- Gotta Get Up, Driving Along, The Moonbeam Song, I'll Never Leave You: that's some S-tier songwriting right there.
- Jump Into The Fire sounds like a motherfucking train barrelling at you.
- Too frequently Nilsson slips into cloying shtick here. Coconut, Early in the Morning, Let the Good Times Roll: I don't need any of that.
- Unpopular opinion, but Without You has never really done it for me. Gorgeous recording, wonderful vocal performance (and seriously, Nilsson's delivery all across this album is fucking incredible. The guy can fucking sing), but as a song I just find it kind of unmemorable.
- Down is...fine.
- So, 50% absolutely brilliant, 20% good-not-great, 30% eh. At his best, Nilsson is a frighteningly good singer-songwriter, but on first listen, I can't quite call this a favourite. Who knows though! Maybe the bits I don't love now will grow on me.
- The vocal layering on I'll Never Leave You is just *chef's kiss*
- Svefn-g-englar feels like ascending to another plane of cosmic consciousness.
- Hjartao hamast goes so much harder than I expected from these guys.
- What the fuck happened to post-rock? I feel like in the 2000s you couldnt look at an Album Of The Year list without hitting like 5 of these albums, and now they just don't exist in the discourse.
- On first listen, I'd say this runs out of steam a bit in the final stretch; that could easily change, though, and the rest is just absurdly beautiful.
- Legit shocked this is on the 1001 Albums list. That's not a criticism, I'm just surprised.
- What a fun album. Never listened to The Darkness beyond "I Believe In A Thing Called Love" (which slaps), but this is able to maintain a surprising level of quality for its whole run time.
- They handle the requisite ballad (Holding My Own) shockingly well.
- Love on the Rocks with No Ice is such a deliriously stupid song title and I love it.
- Probably a 3.5 if I'm being honest, but I'm rounding it to a 3 for this rating system. I could see this improving a lot in my mind, though, with further listens.
- It's perfect. It's a perfect album. I mean, there's no such thing as a "perfect" album, but Purple Rain's gotta be close, right?
- I don't know how many times I've listened to this over the years, but it's still thrilling. A master pop visionary working at the absolute peak of his powers.
- Let's Go Crazy might be the best opener of all time? It's in the top 5, at the very least.
- I've never loved The Doors. I can respect them, and they have some tunes. But I just can't get excited about them.
- The title track kinda sums up everything I don't like about these guys. The endless lackluster jamming. The crushing self-importance. The most basic lyrics imaginable delivered as if they're the most profound poetry of all time. The "Mr. Mojo Rising" section is so stupid it makes my physically upset.
- "Love Her Madly," though? That's the kind of Doors I can get behind. They're at their best when they focus their morose intensity into tight little pop songs. Apparently their producer quit over how terrible he thought this track was, which is ludicrous to me.
- Okay, so 6 songs in I think I can say this: the main thing The Doors had going for them was their sense of atmospherics (that "morose intensity" I alluded to before). So stripping themselves down and doing a blues album, to me, is kinda working against their strengths. Not that there's anything wrong with the blues, but so far it's really not their forte.
- Nope, not for me.
- Hey! The first album I've gotten that I'd literally never heard of before! It's also not available on Spotify! This is a deep cut, is what I'm saying.
- John Zorn is a name that's familiar to me, but I've never heard his music. Ornette Coleman I have delved into on occasion, though he's an artist whose work I tend to respect more than love.
- So, as an experiment, I thought I'd try to reconstruct the tracklist of this on Spotify with Ornette Coleman's original recordings. See how they compare with Zorn's covers. Spotify's missing a couple of the Ornette tracks (like Feet Music and Space Church), but putting together the stuff they DO have, the playlist is about 1 hour 45 minutes. "Spy Vs. Spy" is 41 minutes. Zorn really must've cut these compositions to the bone.
- Here's a good thing I'll say: the drums are immaculately produced. They just THWACK in a really satisfying way.
- Here's a negative thing: this is just noise to me. I truly don't get it. I accept that it's probably going over my head, that Zorn may be operating on a level I just can't comprehend. But 15 minutes in this is just a bunch of sounds. Every track is the same. There are no dynamics. Everything is at a 10 all the time, in chaos, in volume, in speed. I'm sure some people like that! And that's great! But oh boy am I finding it unpleasant.
- I'd be interested to know the reasoning behind putting this in the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. I mean, I'm guessing the answer is "a bunch of people who contributed to the book like it." But a quick glance at its Wikipedia shows little critical activity; 2 reviews, one of which seems to have a lot of qualms with it. It doesn't seem to be a particularly revered classic. Though I'm not a free jazz aficionado, so maybe I'm wrong.
- Okay, "Ecars" and "Feet Music" are good. There's like, a groove to these, kinda, if you look really hard! It's not a lot, but it's enough to ground the chaos and give you something to latch onto.
- Okay, so this actually picks up a lot in the back half. Instead of trying to obliterate any sense of melody and rhythm, Zorn and crew start allowing for moments of tunefulness to offset the chaos, and it makes the whole thing a lot more interesting.
- Still not really my thing, but a very interesting curio nonetheless. Glad to have listened to it, even if I liked it more in theory than practice.
- Great fucking album art.
- Do I have the proper knowledge of cultural context to really judge this? Probably not! I know very little about Brazilian music, nor Jorge Ben Jor's place within its pantheon. I could not tell you what makes this album, specifically, as significant as it apparently is. All I can say is whether or not I enjoyed listening to it. And I did!
- Jorge and his band really lock into a groove here. I'm reminded of Sly and the Family Stone, or Funkadelic, or 60s Miles Davis; not in terms of sound, really, but in the way that all the musicians involved seem to know exactly how to play off of each other. You could imagine any of these songs spinning off into a 15 minute jam session and still being great, because there's a palpable energy to these people making music together.
- I wish I understood the lyrics; they're quite foregrounded in a few songs and apparently his satirical bent was one of Jorge's claims to fame. I should try and find a translation later.
- Great album! I will definitely be listening to this more.
- It's a great album. Just front-to-back jams.
- The title track might be the best metal song of all time? Maybe not. But when I'm listening to it, it feels like it is.
- Jack the Stripper is underrated.
- This coming out in 1970 is so bizarre to think about. I never think about how this is kind of a response to the counter-culture, but it really is: a burn-the-house-down fuck you to the Woodstock era of peace and love. I can't imagine how heavy this must have sounded when it was first released.
- Depending on the day, I'd call this the best album of all time. It remains a glimmering marvel of pop craftsmanship, each song a miniature symphony that continue to reveal new facets of themselves with every new listen.
- I've listened to Pet Sounds so many times over so many years that it's easy to take it for granted; it's the kind of album I could probably play over and over in my head if I wanted to, so embedded its become in my psyche. But when I actually pay attention to it I realize that it's still as magical as it was when I first heard it in high school.
- I Just Wasn't Made For These Times / Pet Sounds / Caroline No might be the best finale to an album ever made. Three perfect songs that capture a devastatingly bittersweet sense of melancholy beauty, that also come full circle as a response to the joyous optimism of Wouldn't It Be Nice. "Sometimes I get very sad" might be the simplest, most heartbreaking chorus in pop history.
- Don't Talk is just magical.
- That's Not Me continues to grow more important to me as time goes on.
- Fuck it, everything here is brilliant. Even Sleep John B., which I used to hold as the one throwaway, earns its slot.
- Fascinating that Here Today is the song with the least streams on Spotify (I would've assumed it'd be one of the instrumentals). I choose to interpret that fact as a much-deserved "fuck you" to Mike Love.
- Hugh Masekela! A major figure in music history who I have very little experience with.
- Let me get two things out of the way. One: this is a jazz album, and while I have a better-than-average amount of experience with the genre, I still consider myself a relative neophyte. Two: this is a double album, which means there's a lot to absorb here. Both of these things, separately, would make it more difficult than usual for me to come to any real verdict after one day. Together, they make that basically impossible. So whatever rating I end up giving this will be EXTREMELY preliminary, and not particularly well-informed. With that being said:
- Minawa is gorgeous. Just an intensely beautiful piece of music.
- The way the instruments start layering back up after the drum solo on Blues For Huey is so brilliant.
- There's a delicacy to this album, it doesn't often reach up and grab you the way that, say, Miles Davis' fusion stuff often does. That's not a critique; it really is beautiful music.
- Makhaya Ntshoko's work on the drums here is phenomenal
- I resisted Led Zeppelin for a long time; they were the definitive "that's my DAD'S music" band for me. But eventually I gave them some serious attention and realized that, yeah, they're pretty great. IV has never been my favourite of theirs, though, so let's see how this listen goes.
- The drums on this album sound amazing. I know "When the Levee Breaks" gets all the attention on that score, but the bounciness of "Rock and Roll" is so, so good.
- "Battle of Evermore" is far better than I remember. The vocal interplay between Plant and Sandy Denny is beautiful.
- It's difficult, I find, to just LISTEN to "Stairway to Heaven" as a song; it's such an ingrained part of culture at this point. But isolated from it's significance it really is a beautifully composed piece of work.
- Yeah this album is great.
- At some point I need to listen to PJ Harvey's discography in full, but I have few doubts that this, to me, is her masterpiece. If she has an album better than this, I mean, that's fantastic, but also, how?
- When she wants to, Harvey's voice can have a grand, all-encompassing quality to it. She deploys that frequently here, and to great effect. She also finds the perfect counterpoint in Thom Yorke's fragile wail.
- It's a songwriting showcase; I feel like you could reinterpret all these tracks a hundred different ways, and they'd still be brilliant because at their core they're just so great. Harvey has pulled away from traditional notions of rock music lately ("I Inside the Old Year Dying" is a fascinating album, but it reads more as a performance piece than a traditional collection of songs), but she can write a fucking song when she wants to.
- Rob Ellis fucking murders the drums on this thing when the song call for it.
- "You Said Something" is so absurdly gorgeous.
- When I first started trying out PJ Harvey's stuff, "This Is Love" was the song I really gravitated to. Which makes sense: it's still one of the catchiest, most direct things I've heard from her, and it's fantastic. I also probably wouldn't even put it in the top 5 of this album, which says something about how high the bar is on this thing.
- Incredibly produced album. It kinda makes me mad how much fresher this sounds than most modern hip-hop.
- The opening run, from Go to the Floor to Pussycat, is brilliant. Second half is a bit less engaging; I don't love the Beyonce collab, and Hot is on the weaker end of the album. But those aren't bad songs, merely slight lulls in what's otherwise an incredibly solid front-to-back listen.
- Work It remains a solid-gold classic.
- Even better than I remember it. Can't quite get to five stars, but its real close.
- Maybe the best-composed plunderphonics album of all time? Shadow is really doing some incredible stuff here.
- This is such a great album.
- "Freddie's Dead" has such a sense of groove for such a bleak song.
- Considering the heaviness of the subject matter, this can be a really gorgeous piece of work. "No Thing on Me" feels like floating on a cloud. "Think" is like waking up on a perfect morning.
- Should I watch Superfly? I have no idea if that movie is supposed to be good outside of the soundtrack.
- Mayfield is one of the best at executing these kind of lush soundscapes within a funk setting. It all just moves, and works on an orchestral level too.
- There's something interesting in the sparseness of this. But, it also has a tendency to drift. Kinda aimless.
