1001 Albums Summary

To really understand this album's impact and its impassioned fandom, you have to understand the music landscape at the time: most of us were held hostage by our local radio stations and forced to listen to the overproduced easylistening pablum of 80s pop. Daydream Nation takes a hammer to all that.

This album felt like it would have been better if it hadn't been produced in the 80s with weak-*ss synth, the drum-machine-like beats, and sanitized arrangements. Gone is the ebullient, unleashed early Springsteen. Kind of a boring listen. Cover Me is a banger, I'm On Fire is a slower burn than I remember, Glory Days sounds better now, Dancing in the Dark, worse.

At times brutal, messy, and self-indulgent. At others, brilliant. Nirvana tried to reject success and return to their live/punk/noisy roots, but the genius still shines through. Can't help wonder what Cobain's career trajectory would have looked like if he'd lived.

Its rhythmic experimentation is sheer genius...most of the songs just don't smack tho, except Life During Wartime.

Man, I did not expect to like this album, but I did. First time I heard the tracks apart from School's out, and they went from psychedelic to jazzy to hard rock and back again. Blue Turk kicks ass. I was expecting the band known for their onstage antics, but there's interesting innovation and creativity here.

Kind of an in-between album with echoes of the tight creative work of his earlier solo albums and what's to come in Graceland, with complex rhythms and bass. Much of it, too, is marred by the production trends of the 80s: overuse of synth, echo-y drums, and sanitized guitar solos. In the end, every song is good, none are great -- well, maybe "Rene and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog after the War."

Holly was 20 when the Chirping Crickets was released, which is insane, given its innovation and distinct sound and that he wrote and arranged the best songs, which still sound fresh: Not Fade Away, Maybe Baby, Tell Me How, and That'll be the Day, and I'm Looking for Someone to Love. The rest of the album feels like mismatched filler -- including a couple songs written by Roy Orbison -- but it's hard to understate the effect this album had on rock.

I signed up hoping to be exposed to new music -- instead, I've been bombarded with mediocre dudebro 60s psychedelia for what seems like album after album. I'm beginning to suspect the author of the 1,001 albums is a boomer.

There were a few decent songs on the first side -- notably Kashmir. The B side sounded like a Zepplin homage band playing in a bar. Which may have been the sound they were going for!