1001 Albums Summary

I feel like I’ve heard a bunch of these songs before, but somehow never heard the name of the singer. Fantastic album front to back.

It’s soooooo looooong. This should be cut down to a single album.

While there are Bowie records with singles I like better, this is probably my favorite Bowie album, and definitely the one that convinced me to listen closely.

R.E.M. feels like it should be in my list of favorite bands, but I found most of these songs pretty boring. Some stand outs managed to pull me thru, but the majority of the songs felt like 20 seconds of good ideas stretched out to 2 minutes.

Mostly incredibly repetitive tracks, with a few also repetitive catchy singles, I think this album is carried by people’s memory of two or three hooks and not much else

Some bangers. Some snoozers. The Talking Heads always strikes me as a talented band trying real hard to be boring. Every now and then they fail and record something great, but a lot of it is just repetitive.

Look, the singles are pretty great, and her voice is incredible, but the majority of this album is boring and repetitive. As a whole, I can’t imagine ever listening to this again.

It’s neat and sounds interesting but I don’t think a sitar can carry a whole album

Loveless is a fantastic album; several songs really stick with me, I find myself humming them days after listening. This album feels like a collection of b-sides that came 15 years too late to be interesting. The songs are fine, but mostly forgettable. It really lacks the magic that Loveless has. The only bright side to this album is that it makes me want to listen to Loveless again.

Fun, somewhat innovative, but ultimately not to my taste. I found it bland musically, and boring lyrically.

He was really good at this on a mechanical level, I just don’t like or relate to the lyrics.

Good, but not a favorite. I definitely appreciate that he expanded and experimented so much throughout his career, running to where the ball was going instead of where it currently was. It makes listening to multiple albums more enjoyable, because he moves on before the style gets really stale.

When this came out, what I really wanted was a new Blur album. Re-listening, I realize it’s better than I remember.

So very boring. And I usually like U2!

The first time I listened to Tom Waits, I wondered, “where have you been all my life?” Swordfishtrombones is a weird album, full of characters, stories, and musical flourishes that reward me for giving it my time. It isn’t background music. I have to be in the right mood for it. I have to be interested in actively listening, as if I’m reading a book or poetry. But it’s also not *that* weird.

I like this well enough. It’s mostly good. There was a time when I loved this indie alt sound, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs were everywhere when I was going to concerts and festivals like mad. I probably would have listened to it in my regular rotation for a few years and eventually forgotten it as my life moved on. Except for Maps. That song is iconic to me. Even before my friends and I banged it out on Rock Band, Maps was an earworm that had stuck with me. Maps keeps me revisiting this album every so often, even though nothing else grabs me quite the same way.

It’s still just Christmas music

Some of the singles are quite catchy in low doses, but everything overstays its welcome and becomes quite repetitive.

Not sure how much is nostalgia and how much is genuine, but I always enjoy re-listens of this album

A couple of these songs are all time classics, a couple are absolutely boring as hell. Overall worth a listen, but generally overrated.

I think if I had heard this in college, I would have been obsessed with it. As it is, it feels like I missed its moment for myself.

When it first came out, I bought this album on a whim based on the cover alone. I grew up in a small town, our radio options were limited to classic rock and pop, and we didn’t have cable - nobody I knew had heard of this band before. I was already filled with a vague angst and was on my way to college, and so this hit at just the right time. I put a poster on my dorm wall, I listened to this on repeat, I memorized the lyrics for the majority of the songs. On a drive home to see my parents I could play this album twice through. Even that amount of nostalgia can’t save this album for me. Just awful.

What a contrast to the last album, Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory. I first listened to both of these albums around the same time in 2001, early in college. I fell in love with both of them, and annoyed the hell out of my roommates. Only one of those two stands up still. Bossanova isn’t my favorite Pixies album, but it’s a far slight better than a lot of albums on this list.

A couple of the early songs are pure excess and almost dragged this down for me, but once I got through them I was reminded of why I fell in love with this band in the first place.

I'm not sorry that I prefer this era of Radiohead to the latter, more experimental era.

Another "how did I miss this?" album. This is exactly the kind of thing my friends or I would have gone wild over around the time it was released, and somehow I went 23 years without even hearing about it.

It’s not bad, just repetitive and bland. The classics are overplayed at this point, the rest just filler. I get why it’s on here, I just don’t care about it.

There’s some truly amazing songs on this album, but some of the others are kinda meh

This is a pretty weak album from a band I generally like. I think if the follow up albums hadn’t been very strong, then Foo Fighters would have been forgotten. This is a Call could have been a Stone Temple Pilots b-side. I’ll Stick Around could have been a Nirvana b-side. Big Me is the first song that feels like an original voice.

I dislike very much John Lennon’s solo work.

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. It probably would have gotten a lower rating if it were longer; as it is, it doesn’t overstay.

I had mostly missed Taylor Swift until last year or so, and only got the early songs via unavoidable cultural osmosis. I'm really glad I had the weekend to listen to this a couple times.

I found this so much more listenable and enjoyable than Green.

I absolutely hated this

Reading the 1-star reviews of this album was life affirming.

Every other song is a banger. Every other song is skipable. I don't really know what to do with this album; I love half of it, and half of it is a snooze fest. By the end, I think the great songs make up for the bland ones.

This maypole shit is fine for a song or two, but quickly wore out it’s welcome with me.

Around 2006, I was heavily using Pandora, a streaming music app with an early recommendation algorithm. I would create a station, meticulously curate it via votes and additional artists, and play for hours while I worked. Inevitably, they would all end up becoming stations devoted to The Strokes. I hate The Strokes, but for some reason, Pandora was convinced that they were perfectly tailored to my taste. Almost everything I like has some crossover with The Strokes, but they mash it all together in a way that ends up being completely unappealing.

More of this maypole shit.

A more interesting version of the arctic monkeys. It’s fine, a little derivative.

This is weirdly nostalgic for me, even though I don’t particularly love it and doubt I’ll ever listen to it again. It reminds me of late college, popping open a dvd case, a gray rainy day, a shitty couch, a mid market movie starring Julia Bullock and Brad Cruise. Setting aside the nostalgia, there’s not really much to it for me to grab onto, especially past the few singles I really remembered. But it also isn’t offensive, and I don’t find myself in a hurry to turn it off. Kind of the definition of a 3 star album.

I loved this when it came out but I have no idea why it belongs on this list

Lot of great songs on here, it was fun to revisit an old favorite. Some of it hasn’t aged super well - “(I am for real!)” seems so corny now. I still really dislike the skits.

I loved the singles from this album when I was younger, but I'd never listened to the full album before now. The highs are great, but the rest is just so much more of the same. It's kind of a slog.

They mixed this on tapes. Incredible work. It took a long time for this album to sink in for me, but now that it has, I adore it.

I loved some of the songs on this, but as an entire album, it really dragged. I'll add a bit to my regular rotation but I don't think I'll be revisiting the whole thing.

Not my favorite Bowie album, and not very familiar sounding in a lot of places. But the man still had it.

The epitome of “it’s fine.” I can see why it’s on this list, I just have a real hard time caring one way or the other about this album. Growing up rural in the 80s/90s, I know I’ve heard the hits on this album a million times. The other songs all sound like something I should have heard, but I can’t place at all; nor can I bring myself to care enough to listen again.

I waffled between three and four stars here. On one hand, I do really love smoke on the water, and the grinding sound of early metal in general. On the other, the actual songwriting on this album is really boring, and I can’t see it standing out enough that I would bother listening to it again in its entirety.

This album is incredibly repetitive. The songs are all 25% too long. There’s some fun moments in some of the fun singles, but they’re buried under unnecessary riffs and awful singing.

First half: It’s not that bad, you guys are just mean Second half: oh

I’ve got really fond memories of this album, but even when it came out I felt like half the songs were filler. This album is carried by one amazing track and maybe two okay tracks. I found the entire thing really hard to get through.

I would have liked this a lot more as a tight 45-60 minutes, instead of a meandering 120 minutes

If someone I know showed up at my door with tickets to a Coldplay concert and said, "bro, you gotta go with me," I'd probably go and have a fine time. If two tickets to a Coldplay concert were on the other side of a fence and I had to stretch a lot to reach them, I'd probably just leave them on the ground. It's Coldplay. It's fine. I think I listened to the whole thing, but it's hard to remember. I get they have a huge cultural impact. I can't really go lower than a 3, because it's so inoffensive, but it's also hard to go any higher.

I loved this album when it came out. I bought it and listened to it endlessly. I get separating the art from the artist in some cases. Art like this is usually a blend of many people working together, one of them being terrible doesn’t necessarily kill the whole thing. And I can recognize the historical merit of this album, and if you’ve never listened to it I think you probably should, just for the context. But I can’t listen to it anymore.

Two stars for two listenable songs. Brittany, girl, he's just not that into you.

I really really want to like Guided by Voices, but 90% of this album didn’t land at all for me and the other 10% isn’t likely to stick. It’s too bad, there’s flashes there that I loved, but they’re gone so quick and so frustrating to listen to that it never feels rewarding. I think I could deal with either the raw tape sound, or the two dozen unfinished songs, but not both.

This isn't terrible, but I can't imagine I'll ever want to listen to it again, over most of the other music on this list from the 60s