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Mon Oct 23 2023
Siamese Dream
The Smashing Pumpkins
Generic grunge droning. Lane lyrics. Mostly forgettable outside the hits.
3
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Tue Oct 24 2023
Marquee Moon
Television
Discordant. Harsh. The kind of music that pretentious nerds think they SHOULD listen to, but nobody actually enjoys. Title track is okay.
3
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Wed Oct 25 2023
The Cars
The Cars
Great record. Utterly cool. Amazing sound. Perfect late 70’s rock and roll record.
4
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Thu Oct 26 2023
So
Peter Gabriel
I read that Phil Collins didn’t understand why critics hated him and loved Peter Gabriel. They were both in Genesis, they both put out monster albums in the 80’s with tons of hits. What made the critics love Peter Gabriel and hate Phil Collins? I think it’s cause Peter Gabriel is wearing a toupee on this album cover and Phil Collins just openly went bald. But who knows?
This is a fine album. It’s hard to really hear the hits because of how often I’ve heard them before. I like Peter Gabriel’s Genesis stuff, and this is kind of three minute pop versions of that. It’s a good album. But “No Jacket Required” better be on this list too.
3
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Fri Oct 27 2023
In The Court Of The Crimson King
King Crimson
This album has: (1) an iconic cover image; (2) an absolute banger of an opening track; and (3) a really cool title track that has sub parts, one of which involves a “fire witch.” That isn’t nothing, but I’m not sure it makes up for the rest of the album being generic prog noodling.
2
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Mon Oct 30 2023
Tommy
The Who
Ugh. I don’t know shit about operas, but isn’t this a rock musical rather than a rock opera? I mean, it sounds like The Who doing a lame ass musical. So, The Who are pretty good, but lame ass musicals aren’t. This is like Micheal Jordan playing baseball. Or I guess if the Beatles did a rock musical, that would be like Michael Jordan playing baseball. This is more like Shaq playing a genie in “Shazam.” Blech.
1
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Tue Oct 31 2023
Bad
Michael Jackson
When you reach the heights that MJ did, even an album made after you’ve begun your downward slide is pretty great. This has some hits and some filler and some garbage, but it’s just past peak Michael Jackson.
3
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Wed Nov 01 2023
Dub Housing
Pere Ubu
I don’t like post-punk. This is awful even for post-punk. Why would you listen to this? Terrible.
1
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Thu Nov 02 2023
The Genius Of Ray Charles
Ray Charles
I prefer rollicking and fun Ray Charles to ballad singing Ray Charles. The first song on the album is amazing but then it goes to snoozetown and never returns.
2
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Fri Nov 03 2023
Time Out Of Mind
Bob Dylan
The stranglehold that the Boomers had on music criticism in the 90’s album-sonified. Dylan hadn’t done anything good in more than a decade when this mess came out but because the critics all liked him when they were 16 we had to appreciate this important new work. Terrible. This is like Jethro Tull beating Metallica and Jane’s Addiction for Best Metal Album at the 1989 Grammys. This late career middling piece of garbage has no place on an albums you must listen to list and I'm embarrassed for everyone involved that it’s on here.
1
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Mon Nov 06 2023
Talking Book
Stevie Wonder
Near peak Stevie Wonder, which make it near-peak music in general. Great album. Superstition is too played out to really hit properly anymore, but other than that it’s close to perfection from start to finish.
4
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Tue Nov 07 2023
Ready To Die
The Notorious B.I.G.
For the ten minutes or so the subject matter is not limited to robbery, murder, being good at sex and being rich, its pretty good. He was obviously a talented rapper, but I wish he had expanded what he was writing songs about somewhat. "Suicidal Thoughts" is good.
3
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Wed Nov 08 2023
Endtroducing.....
DJ Shadow
My first five star rating since starting this project. Close to a perfect album. A cohesive whole from start to finish. So great.
5
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Thu Nov 09 2023
The Gershwin Songbook
Ella Fitzgerald
“The Very Best of” on Amazon Music is only 12 songs and 44 minutes long. I’m not sure why so many of the reviews on here are talking about 3 hours of music. This is fine. I prefer jazzier versions of these songs from other releases, but these are nice. Not really my thing though.
2
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Fri Nov 10 2023
Selected Ambient Works 85-92
Aphex Twin
uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha uncha one star.
1
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Mon Nov 13 2023
The Wildest!
Louis Prima
Fun. A little corny and hard not to hear King Louie, but definitely worth a listen. I’m glad this project introduced me to this artist and album.
3
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Tue Nov 14 2023
Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs
Derek & The Dominos
Great album. Duane Allman was unstoppable at this time. The combination of him and Clapton really shouldn’t work but it does.
4
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Wed Nov 15 2023
Dare!
The Human League
It was okay. There were a couple of decent songs outside the single, but the single became such a giant hit for a reason. Nothing else on the album even approaches it in terms of quality. I doubt I will ever listen to this album again.
2
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Thu Nov 16 2023
Entertainment
Gang Of Four
I don’t like post-punk. I’ve tried to listen to this album multiple times over the years and never got what people like about it. Tried again and still don’t. So harsh and discordant. Not my kind of thing I guess.
1
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Fri Nov 17 2023
Street Signs
Ozomatli
Lyrics are shallow and dumb. Music is derivative and uninteresting. Total waste of time.
1
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Mon Nov 20 2023
Revolver
Beatles
You don’t even have to rank it based on it being almost 60 years old, it still sounds perfect. All pop and rock music owes a debt to this album.
5
View Album
Tue Nov 21 2023
Stardust
Willie Nelson
I have read critics try to explain why this album where a reedy-voiced country singer known mostly for his songwriting covering old standards is so great and I think they all miss the mark. The reason it’s great is because maybe once in a generation an artist hits a patch where they could read the phone book and it would be amazing, and Willie was in exactly such a patch in the late 70’s. It’s not hard work or practice or dedication. It’s magic. Willie was fully connected to forces beyond human comprehension in this time period and so this album is great because he made it at this time, despite its content. This album is great because magic.
But I don’t like old-timey songs, so three stars.
3
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Wed Nov 22 2023
...Baby One More Time
Britney Spears
For her first music video, whichever record executive was behind this travesty dressed this 16 year old child in pig tails and a Catholic school girl outfit and blatantly sexualized her. This “album” was obviously marketed in part toward pedophiles. The people who made this pile of garbage should be in jail.
Substantively, this isn’t an album. It’s two singles and a bunch of filler. I am dumber for having listened to this. Absolutely terrible.
1
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Thu Nov 23 2023
Imperial Bedroom
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
I am a huge Elvis Costello fan but this album just doesn’t hit like his earlier work. It has some good songs but this album doesn’t reach the heights of his 1970’s albums. Still, mid-grade Elvis Costello is better than top shelf most other artists.
3
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Fri Nov 24 2023
Electric Music For The Mind And Body
Country Joe & The Fish
All I knew about this band was that they performed at Woodstock and had a dumb name. This album isn’t bad, but seems to really only be worthwhile in the context of its time. I’m glad to have been exposed to it for the first time through this list, but can hear nothing essential about it.
2
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Mon Nov 27 2023
Brothers
The Black Keys
This is fine. If you want to listen to pretty good blues rock made in 2010, you could do worse than this album. However, there are lots of better blues rock albums to listen to, so I'm not sure why you would go out of your way to listen to this one.
2
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Tue Nov 28 2023
My Generation
The Who
Enjoyable garage rock album. I had heard some of these songs before but not the whole album. Pretty fun and definitely worth listening to.
3
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Wed Nov 29 2023
The Last Of The True Believers
Nanci Griffith
Pretty decent 80’s style country. Nanci Griffith has a nice voice. I’m glad to have been exposed to it.
3
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Thu Nov 30 2023
Go Girl Crazy
The Dictators
I developed a theory when a really smart English professor I had once introduced me to the band Fear. I think two types of people like dumb shit: 1. Dumb people, and 2. Smart people that are constantly surrounded by smart shit and so they think dumb shit is transgressive and rebellious. Well, I grew up steeped in dumbness and I don’t view dumb shit as anything other than dumb. So fuck this album.
It’s only made worse by being made before punk rockers realized their shitty songs wore out their welcome after 2 minutes and so these songs are as bad as the worst punk rock but three times as long.
I wish I could rate this worse than one star.
1
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Fri Dec 01 2023
Legalize It
Peter Tosh
Peter Tosh is one of my favorite reggae artists, but I don’t think this album best represents all he is capable of. I think it’s a good album but not a great one.
3
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Mon Dec 04 2023
Appetite For Destruction
Guns N' Roses
The singles are great. There’s definitely a reason that this is one of the biggest selling albums of all time. The other songs are pretty unimpressive. I am probably biased because I don’t really like glam/heavy/hair metal. I get that people like it and I can kind of understand why, but it really doesn’t speak to me.
3
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Tue Dec 05 2023
Abraxas
Santana
Great album. Love everything about it. What an incredible sound.
4
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Wed Dec 06 2023
Wild Gift
X
When I heard “rising” repeated on Universal Corner I thought “oh gross, this sounds like The Doors.” Then I check Wikipedia and see this album was produced by Ray Mancerek and also learn that The Red Hot Chili Peppers sampled a song from this album, so two strikes against Wild Gift. But it’s not bad. Adult Books is a pretty good song. I don’t like punk, but this was more melodic and musically varied than what I think of as punk. Not an album I’m likely to spin again, but not entirely unenjoyable.
2
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Thu Dec 07 2023
More Specials
The Specials
I like ska. It’s upbeat. It’s fun. It’s got horns. What’s not to like? When this album sticks to ska, it’s pretty good. But when it goes off on weird tangents in genres I can’t really identify, it really drags. Consequently, this album is a bit of a mess.
2
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Fri Dec 08 2023
In The Wee Small Hours
Frank Sinatra
I’m a Goldilocks when it comes to music. If it’s harder than Monster-era REM, I’m like “Chill out and stop screaming, you’re hurting my poor sensitive ears!” but if it’s softer than Neil Diamond, I’m like “zzzzzz, wake me up when you want to rock grandpa.”
I suppose if I was lounging in a big city apartment in a suit and tie sipping a cocktail at midnight with a cigarette in my hand surrounded by hep daddy-o’s and classy dames and calling the get together a clam bake ironically then this would be the perfect album but I’m wearing a tracksuit at 7am getting my kids ready for school in South Carolina and eating a pop tart so this is just not doing it for me.
2
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Mon Dec 11 2023
Live At The Harlem Square Club
Sam Cooke
I’m not a big fan of live albums. In the studio, artists have all the time in the world and every piece of equipment under the sun that they can use to record and re-record every piece of their songs and then stitch the best take of each instrument and vocal together so the end result is a song that is absolutely as good as they can make it. Live versions are just one take of whatever they can throw together on a stage on one particular night. All that being said, this is a good live album.
I love Sam Cooke, but he can sound a bit too polished, so it was fun to hear his songs done in a rougher style. “Bring it on Home to Me” was particularly enjoyable.
3
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Tue Dec 12 2023
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Simon & Garfunkel
Great songs on this album:
1. Cecilia
2. Keep the Customer Satisfied
3. The entire first half of the second side.
Five great songs on one album is pretty strong, but I’d be fine never hearing the title track ever again. “Sail on silver girl” 🙄. Definitely an album everyone should hear.
4
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Wed Dec 13 2023
The Atomic Mr Basie
Count Basie & His Orchestra
It’s funny that one of these songs is called “The Late Late Show” because all I can hear when I listen to big band music is The Tonight Show Band blaring out overly enthusiastic bombastic blaring noise to convince people that they are about to have fun.
Hey big band musicians, why is your band so big? Why do you have like 20 horn players? How is having a band this big economical? You pay each horn player $10 and you’re out $400 bucks. That’s the whole fee you’re getting for the gig. How are you going to pay the other 87 musicians? Are you going to tell Satchmo Jenkins and Tootely Toot Jones that they aren’t getting paid tonight?
I’m deducting one star for each musician involved in making this ruckus above 50. That takes us to negative 8 billion stars.
BWHA BWHAH BAAA WAAA WAHH!!!!!!
2
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Thu Dec 14 2023
Fromohio
fIREHOSE
Slightly proggy, slightly grungy, but struck me as more proto-jam band than anything else. Not my thing.
2
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Fri Dec 15 2023
Shalimar
Rahul Dev Burman
This is really cool, except the songs that have that high-pitched voiced singer. I loved the first song and “Baby Let’s Dance Together.” Such a crazy mix of different styles. Fun to listen to.
3
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Mon Dec 18 2023
Graceland
Paul Simon
Seems to be a huge divide between those that love this album and those that find it to be “sanitised world music for middle class drones with no imagination and less soul.” Maybe I’m a middle class drone with no imagination or soul, but I love this album like few others. Listening to it never fails to make me happy. Whether that is because of its innate musical qualities or because of nostalgia and my own history with it, I can’t say. All I know is that, to me, this album is as close to perfect as music gets.
5
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Tue Dec 19 2023
Ace of Spades
Motörhead
I was fully prepared for this to be nothing more than loud angry music for pimply boys in the 80’s to be mad at their parents to, but I was pleasantly surprised when I found myself tapping my steering wheel along to several songs. Yes it’s loud and angry but it’s also catchy and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Good job scary metal cowboys!
3
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Wed Dec 20 2023
Cafe Bleu
The Style Council
Pretty fun album. All over the place stylistically but had some enjoyable moments. Other than “Gospel” there weren’t any truly bad songs. I’m glad to have heard it.
3
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Thu Dec 21 2023
Seventh Tree
Goldfrapp
I like Trip Hop. At its best, this album sounds like okay Trip Hop. But it’s mostly random synth tones and pleasant vocals with no real song structure. Very forgettable.
2
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Fri Dec 22 2023
Oedipus Schmoedipus
Barry Adamson
Some of this was kind of okay but most of it was terrible. I don’t need to listen to music to make me feel anxious, I’m plenty anxious on my own.
1
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Mon Dec 25 2023
Brothers In Arms
Dire Straits
This is a great jazz influenced pop record. The second side drags a bit, but it is still amazing.
Now here is a play I wrote.
All the band members except Mark Knopler: “Fine Mark, you can play your weird 1920’s metal guitar on all the songs. Now it’s time to come up with the cover art. What do we want to put on it?”
Mark Knopler: 👉👈
4
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Tue Dec 26 2023
A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector
Various Artists
Some of these songs have been covered tens of thousands of times and the versions of them on this album are some of the best ever done, if not the best. This is an absolute monster of an album. The only downsides are 1) they’re Christmas songs and so you can only listen to them a few weeks a year and 2) Phil Spector being a murderer. Other than that, a perfect album.
4
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Wed Dec 27 2023
Behaviour
Pet Shop Boys
Did Duran Duran and Pet Shop Boys get together and decide to go from disco-y dance pop to sedate snoozefests as soon as 1/1/1990 hit? Whether it was a conspiracy to go from 80’s ravers to 90’s droners or not, I think both versions of both bands suck. “Ordinary World” is pretty good but that’s neither here nor there.
The point is, if I didn’t like Pet Shop Boys before they decided to spend forever being boring - and I very much didn’t - then there was no way I was going to like this drab 1990’s version of them. Yawn and pass.
2
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Thu Dec 28 2023
Crooked Rain Crooked Rain
Pavement
I love Pavement. Listening to them never fails to take me back to a time and place when they were probably my favorite band. I prefer Slanted and Enchanted to this one, but they are both incredible albums.
I wish grunge had never happened and Pavement/Sebadoh/Dinosaur Jr. had been the sound of the 90’s. Then maybe the Goo Goo Dolls and Limp Bizkit and Korn and the boy bands and Brittney’s and Christina’s wouldn’t have taken over and there would have been no Woodstock ‘99 or 9/11 or War on Terror and Gore would have won in 2000 and there wouldn’t have been a writer’s strike and The Apprentice would have never made it to air and Trump would have died in semi-obscurity and COVID-19 would have been stopped early by an efficient presidential administration. But it was not to be. Thanks Kurt.
4
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Fri Dec 29 2023
Ingenue
k.d. lang
The aural equivalent of watching paint dry. Very Canadian: boring, soulless, inoffensive and bland. It doesn't warrant a 1-star review because it fades into the background so completely that I hardly noticed it. I would almost rather be annoyed by an album than bored into a coma by one, but not quite.
2
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Mon Jan 01 2024
Amnesiac
Radiohead
I imagine that anyone doing a 1001 album listening to and reviewing project considers him or her (probably him)self a "music nerd" but obviously there is a giant degree of variation as to what that term means to different people. Some people think that if they have been to five Dave Matthews Band concerts that they are a music nerd and some people think that if you haven't got a top ten list of favorite 1920's-era Zimbabwean throat-singing noise disco artists then you aren't really a music fan at all. I am somewhere in that spectrum, probably on the more basic end, and even in full recognition of that basicness I have some serious apostasies from what I consider to be music nerd orthodoxy. For example, I unironically love Neil Diamond; I cannot for the life of me get what people like about Gang of Four, or post-punk in general; I think Gin Blossoms and Toad the Wet Sprocket were better 90's bands than Nirvana and Peal Jam; I wouldn't kick Air Supply out of bed for eating crackers; and damnit do I hate Radiohead.
I think that if Radiohead were just a one hit wonder grunge era band that kept on making some kind of weird music in their subsequent career that a few people really liked then I would probably say, "The singer's voice is not for me, but its okay" and move on, but Radiohead is held up as the end all be all of music nerd music and I just don't get it. OK Computer is okay. Creep is a pretty good song. But everything else they have ever done can be tossed to the bottom of the ocean for all I care. If they come on the radio I turn the channel. I fucking hate them. I think it is mostly Thom Yorke (had to be "Thom" didn't it? Couldn't possibly be "Tom")'s voice, but its probably just everything. Fuck you, Radiohead. Fuck you, music nerds who think everyone has to like Radiohead.
I wish I was an amnesiac and could forget that this band ever existed. And I think what makes listening to this garbage even more upsetting is knowing full well that there are probably at least three other shitty Radiohead albums on this list. Let's see . . . yep, four albums total. God help me, I'm going to have to endure In Rainbows again. Kill me now.
1
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Tue Jan 02 2024
Odessey And Oracle
The Zombies
I wonder if this album gets assigned on 1/1 like the Phil Spector Christmas album gets assigned on 12/25 because “This Will Be Our Year” is the perfect song to start a new year with.
I think this would be a five star record if it weren’t for “Butcher’s Tale”. Even with that dud this is a 4-star record for me. I think the baroque pop sound is so unique and enjoyable to listen to. A great album.
4
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Wed Jan 03 2024
Roxy Music
Roxy Music
I like a couple of Brian Eno songs. I like “More Than This.” But this album is garbage. Nothing about this makes me want to listen to it.
2
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Thu Jan 04 2024
Moby Grape
Moby Grape
This is pretty good. I feel like this was a sound that was popular at the time and I am sure that hundreds of bands did it worse than these guys, but quite a few did it better too. If you get tired of listening to all the bands that did this sound better than Moby Grape did - or if want to get the classic rock version of indie cred for listening to a forgotten band with a tragic story - by all means, put on Moby Grape. I am glad that I have now heard Moby Grape and I could totally see listening to this album again. Not life-changing but decent.
However, the joke that resulted in their band name: “What is purple and swims in the ocean? Moby Grape!” I don’t get it. “What is purple and conquered the world? Alexander the Grape!” makes sense because “Grape” rhymes with “Great.” But Moby Dick and Moby Grape don’t rhyme. I don’t get that joke and I suspect either it’s stupid or I’m stupid or a little of both but either way I’m angry.
3
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Fri Jan 05 2024
Quiet Life
Japan
Oh look, more generic British synth pop. Too bland to hate but nothing to recommend it either.
2
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Mon Jan 08 2024
Abbey Road
Beatles
This is a tough album to rate. Part of me thinks I should give all Beatles albums on this list five stars because they invented modern pop music (or stole it from American R&B and country and brought it to white middle class teenagers like Prometheus bringing fire to mankind). But I think Abbey Road has some problems. I hate “Come Together” and don’t like “Something.” “Oh! Darling” is good but a bit much on the Little Richard impersonation. “Octopus’s Garden” is a Ringo song 😒.
But starting with “I Want You (She’s so heavy)” it’s essentially perfect. Ridiculously, insanely perfect. “Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go” wrecks me every time I hear it. Even “Golden Slumbers” isn’t too treacly when it comes after the long suite of songs blending together that precedes it. Then capped off by the weird and wonderful 23 seconds of “Her Majesty.”
Fuck it, five stars.
5
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Tue Jan 09 2024
What's Going On
Marvin Gaye
This album has some great songs on it, but it’s real accomplishment is to knit every song on the record together into a song cycle where the entire album sounds like one song rather than a collection of songs. Then what takes that to an entire other level is that these were incredibly talented musicians and composers at the tops of their games and so the song cycle is both an amazing technical achievement and sounds beautiful at basically every second of its 35 and a half minute length. This album is deservedly frequently ranked as the greatest album of all time. Popular music doesn’t get much better than this.
5
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Wed Jan 10 2024
School's Out
Alice Cooper
I don’t like Gwar or Rob Zombie or Alice Cooper. I don’t want any horror in my rock & roll. The only thing scary about those bands is how shitty their music is. Grand Finale was decent because it was an instrumental and they couldn’t make it all stupid with their stupid lyrics. Other than that this is total garbage.
2
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Thu Jan 11 2024
Beach Samba
Astrud Gilberto
“The Girl From Ipanema” sold five million copies and Stan Getz made sure that Astrud Gilberto only got $120 for her contribution to it (Getz was a monster who swindled and sexually assaulted his way across America in the 60’s). Gilberto’s husband cheated on her and she was so desperate for money because of their break-up that she toured with Getz and reportedly slept with him. Astrud Gilberto was one of the countless talented women who the music industry used, abused and discarded. And now that I have listened to “Beach Samba”, I feel the karmic scales are somewhat balanced.
I guess the idea is that if she sounded good backed by some of the greatest jazz musicians of all time that she’d sound just as good with the most generic Muzak they could find in the background? This album is a waste of Astrud Gilberto’s beautiful voice. I had to go home and listen to “Getz Gilberto” just to get the taste of this album out of my mouth.
2
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Fri Jan 12 2024
I See You
The xx
Jamie xx's "I Know There's Gonna Be (Good Times)" is one of my favorite songs so I always think I am going to like The xx, and they are always . . . fine. I will find one of their songs completely tolerable, but I'll think, "dang, is this like a ten minute long song?" and then see that it's been two and a half minutes. Nothing is wrong with The xx's music, but it’s just kind of there. It's like the quinoa of music.
2
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Mon Jan 15 2024
My Aim Is True
Elvis Costello
It’s hard to think of anything to say about this album. I love it. I love every song on it. I’ve listened to it hundreds of times and it never gets old. I’m the guy from the Walking Dead in Love Actually and this album is Kiera Knightly. I’m just standing outside this album’s door holding up a sign that says “To me you’re perfect.”
5
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Tue Jan 16 2024
Disraeli Gears
Cream
First off, I have to admit that I have been too hard on this album in the past because I misheard a few important lyrics. I thought they were saying "Strange Brew, girl what's inside of you?" Now I see it's "kill what's inside of you." That is much cooler. Also, in SWLABR I thought it was "the vicar has a mustache" but its "the picture has a mustache," which is not great but at least it isn't so off-puttingly British as using the word "vicar" in a rock song.
I think I also like this album a little less than I otherwise might because "Sunshine of Your Love", like Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit", has been overused in film and television to let the viewer know that the scene is set in the 1960's and possibly hippies and drugs are involved. That has made it harder for me to appreciate that song, and that song is definitely one of the tentpoles of the album, along with Strange Brew and Tales of Brave Ulysses.
All in all, this is a pretty good album, but I think it is overhyped. There are some really great songs, but there are also some duds. I have no issue with it being included on a list of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, but I would not rank it as the 87th-greatest album of all time as VH1 did in 2001. Some other lists put it in the high 100's of greatest albums, which I think is getting closer to where I would put it, but still might be overrating it as far as I’m concerned.
3
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Wed Jan 17 2024
So Much For The City
The Thrills
Everyone knows that an American who appropriates Japanese culture is called a weeaboo. Most people are also familiar with the term for Americans that ridiculously mimic a stereotype of Irish culture: Bostonians. But do you know what you call Irish people who cosplay as 1960’s Californians? The Thrills.
I like this album. I heard “Big Sur” on The OC soundtrack, read the review on Pitchfork, torrented the album and then burned it onto a CD to listen to in my Saturn with an “F: The President” sticker on the back. Could that sentence BE more early 2000’s?
Despite my fondness for this album, I’m not sure it is one of the 1001 albums to hear before you die. It seems a little too slight and unimportant to warrant that. But, I liked it in 2003 and enjoyed listening to it again today, so who’s to say?
3
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Thu Jan 18 2024
Nothing's Shocking
Jane's Addiction
“Jane Says” is a great song. The rest of the album is just okay. Perry Farrell seems like kind of a jerk and I don’t like his screechy singing. I hear less Zeppelin than Van Halen and RHCP and shitty hair metal. It’s not the worst album but it really doesn’t do it for me.
2
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Fri Jan 19 2024
Pelican West
Haircut 100
The band Chicago is pretty lame, but I absolutely love their self-titled first album when they were called Chicago Transit Authority. At its best, this album sounds like Chicago Transit Authority mixed with sophistapop and it’s awesome.
This is probably my favorite album I have heard doing this project that I wasn’t familiar with before (I had heard “Love Plus One” on Sirius XM’s First Wave channel but nothing else). The lyrics left a lot to be desired and it was a bit too cheesy in parts, but overall I really dug it. I am a sucker for a horn section.
3
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Mon Jan 22 2024
Cosmo's Factory
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Take country, R&B, rockabilly, straight ahead 50’s rock and psychedelia and have a band that takes their craft seriously and has a strong pop sensibility mix them all together and you get one of the great American albums. I love the extended “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” jam and "Long as I Can See the Light".
If this album has any downside it’s that it is a de facto CCR greatest hits album and several of the songs have been worn out by classic rock radio. However, even fifty years of over-playing five of these songs can’t overcome how incredible an album this is.
4
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Tue Jan 23 2024
The Suburbs
Arcade Fire
I really like Funeral but have liked this band less with every subsequent album, stolen basketball, Disney collab and sex pest allegation. Trying to listen to The Suburbs today with unbiased ears, it’s okay. A bit too bombastic and pompous. Sprawl II is a good song. All in all, if it isn’t Funeral then I’d rather just skip it.
2
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Wed Jan 24 2024
Butterfly
Mariah Carey
*Mariah*: This SUUUHUHUHACKKSS UHUHUAAHHHSSSHooooAAHHSS”
*Puff Daddy “rap” break*: “This sucks. She is saying “this sucks” but stretching the words out way longer than is necessary because that’s what good singing is? Also I’m a rapist.”
*”Rap” break over, back to Mariah*: “This really SUUHAACCCKS ooooo UHUHUAHHSSSSAHHooooAAHHSS!”
This “album” is just that for almost an hour. No amount of yass-slaying this queen is going to make this anything other than disposable 90’s pop garbage.
No one should ever listen to this, much less have to listen to it before they die. 60% of the “lyrics” are “AAAAAAHHHHHH” Ooooooo” “EEEEEEE” and a high-pitched squeaking sound. This is a paper plate of an album. Meant to appeal to what was popular at that exact moment, sell a bunch of copies and then be discarded and forgotten. Its existence is a net negative for humanity. My day, and my very life, are worse for having had to endure this “music.”
1
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Thu Jan 25 2024
Master Of Puppets
Metallica
I’d like to say that I hate Metallica because they were millionaires who sued to stop normal people from getting around having to pay them even more money to add to their hoards while pretending that their greed was really about artistic integrity, but honestly I just really really hate this shit.
Oooooh puppet masters controlling people. How profound! So anti-authoritarian and anti-war. Oh wait, what’s that James Hetfield? You are "honored" the U.S. military used Metallica's music to psychologically torture prisoners of war because it "help[ed] us stay safe."? Wow, what an absolute piece of shit you are.
I guess stupid angry people need something to listen to in their jean jackets while driving their Geo Metros to go see the latest Fast and the Furious movie, but for everyone who didn’t stop growing as a person at 15, this is unbearable.
And before you start talking to me about 21/32 time signatures and chromatic scales, don’t bother because I don’t know what any of that means. But prog rock bands do all that band geek autism stuff too, but their music is actually enjoyable. In fact, the only way I got through listening to this album was to pretend it was just heavier prog rock, which helped, but not much.
1
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Fri Jan 26 2024
Paul Simon
Paul Simon
Paul Simon is SO BAD at choosing album cover art, that I feel it important to celebrate this album for him doing a good job in that realm for a change (possibly the only other time being Graceland). All the Simon and Garfunkel album covers are embarrassingly lame. Well, Sounds of Silence is okay, but that Greatest Hits cover, woof. And then There Goes Rhymin Simon is giving Steely Dan a run for the worst album cover by a great recording artist of all time. When Paul Simon was picking his stats he put everything into song writing and musical ability and attributed no points to graphic design, the min-maxing motherfucker.
I just watched The Wrecking Crew documentary and was surprised to recognize several of the session musicians from that movie as playing on this album. Makes sense I suppose. Paul Simon is the type to bring in whoever will make his album as good as it can be. It’s really no different than going to Kingston to record with members of Toots and the Maytals in order to make “Mother and Child Reunion” sound like actual Reggae and not a pale imitation. Paul Simon was going to make the best music he could make and didn’t care if he had to beg, borrow or steal to do it.
The first song on each side is the hit and up there amongst the best pop music of all time. But the rest of the album isn’t filler. It never reaches the heights of the two singles, but they are almost all compelling songs in their own way. This is a great artist making an album when he was in his prime. The world is a better place for this album being in it.
4
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Mon Jan 29 2024
Blood On The Tracks
Bob Dylan
I think this album is mythologized to such a degree that it is hard to tell if I’m reacting to what I’m hearing or to the hype. There was a time in my life when I thought I really liked this album. Now I’m not so sure.
I think it’s shitty that Dylan never gave the Minneapolis session players that re-recorded several of the songs credit. I think it’s shitty that he showed up to the New York sessions drunk and acted like he didn’t care about what he was doing. I have rarely been as horrified as when I heard Bette Midler singing “Buckets of Rain”. I far prefer the New York versions of “You’re a Big Girl Now” and “Idiot Wind” but think some of the Minneapolis versions are better, like “Rosemary, Lily and the Jack of Hearts”.
At this point in my life, I am in neither the “Bob Dylan is rock’s greatest poet” camp nor the “This guy’s voice is terrible, turn it off” camp. I like most of Desire and most of Blonde on Blonde. I like Rolling Thunder Revue era Dylan with his eye liner and his silly feathered cap. I like some of Highway 61, and Bringing It All Back Home and John Wesley Harding. But only some of those albums. If I never heard folk or born again era Dylan again I’d be fine with that.
As for Blood on the Tracks, I think I like some of it okay. “Meet me in the Morning” and “Buckets of Rain” are pretty cool songs. But I think that I’ve listened to this album too many times at too many ages to really hear it when I put it on. I think it’s probably pretty good. I think people should listen to it before they die, but it’s not an album I am likely to put on. And isn’t that what makes an album good? Something you enjoy listening to and want to play? Cause for me, this isn’t that.
3
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Tue Jan 30 2024
Rio
Duran Duran
Pop music is always evolving but this is exactly what it sounded like in 1982. Duran Duran should be commended for flawlessly capturing the sound of the moment and making it memorable and catchy enough to still resonate 40 years later.
This is way better than a lot of the generic 80’s British synth-pop on this list that is a chore to slog through (I’m looking at you Human Leaugue’s Dare and Japan). The cover is iconic, the hits are absolute monsters (with “Save a Prayer” and “The Chauffeur” being standouts for me) and “Last Chance on the Stairway” is a song I had never heard before that kicks ass.
All that being said, having lived through this era, although being too young to really participate in it, pictures of this band and seeing the videos bum me out for reasons I can’t fully articulate. Maybe because Duran Duran, and people who owned Duran Duran albums, were the cool kids living a glamorous life that I could only glimpse from the outside. Duran Duran always feels like really good music made for people who aren’t me, rather than feeling like music made for me.
Still, they were the absolute best at what they were doing, even if they were doing it for people who had way spikier hair and shinier shirts than I did. So, credit where credit is due.
3
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Wed Jan 31 2024
Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby
Girls Against Boys
I tried to convince myself this wasn’t that bad by thinking, “It’s kind of like The Jesus Lizard, I guess” but really this reminded me of nothing so much as Bush. So fuck this. I didn’t like this kind of shit when I was an angry young man, so I’m certainly not going to like it now that I’m a bitter, grouchy tired old man.
1
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Thu Feb 01 2024
The Contino Sessions
Death In Vegas
Okay techno/triphop/shoegaze. Not something I’d ever feel a desire to listen to again, but it being the assigned album didn’t ruin my day. I wish a genie had offered the band the ability to take itself a little less seriously in exchange for having to make every song on the album two minutes shorter. But other than those issues, this was fine.
2
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Fri Feb 02 2024
Triangle
The Beau Brummels
At times this sounds a little bit like the soundtrack to the Rankin/Bass animated Hobbit movie (https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL545948224B999E8A&si=PC6Lk90OH7Wwg8JP) which isn't a bad thing, but also is not necessarily a great thing either. This struck me as very 1960's San Francisco. While I think it is an interesting artifact of its time, I would not consider it an album everyone needs to hear.
2
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Mon Feb 05 2024
Songs In The Key Of Life
Stevie Wonder
I think Stevie Wonder is one of the greatest pop musicians of all time and this is his masterpiece. His mid-70’s run of amazing albums, culminating in this one, may be unmatched in music history. The breadth and depth of songs on this album is unbelievable. Fun, soulful, socially conscious, personal, danceable; this album is everything you could possibly want in a record. I don’t think it would be hyperbolic to say, as many people have said before, that this is the best album ever made.
5
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Tue Feb 06 2024
Blackstar
David Bowie
David Bowie was born in 1947. Raquel Welch was born in 1940. David Bowie released Ziggy Stardust in 1972 when he was 25 years old. Raquel Welch was in the film where her famed doe-skinned bikini shot was taken in 1966 when she was 26 years old. Raquel Welch Was 69 years old in 2009. David Bowie was 69 years old in 2016 when Blackstar was released. If you want to listen to a David Bowie album made in 2016, do you want to look at a poster of Raquel Welch in a bikini from 2009? I’m sure Raquel Welch was interesting and charming and insightful at 69 years of age, and I may have loved reading an article she wrote or watching an interview with her at that age, but I wouldn’t want to see Raquel Welch bikini-modeling in 2009, and I don’t want to listen to Blackstar.
Obviously, bikini-modeling and making music are not the same thing, but I would argue that, while older people can still enjoy it, rock and roll music is primarily made by and for young people, just as posters of women in bikinis are. And even if this album can’t be classified as rock and roll, that’s what Bowie was famous for doing (I know, I know, Low etc., still) and so what makes his ambient, jazz noise album any more desirable to listen to than any other 69-year old’s?
I am a firm believer in Sick Boy’s Unifying Theory of Life: “at one point, you’ve got it, then you lose it. Then it’s gone forever, all walks of life. . . ‘The Name of the Rose’ is merely a blip on an otherwise uninterrupted downward trajectory.” We all get old if we live long enough. Some of us, like Bowie, achieve greatness for a brief period if we are exceedingly talented and brave and lucky. Bowie was brilliant when he was brilliant, but in 2016 he was decades past his prime. Blackstar is an interesting artifact and I suppose a nice “parting gift to his fans” (they still had to buy it though didn’t they) but it’s not for me, and I suspect that it’s not really for most people, if they’re being honest with themselves.
2
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Wed Feb 07 2024
Elephant
The White Stripes
I was blown away by this album when it came out. When “Seven Nation Army” became such a big hit, The White Stripes felt like a breath of fresh air and so, not necessarily original, but so different than anything else that was happening at the time in mainstream music. I found them to be very exciting then, and still enjoy this album now.
Musicians are great, but rock stars are really fun, and The White Stripes were rock stars. The mythology, the motifs, the brashness and confidence; all classic rock star stuff. And the songs are worthy of all the trappings that accompanied them. This is definitely an album everyone should hear.
4
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Thu Feb 08 2024
Under Construction
Missy Elliott
Missy’s and Timbaland’s beats and creativity are impressive as always. She merges a very old school style of rapping with production that was way ahead of its time. She was a shot in the arm for hip-hop and is an amazing talent.
All that being said, this album has some real duds on it. This is more “Work It”-and-Friends than an actual album. But “Work It” is such a great song that it’s hard to be too mad about that. I think Missy, like many rappers, is a single-oriented artist rather than someone focused on making a cohesive album.
I think someone dying having never heard “Work It” would have really missed out, but this album? You’d be alright giving it a pass.
2
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Fri Feb 09 2024
Veckatimest
Grizzly Bear
Good lord, when I see the words “chamber pop” I shudder in horror. I kind of get what these guys are going for, but most of the record I just wonder why they would ever want to go for this. When it’s at its best it’s kind of hypnotic and jammy and a pleasant wall of sound kind of thing. But you have to fight through a lot of “goddamit will you fucking hipster nerds shut the fuck up?!” to get to that point. All things being equal, I’d rather listen to an actual album with actual songs than this harpsichord woodwind tonal stew.
2
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Mon Feb 12 2024
Gorillaz
Gorillaz
An English virtual band exploring a variety of musical styles including hip hop, electronic and world music made up of NFT-looking anime human/ape hybrids?
https://wifflegif.com/gifs/552151-mr-pink-fuck-all-that-reservoir-dogs-gif
Some of this music was perfectly fine. I like Damon Albarn’s work. But knowing that I’m supposed to listen to this while watching cartoon monkeys really tanks the whole experience for me. I’ll stick to listening to Blur.
3
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Tue Feb 13 2024
Pet Sounds
The Beach Boys
I’ve owned this album for decades and listened to it a hundred times or more. It’s almost too big to rate. It’s been lauded as one of the top two or three albums of all time for longer than I’ve been alive, but how often does someone decide to spin Pet Sounds just for the hell of it?
Maybe the baby boomers’ lead-exposure-damaged brains cause them to think an anxious and depressed twenty-something boy band member who had until that point only made songs about surfing, cars and girls but decided to hire a bunch of studio musicians with the deliberate intention of making the greatest rock album of all time and then started playing glockenspiels and coca-cola bottles is good. Maybe it’s just three hits, a bunch of filler, and one full on Exotica song for some reason.
I don’t know. But when an album kicks off with “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” and then goes on to contain “Sloop John B” and “God Only Knows”, it’s hard not to give it full marks. “Here Today” and “I’m Waiting for the Day” aren’t too bad either.
Ultimately, I am trying to rate albums based on how I feel about them as an individual and not based on their place in rock history or whatever. For me, Pet Sounds is a cool sounding and pretty album that I can appreciate for not being afraid to get real weird. But I don’t consider it one of my all-time favorites.
4
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Wed Feb 14 2024
Oxygène
Jean-Michel Jarre
It was weird reading the Wikipedia page about Oxygene and learning that it was an international sensation that sold 10 to 15 million copies, and that Jean Michel Jarre was the first Westerner to ever play China and put on the biggest concert of all time, because I had never heard of this album or this artist before today. It felt like that Berenstein Bears thing where you feel like you’ve shifted to a slightly different dimension.
I thought Oxygene sounded a little like Tangerine Dream and a little like Tubular Bells but did not appeal to me as much as either of those. I appreciate that this album was ahead of its time when it was made but I think this type of music has been taken to a lot more interesting places in subsequent years.
I found listening to this comparable to someone liking Renaissance art and then being told to check out crappy medieval art from before they figured out perspective. Like yeah, this guy’s flat face in this circa 1135 painting is cool and all, and was the best they could do at the time, but I’d rather go back to Raphael and Michelangelo and the other ninja turtles.
2
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Thu Feb 15 2024
Two Dancers
Wild Beasts
Stupid, banal, totally unexceptional in every way. Sounds like a shitty Roxy Music, and Roxy Music is already shitty enough on its own. It also reminded me of all those recent bad Arctic Monkeys albums where they are trying to be space lounge singers. Just a waste of an album pick.
2
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Fri Feb 16 2024
Crime Of The Century
Supertramp
I like Supertramp. The blending of pop and prog that they pull off when they are firing on all cylinders is really fun. I had heard "Bloody Well Right" before, but while I have spun Breakfast in America a bunch of times and really like it, I do not believe that I had heard anything else from this album before. Honestly, other than "Bloody Well Right", I don't hear anything on this album that I would necessarily want to hear again.
Crime of the Century seems to take itself a little more seriously than the band does on Breakfast in America. I am giving the album three stars because it is Supertramp, but not peak Supertramp.
3
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Mon Feb 19 2024
The White Album
Beatles
If I had a time machine, I would go back to any time when a band or artist was contemplating making a double album and force them at ray gun point (because I assume if I have a time machine I also have a ray gun) to just make a really good single album instead. The only exceptions being Songs in the Key of Life, Exile on Mainstreet, The Basement Tapes and maybe Blonde on Blonde.
The White Album is great, but you know what would have been better?
Back in the U.S.S.R.
Dear Prudence
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Happiness Is A Warm Gun
I'm So Tired
Blackbird
I Will
Julia
Birthday
Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey
Helter Skelter
Long, Long, Long
That album would be up there with Abbey Road as a near perfect Beatles album. Instead you've got this giant sprawling mess of a double album that includes a bunch of songs that nobody needs or wants.
I get it, they were super famous and nobody could tell them no, they had fried their brains on acid, they had all just had a bad three-month-long weird cult vacation and they weren't getting along. Still, if you watch that Apple TV special where they recorded them for forty-something hours while they made Let it Be, Paul says something about how the band had been off its game since "Mr. Epstein" died because Brian Epstein kept them in line. I have to agree. These chuckleheads needed a grown up.
The White Album isn't bad (I know, hot take) but it suffers from the classic double-album curse. It could have been an amazing single album.
4
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Tue Feb 20 2024
Aja
Steely Dan
I’m smiling as I’m reading the bad reviews of this album that all the sweet summer children are leaving. There is some time travel movie or book I saw or read once and forgot where the main character is a passionate believer in one thing at one point in his life and a zealot for the other side captures and tortures him and then later it’s revealed that the zealot is him from the future who has been converted to the other side and goes back and tortures his younger self. You then learn that it’s half hatred inspiring the torture of his younger self, but it’s half love. That is how I feel about people who don’t yet love this album.
And I say “love” not “like” because one day you will love this album. It is inevitable. The day your goatee becomes predominantly white, this album will arrive in the mail on vinyl, no postmark or return address. You will look at it disdainfully but put it on - because why not? - and it will sound to you like the best thing you have ever heard. You will goggle at the way its seven songs burst with sophisticated changes, exquisitely played by such jazz luminaries as saxophonist Wayne Shorter and keyboardist-vibraphonist Victor Feldman (both graduates of Miles Davis’ ‘60s bands) and session pros like bassist Chuck Rainey, drummers Steve Gadd, Jim Keltner and Bernard Purdie, saxophonists Jim Horn and Plas Johnson, pianist Paul Griffin and guitarists Larry Carlton and Lee Ritenour.
The hypnotic suavity of the musical concepts and Fagen and Becker’s propensity for writing brainy, elliptical lyrics will thrill a part of your soul that has always been there waiting to emerge. You will fall down on your knees like Saul on the road to Damascus and when you rise you will be Paul. And you will love this album with the type of fervor that only the convert can have.
I smile as I read your one-and-two-star reviews calling this album boring elevator music because I was you once, and it seems like it wasn’t that long ago. But two things are undefeated in this life: Father Time and The Dan. And both of them are coming for you.
One day soon we may sit together and discuss how “Black Cow”’s silken, soul-derived groove (propelled by Rainey’s fat bass lines), Feldman’s pristine electric piano solo and Tom Scott’s tenor sax outburst all cloak the tale of a man at odds with his drug-addicted, promiscuous girlfriend, whom he may or may not be clandestinely stalking. We will hear that unmistakable gravelly voice singing “Peg” in the background, and I’ll say, “Steely Dan sought out the absolute master of every single instrument that was played on this album to contribute, and the voice is an instrument, which is why they hired Michael McDonald as their back-up singer” and you’ll smile and nod.
Steely Dan’s unique blend of smooth sophisticated music and complex and dark lyricism will unite us as brothers and we will commune together enjoying this album with no hint of cynicism or irony because we will have moved past those concepts and be far too enlightened to engage in such trivialities in what we will know is the entirely too short amount of time remaining to us in this life.
And on that day, both of our backs will hurt.
5
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Wed Feb 21 2024
Younger Than Yesterday
The Byrds
The Byrds are a very influential band. Sweetheart of the Rodeo is a great album. I like jangly folk/country rock. Plus, I'm sure 60’s teeny-boppers appreciated being able to hear Pat Boone versions of Dylan songs so they could feel like they were super groovy without having to listen to the voice of the voice of their generation. But Younger than Yesterday is not doing it for me.
A fair amount of this album is straight up lame (looking at you "Mind Gardens"), and when it isn't lame it just isn't substantial enough to warrant being on a list of 1001 albums you must hear before you die. I'm not discounting that the Byrds are an important band that made some great songs and inspired some of my favorite bands of all time (REM, Big Star, The Jayhawks), but this album is not very good.
2
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Thu Feb 22 2024
Melodrama
Lorde
***WARNING: Early-mid-40's-year-old-man rant incoming***
Here is something I don't understand about Lorde, and while we're at it, Lana Del Rey/Billie Eilish/Olivia Rodrigo/etc.: are they pop or not? In the "I think this might be pop" category, they win Grammys and sell out stadiums and are played on pop radio and have hits. On the other hand, they don't make songs that are fun to listen to. And isn't that what pop is, at its core? Fun songs that make you want to dance and sing along? Because I would not describe any songs by any of the artists I have named that way, except maybe "Royals".
And - I totally get it - I am lumping Lorde in with other female artists around her age and dissing all of them for not making pop music. Which smacks of some kind of backwards attitude that men can make art but women have to make pop. But before I am totally canceled, back in my day we had Tori Amos and Fiona Apple, and before that there was, I don't know, Kate Bush? Those artists were making music that, for the most part, wasn't poppy, but had something else going for it, whether that was unique instrumentation or engaging lyrics or . . . something. And for me, most of Lorde/Lana Del Rey/Billie Eilish/Olivia Rodrigo's songs aren't pop and also don't have anything else going for them. They are just tinkling pianos and boring synths and I'm-14-and-this-is-deep lyrics.
I like Tori Amos and Kate Bush and Bjork and PJ Harvey and Regina Spektor, so I think my I-enjoy-female-artists-even-when-they-aren't-all-that-poppy bona fides are firmly established. Therefore, I think that there may be some validity to this rant . . . possibly mixed with an unhealthy dose of misogyny and I need to really examine some of my assumptions and possibly do better. But, speaking from my current unenlightened state, I don't like this album. Also, fuck Lana Del Rey.
2
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Fri Feb 23 2024
The Queen Is Dead
The Smiths
For men, the most important period for forming musical taste is between the ages of 13 to 16 according to the first article that came up on my Google search. Well, I had The Smiths Best Vol.’s 1 and 2 when I was in high school and wore those discs out I played them so much and so it’s hard for me to be unbiased when it comes to The Smiths. They are such a perfect band for a lonely, introverted, pretentious teenage boy. I’m so glad that The Smiths exist and that I had them to mope to during those prime time moping years.
The Queen is Dead has an embarrassment of riches of great songs on it. “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side", "Bigmouth Strikes Again", "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out", “Cemetry Gates”. It’s insane. Morrissey was such an incredible lyricist (at this time at least) and Johnny Marr has a sound that is so unique and so fun to listen to. The two of them together are sublime. I love this band and I love this album.
4
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Mon Feb 26 2024
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley
I know this is an important record and I know it has to be on this list. But I am going to give it two stars for the same reason that if it were 1500 B.C. I would be amazed by staring at a fire, but in 2024 I'm not. The world has moved past this sound and I personally find it pretty basic and if I hear that generic rockabilly riff that has been used in 8 billion songs one more time I'm going to kill myself. That being said, if I was a teeny-bopper in 1956 I'd be losing my fucking shit over this album.
Also, Elvis is one lucky motherfucker. Race is a social construct but culture is real. And while cultural appropriation - in the sense of just adopting signifiers of other cultures as a fashion accessory - is wrong; cultural exchange is admirable and is how you get basically every genre of music. Different cultures are constantly mixing and blending and stealing from one another's musical traditions and creating new types of music from the weird Frankenstein babies that they make, and its great.
Cut to the 1950's and there is a giant blockage in the mixed streams that lead to new music being created and shared because colonizers and slave traders invented the concept of race in the 1660's to justify their rape and pillaging of other peoples in the name of profit. And almost 300 years later, there was still this artificial separation between musical traditions in America. That left millions of white teenagers with no idea that black Americans had invented a new sound called Rock & Roll.
So who comes along but a talented boy singer from Memphis who had charisma and a unique vocal style and a pretty face and could dance. But more importantly, he could do pretty decent versions of all this great music that those millions of teenagers hadn't heard yet and that allowed him to become the best selling artist of all time based on a decent amount of talent, but no more than thousands of other artists who were nowhere near as successful.
Congratulations Elvis, the Atlantic slave trade allowed you to become famous enough to spend twenty years popping pills, having pillow fights with 14-year old girls, making shitty low-budget movies, posing with Nixon and then dying on a toilet in your huge tacky mansion.
2
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Tue Feb 27 2024
The Next Day
David Bowie
I think we all know someone who is a completist about a particular artist. They think that if there is a recording of Miles Davis or Bob Dylan or Phish or whomever singing in the shower at age 68 that everyone must hear it. It is clear that Robert Dimery is a completist when it comes to David Bowie. Now, there are worse artists to be obsessed with, but I am done with humoring this clear delusion. [Insert Meme of Robert Deniro saying, "Are you saying that David Bowie made some albums not worth listening to?" and the Joker replying, "I am. And I'm tired of pretending that there aren't" here].
There is a scene in the television show "Sports Night" where a character is trying to edit a baseball game down to its highlights and he gets too in the weeds and just can't cut anything. His version has five minutes of a pitcher pitching to a batter with no hits, and a coworker comes in and asks why he hasn't cut that and he replies that you have to see it because it allows you to appreciate the battle. Then the producer pops her head in and says, "Just give me the double off the wall, the homer in the fifth, and the error at third" and that is the end of it.
In the spirit of that scene, the David Bowie albums that make the cut of 1001 albums you should hear before you die are Hunky Dory, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Low, He has a lot of great songs, but they are spread out over too many albums filled with too many not great songs to warrant any further inclusion on a list of this kind. And I am tired of pretending otherwise.
1
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Wed Feb 28 2024
The Real Thing
Faith No More
I only knew “Epic” and would have been fine living my whole life that way. Veered between lame late-80’s metal, RHCP imitations and just stupid California bro- music, with cringy lyrics running throughout. Some of the bass and drums were well done, which is not surprising for a metal band. I also appreciated the willingness to experiment with various genres. But all in all, this is a hard pass for me.
2
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Thu Feb 29 2024
Everything Must Go
Manic Street Preachers
Good God. I know that in the U.K. they eat mushy green peas and beans on toast for every meal and watch "comedians" being droll and witty while pretending to play a game show for entertainment, but do they really not have any concept of "bland"? This music is bland. It is as bland as the album cover and the pictures of the people who made this shitty album. This is the aural equivalent of mushy green peas.
2
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Fri Mar 01 2024
Unknown Pleasures
Joy Division
Man, fuck this spooky-ass, haunted house, Count Chocula, doom and gloom, oggedy boogedy, creepy crawly, monster mash bullshit and the wolfman it rode in on. Fucking laser beam solos on “Insight”. This sucks. Go smoke cigarettes in a graveyard you techno-goth nerds. 🧛+🤖=💩
1
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Mon Mar 04 2024
The Downward Spiral
Nine Inch Nails
Oh boy, an album by the esteemed artist who scored "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem"! Look, I suppose if you can't make music that sounds good for normal people to enjoy then you can make loud, discordant noise for stupid, angry people to enjoy, and can make a lot of money that way because there are plenty of stupid angry people in the world who can often manage to scrounge together $15. But this is stupid noise and it sucks.
1
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Tue Mar 05 2024
If I Should Fall From Grace With God
The Pogues
The Pogues are fun to listen to and this is a very good album. It’s not something I am super into or spin very often, but I am glad this band and this album exist. And “Fairytale of New York” makes me cry every time I hear it.
3
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Wed Mar 06 2024
Planet Rock: The Album
Afrika Bambaataa
When this started, I thought “oh great, a historically important album that is going to feel like homework to listen to” but by “Renegades of Funk” it had won me over. Yes, it is foundational to modern rap and hip hop, but it’s also just fun to listen to. I’ve heard it said that music is supposed to be fun, that’s why creating songs is called “playing music”. This felt like people “playing music” in every sense: creating something new with joy and excitement and flair. I really liked it.
3
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Thu Mar 07 2024
Sex Packets
Digital Underground
Incredibly dated but honestly still catchy and fun. “The Humpty Dance” was played ad nauseam in 1990 with good reason because it rocks. I’m glad to have heard this album. There needs to be more nautical and sci-fi themed rap.
Quick movie pitch: Hannibal Burress did a bit on a podcast lovingly making fun of old school rappers and how simple their rhymes were, and I think that two minute bit could be made into a whole movie.
Open on our heroes, old school rappers on top of the world selling out clubs just by going, “My name is [rapper] and I’m here to say . . .” and telling people to wear condoms and not to smoke crack. Then a Rakim-like rapper comes along and starts doing internal and multisyllabic rhymes and the old school rappers get made irrelevant overnight.
And then other stuff happens. I guess a love interest maybe. Then the old school and new school rappers unite to defeat a common enemy or something. I don’t know. I don’t know how to write screen plays, but you get the idea.
Call it “Rhyme of the Century”, cast Hannibal Buress, Chris Rock and Will Ferrell as LL Cool J. Make a million dollars. You’re welcome.
3
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Fri Mar 08 2024
Joan Baez
Joan Baez
Reading Ms. Baez’s Wikipedia page, she seems like a very good and genuine person. She was obviously a skilled guitarist even at 19 when this album was recorded. “Silver Dagger” “House of the Rusing Sun” and “Wildwood Flower” are pretty good songs.
Now that all the positive stuff is out of the way, this sucks and I hate it. I hate her voice. I don’t like hearing Colonial Williamsburg music. If I hear about the “salt sea” one more time I’m going to scream. Fuck all of this.
2
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Mon Mar 11 2024
Nilsson Schmilsson
Harry Nilsson
“Nilsson became big when The Beatles named dropped him”. Wake up sheeple. The Beatles had stupid money and power at that time and had the juice to hire a bunch of scientists to mix all four of their essences up together into one person and then age him up to their age so they could hang out and jam with him.
The scientists did it in some weird all-chrome 1960’s lab while smoking cigarettes so it came out a bit off, but they pretty much accomplished it. Harry Nilsson had Paul’s old-timey pop sensibilities, John’s acerbic wit, George’s naive vulnerability and Ringo’s goofiness. He’s a one man The Beatles, but just kind of a fucked up one.
All of Harry Nilsson’s albums are worth listening to, but this really is the one you need to hear before you die. I think “all the songs sound the same” is lazy criticism because it means you aren’t paying enough attention to pick up on nuances, but there honestly are some albums that really feel like that. This album is the exact opposite. Every single song is wildly different from the others but they all sound like Nilsson.
This is a great album by a weird lab-grown Frankenstein monster man who never felt at home in this world because he was brought to life by mad scientists and pop stars arrogantly playing God. Also it has a great beat and you can dance to it.
4
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Tue Mar 12 2024
L.A. Woman
The Doors
“MR MOJO RISIN” is an anagram for “Jim Morrison”. Poetic genius Jim
Morrison came up with that in the days before the internet made it possible for narcissistic nerds to view every possible anagram of their names in seconds. This dork had to sit down with a pen and paper to work that shit out.
There is some inoffensive blues rock on this album, but nothing that makes wading through the ocean of pretension that is The Doors worthwhile. Oliver Stone should have to pay reparations to anyone who sat through that awful movie, and anyone who thinks Jim Morrison wouldn’t be a Trump supporting Q-Anon podcaster if he was still alive is kidding themselves.
- RIFLE WAILS, MD
2
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Wed Mar 13 2024
Want One
Rufus Wainwright
58 minutes is too long for an album, especially one this boring. If there were any interesting moments in any of these songs, I would say he should have just included those and made the album a good 34 minutes long rather than an interminable 58 minutes long. But there are no interesting moments. This is just softer, more orchestral Radiohead, and Radiohead sucks. Sorry, I have to stop writing because this album is playing in the background and I have gotten very sleepy. . . zzzzzzz.
2
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Thu Mar 14 2024
Antichrist Superstar
Marilyn Manson
For someone who played Paul on “The Wonder Years” and had a rib removed to be able to suck his own dick, this guy sure seems cranky. You’d think between hanging out with Fred Savage and all the autofellation, he’d be in a better mood and write happier songs.
1
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Fri Mar 15 2024
There's No Place Like America Today
Curtis Mayfield
I like Curtis Mayfield a lot but had never listened to this album and I’m really glad I did. His sound is so incredible and fits his voice so well. I really enjoyed this album.
3
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Mon Mar 18 2024
At Mister Kelly's
Sarah Vaughan
Out of 48 studio albums and ten live albums, I’m not sure how this was the Sarah Vaughan album chosen for this book. It’s fine, but I don’t believe this album captures her at her best. Sarah Vaughan was incredibly talented and deserves inclusion, but if it were up to me, I’d have gone with a different album.
3
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Tue Mar 19 2024
Morrison Hotel
The Doors
You know what, I am going to say something nice about this Doors album. Many of the songs are less than three minutes long. So, as a listener your suffering is pretty minimal. Good job you overrated pretentious mediocre hacks. At least this collection of awful songs you foisted upon the world has several awful songs that are pretty short. Good job.
2
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Wed Mar 20 2024
Coles Corner
Richard Hawley
I had no idea what to expect from this album and was very pleasantly surprised. It is obviously explicitly referencing a variety of influences, but never sounds like a nostalgia act. “Born Under a Bad Sign” reminded me a lot of “Maple Leaves”-era Jens Lekman, which I love. I am really glad to have heard this for the first time.
3
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Thu Mar 21 2024
Risque
CHIC
I guess I had only heard the radio edit of “Good Times” before but I enjoyed the album version more than I do the song I’ve heard in grocery stores and dentist offices a million times. The lyrics are still utterly moronic and the hook is repetitive, but the extended instrumental section almost redeems the song. That is about the only good thing I have to say about this album.
I know the whole “Disco Sucks” movement was grounded in racism and homophobia from middle-aged white construction workers who throw batteries at Santa Claus that thought everyone should just be happy to listen to Bachman Turner Overdrive for the rest of time, but disco sucks. Disco music is music made for people to dance to. Is “The Electric Slide” or “The Cupid Shuffle” on this list because of their importance in giving boring people something to do at weddings? This music does not need to be heard unless you are wearing bell bottoms, being felt up by Andy Warhol and doing the hustle.
Every review of this album talks about how people have sampled the beats to make other songs. Okay. That just means these are bad songs with some good beats in them. Let’s listen to those better songs that reuse these beats instead of these songs that are really only good for disco dancing and the few ballads they threw in for when the coke wore off I guess.
Most of this is pretty lame, and even worse, it’s lame and way too long. If you’re going to be cheesy, at least get it over with quickly. On the plus side, the overall album length isn’t too bad, even if the songs are way too long.
In conclusion, disco sucks. *throws battery at Santa Claus*
2
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Fri Mar 22 2024
Oar
Alexander 'Skip' Spence
Sometimes your lone voice crying out in the wilderness is right while all the rest of the world is wrong. And sometimes you’re David Rubinson. According to Wikipedia, the record label said “these are just demos, we’re not releasing them” and the artist himself said, “those are just demos, don’t put those out” but David Rubinson insisted that they be released and now here I am almost 50 years later having to listen to this garbage.
Music reviewers sometimes hear a really cool (probably untrue, because artists are liars) story about the making of a record and then tell people they have to listen to the record because it gives the reviewer an excuse to tell the cool story. Yes, yes, fire axes and mental institutions and a motorcycle, it’s all very compelling. But just tell me the story and don’t make me listen to this unfinished, rambling dreck.
There is nothing about this album that warrants listening to it. This is out of tune talk-singing over semi-formed quasi-songs for 45 minutes or so. This album is without any merit whatsoever.
2
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Mon Mar 25 2024
Physical Graffiti
Led Zeppelin
I like Led Zeppelin as a band (not as people, what with their blatant musical thievery and statutory rape, but if that were a deal breaker I’d have to discount 75% of this list) but I think this album has the same problem that so many other double albums do, it is bloated and over filled with just okay music instead of being cut down to just the strongest material.
If they cut three sides worth of music, then instead of filling side four with stuff not good enough for their earlier albums, they should have saved a side’s worth of tracks for their next album. There are a lot of great songs on this album, but also some real duds.
3
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Tue Mar 26 2024
Dummy
Portishead
Man I love this album. I bought this on CD in 1994 and have loved it ever since. I am giving this a five star rating knowing full well that I gave The White Album and Pet Sounds four stars and I don't care in the slightest. I am ranking these albums based on my personal feelings about them, not on some imaginary ultimate scale of quality that I am somehow able to tap into because I am so uniquely discerning.
This is one of my favorite albums and I love it. It is hard to even pick a favorite song off this album because there are no tracks that I don't think are great. Five stars.
5
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Wed Mar 27 2024
Urban Hymns
The Verve
Hey Robert Dimery, which kinda mediocre, completely unexceptional, generic brit pop album should we include on the list of 1001 albums you must here before you die?
Robert Dimery: YES!!!!
76 minutes of shoegaze-lite monotony. Ugh. These songs are too long and too boring and the lead singer sounds like the guy from Coldplay. This album isn't bad, but it sure as hell isn't good.
3
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Thu Mar 28 2024
Buenas Noches From A Lonely Room
Dwight Yoakam
I prefer Hillbilly Deluxe and think it is a stronger album but I really like late-80’s Dwight Yoakam and am glad he is on this list. He may have harkened back to the sound of an earlier time but he sounded like nothing else that was coming out at that time and I have always enjoyed his early albums.
3
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Fri Mar 29 2024
69 Love Songs
The Magnetic Fields
All of your reviews saying that you’re not going to bother to listen to an album this long sound like Philistines whining about about how the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is too big. I got so mad reading your half-literate tossed off dismissals of an album that is foundational to the vast majority of indie music made in the last 25 years and I started to say that anyone who doesn’t bother to listen to this masterpiece and recognize its greatness should just quit this project now. I was big mad for a minute there.
But then an intense feeling of peace came over me. I realized I don’t have to tell you to quit this project. You will do that on your own. You don’t have the passion to finish doing something like this, or to finish anything really. You will continue to live in your sad boring apartment by yourself, or with a series of partners who you don’t care that much for and who don’t care much for you, for the next few decades, playing video games and looking at the internet, and then you will die and the world will move on without much of a fuss. You will have never had the courage to love or be loved, you will never have felt deeply enough to affect the world or anyone in it. You will be utterly forgotten before your body is cold. You are not worthy of being upset with because you don’t really exist.
I wish I could give this album a million stars. Yes, it’s a giant sprawling mess that veers from sublime and too perfect for this world to absurd and maudlin and unbearable. Because that’s love. But you wouldn’t know anything about that.
5
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Mon Apr 01 2024
Crosby, Stills & Nash
Crosby, Stills & Nash
Here are some fun facts. In 1982, David Crosby crashed his car into a fence after having a cocaine seizure. Responding police found his coke and a loaded .45. When they asked Crosby why he felt the need to travel with a loaded weapon, he supposedly replied, "John Lennon." At one point, Stephen Stills started to believe he had been on missions with the US Marines in Vietnam and began wearing fatigues on stage during concerts and signing autographs “Stephen Stills, US Marine Corps”. In 2016, Graham Nash, who was in his 70's at the time, divorced his wife of 38 years to marry a 40-year old. His adult children stopped talking to him, which he said was probably for the best.
These were three talented individuals and this is a pretty decent album and Deja Vu is even better. It is a shame that after making some pretty decent albums these guys spent the next 50 years ruining their lives and the lives of the people around them.
Don't do drugs kids.
3
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Tue Apr 02 2024
Boston
Boston
Idk, man. If you don’t like this album, I think you are going to have to start asking yourself some really hard questions about who you are as a person. Do you like to rock? Do you like to party? Do you like Camaros? Do you like crushing cold beers? Do you like smoking Marlboro Reds? Do you even own a sleeveless T-shirt and jean shorts? Do you like making out with hot chicks? Do you like riding around in a Camaro on a hot summer night dressed in jean shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, blasting rock music, drinking a cold beer and smoking a Marlboro Red on your way to make out with a hot chick, AKA partying? Because if you do, then you know this album fucking rocks.
Also, those are upside down guitars with blue flames coming off the strings on the cover, not cities attached to UFOs escaping a dying world, or whatever your nerd ass thought they were. The blue flames are coming off the strings because of how hard the band is rocking. Just, FYI.
4
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Wed Apr 03 2024
Parklife
Blur
After so much mediocre Britpop, it’s nice to get to listen to arguably the best album of the genre. I like the mix of pop songs with weird experiments. A great album.
3
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Thu Apr 04 2024
Connected
Stereo MC's
*British people hear a type of music* https://giphy.com/gifs/hero0fwar-tim-and-eric-5wWf7GMbT1ZUGTDdTqM The blues, R&B, reggae, sure, but rap?! The audacity of these people. You almost have to admire it.
And the worst thing is that this album is pretty good. A bit insignificant for inclusion on a list like this, but I figure the author wanted to be sure every single British person who was alive in the 90’s was on here somewhere. But when the guy starts rapping it is almost as ridiculous as that album cover.
Is that the top of a set of headphones or some type of cerebro-like mind power amplifying helmet? “Oi bruv, we gotta snake and the earth and mushrooms and a volcano but it’s missing summit, innit?” “How about a lightning bolt?” “Brilliant mate!”
This album wasn’t bad. I knew the single and liked it alright and the rest of the album is pretty similar to it. Kinda silly but not bad. Better than a lot of other stuff on this list but not essential in my opinion. Still, there are worse ways to spend an hour.
3
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Fri Apr 05 2024
Hot Fuss
The Killers
Good lord, this album will be twenty years old in two months and I still think of it as new music. Time makes fools of us all.
I am not prepared to weigh in on whether this was the last great rock record or just Imagine Dragons 1.0. This albums is ambitious and incredibly well-produced and has hooks for days. It also doesn’t hurt that it came out at a time when I was ready to fall in love with an album like this. Listening to it now, twenty years later, it still sounds great to me.
4
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Mon Apr 08 2024
The Chronic
Dr. Dre
I think what was so incredible about this album was the world-building. Like the little girl from “Pan’s Labyrinth”, Dre and the other originators of the gangsta rap genre grew up in unpleasant circumstances and chose to escape those circumstances by building a fantasy world where all the men were tough gangstas and all the women were sexual objects. It wasn’t an original world, but borrowed from Blaxploitation films and funk music, just like Tolkien borrowed from various mythological traditions when he created middle earth.
In the 90’s, white suburbanites pretended to be gangstas the way kids from the 50’s pretended to be cowboys or film noir detectives. And those tropes were not that different. The characters lived in worlds of violence and frequent gunplay, they survived based on their toughness and street smarts, and their worlds were populated by over-sexualized stock female characters. Fantasies like these appeal to adolescent boys, for better or for worse, probably for worse.
I don’t think that the inventors of the gangsta rap fantasy world can be criticized any more than the inventors of other fantasies that captured the imagination of young men looking for a pretend world to inhabit. Plus this iteration of that teen-boy-friendly world-building had style and flair and sounded incredible.
Dr. Dre is nothing if not an expert in identifying and incorporating talent. Ice Cube was a better lyricist, Eazy and then Snoop had more charisma, and his later protege (or young white avatar, according to Atlanta) Eminem was a vastly better rapper, but Dre recognized talent and gave talented artists greater exposure. He also used samples from great music and did so in a way that made them sound fresh to young ears. There is no denying that this album sounds amazing, even if most of the credit for that belongs to George Clinton, Isaac Hayes, James Brown and Donny Hathaway.
I can’t defend the lyrical content of this album but I think it is reductive not to appreciate its strengths.
4
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Tue Apr 09 2024
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
OutKast
I get that it has "Hey Ya" on it, but a single does not an album make. This is the worst Outkast album other than Idlewild. But the worst Outkast album is better than most other groups' best albums. Speakerboxxx is a better than average straight ahead rap album. The Love Below is a bit of a mess. You can never go wrong listening to Outkast but this album is as close to being wrong as listening to Outkast gets.
I would be remiss not to mention that “Tomb of Boom” has two of my all time favorite rap lyrics: “I prefer my liquor dark and a mean white slut.” I hear ya, Supa Nate. Also, “Y'all driving Subarus, stuck in your cubicles; I'm stuck in the air with weed crumbs under my cuticles.” Oh Luda, I don’t care how many cheesy action and Christmas movies you do, you will always be cool to me.
3
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Wed Apr 10 2024
White Ladder
David Gray
Bland. Boring. Soulless. John Mayer without the edge. It’s bad enough that I had to have “Babylon” played at me constantly for six months in a row in 2001, but now I had to listen to it twice on this Nilla Wafer of an album. Boo.
2
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Thu Apr 11 2024
Bossanova
Pixies
Surfer Rosa and Doolittle are great albums. Bossanova is a good album. Come on Pilgrim and Trompe le Monde are okay. I don’t acknowledge the existence of anything else by this band.
I love the Pixies but don’t think this is them at their best. There are still some great songs on here, but nothing that approaches the best songs on their first two albums. And the just-okay songs on Bossanova are way worse than the less good songs on Surfer Rose and Doolittle. Is Bossanova worth listening to? Yes. Is it a top tier Pixies album? For me, no.
P.S. My cat’s favorite thing in the world is to roll around in my closet under shirts where she can bat at them and be partially hidden and rub against things while I pet her. When we are doing that I like to sing “Stormy Weather” to her, but I change the words to “It is time . . . it is time (whoah, oh) . . . it is time, for closet cuddles.”
3
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Fri Apr 12 2024
Miriam Makeba
Miriam Makeba
Being exposed to albums and artists like this is why I’m doing this project. I had never heard of Miriam Makeba before but I am so glad that I have now. This is a really fun album and “Pata Pata” is an incredible song that I found after listening to this album and reading the artist’s Wikipedia page.
3
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Mon Apr 15 2024
Meat Is Murder
The Smiths
Good album by a great band. As with all Smiths albums, Morrissey is insanely clever and Marr is angularly jamming away in the manner that only he can. And “Barbarism Begins at Home” is a fantastic showcase for Andy Rourke’s mind-blowing bass skills.
For all of you who can’t hear The Smiths mentioned without harping on the fact that Morrissey is a piece of shit, boy do I have bad news for you about every single pop star and any member of any band ever. Yes, Morrissey is garbage, but so is pretty much everyone else on this list. I’m not sure if it’s a consequence of having too much money, or the psychological effect of fame and adulation, or maybe just human nature, but basically everyone who becomes even moderately successful making music sucks. Morrissey included, but not exclusively, and not to any significant degree beyond the norm.
So please, if you don’t have the requisite intelligence and savior faire to appreciate The Smiths, just admit that you aren’t that great at listening to music and having taste and stop trying to pin it on Morrissey being a monster. They’re all monsters. Always have been.
3
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Tue Apr 16 2024
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
Arctic Monkeys
I love it when future soft boys make an album when they’re really young and haven’t embraced their softness yet. Future soft boys make albums that are energetic and fun and loud and fast and lusty because the band is the hardest they’ll ever be because they’re 19 or whatever, but the albums are also melodic and poppy and catchy because the band are soft boys at heart. An album like that really hits the sweet spot for me and this is a perfect example of one.
I don’t know what the fuck the Arctic Monkeys have been doing for the last decade or so, lounge singers on Mars or some shit, but their first two albums were great and very deserving of being on this list. And to all you future soft boys who know you are soft at heart but are super angry and cynical and wild right now and for the next year and a half or so, pick up electric guitars for God’s sake! We need more albums like this.
3
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Wed Apr 17 2024
Maverick A Strike
Finley Quaye
Oi bruv, dis reggae music is brilliant innit?! Do we know any Jamaican geezers that can make some for us? Finley Quaye? Isn’t he Ghanaian or summit? Ah, toss it. Sign ‘im to a record deal and put the kettle on!
It is so stupid that this album is on this list that it makes it feel like doing this project is a waste of time and energy. I get it that "Sunday Shining" was big in the UK in 1997 but "Banditos" by The Refreshments was big in the US in 1996 and I in no way shape or form expect Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy to be on this list. For God's sake, there are no Toots and the Maytals albums on this list. A real reggae artist who made actual ground-breaking and influential albums that really do deserve to be heard. Instead we get this weird bland reggae imposter. This is insanity.
Ultimately, this album is not bad. It is a completely nothing melding of reggae and trip hop that managed to strike a chord with a small group of people almost thirty years ago. That is fine. I am glad that Mr. Quaye had his moment in the sun. Or in the cold drizzle I suppose, since he was only big in the UK. There is nothing particularly offensive about this album, except for maybe the lyric "cause I'm a hero like Robert De Niro" and the fact that it is a Scottish person of Ghanaian descent doing a Jamaican accent. But why in the name of all that is holy would anyone need to hear this album before they die?! The answer is, they don't. Terrible pick.
2
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Thu Apr 18 2024
Jagged Little Pill
Alanis Morissette
Alanis Morissette was to grunge what The Partridge Family was to hippies. She was a cheesy pop singer glomming onto the youth counterculture of the moment and helping to commercialize it. And it worked. She sold a billion records and played a not insignificant part in taking grunge from Nirvana to Nickelback. You don’t do that without making some decent songs and there are obviously some decent songs on this album. But nostalgia and a few okay songs should not cause this to be seen as anything other than what it was: a pop singer aping the style of a genre that was in vogue at the time but that she had no connection to whatsoever in order to sell records.
Oh, and my friend Gabe thought it was “the cross-eyed bear that you gave to me”. lol.
3
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Fri Apr 19 2024
Nebraska
Bruce Springsteen
Driving through the parts of our country where it’s flat and empty and feels washed out somehow, with nothing but abandoned towns that used to be vibrant communities breaking up the landscape, feels like listening to this record. This is an album about the forgotten places. The places that have been dying a slow death for 100 years and the people who still choose to live in them for whatever reason. This album is about hopelessness and the beauty that can be barely felt on the edges of stark, ugly despair.
4
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Mon Apr 22 2024
...And Justice For All
Metallica
I just don’t understand why I hate this so much and so many others love it. Maybe you either have to be a dumb adult or a middle-schooler (and so automatically dumb) so that your affection for it carries over to when you are a non-dumb adult. Or maybe it’s like cilantro and you are either born with the gene that makes this sound good to you and if you don’t have that gene then it tastes like soap. I don’t know what makes me hate this, but boy do I. It’s dumb and loud and angry and just the worst. I don’t care if it’s thrash or prog metal or heavy metal or hard rock cause all that shit sounds the same to me anyway. Hairy assholes making unpleasant sounding music for dumb people to hit each other or further sustain brain damage to. There is nothing redeeming about this to me whatsoever. Just ugly noise that makes my day worse.
1
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Tue Apr 23 2024
xx
The xx
Another perfectly acceptable xx album that is totally fine and also too bland to get even the slightest bit excited about. I just don’t see what about these milquetoast records is supposed to be so vital you have to hear it before you die. They are in no way shape or form bad, they are pleasant enough, but I can’t hear anything in them that takes them beyond generic inoffensive indie pop.
3
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Wed Apr 24 2024
Music
Madonna
Like an Oscar going to an actor who was just okay in a role but everyone now agrees was really good in something a few years ago, music critics love nothing better than pretending a late period album by a once great artist is something other than garbage. Sorry critics, I’m not falling for it. Madonna was a force of nature from ‘83 to ‘89 but this sucks.
2
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Thu Apr 25 2024
Sister
Sonic Youth
https://youtu.be/bWQYwqHWiyQ?si=QsbYaZO-z236ViU5
I hate to contradict Juno, but Sonic Youth is pretty cool and this is a pretty good album. I don’t like noise rock but Sonic Youth has always kept their noise poppy enough for my tastes. I wouldn’t want to listen to this all the time but I’d take a kinda noisy rock and roll record over another bland snoozefest most of the time.
3
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Fri Apr 26 2024
3 + 3
The Isley Brothers
This is alright. At times a little too disco-y, at times a little too quiet stormy, at times a little too 70’s soft rocky, but overall not bad. The band sounds great but I wish they had stronger material to work with. Still not a bad album.
3
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Mon Apr 29 2024
Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs
Marty Robbins
This album is like those Men’s Adventure magazines (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_adventure), but with someone singing you the stupid cliched stories with generic Western music playing in the background instead of you reading them. Despite that, sometimes the dumbest things in the world can catch lightning in a bottle. This album should have been one of a million other bits of late 50’s early 60’s pop culture detritus that was forgotten almost as soon as it got home from the record store. But something about this album really works. Maybe the generic Western music is played perfectly, maybe it’s the singing. Who knows. Life is funny sometimes cowboy. 🤠
3
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Tue Apr 30 2024
Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath
This is fine I guess. Kinda Zeppliny, kinda Creamy, but mostly this just strikes me as silly. Adolescent boys playing their instruments loudly and trying to be scary and dark. I like rocking out as much as the next guy, but do you have to be so edgelordy about it? Once your band goes spooky I just feel silly listening to you. It’s not Halloween. Ghosts and wizards and devils and witches aren’t real. They’re just something children are scared of. Or very dumb people.
I think that is ultimately my problem with heavy metal and thrash metal and black metal and all the rest of it. It all just seems like music for dumb people. More so than mindless pop, more so than bro country, more than any other genre I can think of. Just music for pimply, pretentious, angry, emotionally stunted dumb people. Boo! 👻
2
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Wed May 01 2024
Wonderful Rainbow
Lightning Bolt
Lot of reviews saying, “wow you can kind of hear some elements of songs in here” and I agree. “Crown of Storms” is playing now and it sounds like the band knows what songs are and are kind of making a song-esque thing out of static and noise. But what I’m wondering is, why are we grading this band on a curve? Is this band some kind of human interest story about two people with a mental disability that prevents them from understanding what sounds good? Is it a triumph of the human spirit that these two goofy bastards (https://youtu.be/OkzaOwAmDmA?si=5i18tm3SvrobZWkF) made ten “songs” that almost sound like music? Is GMA going to do a feel good story about how the members of this band bravely overcame adversity to make something so close to real music? Because if not, I’m wondering why - if these guys know what music is - why they don’t just make that and not this?
1
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Thu May 02 2024
Teenage Head
Flamin' Groovies
Nothing wrong with doing old music as long as you bring something new to the table which this album doesn’t do. This is just “here is a cool blues riff” and “here is a neat rockabilly song” for thirty minutes. The title track gets close to something new, but other than that, it’s basically a cover record. I’m glad that you discovered a bunch of cool old songs that you like, but if that’s all you have to say then just make a mix tape.
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Fri May 03 2024
I’m a Lonesome Fugitive
Merle Haggard
Five wives, six children, 66 studio albums, born in a boxcar, multiple escapes from prison, a plethora of convictions for crimes he both did and didn’t commit that were ultimately pardoned by Ronald Reagan, and lived to be 79 years old. Merle Haggard’s life sounds too crazy to be true.
Merle Haggard recorded dozens of amazing songs during his career but sitting down for an entire album of his is rarely something I want to do. This one is no exception. I can’t deny his talent or that he touches greatness at times, but he was a working musician who was putting out songs like a factory puts out widgets. Creating art wasn’t really his goal and so it’s no surprise that he only did so rarely.
His albums are the sound of a talented craftsman making solid music, and so worth hearing, but out of his decades-long music career you can listen to the times he really made something that surpassed that in a couple of hours.
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