Paul's Boutique
Beastie BoysPaul's Boutique is both a perfect album and one whose feats can never be recreated. Truly 1 of 1, and maybe the greatest hip-hop record of all time.
Paul's Boutique is both a perfect album and one whose feats can never be recreated. Truly 1 of 1, and maybe the greatest hip-hop record of all time.
It starts out as a sort of glam Led Zeppelin but you can literally hear them figuring out how to Be Queen as the album progresses. Maybe part of that is the bold/insane choice of putting all the Brian May songs on the A side and all the Freddie Mercury songs on the flipside but it has the effect of making Queen's evolution in sound part of the subtext in a satisfying way. Also, Ogre Battle fucking whips.
I'm not sure any band has better captured their own demise than The Smiths did here. Sonically, it feels like a perfect coda for one of the strongest 5(ish) year runs any band has ever had.
This is the point where Simon & Garfunkel start to work for me, but it's still a little too soft and a little too uneven. There are a few real gems here though.
Incredible richness of voice. Beautiful arrangements. Really fantastic.
This album is a great affirmative argument in favor of editing and being concise. At 30 minutes, it's good. At 35 or 40 it would drag *a lot*. I do wish it had a second big single to buoy the back end though. I'd give this 3.5 if fractional stars were allowed.
The Doors have all the same problems as the Red Hot Chili Peppers - three gifted musicians and a gibbering fool for a frontman - but none of the self-awareness or entertainment value. What a dogshit band.
I didn't really have any background on Happy Mondays before this. I don't think it's something I'd actively seek out but I can imagine it being good background music for a party
kd lang is both supremely talented and not really for me. "Miss Chatelaine" is a bop. "Constant Craving", the one song I knew prior, is a hell of an album closer.
The albums with Cale are more interesting, but I am not sure they're actually better, though they're also doing radically different things. At any rate, Doug Yule Rules.
I think this is probably Bob's second best album but it's still light years behind his best
There's a few clunkers but the hits are all absolute monsters. Not my favorite White Stripes record but undeniably great.
It's not a perfect album but goddamn if it isn't close. So much music I love sprung forth from this moment and these sounds.
I enjoy the sonic palette that The Psychedelic Furs play with, but the songs get a little samey, with the exception of Mr. Jones, which is superb. Possible I was not in the right headspace, though.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness. - Oscar Wilde
Bob as a writer is undeniable. As a composer of music, pretty damn good. As a singer, an acquired taste. But for as good as the songs themselves are, structurally and lyrically, the sparseness of his earlier works lacks a little something for me.
It's a 4.5, but I'm rounding down instead of rounding up because it's an album I used to put on in college to write papers to. Half a point seems fair for evoking that particular sense memory.
The first six tracks are like a 4.5, the last four are like a 2.5. Gonna round down to a 3 but it's really a 3.5.
There's no reason for this album's inclusion in this project. It's exactly fine. It's largely unmemorable, but it's competently made and inoffensive.
The Temps break bad, and find their opus as a group. Double it up with Curtis Mayfield's Curtis for a one-two punch.
My pirated this album off of a torrenting site maybe 13 or 14 years ago and, as sometimes happens, I never actually listened to it. What a fool I am.
There's some definite jams here, and I can understand the appeal, even if it's not fully my speed.
Church music with drums or My Morning Jacket without everything that makes them interesting. Your pick.
Am I the only one who's ever wondered how much heroin Lou Reed was able to purchase for $26 in 1967?
I love "Cecilia" and "The Only Living Boy in New York" as much as anyone but Bookends is far and away the peak of Simon and Garfunkel's time together. A daring, emotional, conceptual A-side about life and aging backed with a B-side full of the finest singles they ever put together. Just fantastic.
It's inoffensive, but none of us needed this.
Sometimes, an album can be influential and beautiful and also an absolute chore to listen to.
It's weird listening to this in full for the first time in 2024. Of course I'd heard songs from it before, but it's not as easy to grasp how monumentally different this album must have sounded in 1965 compared to their peers, versus, I dunno, how Black Sabbath must have sounded relative to everyone else in 1970. What I'm saying, I guess, is that this album sounds so *normal* to a modern ear that it's easy to underestimate how influential it was. But the fact that it *does* sound like a typical rock album of later vintage is maybe the best evidence of that influence.
If you're gonna do a metric ton(ne?) of cocaine and get a little too interested in creating a quasifascist alter ego, it better be for a good reason. This is a good reason.
It's unreal how timeless this is, even when it extensively samples the Steve Miller Band. MC Ren and DJ Yella are two of the most underrated figures in the history of rap.
The first Specials album lives up to the band's name. This, the second, doesn't look nearly as good in comparison, but it's still one of the strongest "sophomore slumps" you're gonna find.
I can't believe I've never listened to this before. It's utterly incredible. Redding's take on "My Girl" blows the Temps out of the water, which is an insane thing to attempt, much less achieve. What a collection of songs.
There are a few skippable songs - maybe 2 in each half of the album - but the cumulative effect of Metallica, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, a tremendous crowd, and a setlist that includes almost every great song they wrote from 1983-1999 results in a live album as big, as powerful, and as charged as the band deserves.
I probably could go long on this album, but I'll try to keep it brief It's hard to divorce this album, which came out in the fall of 2000, from the events a year later that radically recontexturalized it. I think, in the public consciousness, this album is a response to 9/11 – after all, who can forget Bono revealing his American flag jacket lining during the Super Bowl Halftime in 2002? - when the album was actually subject to the most improbable series of events a new piece of culture has probably ever endured. Listening to it now, maybe 15-20 years from the last time I last heard it, and in the same age bracket Bono and the Edge (late 30s) were in when they made it, what I hear is a secular gospel album, and a pretty damn good one. There are meditations on the losses of parents, friends, and relationships. There are songs of great gratitude for both natural born and chosen homes and families. There's hope and despair in equal measure. There's an earnestness and poptimsim that the cynical young man can write off that the thirtysomething can't deny is where U2 is, and always has been, at their best. That's especially evident in the first half of the album, which lines up four mammoth singles in a row, but it's also true on what should have been the album closer, "New York" (the less said about "Grace", the better). Is it all a little schmaltzy? Yes, undeniably. But when the songs are so expertly crafted to hit the pleasure centers of one's brain, who cares?
I guess now that I'm in just about 36 I'm obligated to fawn over how remarkable it is that something this technically proficient and dense can also be so incredibly catchy and pop-informed at the same time?
This is a perfect album to put on in the background of an intimate dinner party (complimentary)
The smartest thing George Clinton did might have been the aesthetic divisions between Parliament and Funkadelic. Parliament was designed to be more accessible and pop oriented, while Funkadelic was the home for the collective's heavier, more 'out there' sounds. By separating these competing artistic impulses, they could simultaneously put out records like Funkadelic's Let's Take It to the Stage and Parliament's Mothership Connection. Both are extraordinary albums, but you couldn't make a cohesive album by picking and choosing songs from each. Mothership Connection was beamed directly into homes across America thanks to the enormous success of "Give Up the Funk", and with it, the course of music history was indelibly altered. The success of this album opened up the world to the entire P-Funk collective. Without it, you don't get The Chronic, but you also don't get Speaking in Tongues. It's really impossible to understate the importance of Parliament, or of Mothership Connection. Listening to it, you can almost hear the tendrils of P-Funk reaching out to influence damn near everything that came after.
I don't think I can say much about this that hasn't been said a thousand times over. The Stones put out four near-perfect albums in a row in the span of five years, despite losing Brian Jones in the midst of that period. Sticky Fingers has maybe 3 of their 10 greatest songs and it might be the fourth best of those four albums. Incredible.
This is the first album from this project that I've listened to, having not heard it before, and thought "I need to listen to this more and really wrap my head around it." That's a mark of quality, to be sure. Excited to spend more time with this.
War might be the band whose body of work is most unfairly eclipsed by their famous singles. "Low Rider" and "Why Can't We Be Friends" are great pop songs, but their first few albums are so rich and varied, and this is probably the best of them (and certainly the best album they made after Eric Burdon left). Like The Temps' All Directions, can be paired with Curtis Mayfield's Curtis for an excellent evening of listening.
In a lot of ways, this is the greatest album from the Wu-Tang Clan, collectively or as individuals. The only thing that gives me pause from making that claim ironclad is that when I'm not listening to Liquid Swords, I basically forget it exists. I don't know if that's a me problem or a problem with the album. When I am listening to it, though? Whew.
As peerless as "Shining Star" and the title track are, my brain always comes to Earth, Wind & Fire prepared to dance, and this is very much EWF's Quiet Storm, music-to-fuck-to album. It's a very good take on that, but it's also the province of artists who do it better.
Paul's Boutique is both a perfect album and one whose feats can never be recreated. Truly 1 of 1, and maybe the greatest hip-hop record of all time.
A completely middle of the road T. Rex album is still better than most non-Bowie glam rock, tbh.
Unclear if this is wankery or frippery or some combination of both. It's technically sound but it's not really engaging or entertaining for the most part.
Is it a hot take to say Led Zeppelin III is the best of the numbered Led Zeppelin albums? Because it absolutely is and I don't think it's particularly close, even with an entirely skippable song in "Friends"
For reasons I can't fully articulate, I have steadfastly avoided almost all of Nick Cave's work. I genuinely don't know why, but I had this intense resistance to it for like, 15 years, maybe more. Listening to this doesn't offer any clarity on the matter, as it's overall pretty good! "O Children" is kinda bullshit, but the rest is solid or better. My first thought upon starting the album was "Tom Waits with clean vocals", which is hardly a bad lane to occupy.
A perfectly good glam rock record that doesn't have the one song by this artist you want to hear.
Like Queen II, this is the sound of a band figuring out their path. Unlike Queen II, there is a cohesiveness to the proceedings that is very pleasant. The downside of that cohesiveness is that, while the album makes an excellent sort of tone poem, the songs themselves largely don't stand out from one another, leading it to feel a little long in the tooth, even though it's only 36 minutes or so.
There are two Radiohead albums that will get a 5 from me, and this is one of them. "Climbing Up the Walls" is eternal. Everything else that can be said about OK Computer has already been said.
Sometimes I put this on and I lie on the floor and let it wash over me in waves and in those moments, everything is right and good in the world
Once in a great while, life gives you an album exactly when you need it. Today, for me, that was this album. It helped haul me out of a personal and professional malaise that had been hanging over me for a couple of weeks. I can't put my finger on exactly why, beyond that Bragg has always been someone whose worldview I largely share, but it was just what I needed.
Of all the albums we've heard so far, this more than any other makes me wish we could give half stars. It's a tremendous album, one of the top 2-3 of 2009, but it's not *quite* good enough for 5 stars. The pacing is a little off, and it ends on bit of a whimper. That and well, there's one YYYs album better. Consider this a 4.5 that got knocked down by the system.
I am not always in the mood for "We Will Fall", but when I am, the run of 1969-I Wanna Be Your Dog-We Will Fall-No Fun hits like a sledgehammer. Back half is a little more slight, but it still rips.
I listened to the full extended edition, all ~77 minutes of it, and I have to say, while I appreciate the brevity of the original release, it feels insane that they chose Substitute over Tattoo or Happy Jack, for example. Also, I'll say it: you don't need a 15 minute version of My Generation. Half that would have been plenty.
People call The Smiths a singles band, but T. Rex is both their forebear and superior in every regard. Almost every great T. Rex song is a single without an album. But Electric Warrior represents the rare convergence of their more cohesive albums and their pop chops, and it's their best record for it.
Made in the Dark but I can see now that that was a mistake. This is probably my favorite of their albums on only one listen.
I don't think I'm gay enough for this album
Two albums in a row with absolutely abominable cover songs smack in the middle. What are the odds? Also: this is not an essential album! It's just fine!
It's funny to consider that this comp was released only a handful of years after the somewhat unorthodox songs on it were recorded. In the intervening time (~7 years), he recorded and released like two dozen albums that revealed him to be the future of jazz, making this album's title neither premature nor a misnomer.
There are some really fantastic tunes on this, but it runs a little longer than it needs to. I think the perfect jazz album comes in under an hour, always, and usually under 45 minutes. But Masekela was a blind spot for me prior to this and now I feel energized to look into some of his other work, so that's exciting.
It's often said that pop culture goes in cycles, but if there's any evidence that all of society goes in cycles, too, it's that this album is as meaningful and resonant in 2024 as it was in 1971, 1991, etc.