ugly As I Seem, and just a straight up Country heart break song in Little Ghost, the best song on the album.
But I agree that it isn’t without it’s flaws. Blue Orchid, much as I love it, does feel out of place, and that’s a complaint I have with the other harder songs as well. I also find some of the songs a bit difficult to differentiate by title alone, but the reason for that is that I spend most of my time with the album just letting it wash over me, rather than obsessing over the track listing.
I was reading a discussion about the Like feature of Letterbox and the gulf between a moderately reviewed film with a like and a perfect or near perfect review without one. Get Behind Me Satan is a four, but it’s a four with a like. It’s not the best White Stripes album, and I’m sure the other ones that come up on the list will be better rated. But I do have a sneaking suspicion that it’s my favourite
The White Stripes
5/5
Well, my first consecutive albums by the same artist, and after having declared that Get Behind Me Satan was possibly my favourite White Stripes album. Time to put my money where my mouth is?
Elephant is a more perfect work, an exploration of love and courtship, that’s always surprising in the tenderness displayed, despite the ragged nature of the duo’s music. Both I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother’s Heart and It’s True That We Love One Another are almost Country-esque in their corny sincerity. In The Cold, Cold Night is one of the most seductive things I’ve ever heard, and Meg White’s voice has an untrained sweetness that always reminded me of Mo Tucker. She’d do a great version of After Hours.
Oh man have I enjoyed my couple of days with the Whites. I’ve not listened to them for a while, and as soon as I heard the opening salvo to Seven Nation Army, I was in Uni again, watching bar bands cover it, getting the crowd to chant ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!’ along to the riff, doing my special melody to the final verse. I do still think that Get Behind Me Satan is my favourite of their albums; I have a soft spot for flawed works, I have a soft spot for vulnerability, I have a soft spot for acoustic works, it’s basically a perfect storm of soft spots for me. But Elephant is definitely a perfect work of art, and despite not being my favourite, it is damn, damn close
Alice Cooper
5/5
After doubling down on the experimentation aspect of their music with the excellent School’s Out, Alice Cooper’s next album Billion Dollar Babies is a relatively straightforward affair. By which I mean there are no horn sections of quotations from Musicals.
Billion Dollar Babies is bombastic and complex, often employing string sections and multi-layered arrangements of electric and acoustic guitars, but it does it without ever becoming overbearing. It’s complex and arranged, but also loud and funny, and because of the shock value lyrics never loses the edge that put them at the forefront of the American Glam movement.
Also it was Chris Cornell’s favourite album apparently, so that’s enough for me. God do I love Alice Cooper
The Zutons
2/5
I have copies of the Zuton’s first two albums that I bought from charity shops in secondary school. I always much preferred their second with the original version of Valerie. It’s been years since I’ve listened to this, and I’m not sure it’s quite held up. There a couple of pseudo-Country ballads that are quite good. I think my biggest complaint is that for a band that has arguably one of the more interesting quirks of line-up for an Indie band, not just a saxophonist but a female saxophonist at that, and then they just don’t utilise her in a very interesting way. Some of this music is begging for some ripping John Zorn alto riffs over the top, and instead we get some milquetoast horn squeaks.
I don’t think it’s a bad album by any means. Just inessential, and so kinda baffling
Simon & Garfunkel
5/5
There are very few albums which I have entirely liked on Spotify. I think it’s Led Zep IV, Rumours, and this one. Bridge Over Troubled Water really is perfect
The Rolling Stones
5/5
I maintain that the Stone’s run between Beggar’s Banquet and Exile On Main Street is one of the most perfect in popular music. Sticky Fingers is the third album in that run, and in many ways it’s possibly the best, or at least the most refined.
The real mvp of this album is the excellent second side, which is by turns beautiful, heartbreaking and so, so, soulful
Sepultura
3/5
I can see what they’re trying to do, and I can appreciate that it is (or was) a unique and interesting idea, but I don’t think it ever really lives up to the promise of the idea. Because of the focus on the rhythms of indigenous Brazilian music, the music is necessarily Groove Metal, and that unfortunately leaves something to be desired in the quality of the riffs; they’re all just a bit basic, and that’s really the cardinal sin for a metal album.
So, it’s a two for my quality of enjoyment, but I’ve bumped it to three because I can see what they were trying to do, and how it’s influenced other local non-western metal scenes
Turbonegro
5/5
So, a confession. In addition to actively taking part in this community by being on, and contributing to this site, I’m also on the subreddit. I post a daily review of a new album every day, which can often reach 1000 words. Yes, I am chronically online, how could you tell.
Anyway… I first heard about this album a few months ago when somebody put a post on the subreddit asking for why exactly it was on the list. The responses are actually very well thought through, especially for Reddit, with the best responses examining either a trend in the author’s choices regarding a liking for mixing of styles as displayed in Apocalypse Dudes’ mix of Glam and Punk, or a contextual explanation based on their influence on the role of back to basics guitar music in the early 2000’s.
However, the most suggested explanation as to why Turbonegro deserve a place on the 1001 albums to listen to before you die, is that they fucking rip. And as useful as putting the album into context is, I think that the latter reason is really the best justification. Apocalypse Dudes is undoubtedly one of the most exhilarating Rock albums I have ever had the pleasure to listen to. From the faux Who-esque Rock Opera opening of The Age Of Pamparius to the hilarious piss-taking final instrumental stretch outs of Good Head, this is absolutely some of the most fun I’ve had with a new album in a long, long time.
I’ve listened to Apocalypse Dudes three times today. I’m on my fourth listen through as I write this review. It is half one in the morning. I still feel like strutting around town in my leather jacket, stomping along to the beat, playing air guitar and acting like the most insufferable yet charismatic motherfucker (note: can’t say motherfucker, motherfucker) around.
The genius of Punk is that it’s DIY attitude can and should be inspiring. Unlike Prog, where you have to be a virtuoso (and also a boring fucker who enjoys writing boring 25 minute suites about being a wizard,) unlike Pop, where you have to be unnaturally pretty, and be willing to let a marketing team tell you what to do, Punk is liberating.
I get the same feeling I do with Apocalypse Dudes as I do the early British Punk bands. I want to go out and start my own band right now. I want to take on the world with a few like-minded individuals, present a wall of sound that fucking blows them apart, and take on the fucking world. I want to make music that makes other people feel the way I do about this album
Sarah Vaughan
4/5
It’s not the Sarah Vaughan album I’d have picked to be her representation on the list, but this was an enjoyable set. Vaughan seems more relaxed than usual, even intentionally butchering How High The Moon. It’s all quite fun, even if I don’t think it’s one of the more revolutionary or essential Jazz records
Amy Winehouse
5/5
What kind of fuckery would it be if I didn’t give this album a perfect score?
I once did a quiz where I took lines from poems and lyrics from pop songs and got people to guess which was which. The one that nobody got right was the second verse of He Can Only Hold Her, which I feel is worth quoting in full:
‘Even if she’s content in his warmth
She is plagued with urgency.
Searching kisses
The man she misses
The man that he longs to be.’
I mentioned that Amy was undoubtedly a confessional artist in my review of Frank, I mean it’s right there in the fucking title, but she reached a peak of Confessional songwriting with Back To Black that British Popular music has been trying and failing to reach ever since. The above quote is only one example of the brilliance, the clarity, subtlety, and understated emotion that Amy treated all of her lyrics. It’s perfect literary fodder; if you took the lyrics to both of her albums and released them as slim volume of Confessional verse, it’d’ve been acclaimed as a groundbreaking exploration of the psyche of a broken woman, unique in it’s use of dialect, and heartbreaking in it’s sincerity.
I have this theory about two albums in particular: Lady In Satin by Billie Holiday and Back To Black. They are Rorschach tests of a sort, perfect at diagnosing the specific emotional malaise that’s affecting the listener at the time. In the spirit of confession, I’ll go first. My favourite song from Back To Black is Just Friends, because I have the unfortunate habit of somehow ending up as the other man in affairs between couples. I have been in the narrator’s position in Just Friends more times than I’d like to admit. I know just how it feels to want to be intimate with someone without being able to, because their SO and his friends are in the next room over. It always starts with just being friends, moves onto something else, and ends with the plea to be just friends all over again. You long for the respite, where you’re able to enjoy each others company without the need for sex, just be together as a couple, without the emotional guilt that being alone as paramours gives. But it never comes.
Amy presents the story beautifully. There is no narratorial moralising, the relationship is presented in it’s unglamorous realism. It’s real in the way that only someone with lived experience can present something. And she’s able to do it with all of the different relationship dilemmas throughout the album. It’s a tremendous narrative feat.
I have another unfortunate habit. I fall in love with broken women, almost exclusively. And through my own brokenness, I help them to reach a point where they’re able to move on to better options. If I’d met Amy Winehouse, I would have fallen hopelessly in love with her. I’m hopelessly in love with her as it is. But this means I can see myself in both sides of the relationships she presents. I’m more similar to Amy than I’d like to admit. I’m more like the men she’d have fucked than I’d like to admit. And that really is the beauty of Confessional art, the confrontation of uncomfortable truths, and subsequent realisation of how fucked up we all are under the skin of respectability we present.
I’d have been perfect for Amy. And we’d have destroyed each other. And I understand that better every time I listen to this album. But I still can’t help but wonder. And that is the nature of philosophy as presented by professor Winehouse
Prince
5/5
I have listened to Sign O The Times in the past, but not for a while, and by god I was surprised at how quickly the time went by when listening to it.
I think this is Prince’s masterpiece when it comes to his songwriting. Reducing the amount of overtly sexual stuff and instead focusing on character driven narratives that are occasionally used as allegory, but are often just heartbreaking bits of social and emotional observation, he manages to create an album that is both timely in regard to it’s social criticism and timeless when it comes to the emotional core of the stories.
But because of the complex emotions of some of the songs, and the length of the album, I do think this is probably the hardest of Prince’s classic albums to get into. It’s an overall darker experience than anything outside of maybe Dirty Mind, but Dirty Mind’s darkness is almost entirely played for laughs, and Sign O The Times is dead serious
And then he writes funky goof off stuff like Housequake, which is just a jam. I really love people sometimes
Moby
4/5
Play is at it’s best when it’s being beautiful chill out electronic music, Porcelain and Inside being the best examples. I actually think that the Soul and Blues samples that should be it’s most interesting part are where the album is at it’s weakest.
Anyway, I’m here to talk about Moby as a cultural figure. How weird is it that he keeps turning up as jokes in sitcoms I love, with the same actor who sort of looks like Moby playing him both times. He’s had this very noticeable impact on American pop culture, while not necessarily leaving much of his own work behind. I don’t remember ever having heard a Moby song in the wild before, but I know what he looks like, I know who he is and what he does, all because of my consumption of TV shows. And I find that fascinating.
Def Leppard
2/5
For the record, when I’ve mentioned ‘bad and boring slabs of party rock’ in my previous reviews, this has been what I’ve been talking about.
Almost always the same plodding mid slow tempo throughout the album, with the occasional spot where they go double time for half a bar. Hair Metal has the exact same problem as Prog to me; I have no idea why anyone would want to sound like this.
By which I mean the quality of the music itself. The extra point I’m going to give this is for the production, because this sounds fantastic. Such a shame that this sound is attached to this over-hyped nonsensical bore of an album.
And I’ve not even mentioned the lyrics, which were so uniformly sexist as to put me in a bad mood from the first track. I mean fuck me man, that one was bad
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
2/5
So, I played it while drinking last night, and got through the whole thing, I even think I kind of enjoyed the opening 20 minute song a bit. But playing it again this morning, I’m really not sure. It doesn’t bring out the burning passionate hatred I have for other Prog bands, but I’m sure I’m never going to listen to this again, because I don’t like it.
Although I’m listening to Infinite Space at the moment and getting quite irritated at the constant plinky plonky piano.
I’d have been more interested if it really was so bad I could hate it. But I’m mostly disappointed because I’m just unmoved
Beatles
5/5
For ages, I resisted the Beatles. My parents were of the Punk generation, and so disliked the Beatles on principal, and so never played them, even actively disparaged them. And so, I grew up not just not liking the Beatles, but making the case that they were overrated, like a lot of a certain kind of edgelord little shits.
It’s only through my involvement in this project that I’ve actually sat down and started actively listening to the band. And for that I’m glad for two reasons. 1.) I have been introduced to a lot of actually genuinely really good music. 2.) I think that even if I had listened to the Beatles earlier, I wouldn’t have got it. This is good music to discover as an adult.
And so I think I have to say it. I am a Beatles fan. It’s not an easy thing to admit. But I like the Beatles. And Rubber Soul is one of my favourite of their albums. It’s the perfect mix of earlier Pop success and experimentation with new and exciting ideas. It’s also got my favourite Beatles song on it, In My Life. Even the disturbing Run For Your Life is inconsequential enough that it doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the rest of the album.
So there you go. I’ve been converted. Damn
The Avalanches
4/5
I kind of admire Plunderphonics more than I actually like it. When I was first getting into Hip-Hop, I had one of my life’s first serious discussions about art when debating sampling as an art form with my mother. For what it’s worth, my mother is a fairly typically lower middle-class white woman, who with all the best will in the world, fell off of from popular music forms in the late 80’s. I think I managed to convince her of the art of the sample, and later about the art of rapping in general, during that conversation. She’ll now happily listen to whatever Rap I happen to be listening to, and can engage in a pretty good discussion about Kendrick Lamar if pressed.
Despite my passionate defending of sampling as a form of reinterpretation and contextualisation, when it comes to my own active listening, I tend to stick with the more conservative example set by Hip-Hop, where the sample’s job is simple, and the lyrics and flow are the real stars of the artistic show. The Beastie Boys early albums and A Tribe Called Quest were the masters of this sort of style, taking either recognised and recognisable samples, or more obscure Jazz, R&B and Soul, and incorporating them into a backbeat for their rhymes. It’s a tried and tested formula, and for me, as reinterpretation and contextualisation I find it works beautifully.
As such, I can appreciate Plunderphonics from a philosophical point of view. Taking the underlying idea (wouldn’t it be cool if we took this Black Sabbath riff and put a John Bonham beat under it?) and applying a maximalist vision to it (wouldn’t it be cool if we took a load of different samples and made a whole song without the rapping with them?) it served to create an entirely new art form.
I am primarily a writer, focusing mostly on Realistic short stories and novels and Romantic and Confessional poetry, and I’ve engaged in Plunderphonics literary equivalent, Found Poetry, many times. I can understand the artistic drive behind the style very well. And as such, I’m not going to make the statement I so often make when I don’t like an album or style, that I have no idea why someone would want to make music that sounds like this, for two reasons: 1.) I think that Since I Left You sounds pretty fantastic, both regarding the music itself and the quality of it’s production, and 2.) I absolutely understand the artistic reasoning behind making an album that sounds like this.
But despite all of the appreciation, I still struggle with full enjoyment of Since I Left You specifically, and electronic music in general. It’s a genre that seems, to me, to be rooted in a fairly specific place, that of a club or a rave, and I struggle to find a time when I would want to sit down and listen to it just as music. Outside of the singles intended specifically to be played on dancefloors, it seems to be a very album heavy genre, where the intention is to sit and listen (or dance and listen, I guess) to the full experience in one go. And for albums over a certain length, and under a certain track number, I find that quite difficult. My brain is primed for short bursts. My two most listened to genres are Rock and Jazz, and they both scratch different itches that electronica never seems to be able to reach.
I quite enjoyed the experience of listening to Since I Left You, despite it losing me a little in the last quarter. It’s music I find I can put in in the background and concentrate to. But I can never bring myself to love it. That is a failure on my part, no doubt. But a failing I believe I share with a great number of the general listening public. Electronica is, I suspect, a ride or die genre. And I’m afraid my ride or die genre is Jazz. I’ve spent my time tuning my ear to that genre and it’s styles and intricacies, to the detriment of other ride or die genres. I made my choice, and I don’t regret it.
But I did appreciate Since I Left You
Metallica
4/5
I’m quite a big Metallica fan, and weirdly this was the first of their albums I ever bought. I got it from a antique shop that had a box of random CD’s, most of which were either in broken cases, or not in their cases at all. I got S&M, mostly because I thought the title was hilarious, and Hot Fuss by the Killers, which ended up being the European version with Change Your Mind in it’s proper place and Glamorous Indie Rock & Roll as a bonus track.
Despite having owned it for years, I didn’t listen to S&M all the way through until after having become a Metallica fan, which I think is for the best. This is a long and pretty extra project. And to be clear, I love it. I’ve said multiple times before that Metallica’s style of songwriting scratches my brain in the same way that classical does, and the addition of a literal orchestra does nothing to dispel that idea in my mind.
But I also see this as a project that is absolutely aimed towards die hard fans rather than the casual listener. Metallica may have been on top of the world in 1999, but that doesn’t mean that the average listener, no matter how much they enjoyed The Black Album wants to listen to 2 and a quarter hours of deep cuts performed with the San Francisco Symphony. To the casual listener, this is probably tedious. But if you’re already into the band, then this is a masterpiece, a reinterpretation of a load of great songs, and a unique and interesting functional Greatest Hits from a band that’s unlikely to ever put out a traditional Greatest Hits album. I do love it, but I can see why people wouldn’t
The Jesus And Mary Chain
4/5
I’m not sure why, but I enjoyed this a hell of a lot more than I did Psychocandy. I made the observation with my review of that album that although I like a lot of the music that Paychocandy inspired, for the album in and of itself, I was never a fan. Darklands may have changed my mind.
And the baffling thing is, I really don’t think it’s that different. Darklands has maybe a fuller sound, and relies less heavily on the crushing distortion. I think the real difference is that they stopped overtly ripping off their influences in the Ramones and the Stooges, and instead focused their effort on incorporating them into much better songwriting.
The only complaint I have is that Psychocandy has Just Like Honey, which is an all time classic Pop song, and Darklands just doesn’t have that standout track. If it did, it’s be an easy five stars. As it is, it’ll have to settle for a four, and the knowledge that I’m definitely gonna go back and give Psychocandy a second shot, based on my much I enjoyed this one
Louis Prima
3/5
A confession. I have mentioned Louis Prima previously, in a rather disparaging manner during my Fats Domino Review. For some reason, I seemed to think he was an early Rock n Roller. And so, Mr Prima, I apologise. I shouldn’t have misgenred you like that.
While, I can see The Wildest being a good introduction to pre-R&B Black American music, I’m still not entirely sold on it in it’s own right. Prima seems to me to belong to that group of musicians who are entertainers more than they are artists. I want to like it more than I do, but I’m not sure Prima is really an important artist. In a world where we have Louis Armstrong, do we need another husky, charismatic trumpet player. Especially when Louis Armstrong is one of the greatest musicians of all time. I’m not against Prima, this album is a solid 7 out of 10. But it isn’t Louis Armstrong
Crowded House
3/5
Reminiscent of both Steely Dan and Squeeze, this is good solid Power Pop of the sort that I enjoy, to an extent. I think it’s problem is that unlike Steely Dan and Squeeze, who are both observational and tragic, Woodface is just observational. There should be more pathos in the storytelling, because it’s there in the music. As it is, it’s enjoyable, but never quite elevates itself to more than that
The Cure
5/5
Disintegration is one of the most perfect albums ever recorded, a dense musical soundscape that perfectly captures the Gothic origin of Romantic literature by recreating the Sublime landscapes that inspired the movement, and transposing them into a decaying Urban sprawl. This has always sounded like London at 3am, the witching hour, despite having been recorded in a village in Oxfordshire.
On top of the sheer beauty of it’s sound, Disintegration never manages to lose it’s emotional core, and confirms my belief that, although teenagers for sure love this, existential dread and despair become all the more potent the closer you get to your 30’s.
I’ve never taken hallucinogens, but if I did, I’d take them to this album. Which may be missing a point, possibly but fuck it, Disintegration’s too good
Marvin Gaye
5/5
I try, if I can, to write comprehensive reviews of albums, reviews that deal with theme as well as content, that examine how I see an album in it’s historical, social, political and, of course, musical context. It’s a fun exercise, but the amount of material I’m able to get from an album depends heavily on my relationship to the genre, to the artist, and to the theme. I’m usually able to muster a good 1000 words for an album or genre I know and love, or a project I’m new to, but which deals with a theme or style I can talk at length about.
I could easily do a 1000 words or more about What’s Going On. But how can you criticise an album that somebody has already perfectly described as ‘Sex -The Album?’
I don’t like it as much as What’s Going On, obviously, but it’s still a great soul album. Keep on getting it on
Alanis Morissette
4/5
It loses momentum a little in the second half, but the opening five songs is an almost perfect run, full of infectious 90’s energy
Janis Joplin
5/5
Janis Joplin’s voice is a marvel of nature, and Pearl should be absolutely heart-breaking, but it’s full of such genuine Joie-de-vivre that it’s difficult to allow yourself to wallow. Just revel in the beautiful humanity of it all
Bauhaus
4/5
It’s not got anything quite as instantly memorable as Bela Lugosi’s Dead, but my god did I enjoy this one. I’ve been having a real Gothic/Romantic thing recently, I’ve been watching Castlevania, I’ve been reading early Russian Romantic prose, and Mask is a really good representation of why this style is called Gothic Rock, because it absolutely exudes the same atmosphere as the crushing emotional and spiritual drama that Gothic literature does. Mask really gets going on Of Lilies And Remains, with it’s fascinating beat and Spoken Word lyrics, and then doesn’t let up for the rest of the album. This is yet another instance where I wish this were a 10 star system, cos this is a solid 4.5
Iron Maiden
4/5
I’ve tried to get into Iron Maiden in the past, and have always been put off by the faux-operatic vocals, partly because nobody ever did it as well as Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple. Maybe I should have started with this album because Paul Di’anno’s voice is really doing it for me.
Outside of the vocals, the music is enjoyable. I especially like the noteless riff in Runnin’ Free and the mid section of Charlotte The Harlot
Sparks
5/5
A really enjoyable Glam album, I’m glad I got the opportunity to listen to beyond This Town Ain’t Big Enough.
This is absolutely the sort of album that I’m likely to fall in love with on multiple listens, so I’m gonna jump the gun and give it a five on the knowledge that I will definitely be listening again.
Leonard Cohen
5/5
I’ve used the term Cohenesque a number of times over these reviews to describe the way various artists are able to utilise the craft of songwriting in a way that is both sincere and ironic, personal and universal, philosophical and sensual.
Leonard Cohen is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan, he has a better sense of style regarding lyrics, which are immaculate and poetic, and is also better at crafting melody, there’s a reason he slotted so perfectly into 80’s synthpop.
But Songs of Leonard Cohen is a folk album through and through, and what a folk album. At turns both seductive and sinister, Cohen gives us his thoughts on religion, philosophy and sexuality with a wit that’s dryer than the best martini, and a compassion that cuts clear through the irony.
It’s also often, weirdly soothing, the sort of album you can put on and just vibe with, imagining Suzanne and her oranges, and debating with Cohen about spirituality and sex
Adam & The Ants
4/5
This is such an odd album, because on one hand it’s full of goofy shit like the gun shot effects on Los Rancheros, and the line, ‘Ant music for Sex people, Sex music for Ant people’ and then you get the genuinely fascinating effect of having two drummers playing the same groove at the same time, and the fantastically evil riff to Ants Invasion, which I’m sure has been used by the occult Folk-Metal band Green Lung since (check those guys out, their stuff is fantastic)
I think I kinda love it. It’s genuinely pretty stupid, but it’s a stupid that’s pretty big dumb fun
The Flaming Lips
2/5
It took me a little while to get round to The Soft Bulletin, but when I did I really enjoyed it. I listened to Yoshimi the day I got it, and… I feel like I’m missing something.
I mostly found it just a bit boring and not very memorable. It all seems to blend into one, mid tempo, strummed acoustic guitar lead song with some electronic instrumentation and a guy whining in the background.
I feel like I’m being unfair. This doesn’t seem like bad music at all, just a little, uninspired. Maybe I need to give it more time to really settle in, but I also just, can’t be bothered to listen to it again?
Goldfrapp
5/5
Based on other reviews, I was expecting a dreary, almost ambient affair, but Seventh Tree really surprised me. It’s a gorgeous sounding, often folky affair with often great lyrics often full of bits of great observation.
It may have been enhanced by the setting. I listened to this on a walk along a windy beach front, checking the windows of the shops and hotels for help wanted signs. I’ve recently moved house, and am looking for a job, and so the melancholy existentialism fit my mood and the setting perfectly. But I’m otherwise a sucker for this sort of depressing dreamy Folk Pop, I think I’d have enjoyed this regardless of my circumstances.
I will 100% come back to this, so I’m tempted to give it a five, cos I’m sure I’ll fall more in love with it. Screw it, listening to Caravan Girl again clinched it for me
Hüsker Dü
3/5
I quite like Hüsker Dü. In Sixth Form, I had a period where I listened to as much 80’s Indie and Alternative as possible, spurred by my discovery of and subsequent adoration for The Replacements. Hüsker Dü were a part of that discovery, and I came to them through Zen Arcade, because I was given to understand that it was widely seen as their best album, and Candy Apple Grey, because I found a cheap copy of it for sale on Amazon.
I’ve listened to most of their other albums since, but never got round to Warehouse, and listening to it now, I think there’s a reason for that. It’s good, it’s fine, it’s a collection of perfectly acceptable Pop Punk songs. But it doesn’t quite have that something that elevated their best albums. It doesn’t have the raw narrative, emotional, and musical power of Zen Arcade, it doesn’t have Candy Apple Grey’s incessant Pop hooks, or crushing ballads. I find it’s relative inoffensiveness more disheartening than if it had just been downright bad, because I know this band can do so much better.
If you want the Hüsker Dü album you really should listen to before you die, listen to Zen Arcade. It’s not their best, or their most consistent, but it is their most ambitious and probably their most important and influential for it’s ambition. Warehouse was a bizarre choice. This band is so much more
Led Zeppelin
5/5
I think that this one gets a little left out in the general Led Zep conversation, which is a shame. It’s also seen as their acoustic record, which is understandable, but that doesn’t do justice to the rockers, which are all fucking barnburners, or Since I’ve Been Loving You which is just a masterpiece Blues jam.
It’s the ‘essential’ Led Zep album I come back to least, but when I do I remember how much I like it. It’s a high 9
Radiohead
4/5
Denser and more complex than anything Radiohead had recorded to that point, it’s probably their least good album of their classic period. It’s also their album that I have the most songs liked on Spotify. It’s not my favourite, I have a greater reaction to the more emotional songwriting of The Bends, but the songs I love on it are among my favourite Radiohead songs. It’s not a mixed bag necessarily, it’s still Radiohead. But I don’t like the lesser songs as much as I like the lesser songs on their other albums
Taylor Swift
3/5
I think I’ve seen this film before.
There were three big sides to pick in 2020, Biden vs Trump, Vaxxed vs Unvaxxed, Folklore vs Evermore. There is no over-exaggeration in this metaphor at all.
Folklore and Evermore are sister albums, both featuring a similar aesthetic of Indie Folk Pop focusing on stories of love, heartbreak, infidelity, all set against a background of a New England Autumn and Winter. I don’t actually know about the New England part, I’m from Old England, my knowledge of New England comes from watching The West Wing and completely falling in love with Noah Kahan’s Stick Season album last year.
As an artist, I do understand the instinct to want to stay within a world you’ve created. There’s a sense that you’ve put the work into creating the world, why not stick with it, there are more stories to be told? And a lot of the time, this can be an effective strategy. Balzac, Trollope and Galdos all wrote novel series with multiple returning characters where each individual work functions as an effective work in it’s own right.
But on the other hand, taking each work as it’s own distinct experience has it’s own benefits. It forces you to think about the individuality of each work, about the specifics of the style you’re using, of the story you’re trying to tell. Looking through the Wikipedia page for Evermore tells us that a lot of the reviews referred to the album as the ‘scrappy, freewheeling and bold’ younger sister to the ‘careful, introspective and hopelessly Romantic’ Folklore. I might be showing something about my own soul here, or maybe just betraying the fact that I am myself an elder sibling, but I feel the care, introspection and Romanticism of Folklore makes for a much more consistently interesting, dynamic, and beautiful album than scrappy boldness does.
I don’t think Evermore is necessarily a bad album. It has the same basic instincts as Folklore, and I like Folk music about relationships and love more than I like most other music that you care to name. To continue the literary comparison, Folklore feels like a novel, a large plotted narrative with enough digressions to fill out the world. It establishes the world, the characters and the style remarkably well.
Evermore feels like the collection of short stories that the author published to cash in on the success of the novel. A lot of the songs are very good, but it all feels as if the author isn’t ready to move on. They’ve created this world, and have ideas for how to utilise it, but not enough ideas to fill out a full narrative. Instead we get vignettes.
Checking the Taylor Swift Subreddit, one commenter says that ‘[Swift] has said she sees Folklore as an album about conflict and Evermore as an album about endings.’ While I can’t speak for the truthfulness of this statement, if it is true, it does go some way to justifying my interpretation. The interesting parts of novels are all about conflict, the ending is really the last part that should be considered. With stories, the ending is what’s important, you want to start the story as late as possible, so that you get to the resolution quickly.
There is a place for this approach in literature. There is a place for this approach in songwriting. It all comes down to preference at the end of the day. And I’ve always been a keep the resolution til the very end kind of guy. Keep up the conflict.
All this 500-ish words has been to say, I am a Folklore guy. In my opinion it should have been on this list rather than Evermore. But I can see why Evermore is here. It’s all a question of preference. I have mine. The list compiler has theirs.
And for what it’s worth, I think Hoax has a perfect ending for the story of Folklore. ‘You know the hero died, so what’s the movie for?’ It’s existential, it’s meaningless, it comes out of nowhere. The heroine spends her time screaming at cliffs for a meaning. It’s the ending a Romantic story should have. And then she makes puns about the actual Romantics in the epilogue bonus track? Folklore should have absolutely been on this list, it would have been a five no doubt
Lightning Bolt
2/5
Wonderful Rainbow’s problem is that it’s both too weird and not weird enough
Derek & The Dominos
1/5
My god, how do you fuck up Little Wing so badly? Little Wing is perfect because it’s understated, because it’s soft and pretty, because Jimi’s delivery imbues the song with a sense of true love, a sense that he can’t quite express himself properly through his words, and so lets loose with the most beautiful, most heartbreaking guitar solo ever. You don’t turn it into this lumbering cod blues jam, you don’t make it big and loud as a way of expressing mY eMoTiOnS!! It’s emotional enough already, and it’s a song about love you fucking moron, not heartbreak! Jesus, how fucking badly can you fuck something up.
I was going to be charitable, because I like the song Layla, because it’s one of the few on the album that has a recognisable riff and structure, and the rest of the albums crime is mostly just being boring. But fuck me, ruining one of my favourite songs is a sure way of getting onto my shitlist, not that Clapton needed any help getting on there in the first place. Fuck you Eric Clapton. Fuck you and your whole schtick, your fucking sell out, cod reggae, boring white boomer music. Even when you were electric, you were fucking boring. Hendrix is God, and was and always will be 100 times cooler, more talented and better remembered than you ever will be. Eat shit and die
Dr. Octagon
2/5
Usually with an album like this, I’d suggest that it becomes a parody of itself, but can it really become a parody of itself when that’s how it feels right from the start?
The thing is that I actually think there’s a lot to like about this. The beats are all good, Kool Keith’s flow has a great laid back quality that I really enjoy, the lyrics being practically all non-sequiturs is a novel concept which could work well if the concept wasn’t, well if the concept wasn’t what it is. If you were to take the elements of that make up the music, and give it a proper theme, rather than just what if Doctor Zoidberg was a misogynist creep, then it’d probably be decent. As it is, 2 stars
The Who
3/5
I think this is another case of The Band Effect, where the influence has been so thoroughly internalised that it’s difficult to see just why it was so special in the first place. Lots of artists have done the mixture of Hard Rock and R&B that made for great Mod music since, and The Who made much better albums that outside of the two big singles, The Kids Are Alright and the title track, My Generation seems a little inconsequential. It was a big influence on The Jam, who were a big influence on Britpop, which had a big influence on later Indie on both sides of the Atlantic. The influence is there, but which of the Indie Bands nowadays could claim that The Who are a direct influence? It’s on it’s third or fourth steep at this point.
And that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it. I liked the two James Brown covers a lot, I liked The Good’s Gone and The Ox a lot, and of course I liked the two big singles. But the other half of the songs feel a bit outdated.
I understand why the albums on the list, and I could make more of a case for it’s inclusion than some of the entries I’ve had recently, but I didn’t feel this as much as later Who projects
Fleetwood Mac
5/5
CD bm Bbc
That was typed out by my arm or the charging cable or something when I paused the video I’m watching. I’m keeping it because I think it’s funny.
When I was in Sixth Form, a friend and I decided it was the best idea in the world to record a podcast together. I’m a white guy, it made sense at the time. The idea of the podcast was that my friend and I would drink together and discuss pieces of art that we both liked. We had plans to do everything; books, episodes of TV shows, films. But we were both music guys first and foremost, and so for our first episode, we did an analysis of an album that we both loved.
We only recorded the one episode, which was fortunate because he ended up being a massive piece of shit, but also because he was fucking awful at analysing art. While I would introduce, I think, pretty interesting topics of conversation regarding Rumours, he would just quote lyrics and expect that to move the conversation further. And he would often get the lyrics wrong as well.
None of this has ruined my appreciation for Rumours. I still think it’s a perfect piece of art, if Songs In The Key Of Life is the Anna Karenina of albums, Rumours is the Pride and Prejudice, a more accessible, more relatable, yet no less perfect work. One of my favourite bits of recorded music is the first bit of the solo to Go Your Own Way, how it cuts through the backing just gets to me every time.
Bonnie Raitt
1/5
About halfway through Have A Heart I said to myself, out loud ‘This is really fucking boring.’ I think the printers screwed up the title of the last song, surely it’s called Middle Of The Road’s My Name?
This is non revolutionary music of the highest order, because it’s not revolutionary in it’s music, which is backwards looking and safe, in it’s lyrics, which are simple and unremarkable, and in it’s topics, which are love and heartbreak all wrapped in a neat, socially conservative, little package. The small c conservatism of this album really pissed me off, it’s all about reaching middle age and thinking that you need to find a ‘real man’ to settle down with, having a baby just in the ‘nick of time.’ Even the potentially pro independent woman title of Nobody’s Girl is ruined by a song that’s actually about a man and how the titular character wouldn’t be ‘nobody’s girl’ wouldn’t get ‘upset over the least little thing,’ wouldn’t be ‘fragile like a string of pearls’ if she were to just let herself be loved by this random guy. But we never hear anything from the other woman’s perspective at all, it’s all just the narrator’s interpretation, the projection of their own feelings.
I kinda wanted to like this. I saw how low the rating was, the underdog rooting part of my brain lit up, and really, I’m a sucker for vulnerable women singing about their vulnerabilities. But Nick Of Time is much less musically interesting than a lot of those sorts of artists that I love, and is presented with this political stand point that I do not understand at all. It’s presented with a veneer of Pop-Rock sensibility, but this is a Country album, and a Country album of the self-righteous, reactionary kind that ruins the genre for so many people.
‘A friend of mine, she cries at night.’ After listening to this album, I completely understand why
Deee-Lite
3/5
Is there a name for that particular sort of piano playing style that 90’s Dance music used so often? The plinky plonky stuff that sounds a little like rag time? Cos it’s all over this album, and I’ve always thought it sounded cool.
Although a lot of the album blended into the background a bit, it was never boring or unpleasant, and I could understand why it was possibly influential, although I don’t know if it was for certain. But Groove Is In The Heart is a classic, and the rest of the album was fine
Marvin Gaye
5/5
Is this the greatest album ever recorded? If Rolling Stone is to be believed as of 2020 it is. It was no doubt a political act on the part of the magazine. In 2020, one of the great years for the BLM protests, one of the great years for protests in general, to honour one of the great protest records as not just that, but the greatest album of all time. But, I’m more interested in What’s Going’ On’s connection to the album that it succeeded.
Sgt Pepper’s is the ultimate Hippie Record, full of psychedelic sounds and a vibe that’s mostly peace and love. It’s a good record, I’m never gonna deny that, but for so many people peace and love is the unrealised dream. What What’s Going On has to it’s advantage, is the same thing that Sgt Pepper’s best song also demonstrates. The reality of A Day In The Life, the dichotomy between the lives of the haves and the have nots. Gaye presents this topic with the clear eyed lens of a realist, which makes for one of the most heartbreaking albums in recorded history. Because it’s all still there. The bigotry, the state sponsored violence, the drug use, the fucking climate change! We are much closer to Gaye’s version of life than we are to Paul McCartney’s.
But despite all the doom and gloom, What’s Going On is still a record full of the joy of music, the joy of human interaction through this weird cultural experience that we all love, and also through the knowledge that there are people who will fight for the basic dignity of all humanity, no matter how hard the bastards try to keep is down. So, and I say this with as little irony as my deadened Zoomer Heart can muster, Right On, keep fighting, keep fucking fighting
Björk
4/5
I feel as if a lot of artists want to make a big philosophic or thematic statement on their first major artistic statement, and this is definitely the case with Björk’s Debut, which kicks off with Human Behaviour, which so screams being 22 that it kind of hurts.
Debut settles down into a respectable little Euro-Pop-Art album pretty quickly after that, which is probably less resonant nowadays because of the Euro prefix on that description than it would like to be.
I am reviewing this album about three weeks after I got it, and after my second listen, and I must say that I am being much, much kinder to it than I was initially intending to be. I know this should be a wake up call, I should listen to all of the albums multiple times to properly get them. I would love to, but I genuinely physically do not have the time, especially with all the catching up I have to do.
What I do have to say, especially after having listened to Medúlla in the time between this review and my initial listen is that I feel as if I know more what Björk is about now and that certainly helped my listening experience. Debut may not be the best interpretation of her vision, and is certainly not the best way of get someone into Björk, but once it clicks, it clicks in a good way
Bon Jovi
4/5
For the record, when I’ve mentioned ‘bad and boring slabs of party rock’ in my previous reviews, this is surprisingly not what I’ve been what I’ve been talking about.
I’m kinda surprised myself, I thought for sure Bon Jovi would be worse than this, but I actually ended up enjoying Slippery While Wet quite a bit.
I think the difference between this and the Def Leppard album that I repurposed my intro from, is that Bon Jovi are more musically diverse, there are more recognisable parts to the songs, and that the songwriting is much better. It’s not Springsteen level, which is clearly where Jon Bon Jovi is getting his cues from, but I guessed a watered down Springsteen is still much better than the watered down AC/DC (I guess, they’re closest in terms of lyrical content) of Def Leppard. The characters and situations are more heartfelt and real, and even the most Def Leppard-esque song lyrically, You Give Love A Bad Name, is only peripherally misogynistic, and is made up for by the more realistic portrayals of women in other songs on the album.
I was also surprised at how much I liked the big singles. I’ve heard them all a million times, but always out in the wild, in clubs or on the radio. Sitting down and actually listening to Livin’ On A Prayer and Dead Or Alive really cemented why they were big for me. They’re well crafted, well performed, and equally heartfelt and silly, which is an oddly winning combination.
So, I think I’m converted. I think I’d check out more Bon Jovi after this. Who knew?
The Psychedelic Furs
5/5
For some reason, I get The Psychedelic Furs and Violent Femmes mixed up all the time. I think it’s something about their names.
Talk Talk Talk occupies a space between New Wave and Post-Punk; it always seems to be oscillating between a somewhat respectable Pop sound, and a rawer heavy Rock one. It makes for compelling listening. And when it settles down to the Bowie-Esque She Is Mine at the end, it unravels into a beautifully melancholy portrayal of the absurdity of life and all it’s small characters, coincidences and events which throws the whole album into a greater perspective. This is the sound of Punk growing up, losing some of the Nihilism and embracing Absurdism, and I’m all for it
Jerry Lee Lewis
5/5
I’ve always taken the view that this project is a review of the music rather than the artist. Despite how much distain I have for Michael Jackson’s personal life, the two one star reviews are because I genuinely think Thriller and Bad are not good albums. When I get to Off The Wall, it’ll be rated much higher.
There is nothing bad I can think to say about the music on Live At The Star-Club Hamburg. It’s a fierce, ferocious and perfectly realised expression of the power of pure Rock n Roll. The chunky piano chords, the frenetic drumming, Lewis’s voice with it’s grunts and hiccups. It makes Rock n Roll sound dangerous again, something that Elvis never managed to do. And yes, it’s entirely arguable, in fact possibly justifiable, to suggest that the danger present in Lewis’ music is because of the danger present in the person. But I’m not going to go there. We all know what he did and who he was. But if you’re able to overlook that, then you’ll discover at lot of very good, very influential music
Nick Drake
5/5
Nick Drake’s music echoes the sounds my mind makes. It’s an incredible feat, the sound of a beat with thoughts and images going on in the background.
Apparently, Folk is one of my worst rated genres. I don’t agree with that, a lot of the albums designated Folk by the algorithm I’d disagree are actually Folk. Broken English by Marianne Faithful? That’s a New Wave album, Eli And The Thirteenth Confession? That’s Jazz-Pop. Nick Of Time by Bonnie Raitt I think I fairly described as a Country album in my review.
Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left is a Folk album through and through, and damn, what a Folk album. I knew Pink Moon before undertaking this project, but getting the opportunity to listen to the rest of his work has definitely turned me into a fan
The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy
4/5
Military intelligence being an oxymoron is a joke that this guy absolutely got from M*A*S*H* which is possibly ironic? A guy decrying the phenomenon of television by using a joke that came from a TV sitcom is an irony that I’m too drunk to go into right now
I don’t agree with Michael Franti’s interpretation of television at all. This is definitely a cultural thing. I have no idea what television was like for the average American in the early 90’s. I have a small idea of what it’s like for the average American right now, because I’ve watched some American Football with my Dad which has the ads, and I have to say American advertising is fascinating. It’s a testament to why we are said to be living in the golden age of television. To bastardise a quote from a great (and political) TV series, people stopped believing in television when television stopped believing in them. Once TV started treating it’s viewers as intelligent, adult viewers, that’s when the standard of television shows started going up. You could still make a song like Television The Drug Of The Nation today, but it’d be talking specifically about shows like Fox or GB News, and not television as a conglomerate.
Other than that I agree with everything that Franti is saying. It’s an incredibly prescient album in it’s treatment of… well everything. Climate change, Palestine, economic insecurity, immigration, racial politics, everything that a principled leftist is likely to have an opinion on nowadays, you will find a decent exploration of, which is both from 30 fucking years ago and written in rhyme. It’s infuriating that we’re still talking about this shit, and invigorating that we on the left have such good material that we’re able to reinterpret it so many times, to the extent that we’re able to do it in iambic fucking pentameter if it’ll help push the message across
The Pogues
5/5
I’m not a Hegelian, but I am a Marxist, which has historical Hegelian basics, and I’ve also studied Hegel, and so as a qualified expert, I’d like to offer an opinion that creates a synthesis of the two opinions offered as the two top rated reviews at the moment. If we look at the Pogues purely from an Aesthetic point of view, then they are absolutely worthy of a place on this list based in their insight into the lives of drunkards and the Irish-British underclass.
If we are to look at the band from the point of view of influence, then I’d probably give them more credit than others have. While it’s true that there was never a specifically popular Celtic Punk movement that followed the Pogues particular style, the fact does remain that there was a movement of New Wave that utilised Celtic traditions. It seemed to achieve it’s zenith in Scotland with bands like Big Country and The Waterboys, but it was present in Ireland and amongst the Irish diaspora.
And I’m too drunk to find some sort of synthesis between these two points. It was gonna be something about art transcending direct influence, and that the influence of the Pogues talking about down-and-outs and drunkards allowed other bands to talk more openly about those sorts of themes. But I can’t be asked to elaborate on that more right now.
Póg mo thóin
Led Zeppelin
5/5
It’s too long.
That’s my only complaint, and I love Led Zeppelin so I’m not really complaining. There are a lot of my favourite Led Zep songs in this collection. But I do have the uncomfortable feeling that this would be better served as two single albums rather than a double.
But them again, it’s only a double album because they had so many good songs that they had some left over to fill another side of an LP.
It’s a 9.5, but I’mma round up
Cowboy Junkies
5/5
Yeah, I can fuck with this.
I’ve been on a kick of watching slow burn movies recently, and this felt like the musical equivalent, perhaps even better because The Trinity Sessions was all burn baby, no resolution at all.
It’s like the taking the longest ever drag of a post-coital cigarette
R.E.M.
5/5
It’s kind of difficult to explain how important R.E.M were to American Rock, so I won’t even try here. Everything that came after Murmur either followed it directly or reacted against it, and so while it’s not my personal favourite of their albums, it’s got to be up here for sheer influence alone
Beck
2/5
I think I may be tired of irony.
Or at least, tired of this particular kind of 90’s irony. I’ve started a new job recently (which is why I’ve missed like a week’s worth of albums. I’m gonna catch up soon, I promise) and my employer has a long playlist they put on everyday which has a lot of power ballad love songs on it. As I’ve been listening to this for a week and a half I’ve been taking in these ballads and thinking just how little I can relate to them. The prime example is Always by Bon Jovi. I gave Bon Jovi an unexpectedly good review a little while ago, and I don’t necessarily think Always is actually a bad song, but it’s so emblematic of a sort of overreaching love song, one that has to sound like it’s soundtracking a movie that portrays a love for the ages. It ends up sounding sort of insincere. Nobody’s love is actually that big, that melodramatic, my experience of love has always been rather mundane and as someone with a particular interest in the everyday, I prefer low-key declarations of love. One of my favourite love songs is Bloc Party’s This Modern Love which ends with the line ‘Do you want to come over and kill some time?’ That has always sounded so much more romantic to me than any declaration that I will love always and forever.
What really differentiates 90’s culture from 80’s culture, at least in the US, is that while the 80’s was heart wrenchingly sincere on as big a level as their hair or their shoulder pads, the 90’s was either sincere in a more rootsy way, taking their cues from R.E.M. (who I’m listening to at the moment) or The Replacements, or subverted the 80’s level of sincerity by being cynical and ironically detached. And I think that most of the big artists who people have deemed were ironic have actually become so in hindsight. All apart from Beck.
Beck seems to me a particularly 90’s product, who seems increasingly baffling as we get further away from that decade. I find it particularly hard to actually talk about Beck, because the irony and detachment is so many levels deep that you can’t get a sense of him as a person. The reason people gravitated towards Cobain was because you could get a real handle of the sort of person he was, both the damaged self destructive side, and the self deprecating genius with a wicked sense of humour. Eddie Vedder, you could get the gist of his overwhelmingly passionate empathy and anger towards the systems in place to keep the people around him miserable. Even with the Britpop bands, when Blur took influence from American Rock with the self titled album, Albarn turned out one parodic bit of nonsense for the lead single and spent the rest of the album writing the most autobiographical and direct stuff of his career. But who is Beck? I’ve now listened to two of his albums, and I really couldn’t tell you. He’s a bit wacky, he likes both folk and rap, but outside of that? He doesn’t write about himself, he doesn’t seem to write about other people. Is it a sort of musical surrealism or Dada? The only song that I found myself really enjoying was Ramshackle which is both the most melodic and the most sincere on the album.
I don’t know. Beck’s artistic vision seems completely contrary to my own, and while I don’t grudge him that, I find it difficult to connect with his music in any meaningful way, or even really to talk about why I find it difficult to connect with. At least with music I find actually bad I can describe why. Beck’s taste isn’t actually particularly different from my own, I like Folk and Rap, I like Post-Hardcore and Country. I just find it difficult
Joni Mitchell
2/5
It all just feels a bit directionless, in the melodies especially.
Also, I cannot for the life of me hear where this supposed Jazz influence she’s supposed to have is. Maybe I’m thinking of the wrong kind of Jazz, is it supposed to be easy listening stuff rather than Hard Modal Soul Jazz?
I found the ascending motif on Just Like This Train really grating. And oh god, I just got to Raised On Robbery. This sounds like a rejected Captain And Tennille song. It’s like someone tried writing a Rock n Roll song but only had a second hand description of what Rock n Roll sounded like.
I’m actually kinda baffled. The few songs that are awful are truly awful, and the rest are all kind of boring. Twisted, with it’s actual melody, actually allowed me to listen to Mitchell’s voice. Her lower register is great, breathy, Jazzy and expressive. Her higher register is shrill and just so irritating.
Well, I’m glad that’s over. I’m not gonna give it one star, because the majority of it’s sin was boring me. But it’s put me off checking out more Jono Mitchell in the future. Check back when I get to Blue and I’ll see how my opinion on this album has changed
Cat Stevens
5/5
When I go through an album for the first time and immediately like over half of the songs, you’d better believe that’s a five. Definitely gonna have to come back to this
Jimmy Smith
5/5
Blue Note had a classic album sound and structure and Back At The Chicken Shack is possibly a perfect example of just what made this structure work so well. I could pick 101 released on Blue Note between ‘56 and ‘70 that could feasibly be on this list, but Jimmy Smith is a good choice.
He’s a very warm performer, I first fell in love with him through his excellent rendition of Just Friends on the excellent album House Party, and his style of Hard Bop is one of the best for introducing people to Jazz. It’s got enough intellectual musical edge that it satisfies that part of the brain that I listen to Jazz with, but it’s also got enough solid blues and R&B backing that it doesn’t feel intimidating. This isn’t jumping straight into Ascension or Free Jazz. But I can guarantee that if you found something to like on this album, if you give it enough time and nurture that little Jazz flame in the back of your head, you’ll get to those albums eventually. I’d check out more Jimmy Smith, then go on to some Dexter Gordon, Go! is a good place to start, or Lee Morgan, check out the Sidewinder. Then try some Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and whichever of the instrumentalists sticks out to you the most there, you’ll be bound to find half a dozen good albums that they were leader on
B.B. King
4/5
There were less guitar work outs than I was expecting, but the ones there were are fantastic. I think it might actually have been better served by being longer, which is not a criticism I often have. Is there a deluxe edition somewhere out there?
Lynyrd Skynyrd
5/5
This is kinda hilariously Conservative. Like, both in it’s music, which is pretty typical Blues and occasional Honky-Tonk faire, but also in it’s lyrics. There’s a verse that rail’s against the space program. And weirdly, I kinda agree with it? Yeah, surely we should be putting money into making sure everybody is fed and housed and clothed before we even consider sending people to space?
But I’m looking at this from a modern Communist’s perspective, and surely I shouldn’t have the same opinion about the space race about a group of Commie hating rednecks like Lynyrd Skynyrd, who sing shit like Mississippi Kid?
Whatever, musically this shit slaps. I’m not a big fan of the lyrics, but fuck it, I don’t really care. For the duration of this album, I’m a conservative, Republican voting, American redneck. And I will drink my own, European, Commie tears for as long as it takes
Waylon Jennings
3/5
Yeah, it’s alright. I’d say it’s closer to the James Taylor album that I hated than I usually like, but it also didn’t have any of that album’s tweeness
Herbie Hancock
5/5
I mean, wha can you say, it’s Head Hunters.
But, I have to tell you how bizarre an experience it was listening to this at 8 in the morning waiting for a replacement for a cancelled train, in the middle of North Wales with seagulls crying all around me
Joni Mitchell
3/5
I like it better than Court and Spark, but not as much as Blue. Musically, it’s all pretty good, chiming guitar and excellent bass work courtesy of Jaco Pastorius.
But, this is the Joni Mitchell album that most exposes her biggest failing in my eyes. Her utter and baffling aversion to recognisable melody of any sort. She sounds like she doesn’t write any melodies and just improvises them over her accompaniment. And it’s a shame, because all of the lyrics are quite good. They’d just be better and more memorable if if backed by a strong melody rather than the wavering, uncertain style of melody that Mitchell usually goes for.
On the other hand, maybe that’s the point? She’s uncertain about her place in her life, on the road, and she’s reflecting that in her melodies? Perhaps, but she was playing that same shit on Court and Spark, and I can’t think of any reason to justify that thematically
Snoop Dogg
4/5
Listening to Doggy Style all the way through, you become quite really quite aware that Snoop is using his catchphrases too often. What’s my name, put your hands in the air, that sort of thing. It’s all musically great, and Snoop’s flow is fantastic throughout, but once you notice how many phrases keep cropping up throughout the album, it becomes really predictable.
Oh and also, it’s sexist as all hell, I mean Jesus Christ. Although, it also has the only actually funny Rap album skit I’ve had to listen to, the radio ad one with the jingle that repeats the word balls, I’m not above finding that funny
Johnny Cash
5/5
At Folsom Prison captures Cash in a particularly jovial mood, and as such it is an album that is just a pleasure to listen to. He is a commanding yet cool and charismatic figure, and such the heartbreaking nature of songs like 25 Minutes To Go, The Wall, The Long Black Veil and Give My Love To Rose are made even more so by the contrast with his banter. It’s an almost perfect summation of the human spirit. Some of us are locked up, some of us are on death row, some of us have commuted crimes and never been caught, some have been caught, some have been framed, some are innocent. And we can be reflective and sentimental about that, but we can also crack a few jokes and say damn and shit and stuff like that.
Fleetwood Mac
2/5
If Rumours is the sound of a couple breaking up while on a cocaine high, Tusk is… well what is Tusk?
It’s kinda long, and kinda boring, and most of the songs are kind too long, and kinda boring. It’s more like being the only sober person listening to a conversation between a drunk group in a pub, but everyone’s like sad drunk and not funny.
I feel as if the album’s a grower, and that you have to be in the right mood for it, to be in the mood to like settle down and appreciate it’s melancholy beauty or some shit like that. I’m just surprised that they seem to have forgotten how to write hooks
Frank Ocean
4/5
I have a debate that I like to have which started with a bit in an Anthony Bourdain book. He talks about Orson Welles and how, if nothing else he ever made was as good, he was still up there as one of the greats because he made fucking Citizen Kane.
I disagree with Tony on this, because I think that Welles directed quite a few other good films (as well as a whole load of shit) but also because I think the mark of a great artist, a great auteur, is the ability to consistently produce work of high quality. It’s the difference between a Harper Lee and a Shakespeare say, a writer who produced one work but a very good one, and one who had a much wider range of work, which is not all equally good, but none of which is actively bad.
Of course, there is a secret third option, which I like to call the Tolstoy. Put out a generation definingly good piece of art every ten years or so. This ultimately means that you produce less work than some people, but that the work you do produce is arguably better remembered because of it’s brevity.
This seems to be the approach taken by Frank Ocean, who at this point hasn’t released any new music in 8 years. Agent Orange is very, very good, a pioneering piece of minimalist Alternative-R&B that basically set the foundation for what R&B and other forma of black music would sound like for the next decade. And nothing can take that away from Ocean. But I do feel that if he wants to secure his legacy properly, he should release that third album, and soon.
Everything But The Girl
4/5
I’m listening on a train while winding my way through the beautiful countryside of the West Midlands. It’s so relaxed that I’m just sort of melting into the seat.
My Mum is a big Everything But The Girl fan and so I know a fair few of these songs although I’ve never listened to the album before. And while the song construction and production is pretty immaculate, the band’s real selling point is Tracey Thorn and her voice. My god, what an instrument. The lyrics feature the mix of domestic and pastoral themes that I’m a sucker forever, and their version of I Don’t Want To Talk About It is the best one, hands down. Suck it Rod Stewart
Sex Pistols
5/5
Kurt Cobain is supposed to have said that the Sex Pistols were 100 times more important than The Clash, and in a lot of ways I think that it’s a very true statement. Sex Pistols were, not exactly a foot in the door, rather a battering ram, that paved the way for the mainstream acceptance of Alternative music. I think the inevitable Pistols/Clash comparisons are interesting, because they always come down, in my opinion, to the question of power vs subtlety in music.
It’s not a perfect comparison, The Clash were also a powerful band, and had the Pistol’s survived more than the one album, it’s entirely possibly they may have gained subtlety, especially considering PiL were a very subtle band at times.
I’m in favour of subtlety, as a rule. Yes, there is a place for pure power and rage, but life is complex, and the best way to represent that is through the shifting and incredibly precise changes in viewpoint, motivation and allegiance that the Clash are able to recreate with their lyrics.
But then, for the 37 minutes Never Mind The Bollocks is playing, all I want to do is pogo and bash the shit out of my drums. It’s power overwhelms the subtle part of my brain and pounds it into submission, leaving me with no feelings but how much I want anarchy in The UK.
Ok, I’ll stop, sorry. Or maybe I won’t, I’m a liar after all.
What I’m trying to say is that there is something undeniably cathartic about this record, and it manages to capture a moment in a particularly memorable way. I do still prefer The Clash, but this is probably the second best album within the two band’s discography. And that’s saying something
Dr. John
5/5
Oh man, this is what I’m talking about. It’s so weird.
I have a bit of a fascination with the occult, one of my favourite bands as I’ve mentioned before is a Folk-Metal group called Green Lung who make Black Sabbath-esque Hard Rock with lyrics inspired by Pagan rituals and witchcraft, so having an equally spooky sounding record that sounds like an honest to god VooDoo ceremony is way up my street.
And it doesn’t hurt that this is also just a really impressive bit of musicianship, it’s got a swampy, murky sound that almost betrays how well layered, structured and dense it is. I’m all in and will absolutely be coming back to Gris-Gris
Todd Rundgren
3/5
I had this idea that Todd Rundrgen was like this Wizzard looking motherfucker who made Psychedelic Prog stuff so the fact that he’s just an average looking bloke, who does do some psychedelic stuff, but also quite a lot of pretty standard 70’s Piano Pop is a bit of a disappointment. It’s a bit like my reaction to how boring The Grateful Dead were, your name is fucking Todd Rundgren, why aren’t you actually singing about Wizards and D&D and all that nerdy shit? Why waste that name on this perfectly average man?
And unfortunately, perfectly average is exactly how I feel about this man’s music. It’s fine, some of it is quite good. But there’s a solid hour and a half of it, and none of it sticks out enough to make me want to listen to the album again.
Even his voice is average, he sounds exactly like what I picture an all American white Tenor to sound like.
I kinda wanted to like this, I love the idea of a long album divided into four thematic sections by side. But I just don’t vibe with this guy’s lack of weirdness. As someone who exudes kind of an oddball energy, I think he should have lent into it, or at least like gotten himself a cape or something
Adele
1/5
I’m not a big fan of belters, all of my favourite vocalists are masters of phrasing or timbre or have unique or even bad voices but a ‘fuck it we roll’ attitude. Adele’s sort of singing is technically fine, very good, but I find it really difficult to get into.
I think part of that is that, especially on this album, she’s not given very much to work with dynamically. Because it’s been decided that Adele’s biggest selling point is the power of her vocals, all of the choruses have to showcase those vocals. And so it becomes repetitive, soft verse builds towards powerhouse chorus, bonus points if she jumps the octave, and once you notice that trend, it makes the listening experience painfully boring.
It also made really really anxious for a reason I can’t quite explain. I straight up hated the way this made me feel. I think I have to go on the record and say this is my least favourite album that I’ve had to listen to so far. Not only did it bore me, but it also overwhelmed me to the point that I genuinely think I almost had a panic attack
Bob Marley & The Wailers
5/5
I made the claim in a previous review that Exodus was Bob Marley’s best album.
Am I sticking with that claim after having relistening to it?
Yes. Absolutely.
Everything that made Bob Marley a great artist, from his songwriting, to his musicianship, to his fucking voice, is on top notch form here. I don’t think Marley gets as much credit as he deserves as a singer. All of his work is so tied up with his life story, with his religion, and with the weird colonialist attitude that people have had towards Jamaican culture if they have even a passing knowledge of his work, that the actual artisan nature of the a lot of reggae in general, and Marley’s oeuvre specifically seems to have got lost.
Exodus shows us what we’re missing. An artist who was not only intensely spiritual, but also very bodily in his sexuality, and even more intense in his political feeling, both of which completely override the hippie vibes that every white college student who has ever put up a poster of Marley because they’ve smoked weed a few times while listening to Three Little Birds has had.
Bob Marley was a serious artist, who should be taken more seriously than he is. And Exodus is a high watermark in his excellent legacy
Beatles
4/5
I know that one of the top reviews on this is saying that it’s useless to compare their early work to the later, but as much as I enjoy A Hard Day’s Night and it’s big songs, as an album it wouldn’t be on here if it weren’t for the excellence of their later work. It’s all good, some of it even great, but it’s not as good as the stuff from Rubber Soul onwards
Destiny's Child
2/5
Same problem I have with a lot of albums from the late 90’s, early 2000’s, there are so many songs that they end up just blending into each other. And oh my god, was this a long one.
Fela Kuti
5/5
I don’t have anything clever to say, this is just great
Björk
5/5
I’m kind of shocked at how much I do like this, especially after being a bit underwhelmed by Debut a few weeks ago. Medúlla is by turns strange, beautiful, powerful and incredibly, incredibly human and that humanity is very affecting. Björk has said that the reason for wanting to produce a mostly a capella album was as a spiritual link to the very origins of music, and by god she hits that breif perfectly. It’s a truly timeless listening experience, something that sounds like it could have come out at any point in the entire history of humanity
Haircut 100
3/5
I suppose there are worse ways of getting white boys into funk.
I’m struggling to think what to do with Haircut 100, because while I don’t think this is objectively bad as music, in fact I think it’s quite good, they’re not really a classic or an influential band. I asked my parents, who are of the generation to have listened to them, whether they had any thoughts and all they did was quote song lyrics at me. So they’ve clearly stuck in the minds of certain individuals of that generation, but not really stuck around in popular imagination. I’ve never heard any of these songs before, and while I do like them, I’m not sure outside of a couple whether I’d actively seek out listening to them again
Sonic Youth
4/5
Daydream Nation is the monolith from 2001 for American Indie Rock, and is undoubtedly an important and influential work of art.
It’s also a fairly divisive album, which I very much understand. I’ve owned a copy of this album since I was about 16 or 17, and today is the first time I’ve managed to sit through it all the way through. I never managed to get past the first side.
Listening this time, I really got into it in the second half. I’m still not a huge fan, but I can appreciate it’s influence and how it’s affected a ton of bands I really love. However, I do also think that it’s the sort of album that takes multiple listens to truly appreciate. I’d like to get to know it better, and that’s a take that I didn’t necessarily have 8 years ago.
Beatles
4/5
A really decent example of what Rock and Pop albums were like before the Beatles themselves revolutionised the form with Revolver and Rubber Soul. A decent selection of good cover songs, and less good originals than what would come later, but still decent. I spent quite a happy half hour listening to it. It’s not my favourite Beatles album, or even my favourite early one, but a worthy and influential entry into the Pop Rock genre
Kid Rock
1/5
I had Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation two days ago. One of the top rated reviews is how loud that album is.
Man, do I miss the loudness of Daydream Nation. At least it always came after a period of relative quiet. There is always a sense of dynamics. I don’t know if it’s just that Devil Without A Cause is a victim of the Loudness War, but man, this thing is actually uncomfortable to listen to.
Actually, you know what, I just got to I Got One For Ya. ‘What the fuck happened to the peace and love?’ FUCKING PEOPLE LIKE YOU KID ROCK, YOU DENSE DENSE MORON!
If the album is on this list because it’s notable for being an early example of Country Rap…
Actually you know what, I just got to Only God Knows Why… ???. ???. ???. What? What is this doing on here? What is that autotune? Why is that there? If you’re going to do an honest to god Country ballad, you can’t get the same person who did Cher’s autotune on Believe to do yours. And why the fuck is it after Fist Of Rage, which was possibly the worst, hardest song on the album so far. ??? My god, this is going on my playlist of worst songs ever.
Actually, you know what, I just got to Fuck Off. You got Eminem, possibly the best rapper around in 1998, and you put him so far back in the mix that you CAN’T HEAR A WORD HE’S SAYING! And now, the last two minutes of the song is just a load of answerphone messages? It worked as a trick on Good Kid Maad City, because it served a narrative purpose, but here? Is this a concept album now?
Fuck Black Chick/White Guy. This is the most misogynistic, racist crap I’ve ever had to listen to. I don’t know the half of it? I don’t know the half of it!? Maybe if you treated this woman like an actually fucking person, like someone that you genuinely want to have a relationship with, or even respect her enough to not sleep with other women, then she wouldn’t sleep with other men.
Fuck this. A lot of the bad will people have towards Kid Rock nowadays is that he’s proved himself to be a massive piece of shit. Devil Without A Cause proves that he hasn’t changed in 25 years. I feel numb after listening to this. I need to go listen to some Leonard Cohen or something to remember how to feel like a human being again.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
5/5
Man, it has been a long, long shift at work, and so coming back and listening to some Creedence while sinking a beer in the sun has been a pleasure.
My big new discovery while listening was Wrote A Song For Everyone, god, it’s heartbreaking. I know he’s not exactly underrated, but fuck me, Fogerty could write a fuckin’ tune
Van Halen
2/5
The problem is less with the music, which is fine if a little too sleek and wanky for my particular taste, and definitely with David Lee Roth and the fact that although he’s a decent singer and was a great stage presence, he was a lousy lyricist. No matter how good the music is, having to listen to a song called Drop Dead Legs unironically is torture.
I both liked and disliked 1984 more than Van Halen I. On the one hand, more of the songs stood out. I wouldn’t mind listening to Jump or Panama if they came on the radio. On the other hand, there’s less of that weirdness that was lurking under the surface of I. And as I can’t decide which is actually better, I’m gonna give the same rating
Traffic
3/5
Steve Winwood is a fascinating figure. I think. I honestly don’t know that much about him. Had a couple of Pop hits in the 80’s, played the organ on Voodoo Chile. Was apparently in a band called Traffic in the late 60’s. This was an interesting listen, I’ve seen it on these sorts of lists, and it’s name and cover has always intrigued me, but I was expecting it to be a Hard Rock album.
The mix of Folk and Jazz is one that seemed particularly fertile ground in the late 60’s and early 70’s. I’ve found it to be a genre mix that’s difficult to like, outside of a few choice examples. John Barleycorn Must Die is a better than average example, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, especially the title track. Despite this, I wasn’t blown away by it and can’t see myself returning to it any time soon. Maybe if I’m looking for something to smoke up to, like that guy’s parents in that one review, because it’s a calm, decent, hippie-ish listen, but outside of that…
Yes
2/5
It wasn’t bad. Better than The Yes Album certainly. It seemed to have more structure than that album did, and more purpose, although having another entirely acoustic guitar workout was certainly an interesting choice, even if I did enjoy it the best of all the songs on the album.
I could stand to listen to Roundabout again, and maybe Heart Of The Sunrise, that intro riff is pretty gnarly
Echo And The Bunnymen
4/5
There’s an intentionally isolating effect to Echo And The Bunnymen that makes them difficult to get into. I know, I’ve been trying for years.
But when you get it, let yourself mire in the psychedelic soundscape for a while, it becomes absorbing in a way that only a few Post-Punk albums from this era can be. The Bunnymen are not quite as good as Joy Division or The Cure, but they’re certainly a good third place. And that’s something that nobody can take away from them
The Rolling Stones
4/5
I don’t understand why so many people are calling this a tightening of The Stone’s sound, because it’s a lot looser and baggier than both their early albums and their later masterpieces.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, loosening up and experimenting with their sound was what they needed, especially in order to keep up with The Beatles, but it does make for a long album and occasionally misses the mark.
Under My Thumb is a real guilty pleasure of mine, because it is so nasty and misogynistic, but it’s also a bop?
I still contend that the run between Beggar’s Banquet and Exile On Main Street is untouchable, all of those albums are non skips, and the good songs on Aftermath are all great, but they are further between than in the band’s golden period
The Rolling Stones
3/5
I think this deserves to be in here as much as the early Beatles albums do. Which is to say, yeah sure, as a comparison to their later work.
It’s a pretty good early 60’s Blue Eyed R&B record, with some nifty guitar work, especially on I’m a King Bee. It wears it’s influences quite literally on it’s sleeve, and although pretty good, doesn’t point towards the heights they’d reach, even just three albums later on Aftermath
The Modern Lovers
5/5
I love the fact that having the ‘radio on’ is such a rallying call for the Anthemic opener Roadrunner, because this is a set of songs that wouldn’t ever see the airwaves in any way.
This isn’t at all a bad thing. This is a pretty Dorky project, taking it’s cues from the Velvets and The Stooges musically but introducing some of the comic book and pop culture references that cropped up in later Punk bands like Ramones, Blondie, and The Cramps. It’s a bit of a marked difference from the Velvet Underground, whose most up to date cultural references were little known Austria-Hungarian Novella’s from the 1870’s. But the Dorkiness actually works pretty well in it’s favour, because the sort of people who love the Velvet Underground are also likely to appreciate the importance of those sorts of ephemeral media like comics and TV as an insight into the zeitgeist of the time.
Nobody is ever gonna touch Lou Reed for the mixture of high and low art that he manages to achieve with his lyrical style. And Jonathan Richman is no Lou Reed, which is the only big problem of the album. He knows what he’s going for, but he never quite manages to achieve it. But in failing, he manages to set the template for the lyrical themes that Indie Rock would attempt in the decade following the album’s release. Suburban isolation, relationship failings, teenage angst, cars and TV and Radio and all that jazz. Lou Reed’s lyrics worked because the specificity to his scene and the people in the factory gave everything an Epic quality, and the reason Epics work is because of their universality. Jonathan Richman’s scene is more mundane, and it never manages to attain that epic quality, but suburban specificity is still something, and still something that people can understand. And for it’s ambition alone, this deserves 5 stars
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3/5
Another entry into the genre of albums that I’ve owned for years but never managed to listen through all the way through until now.
It’s first two songs are both pretty good, and the run of four songs from Maps to Poor Song are all great, but the middle of the album all rushes by without anything particularly memorable. I said in my Tea For Tillerman review that if I like half the songs on an album on a first listen, that’s an immediate five. I stand by that for that album, but it falls apart when half of the songs range pretty good to great, and the other half are all unmemorable it becomes much more of a mixed bag
Deep Purple
5/5
So, I’ve mentioned a band I was in for a bit before which consisted of a properly trained Jazz Pianist, a saxophonist who programmed synths to sound like video game bleeps and who was obsessed with Oxygene by Jean-Michel Jarre, and me, a self-taught Punk Guitarist and Blues singer. It was, as you might have guessed, an odd mix for a band, but we managed to make it work somehow. I had to learn how to solo during my time in the band, and one of the ways that I did was by listening to Made In Japan on my trip to the rehearsal space, which was out in the middle of nowhere and took me about an hour and a half to get to.
I genuinely believe that this is one of the greatest pieces of recorded music ever put to tape. It’s such a perfect encapsulation of a Rock concert experience, in a similar way to Live & Dangerous, but with enough subtle differences that it makes having a separate entry on this list justified. Thin Lizzy were a Hard Rock band who genuinely wrote songs, they took just as much from Soul and Folk as they did from Rock and the Blues. And so, while there were improvisational parts to the songs, the solos are mostly improvised, Brian Downey’s drum solo etc, they were parts within an established song structure. Deep Purple’s strength is less in the structure of the songs, I think that’s why I’ve never got on as well with their studio output, and more with the way they can twist and turn the compositions to suit their improvisational wants during the songs live, to make it fresh and exciting every time. I’m listening to The Mule at the moment, and my god, Ian Paice is a beast. Take Ginger Baker and shove him up his own arse, that’s the drum solo I want to keep listening to.
In a departure from my prepared remarks, who wants to hear a joke? None of you? Ahh, who cares.
A letter appears on the desk of Ian Paice. It’s addressed ‘To The Greatest Drummer In The World.’ Ian Paice reads that and thinks, ‘No, that can’t possibly be me.’ So he forwards it on to John Bonham. Bonham reads the envelope, ‘To The Greatest Drummer In The World’ and thinks, no that can’t be for me.’ So he forwards it on. It appears on Ginger Baker’s desk. He reads the envelope, ‘To The Greatest Drummer In The World’ and says to himself, ‘No, that can’t be for me.’ So he also sends it forward. Eventually, it ends up on the desk of Buddy Rich, who sees the address, ‘To The Greatest Drummer In The World’ and nods to himself. ‘Yes,’ he thinks, ‘this must be for me. So he opens it, and starts to read,
‘Dear Ringo,’
The guitar and voice play-off on Strange Kind Of Woman is just fantastic. I just love all of this album. And Child In Time, oh god I could talk about this album all day, all the while telling drummer jokes. OK, one more quickly, How can you tell when there’s a drummer at the door? They knock four times then come in early
Steely Dan
5/5
I listened to this in a pub in the beer garden, drinking and smoking, and enjoying the heartbreaking intricacies of the songwriting. I’m sure it could have been obnoxious, but seriously I felt like the coolest motherfucker ever
Sabu
4/5
It’s at it’s best when it’s focusing solely on the rhythm, Asabache is by far the best song on the album and the following are the other drum and vocal only tracks. And it’s not that the melodies are bad necessarily, it’s just that it is particularly badly recorded, even for the late 50’s, and so does get a bit grating.
On the whole though, I am glad that I listened to it, and given it’s getting on to summer proper now, I may find myself returning to it sooner than I think
Joni Mitchell
5/5
Now this is more like it. This is what I want from my Joni Mitchell like figures, gentle, sensual, melancholy, and full of pathos.
The Joni Mitchell stuff that I’ve had to listen to previously has been part of her later experimentations with Jazz, and I’m sorry, but I really don’t think that they work. I’ve said before, but Jazz Folk is really difficult to pull off, and when the actual Folk music you had been putting off is as good as this, why even attempt to introduce an element that is not only difficult to pull off just from a compositional standpoint, and near impossible to pull of well, and also just antithetical to the sort of music that you had been putting out in the first place?
The big confession is that, I’m still not 100% convinced on Joni Mitchell after this. There are still elements I’m not sold on, her style of writing melody is still a bit busy for my taste, I’m not a big fan of her voice. But I do now understand what the positives people see in her are. I’d be very happy to give this another listen (or three) and maybe from then I can start branching out
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
The sister album to Nebraska, Born In The USA focuses less on the effect that societal collapse has on the individual and instead on the effect it has on family units and couples. It’s also just packed full of bangers. I lied in an earlier review, I’ve also got all of the songs on this album liked as well
The Doors
5/5
Most of this album is a perfect soundtrack for a sunny summer day somewhere in California, coasting along the highway and stopping off at roadside bars and blues joints.
Too bad I’m here in Wales during an unseasonable cold and rainy summer. It’s the first of July, why the fuck am I sitting in a jumper and a blanket?
David Bowie
5/5
There’s a really interesting video I saw at some point that looked at the harmony Bowie used in the title track, which I thought was particularly fascinating because I was having a thing about Suede’s Dog Man Star at the time I listened to it, and one of my favourite songs, The Power, uses the same harmony during the middle eight. It became an interesting chicken or egg question in my mind. Was Bowie inspired to use the harmony because of Suede’s use of it, or were Suede, in their unwavering Bowie admiration, inspired by an instance when Bowie used the harmony in some other period? I still don’t have an answer.
I feel as if everyone has a story attached to ★. When they first listened to it, how soon before or after Bowie’s death it was. The Monday that the news broke, I was woken up by my Mother, who broke the news to me. I listened to it on the walk into Sixth Form, and I’ve not listened to it since. It’s been eight years, and I’ve not heard a note.
And a part of me doesn’t want to. The memory of listening to it in that moment is so perfect and bittersweet that I almost don’t want to tarnish it.
But, having done so…
I’m struggling to find a way of ending this review, because I do think this is a very good album, and an even better piece of art, a reflection on life and mortality, and more importantly a life in stardom. And I have a lot of thoughts about it, but they’re not easy to untangle from my own messy thoughts and feelings about death and legacy and art itself. And the fact that it has this effect on me is evidence of it’s greatness
Isaac Hayes
5/5
To be fair, the 9 minute spoken work intro to By The Time I Get To Phoenix fucks, as does the rest of the song with it’s gorgeous cinematic strings.
Actually, all of this album sounds cinematic. Those strings man, I don’t really associate strings with Soul before Disco. This makes it work.
Fuck it, this is a 5
PJ Harvey
5/5
You know that review of Joni Mitchell’s Blue? The I now understand women one?
Yeah, that’s PJ Harvey for me
Marty Robbins
4/5
Part of me wants to like this more than I do. It’s thoroughly enjoyable throughout, but never again manages to reach the height that it sets for itself with Big Iron, and although the subject matter is similar to other Country singer that I enjoy, most notably Johnny Cash, there’s something about the style that makes it seem all less consequential than Cash’s great works.
I think the problem is that Robbins’ voice is too pretty. It doesn’t have the gravity or drama that the songs need. It’s relaxing, when it needs to be arresting. It should be an edge of your seat event, detailing the various murders and highjinks occurring on the trail, and instead it’s a bit like being told a bedtime story.
I feel like I’m being more harsh than I mean to be. What I’m meaning to say is that I thought this was going to be different to how it was. I’m not disappointed in what it is, I enjoyed it. But I can see there being a version that I enjoyed more
Siouxsie And The Banshees
5/5
Mittageisen becomes even more fun if you imagine it being said by a Tom Baker era Doctor Who villain.
A lot of talk here about how influential The Banshees were, and despite that not being up for debate, it also misses that the reason this was so influential is because of how good it is. Like so much of the early Gothic Post-Punk scene, The Scream grips you with it’s doomy atmosphere, but unlike the gloomy soundscapes of The Cure’s Gothic trilogy or Joy Division’s albums, The Banshees still bring Punk energy to Post-Punk.
This is one of my favourite albums simply in terms of how music sounds. I’m sure I’ve read a joke somewhere about an aging Baby Boomer music critic complaining about new music because his Platonically ideal music sounds exactly like Led Zeppelin. Well to me, that sound is Post-Punk. When I picture myself recording an album, it sounds like The Banshees, and The Cure, and Joy Division, and all of these other bands that I love so dearly
The Good, The Bad & The Queen
5/5
This is fascinating, it sounds equally like it could have come out yesterday and as if it couldn’t have come out any time other than 2007. It’s the echoes of Burial’s Untrue that really sell it for me, but there’s an element of folkiness that I also really enjoy. It’s a mix that I don’t think should work, but it’s just kinda fun, mostly because I think Damon Albarn sounds like he’s having fun, experimenting with stuff that he couldn’t get away with in either Blur or Gorillaz.
I think I might have to give this a five. The excellent closing track is clinching it for me
Nina Simone
5/5
I’ve somehow managed to miss Nina Simone in the past, despite being a huge Jazz fan and just generally a fan of music from this era and with this political conscious. I’m definitely not gonna make that mistake again.
I’ve talked about my dislike of overly bombastic love songs in the past, and That’s All I Ask is the perfect antidote for those, my god I think I’ve fallen completely in love with her because of that song alone. And this is the best version of Lilac Wine I’ve come across. Just masterful
The Kinks
5/5
While The Beatles were perfecting their craft by looking for inspiration both inward and outward, The Kinks were doing the opposite.
I should explain. Around the time of Rubber Soul, The Beatles took to America and The East for their musical direction and started writing more personal lyrics, best exemplified by In My Life, which set the stage for one of the best runs of albums in recorded music history. In contrast, The Kinks moved away from their musical backing in American Garage Rock and R&B and instead moved towards a sound inspired by British Musical Hall and traditional Folk. But their real innovation was lead songwriter Ray Davies’ beginning to move away from the typical teenage love songs he had written previously, and move further outside of his own experience and instead write character pieces. This was an utterly inspired decision. Practically no-one in Pop music at that time was doing character studies, and by the end of the 60’s they were all over the place. I don’t think they would have been if Face To Face wasn’t as good as it was. From the satirical and ironic portrayals of wealth and success of House In The Country, Most Exclusive Residence For Sale, and of course Sunny Afternoon, to Too Much On My Mind’s portrayal of neurosis, to the now outdated but still sharply observed brilliance of Party Line, Ray Davies’ writing is abundant with smart lines and a sense of genuine affection for his characters, which when coupled with the brilliant little earworms that pepper the music makes for an album that’s just a pleasure to listen to
The Byrds
2/5
There’s a part of me that’s really annoyed with album, because I can see where parts of it are already quite good, and also see where some the more out there ideas could be better executed by bands who had better material
Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart
4/5
I enjoyed it while I was listening to it, and then promptly forgot most of it. It did have a rather enjoyable calming experience though, as I remember, which is an odd thing to say about one quarter of the group who brought you Metal Box.
The Smiths
4/5
I only really managed to get into one Smith album properly, The Queen Is Dead. I have copies of their Debut, and Meat Is Murder and I have listened to them both, but neither really struck me in the same way The Queen Is Dead did.
Relistening with fresh ears has confirmed two things for me: Johnny Marr really is a genius, and Morrissey is thankfully pretty ignorable. He’s mostly in the back of the mix, and so I find it quite easy to tune him and his lyrics out, allowing them to just become another texture of the music, which has definitely allowed me to continue to enjoy this music since Morrissey became, well what he is now.
I don’t think it’s the best of The Smith’s albums that I’m going to have to listen to, but if I catch the bug again, I can definitely see myself coming back to this
Arcade Fire
2/5
I had a copy of Neon Bible that I tried listening to and hated, and gave up on Arcade Fire because of that.
I didn’t mind the first few tracks on this album, but was really disappointed by Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out) because the intro was so powerful and then the rest of the song was just kinda… nothing. And then I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the rest. I got up to that part twice yesterday, and gave up each time. I’ll possibly get round to listening to the rest at some later point, but for now
The Only Ones
5/5
Despite Another Girl, Another Planet being one of my top three songs of all time, I’ve never taken a deep dive into the rest of The Only Ones’ discography.
And boy am I glad that I had the opportunity. This is very Punk based, but it’s also great and eclectic in a way I wasn’t quite expecting. It’s slow and heavy when it needs to be, but also frenetic and upbeat, and sometime pretty Jazzy, but always presented with this ramshackle drawl and charismatic sleaze that really sells the oddness of the storytelling. It’s also just a fun, easy little listen, and as such, I’m really glad that I did, and excited to properly dive into the rest of The Only Ones work
Portishead
5/5
If Massive Attack are the sound of a group relaxing at home getting stoned, then Portishead is the sound of an individual sat drinking in a smokey bar, the music distorting and twisting with every drink they have.
I’m really glad I got the motivation to listen to this, because my knowledge of Trip-Hop does kinda stop with Massive Attack, and I’ve been meaning to rectify that with listening to Tricky, which possibly may not have been the best choice. Instead, going with Postishead has 100% sold me. This is 100% what 90’s bars sound to me now, just like 70’s bars all sound like either Neil Young or Tom Waits.
Absolutely gonna come back to this, and will probably be in my sad drinking rotation for a while
10cc
2/5
Listening to I’m Not In Love as I write this, and I’m really impressed by how well it’s able to keep up it’s momentum executing a pretty niche idea over the course of a 6 minute run time. I think it’s helped by a very strong melody, and a commitment to relative simplicity. Take one idea and execute it well with a strong musical foundation. It’s the basis for a lot of good music.
It is not the approach 10cc use throughout Sheet Music, which is a shame. I think a lot of this is quite good, but could definitely have benefitted from an editing process. It’s trying for Maximalism, while their best song works because of it’s simplicity.
I’m sure someone who’s more into maximalism, and maybe more into Roxy Music, would find a lot to appreciate in this. But sadly, I am not that person
Patti Smith
5/5
Patti Smith proves that Punk isn’t about the music, and all about the attitude. The snarling, acerbic intellectualism of the lyrics and music create an atmosphere that’s just as rebellious and anti-authoritarian as bands like the Pistols or the Dead Boys.
Plus, and this really shouldn’t be a side note, Horses is just a fantastic collection of songs taking in everything from blistering lead guitar lines, to mournful piano, to funky reggae-inspired bass lines, all paired with Smith’s poetry. It’s a pretty unforgettable experience, and I really don’t listen to it enough
TV On The Radio
3/5
There are elements that are reminiscent of other Indie bands from around the same time, something about the vocal phrasing and layering of vocals reminds me of Bloc Party, but there’s also an element that I can’t quite put my finger on which kinda turned me off it. It’s not that I disliked any of it actively, I just couldn’t find myself invested in it
Miles Davis
5/5
I mean, what can you say? Not the start of Modal Jazz, but certainly it’s perfection, and also one of the heights of recorded music. It’s Modality allows for a combination of complexity and simplicity that seems to heighten the emotions, and makes for an always engaging listening experience. Add in a stellar lineup, who all play off each other’s strengths and sounds, and it makes for genuinely one of the most perfect albums ever
X-Ray Spex
5/5
The most intellectually rigorous Punk record outside of The Clash and Patti Smith, and possibly the heaviest and most musically interesting outside of the first wave of Post-Punk and hardcore.
Poly Styrene is the standout character, her freewheeling vocal stylings giving the songs a charisma that puts them into the forefront of UK punk.
This is testament to what Punk could be. A group of artsy weirdos lead by a half Scottish, half Somali woman, creating heavy yet melodic music inspired as equally by early R&B as by the original wave of Proto-Punk bands, with lyrics that manage to be funny and biting at the same time. Ground breaking musically and socially, this absolutely earns it’s place amongst the most influential records ever. That it’s so damn good is a bonus
Mariah Carey
1/5
One of my possibly most controversial opinions is that I’ve never been able to stand Mariah Carey’s vocals. Sure, it’s technically impressive that she’s got that range. My vocal range is dogshit. But I’ve never found her breathy, trying-to-be-sensual, glissando thing particularly pleasant to listen to. The best vocalists are the ones who are either the most straightforward interpreters of lyrics, or the best actors.
I’m listening to Breakdown as I write this, and there’s a point where Carey ad-libs on the line ‘Am I losing my mind.’ It’s probably not a fair comparison, but I can’t help but be reminded about the song Losing My Mind from Sondheim’s Follies. I’m most familiar with the 2018 National Theatre production’s recording with Imelda Staunton. Mariah Carey is a better vocalist than Imelda Staunton, but Staunton sells the idea of ‘losing [one’s] mind’ through song much better by dint of acting it, rather than relying on sheer vocal ability.
On then other hand, this is an R&B record and takes inspiration from such R&B legends as Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin, who they were masters at both straightforwardly interpreting songs and acting their material. And they’re both equally good singers as Carey is.
What I think works in Aretha and Stevie’s favour is that they have much better material to work with. There are two things wrong with the production on Butterfly, one of which was unavoidable, one of which could have been improved.
The latter is that the songwriting is just bad. Outside of the opening track it’s all slow, heavily orchestrated ballads with an almost obsessive focus on love and sex for it’s lyrical topics. It’s a proven concept, of course. The love song in Pop ain’t going away anytime soon folks, but the lack of diversity even within the limited scope Butterfly sets for itself is almost kind of impressive. It’s all about longing for them, and that’s basically it. There’s nothing much more to expand on. It plays pretty heavily into the idea that women are just sex objects, waiting for their man to come and ravage them before he goes off to do his manly things, while she’s just left to wait for him to come back and ravage her again. It’s not a great look. I know that women have lives outside of sex, I’ve listened to Joni Mitchell. It all seems specifically designed for the male gaze, a beautiful woman singing pretty, uncomplicated songs specifically about about how much she wants you, and only you. Look, I am a man, and I’m as prone to falling in love with famous women as anyone. I don’t find any of this particularly erotic. It all hinges on the idea that Mariah Carey is just laying about in bed, waiting for you, yes you, the gorgeous listener, who hasn’t realised how genuinely attractive to women he is, to come and rock her world. I try not to come across as the sort of person who specifically looks for plot inconsistencies in porn (That’s not a joke, that is the vibe I try and cultivate in real life. If you saw me you’d think, ‘that’s a guy who doesn’t care about logical inconsistencies in his pornography’) but I genuinely don’t get why this is the vibe or the subject that Carey wanted to go for with Butterfly. Surely there must be other things she wants to write about than just Sex, and how much she wants to have it with you, the completely striking but until now unnoticed by women, listener? I’m a writer (shock of shocks) and I know that I have a few general topics that I focus on specifically, but I still try and vary the things I write about just as a general attempt at keeping myself sane. There’s no way to continually write about the ways that Capitalism has affected the proletariat in their everyday life without going mad. Write a fucking poem about sunsets or some shit, a landscape, whatever. It’ll do you the world of good. Mariah Carey obviously didn’t get the memo.
The former problem with Butterfly’s production, the unavoidable one, is that we’re having to deal with Mariah Carey’s voice. As I said at the head of the review, I don’t find her voice all that pleasant to listen to, which is it’s own problem, but the producers seem to think that we need to be reminded every few seconds that we are listening to a Mariah Carey album and as such they shove as many harmony vocals and different vocal lines into the mix as is humanly possible. I find the songs on this album particularly unmemorable because I have genuine trouble trying to focus on what the melody or the chorus is supposed to be, with the literal chorus (ha-ha) of Mariah Carey’s all vying for my attention.
I do not understand the appeal of this music. Outside of the vocals, which I can appreciate from a technical standpoint, even if I don’t enjoy them, this is a badly written, badly produced, collection of what is essentially anti-feminist slop. It’s not a good Pop album, because I couldn’t identify the intended singles if you put a gun to my head, it isn’t a good Hip-Hop album, because I couldn’t identify any of the non-Mariah artists if you paid me, and it ain’t good R&B, mostly because it doesn’t have any rhythm but also because it doesn’t have any soul.
Possibly not the epitome of soulless commercial music overtaking anything with any actual ideas, and I’ve certainly come across music I hated more for political or even aesthetic reasons. But I’ve rarely come across music that bored me to this extent. And that is, I think, the ultimate sin
Kanye West
5/5
I really can’t explain why, but My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy has the same effect on me that Punk has. It’s so effortlessly perfect, so beautifully constructed, and so brilliant a self-portrait of a highly, highly flawed man that it feels… inspirational?
I’m not a rapper. I have a bit of a history playing Jazz and R&B, but musically I’m mostly a Rock guy. And yet, listening to this album makes me want to bust out a drum machine and a synthesiser and bare my soul over some beats. I think that the confessional nature of the lyrics plays a major part, 2010 Kanye is flawed but relatable because of his flaws, and as someone who is also flawed and actively struggling with how to deal with them, the whole album is worryingly relatable.
But ignoring that, it just slaps as music. Power, All Of The Lights, the Guitar/Vocal solo that takes up the last few minutes of Runaway, all perfection.
Todd In The Shadows talked recently about how difficult it would be to cut controversial artists out of your life, and he name-checked Kanye as one of the hard ones. Listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy all the way through, I finally get it
Brian Eno
2/5
The problem is, outside of the innovative sampling and it’s apparently controversial legacy, the music just isn’t terribly interesting
ZZ Top
4/5
I mean, yeah man, this is pretty great. Not groundbreaking, but a pretty damn good Blues Rock album
Throbbing Gristle
5/5
At one point during Weeping, I went to the toilet and, forgetting that my lights are connected to the extractor fan turned them on then immediately turned my volume up, because I didn’t want to miss what was going on in the album.
I genuinely wasn’t sure what I was expected from Throbbing Gristle, I think it was possibly something closer to Big Black, but what D.O.A. ended up being was, if unexpected, never less than compelling. I mean, it’s also terrifying. There were points when I genuinely felt paranoid and anxious when listening to it. And although the most interesting tracks, the hard-to-hear spoken word recordings, felt pretty voyeuristic at times, it felt voyeuristic in the same way that watching Hitchcock does. It places the listener in an interesting position where listening feels both wrong, and like the most natural thing it the world simultaneously.
It’s the audio equivalent of a horror movie, and all I can say is that all of the coolest people, and most of the best artists, I’ve ever known have been as appreciative of horror as they have other great pieces of art.
I’m glad I took the time to listen to this album, and I’m not sure I ever want to hear it again
Boston
5/5
You remember my theory about innovators and consolidators? Of course you do, you read all my reviews you beautiful, completionist bastard.
Well, in addition to the theory that there are the two different types of artist, it’s also possible for there to be different sub-sections within each type. The one I’d like to focus in on today is the perfecters, of which I think Boston by Boston is a, ahem, perfect example.
Never particularly deviating from the formula of Arena Rock, Boston is still a great piece of art, and it is pretty much a perfect album. And there’s a place for that. Not all art has to be pushing it’s form forward, there has to be a standard form for the Innovators to react against. And that’s where the Perfecters come in. When bands like Boston, the one-album wonders, the not really great artists, are releasing the great records, it’s a sign that the Art Form needs to move on. And so, although I really do like it, it’s also fascinating in it’s position as being possibly the last great Album Rock album before Punk tore the genre down. It all leads to a really good listen, not just as music but also as a document of a particular moment in music history
Jane Weaver
1/5
I found myself a couple of times during my listen losing focus, thinking to myself ‘god, how long has this song been going on for? It’s been ages’ then looking it up and seeing it had only been 3 minutes.
It’s all buoyed by similar Motorik inspired drum beats and synth sounds, to the extent that I really had trouble differentiating tracks, and it didn’t help that a lot of them flow into each other. It’s pleasant enough. But, based on the painfully self-penned and hilariously pretentious Spotify Bio review of her latest album, I have to believe that Jane Weaver really believes that she’s pushing music into some obscure new direction.
“The foundations of Weaver’s sound are still evident – lush motorik drums, pulsating bass, custom modded synths and exotic fuzz pedals – but the stream is awash with scrabble piece poetry and Letraset lullabies leading to lush escapism, the free abandon that you’d associate with free jazz and the avant-garde.
This is the poetic vision of one woman only, turning a new chapter, erecting a new scaffold, drawing empty landscapes as we slowly watch new colours, codes shapes and languages fill the frame. Produced by John Parish (PJ Harvey, Dry Cleaning), this is evidently a new awakening.
From a long-standing pillar of the UK’s independent pop landscape, this is Jane Weaver’s first album since her unanimously lorded top 40 album ‘Flock’ and one-off single ‘Oblique Fantasy‘“
I mean, my god. The smugness is palpable, and it’s made even better by the fact that she uses the wrong ‘lorded’ to describe her previous album, so that rather than talking about how acclaimed it was, she’s instead describing how she rubbed the fact that she had an album that reached a whopping *reads notes* 24 on the UK album charts into peoples faces.
Am I an asshole for wanting to give this a bad rating, based on a review of another album that I haven’t listened to? As I said before, Modern Kosmology is perfectly serviceable as Pop for middle aged people, but it isn’t Avant-Garde or groundbreaking in the slightest.
I went and listened to that new album, and they sound exactly the same. Fuck it. As somebody who is also quite pretentious at times, that level of pretention is off-putting
Duke Ellington
5/5
Insert Johnny Hodges’ solo on I Got It Bad directly into my veins
Sly & The Family Stone
4/5
Not being American, I’ve not been as exposed to the music from this album as I’m sure a lot of people have been. I recognised I Want To Take You Higher, and had listened to Everyday People after a recent Todd In The Shadows video, but outside of that I was going in completely blind, and I enjoyed it, but there’s something I can’t quite place my finger on that’s holding me back from loving it
New Order
5/5
I never really managed to get into New Order in the same way I did Joy Division. I tried listening to Power, Corruption & Lies and, although I love Age Of Consent, couldn’t get past how different We All Stand sounded.
I should have started with Low-Life, because this is exactly how I want my New Order to sound, still with the Gothic edge and darkness that comes from their Post-Punk roots, but with the sparkle of electronica. There’s a sort of typical 80’s-ness about this, because it sounds like the best of the Alternative, left of the dial stuff, mixed with the best of the Electronica stuff that was really starting to make it’s mark. A Platonic ideal of 80’s music would possibly sound like Low-Life.
I’ve talked about Platonic Idealism, or I suppose Transcendental Idealism, before, during my review of Tubular Bells. The difference in my attitude here is that Tubular Bells feels like a particular case of an artists actively seeking to create a Platonic Ideal of music as complex sound. What Low-Life is doing is accidentally creating an amalgamation of notable trends in music of their era, and therefore creating an almost perfect storm of styles. It’s not accidentally genius, it’s genius is clear to see, is tangible. But it’s genius as representation of an Ideal of music styles in the mid 80’s by definition cannot have been planned. And yet it is still there, this is what comes to mind when someone says ‘80’s Music’ to me.
And I love it. Well, time to give Power, Corruption & Lies another go then
Buffalo Springfield
2/5
All Apologies to Neil Young, who I’m usually a big fan of, but this did not do it for me at all. Most of You g’s songs were quite dull and Broken Arrow had me scratching my head multiple times.
The album’s two saving graces are 1) Sad Memory, which was an entertainingly miserable ballad, and 2) that it was short. Otherwise, I really don’t think I’d have bothered
Billy Joel
4/5
Music for horny middle aged, middle class people.
I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way. This reminds me, weirdly, of John Updike? It’s especially apparent in the earnestness, if not in it’s writing style. Updike is one of the great American prose stylists, and my big problem with this album and Billy Joel in general is that I’m not a great fan of his writing style. There’s too much of an emphasis on clever word play and wise-sounding platitudes written in the first person. When you compare his writing to the other great American songwriters of the age, your Paul Simons, your Springsteens, your Lou Reeds, then the difference is apparent.
That being said, I like the music enough that I can ignore my issues with the lyrics, which makes for an overall positive listening experience
Brian Eno
3/5
Music For Airports has 1 big point in it’s favour, and 1 big point against it.
The point in it’s favour is that it is truly groundbreaking. I can think of a good 2 dozen artists that I really love who have clearly taken direct or indirect influence from this album, and on top of that, there’s the fact that ambient music is fucking everywhere these days. I’ve listened to music directly inspired by Music For Airports that wasn’t even really aware that it was inspired by Music For Airports. I’ve fucking fallen asleep to music like this!
Which leads us on to the big detraction to it, which is that it’s incredibly rucking boring to actually sit down and listen to.
I was on board at first. During the first five minutes I was calmed, relaxed, ready to turn around, present myself and yell ‘Yes, Daddy Eno, please take me!’
And then the foreplay continued for another 10 minutes, and then the rest of the album was also pretty boring.
I can see where people have taken inspiration from this, and appreciate it’s influence when it’s in downbeat electronic or ambient interludes on Indie Pop records, but this is the OG Lo-Fi beats to relax/study to, and I don’t think I’m ever gonna prefer relaxing/studying to this than I am that channel.
For personal enjoyment, this is only a two, but because of it’s clear importance, I’m gonna give it a 3
Ryan Adams
3/5
I was so not drunk enough to appreciate this. Ryan Adam’s a decent lyricist, but this is pretty similar in it’s melodic composition, and is mostly all slow and acoustic, which I don’t hate, but it all ends up mushing into one big acoustic clump.
Maybe it’ll reveal itself more on relistens, but I’m not sure I’ll take the time
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
3/5
I’m never quite sure what to do with albums like this, because yes, I get it was era-defining and incredibly popular, but I’ve always felt disconnected from the Hippie movement, especially when it’s done as earnestly as is from CS&N. I’m not counting Young, because I totally get his appeal.
I enjoyed a fair few of the songs, especially Neil Young’s, but there’s always this aspect, this idealism, that I can’t get past. I think it’s best summed up by Our House, which I think is fine as a tune, but as a message, it’s completely antithetical to anything I’ve ever known. The world has so thoroughly changed since 1970 that the idea of being in the future, looking back, and being able to say ‘well it was hard, but we’re doing OK now’ is something I’m certain I’ll never be able to do.
I don’t begrudge the album that. But it’s still a barrier to enjoyment that I can’t overlook
Kate Bush
4/5
Folk-adjacent at parts, if not entirely Folky, this one was interesting. It’s not my favourite of the Kate Bush albums I know, and I don’t think I’m likely to come back to it any time soon, but I’m glad I took the time
Cypress Hill
2/5
I read Cyprus Hill’s wikipedia page in preparation for my listen, and when it came to the description of B-Real’s voice I wasn’t worried. It’s like the Beastie Boys, their voices weren’t annoying, it fit the cadence of the music.
I really couldn’t stand B-Real’s voice on this. And the fact that s lot of the instrumentals are also annoying was really off-putting.
I don’t understand the people who are saying that this is the album that made Hip-Hop click for them. I’m already a fan of Hip-Hop and I don’t get it.
Overall, I don’t think it’s bad enough to warrant one star, I don’t think it’s interestingly bad enough, and it isn’t boring necessarily. But still, I did not enjoy this at all
George Harrison
4/5
I’d have cut the disc of Blues noodling, because it sounds so utterly at odds with the rest of the largely Folky and acoustic material that came before it. But the music on the first four sides is all brilliant, reminiscent of Van Morrison in it’s use of Folk style and Soul instrumentation. The one thing I have to say is that, while George Harrison is clearly a very gifted melodist, he’s not as good a lyricist as either Lennon or McCartney, which really came to a head on songs like Run Of The Mill, which I loved musically but thought was a bit banal lyrically, and I Dig Love, which is overall just a bit inane. But, the music is good enough that I can overlook it
Blur
5/5
I don’t need to listen to Parklife to know it’s a five star album. I still listened to it again, because it is just fantastic.
What I think is really overlooked is the Pop aspect of Blur’s early work. To The End is not only one of my favourites from the album, but it’s also just a classic, very 60’s almost Chanson-esque, Pop structure. It’s a true spiritual successor to the work The Kinks and The Beatles were doing, bringing modern sensibility to classic song structure and creating a new standard for Pop music.
The conventional wisdom is that Blur might have won the battle of Britpop, but Oasis won the war. I’m not so sure. More music not only sounds like Parklife nowadays, but also takes it’s cues from their songwriting and ethos. The mixture of humour and heartbreaking sincerity plays much better than Oasis’ self-aggrandising, and has been much more influential on the recent character and story driven direction Indie Rock has taken in recent years.
And also, it’s just a fucking good collection of music. And that’s all it needs to be
Blondie
5/5
I genuinely believe that Parallel lines is one of the most perfect Pop albums ever recorded. Somehow managing to be both cool, detached, and ironic, and sweet, immediate, and sincere it balances it’s brilliant Pop sheen with a hardness drawn from their Punk roots, and doing so creates an album that’s true Pop Art. And if you don’t like it, you can just go away
The Shamen
2/5
I don’t think this is all that bad.
I mean, I didn’t listen to all of it, it’s far too long, but I don’t think that as music it’s that bad. On the other hand, there was an album that I listened to recently, I don’t remember which one, and the top rated review said that they always try to ask why this specific album deserves a spot on the top 1001 of all time, the most essential of the most essential. And I have no idea why En-Tact of all albums is up here. As far as I was aware, The Shamen are best known for Ebeneezer Goode, a particularly catchy if unsubtle tribute to ecstasy, which only seems to be remembered by a certain set of music history nerds, specifically because of it’s hilarious take on pro-drug advocacy.
But there isn’t any of this catchiness or wit on En-Tact. It’s all played as straight as Rave music can be, and as such, I don’t see why this deserves a spot on the list.
Coldplay
4/5
There was a period when I thought I might be into Coldplay, because I discovered that I quite liked Yellow, and Til Kingdom Come has been one of my favourite songs since watching The Amazing Spider-Man however many years ago.
I tried listening to one of their recent albums, and didn’t really get much out of it. I clearly should have started at the beginning, because Parachutes is really quite good. It’s quite top heavy, I don’t remember as much of the later songs as I do the first few. But on the other hand, having actually actively listened to a full, acclaimed Coldplay album now, I can see where they’ve been influential on subsequent artists I’ve liked. And that has had an effect in my appreciation for them.
I can see how this has been influential. That would be enough to land it at least a three on my rating, but I can also see how it had been influential on a lot of music I really love, and that pushes it up even further.
I still don’t think I’m fully sold in Coldplay. But Parachutes is not just a good, solid Pop Rock record, it’s arguably the definitive Pop Rock record of the 2000’s. Every other Pop band that took cues from Alternative sounds like this, but none of them had quite the staying power. And there is a reason for that. None of them ever reached the heights that Coldplay did. And, although I still can’t identify what it was that defined those heights, I cannot deny that they existed.
Parachutes is a good album. I’m not sold enough to declare that Coldplay are a good band, but this is worth checking out. Let go of some of the cynicism, embrace some Poptimism. Parachutes is good enough that it appears on this list. There’s a reason for that
Brian Eno
5/5
It took me two listens to get into Here Come The Warm Jets, but I got the appeal of this immediately. Just beautiful, calming and serene
Donald Fagen
5/5
This is the album that introduced me to Donald Fagen and Steely Dan, and so has had a huge influence on my musical journey. And in addition to that importance to me personally, I think this is just a fantastic set of songs, all of which sound similar to Steely Dan’s but which lack the level of irony and cynicism. It’s all just great fun, and Walk Between Raindrops is one of the most romantic songs I’ve ever heard in my life
Mercury Rev
4/5
I’d say this has all the hallmarks of a cult work, in that the story is just as if not more interesting than the work itself. A band who after a flop, decided to say ‘Fuck it, let’s just record whatever uncommercial thing we want, the label be damned,’ and as such recorded their most acclaimed and as far as I can tell, best selling album.
And I don’t not like it, I would just need a bit of extra time with it in order to say that I think the music is more interesting than the story
Sigur Rós
3/5
Because of my fucked-up schedule, and the fact that I’m taking a break to catch up on some albums I’ve missed, I’m listening to Ágaætis byrjun right after Brian Eno’s Music For Airports, and… I think I’m burnt out on relaxing shit. I was gonna mention this in the Brian Eno review but couldn’t find a good place to put it, but I’m not naturally a very relaxed person. I’m almost always totally wired, I smoke a lot, I’ve got a lot of nervous energy. I play the drums very loudly and very quickly to the inevitable irritation of my neighbours. I listen to a lot of Punk.
I do listen to more mellow music, but having 2 of these fairly long winded, relaxed affairs one after the other is something I’m not really wired for.
That being said, I’m enjoying Ágaætis byrjun more than I did Music For Airports. There’s more of a sense of dynamics, more of a structure. That ‘that being said’ being said, it also blended as far into the background as Music For Airports did, that I’m forgetting everything that I listened to as soon as I hear it.
I didn’t hate it, and I’d be glad to give it another listen, but maybe not just after I’d listened to another ambient piece. As it stands as a first impression, I’m going to have to stick with the same rating as Music For Airports, the album that has so doggedly followed Ágaætis byrjun throughout this review. Sorry about that, but that’s just the way the dice rolls sometimes
Cocteau Twins
4/5
I’m glad I took some time between listening to Music For Airports/Ágætis Byrjun and Treasure, because I think that that much ambient soundscape might have killed me. I did wind up getting Treasure, but it took me a little while to get into it.
One of the interesting things I noticed was that, despite it’s ethereal sound, there was still a recognisable Scottishness to the sound, something similar to other Scottish Post-Punk and New Wave I enjoy. I’m now wondering if there’s a way of quantifying Scottishness in music, or if it’s just a case of those bands being of a scene and so sharing similar aesthetic goals and interests.
Treasure was another album that was enhanced by my listening while walking along the beautiful Celtic seascapes of Gwynedd. The last album that received that benefit was the Goldfrapp one at the beginning of the summer, and I think the chilly mid-autumn afternoon suited Treasure better than a warm sunny day would. I enjoyed it a lot, but there’s still an isolation I feel from it which means I don’t quite love it. But that’s the beauty of art isn’t it?
The Libertines
4/5
Did you know that The Libertines released an album this year? No, me neither. I’ve not heard anything of them since they reformed and released that third album that I didn’t listen to, and that was about 10 years ago. What Became Of The Likely Lads indeed.
The Libertines really should be considered the British Strokes, the genuine original scene leaders showing the way for how Rock could exist in the 21st century. Instead that title goes to the Arctic Monkeys, who were not exactly proteges but certainly followers of the initial Libertines playbook.
I do think The Libertines should be remembered, but I think what is likely to be best remembered is their first album, and relistening to their self-titled, I can see why. The Libertines is not a bad album at all, and in fact I think it has their best song in Can’t Stand Me Now, but it isn’t as cohesive a whole as Up The Bracket. That’s the problem. And, for a band as intentionally ramshackle and scrappy as The Libertines were (are?) it feels a bit silly to complain that it isn’t as good as their other album, because it’s still fine, it’s pretty good. But when The Libertines legacy becomes inevitably stories of their infighting and the relationship between Doherty and Barât, I won’t be surprised if The Libertines the album gets overlooked somewhat
AC/DC
5/5
Sometimes it just has to be said that an album is an exceptionally well done example of a particular genre, and there are few people who have done Hard Rock better than AC/DC on Highway To Hell.
This is good strutting music
Air
4/5
When the first track came on and was like, an actual song, I thought I was in for a different experience than I ended getting. Playground Love is the best song on the album, establishing a mood that sounds a bit like a funfair Noir, but the rest of the album is glossy, and occasionally trippy electronica that I also enjoyed. But I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d have enjoyed an album that continued on the style of the opening track.
It does make me want to watch The Virgin Suicides however, so I think that’s done a big part of it’s work well
Joan Baez
3/5
I can appreciate that Joan Baez is important as a recording of American Folk, and that it’s an impressive musical achievement in and of itself, but I have a really hard time enjoying this because I don’t like Joan Baez’s voice. The shrill head voice vibrato thing she does in El Preso Numero Nueve is especially grating.
If it were just based on importance this should be a five, but I’m not feeling generous today. Sorry Joan, three stars for you
Malcolm McLaren
4/5
Musically, I really enjoyed this, but god was Malcolm McLaren a shit
Pink Floyd
5/5
I forgot how listenable DSOTM was. I put it on a little after work, and then after a bit went out to do some shopping for dinner, and was convinced that there was more that I’d missed. For a prog album, it’s really quite concise and catchy.
I’m sure I could write an essay about why this, of all albums is the one that’s been so mythologised and critically acclaimed, but sometimes it really should just be about the music man, and this is pretty damn good
Love
5/5
I first heard about this in NME’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums, which when I was a budding music nerd I poured over almost religiously. It sounded interesting, mystical almost, and so fate must have had specific plans for me when I discovered a copy of the album on the floor of my garage one day when I was cleaning it out. It was one of those giveaway things that the British Tabloid’s did to try and get you to buy them in the late 2000’s, but the weird thing is that neither of my parents had even heard of Love (the band) when I talked to them about it.
The mystical quality I imagined of this album comes through in the music and the lyrics, but it’s much darker than my 13 year old self could have imagined. Rabelesian humour is contrasted with absurdism and observations about love and madness, and set against a background of psychedelic folk that incorporates elements of hard rock, R&B and even flamenco. How does an album like this even get made, and why does it work so well?
Forever Changes is one of my favourite albums, best evidenced by the fact that I’ve listened to it twice through while writing this review. I used to save it as a summer album but as I sit here in the mid autumn rain, and am still enjoying as much as I would on a balmy summer day, I think I can happily say that this is an album for all seasons. So put it on next time you’re in love, or feeling mentally deranged, and it’ll hopefully spark an appreciation that is constant, even if it Forever Changes
Pet Shop Boys
4/5
The use of perfectly crafted Synth-Pop and Post-Disco to back lyrics that are this bleak is an inspired choice. Critiquing the emptiness and shallowness of Thatcherite Britain, and the culture of the 80’s in general, by creating beats that are good enough to dance to while off your skull on cocaine, almost encourages the listener to ignore the lyrics, and I’m sure a lot of the listening public did. It makes for a bit of a conundrum, an album that is clearly good both musically and lyrically, and as a meta-critique of itself, but which by the fact of it’s irony and the disconnect between the music and lyrics, creates a distancing effect when trying to listen critically. It makes it very difficult to love Actually, even if it’s easy to appreciate it’s brilliance
Simon & Garfunkel
5/5
I talked a bit about the mystical sound of Love’s Forever Changes a few days ago. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme creates a similar effect with it’s first few songs, but then drops it for a more raucous and human take on Folk music, beginning with the simple yearning for connection and familiarity expressed in Homeward Bound. Simon and Garfunkel continue in this vein for most of the rest of the album, taking in everything from devastating portraits of the fragility of human connection to full blown generational anthems that pastiche Dylan, before creating a synthesis with their version of Silent Night which contrasts the literal mysticism of Christian Theology with actual news stories about Lenny Bruce’s death and Nixon declaring the possibility of five more years of war in Vietnam.
It’s a pretty much perfect encapsulation of the human condition, with our capacities for good and evil, the mystical and the banal, and the ever present, and ever allusive need for human connection
Morrissey
3/5
I said in my review of Meat Is Murder that Morrissey is thankfully the most ignorable aspect of The Smith’s music. This is fortunately still true of my first taste of his solo work. What is unfortunate is that the music is nowhere near the standard set by Johnny Marr and Co. I’m not sure Viva Hate is a bad album, but it’s not got that spark that Morrissey did with The Smiths, and so suffers in comparison
Emmylou Harris
3/5
I forgot most of this almost as soon as I heard it, which isn’t really Emmylou Harris’ fault, I’ve been ill the past couple of days and so my attention span’s been pretty dog shit. That being said, I’m sure the fact that I remember 90% of the songs being slightly boring ballads isn’t working in it’s favour. I like a good Country Ballad as much as the next sad alcoholic, but I try and vary my sad alcoholic listening experiences, cos there’s plenty of other good drinking music from other genres, and anyway, this doesn’t strike me as that kind of Country album in the first place.
I dunno, it might grown on me, and Harris’ voice itself is great, but after a first listen, I’m not sure if i’ll actually listen again
Kings of Leon
4/5
Kings Of Leon are one of my favourite bands. I’m not sure I’ve ever told anyone that. They were one of the first bands that I discovered on my own as a teenager, and I’ve awaited and bought all of their albums since Mechanical bull in 2013. They were one of the first bands that I actually listened to critically, picking out the rhythm and lead parts, listening to how the rhythm section played off each other. I think Caleb Followill is one of the most underrated lyricists of the 21st century, and I absolutely love his vocals.
So I’m much more sympathetic to their albums being in this project than probably the majority of people are. That being said, I don’t think Youth And Young Manhood is their best album. It’s still pretty good, but it’s all pretty raw. Caleb’s vocals are rawer, his lyrics are less mature, and the music is simpler. The rawness is certainly appealing as a countryfied cousin of the contemporary Indie Rock scene, and so in hindsight, I could see the case for Youth And Young Manhood being quite influential, Indie Country being one of the more dominant trends in Alternative music at the moment.
But on the other hand, as a fan this is the album that I return to least, and while I admit that I’m maybe not the typical KoL fan, I think that that counts for something. They haven’t quite found their footing yet
David Bowie
5/5
Station To Station is the great Bowie album that I return to the least, but that isn’t because I dislike it it at all.
In fact, I think it’s one of his most consistent artistic statements, the natural middle period between his more experimental Berlin period and more accessible Glam recordings. And while I could get bogged down in discussion about artistic transition and middle ground, and claim that that’s the reason for my not having listened to this as much as Ziggy Stardust, the real reason is that it’s 40 minutes long but only 6 songs, and I’m a Punk with a short attention span. The Blue Eyed Soul thing he’s doing is great, and he never sounded so good, and I’m not gonna say it could be cut down, because what would you cut? It’s all essential. It’s just my least returned to of an all time great bunch
Orange Juice
4/5
I listened to it last night, and outside of the title track which I already knew and loved, wasn’t terribly impressed, but listening again today and paying more attention to the lyrics it really struck how brilliant this is as a deconstruction of the themes and topics of Pop music. The typical track three ballad actually being a breakup/ hate song, all of the playing around with metaphors and interpolations of Buzzcocks songs. I still don’t think it’s entirely essential, but I’m more impressed now than I was last night
The Roots
3/5
I’m not sure about this one, it’s longer than I like albums to be, and while I think the quality of the beats and the lyrics are both high, there’s also not anything that stands out as excellent to me. I listened to it on a speaker while cooking dinner, moving around a bit and maybe not paying attention as much as I should. But I’ve done that before, and there are albums that I ended up really loving using this method of listening. Ahh, who cares?
Elliott Smith
4/5
First time listening to Elliott Smith, and I’m impressed but I think that it’s the sort of thing I’d have appreciated more if I’d listened to it at a more formative age.
Also, and this is besides the point, I had to listen to it twice because I was listening to it on an Alexa, and my Dad found a way of connecting to it and blasting I’m In The Mood For Dancing instead
The Cure
5/5
Well, considering I started rewatching What We Do In The Shadows on the same day I was given the best Gothic Rock album, I’d say we’re well in out way to spooky season in style.
Pornography is just a masterpiece, a dense, claustrophobic and expansive sounding mixture of tribal pounding drums, thunderous bass and knotted twisting guitar lines. I mentioned that in my Disintegration review that that album is very urban sounding, the Gothic liminal spaces of empty office buildings and suburban streets lit by dim street lamps and neon. In contrast, Pornography is Gothic in a more traditional sense, bringing to mind the isolation of desolate moors, dense forest or, scariest of all, the recesses of your own mind.
Ooh, I am going to have a fun autumn
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
One of my hot takes about popular music is that both the UK and the US editions of Are You Experienced are better albums to listen to than the weird, unstructured mix of the two that most people listen to nowadays because of the CD. Listening to the CD track listing takes a little away from the experience of the tightness of the originals, despite it meaning yo get all of what was eventually released as Are You Experienced.
That being said, this all still absolutely fucks whatever configuration it’s in
Tim Buckley
4/5
The best song is by far the first, where the Jazz influence is most clearly showing, but props to Gypsy Woman for the showcase of Buckley’s vocal abilities.
Happy Sad is probably the best example of Folk Jazz I’ve listened to outside of Van Morrison, and although I liked it quite a lot, I think I’ve reached the conclusion that I’m not a huge fan of the mixture. I like Jazz, I like Folk, but Jazz Folk almost never quite blends for me.
Also, isn’t it crazy that Tim Buckley was 2 years younger than Jeff Buckley when he died, but Buckley Pere recorded 7 albums to Buckley Fils’ 1?
OutKast
5/5
It’s too long. If you were to listen to Speakerboxxx/The Love Below as one full album, as I did, then it’s length is the main problem. I started at about five o’clock after getting off work, and finished at about the time I was ready to get tea ready.
But that’s the double album experience isn’t it, and Speakerboxxx/The Love Below isn’t just a double album. As two solo albums from the two members of OutKast it’s a pretty fascinating experience, both with their own strengths and flaws, both with something to say, and both with a host of good songs.
I can see the arguments for both discs being the superior one, and as such I do think that it’s best experienced as two sides of a whole. But then you get into the problem of length again.
Yet as much as I harp on about the flaws, it cannot be denied that Speakerboxxx/The Love Below is one of the most remarkable pieces of art produced in the early 2000’s, brilliant not despite it’s messy, overblown, and contradictory nature, but because of it. And because of that, it deserves the full five stars
Fred Neil
3/5
This feels like it should be more up my alley than it is, I think the main problem is that there’s little to distinguish Fred Neil from the rest of the Folk Rock set crowd that he inspired. He’s not an outstanding guitarist, lyricist, melodist, or singer. That’s not say that he’s bad at any of these things, but unlike a Bob Dylan or a Paul Simon, there’s not that generational defining talent.
That being said, it’s interesting to see how this was influential on the scene I do enjoy, and it’s not as if Fred Neil was without it’s charms. Everybody’s Talking is one of my favourite songs, so it was interesting to hear the original, and the Raga jam at the end was fun, but not enough to make me consider the album entirely essential
John Prine
5/5
To bastardise a phrase from the highly underrated radio comedy Cabin Pressure, John Prine might not be the first Country album I’ve loved, but it is the first Country album I’ve ever fallen in love with.
A beautifully simple, direct, and profound meditation on loneliness and the ordinariness of broken people, with an undercurrent of righteous anger that breaks through on occasion, all told through a songwriting that couples a fantastic sense of phrasing with an oddball, yet observational sense of humour.
If you want to know how good this album is, all I can say is that the song about wanking is both incredibly funny, incredibly sad, and incredibly touching. You don’t get to write a sentence like that about many pieces of music
Solomon Burke
3/5
The real problem is, despite being a foundation of Soul music, there isn’t really a lot to talk about. Burke’s got a decent voice, and the songs are all enjoyable, but there’s not really any individual track that stands out to me. Decent enough, and probably more influential than I’m giving it credit for, but nothing I’ll return to
Public Image Ltd.
5/5
How to write a review of Metal Box? Try to defend it from it’s detractors, make a comparison to other Avant-Garde music, place it into historical context, make jokes?
I don’t think any of that matters. If the music isn’t for you, it isn’t for you. I can’t stand Michael Jackson’s big albums, but they’re all very highly rated on here. In the reviews of those, I didn’t disparage, I made what I thought were salient points about the quality of the music as I experience it.
Metal Box is supposed to be difficult, and yet despite it’s uncompromising nature and bleak sound, it is often hauntingly beautiful in it’s own way. It is the sound of anxiety and of anger, the Id lashing out at a world that isn’t listening. Lydon’s lyrics are brief snapshots of the inner working of his mind, with everything from observations about people he knows (Albatross) to musings about news stories he’s read (Poptones) to reminders about his schedule (The Suit.) Nothing but snapshots of thoughts, scattershot, meaningless, random, ephemeral yet eternal. Where else are you going to get a listening experience like that than with the Avant-Garde?
R.E.M.
5/5
Document is a great example of a sort of album that doesn’t get talked about too often. An album that is overshadowed by the big singles, but is still really solid if not great.
It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) and The One I Love are definitely the best songs on the album, I’m not going to deny that. But so many of the other classic albums that have one or two big singles that I’ve had during this process are so reliant on the strength of the singles that the deep cuts all struggle to keep up momentum.
Document is first and foremost a good, solid collection of songs. Every one is memorable in it’s own way, whether the hooks come from the instrumental, the vocals, or the lyrics.
This is the sort of album that people should try to write, the singles getting big because they’re good songs because all of the songs on the album are good, rather than because they’re good songs on otherwise middling attempts, or because they were specifically designed to get big. It’s clearly a labour of love, an art built from passion, and it comes through with how easy to listen to, yet instantly relistenable it is.
I’ve made the observation before that I don’t use the word a lot, but I think it’s fair to say that Document is a masterpiece in how to write and structure an album. I love it so much
Jacques Brel
5/5
My French listening is not as good as I’d like it to be, so I listened to Olympia 64 mostly as music rather than trying to focus on the lyrics, which I then read later.
I’m almost in awe of how good Chanson is as an art form, and am kicking myself that I’d not got round to Jacques Brel before yesterday. His gift for melody and performance is impeccable, bringing a real sense of drama to the performances, and his voice is just beautiful. The arrangements also have drama when needed, but also a playfulness which certainly makes up for my not catching all of the lyrics.
Having read the lyrics, I’m even more in awe. Full of simple yet devastating observations but also wordplay, you can see how some of the wordier songwriters working in English were attracted to Brel’s work.
Having got this album at around the same time I discovered how much I liked Charles Aznavour, I’m pretty sure the universe is telling me to work on my French listening, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to do that now. Au revoir
Dire Straits
3/5
A strong first side and closer, that’s slightly let down by an unmemorable run on the second half. Brothers in Arms is kinda fascinating in the same way that Appetite For Destruction is, the big songs are so big and so good that they’ve forever cemented the artists place in popular culture, despite a large chink of the rest of the album being ignorable at best. It’s the opposite of what I was talking about with R.E.M.’s Document a few days ago, which is an album that’s all good throughout if overshadowed by the success of it’s singles. Document would have still been well received if The One I Love and It’s The End Of The World As We Know It had been left off. Without Money For Nothing, Walk Of Life and the title track, Brothers In Arms wouldn’t be on this list. And it’s all because the rest of the songs don’t have that X factor, whatever it is. They’re fine, but they’re deep cuts. And the deep cuts on other albums are just better
The Crusaders
3/5
As a pretty big Jazz fan, I’m kind of disappointed in this. The title track is pretty good, but the rest is rather forgettable and conservative. Considering what was going on in the rest of the Jazz and Fusion scene at the time, it all seems a bit safe.
It’s not unenjoyable, but I don’t see why it’s considered a classic
Dead Kennedys
5/5
Is it weird that I find this album kinda sexy?
It’s incredibly intelligent and incredibly passionate, full of moments of pathos, creativity and humour. It’s basically my ideal partner is audio form.
I’m not as knowledgeable about American Punk as I am British. To my knowledge, Dead Kennedys are the best of the bunch, and getting the opportunity to relisten to Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables really solidified why for me. This album really pushes the boundaries of how creative Punk could be without pushing into Post-Punk territory. Couple that creativity with a dedication to revolutionary politics that blows everybody else out of the water, and you’ve got a recipe for genuinely one of the most enjoyable, relentless, entertaining, and cathartic albums ever recorded
The Band
4/5
In my first The Band review, I made a crack that I gave it a higher score than my first Beatles album. Well, I have now reviewed many Beatles albums, and they’ve got two five stars, and really I was a bit harsh on The White Album. Now that I’ve had more time to digest it fully, it really does deserve the full five. Sgt Peppers too.
But what of The Band? Does their self titled second album get them that magical rating?
I’m not sure. Unlike with Music From Big Pink where I could identify it’s influence on later music that I like, The Band seems more straightforward Country Rock with bits of Soul influence in there, which ended up confusing me a bit. It’s not bad, in fact I think it’s pretty good, but it’s a combination that shouldn’t work, and frankly I’m not sure it always does.
So, it’s gonna have to still be a four. Too bad The Band, but I have enjoyed my time with you. It’s been an interesting ride
The Isley Brothers
4/5
There were three big moments of realisation in my experience of listening to this album. The first was realising that, yes this is that Isley Brothers, the ones who released Shout in 1959, and who I thought hadn’t released anything else of note.
The second was that I recognised the opening song, albeit because of it’s use in my favourite Kendrick Lamar song.
The third was that I’ve apparently been pronouncing Isley wrong all my life. I thought it was Isle-y, as in Isle. Apparently it’s Eyez-Lee, with a zed sound
Dexys Midnight Runners
4/5
So, my second Dexy’s album. The biggest issue I had with Too Rye Aye was that the songs didn’t stand out from each other particularly. Searching For The Young Soul Rebels is much better in this regard, it’s all memorable and all pretty good. But, Too Rye Ay has the benefit of having Come On Eileen which is an all time classic Pop song. Geno is the big Pop single for this album, and I love it. It’s a great song, but it isn’t as good as Come On Eileen or even their cover of Jackie Wilson Said
All in all, Young Soul Rebels is the better album, but Too Rye Ay has the higher high point. I think that the higher quality of the deep cuts compared to the singles means that I have to give it a higher rating
Earth, Wind & Fire
5/5
I don’t think I knew any Earth, Wind & Fire songs outside of September and Boogie Wonderland, before listening to That’s The Way Of The World. And I think that’s a shame. I was pretty amazed by this album; the Jazz influence was clear, which I adored, and the songwriting and performances were top notch throughout. I will definitely be looking out for more Earth, Wind & Fire now
Kanye West
5/5
Yeezus is a really good drinking album. All of the Kanye album’s I’ve listened to have been really good for drinking to. Is Kanye a really good drinking artist?
His topics of thought certainly jump around in the same way mine does when I drink, and just when I’m thinking in general. I really shouldn’t find Kanye as relatable as I do. And for the first time, the ADHD feeling of the topics is replicated by the beats, which jump around and switch up in an almost schizophrenic, but completely absorbing way.
God, am I a Kanye fan? I thought I was woke, but man with this and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, I’m completely compelled. I’m fascinated by everything this man does. Fuck
Creedence Clearwater Revival
5/5
How many bangers do you need to have on an album before it becomes too much? Clearly Creedence didn’t het the quota memo, because Cosmo’s Factory is all banger. Fuck, this is good. I’ve said before in the R.E.M Document review, it’s one thing to make an album that’s great, it’s an entirely different thing to make an album that’s all good, all the way through, and I don’t think Creedence, with the one notable exception, ever made an album that wasn’t all good. And even Mardi Grad has Someday Never Comes, which I and ever other songwriter would kill to have written
The War On Drugs
5/5
Maybe it’s just that I’m in the mood for this, because I am also finding myself in a position where I am isolated, depressed, and just feeling weird about myself, but the long enveloping soundscapes of Lost In The Dream really appealed to me.
The best way I can think to describe it is like an Americana version of Disintegration. And anybody who knows me knows how I feel about Disintegration
Scott Walker
4/5
I can’t remember where I read it, but recently I saw someone talking about the relative dearth of deep male vocals in Pop music. As a joke, I’ve always blamed Smokey Robinson, making the tenor and falsetto so incredibly sexy is certainly the reason why a lot of male Pop stars have used their higher register to great effect.
Scott Walker is supposedly the reason why Bowie started utilising the lower end of his register in later albums, and I appreciate him for that. But, there’s something about his vocals that I’m still not sold on. There’s an inflection that I find a bit irritating. On the other hand, I’m enjoying the music a lot and the lyrics a lot. The darker themes suit this sort of orchestrated style, give it a melancholy that elevates some of the poetry.
‘He’s not a shadow of shadows like you, you see’ is a line that just cuts me.
This is an album that I’m going to explore more, for certain. There are elements of styles that I know I enjoy, and I’d like to get to know the lyrics better
Sonic Youth
4/5
Let’s talk about Cool. Sonic Youth are indisputably cool, they look cool, their attitude is cool. If I met someone who said that they listened to Sonic Youth, I’d think that person was cool by association.
The problem is that their cool image overshadows most of makes other artists of a similar nature, scene, or style stand out. Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground had a similarly cool aesthetic, but Lou Reed was also in the top four singer-songwriters of the Sixties, and wrote at least a handful of genuine Rock Standards. Every cool band formed since 1968 has rehearsed Sweet Jane, Waiting For The Man, or Pale Blue Eyes in their garage.
I’m not sure that Sonic Youth have anything that essential in their catalogue. I would go to bat for Daydream Nation being a pretty good album, and I enjoyed Dirty a lot when I was listening to it. I’m just not sure that there’s any relative cultural staying power in their music. I’ve not ever met someone who’s talked about Sonic Youth, I’ve only ever seen one mention of them in film or TV (a joke on How I Met Your Mother about any Bass playing woman called Kim in any cool band being hot for what it’s worth) and I’ve never heard any of their songs out in the wild. Any time I’ve ever seen them mentioned in discussions of music online (which is also rare) most of the conversation is about how cool and influential they are.
This will be their legacy. The band that was too cool for big, lasting hits. Your coolest friend’s favourite band. And if we’re being honest, I’m not sure it’s any big loss. I like this album, I like Daydream Nation. But Sonic Youth’s coolness has always left me a little cold. I don’t think there’s really much to connect to. There’s not that relentlessness, that obsessive search for meaning or human connection or truth that I feel makes for the greatest art. Lou Reed, the coolest of all cool Rock stars, wrote some of his biggest songs by writing about his own insecurities regarding love and sexuality. Bowie spent his time pretending to be a literal fucking space alien writing about the frailty of human connection. Leonard Cohen, who was again just so cool, wrote almost exclusively about the obsessive intersection between sex, death, religion and his own ego. I feel something when I listen to their music, I feel a connection to another human. All I think when listening to Sonic Youth is, ‘wow, this is cool.’
I’m going to give this four stars, because I do genuinely think that this is good music. I’d happily listen to it again. But I’m not ever gonna love it.
Talking Heads
4/5
Talking Heads debut isn’t as nervy or nerdy as the later output that would make them megastars, but despite that it’s got a lot going for it. A handful of great riffs, I find myself playing Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town every time I’m messing around on guitar, and some interesting reinterpretations of the basics of Rock music. Plus Psycho Killer, which is far and away the standout track. It’s not quite as good as their later albums, but it’s still a fun listen
Air
4/5
This sort of music just glides completely off my brain. I enjoy it fine enough when listening to it, but I never remember any of it afterwards. I’ve been thinking about Since I Left You by The Avalanches, because I said multiple times during my review of that album that I appreciated it a lot, and gave it four stars. But I don’t remember any of it, and that’s exactly how I’m feeling about Moon Safari even as I listen to it. This is all pretty good, the bass work is especially fantastic, but I forget what each song sounded like as soon as the next one comes on. It’s like The Silence from Doctor Who.
I also came to a realisation when listening to New Star In The Sky. I’ve said before that I’m not a naturally relaxed person, but this album reminded me that I’m also a real paranoid bastard when I do start to relax, because I’m sure something’s gonna go wrong at some point.
So, all in all, I enjoyed it while listening. It’s a good album, I’m just not going to remember any of it tomorrow
Eric Clapton
1/5
I have made my issues with Eric Clapton as both a person and a musician clear in my two previous review of his work. But when talking about (how fucking awful his cover of Little Wing was) his artistic choices on Layla, I neglected to mention a problem that became increasingly relevant through my listening of 461 Ocean Boulevard, which is that Clapton is not a very good singer. He’s got a very limited range, which is something that can be worked around, but he’s also got a very flat and uninterested sounding delivery, and is often pushed very far back into the mix of these songs, so much so that it becomes difficult to distinguish him at all. It makes the dreary, stiff, white Blues on the album all the more uninteresting, because both parts of what should be interesting about a Bluesman of Clapton’s standing, his solos and his vocals, are barely intelligible.
I was just utterly bored by this whole project. After I Shot The Sheriff, I cued Bob Marley’s version and, despite it not being a particular favourite Marley song of mine, I was taken by how much better it sounded than Clapton’s version.
God this was a boring review to write as well. Everything about 461 Ocean Boulevard is boring, from the title to the cover to the mixing. I’m sorry to take up so much of your time on this boring review of this boring album by this boring artist who also happens to be one of the most unlikeable cunts in existence at the moment
Kings of Leon
5/5
I don’t know what to tell you, this is a good album. With less overt Country elements than their debut, Aha Shake Heartbreak doubles down on the harder elements of KoL’s sound and perfects their nervy, edgy, indie-inspired take on Southern Rock
Supergrass
4/5
Usually, when critics takes time to mention an artists age at recording an album, it’s because they’re a young creator who has made an outstandingly mature and polished statement for their relative youth, or because it’s an older artist putting out material that’s regarded as on par with their earlier works. Take The Jam’s first album as example of the former, recorded when Paul Weller was only 18, and You Want It Darker for the latter, recorded by Cohen at 82.
I bring this up because I Should Coco was written and recorded by Supergrass when they were all very young, 19 if I’m recalling correctly, and it sounds like it.
I don’t mean that in a bad way. There’s a youthful exuberance that really works in it’s favour. It sounds like it was recorded by a group of teenagers, and it’s music that I think would greatly appeal to my teenage self if I’d gotten around to listening to it. Hell, I’m nearly 26 and all I want to do is bum around, get up late, smoke cigarettes and hang out with my friends like the protagonists do in Alright.
I couldn’t make an album like this nowadays. I don’t have that youthful optimism and carefree attitude. Everything I create is world weary and cynical.
The only other Supergrass album I’ve ever listened to is Life On Other Planets, which was recorded by the band when they were about the same age as I am now, and they seem to have not lost any of their pep in those intervening years. And to be fair, I did record some music when I was around their age that was, looking back at it, quite bleak and cynical, so maybe I’m just a miserable bastard.
All this is to say that I Should Coco is a reminiscence of a teenage self I never was. It allows me an opportunity to be the more carefree self I never was, and I appreciate that
Baaba Maal
4/5
I’m tryna come up with a variation of the Boss Baby joke, something like Person who’s only heard Fela Kuti listening to other African Music: This is giving me major Fela Kuti vibes, but honestly Djam Leelli sounds nothing like Fela Kuti’s work. It’s much more of a vibe, and I really enjoyed it, it’s the sort of thing I can picture myself relaxing to when I’m in a particularly lethargic summer mood, and I’m listening to it at the beginning of November
Jane's Addiction
3/5
It’s not fair at all, but listening to this after Ritual De Lo Habitual made that album seem a little worse by association. I’m not sure what changed between their first and second albums, but Nothing’s Shocking feels like it doesn’t have that spark, that restlessness, and that variety that made me enjoy Ritual so much, while also highlighting the elements that work against the band, most notably Perry Farrell’s vocals, which sound incredibly adolescent on this album.
It’s a shame, what with the explicit Velvet Underground influence, and how much I’ve liked their other work, I wanted to like this better
Missy Elliott
5/5
There’s a contradictory nature to Under Construction. On the one hand, thematically it’s a call to come together and acknowledge that we are all works in progress and not perfect, and on the other all the best songs are about how hot, sexy, and fucking awesome Missy Elliot is. I’m not complaining about that, at all. I’m utterly in love with Missy Elliot after having listened to this record, hearing how confident she is makes me, a straight white man, feel just as sexy and confident as she sounds.
I’m intrigued about what she says in the final spoken outro, about not caring if people think this is real Hip-Hop, because I genuinely think this is one of the best Rap albums that I’ve ever heard, immaculately produced, with a great sense of fun in the lyrics and flow for days
David Bowie
5/5
The song fragments are all fantastic, catchy and intricate in the way that only Bowie could be, and the ambient tracks take the best parts of Eno’s contributions to the genre and expand it with Bowie’s relentless experimentalism and sheer fucking beauty. This is one of those albums that deserves to be listened to all the way through
Kelela
3/5
Take Me Apart is pretty immaculately constructed with shades of Jon Hopkins and Burial in the beat work, and I imagine that’s why a lot of this works for one audience, and why it doesn’t for others. I’m a fan of the both of the artists I’ve listed as influences, and as such I think it’s interesting to hear it used within an American Pop context which is also why I’m sure American critics were so fond of it, because without the context of the American Pop scene this does sound fresh and exciting. But, from the context of British Electronica, this is utilising styles which were at the time about 10 years removed.
If you’re a fan of Electronic music, there’s certainly a lot to like here. And as such, I enjoyed it. But as an R&B album, I’m not sure it works. It’s too reliant on the beats, and not the traditional R&B hallmarks, the vocals and the songwriting. Kelela’s vocals are fine, often beautiful even, but they always feel secondary to the music. The same is true of the lyrics and song structures. None of these songs really have choruses, which is I imagine why some people have had trouble differentiating them. The hook is the use of these specifically British sounds in the beats, which works as a piece of experimentation. But I think to be a true great, Kelela needs to start working on her songwriting, refining the lyrics, finding her niche on specific topics, and working on hooks and choruses.
Also, and this is besides the point but I feel it has to be mentioned, the photo on Kelela’s ‘About The Artist’ section on Spotify cuts out her face and instead presents her to the world nipple first, which is… a bold choice let’s say
Public Enemy
5/5
You can’t fight the power of this record
The Rolling Stones
5/5
Exile On Main Street is possibly the Stone’s most consistently good album. It’s also arguably their greatest artistic statement, an elegiac take on their signature heavy Blues Rock sound that was by the time of recording, being replaced in the mainstream by early Heavy Metal, Glam Rock and Bubblegum Pop, that is nonetheless full of life, beauty and humour.
The point that it’s their most consistent album is, I think, the most interesting part of the album’s reputation. It has less classic songs than the preceding three albums, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard an Exile song out in the wild, but the quality of the songs on here is all top-notch, fun and loose Blue jams with a good smattering of acoustic and R&B tracks. I’ve made it clear that I prefer consistency over greatness, writing one great song is easy, writing a consistently good album is the sign of a true great. And Exile is the capstone of the tetralogy of great albums the band released in the late 60’s and early 70’s, a monumental, twisted work, dedicated to sex, sin, and soul
The Stooges
5/5
I make an alternative Christmas playlist every year, and for a while now I’ve included I Wanna Be Your Dog on every one, following a discussion with my father about Jona Lewie’s ‘Stop The Cavalry.’ I maintain that it is a Christmas song, he says the only thing that makes it Christmassy is the sleigh-bells. I think I’m actually reinforcing his point by picking a song that’s so obviously not a Christmas song, just because it has sleigh-bells, but it also pisses just everybody off and that’s the main thing about Christmas isn’t it?
If I’m being honest, as much as I like The Stooges and recognise their influence in general, and of this album specifically, it’s always been my least favourite of theirs. Outside of 1969, I Wanna Be Your Dog, No Fun and yes, We Will Fall, it’s largely unmemorable, and although the unmemorable tracks are all important and good guitar tracks, with Iggy Pop being as charismatic as ever, the largest influence clearly comes from the 4 big tracks. If this were a base 10 rating system, I’d give it a 9, so that the greatness of Fun House and Raw Power shines through. But the greatness of the best tracks is enough that it deserves the full 5 despite my misgivings
Les Rythmes Digitales
2/5
Why is Soft Machine called that? It should be called Lucifer Rising, soft machine is only whispered a couple of times at the end of the song.
There’s a typo on the Spotify listing for (Hey You) What’s That Sound. They capitalise the ‘s’ on What’s. I’ve checked other track listings online and nowhere else does that. I also find it hilarious that Wikipedia doesn’t mention this rendition at all on the Covers and Samples section of For What It’s Worth’s page, despite the fact that the listing on Darkdancer’s page directs to it.
The way ‘From: Disco to: Disco’ is formatted infuriates me. That is all. Actually no, I’m listening to it now, that is not all. What the fuck is this? I’m so glad I’m not listening to this while hungover.
I am in hell. That’s the only explanation. How could the album that started off with such a decent groove Music Make You Lose Control descend into the so called hook of Brothers?
Nevermind, I actually am in hell now. What the fuck is this on Make Your Body Jacques Sweat or whatever it’s called?
I genuinely just facepalmed at the intro to About Funk. Is this what the album is now? The most irritating vocals ever chopped up into an audio salad then some beat work that, if at least decent, is not decent enough to justify the badness of the vocal hooks? Just have the music. You don’t need vocals, especially if you’re not going to use them to say anything interesting. Just make the album an instrumental
Pet Shop Boys
4/5
Lush musically and compelling lyrically, my big complaint is that the songs are all just a bit too long, most hovering about the 4-5 minute mark, even the shorter songs feel like they could have been cut down. But that’s a minor complaint, and one that I have about most albums from this genre and era. This is really good
Duran Duran
3/5
It’s not bad, it’s just that all of the elements have been better done before and since by artists I like more
Jeff Beck
3/5
Sounds sort of like proto-Led Zeppelin, even sharing versions of Muddy Waters You Shook Me. The most interesting songs are the versions of Ole Man River, which doesn’t work at all as a Blues Rock song, and Greensleeves, which translates pretty well to late 60’s Folk. I think British Blues has been so thoroughly overshadowed by the legacies of Zeppelin, Sabbath and Deep Purple that this early work sounds kinda… quaint. Sean Egan said that the album showed ‘a lack of songwriting base’ which is definitely the main problem. That seems to be a large feature of Rod Stewart’s career in general, I can’t think of a popular song of his that he wrote himself
Big Star
5/5
One of the big influences on a lot of the early music I recorded was The Replacements. I loved the scrappiness of their music, and the way that they were ably to equally address the silliness of life, as well as the seriousness. Most Punk bands did the latter, but not the former and The Mat’s devotion to both is a bog part of why I think Let It Be is the best document of the adolescent experience in popular music.
As such, finding out that The Replacements were big fans of Big Star, I bought a CD that had a copy of their first two albums and, I’m ashamed to say, didn’t get the hype. I was put off almost immediately by Chris Bell’s vocals on Feel, and so never managed to appreciate Big Star’s influence on one of my favourite bands.
Having listened to Third/Sister Lovers, I’m further ashamed that I wasn’t able to push past that barrier, because this is fantastic. Ramshackle, confessional, and Baroque in parts yet full of a beautiful simplicity and clarity of melody and thought. The context of being practically unfinished because of the breakdown of the band gives this a strangely ephemeral feel, as if the album is breaking down in front of your… ears? and creates a sense of melancholy that I find really appealing. I want to drink to this album, then go walking around the city and just watch the people, like the narrator of Nightime. So, that’s how I’m gonna spend my Saturday Night sorted, thank you Alex Chilton
Buddy Holly & The Crickets
5/5
Buddy Holly hiccoughed and warbled his way to the top of the late 50’s Rock n Roll scene. What helps is that he’s probably the best songwriter of the Rock n Rollers, or if not the best, the most consistent. These songs are so good, so brilliantly observed, and simply composed that, take away some of the more specifically dated references, I’m sure they could have been hits at any point in the past 70 years
Brian Eno
4/5
I really wanted to hate this, not because I don’t like Eno’s music, but because each of the 4 albums I’ve reviewed has had a different rating, and I wanted a clean sweep. As it is, Before and After Science is probably my second favourite of his albums after Another Green World, with his best rock work, and more interesting ambient work than Music for Airports
Madonna
2/5
I was just going to talk about how inane this is, mostly because of Madonna’s lyrics, but the beat to Don’t Tell Me pissed me off so badly that it went immediately on my curated ‘Worst Songs Ever’ playlist. I genuinely moved my head around in an attempt to reconnect my headphones. Fuck whoever came up with that idea.
What It Feels Like For A Girl is interesting enough that it pulls this from the brink of a 1 star, but the rest of the album is so banal yet pretending to be deep that it just puts me in a bad mood
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
I said in my review of Blonde on Blonde that Springsteen was the first to really make that album’s attempts at a Rock Big Band work. Born To Run is the fruition of that, and it’s amazing just how coherently all of these influences come together. Born To Run isn’t my favourite Springsteen record, that would be the darker and admittedly flawed Darkness On The Edge Of Town, nor is it his best artistic statement, which would be Nebraska. What Born To Run has going for it is, much like Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love, it’s Springsteen’s most perfect work, flawlessly constructed and executed that flows as a full story throughout it’s 8 tracks from the small beach towns of New Jersey to the epic cityscape of New York, encapsulating the hopes, dreams and disappointments of it’s characters with humour and sympathy
Lloyd Cole And The Commotions
3/5
As far as Sophisti-Pop goes, this isn’t bad and a lot of the best tracks sound like a lot of the good Bedroom Pop that has come about recently. The problem is that the songwriting is trying, as far as I can tell, to emulate the sort of Kitchen Sink Drama that Squeeze did so brilliantly, especially on Up The Junction, and the content just isn’t there. It’s all fine, with some odd turns of phrase that were enjoyable, but it doesn’t rise above fine, doesn’t have the same level of storytelling as Squeeze or the complex emotionality of Prefab Sprout
The Mothers Of Invention
1/5
Tedious.
Intended as a satire of hippiedom, the actual music on We’re Only In It For The Money is of the worst sort of the flower power plinky-plonky bullshit. The random noise is reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle’s exploration with noise and conversation when pioneering Industrial, but it’s done with much less purpose and as such is infinitely less compelling. Worst of all, it’s all done with such smugness. Satire at it’s best reveals our own follies and failings with a necessary humanity. It isn’t an excuse to tell everyone how clever you are, and it certainly shouldn’t be rubbing in how much more clever you are than everybody else. If you can’t recognise the material human reasons for why something needs satirising, you aren’t in a position to properly satirise it.
If I’d been in the studio when they were recording it, I’d have had to stop myself physically attacking him for pulling the ‘The first word of this song is discorporate, it means to leave your body’ crap. I’ve seen people do that at open mic poetry nights, and they were always the ones who wrote the most overwrought, pretentious, vapid crap while thinking they were the smartest people in the room. I’m not going to accuse Zappa of not having talent or ideas, he was clearly a gifted guitarist and had lots of ideas. But I don’t think he was a great artist in the same way that I don’t think a lot of the Prog Rock era was great art, a lack of understanding of humanity and a lack of empathy for their subjects. If you compare Zappa to your great experimental novels, The Brothers Karamzov or Ulysses sure, they’re dense and complex but they’re also human. Or heck, compare We’re Only In It For The Money to White Light/White Heat; it’s just as noisy and experimental but Lou Reef had, under all of the posturing, an underlying sense of the humanity of his characters. Zappa feels like he’s satirising humanity as a whole because he doesn’t understand it
Country Joe & The Fish
4/5
I listened to this while walking through a storm. Literally. It really suited the mood. I’m by the sea, I was walking along the seafront at high tide, the wind was blowing heavily and the waves were crashing on the wall, occasionally spraying over onto the path.
I don’t really remember much of the music, but I had a very good time listening to it against that background
The Yardbirds
5/5
Now this is more like it! This is what I want from my British Blues. Out of curiosity, I went back and listened to Blues Breakers immediately after listening to Roger the Engineer and I think the difference is that The Blues Breakers could play, but they never got beyond jamming on old songs and basic Blues patterns. The Yardbirds is full of great riffs and is all well arranged, as well as including the jamming. It’s also the best sounding of the British Blues records I’ve listened to, both Blues Breakers and Jeff Beck’s Truth being quite muddy.
But what really clinched this as a five for me was Ever Since The World Began which invokes Satan in the first line, starts off as an intimidating Psychedelic chant backed with minimal percussion before breaking into the jauntiest, most Pop sounding tune on the album. Brilliant
The Gun Club
3/5
This album confused me more than anything. I liked a lot of the riffs, but the production is quite thin, it’s the only Punk album I’ve ever had to turn the volume up on. But what confused me most was the lyrics. Songwriter Jeffrey Lee Pierce seems to be going for a sort of Outlaw persona, but he tries to take it in a Punk direction, and I’m not sure it works. It’s quite adolescent, attempting to shock with lyrics about killing people and fucking and stuff.
It might have worked better had I known Jeffrey Lee Pierce was a teenager when the album was released. Attempting to shock like that would make sense, but he was 24. At that point both Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, clear inspirations on Pierce, were writing mature lyrics about their own lives, shocking with the frankness of the descriptions of sex and drug culture. They didn’t need to talk about fucking someone to death in a hole. Real life was much more shocking.
I enjoyed a lot of this musically, and I can appreciate it’s influence on later Cowpunk and Psychobilly, but the weird lyrics and production put this off being a true classic
Alice In Chains
5/5
OK, no gushing. Everybody knows this album is perfect, I’ve got nothing clever to say to expand that front.
I’ve never been able to take Angry Chair fully seriously because of title. I get that it’s a great song, and encapsulates the struggle of heroin addiction, but the image I get is that the chair itself is angry, and I find that hilarious. I’m also surprised that Sickman has spawned a genre of Metal circus music, because the ‘take me out to the ball game’ sounding section sounds fantastic and suitably hellish, I’d certainly listen to more.
One Halloween, I sat in my room playing the riff to Would? on repeat on my guitar cos I thought it would provide atmosphere for any trick or treaters we had.
And that concludes my anecdotes and musings about Dirt. Fuck I love this album
ZZ Top
4/5
A good attempt at updating their 70’s Southern Boogie sound for the 80’s, and fun to listen to, but I can’t think of anything else that sounds like this. People may have enjoyed it, I enjoyed it, but not enough to try to emulate it and I think there’s a significance in that. Maybe the first attempt at Boogie New Wave worked so well that nobody felt the need to try it again?
Also, is there any innuendo in TV Dinners at all? It feels like there should be, but it seems to be played completely straight. I get that the joke is that TV Dinners are bad, but is there anything deeper than that? I need to know. Why would you write a song about pre-packaged meals?
Sonic Youth
3/5
So, Sonic Youth again. I think the point I’ve been trying to make throughout my two previous reviews is that I think Sonic Youth are overrated, possibly? Their legacy will be inevitably tied up with Daydream Nation, which is a great album, and their image, which is impeccably cool.
Sister balances it’s instrumental freak-outs with some great riffs and calmer sections, and the tracks feel less like songs and more like tone poems throughout, which is both it’s strong suit and it’s weakness. Unlike with Daydream Nation, where the songwriting is at the band’s peak, there doesn’t seem to be any recognisable song structure, but the schizophrenic nature of the songs does work with the similarly schizophrenic instrumentals.
On the other hand, and this is something that I’ve come to realise with the other Sonic Youth albums I’ve listened to, I don’t think any of the songwriters are particularly great at lyrics. They’re fine, serviceable, but for a group that’s so often linked with the Velvet Underground in terms of similar influence and experimentation, the lyrical deficit becomes quite apparent.
All in all, I did like Sister, although the production was a bit thin compared to their later albums, but the problems I’ve had with Sonic Youth were more at the forefront here than in either Daydream Nation or Dirty. Maybe there will be that one album that finally make them magically click for me, and I do still appreciate the influence they had on a lot of artists I love, but I’ve not come across it yet. The fact I appreciate them will have to do for them in the meantime
Run-D.M.C.
5/5
I very much enjoyed the track that’s named after Rev Run, but which is entirely rapped by DMC and only features Run grunting and panting like that horny wolf from Droopy.
Raising Hell is the prototypical modern Hip-Hop album. Most of the direction that Hip-Hop has taken since this album’s release can be directly traced to Run-DMC, but one of the reasons for it’s influence is it’s simplicity. A fair few of the beats are purely percussion, and the rhymes and themes are mostly basic.
But because of the relative simplicity, it does feel like a blueprint. The influence on the Beastie Boys is particularly clear and makes the evolution of Hip-Hop in even a few years really evident. The Beasties were using samples from Zeppelin and Sabbath, and had Kerry King doing their solos. In comparison, Run-DMC’s production seems a little thin, and outside of Walk This Way and It’s Tricky, the riffs and guitar parts seem lacking.
And as such, I’d probably rate it just a four. But it’s influence is undeniable, and I can’t not reward that. I’d contrast it to my theory about ZZ Top’s Eliminator from a few days ago, that being we didn’t get a lot of ZZ Top inspired New Wave Boogie because it was so well done on that album. Raising Hell is a masterclass in Hip-Hop’s potential and inspired artists in a way ZZ Top didn’t; inspiring them to have their own go, take the blueprint and expand on it. And if that was it’s goal, it succeeded magnificently
Kraftwerk
5/5
How is it that this record is 50 years old and yet still sounds like what I imagine people in the future should listen to? Autobahn conjures up images of a bright, shiny utopia, the sort sung about by Donald Fagen in I.G.Y. and although the future we’re currently living in is much more dystopian than Kraftwerk imagined, their sound is still so essential that it’s not difficult to imagine that in another 50 years, with a bit of luck, we might be living in a future where the optimism of Autobahn’s sound has come to fruition
Culture Club
2/5
Karma Chameleon is far and away the best song, and I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally set out to listen to it. The Poptimistic part of myself kept trying to intervene, tell me that although Colour By Numbers is a pretty bog standard example of 80’s New Romantic Pop, it’s noteworthy because that was an important part of 80’s music. But a larger part of myself was complaining the whole time that this is just bog standard 80’s Pop, and outside of the big single, hasn’t been well remembered. It’s also not particularly well written lyrically, and Boy George as pleasant as his voice is is almost always overshadowed by his backing singers. I could happily have left this one
Goldie
2/5
The fucking gall to have a song called the ‘Short Attention Span Edit’ on an album that is two fucking hours long. No album needs to be 2 hours long. Most films don’t need to be 2 hours long.
Timeless’ biggest issue is that it’s genuinely quite boring. So boring that I’m struggling to come up with anything interesting to say about how boring it is. But also not boring enough to really work up any hate for it. It’s the audio equivalent of that joke from Cheers: ‘The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.’ ‘Whatever, I don’t care.’
Elastica
3/5
I’ve said before that one of Britpop’s strengths was that there was a good approximation of most styles of Rock from the preceding 30 years. Elastica is the genre’s attempt at Punk and if I’m being honest, I’ve never got the hype. There were a fair few of my cool friends at Sixth Form who swore that this was one of the best albums of the Britpop era, and I never got into it in the way I’d have liked to. Connection’s a good song, and I don’t think the rest of the album’s bad necessarily, but when compared to the heights of the rest of the Britpop scene, Elastica just seems a bit… I don’t even know. I think possibly a bit outdated. The great thing about the best of Britpop was that the classic styles were there, but with a modern twist, which is why Connection works so well. It has that modern update of ‘77 style Punk, but the rest of the album sticks pretty close to the formula. And as such, I don’t think it’s aged as well as a lot of the rest of the scene. It’s still fine, but just that
Harry Nilsson
5/5
It is a bold move to follow one of the most gorgeously heart-wrenching breakup songs ever written with a song about the dangers of mixing lime juice and coconut water.
This was just fun to listen to, and by god is Nilsson’s voice incredible
George Michael
3/5
I’ve had cause to listen to Last Christmas quite a lot recently, and it struck me that the song is all chorus. I don’t know enough about Wham’s other songs to say the same for them, but it struck me that Faith is the same, all chorus.
That’s what I think Listen Without Prejudice means, because for the most part these songs aren’t traditionally structured at all when George Michael was typically a Pop artist. But the problem is that about half of these songs are quite pretty, and half are quite boring and as such all adds up to being pretty boring
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
5/5
There are some pieces of art that are so transcendent and perfect that it feels unnecessary to over consume them. There’s something special about them, some quality that means you can admire them only a few times in your life, and still feel the need to praise them to high heaven. La Dolce Vita is a great example, and I think Shaka Zulu fits that mould.
There’s something so calming about it, I feel like it’d be a great album to write to., and the lyrics I understood all had the quality that I admire in Spingsteen and Chekhov, and admiration for the simple pleasures and minutiae of everyday life, told with a certain weariness, but no less affectionate because of it
Pet Shop Boys
5/5
With the Pet Shop Boys I’ve had so far, I’ve always had a bit of a hesitancy. Whether it be that the songs were too long, or that the slickness of the music undercut the satire in the lyrics, something stopped me from throwing myself into loving them.
I have no reservations about how much I love Behaviour. The melancholy laid back nature of the beats perfectly complements the more personal bent of the lyrics, a lot of which use my favourite songwriting trick of being about the opposite of what the title promises, The End Of The World being the best example.
This is perfect music to walk around a city at night to, reflecting on your own personal troubles, staring wistfully into the middle distance. I will be going back to Actually and Very with new ears having listened to it, am I a Pet Shop Boys fan now?
CHIC
5/5
There’s a lot of reviews that have mentioned the lyrics, but even having read some before listening it didn’t prepare me for how out of pocket some of them are. This is getting a five purely because my experience listening to A Warm Summer Night was something to behold. I thought I heard in the background ‘Te quiero, Papi’ and thought, oh that’s weird, wonder what that lyric is really, kept hearing it to the point I thought I was going mad, and then the last line of the song is ‘Te quiero, Papi’ in a really unnecessary stage whisper. Perfect, no notes.
And then in Can’t Stand To Love You you get the double whammy of ‘Little Punk, do it for me or I’ll number your days’ and ‘You’d think I were into S&M.’ Where did that come from?
The Chemical Brothers
1/5
This album was like a bad trip, annoying, repetitive, come the last stretch all I wanted to do was curl up somewhere dark, not think and wait for it all to be over.
Having listened to the (I hope only) Beth Ortan album on this list, I was not excited to hear her again, and even as someone who disliked Central Reservation, this was a waste of Beth Ortan. The most interesting thing about Central Reservation was the lyrics and here you’ve got her using the line ‘Where do I start? Where do I begin?’ Radiohead were able to do something with that lyric, but they subverted it, and they had decent music behind it, something with dynamics that didn’t just repeat the same chords over and over before devolving into irritating dissonant noise.
Emil Cioran himself couldn’t produce a statement as Nihilistic as repeating ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ ad nauseam over a boring, boring, boring beat. I can’t tell you what listening to a monotone voice chanting ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ over and over again to that stomach-churningly repetitive beat for 6 full minutes while sitting on a dark beach, staring at the waves dragging rocks down into the briny depths does to a motherfucker, but I can tell you that I sure as shit am not gonna kill myself to the fucking Chemical Brothers. They don’t deserve the satisfaction. Ian Curtis killed himself to Iggy Pop! When I commit suicide, I’m going to have to do it to fucking Metal Machine Music or something
The Boo Radleys
4/5
So, unlike yesterday’s 90’s Psychedelic inspired album that lasts over an hour, I actually enjoyed this one. Sure, I think Giant Steps is also too long, that it’d be better if it were cut down to about 40-50 minutes, but it also had a sense of dynamics and a decent set of lyrics, and while it blended into the background somewhat towards the end, it was an enjoyable background listen
k.d. lang
2/5
Just a bit boring, and in a boring way and about 40 years outdated
Carpenters
5/5
I’ve always loved (They Long To Be) Close To You because of it’s use in The Simpsons; it is without a doubt Marge and Homer’s song and for that it’ll always have a place in my heart. The rest of the album though is, I don’t want to say a mixed bag because none of it is actively bad, I just think Karen Carpenter works best when singing songs of love and longing rather than heartbreak, which is possibly ironic given her personal life, but I don’t want to go there.
So much of our experience with these albums we’ve undertaken to listen to over the course of three and a bit years will be unavoidably tied up with the experiences we’re having outside of the generator. I know there are albums I’ve given harsher ratings to than I would have if I’d have been in a good mood that day, and vice versa. I’m currently in a good place with a girl I’ve been crushing on for a long time, and so listening to Close To You while walking around town after talking to her, I was grinning ear to ear and going all Gene Kelly in Singin’ In The Rain on the lamp posts. I must’ve looked a right idiot to anyone watching, but I didn’t care. And for that, despite the fact I think it really only deserves a four, Close To You is a five. If life is our experience, whatever that may mean, then the experience I had with The Carpenters was overwhelmingly positive
Prince
5/5
I have nothing really clever to say about Purple Rain. It’s Prince’s best sounding album, and possibly his most sincere. He was a fascinating artist for his ability to mix the romantic sincerity of songs like I Would Die 4 U or When You Were Mine with the unrelenting horniness of Head or Darling Nikki. And Purple Rain itself is just an annoyingly perfect piece of art. That’s true for a lot of the album really, I love the opening to Baby I’m A Star for it’s effortless transition from I Would Die 4 U. But Purple Rain specifically, god man, how do you write something like that?
The Stooges
5/5
Fun House is the best Stooges album, fight me.
Actually, I think I should qualify that what I mean by that is Fun House is the album that best shows off what the Stooges were about, Raw Power still probably takes it as the best overall album they recorded. But as an example of the raw power (haha) that the band could create without Bowie at the helm, I think if anything it’s a more impressive album. Fun House is as raw, lean, and dangerous as Iggy himself and yet shows an artsy weirdness that was almost entirely missing from their debut. I don’t think it’s any wonder that the genre that this band spawned fragmented into the various ‘weird’ subcultures we see around today.
And, I love it. I love every second of this snarling, whirling, dissonant and disturbing nightmare take on Rock n Roll. I’m gonna go shoot some heroin now
Fugees
5/5
This is, and I say this with love, such music nerd shit. A rap album that acts as a whirlwind tour through through Black American music from the 50’s onwards, with some Reggae influence thrown in for good measure, which is somehow still utterly convincing as a social document as well. It helps that The Fugees all clearly love and appreciate music as much as their audience does and so the interpolations, samples and yes, even straight covers of Robert Flack and Bob Marley don’t ever come across as biting, but as genuine appreciation for the musical influences they’re building on
Scritti Politti
2/5
The term ‘meticulously constructed’ gets thrown around a lot these days, but I think that a great example of how something should be ‘meticulously constructed’ comes from a mid-Eighties Single, which reached No.6 on the UK singles charts by a British act who were initially associated with the Punk movement but who had moved towards a more New Wave sound. I am, of course, talking about Tom Robinson’s War Baby, which is an absolutely perfect song in terms of how it’s written, performed, produced, everything. One the aspects I think is particularly interesting about it is how deceptively simple War Baby’s construction is, the song itself is a simple Pop song structure, verse chorus bridge etc, and rather simple instrumentation, a simple bass and drum groove, a keyboard marking the chord changes, occasional guitar chords used for emphasis, and then a sax providing lead runs and melody. And yet, the way the production works to make this simplicity work, the little touches like the guitar echoing Robinson’s voice in the chorus. And that’s not even mentioning my usual favourite topic; needless to say the lyrics are fantastic, evocative and melancholy, profound and elusive. The whole song sounds like it was crafted by artists at the very top of their game, doing their best to elevate each idea to the top of it’s potential.
On the side of the spectrum, we have ‘meticulously constructed’ to mean, ‘well there sure are a lot of instrumental parts on this, and they’ve sure got a lot to do.’ Cupid & Psyche 85 sounds so busy all the time, it’s maximalist in the very worst way in all aspects but one. I’ve literally just finished to the album as I write this, and my genuine reaction was ‘Is that it?’ It just fades out, on a song that sounds exactly like every other song on the album. There’s no attempt to create a big album closer, it’s just a regular song, that just fades and then nothing. I don’t even like this album and I feel cheated. I’m not sure if I dislike it enough to give it a one, there was nothing egregiously wrong with it, but it gives me the same feeling of self importance that most Prog Rock does, a sense of the grandness of the construction of the music without the understanding of what makes good music interesting
Femi Kuti
5/5
The groove is absolutely infectious, and the social commentary is a righteously angry cherry on top. Femi manages to distance himself effectively from his father’s legacy; the influence is still clearly there but Femi’s music seems more structured, less improvisational. But what’s important for both is that this is just good damn music
Korn
2/5
It’s good to see that the American Metal tradition of Scatting started by David Lee Roth is being continued.
I can understand why Follow The Leader is on this list. Korn were an important part of the Nu Metal scene, and Nu Metal was an important part of the Rock & Metal landscape Post-Grunge.
That doesn’t mean it was any good. All in the Family is proof enough of that. I don’t actually think this is that bad, or at least that badly executed. I object to it more in principle. Koяn are not good enough lyricists for either the humorous stuff they’re trying out on some of these songs or the more serious stuff they were already known for to truly land. It’s the same problem I have with Linkin Park. I’m not trying to deny the pain that either Chester Bennington or Jonathan Davis went through, I just don’t think they’re as at good at expressing their pain as Kurt Cobain or Layne Staley were. Certainly not enough to be generational defining artists. The resurgence of interest in Nu Metal will go away and Koяn and Limp Bizket will go back to being leaders of a scene that was of minor importance at best. Cobain will live forever
Beatles
5/5
The thing that I’ve really come to appreciate with The Beatles is their melody writing. I still think Leonard Cohen is the best songwriter for pairing simple but beautiful melodies with profound lyrics, but Lennon and McCartney’s knack for melody was uncanny and it’s on especially good form on Revolver. I think I still prefer Rubber Soul, but this is great too
Grant Lee Buffalo
3/5
There’s an oppressiveness to this album that put me off initially, it reminds me a little bit of Leonard Cohen’s darker stuff, but without the moral complexity and level of self hatred, or like a more critically acceptable Goo Goo Dolls (complete with an equally silly name,) or like if Peter Buck or R.E.M. couldn’t pick.
I didn’t dislike Fuzzy at all, especially the second time I listened to it, but it also reminded me of artists I liked better and would honestly rather be listening to. And the oppressive nature of it did grind down on me a bit. I wasn’t planning on drinking tonight, but I am now. I need some sort of release
Bill Evans Trio
5/5
Ahh, Bill Evans. The Whitest Jazz Player ever? But whatever his music might have lacked in Bop, it certainly made up for in spacious melancholy. This is perfect music for late night, brooding whisky and cigarette sessions, propping yourself up at a seedy bar and remembering all of the dames who’ve broken your heart over the years. Most of Bill Evans’ stuff is perfect for that, but if I may make a specific recommendation, he did an album with Tony Bennett which is just perfection.
On a side note, I listened to the extended edition of Sunday At The Village Vanguard and each time Alice In Wonderland came on, I initially thought it was I’m In The Mood For Love
The Black Keys
1/5
I work at a coffee shop. Yes, I am writing a screenplay, how did you know?
We serve tea in proper teapots and teacups, and multiple times I have had to replace the cups with mugs because the male customers, and it is invariably men who do this, don’t want to drink out of ‘little girly cups.’ It’s a sort of masculinity that I don’t understand one bit. How does drinking from a slightly smaller receptacle make you feel like less of a man? If I sense that a couple of blokes with this hangup are going to order tea for two, I try and give them the pink spotty teapot.
The Black Keys give me the same sort of sense of toxic masculinity as refusing to drink from teacups does. Brothers is Pop music wearing flannel, it’s designed to scratch your brain in the same way that McDonalds or Maroon 5 does, designed to soundtrack car commercials or pop-up ads for erectile dysfunction pills. But, because it’s informed by the same basic instincts as good Blues music, that makes it somehow OK to listen to, doesn’t make you less of a man than if you admitted to listening to one of the Pop Princesses does.
I think that’s fucking stupid. I am secure enough in my masculinity to enjoy Taylor Swift and not go ballistic if I’m forced to drink out of a teacup. Brothers gets One Star, not just because I think it’s an uninspired rehashing of better and more interesting Blues acts, but because it represents a toxicity in Rock that I cannot stand. If you like Pop, listen to Pop. Don’t listen to this garbage just because you don’t want to listen to ‘girly music’
Skunk Anansie
3/5
Interesting until it got less Metal and more Hard Rock Ballads. I didn’t know British Nu Metal was a thing
5/5
I think maybe my most controversial music nerd opinion is that Ziggy Stardust isn’t a perfect album.
I know, it’s blasphemy, but the three song run of It Ain’t Easy, Lady Stardust, and Star is relatively weak. I do use the term relatively extremely carefully, because they’re all still good songs, they just happen to be the three weaker links in a chain of some of the greatest Rock n Roll ever written.
Even if I don’t think it’s perfect, I wouldn’t trade it for anything else
Minor Threat
4/5
The difference I’ve noticed between American and British Punk over my years of listening to both is that America seemed to do Proto-Punk better, solidified sound and then sort of stuck with it, while British Punks moved on from the sound pretty quickly, incorporating different sounds and influences into a Punk framework, pushing forward a more innovative Post-Punk scene.
American Post-Punk bands did exist, but for the most part, the US’s Punk scene doubled down on the hardness and sounded quite a lot like Minor Threat. Out Of Step is a good album, it bounces through it’s 22 minute runtime enjoyably, is full of interesting riffs and righteous anger at the state of the world.
My only issue is that, comparing it to where British Punk had gone by 1983, it, and quite a lot of the Hardcore scene in general, seems a little conservative. This isn’t Minor Threat’s fault, and I still like it as music, but heart belongs to the restless experimentation of BritPunk
LCD Soundsystem
5/5
I’ve always felt that LCD Soundsystem shouldn’t work. It’s like the joke about Losing My Religion; it’s a five minute song with no chorus and a mandolin as a main instrument, why shouldn’t it be a hit?
LCD Soundsystem are a Dance Punk band fronted by a middle aged bloke who looks like somebodies uncle, and who writes exclusively about being middle aged, seeing the kids around you overtaking you and being ennui-ish about it.
But fuck me, if it works, it works. I am, loathe to admit, still quite young, but since I discovered it at 17 All My Friends has been one of my favourite songs, and it’s sense of melancholy detachment, dissatisfaction and disappointment with how life turned out has always had a special place in my heart, aged 17, 22, or 26. And the rest of the album is also perfect, danceable and devastating all at the same time. All I ever want to do is be with my friends, whether that be tonight or any other night. When listening to James Murphy and Co, I feel among friends
Mekons
4/5
Not at all what I was expecting. The Punk element is much less obvious, and the Country element more prominent, with fiddle and everything. There’s also a fair amount of dissonant noise at points.
The song I found myself drawn to most was Last Dance, but I’m biased towards songs about looking for small pieces of meaning in random moments of life, especially those involving love and/or empty dancefloors. A teacher I had at uni once mentioned that I wrote almost exclusively about the ‘poignancy of the random moment,’ and I get the sense of that in Last Dance. I also love the detail of singing ‘You were waltzing’ in a song that isn’t a Waltz, especially when the band have proven that they could do a Waltz previously on Flitcraft.
I’m enjoying it more on a second listen. The dissonant noise parts are less prominent than I had realised. I think they’re unusual enough that they take focus from the rest of the album which is, if anything pretty standard Country Rock fare, played with a Punky attitude rather than instrumentation. Now that I know what to expect, I like this a lot
Muddy Waters
5/5
Just so cool, the band comes in swinging and grooving, and Muddy Waters voice and playing are on top form
Deerhunter
3/5
This was alright, I think, I’ve listened to it twice and I can’t remember any of it, except that the last song ended abruptly, and had a great name
Peter Frampton
3/5
I think one of the reasons this was so popular is that it’s easy to put on in the background while making out, and not feel like you’re missing out too much. I went for a walk while listening, and spent most of the time imagining I was with the girl I fancy and what I’d say to seduce her if she were there with me. It’s what I imagine teenagers in 1976 doing, and I’m now picturing how difficult making out to music must have been in the LP era, having to stop every 20 minutes to turn the record over, that must have ruined so much momentum over the course of so many lifetimes
Cyndi Lauper
5/5
She’s So Unusual presents an alternative option for 80’s Pop that stylistically takes it’s cues from Punk and New Wave rather than the Funk, Club, and Disco that Madonna and is, as such definitely more unusual as Pop and as a social document. Lauper has a distinct sense of humour and a clear love and appreciation for both Vaudeville and classic R&B. It makes for a fun, infectious and occasionally heartbreakingly beautiful and sincere listening experince
The 13th Floor Elevators
3/5
A few really good riffs, and some interesting psychedelic sounds, but I’m not sure how well it’s held up in relation to other Acid Rock from the same period. It’s certainly impressive that it’s a good year or two older than Hendrix or The Doors, but the only individual song that I felt warranted a second listen was Kingdom of Heaven, which was heavy and stormy in the way the best Doom Metal and Neo-Psychedelia I like is
David Holmes
2/5
When I found out that David Holmes ended up making music for films, about halfway through Rodney Yates, the album started making a lot more sense to me. I can hear this sort of stuff being played over a spy or heist movie montage, with some sort of narration going on to distract from the fact that the music itself is so highly repetitive. I’m actually not sure if I’d call Let’s Get Killed bad at all, I just can’t picture wanting to sit down and listen to it all the way through again, because the music itself is so highly repetitive. I can’t think of any more ways of incorporating because the music itself is so highly repetitive naturally into the review, I think the album’s sapping my creative, because the music itself is so highly repetitive
Kings of Leon
4/5
Kings Of Leon’s fourth album takes a decidedly more streamlined and polished approach than their preceding ramshackle, gritty, Southern Rock offerings.
I’ve said before that I’m a big KOL fan, but I didn’t think that I enjoyed OBTN as much as some of their other albums, it feels less personal and the songs aren’t quite as good as their best. That being said, checking my Spotify just now, I’ve got most of the songs liked. That’s gotta count for something.
While most of KOL’s stuff is buoyed by Caleb’s songwriting, the best stuff on OBTN can be put down to the rhythm section. The basslines on Closer, Crawl, Cold Desert and even 17 are all fantastic, the deconstructedaout drum part for I Want You is incredibly catchy and when the drums come in Sex On Fire’s chorus never fails to get me pumped.
This isn’t a bad album, but it isn’t KOL’s best, and while I can justify the inclusion of their earlier albums on the list, I don’t think OBTN deserves it’s spot. Even then, it’s still a four
Sonic Youth
4/5
So, turns put I really like Gothy, Post-Punk Sonic Youth. Maybe I just really like Goth Rock in general, but this works for me so much more that the other albums I’ve had of theirs. I’m still not sure I’m 100% convinced, but yeah, I could see myself listening to this again
David Crosby
4/5
If I Could Only Remember My Name’s biggest strength is that it is loose, free and interestingly unstructured, flowing through it’s songs with little care for traditional song structure or recognisable melody. It’s often beautiful, but doesn’t leave much to latch onto on a first or even a second listen. But while along for the ride, it’s all fun and quite relaxing, and I wouldn’t mind delving into it deeper