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Albums Rated
3.34
Average Rating
70%
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326 albums remaining
Featured Review
World Clique
Deee-Lite • 2/5
Can one hot song make an album something you need to listen to before you die? What if that song is the unbelievably catchy "Groove Is In The Heart"? Welcome to my TedTalk... "Can a Single Spark Ignite a Whole Album's Immortality?" The question posed, whether one hot song can elevate an album to the status of an essential, "must-hear-before-you-die" masterpiece, is a beautiful, vexing puzzle that strikes at the heart of how we consume, value, and remember music. Highlighting Deee-Lite's World Clique and the magnetic pull of "Groove Is In The Heart," provides a perfect flashpoint for this very debate. In an age of streaming and hyper-curated playlists, the single's dominance has never been clearer. A single track, like the undeniable funk and sheer joy of "Groove Is In The Heart," can be a cultural monolith, instantly recognizable, endlessly sampled, and a guaranteed dance floor filler decades after its release. For millions, the song is de facto Deee-Lite. So, when an album houses such a momentous piece of music, does it inherit that songs "essential" status? The affirmative argument is compelling in that the historical context is essential. That one song, in its brilliance and popularity, acts as a cultural key to a specific time, sound, and mood. The surrounding album, even if wildly inconsistent, becomes an artifact, a complete document of the moment that birthed the hit. Listening to the full album can allow for a deeper appreciation of the creative ecosystem. Perhaps the other tracks offer the necessary shadows to highlight the bright peak of the hit, or they showcase the artistic breadth, or even the limitations, of the artist that led to that single stroke of genius. The hit is the doorway, and the whole album is the room one must enter to understand the architecture of the era. However, the counter-argument elevates the album form itself. A truly "essential" album is often defined by its cohesion, its narrative arc, or its sustained excellence. It’s the entire statement, the fully realised artistic vision, where every track is deliberately placed to build a greater whole. Can an album riddled with filler, B-sides that barely made the cut, or clumsy experiments truly deserve a spot among the pantheon just because of one incandescent star? This perspective argues that such an album is merely a vessel for the hit. It forces the listener to sift through middling mediocrity for a fleeting moment of ecstacy, a task better suited to a playlist or a greatest hits compilation. If the remaining tracks are forgettable, do we truly need to hear them? Is the experience of being underwhelmed by eleven tracks for the sake of one glorious song a prerequisite for musical enlightenment? While an album like World Clique, for example, may be an undeniable landmark of the early 90s house and rave scene, is it a masterpiece of album construction, or simply a collection of tracks anchored by one perfect, gravity-defying moment? The discussion leads us to the classic "one-album wonder" or "one-hit wonder" conundrum. In many cases, artists whose careers were defined by a single smash often released albums that, upon closer inspection, reveal untapped potential or a fully-formed artistic vision that was simply ahead of its time or overshadowed by their own initial success. Making Mirrors by Gotye (with "Somebody That I Used To Know") or even The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (though a more complex case of a single studio album) are often cited as examples of albums that offer more than the massive single suggests, suggesting the public's focus was too narrow, not the album's quality. Ultimately, the judgement rests on the definition of "essential." Is it essential to hear the full story of the artist, even if that story is flawed? Or is "essential" reserved only for the uninterrupted, sustained brilliance of albums that change the course of music with every track? The former suggests a historical and contextual imperative; the latter, a pure artistic standard. And perhaps, the truth is a spectrum, where some albums are essential for their sheer cultural weight, regardless of their track-by-track consistency. TL;DR Nope, but Lady Miss Kier is dope...
Rating Distribution
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2020s
Favorite Decade
Grunge
Favorite Genre
US
Top Origin
Wordsmith
Rater Style ?
114
5-Star Albums
12
1-Star Albums
Breakdown
By Genre
By Decade
By Origin
Albums
You Love More Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Ghosteen
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
|
5 | 2.97 | +2.03 |
|
Rhythm Nation 1814
Janet Jackson
|
5 | 2.99 | +2.01 |
|
Larks' Tongues In Aspic
King Crimson
|
5 | 3 | +2 |
|
Pump
Aerosmith
|
5 | 3.11 | +1.89 |
|
Third
Portishead
|
5 | 3.13 | +1.87 |
|
Fetch The Bolt Cutters
Fiona Apple
|
5 | 3.19 | +1.81 |
|
Miriam Makeba
Miriam Makeba
|
5 | 3.19 | +1.81 |
|
Little Earthquakes
Tori Amos
|
5 | 3.23 | +1.77 |
|
Crooked Rain Crooked Rain
Pavement
|
5 | 3.24 | +1.76 |
|
GREY Area
Little Simz
|
5 | 3.24 | +1.76 |
You Love Less Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
LP1
FKA twigs
|
1 | 2.8 | -1.8 |
|
Group Sex
Circle Jerks
|
1 | 2.74 | -1.74 |
|
Odessa
Bee Gees
|
1 | 2.71 | -1.71 |
|
Out Of The Blue
Electric Light Orchestra
|
2 | 3.64 | -1.64 |
|
Catch A Fire
Bob Marley & The Wailers
|
2 | 3.63 | -1.63 |
|
Rising Above Bedlam
Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart
|
1 | 2.61 | -1.61 |
|
Devotional Songs
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
|
1 | 2.58 | -1.58 |
|
Calenture
The Triffids
|
1 | 2.55 | -1.55 |
|
The Gershwin Songbook
Ella Fitzgerald
|
2 | 3.53 | -1.53 |
|
Queen II
Queen
|
2 | 3.49 | -1.49 |
Artists
Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Michael Jackson | 3 | 5 |
| Beatles | 6 | 4.33 |
| Led Zeppelin | 5 | 4.4 |
| Bruce Springsteen | 5 | 4.4 |
| Radiohead | 5 | 4.4 |
| Pink Floyd | 3 | 4.67 |
| Nirvana | 3 | 4.67 |
| Nick Drake | 3 | 4.67 |
| Johnny Cash | 3 | 4.67 |
| Fiona Apple | 2 | 5 |
| The Flaming Lips | 2 | 5 |
| Aretha Franklin | 2 | 5 |
| Elliott Smith | 2 | 5 |
| Oasis | 2 | 5 |
| Beastie Boys | 2 | 5 |
| Talking Heads | 3 | 4.33 |
| Creedence Clearwater Revival | 3 | 4.33 |
| Sonic Youth | 3 | 4.33 |
| The Beach Boys | 3 | 4.33 |
| PJ Harvey | 3 | 4.33 |
| The White Stripes | 3 | 4.33 |
| Pixies | 3 | 4.33 |
| Bob Dylan | 5 | 4 |
Least Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Bee Gees | 2 | 1.5 |
| Pere Ubu | 2 | 1.5 |
| Björk | 3 | 2 |
Controversial
| Artist | Ratings |
|---|---|
| Adele | 5, 2 |
| Prince | 5, 2 |
| Rod Stewart | 2, 5 |
| Kate Bush | 3, 2, 5 |
| The Who | 5, 4, 2, 3 |
5-Star Albums (114)
View Album Wall
Popular Reviews
Fleetwood Mac
5/5
The album that compelled Fleetwood Mac to successfully queer heterosexuality. They were all drugged up to the eyeballs and fucking each other six way from sunday (except John McVie, poor sod, he had to play bass on all Christine's songs about him) and holed up in a studio with next to no windows and still produced a stone cold top 3 album of all time instead of systematically killing each other for sport.
Any song on here would be an apex mountain pinnacle for any other band not called The Beatles, take your pick. In fact it's CRIMINAL that they left Stevie Nicks beautiful "Silver Springs" off the track listing (thank you to The Dance and deluxe editions for restoring it), and I like to sometimes think that somewhere, in a CVS, Lindsey Buckingham is at this moment waiting for his quarter mile long receipt to print while the store PA plays "Silver Springs" and all he hears is "you'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you"
They never could get away from that sound...
50 stars if they would allow it.
29 likes
Fiona Apple
5/5
[Review pending as author listened to this album, got up, opened his front door, and walked all the way to Brooklyn to offer himself at the altar of the witch coven Fiona Apple surely created through the power and majesty of this album alone]
15 likes
5/5
The defining album of my generation (late gen x, final year of high school, Cool fuckin Britannia to the core) and I can still remember release day, cutting out of said high school to buy this CD right as HMV opened and then rush home to quickly get it on tape in order to be the first to play it on the form room stereo. Everyone was rapt in anticipation, some were disassociating from raw hype alone... Thank fuck it delivered banger after banger. This and their Knebworth shows were the high water mark for Britpop as a movement, the tide was turning long before Be Here Now jizzed itself onto the public a few years later and the Gallagher brothers and other associated band members became pastiches of their former selves, but it doesn't make this any less impactful.
Now they're back, and I'm old as fuck. Almost 30 years later. Ain't life a bitch? But gods, we were kings back then... We were the masters of our fates. We were young, dumb, full of cum. We were mad for it.
Anyway, here's Wonderwall...
10 likes
Muddy Waters
5/5
An actual goddamn delight, open with the quintessential blues song "Mannish Boy" and the smile will never leave your face. The hoochie-coochie Chicago blues bars, Johnny Winter hollering in the background like a maniac, the tight band, the fact it was recorded as is in, like, a couple of days, its just so raw...
This is that sauce. This is the shit.
8 likes
Traffic
2/5
Couldn't be more MOR if it had yellow lines painted down the middle of it.
4 likes
4-Star Albums (227)
1-Star Albums (12)
All Ratings
Herbie Hancock
4/5
Starts out with a clavinet and doesn't let up on the early 70s funk for the next 40 minutes, only four songs so you know you're getting a god bang for your buck.
Standout Track: Watermelon Man
Talking Heads
4/5
People come for Once In a Lifetime, but stay for the absolute, unrelenting, forward velocity of The Great Curve.
Lauryn Hill
5/5
Even nearly 25 years later, this still be flipping in the ghetto on a dirty mattress. Bonafide timeless classic, a standard Miss Lauren couldn't dare to achieve again.
Adele
5/5
Powerhouse of an album that shot Adele to superstardom. Still listenable as it has a timeless sound, still relatable, still raw in many ways.
AC/DC
3/5
Bon Scott's last album and it's in their top three albums, but it never really hit with me. It has Highway to Hell (obviously) but the rest is just .... there
Derek & The Dominos
2/5
I don't know how this got extended to a double album, it has one good song, and even that is good not because of Eric Clapton, but Jim Gordon's piano in the coda. The rest is filler.
The Avalanches
4/5
Come for Frontier Psychiatrist but stay for the rest of the album, especially the title track, it's just the epitome of early 2000s sunny dispositions. A ton of samples all layered together to weave a tapestry of feel good vibes, shame the world would come crashing down less than a year after this debuted and feel good jams went on the back burner.
Einstürzende Neubauten
2/5
Run from it, hide from it, deny it, it comes all the same...
If this Einsturzende Neubauten album is truly one of the 1001 you have to listen to before you die, its probably best to make it your last. It's a full on sensory assault. An harsh dose of unadulterated, raw, violent, uncut sonic sodomy, from the first sound of a sledgehammer wrapped barb wire smashing your into your face to the death rattle of the rusty power drill that's being used to perform trepanation in order to release the pressure that's built up in your brain over the interminable 38 minutes required to listen to this magnum opus of German industrial revolution.
Now it would be easy, too easy, to preread the reviews and decide that a 1 is all that's required and move on with your day, but stop and appreciate the chaos, even if only for a few fleeting seconds. Maybe you'll appreciate the nuance of future industrial tools usage like Lee Ranaldo using power tools at the start of Sonic Youth's The Burning Spear....
The Temptations
4/5
Wild album in that one song takes up over a third of the runtime, outside of the truly great "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" it feels like a disjointed EP...
Rush
3/5
What can I say? Overindulgent mid-70s prog rock where pushing song lengths was a sign of creative wankery. But it's pretty much middle of the road alright and parts of it have a *very* good vibe like "The Temples of Syrinx" section of the overarching 2112 suite and "The Twilight Zone" in the second half would be great after popping an edible.
Steely Dan
3/5
Starts out with a banger but kinda fizzles out like a bottle rocket when really it needs a good diesel engine to carry this along. It'll excite, in moderation, but rarely thrills.
Steely Dan
4/5
"You go back, Jack, do it again, wheel turnin' 'round and 'round. You go back, Jack, do it again..."
Two days of Steely Dan in row, really starting to feel like this was some grand conspiracy to turn me into a hardcore Steely Dan fan. It's like being given a hit of a potent drug without a warning. Like, yeah, I was gonna probably do this shit anyways, but I'd rather initiate it on my own terms.
The KLF
2/5
"KLF is gonna rock ya"
I remember this from 1991, and it's aged like piss...
Talk Talk
3/5
New Wave, Post Punk, Art Pop, whatever... Mostly bland but effervescent in places, rises to high at times but very few and far between
Fiona Apple
5/5
[Review pending as author listened to this album, got up, opened his front door, and walked all the way to Brooklyn to offer himself at the altar of the witch coven Fiona Apple surely created through the power and majesty of this album alone]
Keith Jarrett
3/5
It's scored more about the lore behind the album than the actual album it's self. A series of unfortunate events befell this show and the fact Jarrett was able to perform is a massive miracle.
Long solo instrumentals aren't my thing, but you can throw this on as background music and be pleased with yourself
Dirty Projectors
2/5
If this album was a colour, it would be beige. Offensively beige.
The Rolling Stones
5/5
I mean, its one of the greatest albums of all time, the track listing could be a greatest hits for lesser bands... Sure "Brown Sugar" hasn't aged well, but it's wall to wall classics here, including my particular favourite Stones track of all, "Bitch". It's just a non-stop groove and your life is emptier without this.
David Bowie
4/5
The album before the Ziggy Stardust period, starts with "Changes" and you can tell Ch-ch-ch-changes is coming and that's enough to make it 4 stars for me, add in "Kooks", "Oh! You Pretty Things", and "Life on Mars?" and you have a solid album.
But you really have no idea of whats about to come...
Janis Joplin
4/5
Excellent album but ultimately depressing due to the whole "what could have been". Janis and her band lay down a half hour of power, soul, longing, desire... Raw and uncut, flesh and blood. One of the quintessential american albums.
Dexys Midnight Runners
2/5
I guess you have to be in the mood for a horn section, I was not.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
4/5
Pure 80s heaven, how this album produced so many memorable songs is basically criminal.
The Flaming Lips
5/5
Personally this album was like a gateway drug into a whole new world of sound, back in 2002 I randomly heard "Do You Realize??" on the car radio and it just instantly clicked with me, I knew I had to seek out the origin of it. What I found was a sonic soundscape that felt like a straight up rebirth, gone was my beloved 90s indie/alternative straight jangly guitar music and what replaced it was music with depth and crunch and searing screams of electronic madness.
Sometimes I wish I could go back to that time, that post millennium haze, where life seemed simpler and find this album for the first time all over again.
Magazine
4/5
Never mind the Buzzcocks, here's another post-punk, new wave, arty power rock band... This surprisingly hit me just right.
Led Zeppelin
4/5
I mean, it's literally what you think of when you think of classic rock, late 60 blues born from traditional folk songs, not as good as the discography that would follow it, but a solid foundation with some serious grooves.
Kate Bush
3/5
Just wasn't feeling it, but it's one of her weaker albums.
Lloyd Cole And The Commotions
2/5
Bland, uninspiring, basic. I'm struggling with this one as it's just so by-the-numbers that all the songs sort of bleed into one amalgamous blob of jangly guitar music with no real substance.
fIREHOSE
2/5
Like a mashup of the worst parts of R.E.M. and Cake, which is a shame because I love both those bands, but I hated this...
Ella Fitzgerald
2/5
Gonna be brutally honest, I love Ella Fitzgerald, but ain't nobody got 3 hours to listen to non stop Gershwin songs. She doesn't even song for the first 15 or so minutes. I understand the reasoning behind it and it's part of the larger overarching "Ella sings the whole ass complete American Songbook" that last for around 15 hours, but I'm not American and I have no connection to it and it's all very old and tedious...
Bob Dylan
5/5
As soon as the organ hits on the first song (Like a Rolling Stone), you know you're in for a treat but it's the title track that gets me every time with the opening lyrics of "Oh God said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son' / Abe says, 'Man, you must be puttin' me on'"...
But, yes, I think it can be very easily done
We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61
R.E.M.
3/5
Debut album from a small up-and-coming band from a sleepy college town the the south, I see big things from them...
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
Not his best album (that'd be "Darkness on the Edge of Town"), not his breakthrough album (that'd be "Born to Run"), but probably his most iconic... A track list that plays like a greatest hits (12 songs, 7 (SEVEN) singles), and contains one of my absolute favourite Springsteen tracks (that'd be "Bobby Jean").
Just a near perfect album...
R.E.M.
5/5
I had Murmur a few days ago and joked that I expected big things from this up-and-coming band... Well this was them at their peak. A phenomenal album that felt like a seismic shift in the culture, loaded with anthems for weird kids everywhere. Starts with "Drive" and rarely gets you go.
Britney Spears
2/5
First things first, not my jam... I had to listen to this in headphones at the dead of night so no one would catch me. Obviously it's the monster debut album from the preeminent pop star of the 21st century, starts off strong with the title track but then dips when the second song "You Drive Me Crazy" comes in as it's not the far superior single version. Song three, "Sometimes", is pleasing enough for a mushy pop ballad but thereafter is far more misses than hits and full of emotionless generic pre-millennium pop beats that could have been lifted from a preset library. She would go into better things as far as her career was concerned, but was this as good as it got? It was definitely the biggest commercial success she'd experience but it just felt so empty out with a few fleeting moments.
Jurassic 5
4/5
Just a funky chilled album, cut from the same cloth as the likes of Black Star, big beats and big vibes from the verbal herman munsters, the word enhancers.
Nightmares On Wax
4/5
Very chill album that straddles the gap between trip hop, electronica, and lofi. I LOVED the follow up album ("Carboot Soul") but never really gave. this one a listen, but I'm glad I had the opportunity to tonight, it was a good soundtrack to my mundane tasks, enough to make me stop and bob my head now and then.
Good listening on headphones while you're laying back in the cut.
Nine Inch Nails
4/5
I guarantee that there are very few people in this world who could recall (let alone quote) this, but once upon a time, I actually said to someone, "I used to listen to NIN - Pretty Hate Machine was the best. But Trent sold out, man. The Downward Spiral Sucks."
I look back upon those days and I simply wish there had been a wiser man around who could have caned me for my ignorance. I have to admit that of all the things that shame me in my life (and there are quite a few), this was one of the big ones. However, as usual, I am going off track.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
2/5
I get that this is supposed to be influential, the greater introduction of Bob Marley to the masses and all that, but, honestly, nothing jumped out at me. Telling that with nearly every posthumous compilation, this album accounts for nearly nothing in the tracklistings.
David Bowie
3/5
Start of Bowie's Berlin period, the first "side" of arty krautrock synthesiser inspired jams flys by, aided by timely fade ins and outs, and contains the excellent "Sound and Vision" which sounds like it could go on for far longer than its posted 3:03. Try and listen and no have the do-do-do-do-dooos in your head for days.
Side two slows down more than a little with the bleak as fuck "Warszawa" and the rest is ambient instrumental music. Truly a tale of two albums smashed together, but it works, mostly.
Less than a year later he'd release "Heroes", madness.
Fleet Foxes
5/5
How have I never heard of this before??? This is my jam, folksy earnest singer songwriters with great melodies and harmonies. It's very Band of Horses-ish vibes and I loved it wholly.
The Go-Betweens
3/5
Very much alright, nothing really stood out apart from some songs sound like Badly Drawn Boy, "The Devil's Eye" especially.
The Pretty Things
2/5
Proto Prog Psychedelic Rock Opera, pretty dull despite its best intentions.
Mudhoney
3/5
Proto-grunge and obviously a huge influence on the Seattle bands that would soon follow. In your face distortion is the order of the day here, and if you don't like that then your in for a fairly miserable ride here.
Common
4/5
Smooth as silk, un-Common-ly good... The "They Say" song with Kanye and John Legend is just peak mid 00s vibes, great soul sample, twinking keyboards, again smooth as all hell. Kinda crazy that the beats Common turned down ended up making Kanye's "Late Registration", think how much better this could have been...
Leonard Cohen
3/5
Music to listen to while curled up in the fetal position in that closet under the stairs, rocking back and forth...
Pet Shop Boys
3/5
There's a point about 1:30 into the second song where Neil Tennant muses "what have I done to deserve this?" and it hit me light a bolt from the blue, what have *I* done to deserve this??? I mean, I signed up for this 1001 albums thing to shake up my algorithm mix way from the same tired old songs, and here I let Pet Shop Boys sully it, We're not at the "how am I gonna get through?" part and I'm questioning how am *I* gonna get through...
"It's a Sin" still goes hard though, this was enough to push it up to a mid level album
Iron Butterfly
2/5
One of those albums where they, the The Beatles did on many an occasion, took stereo sound to extreme lengths, where nearly every instrument is placed in the far reaches of your aural capacity, except the bass that just grooves along somewhere near the middle. I've never been a fan of 60s music that has, say, the drums only in one earphone (for example) and the wah-wah infused guitar in the other, its so disorientating, and annoying of you need to take one earphone out to talk to someone quickly during one of the many drum solos.
Anyway, this is the longest 33 minute album I've ever listened to, mainly because the 17 minute title song *never ends*... Such a drag. And it's not even that good outside the god tier riff. Hell, Nas got more use out of that riff as a sample for "Hip Hop Is Dead" in 2006 and that only uses like 6 seconds of it.
I'm yet to 1 star anything (and I've already gotten "Kollaps" by Einstürzende Neubauten), but this came *really* close, it's like 1.5 stars on a good day.
Talking Heads
5/5
"Fear of Music" is perhaps an apt title, that or, as the excellent "Life During Wartime" repeats, This ain't no party, this ain't no disco. This might be the album that signified the glammed up 70s were dead, long live the post punk, new wave, fuck your disco 80s?
Anyway, this is my second Talking Heads album, and I'm a convert, a true believer. Every song brings something new and different from what came before it. This is a truly great album and anyone who says otherwise is a cop. I said what I said....
Blondie
4/5
A perfect Pop Rock album? Definitely a solid track list with timeless classics like "One Way or Another" and "Heart of Glass" but solid gold behind it like "Hanging on the Telephone" and "Sunday Girl", though for that song you should make sure you get the Frenglish version that inexplicable s'est mis au français à mi-chemin. Pourquoi? Je n'en ai aucune idée, c'est vraiment super mimi et bien plus tard Zooey Deschanel a repris cette chanson avec She & Him et elle correspond parfaitement à son esthétique. Mais je m'égare...
4 étoiles
Jacques Brel
3/5
Oh merde! J'ai terminé ma dernière critique avec une touche française, et cela m'a valu un album français en retour, alors je suppose que c'est une chose maintenant?... Anyways, I like the first song, or chanson, called "Amsterdam" as Brel puts his full chest into it, but there after is very hit or miss. The recording is also very rough around the edges, applause fades in and out and sounds like basic stock audio clips inserted between songs, and the overall feel has the taste of half smoked Gauloises and Gitanes cigarettes.
Coldplay
4/5
Its hard to imagine 2002, but when this came out, Coldplay were still a small band... They played in bingo halls and high school gyms on the relentless tour for this album that would make them global stars, they played shows to 600 & 800 people early in the tour in Boston and Philadelphia respectively. That's insane...
Now, this album is good to great, yes it's played out because how worldly popular the band became, but it was all built off hard work, they pounded the hard yards to be hated by millions and richer than god, with a smile on their face. Screw the haters, put this on and remember a simpler time where you could see a band on the cusp of megastardom for less than $10 in a sweaty ballroom or gymnasium playing the best music you had heard at the time.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
1/5
Me (glancing at the title): Love & Devotion, sweet, ready for some Depeche Mode, feeling that...
Well, ladies and gentlemen, it was not Depeche Mode, not even close, not even the same continent, and that disappointment soured this listening instantly. *Sigh*
So yeah, Islamic Devotional singing isn't for me even with my initial disappointment. But I applaud the attempt to break away from the western anglicized norm (though I have had French and German music tossed my way already) and throw in something that's pretty much guaranteed to give you a strong reaction one way or the other. This is my first 1 star, but it is more a solitary star for my personal ignorance.
UB40
2/5
I only know them from their easy listening reggae infused covers of "Red Red Wine" and "Can't Help Falling in Love" that my mum used to like, so imagine my surprise at full blown political discourse against Maggie Thatcher and the fucking Tories... Get it right up you.
Pavement
5/5
29(!) years ago, I remember skipping school classes so I could buy "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" on cassette and listened to it all afternoon. I was 16 and I’m confident it altered the trajectory of my life. I can still remember the feeling of turning over to side two and being met with "Gold Soundz" and it hitting me like a shotgun shot to the soul.
Because you’re empty
And I’m empty
And you can never quarantine the past
This is when Alt Rock became Indie Rock and the too cool for school kids pontificated about Midwestern rock bands from California like it was a secret only to be whispered on street corners. You can never quarantine the past!
The Strokes
5/5
90s Rock was officially over in 2001, we'd survived the few years dalliance with Nu-Metal and bands like The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Vines, and Kings of Leon were here to bring the garage band style cool back. Low production values are the order of the day here, make it sound like it's recorded in one take on a busted 4 track in some guys 3rd floor walk-up in the Lower East Side (in reality it was in a basement in the East Village, but who counting here?).
Julian Casablancas is dripping in understated coolness, Albert Hammond and Nick Valensi have serious guitar duels throughout, Fabrizio Moretti brings a tribal drum feel but my MVP is Nikolai Fraiture and his driving bass, it kicks in during the title track and then I knew what I wanted to do, I wanted to play bass like that.... But I never could.
Anyway, this is a classic, stone cold classic garage rock revival, biblical!
Fiona Apple
5/5
I could listen to Fiona Apple any day, you don't need to tell me to do it. Hard to believe she's less than a year older than me, in 1996 I was still young & dumb yet she sounds wiser beyond the ages we are now some 27 years later.
Kings of Leon
2/5
Their first album was so good that this was so disappointing in comparison, so disappointing that it would take them a few years to even come close to the highs of that first album in their 4th album. This just sounds to bland and by the numbers that absolutely nothing stands out or is relistenable and I'm shocked that many critics rated it so highly.
Hugh Masekela
3/5
Very easy to listen to, good background music in a wine bar style vibe. Nothing really stood out but the whole package was a good feeling overall.
Little Richard
4/5
"A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom!" is the first thing you hear and its still feels as invigorating as it must have felt 68 years ago... Dirty blues classics with a side of boogie-woogie and you're done in under 30 minutes, having had some fun tonight.
Lorde
3/5
Better than I thought it would be going in as I had only heard a few Lore songs prior to this album. Almost every song bar "Liability" was laden with heavy beats and not quite mumbley vocals, and only a handful stood out to me like the aforementioned "Liability" and it's reprise, "Supercut", and "The Louvre" but nothing felt like it overstayed its welcome.
The Police
2/5
White boy reggae, and it's literally advertised as such. I mean, this is the kind of stuff my dad used to listen to so I'm pretty numb to the staccato reggae chords and fake Caribbean patois they're doing here. But still, massive cultural appropriation by the colonisers, not cool.
Stan Getz
4/5
Smoother than the slithery smooth backbeat that runs through the first track "Desafinado", downright tropical vibes ooze out of every nook, close your eyes and just imagine you're walking down Copacabana Beach in the 50s, cocktail in hand. Jazz is a misnomer as this is Bonito Bossa Nova, and your hips will sway sitting in your chair.
Tom Tom Club
3/5
"Genius Of Love" is the song that has that sample you head a million times before, from Grandmaster Flash to Mariah Carey to Paramore, for that alone this is a solid 3 star album.
Little Simz
5/5
I'm skeptical whenever an album outside the original 1001 comes up, and having one so relatively recent is another eyebrow raiser, but god damn this was brilliant. Hard hitting from the first few seconds when the bass kick in and doesn't let up for the full 35 minutes, probably about as perfect as you'll come across in this list.
Jerry Lee Lewis
2/5
Short concert, stolen music. The performance is energetic, but the cloud of "white man popularising the black man's music" hangs heavy here. Classic rock & roll, albeit distilled.
Circle Jerks
1/5
Loud, obnoxious, mercifully short.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
5/5
Peak Creedence Clearwater Revival, the absolute height of their collective powers. Simply put, it's one of the best albums ever commited to tape anywhere at any time. So good that most of it was released as double A side singles, imagine "Up Around The Bend" and "Run Through The Jungle" being paired together. Their definitive compilation album, "Chronicle" has SEVEN songs off this, 7 out of 20...
Impossible to hate
SZA
3/5
mid-to-good R&B vibes, but honestly it was background music that i didn't really pay much attention to, other than her wishes to have a fat ol' booty... Why did that stick with me?
Jeff Buckley
4/5
"Eternal Life" is a very apt song to describe Jeff Buckley, one killer album and then literally dipped into the Mississippi to leave behind a shrouded enigma behind that one album that would live forever.
The Zombies
3/5
Breezy psychedelic pop tunes float on by wanting to be a Pet Sounds or a Sgt. Pepper, and truthfully there's not a bad song on this album, but theres also not a lot of great ones either, they're all perfectly serviceable as a single listen through, but only "Time of the Season" stands out as a relistenable, and thats really about it... As middle of the road as psychedelic pop can be.
Raekwon
2/5
Built ONLY 4 Cuban Linx, and I'm nowhere near Cuban Links... 18 tracks of mid 90s braggadocio hip hop, if that's your thing. Features nearly every member of the Wu-Tang Clan in some way shape or form and it's widely know that they are nutin' to fuck wit, so I won't.
Big Brother & The Holding Company
5/5
Four gentlemen and one GREAT, great broad! A great band just cutting loose so nearly an hour, Janis at her most raspy begging you to take another piece of her heart, and you want to... But mainly they are gonna knock ya, rock ya, gonna sock it to ya now.
The Beta Band
3/5
I remember the original Beta Band buzz and how it was unfulfilled promise, so I went into this with a little trepidation, and was immediately blown away by the opening track, "Squares", but that might have been more to do with the "Daydream" sample/interpolation and how it reminded me of another song that also came out around this time.
Where was I? Oh yeah, they close the album with a song called "Eclipse" about questions and answers and people lying but proclaim "And the music we make is not particularly good" and I'm undecided if they deserve the pizza or not.
Maxwell
3/5
Listen up people, we're now knee deep in the neo-soul smoothness, and there's only one way out, make peace with whatever deity you choose to believe in (or not, free world) because Maxwell is gonna take you there. Where? That wet spot on the bed, that's where...
Beatles
5/5
But seriously, "Drive My Car", "You Won't See Me", "Nowhere Man", "The Word", and those are just the choice picks of Side A. Side B has "I'm Looking Through You', "In My Life", and "Run For Your Life", so for those counting along at home, that's 7 classic rock staples. It truly changed the game musically, laying the foundations for what would come later, and influencing everyone else to be better... Without this we don't get Beach Boys "Pet Sounds, we don't get Velvet Underground, we don't get evolved pop music...
Add in the fact this album was thrown together in around 90 days from start of the writing process after their 1965 August tour of America to pressed vinyl being in people's hands in early December, just an unreal creation in that span of time, and it was their second album of 1965 after "Help!", and 3rd album released within 365 days after 1964's "Beatles For Sale!" was released barely a year before. These mad kids were just chugging along like a well oiled machine, cracking out classic after classic like many normal people draw breath.
Despite me gushing over this album, it's not my favourite Beatles album, its barely in the top 5, but it's still an absurdly easy 5 stars and it's about as filthy as the fuzzy bass on "Think For Yourself". It's almost perfect, but I can't abide with "Michelle", a wholly terrible song from Paul McCartney that's only matched by "Ob‐La‐Di, Ob‐La‐Da" and "Wonderful Christmastime"...
MGMT
3/5
The day I learned to play the electronic riff from "Kids" on a Stylophone, the mystical allure of MGMT was gone forever.
Neil Young
4/5
Whenever I listen to this, I think of many things, the beauty of the music and lyrics and how unfortunate it is that Neil Young did both, how mad Lynard Skynyrd were about one song, and how the Jimmy Fallon skit where he, as Neil Young, sings a cover of Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair" on his Late Night show still lives rent free in my head 13 years later...
Oh well, time to hop up out the bed, turn my swag on.
Various Artists
3/5
A Christmas gift for me? Got the gift receipt? I'll keep the songs by The Ronettes and "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" by Darlene Love though...
Tears For Fears
4/5
Some monster hits, and surprisingly strong outside of "Shout" and "Everybody Wants To Rule The World", such as "Mother's Talk" and "Head Over Heels". I was really into this, it has a bit of everything for everyone.
Soul II Soul
2/5
You got "Keep On Movin'" and "Back to Life" and a shit ton of absolute surplus filler, a classic example of when an LP should definitely be an EP...
Brian Eno
3/5
You can hear the sounds that would make it over the crevasse into his collaborations with Bowie in Berlin, the drum sound on "Needles In The Camel's Eye" for instance. It's a real hodgepodge, but ahead of its time.
Queens of the Stone Age
3/5
I like Queens of the Stone Age, but no Nick Oliveri, no party... even if he does appear at the very end. Subsequent albums (Rated R, Songs for the Deaf) would be much better, and there is a still more than a little Kyuss stank hanging around here, but it's perfectly adequate for what it is (or was).
Pink Floyd
4/5
Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd, so super simple rhymes over psychedelic swirls and overdubs that makes it sound like the most transcendental shit ever laid down on tape. It shouldn't work, but it does...
Ice T
4/5
Classic early 90s west coast gangster rap, braggadocio is the order of the day as Ice raps about people being bitches (both genders), gangster hustle shit, and guns going bang. Plenty of mid song skit style breakdowns but Ice changes things up with the hard metal "Body Count" that would be spun off into a legit side project by the same name. They are, of course, infamous for the "Cop Killer" song, but then Ice-T would spend the last 23 years playing a cop on TV, really makes you think...
Oh, and fuck Tipper Gore and the PMRC
Prince
5/5
I was dreamin' when I wrote this so forgive me if it goes astray... An absolute party of an album, a party where Prince fucks you with the funk, and then makes you pancakes for breakfast the next morning. His purple badness is here giving you the full business.
Lana Del Rey
2/5
I don't get the Lana Del Rey vibe, naver have. This is just a whine/drone/white noise generator for people who think they like the 1950s style idea of America that never was. Anthems for day wine drinking bored housewives who can't manage the cadence for the anti-melodic lyrics like "Down at the Men in Music Business Conference"
I only mention it 'cause it was such a scene.
Kendrick Lamar
5/5
This was my favourite album of 2015 and it's no less potent, vitriolic, and on point almost 9 fuckin' years later. A roaring treatise on our fucked up society that really goes to show that ain't nothing changes but the date.
"King Kunta" and "I" still bang harder than they had any right to.
Lou Reed
4/5
The first time I really remember hearing a Lou Reed song was during the 1993 leg of the U2 Zoo TV tour, Bono would start singing "Satellite of Love" and a pre-recorded video of Lou would duet with him and it was cool. Then came the "Perfect Day" scene in Trainspotting at it was harrowing. And "Walk on the Wild Side" has always been around, I just never knew it as a Lou Reed song. So imagine my delight when all three are on this album. Just a wonderful listen from start to finish.
Frank Zappa
3/5
Psychedelic jazz, man. The in sound from way, way out
Saint Etienne
3/5
Early 90s indie dance crossover that brought us the angelic, divine Sarah Cracknell, who's shimmery silver dress at Glastonbury 1994 *awakened* something deep inside that lives on to this day. "Nothing Can Stop Us Now" is an effortlessly cool summer jam that evokes visions of driving in a top down convertible through villages in Cote D'Azure, scarf billowing out the back. They would go on and make better music, but sometimes it's nice to remember those early days...
Bob Marley & The Wailers
4/5
By now Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer were long gone and Bob was on a tear spreading the word of reggae. This might be the crowning achievement, a classic album of memorable songs, "Jamming" and "Three Little Birds" being the obvious highlights, but the whole album is a solid groove.
Rod Stewart
2/5
OK-ish album, "Gasoline Alley" and "Cut Across Shorty" being the stand outs, but they also sounded much better when he did them unplugged some 20 years later...
Elvis Presley
2/5
Much like Jerry Lee Lewis, the cloud of "white man popularising the black man's music" hangs heavy here. Classic rock & roll, albeit distilled.
Eminem
2/5
I loved this in 1999 when I was 20, I'm horrified by this in 2024 when I'm 45. I can appreciate the craft and all that, but this was a 3 to 4 star album at best back then, it's not that any more 25 years later.
John Lee Hooker
3/5
Hooker gets a second life here using as many collaborators as humanly possible, semi-ironically one of them was Carlos Santana who would run this play back 10 years later... Still, it's the blues by the preeminent bluesman, and the song with Bonnie Raitt "I'm In The Mood" is just pure filth, and I mean that in the best way possible.
Adam & The Ants
2/5
New Wave Romanticism abound, sitting in that weird space between outright punk and the likes of Duran Duran. The singles ("Dog Eat Dog", "Antmusic", and "Kings Of The Wild Frontier") are generally good, the rest doesn't hold up to the same caliber...
Pink Floyd
5/5
OK, I get it, it's a masterpiece, but it's also *four songs long*, and one of those songs is split into two to make it a 5 song "long play" album.... Snark aside, its prog rock at its finest as suite of 9 movements encompasses the aforementioned split "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" bookends, then the 3 songs in the middle are just great, title track being the pick of the bunch but don't sleep on "Welcome To The Machine" (an anthem for disaffected youth that resonates way more than "The Wall") and "Have A Cigar". It's truly an album made for listening all the way through as opposed to individual songs.
Absolute aside, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" is a great karaoke song as you get 8:45 in before you even need to sing, and it's pretty anthemic when you do...
Sepultura
2/5
I always struggled with Sepultura, I dunno why... I enjoyed Max's Soulfly project that came later, this just didn't move me.
3/5
Raw uncut punk energy, the jams were, indeed, kicked the fuck out
David Holmes
2/5
David Holmes produces a few good songs, but his albums always feel lacking, this is no exception
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3/5
"Pump It Up" alone makes this a great album, and it's just that, great, catchy, infectious...
Dennis Wilson
4/5
Obviously strong Beach Boy vibes, a very strong album (first 12 songs if you can only find the 30th anniversary 2CD edition) that gently breezes along without too much effort for the listener, it goes from soulful pop to dirty funk with amazing ease.
The Style Council
2/5
Paul Weller's jazz days, and we don't talk about Paul Weller's jazz days... We ESPECIALLY don't talk about Paul Weller's rap days.
Sonic Youth
5/5
Teen Age Riot takes me bak to simpler times, and this whole album just makes me want to go out and shoot skate videos with fisheye lenses...
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
4/5
Only people who don't love their mothers could hate this. Classic old school hip hop that you'll think you heard elsewhere because most of it was eventually resampled.
Hot Chip
3/5
I struggled with Hot Chip 10/15 years ago except for that one "Ready For The Floor" song and that's not on this, so I still struggle today, because nothing really stands out.
Black Sabbath
4/5
Hard Heavy Metal, kicking what was left of the 60s in the face. Like nothing you had heard before...
The Beach Boys
4/5
Well, this was an unexpected trip, part environmental psychedelic rock/part bubblegum pop? Brian Wilson was in his decline at this point, Dennis Wilson was half insane also so Carl Wilson and Mike Love stepped up to take some of the load and it shows, the final product is just so disjointed. Aurally pleasing because, hey, it's the Beach Boys in 3 part harmony, but it just doesn't hit like they used to.
Bon Jovi
4/5
Big, brash, bombastic, hair metal. Starts out with distorted feedback and classical organ style synths just to make sure you're ready to fuckin' rock. Has the hits, no filler and sold more copies than you've had hot dinners. Love it or hate it, its exactly what it sets out to be...
Fleetwood Mac
5/5
The album that compelled Fleetwood Mac to successfully queer heterosexuality. They were all drugged up to the eyeballs and fucking each other six way from sunday (except John McVie, poor sod, he had to play bass on all Christine's songs about him) and holed up in a studio with next to no windows and still produced a stone cold top 3 album of all time instead of systematically killing each other for sport.
Any song on here would be an apex mountain pinnacle for any other band not called The Beatles, take your pick. In fact it's CRIMINAL that they left Stevie Nicks beautiful "Silver Springs" off the track listing (thank you to The Dance and deluxe editions for restoring it), and I like to sometimes think that somewhere, in a CVS, Lindsey Buckingham is at this moment waiting for his quarter mile long receipt to print while the store PA plays "Silver Springs" and all he hears is "you'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you"
They never could get away from that sound...
50 stars if they would allow it.
PJ Harvey
4/5
"Goddam' Europeans! Take me back to beautiful England", transposing this album 13 years later takes on a very strange story in the post-Brexit landscape, while Polly was influenced by classical poetry while creating some of her own, the tone of the English nationalism seeping through is hard to avoid. It can be likened to the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics where its a throwback to when Britain, or England, was actually Great, now its a sad reminder of whole isolated we feel, by choice.
Slayer
3/5
Thrash Metal at its finest? I dunno, it certainly upped my energy levels for the half hour or so it lasted. First track hits hard and it doesn't slow down, all gas, absolute gas, no brakes.
Goldfrapp
3/5
Good old Goldfap, slow and sensual, borderline ASMR, it's gonna take you places you never knew existed...
The Rolling Stones
3/5
That weird transitional period for the Stones, from when they were releasing an album of mostly old blues covers to what would become The Rolling Stones we know and love. And this is made muddier by having two separate UK & US releases (I listened to the UK edition, it's the artwork provided above) where you have two seperate track listings with two good good songs (UK: "Mother's Little Helper" & "Under My Thumb"; US: "Paint It Black" & the aforementioned "Under My Thumb") and a lot of filler... Sometimes overly long filler like "Goin' Home" which is just an 11 minute long jam session.
Brian Jones is a tour de force here, he'd pick up any old thing laying around and make it work, so for that this album represents a more mature Stones sound. But 1966 was a hard year for many bands, we got Revolver by The Beatles and Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys and everything else was fighting for a very, very distant third place.
Nirvana
5/5
The Nirvana unplugged set, the infamous Nirvana unplugged set, the anti-unplugged while driving MTV producers mad as fuck Nirvana unplugged set, the oh but he's really plugged in and heres some feedback Nirvana unplugged set, the play *anything* but your biggest hits Nirvana unplugged set, the put some shine on the Meat Puppets Nirvana unplugged set, the WTF cover of a fucking Vaselines song and also do a little Bowie and end with a Lead Belly song and there will be no encores Nirvana unplugged set...
Bittersweet, but emphasis on the sweet, because this is Kurt Cobain is, by far, at his sweetest here. Far removed from the frenetic live shows Nirvana would usually perform, there would be no diving into the drum set on this show. Instead it would be the swansong of an icon who would be gone less than 6 months later.
It's a great live album, the best of the released Unplugged albums, and I could listen to this and shiver the whole night through...
New Order
4/5
New Order, but with a lot more "utz-utz-utz-utz", very of it's time as the acid house/alternate dance scene was sweeping the nation... There no "Blue Monday" or "True Faith" level banger here, but it's tight as all hell and, again, very of it's time.
Van Morrison
5/5
Van the jazz man, just lay back, smoke a bowl and let it wash over you like fresh irish spring water. Pair this with his preceding album, Astral Weeks, and you might never be able to function in regular society again... Every song hits just right, every note is crafted with laser precision, even it sounds like Van turned up and recorded this with no thought about anything, just improvising like a demon.
Shame he descended into fucking Eric Clapton level madness during COVID, exposing himself to be a raging antivaxer and skirted with a little antisemitism because if you're in for a penny, you may as well be in for a pound. But, that said, people say it’s not the artist, it’s the art and "Into The Mystic" remains an absolutely perfect song...
Red Snapper
2/5
Surprisingly generic turn of the millennium beats, is this really something that worth listening to? Something worth recommending that someone listen to? I'm honestly not sure it is...
The Dandy Warhols
4/5
This felt like it was right in my wheelhouse, 90s alternative with driving guitars and great vocals. Started off slowly but built as it went along, I was almost sad when it finished. Standout songs are "Be-In" "Minnesoter", and "Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth", but don't sleep on the instrumental "The Creep Out".
And I just want a girl as cool as Kim Deal...
Sheryl Crow
3/5
This ain't no disco, its Sheryl Crow... She's very hit or miss, but when she hits its amazing and there's a few tracks on this album that vibe just right. I'd argue the first 4 tracks are ("Run Baby Run", "Leaving Las Vegas", "Strong Enough" and "Can't Cry Anymore") amongst the strongest start to an album at any time, add in the ubiquitous "All I Wanna Do" and that's pretty much half the album accounted for. So basically the singles bopped, the rest is ok but don't quite rise to the same level.
Solid middle 3 star album, a good way to pass 50 or so minutes.
Violent Femmes
5/5
How did this come out in 1983? It's got 1990s written all over it. Acoustic punk rock is probably the most punk punk could be, and this is a timeless classic. Everyone knows "Blister In The Sun" but there's not a bad song on here, everything has its own groove and hook like "Add It Up", "To The Kill" and "Gone Daddy Gone", and everything sounds like it was recorded in one straight shot as stripped back as everything feels. Real garage music energy.
The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy
2/5
Nah, took much work... like trying to solve an escape room before you're allowed to listen to it
Joy Division
4/5
Joy Division makes me feel old.
I never felt old, like *old* old, until I listened to Joy Division, it was harder music to listen to compared I was listening to before, thematically definitely, it was grown up music... I finally saw what NME, Q, and Melody Maker gushed so profusely about. Finally I was a man.
But then I didn't listen to Joy Division for a long time, and then decades later had a chance to see Peter Hook perform the Joy Division albums and being the kind of person I am, I went to experience it. It was an interminable 3 hours standing in a small club venue, my back and legs were killing me, it was way past my bedtime, and those feelings of not being the young man I used to be soured the whole night.
Joy Division makes me feel old...
The Smashing Pumpkins
4/5
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, well it certainly feels like it'll last forever. Double albums are usually a big ask, a couple of hours is hard to give to something you weren't planning on listening to and the link through on this went to the 92 song dep deluxe edition that runs for nearly 6 hours.
FUCK. THAT.
I hadn't really heard much outside of the monster singles this thing produced and I was somewhat pleasantly surprised at times, but it was mostly that nostalgic trip back to the mid-90s of my youth, and all I really came away with was that Billy Corgan is a madman when he's inspired, but that mad Billy Corgan could really use an editor.
Bruce Springsteen
4/5
One of those Springsteen album you either love or hate, its insanely stripped back as it's literally dems that got released. A departure from the E Street Band sounds of The River, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, and Born To Run that preceded it, and radically different from the Born In The U.S.A. that would follow, its solid Springsteen storytelling, but you need to be ready for the bleakness that come from it.
Suzanne Vega
3/5
Very mid-80s sound, bass is non-existant and everything sounds reverb-y. Now Suzanne Vega, I mean I like her next album that had Luka & Tom's Diner, but this one sounds like another artist I'm struggling to remember, maybe all mid-80s albums just sounded the same, you could tell me this was Carly Simon in her Coming Around Again era and I'd probably believe you
Eminem
3/5
I'll paraphrase my review of The Slim Shady LP from a month or so ago:
I loved this in 2000 when I was 21/22, I'm horrified by this in 2024 when I'm 45. I can appreciate the craft and all that, but this was a 3 to 4 star album at best back then, it's still that 25 years later even if most of it hasn't aged well at all.
Gone are the real childish antics and guests like Royce da 5'9" and MC Get-Bizzy and replaced with a far more polished production but somehow angrier about everything and now has guests guests like Snoop Dogg. It's crazy to look back and remember how generation defining this album was to the angry white boy demographic, add in Limp Bizkit and 1999/2000 really set us up for the 25 years of simmering hatred and insanity we've had since...
Aretha Franklin
5/5
Classic lady doing classic shit. 1968 was a fire year for Aretha between this release and the later Aretha Now and the fabulous Aretha in Paris live album. Easiest 5 stars yet..
Björk
2/5
Medulla... Oblongata? Bjork always had weird albums, but this may be the weirdest. It's almost borderline inaccessible.
Arcade Fire
4/5
Overly pretentious, maybe, but "Keep The Car Running" in a jam...
The Fall
3/5
Mark E. Smith doing Mark E. Smith things.
Suede
4/5
Early proto-Britpop (predates Oasis debut by a year) but let's make it queer coded and goth-y sexy, basically pop an Amyl Nitrate and let yourself relax in to the couch...
Pavement
4/5
Debuting Pavement sounded a lot like an electric Violent Femmes, definitely not a bad thing. A solid opening album, and fulfills the early 90s criteria of fitting on one side of a 90 minute cassette with plenty of time to spare.
Nick Drake
5/5
Ethereal, sad, post-60s-hippy folk music perfection. Nick Drake really was built differently, this is everything Cat Stevens wished he could be, instead Drake makes it all sound so effortless.
The Residents
1/5
I don't really know what this is, or tries to be, but it ain't it...
The Flaming Lips
5/5
Yoshimi was my gateway into the Flaming Lips discography, and this is just a lush sound that really ended the 90s on a high. I hate that I never got to hear it when it came out as summer 1999 was a transition for me from college to "working adult" and this really captures my vibe perfectly.
Paul Simon
4/5
A musical and cultural renaissance for Simon here, some may call it appropriation of South African street music but I feel like it was shining a light on artists like Ladysmith Black Mambazo who would have never seen the light of day due to apartheid and the cultural boycott on South Africa.
It's a good to great album, it passes time effortlessly, I wouldn't argue if you gave it 5 stars, on another day I might have too. I just found most of it semi-forgettable as I went about my day while listening to it, like a half-remembered daydream.
Sparks
4/5
Sparks doing Sparks things, influential and years ahead of the rest.
Röyksopp
3/5
Mostly mid beats over funky basslines, surprisingly bouncy for 9am when I choose to listen to it
Moby
4/5
Ubiquitous barely begins to describe this album as basically every track appeared in an advertisement or movie trailer of some description over the years. People hate this because of that overexposure, but it's a solid album, some tracks hit with a vengeance but it's the more chilled guitar instrumentals that resonate with me.
Tom Waits
3/5
Name an instrument, any instrument.... Go ahead... Chances are this album contains it. I realised this during the Marimba infused "Clap Hands". It's really an eclectic mix of weird as fuck songs, hard to get into but harder to put down. Like riding the Alice in Wonderland ride at Disneyland while tripping.
Harry Nilsson
4/5
That was the Partridge Family's "Doesn't Somebody Want To Be Wanted?" followed by Edison Lighthouse's "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes", as K-Billy's Super Sounds of the '70's weekend just keeps on truckin'
LCD Soundsystem
3/5
I often wonder how recency bias feeds into the whole "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die" schtick, because we've come across more than a few 2000s era album that have, unfortunately stank like shit. This one doesn't, thankfully, but it's also nothing close to a must listen, its just a lot of mid 00s angst over mid beats...
Soundgarden
3/5
I liked "Black Hole Sun", always have, but Soundgarden as a whole was always difficult for me to really get into and this is no exception. It's long and meandering at times, and you really need to be in a particular mood to appreciate it fully.
The Doors
4/5
Psychedelic Blues is apparently the way to my heart, "Roadhouse Blues" goes without saying, but the rest of this album was just a straight up groove on my frequency. Very little of the greatest hits appear here, but in some ways it was The Doors at their tightest.
Ryan Adams
3/5
As others have mentioned, beautiful music by a reprehensible human. And, like other case, you're supposed to separate the art from the artists but....
5 stars for Phoebe Bridgers (and boygenius), and Mandy Moore, and everyone else this monster tried to destroy.
0 stars for him, 3 stars to split the difference
Rush
4/5
Hey, it's got "Tom Sawyer" and "YYZ", it's great!
Buffalo Springfield
3/5
Buffalo Springfield would go on to arguably greater things via Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and this album is just kinda here... Folksy rock and down tempo is the order of the day here, and it can be pleasant at time, great at others but overall it feels like its less than the sum of its part.
Cee Lo Green
2/5
This is just bad (not 1 star bad, but pretty bad), probably why I hadn't heard of Cee Lo before Gnarls Barkley.
Sly & The Family Stone
4/5
The funk gonna get you, whitey.... Just a masterclass in grooves and vibes.
Metallica
5/5
Polarising Metallica album, to some they sold out, to some it was the gateway to metal. It was my gateway to metal, so my judgement is pretty clouded. I loved this as an early teenager, they wouldn't sell out till Load in my eyes, but this was epic, brash, loud, deep, meaningful, meaningless. As soon as "Enter Sandman" kicked in, I knew loud guitars was that which I desired (not fuel not fire), not the indie dance and acid house rave scene that was sweeping the nation. Grunge hadn't come around yet, Britpop was years away, so metal was my jam, much to my parents derision.
The aforementioned "Enter Sandman" lets you in to what this album is all about, it gently lures you in before Lars bass drum kicks you in the gut, Kirk and James guitar play is a shock to the system and they let Jason be heard... Bob Rock's production can be problematic but he's in his element here.
It's a fucking monster of an album in every sense...
New Order
2/5
Not their best work as they veer more towards the synthesizer sounds of the mid to late 80s, only "The Perfect Kiss" stands out...
The Stone Roses
5/5
5 Stars, no questions asked, no response needed.
Simply one of the best albums ever by one of the best bands ever.
This is the one, everything else is just amateurs.
Amy Winehouse
4/5
The tip of the spear for the British new soul singer revolution, Adele and Duffy would soon follow, but while the vibe feels right, the whole package just comes off as somewhat unauthentic. Sure Amy has the look down with the beehive so and smokey eyes, but it's hard to look past the near constant tabloid sensationalism about her much storied drug abuse and fractious relationships.
They tried to make her go to rehab...
It's genuinely a good to great album, but in a post Amy world is hard to listen to and not wonder what might have been if she had gone to rehab.
Brian Eno
2/5
I liked all the Talking Heads albums this this thrown at me, I liked the Eno album too, so logic dictates I should like this.
I did not.
The Louvin Brothers
2/5
As I listened to "Knoxville Girl" I couldn't help but think that Nick Cave would eat the shit out of this, so imagine my delight when, if fact, he had eaten the shit out of that. He did it better...
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
Just a great album, perfect length, bookended by absolute killer songs in "Thunder Road" and "Jungleland" and it feels like the whole album tells a story. Sure it's not an impeccable production, but its a history alerting tour de force by this debuting classic-era E Street Band line-up. Timeless, and AMAZING live.
The Beta Band
2/5
Oh great, The Beta Band... Again. Clearly the author of 1001 bought into their hype and wasn't saying no to any editorial comments.
Below average at best, God awful at worst.
Electric Light Orchestra
2/5
I can take or leave ELO, Jeff Lynne wishing to be the fifth Beatle? Whatever. This is mostly moderate stuff and even it's highest high in "Mr. Blue Sky" has been watered down in recent years to the point that I almost hate to hear it.
Miles Davis
4/5
2 tracks, side A and side B, of improv jazz. Chilled out background music, just a serious vibes album. The trumpet man is gonna take you to the unknown destination, and we're gonna have fun along the way.
Radiohead
4/5
It feels like another Radiohead album I'm supposed to like... And I mostly do, but sometimes I'd rather listen to The Bends, you know?
After the hard tangent of Kid A/Anmesiac, Radiohead finally refind their lost guitars and this album is all the better for it.
Adele
2/5
Has an album that promised so much ever delivered so painfully little? After the monster 21, it was always going to be a hard act to follow and while I openly adored 19 & 2, I listened to this once in 2015, the day it came out, and here we are just over 8 years later and I finally gave it my second proper listen and I'm still as let down as I was back when.
I hope we don't have to review 30 later on, because there's only so much I can bear, let's just pretend Adele blew her vocal chords completely out at that last note of her Albert Hall concert, never to sing again... Shall we?
Meat Loaf
4/5
Meat Loaf may be singing here, but rest assured this is all Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf is merely the conduit these song chose to make their way into our world.
Janelle Monáe
5/5
Janelle Monae is just a different species from the rest of us, we're just here living our humdrum lives and she's out there absolutely LIVING. Nothing is beyond her level and this album, this DEBUT album, just gives and gives...
The Who
5/5
You can't give an album that has "Baba O'Reilly" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" anything less than 4 stars just for those two songs alone, but "Behind Blue Eyes" makes it an easy 5.
Sonic Youth
4/5
Is this Sonic Youth at their most accessible? Most mainstream? They're still doing their own crazy thing but maybe the rest of the world finally caught up with them? Maybe they were still streets ahead of the curve?
Funkadelic
5/5
Again Psychedelic [whatever] proves to be my weakness, and Psychedelic Funk should be a crime, and George Clinton should be put on trial for being far too funky for the rest of the world to stand.
ZZ Top
2/5
A few good well known songs but its 80s low tier rock, proof that a memorable music video can make a middling song better.
The Darkness
2/5
First things first, how the fuck is this pile of shit 20 years old? Retro glam rock wankery thats good for 1 song and they somehow made a career out of it. Where's the justice in THAT? I mean, sure, it was probably better than the sludge that was bubbling around in 2003, but let's be honest, if Justin Hawkins didn't have a glammed up onesie split down to his taint in the video for "I Believe In A Thing Called Love", would anyone really care?
Parliament
5/5
I had Funkadelic a few days ago, now I get Parliament and that means George Clinton is responsible for me being *at least* 72% more funky this week. I'm super funky, fresh and fly, y'heard?
N.W.A.
4/5
You gotta boil it down to the essentials. It's like Cube says, "Life ain't nothin' but bitches and money."
PJ Harvey
4/5
Pure unadulterated rawness here, usual artists take time to grow into who they want to be.... Not Polly, she's kicking arse right out the gate.
The Velvet Underground
3/5
Would Sir care for a starter of some garlic bread perhaps?
No, thank you. I will proceed directly to the intravenous injection of hard drugs, please.
Supergrass
2/5
This album introduced me.to the wonder of the Theremin via "Richard III", and "Late In The Day" still hits the right notes, the rest of the album is mostly forgettable though.
Orange Juice
2/5
If Orange Juice has a rancid or off flavor, then it's gone bad... Applies to this too.
Tracy Chapman
5/5
Give this lady her flowers, long overdue.
Elliott Smith
5/5
A beautiful album that might have been *too* good in retrospect. The start of the Elliott Smith downfall can be traced here, bigger acclaim and bigger visibility leading to a bigger record deal and bigger expectations that leads to bigger problems.
But let's just accept it for what it is, a beautiful album.
2Pac
2/5
Tupac is always a weird one for me, I didn't really hear much until he was dead, and the last album was all very much Gangsta Rap and I was past all that. This one is more mellow in that regard, more introspective? Mostly dull.
Arctic Monkeys
5/5
The bassline on "A Certain Romance" floored me in 2006, and still does in 2024...
Oh, in five years time, will it be "Who the fuck's Arctic Monkeys?".
Otis Redding
4/5
This is the good stuff, a slew of killer covers like The Temptations "My Girl" and Rolling Stones "Satisfaction" and, weirdly, Aretha Franklin's "Respect".... via a quirk in the space/time continuum, apparently he recorded this two years before the superior original came out, go figure.
The Jesus And Mary Chain
3/5
Psychocandy, qu'est-ce que c'est?
Snoop Dogg
3/5
I'm finding that a lot of these early to mid 90s rap albums are not aging particularly well, it's hard to not view these through a modern prism and find them utterly reprehensible. I mean, I loved this 30 years ago but now it either horrifies me for its graphical content or repulses me for its childish immaturity, how can I really be objective?
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
I dunno, should I give a bonafide classic 5 stars just because it's a bonafide classic?
Should I weigh the pros and cons of each track though a modern prism and say things like "Fire" is some basic ass lyrics; it's just "let me stand next to your fire" over and over...
Should I say something inflammatory like, while Hendrix's guitar playing was revolutionary at the time, he's really just a cut rate Jack White and can't hold a candle to The Edge.
No, that would be foolish, because this is a bonafide classic and it deserves its 5 stars, deserves and earns.
Daft Punk
4/5
Repetitive? Yes. Did it need take up an entire CD runtime? No. Worth it? Absolutely.
Björk
2/5
I believe Billie Eilish awes a lot to this album, so its no coincidence they both came into the world around the same time period. This marks the time where Bjork went full weird, 90s Bjork was at least accessible. 2000s Bjork just went off the deep end sonically.
The Killers
5/5
This is, by far and away, the glamorous indie rock and roll Brandon Flowers croons about...
Run-D.M.C.
3/5
Without this there would be no Run-D.M.C., and without Run-D.M.C. there would be no Beastie Boys (seriously, Rock Box was basically proto-Licence To Ill), and no Beastie Boys would make me sad... THis whole album hits hard and is wheelin', dealin', got a funny feelin', and rocks from the floor up to the ceilin'
And it's like that, and that's the way it is...
The Soft Boys
3/5
Opens with "I Wanna Destroy You" that sounds like it's a cross between The Byrds and Cheap Trick and not a million miles away from Gigolo Aunts, and all I could think of was how good it would be for an odd throuple 2 camera BBC Two 90s sitcom starring two hideous guys and a blonde bombshell. It would run for 3 series, so around 18 episodes, and then a christmas special reunion episode years later when one of the guys has a huge tax bill to pay after his bid to transition to America failed spectacularly...
But I digress.
George Harrison
3/5
Starts off strong with "My Sweet Lord" and "Wah Wah" inside the first few tracks but then it just gets drawn out, like does track 4's "Isn't It A Pity" need to be 7 minutes long with an album ending-style coda? And then the actual album ends on a series of instrumentals that play like 12 bar blues...
It could have been 5 stars, but it just keeps dragging itself down
Fela Kuti
4/5
This is a trip, the story behind it and the aftermath of it is wild, critique of military juntas and politically motivated deaths aside, this album is a straight up party groove. It's a strange juxtapose to be reading the wikipedia entries on the album and, indeed, Fela Kuti's life while chair boogieing to the beats they laid down.
David Bowie
3/5
I've already had Low and rated it 3 stars in the past so it's time to have a day of reckoning about David Bowie in Berlin. It wasn't all that great... Don't get me wrong, the first half is stupendous but, like Low, the second half falls apart as Brian Eno gets a little too involved and it's all new agey ambient instrumentals all over again.
If you took the first half of Low and the first half of this and smooshed them together it would be a top 5 all time album.
Bowie in Berlin was more than the sum of its parts.
The La's
3/5
One good song, and a lot of jangly guitars. Worse bands that this have done a lot more with less...
Beck
3/5
Not Beck at his best, but not at his worst either. A few stand out tracks like the Rock Band video game banger "E-Pro" (that glomps on Beastie Boys "So What'cha Want") makes it rise above plenty of other releases, but we're far from peak Beck here, but thats ok.
Suicide
1/5
They'd get better in the second album with songs like "Dream Baby Dream", but this... this ain't it. Basic, monotonous, beats straight from a Casio keyboard and the blown out screaming in "Frankie Teardrops" is enough to plunge this into the depths for me.
Gang Starr
4/5
Good to great, you can't deny its impact.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
2/5
The end of The Attractions, Elvis would ditch them for a solo life of being an international art thief... Says it all really.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3/5
Now, I grew up in the West of Scotland and I've heard 1,001 names for Irish catholics that would make your blood boil and your toes curl, and the N word WAS NEVER ONE OF THEM.
"Accidents Will Happen" is a bop though, as is "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding"...
Tricky
3/5
Trip Hop, but not quite... Not quite Massive Attack, not quite Portishead, Not quite Sneaker Pimps, somewhere in between but not quite.
The Kinks
2/5
Breezy british pop rockers with a surprisingly long album that never outstayed its welcome. 15 songs crammed into a pacy 40 minutes means most are sub 3 minutes, perfect song length. Otherwise it's a wholly unremarkable album, it just is, it feels super cozy and warm but I'd not consider it a *must listen to* album.
Queen
3/5
I like Queen, but... Confession time.... I've been alive for 46 years nearly, and never actually listened to one of their albums. I grew up on the Greatest Hits albums, and some of those appear here, but the rest are just kinda meh?
Bee Gees
2/5
This sucked, not a one star level of sucking, but it sucked all the same
Motörhead
2/5
Never really got into Motorhead, everyone knows that one song "Ace of Spades" (I knew it from an episode of The Young Ones, dating myself a bit) but I couldn't name another by them, so a long ass live album probably isn't the best way to ease yourself in... Hard rock but hard listening too.
Carole King
5/5
Classic singer songwriter doing classic songs shit, loaded with songs you know/knew but couldn't put your finger on. Also it's the emphasis for the "Beautiful" Broadway show, how many albums can say that?
Haircut 100
2/5
Painful plain 80s British New Wave band playing painfully plain music for the masses. The 80s was a dark time, you can't tell me otherwise...
Van Halen
4/5
This might have the best opening combo punch of any album, "Running With The Devil" followed by "Eruption" followed by a cover of "You Really Got Me" on a debut album to, what a way to make a mark.
JAY Z
3/5
One of the few albums I remember getting released on 9/11, its alongside Ben Folds "Rockin the Suburbs" and They Might Be Giants "Mink Car" with the latter being one of two acts of terror put upon the American public that particular day... This was alright Jay Z, but it would get exponentially better when he would perform the best bits of it on MTV Unplugged...
5/5
I wasn't a fan of U2 in the 80s, my dad was, I became a fan of U2 in the 90s through Achtung Baby and the retina searing intensity of the Zoo TV tour. "Where The Streets Have No Name" is an experience played live with the dark build up and soft red lights all cascading towards the crescendo when the house/stadiums lights are turned up and everyone goes fucking bananas, so that was my vision when I started listening to The Joshua Tree in the 90s.
And the album version of Streets doesn't live up to that memory, core memory, its flatter, the bass is dead in comparison, its just so overproduced. Same goes for the other songs I knew so well like "Bullet The Blue Sky" and "With Or Without You" but instead of being down that these versions just didn't live up to the later interpretation, I realised that age and wisdom had made them that much better.
(Tangentially they d a different composition of "Even Better Than The Real Thing" when they play it live nowadays and its fucking sick and I would have killed a man for spouting such heresy back in the day)
So, myself being advanced in age and wisdom, a relisten to this was like meeting an old friend, things have changed, but its comforting all the same. It has an absolutely killer side A.... "Where the Streets Have No Name", "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", "With or Without You", "Bullet the Blue Sky", and "Running to Stand Still" is a HALL OF FAME WORTHY run of hot shit after hot shit AND THEN you get "Red Hill Mining Town and "In God's Country"
You people don't deserve to be this close to perfection.
Franz Ferdinand
4/5
There comes a point where eventually you stumble into someone you know, maybe not well nor personally, but you're kind of acquaintances all the same. You know each other on a first name basis but you're not pals who hang around. Well, this is my storey about such a person.
The Time: Spring 2001. The Place: Glasgow...
I was a fairly recent dropout from college, I was unemployed and as part of my burden on society, the jobcentre offered me a place at a little college 3 days a week to learn how to build PCs and assorted IT related menial tasks because I told them I was a web designer (go figure). Now for those 3 days over a few months we had different people come in and show us the ropes, like Pico (real name unknown) taught us how to built networks, how to crimp cables and put the appropriate connector on them and wire it all up properly; Ken taught us how to put things together in a PC chassis while regaling us of far fetched stories of how a crunchy keyboard really meant you had a bajillion spider eggs in your keyboard instead of, say, toast crumbs; and finally Alex, he was a cool younger guy who didn't try to bullshit us, he took everything Pico and Ken taught us and tied it all together, he also had a million music recommendations because he ran open mic night at a music pub in Glasgow.
One of his recommendations was Carboot Soul bu Nightmares On Wax and to this day it remains a favourite of mine for comfy lofi beats, but I digress.
After a few months I got a job not doing PC builds and left the course to become a functional member of society and within a few years I had up and moved to America to follow my dream. So now we're in 2004, and firstly, THIS WAS NOT 20 YEARS AGO, how dare you, and secondly we're invited to go see a fun little show run by local alt radio station 99X at The Masquerade in Atlanta. Killer lineup, literally because it was The Killer co-headlining with one Franz Ferdinand. The Delays, The Whigs and Scissor Sisters were also on the bill so eat that people.
Glorious night, went down in Masquerade lore, floor almost collapsed but you could have put me straight through the floor when Franz Ferdinand came on and the singer introduces himself.
Its fucking Alex Huntley from Anniesland College.
So I give him a knowing nod and he ignored me and that's how we've remained to this day...
Metallica
3/5
Not my favourite Metallica album (that'd be the Black Album) but it's perfectly ok to me. The last of the classic line-up and has great bangers on it list the title track and "Battery". Absolutely overindulgent though as no song clocks in at under 5 minutes.
3/5
I'll be contrary, Side A sucks, solo Bob Dylan with an acoustic guitar and a harmonica is a blight on humanity. Side B is literally electric in comparison and the (as yet not named) Band are tight and being a judas never sounded so good.
The Offspring
3/5
The Offspring were always just there, doing their thing, neither too offensive not too bland, just doing their thing. "Come Out And Play" and "Self-Esteem" still bang 30 years later.
And I'm always interested in albums released around specific dates (see Jay-Z's Blueprint entry a few days ago), and this one came out the day they found Kurt Cobain's body, weirdly morbid...
Red Hot Chili Peppers
3/5
A return to the classis Blood Sugar Sex Magik lineup, and the Chili Peppers are locked in a groove alright, but outside of the 4 or 5 singles this thing spawned the rest is kinda middling. RHCP are good as a "greatest hits" band, you loved the radio friendly songs you've heard a lot of, but any deep cuts are just not hitting the same.
M.I.A.
2/5
It aint no "Paper Planes", I'll say that much.
Baaba Maal
3/5
Finally something different, after 2 weeks of stuff I pretty much already owned, we get into something that I wouldn't normally stumbleupon. This was so relaxing, just a peaceful vibe.
Stuff like this is why I signed up for this
Queen
2/5
I said for Sheer Heart Attack "I like Queen, but... Confession time.... I've been alive for 46 years nearly, and never actually listened to one of their albums. I grew up on the Greatest Hits albums, and some of those appear here, but the rest are just kinda meh?" and this can be echoed here. Hard to believe this is the same band as 80s Queen.
The Youngbloods
4/5
Psychedelic Appalachia, a little bit country, a little bit bluegrass, a little bit rock and roll, and a good ol' time.
Aerosmith
3/5
Rock really never sounded so dirty as it did in the mid 70s, and this album is borderline proto-hair metal, so its practically dripping with the sauce...
The Who
4/5
Overtures, Undertures, themes and motifs.... Nerdy theatre kids would eat this up. Most gravitate towards "Pinball Wizard" obviously, it's the showstopper, but the ending sequence of "We're Not Going To Take It" with the extended "See Me, Feel Me" & "Listening To You" motifs repeated from "Go To The Mirror!" is just superb.
Doesn't feel as long as it is, and honestly, it's only 74 minutes...
Megadeth
3/5
Dave Mustaine and the lost art of holding a grudge
Peter Gabriel
3/5
A mixed bag, no one particular style, a mish-mash of everything really. Solsbury Hill remains an all timer though.
The Yardbirds
3/5
Jeff Beck lifts this up, but it's still fairly generic psychedelic tinged rock pop, 1966 was loaded with this style.
Coldplay
3/5
Solid debut, some genuinely good songs like "Everything Is Not Lost" and "Yellow" always makes me smile. Pretty sucky that people have basically review bombed this based on their unbridled hate of the band now
Guided By Voices
3/5
Proto-Flaming Lips and about 100 songs long, but rarely going over 2 minutes per track, quite a trip. LoFi taken to the absolute lengths of low fidelity as it sounds it was recorded on a handheld tape recorder.
Cyndi Lauper
4/5
Cyndi either has a voice you love or hate, but how you can hear "Time After Time" and say you hate that voice is beyond me. Classic mid 80s pop, hits all the right notes, ticks all the right boxes.
Elton John
5/5
4 all time songs in "Candle In The Wind", "Benny And The Jets", "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" and "Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)" amd, frankly, I've given other album 5 stars for much, much less...
Willie Nelson
4/5
I love the lore behind some the albums on the list, like this one. Willie was tired of the overproduced Nashville sound, holes up in a new studio in Texas and laid this down in under a week, including mixing. Like, how? More talent in his pinkie finger...
Kate Bush
2/5
Urgh, my second Kate Bush album, both either side of the excellent Hounds of Love, both unmitigated shite...
Kacey Musgraves
4/5
My one abiding memory of Kasey Musgraves was her killer Coachella 2019 performance that included this great bit of banter during the live rendition of "Velvet Elvis"
"When I say 'yee,' you say 'haw.' Yee! (Haw!) Yee! (Haw!)"
"When I say 'yee,' you say 'haw.' Yee! (Haw!) Yee! (Haw!)"
"When I say 'yee,' you say 'haw.' .....! (Haw!) ... I didn't say fuckin' Yee!"
Played them like a fiddle...
Started real, ended weird, par for the course when you used to do shrooms at Bonnaroo I guess.
Boston
4/5
Your favourite rock band's favourite rock band... Soaring guitar solos, epic drum fills, driving bass and organ, and a falsetto voice to die for. Speaking of Rock Band, Foreplay/Long Time was so much fun to play on that game
Sarah Vaughan
5/5
Absolutely stunning. Wasn't sure what to expect but this left me awestruck, tight three piece drum, piano and bass jazz band and Sarah has the range, good lord does she have the range.
Cat Stevens
5/5
Anther artist I had previously enjoyed through their greatest hits release, and more than a few appear on here. This felt absolutely stripped back, just one man and his guitar, everything else melts away. Every song hits just right, warm feelings, even in the sad songs.
Bob Dylan
5/5
Dylan met the Beatles in late 1964, decided to turn electric, then proceeded to record this album in the space of 2 days (TWO FUCKING DAYS) in early 1965 and released it months later, to call it a seismic shift in the musical landscape is an understatement.
Shame so many people just go "oh shit, another Dylan album" and proceed to downvote each subsequent iteration, but fuck, this has "Subterranean Homesick Blues" with its proto-rap lyrical flow (Dylan was an OG MC not Kurtis Blow) AND "Maggie's Farm" that set Newport aflame, its a great album.
Soft Cell
3/5
Doesn't even have the version of "Tainted Love" that segues into "Where Did Our Love Go?", and the rest is pretty down and dirty sleaziness... Minimal beeps and boops make up the soundtrack to a thousand nights in gay clubs across the land.
The Triffids
1/5
Bad, and not in the 80s "bad meaning good" way, just.... Questioning how this made it onto this listing.
Fatboy Slim
4/5
Very much of its time, this was the sounds of the summer of 1998 for me, but 25 years later (almost) I was fully expecting it to have aged badly, but by the time I got to the fourth track, "Gangster Trippin", I was fully invested and chair boogying...
It's a layered cake of repetitive banging beats, pitched sequenced sounds, repetitive sampled vocals, I can certainly appreciate the craft that went into it, moreso that it was done without the modern tools people take for granted, I mean he produced it using C-Lab Creator on an Atari ST that was already pretty old by 1998 standards (watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLjgXPDzeZo to see how homebrewed his studio was).
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be, but I enjoyed this trip down memory lane, though it does get a little weak in the back end aside from "Praise You".
2/5
Electronic bossa nova? Not quite as good as I hoped it would be. Alright background music but nothing you'd seek out to listen to.
Big Star
3/5
Slow and melodic for the most part. The Spotify version was incomplete so that might go against it, only real standout for me was the cover of "Nature Boy"
3/5
War? What is it good for? The funk apparently...
The Rolling Stones
3/5
"Street Fighting Man" and "Sympathy For The Devil" aren't enough to lift this mediocre Stones album up to the pantheon of later releases. Brian Jones would be cycled out before his unfortunate death, so in many ways it's the end of one era and the start on a new...
Supertramp
4/5
Honestly, only really heard their Breakfast In America album before, and the lonesome harmonica this opened with really belies the shit you're about to get into. Yes, its MOR Prog Rock, but it is very well produced MOR Prog Rock, its not pulling itself at the seams like some Prog Rock of the 70s was doing, nothing overstays its welcome, its quite punchy in comparison to the 10 minute+ sweeping epic songs Pink Floyd and Rush were doing
The Monks
4/5
I had to find this album, the digital equivalent of digging through crates of vinyl, simply because it's nowhere to be found. Not on Spotify, not on Apple Music, not on YouTube Music, only available as a YouTube video of the whole album.
And it's weird as fuck, fuzzy everything, Doors-like keyboards, seemingly random lyrics, basic beats that Meg White would be proud of. Actually, this is the birth of The White Stripes 30 years early.
The Smiths
3/5
"Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before"
Urgh, Morrissey. The original incel?
Afrika Bambaataa
2/5
Afrika Bambaataa. Zulu Nation. Touching little boys since the early 80s. I know, separate the artist from the art, but the artist is so vile...
"Renegades of Funk" now belongs to Rage Against The Machine, listen to that version instead.
Nico
2/5
Nico thought of herself as a bit of a chanteuse, many others did too. Warhol liked her, she was a bit of a muse of sorts, so he insisted she sing for The Velvet Underground, but she'd still go solo and the Velvet Underground were along for the ride but this would not be anything like a follow up to that album.
We're in for avant garde shit here, that's to say we're in for some shit here. Shit production. Shit voice. Shit everything. Not 1 star level shit, but not far off...
Dolly Parton
4/5
Dolly Parton is a saint! Marvel in her technicolour dream coat.
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
2/5
Who said it was open mic night? Because that's what it sounds like
Jimi Hendrix
4/5
"Crosstown Traffic", "All Along The Watchtower", "Voodoo Chile" YES! The rest? Ehhhhhhh ... Still a classic though
Billy Bragg
3/5
I can appreciate Woody Guthrie, I can appreciate Billy Bragg, I can definitely appreciate this.
Iron Maiden
3/5
Honestly, doesn't live up to the 5 star album cover
Killing Joke
2/5
So the Killing Joke is an iconic Alan Moore/Brian Bolland Batman graphic novel that explores the origins of the Joker, how Batman wrought him onto the world, and how a cycle of systematic revenge, physiological torture, and, basically, man's inhumanity to man, is really just an ouroboros and those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
It's a 3½ to 4 star Batman story and a 2½ to 3 star animation adaptation.
This has nothing to do with anything I just said, but I hope you find what I said more enjoyable than this album.
Pearl Jam
5/5
My favourite album of 1991, one of the most important years in music history that included (but not limited to) the following albums:
Nevermind by Nirvana
Achtung Baby by U2
Screamadelica by Primal Scream
Loveless by My Bloody Valentine
Blood Sugar Sex Magik by Red Hot Chili Peppers
The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest
Blue Lines by Massive Attack
Foxbase Alpha by Saint Etienne
Apocalypse 91 by Public Enemy
Dangerous by Michael Jackson
Black Album by Metallica
Out of Time by R.E.M
Use Your Illusion I and II by Guns N’ Roses
Its just that good. Every song is utterly timeless.
Green Day
4/5
Had Rock Opera, so why not a Punk Rock Opera. Simultaneously too short and yet some songs feel too long. 20 years later and I'm still surprised Green Day had this in them
Amy Winehouse
3/5
If you come looking for Back To Black style stuff, you'll be disappointed. There are hints of the future, but its all oversexed, after party vibes
Dusty Springfield
2/5
As with a lot of 60s artists, their debut is basically a lot of covers and while it all sounds really good, its still cover versions.
Charles Mingus
3/5
Experimental, Avant Garde Jazz... So you know they're just making this shit up
Gorillaz
3/5
I like the singles, but the rest is just kinda .... I dunno, there. I applaud Damon Albarn pivoting far away from the jangly guitars of Blur to try something absolutely different.
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
Absolutely perfect, 10 songs, under 45 minutes, ranges from moody personal stories to sweeping epics, and contains an amazing amount of Bruce live show staples like "Badlands", "Racing in the Street", "The Promised Land" and "Darkness on the Edge of Town".
The Boss at his best, and, by this point, the classic E Street Band line up were just clicking
The Rolling Stones
2/5
Much like Jerry Lee Lewis & Elvis Presley, the cloud of "white man popularising the black man's music" hangs heavy here. Classic rock & roll, albeit distilled.
William Orbit
2/5
Whats with all these so-called "super producers" making bland as fuck albums? Eno does it too...
I can kinda hear the sounds Madonna must have heard when she wanted Orbit to do Ray Of Light with her, but on its own it just sounds so.... I hate to say bland again, but definitely dated
The White Stripes
4/5
I can remember the moment I was introduced to the White Stripes, they appeared on Jools Holland on BBC2 and banged out "Hotel Yorba" and I was all in, 2 minutes of insanity. The acoustic version on the single I bought days later sealed the deal. Simple garage rock that somehow sounds amazing.
And this is a Meg White appreciation post
Sufjan Stevens
5/5
This was the sound of 2005 indie folk-y rock at its absolute zenith. It has everything you could possibly need, a cohesive narrative, both the meta "an album a state" project and indeed the Illinois stories that made up the songs. And for a brief shining moment, it seemed like Sufjan Stevens was your favourite artists favourite artist, even getting name checked songs by Snow Patrol (that felt so mid-2000s to even type), everyone loved it, NPR, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Rolling Stone, and every blogger with a pulse.
And, most importantly, it still holds up nearly 20 years later. a true timeless classic.
2/5
I'm still Team Oasis 30 years later, Modern Life Is Rubbish? Well, yeah, and so is this album...
John Lennon
3/5
A ok to good album that's weighed down by history, A few really good songs like "Jealous Guy" and "Gimmie Some Truth" and the title track is good if you're a teenager looking for greater meaning to life, but for Lennon is was absurd hypocrisy since he was bigger than jesus and richer than god. And then Gal Godot had an idea....
Lucinda Williams
4/5
Lucinda Williams was one of those artists I had never heard of until I moved from the UK to the US, being introduced to this was a revelation. To me Country music was either old people from the 70s or earlier like Johnny Cash or Kris Kristofferson and Tammy Wynette or Loretta Lynn, or mediocre 90s pop crossovers like Faith Hill and LeAnn Rimes, so to encounter the in-between space that Americana genre existed in with artists like Lucinda and Emmylou Harris was an eye opening experience. This album moved me, it's downright filthy in so many ways with songs like "Right In Time" and "I Still Long For Your Kiss" but it's the consecutive punches of "2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten", "Drunken Angel", "Concrete And Barbed Wire" and "Lake Charles" that keep me coming back.
You should also listen to her 2005 Live @ the Fillmore album
Fleetwood Mac
3/5
How *do* you follow up one the the greatest albums of all time? Apparently ask the record company for somewhere between $1m to $1.4m, spend most of it on blow, hire a university marching band, and record enough stuff to make a double album... Though it's a bit telling that when they eventually made a Greatest Hits album, only "Tusk" and "Sara" made the cut from here.
Wire
4/5
A cool Post Punk, Proto-Grunge, Sonic Youth sounding. Digging it. Gimmie that distortion,
4/5
Utter Prog Rock wankery, 3 songs, 37 minutes long. Rick Wakeman just banging his fingers to nubs on any keyboard he could find. Acquired taste, and I fear this exercise of listening to 1001 albums has led me to acquire that taste.
The Pogues
3/5
Honestly, not my kind of music, but it has the utterly timeless "Fairytale of New York" and that alone rises it above a lot of other things.
Dusty Springfield
4/5
Timeless classics, sultry lyrics, absolutely effortless.
Richard Hawley
3/5
Throwback old style crooner vibes that sounds like the soundtrack to a movie that never got made.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5/5
Not a feel good album, not a fun, happy, upbeat bop, it's just Nick Cave with his usual haunting beauty, this may plunge you into the depths of grief you never knew you could go to.
Beatles
3/5
Supposedly peak Beatles, or peak pre-Pepper Beatles, and while I do like "Eleanor Rigby" and "Got To Get You Into My Life" the rest kinda falls flat or not at all (looking directly at you "Yellow Submarine").
Rubber Soul was better, Pepper would be next, this kinda is just there almost out of contractual obligation...
Pantera
3/5
Ok early 90s metal, but memorable to me because Rob Van Dam used "Walk" as his entrance music in ECW and that fuckin RULED
Duke Ellington
3/5
One of those, what you hear isn't what you heard live albums... The extended version has the live performance but the original was fabricated and mixed and mashed from live and studio overdubs.
I usually love live albums but this one is a little overly live with crowd noise, I can see why they fudged it up with studio replacement
Radiohead
3/5
It feels like another Radiohead album I'm supposed to like... And I mostly do, but sometimes I'd rather listen to The Bends, you know?
Feels like Kid A outtakes, probably should have been saved for the retrospective deluxe edition release of that album.
Bee Gees
1/5
Bee Gees pre-disco concept album, let that marinate in your brain before listening, cherish that moment because it all comes tumbling down.
The Fall
3/5
Mark E. Smith doing Mark E. Smith things.
A Tribe Called Quest
5/5
You on point, Phife?
All the time, Tip
Well, then grab the microphone and let your words rip
The Jesus And Mary Chain
4/5
For some bands the jangly guitars are just that much more janglier. This is one such band of that late 80s shoegaze alternative scene, miles better than the earlier review Psychocandy album, the noise and distortion has been pared back significantly and the jangle pop is starting to rise.
Lupe Fiasco
4/5
Unexpectedly enjoyable, solid beats and flows, can't hate. Very much in the Kanye West Late Registration space with lush production but feels a little like the Wish version of that era Kanye, not that that's a bad thing...
Creedence Clearwater Revival
4/5
So southern, so swampy, what do you mean John Fogarty was born in California? Mans as Louisiana as anyone in history. The start of a, frankly, ridiculous 4 album run
Public Image Ltd.
2/5
Yeah, no, mostly irredeemable nonsense.
Leonard Cohen
3/5
A journey through a world where everyone's secrets are out in the open and love is a transaction. The title track, with its smarmy charm, sets the tone for an album that revels in its own cynicism. Cohen, ever the poet of the smoke filled, dimly lit bar, delivers lines like "If you want a lover, I'll do anything you ask me to" with a voice that suggests he's both offering and mocking the deal.
The album's standout, "Everybody Knows," is a jaded anthem for the end of the world. Cohen's gravelly voice, accompanied by a somber piano and ominous synthesizer, paints a bleak picture of a world where corruption, addiction, and disease are commonplace. But hey, at least the song is catchy! If you're looking for an album that will confirm your suspicions that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, look no further
Elvis Presley
3/5
The post movies Elvis comeback was in full swing and, thankfully, he's not entirely cribbing on black artists music here. Some genuine good songs like "Suspicious Minds" and "In The Ghetto" but don't sleep on songs like "Only The Strong Survive", the backing band as tight as hell throughout.
Miriam Makeba
5/5
This is why I got involved in this, something so extraordinary that I'd never normally listen to. Break the cycle of westernized anglicized music and melt away with this. The only sad part is it was far too short...
Talking Heads
4/5
My third Talking Heads album in this list and I think I love them all, this is no exception, it bops along at a steady pace and everyone loves "Psycho Killer"
Nick Drake
4/5
Nick Drake just makes it all seem so effortless...
Ash
3/5
A level above the usual Britpop dross of the time, hard rocking and produced by Oasis producer leant some credibility to these gangly teens (at the time). I enjoyed it at the time and I enjoyed it now, but it's not setting the world on fire at any time in its existence.
Prefab Sprout
3/5
Starts out with a bit of a rockabilly country twang, but it was fairly middle of the road 80s jazz infused synth pop (shout out Thomas Dolby) from there onwards. Neither soaring too high nor sinking too low, always average on average.
5/5
Polly Jean is really on her game here, I've already had the raw shock of Dry and the later folksy poetical political Let England Shake, and this is the middle of those two extremes. Polished, but not overly so; rocking, but not overly so; accessible; but not overly mainstream...
Quite possibly her absolute peak. Was her "Good Fortune" slipping away?
The Police
2/5
Normally I don't mind The Police, but weirdly this one bar "Synchronicity II" and "Every Breath You Take" was forgettable by the time you reached the end, and you can tell it's the end, they were done. At least they dropped the white boy reggae act by now.
Scissor Sisters
3/5
"Laura" is an all time bop. Anyone who says otherwise is a cop.
R.E.M.
4/5
I mean, it has "Orange Crush", "Stand", and "Pop Song 89"...
Thats it, thats the review
Cowboy Junkies
3/5
The "Sweet Jane" cover is the absolute shit, the rest doesn't quite match up to it but it's not that bad either.
Slipknot
2/5
LAWDHAMMERCIES, we got the angry white boy demographic music again, why did they (the demographic) hate everything? Parents? Women? LIFE??... and why I did not notice that at ALL at the time?
To show how far we've come (or how far the past had fallen) "Wait And Bleed" was nominated for a fucking Grammy. They continue to be nominated for Grammys, so maybe I'm the one in the wrong?
Dinosaur Jr.
4/5
Dinosaur Jr. do one thing, play it loud, and they do that well. Proto-shoegazing grunge, my jam.
Elvis Presley
2/5
Elvis is back from the army and he's still doing the covers. His version of "Fever" pales in comparison to Peggy Lee's original. He'd soon disappear into the movie era and wasn't interesting again until he had to comeback again a decade or so later.
Kanye West
2/5
Another "attempt to separate the art from the artist" , but it's hard... a great album from a truly shitty individual, and I'mma let you finish because he was a piece of shit long before his mental illnesses took hold in the last 10 or so years.
4 stars for the album (good the great but not his best) / 0 stars for the antisemitic Nazi turd he is / 2.5 stars to split the difference but in this case I'mma round it down.
Johnny Cash
4/5
A pretty good live recording, but a live from prison album is something not enough artists do nowadays...
Digital Underground
2/5
Humpty Dance and a whole lotta future sex love drugs, if thats your kink.
The Saints
3/5
Never heard of this band before, and I was put off somewhat by the 27 song long running order, but if you listen to the first 13 that made up the album, its a fun, raucous garage band punk rock sound. And the trumpets!
Massive Attack
5/5
An absolute masterpiece, origins of trip hop right here, add in Shara Nelson and it's just the right tone. "Unfinished Sympathy" remains an all timer as well.
Blur
3/5
The transition from britpop to indie rock, and yet most of it sounds very much the same... Song 2 remains a banger and the official celebration music of your favourite hockey team scoring a goal 25 years later
Jane Weaver
3/5
Folktronica? Sure, why not...
Nina Simone
5/5
This, much like "Lilac Wine", is sweet and heady, and packs a literal punch. Just so overwhelming at times, its just unbelievable that this was leftovers from other sessions for previous albums.
Pere Ubu
1/5
Starts off with a high pitched dentist drill to the more sensitive crevasses of your brain and really goes downhill from there
Joni Mitchell
4/5
Loves me the singer songwriter genre and Joni Mitchell is S tier for this. One of her better albums, but it's no Ladies of the Canyon...
Iggy Pop
3/5
Music to run down Princes Street in Edinburgh to... Add in The Passenger and this becomes a fairly iconic album.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
4/5
Watch out, here come the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, fresh of their indie darling status, and they're gonna dance till you (the royal you, personally) are dead, but you know they won't love you like I love you... They finally crossed over into art pop and are not above committing glamorous murder on the dancefloor. This entire album is bitching way harder, way longer than it has any right to.
The Undertones
3/5
I feel like I'm supposed to like this, because, hell, John Peel loved "Teenage Kicks" to his dying day (and beyond)... and I do like that one song a lot, but the rest doesn't hit the same highs.
Frank Ocean
3/5
Starts off cozy, literally the PS1 startup sound and the intro to Super Street Fighter II Turbo... but thereafter it just didn't fully resonate with me, not to say its not masterfully crafted, a lot of soul was clearly poured into this, this side of R&B just isn't my vibe. It consistently praised as the hottest thing to ever come down the pike but, sadly I suppose, I just down see it and it just feels overly long... 2012 just wasn't a good year overall.
Can
3/5
Sounding like some weird procedurally generated soundtrack from a video game, it rises and falls in time with whatever you're doing.... Working from home? Folding laundry? Cooking dinner? Walking the dog? Having another existential crisis? Everything matches, everything vibes.
Its amazing. 51 years old and it scored my mundane life perfectly.
The Teardrop Explodes
2/5
Generic 80s pop rock mixed with even more generic 80s pop rock with a shot of 80s pop rock as a chaser. Stir well, pour into a higher than room temperature mug and serve.
Kate Bush
5/5
Finally, I've already landed on The Dreaming and The Sensual World prior to this and its the big payoff. Hounds OF Love is a certifiable masterpiece, its got the monster hit in "Running Up That Hill" but it's also got "Cloudbursting", "The Big Sky", and "Jig Of Life", its got production for days, like that gated reverb drums on the title track.
Kate deserved to be a pop star, shame she released this 20 or 30 years before its time.
Traffic
2/5
Couldn't be more MOR if it had yellow lines painted down the middle of it.
Madonna
3/5
Madonna's last good album? Good in a artistic sense, but it's really William Orbit's Strange Cargo III part 2... Strange Cargo IV?
Regardless, the last time Madonna moved my needle.
The Smashing Pumpkins
4/5
Felt like the shift away from down and dirty grunge into a more nuanced alternative rock world. This raised the bar, the singles like "Disarm" and "Today" just lift everything higher as, simultaneously, Billy Corgan descended into madness... You can just hear the proto-Mellon Collie songs if you listen hard enough.
Booker T. & The MG's
4/5
Starts out with a stone cold banger of an instrumental in the title track, but everything else is just dripping with the understated funkiness of 4 guys just jamming on an organ, drums, bass, and guitar.
The Auteurs
2/5
Bland, forgettable, in fact I have no recollection of this band even existing. Are we sure this wasn't some weird A.I. Mandela effect / Baader–Meinhof phenomenon (pause for irony) where they take the sonic signature of a dozen bands and try to make the most pleasing sound out of it in a lab but instead this heap of boredom lurched out instead.
The Bees
4/5
Sweetly soothing, borderline twee and breezy. Just a gentle hug for whatever is left of your soul at the end of a long week and 300+ days into this endeavour.
Beatles
5/5
Don't threaten me with a good time... I mean, its the goddamn White Album by The Beatles... A band being torn apart never sounded so good, so many killer songs on this double album. "Dear Prudence", "Glass Onion", "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "Blackbird", "Birthday", "Helter Skelter", "Revolution", "Savoy Truffle".... Just typing that list out gave me blisters on me fingers. But it also has "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" so lets not say it's perfect by any means.
Honestly, a lot of it sounds like throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks, but when it sticks its so so good that you can forgive the mediocre (or way below in Ob-La-Fucking-Di's case) efforts.
Robert Wyatt
2/5
Good music to drift off to, I suppose. Didn't really do much for me, sounded very "ye olde lute player" lyrically though.
Ride
3/5
One of those albums where people say "this is it, this album will *change you*" and you're like "ok, lets give it a listen" and once it ends you find are absolute unmoved in the slightest...
Is it me? Is my soul lacking something? No, it's Ride, Ride are the ones who are in the wrong....
Leonard Cohen
4/5
"You Want It Darker"... Is that a question or a threat???
I'm treating it as a threat. Like Leonard Cohen said to me personally, "I'll give you something to cry about" and instead of beating me with a sack of valencia oranges, he, instead, cursed me with old fashioned mental disease.
Robert Wyatt
2/5
I had Shleep a few days ago and now this and its probably even worse then that. Shorter, yes, but every song, if you can call it that, is interminably long.
SO. BORED.
k.d. lang
2/5
It's no Ingénue, thats about all I can say.
Method Man
4/5
"The Buddha Monk on the hunt for machine gun funk" is one of many bars I've absolutely glommed from this album, so let me get raw with my southpaw style while puffing on a fat blunt from Cuba...
One of the better Wu Tang solo albums, Method has that drawly flow thats just superb, literally sucking in all the air in the room as he does it. RZA production is sublime also, just a great album overall.
Pixies
5/5
Influential album that ushered in the loud-quiet-loud era of rock. Good thing it's a total banger, Black Francis is in fine form, Kim Deal is driving with her bass, Lovering and Santiago are tight as all hell and there's no wasted time in the sub 40 minutes runtime (always good when it fits one one side of a 90 minute cassette).
Hard to pick a favourite song but "Hey" has a special place in my life as it was the first baseline I learned and could still play it 100% on expert on Rock Band some years later.
The Replacements
3/5
I'm usually down with the jangly guitars, and this starts out super jangly with "I Will Dare" then I found out the jangly guitar part was played by Peter Buck of R.E.M.... They fooled me, they weren't jangly at all. They were just dull college rock. Not cool man.
Arcade Fire
5/5
Another 20 year old album comes from the vault to remind me how old I am now... This was near perfection at the time, and frankly it still is, I could listen to this any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Everything is crafted so god dam well, from the plinky plonky piano opening of "Tunnels", to the hero's journey sound track of "Wake Up" to the haunting fragility in the ending tack "In The Backseat", it sparks nothing but emotion and memories.
Michael Jackson
5/5
Biggest selling album of all time, sold 1 to 2 million copies A WEEK for almost a year. Contains monster songs like "Beat It", "Wanna Be Starting Something", "Billie Jean", and "Thriller". It also features a goddamn Beatle *and* Vincent Price. So yeah, you could say this is good...
Prince
2/5
Title track aside nothing on this really stood out and for a double album that's a lot of hard listening. Very disjointed, very over indulgent...
Elliott Smith
5/5
The last album in his lifetime, here Smith struggles to recapture his apex of Either/Or, and it's clearly an evolution over a revolution. It feels different, it's almost upbeat, in it as intimate as before but the soul is still shining through.
5/5
The defining album of my generation (late gen x, final year of high school, Cool fuckin Britannia to the core) and I can still remember release day, cutting out of said high school to buy this CD right as HMV opened and then rush home to quickly get it on tape in order to be the first to play it on the form room stereo. Everyone was rapt in anticipation, some were disassociating from raw hype alone... Thank fuck it delivered banger after banger. This and their Knebworth shows were the high water mark for Britpop as a movement, the tide was turning long before Be Here Now jizzed itself onto the public a few years later and the Gallagher brothers and other associated band members became pastiches of their former selves, but it doesn't make this any less impactful.
Now they're back, and I'm old as fuck. Almost 30 years later. Ain't life a bitch? But gods, we were kings back then... We were the masters of our fates. We were young, dumb, full of cum. We were mad for it.
Anyway, here's Wonderwall...
Morrissey
4/5
Urgh, Morrissey is a fucking twat, but this is a hell of an album, it cannot be denied.
Beatles
5/5
The last Beatles album (Let It Be doesn't count as that was just reworked from the Get Back sessions), in-fighting and tension was so much that many songs don't feature the full band.
Speaking of individuals, the songs here definitely show that... John was getting bluesy with "Come Together" and "I Want You (She's So Heavy)". Paul was waist deep in "granny music" with shit like "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" that had already been bumped from The White Album and derided in the Get Back documentary. George was still riding that "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" high from the White Album with the truly great "Something" and "Here Comes The Sun". And Ringo had "Octopus's Garden", can't have them all Ringo, but you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, at least you got a badass drum solo on this album.
Then they just went their separate ways and stopped recording a month before this was released and George Martin scraped together bits and bobs to make the suite medley that ends the album.
Its The Beatles, so I'mma give it 5 stars, but the end of The Beatles is definitely a bittersweet thing.
Aretha Franklin
5/5
Just sublime soul lady doing sublime soul lady shit, a tremendous cover of "Respect" that meant she took ownership of the song, the title song is passion unbridled, and "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" is a timeless classic.
The start of a run that has rarely been equalled in music; this album followed by Aretha Arrives in 1968, then Lady Soul, then Aretha Now, then the Aretha Live in Paris live album in 1969. 18 or so months of solid gold bangers.
Ian Dury
2/5
Nah, how can I purge this from my Spotify history? I'm afraid its altered my algorithm is a sinister way.
Megadeth
4/5
I'll quote a smarter writer than me...
"Experts at the Smithsonian Institution reportedly questioned Monday why new art was still being produced after the pinnacle of aesthetic and creative potential was reached in 1990 with Megadeth’s fourth studio album, Rust In Peace. 'As the unquestioned apex of the entire history of the creative arts, Rust In Peace is the finest and last necessary piece of human expression'"
A fun review for an ok album, well a good to great album.
Jeff Beck
3/5
I know Rod Stewart was involved in this album, because it sounds like the dirty rock of the Faces sound at the time, not a bad thing, but at the same time pretty derivative.
The Doors
5/5
From the opening few seconds you know this is going to be god tier, that distinctive fuzzy sound, split stereo in full effect, they literally kick down the doors of perception.
"Break On Through (To The Other Side)", "Soul Kitchen, a bitching cover of "Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)", "Light My Fire", and the epicness that is "The End"... They had no goddamn right to be this good this early.
Paul Revere & The Raiders
3/5
Psychedelic Rock man, it's my true weakness, and this kicks off with a great vibe in "Kicks" that continues on with "I'm Not Your Stepping Stone" and "Take A Look At Yourself".
David Bowie
2/5
Late stage Bowie just feels sad, not as sad as Black Star being his deathbed release, but this is an artist in decline literally trying to gloam on the better times by reinterpreting the Heroes album cover for purpose. Nothing here stood out, nothing felt "you must listen to this before you die" worthy. It's just there.
5/5
I've already had The White Album and Abbey Road picked for me in the last month or so and already had Rubber Soul and Revolver in the last 10 months, so going back to Sgt. Pepper is like snuggling into a warm blanket. Though the transition from the Rubber Soul/Revolver era to this is STARK, they went away and changed everything, and free from the constraints of recording and touring endlessly they almost perfected everything... Production, songwriting, instrument choices, and general vibes is off the charts.
The only downside is the often derided "granny music" McCartney song, following on from the deplorable "Michelle" on Rubber Soul, we get "When I'm Sixty-Four" here and it was only going downhill on other albums after that. But some scholars wish to include "She's Leaving Home" and "Lovely Rita" from this album too...
Still 5 stars, the most important album in music history, and all that.
Pet Shop Boys
3/5
Very of its time, and the gorgeous cover of "Go West" launched a hundred football chants (mostly along the lines of "you're shit, and you know you are"), and its probably the most accessible PSB, almost anthemic in comparison to earlier releases.
Fela Kuti
3/5
I've had Fela Kuti & Africa '70 before, so at least I knew what I was getting into with this album, Ginger Baker was a change though for the second half... Its super tight afrobeats, and time just washes over you to where it has no meaning anymore, and soon enough the hour has passed and you crave more.
Jorge Ben Jor
4/5
I keep saying this any time interesting world music comes up, but this is why I signed up for this. Brazilian Samba mixed with funk I'd never normally stumbleupon. Just a chill time, solid chair boogying and it has the song "Taj Mahal" that some might recognize as the song Rod Stewart ripped off for "Do You Think I'm Sexy?"
Beastie Boys
5/5
Come for the hip hop and hardcore and alternative rock, but stay for the jazzy funk instrumentals but don't play this on your dad's stereo at home, only under hip-hop supervision. It has a lot of that 1-2-3-1, 2-3-1-2, 3-1-2-3 verse flow as they pass the mic along, and it all just sounds so good as this album is loaded with hot bars. I must have listened to this album a bajillion times in the 30 years since it came out, worn out CDs, hard drives and now solid state drives with this thing just banging.
You'll either love it or hate it.
RIP MCA
The Notorious B.I.G.
4/5
How does one rate this through a modern lens? Problematic skits, problematic lyrical content, problematic producer who seemed intent on appearing as much as possible with "yeahs" and "uh huhs" on every goddamn song.
"Juicy" and "Big Poppa" are obvious bangers, but "Machine Gun Funk" is the lowkey MVP of the whole album for me.
Bad Brains
3/5
I mean, its fuckin Bad Brains, the preeminent hardcore band of their time, and they're going reggae and funk...
Pixies
5/5
The first 35 seconds of "Bone Machine" is all you need as an introduction to the Pixies, the drums, the bass, the guitar, and Black Francis yapping in the background, thats it, get past that and you'll utterly appreciate this un-80s album that set the table for rock and grunge that came after it.
Everything is short, punchy, and near perfect.
Iggy Pop
3/5
There's just something wild about David Bowie and Iggy Pop getting so fucked up on whatever that they had to move far, far away from the American scene in 1976 and then go on an all time tear of recording and releasing 4 outstanding albums in a year. 1977 was a special time, before my time though.
This album is dark, moody, brooding as they weaned themselves off the addictions. It's hard to tell who was the catalyst, Bowie with the music or Pop with the lyrics.
Kraftwerk
3/5
A literal journey into electronic music, hypnotic and relaxing, and like most car journeys, I end up falling asleep halfway to the eventual destination.
Louis Prima
4/5
Just a jizzy jazzy party, riffs and riffing, sax and sex.
2/5
Liars, everywhere... They were the liars when they thought they could create music, the list creator was the liar when they said this album was worth listening to.
I will say, track 2 "Steam Rose from the Lifeless Cloak" being the musical manifestation of a migraine, that pounding feeling of blood through your veins like native drums along the Orinoco, is the only reason I didn't give this a 1 star.
Ali Farka Touré
4/5
Blues with a worldly twist, great ambience. Something I'd never normally listen to, but I'll Definitely give this another spin
OutKast
4/5
Not so much an OutKast album as two solo albums packaged as a double album. The division is quite obvious, Big Boi's Speakerboxxx has big beats and solid bars and guests to die for while Andre's The Love Below is mega overindulgence and the first stop on the road that leads to jazz flute albums.
Can the two halves equal a whole? For the most part yes, but the amount of skittish interludes on The Love Below pulls it down for me.
Steely Dan
2/5
Starts off a little funky, but not overly funky, but then transforms quickly into elevator muzak. Not on the same level as other Steely Dan albums here, and honestly sounds like the inspiration for late 70s/early 80s Chicago albums. Make of that what you will...
Alice In Chains
4/5
That monster Alice In Chains sound, the Layne Stanley voice, the Jerry Cantrell guitar, it's here and in full effect as they are at possibly the peak of their powers. Loaded with songs you half remembered like "Rooster", "Them Bones", "Down In A Hole", and "Would?". This mix would sell millions and was worth every penny.
Elvis Costello
3/5
The author of this book must have an Elvis Costello kink, there's no reason to explain how many times ol' Declan has appeared... Anyway, another bland album that has 2 hot songs, in this case "Alison" and "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes", but is that enough??
Maybe the 1001 author should just have included an Elvis Costello greatest hits album and spare us the misery of 6 of his albums? Oh well, 4 down, the only way is up, right?
Simon & Garfunkel
4/5
It has "America", "Mrs. Robinson", and "Hazy Shade Of Winter", what more do you people want from a sub 30 minute album?
SAULT
4/5
Always skeptical when a recent album appears, but this was released 3 weeks after George Floyd's murder and seemed to encapsulate 2020 pretty perfectly. Strength in unity.
Lenny Kravitz
3/5
Lenny in his early psychedelic rock phase, but not really... A little funky, a little bit in his feelings, has quite reached his Hendrix guitar shredder phase of the early 90s. So it's hippy music, mostly, 20 years too late.
But my one abiding memory is a friend who'd change lyrics of songs while singing them, so we gotta let dogs drool (LET DOGS DROOL)
Beck
4/5
Music to listen to while you kick back in a warm bath, enjoying a bottle of wine, and just let the Beck-ness of it all wash over you. And then when you're nice and toasty, pop open a vein...
Ramones
3/5
Not enough albums containing songs that endorse beating up kids with a hefty lump of wood. Truly different times... This is pure punk, three chords, repetitive beats and bass, simple lyrics also repetitive. So repetitive I lost track during a three song stretch of "I Don't Wanna Go Down To The Basement", "Loudmouth", "Havana Affair" and and couldn't remember when one ended and another began...
Badly Drawn Boy
3/5
Now, I'll admit I bought this CD back in 2000 and I loved it then, and I haven't listened to it, or anything else by him for that matter, in probably 20 years now... And what seemed earth shattering to my naive reptile smooth brain back then is kinda boring now. It's just dull turn of the millenium indie music innit?
I still enjoyed songs like "The Shining", "Another Pearl", "Magic In The Air", and "Disillusion", add in a couple more and a killer EP they would make, but this was just too long and too stuffed with filler like instrumental tracks to be enjoyable as it once was. And don't get me started on the aural assault that is "This Song", do not wear headphones for that.
Germs
2/5
It's the fuckin' Germs man, the fuckin' GERMS! And it's not as great as the legend suggests. 15 1 to 2 minutes songs that are so hardcore punk, this band can barely play but does speed thrashing, and 1 10 minute long slog that overstays its welcome by about 9 minutes.
If not for the expanded lore of the legend of Pat Smear and the knowledge of what could have been with fuckin' Belinda Carlisle on drums, this would be a solid 1 stinker.
FUCKIN' GERMS MAN! FUCK-IN' GERMS!
Led Zeppelin
5/5
Their equivalent to The Beatles White Album, a long double album that's a little incohesive as it feels like all manner of shit was thrown to this particular wall to see what would stick, where the highs are so so so good ("Trampled Under Foot", "Houses Of The Holy", "Kashmir", "In My Time Of Dying", basically all of disc 1), but the lows are pretty meh ("Down By The Seaside", "Night Flight", "The Wanton Song", "Boogie With Stu", "Sick Again", basically all of disc 2). But it's Led Zeppelin so you can forgive most of it.
LCD Soundsystem
2/5
I gave Sound Of Silver a 3 and said "its just a lot of mid 00s angst over mid beats"
This is worse than Sound Of Silver because its just a lot of late 10s angst over even lower than mid beats
Primal Scream
4/5
As Peter Fonda said in The Wild Angels
"Well, we wanna be free, we wanna be free to do what we wanna do and we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time... And that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna have a good time, we're gonna have a party."
This album soundtracks that party.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
4/5
Bob kinda goes solo here, no more Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer but this has the classic "No Woman No Cry" and the rest is a solid mix of chill vibes and biting social commentary.
Dr. Octagon
2/5
"Dr. Octagonecologyst introduces the character of Dr. Octagon, a homicidal, extraterrestrial, time-traveling gynecologist and surgeon" so you know we're getting low level porno skits and a rough theme thats held together by hopes and dreams.
In reality its shit level hip hop, even with Dan The Automator at the desk
Belle & Sebastian
4/5
Flashing back to downstairs in the old original 13th Note on Glassford Street in Glasgow, Belle & Sebastian were releasing new EPs every other month and life was simpler, or I was simpler, but I digress...
Upbeat, but not overly jaunty, twee, but not overly cutesy, just a chill laid back jam session in your living room with old friends.
Blood, Sweat & Tears
3/5
Proto-Prog Rock, lots of weirdly familiar riffs that you can't quite put your finger on. The Hammond organ and jazzy bass are the real stars here.
The Band
4/5
A good old time, just great classic rock and roll. Contains "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", "Up On Cripple Creek" which were released as a killer double a side singe, both fronted by Levon Helms voice. Ridiculously good.
Kings of Leon
4/5
A return to the form of their first album after a few albums just wantering the wastelands. Killer list of singles here: "Sex On Fire", "Use Somebody", and "Revelry". I know so many bands who would crawl over miles of broken glass for a list like that in their greatest hits.
k.d. lang
3/5
"Constant Craving" remains an all time song. The rest of the album doesn't rise to that level. Still better than her country debut that's already appeared in my list.
John Grant
4/5
Indie Folk is also in my wheel house apparently... I loved this, so soft and gentle, wrapped up in a blanket with a nice cup of tea.
Jack White
2/5
Jack White can be hit or miss, and this album is a hodgepodge of many different styles... Blues, Rock, Soul, Country, Folk, he's got it all, a 5 tool player. But honestly, 3 good songs in "Love Interruption", "Sixteen Saltines", and "I'm Shakin'" and a shit load of filler.
Motörhead
2/5
One banging tune and a lot of questionable choices....
The White Stripes
5/5
"Seven Nation Army" dominates this, it's the alpha, the omega, there's no way around it, it has more plays on Spotify than Pi has digits... And it's not even the best song on this album... Because that would be "In The Cold, Cold Night" as Meg steps out from the drum kit and lays down the haunting tenderness as if to say "I'M Karen Carpenter, bitch" , and "The Hardest Button To Button" would go before it too.
Stripped back even more from White Blood Cells, this was White Stripes at their peak, the king and queen of the alt rock garage scene.
The Cars
5/5
This was just what I needed, it really let the good times roll, and assorted puns. Truthfully, this is a monster album, not a single bad song on it.
CHVRCHES
4/5
EDM always feels very of its time, and this definitely feels like 2013/14 to me. Just the opening bars of "The Mother We Share" can transport me to those days, and the optimism I had... Of course nw we live in a hellscape but the escapism is a nice byproduct.
It also reminds me of the opening of the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and dancing Tunnocks Teacakes
Rufus Wainwright
2/5
Want Two? Get Two...
Joni Mitchell
3/5
The start of her fading star, Ladies Of The Canyon was a long time ago, even Court And Spark released two years before this feels like a lifetime ago. This feels a touch overdone, overindulgent, she's wanting to tell a story in each song but most overstay their welcome... "Coyote" is a great opening song, but it's also too early a peak to fully enjoy the album as a whole.
Anita Baker
3/5
Spotify had this as an incomplete album, not even listed in her discography. I enjoyed the 4 songs I got to hear ("Sweet Love", "You Bring Me Joy", "Caught Up In The Rapture", and "Same Ole Love (365 Days A Year)"), but it was a very 80s movie soundtrack vibe.
Everything But The Girl
2/5
Opens with the amazing cover of "I Don't Wan To Talk About It" and then.... *Fart Noise*
Honestly, I hate albums that put the objectively best song as track 1, the rest of the album is just a slow speed skid after that. Blowing your load with 40 minutes left to fill is the worst thing any artist can do.
Nirvana
5/5
Nevermind is more than just a collection of songs; it is a cultural touchstone that continues to resonate with listeners decades after its release. Its impact on popular music is undeniable, inspiring countless bands and artists to embrace a more raw and authentic approach to songwriting and performance. In the pantheon of rock music, Nevermind stands as a timeless masterpiece, a testament to the power of music to both reflect and shape the human experience.
Fuckin rocks man!
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
4/5
Young sheds his folksy rock roots and gets a little down and dirty with Crazy Horse. This album contains some legit jams like "Cinnamon Girl" and "Down by the River."
While the album is often categorized as proto-grunge, its influence transcends any single genre. The raw energy and emotional intensity foreshadow the alternative rock movements of the decades to come, while the introspective lyrics and acoustic moments retain a timeless folk sensibility.
The Byrds
2/5
As bland as psychedelic music can be, not even middle of the road, just sitting on the side of the road, unable to cross it.
Deep Purple
4/5
Classic dad rock, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Every song is a driving groove. Want some riffs? Want some guy screaming to an orgasm (possibly?)? Want drum fills a-plenty? Mad man twisting an organ for your pleasure? This has them all!
Janet Jackson
5/5
So of its time, but strangely timeless, Ms. Jackson (because I'm nasty at heart) and producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis weave a tapestry of samples, loops and New Jack Funk to drop an album filled with club bangers. Social consciousness is heavy on her mind here, songs about racism, poverty, injustice, politics, sex, 35 years later and it feels very much on point today. In fact today this would be branded "woke" and all the connotations that go along with it.
Meanwhile I'm still here trying to perfect the 5-4-3-2-1 hand countdown she does in the "Rhythm Nation" video.
Morrissey
2/5
One good song, "Everyday Is Like Sunday", and a whole lot of whining from that twat Morrissey
Arrested Development
3/5
Afrocentric midwestern alternative conscious rap for the masses? Rap around this time was either gangster rap via Dr. Dre's The Chronic, East Coast Hip Hop via A Tribe Called Quest's The Low End Theory, or whatever the Beastie Boys were doing in Check Your Head (punk rap?) so a legitimate alternative was a breath of fresh air. Powered by the three monster singles "Tennessee", "People Everyday", and "Mr. Wendell" this album felt like it was everywhere.
It mostly stands up, once you get past the realization that the version of "People Everyday" isn't the same as the single version you know.
Eric Clapton
2/5
Much like Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and early Rolling Stones, the cloud of "white man popularising the black man's music" hangs heavy here. Classic rock & roll, albeit distilled.
Meat Puppets
3/5
Come for the songs they performed with Nirvana on Unplugged, but stay for the distorted guitars and signs of proto-grunge
AC/DC
4/5
Hard to imagine any band nowadays having their lead singer die then a few months later be all like "we got a new guy, he helped write new songs, and we almost immediately recorded this kick ass album for you sickos"
Apparently the sicko is me...
Steely Dan
3/5
Completing the Steely Dan section of 1001, and it starts off with a literal bop in "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" but then its veering off into their default mid 70s jazzy rock, horns an all. Now quite as Chicago-y as the Aja album, but the road has been laid...
Eagles
5/5
The ultimate dad rock album, there's not a single person born in the 70s or 80s who's dad did not own this on either vinyl or cassette. This was the soundtrack to road trips, always was, always will be... Opens up with 3 huge all time songs in "Hotel California", "New Kid In Town", and "Life In The Fast Lane" before settling into a deep groove like the slow sad vibe of "Wasted Time" and its reprise and the straight up rock and roll of "Victim of Love", the rest kind of follow what came before.
A victim of its own monster success often leads to people turning on it, but this is an easy 5 star album.
Girls Against Boys
2/5
Fuzzy bass, heavy drums, hard guitars, monotone singer? Yep, its a DC post-hardcore indie rock band screaming into the void in the wake of the Seattle grunge takeover... Nothing wrong with this album honestly, its just so one note bland at times. If this was released in 1989 we'd be talking about it in different terms, but after Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden bust the mold wide open, it mostly sounds like a bar band going through the motions.
Kinda telling the most played song on this album (and their entire catalogue) on Spotify only has around 700k plays...
Sigur Rós
5/5
The sound of a long abandoned cathedral collapsing off an eroded cliff. In slow motion.
Cypress Hill
3/5
Let's be clear, it's not as overall good or polished as Black Sunday would be, you wouldn't expect it to be, but I had forgotten how much fun this album this, its a whole ass vibe of half remembered lyrics that came flooding back like a weird old friend. Its surprisingly wall to wall bangers here, overtly violent lyrics but fun as fuck cali beats beats make you forget how gangster Cypress Hill really were, but you'd never call them gangster rap...
A Scooby Doo Y'all, a Scooby Doobie Doo Y'all
Throbbing Gristle
1/5
Just noises, nothing but noises
Julian Cope
2/5
Nothing noteworthy or revolutionary present here... 1991 was an important year for music, and this feels like a remnant of the past.
Simply Red
2/5
Music my mum liked, I can close my eye and hear this playing in my mum's old VW Golf, it would be followed by Level 42, guaranteed. "Holding Back The Years" holds up but, honestly, Simply Red are an abomination and it still befuddles me how they made a comeback in the mid 90s for one hot minute..
The Psychedelic Furs
2/5
Sounds like so many other bands of the time, and every song sounds very much the same.
Shuggie Otis
5/5
This is that good shit, funky psychedelic soul. Every song hits just right and peaks with "Strawberry Letter 23". I've been vibing this for the last 25 years after, of all places, hearing a cover of "Strawberry Letter 23" by Zero 7 at one of their concerts where it was sung by Sia Furler (Pre Sia Sia) and Sophie Barker... Good times.
50 Cent
3/5
Very of its time and time hasn't been kind to it overall, but everyone should listen to Rob Harvilla talk about the troll life of Fiddy on his 2000s edition of 60 Songs that Explain the 90's pod, its a trip.
Tom Waits
3/5
Tom waits for no man, Tom does his own thing, Tom doesn't always strike gold but you miss 100% of the shots you don't make....
The Black Keys
4/5
There's a lot of good on this album ("Tighten Up", "Long Gone", "Next Girl", "Ten Cent Pistol", "Howlin' For You") that remains in my rotation, but there's a lot of mid stuff too. Sure they moved away from their basement recordings and got Danger Mouse to produce the shit of of these songs so they're never gonna sound like the cheap ass days of yore but you know what? I like the Black Keys, and I like this.
KISS
2/5
"Detroit Rock City" is a bop, basic rock but a bop, the rest is bargain basement drivel.
Michael Jackson
5/5
Two forces of nature (Michael and Quincy Jones (RIP)) collide to change the trajectory of modern music was we know it. Overshadowed by Thriller, but rarely bettered.
The Gun Club
2/5
Fairly generic post punk bollocks, nothing earth shattering, just here.
Frank Sinatra
2/5
Sleaze in musical form, so much sleaze that I needed to take a shower afterwards.
Thin Lizzy
2/5
I feel like you have to like that artist to appreciate live albums, and while Thin Lizzy is in the "alright" bin for me, 76 minutes of live (or live enough) is a stretch.
The Shamen
2/5
Sub Mid 90s rave music, US version at least had "Move Any Mountain" but this one did not.
Machito
4/5
I'm starting to really love all the "Afro-" genres this list has introduced me to, so add Afro-Cuban Jazz to the list. Massively up tempo beats that never end, a weird frenetic energy in the rhythm sections and the horns, my god the horns....
The Hives
3/5
It's a compilation but not a greatest hits, so I'm not sure how I feel about that, but damn it has manic energy in spades. Short, punchy, everything you'd want in a introduction.
The Boo Radleys
2/5
Now I'll admit, I didn't mind that "Wake Up Boo!" song when it came out, and that was my only exposure to Boo Radleys in any detail outwith "To Kill A Mockingbird", but, as usual, I digress....
Nothing redeemable here, generic indie shoegaze synths and horns nonsense.
Q-Tip
4/5
The opening track hooked me, the whole album was just joyfully smooth flows, samples, and production.
Cocteau Twins
4/5
As someone who used to live in Grangemouth, Cocteau Twins are the biggest thing ever to come out of that town apart from refined petrochemicals and the M9 motorway in either direction....
Milton Nascimento
4/5
One of those hidden gems I never would have found with out this list. It makes up for the over indulgence of those drippy british indie bands we usually get.
Rich, vibrant, with stellar production. Just gorgeous throughout.
Burning Spear
4/5
Top tier reggae, so much anger bubbling under those vibes.
Fatboy Slim
3/5
Not quite as bombastic as the follow up album, part of this is surprisingly trippy/tranquil compared to his usual big beat style.
Crosby, Stills & Nash
4/5
The folk supergroup playing great songs in 3 part harmony. You'd have to have a heart three sizes t small to hate on this.
The Byrds
3/5
CSN yesterday, Byrds today, 1001AG must think I need David Crosby in my life now....
Johnny Cash
5/5
Thanks, I didn't *want* to cry today...
B.B. King
5/5
Gets introduced as "The King of the Blues" and for 35 incredible minutes, he's holding court
Skepta
3/5
I was Skepta-cal but it wasn't actually all that bad. Solid flow, grimey beats, Norf London rudeboy swagger.... until Pharrell Williams turns up?!?!
Beastie Boys
5/5
Absolute chaotic energy where the sum of its parts shouldn't work, but it all comes together and makes absolute magic, and it's not even a top 3 Beasties album...
Kick it over here baby pop, and let all the fly skimmies feel the beat.... drrrrrrooooopppppp!
The Beach Boys
5/5
I mean, it was the greatest album in the world for a year and 10 days until The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper. This isn't just peak Brian Wilson, or peak Beach Boys, it was peak pop rock and has only gotten better with age.
Serge Gainsbourg
3/5
*Takes a long draw of a Gauloises cigarette*
It is, how you say, a tale as old as time... An older man seducing and deflowering a young teenage girl after running her down in his car.
But this one has at least some badass basslines and funky riffs.
Country Joe & The Fish
2/5
Basic blues style guitar pickings and psychedelic organ vibes, is this enough? I mean, it's all perfectly serviceable, but nothing rises above the mid feeling. I feel like its only here because its the spearhead of the San Francisco scene.
Its also another album that takes stereoscopic sound to its extremes, gotta love the 60s for that, but I, for one, am glad it died down...
Nitin Sawhney
2/5
Pseudo-deep spiritually intellectual/symbolic lyrics over painfully bland late 90s/end of the millennium beats with a snippet of Oppenheimer (the guy, not the movie) as the chaser. Blah.
American Music Club
2/5
Wasn't on Spotify, so had to hunt it down on YouTube (not even YouTube Music), and kinda wish I hadn't, its pretty mid despite its inherent jangly-ness.
Joan Baez
4/5
Absolute tranquility, Joan has that sweet sweet voice that just carries you away. And like most late 50s/early 60s debut albums, its all covers of traditional songs, but she makes each one her own with just her voice and her guitar, the way folk music should be.
The 13th Floor Elevators
4/5
Said it before, but "psychedelic" [genre] is apparently the way to my heart, and this debut album by the band that pretty much coined the psychedelic rock phrase opens up with a great number in "You're Gonna Miss Me" that hits every note I was looking for.
Cocteau Twins
4/5
Finally I get to fix the egregious error I made in my last Cocteau Twins album review...
As someone who used to live in Grangemouth, Cocteau Twins are the biggest thing ever to come out of that town apart from refined petrochemicals and the **M9** motorway in either direction....
Leonard Cohen
3/5
His voice hadn't turned as gravelly as it would on his later albums, and the music sounds at least partially uplifting which goes again his later work also, but the lyrics are still dark as fuck.
Minor Threat
3/5
I've seen the storyline played out so many times before. Oh, that goes in there, then that goes in there, then that goes in there, then that goes in there... And then it's over.
Oh, what a hell of a show, but what I want to know, what exactly do you do for an encore?' Cause this is hardcore
LL Cool J
3/5
Corny? Maybe. But LL has always been in the same lane as, say, Will Smith. A fairly radio friendly east coast rapper who can mix corny shit/comedy in with fire (for the time) bars.
Trackwise, the title song still goes hard 35 years later... 'Cos he's fronting in his ride and his word is bond.
The Damned
4/5
A violent series of short, sharp shocks that adds up to a strangely fun listen.
Gene Clark
2/5
The Byrds post David Crosby were already as bland as psychedelic music can be, and Gene was the most bland member of the band.
The audio equivalent of watching beige paint dry
Super Furry Animals
2/5
I didn't like Super Furry Animals back in 1996 and I don't like them in 2025...
Don McLean
3/5
"American Pie" is a phenomenal song, "Vincent" is a great song, "Winterwood" is passable... The rest? We'll, its there.
The Sugarcubes
3/5
Bjork doing Bjork things, my ex-wife loved The Sugarcubes and Bjork so I'd heard this once or twice before, luckily the intervening 15 years hasn't tainted it in my mind. "Birthday" remains the highlight.
The Isley Brothers
5/5
All time classics, how many times has songs like "That Lady" been sampled? I can think of Beastie Boys and Kendrick Lamar just off the top of my head. And that not even getting into "Listen To The Music" and their cover of "Summer Breeze"
Richard Thompson
4/5
Nice start to a monday morning, even if its closing in on me. Charming, but not overly so. Someone described it as sounding like Neutral Milk Hotel and that's spot on, just the instrumental choices and the cadence are very Jeff Mangum.
Run-D.M.C.
4/5
This is bad, not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good...
Mekons
2/5
The Mekon was the arch-enemy of Dan Dare, The Mekons are the arch enemy of people with musical taste.
Spiritualized
3/5
Shoegazing from approximately 250 miles above the Earth.
ABBA
3/5
ABBA goes dark, moody synths are the order of the day here. Breaking free of the hyper pop 70s era, they're firmly in the 80s gloom here, and it would be their last album for a while.
Led Zeppelin
5/5
One of the greatest albums ever committed to tape, easiest 5, there's zero argument to be had...
But "Stairway to Heaven" is a glorified fingering exercise, and you all know it!
Fever Ray
4/5
Good stuff if you like that Scandinavian beat ala The Knife (of which Karin is half of) and Royksopp and Bjork. Just wild out there sounds and lyrics but it all gels together nicely...
The Chemical Brothers
3/5
I don't care what you say, "Block Rocking Beats" still hits hard. Their next album would eclipse this but mid 90s Glastonbury dance tent music still gets me going.
David Bowie
3/5
I didn't want to cry today, but here we are. The literal end of the line for Bowie, his star finally waned, and this album is bittersweet to the end. It's not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but it's moving, deeply moving.
Television
4/5
Like listening to Post Punk merging into Indie Rock before your very ears
Led Zeppelin
4/5
Not fair, I had IV 5 days ago and going back in time only makes it look weak by comparison, don't get me wrong, on a regular day this would be stellar but... But we got "Whole Lotta Love", "Moby Dick" and "Ramble On" here. so that's Robert Plant sex noises, John Bonham's drums, and dirty rock and roll covered top to bottom.
Jane's Addiction
3/5
The bridge between 80s rock excess and 90s alternative, what was and what would come. "Jane Says" gets all the attention, but "Mountain Song" is the real one here.
Ananda Shankar
3/5
Starts out with a bonkers psychedelic sitar cover of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and doesn't let you go from there, It even throws in another cover, this time The Doors' "Light My Fire" and you're all like, "WHAT THE FUCK Y'ALL?!?!?", properly questioning which timeline you slipped into...
Lou Reed
3/5
Before Iggy Pop and David Bowie went to Berlin to clean up their heroin and cocaine habits, Lou Reed produced this, a story of a prostitute and a smackhead (not autobiographical was it Lou?) in Berlin getting fucked up and doing all the fucked up things that ends in ones suicide.
Fun for all the family....
Def Leppard
4/5
Probably the peak of 80s metal excess, an album that took 3 years to make, produced more hit singles than some bands can claim in a career, and the drummer lost an arm and still played on while one of the guitarists was slowly drinking himself to death....
Queen Latifah
3/5
Honestly, its got solid beats, solid flow, solid bars. And it sounds very much like hip hop in 1989 and feels like Fresh Prince with a tinge of Public Enemy.
Holger Czukay
3/5
The soundtrack to a movie that was shown once, at noon, at some local indie movie theater, in one auditorium rented by the producers for tax and distribution purposes. Weird and delightful...
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
5/5
Improves upon the CSN debut in nearly every way, and the addition of Neil Young is inspired, and "Our House" never fails to make me tear up
Gary Numan
3/5
Music, if all humanity was stripped away from the music. But without Gary, we'd never have the likes of Thomas Dolby, so....
The Byrds
3/5
Oh great, *another* Byrds album (3 down, 2 to go)... This time they go alt country with Gram Parsons on board, and it’s kinda cool?
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
3/5
The singles are cool, like "American Girl" has that timeless introduction that just builds and builds, and "Breakdown" is a cool jam, the rest is just kinda there.
Bob Dylan
4/5
Not the best Dylan has ever done, but not the worst either... Has a couple of genuinely great songs in "Not Dead Yet" and "Make You Feel My Love" with the latter I had heard before covered by many other artists like Adele, Garth Brooks, and Billy Joel.
Its an enjoyable return to form for Dylan after the 80s and most of the 90s were lost times.
Japan
3/5
An album that spawned many bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet and basically gave us 80s music in the late 70s... And for that it must be tried for its crimes against humanity.
Metallica
3/5
Where's the bass???
The xx
2/5
There is definitely a line where modern music just become unenjoyable, and while I try to remain enlightened and open minded, these kinds of mid millennial bats over mumbly lyrics just does not resonate with me (also looking at you LCD Soundsystem)
Small Faces
2/5
60s rock and concept albums, man... Why? The band would go on a near 10 year hiatus after this so it doesn't really bode well, does it?
So this led to 3/4 of the band joining Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood for some seriously dirty rock and roll via the Faces band, so not all bad.
T. Rex
4/5
The prototype of Glam Rock, mostly, I mean "Bang A Gong" and maybe "Jeepster", a lot of it is still like their early folky stuff. But its a pleasant listen.
Muddy Waters
5/5
An actual goddamn delight, open with the quintessential blues song "Mannish Boy" and the smile will never leave your face. The hoochie-coochie Chicago blues bars, Johnny Winter hollering in the background like a maniac, the tight band, the fact it was recorded as is in, like, a couple of days, its just so raw...
This is that sauce. This is the shit.
Paul McCartney
4/5
McCartney and only McCartney (with a little Linda), recorded at home, and plays like it's being recorded in your living room. Contains "Maybe I'm Amazed" and thats still a great song.
4/5
I didn't like this almost 20 years ago when it came out, it just didn't click with me but I still liked "Supermassive Black Hole" but re-stumbling upon it about 15 years ago made me like it, I could put it on and there would be no skips. But then I stopped again and now it's nice to come back to but it might be the zenith of Muse, pretentious lyrics and guitar wankery goes hard here...
That said, "Exo-Politics" rocks, even with the conspiracy shit...
Björk
2/5
There came a point after her first 3 or so albums that I just couldn't take the out-there-ness of Bjork going avante-garde that everything just became an unenjoyable listen, and, sadly, this is a continuing trend...
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
3/5
You really need to be in a certain mindspace for a Nick Cave double album, otherwise the side effects can be jarring.
Dead Kennedys
4/5
With refrains like "kill kill kill kill kill the poor" and "economy is looking bad, let's start a war / fan the fires of racist hatred, we want total war", just shows that time is a flat circle. What big business wants, big business gets...
Face kicking punk for you fuckers
Depeche Mode
4/5
Occupying the space between their 80s synth Some Great Reward and Black Celebration days and their 90s dirty gothy alt rock Violator and Songs of Faith and Devotion days, not quite a smooth segue but you can tell the shift is happening. Dave Gahan stalks broodily over each song, just a menacing figure in the shadows...
Sly & The Family Stone
4/5
The dark side of the funk, but thank you for letting me be myself, again...
Tim Buckley
2/5
Not Happy Sad, just Sad Sad, Tim's too busy elongating every word in "Strange Feelin'" to realise this album of a mere 6 songs overstays its welcome by about 20 minutes.
U2
4/5
This was my real introduction to U2, 80s U2 had been my dad's U2 and the initial sound of "Zoo Station" had forever changed that, the building industrial growl, the distorted guitar sending shockwaves through you, the distorted vocals making Bono sound like he's smoking 2 packs of superkings a day. The rest of the album veers around the landscape wildly with a great run of "Zoo Station", "Even Better Than The Real Thing", "One", "Until The End Of The World", and "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" on side 1, side 2 is a little weaker but I'll hold "Ultraviolet (Light My Way)" over anything by most other bands.
Gotan Project
3/5
Soundtrack to the speedboat ride from Monaco to Cannes, watching the Côte d'Azur drift past as you head towards the setting sun
Johnny Cash
5/5
Performing a song about murdering a man in Reno to the wild applause of actual convicted murderers. Thats dark, dark as the dungeon that held them...
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
3/5
By and By Lord, By and By...
Public Enemy
5/5
1989 the number, another summer, sound of the funky drummer... Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me.
Chuck D and crew deliver a mad album, a ratcheting, seemingly endless series of bangers that builds towards to absolute peak with the final track, "Fight The Power"
Welcome to the Terrordome, bitch!
The Byrds
3/5
The whiplash of going from Public Enemy ending Fear Of A Black Planet with "Fight The Power" to The Byrds opening this with a jangly "Mr. Tambourine Man" was jarring. Anyway, The Byrds do a lot of Dylan for their first album, is it that great? good? passable?
Meh...
It's only saving grace is its punchy play time, 18 songs in 44 minutes, a lot of bang for your buck.
Funny fact, "The Bells Of Rhymney" came up as "Hey Jealousy" by The Gin Blossoms on my phones ambient "now playing" display
Linkin Park
4/5
It starts with one thing... Nu Metal hasn't aged well, Linkin Park (2000–2017) moved beyond it with every subsequent release, so how does one accurately review this? 21 year old me LOVED THE SHIT out of this back in the day, but 21 year old me LOVED THE SHIT out of Limp Bizkit too, 46 year old me tried to listen to this through that modern day prism and found myself almost angry at myself for doing so. I was reminded of all the derogatory "nu metal boy band" reviews this album got on release, and apparently still get on this site, when people should be celebrating the band no one thought would amount to shit overcoming record label odds and selling 16M copies of their debut album... No one does that anymore, and it was only 25 years ago.
But in the end, it doesn't really matter... The band we know died with Chester Bennington, and the greatness they deserved was only really bestowed posthumously. This isn't their best work, but this is a great album.
Robbie Williams
2/5
Never thought I'd see a Robbie Williams album here, especially this one, it's just so painfully dull outside of 1 to 2 ok songs ("Angels" (which doesn't seem as good some 18 years later) and "Let Me Entertain You" which is probably and alright party starter)... Everything else is bottom of the barrel musically and lyrically (outside of his dated line about being clean with Charlie Sheen)
Would he get better? Debatable....
The Young Rascals
2/5
Is every album from the 60s in here or something? Terminally dull with no redeeming qualities
Def Leppard
4/5
Glam Metal/Hair Metal, whatever you want to call it, it started here, 100% 80s excess and power chords and the word rock really means fuck...
Beatles
3/5
Beatles at their best? No. Beatles at their most industrious? Maybe... 14 songs, 6 covers, 2 LPs in under a year as was the typical fare of early 60s music. The covers are tights, especially the cover of the Marvelettes' "Please Mr. Postman", the original songs are serviceable with "All My Loving" being the obvious peak but it's obvious when that and that alone tends to appear on any greatest hit compilation album...
Ali Farka Touré
3/5
Starts out interesting, different, but after the first 4 or 5 songs it becomes fairly repetitive, theres only so many times you can reuse that afrobeat bassline...
The Who
2/5
Not the best The Who have ever done, close to the worst to be honest, but "I Can See For Miles" remains a tune...
The Adverts
2/5
Never heard of this band before and 3 songs in I'm just not feeling it, its like it wants to be punk, with a hint of new wave... But doesn't really succeed at either.
The Velvet Underground
4/5
Would Sir care for a starter of some garlic bread perhaps?
No, thank you. I will proceed directly to the intravenous injection of hard drugs, please.
"Sunday Morning" is a light opening bop before you hit the harshness of "Venus In Furs" and "Heroin"
Kraftwerk
5/5
I feel that one day in the early 90s a couple of french DJs stumbled upon this album and decided to crib its entire aesthetic and thus Daft Punk were born. Proto-roborock never sounded so good or so human.
Madness
2/5
Argh, Madness, as a child in the UK in the 80s, this name is enough to elicit a primal reaction. It wasn't cool then, it's not cool now, and "Our House" is a poor cover of the CSNY classic, doesn't even use the same words or tempo...
Air
4/5
A good album that's absolutely front loaded with memorable songs, starting with "La Femme D'argent", "Sexy Boy", "All I Need", and "Kelly Watch The Stars" is definitely a way to hook any unsuspecting listener. Then it just settles in for a breezy yet cozy back half.
Stevie Wonder
5/5
Stevie got the funky soul here, electric pianos and clavinets in full effect, "Too High" is a deceptively upbeat groove about drug usage, and the whiplash of the *HARD* R N word during the interlude of the hard "Living For The City" compared to the almost joyous infection in "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing".
"Higher Ground" remains the highlight, a worthy addition to his greatest hits collection.
The Charlatans
4/5
I'm of the age where I could appreciate The Charlatans when they broke out, they're a tidy band, neither too flashy or underperforming, but there's no world where this album is in a list of albums you must listen too. You could give me the entire paper content of an office supply store and I still wouldn't get to this album on that list. Theres enjoyable stuff on here but its not even cracking any "best of 1997" top 10, it's not even their best album (that would be the following Us And Us Only album), it's not even their best "classic Rob Collins era" album (that would be the preceding eponymous The Charlatans album)... I can only assume it's here because it was their most commercially successful album (300,000 sold in the UK vs. their usual 100,000) and, honestly, a lot of that was attributed to the passing of Rob Collins the year prior and a hot set at Oasis' Knebworth shows. Can't blame them for riding that wave.
Long way to say I do enjoy this album, its just not an all time album...
Dexys Midnight Runners
2/5
Based on album covers and aesthetics and the success from the days of "Come On Eileen" to this alone, they went from rags to riches, outhouse to the penthouse, and still produced a steaming pile of shit so bad the band imploded for the best part of 25 years... and absolutely nothing of value was lost.
Mike Oldfield
3/5
Prog Rock probably peaked here (sorry Rush fans), the into was cool since they used it in The Exorcist and anyone born in the UK from the 1970s onward heard that musical motif at least 100,000 times in their life without realising it. Ended with a sea chanty style variation of the Sailor's Hornpipe, wasn't expecting that, but over 45 minutes this album took me to a lot of unexpected places.
John Prine
3/5
54 years later and "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore" still rings true...
Pretenders
4/5
Is it late stage Punk or early stage New Wave? Chrissie Hynde isn't here to be pigeonholed by the likes of me... "Brass In Pocket" is the standout/radio friendly bop, but there a lot to love in here if Pop Punk is your shit.
Stephen Stills
2/5
Urgh, a double album by the most annoying member of The Byrds? Oh wait, its by his other band Manassas but he's such a fragile ego it gets billed as him only....
Too long, too rambling, too indulgent, too little drugs (on my side) and, simultaneously, too many drugs (on their side)
The Sabres Of Paradise
1/5
Stupendously bad, so bad you'll be wishing that straight razor on the album cover was in your hands instead
Jethro Tull
4/5
I was ready to dismiss this as "Aqualung" and 10 songs of filler but noooo, this is good shit if you can get past the flute slos
Bob Dylan
3/5
Less traditional folksy-ness and more 12 bar blues, and he's better for it... He's not at the Bringing It All Back Home or Highway 61 Revisited level, but he's coming up strong.
Norah Jones
3/5
Fairly breezy poppy jazzy stuff, I remember this feeling like a slow burning yet ubiquitous album when it came out, it would eventually sell millions upon millions of copies and win Grammys for Album of the Year and Record of the Year so of course there has to be some weird retroactive backlash... I mean, it's not going to set the world on fire, but for 45 minutes Norah does take you away.
The Roots
3/5
The Roots go off, tight as all hell while still reeling off multiple 6 to 10 minute long jams, and scoring a monster single in "The Seed (2.0)" along the way. But don't sleep on the rest of the album, you got a hot Talib Kweli collaboration here in "Rolling With Heat", and Black Thought shows off and out on "Thought @ Work", and an interpolation of a Swing Out Sister song on the excellent "Quills", this has everything!
The Byrds
4/5
*Gasp* an actually good Byrds album... and its the final one I got, this is all that good mid-to-late 60s shit before it all went off the rails and into cocaine mountain
Creedence Clearwater Revival
4/5
2nd of 3 killer album they released in 1969 alone, it has "Green River", "Bad Moon Rising", and "Lodi" and all that and more coming in at under 30 minutes is a feat of unbelievable tightness.
The Smiths
3/5
Morrissey is a twat. Now thats out the way, this is a good album musically, Johnny Marr is inspired and the rhythm section of Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce are tight, but Morrissey is still a twat...
The Cure
5/5
Dark and brooding goth vibes but so very accessible, banger songs like "Plainsong", "Pictures Of You", "Lovesong", and "Lullaby"... Probably the peak of The Cure powers as this album cured (pause for irony) Ray's overly sarcastic tone and spontaneously made him speak perfect Flemish. But a chance meeting with Robert Smith lead to another personal disaster...
2025 and I'm still quoting Mary Whitehouse Experience sketches from 33 years ago...
Ute Lemper
2/5
This album is probably OK to use as background music, but nothing really stood out and time passed by very easily. Maybe that's the best use for it, for times when you just don't really care what you listen to, since time passes and you aren't really bothering to listen. That said, I probably won't relisten to it...
Crowded House
4/5
You know, sometimes it doesn't get much better than this, after writing a fairly ambivalent review of my previous 2 star album from yesterday, I was greeted with a goddamn delightful Crowded House album... Another band who I had only really heard in Greatest Hits form (the brilliant Recurring Dream album) of which 4 songs came from here, so getting into the Neil & Tim Finn deep cuts is a great way to start a day.
Dwight Yoakam
2/5
I've heard of Dwight Yoakam but never really heard anything by Dwight Yoakam... Country music is a hit or miss genre, this feels more like the stereotypical pure twangy country, all songs about a lonely man, who's woman done him wrong and/or up and left him because of all his drinking and partying at the honkytonk. So he sets about drinking and partying his problems away at the aforementioned honkytonk, but on the way his truck breaks down and his dog up and dies so he decides to maybe do a little murderin' on the side...
Therapy wasn't invented yet in 1988 apparently.
Led Zeppelin
4/5
Starts with the hard hitting "Immigrant Song" and doesn't really rise back to that level, "Since You've Been Gone" and "Gallows Pole" are signs of life on an otherwise off album for this band.
The Divine Comedy
2/5
Never rated The Divine Comedy, never my taste, and this just reinforces that belief
Abdullah Ibrahim
3/5
Wasn't sure what to expect, but this is straight up jazz, like stereotypical jazz... like born in a laboratory, pure jazz distilled into a palatable mix.
Peter Gabriel
4/5
It sounds so obvious now but this is where the gated reverb sound of the 80s Phil Collins (who drummed on this albums first two tracks ("Intruder" and "No Self Control") sans cymbals) and Kate Bush (also appeared on this album, and on "No Self Control" too) sprung from... So you could say it's influential.
Still, Gabriel has always been the experimental type.
Christina Aguilera
3/5
She's got soul, she's got class, she's got style, she's badass...
Mike Ladd
2/5
Basic beats, low level flows, just not hitting on any level.
Mj Cole
1/5
There's a reason this is in the bottom 20 of lowest rated album, its pretty much purely, offensively shite. And the fact this links through to a 2 disc "deluxe" version is even more offensive to me, personally. 2 hours of shit dance beats, twinkly electronic piano pieces, occasional jazzy trumpets, and breathless generic lyrics by repetitive "featured" singers makes for a NOT FUN TIME. WHEN WILL IT END? DID I HAVE REPEAT ON BY ACCIDENT AND IT'S LOOPED BACK AROUND? I'M ABOUT TO GOOGLE "HOW TO TIE A NOOSE".
I'd give this 0 if I could, just strap the master recording to a rocket and blast it into the heart of the sun, rid us of this monstrosity... And I mean that, sincerely.
Beach House
4/5
Playing Tame Impala music before Tame Impala was Tame Impala...
Bonnie Raitt
2/5
Bonnie Raitt is a wonderful musician, I adore her follow up to this album, Luck Of The Draw, which is a 4.5 to 5 star album on any given day, but this... I *know* it won the Grammy for Album of the Year, I *know* its preserved in the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" but... I just don't hear it....
Its fairly bland, nothing stood out, it was a passable time and I was never compelled to hit skip or stop, but I just don't hear what's so good about this.
Michael Kiwanuka
4/5
This is the good shit that I'm glad this endeavour makes me listen to, a genre bending tour de force that I never knew existed.
Bill Callahan
3/5
Earnest folksy country, almost spoken word poetry put to music
Les Rythmes Digitales
2/5
Basic stock electro beats and echoey processed vocals does not equal good.
OutKast
5/5
Bonafide classic and still the best rap album of this century, Outkast at the absolute peak of their powers, putting a little stank on ya.
The Verve
3/5
Much like my review of The Charlatans Tellin' Stories from a few weeks ago...
I'm of the age where I could appreciate The Verve when they broke out, they're a tidy band, neither too flashy nor underperforming and were more infamous with their never ending in-fighting and breaking up every other week and Richard Ashcroft properly hating Nick McCabe, but there's no world where this album is in a list of albums you must listen too. You could give me the entire paper content of an office supply store and I still wouldn't get to this album on that list. There's enjoyable stuff on here but it's only cracking the "best of 1997" top 10 lists of old british music rag journalists who wanked themselves blind over any band that knew three chords and could pull an unlikely hit out their arse (looking at you NME & Q).
I mean, 1997 gave us great albums from Radiohead, Blur, Ben Folds Five, Notorious BIG, Foo Fighters, The Prodigy, Missy Elliott, Elliott Smith, Marcy Playground, Sneaker Pimps (those last three being released on the same day), Oasis, and Portishead, then even lower level UK guitar music scene stuff like aforementioned The Charlatans, Stereophonics, Cornershop, Robbie Williams, Ocean Colour Scene. And these were all released either before or the same day as this.
"Bittersweet Symphony" is the stand out but it's long since been played out, and the whole album is overly long and wrought with the notion that length somehow equals epicness and endless lovelorn ballads is what the people wanted. Yeah, there's love if you want it, but it literally didn't need no sonnet.
Korn
2/5
Nu Metal really doesn't stand the test of time, and under the modern gaze a lot of this is downright reprehensible. I was never a Korn fan, so I didn't come in here with the cloud of youthful nostalgia, but this just didn't sit right with me at all... Lots of stuff to talk to my therapist about though.
Faith No More
3/5
"Epic" is epic, rocks for the most part, but after a hard cover of "War Pigs" it ends on an almost jazzy loungey number in "Edge Of The World", It's then you realise the whole thing is a jumbled mess of contradictions and a better run order would have made it a lot more listenable
Wilco
3/5
What's with these mid mid-90s alt/indie albums with a proclivity for going long lately? I had The Verve's Urban Hymns the other day and that too suffered from way too much length, these guys need better producers and editors to make them cut this shit down, not everything needs to fill every second on a.CD, and it definitely doesn't need to be a double album. I mean, if you have multiple 6:00+ songs on your album, the problem isn't the listeners attention span, the problem is you Jeff Tweedy, it's you...
The Fall
4/5
Mark E. Smith doing Mark E. Smith things... but this time it's weirdly accessible.
ZZ Top
4/5
45 minutes of hard driving Blues infused Texas rock that never overstays its welcome, good to great as this genre would be added on to by others, but you can't dispute its groove.
Nanci Griffith
4/5
Contemporary Folksy Country, not Country and Western... Just great singer/songwriter vibes that could have been transplanted from Laurel Canyon in the late 60s.
Hüsker Dü
2/5
You can tell this band influenced Pixies and in turn the whole grunge explosion, but as much as i love those bands, this was a hard listen... Super long, very disorganised, and the good stuff is few and far between
3/5
Happy, breezy New Wave goodness, just quirky enough to make you smile. The unhinged cover of the Stones' "Satisfaction" remains the highlight for me.
4/5
Nothing entirely memorable along the lines of a "Waterloo Sunset" or "Lola", but the whole album flowed together nicely, great compositions, great harmonies, and Ray Davies is just a great songwriter
Portishead
5/5
Portishead took 10 years between their last release and this and there's always a fear that a prolonged hiatus would ruin the bands chemistry.... but no, this is a swirling, brooding, bleak, anxiety ridden masterpiece.
Weather Report
2/5
Jazzy sound of that particular era, probably fueled a thousand late 70s/early 80s dinner parties where people schmoozed, did cocaine, shared partners, and laughed about new fangled things like how do they set the clock on the VCR?
Peter Tosh
3/5
Repetitive? A little, but its a solid groove beloved by teenage stoners since it came out. Pair this with Black Sunday by Cypress Hill and you'll become radicalized against the War on Drugs in no time, let it in, boy! That's freedom calling! Let it in! Let it run! Let it run wild!
Michael Jackson
5/5
Not as good as Thriller, but that's like saying Rubber Soul or The White Album wasn't as good as Sgt. Pepper... You've already released the quintessential 1980s all time best selling monster record, how do you follow that up? Just casually make the 12th biggest selling album of all time I guess, make it have 11 songs and release 7 as singles and have 5 go to number 1 in the charts, make the "Bad" video be an 18 minute long short directed by Martin Scorsese? Sounds like a plan, be sure to throw in a world tour that seemingly never ended, play to 500k paying people over 7 nights at Wembley Stadium? Oh go on then...
Elbow
4/5
Not as rocky as Muse, but unmistakable cut from the same cloth. I mean you can hear it in songs like "The Bones Of You", just the melody and cadence are the practically same as Muse's Black Holes & Revelations era... Enjoyed the hell out of this with "One Day Like This" being the highlight
Ms. Dynamite
2/5
Another one from the early 2000s who was anointed the future of British music and promptly disappeared just as quickly as they arrived, one good song ("Dy-Na-Mi-Tee"), one ok-ish album (this one), one long break in between albums and then discovered music had passed her by and basically retired.... yet somehow she got an MBE some 16 years later for services to music.
Roxy Music
2/5
Not the Bryan Ferry of "Let's Stick Together" or "Slave To Love" nor the Roxy Music of "Love Is The Drug" that I was used to, this is quite out there by comparison. Much warbling from Ferry, like a bad Elvis impression at times, and Brian Eno doing Brian Eno things on the synths. But it's unsure what it wants to be, part glam, part prog, part punk...
The Modern Lovers
2/5
What if Jim Morrison was from Boston and lived despite his drinking, and The Doors stayed around long enough to become punky?
Kelela
3/5
Repetitive, kinda, as song seemingly blend from one to the other if you're not paying attention. Feels like it's going for a Janet Jackson vibe so that's ok, but I had enough by "Enough"...
Marilyn Manson
2/5
Didn't like it in 1996, didn't like Marilyn Manson either... Still dont.
Dr. John
4/5
Slow intro with "Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya" and the elongated drawl of Dr. John calling himself "The Night Tripper", then shit gets crazy, scary, spooky, hilarious... "Walk On Gilded Splinters" is a strong closer, though I had only ever heard the Paul Weller cover before.
Fred Neil
3/5
Someone made the conscious decision to tremolo all the things, and for that they deserve their judgement day.
Steve Earle
3/5
Well, I heard Steve Earle had lots of wives / About as many as cats have lives / Met him on his records and we're good friends.
He writes a song for everyone / They fall in love and before it's done / He writes an even better one when it ends
Liz Phair
4/5
Liz wants to be your blowjob queen and fuck you till your dick turns blue but she is absolutely not here for your shit.
Sam Cooke
4/5
What live albums should be, a window into the party some people had, no wasted time, no excessive banter, no encore. Enough to make you move, and wish you were there.
Chicago
3/5
Imagine having the chutzpah to make your debut album a double album, imagine making it be so soft rock it's practically malleable wet clay, imagine having a 7 minute guitar solo as song for no reason... That's the Chicago way!
The Band
4/5
The birth of Americana, taking rock, blues, folk, R&B, soul, country, and swirling it all together in a pot. Everyone comes together and gets their chance to shine, nothing is wasted.
"Tears Of Rage" and "The Weight" stand out, but don't sleep on "Caledonia Mission" and "This Wheels On Fire"
Pixies
3/5
Yeah, you just gave birth to grunge with Doolittle and toured relentlessly (for good or for bad) and become huge in the UK and Europe, but what have you done lately and, most importantly, how do you follow that? Pixies are, unfortunately, on the downward spiral here, its just beginning but the vibes are most definitely off.
"Velouria" is a great song, perhaps my favourite Pixies song on any given day, but the rest is middling at best and tensions are rife.
Peter Gabriel
4/5
So... I've already had I (Car) and III (Melt) and after a decade of experimental art pop, Gabriel seemingly says "fuck it, how about some dirty commercialism instead?". So... it produced monster single with an even bigger monster of an MTV video in "Sledgehammer" but I adore "In Your Eyes" and "Big Time" also, mainly the latter because it sounds like it was ripped from the Talking Heads.
So what? So 80s.
The United States Of America
3/5
A PROPER psychedelic freakout
Primal Scream
4/5
It's 1997, Britpop was sweeping the nation and old men Primal Scream are still in their twisted psychedelic phase making an alternative soundtrack to a movie no one really remembered. A dark road trip with a bleak ending...
There goes the challenger being chased by the blue, blue meanies on wheels. The vicious traffic squad cars are after our lone driver. The last American hero, the electric centaur, the demi-God. The super driver of the golden west...
Stevie Wonder
4/5
The funky clavinet in "Superstition" is god tier, the whole song is god tier... A song so good he performed it on god damn Sesame Street (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ul7X5js1vE) and went tour with the Rolling Stones. But, most importantly, he finally shed the "Little Stevie Wonder" era off and became a serious artist, and was launching into a whole new atmosphere.
The Verve
2/5
There's moments during "This Is Music", "On Your Own", and "Drive You Home" where Richard Ashcroft just can't hit or sustain the notes he's looking for, and it's just sad... Sad he'd even attempt it. He seemingly thinks he's a big time singer/frontman with chops and swagger when really he's a warlber of bad teenage poetry (at best) to mediocroe music.
Now, again, I'm of the age where I could appreciate The Verve when they broke out but now I'm merely thinking I had their albums at the time just to have them, because I increasingly don't even like them, I don't even remember if I listened to this one really outwith a couple of songs... They're all so fucking long, like does this album require 3 songs that are over 6 minutes long? Fuck. No. Length does not equal epicness and volume does not ensure quality.
The B-52's
4/5
New Wave Psychedelic Surf is a genre right? This is a whole ass party on a record, everything you need is here
Penguin Cafe Orchestra
4/5
Surprisingly chill and feels like a Spiritualized vibe when it gets really orchestral, but you can tell its got Brian Eno's fingerprints on it
Deerhunter
2/5
It's all been done before by better people, one song sounds like a Sigur Ros ripoff, one sounds like generic indie band sample #8 in GarageBand. It's not bad per se, it's just so bland overall apart from the abrupt ending, that caught me off guard.
Leftfield
3/5
Nowadays this would just be EDM, but streets never forget the days of House music. There's a slew hard trancey bangers here, way too hard and trancey for an average Tuesday morning though....
The Temptations
3/5
Some funk early on, some motown soul later, something for everyone. Their version of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" lags far behind Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight & The Pips and even Creedence Clearwater Revivals versions though.
Goldie
2/5
In fact it's not timeless, it's very much of its time, and that time has long since gone... But it takes balls to release a double album as your first, and have the opening song be 21 minutes long. I was never a fan of the jungle/drum and bass genre before but after 21 minutes of "Inner City Life/Pressure" I'm absolutely still not.
Miles Davis
3/5
Experimental improvisational jazz man, just a bunch of cats sitting about and jamming freeform and exploring riffs endlessly... One piece clocked in at 4 minutes and change and I almost fell over with shock.
Donald Fagen
2/5
Jazzy sound of that particular era, probably fueled a thousand early 80s dinner parties where people schmoozed, did cocaine, shared partners, and laughed about new fangled things like how do they set the clock on the VCR?
Neu!
4/5
Starts off all dreamy ambient stuff in the first half, then "Hero" comes on and jolts you awake and it becomes a whole different album.
Tori Amos
5/5
Much like her eventual contemporaries like Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette, Ani DiFranco, and PJ Harvey (all of whom I adore), Tori Amos came out the gate absolutely fully formed and has only gotten better with age. This album is absolute ass kicking, deeply personal, and thoroughly exquisite all at the same time.
Emmylou Harris
4/5
Just a powerful distinctive voice, and this is real country and really beautiful.
Metallica
4/5
An astonishingly good live album, smashing together the metal and the symphony, perhaps a little too good as each note is perfect... I've seen bands become a little loose with playing songs for the 1000th time but everything is studio quality here. Its almost the uncanny valley of live albums.
Anyways, songs are great, "No Leaf Clover", "Hero Of The Day", and "Nothing Else Matters" are the highlight for me
The Beach Boys
4/5
RIP Brian Wilson, composer of teenage symphonies to god.
TV On The Radio
3/5
Pretty middle of the road really, nothing stood out, nothing excited me, it all blended together into a dull mix.
Peak dirty rock and roll.... Rod Stewart being super fucking sleazy, Ronnie Wood found a fuzz pedal and went into overdrive with crunchy guitar licks everywhere. Ronnie Lane's driving bass filling the space alongside Ian McLagan organs and Kenney Jones drums. Everyone is absolutely on point here and it comes to a, frankly, orgasming crescendo at the end of side 1's "Stay With Me".
Should come with a pack of smokes for afterwards
Billy Bragg
3/5
Billy Bragg goes a little jangly and remains political and the political side is still as relevant today as ever.
Blur
3/5
Blur just can't help themselves, overloaded album with selective good to great songs weighted down by a large number of absolute dross. For every "Girls & Boys" style bangers theres a dull a fuck "Tracy Jacks" chaser but then it's followed up by the likes of "End Of A Century" and "Parklife", maddening really..
It's got nothing to do with your "Vorsprung durch Technik", you know
Siouxsie And The Banshees
3/5
Dark yet spunky post punk rock thats not afraid to try and please the establishment with a kickass cover of "Helter Skelter"...
Air
5/5
Between this and the Tron: Legacy soundtrack by Daft Punk, I'm inclined to let French electronic duos score nearly every movie until the universe grows cold in its heat death rattle. Listen, I don't make the rules, but I'm damn sure going abide by them...
Paul Weller
2/5
A couple of ok to good songs ("Sunflower" and "Wild Wood") and a whole lot of MOR pre-Britpop style rock. I used to like Weller a lot, but I've honestly barely listened to anything by him in 25 years now, it just makes me think as a young and impressionable teen in the days when this came out, maybe I was too easily dazzled?
Supergrass
4/5
A simultaneously underrated and overexposed band who did a shit lot more good stuff than the supremly bouncy "Alright" would suggest. Almost more Punk than Britpop, certainly more so than their contemporaries. Just 100mph in your face fuzzy music here, loved it.
Minutemen
4/5
Minutemen aptly named because this 43 song quadruple album(!) clocks in at a tight 74 minutes, so each song is barely longer than a minute. And while nothing overstays as welcome, it never feels repetitive. It's a fucking wild album straddling the punk and hardcore scenes while moving beyond them.
Aphex Twin
2/5
I remember nearly nothing about it, it was just background noise...
N.E.R.D
3/5
Ah, Pharrell Williams, this is such a capsule to the time people cared about the likes of The Neptunes stepping out from the production desk to become artists in their own right. It's not quite rap, not quite rock, not quite r&b, it's not bad, but I wouldn't listen to it again.
Donovan
3/5
Like mid-60s psychedelic vibes? Sitar and Harpsichord like sounds? Must be "Season Of The Witch" time...
Screaming Trees
2/5
Surprisingly bland, like an open mic night band....
Peter Frampton
3/5
In Frampton's World, first you get the guitar, then you get the talk box, then you get the women...
Beyoncé
2/5
Beyoncé wants you to know how bad she's been, and will continue to be, and how you better give her some serious deep dicking, but she ain't gonna take your buster ass to Red Lobster yet, that come later... after she does...
Kanye West
2/5
This was the point I gave up on Kanye West, I wasn't a fan fan but I like his first few albums, and I remember listening to this the day it got released and promptly never listened to it again until today. It remains as abrasive today as it did then and just gives me a tension headache to listen to it.
Giant Sand
2/5
Not bad per se, just really fucking dull...
John Martyn
2/5
Good lord, another dull album, thats 3 in less than a week now. Its really sapping my desire to continue this project... Anyways, this is 8 songs that seemingly never end, mostly forgettable until the last song "Small Hours"... "Big Muff" was interesting, but died by not having one single ounce of distortion pedal on it... (checks notes) Nevermind, it was about a different kind of Muff.
Beth Orton
4/5
Chill vibes from Beth, breathy ethereal vocals over lush arrangements is the order of the day. Loved this.
Simple Minds
3/5
Catchy radio song like "Promised You A Miracle" and "Glittering Prize" but, like much of the Simple Minds oeuvre, this just never clicked with me. They have that late 70s/early 80s new wave synthy sounds and just can't shake it. Not bad, just not memorable.
Os Mutantes
4/5
Samba and Bossa Nova tinged Psychedelic Rock? Hell yeah!
Roxy Music
3/5
A little bit Arty? A little bit Jazzy? Progy? Glamy? Rocky? All of the above? Very eclectic.
Clearly Roxy Music were just trying to find their footing here, throwing ideas at the wall to see what would stick, weirdly ahead of its time... A bouncy delight overall.
Jamiroquai
2/5
The walking contradiction that is Jay Kay, absolutely cribbing on natives and black mans music despite being whiter than milk, and playing lyrical themes against corporate greed and pro environmentalism.... but then he made a shit ton of money and blew it on gas guzzling super cars.
New York Dolls
4/5
Classic punk rock, gritty songs by a band that can barely play, you can hear the influence they had on bands in the mid to late 70s and even into the 80s. Your favourite bands favorite band...
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
2/5
Absolute gratuitous prog rock wankery and its a live album too so it just feels endless and the crowd are eating it up as they cheer so loud at the beginning when they announce what they are about to do... It insists upon itself.
Rod Stewart
5/5
I had Faces A Nod Is As Good As A Wink... To A Blind Horse not too long ago, and this is in the same vein since they were released a mere 6 months apart, it's basically a Faces album in everything but name. Rod and Ronnie Wood are the magic makers here as the voice and guitar propels this forward at a generous pace, even the slower songs.
Rod may have become a self contained crooner of old songs who hasn't had a hit record of any relevance since 1993, the younger Rod was a force to be reckoned with, between Jeff Beck Group, Faces, and his solo career, he had all time bangers by the boatload.
David Gray
3/5
I was more than prepared to write this off as turn of the millennium angst guitar based over mid beats rubbish (and it mostly is....) but then "This Year's Love" came on and I forgot how fucking beautiful that song is. David Gray has one song like this in each of his albums I've listened to, for example "Be Mine" on A New Day At Midnight and "Full Steam" on Draw The Line, just a beautiful ballad that hits the feels just right (or wrong) and makes you forget how the most of the album is contrived pap.
Then he gets you with "Sail Away" and you're gone, damn this troubled introspective troubadour playing with my emotions...
I had to follow this up with some Damien Rice, I'm not doing well babes....
My Bloody Valentine
4/5
Well, its My Bloody Valentine, so its layers of distortion, so many layers of distortion... I did appreciate the endless drone in Loveless, and I can appreciate the endless drone in this too, but its really not for everyone. My Bloody Valentine isn't what you would call an accessible band.
Paul McCartney and Wings
3/5
A few decent songs in "Band On The Run" and "Jet" but mostly an inoffensive forgettable experience.
The Mothers Of Invention
3/5
Weird, incohesive, bonkers, yet entertaining.
Teenage Fanclub
4/5
That sweet spot between late 80s jangle pop and alternative rock, early 90s shoegaze and british indie, and the forefathers of what would become Britpop.
Steve Winwood
2/5
An 80s era Steve Winwood album that has no bangers like "Valerie" or "Higher Love". No thanks... He was not back in the high life yet and he got no friends in the low places.
Jazmine Sullivan
3/5
Not as bad as some of the reviews suggested, and I remain skeptical when fairly recent albums appear on this list. So, is this an essential album? Assuredly not, but that doesn't mean it's not worth a listen...
Rocket From The Crypt
4/5
Mid-90s Punk-ish stylings, and I really enjoyed it. I remembered the "On A Rope" song after it was a surprising hit in the UK 30 odd years ago and the rest of the album was a similar delight.
The Jam
4/5
A strange one, like no stand out songs, but the whole thing is a carefully curated journey into the post punk new-ish wave world. The band are tight and Paul Weller is inspired, a nice time.
Eels
3/5
Eels, and E in the royal sense, are a hard act to label, evey album has one absolute banger (sometimes more) that just rocks you to your core and then the rest is fucking eclectic as all hell. "Novocaine For The Soul" remains a mid-90s anthem though.
Youssou N'Dour
4/5
Love the Afrobeat like vibes, just serene chilled music for a lazy lunchtime in the sun.
Brian Eno
3/5
The precursor to Bowie in Berlin, and Talking Heads beginnings, and, I guess, the better part of U2's discography... and it's pretty wild and weird and amazing and dull and everything all at once. I mean it opens with Phil Collins on drums and John Cale absolutely abusing a viola...
The Crusaders
2/5
Some say this is just generic elevator/call hold music, I say it's more like the music The Weather Channel used for Weather on the 1s, todays high will be 94° with a 6mph wind coming from the north
Wilco
4/5
You had to be there in the early 2000s indie scene, days where Jeff Tweedy, Conor Oberst, Matt Ward, Ben Gibbard, and Jenny Lewis and their assorted band just fucking ruled, they were pumping out classic albums like we breathe and blink everyday. Earnest troubadours here to soundtrack your twee life... Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is probably the pinnacle of those days, bands would eventually sell out from their indie label and join the massive conglomerates and eventually become the mainstream.
Black Sabbath
3/5
I'm now used to the "In Memoriam album choice" 1001 gives us, RIP Ozzy, you wild weirdo, went out raising 200m for charity after living a life some consider a myth.
As for this album, puts the heavy in heavy metal, another kick in the face to the hippy music scene of the 60s, that was dead and was never coming back because heavy riffs, heavy drums, and heavy singing was the only way through the gift shop towards the exit.
Depeche Mode
5/5
Just a masterpiece of pre-grunge alternative electronic music,dark and dirty as all hell, mean and moody as fuck. There's a underlying menace in this that you can't quite put your finger on, and it turned out to be Dave Gahan's heroin addiction.
Zero skips on this album, but "Personal Jesus", "Enjoy The Silence", and "Policy Of Truth" are top tier bangers. Just can't get enough...
Pentangle
3/5
Folk Music as its meant to be, as in Ye Olde Folk Tune for Thine Soul... They getting Medieval on your ass here.
Sabu
4/5
Afro-Cuban percussion vibes, very energetic, I dug it
10cc
2/5
Absolute drivel from "The Worst Band In The World"
Nick Drake
5/5
Ethereal, sad, troubadour folk music perfection. Nick Drake really was built differently, this is everything Cat Stevens wished he could be, instead Drake makes it all sound so effortless.
Heaven 17
2/5
Heaven 17 have that one good song, "Temptation", that is not on this album though... Excuse me, I just to go listen to that, so good.
Anyways, this is an album you need to hear before you die? Well I guess I can stop doing chemo now, I'm done with life because of this album, its that bad.
Dizzee Rascal
4/5
G'wan roodboi! Taking the most basic beats I might have ever come across and turning them into actual alchemy gold with some of the most unintelligible lyrical flow i've heard... Just a rascal, a dizzy rascal....
Marvin Gaye
5/5
A bonafide classic stuffed with classic songs, how this isn't in the top 20 is a mystery to me, almost makes me wanna holler... OK, maybe a little too religious, but it is what it is.
Ray Charles
5/5
So, 1959 rolls around, and someone at Atlantic Records decides, "You know what? Let's just call this album The Genius of Ray Charles. No pressure, Ray, just live up to that title." And what do you know? The man actually does. The nerve of him... And it's almost offensive in its brilliance.
Look, if you're not into groundbreaking, genre-defining music that will make you feel things you didn't even know you could feel, then sure, give The Genius of Ray Charles a miss. But if you are, just be warned that it might make all your other music sound a bit… less genius. Don't say I didn't warn you.
The Flying Burrito Brothers
3/5
Gram Parsons carries on the psychedelic alt-country vibe from his one Byrds album... Some of it is kinda dope, some of it is more like traditional country, a real mixed bag. But their cover of "Do Right Woman" is pretty special.
Radiohead
5/5
I've heard this a million times, its a generational defining album, it has different styles and something for everyone but the whole package is so technically on point it's bordering on perfection. A change from Britpoppyness to Flaming Lips outthereness and paired with their legendary Glastonbury set a few weeks after this was released cemented its legacy into the consciousness.
I usually joke on Radiohead reviews that "It feels like another Radiohead album I'm supposed to like... And I mostly do, but sometimes I'd rather listen to The Bends, you know?" and I'd still rather listen to The Bends, but I adore this also as a foundational shift in my personal sonic landscape at the time.
Black Sabbath
4/5
Contains "Paranoid" and "Iron Man" and "War Pig" and "Hand Of Doom" and, basically, its entire track listing. RIP Ozzy
Van Morrison
4/5
The perfect stoners album and a great double play when paired with Moondance.
Shame Van is a bigot
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
4/5
Does exactly what it says on the tin... Songs about death. "Where The Wild Roses Grow" gets a lot of the plaudits but this entire album is dark and menacing, both beautiful and violent...
Echo And The Bunnymen
3/5
Extreme late 70s/early 80s post punk vibes, close your eyes and it could be U2 or Simple Minds, somehow Ian McCulloch sounds like both Bono & Jim Kerr, depending who you are thinking of at that moment... A tidy package all in all.
Buzzcocks
3/5
Raw Punk energy that propels you through the short punchy tracks. Different from the anger of other punk bands in this list, more accessible? Just a fun album from start to finish.
The Libertines
3/5
Bargain bin indie by a band who can't play. All most people remember of The Libertines was Pete Doherty sucking all the air out with his various drug addiction issue headlines. "Can't Stand Me Now" and "Don't Look Back Into The Sun" remain on regular rotation to this day though.
King Crimson
5/5
Takes a while to get going, approx 3:40, but once it does it's just a dose of pure prog rock, the absolute wankery on show is amazing, borderline filthy. Sure they probably made it all up cause they were high as fuck, but they made it sound so good....
Fugees
5/5
A top 5 hip hop album of all time? Top 3 probably. Just lush immense production and vibes here, everyone is at the peak of their game, Wyclef behind the desk, Pras with his smooth flow, and Lauryn Hill straight defecating on your microphone. This was untouchable until OutKast's Stankonia came around so I'll revert my original hypothesis to top 2 hip hop album of all time.
Manic Street Preachers
3/5
Manics were always alright in my opinion, nt something I had to seek out, I knew some stuff from before this like "Motorcycle Emptiness" from Generation Terrorists, and "La Tristesse Durera" from Gold Against The Soul... And I knew about Richey Edwards mysterious disappearance.
So most of the draw in this album was the inbuilt lore, could this band survive as a trio while missing half their songwriters (though some say more than half given Richey's lyrical input) and down a guitarist who didn't play guitar? And the answer is mostly yes, but the soul had gone and tone had shifted from introspective to outwardly more political, even the few songs Richey wote felt different, like "Kevin Carter" which is probably my favourite song on this album.
An alright album, but a step down from their previous work, ironically the band would become way more accessible and commercially successful in the later 90s as a result
Pink Floyd
5/5
An all time classic, an utterly unbelievable record. So influential across all media, I mean without this record do we have Radiohead's OK Computer? Monty Python and the Holy Grail? A deeper stoner appreciation of The Wizard of Oz?
But I'd give it an easy 5 if it had only "Us And Them" and 35 minutes of explosive diarrhea noises, so maybe I'm not the most subjective reviewer here?
Echo And The Bunnymen
3/5
Oddly enough I got the first Bunnymen album a week ago and the contrast in style and craft is very apparent, but is this following the evolution of post punk into new wave? Even Ian McCulloch no longer sounds like an outright Bono/Jim Kerr impersonator, but there are still moments.
Tidy album, "The Cutter" being the standout, a great opener.
Simon & Garfunkel
5/5
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary And Thyme? More like Poetic, Delicate, Timeless and Harmonies.
Animal Collective
2/5
"Experimental Pop" should be the first red flag. The endless echoy reverb should be the second. If you're already ignoring those then you're own your own kid...
Mariah Carey
4/5
In an era defined by a minimalist turn in alternative music and the burgeoning lo-fi aesthetics of indie rock, Mimi's Butterfly stands as a glorious repudiation of such sensibilities. It is a work that argues for the power of excess, for the virtue of the grand, the sweeping, and the all-encompassing. The album is a testament to the fact that when every element, from the layered vocals to the innovative production and the deeply personal lyrics, is turned up to its maximum, the result is not cacophony, but a sublime and overwhelming masterpiece. Butterfly is a declaration that true artistry is not found in the quiet whispers of a muse, but in the thunderous, undeniable roar of a liberated spirit.
Orbital
2/5
The so-called Brown Album, because it's mostly shit?
Deep Purple
4/5
Everything about this album is terminal forward velocity. The album kicks off with the blistering "Highway Star," a track that perfectly encapsulates the band's blend of high-octane rock, Ritchie Blackmore's ferocious guitar work, and Jon Lord's virtuosic, classical-influenced organ. While "Smoke on the Water" might be its most recognizable track, with its iconic four-note riff, the album is far from a one-hit wonder. Songs like the funky "Maybe I'm a Leo" and the propulsive "Space Truckin'" showcase a band at the peak of their creative powers, jamming with a purpose.
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
As a huge Springsteen fan, I loved the vibe of the E Street Band reunion tour era, and this album has some of my favorite songs ("Waiting On A Sunny Day," "Mary's Place," "Worlds Apart," "Lonesome Day," to name a few). However, while I appreciate this album, it doesn't feel like a Springsteen and The E Street Band record. It's not a bad album by any means, but it's not what I reach for when I'm in the mood for a Boss album like, says, Darkness on the Edge of Town or Born To Run.
I sometimes think a stripped-down, no-band approach, like Nebraska, or as part of a folk-rock trilogy that runs from Ghost Of Tom Joad through Devils & Dust might have made it resonate more with me. I will say, when it hits, it hits really hard, like the usage of Islamic music and imagery in "Worlds Apart" ('neath Allah's blessed rain") in a time where Islamophobic sentiment was quite possibly at an all time high, but it just feels different, an album that's somehow less than the sum of its parts as its trying to reflect a different world. Like a strange celebration trying to uplift a gloomy world still reeling...
Eurythmics
3/5
Banging opener, banging title track, everything else feels like filler except "Jennifer" rises above the mediocrity and with which you can point the path from this to "Goodbye Horses" by Q Lazarus, and "This Is The House" which is just unquestionably bad...
G. Love & Special Sauce
2/5
Sounding like a cut rate Sublime, has some decent beats and hooks, but I can't shake the open mic nature of it all
TV On The Radio
4/5
Messy, disjointed, bold, visionary, all the sides of the same coin. It's a unique blend of post-punk and soulful electronica, a raw and worthwhile listen.
Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart
1/5
Much like my review for Run-D.M.C.'s Raising Hell where I said "This is bad, not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good..."
This is bad, not bad meaning good, but bad meaning bad...
The Pogues
3/5
Good enough for the Navy, good enough for The Pogues
Everything But The Girl
3/5
The soundtrack to a chill out room in any mid 90's dance club, chilled enough to cool off but not too downtempo that you'll start thinking about winding down for the night, better go order some shitty beer (for some reason it was always Rolling Rock) or a vodka and coke, take a few puffs on a joint and then hit the main floor again, revitalised.
Ozomatli
2/5
Latin flavours, but bland as all hell, no spices, no sizzle, just elevator muzak style beats with weak bars over the top.
Blue Cheer
3/5
Psychedelic Rock with a tingle of fuzzy distortion, so much fuzzy distortion... Great cover of "Summertime Blues" kicks it off and it's probably the highlight, again I struggle with album who blow their creative load right off the bat.
Black Flag
4/5
Don't give me a reason to not bump Black Flag, throwing myself around my office like Henry Rollins would want.
Fuck the man.
Taylor Swift
4/5
Its hard to talk about Evermore without referencing Folklore, as this feels like b-sides or vault tracks from the Folklore sessions. Now people will see the name Taylor Swift and just immediately hate on this, but this is a really good album, not as good as Folklore, but has some real strong songs within like "Champagne Problems" or "Right Where You Left Me" or "Dorothea"... I'd have loved a Long Pond Sessions version of this like Folklore got but oh well.
The Rolling Stones
4/5
The Stones stumble into a juke joint and ingest the vibes via osmosis... Stone cold classics on this album like "Tumbling Dice", "Sweet Virginia", and "Shine A Light" and the whole thing is just an experience, even if it's cribbing the black mans music...
3/5
Pretty inoffensive pop by a band who were always inoffensive new wave rockers. It really doesn't sound like a dawn of the millenium style piece, the elaborate lush arrangements feel more like the late 60s style.
Syd Barrett
2/5
Shades of early Pink Floyd here, but I'd already said this of early Pink Floyd
"Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd, so super simple rhymes over psychedelic swirls and overdubs that makes it sound like the most transcendental shit ever laid down on tape. It shouldn't work, but it does..."
This time it doesn't work, it's missing everyone else...
Sugar
2/5
Surprisingly dull effort from former Husker Du front man Bob Mound, like generic alt rock made for college radio...
Turbonegro
2/5
Starts with a mad buildup and a hot riff, and sounds great, like a great 80s hair band, and then the singer.... uhhhh.... sings? and it all comes crashing down.
Missy Elliott
3/5
One thing you can say about early Missy Elliott is her albums are fun, Timbaland production is tight as hell and undeniably of it's time, but Missy's raps are just so off the wall surreal one minute then super serious the next... It keeps you on your toes.
The Kinks
3/5
A cracking song in "Sunny Afternoon" and the whole album flowed together nicely, great compositions, great harmonies, and Ray Davies is just a great songwriter. If not for a couple of guys from Liverpool then he might have been the preeminent British songwriter...
Orbital
2/5
Orbital could use a better editorial process, cause this thing is interminably long. 10 songs at an average of 7 1/2 minutes a song ain't the flex they think it might be, especially when its bargain basement beeps and boops.
Fun Lovin' Criminals
4/5
Back 30 or so years ago I heard this and it was quite catchy. It hit that 90s teenager sweet spot of a rock-y blues-y rap crossover, schmoove vibes and a hint of Quentin Tarantino bubbling underneath. Their follow up album would be leagues better, but this still hit for me.
Le Tigre
4/5
A crazy, fun, wild, timeless album... Peak Electropunk from the off with the killer "Deceptacon" and it's all uphill from there.
and who took the bomp from the bompalompalomp?
Slade
3/5
Dirty Glammy Rock that feels inspired by Rod Stewart and Faces, what's not to love? The only downside is it didn't have "Cum On Feel The Noize" that was included in the Japanese 2006 remastered release...
Joan Armatrading
4/5
Joan Armatrading's self-titled 1976 album is a landmark of the singer-songwriter genre. It's a raw, emotionally resonant record that masterfully blends folk, pop, and blues. The standout song, "Love and Affection," is a testament to her style: intimate, heartfelt lyrics delivered with a powerful, soulful voice, a singular talent and a crucial pioneer who has *the* range.
Her work directly paved the way for artists like Tracy Chapman. Armatrading's success as an independent Black female artist who wrote and performed her own acoustic-driven material created a powerful blueprint. The influence is clear in Chapman's music, from its focus on honest, narrative lyrics to its blend of genres and its overall sense of stripped-down authenticity.
Erykah Badu
2/5
OK enough Neo Soul grooves, but while I appreciate the range of Badu's voice, I can't handle the tone of it... She's no N'dea Davenport for example
Waylon Jennings
3/5
Toe tapping Outlaw Country style done by a future member of The Highwaymen.
David Bowie
3/5
I mean, its aaaaaaaalllrrrriiiigght but it's far from the best Bowie has to offer, hard to tell how much drugs he was on here to think that a soul record was the answer...
David Ackles
2/5
Overly bombastic, like a soundtrack to a musical or a movie that was never produced.
Barry Adamson
2/5
Another concept soundtrack to a movie that doesn't exist, that's weirdly two in a row now.... NEXT!
Dr. Dre
3/5
I loved this in 1992 when I was 14/15 I'm horrified by this in 2025 when I'm 47. I know its a cornerstone of 90s west coast gangster rap, but it really doesn't stand the test of time, and under the modern gaze a lot of this is downright reprehensible... Violence, misogyny, homophobia, its all here if that's your thing.
Sleater-Kinney
4/5
Words and Guitar... I want it, I got it. Peak Riot Grrl vibes as Carrie Brownstein yells for a solid half hour over great guitar nodles.
The Who
3/5
A cracking title track, a few alright songs for the kids, and the rest is just utterly unnoteworthy
Miles Davis
3/5
Solid grooves here, big band sounds with brass and woodwinds. Lovely. Did feel like hold music/weather channel music for a little bit but overall enjyable
Dire Straits
5/5
Mark Knopfler weirdly does more with the guitar notes he doesn't play here, everything is so precise and on point, but every song has room to breath and the little finger picking meedly notes are just sex.
Aerosmith
5/5
Aerosmith's mid 80s reunion and subsequent run of albums on Geffen must surely be the most unreal comeback in music, each one was a banger, peak pop rock hair metal. This isn't the best one (that's Get A Grip), but it might be the peak of that era, it has "Love In An Elevator", "Janie's Got A Gun" and "The Other Side" as killer singles, a kick ass opening in "Young Lust".
Just a fun rocking album
The Cardigans
4/5
For those who were on the Cardigans bandwagon since Emmerdale, this album takes a turn from inner ennui to full blown outer melancholy about dissatisfaction surrounding unfaithful lovers. The Iron Maiden cover isn't evenough to perk things up, this is a sad record, even the relative upbeat "Lovefool" is loaded with dark lyrics of unrequited affections.
Me? I'm just sad we're approaching 20 years without a new Cardigans album.
Culture Club
2/5
One good song, thats it, and it blows that load straight out the gate. That's not enough. The rest stinks. It's only saving grace is its under 40 minutes...
TLC
4/5
Prefect early to mid 90s R&B with rappy hooks, En Vogue, SWV, and even Salt & Pepa were massive and still didn't touch the rare air TLC were in when this came out. A soulful all girl trio who accentuate each other. Horny as all hell, as is their wont.
Nirvana
4/5
A brooding, downright menacing album, it was never going to be another Nevermind, but it stands as a great album in its own right.
Marvin Gaye
4/5
Title song is the song you think of when someone tries to imitate a porn soundtrack with a "bow chikka bow wow" wah wah sound.... Its sensual, dirty, horny, all them things. lay back and get your post listen cigarette ready, you'll need it.
Death In Vegas
2/5
Mid beeps and boops from the turn of the millennium, but the Iggy Pop fronted "Aisha" is perhaps the most interesting, and most ridiculous. Going from "I think you ought to know, I'm a murderer" to "the rules are all wrong, every perversion is justified" to "Aisha, I'm confused, Aisha, I'm vibrating"...
The gods all suck... Must have been wicked weed
Cheap Trick
3/5
I mean, the live version of "I Want You To Want Me" and "Surrender" are superior to the original, the rest is kinda meh. Big in Japan ain't what it used to be...
FKA twigs
1/5
I can listen to most anything, this project has shown that, but this just didn't do anything for me beyond guttural repulsion. It's just noises, random unconnected noises. I'd take a double album of Yoko Ono screaming endlessly over this as at least that has a deeper meaning
Sinead O'Connor
5/5
This was haunting back in 1990, and doubly so now, it has a few upbeat songs like "The Emperor's New Clothes" but it's mostly a maudlin dirgey affair, and extremely moving.
Morrissey
4/5
Morrissey is a twat....
Now thats out the way, he was in a fine vein of form here with this and Vauxhall & I, begrudgingly respectful.... but Morrissey is still a twat...
Taylor Swift
4/5
if you had a lab that could somehow create perfectly distilled pop music in songs under 4:00 in length, this is the album it would create. Production and lyrics are perfectly intertwined and nothing feels too quick nor overstaying its welcome. This is the album that made the Taylor Swift industrial machine that's still churning out tens of millions of sold albums and billions of listened minutes on Spotify...
Slint
2/5
Kinda dirgey, kinda bleah... Nothing to really note, its short but feels like it lasts forever.
Pulp
4/5
The closest comparison I can think of is its the UK's equivalent to R.E.M.'s Automatic For The People, insomuch it's full of anthems for weird kids everywhere. Its not close to that level of quality but everything hits in a weird comforting way and if you vibe with it then you vibe HARD with it.
Jane's Addiction
3/5
Never really vibed with Perry Farrell or Jane's Addiction, I can appreciate the change they were ushering in with this and the album before, and the whole Lollapalooza thing, but then he did Porno For Pyros and it was meh, and then Jane's Addiction would do a series of reunions that ended in wild and spectacular fashion last year.
I've only ever like a handful of songs by them, and the rest I can really take or leave, this has "Been Caught Stealing" which is a classic, but the rest is pretty forgettable.
Genesis
3/5
A double prog rock album by a band on the verge of losing their voice and lyricist... Clearly the producer never said "maybe that's enough lads?" because an hour and a half is way too much commitment for this kind of thing.
Antony and the Johnsons
2/5
Excessive vibrato warbling isn't my thing, your mileage may vary...
Siouxsie And The Banshees
4/5
Well crafted post punk vibes, almost haunting in its delivery as they moved onwards towards the darker goth-y sounds of the early 80s
Hookworms
2/5
Wholly unremarkable by any quantifiable metric, listened to it and forgot about it almost immediately, like zero impact in my short term memory whatsoever. It's not bad, per se, just bland.
The Icarus Line
2/5
In 1997, the band Sleater-Kinney proclaimed "words and guitar, I want it", well this is words and guitar and I don't want it.
The Allman Brothers Band
3/5
Just feels like a long jam session, as is the Allman Brothers wont I suppose, which can be ok sometimes, but filling a CD with just 7 meandering songs is criminal, that's an average of 10 minutes each. It ebs and flows, but you gotta be in a jammy bluesy frame of mind to appreciate this.
The Clash
4/5
Classic punk, fits a ton of banger songs into 35 minutes, just feels like the late 70s London. Just needed a "fuck Maggie Thatcher" song...
Public Enemy
4/5
Different sounds from the previous Fear Of A Black Planet, harsher beats, and a killer crossover track with Anthrax in "Bring The Noize". This felt like the end of a 4 album hot run, as by the time their next album came out the game had changed...
Mercury Rev
3/5
I remember hearing "Goddess On A Hiway" on Jo Whiley's Channel 4 show and immediately falling in love with it, the rest of the album doesn't quite live up to this nostalgic high, even though its Flaming Lips coded, but it's pretty alright overall.
Duran Duran
4/5
New Wave power pop, just incredibly 80s, dripping with shoulder pads, mullets, and killer basslines served with a dab of cocaine. This has 3 monster songs in "Rio", "Hungry Like The Wolf", and "Save A Prayer" which set them up for life...
Ravi Shankar
3/5
How often do you get a walkthrough of the music before you actually hear it? Certainly gives you a deeper appreciation of the melody compositions, but it's still sitar music and sounds like its just made up as he goes, like experimental jazz
Jean-Michel Jarre
3/5
The in sound from way out, the future is the past is the future is the beginning is the end is the beginning, and this was before Jarre was rocking out on a goddamn laser harp...
*pew pew sounds*
Radiohead
5/5
I usually joke on Radiohead reviews that "It feels like another Radiohead album I'm supposed to like... And I mostly do, but sometimes I'd rather listen to The Bends, you know?"
FINALLY MY PRAYERS HAVE BEEN ANSWERED! This is a sweeping epic album, I'd like to say it a revelation amidst the samey Britpop dross that was being shat out by bands not names Oasis or Blur, but no, I was painfully wrong about this when it was released. I wrote it off as depressing music, and don't get me wrong, it bloody well is, but its layered like an onion, and then you peel back the emotions and tears and find something so beautiful and fragile and pure, orgasmic... Was this really that weird band who did "Creep"??
No skips on this album, one of the best guitar albums of the 90’s, they're all great songs in their own right but listening to "Fake Plastic Trees" still gives me chills.
John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers
2/5
Much like Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, early Rolling Stones, and future Clapton work, the cloud of "white man popularising the black man's music" hangs heavy here. Classic rock & roll, albeit distilled.
Leonard Cohen
3/5
Songs of Leonard Cohen, is a masterpiece of poetic folk. Focused almost entirely on his intensely personal, literary lyrics, the album established Cohen's signature style: that deep, meditative voice set against sparse, melancholic acoustic arrangements. Some easy classics like "Suzanne" and "So Long, Marianne" really lift this up from its depths.
Dinosaur Jr.
4/5
Proto-Grunge & Shoegaze here with heavy distortion and loud-quiet-loud noise progression, Imagine listening to this in 1987 and hearing what the future of music would be like while the rest of the soundscape was hair metal and shit.
Deep Purple
3/5
Live albums are utterly subjective, some bands are better live and each song takes a new turn every performance, some are rigid and their live stuff sounds just like their studio versions.... Deep Purple sit somewhere in between where the songs sound studio quality, but are elongated to an extreme length. Besides we've heard all this stuff on their other two albums included in this list...
Baaba Maal
3/5
I'm digging the world music selection in this list, and this was pleasant enough, and I'd probably have enjoyed it more if I had context around the lyrics.
CHIC
3/5
Come for "La Freak" but stay for the finest funky disco Nile Rodgers could dream up. Now, everybody struuuuuut....
The Smiths
4/5
I can believe two things at once... Such as "Morrissey is a twat" and "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" is an all timer... but Morrissey is still a twat...
Paul Simon
4/5
A mishmash of ideas, a few standout tracks like "Mother & Child Reunion" and "Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard" lift this up from an average album, but overall its an easy way to pass 40 odd minutes
The National
3/5
Honestly, it sounds like a more monotone version of Interpol's stuff from 5 years before. This doesn't shatter my earth but it's a solidly ok album... Very whelming.
Lightning Bolt
2/5
Sounding akin to a misfiring 1986 1.4L Ford Fiesta, this thing tries in vain to propel you forward but, bless it heart, it's all noise and no power
The Prodigy
4/5
Nonstop banging rave music, best dealt with a dust mask full of Vicks Vaporub and let the beats take you away, because you're never going home again... at least the person you were before isn't
Doves
4/5
Cut from the same cloth as Badly Drawn Boy, Snow Patrol and that ilk, this album was pretty damn decent for 2002, it had great singles off it like "There Goes the Fear", "Pounding", and "Caught by the River" and even "Words" got some traction for use in advertising... Looking back I loved this, it wasn't just another sad Britpop album, as NME called it back then, it was "the most uplifting miserable album you'll hear all year." And that's the core of some mad therapeutic breakthrough since my own very sad, mopey early 20s...
This album gave quasi-emo 20-something me permission to wallow, but in a grand, cinematic way. The lyrics of "Words" ("Words, they mean nothing / So you can't hurt me") were a defensive shield, a rationalisation for emotional unavailability. The soaring chorus of "N.Y." was pure escape fantasy, the sound of running away from my problems and calling it an adventure (which I did by leaving the UK for America in 2004). Every epic, drawn-out coda, like the one on "There Goes the Fear," was a substitute for a genuine release of emotion; I'd just turn the volume up and let the drumming drown out the existential dread...
Listening back now in my late-40s, I don't hear misery; I hear that crazed hope I had while working overtime in a basement, struggling with friends to get our company off the ground. This album wasn't about the darkness, it was about desperately searching for the light switch. The optimism that the band was striving for shines through, not as naive cheer, but as a hard won perspective. When Jimi Goodwin sings on "The Sulphur Man," there’s a desperate plea for connection that I completely missed the first time, only hearing the 'soul in tatters' part. The real genius is the way the music, all those lush strings, the layered guitars, the electronic flourishes, acts like the supportive, non-judgmental container you create after years of therapy. It holds the darkness without letting it swallow you whole.
The tracks that hit hardest today are the ones about forward motion. "Pounding" isn't just a frenetic banger, it's a defiant instruction to seize the moment, that ultimate antidote to the paralysis of my youth. And the closer, "Caught by the River," with its question, "Would you give it all away...," is no longer a lament of surrender, but a mature contemplation of what you truly value. It’s the sound of accepting that life is a flowing river, not a stagnant pond of regret.
In the end, The Last Broadcast didn't just soundtrack my youthful despair; it unknowingly provided the architecture for the resilience that followed. It's a reminder that even when you feel like you're broadcasting your final message from the abyss, there is always, always, a second, more beautiful signal waiting to be found.
Brian Eno
2/5
Literal elevator muzak, nothing grand, nothing flashy, nothing remotely memorable at all...
John Lennon
4/5
Lennon spreads his wings by taking the bones of his best work from The White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be, and turning it up to 11. He goes for that raw bluesy garage band style sound he started in songs like "Come Together", "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", and "Yer Blues" in songs like "Hold On" and "Well Well Well", while some of the slower acoustic song sound like interpolations of the "Sun King" riff...
Derivative? Maybe, but it sounds really good.
Deee-Lite
2/5
Can one hot song make an album something you need to listen to before you die? What if that song is the unbelievably catchy "Groove Is In The Heart"?
Welcome to my TedTalk... "Can a Single Spark Ignite a Whole Album's Immortality?"
The question posed, whether one hot song can elevate an album to the status of an essential, "must-hear-before-you-die" masterpiece, is a beautiful, vexing puzzle that strikes at the heart of how we consume, value, and remember music. Highlighting Deee-Lite's World Clique and the magnetic pull of "Groove Is In The Heart," provides a perfect flashpoint for this very debate.
In an age of streaming and hyper-curated playlists, the single's dominance has never been clearer. A single track, like the undeniable funk and sheer joy of "Groove Is In The Heart," can be a cultural monolith, instantly recognizable, endlessly sampled, and a guaranteed dance floor filler decades after its release. For millions, the song is de facto Deee-Lite. So, when an album houses such a momentous piece of music, does it inherit that songs "essential" status?
The affirmative argument is compelling in that the historical context is essential. That one song, in its brilliance and popularity, acts as a cultural key to a specific time, sound, and mood. The surrounding album, even if wildly inconsistent, becomes an artifact, a complete document of the moment that birthed the hit. Listening to the full album can allow for a deeper appreciation of the creative ecosystem. Perhaps the other tracks offer the necessary shadows to highlight the bright peak of the hit, or they showcase the artistic breadth, or even the limitations, of the artist that led to that single stroke of genius. The hit is the doorway, and the whole album is the room one must enter to understand the architecture of the era.
However, the counter-argument elevates the album form itself. A truly "essential" album is often defined by its cohesion, its narrative arc, or its sustained excellence. It’s the entire statement, the fully realised artistic vision, where every track is deliberately placed to build a greater whole. Can an album riddled with filler, B-sides that barely made the cut, or clumsy experiments truly deserve a spot among the pantheon just because of one incandescent star?
This perspective argues that such an album is merely a vessel for the hit. It forces the listener to sift through middling mediocrity for a fleeting moment of ecstacy, a task better suited to a playlist or a greatest hits compilation. If the remaining tracks are forgettable, do we truly need to hear them? Is the experience of being underwhelmed by eleven tracks for the sake of one glorious song a prerequisite for musical enlightenment? While an album like World Clique, for example, may be an undeniable landmark of the early 90s house and rave scene, is it a masterpiece of album construction, or simply a collection of tracks anchored by one perfect, gravity-defying moment?
The discussion leads us to the classic "one-album wonder" or "one-hit wonder" conundrum. In many cases, artists whose careers were defined by a single smash often released albums that, upon closer inspection, reveal untapped potential or a fully-formed artistic vision that was simply ahead of its time or overshadowed by their own initial success. Making Mirrors by Gotye (with "Somebody That I Used To Know") or even The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (though a more complex case of a single studio album) are often cited as examples of albums that offer more than the massive single suggests, suggesting the public's focus was too narrow, not the album's quality.
Ultimately, the judgement rests on the definition of "essential." Is it essential to hear the full story of the artist, even if that story is flawed? Or is "essential" reserved only for the uninterrupted, sustained brilliance of albums that change the course of music with every track? The former suggests a historical and contextual imperative; the latter, a pure artistic standard. And perhaps, the truth is a spectrum, where some albums are essential for their sheer cultural weight, regardless of their track-by-track consistency.
TL;DR Nope, but Lady Miss Kier is dope...
The White Stripes
4/5
While Elephant remains the pinnacle of The White Stripes' discography, Get Behind Me Satan marks the onset of a gradual decline. The production, though polished, feels slightly overdone compared to their earlier, raw recordings. There's an obvious ambition to replicate the success of "Seven Nation Army" with "Blue Orchid," but it falls somewhat short. The album is well-crafted and consistent, but it ultimately feels like a rehash of previous ideas, lacking the same spark as their earlier work. However, "My Doorbell" and "The Denial Twist" have stood the test of time and remain staples in my playlist.
Anthrax
3/5
Alright thrash metal, good way to pass the time, but also nothing really stood out as a "must relisten to".
The Stranglers
4/5
A punk band who could actually play their instruments.... in fact the bass in this album is S-Tier, just a ridiculous groove going on. I had heard "Peaches" before and this is far above that level. Just a tight punk album.
Arcade Fire
3/5
The title track is a jaunty number, but overall I didn't like this as much as previous albums. My one abiding memory of this at the time was Rosie O'Donnell freaking out that it won the Grammy for Album of the Year because she had never heard of it...
Not much of a legacy I suppose.
The Specials
2/5
I'll be honest, my knowledge of The Specials was pretty much limited to "Too Much Too Young" and "Ghost Town" and none of this matches up to those songs, so pretty disappointing, really.
Super Furry Animals
2/5
Copy/paste of my previous SFA album on this list... "I didn't like Super Furry Animals back in 1996 and I don't like them in 2025..."
Roxy Music
4/5
Finally, a Roxy Music album without Eno, and it's pretty rocking. "The Thrill Of It All" is a blistering opening that really sets up everything else that follows. Also an S-tier album cover....
Bebel Gilberto
4/5
Sweet sweet Bossa Nova, no idea what its saying, but its so nice... Some soft drift away music.
The War On Drugs
2/5
Honestly, started off with a ratcheting noise and then warbling tremolo guitar, and those are my least favourite noises in the world so my view was tainted from the 0:00 mark. What follows is dreary, dreamy, pretentious indie bullshit, so in hindsight the 0:01 mark was the high point.
Its not 1 star bad, but it's like 1.5 stars....
Public Image Ltd.
2/5
Johnny Rotten tries to become a serious musician. Fails.
Sonic Youth
4/5
Sonic Youth are legit time travellers, creating one of the definitive grunge album 5 years before everyone else. Anyway, you don't need to tell me to listen to Sonic Youth...
Missy Elliott
3/5
One thing you can say about Missy Elliott is her albums are fun, Timbaland production is tight as hell and undeniably of it's time, but Missy's raps are just so off the wall surreal one minute then super serious the next... It keeps you on your toes. "Work It" remains a timeless banger though
Suede
3/5
A heavy album in between their solid debut (the eponymous Suede) and poppy comeback (Coming Up), the fact they even needed a comeback after this tells you how well this was received.... if their debut was the drugged up high of poppers, this is the hard comedown. "The Wild Ones" and, appropriately, "Heroin" stand out.
Tom Waits
4/5
A pseudo live album that's a real blast, you can tell Tom is feeling the crowd assembled in his fake smoky jazz club as he tells his stories preambling into the actual song.
Buena Vista Social Club
3/5
Soothing Cuban jazz that was the hottest thing in the whole world for a hot minute due to the popular documentary. Its good, but nothing particularly stands out for me, is just good background music.
T. Rex
4/5
Solid Glam Rock, and songs like "Telegram Sam" and "Metal Guru" are the high points of this album, but it mostly sounds like bluesy chords with hot licks over the top, and I dig that...
Pere Ubu
2/5
Absolutely unmemorable, very much a "listen to once, forget forever" album. Now I'm afraid to relisten to it in case the dreaded Spotify algorithm thinks I actually liked it... Not as bad as their other album on here, but that's not praise in any way.
Klaxons
4/5
I almost rolled my eyes out my sockets at the thought of _another_ mid to late 2000s UK landfill indie rock band, but this was fun, energetic, frantic. I do love a band where the bass is the driving force, and the basslines on this are powerful.
Standouts were "Gravity's Rainbow" (solid Pynchon reference), and "Golden Skans"
The Associates
2/5
The drummer sounds like he's having a good old time on "Arrogance Gave Him Up", but it might also be a drum machine, it's the early 80s, its hard to tell... it might all be drum machines, all the way down...
Marianne Faithfull
3/5
A very middling album, generally ok, but mostly unmemorable. The cover of "Working Class Hero" was a choice though.
Patti Smith
4/5
I mean, its goddamn Patti Smith, playfully covering "Gloria" and "Land Of A Thousand Dances", but raw as all hell. She comes swinging out the gates and doesn't let up for the duration.
Songhoy Blues
5/5
This is the good shit, this is the kid of hidden gems I love to find, this is why I signed up for this.
Lambchop
2/5
I can tell this was crafted with love and care, but it comes across as just unbelievably dull
Shack
2/5
Shack made this list? Fucking Shack? They're barely a level above the worst busker you ever heard, and even the best song on this album, "Natalie's Party", sounds like the shit theme song for a shit 90s sitcom starring Samantha Janus
Wu-Tang Clan
5/5
Just an hour long ass kicking where they literally tell you ways they'll torture your ass, rugged and raw is the name of the day and each member gets their chance to shine. Hard to pinpoint individual songs when the whole album is a continuous flow, but big shoutouts to "Bring Da Rukus", "Shame On A Nuh" (censored title) and "Da Mystery Of Chessboxin'" as well as the usual "C.R.E.A.M." and "Protect Ya Neck". I do prefer the more rocking version of "Wu Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing Ta Fuck Wit" featuring Tom Morello of RATM and Chad Smith of RHCP thats on Loud Rocks
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
4/5
The original version has all but disappeared from streaming, there is a 30th anniversary rerecorded version called Shaka Zulu Revisited, which, alas, is an inferior version. This opens up a debate about the sanctity of physical media as a vital cultural safeguard and a commitment to permanence, integrity, and the unassailable right of the artist's original creation to exist unaltered.
White Denim
4/5
Sounded a little like The Black Keys, which I really liked. I'll probably relisten to this, its cool.
LTJ Bukem
2/5
For some people, there's a time and a place for drum and bass, but, alas, a Friday morning before I've had my coffee ain't it for me. I can appreciate the craft, but I was just waiting for it to end
Gram Parsons
4/5
I will not stand for Emmylou Harris erasure, Gretchen!
Randy Newman
4/5
I enjoyed this way more than I thought I would as my exposure prior was Pixar work and "I Love LA", he's not the best singer, but has a distinctive tone, but his songwriting is top tier.
The Human League
3/5
Much like my treatise on the relationship of Deee-Lite's "Groove Is In The Heart" and its stratospheric trajectory vs. the greater meh-ness of the World Clique album containing it, does something as immortal as "Don't You Want Me" make The Human League's Dare! a *must* listen? I mean there's a lot of good early 80s synth-y vibes here and Phil Oakley is a perfect frontman for this genre, but I can't help but feel my life would have been just fine if I hadn't listened to this at all...
Devendra Banhart
3/5
Psychedelic folk was still happening in 2004? That blew my mind...
Stan Getz
4/5
Opens with the beyond cool "The Girl from Ipanema" and the vibe is set from there onwards. Bossa Nova is always a cool sound and this way utterly delightful.
Neneh Cherry
2/5
Starts with "Buffalo Stance" which is probably the peak of the album and, as I've noted before, I struggle with albums who blow their creative load right off the bat.
David Crosby
4/5
A Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album in everything but name. Super jammy, super harmonies, and, dare I say, super weedy.
Oasis
5/5
Hard not to gush over this album, despite its inherent flaws of shit production, mediocre derivative music, and pretty average lyrics, because it captures a mood. I was 16 when this came out. Too young to appreciate the Stone Roses when they appeared some 5 or so years earlier, too young for the whole baggy scene, and UK music world seemed dominated by electronic dancey music, so having a guitar band that genuinely spoke to me was a life changer. But it took me a while to get into them, the early singles didn't register on my radar but hearing "Live Forever" was a revelation, instant fan time.
It would be stupid not to give a pivotal, foundational moment in my musical education a solid 5.
Iron Maiden
3/5
Honestly, as far as early 80s metal goes, this was pretty bland, it was good for a whole sit down listen, but really nothing memorable stood out to me.
Basement Jaxx
2/5
So of its time, turn of the millennium beats with random lyrics thrown on to and a lot of "yaw yaw" noise and layered noodling. "Red Alert" and "Rendez-Vu" stand out as songs I heard in those turn of the millennium clubs 25 years ago, the rest is.... regrettable.
Radiohead
5/5
It feels like another Radiohead album I'm supposed to like... And I mostly do, but sometimes I'd rather listen to The Bends, you know?
Finally got that out the way, I remember being somewhat repulsed by this upon release, it was too weird, it was too different. It's only now I realise that it was me, it was always me, I wasn't weird enough to appreciate it at the time, now I can safely say I'm very weird and this tickles a brain itch like few things on this list have done so far.
The Zutons
3/5
I loved the Zutons when they burst onto the scene, mainly because I've never played a saxophone, but I'm 99% sure I play saxophone at the same level or better as Abi Harding...
Anyway, back to the matter at hand, who killed The Zutons? Their record label dropped them in 2008 some 4 years and 2 more albums after this, pretty much right after Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson made their version of the song "Valerie" a bigger hit than Zutons could ever dream, so lets say them... Still blows my mind that they did "Valerie" originally.